Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl

by Estee

Rating: teen
Tags: Violence, Crossover, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Other, Adventure
Length: 720101

Yesterday, she was a sweet, somewhat old-fashioned exchange student trying to find her place in a strange culture. Today, Centorea Shianus is a new world's greatest terror.

It had been hard enough, being one of the first. With the walls dropped, leaving her nation, her herd, traveling to Japan and trying to exist among so many strangers... every day had been a challenge. But she'd tried. Day by day, hoofstep by hoofstep, she'd felt she was finding her place in the human world.

But now there are no humans. No other demis or liminals. Nothing to anchor her. She exists among tiny horses and the scent of their fear, or at least what little of it drifts into her cell.

For nopony can look at a centaur and see anything but a monster.

(Now with author Patreon, SubscribeStar, and Ko-Fi pages -- and the TVTropes page just went live.)

Cover art by Harwick. Please contact him for commission rates & prints.

Trigger warning: character interpretation.

Published 2019-02-26 01:20:02 UTC
Last updated 2022-07-16 05:38:13 UTC

Unnatural

It wasn't her first cell, and that might have said something about life in the Kurusu household. The residents -- herself very much included, even when she tried so hard to ride herd over the rest of the group, keep some occasional degree of control and, with much less success, retain some portion of dignity -- had an outright talent for finding trouble: something which actually became worse when they worked in groups. And it was true that part of her original intent in joining the student exchange problem, the experiment which had started to introduce the once-hidden liminals into human society, was to find some way of becoming a true knight -- and knights were certainly expected to deal with disasters. She just hadn't been expecting quite so many of them.

Not her first cell, and that was with the hastily, horribly-written laws which guided interaction between the liminals and the planet's majority species in putrid play: something where one moment of being caught simply defending herself could have so easily led to deportation. But it was the first time she'd been in one alone. At least one of Cerea's friends --

My friends call me Cerea.

-- had always been confined with her. It gave her someone to plan with. Or more often, someone who, if not necessarily capable of true help because few things were more pointless than trying to construct an intelligent course of action through Papi, was at least there. At the absolute minimum, she'd had company.

My friends are gone.

She shivered as more of her body heat was stolen by the cold stone floor. (She'd been dumped on her left side, and those bruises were screaming accordingly.) The chains rattled.

It also wasn't her first time being tied up, and that number was much closer to triple digits: something which definitely said a few words about life in the Kurusu household, or at least about having to deal with a certain (a mind which was trained towards politeness to the point of near-absurdity automatically edited out a number of terms) housemate. Living with Rachnera involved a number of daily adjustments, which included a frequent need to glance up. That particular liminal claimed to be an ambush predator, one who was simply practicing her daily routine so as not to lose her edge and it wasn't as if anyone ever got hurt, so what was the problem? The problem was in having a housemate who treated tying others up in spider silk as something which potentially came with its own fetish, and Cerea was afraid it actually did: she'd seen the smile on the other's face as she tried to struggle free, watched the near-sexual delight passing through all six insectile eyes. Cerea was regularly bound by an expert.

She would laugh at this.
She would laugh at me.
She always laughs when I can't get free.

There had been a lot of laughter.

Her eyes closed again, and it took a few seconds for the shame to pretend it was receding.

The next thought was an echo, and possibly an inevitable one: My friends are gone. Friends, and those who were somewhat less.

Or rather, they weren't there for her: they couldn't be. They were still in Japan. There was no one there for her at all. It was just Cerea, the chains, and the cell. And she'd wanted to be a true knight, the stories had knights captured all the time (which was really surprising when she considered how effective a knight was supposed to be at combat, but she supposed the best way into a few castles was through being initially defeated) and if she had ever even pretended a right to the title...

She was alone. She was lost on a scale she had never imagined to exist, and that was after having experienced the displacement which came from flying thousands of miles away from home (in the cargo section of the plane, no less: it had taken six layers of blankets to reach Japan and she'd still been sick for a week) to live among a species which she'd only known through stories, rumor, and -- something her mother had never caught her at.

But then there had been Japan, and the household. The person she had so hoped would love her, and the chaos which always seemed to prevent her best chance. Friends to go with that. Some closer to rivals, others sisters, one just barely escaping the definition of enemy. A life of chaos and confusion and, looking back, frequently-repaired clothing because as long as there were enough threads left, nothing was going to get her into a local store to shop for replacements. An odd sort of life at best, but it was her life and frequent bindings aside, there had been ways in which she'd been getting used to it. And always, she'd believed that all she needed to make the subject of her growing love return her feelings, to truly become his knight, was a single moment. The right moment, just as it existed in all of the best stories. Her chance.

Then there had been the road.
The forest.
Everything else.

She'd broken into a full-scale gallop upon seeing the upper levels of the town (or at least the best speed her injured body could achieve) because it had not only indicated civilization, it had been a familiar one. Part of her had only seen that the distant buildings had an old-world European style to them, that had to mean people, and so she hadn't truly thought about scale or some of the odder touches until she'd vaulted the last line of obscuring bushes and --

They attacked me.
They defeated me.

She'd been defeated a lot, since leaving home. As a prospective knight, she had a won-loss record closer to that of a professional jobber, and only a portion came from the restrictions placed on her by those horribly-written laws. In this case, she'd been taken down by sheer numbers, by light and wind. Things she'd had no way to expect, and that part of the shame was still there. It was always there, when she lost. It never truly departed.

Cerea had possessed no real way of expecting to see little horses (or a tripled odd distortion of same), especially given the direction of the wind and the minimal scents which had reached her. Nothing would have made her believe that they would attack on sight.

But they had. She'd fought. She'd stayed on her hooves for a while, done some damage to the other side. But in time, they'd surrounded her, cut off all retreat. Brought her down. The one mare had been about to stomp into her skull --

-- and then they'd bound her.

It was possible that they had her tied up pending trial, if any existed for someone who had been attacked on sight. Or they could have been waiting for the professional executioner.

They're so scared...

It was also possible that they'd never seen anything quite like her, just as she'd previously seen nothing exactly like them. She'd gone through some fear during her initial time among humans, done her best to hide it. Some of the stranger liminals still disturbed her. But to just attack...

Even now, the scent of their terror was drifting into her cell. She wondered if it would be the last thing she ever sensed.

But the chains had rattled...

Cerea twisted her upper torso as best she could against the net. Looked around.

The cell, like the castle, seemed ancient: the rough-hewn stone which made up the walls wouldn't have been out of place in the oldest settled portions of France. Portions of the jammed-together boulders which made up the floor could be used for the slow rasping of rope -- but that would be too slow, especially when she didn't know how long she had. Besides, that was a secondary layer: the chains had priority.

There were some empty wine racks scattered around the edge of the room. Nothing useful.

The door -- that was mostly wood. Heavy wood, but she was a centaur and it wasn't a particularly large door, with very little in the way of metal reinforcements. A few good kicks might take it out. And as for anyone who might be on the other side -- the door also possessed what could be seen as a minor defect: the little barred window which allowed any jailer to peer in would be, if she was standing, on a level with her lower sternum.

But that lets them see I'm standing.

There were no eyes there yet, and -- she took a deep breath -- yes, one of the little horses was in the hallway. A scared little horse. Possibly too frightened to peer in all the time.

Her friends were gone. She didn't know where home was, and they had her weapon -- or rather, her poor excuse for one: the laws meant she wasn't allowed to carry anything real. But Cerea felt herself to know this much: to stay might be to die. The forest had held its terrors -- but she'd beaten the first two. Being back there was better than being here.

No one to help her. No one to save her (and a true knight shouldn't need saving). She had to do it herself. At the very least, she had the option to die trying. And she would try, because --

-- she was regularly bound by an expert.

She'd just shivered, and the chains had rattled. There was slack, and it existed because the little horses weren't experts. With Rachnera, Cerea would try to shift an arm and her right hind hoof would kick her own backside. These bonds hadn't been rendered with skill, practice, or anything outside of what was suddenly starting to feel like total improvisation.

I know how good she is. Too good, because she's caught me dozens of times. The horses caught me once. These aren't professional bonds.

A knight would work with that.

Rachnera had explained it to her, mostly to watch Cerea's frustration. There were certain issues involved in tying up a centaur, and the largest came from their raw strength. Cerea didn't have the near-supernatural advantages possessed by some of her housemates, but physical power was readily available -- something which thickly-woven cords of spider silk negated. The metal was just about as bad.

But that wasn't the only problem. Strictly speaking, Rachnera had the largest body in the household, at least when figuring for the spider portion which made up her lower half. And that part of her form was built from chitin, exoskeleton relying as much on hydraulic pressure for movement as musculature. Put it together with the more humanoid half and the majority of the total lacked flexibility. Portions of that liminal's body were forever out of its owner's reach, and no amount of contorting could change that.

Centaurs were just about as big. But unlike the hybrid specimens which made up the arachne, a being trying to reconcile two completely different types of bodies, centaurs were fully warm-blooded mammals. And dealing with a form so large across the span of eons had encouraged the species to evolve a certain degree of double-jointing just to reach the far ends of their own backs.

Cerea wasn't as flexible as Suu: merely possessing a skeleton prevented that degree of contortion. But she could move in ways which humans found unnatural, and so seldom did because it was already hard enough to make her hoped-for love feel attraction towards her. And now she needed to.

It started with her arms, because she needed to have her hands free in order to have any hope at all. Arms which had been bound behind her back. She could feel the metal against her wrists -- but not against the entire circumference.

She twisted her neck, raised her bound arms behind her, managed to get a glimpse. Twisted again until she was able to see her forehooves, which actually took a lot more work.

It's the same kind of chain.

They had bound her arms the same way they'd bound her legs: the only difference seemed to be a knot in the links which kept rubbing against her spine. And hooves weren't flexible -- but hands were. The cuffs were already a little too large for her wrists. All she needed to do was compress...

It hurt. Centaurs tended to be double-jointed over most of their human body -- but hands had limits. Still, it was possible to, with a lot of effort and squeezing, make a hand smaller than the diameter of the wrist, and the metal of the cuffs provided a surface to compress against. She also wound up scraping off quite a bit of skin, and had to bite back a yelp -- but the blood was making things that much slicker. Slowly, surely, one side was coming free --

-- two huge green eyes were staring at her through the bars.

She smelled the fear, pulled her lips back from her teeth. The eyes vanished, and she heard hoofsteps retreating across the stone floor. That part went on for a while.

Cerea waited a few seconds. Resumed, and with one more flow of red, she had her right hand back.

It made the next part easier: the right could squeeze the left before it went through the cuff. And then she carefully, quietly slipped the metal down across her fur until it silently rested on the stone floor, hidden on the other side of her body. Progress. If any of the horses got within arm's reach, she could now get her punches tangled in the net.

The centaur took a closer look at the discarded chain. Each cuff had a lock, and a keyhole. The latter seemed odd. The ones with the horns, who had created light -- that light had moved things. But what about the ones without the horns? Keys in the mouth didn't feel practical.

Still, it was a lock. And she was strong -- but the majority of that was in her lower body. An ogre could pull chains apart by hand: she didn't doubt Tionishia would be capable of it, although someone would have to give that gentle soul a rather good explanation for the why.

I'm no better than second to everyone --

-- no. Look at the lock.

She looked.

I don't know how to pick a lock.

Not that she had much choice but to try. Even with an awkward reach and limited visibility, it was make an attempt or wait to see what the little horses would do next. She didn't have a lot of faith in the little horses. But she did have a tool, something all the applicable stories said was just what she needed...

She'd read a lot of stories, when she was young. It had taught her about knights, and the blocked-off world. She'd believed in the stories, much of that had been wrong, and she still believed in most of it because reading had been the majority of what a confined community was allowed to do.

Another check of the viewport bars, and then her hands carefully moved up.

Cerea had a lot of hair: head and tail both. The human portion grew quickly, needed frequent trimming and could rapidly become too much for easy management. (Everyone in the household had their own reason for tying up the bathroom, and Cerea's was a near-addiction level need for the hair dryer.) It meant she generally had to pin some of it up. And weren't hairpins supposed to be the perfect tool for picking locks?

More awkward contorting, which included wriggling around on the floor to hide as much of herself as possible from casual sight: she remembered to take the discarded chain with her. It aggravated bruises, opened a few of the smaller slow-clotting wounds. But in time, she managed it, and the metal hairpin was poked towards the lock --

-- where it promptly skidded away from the hole.

She frowned. Pushed again, using a little more strength, and so nearly started when the tip skidded across the metal surrounding the keyhole in a way which seemed as if it almost had to produce more sound than a light scratching.

Is it magnetized?

If so, the magnet was ridiculously powerful for its size. She pushed with increasing amounts of power, and nothing she did could get the hairpin into the keyhole. It was simply repelled, every time.

Cerea took a slow breath.

All right. But that's just with metal.

She had a lot of hair, and so needed a proportionate number of hairpins. The limited finances of an exchange student meant they couldn't all be quality. She was almost certain that the cheap plastic ones would break off inside the lock as soon as she put any pressure on a tumbler -- but they were what she had to use, and they certainly wouldn't be affected by a magnet.

More careful movement, recovering the lesser pin. The awkward angling was shifted until she had the best possible view of the first lock: the one around her left ankle. She bent a little more, winced at the compression along the bruised area (because of course the horses had kicked at those very obvious targets), put the tip into the keyhole --

-- and red light fountained from the lock, light which was filled with the same sparks that had danced around those glowing horns.

It was a small display, no more than would have been seen from an energetic sparkler, and so her body hid all of it. But she still had to repress another start, and wound up doing it again a second later, at the moment when the lock simply fell open.

The centaur stared at it for as long as she could risk giving it attention: all of two seconds. And then she looked at the cheap hairpin --

-- they are attacking her from all directions, and she can't defend herself. It is a vulnerability of the centaur body: the number of opponents required to surround is a quantity which can easily overwhelm. For a centaur, guarding one's right flank isn't a casual feat, and there are so many of the little horses, too many to stop. And the ones with the wings keep blasting wind into her eyes, and now one with a horn sends light towards her, light she instinctively realizes is meant to hurt --

-- the swing is reflexive, because that's what practice swords are for: developing the necessary skills to reflex level without anyone becoming injured. (She isn't allowed to carry a real one, because of those laws. She sometimes believes she never will.) Something is trying to hurt her, so she swings. It won't do anything, she realizes that even as it's happening, and naturally the only result is that the sword cuts through the light.

But the light isn't deflected. It falls apart in a shower of sparks and fast-fading violet spray. The little horse who projected the beam staggers. And she doesn't have time to think about that because another one is about to kick her and --

-- she had time to think about it now.

She looked at the next lock.

My name is Centorea Shianus.

Not the Lady Shianus. I'm not a knight. Maybe I never will be.

Maybe I'll die here.

(She wished she could see her mother again.)

I. am. leaving.

Distorted

His name was Blue Flamer, and he really didn't deserve any of it.

The young stallion was a rookie police officer, and held that status in a way where every word in the description needed to be capitalized, along with using a few italics and the occasional strategic touch of boldface. This didn't mean he was bad at his job: he had the mark for the work, and had been steadily boosting his skills through training. He simply lacked confidence. In a settled zone where most problems could be resolved by a careful recitation of all participants' full names (because the implication said that if the officer knew that, then there was a plethora of potential embarrassments waiting right behind it), he tended to stammer. And he'd been late to the fight against the monster, something else which hadn't been his fault: he'd just been on the other side of town when everything started.

His fellow officers rather liked him. There was a sincerity to his eagerness, and the misery which crashed his expression whenever he felt he'd gotten something wrong inspired a completely natural desire to groom his ears while telling him everything would be all right, which wasn't exactly practical in a police station. So as an alternative, with his having missed the true opportunity to prove himself, his coworkers had thoughtfully provided another one: the first guard shift outside the monster's cell. He wouldn't miss too much of the party and when he finally joined it, they could talk up his courage in standing as the first line of defense against the monster, preferably in front of a few smiling (and lightly inebriated) mares. They all felt it would go a long way towards building his confidence, not to mention getting around the problem he had with talking to mares by getting a few to speak with him.

He wasn't a bad pony. He was just... scared.

It was just him outside the cell -- well, technically, his current position (far end of the approach hallway) still counted as 'outside the cell'. Yes, there was another line of defense, just in case, but... right then and there, it was him. A single young unicorn and the monster on the other side of the distant door.

He could smell it. (He didn't know how sharp its own sense of smell was, and it wouldn't have helped.) He was about average for a pony there: there were things he could pick up on, and so much more which he missed. But the monster had its own scent. Some of that came from mud: the thing, along with its garments, had been rather dirty when it had first appeared, and that status hadn't exactly been improved by the drag through the streets. But it had clearly been exerting itself before the fight, something which both accounted for the first group of wounds and intensified its natural odor.

The worst part of the smell was that which was almost familiar. It almost matched the delicate natural perfume which could arise from the fur of a healthy young mare, only it was... off. (Perhaps the injuries had something to do with that.) But it could never be that enticing scent, because there was something else mixed in. Something which probably arose from the other torso. The hideous part.

He had risked a glance (because a guard had to check on the prisoner), felt his legs go into reverse when the monster had exposed its teeth. But it had been enough to get a sense of the thing, and -- he had been trying to imagine it as a pony. What would it have been? An earth pony, as that strength suggested? (There was far too much bulk for a pegasus, let alone a unicorn.) What would it -- or she, some of his fellows thought it was a female -- have looked like?

Part of Blue wanted to imagine that. And every time he came close, the scent reached his snout, and the warping crashed back in.

The totality smelled like nothing he'd ever scented before. Fur and flesh, added to mud and skin and other and --

-- blood.

It smelled like blood.

(His legs tried to back away again. The base of his tail bumped against a wall.)

Well, that was natural: the monster had been injured. He'd seen that. It was bruised -- it was so easy to see the bruises on the parts without fur -- and battered, with a number of cuts. So it was bleeding, and that blood smelled like blood should. Perhaps all blood was the same, once you got that far down. It was just that... it had smelled like blood from the very start, and he could only hope that all of it was the monster's own.

But that scent was getting stronger.

It's hurt.

It's a monster.

A soft, choked-back whimper wafted through the gaps in the bars. The scent intensified yet again.

It's hurt.

They had called for their leaders, and... well, strictly speaking, having them arrive to find a dead monster would probably just mean an unoccupied cell within what would have been its final, inevitable destination. But there were rules about how you were supposed to treat prisoners, and while he'd only ever applied them to ponies...

Blue had grown up in the town, had never really left it. His experience of the world was limited to something much less than a single square gallop. It wasn't the sort of town where the farmers hosted much in the way of tenants, but there were a few. He'd seen alpacas, and to be seen was to be spit on. Gotten dirty while breaking up fights between pigs. But that was the total extent of his other-species experience: working with tenants. When it came to those who held their own nations, he'd never even met a donkey. He didn't know how to deal with something which possessed that level of command over their own sapience. He just knew that the thing on the other side of the door was a monster.

But he also knew it was in pain.

(His legs were beginning to shift, again without conscious intent.)

Could it bleed out before anypony arrived? He didn't believe it possible -- but the increased strength of that blood scent wasn't fading. Perhaps monster blood didn't clot in the same way. And what about food? Did it live on magic alone, stealing the power of others for its sustenance, or was grass required? What about hay or fruit? And this was a monster: nothing said it would be adverse to -- he automatically gulped back the sudden nausea -- meat. At the very least, it probably needed to drink...

The monster had been in at least one fight before breaching the town's border, and perhaps that was why they'd won: it had already been pained. But he didn't know how much pain it was in. What that pain, untreated, might result in.

(A few body lengths had been gained.)

Blue was guarding the monster. But as a police officer (a marked one, whose deepest understanding of the job occasionally arose from the soul), he also had an obligation towards it: the single most basic. To make sure it didn't die on his watch.

Slowly, he approached the door. Listening.

The monster's breathing was slightly ragged. (He had seen it breathe. Too many things moved.) There was a little scrabble of keratin on stone, but that was as normal as anything could be with the creature: just hooves moving across the floor. There were enough gaps in the nets for a hoof or two to stick out, and the monster had been in a position where contact was possible.

Admittedly, it was a rather light sort of scrabble. If it had been a pony, he would have thought the minimal noise represented the sound of something trying to move very carefully. But it was a monster.

How was he supposed to communicate with it? His best option was probably to just bring in a bucket of water, place it near the hideous head, and see if the thing tried to drink. He could do the same with food, although he wasn't looking forward to any attempt at finding meat. But for first aid... police officer training included some of that, and he could render minor assistance to a pony. This was a monster. He wasn't sure what he could do there, if that was anything at all. It was possible that every physician in town would fail --

-- but the blood smelled the same.

Blue kept forcing himself forward. He was nearly at the door now, just about at the point where he could be able to look through the bars and check on the thing: he paused to brace himself accordingly.

Bottles were lined up along the wall, and being so close was making him wonder if the owner would miss one.

He was really hoping it didn't need help with toiletries.

Try to just -- look at the torso. The proper torso.

He didn't want to even do that much. (He knew some of the other officers had a term for mares with attractive bodies and repellent features, and thought it sounded like ButHerFace. In this case, it was ButEverythingFromTheWhiteGarmentOnUp.) But to check how badly it was injured, he would need to do a full-body examination, and that included everything which was warped.

The thought froze him again. More illness was swallowed back, and he listened.

It stopped moving.

It's breathing, but it isn't moving.

I should get in there --

-- it could be a trap --

-- it's my job --

He was shivering slightly, standing in that stone hallway. The outer expression of the inner war, the message of his mark battling with the more primitive drive of his fear. It meant he never quite reached the door, and so he wasn't in any direct danger when the entire thing jumped.

The sound came at the same instant as the movement, the moment when his widening green eyes saw that the bolts had just been jolted halfway out of the hinges. It was a familiar sound, because there were farmers in the area and he'd visited their homes during harvest season. It was the sound of extremely powerful hooves impacting against wood, only magnified.

Blue didn't have time to think. There was no chance to move. But he wasn't on the other side of the door, and so he didn't get hurt when the next impact sundered the hinges entirely, shot it out of the frame and into the opposing wall -- after it took care of what had been in the way.

Glass shattered. Several rather fine vintages died, and an old saying almost randomly passed through Blue's near-frozen mind, something Connemara ponies had supposedly been known to claim: that when you died, you would be suspended upside-down in a barrel filled with all the alcohol you'd ever spilled and if that was enough to drown you, then -- well, that was where his memory ran out. But it was presumed that since you were already dead, the next part had to be really bad.

The monster, who'd clearly had time to land, plant, and spin, was visibly huge enough that shattering everything in the hallway wasn't going to put it at any real risk, plus there would be some issues in finding a properly-sized barrel.

It plunged through the door. The blue eyes (forward-set, predatory eyes) had already spotted him, and the thing crossed the scant distance before he could move, the second torso dipped towards his level and the hands lunged forward, got a grip at the base of his forelegs and lifted --

-- it wasn't quite done moving yet and so in the middle of everything, he felt his back hit the wall. It was enough to make him lose the sensation of points jabbing into his fur.

It had just lifted him, and seemed to have done so almost casually. Its lips were pulled back from its teeth again. The furious blue eyes were staring directly into his, and it made him want to look anywhere else. But in one location, there was blood flowing from scraped skin. Another found covered mounds of flesh heaving from the anger in the monster's breaths. And to look at the face...

The mouth opened, as he initially failed to muster any degree of horn corona in his overwhelming terror. As he waited to die.

Its hot breath hit his snout.

"Où est mon épée?"

The little cerulean horned horse frantically neighed.

Cerea knew she needed all the time she could get: it was possible that the sound of her breakout had been audible on the upper levels, and reinforcements could already be on the way -- but somehow, that still left a moment for feeling stupid. The stallion couldn't understand her, and she had no way of verbally communicating with him. She was capable of producing horse noises: the flexible vocal chords of her species provided there -- but it wasn't a matter of simulating natural sounds any more. She was dealing with a language, and she would have no idea what she was saying --

-- hard-sparking green light was starting to build around its horn, the glow matching the exact shade of the horse's eyes. The light which could attack.

Her left hand pressed the horse more firmly against the wall, allowing the stone to take some of the weight while freeing up her right for a few seconds. It let her poke the plastic hairpin into its horn.

The glow fizzled, winked out. The pony winced, and its expression somehow carried across a sudden feeling of deep-seated nausea. The horn remained dark.

"Right," she rather pointlessly said, and had to fight back the blush. (She had been told she was one of the world's greatest blushers. She'd had far too much practice.)

She wished she had her ascot. If she couldn't talk to the stallion, then leaving him free to call for help was an even bigger mistake -- but she couldn't bind his jaw with the red cloth. It was somewhere in the forest, where the first drops of her blood had been absorbed by strange soil.

But she needed to communicate with him. She had to find out where her sword was, the only thing which might give her a chance. There were knights bold and daring accomplishing great feats in any number of stories and despite her deep faith in them, Cerea almost suspected the greatest among their number might still encounter some difficulty in escaping a castle while armed with a hairpin.

There was no point in trying to use any other language she knew. (Several, and she'd continued to study Japanese after moving to that nation, hoping to achieve a native level of fluency. She loved the formality of the tongue, the multiple levels available for offering respect.) But there were ways of communicating which didn't require sound.

She twisted her right arm, shook it a few times to get the blood flowing, let her run down her hand. Quickly smeared the wall in three sharp slashes: one for the grip, another for the hilt, and the longest represented the blade. The horse's fearful eyes watched every movement, and she watched the intelligent mind behind them take in the shape. Spotted the recognition.

Cerea knew the next word was equally pointless, and yet found herself saying it anyway.

"Where?"

Blue stared at the image. The sword made of blood. The thing which could do so much damage if the monster took it back.

He was in some pain: the impact against the wall hadn't been too bad, but the currently-unbalanced grip meant too much of his weight was resting on a single joint. And there was a lingering feeling of deep illness, something which seemed to radiate from his horn -- but he was still able to think.

The monster furiously nodded at the image. Looked at him again. Waited.

I can't --

-- he could. It was close by.

Strictly speaking, it shouldn't have been. Anything seized should have gone into the evidence locker, something a police department with very little need for one still possessed. In fact, it had all of the standard enchantments and then some, because the unused part of the budget had to be spent on something. Whenever you took custody of evidence or an item which was just dangerous, you trotted with it through the frame which projected the initial screening spell. Then you picked one of the open-front cubes which created the second screen, opened the door which was receded into the properly-sized face, placed the item into the container and its third layer of enchantments, and that was the whole problem. Everypony had realized that to bring something so hostile to magic through magic might completely disrupt the station's security. It could potentialy negate it, and the only way to prove it wouldn't happen was through giving the disaster a chance to strike.

So the sword had been put in the castle. Given a room to itself, one where all of the devices and wonders had been cleared out first. Left completely alone within its binding of ropes, so that nopony would have to touch it.

He could bring the monster to it. Or rather, he could bring the monster to the upper levels. Create a chance for the escape to be seen, and thus stopped. There were other residents in the castle, and it wasn't as if the monster could be missed. All he needed was for a single pony to spot them, gallop for the outside, sound the alarm.

But he would be putting that pony at risk. The monster could catch her (he was picturing a mare), as it had caught him. It was his job to assume the risks. To protect. And if he could just get to a window...

It was looking at him again, with that predatory gaze. He wished it would stop.

I can't do anything down here.

He would have to take it to the ramp. Bring it into the upper levels, and hope for his chance.

Blue tilted his head to the left. Made something of a show out of looking up.

The monster slowly nodded. (It could do that much in making itself understood, and he stared at the bruises which mottled the neck.) Gradually, it knelt down, sliding him along the wall as it did so, maintaining the pressure. The right arm went back, and he heard a tearing sound.

A ragged length of black fabric came forward. Then it went around his jaw, and all he could smell was the monster's blood.

The left hand let go. And before he could move, it firmly grabbed his horn.

She was just glad there wasn't more of a gap in their sizes: having to move with her upper torso leaning to the left would have been too awkward, especially since she wasn't --

-- they are not getting me into that shop. They had very nearly succeeded on the last attempt: Miia had pretended they were taking her out for a surprise, the blindfold was just part of the fun, but the treatment used to make lace brilliantly white had a certain drifting residue and she'd picked it up at the moment the door opened, with the initially-blind break for the unseen horizon coming a heartbeat later. It wasn't as if Miia had been able to keep up, not with the way she had to move, and even with Papi's surprising speed in the air...

...no better than second to...

...it didn't matter. They weren't there. (Miia would have hated the castle, the cold stone relentlessly pulling heat from an ectothermic body.) She knew where they were. Cerea was the one who was lost. Gripping the horn of a little horse as it reluctantly led her forward, somewhere far from home.

That reluctance wasn't exactly hidden. An unwrapped mouth would have still left her unable to understand its neighs, but the body language was writ larger than the actual body. It didn't want to be doing this. She had no reason to believe it was taking her the right way, and had already made tentative plans to release it and race through the hallways if it seemed as if there was any possibility that she was being led towards a trap. Reinforcements would have also counted, especially without her weapon.

Weapon. It was strange to think of the sword that way, especially in light of the way she typically used it: to wit, she couldn't. Oh, she was proficient enough -- but at best, when facing humans, she might get to make a display of strength by taking out her temper on a water bottle. She couldn't touch them. Other liminals and demis -- those could be fought: the laws had no restrictions about battling her own kind, let alone the myriad of others. But against humans, the ones who so often seemed to be looking for any opportunity to hurt her...

The head of their strange household wasn't like that (although such had taken a little while to realize: the first impression had been horrible). And that was why she had ultimately started to love him.

She wanted to fight for him. To be his knight. But the laws stayed her hand so much of the time, she couldn't even bluff when everyone knew what those laws were, and during the rare occasions when she could do something -- she was holding a plastic sword without an edge.

She was a centaur, and that meant her body was a weapon. A kick in the right place could kill --

-- but the best knights don't have to kill --

-- and yet she had continued to find herself in situations where her strength meant nothing. Where her skills were meaningless. Where, to be dismally frank about it, the newly species-integrated world mostly seemed to exist as a series of means for shredding her blouse. (It was torn in a few places now, but mostly around the sleeves and waist: an almost-refreshing break from routine.) She fought, she lost, and if she was lucky, she got to cover herself with her arms as best she could before galloping off to find a quiet place. Something isolated, somewhere she could weep in solitude.

To find love. To be a knight. Those had been the goals of her new life, and so she was both repeatedly and doubly a failure.

Right now, all she wanted to do was find her way home. And so much of her expected to fail at that too.

But the stallion trotted, if reluctantly. She followed. And he was leading her up.

She looked around as they emerged on the next level. More stone for the construction, but the surfaces were smoother, seeming more like a home. (It helped to be away from the smell of wine.) The hallway was also rather extensively decorated. Alcoves had been hollowed into the sides, and the majority of them hosted sculpture. Not always well: some portion of the statues occasionally jutted into the hall, and Cerea had to steer carefully around them. The lighting felt oddly dim, and the only movements she could hear were their own.

But she could hear the little horses. The sounds were distorted, weakened through distance and stone -- but the sounds were there, although the source was probably outside.

She knew what horses sounded like when they were happy. This was similar -- but she'd never heard it in such quantity.

They were happy. They might have been celebrating something, out there in the streets of their strange town.

Cerea felt she knew what the celebration was about.

She looked down at the stallion, and found herself regarding one of the icons which had been branded into his fur -- no, it was the fur itself, the strands forming a rather exacting pattern. Some sort of badge, with a matching image on the other hip. She couldn't smell any dye. It looked natural.

Her flanks were only partially covered by the torn skirt: there had been enough damage to reveal some portion of her own hips. To show where no icon was present. Simply fur, dirt, and slow-drying blood.

She'd caught the stallion looking at that part of her body. Over and over, as if his gaze had been pulled inwards towards vacuum. And she didn't understand why.

There weren't any ponies: it was a relief, and it was also a nightmare.

The relief came from realizing that the castle's residents had been, for just about all intents and purposes, evacuated. There was a party going on outside, and so most of the town's oldest family (plus servants) had apparently ventured forth to play their part in it. Additionally, even with officers posted, some of them had been understandably nervous about having a monster in their wine cellar: Blue could easily imagine a few ponies heading for the hotel, which at least gave those business owners something to do for once. It meant they wouldn't get hurt.

The nightmare had him in the corridors with a monster keeping a tight grasp on his horn. The inner corridors, because his guard post had been the first line of defense and the main entrance to the cellar was near the center. There were at least two more officers posted outside the castle. He needed a window. One good kick could hurt the monster enough for it to let go, and after that -- well, in theory, he just had to hit the glass horn-first.

If he could get up enough momentum to even try. If the glass wasn't reinforced by spells and for a castle this old, it almost had to be. If...

The main door would be easier. But there was still a benefit to leading the monster past a town-facing window: the chance that somepony might be looking at the castle and so would see a monster go by. It was in his best interests to try and lead the thing towards the perimeter. They'd beaten it once.

If he could just find the perimeter.

It was a big castle, and he hadn't spent a lot of time in it. He basically knew the path down to the repurposed wine cellar, and something about the way his horn was being grasped... whatever had produced that feeling of illness was still there, if at a lesser level.

(It was possible that the females could only drain by touch. That the monster was directly, slowly pulling his magic away, and he kept looking at the warped shadow which fell over him. Waited for it to grow.)

It wasn't painful: he would have expected that having the core of his being ripped free would hurt. But it was disorienting, and that was literal. He couldn't quite seem to keep track of where he was supposed to go. Left and right first became confused, then threatened to switch with back and front. And the monster had to be getting suspicious. There were times when he risked looking up at it and found that tiny nose slightly upturned, testing the air. He couldn't tell if its eyes were narrowed from his current angle, not when the eyes were so small to begin with. And it required a fairly extreme, very visible head tilt to risk such glances: anything more subtle and the mounds got in the way.

He looked at the way those mounds constantly, subtly shifted with just about every movement and breath the monster took, and the word Yearrggh... went through his mind, with company. The monster had many ways of inspiring nausea.

But he had to focus. He had to remember where he was supposed to be going. He had to get help.

Statues. More statues. Some doors, very few of which had statues behind them: she was opening everything she could. This occasionally required a double foreleg dip so her left elbow could press on a lever: when her right hand got involved, she could feel little indentations in the wood, and the dim light was still sufficient to reveal tooth marks.

A place where no one had hands.

It made her think of Papi. Harpies had flight -- but they had paid a price for that. Their bodies, by necessity, were small and thin: it was easy to mistake an adult for a youth who'd barely reached adolescence. Metabolisms could be far too quick: any truly extended effort would require food immediately after, and the desperate raids on any source available had led to a few of the legends which had survived segregation. And unlike some of the other flying liminal species, harpies had but four limbs.

Where arms should have been, harpies had wings. And just before the full span of those wings swooped out and down -- a single protruding talon, and bone to press it against. It was all Papi had for hands, all any harpy had. And she didn't see it as a price which had been paid, because flight was too dear. The fact that she could barely make her way through ground life and its constant need for manipulation didn't matter, mostly because Papi seldom thought about it -- or much of anything else.

Cerea suspected Papi would have loved the little horses, largely because so many were brightly hued. But to adjust into a world without hands... that might have been easy for her, where so little else was.

You had to look after Papi, because she could seldom look after herself. (The exception was combat. The wing talon was almost useless. The three on each foot could rend flesh.) She was the same age as the rest of them, and her lack of intellect still made her the baby of the group. Trying to keep the harpy from getting into trouble could be a near-constant demand on Cerea's time -- but she'd been a lone foal, there had never been the chance for a sister and --

-- I have to get home.

The stallion was staggering a bit, and it didn't feel intentional. Like he was starting to weaken.

Is that from the hairpin? She'd been keeping it pressed tightly against the horn --

-- and then she saw it.

The corridor ended in a T-intersection. There was a side door plus two statutes to move past before getting there (with one of those statutes significantly poking into the hallway, a very large, poorly-balanced effort that looked as if the sculptor had removed every human element from a gryphon and left nothing but the animal) -- but that would put her at the partially-open door at the exact center of the passage. The one where a familiar glint off metallic paint had just reached her eyes.

She saw it. Her sword, and did so in the first moment she'd ever truly wanted it.

Cerea saw it, and so did the stallion.

She missed the moment when his eyes widened. Had no way to know about the desperation which had just seized his thoughts, the self-hatred at having somehow led her to where she wanted to go. Neither of them understood why the door had been left open, and it would take long hours of questioning before any admitted to having accidentally dragged the blade into contact with the lock. But it was her sword, she focused the entirety of her being on that, and so misplaced the stallion until the moment when he kicked her.

She yelped: she couldn't help it. Even with a rather ineffective kick to the side, that foreleg had already been bruised.

The renewed pain loosened her grip.

The illness began to drop away.

It wasn't instant: he still didn't feel entirely like himself. But it was enough for focus, to see the monster wildly glance between himself and the sword. To make a choice, and the huge body began to gallop forward, leaned to get past the statue, had a new rent placed in a sleeve when the new angle wasn't quite sufficient. Heading directly for the door at a speed he couldn't match --

-- but he didn't have to. His corona got there first.

Green energy (still wavering around the edges, sparks dim and flickering) surrounded the door, began to pull it closed. Prepared to hold it against anything the monster could bring to bear.

He wasn't spectacularly powerful for a unicorn: his field strength was above average, but it wasn't as if he'd been anywhere close to getting into the Gifted School. He was merely prepared to commit everything he had, and his corona began to surge around his horn as he pushed.

The monster's right shoulder went into the fast-closing door, and all of that hideous strength pushed right back. All of the mass, and the spike of pain which began between his eyes told him something about just how much mass there was. It was more than he could ever hope to lift, exponentially so, he couldn't fight like this and --

There would be other questions, before the next stage began. Many of them, and a rather forceful series would take his tactics apart. He could have switched focus, pulled on a single hoof, tried to yank the monster off-balance and hoped it would crash to the floor. There was always the option to twist ears: that kind of pain distracted most creatures from their current goals. But he was (although he did not realize it) the victim of stories. He had arrived too late to the battle and so had been told about the sword, with recent history already beginning to distort into legend. Blue knew what the sword had done, and also knew what ponies had told themselves it could do. The two were rapidly becoming confused. And so his priority was to keep the monster away from it, he already had the door in his field, his eyes were starting to water as his horn's corona went double, a single moment of switching targets would allow it to go through and it was already winning, the door was opening more and more by the second, he forced himself to trot forward in the faint hopes that lesser distance would allow him to apply more force, past the side door, up to the statues...

Green flashed and surged, within that hallway, and Blue had no way to know that he should have already lost. How tired the monster was, and how hurt. It wasn't the creature's first night in pony lands, and every hour had taken a toll. It had been beaten in the fight, wounded, had already lost so much blood. Its own strength was beginning to ebb. But what remained was enough.

It pushed, and he screamed as the light broke, the pressure too much to bear. The double corona winked out, and he crashed to the stone floor.

He barely had the strength to raise his head. To see it seize sword and scabbard, quickly untangling both from the nets, using the confiscated belt to put them in their proper place. All he could do, as a monster was set free, was watch the end of his world begin all over again.

Blue could merely watch, and it was the only sense which seemed to be fully operating after giving so much to his desperate effort. He was only slightly aware of the stone below his barrel. He felt as if he could barely hear.

But somehow, the sound of the side door opening still reached him, as did the little gasp.

The castle's current owner, a young mare known to be less than proficient at parties, rushed forth. Dropped down to mauve knees, her chin moving forward to press against his forehead. Basic medical attention: checking for a fever.

But then she saw it.

It had donned its weapon, found some means of turning within the little room until it was facing in their direction.

They had no way to read the expression on its face, for it was the face of a monster.

It charged.

It was galloping directly for them. And Blue tried, he delved within himself for anything that might be remaining, he sought one last burst of strength, enough to push a mare who was paralyzed by terror to safety, get her away from the inevitable trampling, but there was nothing left and

it jumped.

The monster went over them, easily clearing both bodies and nearly cracking its head on the ceiling in the process -- but the upper impact was avoided. Instead, its flank merely hit the griffon statute, and they heard the cry of the beast, scented the latest flow of blood.

It landed, staggered somewhat from the pain. Instinctively glanced down its flank, trying to see how bad the wound was --

-- it had hit the statue. It knew that. So did Blue, because he could see the results.

The monster was huge. Heavy. And a precariously-balanced sculpture, impacted by a monster, was starting to tilt into the hallway. It was about to fall and when it did so, there would be two ponies underneath: one too frightened to escape, the other too exhausted to move. The first two fatalities of the monster's reign.

He was supposed to protect ponies.

He had failed.

Blue closed his eyes and waited for the final surge of pain.

The impact was followed by a scream.

Then he realized neither had been his.

He looked up, and the monster was standing over them. He could see barrel, belly, powerful legs, and little more, right up until he managed a glance to the side.

It had spun, jumped again: the heavy hooves landing around them had been the impact. The scream had come when the statue had toppled into the monster's flank.

It screamed again, threw all of its weight to that side, and the statue moved. Straightened, then fell backwards. Crashing into the alcove.

The monster staggered a little more. The huge body moved over them, with none of the hooves coming close to impact. It barely managed a turn, angled itself to look down at them, and the expression was mostly unreadable. It was possible to see the pain.

Then it ran.

It wasn't all that hard to find the point of exit: the castle had several windows on the ground floor, the one which faced the open pasture that stood between structure and the forest border (and incidentally faced away from the rest of the town) was very large, and while the glass had in fact been reinforced by numerous security spells, the monster had apparently hit it sword-first.

After that -- there were hoofprints in the dirt for a while, heading for the trees. And once they crossed the border, the search stopped. It had to stop, because the residents knew they needed help.

The tales were flying, and some of that was literal: pegasi had a certain advantage in spreading gossip. Some of those who hadn't been there were the ones who swore they knew exactly what had happened. Blue tried to speak, was backed by the young noble, and both had to struggle to keep their words from being lost: something which became all the worse with one barely able to stay conscious, wearily forcing himself towards morning.

But he didn't have to wait quite that long, for ninety minutes prior to the arrival of daylight, the sun came to them.

It had brought company.

The questioning began in earnest, conducted by those who could listen. And when it ended, the elder looked to the younger, for the younger was once again there to be sought.

That pony nodded. A simple movement, one which almost managed to contain the sheer power behind it.

"Begin the hunt," the younger ordered them.

And with both that and the statement which followed, the world changed.

"We will join it."

Warped

She needed to stop, and she could not.

Galloping through the strange forest under what little moonlight dappled through the trees, when Cerea had already been awake for... she wasn't sure. It was simply a number which worked out to 'too long'. There had been the road, then the forest, and everything which had followed excluded opportunities for true rest. You slept when you were safe and at best, she'd been able to find the most temporary of shelters: camped in the shadow of boulders which could at least prevent approaches from the stone-blocked side. But then a new scent would drift into her nostrils, instincts which had been unable to drop below high alert responded by jolting her back to consciousness, she would need to move again...

There had been battles before reaching the town, and it could be argued that she'd won them simply because she had reached it. But each encounter had left her with fresh wounds. There had been no chance to recover, just about nothing for rest. The fight against the little horses had seen her completely beaten, and just before she'd escaped...

Her flank hurt. It felt as if the muscles on the impacted side were caving in. There was something within her very much like the sensation of tearing, it hit her anew every time she moved, and she couldn't stop moving.

She needed rest. Treatment. Food, and her exertion was turning that aspect into a rapidly-increasing problem. A body so large (and she had gone through a lot in the household just from trying to keep the others from learning any actual mass-related numbers) required a proportionate amount of intake. At the peak of her appetite, Cerea could treat a full buffet table as her first course. She was banned from every all-you-can-eat establishment in her host city. And she was a herbivore -- well, technically so, and most of that was by choice. She could live on grass if she absolutely had to -- but if that was all which was available, it would take a tremendous amount just to get her from day to day. It also included the requirement to stop and graze. And in this strange place...

Normally, the unfamiliarity attached to most of the plant life wouldn't have been a problem. (The season was: to the best of her judgment, it was mid-autumn, and so quite a bit of it was dead.) She could simply scent when something was safe to consume, and had done so shortly after her arrival.

And then the most enticing meal she'd found had tried to kill her.

Tired. Hungry. Hurt. She had been trying to make her lungs store the Second Breath which she was sure she was going to need, and she couldn't find the required focus. Her night vision had limits, she knew nothing of the terrain around her except that it was hostile, every hoofstep sent vibrations crashing through her body to do what damage they could or, just as often, remind her of the wounds which were already there. And she couldn't stop, because it wouldn't take long for the little horses to learn she'd escaped. This was their land: she assumed they had ways of moving quickly through it. Lesser size didn't necessarily equate to lesser speed, she couldn't do anything about hiding her own tracks when she was just galloping, familiarity with the terrain would allow them to catch up and... there was another aspect. The thing which made her keep looking up.

She had to stay under the canopy provided by the trees. But maintaining any degree of movement meant eventually giving in to her body's needs and so when the sweet scent wafted towards her, she reluctantly turned towards the stream.

The cold water felt too good on her face, and that scared her.

She had lowered herself as much as she could, trying to suppress every little moan. Scooped up the liquid in cupped hands, done her best not to drink too quickly: allowing herself to guzzle would likely mean having all of it come right back up again. And whenever she wasn't drinking, her eyes sought the sky.

There were trees in the vicinity of the stream, and some of them were sturdy -- but none of the branches stretched out enough to fully shield any portion. It gave her a clear view, and part of the current terror was that the same could so easily be said coming the other way.

It was a clear night, the first fully clear night since she had become lost, and that was part of why she was a little bit cold: no clouds to insulate the land.

(She should have been colder.)

It let her see the sky. And because she could see it, because she had to look...

Centaurs, like so many other liminals, had a rather dubious relationship with the moon. (About half of the orb had emerged from the forever-cycling shadow, and it had been slowly waxing.) When it was full... that was when her instincts were at their peak, and there were ways in which that could be an advantage: she reacted more quickly, with movements coming from something faster than thought. But it could also be harder to think, and if anything had truly been on her mind when the full moon rose, any goal... the decorum which forbid the most direct means of seeking it might vanish. She had to guard many things when the moon was full, and the first was herself -- especially after the first such cycle spent in Japan had seen her fail.

She almost wished the moon was full. Enhanced instincts and a quicker reaction time would have helped her, and she knew it would become easier to temporarily dismiss the pain. But...

...she could also see the stars.

It was mid-autumn here. It hadn't been in Japan. And it was true that the lower hemisphere would have a different season, but it would have been the opposing one. She could see the stars, and...

The oldest legends, the tales from the time before segregation -- they claimed centaurs had been the first astronomers, had gifted that science to humans. (They had done so because that had been their role in the world: the tutors and protectors of a species which frankly needed a little help.) It was considered honorable for a centaur to master astronomy -- but having been confined prevented the opportunity for many direct studies. And Cerea's interests had never really trotted in that direction: she had preferred the role of the knight to that of the teacher. Her relative lack of interest in the science had disappointed her mother, but... well, it was hardly Cerea's only means of doing that. Disappointing her mother was something of a regular event, very nearly a sport, and it was yet another thing where the typical result meant something had been lost.

She didn't know the stars, not as strongly as her mother felt she should. But she couldn't find a single familiar constellation. And the moon itself -- she could see it clearly now, and something felt wrong. A subconscious recognition that certain craters were absent, and the new ones weren't close enough to pass. An entire night sky existing within an uncanny atmospheric valley.

The human majority had been shocked when integration was first announced, and part of that had come from the implication of how much they'd missed. They had believed themselves to have just about completed their exploration of the world, and they had been horribly wrong. A lot could be hidden, especially if you had ways of keeping people from looking. Multiple species had carefully slipped into deliberate cracks. Centaurs had made their homes in the secret places, and knowing that such areas could exist --

-- she didn't know where she was. But even with the strange plant life, the creatures, and (initially) the altered season -- she'd believed herself to be on Earth, because she knew how much could be hidden. After all, she herself had spent most of her life as incarnated rumor.

Months ago, she had made the choice to become one of the first. To go among the humans as part of the great integration experiment, and there had been ways in which that made her feel lost every day. Becoming part of a world all at once: no dipping a hoof into strange waters, simply plunging in and hoping not to drown. But if everything had gone wrong, if the laws had tripped her up or worse, her love had rejected her -- there would be a plane flying home. She could limp back. Return to the herd, with the comfort of familiar sights and scents almost sufficient to make her forget that she had disappointed her parent yet again.

But now she could see the sky. And even without having mastered astronomy, she knew she had not been brought to a hidden place in the southern hemisphere. The sky was wrong.

She was lost. Perhaps more lost than anyone had ever been. Lost, hurt, scared, and... cold.

But she wasn't cold enough.

There were ways to roughly gauge the temperature on that chill night. (One of them was embarrassing, and the horror of displacement was temporarily dampened by relief: at the very least, no one could see her.) And centaurs were quite literally hot-blooded: her body's natural temperature matched that of a horse. She had hoped that it would make her love think well of her, encourage him to cuddle with -- well, the portions of her body which were most familiar to him, at least to start. In reality, it mostly made Miia curl up with her on chill mornings and, because it was Miia, curl around.

It was cold enough that Miia would have wrapped her hours ago, the lamia sleepily resisting any attempt to get pressuring scales away from fur. But Cerea didn't feel all that cold. Her body might have been reacting that way, but her mind said she was, at most, lightly chill. In fact, as far as the temperature went, the longer she moved, the more comfortable she seemed to become.

It was something else to be afraid of.

She was resilient, with tremendous endurance: she was a centaur. But there had been battles. Too little rest, not enough food. Even centaurs had their limits, and --

-- her wet palm moved along her flank, and her fur was coated in red.

Wounded.

Without treatment. For days.

There was a foe she couldn't run from, and it was moving with her.

All she could do was hope to find a place of rest. Somewhere she could eat, sleep, recover. Let her body do the work. She was a centaur: she had to be strong enough for that. Just once, she had to be strong enough --

-- her ears perked, twisted towards the not-distant-enough sound of whirring wings. Large wings, and all four legs compulsively jerked, got her upright again: a simple jump cleared the stream. She was too exposed when she was away from the canopy: her best chance to remain hidden was obscuring the view from the air. It turned every drink into a risk.

But without water, she would die.

If I can't rest...

The little horses were hunting her, on the ground and from the sky. She had to keep moving.

It was getting worse.

The sun rose, and the world felt as if it was starting to blur. Greenery blended together, right up until the moment something came out of it. None of the little horses had caught up to her, but there were other things in the forest. One of them managed to bite her left hind leg before she drove it back, and she couldn't be sure she had removed all of the splinters from the freshest of wounds.

Time seemed to be warping. It was morning, and then it was noon: she didn't retain much memory from anything in between. She found water every so often, but not enough: every time she stopped, the wings caught up --

-- was she only imagining wings? So much could be arising from within, as what should have been a chill day turned into a falsely comfortable one, then began to tilt towards an unsubtle heat.

It didn't matter. She heard wings and she moved. Some of the scarce surviving fruit was recognizable, and she took what she could. (The fruit tasted like -- she wasn't sure. Taste had been the first thing to go.) She was taking in just enough calories to stay upright, and that was a status which wouldn't maintain for long.

The forest just kept going on, and she didn't understand that because she had already found an inhabited area. There were wild places on Earth, more than the humans had ever suspected -- but where something lived, it was hard to travel more than a few miles without coming across a road. At the very least, she should have found a cell tower by now, but she hadn't seen any telephone poles in the town, it was possible that the little horses didn't have them... and no matter how far she went, there was just more forest..

She was trying to follow the sun: that at least kept her moving in a consistent direction. She tried not to think about the moments when its position appeared to jump, and that effort was aided by the increasing times when she couldn't seem to think at all.

Cerea kept moving. It was the only thing she could do, without the chance for rest, the offering of true shelter. She moved because she was being chased, because she was a centaur and the fading belief that such would somehow be enough to save her was part of what kept her going forward. The rest was the growing fire which prevented her from thinking about much of anything else, including how much she should have been fearing it.

There were times when she heard hooves. Others had her pick up on wings. The sounds pressed against her, even when she wasn't sure they existed. But it didn't matter, for the only real thing was the chase.

The sun crested, dipped. Night came, the temperature crashed, and she didn't notice. She was traveling with her own source of heat, and the burning rose as it continued to spread.

Eventually, she stopped feeling hungry, and was no longer capable of worrying about it. Didn't know that calories had run out, and she was now moving solely on the sheer stubbornness which so many felt was the truest hallmark of her species. Running on hope.

But she kept moving. She had no other choice.

She would run until the moment when she would never move again.

There was a tree, an unusually large one: the facing side of the trunk presented a surface nearly the length of her body before truly starting to curve. Its bark was exceptionally dark, even under the moonlight. So much light was reaching it, for every last one of its leaves had fallen, and the branches stretched out far enough to prevent anything else from growing in the area: it was the sole occupant of its own little clearing. Broad, pronged flat pieces of little death had layered themselves around the base. It was something like a maple, a little like a redwood, and very much like the last thing she might ever know.

Her breathing had become ragged hours ago. The scant surviving portion of her skirt was completely saturated, and the blouse's soaked state had already moved beyond humiliating. The difference was that for her upper torso, the moisture came from sweat, liquid she could no longer afford to lose. For the lower, it was froth. It had been froth for some time, and if she had known the exact duration, the knowledge alone might have dropped her.

She could no longer run. Each hoof was raised just enough to let it drag a shallow trench through the leaves.

They're right behind me.

She had been thinking that for some time. It was becoming the last thought she truly could hold onto. It was close to turning into the last one she might ever have.

I need to hide.

There was... there was a tree. There was a tree and it wasn't trying to kill her. It was so big. She could... go around to the other side. Sink down behind the trunk. Rest in a bed of leaves, perhaps cover herself with leaves. It was a plan. It made perfect sense, because just about everything did in the midst of the inner fire.

I pinned my hair back up. To keep it from getting tangled in wood and worse during the run. They won't see that. If I tuck my tail close...

She... just needed a few minutes. That was all. Just a few minutes and then she would recover. A little rest. There had to be that much, or soon there would be nothing at all.

She limped forward, put out a hand. Clotted blood rubbed into the bark.

It was a nice sort of tree. Papi would have been happy to perch in it, while Lala undoubtedly had something morbid to say about the setting: the rest of them would have then spent hours in explaining it to Papi and Suu. She could almost hear the dullahan: some kind of fully predictable comment regarding the inevitability of death. How every autumn was the world entering a mass self-inflicted burial, because that was the sort of thing dullahans loved to talk about, endlessly. Fortunately, there was always the option to stuff something in Lala's mouth or, given a dullahan, to just stuff her head in a cabinet.

She isn't here.

She said she would be there for us when we died.

She isn't here. So I'm not going to die.

Her upper torso swayed, leaned forward. Bruised flesh compressed against the bark, and the angle allowed her forehead to contact wood.

Blue eyes began to close.

Kimihito...

-- and some forty feet behind her, she heard hooves step onto dead leaves.

She turned, and reflexes brought her hand to the sword's hilt. Forced her eyes to open, made herself see. She hadn't been able to muster the Second Breath, and it meant she was reaching for strength she no longer truly had. But she still found a way to turn, and unearthed no means of understanding what she saw.

This horse wasn't quite so little.

The mare took another step, and that which was not a mane twisted, with border shifting as little lights flashed within the dark flow. The large wings were half-unfurled, and something deep was radiating from a horn which the moonlight caressed. All of that found a final way of registering with Cerea as she looked into the dark eyes, saw the intelligence behind the narrowed lids. But there was something which reached her before any of that, a level of recognition which went down to the soul.

Cerea had been in the presence of power before. Most of the time, it was petty, and that was bad. Occasionally, it was petty and political: that was worse. But there had been a few encounters with true strength, the aura of confidence and control which could radiate deep into the night. Even now, with the fire burning, she knew what that looked like, felt like. There was no escaping it.

In height, the mare was still somewhat less than Cerea. In presence, it dominated the world.

Her foreknees began to dip, and she initially believed it to be mere courtesy. Then she remembered that she was in the presence of an enemy, and one of the final efforts straightened her legs again.

The mare took another step. Cerea just barely managed to register the partial armor resting against sternum and forelegs. The saddlebags... those were harder to see, because wisps of fog were rising from the mare's fur.

She had already seen three separate subspecies branches within the population of little horses. This was something more than a fourth.

It didn't matter. Her sword was in her hand, and that finally meant something.

The mare continued to approach, and any scent of fear which might have existed was carried away by the mist. It simply kept coming, in no hurry at all, with the dark eyes silently drinking in the length of the blade.

The horn's glow abruptly increased, and a bolt of dark energy lanced forth.

Cerea's hand moved, did so without true thought. And when the blade deflected the strange light, when the bolt went into the leaves and she saw the mare's wing joints briefly loosen, there was a moment when the fire told her she could win.

But her hand had barely moved. It hadn't needed to, and it would be some time before she realized the mare had been aiming for the sword.

The enemy quietly nodded to herself, and then another bolt was launched. Cerea moved --

-- the primary bolt was deflected, and her arm had to move into a given position for that. The secondary, trailing a split-second behind, had been aimed for the exact spot where her wrist would have needed to be.

She cried out in pain as her hand compulsively opened, as the sword dropped, tricked by nothing more than a basic feint. And then the dark energy flared around the horn, projected forward faster than she could move, coated her body and pushed.

All four knees folded, and did so at the same instant when her arms were slammed against her sides. Another surge pressed on the full length of her back, and a brief spray of leaves flew into the air at the site of impact.

Her sword was less than two feet from her hand. Two feet and what little remained of a lifetime.

The mare, posture showing nothing more than simple satisfaction, nodded again. The dark eyes narrowed a little more, and the head tilted. Staring down at her, which carried the impression of a fully natural action. It gave Cerea a full view of the horn's lowered point.

She strained against the dark light which covered her from shoulders to hooves. All it did was make her skin tingle, as if a limb had begun to fall asleep and taken the rest of her body along for the final ride. And...

...there was something else. One more sensation finding a way to register with her senses, because it was something she hadn't felt for hours.

The light was cool.

It was like being outside the house in early autumn, when the cruelest heat of summer had passed and a touch of chill was the most welcome thing imaginable. It was the soft breeze ruffling her fur at the end of a long run. It was the reminder that comfort came from more than sunlight, and there were times when the best part of existence was realizing that the night had its own way of being alive and everything which moved within the darkness was welcome to seek that joy.

It was cool, the first thing to bank the fire in hours. It let her think.

And it let her see the rest of the dark light sort something out from the contents of the now-open left saddlebag. The metal which emerged and floated forward, coming towards her head.

She jerked, twisted, tried to break the prison. But nothing did any good: the light was stronger than she was, and the metal kept coming. It was a flat silver disk with a thin black opal set in the center, about half the size of her palm, with multiple threads of silver wire trailing from one end. Wire which twisted and warped as it came closer to her, stretched out into new configurations which seemed more than sufficient to wrap around her throat and that was where it was aimed --

-- the disc touched her skin, clung there. The thin wires went under her jawline, up the left side of her face, the tips touched the base of her ear, and

the horse neighed.

It was still a neigh. That was a familiar sound, even with the new layers of complexity worked into that basic vocalization. But somewhere within Cerea's mind, at the moment the wire touched her, it became something more.

"Greetings, centaur."

She froze, paralyzed by words. By the sound of something she could understand, and the ice laced into the commanding syllables.

The layer of dark light around the mare's horn increased, and the next bolt moved between branches, went into the sky. Cerea's eyes automatically followed it, and so she saw the downwards-pointing arrow silhouetted against the night.

"I wonder," the mare softly, darkly said (and the cold power in that voice was so controlled), "if you are capable of appreciating the effort involved. Translation spells... the most common requires a pony who speaks both of the languages to be directly involved, and their comprehension is simply loaned to another for a time. Inept efforts might temporarily sacrifice the caster's own knowledge, and that state lasts until the thaums finally drain. An improved version merely requires that anypony within a fairly large radius know the needed tongue. But the most advanced..." and her voice dropped slightly as she took another hoofstep, came closer still "...that is almost impossible. The one which reaches deep, to the very concept of language itself, and so can allow the comprehension of something never before heard. Across the centuries, only a few have been able to work that spell. And with so few able to use it... the number of devices made to cast it suffer accordingly. In the modern nights, only five such survive, and the newest was created three hundred years before my Return. You are wearing one of our greatest treasures, something only brought under Moon when the new is found. Our best hope for true communication when a species first steps into the light."

She couldn't speak, not in the presence of that aura. All she could do was listen. Wait. Watch as the hornpoint came closer.

"You comprehend my words," the mare steadily went on. (More fog rose from that dark fur, spread through the clearing and sank into the leaves.) "I perceive that within your eyes, centaur. The magic functions -- when it should not. Because in the rough shape of your form, you are something other than new to us. We have learned from experience -- and what the more recent experience teaches is that at the instant the device touched you, it would have lost its charge. Become nothing more than jewel and metal, its thaums stolen by flesh and fur. But it continues to function. It functions because it retains its power, the same way mine did not enter you. My own strength is retained: something I suspected would occur, once the truth of events had been untangled from the mere perception of them. Something beyond our experience..."

The mare was about fifteen feet away now. The perfect distance for a lunge.

"You are not new," she stated. "And yet it would seem you are. I looked at the photographs, before the hunt began. Fair --" a very direct look at Cerea's lower torso "-- and foul." Moving that dark regard first to the upper, then back to the face. "Let us see how deep the foulness goes."

And stopped moving.

"Your name," the mare ordered.

She swallowed. The saliva moistened her tongue.

"...Cer --" No. This wasn't a friend. "Centorea Shianus."

Her own speech emerged as words: she could hear them within her ears. But there seemed to be a certain overlay of nicker.

A slow nod. "The lack of imagination of your parents is noted," the mare dryly said. "What is your --" and there was a moment of confusion, as if two words had been said at once "-- territory/origin?"

It took a moment to reconcile the overlap and in her weariness and confusion, she went with the second. "France." There was even enough in her for a little audible pride.

The mare's features briefly contorted and even with Cerea unable to truly read the expression, she could tell it had harshened. (The flaring of the horn's light provided an additional clue.)

"That suggests a nation," the mare darkly stated. "There were never enough of your kind to create one, not with the way you were --" another overlap, tripled this time "-- born/appeared/manifested -- and a single specimen was disaster sufficient for a lifetime." And with decibels surging, "Where is this nation?"

"I..." The light around the horn was spiking. "...I don't know..."

(A somewhat more fevered thought noted that she was being distressingly informal. Apologies were probably required.)

"You do not know," the mare semi-repeated.

"I don't -- do not know where I am. How I got here. I was just -- it was a morning gallop, and the road --"

She stopped. She didn't know how to explain what she didn't understand.

The mare looked at her, under moonlight and shadows, as the fog began to layer itself against the entrapping light. Just -- looked.

"You struggle," the mare softly said. "But that is all you can do. Strength against magic, when you have no strength left. I see your wounds, centaur. I see the froth sliding from your coat. I attempted to search for you while you slept, and so I know that you have not. Everything the townsponies told us about -- and none of it is in you. It is carried in a weapon you can no longer touch. And so to the next question." The next words were spat, and the moonlight reflected off the thin coating of fresh ice upon the leaves. "What is your association with Tirek?"

All Cerea knew was that it sounded like a name.

"...who?" Was that respectful enough? "...whom?"

The mare blinked.

"All of this power touching you," the mare finally said, "and your size has remained consistent. The only fluctuations were encountered within some of the more distorted tales. But for the sake of completion: are you intending to become any larger?"

Cerea's eyes involuntarily went down to the only area which might apply.

"Um," she replied, and had no idea where to go from there.

Dryly, "In the anatomical sense, I understand what those are typically meant for. So unless you are indicating that such is where you store your power --" which was immediately followed by "-- and it is rather easy to spot a blush of that intensity, especially without having to gaze through fur. So I shall take that as a no."

Cerea, who really hadn't wanted to discuss the impressive duration of centaur puberty, went along with the denial quickly enough to make the world blur.

The blur lingered. Her head began to drop.

The coolness had helped. But it had only done so for a little while.

"In form, you are nightmare," the mare decided, and did so while receding into the distance. Without moving, which struck Cerea as an interesting sort of trick. "In soul..."

Her breath caught in her throat, emerged as a rasp.

"For now, you are my prisoner," the mare softly said. "But for one who took what would have been a fatal blow for two of my charges, it has the chance to potentially become something more towards... protective custody --"

Cerea's eyes closed.

"Centaur?"

The only response came from fingers going limp and froth falling onto dark leaves.

The mare lunged forward then, pressed her chin against the exposed forehead. This was followed by backing away until she had a full view of the wounds, and the red which flared around the edges.

She glanced towards the sky, adjusted the position of the arrow to have it pointing precisely at the fallen sword, then shifted her body until she was standing next to the warped form. Leaned in, touched flanks.

The dark corona flashed, and a tiny shower of hairpins fell onto vacated ground.

Aberrant

The two middle-aged unicorn stallions who currently occupied the revived post of Royal Physician (one diagnostician, one surgeon, both effectively married to each other in all ways but the legal and sexual) had discovered the job came with a few unusual requirements. They both had to be extremely good at keeping secrets: not only did having any understanding of alicorn biology (and worse, origins) place their own conjectures into Classified files, but rumors of alicorn colds tended to lead into major stock market dips. When dealing with the medical needs of a species which numbered in the single digits, a certain degree of desperate improvisation was frequently essential. It helped if you weren't easily startled, and both of them were now almost used to the thunder which announced the younger's displeasure with the most recent procedure. And on the whole, you had to be ready for anything -- but when managing the health of the elder, 'anything' had required proper equipment. This had led to the creation of a singular examination table, one which had been designed to accommodate a form of that sheer size. It did a lot to make the elder just a little more comfortable (which was already essential for somepony who had both an effective phobia regarding needles and a way to melt them) while negating the need to shove a lot of smaller tables together. It also effectively negated the need for praying onto Sun that no sudden shifts in body weight would lead to that large body tumbling into a sudden gap, and did so after it had already happened.

There were four ponies in the highly-secured offices within the Lunar Wing, and they were standing next to examination tables which had been shoved together: the one meant for the elder, and that typically used by the younger. There had been no other choice. The unresponsive patient was too large for a standard table, and when it came to overflowing that which was used by the elder... torsos weren't supposed to bend that way.

The doctors had called the siblings in. (They could do that, when it was a medical matter. They were the only two ponies in the nation who had the authority to make those mares follow certain categories of order, and it usually didn't keep the diagnostician from sleeping for more than one night in five.) And they had been conducting the briefing while speaking in what nearly amounted to normal tones, at least after the terror had been subtracted out.

"-- and we have no starting point," the surgeon groaned. (Muscular for a unicorn, with a warm brown coat and shaved-away mane.) "We went through the Canterlot Archives, Princesses, and when it comes to centaur medicine, the only solid thing we found was suggestions for treating any wounds they inflicted. The anatomical charts are open guesswork --" a soft snort: the thick black tail twitched "-- and based on our examination of her, somepony was making some lousy guesses."

"Nothing at all," the elder quietly said. "Not even in the oldest part of the stacks?"

"There's actually more in the newest," the diagnostician sighed. (White, thin, with a mane which just about outmassed the rest of him.)

"I fail to understand," the younger frowned. "Why would there be recent publications?"

"They're self-help books." (The sudden flare of anger made the diagnostician sound slightly less like a mare.) "Your Magic Is Back And So Are You. Helping ponies deal with the trauma of Tirek, mostly through repeating the same useless things which have been in self-help books for generations and adding the word 'Tirek' a few dozen times. Crisis response through instant book sales, Princess. And they do nothing. I read through seven of them and the only thing they made me think about was --"

He abruptly stopped as his head went up, and slightly to the right. (The other three, with well-practiced ease, ignored it.)

The surgeon took over. "We've examined her as closely as we can: all the spells and devices we could utilize. Princesses, there are ways in which we could usually try to treat any mammal, just because mammals share some basic arrangements: the location of vital arteries, the placement of certain organs. But with her -- some of the organs are in new locations, and we've verified at least one set of duplicates. And that's not even getting into her digestive system!"

"Is there something wrong there as well?" the younger inquired.

"It's functional," the surgeon helplessly declared. "It's just... stretched."

The diagnostician's head came back down. "-- but why would reparations need to apply six generations later?" (They initially ignored that too, although there would eventually be a lively debate over just what the actual fantasy had been.) "Princesses, this is what it comes down to. There are certain procedures which apply to everything living, like cleaning and dressing the wounds. We've done that. A very few medicines will work on any mammal, at least once the dosage is adjusted for body mass: that potentially gives us a painkiller for her --"

"-- mchanga," the elder softly guessed.

The smaller stallion nodded. "That's what we'll try. But she could have a bad reaction, Princess, because nopony's ever treated a centaur with it before. It could kill her. Any potion or drug we use could be fatal."

"And universal status doesn't help us with the infection," the surgeon grimly stated, "because there are no antibiotics which are that broad-spectrum. We can try the ones which work on the most species and hope -- but if we're wrong, we could damage some of her organs. Organs we don't know how to treat. One crisis might kill her."

"She's resilient," the diagnostician told them. "Exceptionally so: we've already seen that in the tests. If we can break the infection, the rest should heal on its own. But without that..."

The younger looked to the elder, who silently nodded.

"Then the infection," the younger told the physicians, "shall be burned out."

They stared at her. (The dual capacity for doing so wasn't quite a job requirement, but it wasn't far off either.)

"Princess," the surgeon tried, "it's already gone into the body: you can see some of the red streaks along the arms. And she has them in other places." The monster had been put back into the remnants of its clothing before the siblings had arrived, although the stallions weren't certain whose dignity they were trying to protect. "If it was just on the surface, we could --" he swallowed "-- try flame: the burn scars would be better than letting the infection run free. But it's too far along for that, too far for even --" another gulp "-- amputation. Her own fever isn't enough to stop it, and raising her body temperature enough to kill the infection would also kill her. We can't generate inner heat where the radiance is directed so precisely as to harm nothing except the infection --"

But that was when the elder stepped forward.

The white head dipped towards the monster's body. A corona of sunlight danced around the horn.

"Doctors Bear," the elder quietly said, "let us show you a little trick..."

The filly's prison exists within a gap in the world.

Such vacuums take some effort to arrange. There are times when land has to be purchased, and that has actually become easier: modern technology means such things can be done without requiring buyer and seller to be on the same continent, let alone within one room. But human advancement makes other aspects harder. Satellites can only be rerouted so many times, and the fear that someone will spot the code which tells the lens to not record a given location...

It used to be easier. Humans were more respectful of ownership, or at least easier to scare off when the borders had been breached. They ran, and all they carried back were stories: things which could be dismissed as the ravings of a drunk who'd read too many stories as a child. Every border guard carried a flask and when you caught up to fallen quarry, you left them smelling that much worse for both wear and credibility.

But there have been cameras for decades now. (Some of the fae among the liminals got caught that way, and so many strings had to be pulled in order to falsely make the entire thing appear in the history books as a hoax.) The filly is eight, and she knows all about cameras. She's been taught to avoid them at all costs and years from now, when somepony enters her shared household under the lie of filming a documentary, she will not be the first to suspect so much as the first to fear.

Cameras are a threat. Still images are bad: moving ones are worse. She is eight, and the herd talks in hushed tones about digital cameras. Images which are easy to fake, becoming easier with every passing year, and perhaps that will give them some protection. Making something come across as a hoax is simpler than ever. But the hidden communities around the world have to keep doing it. They feel as if they are forever one sighting away from being exposed.

Worse: one capture.

The herd exists within a gap in the world, for few recognize how large France truly is. Land can be acquired, was purchased centuries ago, and humans stayed away. (Mostly away. There is a time every year when humans are brought into the gap, and they must always be made to forget. The filly doesn't know about that yet: just that a night exists where every child is put to bed early, with none knowing why.) The herd has a forest and some clearings, space enough to farm, room aplenty for schools and contests and games of all sorts.

There's also a cemetery. That takes up a lot of room.

The filly's mother wants her to participate in every game, sometimes comes close to outright shoving her in because the filly's mother is among the strongest and therefore the filly had better put on a good showing. The herd expects that of the filly, her mother expects that and --

-- her mother... pushes the filly forward, always expecting more of her. Pushes in strange ways, as if simultaneously insisting that the filly must take part while -- and the filly only sees this in rare glimpses, when the racecourse passes that part of the segregated stands and she gets a glimpse of her mother's face -- still being afraid of what could happen when she does. Her mother pushes too hard sometimes and so the filly often feels that there's no fun in the games, just an unrelenting drive insisting that the filly must succeed, will succeed, even when the competition is older and faster and just better and...

The filly does well enough. But so much of the time, she comes in second. And that's not good enough. It disappoints her mother, and the filly has so many ways of doing that as to make it a sport of its own. She retreats to her room, to the stories which don't question or judge her, she tries not to get caught crying and --

Her mother loves her: the filly knows that. Sometimes, after a really bad game, her mother comes into the room and cradles the filly's head against warmth and softness. Sings to the filly, singing without true lyrics in the rising and falling croon which those flexible vocal chords can so easily provide. The filly loves being cuddled that way, and hates that the surest means of finding such comfort is through losing.

Her mother loves her. But her mother pushes, all the time, and sometimes the filly feels as if a young back will break.

Her mother loves her. Her father... she doesn't see much of her father, because her father is a stallion. A stallion is a colt who's grown up and the filly is not allowed to be among the colts unless adults are present. Colts are crude and angry and, far too often, stupid. Her mother doesn't seem to think stallions are much better. None of the mothers seem to think that, and so fillies are supervised closely whenever colts and stallions are about. They play separately. They're educated in facilities which exist on opposing sides of the gap. A society which has been segregated away from the humans has one more level of dividing line to inflict.

The filly should have more friends among the other children, because her mother is among the strongest and that would normally invite a certain degree of formal approach. (A society so confined has great need for formality, as there is nowhere for any true argument to go.) But the filly is being pushed too hard. No one really likes playing with the one who's always being told to beat you, and the filly can never protest, can't say that she just wants to have fun without worrying about placement and recognition and honors. To be among others where her mother can see her (and that happens far too often) is to know the challenge will be coming. That she has to prove herself again, and nothing she does is ever enough proof.

So the filly gallops back to her books, because then she can pretend she's studying: after all, it only takes seconds to swap one out with another book. Her mother respects studying, because fillies are supposed to be smart (while colts are stupid) and it's traditional to study.

There's a day where her mother catches her studying -- or at least, that's what actually gets caught. Her mother is in a rare good mood, because the filly didn't come in second in the last race. (It helped not to be going against older fillies for once.) And her mother tells the filly that one day, maybe she can take up a duty of their species. To go among the humans and teach, because humans frankly need a little help. Her mother smiles, leaves, and --

-- the filly doesn't try to retrieve the other book, the one with knights and valor and victory in it. She just stands there and looks out the window of the old house, because just about all the houses are old and her mother's line has lived in the same house for centuries. Anything new has to be brought in through connections and smuggling and double-blinds. Every contact with the outside (even the necessary one) is a risk, and so such contacts are kept to a minimum.

The herd has been hiding within the gap for centuries. The same gap. And for centuries, fillies whose mothers loved them said that the next generation would be the one which fulfilled the ancient duties. To be a teacher. To be a knight. To...

...leave.

The filly looks out the window, at the same old view, and realizes her granddam said that to her mother. Her mother just said it to her. She will say it to her own child, and nothing will ever change.

And she runs.

She bursts from the house, arm over her face so that none can see the tears streaming. She gallops through forest and clearings, and there is no square foot of soil which her hooves can pound against which thousands of the lost, the lied to didn't already touch before they were confined one final time within the cemetery.

Since the moment of her birth, she has existed within a gap in the world. It's where she lives. It's where her kind might as well have always lived, and it is where every last one of them will die.

She gallops through her prison, eventually collapses against a too-familiar tree and cries herself out, at least for what will show. The inner weeping will continue for years to come.

Eventually, she forces herself back to her hooves, goes to a stream, cleans her face before trotting back, because to be late for dinner will disappoint her mother.

She trots for home and in dream, she believes that ancient house is the only one she will ever know.

In dream, dark eyes watch her from a hidden place in the phantom woods.

The younger watches the filly until the nightscape begins to shake, jolted by the force of the approaching wakening. And when she can stay no longer, she silently nods to herself before vanishing.

The next judgment will wait for the day.

Twisted

In Cerea's opinion, the other species didn't even wake up properly.

It wasn't just the morning stretch. (Centaurs had a rather unique way of stretching, and many of those who watched it wound up with phantom pains in their own joints.) It had taken some time in the household before she'd realized that the human body had prioritized its wake-up alarm around hearing: the noises created by the desperate group struggle to keep Miia out of the kitchen would alert her beloved long before the near-fatal scents which arose from the group's failure did. And with the lamia... based on Cerea's experience, Miia's initial alert was registered thermally, because that was her body's greatest weakness: sense when the temperature was dropping too low and move towards heat -- something which could become more difficult when the lethargy caused by cold slowed her down.

Admittedly, there were times when it was important to prioritize one sense over another: Rachnera's presence in the household meant the residents were now extremely attuned to the sound of spider legs scuttling across the ceiling. But for centaurs, the most powerful sense was smell and so when Cerea began to wake up in the newest of prisons, those impressions were what registered first.

Cotton, linen, with both added to old feathers. This eventually resolved into the realization that she was on a bed -- no, on multiple beds which had been pressed together: she could feel the little gap under her barrel. Centaurs didn't use beds: in fact, one of Japan's greatest delights was the tatami mat. A little resilience with a touch of give was fine: a downy mattress felt as if it offered no true support at all.

Stone. A lot of it, all around her. Ancient stone, or at least stone which didn't see a lot in the way of cleaning. The same could be said for the paper...

Binding glue.

...books. The wood scents were probably rising off the furniture: she could almost recognize some of the types, the same way some of the trees in the strange forest had almost been oaks. One nearby piece was very nearly mahogany. But there was something else there, added to the faint miasma of varnish.

Age had its own scent, something which never entirely went away. Cerea was intimately familiar with every aspect of it because from the moment of her birth, her little piece of the world had been old. Wherever she was, it had been constructed centuries ago, and most of the intervening time appeared to have passed with very little in the way of dusting.

Stone, wood, cloth, paper, and -- metal.

This is a cell.

Cerea opened her eyes, brushed too much hair away from her face, and so verified she was right. But at the same time...

It was a prison cell: the reinforcements on the door (added to the fact that her side only had the backplate of the lock) proved it. But it was also something out of a story.

She'd read the books. There were times when a knight had to be captured, still more when they broke into a castle to rescue their lady (and it only took a little mental editing to render that image into a lord). And since it was a story, there were dungeons of all sorts, chains mounted into stone and torture devices which the author never quite finished describing, although Cerea sometimes suspected Rachnera had grown up with a few fully illustrated editions. But that wasn't all that was present, because in stories -- and, for that matter, in certain parts of history -- some prisoners would be important. Furthermore, a few of the captors would have a certain dignity within their evil, and so recognized that you really shouldn't imprison nobility the same way you imprisoned everyone else.

Not everyone realized that, of course: in particular, Meroune's mother had a way of rigging cells which brought maximum comfort for anyone who could breathe water: everyone else just suffered a minimum of drowning. But for those who did... some cells would be richly furnished. Beds (for the species which used them) would be elaborate. The furnishings would be expensive, the lighting would be perfect for reading something from the extensive library, and the bathroom would be stocked with the best shampoos. (A species which possessed both fur and hair had a major need for shampoo.) And Cerea had read about such cells, heard that a few survived on Earth in the oldest of the human castles and a few liminal keeps...

This wasn't quite it.

For starters, there was the bed, or the three which had been shoved together to create something which didn't quite add up to one. The musty scent rising from the library shelves indicated that no new volumes had been added in some time, and a deeper breath suggested that the editions present might qualify for a printing earlier than 'first.' And of course all of the proportions on everything were off, because it had all been made for little horses.

There was a flat silver disc, one with a black opal set into the center, sitting on a nightstand. Wire trailed down the edges.

Cerea found herself looking at it for a while.

The -- other horse...

She felt she remembered most of that. The dark mare, the one with wings and horn both. The one who had spoken to her, the one who'd possessed that presence...

Captured. But -- not chained this time. She'd been placed in the sort of cell you offered to a noble --

-- or a knight.

I don't deserve --

Cerea took a deep breath, and felt fabric strain against her skin. That was normal, and would remain so for as long as she fought off any and all attempts to take her shopping. However, some of the locations for that strain were new.

The next examination, out of necessity, was of herself.

The wounds (cuts dressed, a few bruises exposed) were healing, and doing so with the typical efficiency of centaur biology: the degree of recovery indicated she'd been asleep for at least two days. The infection, however -- that had been defeated, and she wasn't entirely sure how. With segregation broken, every liminal species (for those which had participated in the exchange program) had been desperately trying to send medicines and guidebooks to the host cities, just in case their children got into trouble. Centaurs had medicine which would take out infections, and a supply of it had gone with her to Japan -- but she knew she was too far from home for any such thing to be here.

But they have magic.

In some ways, it might have been unfair to say that Cerea believed in magic, in the same way that you wouldn't normally describe a bird as believing in flight. Cerea knew magic was out there: she simply had a few differing opinions about the way it manifested. Cerea knew about the magic which arose from ritual, the little effects which were generated from people doing things the same way over and over while believing in the results, and also felt that those rituals were a little different in each nation because of course everyone wasn't going to believe the exact same thing. And in a very real way, stories were rituals: no matter how many times you read them, it was the same results leading to an identical ending. So if you just read the right things...

Cerea had attempted to study Japan through reading its stories and learning about the magic inherent in its people's rituals, and so had come to the conclusion that the single best way to meet her future beloved was through donning a cross between a schoolgirl's uniform and office worker's formal wear, then charging up and down alleyways as if she was horribly late for something. A lack of initial results had made her wonder if she also needed to place the traditional piece of toast in her mouth.

The local magic could translate speech and heal wounds. However, it didn't seem to be capable of doing much for clothing.

Her blouse and skirt (or what had remained of both) were gone, and she tried not to blush too strongly at the thought of having been undressed. Instead, someone had found a rather basic, dull-grey pullover shirt and then pulled it over her. It had enough room for her breasts until the moment she attempted to breathe, and then it pulled against everything except her arms. It had a distinct way of cutting into her armpits, but the sleeves seemed to have been designed for someone with much larger biceps, and the cuffs had been folded back a few times.

When it came to her lower torso... the majority of the little horses had been nude. (She'd seen a few exceptions here and there while being dragged through the town.) But still, someone had made an effort to cover that as well, and the 'effort' took the form of grabbing the nearest large piece of fabric, roughly stitching it to the back of the shirt, getting some degree of draping on the flanks, and calling it a day. Based purely on the crosscut underlayer feel against her fur and the red plaid pattern on top, Cerea was almost completely sure she was wearing a repurposed tablecloth. It looked all the worse against the rich purple velvet of the bed.

It took two attempts to stand up: she was still recovering, and trotting across mattresses wasn't easy: she nearly had a hind leg drop into a gap. But she gained her hooves in time, made it to floor level, trotted across carpeted stone to the other door and ducked to go through.

The bathroom was almost proper. Admittedly, it took some time to figure out the tap arrangement, plus the sink was far too low and naturally, so was the mirror. But it had a trench, and a continual-flow one at that. She'd been stuck with human toilets for...

...the wince was automatic. Centaurs -- well, there were things you could do with the creations of the human world, and there were things a species with buttocks which were wider than the toilet couldn't -- and that was before you got into the rest of the anatomical issues, very much including the fact that for a centaur, crouch-and-squat wasn't really an option. The bathrooms in the shared household were, out of necessity, rather complicated -- but there was only so much room available, and so Cerea had been stuck with a lot of improvising. Not to mention that during her fevered gallop, she had been more or less -- well, yes, you could do it on the run, but it was just so undignified.

Someone had cleaned her. It wasn't just the wounds: her skin had been scrubbed (and she tried not to blush again). A portion of the dirt had been removed from fur and tail. However, no one had washed her hair, and far too much of it was cascading down her body: she'd clearly lost some pins, and she had a very good idea as to which ones they had been.

She took care of herself as best she could. She missed her grooming equipment: the long-handled brushes would have been a comfort. Then she thought about the time her beloved had helped to brush her, the dream she'd had on that same night where she'd been carefully instructing him about when to avoid the sensitive areas near her tail, and then her dream self had told him just when it was right to --

-- she washed her face again, got rid of the tear tracks. Redid her hair with the limited number of metal pins, mourned the state of her tail. Pushed back the sleeves enough to see another little wound, one which had been expertly dressed because it had been expertly inflicted, purely out of necessity.

So they have IVs, or something like them. And more, since she hadn't woken up on a soaked mattress. The little horses had been -- taking care of her, and doing so without nets and chains. But she was still in a cell --

-- which was when someone knocked on the door.

Her first well-taught instinct was to frown at the rudeness: only the youngest children kicked to announce themselves. The follow-up thought reminded her that she was the only being in the area with hands (well, the immediate area: the shirt wasn't new and so suggested there was something around which at least had shoulders and arms) and tapping with hooves was the lone available option.

One of her jailers. And being oddly polite about it, even for a noble's cell (which Cerea didn't strictly deserve), especially when dealing with someone who had already escaped once. But... the sky was wrong, the world was strange, and --

-- I have nowhere to go.

The polite knock repeated itself, and was followed by a soft whinny. Cerea carefully turned, ducked out of the bathroom, and went to the nightstand.

They had left it for her. They meant for her to use it. And so she picked it up, pressed it against her throat and winced as she felt the wire snake its way up to her ear.

"I'm awake," she tried. And hungry. Being fed by IV kept the body going, but the stomach still wanted to know where the real food was.

The pause from the other side of the door felt like a startled one, as if that party hadn't really been expecting a reply.

"...yes," the voice eventually said. Female, and not that old: for a human, Cerea would have been guessing a half-decade past her own years. "So before I open the door..."

This pause, however, felt free to be openly awkward.

"...I need you to understand what's going to happen."

Cerea waited.

"I'm taking you to an upper level," the unseen mare stated. "I mean, it won't just be me. I'm just the one who'll be trotting next to you. And talking to you. In case you have any questions, and I'm pretty sure you do. We're going to get you some food. And after you eat, you're going to speak with the Princesses."

Cerea blinked.

"Princesses?" She spoke with one princess just about every day (which had eventually taken a certain amount of aura off the experience), although it was hard to get the topic away from romantic tragedy --

'-- I'm awake.' I'm being kept in a noble's cell. It doesn't matter if I don't deserve it. I have to act like it.

Her speech had -- been less than acceptable. Admittedly, part of that had come from the difficulty of being formal with those who were fighting you, and she supposed she could blame illness for some of it -- but those were excuses. She had to bring her standards back up, especially since she was about to be taken in front of Princesses.

"They're going to meet you." Another awkward pause. "Well, meet you again. For one. Mine. And... um... talk about what's going to happen next. But that's all that'll happen. Nopony is going to hurt you. Not unless you try to hurt somepony else. And I'd really rather you didn't do that. Because I'm very good with wind. Very good. And in this case, I'd... rather not be. Princess Luna doesn't want me to show you that, not today. She just wants you to -- come up. Okay?"

She was being treated more honorably. She needed to reflect that.

"Very well," Cerea said, and wondered if that had been formal enough.

"I'm opening the door now," the mare said, and Cerea heard the little tremble in the tones. "Right now. I'm --"

-- it opened, and the little winged horse almost instantly jumped backwards.

Some would have insisted that it couldn't have been helped. She had been chosen for her bravery. For her ability to be steadfast in the face of the unknown. To use the fear instead of giving in to it and, in this case, her skills with wind currents were making sure that the scent of her own fear was being utilized to coat the ceiling. But she hadn't been expecting movement, and so Cerea's instinctive change in stance startled her, made wings flare as magic prepared to conduct forward.

But then she saw what that stance was. And the centaur had already recognized that some aspects of body language translated directly, made the little horse's physical positions more readable than their expressions. The same applied going the other way.

The little mare had no way of accounting for the forward-swept arms and open hands, presented with their palms up. But she knew what a foreleg dip meant. The little bow of the head. And for whatever might have been lacking in physical language, the word filled in the gap.

"Lady," Cerea softly breathed, and held her curtsy.

Huge silver eyes (which were just slightly brighter than the well-polished armor) blinked. Deep black wings awkwardly rustled.

"Um," the little horse tried. "I'm... um... 'lady'?"

Cerea's eyes came up just enough to look over the armor again.

"You are a knight." There was rapture in the statement. "I am in the presence of a true knight..."

Another blink, followed by a slightly worried glance at the three little horses who were serving as backup. Cerea, who couldn't read their expressions and didn't have the right sight line anyway, could only scent that all of them were afraid. She had no way to see that two of them were grinning, and the third had managed a smirk.

"I'm a Guard," the winged horse tried. "I... guess that's a little like a knight?"

Cerea wasn't buying it. All she'd had to do was feel the little horse's presence, and that had told her that the winged mare was everything like a knight: this apparently included the humility. "As you say, Lady," and she straightened. A knight...

She was standing within the aura of her dream. Wherever she was, it was a place which had knights. Real ones...

There was a moment, standing within her cell, where she almost felt the agony of displacement beginning to fade. But then she thought of her beloved, and simply adjusted her posture to show more respect.

"I'm Nightwatch," the little mare said, staring up at her (and that with some rather awkward angling of the neck). "I'm on the Lunar shift. It's... about two --" and then there was another one of those verbal overlaps "-- durations/periods/hours away from Moon-raising. That's enough time to eat. We're going to take you up to one of the Lunar kitchens, because they aren't quite active yet. You'll eat there. And then you'll meet the Princesses."

Cerea nodded, since she knew that gesture was understood. But the exact linguistics used had just begged a certain question. It wasn't the use of 'somepony': as with the overlap, she assumed the magic had a few potential flaws. It wasn't even the fact that Moon seemed to come with its own audible capital. It was something else.

"The Princesses?"

The little mare nodded back.

"Is the Queen away?" -- and almost froze. She knew she'd just been rude. Not only did she have no way of knowing what the current state of the royal family was, if the Queen was even alive (much less if a King was involved), but there was every chance that the children were being given responsibilities as preparation for rulership. Besides, it wasn't as if Cerea rated a queen, and the last one she'd met hadn't been worth the title --

-- the silver eyes had gone hard.

"There's no queen," Nightwatch harshly stated. "We don't have queens. Any nation which wants a queen is welcome to have one, and to keep us out of it. Our highest ruling rank is Princess. We have two."

Cerea blinked, which did nothing to fight back the growing blush.

"Princess," she tried.

Nightwatch solidly nodded. The black wings arced.

"Then the elder is in charge?"

A subtle wind current was beginning to rustle feathers. "They're both in charge," the little mare said. "They are equal in the co-rulership/consortium/bilateral monarchy. They lead our nation. That's how things are. It's how they should be." This was punctuated by a tiny hoof stomp -- and then, slowly, the wings settled back into a rest position.

More casually, with most of the fear still wind-pressed against the ceiling, "Are you hungry?"

"...yes," Cerea managed.

"Okay," Nightwatch said. "Follow us, then. Me. Mostly me." Started to turn -- paused, glanced back and up. "Um. I'm a pegasus. If that translates. Those of us with wings are pegasi. Except for the Princesses. If that helps."

It did, although Cerea mostly felt embarrassed about having had to be told. A pegasus. The legends said centaurs had originated in Greece: in fact, the original native centaur tongue was a heavily-mutated form of that language. (It was possible for a centaur and Greek native to understand each other somewhat if both parties involved spoke very slowly -- something which, given the nature of both language and speakers, pretty much never happened.) She should have remembered what she'd been taught of that history. Her mother would have been so disappointed --

-- I'm about to meet the leaders of a nation.

For that much alone, it didn't matter that she was lost, or that she was about to speak with little horses. Somewhere within Cerea's mind, a number of story-taught vocabulary switches flipped over to ARMED.

It was a proper castle, which was to say it had been built to survive several sieges, possibly through outlasting them. The amount of food kept in the one kitchen would have gotten most defensive forces through at least a week or, in Cerea's case, the appetizer.

She had her escorts, and they stayed with her: the lone pegasus, two stallions whom she was reminded were called unicorns, and the strongest-looking male was an earth pony. They all seemed to think of themselves as ponies, and Cerea thought about how the term often designated size more than youth, then wondered if there were any real horses about. Their castles were probably larger.

Once they reached the upper (ground) level, walls shifted to marble. There were alcoves, and more artwork: Cerea found a kinetic gryphon sculpture -- still with nothing human in it -- to be rather dubious. (It also triggered a phantom pain in that part of her flank, but the muscles seemed to have almost completely healed.) She had plenty of opportunities to look at her surroundings, largely because that was all there was to look at.

A castle so seemingly large -- one which hosted the leaders of a nation -- should have had a staff to match, and there were times when she could hear them off in the distance: hooves scrambling across marble, fading wingbeats. But that was it. The kitchen had seen food left out for her, the hallways had been cleared for her passage. They were keeping the local population away from her, but for the knights who were meant to stop her if she tried anything, and -- she was lost, weaponless, and determined to at least make an attempt towards true courtesy while in the presence of the Princesses. Even if the sentence was harsh, she could try to meet her fate with dignity. She had to be capable of that much.

But they'd just about emptied the castle for her, or at least the limited portions where she was allowed to tread. There should have been so many more of the ponies, and she'd only seen her escorts. No others would be forced to deal with the monster.

Food. Art. Kitchen equipment, and she'd needed a moment to recognize a vertical ice cream churn. A newspaper...

It had to be a newspaper: the configuration of the folded pages was about right, as was the smell of cheap paper and printer's ink. She got a glimpse of black-and-white photography in the abandoned document which had been sitting at the far end of the kitchen counter -- but then she'd seen the text, and so learned the magic didn't work on anything which had to be read. The symbols stayed just that: symbols, ones where she couldn't even begin to guess at the words behind them.

Not that she had much of a chance, as there had been all of ten seconds to examine the thing from a distance before Nightwatch had looked in the same direction, instantly taken off, snatched up the newspaper in her mouth, and dropped the thing into a trash bin.

Cerea had wondered about that. The need to hide something which she couldn't read, along with how bad the ink had to taste. But then she'd spotted the carrots, and they had been --

-- strange.

She'd found some fruit in the mid-autumn woods, shortly after her arrival. It had been surprisingly good, especially for wild and late in the season. And the carrots were beautiful, they were clearly professionally grown, she had braced herself so as not to drop into open rapture in front of witnesses and -- it had been a carrot. A perfectly-recognizable, normal carrot. But it was if the root had been grown in soil which had one vital mineral missing, something which didn't affect the nutrition or appearance, but -- missing. It was a carrot, it was good, and it wasn't all it should have been.

The bread was wonderful. The pastries went beyond that. But with every vegetable, every piece of fruit -- there was an absent piece, and she couldn't tell what it was.

She thought about that as her personal escort brought her deeper into the castle, and the sunlight which occasionally reached them began to dim.

"We're almost there," Nightwatch said. "They're using the Lunar throne room, even though it's still daylight." Another awkward pause, and feathers rustled again. It was easy to spot: the pegasus' natural hue was outstandingly dark. She couldn't blend into any shadows because she created a patch of deeper shade within them, and standing in the castle's lighting (recessed, and Cerea was having real trouble picking out the source) made every movement exceedingly visible. "Um. Princess Luna's normally awake now, and Princess Celestia wouldn't be sleeping for a while yet. So normally it would be the Solar throne room, since Sun hasn't been lowered yet. But this is Princess Luna's baliwick/category --" the silver wire almost seemed to hiss, and then settled on "-- dominion. That means she's in charge."

"Dominion?" Cerea tried.

"They're... each in charge of different aspects of law," Nightwatch replied. "Princess Celestia can advise, the same way Princess Luna would advise her for another dominion. But the decision is Princess Luna's."

Life. Death. Imprisonment.

She had no weapon. No magic of her own, and she'd already experienced what the dark mare was capable of. A nation full of such powers...

She had tried to run. But now she knew what she'd been running from, and so there was no point to trying again.

They trotted. Hoofsteps echoed in empty halls.

"This is the Moonrise Gate," Nightwatch finally announced, and Cerea looked at the silver-shot marble, the ornamentation around the doors. "They're expecting you. Um. But you knew that. Just -- go in."

She didn't, not immediately. She had to be polite. She had to be at her best. And so she knocked.

There was the brief sound of paper shuffling, and then a rather imperious voice stated "Enter." A familiar voice.

...oh no...

...maybe that's another knight. With her aura, she would have to be a knight, at the very least. She's guarding the Princesses in their throne room.

Or...

Cerea swallowed. Squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, felt the shirt pinch her again.

...well, it would have made the loss slightly easier to justify in front of her mother...

She opened the door and, with head down, trotted inside.

The aura hit her first. The sheer power in that room, the strength and patience and age almost drove her to all four knees, and that wasn't a good posture for a centaur to begin with. Instead, she allowed the pressure of that aura to drive her into the deepest curtsy of her life, and was momentarily grateful to the ugly shirt for keeping everything in place.

The imperious voice wasn't impressed. "A gesture of respect, I believe. However, I prefer the testimony of words and actions. Straighten yourself, centaur."

She did.

The dark mare was seated upon the throne, one so elevated as to have a ramp leading up to it, something which had Cerea craning her neck just to fail at making direct eye contact. (She was almost completely sure she wasn't supposed to look directly into royal eyes without permission.) And standing at the right side of the base was the first true horse she'd seen, at least when gauged by size alone: the wings and horn took something away from that status while adding an extra level of power. A white mare with purple eyes, and different hues in that strange flow of what wasn't quite a mane.

She saw their strength. She could feel their majesty.

Princesses. To be in the presence of this much power rendered 'queen' into a bad joke.

"We have yet to be formally introduced," the dark mare stated, and 'formally' lodged behind Cerea's eyes. "You may address me as Princess Luna, should the occasion arise where such an address is required. And you stand before Princess Celestia as well. The first centaur to be the presence of the full consortium/leadership without attacking or being attacked, in -- some time."

She could feel her shoulders starting to shake.

"This," the white mare said (and that voice had the beauty found in the sharpest of antique blades, sitting patiently on a wall, beautiful and disregarded until the moment someone found the need to cut), "is not a trial. Please don't mistake it for one. We will speak to you, you will speak with us, and there will be a judgment of sorts. But it isn't a criminal matter, especially as there are no charges currently outstanding against you."

The dark mare softly snorted. "In the most absolute sense," she stated, "we could have visited the statutes which cover the inciting of riots. However, such generally imply that the inciting party do more than vault greenery."

"They attacked you," the softer voice reminded them (and it was 'them' now, as the ponies had come in behind Cerea). "On sight. And there is a reason for that, one we will have to explain in time. They had motive for their fear, and..."

The white head dipped.

"...I understand that," the taller Princess went on. "I can justify it. I've been going over it again and again. The exact scenario: a centaur appearing from nowhere, so soon after Tirek, and I can't see any other way they should have acted." The huge rib cage slowly shifted. "I can explain and excuse their actions. We both can."

Tirek. A name from the forest, and Cerea still didn't know who that was.

"We can justify," the dark Princess said. "But in time, we must also account. And that time may come. But for now..." A surprisingly small nod, directly to Cerea. "...is there a statement you wish to make before us?"

Several hundred stories, most of which had been written by authors who saw research as something which only got in the way of a good tale, carefully lined up behind Cerea's tongue.

She thought about everything she'd ever read regarding knightly speech. Hoped the silver disc knew terms it could render her words into. Took a deep breath (but not too deep, in case that offended), and let fly.

"Prithee, miladies --" mimares? "-- allowst me the chance to thank thou for any chance at greetings. Zounds, for I hath not expected any opportunity to make amends with thee regarding any disturbance. Thusly and truly, I shalt spake --"

She wasn't quite making eye contact, and so didn't get to see the dark Princess' ears go straight back. She also wasn't looking in quite the right direction to spot the sudden contortion in the white mare's features, and had no way to know what it represented. However, her own ears did rotate at the sound of wings going limp, along with the sudden thud of hindquarters on marble as Nightwatch discovered a rather abrupt need to sit down hard.

Cerea, who didn't have the air current direction to pick up on what was really going on, assumed it was something to do with taking an assigned position and kept right on going. "-- as if under oath, for thou hast no reason to trust me, and only by swearing upon my blade --" more awkwardly "-- or any blade thou mightst happen to have available --"

The white mare made a rather odd choking sound.

"-- Moon's craters!" the dark Princess half-shouted, and powerful legs nearly flung that body fully upright. "Centaur, I realize you have only the most passing acquaintance with me, and so have no means of recognizing any irony regarding the source of what is said next. But regardless, it will be said. Your speech is overly, ridiculously, painfully formal. Please reacquaint yourself with the concept of contractions. Immediately."

The syllables fell apart in her mouth, briefly leaving behind a wounded 'pitchkettled' which she'd never had a proper place for. Her body responded accordingly, with facility and experience.

The white mare sighed. "There's no need to feel embarrassed," she said. "Just -- talk to us. Normally."

"But..." Cerea weakly protested. "You're -- you're royalty..."

"Yes," the dark Princess replied. "We are. But we are not your royalty, and so neither of us can give you an order. Simply regard it as an extremely sincere recommendation."

Her head went down again, leaving her looking at a very familiar, miserably-shifting view.

"...what do you want me to talk about?"

Another sigh from the larger. "You told Princess Luna that you're from a place called unknown/unfamiliar nation/Prance/not Prance," the translation stuttered.

"Yes," Cerea miserably replied. Even her formality had failed... "But... that's where I was born. It wasn't where I was living before I came here. I was in a nation called Japan."

She missed the matching slow nods. "And how did you come to be here?" the dark mare asked.

"It's... hard to explain. I don't know what happened..."

A simple, rather soft statement from the dark Princess. (Cerea, in her misery, completely missed the intonation of request.) "Try."

She runs.

It's something she does every morning, when the weather permits it, and today is no worse than moderately foggy. Sometimes when the weather doesn't permit it, and then she returns to the household chilled or soaked ('soaked' is worse, especially if Suu is dehydrated) and has to groom herself again. She runs because she can. She knows she has to return to her host's residence eventually, she knows she risks questions if anyone finds her too far away from that household -- but she's allowed to run. The poorly-written laws at least pretend to understand that much: a centaur needs to run. But it's not the only reason she takes a morning gallop whenever the conditions allow it.

She runs because she doesn't know every last one of these streets by heart.

She runs because there's a chance to go a little further every day.

She runs because there's a horizon and if she just keeps galloping, she might be able to reach it.

There are still borders, still walls, ways in which those horrible laws imprisoned her and every other liminal who's become part of the great experiment. But she runs because now there's a chance that if she just tries hard enough, there might be a chance to gallop anywhere. To go out into the world as a full part of it, for the rest of her life. To gallop with her beloved astride her back, his knight and steed and lover and...

She allows herself to dream, when she's running. Her body takes care of itself, and it frees the mind for fantasy. There are times when she can almost feel his weight on her back. His hands on her... actually, that's been a frequent problem on those occasions when she has to carry him, but she's not used to carrying a rider and when the jolting threatens to shake him off, he just grabs. It happened the first time and it took her a while to forgive him for that.

She's been wondering about purchasing tack. Something to make it easier for him, and save the other contact for when -- for when they're both ready.

It has to be her. She has to win this time. She can't come in second. Not for this.

I'm no better than second to --

She's also trying to run away from those thoughts, and there are times when she almost gets a lead.

She runs, and she always tries to find new streets to gallop down. Part of that is because she can explore. Some is due to the fact that a few people have complained about being woken up by pounding hooves: she gallops very early, before the rest of the household can rise. And she's also learning which houses host those who hold phones up to their windows and record the sight of a fast-galloping centaur for private review or worse, public upload. She recently became aware that she has something of a fanbase online and has already decided that if she's very lucky, she'll never have to meet any of them. (She made the mistake of reading her own Comments sections.) She's carrying her sword this morning just in case she runs across any of them or, in a world where the laws were a little more just, over.

She runs for the joy of it and today, because she started even earlier than usual, she finds a new street.

It's a quiet-seeming one. She looks down it as her body instinctively shifts into the left turn, and all she sees are three houses, fairly scattered with large lawns between each. All three are on the right: the left holds a light touch of what isn't quite forest. The community has been expanding, and so any woods are simply holding territory until someone decides an estate would be more fitting.

Beyond that, the fog takes over. But it doesn't matter. She runs in rain and wind and cold: the only exception is ice, because hooves have a way of skidding out. It's not that chill, as fog goes, especially not this time of year. And by the time she reaches the place where the fog blocks her sight, she'll be able to see more.

Besides, it's a new street. She has to explore.

So she gallops. She's starting to really get the pace now, feeling the heat moving through the muscles. The joy. And she's moving within a mobile window of newness: fresh territory opens up for her as she gallops forward, the fog closes in behind her and hides the recently-familiar. It's like she's been given her own personal portal of discovery, and she wishes she had someone in the household whom she could talk to about it, but... Papi and Suu don't understand, Rachnera would laugh it off, Lala probably has a long morbid talk prepared on the mystical significance of fog, Meroune would find some way of turning it into a metaphor for tragically drowning (although how a mermaid is supposed to manage that remains a mystery), and Miia generally manages to take it personally. She could tell her beloved, but... she still has so much trouble talking to him about the little things.

He holds her hand, when he sees she's having trouble. He holds her hand, and she never wants him to stop. That's how she knows she loves him.

A house flickers by on the right. It's an interesting architectural style. She tends to notice such things, after spending so much of her life looking at the same buildings.

Then another one flickers. It flickers into something with a metal railing in front of it, where a fence should have been. It flickers so that there's no house on the other side. Then it flickers back.

It takes a moment for her to truly notice, with so much of her focused on the run. And then she glances backwards, already beginning to convince herself it was just a trick of the light, and the house is there. But it's made of wood now. Rough-hewn wood, like logs were just cross-stacked on top of each other. Then there's another flicker and it's metal, but the surfaces are too smooth and she looks directly behind her as her heart starts to pound all the faster, as she tries to tell herself that it's a dream and nothing more, she twists flexible joints until she's looking straight back and then she breaks into the fastest gallop of her life.

The fog is still there, defining the limits of her window. A few wisps of it. And behind that is nothing. Sensory vacuum, an absence of sight and sound and matter, a solid wall of obliterated perceptions and it is moving forward. It is moving towards her and where it crosses, there is nothing at all.

She sees it, and she knows that if it flows over her, she will be nothing.

She gallops. It's all she can do. She accelerates, finds her best speed and then surpasses it. Her entire being becomes something which can do no more than run. And beneath her hooves, the road is asphalt for a few seconds before it turns into mud and the change nearly trips her: the recovery takes place on planks. Houses are wood. Plaster. Sod. There's a car next to her on the road, she just barely sees the driver's face and what she mostly sees is that it's orange in the split-second she has before the car is gone.

There are pines on her left and caves on her right. Now it's a pineapple grove and domes made of animal skins. Something hovering and something reaching for her as the vacuum flows faster, she slams her left arm over her chest and tries to run faster still, she whips her tail against her flanks to protect it, the road is dirt and cobblestones and trestles and there's a little fog left behind her and around her, but the vacuum is eating that and she puts on one last burst of speed and nearly runs into a tree.

She barely manages to go around it, and not without contact: the scraping puts the first tear in her skirt, and harsh bark draws a new world's first blood.

There's too many trees. She can't straightline gallop any more: she's losing speed. She has to glance back, see how much safety she has left and when she does so, she finds more forest. True forest, locked in mid-autumn. The fog is gone. The road is gone.

She slows, dismisses the frantic rule of instinct, allows thought to resume control. And it might be a liminal trick. It's possible that she found the lingering defenses around an old gap (although of a kind she's never heard of), or that a prankster species has been having fun with her. Well, that's something where the laws don't stay her hand: if something capable of illusion was playing games with her, it'll find a competitor willing to take revenge. But she's pretty sure such effects are limited in scope. Much more limited than what just happened.

A team, then. She'll just search until she finds them. Until the road returns. And her hand will stay near the hilt, for when she does find them.

And it's possible, looking back, that she had already realized what had happened, at least on some level. That her mind was coming up with excuses, trying to protect her for as long as possible. But her hand stayed near the hilt, and so that was what truly protected her. What kept her alive.

The fog was gone.
The road was gone.
Everything was...

A soft yellow glow floated a mug towards her and when she scented the pure water, she drank.

"Thank you." Small words. Inadequate.

"You're tired," the taller Princess quietly said. "You're still recovering, and that took a lot out of you. Maybe we should stop for the night."

The dark mare briefly closed her eyes. "Simply attempting to explain --" paused "-- a 'handheld movie camera which instantly places its pictures onto distant screens' took some time. But I believe we have the essence of your passage. Two questions, and then we end this session." Looking down at Cerea. "Can you manage two?"

She nodded.

"The place at which you arrived," the dark Princess began. "Did you mark it in any way?"

Cerea blinked. "Yes." Her skirt had already been torn: she'd removed a small strip of fabric and tied it around a low branch. Marking the center of the illusion, making sure she had something she could return to.

"So you could find it again."

She had to be honest (although she was still wishing she could be more formal). "Not without a lot of looking. The first fight --"

"-- we will come to that," her most recent captor said. "If necessary, in time. I will currently assume it left you disoriented." (Cerea nodded.) "But there is a place to be found. Something which we can examine. However, given the estimated time since your arrival, some portion of the corona/field residue signature may have faded..."

The dark mare thought about it. Nodded to herself.

"Return to your quarters." A glance at the escorts. "And take her there. Rest as much as you can, centaur. We may not have time for a second session, not if we wish for there to be anything remaining which can still be used."

Another nod.

"Tonight, we plan," she told Cerea. "Tomorrow, we seek out your arrival point. And we will see what we can do about returning you to your home."

The siblings mutually watched the Moonrise Gate close behind the somewhat-dirty tail, which had been drooped from exhaustion and stun. Listened until the echoes of hooves faded.

"She reminds me of Twilight," the elder finally said.

The younger blinked. "Do tell."

A little sigh, glancing up at the throne. "It's the fear more than anything. That constant terror of saying the wrong thing and having everything fall apart. You didn't know her when she was at her worst with that. You only met her after she started climbing out of that pit. But you've talked to her enough times..."

A slow nod. "Yes. The trepidation. That every verbal hoofstep could be the last. She was afraid of that. But..."

After the pause had stretched out for a while, "But what?"

"Did you notice that it was the only thing she was fearful of?"

The elder frowned. "I don't take your meaning, Luna."

This time, the younger sighed. "Perhaps I was perceiving the wrong aspect. Or... I am simply more attuned to such things. Too much so."

"I didn't really notice," the elder admitted -- followed by, with a light smirk, "Maybe I was too distracted by the sound of your being out-Lunaed."

"Oh, do shut up," the younger grumbled.

There was a brief period of compliance.

"So you're sending her home," the elder finally tried.

"If we can." Dryly, "Immigration is my dominion, sister. Therefore, the same can be said for deportation. I barely understood so much of what she said, even with the device doing what I presume was its best. Even some of the memories I encouraged to emerge from dream were difficult to interpret. But I recognize that she comes from far away. Somewhere we could gallop towards for all of the cycles to come and still never reach. She does not belong here, and there are those who miss her. She needs to go home." More softly, "At the very least, let those who retain their parents not lose their remaining time with them."

Starkly, "And if we can't send her back?"

"We must," the younger simply stated as her horn ignited, and dark energy brought the newspaper out from behind the throne. Floated it down to the elder, displayed the front page as a simple reminder.

It wasn't a particularly good picture: most of the facial features were obscured by the net, although that might have been a mercy for the more fragile readers. But it was clear enough for a limb count. And of course, there was no way to miss the Canterlot Tattler's triple-layered headline.

CENTAUR SPOTTED IN PALIMYNO!

The Monster Escapes!

WHAT IS THE PALACE HIDING?

Uncomprehending

It was possible to learn a lot about the book just from the printing style. Several of what might be possibly be individual letters had been rendered in something closer to portrait than calligraphy, and not all of them came at the start of what she was guessing to be paragraphs: the majority of such elaborate works could be found there, but others appeared at the end of character bursts, with a few strays in the middle. Moving to the page border found heavily-stylized ink vines braiding through each other in a way which Cerea couldn't quite disassociate from the more solid animated ones in the forest: simply looking at the edge design was making her neck ache. And truly major events found little pieces of art darting in and out of the lines, a chase conducted in near-shimmering images throughout the story.

It told Cerea that the ponies had been through a period of illuminated text, just like certain portions of medieval Europe. The rendering of the art suggested an Impressionist surge had taken place with at least partial overlap, and the solidity of the original ink transfer told her that an engraving plate had been used. The book smelled old, had the must of centuries lingering in permanent aura, she'd been incredibly careful about opening the cover -- but the colors were still fairly bright, and that said a lot about their ink.

Or the magic they use to preserve it.

Was that possible? Invoking magic made it feel as if just about anything was. Spells to make books last...

She knew a lot about old books, because most of hers had been something close to ancient. Cerea knew how to be careful with them. The required delicacy of her touch had reached the point where she could go into a manga shop, read an entire volume on the premises (presuming she could both get into the aisle and no one asked her to move), then put it back onto the shelf without leaving the faintest ghost of a crease upon the spine. (Not that she generally would because like so many other natives of France, Cerea regarded manga as something which would be better worth examining once it finally managed to completely grow up. A nation which often treated comics as high art wasn't entirely ready to grant full respect for a relative youngling.) She was aware that some of these books were older than a few of the ones upon her own shelves. Admittedly they weren't quite as delicate: she'd noticed some fairly heavy reinforcements on the corners, which went nicely with the front cover and its lingering bite marks.

Opening books by mouth. Nosing to the next page. The necessities of a world without hands. And she wondered how the painting had been done: if the arts were the exclusive realm of those who could move things with hornlight, whether thin brushes were strapped to forelegs, or -- if it was just done by mouth. She was vaguely aware that human artists dealing with various degrees of disability had worked that way, and when an entire species had no other choice...

The book (one of a hundred and fifty-three in the cell: there had been plenty of time to count them) told her a lot just through the way it looked. But it couldn't tell her the most crucial thing, and so Cerea, who hadn't quite found a comfortable place on the stone floor, miserably gazed down at the bright colors, knowing none of it was her fault while still feeling as if she'd somehow failed again.

But I'm going back to him --

-- no. I can't think about it that way. Not yet.

There was a place for optimism and in Cerea's life, that location just about always seemed to be well away from her quarters. The dark Princess had said that they would see what they could do about sending her back. They would try. But the promise had been for attempt, not success. She could be back in Japan tomorrow, or -- it might take longer. Pinning all of her hopes on an instantaneous return just left that much more to be dashed. But there was a chance to return to her love --

-- is he all right?

He probably was. He had an odd knack for survival, something which was a necessity just to live through a few expressions of liminal affection: in particular, Miia's tail hugs had a way of compressing the rib cage (just before collapsing the lungs), Meroune liked to kiss while fully in her environment and could neglect little things like 'let my partner come up for air', and Suu's affection occasionally went past (and through) the slime girl's membrane. But he wasn't indestructible. He was tough for a human, but he needed help with so many things because he was human, and -- realistically, hosting seven liminal girls meant there were both a lot of situations which demanded help and just about as many opportunities to get hurt. Cerea did her best to ride herd over the household, but she didn't always succeed and without her moderating influence -- it was moderating, no matter what Rachnera insisted on calling it --

-- and what are they doing?

The initial answer arose from fear, with the inner images showing a race where one participant had been disqualified after leaving the track. Not even second any more: a competition where she'd outright lost, her love claimed by scales or fins or, worst of all, spider legs. But she managed to banish most of it, because she knew that wasn't right -- or rather, it wasn't a scenario which would come true just yet. Yes, some in the household would certainly find their own path to his affections to be somewhat more clear without a centaur body in the way. But none of them, not even Rachnera, would have made an immediate move. Because in a way, the household was something like a family, and...

I vanished.
I've been gone for days.

If her absence continued... there would be readjustment. A sorting of the new order, and some of that might lead to fresh vacancies: she could easily picture terrified parents pulling their children home. But given how long she'd been missing -- they were still looking for her.

It was so easy to picture the events. Cerea went for morning runs: the entire household knew that, although it had taken a while before the fact had truly stuck with Papi. The duration of those gallops was a variable, and so they wouldn't have been too concerned until she'd missed breakfast. After that... another hour before they went out into the neighborhood? Papi searching from the air, and flying always seemed to help the harpy concentrate on what needed to be done. Meroune, once bundled into her wheelchair, had the least trouble dealing with the more skittish neighbors: a simple hairstyle adjustment added to the blanket hiding her fins and hands clasped in her lap so that none could see how they were webbed -- the mermaid could effectively pass for human, at least for a little while, and so it would have been she who went door to door (at least for those places without front stairs), asking if anyone had seen or heard something. Rachnera was more likely to just drop in on people and if the trees were tall enough, some of that would be from overhead.

Once that had failed, Ms. Smith would have been summoned and since it wouldn't have been noon yet, the unfair presumption would have had her first words upon arrival as a protest regarding having to be up so early. The truth was that their government liaison was nightmarishly lazy -- right up until the moment someone gave her a job which couldn't be passed onto someone else. She would have been the one to both call and direct the police, along with utilizing available liminal forces. Doppel and Zombina would have taken over on house calls, with Manako doing her best to trace Cerea's hoofsteps. Before mid-afternoon, uniformed officers would be on every street and shortly after that, the media might become involved. Broadcasting her picture. Asking people to call, Email, make contact to tell them anything they knew.

And eventually, someone would have contacted her mother. Told that parent that her daughter had found yet another way to disappoint her. Kidnapped or worse. Potentially having lost the fight of her life through forfeit.

Because that was one of the nightmares. The laws were so poorly written, and there were humans who hated the integration. There were crimes committed against liminals who couldn't even defend themselves without being removed from the country, and while the humans were, in theory, equally subject to prosecution -- they attacked in groups. Traveling packs of alibis.

There had already been assaults against some of the exchange students: Cerea herself had once been on the absolute edge of being pushed off that cliff. So many of the liminals feared that it would eventually become worse. The potential to become worse was always there, and that was in a nation which had at least tried to participate in the great experiment.

(There was a reason Cerea had found herself so far from home. The moment when she had wondered if she could ever think of herself as French again.)

Humans became angry, the miasma of fear expressing itself as anger clogged the air, and -- she would hesitate. Because to defend herself might see her escorted to the airport, her love lost forever, and given the choice between that and suffering a few blows...

With humans, she hesitated, when a just world would have let her attack. And Rachnera mocked her for it.

Rachnera had her own method of dealing with the problem.

"It cannot continue to work," Cerea had insisted within the echoing confines of the huge bathroom. (She was typically extremely formal with the arachne, at least for spoken terms: the strictly inner vulgarities occasionally managed to get a censored word in.) "You are relying on fear. That they will be so terrified of what you might do after they report you as to say nothing. Eventually, one of them will find their spine. A few words to the wrong people and Smith will no longer be able to save you. Fear doesn't last."

"So you claim," Rachnera had countered, lazily lacing hardshelled fingers around each other. A small construct was beginning to emerge between them.

"And your webs hardly vanish. You're leaving behind evidence --"

This was interrupted by a shrug. "-- so call it evidence. It still means someone has to testify." Three visible eyes (the right tier) joined the wicked fanged grin: the others were obscured by light purple hair. "It'll never get that far."

"It has to." And Cerea didn't know how she felt about that. She didn't like the arachne, she didn't feel as if she ever would or could, and losing Rachnera would mean one less problem in the house, that much less competition for her love's time -- but to see that rival deported...

"I use their fear." Another shrug. "It's easy."

Which was when Cerea had partially turned away, all the better to conceal the mutter. "For you."

But it was still heard. Rachnera often overheard things, to the point where Cerea wasn't entirely sure that the ears on the human portion were the only ones.

Softly, "Oh, is that today's issue?" A skittering noise: the big body getting closer, eight legs forever scuffing against the floor. "They look at me and they're afraid, because arachnophobia is something which humans simply need to be reminded that they've always had. But when they look at you, when their gaze moves to that which isn't part of their own bodies... that's not what they perceive, is it? They see something they've tamed. Broken. Not so much partner as servant, not so much servant as slave. They see you, and they can't be afraid because they feel like their entire species has already won..."

She refused to look back. Forced the sudden surge of anger into her features, made them go blank and stiff. But her spine was tight from tail to neck, and she could feel her shoulders beginning to shake.

Somehow, Rachnera's unseen pause felt like a thoughtful one.

"Which creature," the arachne finally said, "kills more humans than any other in the world?"

Nothing would have made Cerea turn. "Spiders." Because of course it was going to be spiders.

It produced a merry giggle. "Oh, if only. No, Cerea, the honor of greatest reaper goes to the mosquitoes. It's the malaria, you see. You might never believe me if I gave you the true number, but -- it's not a small one. They do their best, and never think about what they're doing at all. And then, on the tier just under that, you have the multitude of deaths from allergic reactions, which brings us to wasps and bees and hornets --" and the delighted peal was just a little too quick "-- oh my! Too soon?"

She forced her hand away from her face, went to war with the blush and lost.

I tried. I did everything I could and one still got through...

"But not spiders," Rachnera mournfully said, the regret as faked as the apology. "At best? Billions of humans, and perhaps two dozen spider-caused deaths in a particularly busy year. In fact, do you know which animal regularly bests those numbers by a factor of three or more?"

"I do not care --"

"-- horses."

Hands of flesh abruptly went limp. The ones covered in chitin made soft skittering sounds as they moved against each other.

"Yes," Rachnera thoughtfully continued. "Horses. All that strength, all of the mass -- and I think a girl so dedicated to hiding her true weight from the world will know exactly how deadly that combination can be. A hoof kicked into a human skull is something of an impediment to living. And still they think they have you tamed, conquered, enslaved... until the whip hand comes down one too many times. They know you're stronger than they are, Cerea. It's why they feel they have to conquer you. Because if they don't..."

Hard digits pressed something against her palm: softer fingers automatically closed.

"Maybe they need a reminder," Rachnera had whispered, and a pointed tongue flicked against the furry ear. "Of who could be in charge, if she wasn't so nice..."

Eight legs sprung into a leap. The scuttling moved to the ceiling, eventually wandering into a hallway.

And after a while, Cerea had looked at the miniature silken whip in her hand.

She didn't like the arachne. She wasn't sure she ever would. However, in terms of sheer physical power -- if nothing else, they had that in common. But in how humans reacted to it...

I want...

She looked at the book in her hands again. The colors, the artistry, and everything else.

-- there was a whinny from outside the door, one which almost seemed to have a question mark attached.

She didn't reach for the disk immediately: she had to wipe her eyes first. "Yes?"

"I heard..." An awkward pause. "Um. I heard something," the little horse went on. "It was sort of like... can I come in?"

Cerea had no right to order a knight away from anything, especially as the prisoner being watched. "Yes."

There were a few equally-awkward metallic sounds, and then the door opened. Cerea had to drop her gaze in order to watch the deep black pegasus hesitantly enter, and it let her see the three other Guards who were still posted in the corridor.

"Is something wrong?" the little mare asked, with her right hind leg carefully nudging the door mostly shut.

"No," Cerea lied.

"Oh. Um. Because it sounded like -- um. If it was one of us, it would have been..." Feathers rustled, possibly from sheer embarrassment. "Did you have any questions about tomorrow?"

She was aware that the subject was being changed, and she welcomed the switch. "I didn't understand what the Princess said about --" what had the word been? "-- residue? Signatures?"

"Oh," Nightwatch said. Hooves slowly, reluctantly shuffled closer. "Um... with magic... everypony who does magic works in it their own way. It's sort of like mouthwriting. No two ponies are going to produce a character/letter/concept which is exactly the same shape. And it's possible to see/feel/know or learn a little about the caster, and the spell, by examining the signature. But it's something which fades. You only have so long before there isn't anything to work with at all, not which could be understood. There's ways where we would already be past the limit. But the palace has a few things which could help. Princess Luna is taking them out of the armory tonight. And tomorrow, we'll try to find where you arrived, before the signature fades to the point where even those devices won't do any good."

Cerea slowly nodded. "So the longer she waits, the less there is to learn."

"Yes. Normally we'd try to plan a little more, but there's no chance." The little mare softly sighed. "And that's why I have to go off-shift in two hours, because Princess Luna wants me to come along. The palace has medicines/potions for staff members who need to sleep in a hurry because of a shift change, but I hate..." Stopped, and feathers rustled again. "Um. You should probably sleep too, but we can't give you any potions, because we don't know how they'd work on you. Maybe if you... read yourself to sleep --"

"-- I can't read."

The pressure of humiliation squeezed blue eyes shut, and Cerea turned her head away: it kept any tears out of sight and this time, she'd managed to suppress the little sob.

"Um," the pegasus initially tried: this was followed by a rather weak "What?"

"I can't..." Her breath caught in her throat. "I..."

I don't know you, and all you know about me is that I'm something you're afraid of. But after tomorrow, I may never see you again.

Or the pony could wind up guarding her cell for months. But somehow, it felt as if this particular humiliation had a chance to stay behind. Locked away in the cell forever.

"...I used to read a lot of stories," Cerea softly said, still without looking at the mare. "I still do. But for a while, stories were -- everything. And there are books in this cell, and I was thinking... that I'd never read any of them. That no one from my home ever has. I had shelves full of stories no one's seen, I took a book down, and... I forgot that the spell doesn't let me read." And there was nothing left for keeping the pain from her words. "I'm surrounded by stories I'll never know..."

Cerea never saw the silver eyes blink. She could only listen as the hooves shuffled again.

"Um," Nightwatch said, and part of the warm breath wafted across Cerea's fingers. "The Tale Of The Second Sunrise. Recorded and translated by Frith Inlé. It's... a collection of what would normally be foal stories, but these don't come from our nation. Um. The tales are foreign: the printing was local. So this was probably put here for someone who was temporarily held during a war and knew our language. And they're old stories. I know they're not taught in our schools, and I'm not sure most yaks can still be bothered."

Yaks. Ponies and yaks: it made Cerea briefly wonder about deer. "Oh. Thank you."

Another warm breath.

"Um. So. 'Ice thirsts for light. Ice tries to capture that which some would say harms it. But it longs for that touch, for it does not bring pain. Only change. The two are so often confused --'"

Cerea's eyes shot open.

The little pegasus backed up before raising her head, allowed the centaur to briefly look directly into silver. Moved forward again.

"I don't think it's a long one," Nightwatch decided. "Less than two hours, anyway. So. 'This is the tale of the ice which loved the light, and some would say the ice paid the price for bringing it forth...'"

The two females listened to the words, for it was a story both ancient and new. In time, it ended, and the pegasus tried to nudge the sleepy centaur towards the bed. Soft protests came back, and the larger body eventually settled in against a slightly different patch of floor, leaning against the bookcase for support.

The black pegasus glanced back through the doorway as she cleared its threshold, and then silently sealed the cell.

Grotesque

The loaned shirt had told her there was something which locally existed that had shoulders and arms. Magic and tools combined to provide a level of technology, and it was possible that whatever was working with a more standard variety of limbs had created some of it. However, the return of her original clothing suggested that in a place where the majority of the locals were covered by nothing but their fur, nothing was capable of laundry or fabric repair service.

Then again, upon closer examination, there hadn't been all that much left to clean or save.

"Um," Nightwatch awkwardly said, wincing as Cerea unfolded what remained of the blouse. "Um... the -- torso? Upper torso -- um... the torso part is mostly intact. Except for the rents on the sides. And the back. And nothing gets quintail stains out, unless it's from fur. We've tried."

Cerea was still looking. "It happens," she tried, because in her experience, it happened rather frequently, only along the front: it was both where most of the strain was typically located and a too-frequent target for... just about everything. "So that's my skirt." Just barely keeping the question mark off the end.

One of the earth ponies carefully raised his head, offering the full bag up to her hand.

"That's a skirt?" Nightwatch asked, light stun openly filling her voice.

It covered Cerea's buttocks (and getting her tail through the provided gap could take some work) while failing to surround her legs in tubes of fabric, and it didn't reach the floor: therefore, it was a skirt. It also happened to have all the style of a car's draping tarpaulin and did about as much to hide the shape of what was underneath.

Quite a few female centaurs wore skirts. Knights got to wear barding. Even without the formal title, Cerea had gained a set which had accompanied her to Japan: training gear which didn't have to be made from plastic -- but it was still training gear. While giving it a decent polish (up to two hours: three if the inspection was being conducted by her mother) would make it pass for something suitable, it wasn't the highest-quality metal, some of the joints weren't as smooth as they should have been, the breastplate pinched her exactly where the name implied, and it was understood that she would only gain her real armor when she had both reached her full adult size and won her title. The second factor had been the true sticking point.

"Yes," she carefully replied, setting the blouse down before extracting the larger garment from the bag and shaking it out. One gap quickly caught her attention.

...well, it's not as embarrassing here. They go around with that part of their body on display all the time. Although now that she thought about it... well, it wasn't as if she made a practice of inspecting that area, but she was sure she hadn't actually seen anything. And that applied to mares and stallions.

Maybe they have some sort of trick valve. If I looked --

Cerea wrenched her gaze back to what was left of the skirt. (Looking was rude and besides, when it came to that purpose, she was too far above the stallions and all of the mares were facing the wrong way.) All things considered, she was best off with the tablecloth for now.

One of the stallions spoke up: a unicorn, visibly larger than all but the male earth pony, and quite a bit older than the rest of the group. The most experienced, the one who clearly played the part of advisor to the younger members of the group -- and Cerea's nose told her that his fear had only been banished from sight. "In the event that we can send you back today," that stallion told her, "the Princess wants you to take all of your things with you. As many as we can find."

Her mind ran it through an additional translation and came up with Cutting down on contamination. But that was a hopeless cause: there were scraps of lost fabric all over the forest, and she didn't know what had happened to her sword. For that matter, she was still short several hairpins. And that wasn't all.

It's probably broken.

It wasn't working anyway. Not that it could work here. Even if they had something similar... Well, that was the stuff of fantasy, and the type which went beyond mere magic: it was hard enough to get two supposedly-compatible pieces working with each other, and it took a poor writer to assume items with fully separate origins would just cooperate. It was currently junk, and it was littering some part of the forest. She would look for it, but she didn't expect to see the thing.

Another major gap in the skirt indicated where the second pocket had once been, and that was actually more distressing. She was supposed to carry her identification at all times: this was partially to prove her legal temporary residency on demand, and the rest was apparently because Japan had decided it was possible for some of its citizens to confuse a centaur with something else. (Cerea had first presumed that no one could be that stupid and, after gaining some experience, had revised that to 'Anyone that stupid isn't going to be convinced by identification anyway.') Losing her ID was good for three hours of punishment, with all of it spent in the line which required multiple international calls and faxed documents before lining up a replacement. She already knew the agency wasn't going to accept her excuse for having lost it.

"I understand," she told them. (It took a moment before the words emerged, used for internally glaring at the part of her which had just semi-sarcastically decided that remaining lost was a very good reason for not dealing with integration bureaucracy.) "This is everything I still had. I did lose some things in the forest, but I don't know where." And she had retained her scabbard, the leather-and-metal straps were fully intact, but -- it was empty.

The stallion nodded. "If we can find them," he told her, "they'll go back with you. But the priority is getting you home. So you're ready to go?"

She'd groomed herself as best she could. (Still no long-handled brushes, and she'd been reluctant to ask.) Food had been provided: not just meals before departure had come around, but a supply to take with her, along with a canteen which she swore had been designed for opening by hand. There had to be other species...

Then again, hornlight seemed to have its privileges. But so did wings, and she supposed the earth ponies had their own magic. Based on the name, it probably had something to do with rocks.

"Yes." They're looking for me. They're waiting for me. He's --

-- no. It was too early to hope. "How long will it take to get there?"

Several ponies blinked at her.

"How -- long?" Nightwatch finally tried.

The translator made it possible to recognize vocal confusion, and Cerea didn't understand why it was there. "We're at least a few kilometers away, correct?" She hadn't seen the current castle from the outside, but she'd been taken through enough of it to recognize that it was big: any structure so massive would have been visible from any point in that first town. "So there's travel time. And --" she tried not to wince "-- when you take me outside..."

It was possible that she was about to be marched into a very large box, one with both just enough air holes to keep her alive and a lot of sheer black fabric draped over them to prevent the ponies from peeking within. Keeping the population from having to see the monster.

"Um," Nightwatch initially said.

That turned out to be the less incredulous explanation.

The dark Princess came to them.

The sound of hoofsteps reached them first: greater mass being planted with more strength. The aura was right behind that and finally, tiny twinkles from something very much like mane-captured stars reflected off the stone.

She was wearing saddlebags again, exceptionally full ones which bulged in awkward ways from the odd shapes within. An orange earth pony stallion in silver armor was trotting at her right, a light green unicorn mare matched the pace on the left, and the already-present Guards were openly staring at the group.

"Princess," the large unicorn stallion quickly said, "where are they?"

"I presume you mean the typical expected parties," the Princess dryly replied. "The Bearers have a mission and cannot be pulled away from it: this means the direct services of Magic are not currently available. However, should we not succeed in an immediate return, I will request that she examine our results. And while I had hoped to retain the performer, she is currently serving as consultant to their cause." A soft snort. "While there are benefits to the ongoing repair of that relationship, there are also certain detriments. Having the two of them studying our findings together might result in a laboratory door which never opens again."

The stallion wasn't quite done. "What about Sunbur --"

"-- I would prefer the services of a party who possesses the potential to be in this corridor while conscious," the Princess sharply cut in. "That one has a difficult enough time dealing with the world beyond his chart-cluttered window: asking him to step into a wild zone would result in my levitating his fallen form along until he once again awoke, likely just long enough to perceive that I had not been bluffing about bringing him regardless." This snort was decidedly louder. "Should I make the decision to involve him, Bulkhead, you will know through the room I dedicate to his excess notes and the padding layered onto the floor, as falling onto said notes seldom protects him during subsequent faints."

Bulkhead took a step forward.

"I don't like you going out there again. Especially after what you did last night."

And now Cerea was staring at him. At the knight speaking harshly to his lady, with the words brought forth by the needs of duty.

(She wasn't offended: part of a knight's role was to keep their master safe in spite of themselves, and evidence had proven that her own love could get into trouble simply from taking out the garbage. It was just a shock to see someone else doing it.)

"Somepony has to wear the signature scanner," the Princess coolly declared. "As the pony with the most experience in interpreting its findings --"

"-- I didn't like you confronting her alone either," and his snort had been just as loud as that of the dark mare. (He didn't look at Cerea when he said that. He didn't have to.) "Especially when you didn't tell us that was what you were going to do. We turned around and you were gone --"

"-- in the event that she had been like Tirek," the Princess stridently stated, "confronting her as a group would have been a mistake, as there would have been that much more to drain. She was captured. And now we will attempt to send her home." The dark gaze moved up to Cerea's eye level. "Centaur?"

The mare was royalty, and that was most of why Cerea put up with it: the remainder came from lingering doubt as to whether she'd earned anything else. But it was beginning to truly register now, outside of fever and throne room: Cerea had told the Princess her name, and she hadn't been addressed by it once.

"Yes?" she replied, and waited for the rest.

The Princess trotted closer. "We are teleporting." The large head tilted slightly to the left. "Did that translate properly? You are familiar with the term?"

From stories. It was still enough to let her nod.

"We know that you can be transported in such a fashion," the dark mare said, "as that is how I brought you to the palace: the nature of your medical emergency did not allow for anything slower. Therefore, it can be presumed safe to do so a second time. However..." The pause lasted for a full breath. "...during the initial teleport, you were unconscious. So I am advising you to close your eyes and keep them that way, until I tell you it is safe to open them again -- and that will not be immediate: covering that distance requires a small amount of time. You have no direct experience of the between, or training in calling upon memories to form a shield. A realm which provides no input for the senses has been known to disorient the mind, and we will need you to be fully focused when the search begins."

Another nod. It seemed to be the current limits of her conversational capacity.

"And the process is easier when there is direct contact," the Princess continued. "So we will need to touch." A long, slow look at Cerea's upper torso. "I will permit you to place a hand upon my back. Briefly. And..." This regard roamed the full length and breadth of the centaur's form. "...in order to better manage the total mass, there shall be multiple transports."

So it had come to this: ponies were talking about her weight...

(For a centaur, she was exceptionally fit. But Cerea had made several mistakes before traveling to Japan, and one of the most damaging had been a carefully-studied collection of exactly the wrong articles.)

"Counting the centaur and myself," the dark mare went on, "we will travel as a party of seven, and we will do so on hoof: the search has reached the point where scouting from the air will no longer be effective. There are sufficient hours of daylight remaining for us to cross a considerable distance."

Nightwatch's legs reluctantly moved forward. "Um," the little knight awkwardly began, "have you slept?"

"Sufficiently," the dark Princess steadily replied.

"A normal sufficiency," the pegasus valiantly tried, "or --"

The dark left foreleg came partially up, slowly went back down. "I appreciate your concern. But this search, conducted as a group, requires daylight. We could bring illuminating devices or rely on corona light, but I wish to limit the total amount of magic we are both carrying and using. In part, this is meant to keep the readings from becoming contaminated and additionally... we are, in many ways --" a glance at Cerea "-- already risking enough."

"But --" Nightwatch attempted.

"-- and the subject," the Princess stated, "is now closed." She stepped forward again, silver-shod hooves moving easily on stone, and passed through a gap in the line of Guards. Shifted until she was standing on Cerea's left, about a foot away.

"Your hand upon my back, centaur," the dark mare ordered. "And close your eyes."

It left Cerea with a moment where she was relying on her remaining senses. Listening to the sped-up breathing of the smaller ponies as they watched the touch. Scenting not just the constant fog of their fear, but a sharp surge of what she guessed to be shock.

And then there was the Princess.

The back was... solid. Exceptionally so, and she hadn't quite expected that: the seemingly-ethereal nature of mane and tail had somehow suggested an equal lack of perceived mass for the body. But the spine was under the center of her palm: the peak of a vertebra poked into her skin. Powerful muscles stretched out to the sides, and there was a slight sensation of movement as the mare steadily breathed.

She smelled something like the scents of the other three subspecies combined, only with additional factors. Her fur was slightly cool to the touch, and exceptionally soft.

"Now," the Princess said.

Sound stopped. Scent vanished. The floor went out from beneath Cerea's hooves, and all four legs briefly scrambled for purchase before she realized she was standing on nothing. There was enough time to take a breath, and something which was neither air nor vacuum sent her body reeling as every instinct tried to figure out how it was possible to survive within absence --

-- dead leaves crunched beneath her hooves, and the scents of an autumn day drifted up to her. There was also a heavy overlay of paint and wood.

"We have arrived at the base camp," the Princess told her. "Lift your hand, and then you may open your eyes."

Cerea did, and saw -- a hollow wooden structure with no floor and closed double-doors leading out. It was somewhat larger than the average toolshed.

"This," the Princess informed her, "is a gatehouse. Each settlement is meant to have at least one: larger populations have them scattered throughout their settled zone. They provide those who can teleport with a safe location in which to arrive: something meant to be forever empty unless somepony is using it. During emergencies, they allow the thrones to dispatch select forces with efficiency -- presuming any enemy did not think to cut off the gatehouses, or render them less than safe. And they can be constructed rather quickly. This one is but hours old." The horn ignited with dark energy, and the coated doors swung upon. "Does this part of the wild zone look familiar?"

Cerea stared.

They had been in the hallway outside her cell, and now they were back in the forest -- only this time, there were three ponies standing outside the gatehouse, their attention smoothly shifting to the opening doors in the split-second before they saw her.

Spines stiffened. Jaws went tight, and the newest fear cloud began to spread.

"I..." She swallowed. "I'm not sure."

A slow nod. "I hardly expect you to have memorized every hoofstep of your journey," the Princess stated as she moved forward, the cool back shifting away from Cerea's reach. "And your current view is rather narrow. However, this is the last place in which I was able to verify your previous presence -- at least from the air."

She left the gatehouse, and Cerea began to follow her out into the little clearing. A section of the forest which was fully exposed to early afternoon sun and clear sky, no more than sixteen meters across at the widest point. The size of the space meant the depth of drifting leaves was fairly minimal, and so it was possible to see where a number of stained ones had been crushed into the soil by desperately stamping hooves. Another, significantly larger portion of earth looked as if something had recently exploded outwards, with a very large, rather irregularly-shaped mass having been pulled up from beneath: the soil wasn't just disturbed, it was disrupted, and a series of partially-filled pits were surrounded by dark debris. A small portion of that was rocks, stone encrusted in deep soil. The larger percentage came from bones.

"Your hoofprints, I believe," the dark mare said, and inclined her head towards them. "Along with what I am presuming is your blood."

The young centaur swallowed again, for now she knew exactly where she was.

They came up from the ground...

"You saw what you presumed to be the protruding portion of a root vegetable, correct?" the Princess not-quite-asked. "It would have both looked and smelled edible, and for the very little it might be worth, it is. If you can wrench it free from the end of the tentacle. Something of a delicacy for those who feel the refinement of their tastes is best reflected by the total number of digits on the restaurant's bill."

"...how did you find this?" She couldn't even smell the creature now, and the blast of its emergence had fouled her nostrils for hours.

The Princess glanced back at her.

"I knew the direction from which you had entered the town," royalty calmly said. "That provided a place to begin. I also considered that you would have had no need to conceal yourself from an aerial search until such was initiated and those moving through trees tend to tilt towards open spaces. The duration of the hunt, combined with the distance covered, gave me some idea of your fairly impressive ground speed, and you told me how many Moon-raisings had passed since your arrival. So I ranged outwards from that starting point, checking any clearing I could find from the air along that general direction, also working under the theory that those who are lost, even in cloudy weather, will try to track either water or the movement of Sun and Moon -- and streams are fairly plentiful in this area, so you would have possessed no desperate need to remain near a riverbank. Additionally, I can see perfectly in the dark, and the Royal Physicians took a number of pictures while you were being examined. This allowed me to memorize your hoofprint."

The dark mare lightly, almost casually shrugged, and Cerea had just enough left within her own shock to recognize the movement as having been exactly that.

"I also happen," the Princess added, "to be capable of flying rather quickly." Another look at the trampled area. "So I tracked your path from the air, as far as I could. And when I found what seemed to be the last clearing along the general trail, I extracted the wounded root angler, memorized the location, then teleported back to the palace and retrieved a gatehouse team. They have been guarding this spot since." And now that dark gaze moved back to Cerea. "But this is the point at which aerial surveys cease to help: not only does the wild zone becomes too thick, but one of the devices we will be utilizing is distressingly short-range. A maximum effectiveness of two hoofwidths. We can no longer search from the air. And so we will proceed on the ground. Centaur?"

Cerea managed a blink.

"Your hindquarters," the Princess noted, "are still within the gatehouse. As I have already indicated that such spaces need to remain empty?"

After a few seconds, a stunned mind managed to direct four legs into a forward stagger.

She worked all that out. Overnight.

There were many kinds of power, and this mare seemed to possess all of them.

"Good," the Princess decided as Cerea cleared the structure. "Wait here."

She did: she had no other choice. She watched as the flash of light took the dark mare away, and waited upon her former battleground as the gatehouse team stared at her. As the little ponies fought against the urge to run.

It took a little while before everyone arrived: the Princess stated (with some annoyance) that one Guard had abruptly decided to use the nearest trench before they left, and that had held the process up. The earth ponies were brought in last, and stayed in the closed gatehouse with the Princess for a few minutes before emerging.

"Very well," the Princess finally said. "We are assembled. However, there is still something we are waiting for --" with not-at-all concealed grouchiness "-- and I had hoped it would be here by now. But the delay does provide time for giving the centaur a briefing regarding our chosen devices." Dark light opened the lids of the saddlebags, delved and sorted. Three objects emerged.

The light green unicorn mare took a too-slow breath. "That's a lot," she simply stated.

"Yes," the dark Princess replied. "It is." Turned towards Cerea, and the floating items shifted with her. "I wish for you to understand how we will be proceeding. This is a thaum compass." And it looked very much like a normal one, only with a diameter slightly larger than a hoof and a height to match. The inner needle was currently rotated towards the west. "It points towards sources of magic. But it is not the most reliable of guides. In particular, it can be disoriented by any relatively localized use, and has to be told to ignore a given source: it took some time to convince it not to constantly indicate me. As such, it is meant to be a secondary factor in our search. This --" thick goggles, crystalline lenses within a housing of brass, all sized for a pony's eyes -- "is a signature scanner. It also detects magic. Any magic, although some forms require the wearer to be fairly close. And it does so when those signatures have faded to a level where a pony's own senses cannot detect them. But it presents that information visually, and such requires a significant amount of experience to interpret."

Cerea, for lack of anything better to do during the discussion of a subject she knew nothing about, tried nodding again.

Her ears twitched, and it took her a second to recognize the sound of multiple large wings moving in from the east. Another moment was required before she fought back the urge to flee again.

"Lastly," the Princess told her, "this is our analyzer." A center-indented electrum disk with runes lining the edge: even with the dark light covering it, the metal shimmered as if it had been coated in the thinnest film of soap. "It is capable of recognizing any spells which it has previously encountered. It can also compare aspects of a new working to anything it already knows, and suggest what the fresh creation was meant to do. This is the piece where the range issue is the most severe, and the device itself is slightly more scarce than your loaned translator. New thaum compasses can be constructed, albeit with significant effort. A damaged signature scanner can be repaired. A wounded analyzer is gone." Staring directly into Cerea's eyes now, the dark gaze lancing through a gap between floating metal. "Do you understand?"

"Yes." Which was a partial truth. She knew what the -- devices -- were supposed to do. Cerea just didn't understand why she was being cautioned like this. It wasn't as if she was going to use the things --

-- the Princess' head lifted, turned to the east as the bearers of those wings came into view. But she wasn't really looking at the pegasi. Her attention was focused on what they were towing beneath them.

The small flock descended over the clearing, didn't touch down. Instead, they simply released the mouth-held tow ropes at the instant the net touched the leaves, and then quickly flew away.

"So I would appreciate your efforts," the Princess darkly stated, "in doing your best not to have that thing touch it."

Cerea's eyes were focused on her sword (and the little bag next to it), and so she didn't see the ponies backing away from it. She only heard hooves crunching across leaves.

She also picked up on Bulkhead's rather loud gulp. "Princess," the oldest knight shakily said, "we -- I hate to say this, but we could use that. Something which wounds magic --"

"-- yes," his lady interrupted. "I have spent some time considering the possibilities." And even without being able to read pony expressions, Cerea could hear the mix of revulsion and fascination within the steady voice. "But as a weapon, we would have some trouble in wielding it. A sword cannot be effectively used with teeth clamped upon its grip, and I am told that those who tried to lift it that way became ill until they stopped. There is no way to encase it within a field. It could be given to a protector, someone with hands who was utterly trusted --" the dark eyes briefly closed "-- and the first entity who came to mind has been dead for -- some time. And he had his own magic, something which merely holding the sword might negate. To think is to possess some form of power: to touch that thing is to have that power quelled. None can use it. None who were born upon our soil."

"But it could break enchantments!" the light green unicorn suddenly insisted. "Things like Poison Joke, or what Joyous went through --"

"-- by repeatedly hitting the victim with the blade until the curse was eliminated?" the Princess asked. "Is that how it would work? Should the cursed one carry the sword at all times, effectively trading ailments? And there is but one sword. Does it still suppress magic if broken into pieces? What if fragments are lost? Stolen? And what happens if someone shaves off a portion which is small enough to be ingested? A new kind of poison..." She slowly shook her head. "There are many ways to use the sword, Abjura, and so many seem to be beneficial -- but keeping it is a risk. One which comes with fearsome consequences. And --"

The dark eyes went to Cerea again.

"-- we are not its owners. Place that within its scabbard. Quickly. And do not draw it unless you see no other choice."

She slowly trotted forward, and more leaves crunched as her hooves stepped into the net's spaces. Foreknees bent, and she carefully lifted the sword.

"...how do you feel when you touch that?" Abjura breathed. "Sick? Weak?"

The typical answer would have been useless. "Normal," Cerea quietly replied, for the sword only wounded magic, and she had none. She sheathed the blade, then knelt down again, collecting the bag before turning back to face the others.

"And the translator functioned while she held it," the Princess exhaled. "As your widening eyes suggest you can still understand me, it also does so with the blade concealed. The few experiments we conducted at the site more than suggested direct contact was required. Simply do not have it touch disk, wire, or any device at all. I would also be rather offended by any contact made with us." The dark gaze moved around the clearing. "I trust you recall having been here now?"

"Yes." (As words went, that one seemed to be doing a lot of work.) She opened the bag.

"And how much time had passed since your arrival -- yes, we were presuming those were also yours, especially given the effects. Keep them away from the wire."

Cerea, who had already been getting ready to pin up some more of her hair, fought back the blush, lost, and simply started shifting the metal pins towards that side. "A few hours." She was certain of that: time only blurred during fights and fever.

Another slow exhale. "Good. If we are fortunate, we may approach the rough vicinity of your arrival before Sun is lowered. And your point of entry for this clearing?"

She had been tracking along the path of the cloud-shrouded sun: Cerea's right hand gestured.

The Princess nodded. "The thaum compass was already indicating something in that general direction. Let us proceed."

The procession carefully trotted into the deeper woods: the Princess near the lead, with Guards both leading and flanking her. The remainder moved with Cerea, and it didn't take long to notice that they were proceeding at a distance which put them just beyond the combined reach of arm and blade. Even Nightwatch was --

-- she's a knight. It... makes sense. She has to think about her lady, about threats, and...

She trotted, accompanied by the group without ever being part of it.

They were trying to send her home.

She was surrounded by a mobile chasm, one which had been filled by fear. Some of it was her own. She had been attacked in this forest, over and over. She had nearly died...

I want to go home.

It wasn't the steadiest procession. Stories left a lot of little details out, and one of what turned out to be the major omissions regarded the occasional need for someone to step behind a tree. (Not too far away: she'd noticed that all of the ponies generally did their best to stay in sight of each other, and that was the lone exception.) Every so often, the Princess would pause, snort, and something about the dark eyes suggested a steadily-elevating level of irritation, one which had initially been launched from a point well above sea level. This frequently led to the thaum compass being rapped with a silver-coated forehoof or, at the moment Cerea finally identified the scent of frustration, knocked against a tree. It wasn't too long after that before it became possible to hear royalty darkly muttering under its breath.

Most of the Guards were rather studiously ignoring it, and their posture said they were doing so in that special way which told Cerea they were actually paying exacting attention to their lady's behavior while doing their best not to get caught. She didn't quite have the knack for that lack of attention, and so Nightwatch eventually flew just a little closer.

"It's okay," the small knight tried to softly reassure her. "She's just... been up too long."

Cerea blinked. "It's only --" four in the afternoon? Five? Was this place so different as to have its days be a new length? "-- oh." Because she'd just remembered. "She was looking for my path at night." Which meant Cerea had kept royalty up well past its bedtime, and the wince settled in. "So she hasn't rested..."

It seldom took very long for her to conclude that most things were her fault. Actual involvement only shortened the process.

"That's not it," the pegasus said, wings moving in a way which somehow maintained a sort of mobile hover. (Cerea couldn't work that out. It should have taken hummingbird speed to accomplish that, and the limbs weren't going anywhere near that fast. Magic seemed to be involved.) "She's always awake at night. Um. Usually she gets up a duration/hour or two before Sun-lowering and goes to bed about the same after Moon is brought down." With a sudden surge of defensiveness, "And she can be awake any time she likes, no matter what anypony says. Sun doesn't burn her, and it never will. Writing down lies doesn't make them true."

Which was when it finally hit her. Sun-lowering?

"But she sleeps during the day," the pegasus went on, the near-whispering voice just a little steadier. "And Sun doesn't hurt her, but too much of it and she..." Their faces were different. The winces were just about the same. (The pony's was actually easier to spot: eye size did a lot there.) "She just starts feeling... irritated. Edgy. And it's not just the lack of sleep, she didn't sleep enough no matter what she told Bulkhead. It's just Sun and being awake for too long at the wrong time." With the tone of gossip, "The Solar shift told me that Princess Celestia gets the same way during all-nighters. It's just -- who they are --"

"-- we have phoenixes in the area," that irritated voice dryly announced.

"Princess?" one of the earth ponies asked. (Cerea didn't say a word. She was just automatically bracing herself for having to deal with the world's foremost level of misplaced, fully unjustified ego.)

"I know exactly what that particular tilt of the needle means. Along with the fact that if it continues to attempt upwards movement, it will break -- for the third time, dismiss that before I open your lid and -- perfect. It seems they are mating. I suppose this means we can look forward to a char of dragons next. At least that would provide the occasion for exercise..." A snort, another rap of the light-held compass, and the dark mare moved on.

Cerea needed a second.

"Phoenixes..."

"Yes?" Nightwatch asked.

"...they're -- birds, right?"

"Um. Yes." A too-long pause. "Except for the one Princess Celestia keeps as a pet. That's more of a menace."

"So what are gryphons?"

The pegasus abruptly tossed her head, as if trying to dislodge something from one ear. "Did you say griffons?"

"I... guess so. The ones in the statues..."

"They have their own nation. We're at peace." Another pause. "Well, we're at peace now."

"And the statues represent what they look like?"

"Yes," Nightwatch replied, the confusion wafting in wing-shifted air. "Except for that kinetic one we passed. Their beaks only have that much blood when they're eating. Why?" And with a surge of mental flight, "Do you have them where you came from? Griffons?"

"...yes."

"So what do they look like?"

Cerea tried to find a starting place.

"They have hands --"

-- and then she saw it.

I know that tree.

I circled it a few times because I was -- trying to pick a direction. Somewhere to start. That's my hooftrack in the dirt...

"Princess?" (And wished she'd somehow been more formal, even as the dark mare glanced back at her.) "We're close."

The Princess looked her over, with most of that regard staying near Cerea's eyes. Shifted her attention back to the thaum compass.

"It is... somewhat more intense up ahead," she stated. "Assuming the interference from phoenix reproduction has been factored out. Let us open our own senses. Can anypony feel anything?"

Abjura took a slow step forward. Her head moved from left to right, then up and down, as if the horn was somehow testing the density of the air.

"It's..." A quick head shake. "Something happened. But it's too faint for me. It's like trying to find a shape in drifting smoke. I can't retain anything..."

The Princess frowned, closed her eyes: the light-held devices bobbed and dipped.

"Not smoke," the dark mare softly countered. "Water. Or rather... a dry riverbed. The place where something once flowed --"

Her head abruptly tossed, and stars shifted within the strange mane.

"Now why are my thoughts proceeding down that exact path?" royalty carefully asked itself. "Air to water. Water to riverbed, and it feels as if there is another hoofstep yet to come. Forward, all of you. And be on your guard. I sense nothing powerful enough to be active -- but that does not mean it could not become active again."

They shifted forward. Every horn seemed to be testing the air now. Pegasus wings rustled in strange patterns, and the earth ponies looked as if they were listening to something no one else could hear.

And then they were there.

The trees were much more widely-spaced, but that was just for the trunks: the branches were more than sufficient to cover the gaps. In spring and summer, all light would have been dappled green: for mid-autumn, there were just enough dead leaves clinging to their former source of life to make any view of the sky uncertain. They had room to move, but only at ground level: any attempt made by the pegasi to reach a higher elevation would have quickly found itself working through a maze of wood.

A slight breeze was moving in from the north: cold air shifted fur and feathers, made Cerea's right arm automatically begin to shift forward in case covering was required. They could hear animal noises in the forest: it was possible to identify a squirrel's chatter, and the strange birdsong had some chance to be that of a phoenix. (The song which arose from those Cerea dearly wished to forget usually sounded like exceptionally mindless gossip.) At the southern edge of that auditory range, a harsh surface scraped against bark. It somehow felt as if there was a familiar aspect to that sound, something which aborted the covering motion and dropped Cerea's hand closer to the sword's hilt.

But there was also a strip of black fabric around a low branch.

"Your marker," the Princess said. "Many would not have thought to provide such a detail. Abjura, take the analyzer. I shall utilize the signature scanner." The dark light shifted: one bubble sent the disc towards the light green mare, while a secondary portion brought brass down over her own fur. "Let us see..."

Cerea watched, and for nearly half a minute, there was very little to look at. Six ponies: three moving around the clearing, two standing still, and one hovering nearby.

Several of the disc's runes brightened. Two flashed, once each. Then they did it again, only faster. And again...

"What is this?" Abjura breathed as the display increased its speed. "It's digging deep, Princess. It doesn't know the exact spell, but it's finding something in common with a previous encounter. It's just something from a long time ago, something it has to reach for..."

The brass-covered head didn't look at the unicorn. It was staring into the woods.

"The next hoofstep," the Princess softly said. "A logical progression, and we never would have perceived the final link had it not been for the device. Air to water, water to riverbed -- and riverbed to mud."

One of the earth ponies looked up at that. "Princess -- I don't know what you're seeing, but when we get back, I need to --"

"Be calm, Acrolith." (The multi-hued mare's breathing slowed.) "None of you can perceive what I can through these lenses, and so explanation is needed. I must try to explain, because this is something I have never seen before -- and yes, I am aware of what it means to hear those words emerging from my throat. To translate the perceptions..."

A long moment of silence, during which the flashing of the runes steadied. Somewhere to the south, a piece of wood was abruptly sundered. It was something Cerea mostly registered on a subconscious level: the wind was wrong for registering the nature of the true danger -- but her hand tightly closed on the sword's grip.

She felt her shoulders go uneven, her posture lightly listing to one side. The length of the day was blamed, and a simple effort brought her upright again.

"Imagine magic as hues," the dark mare quietly told them. "Simple enough to do, given the way coronas manifest. Every effect as its own color. But those colors are most distinct when they are separated. Bring red and yellow too close, and the viewer might believe there was a single orange working present. And with every additional overlapping shade, the perceived color continues to shift. Add too many, superimpose to the point where everything blends...”

They were all watching her, and so none truly noticed when two of the Guards sat down, their expressions mutually shifting to something Cerea would have been unable to interpret as a dazed smile. The young centaur simply watched the Princess turn towards her, and caught a glimpse of the eyes behind the lenses.

"Add enough colors, and all one can perceive is a murky brown," the Princess declared. "Everything sluggishly flowing in the same direction, barely functioning. A working as relentless, unstoppable mass pressing against a barrier until sheer weight collapses the wall. This is a mudslide."

Abjura slowly nodded. "But it's a mudslide with intent," the unicorn said. "I think somepony directed it. Multiple ponies, and... that shouldn't be possible, to get that many together on one effect without the disparities in their signatures ruining everything. The limit on the Combiner is three." She stared down at the disc. "But what I'm seeing here -- yes. This was a deliberate attempt to corpuscle."

And if she had known more, it would have been the moment when Cerea truly reacted. When she began to search for the threat. But she had some experience with the translator now, believed she understood a few of the faults: 'somepony' was presumed to be one of them. Having 'corpuscle' reach her wire-touched ear simply made her wait to see what the near-overlapping next word would be, the magic struggling to retrieve the proper term.

But the Princess regally nodded.

"Sanctity," the dark mare agreed. "Sanctity and steak. Triplets?"

It was still the wrong assumption: that magic was something which ran on its own sort of battery, especially since the Princess had mentioned charges during their first meeting. Cerea now believed that charge to be running out, wasn't completely sure how to communicate the problem when communication itself was on the verge of becoming impossible. She moved forward, her free hand frantically gesturing to the jewel, trying to make herself understood.

But then the Princess' wing joints loosened. Feathers splayed across the forest floor, and did so at the same moment when the male pegasus calmly perched in a tree.

"Carpet!" he declared. "Ursury shadows!"

A much larger piece of wood broke, still to the south. Cerea heard something rough scrape, and that noise was nearly lost in the solid triple impact of shell into dirt, an announcement of impending arrival made by something which no longer had any need to move silently.

She spun to face it, and initially took a wing to the face for her trouble.

"Quiver!" Nightwatch wailed, the frantically-flapping little knight moving in rough ellipses. "Avatar uneven, frantic cabal --"

But the Princess was the one who found what felt like the right word, a single moment of desperate focus giving a name to the monster which broke through the branches, almost leisurely moving towards smiling, sitting, flapping meals.

"Neurocypher!"

After the first encounter... that was when Cerea had almost expected the memory to fade. You went through a nightmare and once the daylight touched you, the terror began to blur, smear, thin out. Eventually, unless you did your best to fix every aspect of it, deliberately reliving it again and again, all you would remember was that you had been scared. The details went missing and with those gone, the fear itself would be lost.

But it had happened during the day. It had been real. It was still real, when nightmare was all it ever should have been.

The basic form was actually fairly easy to describe. You took a crab's leg, tinted it to a particularly nauseating shade of brown-tinged puce. Expanded it until the full arc of the joints could just about shadow a centaur's body from head to tail. Add tiny spikes to the armor, ones which weren't so much sharp as abrasive: close contact would take layers off skin. (A few strategic cracks had to be placed at this time, mostly around the joints.) Then you added two more legs just like it, spaced evenly around an armored circle, something roughly the diameter of a small car, with the underside just about as high off the ground as the roof.

And once you'd imagined that -- you pictured another just like it. Inverted it, stacked the second directly on top of the first, gave it two bands of partially-exposed musculature at the joining seam. One allowed some degree of rotation, let the halves shift independently. The second was where the eyes were, or that which passed for eyes. Normally, there would have been a full circle of black orbs evenly spaced around the perimeter, something which took in all light and gave back nothing except malice. This particular specimen was down two.

There was no point to looking for the mouth, for that was on the underside. A mouth larger than the pony it would lower itself onto, a pony who couldn't think about running or fighting or anything at all, a pony who simply sat among the leaves and merrily chatted about muddles and masks as the monster closed in with its tripod half-limping gait, the serrated fangs preparing to descend.

The second encounter had given it a name. The first made a pointed limb freeze, because three of the remaining eyes had just spotted what was galloping in from the north.

Strictly speaking, the thing didn't need to be treated with all that much formality -- but battle cries had rules all their own.

"Greetings, monster!" Cerea shouted. "I see thou dost remember me!"

And the sword slammed into the closest leg. Or rather, a selected portion of it.

She wasn't on the best terms with Rachnera. It was possible to find multiple liminal species who weren't exactly fond of the arachne, and ancient wars meant dusty battle tactics were available. This was so much bigger, had both the wrong arrangement of limbs and less of them -- but there weren't any webs. And when you were fighting something with this kind of armor, a coating which followed so many of chitin's rules, there was a basic tactic. You didn't worry about the armor itself: even with centaur strength and the dense plastic of the sword, it took a serious swing to put a crack in that shell (and she'd managed a few). Because the creature needed to be capable of movement. It couldn't shuffle on fully-frozen limbs, it needed flexibility, and armor could only overlap so much.

It meant you went for the joints and in Cerea's case, she went for the one she'd already cracked.

The little ravine in the shell deepened, spread, and there was a grinding sound, something which was nothing at all like a scream because the thing couldn't scream. It had no language with which to protest, and there would have been no excuses it cared to make. It simply knew it had felt pain, that something which had caused it pain was back, and pain wasn't something it knew how to deal with. Its magic would approach before it did, sedating the prey in advance. It fed, and nothing felt pain at all. It was incapable of realizing that some of its victims even laughed as they died, because that was the behavior which randomly-firing neurons had picked at the last.

It killed, and so it survived. That was how the world was supposed to work. It killed, it reproduced, and it lacked the intellect to realize that enough years of those behaviors would lead to a natural death. It couldn't think about death. Thought was something it destroyed.

But it had memory, even if those recollections lacked a true sense of time. There had been a new kind of prey. It had moved towards the prey, because that was what it did. Its magic had done the work, and so it was time to feed.

Then the prey had moved.

The prey was back, keeping it from reaching the little meals. And the tripod shifted, moving backwards in that strange limping gait, something which was only happening because armor was so slow to heal. It rotated the upper circle, tried to catch the prey with one of those limbs, but the prey jumped and all it could do was brush against the prey's lower back.

There was a tearing sound, and the noise hadn't come from flesh. Stitches had given way, and a rather ugly repurposed tablecloth fell to the forest floor. The black orbs saw the movement: one tracked it, another focused on the moving prey, and the most local third ceased to function forever because a plastic sword with no true edge was still perfectly capable of being jammed directly into an eye.

It rotated as much as it could, flailed its limbs. But it didn't know what to do: it had no true knowledge at all. The armor was meant to give it protection against that which could attack at a distance and when that happened, it would retreat. Close quarters combat was beyond the realm of every instinct it possessed. It was being driven away from subdued prey, its upper limbs broke branches as its body was driven backwards towards a clearing, it twisted this way and that and another branch broke and came down on the prey's left shoulder.

The impact staggered the prey, made it lose focus. A lower limb shifted, raised, the terminal point lined up --

-- and leaves blasted into its surviving eyes, with the gust sending a few into broken sockets. A gust which went around the centaur, because the pony who'd created it was just that good with wind.

Nightwatch, easily twenty-five meters above the ground, flapped her wings again, and the monster retreated from Cerea, lost more ground to the pain of debris pelting against wounds.

"You don't radiate up much, do you?" the pegasus shouted, and the increased distance between centaur and monster made it safe to look up towards the sound. "Because you can't! It's a torus, not a sphere! I remember that now, I remember what you are!"

And there was more than that in the sky: larger wings beating against the air, silver-covered legs shifting in a strange pattern beneath the Princess' body, blackening vapor was rapidly coalescing between limbs --

"-- no!" the Guard yelled. "Princess, it'll go for the sword first! You can't --"

"-- the sword," the Princess calmly said, "is not metal."

Her forehooves slammed into the newly-created cloud.

Cerea wasn't sure how old she'd been when her mother had formally taught her about thunder. Three or four, probably. She did have a distinct memory of having been told to count the seconds between flash and boom: every extra moment of delay meant the strike was that much further away. Storms visited places where she had never been, and it hadn't taken all that many more years before the jealousy had set in.

There was light, and then there was sound. It always happened in that order. But when the origin point was about twenty-five meters over your head, there was no perceptible delay. There was only the explosion which still echoed in pressed-back ears, and the flash which felt as if it had seared itself into her retinas.

She blinked until she could properly see the monster's corpse (a monster she hadn't even properly defeated, something where she'd needed to be saved), and she shook her head until she could hear again. The process took more than long enough for the ponies to reach her: some trotting, some landing, and all staring.

The Princess' horn sent dark light onto brass, lifted it away and revealed unreadable features.

"It now occurs to me," the dark mare quietly said, "that, even in my haste to reach this site before all residue had faded, I might have spent more time inquiring as to what you had faced in the wild zone." She slowly shook her head. "A special danger of the neurocypher: the more intense one's thoughts, the more easily those thoughts are disrupted. With all of us trying to deduce what had brought you here, there were none to watch for the signs. None who knew what those signs were. And you were not affected. I have previous experience with the abominations, where nopony else here does. I have needed to bring myself down to instinct before, to get out of range before striking as a being which could once again think. But it would have required leaving its range. In that time, with the thing already so close..."

She looked up at Cerea.

"You are shaking," the Princess stated.

It was adrenaline. She frequently found herself shaking after a fight: unused energy with nowhere to go. "It's nothing."

"Is the wound on your back also nothing?"

Cerea looked.

I didn't even feel that.

"It's just a scrape in the fur. There's barely any blood --"

"-- you have already been through one infection, and I was informed that antibiotics are not universal between all species. However, topical disinfectants are, and so Bulkhead is carrying a quantity in his saddlebags. Allow him to apply the liquid before the next medical crisis arrives. At a distance, please. The sounds produced by cleansing can be worse than those forced by the wounds."

The centaur slowly trotted away, with the unicorn stallion following. The rest of the group stayed near the corpse, and silently held that position until they heard the first distant hiss emerge from between clenched teeth.

"Abjura," Luna finally began, "before anything else happens, while we have privacy: the analyzer. Your speech before the attack indicated that it had produced a result. Did it recognize the exact spell?"

Slowly, "No. Just a commonality with another working. Something old, something I don't think anypony's cast in my lifetime. The general category of effect."

Silence.

"You do not wish to tell me," Luna observed. "I will not blame her for whatever --"

The word wasn't spoken so much as extracted. "-- summoning."

(At the far right of the group, silver eyes slowly closed.)

"So the working tried to bring her here," Luna calmly said.

"Tried to bring something." There was helplessness in those words. "Was there any residue on her body?"

"Not that the scanner showed. But she was carrying the sword: extended contact might have dispelled it. I failed to perceive so much as a single lingering thaum from the teleport. You are suggesting that the caster missed their true target?"

"I'm saying it's possible --" and the unicorn took a deep breath. "-- no. I'm lying. I'm saying I can't tell. But I don't think it was a natural effect. I was hoping she'd just stumbled into one of the deep places, but with this..." Another. "It's not impossible, but the only reason I'm saying that is because the rules are different in the deep places. They're just about as bad as chaos terrain. There's a chance it was an accident -- but it's a small one."

"And reversing the effect? Sending her back tonight?"

Sun was starting to dip now.

"...you're the Princess," Abjura finally replied. "I was hoping --"

"-- Princess," Luna softly countered, "still does not mean 'deity'. So we cannot simply reopen the passage. We will need further study, and possibly the combined services of Twilight Sparkle and Ms. Lulamoon. But even with their help, we will likely be hosting her for weeks. Moons..."

There were possibilities beyond that. Everypony knew what they were, and so nopony voiced any of them.

"What if the press figures out she's in the palace?" Acrolith finally asked, timing the words to get past the next hiss. "We could try to claim she was placed in Tartarus." A long pause. "We -- we might even have to --"

"-- no," Nightwatch stated, and still did not open her eyes.

"Just to have them see her go in, in front of the cameras." Acrolith protested. "We could bring her out right after --"

"-- no --"

"-- the decision is mine," Luna interrupted. "The decision also happens to be 'no.'"

A curl of smoke rose from the scorched shell, dissipated into dimming sky.

"Then what can we do with her?" Abjura softly asked. "After Tirek, what place does the world have for a centaur?"

And nopony said anything at all.

Unloveable

She waited until the last echoes of their hoofsteps had faded, gave herself a little time beyond that as her hands clenched ever-tighter with effort, ragged fingernails nearly cutting into her palms, and knew it didn't matter. There were guards outside the cell, and while they seldom made any attempt to look inside --

-- because none of them can stand to look at me --

-- they could hear so much of what she did. She would be unable to conceal all of it from those high-lofted twisting ears, and she didn't doubt that every last bit of what they observed would be reported to their leaders. In that sense, there was no privacy, no hopes for concealing what was about to come.

But the dark mare and white horse didn't need to hear it directly. She couldn't stand the thought of having them as any degree of true witness, not for this. And so Cerea waited until she was sure they were gone, that the only ones watching her were those who always did, and it was only then that she allowed herself to collapse.

As it turned out, the bed had a purpose. She couldn't really sleep on it, and it didn't even serve as a decent place for waking rest. But with all four legs folded under her body, her upper torso fallen forward as much as it could, arms reaching out for anything which might serve as her bruised breasts painfully compressed against the mattress -- there were worse ways to futilely conceal tears than by sobbing into a pillow.

Her face was buried in fabric. She could smell feathers and soap and bleach, the ancient pillowcase was still mostly white and so the ponies had bleach, but she couldn't smell detergent or softeners or any of the thousands of chemical combinations which had assaulted her during those first days among humans, a sensory near-overload which had just about put her on edge from the moment she'd stepped into it, something which had made it so hard just to be polite when nearly every part of her had wanted to run away, gallop until she'd escaped from the horrible stinking world...

I...

She tried to rally, because she knew how it looked from the outside (not that anyone wanted to see her). A weakling. Someone who couldn't deal with the most minor problems. A filly whose response to the smallest push was total collapse.

...knights don't -- they don't cry...

Strictly speaking, this wasn't true. Knights in stories were permitted tears or rather, rare circumstances would permit them to indulge in the singular. Watch an ancestral home burn, mourn the lost potential of those whom destiny had selected to be their foe, perhaps think about the bonds of duty, and a single drop of unwitnessed moisture was perfectly appropriate. Inelegant sobbing, however, seemed to be the exclusive realm of the ones who sat in their cells and waited for rescue.

Knights didn't cry, not on this level. But she wasn't a knight. She never would be.

Lost. Displaced. The terms she had been using for her situation were lies. She had been kidnapped. And it had been days now, days which could turn into months or moons, she might as well start calling them moons because days would accumulate, press down on her with their unrelenting weight, press her deeper into truly foreign soil until her hooves were mired beyond extraction. Until everything was buried.

She had allowed the first seeds of hope to bloom, after that initial meeting with the Princesses. They wanted to send her home, and so it seemed possible that she could go home. But it was magic they didn't understand, created by ponies they might not be able to find, ponies who could find her first. Or it was possible that she had never been the intended target, everything which had happened was simply a grotesque accident and the ones who had destroyed her life would never know. They would resume their casting, try to bring in whatever they had been seeking, and her presence was nothing more than a headline which triggered shivers in all who read it. Instinctive fear of the monster.

She had permitted herself the dubious blessing of hope, and it now seemed as if that had been the mistake. Hope was pain. Hope was self-directed torture. Hope was what had sent her out into human society in the first place: savage, desperate, unreasoning hope. Hope was the refusal to accept reality because you had lied to yourself until the falsehoods accumulated into something very much like belief: the lie that there might be something better out there if only you tried...

Hope had bloomed. But those new shoots were fragile and as Cerea's tears soaked the pillow, the afterthought nose starting to run (because that always happened when she cried for too long, it made her look stupid and she hated it), inner hooves stomped down every sprig of green they could find.

They would look for her: that hoped-for love, friends and rivals, their assigned government liaison and all the forces under her command. In time, her mother would arrive in Japan because it wasn't as if that parent was going to trust anyone to retrieve her daughter properly. They would search, they would do everything they could and then they would --

-- give up.

That's already started.

It's been too many days. Too long with no signs, no clues. They'll start to think I was taken out of the area. They'll expand the search. But in their hearts, it'll be something else. They won't let themselves think it, not for a while, and even Lala might need another week to say it. But she'll be the first, because she'll decide she has to make them confront it. To turn them away from hope so they can face reality. She'll tell them that --

Hope was over.

-- I'm dead.

They need to recognize that I'm dead.

(Powerful hands clutched at the pillow. Little rents opened in the casing, and multihued down began to drift onto the blankets.)

Would there be a funeral? She couldn't see her mother permitting it, not in Japan, for none of her kind had been interred away from that overcrowded cemetery, and there was no body to bury. It was hard to even picture allowing a simple marker for such a disappointment and --

she loves me

-- even if it did happen, her beloved wouldn't be allowed to attend. No human would be brought into the gap, not for that, not when her mother might blame humans for having allowed it to happen, if any time could be taken away from blaming the lost daughter for having been so weak as to die --

she loves me
she loves me

-- and to permit other liminals... no. There wouldn't be a ceremony, any attempt to say farewell. It wasn't as if anyone would even attend because when it came to interaction with her peers, her life had been filled with forced competitions and contests against those who so often crossed the finish line first. None of that had allowed her to make any...

...to make...

She would never go home. She would never be a knight. She would spend what little might be left of her life among those who could only see her as a monster. And there was more than that.

No one will ever love me.

There was nothing in her which could argue with that. Not now, not here, not among ponies. With humans...

...why hadn't she wanted her own kind? Yes, stallions were coarse and rough and frankly stupid, but that was just how they were and mares had managed to deal with it for centuries. There had to be a way of looking at a stallion which made you feel something other than revulsion, and she'd never found it. She'd gone among humans to seek love, and

I didn't know
I didn't know

she'd been so stupid. To think that because some part of her body was familiar to them, that because her features were right

I'm not beautiful or pretty or

and her upper torso could be seen as

but they don't see it that way, not where I

that it would be a place to start. That they would first look at what they knew, and eventually they would come to love the whole. To love her. Except, of course, for what had just occurred to her as an extremely practical and rather belated realization: they could kiss her and cuddle and hug (for she so loved to be hugged) and there could be so many expressions of affection granted to familiar anatomy -- but at the instant it went any further, she would have been asking someone to have sex with a horse.

He loves me.
He cares about me. All of us.

And away from house and world, divorced from all hope, the next thought finally arrived.

But that doesn't mean it's love.

He -- could have loved me. I thought that if we just had enough time, if I could get him away from the others, if he just got to know me --

-- why would anyone who truly knew her ever bother to love her?

He held my hand.
He held my hand and I never wanted him to let go.

That was over too.

No one will ever even touch me.

Kicks didn't count.

How much contact had there been, with her beloved? A fair amount. Never enough. And looking back, forcing herself to be honest at the end of all hope -- so much of it had been initiated by her. She'd asked for his help in grooming, because she wanted him to become accustomed to touching that part of her body: that horrible hope that it would help him to love all of her. It was also another reason for getting him on her lower back, and --

-- how many times did he grab at me, when I shifted too fast for him to adjust?
How many times did I shift on purpose?

She put him at risk of falling and he grabbed for purchase. Grabbed at her breasts. Had she wanted him to touch her there? To have him long for armfuls of softness? The first time, a true accident, because she hadn't considered what would happen after a lifetime without a rider, she'd been angry with him and it had taken a long time to get past it -- but after that? Had it all been a ploy on her part, a subconscious game to make him touch her there? To feel how human she was, at least in that part --

except that as far as he's concerned I'm

-- and want to experience it again? She loved hugs, she loved being hugged, but she seldom got the chance, hardly ever had anyone who would touch her and --

-- how many times did I pull him against me?
To protect him.
To thank him.
To check for fever.
To have an excuse for having him touch me.

It was worse than that.

How many times did I put myself in a situation where I would be embarrassed and start to blush, just so he would hold my hand?

Rachnera would catch me, and he would free me. He would help groom the silk out of my fur. He would be brushing me and telling me it was all right and he would hold my hand and I'd tell him there were some strands over there and he could try to remove those too and if he just touched me enough, if there were enough excuses for making him touch me, it was time together where he was touching me and if we had enough time together and he just got used to me he would love --

-- he --

-- he didn't love me.

(Perhaps he had.)

He never would have loved me.

(Perhaps he could have.)
(It didn't seem to matter any more.)

No one will ever love me.

Three fingers went through the pillowcase. She raised her head just enough to blow her nose.

...who did she want him to love?

It was a strange thought, and all the stranger for how sudden and sincere it was. But she wanted him to be happy. She'd lied to herself about being the one who could do that, along with protecting him: something else where she’d failed over and over. But she was no better than second to anyone, and when it came to protecting...

...no. She wouldn't. When it came to familiar anatomy, Tionishia almost had everyone else beaten. With the exception of the lone horn protruding from the forehead and some odd angles on the ears, everything the ogre had was human: there just happened to be a lot of it. And she could certainly protect. But there was also a certain innocence there, and it existed on a level which made dating difficult: Tionishia's idea of a good time was a tea party, and there was still a chance that half the attending guests would be made of rags and porcelain.

Zombina, however, was very much an adult in body and mind. And she was fully human, or had once been. She also happened to be dead, which presented a certain barrier to many forms of intimacy: for starters, love bites were right out. And neither she nor the ogre were actually part of the household.

Not Suu. Not Papi. Not Mero.

She shuddered.

Not Rachnera.

Not that she felt Rachnera truly loved him, at least not so much as the arachne loved getting in the way. Rachnera's passions centered around inducing reactions, and it now seemed as if constantly trolling the others by making them think she was a true part of the game... It gave her frequent cause for satisfaction. Rachnera respected their host, and that was rare enough for one of the spiders. But she didn't love him.

So it was Miia or Lala. And Miia was almost like a sister to Cerea, albeit a sibling of a separate species who had a bad habit of sleepily wrapping her on cold mornings. She knew Miia wasn't a bad match for him, although there was a risk of death which was constant and dual: being on the receiving end of her loving or eating her cooking, make your choice. But with Lala...

In body, the dullahan was effectively human: just with a different skin color and strange sclerae. (The fact that the head was detachable was something you almost got used to: coming across that head in unexpected places guaranteed the adjustment process was never complete, and Lala had refused to explain that one time with the dishwasher.) Admittedly, she had something which almost approached an inverted aura: the opposite of presence. If she wasn't talking, it was possible for the housemates to forget Lala was in the room, or even within the residence. And she had a propensity towards drama which was generally found in the worst of teen vampire romance novels or worse, those who had recently read them --

-- but she was kind. As patient as the grave. Just about as all-embracing. And when it came to protecting, she would guard her beloved unto death. And beyond.

Lala or Miia. It would never be her (and she had almost convinced herself it never could have been), so she wanted it to be one of them. She was almost glad to have settled it.

Her ears twisted, tilted back and focused on the sounds coming from the hallway. Awkwardly-shifting hooves, almost shuffling in place. As she'd expected, they'd been able to hear her crying, and none of them had any idea what to do about the situation. After all, who could understand what would upset a monster? It was best not to come in, really. No one should get too close, lest she rip their magic away.

She hadn't been expecting any of them to enter anyway. Not during the day shift.

Cerea cried for a while, because her home was forever lost. She cried because she would never see her family again, because she would never have anyone love her, because everything and everyone she knew was gone and she would forever be looked at as being nothing more than a monster. She wept into the pillow because to believe all of that would be true forever was easier than feeling it could change, because hope felt like poison. It was the sugar which sweetened a future she could never reach, even as it steadily rotted everything from within.

She cried because in so many ways, every dream she'd ever had was dead, and there was only one person who cared enough to mourn.

She cried until the tears ran out, until all she could do was sniffle against saturated fabric. And then she forced herself to stand up, went into the restroom and filled cupped hands with water, splashed it against her features until her face was clean.

Some time was spent in attempting laundry. She'd both soaked and stained the pillow, along with causing a degree of damage. She wanted to be a good guest.

And then she waited for sunset. For the arrival of the only voice she wanted to hear.

She finished her recounting, and the deep black pegasus awkwardly stared up at her.

"Um," Nightwatch said. "Why?"

Cerea's initial response was to simply tilt her head in confusion: the realization that the expression probably wasn't recognizable came a split-second too late. "Why...?" But the tone was asking for clarification.

The wings twitched into a minor adjustment of position: feathers rustled. (Her wings were always moving when she was near Cerea: slowly, often subtly -- but they moved, and so the air around the pegasus' body shifted to suit.) "Why do you want to know what I think?"

She managed to fake a weak smile, and realized that meant nothing either -- but did so just in time to recognize that having had it be a tight-lipped one was a good thing: she understood something about horse body language, she was among ponies, and showing teeth could be taken as a sign of aggression.

"There are worse things," Cerea quietly said, "than seeking the counsel of a knight. What do you think I should do?"

The pegasus slowly, unsteadily sat down. The tail splayed a bit. Her wings kept moving.

"The cells aren't realistic," the Guard finally said. "Not forever. Sometimes ponies on the staff -- um. They... um. They take --" and it was just barely possible to spot skin going red under dark fur "-- breaks. Together. They take breaks down here, because they think most ponies have forgotten the cells are even under the palace. And they're right, mostly. But eventually, there's going to be ponies who take a break, and -- somepony will say something. Eventually."

Cerea silently nodded.

"There's lots of islands," Nightwatch continued. "Places off the coast which are legally part of Equestria --" (Which finally told Cerea the nation's name, or at least what the translator had decided to provide for it.) "-- but aren't ever used: only two islands have settlements, and nopony was planning on starting a new one any time in the next few years. There's legends which say the Princesses used at least one for a private prison --" Stopped. Blinked. "-- um..."

The centaur remained quiet and still. She was standing at the furthest point away from the door, hindquarters half-pressed into a corner (and part of a bookcase), and she hadn't taken a single step forward since she'd heard the Guard arrive and softly called out the request to have that pony enter her cell. It seemed best to keep some distance between them. To make the meeting that much less disturbing.

"...anyway," the pony forced herself to go on, "they're very private. And some of them are kind of pretty. So it wouldn't be hard to find a nice one for you, something where anything harmful could be cleared out. It's not impossible for somepony to find you there, or someone from one of the other nations. But spells could be set up to fight that. Make it a little more hidden..."

"Creating a gap," Cerea quietly said, "in the world."

The pegasus blinked again. “...yes."

The centaur waited.

"It would be pretty safe," Nightwatch said. "And warm, if they picked a good one. Plus I -- guess it's possible to get used to wild weather? But it would be -- um. It would be... you'd just be -- there -- are you okay?"

No. "I'm fine," Cerea lied. "Why?"

"Because..." The tail shifted somewhat. "...I usually can't really tell what you're feeling. Not from your face. But just now, you looked -- you almost looked like someone who was -- hurting." More awkwardly, "Or like someone who'd already been hurt, and they were remembering going through it. Someone who didn't ever want to do that again..."

It was Cerea's turn to blink.

I'm trying to learn how to read them...

The process wasn't exactly one-way.

"It's nothing,” she lied again. "And the -- other option?"

The pony was quiet for a while.

"What did you do?" The dark head tilted up a little more, made eye contact. "In your home. Um. I mean for a living."

Cerea sighed. "I... didn't." The shame started to rise up again: she knew how much she cost to house, all the damage she and the others had caused, how little she'd contributed in return --

It doesn't matter.

"I was a student," she made herself finish. "An exchange student, if that translates."

The pegasus nodded. "We have a few. Um. Not very many. But sometimes, one of the other nations will agree to a swap."

So at least that had been understood -- but it was about to get harder. "It's..." How could she even put it? "...new. I was one of the first. It's..."

The pegasus was waiting.

Cerea sighed. Just try. If only because trying was a prerequisite for failing. "There's a dominant species, where I come from. And centaurs aren't it. There -- aren't all that many of us, compared to the humans."

"Humans," the pony carefully said. "We don't have those. What do they look like?"

Cerea carefully brought her right hand to her waist, leveled her open palm, then slowly raised it until her fingers brushed against her hair.

"Only with different ears," she said. "And no horse bodies. Two legs."

Which was when the centaur truly learned what pony nausea looked like.

"Oh," Nightwatch tried. "Um... how many are there?"

"Enough to hide from," Cerea quietly replied. "And it wasn't just centaurs. There were a lot of species, like the gryphons I know. Ones who were a little like humans, but not enough. We thought -- they would be afraid of us. They were, once, and then there were so many more of them, enough to destroy us. So we hid ourselves away. But we couldn't stay hidden forever. Something happened, and -- we came out. A few of us were chosen to go into human cities as the first wave of exchange students. To become part of their world. To let them get used to us..."

To find the ones who would love us.
Who would love me.

And she'd failed.

"So that no one would be afraid any more," the pegasus quietly finished.

Cerea nodded.

Almost too softly, barely audible at all. "Did it work?"

Seconds passed. Time in which they were just looking at each other.

"...no." Cerea's head dipped, eyes nearly closing. "Some people accepted us. Others didn't. It was never going to be everyone: it never could be. There were a lot of humans who hated us. Hated me. But there was one man who --" and stopped.

It hadn't been in time. "Who what?"

"It doesn't matter," Cerea said, because she'd told herself it didn't. "Not now." And then, with open bitterness, because she'd spent so much time in inner cursing against her luck after she'd found out, "Besides, he was into legs."

Nightwatch's silver gaze moved down. Very, very slowly.

"But you have nice legs," the mare awkwardly decided. "Um. I mean, they're a little long, but they're very shapely. Strong. Powerful. They're good legs. Um. Better than mine. And he didn't like them?"

Cerea winced.

"It's..." and sighed. "Here..." She forced her hooves to move forward, because the cell was well-furnished and in a touch right out of the best stories, those furnishings included a writing desk, so that the prisoner might write long letters to their beloved regarding their sad fate. Destined never to be mailed, of course, but the important thing was that you got to write it down. Besides, it allowed the author to quote extensive tragic passages and those gave Mero something to do, which was mostly quoting them all over again.

She awkwardly angled her body, adjusted a few times until she was at a roughly appropriate height and could see what she was doing. Dipped the quill, then began to work.

Because a proper knight (which she would never be) was expected to master more than combat. You had to know the ins and outs of courtly etiquette. It helped to have some understanding of politics. And it seemed to be an absolute requirement that each candidate master at least one artistic skill. In Cerea's case... she could sing, but that was true for just about every mare: the flexibility of the centaur voice box gave the species a rather impressive range. Still, she was better than average there. Just not first.

But she could also sketch. Not well: she wasn't particularly good at composing from pure imagination, considered herself to be rubbish with color balance, and often required a model. But it was enough to reproduce something she'd seen a few times, with a fair amount of detail.

The quill moved. She tried to fix a few errors, wound up mostly smearing them into different errors, and eventually started over on a second sheet.

"Human leg," she eventually said, and held up the paper. "And that's one of their ears on the right."

The pegasus stared.

"Ugh," Nightwatch opinionated. "Oh... feet... ugh... um..." A quick swallow, which trapped most of the increased nausea. "So you were a student...?"

"Sort of," Cerea sighed, placing the sketch back on the desk. "I didn't actually get to attend the schools. They were refitting houses to accommodate us, but the schools were taking too long and some of the principals for the prestigious academies were actively fighting having us there. They had enough power to stall. It meant I wound up taking --" and her next words made the wire hiss "-- a lot of online courses. By email."

The little Guard tilted her head to the right. Shook it a few times, twisted her ears back and forth.

"You went to school," she eventually said, "by sending mail through the air with electric fire?"

Cerea blinked.

They don't have computers.

"...yes?"

"Your home," a sincerely-impressed pegasus decided, "has more in common with us than I thought." And before Cerea could respond to that, "What were you going to do when you graduated?"

She wasn't a knight.
She had never been one.
She never could have been.

"It doesn't matter," the girl quietly replied. "I... was trying to do something stupid. Something I wasn't right for. I just didn't figure it out in time."

"You can fight, though," Nightwatch said. "You could have --"

"-- I lost." Blue eyes briefly closed. "A lot."

"You're breathing," the pegasus gently countered. "That usually means you won."

It usually meant I'd been humiliated. And that her blouse had been torn again, with everyone staring at what shifted with every breath.

"And you carry -- that thing," Nightwatch continued. "You're good with it." Thoughtfully, "Did all the students carry one? So they could defend themselves if someone --"

Cerea's response was instinctive, unstoppable, and both dark ears flattened against the skull.

"-- that's what it sounds like when you laugh," the pegasus forced out.

"I'm sorry --"

"-- or when you laugh and you're not happy." The wings stretched, continued their slow shifts. "When you laugh because you hate something and laughing feels easier than screaming."

The girl stared at the adult.

"I laugh like that sometimes," Nightwatch evenly stated. "On the worst days. Why did you laugh?"

The centaur took a slow breath, felt the shirt pull against her. Watched the mare listen as Cerea told her about the laws.

"That's not the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Nightwatch said.

"Really?"

"No. I've been guarding Princess Luna since two weeks after the Return. I've spent a lot of time with her, so I'm usually there when somepony opens their mouth and lets their dumb fall out. I've heard a lot of stupidity." The dark tail was lashing. "But you did just take over second place. First is still that griffon astronomer who tried to get into the Lunar throne room so he could lecture her about how Moon didn't exist. He never got in. She came out. And he left. Faster than he'd arrived. And that was with his legs iced up."

"...oh." (She didn't have trouble with the idea of someone having said that a perfectly visible celestial body wasn't real. There were still humans insisting that a lot of their kind had suddenly chosen to move around in rubber suits.)

"You can't even protect yourself," the mare slowly said. "That's... that's just..." She took a deep breath. "But you want to know what I think. About your staying in Equestria. About trying to just -- be. Um. Being yourself while you're here. Among us." And again. "You really want to know?"

Cerea nodded, because that was the same for both. Waited.

The little pegasus took one more breath. Gathered her strength, and said what had to be said.

"You scare me."

Cerea's eyes closed. Her shoulders slumped as both hands fell open, and a blonde tail went limp.

"I..." She heard the pegasus swallow. "I was there. When Tirek... he..." And now those wings had accelerated into something approaching a flap. "...Guards... get in the way. We buy time. It's what we're supposed to do. I got in the way for somepony else when I knew what would happen, and he... it was like being kicked by a mountain. Kicked in my soul. I go back there sometimes when I sleep, and... there's too many of us. She can't help all of us, not every night. I see you, and I think about him. I see you and I'm scared. The first time I opened your cell door, I used my magic to shift the air around me, so you wouldn't smell how scared I was, because sometimes we can smell fear on each other and I thought you might be able to do that too. I move the air all the time when I'm near you, enough that it makes my wings ache after I leave. I'm scared..."

The weight of that unscented fear multiplied itself by the unknown population of a nation, pressed against the full length of Cerea's back, began to drive her into the floor --

-- and then the wingbeats stopped.

Feathers rustled. Stilled as they moved into the rest position.

"Wait a few seconds," the little mare softly said. "Just... wait. Let the air currents go back to normal. Please."

It wasn't that she waited, really. She was in a cell. She had nowhere to go, nowhere she could ever go, and so the time simply passed until the fear filled the air again, went into her nostrils and soaked into her brain and --

-- the blue eyes opened. Looked into silver.

"You're scared," Cerea quietly stated.

The pegasus silently nodded.

"But you're... you're not that scared," the girl softly observed. "It's closer to being nervous. Worried --"

"-- you didn't have to save us, in the forest," Nightwatch said. "You could have run. Nopony could have stopped you, not in time, not when we couldn't think. It's hard to fight a neurocypher directly, even for an earth pony: it takes so much strength to crack the shell and it's a bad idea, just staying close. But you went after it. With that -- thing... with a sword which doesn't even have an edge. For the second time. Ponies could have died, and you fought." More softly, "You were trying to drive it back, weren't you? Away from us. That's why our heads cleared, because you were getting it out of range and you were wounding its magic with every blow. You tried to protect us on instinct. And..."

Her wings flared. Flapped.

They were still looking at each other: direct eye contact. But there was no longer any need to look down.

Nightwatch hovered, just about two feet away from Cerea's face. It was close enough for the wind from her wings to ruffle blonde hair, even as it blew the papers off the writing desk.

"...it's harder to be afraid of someone," the little mare quietly observed, "after you've read her a story. After you've seen that she's... scared too, scared without a flock or herd she can ask for help. Scared because she's so far from home and alone, scared because there's monsters, things she doesn't understand in a place she’s never known, and still, when something happens -- she doesn't run. She fights. For the ones she's afraid of."

And Cerea couldn't move. She just felt her hair shifting across her face, blown loose from the pins. The warmth of the pegasus' breath.

"It won't ever be everypony," Nightwatch told her. "There's always going to be ponies who are afraid of you, and so it won't ever be everypony who accepts you. But... it also won't be everypony who's afraid of you. Not forever. And if there was somepony who tried to bring you here, on purpose, if they come to take you -- I’ll fight for you."

Silence, but for the soft sounds of the hover which created the face-to-face meeting, a hover which never should have worked. Something which only magic allowed to exist at all.

"...you're crying."

Cerea nodded.

"Is it because you're sad?"

"...yes." With a weak smile, one which was careful not to show teeth. "Mostly. And scared. Lady --"

With a little huff of insistence, "Guard. Um. Nightwatch."

"-- what am I supposed to do now?"

Cerea wondered if the pony's expression represented a smile.

"I don't know. What did you decide?"

"So we are now in a regretfully familiar place," the dark Princess said from her place sitting high on the raised throne. "Needing to keep the secret while simultaneously expanding the conspiracy."

"We're buying time," the white horse (standing near the throne's base) added. "Part of that is for making you presentable."

Cerea looked from one to the other, felt the breeze from the ongoing hover at her left side, produced by the only Guard who had entered the meeting. "Presentable?"

"You are still injured," the elevated mare stated as the dark gaze moved across bruises and contusions. "Visibly so. You heal rather quickly, but you have yet to finish the process. And one could argue that bringing you to the populace in such a battered state would be preferable because they would see that you can be beaten -- but I would prefer for you to be healthy."

"We also need to begin educating you," the taller observed. "Not just about our nation and the world. About what you're facing, and who."

The dark mare nodded. "Additionally," she said, "while the initial portion of the proceedings will be concealed from sight, the legality of the total shall be visibly brought over the stile. As of this moment, you are no longer intruder or invader. But in order to grant you our full protection, it is necessary to apply another definition. One which comes with its own paperwork --"

The cool gaze turned into more of a squint.

"-- is that a wince?"

Cerea tried (and failed) to force her features into some form of neutrality.

"I ask because in order to more properly understand each other, it is necessary that each of us become educated in the other's expressions," the dark Princess declared. "Also because I am fairly certain you are wincing."

I just did this... "Yes." She was probably going to be introduced to the pony equivalent to Ms. Smith. Cerea wondered if it would be possible to get that mare out of bed for the first meeting in under a week.

"Good," that mare decided. "So that is a wince. Be assured that I will remember what it looks like. You will also require a tutor --"

"-- I can do some of that," Nightwatch quickly said. Which was followed by a more awkward "Um. Well. I spend a lot of time in her cell anyway." Hastily, "Outside her cell." A deep breath. "...in?”

Both Princesses were now looking at the pegasus, and Cerea couldn’t figure out the identical expression.

“A portion,” the dark mare slowly said. “As you wish, Nightwatch. But your mark is hardly for teaching, and you are known to be less than fully expert in history. We may need to add experts at a later date, especially given the legal requirements.” (The pegasus nodded.) “But with your participation, we can begin immediately.”

And she looked at Cerea.

“We will continue our efforts to send you home,” the dark Princess stated. “But until that night arrives -- welcome to Equestria, centaur.” The silver-shod left forehoof came up, briefly pressed against the moon-embossed metal plate. “Let us hope none of us have too-frequent cause to regret this.”

In a way, that was when it all truly began.

And when Cerea looked back at the last, she would realize it had also been the moment when it all ended.

Nightmarish

From the edge of nightmare, she watches the centaur run.

So many of the dreams have centered around running, and there are several reasons for that. The ongoing imprisonment is not the least of them, for to confine just about any sapient will eventually lead to a nightscape where the captured can run free -- if only for a time. And with ponies... there has always been a part of the pony mind which longs for the gallop, demands that cold air enter lungs which feel as if they're catching fire, hooves pounding against the solid world as a constant declaration of my path, my will, my home. Even pegasi aren't immune, and those who never descend below the vapors will still find their nightscape selves racing across a dream of pastures. Everypony visits that pasture eventually, and perhaps it serves as a preview to what awaits them in the shadowlands. The last pasture. The final fields.

Some part of a pony always wants to gallop and in this aspect, the dark mare suspects the centaur isn't the least bit different. She longs to run, and so part of the observer's mind notes that they have to find a way for the girl to get some exercise. To release a tiny portion of the stress, for to confine a pony for too long... well, perhaps centaurs suffer from their own version of Stable Syndrome: the reason why the primary aspect of so many punishments starts with confinement. After a while, some ponies will do just about anything to be free again, and most of them start with lying about a personal reform.

In other dreams, she has found the girl running because the cell door only exists in the waking world. Running because she wants, needs to run. Running because she's lost, she doesn't know where she is or how she got here or if there's any way home, but if she just runs, home will eventually appear. All she has to do is spend the rest of her life running through everything which isn't her home and whatever's left is where she belongs.

It took a while for the dark mare to realize where that dream was truly headed. That the girl was trying to run down infinity, and the intruder managed to twist just before everything would have gone wrong.

She is watching the girl run, and is doing so from concealment. Not that the girl would know to look for her, or have any concept of how the intruder might manifest -- but concealment nonetheless, for some are more attuned to their nightscapes than others, more readily sense intrusion, and a near-secret of the nightscape is that while only the dark mare may wander, all have the potential to manipulate. Some more than others, yes: anypony fully lacking in imagination generally just recreates their waking time all over again, and those would be doing well just to deliberately change the color of a pebble. But for those who are aware they are dreaming, who realize somepony is there... if they think to do so, they can fight her. Not well, most of the time: she has the benefit of both power and experience, can usually spot a potential attack simply because she's seen that tactic before. But some fight, and -- she's still not completely sure what the girl is capable of. It's best to be cautious.

Just about everything is mutable in the nightscape, for those aware of the dream -- but to purposefully alter one's appearance is one of the hardest things there is. In dream, the true self-identity tends to emerge: without a setting to encourage and stabilize the change, the dreamer generally appears as they truly perceive themselves. (Even now, after so much time, it takes a minor effort of will for the dark mare to appear in the form everypony expects.) It can make concealment difficult, and so the dark mare tends to use the environment. In this case, it's simple: the girl has not thought to look up. She has -- other concerns, and it lets the observer use a piece of dream-woven cloud as both support and camouflage.

The vapor keeps pace overhead, as the girl runs. And there are so many reasons to run, for the joy of it, the need, the desperate search for home...

...but this is a nightmare.

The girl runs within the mobile window created by shifting fog because oblivion chases her. And if she stops, she will die.

The road changes again under pounding hooves, and the girl nearly stumbles. There have been too many surfaces during the mad gallop, and the dark mare doesn't understand what some of them are: the cruel-seeming black which both captures and radiates heat was especially nauseating. But it's easy to recognize trestle ties, and the girl tries to make her hooves land on the railroad's wooden planks, does her best to do so without losing speed, and the wall of nothing just keeps coming. It is currently ten body lengths behind her and where it crosses, the rails do not evaporate. They simply are not -- or worse, never were.

She is running because there is no other choice. She is running because to stop moving will mean she ceases to exist. Her hooves shift across a changing landscape, and the body racing across a new kind of chaos terrain sees some of its anatomy vibrate, while other portions shake, bounce --

-- twist.

In dream, the true self-identity tends to emerge. The way the dreamer might forever perceive themselves at the core, no matter how many centuries of tarnish build up on the exterior. And in dream... the girl is not as she appears in the waking world. The world around her is unstable, changing from instant to instant, and the girl...

She loses a step to a shift in the road, and the body sheds muscle tone. There are times when she is too thin, almost sickly. Another stumble finds her visibly overweight. One instant shows dimmed eyes, another finds twisting ears which will never hear the doom approaching, the sickening hiss of air meeting its end.

The girl gallops, and it's not good enough because while the nature of the flaw might vary from moment to moment, there is always something wrong with her. Something which renders all her efforts into a joke, and yet she runs because her failure will serve as the final punchline --

-- and yet she runs.

And now she is running towards something.

It takes the dark mare a second to recognize it, that the forward edge of the fog is beginning to part. That there's someone standing there, a being she can't quite make out. A biped, possibly, one with dark hair, and she can see those arms moving forward, hands palms-up, reaching for the girl, who puts on a final effort, leaning forward, trying to touch --

-- the insect legs erupt from the fog, nearly as tall as the biped and moving so much more quickly. Smooth chitin scoops inwards, presses against ribs and stomach as a low-pitched female giggle shakes the world.

The biped is pulled backwards into the fog. Vanishes as the giggling becomes a chorus, joined by lower tones, and the dark mare wonders if the last expression she saw was meant to be a smile.

The girl stops moving.

The body is sickly and overweight and half-lame and completely still. She stands with slumped shoulders and closed eyes, simply waiting for oblivion to reach her, for there is no reason to run anymore. And the vacuum surges forward, the girl refuses to move and

the dark mare twists.

It takes too much: it always has. Slow, subtle changes, or simply working with what the dreamer has already provided -- that's second nature now. Suggestions generally need a channel: perhaps this road goes where you wished to be, or the scent (for the mare has already noticed that the girl's dreams include scent) will remind you of something important. But to take an entire nightscape and wrench it... that is like redirecting lightning, and doing so at the moment of impact against the mare's own body. Feeling the first instant of electrocution and doing anything to keep it from becoming the last.

The intruder nearly loses the supporting cloud in the tremendous effort, has to find room in the silent-yet-half-screamed instructions for reminding herself that gravity is purely optional here. The rest banishes the fog, turns the road into a narrow path between familiar trees, sends the nightscape to a fully natural spring in a world which has never known the gentle care of pegasus weather control or the encouraging song which earth ponies send through the soil. It shreds the danger while shedding years, and the girl's form stabilizes as it shrinks, for the self of memory had yet to trick itself into such levels of distortion --

-- and then there is a filly standing in too-familiar woods.

The dark mare collapses across what little remains of the false vapor, presses a forehoof against her aching head and is momentarily surprised at contact with the horn.

You are home. The nightmare fades, for you are home. Safe. Let yourself be home...

The filly, whose blouse and arms are now dapple-tinted by sunlight moving through leaves, abruptly looks up.

The dark mare curls her body (which seems to be somewhat smaller now), tucks into a tight ball of what may be about to become rather unwelcome life. For to twist still takes too much, and turning nightmare to dream is the sort of thing which can alert a dreamer to intrusion. Make them recognize not only that somepony is present, but that there might be a means to fight -- and the first strike would come in an instant when the dark mare has yet to center again, is still trying to recover her strength. If a battle begins now --

-- but then the filly turns her attention back to the trees. To an adult who's just barely visible through bushes and branches and foliage, an adult who has no idea the filly is there.

You are home, the dark mare softly reminds the filly. Home...

And now the filly is moving. Hooves step carefully, trying to make every impact land on noise-absorbing soil. She's tracking the adult from a distance, watching her move. And the dark mare holds the dream together as long as she can, but the rhythms of the sleep cycle move on and she can just barely keep the girl in her own past long enough to get some sense of what might be happening. The filly isn't just observing the adult, and tracking might only be part of it. She's -- looking for something --

-- but then the trees shake. The ground vibrates, the sky begins to dissipate, and the intruder is in her throne room again. Thinking about everything which was seen, trying to make sense of it.

It could be argued that there was no need to twist. The nightmare would not have killed the centaur. (It is almost impossible to craft a killing dream, and the exceptions are things which should never happen again.) But the waking would have been harsh, a mind recoiling from the edge of what would have felt so much like death. Trauma added onto trauma, and... the girl had

stopped.
Completely stopped.
Knowing what was coming, what would happen, and she'd -- stopped.

The intrusions will continue.

Cerea was staring at the huge stack of unreadable forms and the paperwork, using the dark power which came from having that much bureaucracy concentrated in one place, appeared to be staring right back. It didn't help to have at least two of the symbol-heavy characters resemble eyes.

"Um," a worried Nightwatch said, which really didn't accomplish anything.

The centaur sighed.

"I just did this," she quietly observed, mostly to herself. "And at least they were written in French." Technically, anyway: it hadn't taken all that long to realize that the exchange student program application forms had actually been composed in Bureaucrat. "I don't even know how to start..."

"I can read them to you," the pegasus offered. "And help you fill it out. But some of it... um. I don't think we can do all of it together. There's another pony involved, or there should be. He'll be the one who gets you through most of it. I think the Department just sent this over in advance. Because the palace requested the forms, and the forms arrived before the pony. But..." Silver eyes had focused on the top sheet. "Some of the requirements can't apply to you, not without some help."

"Like what?" If nothing else, she was vaguely curious about the exact nature of the approaching disaster.

"Birth paperwork from a recognized nation, as proof of identity. Um. It's not like you were carrying any..."

Cerea sighed. "I had an --" and wondered how the disc would translate it "-- identification card. Something which showed that I'd filled out all the forms already. It was supposed to substitute." Her herd had kept written records of all births and deaths, and such had been official enough to be accepted by some of the human governments. "But it's somewhere in the forest."

"And your nation isn't recognized," Nightwatch went on -- stopped. Feathers awkwardly rustled. "Um. I know you have one, but it's not a good idea to make anypony think about that for too long." Dark legs reluctantly shifted a little closer to the writing desk, with wings flaring out in alarm as the old wood creaked under triplicate weight. "But we've had residents get through without that before. Yapper did, and the Princess intervened on her behalf."

"Yapper?" She wasn't entirely sure how the disc translated names: there seemed to be a good chance that 'Nightwatch' was just the original root definition of whatever the pegasus was truly called, or that Cerea was just getting part of the little knight's title. 'Yapper', however, seemed to imply a certain set of traits, none of which would ever stop talking long enough to let anyone ask what they were.

"Um..." The Guard took a slow breath. "She's part of the palace staff. Maintenance. Usually on the Lunar shift. You'll probably see her eventually. I..." and even for the pegasus, the pause felt exceptionally awkward "...think that should wait for a while."

Okay... But she trusted the little knight. "So not having papers is a problem, but you think the Princess --" wait "-- which Princess?"

"Princess Luna," Nightwatch clarified. "It's her dominion. And usually when somepony on the Lunar shift says 'the', it's her. The Solars mean Princess Celestia. It's just -- how we talk." The dark tail shifted slightly. "Anyway, she should be able to get you past that, because she's done it before for someone else, so there's precedent. But there's trickier parts. Like..." and the pegasus swallowed. "...communication. Anyone who's going to be staying for -- a while -- needs to understand the language and be capable of responding." More quickly, "That doesn't always mean speech. There's a sort of language which some mute ponies use, but it... um... it's built on foreleg gestures, tail movements, and --" with a very reluctant look up "-- ear positioning. And your ears are in the wrong place to start with. Plus not all that many ponies understand signing. But right now, you're relying on magic, and if anypony challenges you, or the palace needs the device back..."

Cerea took a slow breath, felt the shirt pull against her again: the sensation increased as she raised her right hand towards her neck. All right. It was something like --

"...I mean, nopony expects a new arrival to be fluent when they cross the border! Um. Well, some ponies do. Not... very nice ponies. So there's time to learn. But you're... you're not..." Another, deeper gulp. "...Tirek. You're not him. I have to remember that you're -- anyway, he could speak Equestrian. But just because he could doesn't mean you can. I don't know if --" and the silver eyes finally focused on what was happening. "-- don't take that off! We can't --"

But the overlay of meaning vanished as the metal lost contact with Cerea's ear, leaving nothing more than a frantic whinny and a little horse who was staring up at her, one foreleg now desperately gesturing towards the freshly-removed disc.

Cerea shook her head, because they had that in common. Took another, deeper breath, placed the palm of her left hand against her own throat and felt the faint vibrations of her own pulse. Opened her mouth. Tried.

The pegasus blinked. And after that response repeated three more times, Cerea replaced the disc.

Almost desperate, "Did you understand me? And what did I say?" Because that was a subject of some concern. "It's something I've heard outside the door a few times, before I can get the disc on, usually when there's hooves getting close. I thought I had it memorized, but I couldn't be sure --"

"-- um," and the undertone was pure amazement. "You said... that you were coming on shift. Roughly." More quickly (because Cerea's expression was already beginning to fall), "Roughly for meaning. You had the sounds right, but that's not the exact words. It's just how we announce that we're taking a turn. Something Guards say to each other. You --" and the pegasus was staring again, with the silver gaze growing bright "-- you can speak..."

"...I can mimic," Cerea softly countered. "Our foals make sounds like yours when they're young, before their first words in our language." Doing so as an adult was regarded as having kicked all civilization away, but it wasn't as if her mother was going to know about this particular bit of disappointment for a while. "We don't lose the capacity. So I can make the right sounds, but if I don't have the disc on, then I don't know what any of them mean. And it's not always easy to connect them when I'm using the magic, because I don't know if the disc is rearranging your syntax. Like if... every sentence in your language starts with the verb, but I hear it in what would be my normal place because that's just how the spell works."

"But you could learn," Nightwatch quickly said. "You just need a teacher, and time. And... um. Did you know that you sounded a lot like Balistraria just then? Like almost exactly? Because she always announces when she's coming on shift, every time, so if you picked it up from anypony --"

"We're good mimics." Although that was a generalization and when it came to herself... she was no better than second.

The dark tail abruptly twitched.

"Um. You've been listening."

Cerea nodded.

"With the disc off," the little knight added.

Again. It was the only way to hear the full complexities of the natural sounds.

"...what did you hear us say?"

"I don't know," the centaur girl rather reasonably replied. "The disc was off. Why?"

"Because there was this thing with Bulkhead and..." Another twitch, with this one coming a little closer to lash. "...um. It was early, so maybe you were just getting up. And didn't have the disc on yet. And heard it." Black ears went straight back. "Um..."

But that was when the hoof rapped on the cell door, and both females stopped. A second later, Acrolith pushed it open.

"We've cleared a path," the layer-hued earth pony mare told them. "The Princess wants their first meeting to take place away from the cells. Follow me up."

And then she was waiting in what felt like a rather informal sort of conference room, something where the padding on the benches showed a few old food stains and the paintings... well, it wasn't as if Cerea had the background to truly appreciate pony art. It was possible that having the frames set at those askew angles was actually supposed to mean something significant, or at least something other than 'the decorator was tipsy.' Which stood in not-quite-contrast to the artwork, where she was almost certain the painter had just been drunk.

The room smelled somewhat of old herbs and drinks which hadn't quite been finished. There was a mug on the center table, about one-quarter full with a creamy yellow fluid. It let her identify a source, for some of the Guards walked around smelling like -- well, like the liquid. Usually at the beginning of a shift or near the end. Or towards the middle. Plus there was one who, in retrospect, must have been bathing in it.

The scent told her that it was safe for her to consume, and she left it right where it was because it was only a quarter-full and she didn't know who'd had the rest of it. Additionally, it was possible for someone to walk in on her while she was finishing it off, and that was why her ears were twitching forward. Listening for the sounds of approach.

She was meeting someone. Someone important. She had to make a good impression, insofar as that was even possible. She couldn't help looking like a monster. She could keep her hands off the leftovers.

Cerea stood and waited, fully aware of Nightwatch's presence on the other side of the closed door. Tried not to shuffle her hooves too badly and, after the delay stretched out a little more, switched that to an equally non-successful attempt at preventing her fingers from clenching. Trying to hear anyone who might be getting closer, figuring out what she could potentially say or do to calm them, give herself that much more of a chance...

The curtsy seemed to be doing fairly well so far. At least, no one had run away from her screaming on the two previous occasions when she'd performed one. As opening gestures went, that seemed to be fairly encouraging --

"-- just a little suspicious."

A stallion's voice. Somewhat gruff, more than a little irritated and making no effort to suppress any of it, which added an element of shock when she instantly identified the next speaker.

"And what," the dark mare lightly said, "could possibly be making you react with suspicion?"

"Previous experience," the stallion instantly replied. "This isn't the first time you've summoned me to the palace at night, Princess."

"Ah. But this time --" and there was a lilt in the mare's tones "-- there are no butcher shops involved. Nor has there been any other degree of culture clash or misunderstanding which we must discuss, preferably before the opinion columns can do the same. Your charges have been exceptionally well-behaved this moon, and so you are clearly performing your task at the level I would expect from you."

The only thing darker than royalty's eyes was the unseen stallion's voice.

"And you still summoned me to the palace."

A pause.

"True," the Princess casually replied.

"A very empty palace," the stallion added. "I haven't seen anypony since we came up the second ramp. Why is that?"

"And now you have," the Princess countered as hoofsteps sounded on marble, the sound less distorted now that the corner had been rounded. "For there is Nightwatch. Have the two of you met? I find first meetings to be rather important. Nightwatch, this is --"

"-- we've seen each other," the stallion interrupted. "Princess, you brought me here at night."

"Yes." And lilting had nearly become levity. "As you are under my dominion, and so you can be summoned when the need arises, because I am your Princess and so promptly responding to my summons is generally seen as both a sign of courtesy and a rationale for retaining employment. That you generally work the Solar shift simply requires an extra degree of need --"

"-- into an almost-empty section of the palace. When there's been rumors flying and galloping around --"

The levity fell away.

"Rumors," the dark mare repeated -- and then her tones shifted back. "Well, I am certain we will be discussing that shortly. For now, I have summoned you here to perform your duty. The one under my dominion, which you retain because you are the pony who is most suited to fill that position. All I require is that you do so again, to the best of your ability, with an absolute minimum of future Moon-lit conferences because absolutely no problems will have arisen."

The door opened. Just a crack, just enough to let Cerea see a fraction of the dark mare on the other side. Nothing else.

"So simply step around me," the Princess stated, "and meet your newest charge." A pause. "Oh, and close your eyes first."

What is she...?

"Princess," the stallion said, and there was something other than deference in that voice, "if I hadn't been suspicious before --"

"-- this is an order," the dark mare told him. "Close your eyes. Step around me. Go inside. Open them again."

Light moved across the wood, pushed it open a little more. The Princess stepped aside, and the stallion, eyes squeezed shut in something very close to pain, entered the room.

There was something about the unicorn which reminded her of Ms. Smith, but it did so as an opposing aspect. The government employee who theoretically supervised the Kurusu household generally possessed an aura which suggested that the effort required to make a single phone call on anyone's behalf justified a three-week vacation just for recovery. The stallion moved in a way which directly stated that if he were to suddenly fall into a coma, it would simply be to catch up on sleep.

His fur was an exceptionally dark blue, with the exception of a few graying hairs near the muzzle: Cerea, who could only equate such things to horses, guessed that he might be middle-aged. The icon on his flanks displayed a rather plain octagon, albeit one of a fairly bright red. The black mane and tail looked as if they either hadn't been groomed for a week or had been groomed in a hurry by somepony who'd been awake for the majority of that time.

He stopped. His nostrils twitched. Eyelids shot open, revealing a brighter blue than his fur. Something almost sky-hued, the color of the warmest summer days.

Cerea instantly dropped into a full curtsy.

It was a rather low version, one which put her outswept right hand about two feet from the pony's face. As far as showing deep respect went, it was about as deep as her knees would allow her to go without buckling and sending her crashing into the ground breasts-first, which really wasn't the best way to make a good impression. This version was professional, expertly executed and, when it ended, left her staring almost directly into a slightly-opened mouth.

There was a new scent of fear in the room, and Cerea had expected that to happen no matter what she did. But it was the secondary layer.

"As I did not gain a chance at the earlier introduction," the Princess said from her place within the now fully-open doorway, "allow me to perform this particular version. This is --"

"No," the stallion said.

The dark mare ignored it. "-- your newest --"

"No." And he began to turn. "No. No, no, no. No-no-no. No." The black tail was lashing. "No, no no, no-ho-HO. No no no, no no, no no no no, no, no, noooooooo..." Heading directly for the doorway, hooves stomping into marble as if trying to crack it, head and horn lowered to an angle which seemed to identify his ruler as nothing more than a temporary obstacle.

The Princess' horn ignited. Dark light projected forward, surrounded the stallion, lifted his body about three inches off the floor and performed a precise 180° rotation while all four coated legs futility marched on air.

"NO." the stallion declared, and did so almost directly to Cerea's still-lowered face.

She straightened: there didn't seem to be anything else she could do. It let her see the Princess over his back, and...

...Cerea still wasn't completely sure what the equivalent of a pony smile looked like. She was very much hoping that the dark mare's expression wasn't it.

"Centaur --" the Princess began.

"No."

"-- allow me to introduce Crossing Guard, who is the current head of our Immigration Department. And if he wishes to remain in that position, he might be well-advised to cease his protests --"

"...no..." the stallion half-whispered, perhaps just to put it on the record.

"-- and greet his newest charge."

The unicorn twisted within the corona and found that while his legs remained confined, his neck was perfectly free to turn enough for a degree of desperate eye contact with his liege.

"There were rumors," he frantically said. "Rumors that you'd captured it --"

"Her," the Princess calmly cut in. "You have dealt with sufficient species to recognize the rather prominent signs of a female."

Cerea fought back most of the wince and none of the blush.

"-- after the fight, that it -- she was being kept in the palace while you figured out what to do with her, but... but..." He couldn't seem to get his mouth to completely close. "Princess, I -- you know what's going to happen, there's only one thing which can happen --"

"You brought in Yapper," the dark mare almost placidly said.

"There are warrens all over Equestria living in relative peace with adjacent settled zones! There's even some trade here and there! It was time for Yapper!"

"Something we only recognized in retrospect," the Princess countered.

"But she's still had problems, she's always going to have some problems, and..."

He turned away. Forced himself to face Cerea, and that bright blue gaze roamed over her, losing the last degree of warmth as it crossed the repurposed tablecloth.

"I trust you," he told the Princess, and did so without looking at her. "I trust that you weren't tricked. That you wouldn't be doing this if she didn't deserve it. But you have to know what's going to happen. It's going to be every headline, every time. It's going to be everything. They're going to focus on her and they won't stop. Princess, there has to be some other way --"

"-- several," the dark mare cut him off. "And yet this is the one which was chosen, for imprisonment and exile do not suit one who deserves her chance. You are at the head of Immigration. You have seen butcher shops introduced into the Heart, helped to rewrite the rulebooks for sports which suddenly need to accommodate a single kudu's twisting horns. This is a sapient. She is peaceful, and will remain so as long as no violence is directed against her. She has recently arrived in our nation, and it may be some time before she is able to return home." Her head lowered slightly, with the dark energy around the horn showing the faintest hints of tiny spikes. "One might argue that she qualifies as a refugee -- if one does not simply label her as the victim of a foalnapping, for her arrival was involuntary. We are trying to send her home, Crossing. But until that day, she has earned her chance at a new one. And making that chance fully legal and supervised is your duty."

Her volume had never changed. Only the intensity of words and that singular stare.

The corona lowered the stallion, gently placed him back onto the marble before winking out.

"There's going to be riots," Crossing Guard stated.

"We will do our best to avoid them," the Princess calmly replied. "I will be rather disappointed in you if the count reaches too far into the plural."

"Organization/conspiracy/CUNET's going to go after her. All of the opposition papers. Everypony."

It felt as if he was talking about someone who wasn't there.

"Mr. Guard?" Cerea tried.

The disc, after rapidly passing through several terms which threatened to blister the tips of her ears, eventually rendered the resulting sounds as "You wait."

Cerea shut up.

"This has been discussed," the Princess said.

He turned to face his ruler. "And the reason you didn't tell me I was being brought here to process a centaur?"

"Well," the dark mare shrugged, "if we are to be completely sincere with each other, especially as I recognize that you have been speaking with something less than full decorum towards me... there is no living pony of your generation who possesses more experience in dealing with the other sapient races. You have done your best to understand them, to bring them into our society, to defuse the conflicts which arise when cultures inevitably clash. There are times when you have managed to think as they do. A rare talent, Crossing, and one which the palace needs more than ever. And as the pony who not only possesses so much experience, but one who thought he was sacrificing his magic by drawing Tirek's attention so his department's staff could escape... I wished to see how you would deal with a centaur on first sight when you knew, simply based on the fact that I had brought you to her, that she was no threat."

He took an exceptionally slow breath.

"We've known each other for a while now."

"Nearly two and a half years," the Princess said. "Since I resumed that part of my duties."

"We've had a few meetings."

"Yes. With and without soy."

"You also just wanted to see my face."

Cerea was really hoping that wasn't a smile.

"I believe I said that," the Princess stated. "I will expect you back tomorrow, at whatever hour your duties permit. To assist her with the paperwork. Fully legal, Crossing. I wish this to be tied with a full/unbreakable/," and then, much to Cerea's surprise, "latigo knot."

The stallion tightly nodded. Turned to face Cerea again.

"Tomorrow," he said.

She managed to nod back.

"Tomorrow," the Princess said. "For now, return to your family. Please pass on my best wishes to Tarter." She stepped aside, freeing the passage, and so the last view Cerea had of her new supervisor was of a hard-lashing tail.

The Princess stepped into the room. "A strong first meeting, I think," she said. "In all truth, better than I had expected. However, the fact that rumors have reached him..." She slowly shook her head. "One could see it as a chance for those who hear the stories to consider the thought in advance. And one probably should not. So. Shall we move on to your second meeting?"

Cerea blinked.

"Someone else? Tonight?"

"Yes," the dark mare said. "As we are trying to prepare you in all aspects. Follow me, centaur."

I don't think he likes me.

It wasn't a good thought to have about the individual who was effectively going to be in charge of her. But then, she'd never gotten the impression that Ms. Smith liked her very much either. Admittedly, that was because the household tended to create a lot of work for someone who claimed a medical allergy to responsibility...

"This particular meeting," the Princess said, trotting slightly ahead down the marble corridor, "was actually the more difficult to arrange."

"Oh," Cerea said, mostly because she hadn't said much of anything during the first meeting and, given the way she'd been discussed, was feeling the need to remind herself that she was still there.

"We actually have a preference in the matter," was the oddly disgruntled follow-up. "But as it so happens, there is a mission, and we have no way to know when it will end. So rather than wait for the return of our first choice, Princess Celestia and I have been scouring the ranks for a worthy second. Somepony flexible. Open-minded. And who could, of course, be sworn to secrecy."

"Oh," Cerea tried, mostly because it had worked before.

The next words were so chill as to drop the temperature in the hallway by five degrees. "Being willing to actually follow through on their claims was also seen as a positive."

Cerea looked closely at the lashing tail, along with the way some of the stars within it seemed to be rearranging themselves.

"I don't --"

"-- generations," the Princess irritably declared. "There have been generations of them, and they all possess the same false battlecry. 'I can work with you!', they will declare. 'You are an inspiration to me!' Keeping in mind that they do so without ever having been in our presence. Most of the declarations emerge at parties, and float into the air on a sea of drink. And when they are challenged to prove themselves? Brought into the palace to confirm their boasts? What happens then, I ask you?"

She didn't even know what they were talking about, and the temperature was continuing to drop. "I'm --"

"-- one claimed hysterical blindness."

"...what?"

"The inability to see. Or rather, the inability to see us. In fact, for the rest of his life, he declared that only a single rather narrow range could still be registered by his vision." The dark mare snorted. "You might find it rather interesting that his work had already been reflecting such."

In lieu of response, Cerea's arms moved to cover her chest. A glance up found icicles beginning to form on the ceiling.

"Oh, and there was that one who said she simply needed some privacy in order to work. Which I imagine she eventually found after crossing the third border and changing her name for the sixth time."

"Um..."

"I would be neglectful if I failed to mention the pony who found a means of mistaking us for parade floats."

"Er." The air felt as if it was thickening in her nostrils. There was a mild burn entering her lungs, and she wished it would relocate to her skin. Scenting anything was starting to become impossible, and the olfactory world blurred blue.

"And I continue to do my duty to history by never mentioning her name," the Princess spat: the globule bounced off the floor. "Although at the very least, her efforts were put on public display prior to the age of photography."

"Oh."

"Regardless, I will not rest until I find that one painting."

Cerea swallowed. Her hands briefly rubbed against her goosebump-covered arms, then quickly went back to where they had been.

"However," the Princess said, "in this case... we found somepony who has experience in the other nations. And lacking in her own label, which appears to help the process."

Label?

A dark suspicion began to move on hoof edge through Cerea's mind. The primary effect was to make the chill spread faster.

"A humble practitioner of her craft," the dark mare added. "Which in this case means that all the space generally occupied by ego has instead been devoted to talent. And so I am confident in her ability to work with you."

The air was actually beginning to warm again, which was mostly indicated by the little patter of meltwater from above. Cerea, whose frozen sensation was now fully internal, didn't notice.

"I --"

"So. This door..."

The dark energy opened it, and an elderly bespectacled unicorn mare jumped roughly a meter straight back before falsely recovering into a weak, frantic smile. One which fully ignored all of the supplies which had just been jolted from her saddlebags, which included the pins and spools and needles and everything else which Cerea's desperate eyes was sending as direct alert signals to all four legs. Everything except the worst of it, which only needed an extra horrible second to appear.

"Hello," the quavering voice managed, and pale yellow light unfurled the measuring tape. "So where would you like me to start?"

There were several ways to regard what instantly followed. For starters, from Cerea's perspective, logic happened.

The Princess disagreed.

"...and that's the arms done," the elderly mare said. "Raise them, please."

Both of Cerea's bare arms went up.

"Thank you."

"You are welcome," the Princess said from her place at Cerea's side. Her eyes were tightly closed, and the dark head was facing away from the centaur girl. "Are they raised sufficiently?"

"Yes..." The tape slowly floated forward. Cerea's eyes watched it approach, at least for those moments when she could focus her gaze at all. Most of her time in the room had found them rolled partially back or, as with the current case, treating every levitated object as if it was the most recent shark to emerge from an endless frenzy.

"You are fortunate," the Princess softly said.

Cerea didn't say anything.

"In that I am rather uniquely qualified to recognize a phobic reaction."

And, in fact, couldn't.

"Even when it manifests in the body of a centaur. The commonalities help, of course. The rearing back, the attempt to pivot on a single hoof, the desperate blind gallop for any available exit... clearly a phobia in play. As I explained to Corsetiere Garter, at least once the screams had stopped."

At all.

"The majority of which were yours."

No matter how hard she tried.

"Admittedly, the exact reason why you would display such a reaction upon learning that somepony wished to clothe you remains a mystery. Regardless, we proceed."

The measuring tape moved close enough for Cerea to see the symbols on it. She assumed some of them were numbers, and knew the results were about to be humiliating.

"You could stop struggling," the Princess quietly suggested. "I can feel you straining against my field. I am also perfectly capable of holding you perfectly still for a very long time, with the exception of when I am asked to move some portion of your undressed body. Nor can you blush hotly enough to burn your way out. And since the evidence suggests that we are best off getting this over with..."

The evil, accursed, horrifying tape dropped down.

"So let's do the bust measurement," the seamstress said. "Underbust first, of course. Lift, please."

The dark corona focused. Intensified.

Please let me die.

She didn't get her wish.

"And overbust." The old mare squinted. "Let's see. Fullest part..."

Please don't let her say it out loud.

She didn't get that one either.

Inappropriate

From the outside, the filly's behavior appears normal. It could be argued that she is beginning her investigations rather earlier than the majority, but her mother is among the strongest, her mother pushes and so the filly feels that anything she does too soon already has a countering vote for too late. In any case, it's something which just about every filly in the herd eventually does, because it's expected of them. She just happens to have taken an interest somewhat sooner than the rest of her generation.

Her mother -- doesn't object, because that curiosity shows that the filly is taking responsibility. Of course, responsibility is the sort of thing which you're just supposed to take more and more into an even-increasing burden while no one ever carries the smallest part of the earlier weights away, so the new isn't permitted to claim any time away from the old. The filly is training and studying and competing and trying to steal hours in which she can just read -- but now she's doing this too.

Then again, it's not as if it's taking time away from being with her friends.

Her mother permits the new activity, for it is something the filly will be expected to do as an adult and there's nothing wrong with taking an early interest. Of course, even a filly for whom the expectations are high (too high, forever too high, and the moments when she feels she's getting close to any level of true accomplishment are immediately followed by the ones where the goal line moves kilometers away), there's only so much a girl of her age can do, and so it isn't taken all that seriously at first.

Well... her mother takes it seriously (because of course her mother does) and so the girl is given her first practice sword. But for those she's accompanying... they're reluctant to expose a child to danger. Not that danger generally intrudes, but -- no one in the herd can ever be sure of when the next breach might occur, and few like to think about the things which might need to be done in the name of keeping their gap secure. Those actions haven't been necessary in generations, especially not with alcohol among their supplies to go with well-trained skills in inflicting concussions, but -- they can't be sure, and it's nothing which should ever be done in front of a filly.

Additionally, she has a bedtime.

So she accompanies the day patrols during what have always been the lowest-risk hours, and they aren't entirely sure what to do with her. One of the strongest has told them to allow the trot-alongs, but... well, she's too young to truly participate, they're not comfortable with discussing certain realities of the duty in front of a child, and centaur culture hasn't really caught onto the concept of 'mascot'. There's a distinct level of discomfort when she goes along on the routes, and it's something she can't figure out how to overcome. She's getting better at leaping physical hurdles (except that whenever she clears them all, her mother almost immediately raises the ones along her training runs until the parent finds a height which the filly can't reach), but she has no idea how to get over social barriers. The other fillies don't talk to her because of the way her mother pushes, she hasn't tried talking to the colts because all such meetings are closely supervised (and colts are stupid anyway), and when it comes to adults... the years form a chasm which can't be breached.

Still... she's allowed to accompany them. They answer a few questions, and while she's not really good at the subtleties of prying without having her inquiries being identified as exactly that, those on patrols frequently have very little to do other than speak with each other. The tones may be low and hushed (because if anything did happen, giving an intruder sound to move towards is a double-edged blade), but they still form words, and the filly knows how to listen.

There are times when the mares almost forget she's there, start to discuss matters occurring within the herd which might qualify as gossip for the more inquisitive adults. (Even with the great formality required by the pressure exerted from the gap, gossip still exists: every society needs its pressure valve, and many half-whispered words emerge as something close to hissing steam.) If the filly had been old enough to understand some of the terms, she would have been able to acquire an impressive range of blackmail material -- but it's not what she's there for. Adult matters belong to mares and stallions, those who've been trapped within for so much longer. She's a child, and that means she can think more clearly. She can prioritize. And what she's really interested in is the patrols themselves.

She examines the equipment they carry, those things used to disable and discredit any intruding humans. She listens to discussions of tactics. She follows at a distance of a few hoofsteps as they check the borders, because just about every adult mare spends some time on the patrols: it's the only way to try and maintain the security of their land. She's just learning about everything sooner than most, because she's taken an interest. As far as she's concerned, it's something she has to do, and it has to be done now.

The filly has realized that her world is a prison.
There are certain obligations for those trapped within prisons. They begin with exploring the limits of the cell.
And if those who keep you within are willing to let you memorize their patrol routes...

The mountain which hosted the capital had a surprising number of plateaus. It was more than enough to allow multiple facilities to operate on fairly level ground, there always seemed to be just enough of those surfaces available for whatever ponies might need to do, and just about nopony had ever questioned that.

Under normal circumstances, traveling about a third of the way around the mountain's curve would discover the Guard training area. There were obstacle courses, training dummies which had been kicked by generations of ponies who were both trying to master combat and very actively imagining that every hoof was actually slamming into their drill instructors. There was a group canteen, although it was seldom used: Guards were generally trained in fairly small numbers, and the march back to the city in search of real food served as bonding time and additional exercise. For the same reason, the barracks mostly served as a place to store your day clothes (for the few who wore them), although the showers saw a lot of use. Hot water always seemed to run out a little too quickly, and the massage setting on the showerheads had been installed as an act of careful cruelty.

Nothing about the training area was classified. Very few Canterlot residents had bothered to learn where it was, because Guards were mostly something which existed as background scenery: where you had Princesses (or rather, for a very long time, the singular), you were going to have Guards who moved with them, kept an eye on them, and as long as those Guards remained background scenery, it could be presumed that the world was operating at something fairly close to normalcy. But for those who knew the location, the only thing which generally prevented them from visiting was the length of the hike. As the area was seldom under active use, multiple centuries' worth of adolescents had decided the place was their exclusive playground: races would be conducted through the obstacle courses, training dummies were granted multiple names at the moment of impact (along with multiple degrees, because all the years of taking on new identities meant the wooden simulacrums were now theoretically qualified to teach every school course which existed), and more than a few fumbling attempts at romance had been launched within the barracks. A very few would come back as adults, and generally found that they'd improved in everything but the last.

Under normal circumstances, anypony could potentially visit at just about any time they wished. In this case, the approach was being made at two hours before Sun-raising, and the oldest mare in the world had just found a dark shield dome in her way.

She slowly shook her head as she looked up at the slow-rising curve, and the borders of her mane twisted a little faster. The white horn was carefully angled forward until it was a few tail strands away from contact, and the lightest touch of sunlight was allowed to manifest upon something which was not quite bone. A little more leaning, just enough contact for the caster to recognize that a rather familiar signature was making itself known, and then she waited until the energy directly in front of her shimmered, thinned, and ultimately provided a hole which was just slightly too small for ready passage.

The elder grumbled a little, because there was nopony present to hear such a mundane expression of simple emotion. (Additionally, it was her sister, there was every chance the size issue had been a deliberate one, and so she was entitled to grumble.) And then she bent her knees, awkwardly angled her head, tried to compress wings beyond the normal rest position and did so against a rib cage which had just released every last tenth-bit of air...

Eventually, she found herself at the track.

The ground-level racing area was one of the constants: a basic oval where the turf had been pounded into solidity by generations of racing hooves. (The sky version, for pegasi being timed in their flight, was intermittent: any pegasus cloud construct needed regular use in order to maintain itself, because the magic of the molding requested its long-term power from those in attendance. To abandon anything made of clouds for too long was to find no more than dissipating vapor when you got back, and those who liked to indulge in long vacations took house sitting very seriously.) Just about any Guard had to be capable of moving quickly: a candidate needed a lot of talent in other areas before a below-average hoof speed would be overlooked. Hundreds of ponies had been timed on this track, enough of them had passed their tests in order to maintain that constant background presence, and... some of them had died because in the end, they had been exactly fast enough to get in the way.

The elder closed purple eyes for a moment, witnessed the too-long procession of the lost moving across the inner stage. And when she opened them again, she was watching a centaur run.

Her sibling was standing within a designated spot a few body lengths away from the right outer edge of the track, something which had been used by those who often shouted their criticisms to the world and so was perfectly suited to host that pony. The dark horn was lit: maintaining the shield, along with simply holding a small flattened mostly-steel circle in a bubble at her right. And she paid no visible attention to the ongoing approach of the elder, simply choosing to watch the girl who was galloping around the track, with those dark eyes seemingly focused on pounding hooves.

The girl was running, and it was just about all she was doing. The blue eyes (so much worse at checking to the sides than those of a pony: a special vulnerability of so many predators) were doing little more than watching the path in front of her. Arms shifted in strange ways, because bipeds naturally moved those limbs as they walked or ran, an extra means of keeping balance and -- this was a sapient with four legs. It changed the pattern, and even a mare who had known more than a thousand years of life hadn't seen enough centaurs to have those motions memorized.

There was some sweat on her skin, with more saturating her clothing. Even under the light of a shield-distorted Moon, a portion of the latter was approaching translucency: she had clearly been moving for some time. Every so often, little drops were blown off her body by a breeze from overhead.

Purple eyes watched the girl run, and had to shift fairly quickly in order to keep doing so. Most of that attention was committed to the movement: a portion kept going back to the clothing. The majority of the soft whistle was suppressed. But every so often, she would focus on her own sibling.

"You are up rather early," the younger said, not bothering to glance back at the elder. "Surprisingly so. I would expect your normal excuse to be an inability to sleep, but as you have a distinct habit of interrupting whenever I am attempting to do or see something interesting..."

She didn't bother to dignify that part with a response. "Why is she out here?"

"Stable Syndrome."

The elder blinked. "You think --"

"-- I have reason to believe she is susceptible," the younger quietly said. "There are things she has in common with us, and high among them is the need to run. Those who have committed no crimes should not be confined within cells, her situation is unique, she has a desire to simply see anything new and... she has been trapped within the walls for far too long." A slow breath. "Additionally, I recently -- and inadvertently -- caused her a degree of trauma, and I have yet to find a psychiatrist whom we could sufficiently trust to treat her. There are worse ways to deal with the residue of such an experience than movement."

"What did you do?" Because the younger had many (generally deliberate) ways of inspiring terror and in the modern day, the worst was completely inadvertent.

Luna sighed. It was a rather soft sound, especially coming from a fairly large body. It was also something which most ponies didn't expect from that half of the Diarchy: anger, frequently, eyes fading to white, in the worst of their nightmares, but something so simple as a sigh...

"Attempted to arrange for her clothing," the younger softly replied. "Let us leave it at that for now, except to say that her reaction was -- significant. Enough so that I felt it best to simply finish the process of measurement immediately rather than subject her to multiple attempts."

Celestia blinked.

"She was wearing clothing when she reached Palimyno," the elder observed. "Does she only get dressed when she's going out for runs?"

There was just enough of a laugh to identify the mirth as having been derisive. "She in no way qualifies as one of our own extremists." With the snort being even more so. "Those who insist that all clothing exists for the sole intent of sexual enticement, cruelly forcing the viewing parties to fantasize about what cannot be seen, and that even the thickest of garments worn for the coldest of winter days do not represent an attempt to ward off frostbite so much as unlicensed prostitution." And that was followed by a slow head shake. "I was rather hoping that they would have died out during abeyance, but the lifespan for that level of idiocy appears to be indefinite."

"I did manage to get the protests down to an annual event," Celestia sighed. "So how normal is clothing for --" and stopped, having spotted the potential violation of her sibling's code just a little too late --

-- but there was no reaction. "It is normal for the females of her species as a whole," Luna replied. "It does not breach her privacy to tell you that, sister. Under normal circumstances, she is clothed, and would only be found nude in situations of privacy, medical needs, or --" the hesitation went on for a little too long "-- embarrassment. We would do well to avoid situations in which others decide they must see what level of horror exists beneath her garments, especially as she currently has no defenses against the rudest of unicorns. It is not the clothing she fears, Tia: she needs that. It was having to be fitted."

"Why?" A simple question, and a risky one.

"If I knew that," the younger evenly said, "then the answer likely would qualify as a breach of her privacy."

The centaur approached, and focused blue eyes failed to notice the two alicorns standing off to the side. Then she was in front of them, hair and tail streaming out behind her. Then with a gust of wind and rustle of feathers, she was beyond.

This time, a little more of the whistle made it to open air, although it wasn't quite enough to mask the tiny click.

"It is more impressive than you might think," Luna observed, and took a glance at the circle: one of the little brass plungers along the top had just been pressed down. "A fine piece of clockwork, this stopwatch... and it continues to demonstrate what I had verified on previous passes. She has been maintaining that rate."

"That fast," Celestia said, and didn't bother to repress any of the stun.

"We had already gained some idea of her ground speed during the search for her arrival point," Luna reminded her sibling. "It now appears that I should have factored in an increased subtractive variable for her wounded state. And given that she has some healing distance to yet cross before becoming fully restored, it may be safe to assume that her true maximum is somewhat beyond this. Not faster than either of us, Tia, and hardly able to outrace a pegasus -- but I can think of no unicorn who would be able to match her pace, and any earth ponies would only accomplish the feat within the safety of legend."

"Without magic," Celestia quietly observed. "Without being -- us. It's just her."

"Simple biology," Luna agreed -- then added "I imagine the clothing helps."

It was instinctive. It was also inevitable, and it took an effort to stop looking.

"Well..." The sudden awkwardness didn't seem to know what to do with itself (which did feel oddly appropriate). "She's not... shifting..."

"As is the purpose of the underlayer," Luna agreed. "Clearly well-constructed, as befits an expert."

"But the outer..."

"Provides coverage. The draping of her flanks is rather well done, is it not?" Luna's gaze followed the centaur around the far curve. "Although the designer did leave those small windows of exposure. I suppose she is simply used to doing so, even when designing for a child --"

She stopped. The dark eyes briefly closed.

"-- I believe I now understand why I continue to say that," Luna softly observed, with her eyes once again tracking the run. "A portion of her form matches ours, and so I think of her in our terms. And I wonder how that will taint the ways in which others treat her, for those who find a means of not perceiving her as a monster..."

"Some ponies have the same problem with Saddle Arabians," Celestia quietly reminded her sibling.

"Yes. Well, in that instance, it is more towards both sides having found a reason to look down at each other." Which triggered a small snort. "Which is somewhat easier on their end, at least from the physical aspect. Still, with her, it may become a factor. And now that I have realized what is happening, I shall do my best to guard against it."

And then they were watching her run again.

"There is something rather strange about her breathing," Luna frowned. "Did you notice?"

Celestia tried to focus, and found her attempt hindered by the obvious. "It may just seem that way because of what she's wearing --"

"-- no: the undergarments continue to succeed at their task," Luna decided. "Watch her ribs, Tia."

After a too-long moment, "...which set?"

"The lower," Luna clarified.

The elder frowned. "Luna, her breathing is --" and went through several hasty internal revisions before finishing with "-- kind of obvious."

"I am uncertain," the younger replied. "I have been watching her run for some time, and -- there is something which takes place in the lower. Something which has only happened during the run, and that has been both intermittent and partial. But I am convinced there is a degree of shift, of a sort which would be associated with breath."

"Her lungs," Celestia firmly said, "are in her upper torso." Even with the undergarments performing at peak efficiency, there was a certain amount of rather visible movement.

"Yes," Luna agreed. "They are. Two of them are."

"...Luna?"

"The Doctors Bear," the younger reminded her, "indicated that they had discovered at least one --"

She paused for a moment, as the girl ran by them again. (There was another click.) This time, a few small drops of sweat hit the siblings from overhead.

"I cannot fault her for that," Luna passively said as she indulged in a light full-body shake, trying to get rid of the moisture before it could fully soak into her fur. "This has been proceeding for some time and regardless of her own speed, she has never been an endurance flier."

"I'm surprised you brought a Guard for this," Celestia admitted. (Evaporating the water was easier, and so steam briefly rose from the white coat.)

"She asked to come," Luna explained. "In fact, one might say that within the bounds of protocol, she was somewhat -- insistent."

Which brought out a small smile from the elder. "It's a good sign."

"Yes." But it didn't prevent the sigh. "And an entire continent remains."

And back to watching.

"It's warmer than the schedule dictated," Celestia observed. "Especially for autumn."

"The weather team only maintains this area when training is in progress," Luna responded. "Additionally, I tweaked the local conditions somewhat, to increase her comfort. As her current garments lack something in the way of insulation."

All right. Let's just get it over with.

"Luna -- there's been... certain changes in fashion. I know you haven't exactly had the chance to see this -- version of it --" and who had? "-- especially for her kind of form. But when it comes to what she's wearing, she's in..."

It was surprisingly hard to say. Part of it was simply due to the nature of that lone listening audience, and the rest came from the sudden realization that she'd fallen into the same trap as her sibling: something which was all the more apparent as the remaining deliberate gaps in that garment shifted with the run.

"I am aware," Luna steadily replied, "that she is wearing a negligee. Based on the degree of red which was suffusing her skin upon meeting her in the cell, the same can be said for the wearer."

"...did you ask for one?"

"No. I commissioned the services of a pony whose talent is for a foreign art, and her first efforts naturally delivered the things she knew best. The price of a specialist. I have already informed her that based on the wearer's reaction, something less -- sheer would be rather desirable, and so we now await cotton and linen." Luna slowly shook her head. "I look forward to the end of the Bearers' current mission for many reasons, Tia: to know that they have succeeded, that they are alive and safe and whole. But to a much lesser degree, I simply wish for the Lady Rarity to take up some part of this task."

"Oh." Celestia squinted a little. "Are those torso ties -- upper torso... part of the design? They look a lot rougher than the rest of it."

A soft snort. "Nightwatch is of the opinion that the centaur used some of her hairpins and the fringe of a towel to sew the most prominent deliberate gap shut. Neglecting to do the same for those on the flanks is simply a matter of not having perceived the need."

More watching. The centaur accelerated a little. The pegasus, whose wish for water was now beginning to radiate from her feathers, did her best to keep up.

"Rarity?"

"Are you now doubting her ability? Admittedly, you were somewhat tentative during the original proposal."

"I've mostly been afraid to commission her for us because we might lose the first six workdays to the faint," Celestia admitted. "But when it comes to designing for someone who isn't a pony... let's just say I got a scroll about sandals. And it wasn't a particularly happy scroll."

Luna frowned. "What are sandals?"

The elder, who was still thinking about the too-small gap in the shield, kept the reply at "Exactly," and took some small pleasure in the younger's snort. "Luna?"

"Perhaps not the best of times to ask a question," her sibling decided. "Not if you truly have a reasonable expectation of not being sent to find your answers within the Archives --"

"-- is she beautiful?"

And for a moment, the only sound left was pounding hooves.

"That," the younger slowly said, "strikes me as a rather odd query. The rationale for your inquiry?"

"Because I've been watching her run," the elder replied. "And if she was a pony -- a pony displaying that kind of speed and strength, with that form --"

"You were never much for mares," the younger harshly broke in. "In fact, disallowing one rather recent and somewhat artificial exception, you have never been anything for mares, and this is not even --"

"-- which doesn't prevent me from seeing the beauty in athleticism, Luna," the elder quietly cut her off. "Not just the body, but the way that body moves. It's part of what draws so many to the Games: the joy of seeing ponies performing at their peak. There's something to that. There always has been. I've seen it in so many species during their own events. A griffon going in for the swoop, a minotaur executing a pin, a zebra heading for the finish line in the Ziara Kuu -- athletes all. And watching her run... that's as close as I've come to seeing her as a pony, because that part of her, when she's exerting herself... it's something to see. It's... beautiful."

Silence.

"The experience begins to lose something," the younger tightly said, "as one's gaze moves up."

It couldn't be argued, and so the elder didn't try. Trotting on the absolute edge of her sibling's code was hard enough. "You said that wearing clothing was normal for the females of her species."

"Correct. The males frequently prefer to go shirtless." The younger frowned. "I have just experienced a realization: our rather dubious fortune actually could have been considerably worse. Our chances of successful introduction into our society would have been decidedly lessened with a male."

It took a moment before she decided not to ask -- at least, not just yet. "That means you've seen enough of her people in her dreams to have some idea of what's normal for them."

Far too many seconds passed. It was enough for the centaur to go by them again, and the stopwatch distractedly clicked.

"To a degree." The younger watched the girl move towards the first curve. "I am beginning to wonder if we should attempt to adjust her hairstyle before introducing her to the public. Make it into something which has some resemblance to a mane." With a tiny snort, "Additionally, assuming that the translator ended its overlap on the proper term, I overheard enough discussion between herself and Nightwatch to learn that her current style is referred to as a ponytail. I can almost guarantee that somepony will be offended --"

"-- to watch her gallop," the elder broke in, "is to recognize a sort of beauty. It takes an effort, but... it's there, Luna. And you're the only one in the world who's seen enough of her species to have some idea of how they might perceive each other. So I saw the harmony in her movements, and I wondered... is she beautiful?"

The half-tangible tail twisted, and six of its stars slowly dimmed.

"I do not know," the younger softly answered. "There is only one sapient on the continent who could answer that question, and she is exactly the wrong person to ask. Let her gallop, Tia. She needs to gallop, in the last nights when she can do so without price or penalty. For there will be times to come when her deepest dreams arise from the desire to flee."

Like so many things, it started with something small.

Technically speaking, couriers were supposed to stay within the air paths, and it was the sort of speech which the true professionals regarded as a mere technicality. Yes, it was true that the sky had its own share of monsters, and air paths had been constructed in order to create the same kind of relative safety which the roads and rails offered to the ground. There were protective techniques woven through layers of atmosphere: carefully-set border temperatures discouraged some forms of intruder, wind shear deflected a number of others, and if all else failed, thunderheads were set at regular intervals to allow just about any pegasus access to near-instant offense.

But as with roads and rails, part of that safety came from the routing: if there was a known problem area, something impossible to completely clear out, a constant source of risk -- then the natural solution was to divert around it. It meant very few of the paths were perfectly straight lines, because a continent where so little had been truly tamed had a lot of risk to offer. And for a courier who was trying to shave some time off their route, with one package to drop off in a given settled zone, three more to pick up there and the delivery point for the smallest new one was three gallops away, with only so many hours they could safely spend in flight per day...

They were supposed to stay within the air paths. A true professional would look at their target schedule, think about the weight and distance added to the sheer number of deliveries plus ponies who were oddly slow on the payments if they believed the package to be so much as a single minute late -- although such receiving parties always managed to get the complaint letter to the head office in record time -- and then they would do what they insisted their mark required. (The arguments of their empty tip bag were vocally regarded as secondary.)

Couriers left the paths all the time. There were ways in which they arguably served as scouts for new air paths: any route which could be crossed in safety over and over again would be extensively discussed at those eateries where couriers congregated (because the other things you could always count on a courier to gossip about were bad clients and cheap food). Knowledge of the trail would spread, an increasing number of couriers would use it to the point where somepony in government noticed and, rather than deliver a chew-out lecture which was just going to be ignored anyway, would simply draw the thing onto the next route expansion map and start arranging for thunderhead encampments.

This route, however, was nowhere close to that level of recognition. In fact, prior to the desperate diversion which cut through the wind shear and sent a single young mare into the unknown, it hadn't existed as anything approaching a route, or a trail, or anything except a really bad idea. Couriers tended to ignore the warnings on those parts of the map which existed between destinations -- but that had limits. Because there were places you weren't supposed to go, areas which the air paths went around for a reason. Chaos terrain wasn't limited to the ground, because that would be a rule and as such, went against the general principle. A deep place could be found at high altitude. And some sections were simply forbidden, with the map saying no more than Classified, at least where the warning symbol didn't read Death.

But she was new to the job. She had the mark for the work, and was still in that stage of youth where she foolishly believed that the icon would protect her from anything so mundane as a mistake. She was new and inexperienced and didn't have the maps memorized yet, had barely spoken to anypony at the best eateries because she was still learning where those were, it was one of her first major assignments and the tip bag around her neck was empty and she was going to be late.

She was many things. For starters, she was completely unaware of her own mortality.

So she took what she perceived as a shortcut, because there was a Point A and a Point B and all she had to do in the name of making up for lost time was to take the shortest distance between them. Any monster which was already occupying that portion of the map was something she could outfly. It wasn't even that much to cross, compared to the winding route which went around... whatever was in the center, because that was Classified. But she had no intention of intruding on the government's privacy and, if caught, would just say she'd gotten lost and clearly the best way to get her out of the area was through escorting her to the other side of the air path.

Fly straight through. Keep her awareness focused on the atmospheric currents, trying to pick up on the presence of monsters before they ever saw her. She wasn't about to spend much time looking down because that was probably where the Classified stuff was, plus she'd grown up in a cloud city and still couldn't quite see 'down' as being important. Just -- go from one side to the other, with her mark guiding the way. There couldn't be anything easier.

So she flew.

As it turned out, she couldn't have seen much of anything. She told herself that it was wild weather, that the heavy clouds around her were a good thing. Wild weather outside the air paths and settled zones was a normal occurrence, something so natural that ponies who were far too used to control saw it as being just the opposite and in this case, they would have been right.

She kept her attention on the air currents, because the potential ammunition all around her was incidentally preventing her from seeing anything. She didn't look down, and she wouldn't have spotted much in any case, for the heavy cloud cover of the air was just about matched by the fog along the ground. (The first visual indicators were some time away, and they too would be missed.) She just pushed her body forward, and she was enjoying herself, because the feeling of being the first to take this shortcut (she'd told herself that she was the first, and she was very close to being right) was just too good. A little risk, a touch of potential danger which wasn't actually manifesting, combining into a very special sort of adrenaline high --

-- she was in the center of an exceptionally thick cloud bank when it happened, something where all she could truly see was the cloud itself. Even pegasus sight revealed little more than the uniform damp chill of the moisture, and she was mostly thinking about how with a good tip from the job, she could pay for saddlebags which had been worked to be waterproof, was just glad that her current shipment couldn't be damaged by the moisture --

-- and then the world twisted.

It would be a long time before she described it to anypony. She didn't know that many couriers yet, and a mare who was still trying to establish her reputation wasn't going to talk about a moment of weakness. Yes, couriers passed on information about potential shortcuts, and that included the reasons why some were never taken, but -- she was desperate, she'd been flying for longer than she should have, and so when her ears roared and her sense of balance seemed to drop away, the sleek torso wracked by sudden contortions as her wings became twin pieces of dragging weight and the fall began...

She wasn't thinking: a pegasus in midair trouble frequently didn't. Her body was trying to recover on instinct alone, find a wing configuration which would allow for an emergency glide, something which could bring her to safety within whatever Classified thing was below --

-- and it ended.

Orientation came back, all at once. Her wings flared to their full span, flapped, the empty tip bag swung to the back of her neck and she was fine.

She spent most of the remaining crossing watching herself for signs that it was happening again. Her first suspicion was Manière's disease, and that was a fear which put nearly all of her focus onto her own body. But she reached Point B without any further incidents, got all the way to her destination, collected a fairly decent tip, found a place to stop which had a mirror and the pink eye tinge wasn't there. She didn't have to spend three days in bed, barely able to move towards a restroom without tripping over her own hooves. She was fine.

So she told herself that she'd been a little tired. She'd been in the air for too long, she'd ignored the signs which were telling her to rest (which a marked courier could just push through anyway), she'd lost it for a second (only a second!), and she didn't tell anypony because admitting to weakness wasn't the best way to build her reputation. Besides, an error which had been survived was also called 'experience'.

So she splashed some water in her face, watched as that which landed on the vapor floor was reabsorbed by the cloud, then left the restroom and went to order her meal.

It started with something small.

Uncivilized

The mirror had been placed at what was, for her, a fairly awkward height. It meant some fairly uncertain adjustments of legs and overall posture were required in order to get the relevant area within the reflection and even then, certain portions went off the top and, because it was her, the sides.

Even so, she carefully worked on her overall position until she had the maximum possible aligned with the silvered glass. And then Cerea bounced.

It was an extremely rough, very limited sort of bounce: the starting bend of her knees meant she really couldn't get a lot of upwards momentum without completely abandoning her hard-won position and in any case, truly exerting herself in that direction would have meant cracking her skull on the cell's ceiling. But it was still a bounce, and her stare stayed focused on the reversed results in the mirror.

Nothing broke. There was no sound of rent fabric to go with the metallic screech of dying hooks. Nothing came crashing free. The bra, and that which it insisted on containing, remained exactly where it was. There was simply a little bobble of soft flesh along the artfully-exposed upper regions, because such could be desirable for those required by species to wear the things and so the creator had (wrongfully) decided that Cerea might like to indulge in low-cut blouses now and again. The dark Princess had already sent back a request for something more enclosed (especially with winter on the approach): the unicorn had responded with the first sweater and, apparently still working under the same impression, had made sure the upper part included easily-opened buttons.

Cerea's relationship with her own build could be readily described as 'convoluted'. There was pride because at the absolute minimum, her body was that of a proper centaur -- and one who hadn't exactly completed puberty just yet: given enough time, she fully expected to match or surpass her mother's size. But it was a centaur's body, she'd left the herd, and when you went among...

It doesn't matter.
(Or it mattered more than ever, as a subset of an issue which could never be overcome.)

There were a few who were larger than she (and her feelings about that were decidedly complicated): she hardly represented the farthest end of the bell curve. But even so, anything she tried to wear would quickly surrender: there was rather more vibration and jolting from a centaur's movement than a human's, largely due to the additional pair of legs. There were times when she'd sworn that there was no physical contact required and bras sundered in her mere presence. It was just one of the factors which kept her out of lingerie shops, added to the reluctance to be measured (because Japan's residents had what she felt was a completely unhealthy fascination with those numbers) and the fact that she... wasn't with her herd any more.

Realistically, she recognized that a bra which hadn't died during that first gallop (and it had felt so good to run) wasn't going to be defeated by a mere bounce. (And bounced again anyway.) But the fact that nothing had torn yet was making her wonder if magic was involved. And just that it was just so well-made...

She more-or-less stood in front of the mirror, clad in nothing more than the soft white bra, and thought.

The Princess mentioned other species. The existence of her first loaner shirt had suggested something existed which had arms: the services of the visiting unicorn told Cerea that at least one of them had humanoid mammary glands. She was starting to wonder just where (and what) they were, and -- whether having her own bras being so well-made meant the majority of their females were built on her own level. It was possible that the unicorn had simply upscaled, but that had never worked with anything made by humans. Or the mare's experiences could be limited to a single previous client --

-- would it have been easier? If I'd reached a biped village first? Because I'd be a little more familiar, at least for one portion, and...

No. She'd been told that the entire world knew of Tirek. There were no humans, which meant nothing fully matched her from the waist up. And in any case, it seemed likely that every species Cerea might encounter would regard her as having too many limbs.

Still...

The centaur girl slowly shook her head (and watched the movement of Too Much Hair in the mirror: that needed a trim). She was among ponies. The Princesses were the ones who were willing to welcome her, and while she might eventually meet someone from a biped species, this was where she had to take her first chance. To simply abandon this nation for another without even trying -- it was something much less than honorable.

They had given her clothing, and new pieces arrived every day. They were semi-regularly taking her out to what she'd been told were training grounds, giving her that chance to run. She'd even mustered the courage to ask about her sword, because she'd wanted to practice -- and that feeling was something she hadn't experienced in years. Training with the plastic blade had been entertaining enough for a child: the teenager had eventually started to see it as an insult, while the exchange student perceived nothing more than an endless exercise in frustration. But now that it could serve as an actual weapon...

But all they'd told her was that it was being moved, and the process was apparently taking a while. The palace was trying to have the blade travel under heavy security: some of that meant using routes no one would ever think to watch, with other portions of the path requiring that the escorts abandon roads entirely. It slowed everything down. And since no magic could be used to speed that movement, the transport needed more time.

They hadn't told her exactly where the sword was, and...

They want me to take it back to Japan. If I go home. (She could try to think of it as 'when,' and doing so sent waves of pain through her soul.) Because they don't want it here, any more than they want me here. They want me to take it back -- but it doesn't mean they'll let me have it. Not for as long as I'm in their nation.

Asking to practice with it had effectively been asking for a weapon, for she was going to be introduced into a nation filled with those who were afraid of her for the second time and... there were certain memories of Japan which made possession of a usable weapon into a comfort. But when it came to any imminent return... the Princesses hadn't said a word.

She didn't know what they intended for the sword, and she was unsure as to whether she should even ask. They were giving her so much: clothing, a chance to run, and those felt like debts which needed to be repaid. But she had no magic of her own, nothing which could fight back against anything fearful ponies might try against her. It was, in some ways, worse than the laws: at least those had offered the opportunity to trade integration for deportation in a single flurry of striking hooves.

She missed her sword, and that was a strange feeling indeed.

Clothing. Exercise --

-- a hoof rapped against the cell's door, followed by what was becoming a very distinctive whinny. It was easy to know when Nightwatch was announcing her arrival, if only because no other pony's vocalizations had so many awkward pauses.

Cerea carefully took the disc from its resting place on the edge of the sink, held it to her throat, and winced in discomfort as silver crawled up to her ear. It was an experience which didn't seem to become any less awkward with repetition, and the nature of the visit meant there was a lot of that ahead.

"I'll be out in a minute," she called as her left hand went for the newest blouse: something tan in hue, and only twice as sheer as she would have wished. (Sadly, this represented an improvement.) "I'm just getting dressed."

"Oh," the mare said from the other side of the cell door. "Um. Take your time. We can start the lesson whenever you're ready."

-- education.

The black pegasus' latest nicker went on for a little over a second. There was a bit of rise to the first part of the sound, followed by a tiny click as the tongue touched the roof of the equine mouth, and the whole thing ended with a hint of snort.

Nightwatch nodded to Cerea, who carefully put the disc back on. The pegasus took a breath.

"'Directions'," the mare supplied, and briefly glanced down at the lesson planner again. "Because you're probably going to get lost a lot. It's a big city, at least when you get close enough to see how big it is." She hesitated. "Um. There's a natural optical illusion at the main entrance. The whole city just sort of dips behind the Gate, so if you're looking at it from a distance, you mostly see the Gate and the palace. Not that you've gotten the chance. But it's most visible if you're seeing everything from Ponyville."

"What's Ponyville?" felt like a perfectly natural question.

"The closest settled zone to us," Nightwatch replied. "You can get there in a few hours on hoof. Less if you're flying, or if you're taking a train." The dark features twisted into what Cerea could now identify as a full wince. "Um. Not that you can fly. And trains might be a bad idea for a while, because it could be a lot of ponies in what's going to feel like a very small space --"

Which was the point where Cerea recognized the need to save the little knight from herself. "Lady --"

"-- where they can't get away from you, except that the pegasi might go out the emergency windows and I guess if the train isn't going that fast yet, some of the earth ponies could just jump for it -- oh... um..."

"-- it's all right," Cerea sighed. Trains -- steam-powered ones -- but not anything automotive. They pull their own carts. A previous vocabulary lesson had established balloons, and Cerea had been proud to hear they existed because they were French. (This had led to a natural inquiry regarding zeppelins. As it turned out, the ponies had them -- and typically treated them as a means for day cruises which carried passengers, refreshments, and very little else because even with magic, the basic rule for a zeppelin remained the same: you could have all the space you wished, as long as you didn't fill it with anything.) But air power, when it came to Equestria, seemed to be mostly limited to the possession of wings. Then again, the ability to control winds meant the potential to make a balloon go where you wanted...

But the disc's desperate, frequently-failed attempt to translate concepts had eventually taught Cerea that there was just about nothing around which was purely mechanical. No airplanes, a complete lack of trucks, and 'gasoline' had apparently been rendered in Nightwatch's ears as 'smelly liquid fire which makes things move when it explodes': that hadn't exactly helped.

Still, there were a thousand kinds of innovation which could be introduced to the ponies -- by a trained scientist holding degrees in at least six different fields, and that worthy would need to either possess a fully-eidetic memory or have arrived carrying a tablet which was holding a full library's worth of reference guides. The latter required working rather quickly, although Cerea supposed the sheer level of improbability which had already been met wouldn't need to stretch all that much to include a solar charger.

She was an exchange student whose truest field of study had been aimed at what she'd hoped would be her eventual knighthood. This meant cultural studies, art, etiquette (not that her lessons there were being allowed to locally hold), combat, and linguistics. Technologically speaking, Cerea knew how to operate a smithy, and the only thing any human ever needed to solve the mystery of Damascus steel was to ask a centaur. Personally introducing the quadruped equivalent of a Model T wasn't going to happen and given what the quest for oil had done to her own world, Cerea suspected the ponies might be better off.

"So the full sentence is 'I need directions'," Nightwatch awkwardly (and only partially) recovered. "Now you try it."

Cerea carefully took the disc off.

It was a tedious process. The only way to hear the full complexities of the pony language was to do so with unaided ears: with the disc on, the overlapping translation masked out some of the subtleties. Learning which word she'd just been given meant letting the wire crawl up the side of her face again, reviewing meant doing it all again for every single term, and it made extended lessons both repetitious and discomforting.

The centaur girl took a slow breath (which didn't sunder anything either), carefully arranging mouth, tongue, and vocal chords into what felt like the proper pattern. ("Sny hinhah cwseeeort," was the closest phonetic approximation to the result and at that, the alphabet was lacking at least six letters. It also presumed that in the event of having gotten it right during an appropriate situation, anyone she addressed would be willing to do something which wasn't fleeing.)

The pegasus proudly nodded, then pointed her right forehoof at the disc. Cerea put it back on.

"You don't even have an accent," the mare declared. "Um. Well, you probably do. Mine. I just don't hear it because it's mine and hearing your own accent is harder than hearing your own voice on a phonograph." A little more hesitantly, "And you're still listening to us when we're outside, aren't you?"

Cerea nodded. She was nowhere near the point where she could guess at what a new word might be through breaking down its components (and it was possible the pony language didn't function that way), but the more familiarity she had with the basic sounds, the better.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," the little knight timidly proposed. "At all."

"Why not? The more exposure, the better: that's the same for mastering any language. I didn't really start to master Japanese until I was hearing people speak it every day --"

"-- because we're Guards," Nightwatch carefully cut in. "And Guards say things."

Cerea blinked. Frowned. "Palace secrets?" was her first guess. "Information which is classified, but everyone can discuss it outside the door because they know I don't understand?"

"Things," the pegasus awkwardly repeated. "Just.. things. Um. Ask me for directions again. I think we need to repeat that one a few times." She glanced down at the vocabulary sheet which had been placed on the center mattress in front of her extended forelegs: Cerea wasn't using the bed, and the mare felt more comfortable on top of the sheets. "We've got nine more words after that. Followed by reviewing the last three nights. And then we'll work on reading some more."

That was easier, because no disc removal was required and it was something Cerea could study on her own. Nightwatch would nose the paper over to Cerea, then read the first word on the list. Cerea wrote down the meaning in French, and then she had her own vocabulary guide. Reading was proceeding faster than speech, in no small part because there were still completely unfamiliar books in the cell and it was giving the centaur incentive.

The little mare softly, unexpectedly sighed, and Cerea's attention immediately focused on lowered ears and a drooping tail. "What's wrong?"

"I'm not good at this," the Guard quietly replied. "This should be done by a real teacher. But the Princesses still can't find one, because just about everypony attending the weather colleges already speaks Equestrian. It's the same for the Gifted School."

Which led to the first phrase Cerea had asked to be taught, followed by her very first word. The ones she'd felt she was going to need more than any others. "I don't understand..." had no companion more natural than "Sorry."

"Weather colleges are for pegasi," Nightwatch explained. "Mostly, and it's not only about weather: it's just what they're called. It's where our strongest master their magic. Sometimes there's a griffon taking notes, because even if they can't do any of it, they want to find out how it's done. Or someone from another nation sits in for a while. But the Gifted School is for unicorns, and it's for their own magic."

"And earth ponies? Where do they study?"

The mare's features were unreadable, and might have remained so long after Cerea learned every basic pony expression. You didn't often encounter someone trying to deal with a concept for the very first time. "...at home? I guess their magic doesn't require a lot of specialized tutoring. You don't need classes in how to be strong, and when it comes to the Effect --"

"Sorry?"

But the mare was fully self-distracted. "-- that's sort of automatic, isn't it? I mean, there's stuff like wasteland. Arcolith can do wasteland. That's part of why she came along, when we were trying to find your arrival point. But I never really thought about where she would have learned it. Maybe it's like a unicorn's trick: she just knew how to do it at the moment her magic appeared...?"

Cerea felt as if she was at least ten questions behind, which wasn't much of a change over the usual eight. "What's 'wasteland'?"

"She gets close to a plant and it dies," Nightwatch stated, and Cerea could hear the sincere admiration in the pegasus' voice. "If she wants it to. It can be better than hitting it with lightning, because a lot of the most dangerous plants are electrically resistant. Um. Probably because we've been fighting them with lightning for so long. But nothing stops wasteland. She just doesn't like doing it because it makes her feel sick." Which was followed by a sigh. "It doesn't change my being a lousy teacher. I don't have the mark for this and sometimes, if you don't have a mark, you shouldn't be doing it at all --"

Twelve questions back, losing ground coming up on the turn. She'd learned what a mark was: the icon near the pony's hips. She understood that it was important, that it seemed to focus magic in some ways relating to a pony's skills -- but it didn't define everything an individual could do, and Cerea had no idea how a pony got one. It was possible that they were present at birth, sorting the entire nation into predetermined castes. Or they could appear later in life, it was possible that some ponies never got one...

But there were hundreds of things she needed to know about, and marks felt as if they were pretty far back on the list. Right now, she needed to learn how to speak and read. And no matter what Nightwatch might feel --

"-- I'm learning," Cerea quietly answered. (She tended to keep her voice low around the pegasus, moved a little more slowly so as not to startle the one who wasn't quite as afraid.) "I think that means you're teaching."

Silver eyes blinked. Slowly, the dark features worked into what Cerea now knew was a pony's smile.

"What else are you doing tonight?"

"One more lesson. Then I have to meet Mr. Guard for more paperwork." Both of which were being done upstairs, because her cell needed cleaning and the best way to do that was for her not to be in it. There were members of the maintenance staff who were aware the lower levels were currently in use, and none of them were even remotely comfortable with the prospect of working while Cerea was carefully cringed into a corner or, given her size, against most of a wall. "And then I'm back here."

"No doctors?"

"Not tonight." The two unicorn stallions had come down on the previous evening, spending nearly two hours in the cell -- and the initial round of questions had centered on herbs. Cerea had already been through one medical crisis (and wasn't entirely sure how it had been resolved): the physicians were trying to prevent a second. This meant asking her what centaurs ate when they were feeling ill. She'd been able to provide a few names, and some of them turned out to be plants which grew in both worlds -- but there were others which seemed to be unique to her own, and she didn't know how to synthesize the drugs which various herds had worked out across centuries of liminal history. At best, she'd been able to give them a mild stomach tonic, two antihistamines, and a rather dubious chance at a sleep aid. They'd already known how to work with willow bark.

"I'll see you when you get back," Nightwatch offered, and inclined her tail towards the nearest bookshelf. "We'll pick up from Chapter Four."

Cerea smiled (while being careful not to show teeth), because the first three had shown it to be a good story. The danger was just beginning to appear on the horizon, but she had some concept of its scope and possessed no idea for how the protagonists would deal with it. She wanted to know the rest and until she picked up a lot more vocabulary, that could only be done through having the pegasus read to her.

"Thank you," she said, because it was the thing she was most thankful for. Just having someone willing to stay in the cell with her, reading a story. The one who wasn't as afraid.

"So what's your next lesson?"

Cerea winced.

"What are you doing?"

"My torso's too low --"

"-- which torso?" the old earth pony mare demanded, and gray-white fur rippled from the sheer indignity of it all. As with every other pony, Cerea could scent the fear rising from that coat, and she wasn't sure it would ever change -- but for this pony, there was a chance that the primary terror had a different source. Spending the vast majority of her life in a society with no room for change had introduced her to those who liked it that way, and she suspected this mare's greatest fear stemmed from the chance that every day wouldn't be exactly like every other: learning that the most recent calendar spaces now included the need to teach a centaur had already fulfilled that. It didn't take the disc to hear Tradition in every word, because Etiquette arose from Tradition and when the mare spoke, so did the capital letters.

This was etiquette training, because Someone Who Is So Different needed to be among the Common Folk without Disturbing Them Any More Than Necessary. It meant learning about body posture, and so much of that was natural to Cerea -- for a certain majority percentage of her form.

Ponies had their own body language, and some of that matched Cerea's own. But there were other sapients who had to learn how to go among ponies, communicating as naturally as possible, and that meant cross-species etiquette advisors existed. Cerea suspected this specimen was a permanent part of the palace staff, and so might be similar to what was encountered in the United Kingdom before a meeting with the Queen: this is where you stand, you can only raise your head to this angle, and you never, ever spoke first. This was an etiquette advisor who had apparently met dozens of visiting dignitaries, hastily training bipeds and quadrupeds alike before meetings with the two royals could begin. The mare was used to all of that --

"The upper," Cerea awkwardly said. "I'm dipped too low." The bra wasn't fully designed to prevent that angle of movement. "I'm..." and the blush began to rise "...sliding. This is just blocking --"

"So use your left foreleg! As a Civilized mare would!"

"My legs don't bend that way," the girl desperately protested. "Ms. Manners --"

"-- then what exactly," the mare huffed, "are we supposed to do with your arms?"

-- but her training was intended for those who either had a pair of legs and arms each, or four legs and 'arms' were distant rumor. Cerea's natural count was four legs and two arms added to a single perpetual burn of embarrassment and no matter how Ms. Manners worked the math, the centaur wound up being over the limit.

"This," the earth pony stated, "is ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. How is anypony supposed to operate under These Conditions?"

Cerea, whose too-low dip was progressively causing more and more blonde hair to slip in front of her face, was starting to ask the same question. And some of that fall was now dragging on the floor because she really needed a trim, plus this wasn't a good position to be holding, her forelegs were bent far too much, but she still had an arm free and there was a table edge nearby. If she could just brace herself with the palm --

"What is that arm doing?"

"It's --"

"-- I am certain," the mare declared, "that if I was so Unfortunate as to possess arms, I would know where they were at all times. Seeing as how they are rather permanently attached and since they are extending from your shoulders, I don't know how you're losing track of them." Followed by, in the tones of highest offense, "Also, in that position, with your arm outstretched, your horns would be gouging the edge of the table. Are you aware of how old that table is? The damage you would be doing to a Historic Heirloom of the nation itself?"

"I don't have horns..." A dark thought was allowed to flash a frozen image within inner vision.

You could have gotten Tionishia. She has a horn.
She would have curtsied. Bowed. Jumped up and down in delight just to meet you, because I'm pretty sure she would just love ponies. It wouldn't be Etiquette, but it would be Sincere.
You would also be down by one chandelier and most of what's in that china cabinet, because when an ogre jumps up and down, the vibrations have to go somewhere.
Oh, and then there's Rachnera. You would either be bound in silk by now or trying to figure out a courteous position for pedipalps. The silk would be easier.

"I fail to see how that is My Problem," Ms. Manners huffed. "I am pointing out what would happen if you did. So you should avoid that, in case you ever do." The mare sniffed. "Six limbs. Six and one or more forehead protrusions would naturally be next, if only because the world sees a lifetime of Service to the Thrones and wishes to punish it. So I fully expect you to grow a horn, as that is what would inconvenience me. Move your hand."

"I -- " Her foreknees were beginning to shake. "I should straighten up --"

"-- a proper Greeting Stance," the earth pony stated, "would not straighten until released. And would be performed using one torso." She took a measured, angry step closer. "Move the hand."

Cerea moved.

Then she moved again, with the second shift considerably more involuntarily.

"OW! HOW DARE YOU! THE PRINCESS WILL HEAR ABOUT --"

"Sorry!" About several things and her new position wasn't the least of them, because her torsos were connected and the only way for the upper to slam into the floor like that was to have the lower assume a posture which could only be maintained for a split-second before the whole thing crashed sideways, which was why that one presumably-equally-important-bench wasn't any more and the china cabinet had gone through the sort of internal redesign generally associated with a color-blind earthquake. "I'm sorry! I'm --"

And she was in fact sorry about the damage, along with how horribly awkward she looked and the chance that someone who wished to be a knight wouldn't be able to learn etiquette. There just happened to be a moment when she wasn't completely sure she felt the same way about the inadvertent snout slap.

"Have you ever been arrested?"

She was still learning pony expressions. Body posture was easier: so many of those echoed the horses she knew, while others could be found in centaur forms. This one told her that Crossing Guard was tired, and it also let her know that absolutely nothing had changed because he'd been tired during every meeting.

He was part of the Solar staff, and Cerea now understood that to be those who worked the majority of their hours during the day. But he'd been coming to the palace at night, because that was when he was available. For Cerea, it was a little easier: she had to be fully alert during Nightwatch's teaching sessions, and so her waking time had slowly been sliding into the Lunar shift. But he was seeing her after having already put in a full workday, just to make sure her paperwork was sorted out. That everything was legal, and that was part of what made him tired.

"Er," Cerea said.

Her answers usually made it worse.

"So you've been arrested," the weary unicorn stallion translated from the awkward. His eyes briefly moved around the temporary workroom, visibly searching marble walls for something which might save him from the details. The decorations had nothing to contribute.

"...yes. A few times." Which was being rather generous towards 'few,' along with mortally offending any dictionaries in the area.

Steadily, "Any convictions?"

"...no." Technically, the entire household had once been assigned community service, but it had been revoked after the community had realized having seven inexpert liminal girls trying to serve it wasn't the best idea. (No one had ever figured out what Suu had done to the park's flower clock, although Papi's signature had been writ large in talon scratches all over the merry-go-round.) "It was mostly just temporary holding."

"Mostly," Crossing Guard repeated. A bright red corona briefly flickered around his horn, and another piece of paper came off the top of the desk's tall stack. Three meetings had brought it about a third of the way down, and Cerea wondered why the light was showing spikes around the edges.

"The mother of one of my friends had us imprisoned for a while," Cerea awkwardly said. "Without charges."

The unicorn took a slow breath, and a "Because...?" beckoned Cerea to her doom.

"Because she's the queen of her people and she can do that. Until someone finds out about it, anyway." The blush was working its way towards her neck. "There was nearly an international incident once we got out, and some countries stopped taking exchange students from her area. A few more cut off trade. Because she's --" it was hardly polite, but Meroune had given her permission to say it "-- sort of... crazy?"

The previous breath was repeated. There was a chance that it had been exactly the same breath, because the head of Immigration didn't seem to be getting any oxygen out of it.

"A queen," he carefully attempted to summarize. "Put you in a cell."

"With my friends," Cerea added. It would have been 'helpfully added', but she wasn't really sure it was helping.

"With no charges."

"And then she tried to drown us," the centaur girl said, mostly for the sake of completion. "But it all set off a lot of political problems. It's not as if there's going to be a war, but no one wants to deal with her now."

"Because," the pony tried, "she's crazy."

Cerea nodded.

"And you're friends with one of her children. Still."

Again, only with extra awkwardness.

"That's queens for you," Crossing sighed. "I think I can put that down as 'detainment only'."

"...okay," was the best she could initially do, and the eventual "Thank you," felt ill-timed.

The unicorn slowly shook his head: a mane which had already become disheveled over the course of too many normal work hours failed to settle back into any kind of groomed position. "I'd normally say we had an advantage here, since it's apparently impossible for anypony to contact your homeland and check any of this," he said, "but it also means I'm relying on you to be completely honest with me."

"I'm trying --"

"-- I believe you," he crudely interrupted. "Some of what you've been saying is too embarrassing for anyone to just make up."

The hornlight picked up a quill, and he scribbled a few things on the paper. The only word Cerea recognized was 'No.'

"Is anyone --"

"-- anypony --" came in on the downbeat.

"-- going to try and check?"

"Yes," Crossing Guard starkly said. "I would reasonably expect that when the palace sees fit to grant a centaur immigrant status, somepony is going to investigate -- no, wait. I lied."

Cerea, feeling he hadn't, just waited for the rest of the sarcasm.

"It's going to be a plural. Lots of someponies. Combing the world for hints of a centaur nation and when they can't find one, they'll just use the lack of confirmation as freedom to start some really interesting rumors." The spikes around the enveloped quill began to display ragged edges. "We're going to do our best to suggest you're a singularity: something which isn't likely to be repeated. But they already know about Tirek. One is an aberration. Two gets that much closer to population. It means ponies are going to be looking for the third through thousandth, and some of the papers will tell them to check in every shadow." He snorted. "They'll have a nation in their heads, too many of them, and the invasion will start from their own closets. We'll be lucky to keep things at one riot..."

She'd been trying not to think about that, ponies getting hurt because of her, and so she desperately tried to change the subject. "I understand why they'd be afraid of more centaurs --"

"-- oh, good," was the desert-dry response. "You understand."

"-- but maybe if you implied a mixed nation? One where I'm just part of a really small minority? That's how it was in Japan." Which was when the idea kicked her in the right flank. "What if you said I was a diplomat from that country --"

"-- if you're looking for diplomatic immunity," and he ignored her frantic nod, "we don't use it. Too many problems. And even if we did, we'd need an exchange of papers between nations. Also an exchange of diplomats. So we're forging a country out of paperwork and asking somepony to get lost for what might be a very long time. And again, somepony's going to go looking." More scribbling ensued, and Cerea's twitching ears picked up a tiny cracking sound from the quill. "That's this section done. Next up is --"

A sheet floated down from the stack. He glanced at it.

The words were far too quick. "-- we can skip this part for now." And the next piece of paper slammed down on top of the ignored one.

"What is it?" Because there was a new scent in the room, something which had only arisen when he'd seen the words. "Is there a problem?"

"It's something we can't deal with yet," he harshly declared. "We'll answer this one when the time comes. And that time isn't now."

He smells worried...

Had there been anything on that page she'd recognized? One small word had looked vaguely familiar, but it had been covered so quickly --

"It's not a concern at this time," the unicorn stated (and now that scent was increasing). "Leave it at that. We've got enough of this to get through as it is." He glanced at the covering sheet. "Which brings us to detailing your previous travels --"

It was a half-second away from being a simul-wince.

"-- through nations nopony has ever heard of," Crossing Guard finished, "in a place we can't reach."

The quill broke in half.

The hornlight winked out. Separate sections of feather dropped onto different parts of the page. The ink simply went everywhere.

"I'm going home," the unicorn stated. "It's been too long a day for this, and I'm not going to let it become too long a night on top of it. I'll take you down to the cells, and then I'm leaving."

"We're supposed to call for a Guard," Cerea quickly said. "To bring me down --"

"-- I know where the cells are," Crossing Guard snorted as he started to turn away from the desk. "I've also been in the palace enough times to know how to reach them. And you, as an immigrant to Equestria, are my charge, which means that in appropriate circumstances, you follow my orders. I want to go home and I'm not waiting half an hour for somepony to finish their wake-up juice break. So I'm giving you an order. Follow me."

He had authority and in that, he was much like Ms. Smith. With both officials, the alternative to doing what they ordered was to not do it. In fact, you could expect to never do anything they told you again, only at a distance of several thousand kilometers: the explanation for why you hadn't done it would be directed at a parent, who really wouldn't want to hear any of it because Cerea would have failed.

Her eyes briefly closed as her head dipped forward, and she meekly followed her superior out of the room. Eight hooves began to work their way down what was becoming a familiar corridor. Cerea had been brought through what felt like every cleared backroad for the lower levels of the palace, and that meant she knew to turn left --

-- he turned right.

"It's that way," she risked, and let one arm point because that was just part of what arms were for and if the disc hadn't made another mistake, then Ms. Manners was the worst-named pony in the world.

"It's faster this way," the unicorn countered. "That path winds around too much."

"But --" was an even bigger risk.

"I'm pretty sure I gave you an order."

Cerea knew about orders. Her herd had a great need for formality, and one of the ways it ensured the maintenance of a confined community was through expressing ideas as orders. And she had been in training to become a knight, you couldn't even think about that kind of goal if you weren't willing to do what your liege commanded...

A knight had to know everything about orders. And the first thing the books taught you --

"It's the wrong thing to do."

"So is losing your paperwork," Crossing Guard darkly said. "Mostly because I'd have to fill it out all over again, from scratch, and we'd also lose all that time. But it's an interesting thought. Now are you coming or not?"

I'm not supposed to move around the palace by myself.
There's supposed to be at least one Guard, or one of the Princesses. And there always has to be some warning.
This is wrong.

A knight obeyed orders. But a knight also had an obligation to evaluate those commands. And that was why the books taught you to watch out for the stupid ones.

"I --"

He snorted, and did so at the same moment his horn ignited. A spiking red loop of light projected around her right wrist, then yanked.

It gave her an instant impression of his strength, or at least the amount he was committing to the effort. His current power didn't match that of the dark Princess: in Cerea's opinion, he wasn't capable of lifting her. But that didn't seem to matter very much, because she had no natural defenses, no way to get the light off her body, and what strength he did have had just yanked on her arm.

She felt the strain in her right shoulder, and instinct shifted her forward in the name of preventing injury. But he kept pulling, not even looking at her, angry hooves pounding against marble as he marched ahead, and her own hooves were skidding --

"-- we shouldn't be doing this!" she tried again, because words were most of what she had left. Cerea didn't know if it was possible to fight against the pull, to break the light with effort instead of sword, or what would happen to the unicorn if she somehow managed it. That seemed to make talking into the primary option. "There's a reason --"

Another snort as he went around a corner, she wanted to plant her hooves and push backwards, so much of her wanted to test and see what happened next, but he was her superior and the order was stupid and she didn't know what disobedience would bring --

"-- bad things happen when you go out of bounds!" Cerea gasped, and that was where words momentarily ran out because the next yank felt as if it had almost dislocated her shoulder. She had to go forward, just to stop the pain. "We can't --"

It put her around the corner, into a part of the palace she'd never seen. It let her get a view of the unicorn's corona, the light now oddly double-layered around the horn, with the lower portion fading towards white.

It also gave her a view of the opening door. The unicorn mare who casually poked her head out into the corridor, a pony she'd never seen before, one whose expression took no effort to recognize as a sneer.

She automatically looked to the left, checking the hallway. Examined the right --

-- there was a moment when she had only seen Crossing Guard, and Cerea didn't recognize the way in which that sneer began to distort. The air currents in the corridor were wrong for her to scent any degree of confusion, and no pony around her had behaved in a
manner which would let her learn disdain.

Then the mare spotted Cerea.

There was a scream.

It was a very familiar scream, because Cerea had heard it coming from more than a dozen pony throats at the moment she'd vaulted the greenery into that first town. It was loud, it echoed, it lost nothing to the sound of desperately-racing hooves, and it seemed to go on for a very long time.

The unicorn stallion blankly stared after the now-departed source, and the loop of light vanished from Cerea's arm, even as the sound of hooves pounding towards them began to cut through the noise.

"You were trying to tell me," he slowly said, "that the Guard makes sure the path is clear before you move. That anypony who sees you is a pony who already knows you're here. That's right, isn't it?"

"...yes." She had to fight the urge to rub her shoulder, and was rapidly losing the battle against the one which insisted that she cry.

Softly, "I'm sorry. I should have thought about that. I should have listened. I --" and his spine slumped "-- treated you like you didn't know anything. Like a disobedient child." Barely a whisper now. "Why would I...?"

"Mr. Guard?"

"Bad things happen," the unicorn quietly continued, "when I try to get home. I'm sorry."

"Who -- who was that?"

"That," the stallion said, "was the worst-case scenario." His ears moved in concert with Cerea's, orienting on fast-approaching ponies. "I'll tell the Princess exactly what happened. I'll make sure she knows it was my fault. But this was supposed to be about introducing you to the nation, when everything was ready..."

His head slumped, and did so at the same moment the hornlight vanished.

"I'm not going home, unless the Princess fires me. And even then, I'll ask for one last shift. Nopony's sleeping much tonight," Crossing Guard quietly declared, and did so at the moment a panicked Nightwatch came flying down the corridor. "Because there's only one chance to make the smallest portion of this work again."

It felt like far too many other moments in her life. Every last one had her knowing what was coming next, feeling it was all somehow her fault, and finding herself with no means of stopping it...

"You're making your debut tomorrow."

Loathsome

She had been told to remove the translator: something which had come across as being all too close to a true order. And so when it came to speech alone, she could not truly understand what the dark Princess was saying to Crossing Guard in the empty conference room, not for more than one hard-learned word in twenty. Every so often, a soft conjunction or understated definitive article would rise from the flow of tightly-controlled neighs and whinnies, and their weight would press down on the black mane, put a middle-aged head that much closer to collapsing into its own neck.

He was staring at the floor as she spoke, with Cerea motionless on his immediate left. The black tail was completely still, and there seemed to be just a little more grey in his muzzle.

None of the dark mare's vocalizations were particularly loud. Her hooves did not scrape at the floor, and the horn never approached another's flesh. But the temperature was slowly, steadily dipping with every new set of incomprehensible words, eventually reaching the point where Cerea's right arm automatically went up in the usual pointless attempt to hide the results. And while the unknown terms themselves seemed steady and even...

She had the option of watching the mare's posture, even when all that indicated was simple calm. Scent told her very little, especially when the miasma of fear and shame rising from Crossing Guard blocked out so much else, and anything which came off the dark mare tended to die in the cold. But there was also that strange mane and tail, something no other little horse possessed, and no matter how the words came across...

The four minutes of questioning had seen several flares. A number of constellations had rearranged themselves. Cerea, who had never taken the strongest interest in astronomy, technically became the first centaur in over four centuries to directly witness a supernova and distantly considered the occasion wasted.

The actions of the false stars seemed to serve as a reflection of how the Princess truly felt. But all the girl could do was stand silently, with her left hand fallen limply open and her own head down, excessive hair occasionally falling before her eyes. Trapped in a room with artwork she didn't seem to be capable of appreciating, with benches she couldn't rest upon and books she was unable to read, listening to words she didn't understand coming from someone whose mood she fully recognized.

To Cerea, the mare was expressing the soft rage which came from someone who was dealing with a fundamental level of incurable disappointment and so in the whole of that strange world, she was the most familiar thing.

Finally, there was something which seemed to be a last word. This was followed by the mare's head tilting right, with the horn indicating the door. And Crossing Guard, never raising his gaze from silver-shot marble, slowly trotted out, a half-limp left hind hoof wearily nudging the door shut behind him.

The dark Princess shifted her head again: the horn pointed towards the translator, its wires strewn across the table. Cerea slowly reached over (which required an awkward lean) and put it on.

"I will have somepony take you back to your quarters," the mare softly told her. "I advise you to gain whatever degree of rest you can. There are matters which need to be arranged, and doing so with expedience will require Princess Celestia to join the effort."

More hair fell in front of her face. A natural consequence from having her chin drop so harshly.

"I'm sorry --" was automatic, and rather well-practiced.

Just as softly, with no edge to it at all. "-- precisely which of your actions do you feel requires apology?"

Cerea's gaze shifted. Just enough to see steady eyes and stars.

"I am," the dark Princess quietly told her, "rather familiar with fear." None of those false stars dimmed. "Not only the ways it expresses itself, but the myriad of means it will use when attempting disguise. For some, it tries to masquerade as control. For if the cause of terror can be dominated, then how could it ever be something which requires fear at all? I had not believed Crossing to be that sort of pony, but..."

The mare's head dipped, very slightly. She took a slow breath, one which pulled that much more heat out of the room, and then her eyes came up again.

"He told me," she added, "that he felt he had treated you as a child. And he did not understand why. But I believe I do. For there is that aspect of you which echoes us, and so there is also vacuum. Something which will give so many their excuse for disguising fear under the weak trappings of dismissal..."

"I don't understand." Apologies. Incomprehension. Put them together and the pairing seemed to make up ninety percent of her vocabulary.

The mare looked at Cerea's skirt --

-- no: the fabric covering her left hip. Kept looking for three long seconds, and then returned to the girl's face.

(The dark mare could look at her directly. It stood out, especially when almost no one else would.)

"You have no mark," the dark Princess stated. "A pony's form in that portion of your being, if on a scale seldom seem. Almost completely familiar. And no mark. For us, something which indicates youth and a life which has yet to find its direction. But for you... it is the natural state. Permanent. Even in their terror, they will see you existing in a state of perpetual childhood, and it will give them yet another excuse for their actions."

She shook her head. Constellations slowly shifted back towards their original positions.

"Rest, while you still can," royalty continued. "Eat and drink, for you will need strength. There will be a briefing provided regarding some of those you shall be facing. Your part will be played some hours from now, on a fully public stage. But no action of yours created the events of this night, and so there are no apologies required."

The mare turned, began to trot towards the closed door --

-- stopped.

"I did not dismiss him from service," she steadily added. "Regardless of his own repeatedly-stated wishes on the matter. And he will continue to supervise your integration into our society."

"...what?" was all Cerea had.

"He believed that his actions warranted it," the mare stated. "He almost begged for termination of duty. But he has been through much before this night, in the name of that duty. He recognizes his error, and..."

The dark tail twitched.

"...I would rather have you watched by somepony whose duties have become that much personal," the Princess told her. "By a stallion who knows that he must correct for his behavior. That he has an obligation to do the right thing." Her ears flexed, rotated slightly backwards. "In the modern vernacular, centaur, he owes you one. Perhaps several. And I believe he will do whatever is necessary to clear that intangible debt. Wait here for your escort: I shall see you before the press conference begins."

Dark energy opened the door. What felt like a fully unnoticed back kick made it vibrate in its frame for nearly ten seconds, and it took longer than that before the last echoes of impact faded away. The girl stayed where she was, shivering in the new cold. Forced herself to stay that way, until the sound of hoofsteps was gone.

And then her hands were clenched, her upper ribs were heaving, she was gasping for air over and over but she couldn't seem to retain anything for more than a few seconds, lungs unable to process basic functions while the Second Breath became an impossible rumor, her eyes were streaming and she was beating her hands against the table as her hooves cantered in place, legs fully beyond her control as the panic attack (the first in so many years) tore through her and a voice which could duplicate so many sounds rose and fell through an orchestra of agony, never finding a single word before settling into a final note of despair...

The sheer duration of the elder's life had allowed her to learn many truths, and her sister's presence in the rather plain bedroom served to reassert one of the most basic: nopony ever woke somepony up at that hour for a good reason.

The briefing was fairly quick. (She'd also learned that the biggest disasters didn't require that much time to summarize.)

"All right," the elder began as powerful legs kicked the last of the blankets away, because nothing was all right and so it was best to get that lie out of the way immediately. "The first hoofstep is not letting the Tattler have the benefit of an exclusive."

The younger nodded. "Fortunately, we have some time. She managed to slip out of the palace before anypony knew what had happened --"

"-- starting from a section she wasn't supposed to be in," the white mare groaned, carefully planting huge forehooves upon well-worn carpet. "I am more than sick of having her sneaking off, Luna, poking around in every corner she can reach for something she can distort. And she's actually got something for once, something real, something she's going to use --"

"-- several hours from now," the younger quickly cut in. "She is incapable of teleportation, and the Tattler is reluctant to cover the expense of an air carriage, let alone having a more talented caster deliver her to the gatehouse closest to their offices. That means she likely galloped the whole way, and she is not particularly fleet of hoof: by my estimate, she is still slightly short of the building. Once she arrives, the article itself requires regurgitation --"

"-- writing --"

"-- I chose the more accurate term. Additionally, there is likely to be a sketch with carefully-added inaccuracies, and all of that must be placed within the printing machinery. Most likely displacing whatever had originally been intended for the front page, as nothing else may now take that space."

The elder nodded as she gained her hind hoofing: yellow briefly projected in the general direction of casually-discarded regalia, then winked out in favor of other priorities. "They can't publish a morning edition without operating in your hours, and there's only so fast they can work. We'll get the staff to send a short piece to every paper -- including the Tattler, since they'll need something to bury under the weight loss ads. Telling them we have her, we're introducing her --" A brief frown covered a portion of the rising fear as the white mare began to head towards the doors. "-- not at sunrise: there's no way we can have everything set up by sunrise --"

"-- Moon-raising," the younger suggested. "The beginning of my hours, the end of yours. We flank her together, at a time when both of us are truly capable. And it will be a true press conference, so the meeting will take place in my Courtyard."

"Which gives us a full day with the news racing across the continent," the elder reminded her sibling. "So the next missive is for the Canterlot police. We'll send Guards out to coordinate with them. I can drop scrolls into every other police department on the continent, but there's only so many Guards, and even with teleportation escorts working full-time.... we can't send that many reinforcements, we need the majority of our own ponies for Canterlot..."

"They will still know to watch for mass panic," the younger told her with a fully-false calm, hastening to follow the longer stride into the hallway. "Simply being aware that such may occur --"

Darkly, "-- what do you mean, 'may?' I should go into Ponyville myself and have Miranda put the Trio on lockdown --"

"-- will allow them to stop much of it before it truly takes hold." More quickly, "And send an additional round of scrolls, sister: to the weather coordinators of each settled zone."

There were times when each simply knew how the other thought. "Direct schedule override. Damp and chill. Early snow for every team which can arrange it -- Sun's spots, we're going to have a weather-based postponement of a hoofball match, there hasn't been a hoofball rainout in three centuries and the Tide's home crowd comes close to full-scale riot just for a win..." That was worth another groan.

"It cannot be helped," the younger said (and now they were beginning to pass members of the Lunar staff, ponies jolted into full awareness from seeing the sisters moving together at an hour where nothing good could be happening). "Damp, chill, and snow, sister. Being so deep into autumn works in our favor, as the pegasi will not need to create so extreme a shift. It is something which will prevent a few riots from forming."

"Excepting the ones started by ponies who freak out every time the schedule is so much as a degree off," the elder grumbled, because that too could be a mask. "I could wish this was Nightmare Night: at least then, we could have claimed the world's best disguise... Okay. General statement to the press, weather override..." Her mind was still racing, because there were times when directing actions during a crisis was simply a matter of being able to channel panic a little better than everypony else. "Do we risk a separate exclusive?"

The younger blinked, then glanced back at the small parade of ponies who were beginning to trail in their mutual wake. "Your meaning?"

"If we move quickly," the elder tried, "we could have somepony interview her. A direct counter to what's going to be in the Tattler. Her own words --"

"-- she may not be ready for such a personal conference," the younger reluctantly countered. "Especially with no true briefing on what she can say, and what she must not. Additionally, all of it will cost us time: finding the reporter, bringing that one here -- and speech requires its own portion of the clock, as does the transcription. I do not believe it is possible to have it happen and still see the results reach the morning edition."

"Princesses?" came from behind them. "What's going on? It sounds like something just --"

"-- follow us, Moonstone," the younger broke in. "We will have need of you shortly."

"Is it..." A tiny gulp from the shimmer-white earth pony. "is it the centaur?"

"Yes. And it is also not her fault." Now fully aware of the audience, "Princess Celestia, do you wish to make the attempt?"

White legs accelerated to the fullest extent they could risk indoors with witnesses present: some of the less sturdy followers began to drop back. "If we can get somepony in here within an hour, with one of us supervising the entire interview --" purple eyes half-closed, quickly recovered from the wince "-- which is probably going to be the impossible part. Try, but I'm expecting to fail. How many protesters do you think we're going to get?"

Not without dark humor, "What is the current population of Canterlot?"

The elder told her.

"Ah," the younger said. "Subtract the employees of the Bugle and the majority of the palace staff. Additionally, I believe we can trust Fancypants to remain on our side. And there you have the theoretical maximum."

"I wish he was at our side for this," the white mare sighed. "He's still in Trottingham. If we had him unofficially representing the nobles..."

"Can he be safely extracted?"

This time, the purple eyes went up. A dark gaze followed, and then both mares were looking at the ceiling. Or rather, at a tower well above.

"No," the elder decided as they both hit the first down ramp: the ever-increasing retinue braced for the slope. "Not even for this. But I'll get him on board as soon as he comes home. Any other ideas for racing a first-time starter?"

There were times when each simply knew how the other thought, and such occasions were not as frequent as they could have been. The sisters were, in many times, very different ponies. There were aspects in which each reflected the other, added to one in which each carried the other... but that deepest reflection was an ancient one. The centuries had seen both change, although not so much that the mares who had once set out into chaos could no longer recognize themselves in the most secret of inner mirrors.

Still... the same thought could occur to both, and do so within a singular moment. But they wouldn't always act on that thought the same way. The viewpoint of day encroaching into night: the perspective of protective shadow gazing towards revealing light. They were very different mares, and those differences were what allowed the Diarchy to function. Viewpoints which could debate, approach, and reconcile.

Older and younger. The last living links to so much of what had truly happened. Those who had survived.

But they knew each other. They reflected each other. And so this time, both had the same thought, at the same moment. They saw it in the eyes of the other, and so they also saw the instant when each rejected it.

"The thing I would most wish to aid us," the younger darkly stated, "remains useless."

The elder nodded. And with still more ponies desperately trying to follow, they headed for the main conference room. They needed to write, plan, try to cover every contingency while knowing that such was impossible, do whatever they could to stabilize their nation in the face of a phantom threat. Everything which was practical and necessary.

But neither could make herself believe in prayer.

Freakish

The briefing book had been rather hastily compiled. Pictures had been poorly glued to pages: some of the glossy borders went off the edge, and moving the sheets too fast could send the images into distant corners of the cell. Words had been frantically scribbled onto paper, no one had found any time for binding -- and then one of the little horses had remembered that Cerea couldn't read the thing. Nightwatch had been dispatched accordingly, and so Cerea had learned that the creamy yellow drink which scented the breath of so many Guards was called wake-up juice (or at least, that was as close to the real name as the disc could get). The pegasus had spent the final daylight hours in treating it as a substitute for all other nutrition, and her feathers would occasionally vibrate accordingly.

"Can you remember who all of them are?" the little knight frantically asked. "You have to remember who all of them are. Not necessarily their names, but what each one looks like, and the position they'll probably take. Um. The position in their articles. The next articles. The ones after tonight --"

She'd learned Japanese to a (barely) workable conversational level in four months: being constantly surrounded by natives had rapidly improved her fluency. "Yes. But... you said this won't change their minds..."

Silver eyes winced shut. "Um. Not for most of them. But that's because the best ones won't have an opinion -- um..." It was possible to watch inner words frantically rearranging themselves. "I mean, they'll just tell ponies what happens, and they'll keep their own feelings out of it. There's still a few who can do that. But --" The black head lunged forward, sorted out two sheets and eventually recovered the associated photographs. "-- there's the ones who'll come in with their minds made up. Everything which happens... won't, not the way it really did. Not in a way which makes them think, because they've already decided what it means. For starters, Ms. Marshdew is going to support you --"

"-- how do you know?" That seemed important. "Did you speak to her? Has anyone --"

"-- anypony," Nightwatch desperately corrected: something which actually came with a lash of the tail. "You have to try and say that! I can hear it when you say 'anyone!' They're two separate words! 'Anyone' is for someone who isn't a pony, or a really mixed group! And it's going to be just about all ponies tonight --"

The pegasus blinked.

"-- except for the ones who aren't," the little knight groaned. "Sun and Moon, it's going to be Dejected and Gracie at the very least, and nopony put pages together for them --"

"-- who?" Because there were a thousand times to worry about, a million reasons to lock herself in the bathroom (not that any part of a cell locked from the inside, but she could try to jam her hind hooves against the door) and just about all of them had conspired to try and keep her from sleeping -- but a question gave her something to think about for a precious second. Something which wasn't another vision of fast-approaching disaster.

It also let her focus, and that felt as if it was becoming more difficult by the minute. Sheer emotional exhaustion had sent her into collapse shortly before sunrise, and the few inner images which hadn't tried to prevent that turned out to have saved their efforts for jolting her awake again. By her best estimate, she'd gotten about three hours of sleep, and the longest single increment had been twenty minutes.

Centaurs entered REM sleep somewhat more quickly and frequently than humans, and those dreams typically included every sense. It currently didn't seem to be a good thing.

"International press!" It was all too close to a wail, and the sound nearly drowned out that which came from the approaching hoofsteps. "Let me think, let me think... um.... Dejected is going to take the worst possible view, but he's going to base that in facts. He won't try to say you'll destroy the world, because the Princesses will tell everypony you can't and he usually takes them at their word. He'll just say something about how the riots will burn down Canterlot. And Equestria. Maybe the Burning Lands, but I'm not sure anypony would notice."

Her back went tight with fear: something which began at the nape of her neck and ended at the base of her tail, with that blonde fall beginning to frantically lash. "He's..." She was picturing riots now or rather, she was picturing them again --

-- move back for the doors, try to get them closed, the police are supposed to protect us and maybe they won't get through the doors --

Wingtips appeared to be on the verge of wringing themselves. Wingtips weren't supposed to do that. "He's a donkey! Just about everyone in Eeyorus is going to read about his worst-case scenario because that's most of what donkeys come up with on their own anyway! And Gracie won't say much on a first meeting. She'll be watching to see how many times everypony else gets to you, and how often you score something on them, because that'll tell her something about where you stand. She might poke and prod a little, but when it's a group, she prefers to let everypony else do most of the work. And then she'll know if she can dominate you. So remember: Dejected will make everything as bad as possible, but everypony usually ignores him unless he writes something they thought of themselves. And Gracie's going to be like most griffons during a first meeting, only lazier -- we didn't tell you about griffons, Moon's craters, you don't know about how griffons think --"

The more solid of the hoofsteps stopped, and a powerful forehoof pushed open the cell door.

"Picture any group of adolescents attempting to determine where each ranks in a chain of power," the dark mare offered. "One where those who are strongest generally feel they have an obligation towards the weak, the weakest truly need that help, the middle grouping tends to vibrate back and forth within a limited range, and those trapped just below the top link often conspire to fling the current occupant down, because they have yet to understand the responsibility which comes with victory. And now you understand enough about griffons for a first meeting. Especially when it comes to Gracie Topside, whose first response to the appearance of Tirek was to find an interesting perch from which to report on events while hoping somepony else would launch the first interview." She strode into the cell. "As I recall, that tactic bought her some time before her own magic was drained, which amounted to roughly forty seconds. Disrobe."

Cerea blinked, which at least served to distract her from thoughts of talking donkeys and the associated memory of four increasingly-bad movies. (She still couldn't quite reconcile a humanity-free gryphon.)

"You want me to..." they're nude they're mostly all nude all the time so maybe she wants me out there without anything on so I'll be more like them but she wants me to go out there naked

An elderly, bespectacled unicorn followed the Princess in: quavering jasmine light deposited a bundle of cloth on the center mattress.

"Only to your undergarments," the dark mare clarified. "And then put these on."

"Are they holding up, dear?" Corsetiere Garter timidly inquired.

"Um..." It could have come from Nightwatch, and Cerea wished it had. "...it's -- better than anything I've ever had. They've lasted for days..."

"Days?" the unicorn carefully asked.

"Days," Cerea just-as-carefully repeated, because she wasn't sure how to explain about the previous high-activity record: roughly twenty minutes --

-- I charged down my mother.

It had been done in the name of her beloved, to stay with the one whom

I loved him.
He never could have loved me.

she'd wanted, and she still wasn't sure how she felt about that memory. There had been an expression on the elder's face at the moment Cerea had committed to the fight, something which bore traces of the usual disappointment -- but there had also been another aspect. Something the daughter had almost never seen --

"I'll come back to refit you, of course," the old mare said, and completely missed Cerea's tail abruptly knocking most of the papers onto the floor. "I know a growing girl when I measure one. But this will do for tonight."

"If you disrobe," the Princess tightly declared. "Now, centaur. Moon will be raised soon, and most of the attendees have already gathered. Which includes the ones whom the Guards are doing their best to keep outside the Courtyard. We have very little true control over how long this will last, let alone what has already transpired throughout the day --"

"-- what happened?" She had to know. She had to find out if it was her --

"-- we expected fear," the Princess interrupted. "Fear manifested. And because we were ready for its appearance, it did not manage to gather true momentum within the capital. Pockets which were isolated, broken up, and dealt with as individuals. No fatalities, and only a few minor injuries. Do not concern yourself with any of it."

Is she lying to me?

Cerea didn't know. She understood the body language of horses -- but those of her home were incapable of anything more than the most basic falsehood: the lie of calm while a rider mounted, quickly replaced by the joy of sending that human into the dirt. The dark mare was exponentially more complex, and the steady gaze remained unreadable.

"But citizens have the freedom to gather -- although in this case, we have told them to remain outside the palace walls," the Princess continued. "And so a few have come as close as they dare. You do not appear to be disrobing."

There's nothing to be embarrassed about. They don't see me as attractive. They can't --

They only saw her as a monster.

She forced her arms to move, and unsteady fingers fumbled with the buttons of the blouse.

"There," the dark mare directed once the process was complete, watching Cerea's deep breaths with the neutrality of total disinterest. (The intake of air allowed her to smell other ponies, waiting in the hallway. She could scent how frightened they were.) "First the white underlayer, and then the sweater. Pink: what I am told is a calming shade. Fuzzy, to soften your outline. Warrens of angora rabbits were shaved for this, and so it should provide sufficient warmth. It also fully covers you from neck to wrists and upper waist, hiding some of the visible aspects of your strength from those who might be disturbed by it."

She slipped both on. Neither piece had been designed to reveal the slightest hint of cleavage, and both draped loosely. Her breasts created the usual projecting bra-clad shelf -- there was nothing to be done about that -- but the fabric didn't thin from strain as it passed over those curves, and the rest of it gave her upper torso a certain formlessness.

"The skirt," the dark mare directed. "This is somewhat more of a risk. I wish for them to see that which is familiar -- but the more which is exposed, the greater the chance that they will only perceive your physical prowess. So a compromise: the fall comes to the knees." The intensity of the gaze went directly into Cerea's eyes. "It is possible that somepony may inquire regarding marks. Those in Palimyno reported your lack of icon, but there may still be a question as to whether your species has the potential to manifest one. In the meantime, it is best to cover what most would perceive as rather belated absence."

She put it on. Like the sweater, it had a strange softness to it, and the gentle touch felt wrong against tensed fur and skin.

"Did you read the briefing sheets?" A pause. "You had them read to you. Do you recall their contents? Those whom you may be speaking with, at least for what might soon be left of the throng?"

Left? Her voice went with "Yes."

"What you can say," the dark mare continued, "and what you cannot? Remember: we are trying to create a degree of sympathy, at least as far as that might have the potential to exist."

It could be said that the story which the palace had created was a true one. It could also be said that omission was its own kind of lie, and one of Cerea's few intact desperate (and fraying) hopes was that it wouldn't be said tonight. "Yes."

"Then we turn to your hair," the Princess declared, and two slim, trembling mares stepped in. "Kneel."

Cerea carefully lowered herself. Flickering green light and nimble teeth began to work at the loose strands.

"Down the center of her back, and keep it there," royalty directed. "Attempt to suggest the position of a greatly-extended mane. Braid it if you must. Centaur, remove the pins so that they may work freely." Careful evaluation moved to Cerea's covered buttocks. "No more than the lightest curling for her tail: that can stand --" and paused again. "Centaur, do you have a preferred style there?"

He brushed my tail.

"I just... keep it clean," she lied, and tried not to think about the way Nightwatch's silver eyes had just focused on her.

I thought he liked curls.
I thought he could love me.

"It is a fine tail," the dark mare neutrally commented. "Well-proportioned. Excellent fall. I would normally discourage photography designed for the limited interests of a rather selective audience, but in this case, I am actively hoping for at least one pony in the world to consider that someone cannot be such a threat if she has such a fine tail." The evaluation began to move again. "You are clean, and your wounds have healed: that much has been accomplished. Now: you had mentioned that you are capable of scenting when something is safe for you to eat, if not when it is considering attack. Are you capable of consuming wake-up juice?"

"Yes." Although she wasn't sure about the prospective taste.

"Good. Because I am aware that your sleep was limited, and we only have so many edibles which contain natural caffeine. Unless you are willing to risk tea or --" the next word was nearly spat "-- coffee --"

Cerea blinked again.

As a filly, caffeine had been... hard to come by. Just about everything had to be smuggled into her gap in the world, and when it came to tea... those plants didn't grow in France, although the available crops meant the herd had very little trouble flavoring anything which did make it through. Similarly, it had been impossible to cultivate coffee, and just getting a can of soda could be a two-month wait as the shipment moved between double-blinds and drop sites. But then there had been Japan, and...

Caffeine had several purposes in the household. Cerea loved the formality of a tea ceremony, although she was much better with ceremony than tea. Suu simply took the new liquid in through her membrane and because caffeine could be a dehydrator, the next moisture-seeking attack might be a jittery one. Miia typically failed to see that her mix had gone to mauve until the coughing began, Lala indulged in Irish coffee, Meroune preferred tiny sips of wine, few things were more terrifying than the already-energetic Papi on a soda rush, and Rachnera...

The memory almost made her smile. Because Rachnera's body took many things from its spider portion, and one of the most prominent was that caffeine got the arachne drunk. It didn't even take that much: two small cups put her on the ceiling, while four created a slowly-rocking ball of chitin and legs. One which spent most of the night singing off-key.

There hadn't been a lot of opportunities to seek revenge for the frequent bindings while in the household, and one of the few Cerea had ever managed began with an energy drink.

"I can manage coffee," she told the Princess. Coffee where you just trot into a store and look for the right aisle...

The dark mare blinked.

"We will," a sincere voice stated, "try to avoid having the press learn about that. Except for those who might find it to be the greatest commonality. Coffee, then. I shall have some brought to you."

She was starting to feel the weight of the braid against her back. It went poorly with the pressure of everything which was waiting outside.

Twice. This is twice now...

(Technically, it was the third time.)

The dark mare watched, as the hairdressers (manedressers?) made her ready. So did the elderly unicorn, and the little knight who felt like the closest thing Cerea had in the world to a --

"Centaur?" Cerea looked up. (From this position, it was slightly up.) "Something has just occurred to me, and thankfully done so while there was still time to potentially resolve it."

She waited.

Thoughtfully, "Do you have another name? Something we can introduce you by?"

...what?

"I told you my name," was the immediate protest. "In the forest." And with everything which had happened, everything she felt was about to happen, the thinnest sliver of anger began to slip through. "And all you've ever called me is --"

"-- by what you declared yourself to be named," the dark mare quickly countered. "With a touch of what I am assuming to be your native tongue's feminine form, but we lack that and so I turned to the neutral." With what felt like false patience, "I happen to recall a comment regarding the lack of imagination possessed by your parents, and I will keep my hooves planted against that ground." One of those forehooves stomped: half of the cell vibrated. "'Centaur Centaur'. I cannot perceive how they could have made less of an effort. And so it would behoove us to have something else we could introduce you by: a nickname, a fillyhood fancy, anything -- simply to prevent the citizenry from being reminded of your species every time you are addressed."

There were several things she could have done, and flinging the enchanted, suddenly-incompetent disc across the cell felt like it might have been the least of them. Instead, she allowed herself a tiny indulgence on that fast-approaching night, something she so seldom got the chance to do with both complete legitimacy and accuracy.

The girl held her now lightly-shaking position against the cell floor, and silently blamed her mother.

'Centorea'.
The lead family in the valley. One of the oldest, the strongest. So of course we had one of the original surnames.
But then she named me 'Centorea'.
She wanted me to live with that. Every day from the moment I knew what a name was, and what it meant. To live with it, and to live up to it.
Every time anyone addressed me, they told me I was a centaur.
That I had to be a centaur.
That there was nothing there other than a centaur.
She wanted everyone to know that.

As names went, it hadn't been much. However, when viewed as a fervent wish --

-- no.
She doesn't get that.
Not after --

"-- your hands," the dark mare softly noted, "are clenching. When added to the shaking, I would consider that to be an unusual reaction." Just a little more quietly, "If I have given offense, then there will be a time for apology: I recognize that I may have inadvertently trotted upon some level of cultural taboo. But it is a necessary query. I must know if there is anything else they can call you." And once again, the girl missed the true tone. "Please."

"I..."

She swallowed.

Rachnera had happily informed her that it was a town in the northern part of Italy, one which seemingly existed solely for the restoration of furniture, and had saved that little fact for the moment when the centaur's weight had once again shattered an inadequate wooden support. After that, she'd done a little research of her own and discovered it was also half the description for a medical condition, something which generally applied to those in catatonic states. That you could move their limbs to new positions, and they would just -- stay there.

But it was something more than either of those bits of trivia. Because there was a reason she so seldom brought it out, especially when she'd never had any real opportunity to use it within her own herd. After a while, she'd been -- saving it. For the right time, for the right people. A few short, precious months of hearing it, and now...

It meant something, if only to her. It wasn't supposed to be casual. Because the little horses were afraid of her, they were almost all afraid, and to bring that out in front of them...

It was asking an entire terrified world to be her friend.

Blue eyes briefly squeezed shut. Her hands fell open. Pink fabric rose and fell.

"...Cerea."

The dark mare nodded.

"Cerea," Princess Luna repeated. "So it shall be."

Miscreated

Her hoofsteps echoed in concert with the memories.

Smuggled into the area, and teleportation could be viewed as an improvement over being transported in what her nose had quickly told her was a trailer meant for moving racehorses: the manure cleaning had been something less than thorough. Kept out of sight until the time came, and then the procession towards the doors, the chance to step out under open sky --

(It had been the second time.)

-- in front of watching eyes, the world filling in its gaps as introductions were finally made...

...but there was a reason why Cerea had wound up in Japan. It was something which had started at the moment those older doors had opened, it had sent her thousands of miles from what they'd told her had never been her home, and when it happened here (because this time, 'if' felt like the impossibility), she would have nowhere left to go.

So much of the final trot was familiar. The guards escorting the procession were ponies instead of humans? Then they were still guards. And the scent of fear was there, she couldn't believe it would ever truly fade -- but there were other aspects now, ones which had initially emerged from a completely different species. Nervous anticipation. An undercurrent of dread. The terror which only came about when facing the new.

The humans who brought them to the doors had been like that, on that first day of a new world.
Then they had emerged into the true fear.
And then it had all gone wrong.

It was familiar, and so the past tried to overlap the present. Hoofsteps came all too close to echoing boots. The ancient nature of one hallway was easily mistaken for another. She could glance down at Acrolith, see the sturdy earth pony mare clearing the path ahead -- but lose focus for a single second, and the top of the mane would twist into deep blue, gain a thin line of silver-white trim around the peak as a Parisian police officer made a visible effort to keep his right hand away from the grip of the gun.

But the scents were those of ponies, and they kept her anchored within the moment. Swimming through the more recent ocean of fear.

There were other new aspects, of course. The Princesses were trotting at each other's sides, close to the front of the strange procession. (There were Guards in front of them, watching the path -- and more behind Cerea, probably present in the increasingly-likely event that she made a break for it.) On that earlier day, France's president had been nowhere near the conference: for the pony nation, royalty had chosen to directly take the lead.

Their movements were steady. Every hoofstep seemed to have been planned in advance. But looking at the strange mane of the white mare showed the borders of those colors twisting against each other, and the dark Princess wasn't displaying twinkling stars so much as a series of steadily-increasing flares.

The partial armor worn by each had been polished. Heavily, to the point where light bouncing between marble and regalia might have needed nothing more than a slight touch of wavelength compression to successfully lase.

It reminded Cerea of her mother, because her parent was among the strongest and so would often show up at herd meetings wearing highly-polished armor. It tended to be the sort of polish which suggested that the mare wearing it had put in five minutes more than you had (and that even if you put in an extra hour, she would still find a way to go for five over-and-above minutes). The presence of that armor made a statement: the same one the Princesses were silently making. And as with Cerea's mother, it wasn't a suggestion that the protection was actually needed. The message was simpler than that.

Royalty moved through its palace, something where the hallways no longer had any need to be cleared in advance of Cerea's passage. (They had come across a few on the staff who were seeing her for the first time, and she'd tried not to look at the trembling bodies as they pressed themselves into alcoves.) And with every hoofstep, the polished armor told the world We Are In Charge Here.

There were times when Cerea could simply sense the aura which came from power. The Princesses seemed to feel their populace needed a reminder.

A gold-armored female pegasus flew up to the white mare, hovered near her head. "We just got five more, Princess."

"Are the conditions holding?" the regal horse quietly asked.

"We're okay so far." Wing patterns briefly twisted into an awkward sort of flap. "But the rivers are going to be a little low for a while: the weather team wasn't ready for this, and --"

"-- the necessary moisture," the dark mare patiently cut in, "had to be taken from somewhere. And the Courtyard itself?"

"The divide is there for the fall." Back to the white mare. "We could use a little help with the heat, though."

"When I get in there," the taller Princess steadily promised. "I know the Solar shift nearly flew themselves into froth for this, Glimmerglow. I'll do my part."

Two unicorn stallions (one white and slim, the other brown and muscular) briefly registered their presence near Cerea's right flank as a twinned gust of nerves before moving into actual view: eight legs scrambled to reach the Princesses.

"Ready," the white one said as he caught up, with the thick black mane displaying more stability than his voice. "As we're going to be."

"Good," Princess Luna told him. "Because I am certain that we will be hearing at least one question regarding contagion, and it will help to have professionals standing by to declare idiocy. Thank you, Doctor Bear." Her gaze moved towards his partner. "And Doctor Bear, I see your field is carrying -- folded charts?"

The brown stallion nodded. "We're going to try and sell them on sexual dimorphism," the larger unicorn said. "If it becomes necessary. In this case, it helps that she doesn't have cloven hooves or fur on her upper portions, and the absence of --"

"-- should we push her sleeves back?" the taller Princess cut in. "Emphasize the skin?"

He winced. "Princess..."

She managed a smile. "I know: you're a surgeon, not an image consultant. But we might consider doing that at some point."

The nod was a fairly weak one. "Anyway, the idea is that we can't make anypony see her as something other than a centaur -- but by using gender as a dividing line, we may be able to put a little distance between her and Tirek. Best-case, we can add 'subspecies' to that."

"But that won't be easy," the thinner male said. "Not when they both affect magic. Most ponies are going to be thinking --"

His head went up, and slightly to the right. All four legs continued to move at the same pace, and the brown stallion leaned into him just in time to steer the smaller away from the first crash.

"It's still worth trying," Princess Celestia decided.

One more body went past Cerea, head down and horn lit. Some of the wind produced by Nightwatch's wings got through the glow, and the tall stack of carried papers shifted slightly at the top.

"Ready," Crossing Guard told Princess Luna, and said no more.

"Good," she told him. "As we are nearly there..."

The procession moved through new sections of the palace. Cerea still didn't know how large the structure was: just that there were portions where the marble had silver flecking, and that was where she'd spent the majority of her time when out of the cell. Other parts showed gold. There was at least one layer below, many more above, and she couldn't say anything about the view because there had been a policy about keeping her well away from the closed windows -- but it didn't feel like they'd come that far up. There was a chance they were at ground level. And ponies joined the little parade while others moved ahead or dropped back, while all Cerea could was silently keep pace and try to focus on where she was. On the when.

"...are you okay?"

She glanced at the black pegasus, whose near-hover had placed silver eyes directly on the most natural view line. Replied on the same level of whisper. "...no. I do not think that..." She swallowed. "I don't think anyone could be okay right now. But I'm still going to try."

The little knight nodded --

-- and the front of the procession reached two large silver-bordered doors. Portals which faintly vibrated from the accumulated force of hoofsteps, something which had been added to what Cerea's twisting ears insisted was a faint whisper. A whistle of air current around the frame, perhaps, or some tiny intruding fraction of another sound produced by whatever was on the other side...

"Stop," Princess Luna told Cerea, and her hooves nearly tangled in the attempt to hold up. "This is where we leave you for a time. Princess Celestia and I shall initially speak to the press together. While accompanied by selected members of the government and palace staff --"

"-- but if male unicorns had curled horns, you'd never be able to find anypony free on the weekends --"

"-- and thank you, Doctor Bear," the white mare sighed. "We're going to prepare them for you, as best we can. And when we think they're ready, we'll bring you out. So for now, just try to stay away from the doors. We don't want anypony to get a look at you when they initially open, or if somepony needs to duck back in for a minute."

She automatically took two hoofsteps back: one blind spot-occupying Guard shifted just in time to keep from being accidentally trodden.

"This may require some time," the dark Princess stated. "But it is preferable to have you waiting nearby than to create an additional delay through bringing you up from the cell after we are finished. And we will not teleport you, because having you appear from nowhere will undoubtedly exacerbate a number of what we are expecting to be extant issues. Nightwatch?" The little knight instantly focused. "Stay with her. You emerge when she does. However, keep two body lengths between you. A watcher, but not a warden."

"Yes, Princess," Nightwatch evenly replied.

"All right," the white mare said. "Does anypony need a restroom?"

Multiple heads shook. (Cerea decided it wouldn't help.)

"Then we're as ready as we're probably never going to be," Solar royalty wearily announced. "Here we go..."

Light surrounded her horn, projected forward to coat the doors in a shimmer of sunlight-yellow. Pushed, and --

-- Cerea was too far back to truly see anything, especially when trying to look past the bulk of the white body. There was a brief glimpse of patterned stone, the impression of open space beyond, and a blast of sound, so many words that the wire started with a hiss and quickly accelerated towards shriek, dozens of partial syllables twisting within her ears as the cold surged into the hallway, her arm came up and her ears went back and --

"-- wait for us," Princess Luna softly told her. "We will do what we can to clear the path."

Royalty moved forward as large white wings unfurled, began to subtly shift. Part of the retinue followed. The doors closed.

And Cerea waited.

She seemed to have an odd awareness of her own ears.

It was the sort of thing which usually resulted from a rather base level of prank: someone in the household would go up to another one of the girls, whisper "Did you ever realize that you have a tongue?" (or any other portion of anatomy) and in the case of those who had them, they would then spend the next hour trying to rid themselves of the constant sensation that there was a tongue in their mouth and they weren't entirely sure what to do about that. As pranks went, it was fully effective against five-sevenths of the group: Suu could simply reabsorb the part, and Papi had been known to forget about things which were attached.

In this case... when it came to comparing the features of her head against those of a pony, ears were what came closest to matching. But it was, in many ways, a cosmetic similarity: some degree of resemblance in the overall shape, with an added range of motion. Pony ears were just about set towards the apex for both sides of the skull, were larger in proportion to the head than Cerea's and didn't narrow as much or as quickly while moving towards the tips. They also lacked the little tufts of fur at the very ends, and the default position was just about straight up.

For Cerea... her ears didn't have a human shape

ears down and back, under my hair
I'm okay if they don't see my ears

but they did share the placement. (Many little things about human anatomy still shocked her, and the fact that the entire species could only fix on a noise through turning their entire heads was the sort of disturbance which could make obsessive thinking about tongues into an improvement.) It still gave her a fairly good rotational range, and subtle muscles allowed for some small degree of cupping to focus sound. But they were on the sides of her head, and... there were still ponies in the hallway. Nightwatch, and a small selection of observing Guards.

"Do you need anything else to eat?" the little pegasus softly asked. "Drink?"

Her stomach was already churning. "No. But thank you."

The awkward pause hovered on Cerea's right. "Do you want... um... anything?"

I want to go home.

"Different ears," was what actually slipped out.

"Um. ...what?"

Because it was harder for her to press her ear against a door. She couldn't exactly do it subtly --

-- all right, it wasn't as if humans were all that subtle about it either. But at least their ears had been designed for a better fit. In fact, now that she thought about it (because it was so much better than thinking about what might be going on outside, or remembering what once had), it was as if whatever had created humans had basically said 'You know, eventually, these two-legged things are going to be listening at doors, assuming they can ever think of them. We'd better set something up in advance.' Meanwhile, she had to rotate, and then she had to cup at best she could so as not to miss any sound which might make it through, and then she had to figure for the fact that she wasn't exactly casually leaning against the wall in order to acquire that position in the first place, plus there were awkward angles of head and neck to consider, one shoulder was probably curled inwards and as for what was probably going to wind up happening to that one breast...

"...nothing," Cerea sighed, because she also wasn't supposed to be anywhere close to the door and listening at the wall wouldn't do much.

She had been straining to pick up sound from the outside. Hear any portion of what was going on. But just about nothing reached her: at most, she occasionally got a tiny susurrus, the undercurrent babble of voices without any meaning.

They were talking about her, where she could not hear them. There had been times when the herd had done that, speaking in what was meant to be perfect privacy just before her mother had arrived, wearing armor polished to a level which could blind --

"It's been a while," Nightwatch observed, perhaps under the delusion that doing so would somehow help. "About forty minutes, I think."

Cerea's hooves briefly cantered in place against the marble.

"Um," the little knight continued. "I didn't think it would be this long. But there's a lot to talk about. I guess it could be this long. Since it already has been. Or it could be longer --"

The heavy left-side door opened. A lesser cold trotted through, with warmth close behind -- but very little sound followed them. There was a distant sort of rumble, something rising and falling as it worked with the need to stop for more oxygen. But for that which most immediately awaited them, the world seemed to be holding its breath.

"We took it as far as we could," the white mare quietly told the waiting group. "And we got them quieted down. They're as ready as they're going to be, and -- that may not be ready enough."

"Some things arise from instinct," the dark Princess said, with that steady gaze focusing on Cerea's eyes. "And when the herd decides that the time for thinking may have ended, not all will be capable of retaining rationality. You..." A slow breath, and a single wisp of fog rose from her fur. "...are likely about to see something which we did our best to prevent. A reaction. Because in the most realistic outcome, all we accomplished was to convince the strongest among them to hold their ground."

"Please don't judge them," the white mare softly asked. "Not for this. Nearly all of them live in Canterlot, and... just about all of them were attacked. Seeing you for the first time -- it won't ever be any worse than that. But we're going to do exactly what we discussed. Trot out with you. I'll be on your left. Princess Luna will be on your right. Without fear."

They said they would stay with us...

And the words slipped out. Just barely a whisper, only audible in the near-silence of the marble hallway -- but they emerged, and so they could never be taken back.

"...are you afraid of me?"

Her hands immediately went behind her back, clutched at each other as her head went down, and blue eyes closed with shame.

Something touched her right flank, poking lightly against the skirt. A wingtip, barely registered and visibly unacknowledged.

"No," Princess Luna said. "We are simply afraid for you. Arms at your sides. Hands open. Matching our pace. With us now, Cerea."

The brown ears twitched.

'Cerea.'
She called me --

It didn't mean anything. It was the only thing the disc wouldn't render as 'centaur'. It didn't represent the near-sisterly bustle of the household, or a quiet word from the one she had so hoped would be her love...

But she had heard her truest name, and so her eyes opened again.

Flanked by royalty, in the company of a true knight, Cerea walked into the light.

Too much light.

It should have taken hours of careful thought to fully reconstruct the events of eight seconds, something which would have been further slowed by the steady heat of humiliation. Under normal circumstances, there would have been no way to track events as they were happening, not even for someone with a lifetime of knightly training: there was simply too much happening at once.

But nothing was normal about that night, and the newest level of strangeness began at the moment the moon's light touched her, streamed across skin, sweater, and fur in something close to a caress before it reached down to her core and yanked.

Time slowed. Every sensation intensified. Instinct surged towards the master controls and did its best to shove Reason into the stinking trailer.

The moon was full.

It was the first thing she was aware of: for an endless horrible instant, it was the only thing she was aware of. And she didn't know what this world's lunar cycle was, but she had been outside for exercise at the track, the sky had been visible and the moon...

She recognized that it should not have been, and did so in a moment when she was trying to reconcile anything but that which came from her senses, every channel of input turned up beyond its maximum. But nothing she could do would make it anything other than what it was: the clearest, largest full moon she had ever seen. It was something which put all supermoons to shame. It didn't dominate the sky: it almost was the sky. It gave her a perfectly clear view of every crater, it was something which would have given an astronomer fits as they tried to make the choice between once-in-a-lifetime observations or pointlessly trying to flee before that life ended, and it probably would have made Papi screech about how it was the third day again and the harpy still didn't have the right masks.

It was something which existed at any moment when night was upon an occupied Lunar courtyard, and she had no way of knowing that. She only felt the heat surging under her skin as her heartbeat accelerated, lungs working so smoothly that the Second Breath would be the product of a casual wish. The moon was full, and...

Almost every liminal had that dubious relationship with the orb, although the exact nature of the channel and its results would vary. With centaurs... with Cerea, it was an amplifier. On the first night under a full moon in Japan, she had still been looking for a host family. She'd been granted an unusual degree of freedom to begin with: most of the exchange students could only venture out if their government-assigned host was with them, but the herd (or rather, her mother) had convinced the program that a centaur needed to find her own match, and so Cerea had begun her search. She still wasn't sure if toast would have changed the results.

That had been the foremost thought at the moment the light first touched her in Japan, and so it had seemed perfectly sensible to extend her search into the night. All night, every night until the moon waned again, and what she'd mostly learned was that patrolling police officers liked to check IDs multiple times (while having no interest in hosting, despite a knight's obvious match with law enforcement), while the majority of those stumbling home at that hour were good for nothing else. But in the household, during that time when it had just been her (failed) beloved, Miia, and Papi... she had been thinking about... the same thing as the other two girls. She'd just hung on a little longer before the desire had overwhelmed her, had even told herself that she was just entering his bedroom in order to defend him -- but there had been two rivals, she had to be the one who claimed him, she couldn't come in second and --

-- what would have happened, had she beaten them? She didn't know. She had never faced her instincts on that level before, not when the males of her own species repulsed her, and she had lost. But she knew what the worst case was. The thing which had seen her cage herself during every full moon which followed.

It wouldn't have been seduction.
It wouldn't have been love.
It would have been horror.

It had taken some time before the shame had pretended to fade, something which had been true for all of them: even Papi understood how bad it had almost become, at least once sunlight had returned. Every full moon after that had seen the girls locking themselves away, trying to keep him safe, and each successive new addition to the household had agreed to follow that code. He had escaped them once, and only the belief that he had been injured had shocked them back to their senses. They couldn't risk having it ever happen again.

But he was gone. (She was still telling herself that he never could have loved her.) There was no desire. The moonlight reached within her, and what it amplified was desperation, frustration, the anger which she had been repressing from the moment she'd learned that there might not be any way to return home and there was the possibility of spending the rest of her life as the only one of her kind, friendless and loveless in a world which reeked of fear.

It reached all of that, and the mix which had been building from the moment of her arrival surged.

Less than a second, and she was struggling to hang on. To remain a being of thought instead of turning into something ruled by instinct. (The Princesses had yet to realize something was wrong, hadn't had enough time to pick up on the change in her breathing.) But there was so much else competing for her attention, every sense fully open, and in the endless moment when the light first touched her, she registered every last bit of it.

Look to the sky and there was the moon, the largest and fullest moon any centaur had ever seen. A circle of small, exceptionally dark clouds which nature never would have allowed to be so close to the ground, and those were about to become important. But beyond that, there was only swirling white.

She had seen some of what the little winged ponies could do during the first fight, and Nightwatch had tried to explain a few of the intricate ways in which pegasus magic worked. Cerea now understood that the species had some capacity for controlling the weather, something which became easier when done by groups (although for some yet-unknown reason, the groups couldn't be too large). She'd seen the dark Princess casually adjust the temperature with a few flaps of her wings, and felt the mare's anger chill the world. But this was another level entirely, autumn night forced into something close to blizzard. Cold and wind and blasting snow, nearly whiteout conditions -- but they were something which existed only beyond the boundaries of the courtyard.

(They were entering a courtyard, one which had been paved with huge flat opalescent stones. She was just starting to register that: the ornate columns which set the borders for the vast open perimeter, the benches set out for those who had assembled there. Easily sixty meters across the most narrow portion, perhaps double that for the widest part of the oval.)

Where she was... brisk, a little breezy, and both conditions seemed to microscopically mollify with every shift of a white feather. But outside the courtyard, snow was coming down in sheets. It seemed to have been doing so for some time: a carefully-shoveled (plowed?) path indicated where the majority of attendees had entered, and there was something which vaguely resembled a huge open-faced copper grating next to that corridor: the snowpile next to it was steadily melting.

Autumn within the courtyard, winter beyond, and not a single snowflake reached Cerea. (She would have welcomed the cold. Anything which calmed the inner fire.) And somewhere within the surrounding storm, there was shouting, echoes pulled across the space between worlds to emerge anew from pony throats, and she realized too late that her first look at the gathering was actually a desperate search for yellow vests.

But there were none, although some of the ponies were still dressed for the weather which lay beyond the invisible border: others had placed their heavy jackets underneath the sturdy wooden single-occupancy benches. One was still moving down a wide, carefully-arranged aisle. A few were wearing hats, and what she guessed to be band-trapped press passes rustled lightly in the breeze.

None of them were shouting. (Those vocalizations were the property of the protestors, somewhere out in the white, and she distantly wondered at the level of dedication required to keep a protest going in that.) They weren't speaking at all. They had simply all focused their complete attention upon her, doing so at the instant she had become visible, and in the moment when she truly began to look at them --

There was just enough time to make an initial estimate, during the stretching of the seconds. At least seventy ponies for the portion directly in front of her, probably more to the sides. She finally saw a living gryphon (griffin?) and wondered how anyone was supposed to read an expression upon the inflexible beak. But she saw them all after days of never being with more than six or seven, after a time when the number who could stand to be near her was usually closer to one, and...

...she hadn't seen them in this kind of gathering. Not when they weren't attacking her, or celebrating her defeat. There were at least seventy of them, and they were --

-- small.

They were all so small.

The white Princess was still the only true horse among them. These were ponies. Some of them would have barely reached her upper waist: the tallest would have had their features lost in the shadow of her breasts. And every last one had magic of some kind, but when she compared them to her own body, even the sturdiest earth ponies seemed small and weak and

"Of who could be in charge, if she wasn't so nice..."

It almost made her jump. The memory of words arrived as something close to speech, and the phantom touch of a pointed tongue flicked against her right ear. But there was a sense which had yet to be heard from, she was already operating on the edge of overwhelm and when the next impression reached her, pushing in on altered breezes...

How to describe it, to someone who wasn't a centaur? When she finally tried to tell Nightwatch about her perception of what had happened, she would turn to something she thought the pegasus might understand: electricity. About seventy ponies, just within her immediate visual perception. More than that in the olfactory world, although it would take some time to truly sort them out as individuals. They mostly existed as intertwining currents within flow tides, because pegasi had a different base scent than a unicorn, who wouldn't smell like an earth pony, and nothing duplicated the scent which arose from royalty.

So imagine each pony as their own generator. In any given moment, they would be producing sparks of scent: things which arose from mood, health, simple existence. And when Cerea had first emerged, some of those generators had been running at settings which she was slowly learning to recognize. The sub-aspects of fear: anticipation, nervousness, worry and trepidation. But then they had truly seen her, and...

Every piece of internal machinery begins to ramp up production. Voltage surges. Scattered at various points across the courtyard, six of those generators surge into overdrive. Every setting instantly dials up to the maximum, and a burst of pheromonal lightning blurs white-hot off the fur. The energy seeks a conductive surface and so even as the pony starts to move, the wind is carrying that power to the nearest pieces of biological hardware.

It makes contact, sinks in through skin as much as snout. And where it touches, those generators begin to flare...

It's not quite instantaneous, because air requires time in which to travel, and reflexes can only respond so quickly. But the surging parties are spread throughout the group. Each one serves as a fresh epicenter for a traveling series of flares. Every victim, regardless of what their own state had been, responds to the terror. Every one of them starts to produce fear. And it's possible to see a few struggle against it: ears go bolt-upright before twisting backwards, lungs work too quickly, a tail lashes against the owner's flanks over and over again in an attempt to provide new input, anything else to focus upon, and so she also sees one deliberately bite his own lower lip. Some fight, wings twisting, hornlight pushing against their own skin, and there are those who win. The settings begin to dial down, much more slowly than they had surged up. But breathing slows. Eyes focus. What remains is still filled with fear, but it has some control over that state. A sapient being choosing how to respond, and those who win can choose to stay where they are.

But all around the victorious, those who have lost their battles are still surging. Their production brings the intensity of the invisible electricity up and up, until what's starting to fill the courtyard is at a temperature which threatens to melt all resolve. Nightwatch's wingbeats falter. The Princesses tense and when she senses that, she nearly loses the last of her hope.

Later, she will recognize this as her second experience with the phenomenon: the first came when she vaulted the greenery and landed in the pony town, and it is only the full moon (or the way her body has responded to what it believes to be the expression of that orb) which allows her to track it so closely now. A few succumb immediately, their defeat spreads out, even those who win contribute, and --

-- there are gaps. Three of them, all producing their own variations of scent, beings which can't be ponies. They may be able to recognize the lightning, but they can't conduct it. They serve as tiny breaks in the storm, and they aren't enough.

Fear conducts.
Terror surges.
Every pony serves as a conductor.
And the lightning burns away rationality, sears individuality into something smaller than dust.
There are a few ponies left before her.
The rest is the herd.

It looks at her through more than a hundred eyes. It needs to react, and there is some portion which evaluates her, measures its sheer cumulative mass against her own and comes up with a total which has her begin to reach for a weapon which isn't there --

-- but it knows what happened the last time it encountered something with this arrangement of limbs. It remembers the violation, the wrenching removal of its core. Something very much like a rape of the soul.

It can't go through that again, something which cannot think has been reduced to a pair of choices -- and the first is impossible. Because if the herd moves, it can trample her. She will be kicked to death within seconds, and the mindless beating will continue until hooves are stomping into bone fragments and pulp. The herd can kill her, the herd knows that, the simple mercy of a single mare who had regained herself at the last cannot happen here --

-- but she is flanked by the two most powerful entities in the nation. Those whom, in a state without true thought, the herd can only see as that which stands against it, something which can stop it, and so the herd knows victory is impossible.

It cannot fight.
And for the parts of it which, until a moment ago, lived and breathed as pegasi, the 'flight' part becomes literal.

Wings flare, send those portions towards the white. Endless sets of legs kick out, get their owners upright and make them gallop down the nearest available path to safety. And one has his horn flare with brilliant blue, a burst of light which takes him with it, but the rest are flying and running and for the most part, they are doing so using those wide, carefully-arranged, channeling aisles.

The herd flees. It has to run, if it wants to live. And the paths it takes brings it under waiting dark clouds which have Guards hovering above them.

Silver-coated hooves slam into vapor, and every last milliliter of cold moisture dumps onto the herd.

The shock is almost instant. The majority of generators momentarily short out. Some trip over their own legs (and four legs offer a multitude of options for how that can happen), a few slow and get hit from behind by the ones who didn't. And a number continue on no matter what, race into the white where the cold and moisture dampen and dissipate their scents, chased by Guards who can easily catch those who cannot think, get them in front of something which generates heat before illness sets in. But the rest...

The herd begins to fall apart, doing so almost as quickly as it formed. Pupils snap back to their full size. Tails untuck themselves.

Eight seconds.

"And this," Princess Celestia quietly, evenly said as her wings slowly settled into the rest position, "is why we requested that you honestly ask yourselves whether you were ready. Why we took so much time to let you try to internally prepare. Some of you were ready. For the rest... we are here. I'm asking you to remember that. No matter how you feel about what she might represent, even with what you went through... we're here. The full Diarchy, standing ready. We've told you she's harmless. And if you believe she isn't... then also believe that we aren't."

"Gather by the heater," Princess Luna added. "We will have two additional ones brought in, along with using the palace's desaturator to separate water from fur. And once everypony is dry and warm, the next stage will begin."

"She'll talk to you," the white mare continued. "She'll answer your questions, as best she can. So will we. And after that..." It was a deliberate pause, one meant to create the opportunity for hope to bloom, and so it was also the moment in which it tried to die. "...maybe you won't be afraid any more."

And the girl couldn't move. Moon-heightened instincts burned through her, and she didn't lift a single hoof. For to move just then would have been to run, and she would have run until the moment when she would never move again.

Eight seconds.

Eight seconds as a preview for the rest of her life.

Lurid

She had been sent back through the doors, put out of sight while those within the courtyard were dried, warmed, and given a second chance to brace themselves for her presence. Royalty had softly debated that for a moment, considering whether keeping her there the whole time would give the crowd that much more opportunity to become accustomed -- but they had also felt it was something which would keep the previous base state from fully returning, and so the temporary banishment had occurred.

Waiting again, with her body away from the moonlight. She was trying to tell herself that helped, but... the first exposure had already taken place. It took effort not to clench her hands, her hooves kept trying to canter, she wanted to run and she wanted to gallop and when she thought about the possibility of spending a lifetime in watching herds either flee from her or move in for the kill, she almost wanted to hit something.

But she was about to meet them, at least if the same thing didn't happen again. She had to retain control, because her limited direct experience with being the subject of human media had suggested what would take place if the press conference were to be postponed. The newspapers would only have a single topic for their articles: the panic. She had appeared, they had run, and then she had been hastily concealed once again. Days of paragraphs which discussed nothing more than the possibility of seeing that recur every time a pony spotted her, with no soaking clouds prepared to shock her victims back to sanity.

It had to be tonight. And that meant she had to hang on, retain full control, act as nothing more than a fully rational being, because it wasn't as if anything could be done about the moon.

She suspected the guards around her knew something was wrong: it wasn't as if she was holding back every last physical sign, especially as those were a relatively safe place to channel what was happening inside. They probably didn't know how to interpret flushed skin. But for the rest of it... she felt they'd decided that witnessing the mass panic had shaken her, and there was some truth to that. It just wasn't the whole of it.

It had been, if looked at from a strictly rational viewpoint, fairly educational. Especially the part where a few among the crowd had potentially, instinctively decided that the best preparation for fleeing was through dumping all unnecessary weight.

The horses of her home couldn't vomit, and so some forms of rather basic illness had the potential to be fatal. Cerea could, although she had wondered if the sensation was more wrenching for centaurs. And as it turned out, so could ponies. She hadn't been expecting that.

Go figure.

The left-side door opened again.

"We resume," Princess Luna told her, carefully stepping inside. "There are... somewhat fewer to face now. A number came to the conclusion that they could not be in the Courtyard without succumbing a second time, and so they departed accordingly."

"I still don't know where Tombstone wound up," the white mare sighed.

"He chose to teleport out," the other Princess stated. "Without true thought. That meant his destination would have likely been whatever he subconsciously saw as the place of greatest safety. If that was within his range, then that is where he appeared. And as he has not returned, the first assumption is that he chose to remain there."

"Most dams," Princess Celestia wearily indicated, "rearrange the colt's bedroom after the stallion moves out."

"In which case, neither of us knows where he once lived and his recoiled form had a chance to land upon a mattress." The dark mare's exasperation was expressing itself as twitching flight feathers and flaring stars. "Cerea, are you prepared?"

"...yes," was the most she could manage.

"Then here we go," Princess Celestia told her, already moving back into that flanking position. "Again. Stay with us..."

More words drifted up from behind Cerea. The disc took its time about stuttering through the overlapping terms before settling upon one which it seemed to feel its wearer would comprehend, and so the girl inadvertently learned that the ponies might have some form of cinema. There really didn't seem to be any other reason for the half-muttered overheard comment (something which Acrolith had probably made to herself) to have been rendered as "Take two..."

Princess Luna was on her right, the white mare at the left, and both kept pace as Cerea forced her legs to trot forward. Back into courtyard, moonlight, and the miasma of terror.

There was something less of that last now, at least when compared to what had been present at the moment of her retreat. Part of that was because the first scents had dissipated with time, and there was also a lower population present to create new ones. It meant that what was present didn't threaten to overwhelm the olfactory world, at least at that moment of first (second) contact, and so she gained the opportunity to look around a little more.

The opalescent paving stones shimmered in the moonlight. Some of the benches were slightly out of alignment: hastily pushed back upright after the herd's attempted departure had knocked them over. There were two more of the copper grates, and a few ponies were staying close to the heat. It was a little warmer overall -- but the storm continued to swirl outside, rendering the courtyard into a vacuum within a world of white. She could still hear the rhythmic sounds which came from the chanting of distant protesters, but the disc failed to render those faint noises into words.

Sight found the original gaps in the olfactory world before scent itself did: a natural survey of the crowd (now down to less than fifty) spotted the griffon again, then a well-groomed yak who was more than a little undersized when compared to what Cerea considered to be the real thing, and finally stopped with the donkey.

Vision told her more than scent did, even under the full moon. Because at the moment she reached into the olfactory realm, Cerea hit a wall.

Most of the ponies in front of her could be scented, and those odors changed in the way she'd been expecting: the surge into fresh fear, complete with harshened breathing and self-lashing tails. But at the far right of the group, odor stopped, and did so at the place where the fur of those waiting rippled, shifting straight up --

-- three of the ponies broke. Two stallions, one mare, and all on the blocked side of the wind wall. Rushed for the aisle, and galloped out into the night. The remainder shivered, shook -- then slowly refocused on Cerea. Evaluating her through the invisible cloud which saturated the air, and too many of their expressions were unreadable.

The Princesses silently watched the departure of the trio, then led Cerea up a small ramp to a minor stone dais, one which rested about eighty feet away from the palace doors. Nightwatch accompanied the procession, staying at the ordered distance.

The few ponies who'd been waiting on the dais itself shuffled a bit: the doctors went towards the left, while Crossing Guard silently shifted right. Cerea reached the forward edge, her forehooves stopping just behind the little elevated rim: something which didn't quite reach her ankles.

The crowd stared at her, and there was a moment when she was almost grateful for that because it was still a crowd. Some trembled. Others were locked into something closer to a faint vibration. And there were those she recognized from the pictures, along with one mare whom --

Princess Celestia took a deep breath.

"Thank you for staying," she gently told those who remained. "I know it's not always easy to meet the demands of your profession. Not when your marks ask you to be present at events which others would flee from, so that you can tell them what had happened at the last. And that's what we're asking you to do now. To remain, and to report events to those who could not be here."

Purple eyes looked to the right. (It was possible to recognize the brief moment of shock when they found a vertical break in the sight line.) The other mare took the cue.

"I say the following," Princess Luna continued, "for the benefit of our guest. We have representatives present from both multiple publications and nations. There are also those here on behalf of --" and Cerea felt the temperature dip "-- what shall be described as 'special interest groups,' who insisted that they be granted a chance at presence. After a rather spectacular display of claiming what they perceived as their rights, it was decided to let them enter the Courtyard." The dark eyes made a rather pointed survey of the area. "Following what I am hoping was the final round of departures, I believe we currently have four remaining."

She wasn't always all that good with the dark mare's tones. Spotting underlayers of meaning was somewhat easier.

Ponies they didn't get to brief me on. Cerea forced her tail to remain limp.

"And this summary is also for her," the white mare calmly went on, the borders of that strange mane shifting slowly with each word. "Because she was waiting while we talked to you, and so she doesn't know exactly what we said."

She had an idea. There had been more words in the cell, while her hair was still being braided. (She could feel the oddly-focused weight following the curve of her upper spine, and it was something else to distract her under the moonlight.) The Princesses had worked out every stage of the plan, at least for the parts they could directly control. The things they would do.

The large white rib cage swelled with the pressure of an exceptionally deep breath. Feathers rustled.

"You are looking at the victim of a crime," Princess Celestia told the gathering. "She stands upon the dais of her own free will, waiting to speak with you. But when it comes to her presence in this nation --" a little more softly "-- that's something she didn't choose. She was a student, studying a foreign culture. Something stole her away from that, and it brought her to us. Lost in a culture she never knew existed, something she hadn't even imagined could exist. Wrenched away from her home and everything she had ever known."

The white wings spread. One of them arched over Cerea's lower back.

"I would appreciate it," the larger Princess steadily continued, "if everypony here would think about that for a moment, and do so as you look at her again. To imagine that there was a moment when you were in Equestria, and that was followed by another when you didn't know where you were at all. That you had no idea where your home was, or what had removed you from it. That you were in a wild zone like none you had ever seen before, disoriented and lost and frightened."

A few of the large watching eyes squinched shut, and did so a second after the wing draped itself across the top of Cerea's skirt. Something the centaur barely felt, although the multiple gasps and little shrieks from the audience reached her without issue.

The dark mare cleared her throat, and the white wing folded again.

"That is the state in which she spent days," Princess Luna took over. "Lost in the wild, barely able to find food -- and when she felt she had located sustenance, it nearly led to her death. The first living thing she met in our nation was a root angler --"

It only took a split-second for Cerea to realize that little detail had not been in the original presentation, and it was the same moment when she heard five new little gasps break through the night.

"-- at a time when she did not know they existed, much less how they kill. And yet she stands before you now, when that encounter did not serve as her sole battle. Why did she so desperately charge towards Palimyno, when at last she sighted buildings? Why did she vault the bushes? Because she felt that she had found a place where she could seek help."

"But she knew nothing of us," Princess Celestia picked up the flow. "Nothing of what had happened, just a few moons ago..."

The white head dipped, and the script broke at the same moment as the mare's heart.

"A moment of silence," the only true horse requested. "For those who fell during his attack. And for the ones who felt there was only one way to never feel that fear again."

Every head bowed. One mare did so half a beat behind the others: something Cerea only saw because she hadn't known the Princess was going to do that, and she'd needed to watch in order to know what she should do...

...there were deaths.
There were suicides.

The weight settled across her entire body, driven deeper by the light of the moon. There was no part of her which did not sink from sorrow, and it was followed by hatred. Loathing of an entity she had never seen. The thing for which everyone believed her to be nothing more than a distorted reflection.

They took their own lives because it meant never having to face a centaur again.
There are ponies out there who lost members of their families and every time they look at me...

She hadn't seen a picture of the one who’d preceded her. But she knew her herd's stallions, ugly and brutish and crude, and the males of her valley merged into a single huge form, something where she barely had to aim the sword's blows because there was just so much to hit, and her inner self swung over and over and --

-- it took a moment before she recognized the sounds of movement.
Another before Cerea realized she was crying.

It could be seen as shameful, to show such emotion before a crowd, even with the moon offering excuse. To be so base as to simply weep. But ponies had died, everything about those deaths was now tied to her, and ponies had died...

...the Princesses were staring at her.
Everyone was staring.
She could feel Nightwatch's silver gaze. So close and not close enough.
(Scattered throughout the crowd, beyond what she could readily see, six twitching tails began to slow.)

She sniffed, because her nose ran when she cried. Brought her head up again and forced herself to face the crowd.

The dark mare took a breath.

"I wish to thank police captain Nightwalker Statute for her final exercise of discretion in the matter," Princess Luna stated. "A commendation is being forwarded. For without that moment of mercy, the only crime committed on that night would have been ours. The execution of an innocent, as a punishment for deeds which had never been hers."

One pair of golden eyes looked away.

"Your mark asks that you find the truth of events," Princess Celestia stated, and something about the words felt oddly forced. "And now that she is standing before you, the Diarchy is making a request."

"You hear things we do not," the dark mare added. "Possess sources which speak only to you, or so multiple articles claim."

"So if you hear anything about what might have brought her here..." the white horse softly finished, "...please tell us. Because in the end, even after you tell everypony that it's safe -- that's the help she needs most. But until that day, we have chosen to give her the chance which she has earned. The opportunity to live among us. To take the first hoofstep towards acceptance."

"To become part of our nation," the dark mare concluded. "We stand before you, unafraid. We welcome her. And in the face of that -- what will your own choice be?"

Royalty looked at her. And with the moonlight enhancing everything, each moment of sorrow brought into sharp relief against the frame of a lost household where the name had almost seemed to meet something, she gathered herself as best she could. Took a shallow breath, because a deep one produced too much movement in what the ponies lacked. Let her arms stay at her sides, as they probably didn't know how to interpret gestures.

Spoke, and magic which had been ready for the bare whisper carried her words to everyone in the courtyard.

"Prithee --"

White and dark blue hind hooves simultaneously kicked her hocks.

The girl swallowed.

"My name is Cerea." Forcing herself to look at those in the crowd now, as much as they had to will themselves to look at her. "I... never meant to scare you. I hate that I scare you. But I can't help who I am. What I am --"

I didn't know.

"-- and I'll do whatever I can to make that easier, while I'm here. But I..."

It was so easy to blame the moonlight for everything. The pain. The invisible wounds inflicted by every stare. The moisture on her eyes.

"...I just want to go home..."

The dark wing softly, subtly nudged her. She barely felt that either, although that one shriek was becoming familiar.

"All right," Princess Celestia gently told them all. "We're going to get her some water. After that, we'll take questions. As this is the first time she's meeting any of you, please follow the protocol you used for your initial appearance at a press conference: before asking a question, give your full name and the publication you're representing. Those here on behalf of their groups should identify them. We'll allow followup questions if they flow from the original inquiry."

"We are hoping for intelligence, politeness, and insight," Princess Luna stated. "Conduct yourselves accordingly."

They didn't.

"Is she pregnant?"

A large white forehoof partially lifted from the dais before coming back down again. (Cerea, who had yet to witness a facehoof, had no idea what the aborted movement meant.)

"Is this question meant for the Doctors Bear," the white mare queried with what felt like an almost heroic excess of patience, "or Cerea? If it's the latter, please address her directly."

The pegasus rather visibly thought about it.

"The doctors," the mauve stallion decided. "Because she might not know."

Both unicorns immediately looked at Cerea, who managed to confine her reactions to the tiniest of head shakes. There was a certain base requirement for becoming pregnant and, outside of potentially founding a new religion, she lacked it. And when it came to the requirements for a partner --

I didn't know...

"She isn't," Vanilla Bear stated on her behalf.

"Oh." The stallion took another look at Cerea's upper torso. "Was she pregnant? If that's the case, how many does she usually deliver in one -- "

"-- I am uncertain as to whether you wish for your readership to fear the arrival of foals," Princess Luna tightly interrupted, "or have them mourn for a parent who was torn away from her children. Regardless, given that you live in Canterlot and, through embassies and citizens alike, been exposed to a somewhat-mixed populace, I would have hoped that at a minimum, you had encountered ageládas/ --" the wire hissed "-- /female minotaurs before this. We show development only when actively nursing or preparing to do so: other species do not."

The hot tide of red which had been moving towards Cerea's neck momentarily paused.

They have minotaurs? It would have been a curious mix of emotions even without the moonlight: frustration, exasperation added to a touch of jealousy, and a sudden surge of pure inferiority. Even here, I'm no better than second to --

-- actually, that might not be it at all. What the ponies named as a griffon had every possible human aspect removed, and the same could easily apply here. And given the presence of a yak and donkey, until Cerea saw some proof in the form of an actual specimen, she was just going to assume they were talking about cows.

"What's happening with her skin? Is she summoning some sort of power?"

It was almost possible to hear royal teeth grinding against each other. "It is somewhat easier to distinguish a blush," the dark mare stated, "on those without fur."

"Could we get a private photo shoot? Informational purposes only. With and without clothing. We've got some room waiting on Page Three --"

The blush completed its interrupted journey.

"-- and the Trottingham Solar should consider its opportunity fully wasted. Next?" The pegasus, driven back down by the force of stare and voice, made a rather poor landing. An off-white unicorn mare with a curly brown mane cleared her throat, doing so at the same time her horn's light flashed once. "Very well. Follow the format."

"It would be my honor," the unicorn proudly declared from the far left edge of the gathering. (Princess Celestia's forehoof shifted again.) "Raque Marshdew, with The Palace Bugle. Hello, Cerea!"

Cerea's memory brought up the picture, matched it to the mare as the memory of Nightwatch's words whispered in her ears.

"She's openly pro-palace. It -- can go too far sometimes. Princess Celestia's said that if she ever accidentally burned down half the capital, Raque's first article would be about the need for land clearance. The followup would probably be the benefits of adding ash to soil. Um. But she's also kind of a... hypocrite."

"How so?"

"She writes about things which really open-minded ponies should do, but it doesn't mean she'll do any of them. Like when we got the butcher shop in the Heart. She encouraged ponies to eat meat for a week as a sign of tolerance, and we really can't. Not without getting sick. But when she went to a dinner with the Princess, and Anise served her what she thought was a steak..."

"Hello," the girl uncertainly said, as moonlit emotions pushed and prodded from all sides.

"So I just want to have this on the record," Raque brightly said. "When you were escaping from Morgan Castle. The injury you sustained in blocking the statue's fall. Was there any potential for it to be fatal? Did you take a mortal blow to save ponies?"

"I'm..." She swallowed. "...I don't think so. It hurt..."

It was about as much as she'd gotten to speak at any single time, and she didn't feel like she was becoming any more articulate.

The surgeon's horn flashed, and the crowd's attention refocused.

"She already had multiple wounds by that stage," Chocolate Bear informed the audience. "We determined minor lacerations, bruising -- surface and bone -- plus a minor muscle tear: those have healed. The statue hadn't exactly been sterilized before contact, so it's possible that it aggravated the infection."

"Which would have killed her," Raque decided, "if ponies hadn't helped."

"From all indications," the brown unicorn said, "yes."

"So she saved ponies," Raque smiled, "and ponies, in turn, saved her. Thank you, Doctor Bear."

An earth pony mare raised a foreleg: Celestia nodded to the mare, and shimmer-grey fur was lowered again.

"Doric Corinthian," the new mare's oddly-accented voice stated: a pony whose picture hadn't been in the briefing sheets. "Polis Gazette."

Nightwatch's hover moved subtly closer.

"Um," the Guard said. "Because she doesn't know about that, maybe you should..."

The grey mare nodded. "International press," she further identified herself. "From Mazein." Which registered in wire-touched ears as May-zeen, and told Cerea absolutely nothing she could use. "We haven't heard a lot about where she's from, or why it can't be reached by normal means. The Gazette recognizes that much of the world remains unexplored, and that first contact with a previously-unknown sapient species was made as recently as twenty-nine years ago. So my readers will certainly understand the idea of an uncharted land. However, given sufficient effort, exploration is both possible and, in many parts of the world, ongoing. Why the insistence on having magic send her back?"

Purple eyes slowly closed, opened again.

"Because there's no other way to get there," Princess Celestia replied. "I have to ask for your trust on that. We won't see anyone else from her home unless something happens, and they are incapable of reaching out to us. Exploration won't help."

"How do you know, Princess?" Doric challenged. "Without having looked --"

"-- it's not a matter of looking," the white mare carefully interrupted. "Magic brought Cerea here. Magic has to send her home. And without that magic, I can't even show you where her home is."

"That," the columnist starkly said as her ears went back, "sounds impossible. Or like an excuse."

"Until the moment she appeared," the taller Princess softly countered, "I would have told you that her arrival was impossible. My excuse is never having seen the magic before. We are trying to reverse-thaumgineer the process. The palace will call in multiple resources to do so, and we hope for the process to accelerate when the Bearers return. But nopony is going to try and send a returning spell from theory to horn in a single leap, Doric, because we know how trying to create new workings on the spot usually works out. Or rather, how it almost always doesn't. We're trying to keep her from being hurt, or finding herself somewhere worse. We need time, we need the workings -- and for now, that's all I can tell you."

The grey mare's fur slowly settled back into its natural grain.

"Can you update us on their mission?"

"You'll know shortly after I do," weary-seeming royalty responded. "And if you find out first, please tell me."

Doric nodded. The donkey got off his bench.

There was initially something about him which made Cerea think of a bulldog. Then she looked at the broken roan pattern of his coat, and the thought went into reverse. Because bulldogs were ugly. They were objectively hideous, with eyes which seemed to be perpetually on the verge of watering, teeth that didn't fit in their mouths, jowls that pretty much went everywhere because the slobber had to be delivered somehow -- and from all of that hideousness came a fundamental joy. For a bulldog, the worst had already happened: they had been born as a bulldog. Everything which came after just had to be fun, and that unending optimism made them utterly endearing.

The donkey's posture suggested the universe had treated his birth as the X on the map for a century-long drilling operation.

"Continuing the international trend," he slowly stated as a naturally-droopy tail did its best to suggest it was only attached by a slowly-departing pin. "Dejected Overcast. Daily Downer, out of Eeyorus."

Cerea silently congratulated the disk for having perfectly captured the mood.

"It seems to me," the sagging voice assembled syllable by syllable, "that tonight may have served as something of a preview. Every time she goes out in public, there's going to be at least one pony who's seeing her for the first time. The palace can't have riot-breaking conditions perpetually set up over the entire city: not only would it destroy the weather schedule, but the team would quickly exhaust themselves. At some point, a simple stroll towards the Heart --" the shaggy head inclined towards Cerea "-- central shopping district, miss: wasn't sure you'd heard that yet -- could set off a reaction like this city hasn't seen since Gristle's opened. As a starting point. So my question is for the Princesses. Does the palace have a plan for having ponies acclimate to her presence and if so, does it realize that it can't convince everypony that she's safe, no matter what it does?"

He sat back down. Waited.

It won't be everyone.
It can't ever be --

Her hooves were trying to canter again, and both hands were trying to wander behind her back. Posture began to collapse on itself, doing so at the same moment where her tail sought refuge between her hind legs.

"For the latter," Princess Luna slowly said, "yes, we are aware that a perfect introduction is impossible. Should the whole of Canterlot somehow agree on a single topic, there are those who will travel into the city and encounter her with no warning. We have asked you to spread the word, and we recognize that such distribution cannot be universal. Even if -- or rather, when -- we send one-sheets into every household, we will inevitably have the one pony who never reads them, for he sees such things as the government trying to tell him what to think."

A unicorn mare openly snorted. Cerea didn't look in that direction. She had looked there once, and then she had very carefully not looked again.

"We will remain alert and ready to defuse any situation as best we can," the dark mare continued. "But it is the same issue which afflicts law enforcement. We do what we can to prevent -- but there will be times when we must respond."

"With the first part of your question," Princess Celestia carefully assumed control, "we were thinking of hosting a series of limited exposures, similar to Open Palace nights. Allowing ponies to come and meet her in groups. There was some discussion of starting with the schools --"

It took a second to isolate the scream of purest outrage, plus one more before any part of it resolved into words.

"THE SCHOOLS?"

"Yes," the white mare stated. "Because children can recover more quickly from trauma than adults, and are also quicker to adapt in new situations --"

"YOU INTEND TO FORCE THE UNNATURAL UPON THE INNOCENT! TO MAKE THEM THINK IT'S NORMAL!" The overweight unicorn mare shook with rage, and a coat like rotted pearls shredded the moonlight. "MY ORGANIZATION WILL NEVER PERMIT --"

Which was when dark energy clamped down on her jaw.

"You are speaking out of turn, Mrs. Panderaghast," Princess Luna softly stated. "I am almost certain that when I release you, your next words will be to declare that I have violated your right to speak at all. I have not. I am simply enforcing the order. I have always allowed you to speak, although I do occasionally find myself questioning the number you claim to speak for. And as you do not attempt to pass for any level of journalist -- and in any case, the head of an organization which claims to promote unicorn rights cannot fly the banner of neutrality -- you are here at our sufferance. I will let you know when the time has come for you to try and make us suffer."

The dark light winked out, and the high-piled mane teetered with fury. "PRINCESS CELESTIA! ARE YOU JUST GOING TO LET HER --"

"-- I think," the controlled voice cut in, "you forgot whose Courtyard this is. Even with the reminder directly over your head. The dominion covering the laws which bring Cerea into our society was claimed by Princess Luna in the first nights of our nation. And in the nights following the Return, they have become hers again. I'm here to advise, fillies, gentlecolts, and sapients. No more. So if she wants to enforce decorum..."

The other royal horn ignited again. Mrs. Panderaghast shut up.

"I think that brings us," another unicorn mare said (and it meant Cerea had to look again at last), "to questions of law."

There was something strange about that one's appearance. Cerea didn't know how to judge beauty in ponies: health was easy to spot and she could tell how much grooming had been put into someone's fur, but it didn't tell her what the little horses found attractive. But with this mare...

In the most basic description, the color of the fur was blue, with tail and mane (both worn long, and falling solely to one side) white, while the eyes were red. Her horn was on the short side, narrowed quickly, and stopped when the tip started to slice air. Her grooming was decent enough, even if the fur seemed to be a little more slicked down against her form than anyone else's. And the nostrils seemed to be a little too large for the snout, as if she had been locked in perpetual inhale. Sniffing around for a story.

But with the colors... each one felt as if it was somehow off, rotated a single subtle degree along the wheel in exactly the wrong direction. She had a way of sitting on the bench which stated that she might not own it, but she was fully prepared to prove that you didn't. Her lips were thin, she smiled too much, and when that mouth was smiling...

It would take Cerea some time to figure out exactly what was wrong with the smile and when she finally saw it, she would wonder why any thought had been required at all. It was so obvious, when you looked at it properly. Everything about the mare was on open display at all times. You just needed the right perspective.

"She hates you."

"I know I surprised her in the hallway, but --"

"-- no. She hates you." Starkly, "It doesn't matter what you did, or what you'll ever do. Anger sells papers. Hatred engraves the plates. She hates you. You could save her life and she'd thank you, because it would give her that much more time for hate. You were her enemy on the day you were born, and she just -- waited to meet you. The same as she's done with all of her other enemies. Including me, because I won't hate you. Anyone who doesn't hate you is wrong..."

She'd stood perfectly still for a while, in the light chill of the cell.

"You've met someone like that," Nightwatch had quietly said.

"Yes."

It was a smile where the lips were pulled back a little too far from the teeth. The smile of a predator.

"Wordia Spinner," the mare declared, and got up just enough to send her forelegs into the most base mockery of a Greeting Stance to ever put Ms. Manners into an apoplectic fit. "Proudly representing the Canterlot Tattler. I have several questions, and they all share a theme: the law. So I do hope the thrones will allow me to continue along the general line for a time."

Neither Princess said anything. Waiting.

The reporter pretended to look at Cerea: the actual sight line went somewhere over her right shoulder. "Of course," she added, "this is our second meeting." With something which could never be merriment, "I do apologize for running out on you the first time, but I had a deadline to make. And of course, it helped to have time to prepare. So..."

Cerea took a slow breath. Focused.

You're still scared.

But it was now a question of how the mare would use it.

"As I understand it from the first part of the briefing," Wordia began, "she is being treated as an immigrant. Would that be correct?"

"Correct," Princess Luna echoed.

The air crackled with frost. Cerea's arm came up again.

"There are certain requirements which an immigrant must meet," the reporter steadily continued. "One of the first which comes to mind is criminal record. She took some pains to escape from her cell, in spite of her obvious innocence. Why does an innocent feel the need to escape? Surely it all would have come out during the trial."

"Why was an innocent attacked?" Princess Celestia softly countered.

One thin eyebrow went up.

"Interesting..." Wordia decided as her horn ignited: the glowing quill rose off the bench, went to the pad, and made a few notes. "I would say the sudden appearance of a centaur qualifies as a natural disturbance. Tirek, after all. I'm sure everypony understands an attack: in fact, some of the things you've said tonight suggest you can see it that way. Rather unusual for the palace, but..." A light shrug. "...I'm always happy when we're in agreement. Still, no attempt to communicate --"

"-- rather difficult when one does not speak the language," Princess Luna shot back, "and loops of field are moving for the throat."

"-- and didn't wait for the trial. She escaped, while causing injuries..." More notes.

"Her own," the white mare stated.

This was ignored. "And before that, she fought. And yet you say she's peaceful. There's an argument to be made that any degree of fighting..." The smile widened. "And of course, as Dejected pointed out, there's always the chance for something else to happen, especially when parents storm in to ask what you've been showing to their foals."

Cerea's hands were clenching. Everyone could see it, she couldn't seem to make it stop...

"I've been thinking about that," Wordia smiled. "But even after she's already made such a poor first -- and second -- impression... not deliberately, of course! -- I do think she deserves the chance to prove she's peaceful. Under the law. It's simply a law which doesn't exist yet. And since I have the Diarchy assembled before me, I'd like to propose it now for the Night Court's vote."

"Which is?" was all Princess Luna said.

"Simply this," the unicorn shrugged. "That to truly prove she is peaceful, she will never attack another. Regardless of circumstances. And doing so will see her immigrant status revoked, followed immediately by deportation. Reasonable, yes?"

It was possible that just about no one heard Nightwatch's gasp, not when having it reach the benches meant traveling through a storm of sudden murmur. Cerea barely heard the reaction from the little knight, the only pony she'd told about the laws, and her fingernails bit into her palms as every muscle in her arms tightened, legs fighting the urge to charge as it began all over again --

-- cool air washed across her fur as wings flared out, and Princess Luna jumped down from the dais.

The dark mare casually approached the reporter. Even, measured steps which ended directly in front of the mare, as a silver-clad left forehoof came up.

"Princess Luna," the armored focus of power politely said. "In the full title, that would be Princess Of The Night, Our Lady Of The Evening, Custodian Of The Stars' Memory, The Mare Of Dream, High General Of The Second Army, She Who Watches Over --" paused. "The full recital occupies a considerable amount of time. Suffice it to say that sufficing should be said and so 'Princess Luna' is generally sufficient." The raised leg politely extended forward. "I would hope for this to be a pleasure, although I confess to certain doubts which should have no reason to exist --"

"-- what," Wordia Spinner interrupted, "are you doing?"

The hoof slammed down. Several columns vibrated. The nearest wall of snow slumped into the Courtyard. And the mare pulled ever so slightly back.

"My apologies," the Princess softly told the unicorn. "I had thought you were somehow under the impression that we were meeting for the first time. I know you, Wordia Spinner. We have spent hours together in this Courtyard, you and I, and that has created a rather strong degree of acquaintance. Something enhanced by my habit of reading your articles on every news day, simply to become that much more familiar. There are ways in which I feel I truly know you -- and so let me make a prediction. On the record, especially as I suspect yours is among the few places where my next words will not see print."

The white horse did nothing more than observe. Nightwatch managed to smooth out the disrupted hover. But there were ponies pulling back on their benches all over the courtyard. Ponies who were...

...scared...

"An ambitious plan," the Princess half-whispered, with magic carrying the words to every listening ear. "It truly allows you to have everything your own way, does it not? I read your most recent article, Ms. Spinner. The one in which you coined the term which you are hoping to use again. 'Centaur panic.' The concept that those facing her would, when they attack, be acting naturally. And if she fights to defend herself, you are proven right while she is exiled. If she flees, there will be other chances, and should she simply endure... what kind of obituary have you written? Does it honor her, for observing the principle you assigned to the last? I have certain... doubts."

The long white tail was starting to lash. The Princess didn't move.

"We might view this as an aspect for the hypocrisy of tolerance," the dark mare stated. "The distorted view which states that to not agree with your hate proves us as the intolerant ones, because true tolerance would surely be to do nothing more than stand and take it. The hypocrisy of pacifism, perhaps? That if one is truly dedicated to peace, one will grant those who wish for their death the gift of a stationary target? Centaur panic, Ms. Spinner. A panic your writings will be designed to encourage, knowing that there is but one centaur and surely somepony on the jury will decide the fear is forever justified. You wish for a law to pass through the Night Court, and perhaps there is enough terror there to create a majority -- but I would have to sign it. How do you see that as happening? That you can create enough public pressure to persuade me?" And with the smallest of hoofsteps forward, "I faced down Discord in his prime, Wordia Spinner. What are you?"

The unicorn's back left hoof went off the bench.

"You wished to place yourself upon the record," Princess Luna continued as the third nova went off near the tip of the tail. "That you, and only you, had tried to present the lone reasonable solution. And from there -- negotiations? So many kicks before she can respond? No, even better --"

The dark mare smiled.

"-- the thing which you saw as simplest to acquire and enforce. That where the majority might truly support you, out of that same fear. A most basic request, something I would surely agree with in the name of concession and having you falsely back down..."

Her horn ignited. Wordia Spinner's back legs crashed into the paving stone as the corona intensified, and dark light projected --

-- backwards, going well over Cerea's head before moving down to the doors, opening both as the light flashed three times.

Multiple hoofsteps began to trot forward, emerging from the hallway. There was also something of a sliding sound, one Cerea had become familiar with in her attempt to prevent it from becoming too loud. The noise produced by hemp skidding across stone.

Four ponies screamed. The griffon's wings flared out. One earth pony stallion tried to hide under his bench and wound up knocking it over: a minor domino effect echoed forward from there. And the Princess simply smiled, as Cerea's ears twisted towards that sound, fighting the urge to fully look back, to run towards what couldn't possibly be happening and claim it before royalty changed its mind...

But she wound up turning. Just enough to see it, and considered that it probably hadn't made too horrible of an impression, at least not when compared to what had already happened. After all, most of them were staring too.

"You wished for her," Princess Luna stated as the four-pony team dragged the net-bound sword all the way into the light, "to go unarmed."

Mouths were now frantically delving into saddlebags. Light pulled out pieces, set them aside, went in again.

"Because a unicorn could potentially counter a unicorn, a pegasus might try to unweave that created by another -- but what can a centaur do when attacked by magic?" The smile thinned. "Anything she wishes to. Cerea, will you pledge before the press to only use it in the defense of yourself or others?"

Hope hurt.
Hope was torture.
Joy could be nothing more than the moonlight amplifying the faintest thread of desire. The magnified delusion of having a chance.
But it was her sword. The only thing which granted her the possibility of standing against magic.
And the Princess was giving it back.

"...yes."

"Then take up your blade," the dark mare said, doing so while the power of that gaze was still fixed on the reporter. "Now."

It took some time to get it untangled from the latest nets, more to free the scabbard. The total proved sufficient for the ponies to finish at their tasks and so in the instant she turned back to face them with hilt in hand, she received a reminder that the species had gotten around to inventing photography.

Dozens of flashbulbs went off.

She could readily picture it (and the moonlight was making it hard to stop). She had been given a chance, and that had in turn created a Photo Opportunity. Her holding the sword was going to be the front page picture on every edition. The monster reclaiming its weapon.

(She was wrong.)

It would induce fear. It might incite more riots. Ponies could easily be hurt, and Cerea's second instinct, even freed from the possibility of once again living under those horrible laws, able to freely defend herself at last, was to wonder if the dark Princess had made a mistake.

But she was wearing her sword. A sword which could actually do something. And Princess Luna had returned to the dais.

"You had initially mentioned," the dark mare said, "that you had several questions." Her head tilted slightly to the left. "The next?"

Wordia was back on her bench. The white tail was still lashing.

"We were dealing with her criminal record," the unicorn finally resumed. "No charges for the riot or escape?"

"None," Princess Celestia replied.

"And in this mysterious place which nopony will identify? The one which may have so many more centaurs about?"

"She is," a new voice stated, "by her own admission, part of an extremely small minority. And detainment only, Wordia."

Red eyes blinked.

"So there you are, Crossing," the reporter decided. "I was wondering what had happened to your voice. But of course, you're taking her word for it."

"We'll run a full background check once we make contact with her last place of residence," replied the head of Immigration. "Of course, should we manage to do so, I think we'd benefit from the assistance of a professional. Like a reporter."

The disc rendered the next noise from Nightwatch into something of a snicker. Portions of the white tail tip were beginning to fray.

"Which would bring us to communication," Wordia announced. "Now of course, some would say it's perfectly natural that a new arrival wouldn't speak Equestrian. Or any other language which anypony knows. I would like to hear her native tongue at some point, simply to help identify a region --" looking past Cerea's right shoulder "-- you can speak, can't you? Without magic to organize whatever limited amount of sapience you might possess?"

Her spine went tense. It did so from neck to the base of her tail, representing something of a major feat.

"Yes," Cerea forced out, as moonlight beat down upon her skin.

"Good... we may come back to that... and it even potentially means you could vaguely recognize that magic is the only means by which you can currently communicate. An immigrant must be capable of natural speech, and while the device you wear belongs to the nation, I'm certain the nation will at some point need it back. Or have certain concerns about seeing one of the rarest creations in Equestria ruined through clumsy contact with a sword tip."

I am not clumsy.

The mare hated her. It was so easy to hate the mare in return, and the moon was so bright...

"So it might help your rather weak case," Wordia smiled, "if you could give us just a touch of actual language. A few syllables will do. Assuming your rather strange mouth can even --"

But that was when Cerea's right hand shot up, almost wrenched at the disc while ponies watched her and the Princesses turned to look at her face (so few could look at her face), all murmurs and words became neighs and whinnies as the wire lost contact, she brought the disc down as she stared directly as Wordia and every word she'd learned rushed through her brain, but none of them sounded right because they were all apologies and requests for assistance and foal words, they were foal words and nothing among them would serve to show this mare that she wasn't just a thinking being, but one who was starting to think she'd had enough.

She didn't have anything strong, not from what Nightwatch had taught her. But there was more than just the little knight --

"Hneiya hfffnastsnnnny, mffpt nas ssscemnay heeeyla!"

The verbal blast hit dead-center, sent off-blue ears straight back as the mare's jaw dropped. It was the reaction Cerea had been hoping for: the inability to deny that she could learn the native tongue --

-- but then everything else happened.

A series of sharp, short neighs rang through the night. Rib cages convulsed all over the courtyard. One stallion tucked his head under a shaking wing. Other ponies curled up on themselves, pushed snouts into their own fur to muffle the noise, Wordia Spinner was completely frozen, the yak had dropped to the stone and was kicking out in all directions, the Princesses were staring at Cerea with expressions which couldn't be mistaken for anything other than shock, Nightwatch was frantically flying across the minimal distance and Cerea suddenly realized that she had no idea what she'd actually said.

Fingers desperately coaxed the wire to move faster and when it finally touched the tip of her ear, the raucous laughter nearly drove her off the dais.

"I told you not to listen to us when it was off!" a close-hovering Nightwatch desperately whispered, words lost to all but Cerea in the midst of the mirth. "I told you! I know that was from Bulkhead, that was his accent, that was Bulkhead and you just --"

"-- what did I say?" Cerea frantically breathed back. "I don't know what it means! It just sounded... authoritative..."

"He says it when he comes on shift! Because he's Bulkhead, he's a senior Guard, everypony knows it's just something he says --"

"-- what?"

Nightwatch inhaled.

"'Okay, asshole: I'll take it from here'!"

Cerea's hind legs came within a heartbeat of bucking her halfway off the dais: the fore went through a massive twitch which, if allowed to express itself fully, would have put her over the crowd and down the snow-carved path at top galloping speed, never to be seen again. As it was, the braid whipped to the right, her tail came very close to knotting itself, frantically heaving breaths finally gave the bra a real test, and she became aware that neither Princess had blinked for twenty seconds.

"I... I'm sorry..."

She was, at least on the level of humiliation. She had reflected poorly on those who were trying to help her, and that required all sorts of apologies. But the words only reached those on the dais, because nopony else could hear them through the laughter.

"Well," Princess Celestia quietly said, "I think that means she'll try to skip the full sapience test. Some do claim that the final proof of true thought is a sense of humor..."

"She'll hate me," Cerea forced out. "Forever."

"I believe that had been previously established," Princess Luna shrugged. "I will not argue the perception of enemy -- but I might ask you to look at the full gathering."

Frantic blue eyes moved across the group. A few weren't laughing. Mrs. Panderaghast was hosting a one-second class in a new pony expression, and white-hot embarrassment burned scandalized into Cerea's memory. But the rest...

"You are not her only enemy," the dark mare stated. "She is rather casual in their creation. And what happens when you establish yourself among that number?"

She couldn't answer. She wouldn't let herself think of it, and so spent the entire time waiting for calm to resume in trying not to canter in place upon the stone.

After a while, when it was down to a few scattered giggles and rib cramps, Princess Celestia stepped forward.

"We do have other reporters who would undoubtedly like to be heard from," the white horse smiled. "And as we just lost some time, with first-edition deadlines undoubtedly approaching if this goes too deep under Moon, I'm going to limit you to one additional followup, Wordia. I'm sure we'll see the rest in your column tomorrow, and I may have a response sent to the Tattler's offices. So make it a good one."

The unicorn mare glared at every occupant of the dais, tail lashing faster than ever. Princess Celestia's only response was to slip into a posture which Cerea's mind insisted on describing as 'aggressively relaxed.'

"I think we've proven language capabilities," Crossing dryly added. "Although I'd hope everypony would be willing to give her some time to, let's say, expand her vocabulary --" they waited the next wave out "-- so what does that leave?"

"One more?" the aggravated reporter checked.

"A mere singleton," Princess Luna responded. "Quickly, if you would?"

The white tail stopped moving.

It did so all at once. There was a moment when it had been beating against the air in the surest sign of a pony who was something less than happy, and then it stopped at the exact moment the mask dropped away.

"Employment," Wordia smiled, and sharp points made from imagination formed at the tips of her teeth.

Cerea heard Crossing swallow, felt Nightwatch's wing brush against her upper back on the downbeat, saw the massive white rib cage swell...

"She's not a student," the unicorn reminded them all as the lurking trap finally closed. "That's another set of forms. She's going for citizenship, if she makes it that far. That's what immigration means, doesn't it, Crossing? She'll be taking those classes, even if she empties out the classroom just by showing up. But it means she's not protected by the laws which would cover students. An immigrant isn't a guest of the palace. An immigrant needs to have a skill. A job, and to find one within two moons of entry. Most have employment waiting for them when they enter, or can prove their ability to gain it. They can certainly be out of work for a time... but it's a little hard to ask ponies to have their taxes cover someone who isn't really part of the system yet, isn't it? That just doesn't look good. Integration requires work: I seem to recall Princess Luna saying that when Gerald Gristle came in. So -- what does she do? Who does she work for?"

The smile widened.

"I hope I can be forgiven," Wordia added, "if I have certain natural doubts regarding her capacity to do anything involving direct contact with the public. While understanding that it's really not her fault, of course..."

"-- we can skip this part for now. It's something we can't deal with yet. We'll answer this one when the time comes."

Cerea now knew exactly what had been within that temporarily-dismissed section of paperwork, and all of her senses felt as if they were crashing in on each other, the entire system collapsing under the weight of unstoppable horror.

No one. No one would hire her. Not when her mere presence could set off a panic at any moment. She didn't have the skills which allowed her to perform a normal job in total isolation, her attempt to fake being a food vendor at Miia's side had led to the most natural outcome: torn blouses (or rather Suu, who had been simulating their clothing, giving up completely), and there had been some talk of having her look for rulebreaking liminals -- but that was really the job of Zombina's squad and while it would have been helpful for a knight, there hadn't been time to see anything come of it.

She knew how to farm, because every centaur had to help maintain the herd's food supply. But Nightwatch had told her about earth ponies.

It didn't feel like there were many smithies in operation. She would need to open one herself, she didn't have money, and who would loan her the start-up cost? How was she supposed to deal with customers? Would anyone ever enter a shop she operated, or would she just trot up one day to find the entire thing had been set ablaze?

...where am I supposed to live? Who would rent to me? Where could I even buy food?

In the herd, all of those questions had been answered. Within the human nations, the same laws which had prevented self-defense insisted that she not be completely closed out (although a lot of people had tried to work within the loopholes, and she had reluctantly admitted that the all-you-can-eat places might have a point). In the land of ponies, there was a real, unstoppable, unsolvable problem.

The Princesses had tried to welcome her into their world.
A world which had no place for a centaur.

Her head was spinning, reason spiraling into fragments under the pressure of realization and moonlight. Both arms began to come up, hands clutching at her hair as her breathing quickened, the panic attack was coming, it was going to happen in front of everyone because it had all failed, it never could have worked and it was disintegrating where everyone could see, she was going to come apart --

-- her arms were tingling.

She looked down, just as the coolness of the dark light gently pushed them back against her sides.

"A fair question," the entity on her right allowed. "Where should she be employed? A sapient capable of learning quickly, adapting to new situations with blazing speed? Who rushes towards danger in the name of protecting others, wielding a weapon which gives her a power nopony possesses?"

The Princess smiled, and did what the best of royalty had arguably been created for. She spoke words which changed the world.

"She is employed by the palace," Princess Luna told them all. "As the newest member of the Royal Guard."

Intolerable

Had there been so much as a second, all of the dreams would have come flowing back.

How long had it been? Cerea couldn't be sure. She felt it was her oldest dream and in that, she was wrong. There was something which predated it, the hope she'd given up on so early, a dream denied because she'd decided it was dead -- and when she finally put true thought towards all which had happened in Japan, she would realize that was the one which had come true. But for this...

Alone in her room sometime after having been pushed into another contest against fillies who were older, stronger, faster, everything more than she was: a situation where coming in second was the best she could hope for, and that only in a two-filly race. Her mother so often saw second place as being nothing more than the first loser and while locked in the battle for the heart of the one she'd felt could be her beloved, Cerea had finally started to agree.

Crying softly so that her parents wouldn't hear (although she had never figured out what her father would make of tears, or if he even understood that kind of pain at all), with only her books for comfort. Was that where it had truly begun, from trying to tell herself that stories could make her feel better? Or had her mother read to her when she was but a foal, tales of glory sinking into a depth of memory which was almost (but not completely) impossible to fully recover?

What had she truly latched onto, trying to use words as the grips which could temporarily pull her out of misery? The fact that knights traveled, when the filly believed she never truly would? Perhaps it was that they were so often alone: the struggle to create order in a world which resented it frequently came across as a solitary task, and a knight was fine with that. But there were other moments when they gathered with their fellows, and those were true companions indeed. They toasted each other's glories, were never jealous, engaged in constant support and at most, told a few jokes where the subject of the jest was the one who laughed loudest.

They won more often than they didn't: the opposite of her own life. And even in those times when they lost... when a knight fell, and a filly's tears had to be hastily wiped off the pages before damage was done... even in death, a knight could manage some level of final accomplishment: taking your foe with you was highly prized. A knight's existence always seemed to find its purpose. So there had to have been some point during her endless prison sentence where the filly had decided that the only way for her own life to --

-- but perhaps the exact timing didn't matter. There had been stories and in the end, a dream was nothing more than a story she told herself.

There had been so many of those stories. She had seen herself in armor, battling across lands she would never know for someone whose face occasionally changed as she tried to figure out what her own tastes might be. (She was arguably still working on that part.) But there were commonalities. She cared about that person, about their cause, they had recognized it, she charged into battle on their behalf and...

A knight lived for something.
A knight fought for something.
A knight died for something.

Given a single second to take it all in under moonlight, implications sinking through suddenly-frozen ears, every dream would have come back at once as an army, and the charge of phantom selves would have fighting a battle against disbelief. Because it couldn't be happening, not to her. The dark Princess hadn't just said those words, because applying them to Cerea was impossible. She'd been in the presence of Nightwatch more than anyone else, just about had the little mare's aura embossed into her memory. The title of Guard didn't matter, because Cerea knew what her teacher was: a knight. And if Nightwatch was a knight, and the dark mare (royalty, a Princess, one of the leaders of a nation) had just made Cerea into a Guard, then that meant she had just become --

One second. That was all she needed. One second for the inner war to begin: every dream versus everything she believed about herself at that deepest core. And in spite of all previous evidence, every tally of the dead mounted on a wall of slain hopes and mutilated self-perceptions... perhaps the right side still could have somehow won.

But she didn't get one second, because the shouting began immediately.

Later, she would tell herself that she wouldn't have been able to understand it if every word had been in French. Just about everyone was yelling, everyone, the reporters were shouting questions and some ponies (Mrs. Panderaghast very much included) had chosen to go with screams of purest outrage, the dark mare was just beginning to react to all of it while the white horse was frozen, the large rib cage had completely stopped moving as that strange mane's flow came to a full halt...

There were too many ponies calling out at once, and the flow overwhelmed the disc. Dozens of terms began to overlap within her ears, she instinctively flattened them against her head in self-defense and the vocabulary still kept on coming, she'd already been operating on the edge of sensory overwhelm and her skull was filled with echoes of "No/no/no/no/no," so she tried to focus on scent instead and all that did was tell her what outrage smelled like --

-- there was a faint whiff of alcohol, overlaid with something she just barely managed to recognize as a unicorn's sweat --

-- a horn ignited, and dark light lanced in a dozen directions.

It wasn't quite instant: the Princess had to turn somewhat in order to get a sighting on all of the possible targets, and there also might have been an upper limit on how many of the projections she could send at once. But that light moved, Cerea felt the memory of phantom leaves spray up around her body, and verbal silence fell upon the moonlit courtyard.

The quiet didn't last. Snow-bearing wind howled beyond the columns, and the carried sounds of protest sent one final deep snake hiss into Cerea's ears.

"Decorum," Princess Luna imperiously stated, "shall be maintained. I recognize that this is an announcement which instantly inspires a rather natural number of questions. However, while the gathering is capable of asking any number at once, there is a certain difficulty in simultaneous answers."

Several earth ponies were scraping forehooves against the dark light around their jaws, to no avail. Multiple horns sparked, and the hold did not weaken. Dejected simply sat quietly, waiting. The griffon's beak was vibrating with seeming frustration. And Nightwatch...

The little mare's hover was bobbing all over the place. Her armor was slightly askew, and the tail kept miscorrecting its position. But she hadn't said a word. The true knight had found no need to comment.

"Are you all quite done?" the dark Princess inquired, and even those actions stopped.

Cerea could smell the fear again, beginning to overwhelm the outrage. She didn't understand why it was resuming at that level of intensity. They had something new to feel about her now: anger. That someone so unsuitable, so imperfect had just been chosen. Not just a stranger, but a horror --

-- she's just saying it to buy time, cover up the stall while they look for something else I can do, if that's anything at all --

There had been no time for dreams, and so doubt had the floor. Judging by part of the reaction from the audience, it also had also claimed a major part of the courtyard.

"Good," Princess Luna decided. "Now, let us consider who was the most likely to have both already formulated and organized their protest into something which might pretend towards coherence -- well, Ms. Spinner, it rather surprisingly seems as if the thrones have an additional need for your voice after all." That patch of light winked out first, and a silver-clad foreleg politely gestured in the appropriate direction. "Do proceed."

The unicorn took a breath. Some part of Cerea's overloaded senses noted the sweat in the off-blue coat, and the fumes of liquor reached her again.

(She'd seen that the ponies had alcohol, smelled the contents of the cellar where she'd been imprisoned. She didn't indulge much herself: human brews were pitifully weak and when applied against her body mass, her bladder succumbed long before her brain. Suu had far more trouble: the slime girl's metabolism processed such drinks very slowly, and she would stumble about with a red inner haze distorting translucent blue for a couple of days. Papi's low weight meant she became drunk quickly, but the high metabolism meant that state lasted for about an hour. Rachnera dismissed such things as poorly-flavored liquids which dried her out more than they satisfied thirst, Mero tended to lose all estimates of others' breathing capacity, Miia had a similar body mass issue, and a drunken Lala had been known to rather literally lose her head. And the centaur girl recognized that she was thinking about all of that because it was something to consider other than the impossibility which had been said, along with almost simultaneously wondering just how many of those in attendance would finish the conference by heading directly towards a bar. Human media suggested such press behaviors were common.)

"Species," the reporter stated. It was a rather obvious statement. It called attention to something which could not be considered as anything other than an absolute fact and as Cerea would learn, when it came to Wordia Spinner, that made it something of a rarity.

The white horse, whose posture somehow suggested an equine who had been thinking rather quickly, finally took a breath.

"There has never been a restriction on who can serve as a Guard," Princess Celestia told the courtyard. "Not when it comes to that. Look back to the very first days of this nation, and you will find Equestrian citizens who were not ponies. But that population has remained small. About two percent, at the last census -- not counting protected/vulnerable/tenants, of course. So for someone to hear the call to serve, out of such a small sample, when all they see within the armor is ponies... that's rare. The last non-pony Guard ended her service one hundred and forty-eight years ago." Purple eyes briefly closed. "Ended it in the same manner as far too many, before and after. Her name was Blitzschritt, and she was the last ibex citizen of Equestria." More softly, "Her death... was the reason they withdrew back to the mountains. You can find her statue in the highest part of the gardens, where the snow never melts, carved from granite I took from the world's tallest peak. Hardly anypony has seen an ibex since. They remember, and they say they have forgiven... but the majority always kept to their own borders, and the few who joined us had no more reason to stay."

And now the courtyard was truly silent, as the dark mare's head bowed.

"I'd hope that some of you remembered her from your history classes," the white horse softly wished. "But too much becomes lost, and if nopony else will remember her -- then the palace still does. No species restrictions on Guards, Wordia. Now or ever."

"But there are other restrictions," broke the crowd's silence. "Citizenship: that has to be one! Even if you somehow managed to look at that pile of paperwork as building something real, she's an immigrant. How can she be a guard if she isn't even a --"

"-- before there was a nation," the dark mare interrupted as her head came up again, "there were Guards. Not necessarily under that name. I believe we can consider the clause to have been sufficiently granddammed and should updating be required, that is a law which both of us would sign. Your first two queries have been born from lack of knowledge and guesswork, Ms. Spinner. Can you do any better?"

The red eyes flashed.

"Age," Wordia declared. "There's a minimum. How old is --"

Princess Celestia nodded. "For ponies. Different species mature at different rates, and the Doctors Bear assured me that Cerea is an adult."

Cerea's mouth automatically began to open, doing so in perfect (unknown) concert with that of Vanilla Bear --

-- there was no flash of hornlight. Something warm and fully invisible briefly (and very gently) pressed against her jaw, and the words went tumbling back down her throat.

"Strength of magic," was the next volley. "I know there's standards which have to be met."

"Unless the palace directly intervenes on a hire," Princess Luna countered, "because there are times when talent is more important than any degree of casting. In this case, an assessment of 'unique capabilities' would more than serve for the override."

Which was when the dark blue stallion found his voice.

"But don't worry, Wordia," Crossing told the pony who also served as his enemy. "I think I can safely promise that as soon as we figure out what the exact scale of centaur magic is, we'll test to see where she falls on it."

"Centaur magic," the reporter starkly repeated.

I don't have any --

The head of Immigration shrugged. "Anti-magic? Don't worry: we'll put something together. Of course, that may require --"

Many kinds of instinct became easier under a full moon, and so Cerea's mind filled in the deep sarcasm of "a larger sample size" just before his mouth mysteriously closed too.

"A what?" Wordia challenged.

The stallion's left forehoof came up, awkwardly rubbed at his jaw until mobility resumed. "Some time," he falsely finished. "Since we only have the one centaur, and we're not likely to see any more. Next?"

The reporter took an exceptionally deep breath.

"Just this," she declared. "Nopony --" the disguise for the malice came from not really having any "-- or in this case, no one -- can just be made into a Guard on the spot. There's a training period. The palace may have the discretion to choose its own candidates -- and do so while fully ignoring what should be a rather interesting public reaction --"

She's going to say they hired a monster.
There's already been at least one riot.
A monster working for their leaders...

Her hands were beginning to twitch again. She wanted to panic, she wanted to tear at her hair and pull at the sweater just before she galloped into the darkness --

-- but the dark mare had chosen her to be a knight. Something she hadn't earned, something she couldn't succeed at, she was going to fail again because she always failed and --

-- she had been chosen.

All four knees vibrated. Her breasts heaved. But her hooves remained still.

"-- but those candidates are evaluated. I think the nation has the right to insist that she go through the full course before assuming her --" and this was spat "-- duties."

Princess Luna nodded.

"That much I will grant you," she steadily acknowledged. "She certainly requires education for the parameters in which Guards operate, and a degree of combat training shall accompany that."

"You're going to teach her to fight." It was exceptionally stark.

"She is already rather capable in that regard," the dark mare responded. "But she does not know about the potential foes which inhabit our part of the world. So that shall be part of the training."

"And what if she has to fight ponies?"

Princess Luna's head tilted slightly to the right.

"Fighting ponies," she semi-repeated, "as part of her Guard duties. A rather interesting proposition, Ms. Spinner. Which ponies would you consider to be our enemy? We are at peace with griffon nation/Protocera, and so their native pony population is unlikely to attack. Prance --" (Cerea shook her head a little, which did nothing to reset what the wire had just rendered.) "-- tends to keep their conflict with us to the verbal. Also the eternal and constant. Did you have another region in mind?" The pause was deliberate. "Something rather more local?"

The reporter was silent.

"Nothing which comes to mind, then," the dark mare decided. "Or at least, nothing voiced." A casual shrug. "So the full training: that is fair enough."

"But training," the white horse cut in, "adapted to a centaur. We don't ask unicorn applicants to pass pegasus magic tests. She'll be judged on her own merits. But in the meantime -- Princess Luna?" The dark mare's glance moved across Cerea's lightly-vibrating form before finding its target. "We usually don't do this before the training is complete, and the established oath can be taken then. But I think everypony needs to see that this is official. So..."

The other Princess nodded.

"Cerea," she instructed, "step down from the dias. Orient your body towards the south."

She did, moving forward over the rim. (Part of the crowd pulled back, and she'd expected that.) But even with the moonlight, she could barely feel her legs. Stepping across stone on mobile numbness, with her tail unable to figure out what it should be doing with itself and a pair of permanently-attached arms suddenly uncertain regarding that status.

It left her facing away from the press. More towards the palace. But she could still scent their presence, fear and outrage added to confusion and what she was guessing might be the olfactory signature of desperate denial...

Twinned gusts of wind rippled her fur. The Princesses landed in front of her, and wings refolded themselves.

"Kneel."

The word had come from Princess Luna. It was the command of royalty. The order of a master (mistress) to an unworthy servant, and so Cerea's forelegs bent.

Purple eyes briefly closed again.

"It's been a long time," the white horse softly said -- something the magnifying magic precisely ignored, words spoken so softly that Cerea felt as if she had been the only other person to hear them, and just barely while under the enhancement of moonlight. "But before there were Guards, there was a protector..."

The dark mare smiled.

"Someone with hands," she quietly told her sibling. "Yes. Shall we use that? His action, when he swore himself to her?"

"Yes," the white mare whispered. "I think we should. He would be honored." And at normal volume, in the most formal tone Cerea had heard from the horse, "You have taken up your weapon --"

Stopped, as the large head moved hard to the right. Stared at the dark mare, and there was a single instant where Cerea felt she had scented the shock --

-- but it was only an instant, and the taller of the royals smoothly slipped back into serenity.

"-- in our presence. Lay it sheathed before our forehooves."

Her fingers fumbled at the straps, and contained plastic clattered against stone.

The sword looked strange, under the moonlight. The scant exposed portions of metallic paint didn't seem to be reflecting enough back to her eyes. It was as if she was regarding it from the depths of dream.

The Princesses looked down at her or, in the case of the dark mare, somewhat down.

In a whisper, "We will shortly be placing our horns against your shoulders. It would help if you leaned forward somewhat."

Her upper torso, mostly acting under its own volition, bent accordingly.

Both horns ignited with light. Warmth radiated against Cerea's face from the left, while coolness failed to relax her on the right.

"As Princess Celestia has stated, your full Guard oath shall wait until your training is complete," Princess Luna declared before the world. "But there is an older one. Something..."

There was something strange about her eyes. They were dark, and yet there was a brilliance about them. The gleam of memory rising beneath moonlight.

"...we have not heard spoken for a very long time. And most of that speech shall be ours, for the original recipient also had yet to master our language."

"But more was understood than spoken," Princess Celestia gently continued. "And in the end... all we could ask for was agreement."

Each looked to the other. Back to Cerea.

"Will you protect us?" Princess Celestia asked.

I can't.
I'm not good enough.
I couldn't protect him. Over and over. I just failed.
I wasn't allowed to protect him.
If I make one mistake...

But the press was watching.

"...yes."

"Will you give your life, if need be?" Princess Luna advanced the oath. "Would you die so that others might live?"

It was what a knight did.
I'm not...

Her shoulders were shaking. She couldn't look up at them. To look would be to break.

"Yes."

And the next words belonged to the white horse. "Will you save us from ourselves?"

Cerea blinked. Stone flickered in her vision, developed a watery overlayer.

"Ah," Princess Luna whispered as the press began to murmur again. "Truly the original." And waited.

"Yes," Cerea answered, for it seemed as if there was nothing else to be said --

-- but she was wrong.

The dark mare leaned in closer. It almost forced Cerea to stare into the huge eyes, eyes which radiated power and control and --

-- pain?

"Will you let us save you?"

The murmurs flowed into a river of sound, rushing waters of disbelief and incomprehension because this was like nothing they'd ever heard and Cerea matched them, this was an oath which had never appeared in any story, it was something which belonged to their lives and it somehow felt as if this was the first moment when any part of their nation had learned of it...

What did saving her mean? Sending her home?

"Yes."

They leaned in. (For the white horse, it was more of an effort, and Cerea watched powerful legs bend.) A horn laid itself against each pink-covered shoulder.

She didn't really sense the finer details of the contact: even the moonlight's overcharge needed to pass those impressions through fabric and bra straps. But it was as close as she had been to the horns, and there was warmth on one side and coolness on the other and...

...they weren't keratin: she could see that now. But they also weren't bone. She didn't know what the horns were made from, what biology had created in the name of channeling magic. It was just slightly heavier than she would have expected.

But it was the weight of the words which pressed her into the stone.

"We're close enough to be struck down," the white horse told the world in a matter-of-fact way, and it made the next shriek resound through the courtyard. "At this distance, with or without the sword, she could potentially kill one of us before the other could react."

"But we could do the same," the dark mare noted from the heart of her own personal echo. "Death is upon her, should we wish it."

It was taking everything she had left not to spring upright, to gallop. She could feel the sweat beginning to flow across her skin, wondered if froth was forming beneath the skirt. They had to scent her own fear: it was rapidly becoming all Cerea could sense...

"And yet she maintains her ground."

"As do we."

"We believe you," declared Princess Celestia.
"We shall trust you," stated Princess Luna.

Their eyes closed. They held the position.

Dozens of flashbulbs went off.

And that was the front page.

Flagrant

There were a number of additional questions, and the circumstances meant Celestia actually regarded that as a rather reasonable thing: those who had just witnessed history were certainly entitled to think about the implications. However, ponies operating in the degree of shock which came from having witnessed a fundamental overturn of the universe generally weren't known for doing a lot of thinking, and so the voiced queries generally fumbled their way across an increasingly-ridiculous series of fractured parameters.

Eventually, they got the reporters out of the Lunar Courtyard, because articles needed to be written, type had to be set and in the case of far too many (and not just those who were against them), you couldn't get a really good distortion without a few hours of dripping acid upon the actual events. The fact that it had become just about impossible to get a full sentence out of Cerea following the oath wound up encouraging them to disperse: the girl had spent the remainder of her time in the public eye within what the elder had been interpreting as a state of deep stun, and the current worst part about being a ruling Princess was that Celestia had to lock every last possible expression for her own part of that perfectly understandable reaction completely out of sight. And then she had to keep it there while the sisters attempted to answer those questions which actually had them, while implications boiled inside her and the perfect illusion of the full Moon shone down upon the Courtyard. It was a constant reminder that she was deep into her sibling's hours, and Celestia did about as well under too much Moon as Luna dealt with an excess of Sun: a full week of schedule flip could turn both into a bomb, and the only consideration remaining might be just where to go off.

The centaur girl was sent off to bed, and Celestia watched her hooves move down the palace hallway in a half-stagger: something which was echoed in too many of the accompanying Guards because they had heard what Luna had said, it would be mere hours before all of Canterlot knew what Luna had said, the news would spread across the continent in about a day and once it crossed the world...

She watched that, and Nightwatch's awkwardly-flapping wings, until the girl was out of sight. And when she finally turned away, she discovered that her sister had used the chance to get out of range.

They both knew the palace better than any other living pony. But Celestia had (regretted, hated, loathed) more experience. And in this case, she suspected Luna wasn't hiding. She'd just chosen to relocate the inevitable to somewhere more private...

It turned out to be a balcony atop one of the old towers, and the dark eyes were staring up at the true Moon. Forelegs had been hooked over a railing. An alicorn who was effectively immune to cold silently ignored the weather: snow was blowing onto the balcony, and Celestia's arrival vaporized all of it.

"I believe we should maintain the conditions for an additional cycle," the younger proposed. "Simply to moderate the reaction when the articles are released, as much as such can be hoped for. Which should also grant us some time to begin the composition and printing of the informational one-sheets. Following that, we can grant Canterlot a compensating period of unseasonal warmth --"

"-- how long have you been planning that?"

The younger carefully reared back, wings flaring slightly to aid in the turn. Landed to face the elder, or least what could be seen of the white form through the cloud of steam.

"It was not a plan," Luna coolly declared. "It was a -- consideration."

"You had her take up her sword before the press! Promise to defend! She was halfway to being sworn in before you --"

She had every intention of continuing, had in fact planned out the rant during the search and at one point, had nearly turned the opening stages into a mantra to help her stay both enraged and awake. But there were certain things which couldn't help but interrupt arguments, and the sound of a heat-abused part of the floor cracking was one of them.

"Concentrate on your breath, sister," the younger advised. "Not many know that stone can burn, and this is not the night to teach them."

Celestia raised her right forehoof, stepped back just enough to see both wound and glow. Glared at Luna.

"You didn't tell me." The words were slightly less heated than the air. "Everything that's happened, and you still didn't --"

The dark head dipped.

"...yes."

"Why?"

Softly, "This."

Celestia stopped.
Breathed.

It took a little time. Precious seconds before she stopped feeling as if every strand of her fur was a wick, with the world around her as waiting candle. And the whole time, Luna wouldn't meet her eyes.

"You were not with us, Tia," her sibling quietly said. "You did not see her fight, when the neurocypher came. I feel I would have survived: it... chose a different first meal, and that would have provided me with time to reach instinct. But some of our own would have died. They did not. I saw her fight, through the haze of the monster's power. It... required some nights to fully assemble the memory. And I realized -- what is her place? Abjura asked me that, at the arrival point. What does the world hold for a centaur, after Tirek? Fear. You saw that tonight. It holds fear. But when I could truly remember watching her battle..."

The silver-clad left forehoof scraped at the cooling floor.

"...you said you found beauty in watching her run? She fights like nothing I have ever seen. So few centaurs in our lives, and their ways were not hers. Certainly not Tirek's, content to drain from those in flight, watching pegasi plummet to their deaths while his only regret was that they did not possess more to steal. She is new, sister. Something strange, something unfamiliar, and... someone whose heart has been wounded. Who bleeds within every night. And who, when confronted with danger, gallops towards it. She brought back a memory..."

"He couldn't gallop." A statement of fact.

You invoked him...

Luna's lips almost quirked.

"Yes. Well. Two legs. She hardly reflects him in form, Tia. But -- a bleeding heart, a wounded soul, and a noble purpose. Look within and..."

A mare immune to cold shivered.

"...find a mirror," the younger concluded. "From the instant we first discussed the immigration option, I recognized the employment issue. Who would hire her? Even the boldest of our nation might hesitate. I can perceive the potential for somepony of great love to take the chance. I can think of such to have crossed our own lives. I remembered the first."

"The only reason I allowed some of them to retain the title of 'noble'," Celestia softly said. "And?"

"And he would not have been enough," Luna said. "Because there would always be others, forever the chance for one to successfully channel fear into aggression. She needed protection. The shield created by the palace, in so far as that might hold. And for employment here... what can she do?"

"Fight," the elder slowly acknowledged. "And that's part of the problem, Luna. You turned her into a combatant --"

"-- she needed her weapon."

"I know. We agreed on that days ago." The huge white forehoof stomped, doing so as the mane accelerated its flow. "Every sapient species has its own magic: a minotaur's strength can potentially break a unicorn's field, donkey endurance pushes forward through altered weather. We can't always counter each other directly, but everyone can at least try to find a way to defend themselves. Everyone but her. A sapient without magic, the only one I've ever seen, helpless every time she goes out in public. She needed the sword, and you were practically waiting on Wordia --"

"Somewhat predictable," the younger judged. "In a few ways."

"-- but this puts that sword in our service," Celestia forced. "You saw the original round of articles, when the rumors were going around. The fears of what we might use it for. That's international, Luna. They already deal with the fact that we're the only things standing between the world and global extinction. Most of them try not to think about it, and all of them do." The words were getting faster. "But they know they have their own magic, they tell themselves that their magic has a chance, and now we have someone who breaks magic. Try to guess what this is going to do at the next Zoology Conference. I'm guessing someone's going to propose rewriting the Treaty Of Menagerie to cover her, or exclude her, or just walk out. And that's before we get to what this is going to do with our own citizens, because some of them may decide that this means she's under our control, but others are going to see a centaur that close to a Princess and wonder when she's going to strike. Once again keeping in mind that if we both go down, Sun and Moon go --"

"-- I. Do. Not. CARE!"

The dark eyes had come up again, and frost began to creep across the stone. Radiating out from silver.

"Let them talk." The words were all too close to a hiss, cold syllables slicing through the air. "Let them scream, let them come. She has earned her chance, and how many of them can say the same? I know what we risked by bringing her into the light, sister: we both do. Two suicide attempts in Canterlot alone after the articles appeared, both stopped. An entire continent of police on high alert. And she is not stupid, Tia: she heard your request for a moment of mourning, she will realize that the fear may rise to the point where it could have started again. She already blames herself for --"

Stopped, as stars dimmed within the flaring mane and the ice chose its border.

"-- no," Luna whispered. "I still have not galloped that down, and I may find myself unable to tell you when I do. For having potentially tantalized... for that, I offer apology. But it comes back to those discarded options, sister. There is potential damage in every second she spends in the world, and we -- brought her into the light. Because the other choices equaled imprisoning her for what might have been a lifetime, and a rather short one. For the crime of existing. And rather than do that -- we took the chance, and hoped to avoid the worst of the toll. For one cycle, we did. And did you not say it should never be worse than the first night?"

Celestia did the only thing she could, in the presence of reflected (and echoed, so many echoes) pain. She waited.

"Her only chance," the younger finished. "Earned. So I do not care. They would talk regardless. Some scream because they wish to. They charge because it lets them pretend they are not afraid, while we remain ourselves and she bears her sword. They will come? Let them come. And I did not tell you, because..."

She sighed, and freshly-crystallized snowflakes fell to the floor.

"...we are equal in the Diarchy. That is the law. But even now, after the Return, and the era of new Bearers... not always in your own eyes, Tia. Too much time alone, and --"

The dark eyes looked away.

Gently, because that was what Luna needed now. "It wasn't your fault."

"Regardless," was a rather flat response. "So I allowed it to happen, before witnesses. And then you would have to support me."

The long white legs risked a step forward -- but just one, at least to start.

Celestia looked at her sister for a while. Considered that there were many ways to describe Luna. 'Diplomacy's other option' was internationally popular, along with being among the few such terms which remained printable. But there was something more accurate. For most of the palace staff, the younger could, with some truth, be regarded as a hyperintelligent force of nature, only one with lingering emotional issues and the public relations skills of an avalanche.

But for the elder, it was a sibling who still wasn't completely sure how to be home.

Ice slowly began to melt.

"I admit to being at something of a loss in one regard," the younger admitted as she once again stared out into the falling snow.

"Oh?" Genuinely curious.

"The training. At least the combat portions of it. We have never seen a centaur fight as she does: nopony has. We require somepony used to dealing with potential Guards, who is capable of not only adapting to new circumstances, but constantly dealing with having to be in the presence of a fighting centaur..."

The warm white wing draped itself across the cool dark back.

"Oh, Luna," Celestia smiled. "Have I got a pony for you..."

Unwelcome

It was the little details which could become lost.

International reactions? There would soon be debates in every hall of power and with Mazein's democracy, that meant just about every last minotaur's home. Ultimately, the oldest allies Equestria had would decide to stand by their friend, but in that special way which suggested said friend might have overlooked something and therefore someone of sense had better be keeping an eye open. Shortly thereafter, Protocera's current President officially advised a wait-and-see approach, which naturally led into the fourth impeachment attempt of her term. Eeyorus reviewed disaster relief policies again. The hundred city-state kraals of Pundamilia Makazi failed to reach any degree of true consensus, which was the most natural outcome for a conference of zebras. Most of those who resided within the Burning Lands paid the same amount of attention to pony events as ever: namely, nothing concerned the dragons unless it seemed to directly threaten them and since the majority had decided nothing could be a threat to a dragon, those very few who'd actually bothered with both acquiring foreign newspapers (often moons behind the publication date) and learning how to read curled up atop their hoards and went back to sleep. And Prance vowed to look down upon everything Equestrian forever, which meant little more than that Prance still existed.

Every nation had their own way of dealing with the news, at least for those who were capable of hearing it: those parts of the world which remained unexplored had a certain difficulty in starting newspaper subscriptions. But Yakyakistan eventually assembled an opinion, Saddle Arabia had a few thoughts on the matter, various Diamond Dog warrens scratched their heads in confusion (or to get rid of ticks) while the ruler of a known changeling hive briefly shuddered (and immediately denied it) at the thought of potentially being revealed with a touch... countries myriad and yet to be named all tried to find some way of dealing with the latest capability of a nation which, in the opinion of the majority, already had too many of them.

But much of that would be recorded within articles (if not always accurately), and it didn't truly reflect everything which was going on. Because the world was more than governments and the beliefs of the powerful, even if those in charge frequently did their best to forget about that. Ultimately, the world was comprised of people.

People are made out of stories.

Every life is its own tale. A freshly-printed cover turns to the first blank page with the breath of a newborn's cry, while a well-worn spine and yellowed pages are filed within the library of the shadowlands at the end of a very long day. Spot a sapient moving down the street, and you've just met a narrator. They all move through the heart of their own story, personally relating events as they interpret the characters around them (not always well), and the most egotistical never manage to realize that anyone else might have a story at all.

Some of those characters interact. Crossovers happen on every corner. Tropes intermesh, plotlines meet, things too strange for fiction remain within the rougher canon of reality, and when something truly unique occurs...

There was a new story being told in Canterlot, a tale no one had ever believed possible. The formal announcement of its existence rippled pages around the world, and some of those stories were changed.

Take down selected volumes from the shelves of the living. Turn the pages...

The first thing the mare does when she reaches her desk, even before loading the ink into the typewriter and making sure the push-pedals which assemble letters from a group of raised shapes are well-greased (something she always does, as it's not as if she can trust anypony else for it), is to read the waiting police blotter. It disappoints her, and she had been counting on that nightly tally of Canterlot activity for support.

She was so careful in the composition of the previous articles. The mare feels she understands the steam engine of fear: no matter what happens, you just keep loading in fuel. There's no reason to keep an eye on the pressure gauge, at least when it comes to the usual purpose. Every choice for her original words was designed to push the boiler to the maximum, because explosions can always be blamed on someone else and she then gets to write columns about fallout and debris.

But the report does not contain what she had been expecting, at least not for the capital. (It'll take time to receive matching public documents from the other settled zones.) Any suicides could so easily be blamed on the centaur, and on this most crucial of nights -- nothing.

Not that it does more than briefly slow her down. There are more nights to come, courtesy of the elder who should have become nothing more than a living gear turning the sky centuries ago -- along with the younger, whom she usually manages to imply is nothing more than Nightmare in a slightly-altered form, while wondering when everypony else will catch on.

The mare often suggests that anypony who can't see things as she presents them is brainwashed, nothing more than a sheep (she frequently insults sheep, usually by comparison) of no education or independent thought, being led towards a slaughter which will surely take place any day now, and the existence of a centaur seems to have made that day somewhat more immediate.

The mare has declared that ponies need to think for themselves, and believes the only way anypony can prove they're thinking for themselves is to mindlessly agree with everything she says.

No suicides. But she has events to relate for her readers, especially since she already knows how they'll want to see them. So she personally greases the pedal gears, checks the levers, loads the ink, and stomps out a few test sentences before formally starting because she's a professional.

She chooses her words carefully and in doing so, cuts through time. Entire minutes are discarded: there's no reason for anypony to know they existed. She will tell them a story: something they'll accept as reality because history is supposedly written by the winners, but the important part is that it's read about by those who weren't there. Every word is fuel for the boiler, designed to increase the pressure of fear because given enough time, there has to be an explosion. Bodies to be laid at the forehooves of the centaur, stacked up until nopony can perceive any kind of future which does not have them among the dead...

...she stops. Her horn ignites, opens a drawer while the other ponies who work in that part of the building carefully ignore her actions: they have their own distortions to create and in any case, it's not a good idea to make her focus on what she's actually in the middle of doing. The mare makes enemies easily, frequently with pleasure and in the case of what she's doing right now, it would be the only part of her life where she didn't discriminate.

The bottle floats out. And the mare feels that its contents increase her creativity: the lubrication which makes the words flow that much more smoothly. Sometimes she drinks when she's done writing, in order to be more creative later. Or before she goes into a press conference where she's supposed to be introduced to a monster, and needs to find ways of making that small part of the world which thinks properly understand why that should not be.

Sometimes she drinks before she goes to sleep. Or drinks until she passes out, which is just as good.
There used to be a tiny part of her which wouldn't allow sleep. That which says she's writing words designed to encourage fear, to make ponies feel as if there's no way out other than attacking that which they're afraid of, or...
...nopony managed to commit suicide in Canterlot yesterday.
In spite of the centaur.
(The monster. It's a monster. Nopony can ever be allowed to see the word as meaning anything else.)
In spite of what she wrote.
Because those first articles were, on some level, meant to...

She used to have thoughts like that. But now she has a bottle.
The bottle is better.

Eight return to Ponyville deep under Moon. Seven of them are coming home.

It's that part of the night which exists within its own permanent awkwardness: so late that it's on the verge of becoming too early. And they are tired and worn down from their adventure, they need rest and they have been fully away from all sapient contact for some time, excluding the ones who were trying to kill them. They know nothing of what has transpired, and this is not quite the time to tell them.

The group separates almost immediately. They had spent days operating as a unit, albeit one which had an assigned temporary recruit and that made things awkward for a while. (The designer and baker... well, they're talking to the performer now, more or less: for the designer, each sentence still gives off the impression of having been assembled from knives, and it took the entire mission to dull that down to something more suitable for smearing butter.) But at the core, the group is composed of very different ponies, along with someone who isn't a pony at all and silently dreads the day when he might once again stop thinking as one. They are individuals, and now that they don't have to be Bearers for a little while, they can hear their lives calling.

So they go to their own homes. (Two limp somewhat along the way, while one trots because her left wing is still sprained.) They move through a town which is largely asleep, and those few residents who see them are merely glad that they've returned home. Nopony among those few greeters wants to disturb them, not yet -- and three of the ponies who see them are under the impression that the palace has provided a full briefing already, so there's nothing to say. Besides, a town some distance to the west of the Lunar Courtyard has yet to learn of what had happened there, those commuters who work for the capital's newspapers won't be returning home for hours, the first editions may beat them back and -- their heroines (plus one hero, and a guest who has yet to be truly forgiven) are tired.

The weather coordinator is the only one to notice anything unusual: she collects her tortoise from the petsitter (and, about ten minutes after the fact, briefly wonders whether she should have apologized for knocking on the bedroom window so loudly. Pushing it open from the outside doesn't strike her as having crossed a line), gets some altitude while he's riding in the insulated saddlebag, and quickly reaches her home. But she wants to put some maintenance in before going to bed, because the long-term existence of any vapor construct requires the presence of pegasi: too long without tapping into the magic of residents and visitors, and...

She didn't expect the mission to go on anywhere near that long, didn't get a housesitter, and so making sure her interior decorating isn't on the verge of becoming rather more exterior is important. So she looks around from the outside, seeing what has to be shored up first, and that lets her spot the snowstorm which engulfs the capital. And she knows that's unusual, but she doesn't treat it as important. There's probably a surprise festival or something. Maybe one of the stores bribed the capital's team and put together some kind of big event, or a noble is hosting something with a winter theme... it doesn't matter because if it was important, the palace would have told them already. (The fact that they've been out of contact doesn't really register, not when compared to the call of her bed -- not to mention the need to prevent that bed from relocating itself.) So she shrugs, adjusts a few clouds into greater density around her fountains, and makes a vow to check the headlines in the morning.

Of course, she has absolutely no intention of keeping that vow. It's too soon after the mission for any of the stories to be about her -- okay, fine: them. Plus her weather team doesn't know she's back yet, and the worst way to tell them would be by appearing before she'd finished sleeping through noon --

-- but as it turns out, the news comes to her.

In another part of town, the librarian and her little brother are heading towards their wounded home. The performer is trailing some distance behind, largely because the caravan had to be parked somewhere, the vast majority of the town can be drastically understated as being something other than fond of her, and there was a faint hope that somewhat less damage might be done if she left her residence sitting on an alicorn's property. There had been -- call it a 'natural reaction' -- when she'd once again crossed the border, and if the others hadn't quickly moved towards the sounds of justified anger...

She's trailing some distance behind -- but not too far back. Just in case.

The theory turns out to be partially correct: the caravan is intact, as none of the vegetables which were kicked into its sides managed to penetrate the wood. (However, there's a fresh lightning scorch near the hitch, and one of the wheel spokes is fractured.) And the librarian heads towards her own door, softly asking her sibling if he can stay awake long enough to send one scroll now that the effect which prevented all communication is starting to wear off, just something which tells the palace that the mission was successful and they're home. And he thinks he's up to it, but she feels he's hardly the best judge and so she's already second-guessing herself on that when she hears the caravan's door begin to open.

It delays everything for a few minutes. The performer cannot sleep in there: the purchased pegasus techniques which insulate the interior were already losing power when she arrived, it's a cold night and the caravan is leaking. She can come inside. There's a guest bed --

-- the performer has overstayed her welcome already, any amount of time when she's in this town is an overstay and she has to leave, there's blankets in the caravan and --

-- there's blankets on the guest bed, along with a warming pan. Also, there's a dragon. Add a dragon's presence to that of a warming pan and waiting times for heat are cut down significantly. Plus the librarian just saw that wheel spoke, the performer should replace that under Sun and certainly shouldn't risk practicing more advanced, hard-won, and deeply-loathed wheelwright skills on the road at night. She has to stay...

The performer was going to sleep! In the caravan! That's all! The road would have waited --

-- no. Because the librarian knows the performer a little better now, understands the pressure which comes from within and without. If the unicorn gets into the caravan, then the caravan will be rolling at the instant its owner decides nopony is left awake to hear it move. It's not just a matter of wanderlust, not after so much of the mission was spent traveling through a strange land, generally with the pursuit about sixty body lengths back. It's... because the performer knows how the town's residents feel about her. But that's not the librarian. And most of what they talked about during the mission was the mission, that one theory from the last letter still needs some face-to-face discussion, it's just one night and...

...stay. Please.

...
...all right. For one night. Plus a breakfast. That's it.

And that was all it was meant to be (although the librarian was going to try for a full extra day in the morning). But morning is when the news arrives. The request. And the performer's wanderlust is frustrated, but she's still on probation for everything which happened with the Amulet (when it easily could have been so much worse), she has to do what the palace asks and magically speaking, the problem is an interesting one. So she stays. Just to work on the problem.

In time, it will take her somewhere she never wanted to be.

Silver eyes watch the centaur sleep.

It's been a remarkably steady sleep. Given what she's seen of the sleeping habits for the cell's occupant, there's an argument to be made that it's unnaturally steady.

Unless, of course, you happen to work on the Lunar shift and have a better understanding than most for what your Princess is capable of.

Night after night, she's watched the centaur sleep, and it's told her what's natural. For starters, the girl sleeps on the floor: after that first waking, the bed was never used. All four legs fold until belly and barrel are completely down, the upper torso seems to lock into position, and both arms fold and tuck under the breasts. (The little pegasus has been to Mazein with her Princess, met ageládas before that. Breasts still weird her out.) The girl closes predatory eyes and shortly after, the nightmares begin.

Normally, the girl's upper torso jerks in her sleep. Arms desperately reach for a weapon. The tail lashes, then tucks against the far side of the body as if it's trying to hide. During the worst of it, legs straighten and she's halfway to standing before she fully wakes. She dreams often, more than the mare has seen ponies dream, and perhaps that's natural for a centaur.

The nightmares could also be argued as natural, at least for someone who's in a cell.

But this is the last night for that. And after the press conference ended, the girl (whom the pegasus knows is not a full adult, she feels she may be aware of more than almost anypony when it comes to the centaur and part of her aches when she passes some of what she's learned on to her own Princess) was incapable of speech. She was... the way she had been in the Courtyard, only more exhausted. The mare, who has the most experience with their visitor, had seen the change take place at the instant the centaur stepped out into the moonlight. She wonders if she was the only one who realized what was happening.

The surge of instincts. The struggle to hang on in the face of the unknown stretching out second by second.

One more way in which the girl is just like them.

The girl couldn't talk. She was too tired from having fought that constant inner war, and so she sank down onto the cold cell floor (although somewhat less so now, as the mare moved an insulating blanket there on the third night) and went to sleep. And she should have been twitching, misplaced ears rotating in all available directions as the dreamer listened to her own inner screams --

-- but the little pegasus knows more than most about what her Princess is capable of. The girl's rest has been steady: unnaturally so. The harsh night ending with a silent gift.

The mare is watching the girl sleep, and doing so from inside the cell. And in the corridor, Guards come and go, because nopony's quite sure what the assignments are now. The centaur never would have tried to escape, there's no more risk of having somepony come down and find her -- but they haven't received new orders, and so Guards come and go.

They also talk, because that's what Guards do.
The mare doesn't need an enchanted device to understand what they're saying.

There seem to be two camps developing. Those who went to the arrival site, and everypony else. (The first group represents a rather small minority.) And the discussions turn to the oath, something none of them had ever heard before, not a Guard's oath --

-- it was the proudest day of the mare's life, reciting that oath --

-- but so close, they talk about the reporters and the questions and the fact that nopony's been able to find Bulkhead for hours -- but mostly, they talk about the girl.

Quite a few Guards have spent time outside the cell. (It's a much lower percentage for the rest of the Lunar staff.) And for the ones who've watched her... they understand she's not a monster in anything more than that unnatural form. The ultimate definition of a monster is something incapable of caring: that doesn't describe the girl. She... arguably cares a little more than might be strictly healthy. But maybe that's just how centaurs are...

They talk about what happened. What has to happen next. And they're Lunars, they care about their Princess, any one of them would give their lives to protect her -- but part of being a Guard is having to be the pony who tells a Princess when she's wrong. And they know the girl isn't a monster, but...

...it can't work.

It can't.

That's the opinion of the majority. Those who were in the forest -- they talk about how the girl can fight, she fights like nothing anypony's ever seen, having that sword wielded for the thrones will give the Princesses protection (it's plural during that part of the recurring argument, as nopony's mentally assigned the girl a shift), Equestria might be that much safer with the girl among their ranks --

-- but there's always a counter. Safer, when every public hoofstep might set off a riot? Less threats, when there's no way to tell how the other nations are going to respond? And even those who were in the forest can't say she'll succeed in getting through the training, or that anything will work out. Just that there should be a chance.

Maybe she won't make it through training.
(Maybe there's Guards hoping for that.)
(The ones who still can't get past their fear.)
So what does she do if she fails?

And nopony has an answer.

The little pegasus stands in the cell, watching the girl sleep because it's easier than having to think.

Her shift ends. She trots down the street under the grey light of a mostly-blocked Sun, because flying through heavy snowfall should only be done in emergencies. Nopony heading out for the Solar shift really notices her. She's not unattractive, although it took most of her life before 'night colors' finally came into fashion -- but there's heavy snowfall, shivering ponies blinking flakes out of their eyelashes aren't exactly in the mood to flirt, and she's off-shift. One of the first things a Guard learns after taking up active duty is that most ponies just see the armor. (The partial exception is a few chosen pegasi on the Lunar staff, who occasionally take up armor that's a little bit different. The little mare is one of them, and so she's also learned that even then, ponies don't recognize what they're seeing.) Take it off, and she's completely anonymous. Just another Lunar mare heading home at the end of a cold night.

She sees two exceptionally foolish unicorns trying to read the morning paper as they trot along. One is weak enough that most of the wind gets through her field, and both have their coronas wink out at the moment they truly spot the headline.

Eventually, she gets home. It's easy to dry her fur, because she's one of the strongest on the palace staff. It's just a question of reaching the bathroom before using the technique: separated water has to land somewhere. And then she...

...she was watching the girl. All night. She was in the Courtyard, she went through everything which happened there, and she should be going to sleep. But little glints of grey light sneak through the gaps in shifted blackout curtains, glance off the mirror to land elsewhere in the small apartment, and...

...she was watching the girl.
Now she's looking in the mirror. Watching herself.
And she doesn't know why.

The merchant pulls his cart through one of the wider gaps between the trees, then pauses to scout out the next part of his route.

He doesn't come this way often, and this is true of everypony who's ever been down the faint forest path: 'often' just doesn't apply. But there are times when the main road has problems, especially with flooding. The rainfall in this part of the continent can be very heavy, and it drains the standing techniques faster than usual. Sometimes the thaums run out before a recharge arrives, and when that happens -- well, you can try to pull your goods through a mire of mud, or you can go off the main road. Dozens of ponies have kept this path open, and their passages are still rare enough that the next traveler needs to pay attention or lose even that degree of trail. (Blazes can be wiped out, he's not the kind of exceptionally rude earth pony who would just casually scar tree bark, and stacked-up rockpiles fall over.) So he's stopping every so often, just to make sure he's still going the right way.

Fortunately, the trail was originally scouted by those who were pulling carts, and so what's there is wide enough for him to bring his own through. It means taking the long way around, but it's still faster than going through the mud (not to mention better for his coat) and if they're all technically stepping through a location where the map says they're not supposed to be -- well, who's to know? Besides, if the palace didn't want ponies off the trail, then the palace should send pegasi around more often for recharges. (So there.) He's making progress, more than he would if he was dealing with the mire, and the cart's hard-purchased enchantments only help the cart. If he'd stayed on the road, he would have probably sunk in up to all four knees by now.

Instead, he's making his way through the trees. Following the path as the hitched cart steadily comes along behind him, wheels automatically adjusting to the shifting terrain. Sometimes this means a degree of compression, actively shrinking by a hoofwidth before they flare back to full size just in time to prevent a small drop from delivering a jolt to his goods.

He'd originally hesitated before paying so much for the workings which allow that to happen, and he hardly enjoys nosing over bits so a unicorn can keep the charge up (there are no unicorns in his family, and that's starting to seem like a horrible loss of potential freebies) -- but his items are fragile. It's easy enough to hit a pothole in the road, sudden changes are guaranteed on a trail, and since the castings were performed, he's no longer losing money on damaged goods. There's just times when you need to spend bits now in order to save them later.

Branches drip moisture onto his back: the largest and coldest drops occasionally require an effort to keep from jumping. He rotates his ears regularly, listening for potential trouble because even though the path is established, he's still off the main road. But he isn't losing that much time, he can make it up with a trot once he clears the problem area, there's profit ahead --

-- the hitch rams into his shoulders with all the force of an earth pony taking a strong step forward. It's more than enough to make him yelp, he spends a few seconds in both trying to drive the bruising pain back down and listening to discover if anything heard him --

-- the wheels have locked.

He pulls again. They won't move.

...all right. Maybe something got jammed in an axle: a pebble was dislodged from the earth and wound up stuck in exactly the wrong place. It's the only reason he can immediately conceive of for the problem, especially as the enchantments are supposed to help the wheels turn. Not much -- making the cart truly self-powered would cost a fortune, produce a giveaway glow, require more recharges than he ever wants to pay for and, too often, would leave him galloping away from his own goods in order to avoid being trampled -- but enough so that when he's tired, the cart can do a little of the work on its own.

So he unhitches himself, wincing at the fresh pain. Turns, takes a step towards the cart --

-- the forest blurs, all four knees go weak as his blood roars in his ears and there's a single moment when he realizes that sound is the only thing he can truly hear, something he's about to test with his own scream --

-- and then it's over.

He blinks a few times. Quickly listens again, and it doesn't take long to determine that nothing's approaching along the ground.

Could that have been what a neurocypher's attack feels like? He can't pick up on anything crashing through the forest and the trees are too closely spaced for one to silently travel -- at least, they're too narrow here. Maybe he's at the extreme edge of a big one's range, and the magic just washed across him for a second. But he thinks a little more, and remembers that it's the wrong part of the continent for neurocyphers: there's never been one sighted in this area. They're gallops upon gallops away.

Of course, it could be a new kind of monster.

...he has to move.

He checks the axles, doing so at the speed of desperation. But he can't find anything wrong. He pushes at the cart from behind to no avail, he gets back into the hitch and pulls with all of his returned strength --

-- the cart moves.

It happens all at once. The wheels shift, but they do so unevenly. The left side of the front axle lands before the right, and he hears the faint tinkle of broken glass.

This causes him to lose some additional time. Expressing his full opinion regarding the situation requires a number of sentences and, for ponies with less travel experience, at least three fully comprehensive translation guides.

It's eight days before his route brings him around to the pony who did the original enchantments, and that gives him the occasion for other Words. Most of them have to do with low-quality work, because the recharge he'd paid for prior to getting on the trail should have lasted for at least another week. For the spells to just spontaneously discharge all stored power -- well, now he knows what it feels like to have that wash over him, doesn't it? And he tried to get a recharge at the next town, that held for a while, but 'a while' is now a continually-decreasing variable and given the amount he paid for --

-- the unicorn eventually manages to get a word in edgewise, which nearly involves using her horn in the same fashion. And after thoroughly inspecting the cart, she... apologizes. She doesn't know what happened to her enchantments. But she can't argue that something did, and she's going to recast them from scratch. For free, because there aren't many ponies in the world who specialize in her work and the fact that most of the recipients travel so much means they have very little trouble in finding the others.

She puts him up in a hotel for the two days it takes her to recast everything, which effectively repairs both the cart and the client/caster relationship. He never has any problems with her workings again, and eventually winds up recommending her to a few other ponies because while work which never needs maintenance or repair is invaluable, somepony willing to both admit when they've made a mistake and make up for it can be truly precious.

But after he leaves, she continues trying to figure out what she did wrong. And she can't find an answer. It haunts her dreams for weeks, it makes her triple-check every spell she casts for two moons, and it never happens again.

It's the little details which become lost.

Cacophonic

There were always those who believed what they wished, sometimes with that special defiance which suggested any countering evidence had been deliberately created as a means of proving those beliefs true: after all, if they didn't have all of the correct information, then the palace wouldn't go to the effort of lying to them. And so there were a number of ponies (and others) who simply knew that the younger could not bear the touch of Sun.

Their beliefs as to what happened at the moment of contact tended to vary. A rough majority felt Luna simply went into a coma at the instant that brighter light reached her, and could not be woken by any known force until Moon held sway again. Others still put their faith in the 'catches fire' issue. In both cases, any daylight encounters with the actual party involved were typically blamed on carefully-created illusions coating the body of a stand-in: it was something which had the exceptionally rude trying to make physical contact with horn or wings, and it usually ended with an internally-grumbling alicorn levitating the offender towards the nearest exit. (The captured pony would frequently spend the remainder of their increasingly limited time in her presence trying to flail their legs towards the wings, as clearly the horn was real enough.) The younger had been the most talented illusion-caster of her generation, had taken up that title again in the modern nights, was fully aware of just how hard it was to keep a fully realistic simulation of a pony body going in realtime -- and so as much as anything else, the insult taken regarded somepony having decided it would be just that easy.

Ultimately, all such beliefs were false: after all, it was impossible to be there for the exact moment of Moon's raising without having awoken some time before. The younger suffered no injury from the touch of Sun -- but as with her sister's reaction to Moon, anything over a few hours served as an ever-escalating irritant. Each was slightly weaker during the time of the other, but that was something which required witnesses who understood their true peaks and could thus tell when they were operating below that capacity. (The harder part was being present when those peaks were actually being exerted.) But neither was driven into magical sleep, and the elder hadn't heard a rumor about the white form simply freezing for centuries.

(There was something in Celestia which actually liked the image for its sheer audacity: her body trapped beneath a Moon-created thick coating of clear ice, which shattered away in all directions at the moment daylight reached her. She suspected the originator had once seen a cockatrice victim successfully breaking out of the shell and simply taken the idea sideways. The concept of a stone coating appearing and vanishing with Sun or Moon also struck her as a good start for some kind of fiction -- but she hadn't been sure about the rest of her idea, the creative arts had always been Luna's dominion, and in any case, it usually wasn't so much a matter of getting a castle above the clouds as just bringing the clouds that much lower. Besides, a third of the nation's castles were made of clouds to begin with.)

Their hours overlapped: that was just the natural cycle. Noon (or, in the elder's case, one in the morning) was difficult to reach, and for the sisters to interact during the heart of each other's hours generally indicated either crisis or insomnia. But at the respective beginnings and ends of those mark-assigned shifts... they usually got to see each other. They made an effort to take first/last meals together. They wanted to be there for each other. And during the earlier parts of the Return, when a major story broke, there had been an occasional desperate rush through the palace as Celestia attempted to complete a personal seek-and-destroy mission for all palace-hosted newsprint, because the publications tended to arrive shortly before dawn and the one thing the younger definitely possessed was a decidedly shorter temper.

Of course, life and sibling interactions had a certain flow. The palace had a subscription to just about every publication (mostly gifted by the publishers, although the Tattler charged full price and occasionally tried to kick in an increase on the delivery fee), and Luna had silently doubled that number while ensuring a few were dropped off in locations which she could usually get to first. It was no longer possible for Celestia to delay the explosion through censorship, and so some of the overlap hours following a major event were now spent in going over the articles together.

As explosion-preventing tactics went, 'talking it out' didn't have what the elder considered to be a spectacular success rate, but it did ensure she would be in protective proximity when it all went off.

"Not quite as early as expected," the younger noted from her throne as Celestia wearily trotted into the room, sunspots and little flares playing over the surface of field-carried publications. "And that is after I advised you to gain as much rest as possible, promising to wait until you arrived, even offering to take Sun for the cycle... while knowing you would ignore all of it. What has kept you?"

"I checked on Cerea," the elder sighed. "I thought it was going to just be a peek into the cell, but -- she woke up." The white mare slowly shook her head. "I'm not sure why. I was doing everything I could to be quiet..."

The younger silently meditated on what usually happened when somepony who was twice the size of the average citizen attempted to practice stealth -- then discarded the fast-approaching smirk. "A guess?" She stood up, started to trot down the ramp. "She scented you. It does not break my code to tell you that her dreams include scent, sister, and do so at a level of refinement I have never seen. And I did what I could to calm her sleep, give her a chance at true rest while staying away from her nightscape -- but the effect has a maximum duration, and scenting your presence in the hall might have been enough to wake her."

Celestia slowly nodded: the newspapers bobbed in time with the movement.

"No magic," the elder stated. "But we can't dismiss biology."

The younger nodded back as she reached the bottom of the ramp, stepping off onto silver-shot marble. "Did you speak with her?"

"Just for a minute."

"And..." The dark mare briefly paused. "...her condition?"

Celestia's eyes closed.

"The first thing she asked me was if there had been any suicides."

Dark fur slowly shifted across the course of a carefully regulated breath.

"While fully prepared to blame herself for every loss," Luna quietly observed. "But I have already seen the overnight tally, Tia, and so I know that you were able to give her the true total."

Purple eyes gradually opened. "When we both know the only number she was going to hear from either of us was 'zero'." A little sigh. "I'm just glad it happened to be true for Canterlot." More slowly, "But we still have to wait on the rest of the continent, and --" a deeper breath "-- we have to watch out for somepony blaming any deaths on her. The next sole survivor of a monster attack who decides to reunite the family in the shadowlands -- you know Wordia. She'll imply that pony would have found a way to go on, if it wasn't for having to live in the same nation as a centaur."

"The focus of all blame for a time." It wasn't quite a sigh. "I seldom have the opportunity to feel grateful for the illiteracy of another. Nightwatch has informed me that condition will not last -- but for now, we can keep her away from these words."

Celestia carefully lowered her body, arranged limbs into false comfort as belly and barrel pressed against the floor. Luna moved to face her, then matched the position as sunlight began to split the papers between them.

"Some of those are mine," the younger noted.

"I thought it would be easier if we each had a copy to read."

Wryly, "An uncensored copy?"

"I haven't done anything to them --"

"-- on this occasion," the younger concluded. "So. You did not indulge in any 'sneak previews'? Because I chose to use some time for reviewing the police blotter, and thus had no chance to review. Additionally, you might recall that I had promised --"

"-- I saw some of the headlines." Celestia shrugged. "That was inevitable just from picking them up. But I haven't gone through the articles."

It got her a somewhat dubious nod. "As you say." A pause. "You said it was the first thing she asked about. Which queries comprised the remainder?"

"Riots. Protests -- we've got some fresh ones arriving for the Solar shift: I had the snowfall stepped up accordingly. And she..." The elder hesitated. "...asked me for something."

The dark eyebrows went up. "Truly?"

"It surprised me too," Celestia admitted. "She's been almost completely quiet there. I've barely heard her ask for water."

"I feel," Luna slowly began, "she sees her mere presence as something more than imposition. Nightwatch has generally needed to inform me of when a true need exists, and that from observation. Such as observing that she has been attempting to clean all of her clothing using the restroom's water flow, because sending out laundry would be increasing our burden." And in the tones of carefully-measured understatement, "So I am rather curious as to what she would actually request."

Celestia told her. The dark eyebrows climbed higher.

"Interesting," the younger observed. "And did you grant it?"

"Within twenty minutes," Celestia replied. "She was already starting with it when I left again." A little shrug, magnified by both the size of the white body and the burdens it was preparing to carry. "Would you like to hear some good news?"

Luna's ears perked. "If only as a reminder that such can still exist? Yes."

The elder took careful stock of her sibling's expression, waited one extra second before proceeding. "They're home."

And then drank in the results, because it was still so rare to see Luna truly smile.

"The briefness of that summation," the younger immediately decided, "implies the safe return of all, along with full mission success. Correct?"

Celestia nodded. "I only got the scroll about seven minutes before I went for the newspapers." A small frown. "And it flickered in. We've spent four years waiting for someone to try using a lockdown effect directly on Spike, and it finally happened. Getting communications from him during missions just became a lot chancier."

"Assuming the party who made the attempt spread the word, and that was not one prone to communication with those who did not share his interests," Luna pointed out. "It is somewhat less likely for another to think of it independently. In this case, they had rather more knowledge of how we had been operating, thanks to that --" the word was nearly spat "-- spy. In the best case, two were aware that dragons have their own means of accessing the aether: it may stop there for a time. But --"

"But we'll start preparing for the worst," Celestia intercepted. "I already sent a scroll back."

"Your request?" Luna checked.

"Basically to keep Trixie there, stand by for further instructions, and don't come to the palace," Celestia filled in. "Twilight's going to see most of the headlines --" this triggered the briefest flash of a wry smile "-- because dealing with a librarian who puts out her own received periodicals in the morning comes with certain problems -- and without my directly telling them to stay put for a while, you know she'd be on the first train out. But they need time to heal, Luna: Fluttershy has a sprained wing, Pinkie cracked her left hind hoof... the current situation doesn't justify bringing them in when they're injured. So all I gave them was a shorthoof briefing and the order: stay in Ponyville until we call for you."

"Your former student," Luna pointed out, words forced into a frozen steadiness, "has been developing something of an independent streak. Can we rely upon her following that order? Because if any would have cause to, shall we say, reexamine our evaluation of Cerea as 'harmless unless attacked'..."

The purple eyes briefly closed again.

"I know what they almost lost to Tirek," Celestia softly countered. "I also know they haven't forgotten. So I'm just going to hope they trust me enough to let themselves heal. And that's not just from the mission injuries." The sigh rustled her wings. "For what it's worth, I'm half-expecting Fluttershy to be the one who decides she has to come, no matter what I tell her. But... we'll see what they do. I already told the Guards to inform us if any of them tried to get in."

"We will begin to deal with that," the younger firmly said, "if it should actually occur. In the meantime, we have more than enough to do."

"And speaking of starting..."

Celestia inclined her heads towards the newspapers. The younger nodded, and folded headlines were unfurled.

"The Tattler?" was a natural inquiry.

"Bottom of the stack." The elder sighed. "I figured we were better off working our way down to it. In several senses."

Luna nodded, and both siblings began to read. It took about eight minutes before Celestia openly snickered.

"Who?" was Luna's immediate inquiry.

"Garoun," Celestia replied. "He described her -- verbal demonstration as 'The natural linguistic consequence of spending so much time around Guards.'"

The snicker retriggered in the opposing form. "Is that how Mr. Charger summarized the event?"

"And that is the only way he described it," Celestia smiled. "Which, so far, makes him the lone pony to figure out what actually happened. A status he'll probably maintain." With full sincerity, "I'm going to miss him when he retires next year."

"There have been times when that insight worked against us."

"Yes," the elder agreed. "But reliably so, and always in neutrality..."

More pages turned.

"If not for his current profession," Luna eventually observed, "I would consider hiring Dejected Overcast as a consultant. This article contains a number of rather fine secondary riot-breaking techniques, most of which would be unknown to anypony who had not read through the full police and Guard hoofbooks. His summary is exactingly comprehensive."

"Except that we'd be hiring someone who's openly assuming they'll all eventually fail," Celestia pointed out, then switched to a fresh paper, followed quickly by an equally fresh groan. "Oh, no..."

"Sister?"

"The Bugle put Raque's opinion column on the front page again -- and here we go. 'I encourage everypony to participate in the palace's Meet A Centaur Days! After all, how can we truly say we accept someone unless we get the chance to say it directly to her face, while remembering at all times that the distortions of those features are hardly something the poor thing can help? And when you let her pick up your foal, watch as she cradles it against her --'"

Celestia paused. Winced.

Luna, who'd quickly switched to the Bugle in something approaching self-defense, had just reached the same portion. "Ah. So we learn that a mare who claims friends from all species can somehow have no idea what a 'bosom' is."

The elder silently nodded.

"Or how to spell it. Admittedly, a rare word to see rendered in Equestrian, but it remains an error which was not caught or corrected by her editor."

Again. The wince had effectively doubled.

Luna took a breath.

"A regrettable coincidence," she decided, "to have the error come so close to our term for 'speartips'."

There was a brief pause while the corrective scroll was composed and sent.

"Still not the best image," Celestia sighed once they were free to read again. "Asking ponies to let her hold their children is taking it too far, too fast, and it'll keep a lot of hooves from approaching those sessions. But that's Raque. Never suggest a single hoofstep when a gallop will fail..."

Eventually, they were down to the last paper: one copy each. Something which had been originally placed into the stack with a fold which left the back page on full display.

"Let us compare summaries before we conclude," Luna offered, mostly as a way of putting it off a little longer. (Celestia nodded.) "Based on what we have read, what do you see as most likely to have granted her any degree of public chance?"

Immediately, softly, with gaze lowered, "Crying for the dead." The huge mare softly sighed. "They weren't expecting that." The right wing partially unfolded, just enough to potentially tuck the white head beneath it. "I wasn't expecting that. It was the first thing which seems to have made some of them briefly see her as a person. But they were the only direct witnesses, and... it won't mean as much for the laypony. Not when they're just reading it."

"Yes," the younger quietly agreed. "But it was mentioned in the majority of the articles, and so perhaps there will be those who think about the words somewhat more deeply." Full constellations dimmed within the mane. "As a monster is that which cannot care..."

Both heads dipped, and the sisters took the moment they needed to put the memories away.

"Tentative allies, here and there," Luna decided. "None but those on Ms. Marshdew's level who fully, almost mindlessly claim to welcome her simply because we had decided to do so, but a number willing to at least watch and wait." Dryly, "I suspect most of those were created by her unexpected linguistic talents."

"But there's a price to pay for that," the elder observed.

"One she had paid on the day of her birth," the younger replied. "Not knowing that the one collecting that toll would ever come into her sight. She would have paid that price had she said nothing at all, even if she had agreed with everything the Tattler's readership might ever desire..."

There was an odd echo within the words, and it brought the elder back to the first time something like them had been said.

"Because for those who hate," Celestia quoted, "there's never such a thing as 'enough surrender'."

Luna silently nodded.

"And there is always one more thing to take," the younger quietly finished. "So. Knowing that the only thing we will regret more than reading what Wordia Spinner has written is already having guessed the majority of what it might say..."

Light and dark coronas reluctantly flared. The paper flipped, and each briefly regarded the ink stain which was soaking into their respective portion of the marble floor because it was easier than looking at the words.

"Another front page opinion column," Celestia made herself say. "But we expected that."

"Facts buried within," Luna added. "Or rather, facts simply buried. There should be no issues in identifying the murderer."

They read. It took a while. The author's sentences were something of an acquired taste and for those who lacked a predilection for such verbal cuisine, the results kept trying to come back up.

"'Demonstrating a vulgarity of mind to equal the monstrosity of her body'," Celestia slowly quoted.

"'possessing every possible kind of physical deformity -- something which must not be allowed to distract from the warping of mental and moral'," Luna picked out.

"'Openly mourning the imprisonment of the one who caused so many deaths...'"

"An opinion column," Luna starkly said.

Darkness coated the white mare's voice. "The word 'propaganda' was taken. Just keep going."

They forced themselves to continue, syllables soaking acid into their eyes.

"I could wish for more research," the elder said. "Three newspapers remembered the historical precedent of dropping charges incurred during first contacts. Something which was done for ponies a few times, because it's hard to meet a new species without stepping on a cultural taboo."

"While she implies that we only did so because we are frightened of 'the centaur'," Luna noted. "Even more so than we were of Tirek. Afraid to imprison her. Afraid to fight. Afraid to truly deal with her at all, and so when the thrones have failed, such should be the province of citizens..."

"With that last not being directly stated," Celestia reluctantly decided. "Expertly implied. In a way which verbally avoids collecting any blame for what her readers might do."

"I have never said that she was not expert in her craft," Luna declared. "It is simply that very few care to watch somepony sculpt in manure."

More sentences went by.

"Remember that first contact where they insisted they were the only true sapients?"

"Yes. Prance still exists."

They mutually moved to the next paragraph.

"Fear."

"More fear."

"Terror."

"Grotesquerie."

"Nightmare -- sorry..."

"Do not be. The actions of nightmare is what she meant to imply. Although having this as its intent would have meant a degree of sharing which it never would have been able to comprehend."

"Have you found any mention of her name?"

"Not a one. Ms. Spinner seems to feel that 'centaur' suffices. After all, to grant the dignity of a name is not an honor one generally assigns to monsters..."

They finished.

"So barring a rather spectacular reaction from one of the other nations," Luna softly concluded as the final stars in her tail nearly winked out in concert with the appearance of the terminal period, "we have met the enemy."

"And they," Celestia wearily observed as a body exhausted in more ways than the physical allowed a heavy head to dip onto cool marble, "are us."

Abhorrent

There had always been books, and there had almost never been a choice.

Cerea's herd had possessed its share of writers. It was possible to arrange for the arrival of ink and paper (because while centaurs knew how to create both, doing so in quantity would deplete the gap's resources), and so new stories sometimes emerged from within. But it hadn't taken long for her to perceive the underlying twinned-yet-opposing themes which permeated nearly every syllable of centaur literature. There were tales of honor and adhering to a personal code no matter what the cost, compliance and looking out for the herd before considering the needs of an individual (if that actually became a concern at all), and every last bit of it would be saturated with what the filly could only perceive as claustrophobia.

That was the better option. The ones who had retreated into claustrophilia, who saw making multiple species spend their generational existence within the gaps as the best of all possible worlds... that made her want to kick both books and authors across the room.

(Some of those had spoken up at the first meetings. A number were still talking, and the only word for so many was 'Stop.')

So for the most part, it was books from the human world, because smuggling those into the gap could actually be marginally easier than getting the publications which had been created by other liminals. And for the most part, those had arrived in bulk shipments: bookstores dumping supply upon going out of business, library remaindered sales, publishers tearing off the covers of last printings and tossing the results into dumpsters. (That last always arrived as a fresh wound to Cerea's soul, because someone who was always so careful with stories hated to see one hurt -- but at least it was a new story.) And the leaders of the herd had some degree of hard-won access to the Internet (cellular data from burner phones where the connections were always dropping out, because having a signal repeater too close was a risk which couldn't be endured and trying to get anything else would chance revealing all), but the creation of an online credit account... you needed someone on the outside who could buy gift cards to create a waiting balance, it was almost impossible to set up anything with a bank, and it all meant that ordering a title directly usually didn't happen.

You took potluck, when the crates came in. It was all too common to get fifty copies of the same novel, which at least meant there was enough for anyone who was interested. Just about as frequently, there would be a multi-part publication and the herd would find itself in custody of Books 1, 2, 4, and 5: the third, sixth, and seventh were scheduled to arrive on the Twelfth Of Never, and so a certain young wizard hadn't so much escaped Cerea's notice as been put on permanent hold. Or it would be cookbooks, useless cookbooks for cuisines which would never reach her, atlases for the lands she could never see...

On a truly good day, you might get a tourism guide. Glossy pages four decades old meant Cerea had been to Sicily a hundred times, had in fact tried for it as her second choice of exchange student destination. (The first had been the United Kingdom, because knights -- and then everything had gone wrong.) In dream, she had taken rowboats through the beauty of the grottos, while being completely unsure as to how a centaur was supposed to sit in a human rowboat. She loved the little island, did so without ever having stepped upon its soil, and usually finished a reread of the book through crying herself to sleep.

But once -- just once...

Six books. All six, which meant the series had arrived complete and whole. An adventure, and a rather strange one for the formatting, because it was the creation of a group. There were four authors. They were working with the blessing of a fifth, who had asked them to create something in the spirit of his writings. And they did not create as a mosaic, with each laying down a few verbal tiles within a carefully-edited whole. Instead, one wrote the first book, then passed it off to the next. Two wrote a book each, another composed an internal pairing, and the one who had the first also created the last.

Cerea had been the only one interested in such an odd concept. But there was a dungeon which was the size of a world (several worlds, with gates leading between them), and the main character felt very much like a knight. He gathered companions who were strange, yet loyal and true. There was an adventure, it was complete and whole and she could be there from first page to last and it was --

-- bad.

Some of the individual books worked. The fourth was especially good. But the authors hadn't created a master plan. Each simply passed their volume off to the next writer, and the typical result was the literary equivalent of giving someone careful directions on how to reach a destination and watching them merrily nod, followed by galloping off in the exact opposite direction. They did what they wished, under no guidance or directive to respect each other, and the one who'd written the first had carefully gathered up everything from the intermediary volumes just before starting into the last, because it was that much more fuel for the bonfire which destroyed everything she'd been trying to care about.

By the time the last page was turned (because there was a certain morbid fascination which wanted to finish through bottoming out), she hated all of it. The ending hadn't ruined everything (although to be fair, it had tried): it was the lack of cooperation which had killed the series. Cerea had flipped the books around on the shelves so that she would look at page edges instead of spine, done her best to never think about them again...

...except for the art.

She had invisibly trotted at the side of the explorer, been with him through it all, and felt those who'd created his journey should have given him more respect.

She had also watched him sketch.

Perhaps that was what had given her the choice for what she ultimately pursued as an artistic skill. For he did not know if he could bring anything back from the dungeon to his home (much less if that home could be reached again) -- but he had possessed two vital resources: something to draw with, something to draw on. And so at the back of each book, Cerea had found the sketches. Capturing the things he saw along the way, and it was sometimes surprising to see how different they appeared when compared to the visions which words had evoked within.

Ultimately, those words, jumbled and tossed between the egos of four -- those failed her. But the sketches had a unity to them, something which made Sir Folliot (she had privately granted him a 'Sir') a little more real...

She didn't know if she would ever go home. (She didn't want to think about it. So much of her current activity had been created in the name of not thinking.) But if she did -- what would she take with her? She doubted she would be allowed to carry much in the way of souvenirs. The disc wasn't hers, and it was possible that any other enchantments she might find would only work here. Without a truly stable passage, she would never ask a pony to risk coming with her, and... any stay beyond just long enough to say Cerea was telling the truth felt like a truly bad idea.

Things from this world might stay with it. But if she could bring back anything...

Cerea, hating that she was imposing, asking for anything when her mere presence was already doing so much (and the white Princess had told her that none had died, she didn't know if she believed it), but also in a position where she couldn't exactly go shopping any time soon and that had the benefit of being completely familiar -- had asked for a sketchbook and art supplies. Because if nothing else, she could draw the things around her, the practice might help what she still felt were meager skills, and... well, she could have asked for a camera, but sketches could be made after the fact. Additionally, a lifetime of listening to worried talk about digital composition told her that such pictures were too easy to fake. (She hadn't mentally adjusted for film.) Besides, the sketchbook was probably cheaper.

She'd been drawing for hours, interrupted only by delivered meals, because it was something to do. Because at the moment she stopped, she would start thinking about suicides and fear and failure, she was going to fail, she'd been offered a chance which she didn't deserve, there were going to be consequences for that failure and --

-- she dipped the quill again, tried to focus on the curving lines --

-- that's better. It looks like her now. That little bit of extra shading around the eyes had done the trick.

Hours spent in sketching, because it felt like something which could keep thought away. There had even been precious minutes where that had held true. But the drawings themselves...

She went back to the first one she'd attempted. It needed more work. She'd been trying to get it right for hours, and --

-- the familiar scent reached her, and she carefully put the quill aside, closing the sketchbook before reaching towards the disc. The wire touched her ear just in time.

"Um. I'm... um. Are you busy? Because there's some things we have to do tonight. Moon was just raised, and Princess Luna just told me to start doing some things with you. Not the usual things. Things about getting ready for training. And -- just getting out of this cell. Um. Can I come in?"

The little knight sounded more awkward than usual and with Nightwatch, any verbal increase represented a pretty significant upgrade. "Yes." It wasn't as if she could really deny entrance to the cell.

The door opened. "Okay. Oh." Black wings twitched, brushing the edge of carefully-worn saddlebags as they did so: Cerea spotted a bulge at the forward corner of the right one. "Good. You're dressed. Because you like being dressed, and..." The tail seemed to be on the verge of wringing itself. "Um... what were you doing?"

"Sketching," Cerea explained. The blush didn't rise. "I just thought... it would be nice to make a record. Some of the things I've seen."

The silver eyes brightened. "Did you draw me?"

"No." And before the dimming could set in, "Not yet. There were some other things I wanted to..."

Her head dipped, and the unfamiliar weight of the long braid shifted along her upper back.

"I'm probably going to be here for..." Cerea forced the breath to slow, desperately hoped that whatever the dark Princess wanted wouldn't involve going outside. "...a while. There's time to draw everyo --"

She stopped.

"-- everypony."

It was just a word. A silly little twist of language. It wasn't supposed to hurt.

"So I just..."

Gently, "Can I see?"

She nodded, because it was easier than talking. The pegasus trotted closer, then jumped up to the mattress.

"It's easier to look from here," Nightwatch explained, reorienting to a position which would let her peer in from the right. "And hovering around books doesn't help the pages. What did you draw?"

Cerea silently turned to the thick book's second page. Nightwatch stared.

"I know it's not very good," the girl quietly admitted. "I need to practice --"

"-- is that your house?"

She felt herself smile.

"Sort of. It belongs to my host family in Japan." A tiny shrug shifted the fabric of the most recent sweater: soft yellow, and still fuzzy. "We all lived there."

"How many people were in the family?" the pegasus asked. "It looks big..."

The centaur blinked.

"I'm not sure."

"Um. What?"

He didn't talk about himself much.
He usually talked about what was going on with us. The things we'd done. We never stopped giving him things to talk about. But when it came to his own life, he just...
...I lived in that house for months.
I went through everything with them. With him.
I barely know...

"It was just one human," she quietly said. "He told me once that it was his parents' house, but they were in another country for their job. It was hard to contact them, but they knew he was hosting us, and... they didn't mind. They just wanted the changes reverted after we moved out."

"Changes," the little knight carefully said.

"Hooves and human floors..." Cerea winced. "It was felt glued to my hooves or carpets. The carpets were easier. And that was the least of it. The renovations had to reroute a lot of underground power lines to make enough space for Mero to swim."

I know he lived there with his parents.
Did I ever see a picture of them? There were some framed photographs of adults, but there was more than just two humans in them.
There were so many bedrooms. Did he have siblings? Younger ones who traveled with them? Older ones that had moved out?

"Indoor swimming," Nightwatch tried -- then smiled. "Is Mero a seapony?"

Another blink. They have... "No. She's --"

"-- it's a joke," the pegasus cut in. "Seaponies don't exist. It's just an old story. Um. Lots of old stories, but they're all just stories." Silver eyes squinted a little. "You can tell a lot about someone, looking at their house. That one looks friendly. Welcoming." She paused. "And like it's owned by someone with hands, because there's a doorknob and that's really awkward to put in your mouth. Levers are easier."

"He was... nice," Cerea confirmed. It was the most she would allow herself to say.

"So what else did you draw?"

She turned the page. Nightwatch's stare immediately intensified, and did so at the same rate as the pony's visibly rising nausea.

"Um... wings don't -- they don't go there..."

Cerea quickly flipped the book closed --

"-- no," the little knight said. "Please. Um. Just... open it again. I just didn't -- I didn't expect..." Feathers awkwardly rustled. "Please?"

She thinks I'm a monster.

It was, in some ways, unfair. When in Cerea's presence, Nightwatch had less fear than just about anypony, and there were ways in which the centaur wanted to think of the pegasus as a --

-- I scare her. Still.

Because among so many other things, Cerea represented a warping of the familiar, and that was true for all of the little horses. But for a pegasus, there was another distortion available.

"Are you sure?"

Shoulders and hips squared.

"Yes. Please?"

Cerea reopened the book. Silver eyes looked.

"What's her name? Um. His name? Because there really aren't any --"

The girl understood: the pegasus only knew one way to identify a liminal female and with this particular species, that qualification was universally minimal. "Her. Papi. She's..."

It was the first time she'd really thought about it. Earth ponies, viewed as an average across the relatively small sample Cerea had seen, were the tallest and most muscular. By contrast, unicorns were frequently the shortest ponies -- but there were exceptions among both limited populations. And when it came to pegasi --

"...sort of like you," Cerea finished. "Sleek. Flying means she doesn't carry any more weight than she has to. But she's stronger than she looks. She can stay in the air while there's an adult human in her talons, at least for a while."'

"Um. Is she nice?"

There was a moment when she wanted to laugh. "She's... not easy to get used to. She's enthusiastic, for starters. She wants to do everything, she wants to do it quickly, she wants to do it now and then if she can't do something else, she wants to do it all over again. And she doesn't understand why everyone else doesn't feel the same way, or can't keep up. And she has to eat more often than the rest of us, so she sees our food as something that we've just been holding until she needs it. When she plays, she has more fun than anyone. If she's tired, she's tired enough for three. Her body is small, but everything else about her is just -- more. She's..."

Her words seemed to be running at the same quality level as her sketches.

"...hard to put up with," Cerea finished. "But she's easy to love."

"Did you love her?"

The strangest thing about the words was that for Nightwatch, there was nothing strange about them at all. The disc had rendered them as a perfectly standard vocalization, with nothing more implied by the intonation than a simple question.

If I said I loved Papi, she would see that as normal.
Pegasi don't just marry pegasi, if there's marriages at all. They marry unicorns and earth ponies. Maybe griffons and donkeys, and even yaks. And mares unite with mares, which means stallions can be with stallions...

Homosexuality was rarely seen in Cerea's herd, and was never welcome. It was understood that there was a time when adolescent fillies might spend happy hours together, because it was so much better than trying to deal with the crudeness of colts. That was tolerated, because every adult mare had been through those years. But when the breeding population was so small, and just trying to arrange for children required --

don't think about it

-- special effort...

If you were an adult mare who was capable of breeding, then you needed to find someone you could breed with. That was practicality. It was what the herd required. Love was for adolescents, and Cerea --

-- I didn't even have --

"Are you okay?"

Blue eyes blinked. "Sorry?"

Worried, with feathers rustling to suit as the scent of concern filled the cell. "You went quiet. Um. For a little while. I didn't know if I said something wrong..."

"Like a sister," Cerea quietly said. "I loved her like she was my little sister. I think we all did." One more breath. "Princess Luna gave you an order. We should start following it."

She closed the book. A book which was supposed to be reserved for all the things she might see.

A book which was currently hosting those she might never see again.

The little knight was leading her through a new section of the palace. They were still moving on the lower levels: Cerea hadn't seen a window yet. But they'd left the cells, and stone walls shifted into marble.

"Um," Nightwatch awkwardly began, trotting about two meters ahead. "This is... um. The palace is old. Really old. Old enough that..." Paused, glanced back and up with that familiar neck angle. "Do you know what sieges are?"

Cerea nodded. "It's old enough," she carefully said, "that it has to be its own city."

Silver eyes widened. "Yes. How did you know?"

Because that was in the best stories. When a war reached the point where it was at the king's gates -- or in this case, the Princesses' -- those inside had to be capable of fighting back, waiting it out, and finding ways to keep going. A truly superior castle design would have huge storehouses of food (although given the state of storage science when they had been built, that mostly meant smoked meats), and a few would even find room for growing crops: if nothing else, mushrooms could usually be kept going underground (and Cerea was now starting to understand what having earth ponies might mean there). You needed stables -- well, you didn't need them here -- and a place to store all the tack -- possibly the same...

A siege was frequently about starving out those within, or making things so untenable as to force evacuation. So there were ways in which a castle needed to be a city, because hidden supply tunnels didn't always stay hidden. The more functions you could cram into the structure, the longer you could survive. Magic could only help -- but then, magic might be attacking...

"It's just how the best ones are built," Cerea carefully replied. "You have everything you need to get through the siege. The enemy has to bring in their supplies --" although if they were at the gates, they could be presumed to have captured some of yours "-- and you can still make a few of your own from within. So this is one of the parts which was made to help with sieges?"

The pegasus nodded, then began to trot again. "The Princess wants you out of the cells. Because you're in training now --"

I won't get through.
I can't.

"-- and you shouldn't be in a cell. Not when you work here -- oh." She stopped again: Cerea pulled up just in time. "I forgot. I was supposed to..."

Her head turned again, looking back along her own body. Teeth carefully nipped at the right saddlebag's lid, and a wing nudged the contents up from below --

-- the fist-sized cloth bag was casually head-tossed, and Cerea's right hand smoothly intercepted the surprising weight as the contents jingled to an internal stop.

That sounded like --

"It's your pay," Nightwatch apologetically said. "Um. I'm sorry I forgot..."

But she was already fumbling with the drawstring. "Pay?" Because exchange students barely had money (with the exceptions of Mero and Rachnera: the former had access to her family's account and it was generally best not to ask where the arachne got anything, just in case she decided to tell you), Cerea hadn't been able to get a job, she had been a constant drain on her host's finances and for someone to just give her actual money...

"Yes," the little knight continued. "It's paid training. It always has been, because it takes a while and you sort of need to live while you're waiting to find out if you get in. Um. The Princess said she backdated it to when we went into the wild zone, because that was your first time fighting for the palace. And language classes count as training. So..."

Golden coins were being poured into her palm, and their weight suggested the actual metal was still involved. Silver...

"Those are new," Nightwatch added. "The silver ones. I mean, it's all new to you, but we just got the silver ones back. Um. I have some of the first ones. The real first ones..." Her tail twitched. "...it's a long story. Anyway, the silver ones are for Princess Luna. You can see her head embossed on the front. But they have the same value as the bits."

"Bits," Cerea carefully repeated, because her head was still spinning. She had money --

"could set off a reaction"

-- which she couldn't spend.

"That's what they're called, when they're all together. But now the gold ones are -- oh, I hope this translates... sols. The silver are lunes. That's how they used to be, and now it's how they are again. And we'll work on numbers, so you don't give anypony too much or too little. But you're a Guard in training, so you get paid like one. It's just that..." The pegasus swallowed. "...you'd usually be spending on things like rent and food. And the Princess said -- that until it's safe to send you out -- you should live..."

There was one definitive way to improve the look of the primary room, and Cerea had thought of it instantly.

"Um," Nightwatch said from her lower right, which pretty much seemed to sum everything up.

It was a very large space. It had clearly been designed to host at least twenty ponies, and so someone had decided that amount of space was equally suitable to storing several dozen pieces of furniture: depending on the size, this had been done either on, around, or under the ancient beds. There were also filing cabinets, all of which had their drawers hanging open and empty. Broken pieces of columns were strewn near the entrance: those seemed to be the most recent additions, and the closest one was partially covered in fossilized icing.

There were a few books. Some of them had been tucked halfway under musty mattresses, and were doing a slightly lesser job of escaping than the ticking.

The back of the room currently served as a practice area for siege survival, and the debris had been stacked into barricades accordingly.

There was lighting in the ceiling. Some of it glowed. Portions flashed. A few buzzed. The one directly over Cerea's head was pursuing a life of ambition and had decided to do it all.

It was possible to mark the population of the area as a rather temporary two. It was also potentially possible to bring that up to around two million, but Cerea had already decided the attempt was pointless: the dust bunnies were going to breed faster than anyone could count.

"Guards go home at the end of the day," the little knight frantically apologized, each word emerging a little faster than the one before. "We haven't had a siege in more than a century. Nopony's needed the barracks..."

There was one definitive way to improve the look of the primary room, and a complete lack of fire.

"I can clean it out," Cerea quietly said. "It'll just take a while." And someone would need to supervise the process, as there might be something within which, in spite of all visual evidence, shouldn't be thrown away -- plus she couldn't take any of the garbage outside.

"She probably hasn't been down here in -- a long time. But she just wanted to give you a place to sleep! Um. And wash up. There's supposed to be a restroom off to the right. With a group bath. Behind that -- that... the thing. The stone thing with the wood in it -- oh."

"Sorry?"

"I just figured out where that one piece of yak art wound up. They don't do very well when they try to get rid of art. Anyway, we can move it. With some help. And then you can take a bath. Um. Maybe not with a group." Silver eyes frantically took a census of the debris, only stopping at the point where some of the long-term residents became capable of applying for retirement benefits. "Oh, where are you going to sleep? Maybe we should just go back to the cells --"

"It's all right," Cerea carefully told the little knight, because it wasn't. "I can clear enough to sleep. It has to be done sometime."

"...you're sure?"

It was horrible in the barracks. It would be hours of back-breaking work, and that meant something extra when a centaur said it. But it wasn't a cell.

"I'm sure," the girl stated.

Weakly, "Oh. Okay. But we'll need unicorns to fix the lighting. And probably somepony to check the plumbing. So there's..." The pegasus swallowed. "So there's a little more to show you..."

Another new path. Cerea wondered how long it would take before it become an old one. Until every hallway was memorized, and she still couldn't get out --

"-- so we're going to one of the Solar kitchens," Nightwatch explained. "Anypony who works in the castle can eat there. It gives the cooks more to do than just serving the Princesses. You can always ask somepony to make something for you, and the raw bar never closes. But you usually can't make something for yourself without asking the chef first, because some of the cooks get really touchy about anyone using their equipment."

"Raw bar?" Nightwatch had said eating meat made ponies sick, and now they were talking about oysters --

"Raw vegetables."

"...oh."

Nightwatch shuddered. "Unless it's Sizzler putting a special one together for a few of the ambassadors." More quickly, "Don't ask."

Who? "I don't --"

"-- don't ask. Anyway, I'll show you the Solar kitchen first. Then a Lunar one. You need to know how to reach both from the barracks, because we don't know what your training hours are going to be. And then we're supposed to meet somepony. Um. I don't know who. The Princess just said it was for the training. And that we might be met first. So we go down that next turn..."

Cerea looked. Hesitated.

"We go towards the glow?" Because what was streaming from the indicated turn had lit the marble with the sort of fierce deep red which normally set off messages of Stay Away in so many liminal minds. It was something very much like the color of luminescent blood.

"Oh. Um. Yes. Actually, you need to know where that is too..."

The glowing red metal door was extremely large. It had to be, just to accommodate the sheer number of locks.

"That's the armory," Nightwatch carefully said. "You'll probably go in there eventually. But... not with the sword. It's too risky. And the spells aren't attuned to you yet anyway. I can take someone in, but... it sets off a signal on the upper levels. Just in case anyone ever made me take them in. And since you don't know how anything works, and we don't know how much of it would work for you..."

She wasn't clumsy. But she also didn't know how crowded the armory was, and being around a concentration of magic you didn't know how to use felt like a pretty strong synonym for 'disaster'.

"I understand." She looked at the runes of the pony alphabet which were worked into the arch of the door frame, and guessed (as it eventually turned out, rather accurately) the translation to be something like Don't Be Stupid. "So what's that door?"

Nightwatch automatically looked to where Cerea's right arm was pointing, because arms were useful for that sort of thing and Ms. Manners could (Cerea's mind managed to censor most of it) hopefully figure that out eventually. "The open one? That's the repair shop. Because when you have this many devices and wonders, you need to be able to maintain them. Fix a few if they get damaged. So the palace has a specialist on the staff." With what Cerea now recognized as a small frown, "But the Princesses have been sending some of the oldest pieces to Ponyville. I don't know why..." Which was followed by a full-body shake, and a tiny shrug. "Anyway, that's safe enough, at least for looking. Although there's some things you can't touch."

They moved carefully, with Cerea maintaining a set distance between them. (It wasn't trying to give Nightwatch some space -- well, it was partially that. But there was a rather extreme difference in their heights, and trying to look at the pegasus on floor level when they were too close together usually left Cerea staring at some degree of pony back and rather a lot of centaur bustline.) "Because it's enchanted?"

"Because it's part of how they're fixed." The little knight reached the doorway first, arced a wing. "Like that one."

Cerea looked.

Her first thought was that in some ways, every repair shop was exactly the same: you had tools hanging on wall hooks, and you didn't know what most of them were for. In this case, some of them ended not in handles, but in what she eventually interpreted as jaw grips. Other, finer pieces lacked those, and she decided they were meant to be moved by a unicorn's horn light: this struck her as being mildly discriminatory.

There were modified horseshoes, at least in the sense that they had been made to slip on over a hoof: some of those had tools jutting out of the forward end. Parts were scattered across shelves: twisted pieces of mostly-precious metals, along with what seemed to be a few partial housings. The few portions of wall not covered by shelves were coated with incomprehensible diagrams: the same applied to the whole of the ceiling. There was very little wood, a rack filled with vials of what her nose told her were some very rare oils, and multiple spools of both copper and silver wire.

On the whole, it looked like a jumble. It also looked like the sort of jumble where the person who'd created it knew where everything was, and the fact that no one else could figure it out just created job security.

"There's also a blacksmith shop on this level," Nightwatch quietly told her. "For repairing armor, and making new pieces."

Cerea immediately looked at her. Then she backed up enough to get a proper sight line.

"There's a smithy?"

"Um. I just said that."

I can --

-- except for the fact that all the tools would be designed for pony use: something which was already begging any number of structural questions. But even so...

"I'd like to see it," Cerea carefully requested. "Sometime." But there was something else Nightwatch had wanted to show her. "I'm sorry. I didn't see what you were trying to --"

The wing arced again, and Cerea looked at the indicated shelf.

Another spool, and a much smaller one. It mostly stood out due to isolation: the rest of the workshop was crowded, with just about every square centimeter in use -- but the spool had been given some space to itself. About two handwidths, and that was something which stretched out in all directions.

"It's treated," Nightwatch quietly said. "So it's okay to be near it. But you shouldn't ever touch it, because it's not part of anything yet, and that means it's still dangerous. If you touched it --"

Cerea was still looking at the wire. On the surface, it resembled the silver -- but it had been drawn even finer, to just about the width of a hair. And it was brighter, had more shine to it, reflected beautifully to the eye...

"It's just platinum," she steadily observed. "Why is that dangerous?" The ponies seemed to treat two of the major precious metals fairly casually, which suggested some things about the local mining. It was possible that platinum was more scarce, but to call it dangerous --

Instantly, wings flaring and flapping in order to say it directly to Cerea's face, "Are you kidding? If you even touch that, it'll --"

And stopped in mid-hover, with the black jaw hanging open.

"...it can't hurt you," fell out on a tide of wonder. "It... it really can't, can it? It can't hurt you..."

She looked at the spool. Went back to the pegasus, and then resorted to the phrase which served as a one-size-fits-all. "I don't understand."

"You can touch it," the amazed voice told her. "Just... carefully. Not because it'll hurt you. It can't. But because you have to put it back exactly where it was."

She moved aside and Cerea, locked in the perpetual pony proximity state of having no idea what was going on (while still trusting the little knight that there was no danger), carefully moved into the room. But she still had the coin bag, and the skirt she was wearing didn't have pockets. There was a chance she might wind up needing both hands...

She doesn't think about it.
She can't.
It's not something she knows to think about.

After a few seconds, she let go of the sweater's neckline, fought back the last of the blush as her next breath produced a slight jingle, then stretched out her right arm and picked up the spool.

Nothing happened. It was platinum wire, drawn so fine that to run her fingers sharply across it might risk a cut. But that was all it was.

Somewhere behind her, Nightwatch breathed. Did so as if breath was all there was.

"What do you feel?" the little knight carefully asked. "Anything?"

There was only one answer for that. "Normal --"

-- wait.

When I took back the sword in the forest...

She didn't set the spool down. Not yet. "What does it do?"

Which got her a completely factual statement, perfectly balanced between awe and fear. "It absorbs magic."

Cerea's head turned just enough to allow the stare.

"It's... how you make self-charging devices. And wonders. And -- everything," the pegasus quietly said. "It pulls magic out of the air, and then that power goes to the enchantments. There's some in your translator, near the core. Because there has to be. Without it... you need recharges. There's unicorns who can provide energy/power/thaums for a device, and I'm good enough to boost a wonder. But the charges always run out, when you don't have platinum. So you have to keep powering things up again, and some ponies make a living that way. Providing fresh charges, when the owner can't."

"So why not use it all the time?" the centaur carefully asked. "It's too rare?"

"It's... sort of rare." The pegasus swallowed. "Nopony's ever found any really big deposits. Just... craters. With platinum around the fringe."

"Craters." She felt like she was on the verge of the answer --

"...it absorbs magic. Constantly, from everything -- unless you know how to tell it not to, and that's really hard to do. And risky. So someone can wear the translator, and the platinum won't absorb from them. Just the air. And any thaums it takes in go to the spells. But when you get a lot of platinum in one place, and it's not treated..." The next gulp mostly brought down air. "...it just keeps pulling in power. Small pieces can leak a little, unless they're stabilized. Big chunks... they're more stable. They hold the magic. And when it can't hold any more, when there's nowhere for the power to go..."

Nightwatch shivered.

"...you get a crater."

Cerea slowly, carefully put the spool back. Exactly where it had been, and did so in a way which never brought it close to the little knight.

"But you're safe," Nightwatch said. "You're... you can touch half-treated platinum, or maybe even the raw stuff. Whenever you want to. That's... that just feels strange to think about. That there's someone in the world who doesn't have to be scared..."

She flew a short distance down the hall, landed again. Cerea cautiously exited the workshop.

Prospector.

When she failed as a Guard, it could give her a backup profession. One where she would have to keep going into new areas, constantly encountering ponies who were terrified of her and risking more mob attacks -- but it had to pay something.

"You really feel normal?" the Guard checked.

I don't know how to get home.
The Princesses think I can guard them. When I couldn't even guard him.
I shouldn't be here...

'Normal' was a rather shaky term.

"Yes," Cerea lied.

"Are you hungry?"

She made sure the smile didn't show her teeth.

"Yes."

Just about all of the chefs had left the kitchen, leaving a single blood-red specimen (a unicorn stallion, with an oddly-liquid quality to his coat) peering out from behind the edge of a counter.

"...sorry," Nightwatch weakly offered.

For the rest of my life.

"At least it wasn't a stampede," the little knight said. (She'd taken very little for herself and in any case, Cerea just needed more time to eat.) "They just thought it would be easier. Outside. And..." She sighed. "...I'm sorry."

"It's all right," Cerea said, because it still wasn't.

"How does that taste?" came across as a valiant attempt to change the subject.

Like all of the other produce. Like something's missing. She took another cherry tomato, carefully chewed and swallowed. "It's good."

With open pride, "It's grown by the most talented earth ponies. All of it."

Maybe magic has an aftertaste.

Or it was filling in for something. Something which was supposed to be there. And what little she'd found in the forest had been normal...

It almost sparked a new concern. But she'd been on palace food for a while. She would know if she had been suffering a nutritional deficit, especially given the sheer quantities she needed to consume. It was just... an absence.

"I think somepony's coming back," Nightwatch said. "I can hear hoofsteps."

Cerea put down the carrot and, with the crunching noises banished, picked up on the little echoes. Someone was definitely on the approach: hooves landing with purpose, every echo produced by intent.

"Maybe that's the pony we're supposed to meet," the Guard added. "About the training." Wings half-unfolded, tucked back in again. "Um. I was thinking about that. A... lot of ponies were. Because you have to be trained, and... I guess there's a chance the Princesses might do some of it? Except that they don't normally. Even if Princess Luna already had you out at the track to check your ground time and --"

The pegasus' hind legs collapsed, leaving the tail splayed all over the floor and Cerea automatically turning towards the sound of the half-crash.

"-- oh, Moon's craters," the mare half-whispered. "How long was she planning --"

Silver eyes just barely came up, looked into shocked blue ones.

"But there's a lot more to being a Guard," Nightwatch barely managed to rally. "And you need somepony who can teach you what we all learned. Um. And... you know... because they don't know you, and... I don't know who could..."

The hoofsteps were getting close now. Their owner was near enough to be scented: an earth pony stallion, somewhere in the senior years because age had a scent all its own -- but so did health, and this one was in very good shape.

"...because most ponies wouldn't be able to -- you know, not immediately, and -- I can't think of anypony." She paused. "Well, nopony active. But that's --"

Which was when the forelegs went out.

"What's wrong?" Because something was: she might not be able to fully recognize the expression at its current intensity, but she could smell the rising combination of shock and purest horror.

"-- no, no, no," the little knight frantically whispered. "He's supposed to be gone! We all turned up at the retirement just to make sure! He can't be, he just can't --"

And from behind them in the doorway, at the exact moment when the approaching scent no longer needed to follow the airflow around the corner, came the bellow: something which made hanging pots dance, sent the red stallion racing towards a storage locker while the bravest mare Cerea had seen pressed her forelegs over her own head and tried not to moan.

It took exactly two of those syllables to make Cerea's ears attempt full retreat under her hair, plus three more to make her vow that in the name of such future protection, she was never using the braid again.

"Greetings, Nightwatch! I am pleased to see that you have retained the absolute minimum degree of instruction required to not be dead! Now I see that I have a potential recruit before me! A recruit who, as the first of her species to reach me, surely has many things to teach an old stallion! In fact, this process has already begun, because until the moment I saw her, I did not know it was possible to stack manure that high! There is a Greeting Stance for your sergeant, trainee, and it is not the one Nightwatch has assumed: that is reserved for graduates! It starts when you turn around and let me see all of what I have to work with, because the view from the back has not been particularly impressive! And it ends when you are found unsuitable, graduate, or quit!"

It was just enough of a pause to let three over-vibrated pots crash to the floor.

"And Princess Luna feels that you will graduate," the old stallion stated. "So I can only hope that I am here to prove her right! My name is Emery Board, and you will call me Sergeant! Now turn!"

Brutal

He should not have reminded Cerea of her mother.

Physically... perhaps there was a pony with the fur hues and bearing to invoke that mare, and he wasn't it. Emery Board was patterned in camouflage colors: Cerea suspected that under normal lighting (as opposed to what currently existed at the Guard training grounds), he would readily vanish into the majority of spring and summer forests, and she occasionally had trouble distinguishing his hooves from the grass. Her mother was fairly tall for a centaur, something where Cerea actually took after her parent: the sergeant didn't come close to matching the height and bulk of most earth ponies. He was the first pony she could internally describe as being wiry, and the movements of those legs came with the suggestion of metal having been pulled into new positions, ready to snap back at the moment effort ended. Some of his body postures indicated a precisely-adjusted statue.

His age was mostly indicated by subtle aspects within his natural scent, all of which Cerea could readily distinguish because

why isn't he

there was nothing else in the way. There was a certain tendency towards crags within his features, but they didn't look like the result of weathering years so much as they came across as a lifelong refusal to accept anything in the way of softness. His eyes had the brightness of a younger pony, along with the narrowed lids of someone who didn't like anything they were seeing and was prepared to spend the next six hours explaining exactly how you'd been doing it wrong. He spoke in quick shouts and direct orders: get up, make sure you meet your escort (which turned out to be a new unicorn, one who had teleported Cerea directly to the training area shortly after sunrise and far too soon following breakfast) precisely at this hour, then approach me and do exactly what I say! And keep doing it, even when you know that nothing you do can ever be good enough and the only thing you can accomplish is the triggering of the next demand!

Her body had responded to his orders on something very close to instinct, with reflexes honed by the endlessly-turning grindstone of inadequacy. He had led her to a new section of the training area, one which had a population waiting to receive her. They were well-padded, motionless, mindless, and bore an aroma which said they'd been through all of this multiple times, generally without cleaning.

He'd also had a sword waiting for her. Not her sword, because that had to be moved separately, and... there was a reason the light was strange at the training grounds, and she sometimes found her hooves lightly cantering against any available stones in an attempt to block out the distant, muffled sounds which the inciting cause was still producing. They weren't as far out as they could have been, there had been places near her arrival point where she would be able to see them if she turned and if she turned...

She didn't know what they would do. But she knew what the sword was for, and so she'd taken it up on his order. An edgeless practice blade made from what he'd told her was called black ironwood: something she'd never previously encountered, and so it might have been from a tree which was only known in this land. It had a pleasant aroma to go with a surprising density: she'd never seen so much plant mass contained in a relatively small area, and it gave the fake sword something which was very close to a proper heft.

He had ordered her to gallop into the field of wooden practice dummies and attack them. To treat everything about that as if it was a real battle. She'd just barely managed to ask if there was some kind of magic involved (because she'd been picturing animation of the unliving, joints manifesting to let them fight back) and he'd looked at her for a single second before the next shout had threatened to wither autumn-weakened grass.

So she'd followed orders. Because in form, there was nothing about him which should have made Cerea think about her mother. But the words...

With the matriarch, the words generally weren't expressed as orders. They didn't have to be. Every sentence was a direct order: including that sort of tone just made things redundant.

You couldn't meet her standards and if you somehow came close, those standards would be moved.
You couldn't satisfy her requirements.
And on your best day, you would still come in second.

She'd just finished. He'd told her to step out of the dummy field -- she'd retreated to the western edge, head already lowering with shame -- and now he was trotting around the mannequins. Examining the chips of freshly-gouged wood which were strewn across the grass.

Finally, he looked up at her, and did so in such a way as to suggest that no matter what their respective heights might be, he was actually looking down.

"There's problems," he stated.

That was the worst part: having it be a statement. That the fact of her failure was so obvious as to remove all need to shout.

Slowly, the sergeant trotted closer. He stopped at a distance which allowed him to maintain precise eye contact, and his silent regard suffused air which was closer to spring than autumn. Unseasonably warm (which had put her in a blouse instead of a sweater), and none of the snowfall from the previous two days had landed here. There was nothing for that heat to melt.

So much like spring, at least for one day -- but there was no breeze, because that was impossible. And none of the warmth reached Cerea's heart, as her fingers began to go limp on the sword's grip and her shoulders sagged forward. Pressed down by the weight of failure.

"Heard about the fight in Palimyno." The disc rendered it into something which came with an audible shrug, but the forelegs and shoulders themselves never moved. Every part of his posture simply maintained, and the tilt of his neck had done nothing to shift the ancient hat. "Starting to see why it ended that way."

"I'm sorry --" was automatic. Unstoppable. Very nearly vocalized in the pony form, even with the disc on, just to prove she could do something right --

"-- shut up."

Just like everything else, it had been an order, and so she stopped talking --

"And open your eyes."

She forced herself to look at him again. Waited, forcing her breathing to be steady, which just let her take in more of the odors and

he isn't

She didn't know why. And it should have been a comfort, to have that true of someone other than the Princesses. To know that there was anyone who...

...but then, she'd just shown him there was no need to be.

His gaze moved a little. Up, then down, and finally went back to looking into her eyes.

"For starters," he stated, "you've got the same problem as the General."

"I haven't met --"

The sergeant snorted. "The Princess. Princess Celestia, this time. You won't hear the other title much. But it's the same problem." He broke eye contact, began to trot back towards the array of splintered wood. "Can't fault you for not knowing how to fight back against magic, because you didn't know that existed until about three seconds after you cleared the bushes. Sounded like you figured out some of the basics in a hurry. But this is about the part you didn't compensate for. Still haven't."

He turned. Looked her up and down again. Mostly up.

"Size," he told her. "Pretty easy for you to get swarmed, isn't it? Takes a lot of ponies to fully surround you. But if they can get the oval and keep you from jumping out of it, you're going down. Because they can keep attacking your legs. More length, more to go directly after. Having your knees that much higher just makes them an easier target for bites and charges. The General's been dealing with that her whole life. But she's got options you don't."

He slowly shook his head.

"Same could be said," he added, "going the other way." Broke eye contact, trotted up to a training dummy, and examined a small gouge. "What happened here?"

It seemed to be taking all of her strength to prevent the shaking, and most of what that proved was that she didn't have all that much true strength to begin with. "I don't know what you --"

Looking at her again, with enough intensity to cut off her words, and there was no discernible expression within the brown eyes.

"Been traveling, since I was discharged." Another snort. "Honorable discharge. Big turnout to see me off. But I couldn't retire. Figured there was still a need for me, and if Equestria thought I was too old to keep going, then there's enough other nations out there to give me a place. Best thing about you being here so far? That's over. The General reactivated me, and it's not like anypony can override her. Traveling wasn't bad, though. Got to learn a few things. Saw some stuff which most ponies don't."

The lack of pause stood out.

"You play sports?" he immediately asked, and waited.

She wasn't sure how to answer. The herd had its games. But when it came to athletic competitions, just about everything was head to head. You competed, and you did so as an individual. That made it so much easier to lose --

-- but it had never been playing. Playing was something you chose to do. Something you enjoyed, and so play had never been any part of it.

He took her silence as denial, and snorted again. "Probably thinking you couldn't explain it to an old pony if you wanted to. Centaur sports. Four legs and two arms: that's got to change a few rules --"

"-- racing," she quietly said. "Obstacle courses. Fights. Jousting."

Patterned ears twisted.

"Last one didn't come all the way through," the sergeant said. "Charging at each other with spears?"

"...lances. Blunted," Cerea finally tried to explain. (Her own ears were twisting, because the silences were letting too many of the distant sounds reach her, and it was the wrong time to canter in place.) "While wearing armor. It's..." She had to force the breath. "...something we're supposed to do with a partner, because the impact is... our shoulders..."

Stopped, as her newest failure reached ears which had just tried to hide beneath unbraided hair.

"...there's supposed to be someone on our backs," she finished. "A rider. But that wasn't possible until about a year ago, and... there aren't many riders." And once the possibility had finally opened up, it turned out that there weren't very many who were willing to be ridden.

It got her a bare nod, one which suggested the neck was being forced to shift against basic design principles, and artificial highlights shifted across his fur. (She was trying not to look up. Looking at everything which that twisted light had created was bad enough.) "So let's see if this comes across. There's this sport called --" and the wire hissed "-- baseball/cricket/boring/rounders --"

Cerea blinked.

Baseball was a primary sport in Japan, and so Cerea had briefly studied the game before traveling. She hadn't been all that impressed: long periods of doing nothing followed by split-seconds of activity, followed by doing nothing all over again. Baseball, when played on defense, seemed to mostly be good for standing within what was admittedly a beautifully-maintained outfield while indulging in long thoughts -- and she'd found that out directly because there had been a day when her beloved

he never could have loved

had taken the household to a public park to let them see how it all worked. Eventually, the amateur team practicing on the diamond had become curious enough to ask the spectators if they would be interested in taking the field -- or at least, that was how they had tried to explain it: Cerea suspected they mostly just wanted to see the girls trying to play the sport, with some hopes of torn blouses. Of course, there weren't enough girls for a full squad, and not all of those present could play. (Meroune, when on land, was confined to a wheelchair, and Papi was quickly proven incapable of gripping the bat.) So some of the amateurs had filled in the vacant slots, and... well...

...there were ways in which liminals almost fit into human society.

"She's just taking a lead off first."
"It's a five-meter lead!"
"So?"
"She's still touching the base!"

Sports weren't among them.

Miia had been the first to be banned. (It wasn't just the havoc wreaked on the basepaths by a body seven meters long. The human torso could be boosted into the air by a snake tail which usually seemed to be about eighty percent muscle, and when it came to leaning over the fence to recover a potential home run...) Cerea had been second --

"-- you got something from that," the sergeant checked. "A sport which involves taking a swing at a moving object."

She nodded. He looked her over again. Up and down, lower sternum to tail.

"Biped sport, mostly," he continued. "Some ponies play their own version of rounders. Never cared for it myself. But traveling meant I got to see my biped squads play. How they swing." And the abrupt, brief chuckle could have been seen as a sign of something within the stallion which made him relatable -- but the perceived darkness of that joy blocked it. "And when you see how they play, it tells you something about how they fight. Strengths and weaknesses."

Still looking at her, as if he was waiting for something.

The sun shifted across the sky, and greenish rays played across his face. Because there was a shield covering the training area, and just barely. The top of the dome was so low as to skim the treetops. It was the only thing keeping the protesters out because the training grounds were apparently public and they had known she would need to use them, so they had arrived before she had, set up signs and marching lines and chants....

It kept the breezes out. It flickered sometimes, especially when Cerea heard distant hooves pounding against light. It looked as if it might vanish at any moment, it brought back a certain amount of spiritual claustrophobia, and it was just another kind of gap set into the world.

"I don't understand..." She knew it wasn't the answer he wanted. Failures tended to be cumulative.

This snort was louder.

"They swing," he told her. "Trying to make contact. And some of them miss. I saw some of the strongest ones swing so hard, they spun their whole body around. One of them did two circles and dropped into the dirt. That's torque. They've got the upper-body strength, because they've got an upper body. But there's only two legs, and when the top half twists like that -- the legs get dragged along. Told me how easy it is to make a biped overcommit. Get him off-balance to the point where maybe I don't have to drop him, because he just did it to himself."

He looked at the ironwood sword.

"Swing it. Hard."

It was an order from the one who was about to reject her, and so she obeyed. She brought the wood back as she raised it, channeled physical effort into what she felt was a fairly hard swing. There was more force put into it than the ones she had directed against the mannequins, air whistled across and around the false blade and she used the followthrough as the start of the flow required to bring it back into a resting position --

-- he nodded, and the next words emerged at something close to normal volume. It made them feel strangely soft, if only for decibels: the tone remained harsh. But there were other aspects rendered by the disc --

"Watching you, when you were in there." His tail indicated the cellulose army. "All of you. Got some interesting things going on with your joints, don't you? More range than most. Upper waist musculature was interesting. You twist further than a biped does. Naturally, without pain. And in the end... two arms. Four legs. Gives you something they don't have. Bracing. You can't twist yourself into the dirt, because you've got more support."

-- curiosity.
Evaluation.
Fascination.

Miia had been the first girl banned from the game. Cerea had been second, because she had come up to the plate, ready to take her swings. And perhaps they had simply been waiting for the sight of a braless centaur galloping around the bases -- but they had been robbed of that, because there had been no need for her to hurry.

No one had ever found the ball.

"For your size, your strength... you can commit more effort into a swing than anyone," the sergeant told her. "I should be seeing sundered limbs. Decapitations on all sides. SO WHY AM I LOOKING AT SOME PITIFUL LITTLE GOUGES? Every one of these woodheads should be in pieces! WHY DIDN'T YOU COMMIT TO THE ATTACK?"

The sheer force of the shout drove her back, and that wasn't the only thing making her legs go into reverse: the sergeant had his own aura, it was the first time she'd sensed it at all and he was marching towards her, hooves harder than stone driving into the earth as everything about him pushed against her --

"-- you said -- you said to treat it as if it was real -- as if they were ponies --"

"-- and if they were ponies? You would be DEAD! Why didn't you --"

"-- I've never killed!"

Her head dropped at the same instant as her tail, and her fingertips closed just in time to keep the practice sword from going into the dirt.

I wasn't allowed to fight.
I tried to defend him against humans and all I could do was -- stand there. Because as soon as I did anything real, I lost him forever.
I tried against liminals, and... I failed. Over and over...

He had stopped moving. Only his words crossed the five meters between them, and did so on a current of personal calm.

"Had a yes to that. Once."

"...what?" Her vision was blurring. Ears twisting in all directions --

"-- a recruit. Who'd killed. Before ever reaching me." A plain statement of purest fact. "And that's why she came here. Because she felt like she had to spend the rest of her life making up for it. And she got through."

Don't shake, please don't shake, on top of everything else --

"Didn't think you'd killed," he told her. "Fought for your life in Palimyno, didn't kill. They're all pretty much recovered now, even if some of them are lying about it. Killing is easy, recruit. Putting somepony down without killing -- that's harder. Takes more skill, discipline, and knowledge you don't have yet. Best-case, you get through your whole life without killing. Guards die for ponies more than they kill."

Nothing about the solid posture changed when he said that: not a single strand of fur twitched. But a new scent rose from him, only to be banished again. Carrying, if only for a moment, what his words could not.

"Can't completely tell yourself it's real, when you're fighting wood. It's not the same. The wood wasn't fighting back. And if this goes far enough, we're going to have you out here against ponies --"

"Ponies," emerged as exceptionally stark.

"That's when you show me how you don't kill. Because you'll be fighting volunteers."

"Volunteers," mostly saved her some effort in trying to find an original word.

"I'm still their sergeant," felt like a very vicious observation, and it almost curled the far left corner of his lips. "I can get volunteers. Fighting ponies, fighting whatever else I can get out here. Whatever and whoever. Standard for Guards. But this is wood, trainee. On wood, you show me force. On sapients, you show me how you hold back. Because the goal is always the same: make the other one stop fighting. Killing stops that, and killing's easy. Killing is the last stop. Wounding... if there's a group, and they care about each other, wounding one can take out more than that. They have to get their friend out of there, so you get a couple more to leave when they evac. But just making them drop, or putting them in so much hurt that they have to stop... that's a skill. And you're here to learn. But today is wood. So swing harder."

His head tilted slightly to the right.

"Don't remember giving you permission to stare."

She often seemed to have very little control of herself, when around the ponies. Emotions. Posture. Words.

"...why aren't you afraid of me?"

Because she could scent his age and for a single second, it had been joined by his sorrow. But there was nothing else. And outside of the Princesses, he had been the only one.

He snorted.

"I don't see anything worth being afraid of -- still staring." The right foreleg gestured, directed her towards the mannequins. "I traveled. Wasn't in Equestria when it all went down. Heard the reports. Came back and --" (she tried not to let her nose wrinkle, to show any sign that she'd picked up on it again) "-- saw mine off. So I didn't meet him. Might have been a shorter fight if I had. Or might have just been one more goodbye. Can't say. Could have thought of a tactic, could have gotten stomped before anypony could use it. Doesn't matter, because I can't make the past come out a different way."

Trotting steadily towards the practice area, and she forced herself to follow.

"Didn't meet him," he repeated. "Just you. And you're not him --"

Eight hooves had stopped, and the forward four only halted when he realized she had.

"You haven't been hearing that a lot," he decided. "Or at all. But that's how it is. You're not him. The fear's there for others, and maybe there's ways we can use that. Right now, it's just not justified fear, BECAUSE YOU ARE NOTHING WORTH BEING AFRAID OF! NOW GET BACK IN THERE! KEEP YOUR LEGS MOVING, BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT KICKING ENOUGH AND UNLESS YOU ARE BRACING TO SWING OR KICK, IF THEY ARE NOT AT FULL CANTER, THEY ARE TOO MUCH OF A TARGET! I WANT TO SEE YOU SWINGING LOWER! KEEP THE SPACE AROUND YOU CLEAR! AND IF THERE AREN'T AT LEAST TWO DECAPITATIONS, WE WILL DO THIS AGAIN! AND AGAIN! AND AGAIN! I HAVE MORE DUMMIES, WHICH CURRENTLY INCLUDES THE GIANT SPECIMEN WHO SHOULD BE MOVING ALREADY! IN THE EVENT THAT YOU FAIL TO LEARN FROM OR RETAIN YOUR TRAINING, I DO NOT KNOW WHERE TO GET ANOTHER CENTAUR! I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO LET A SINGULAR OPPORTUNITY REFLECT POORLY ON MY RENEWED CAREER! NOW MOVE!"

The vocal blast whipped against her flanks, made her jump, sent her into the midst of false melee at full gallop, she was swinging before she had the chance to realize she was swinging at all, and then --

He was looking at the debris, and doing so on the move. Kicking pieces of false limbs as he circled the remaining torso.

"Going to have someone cut you a staff," he decided. "Cap one end in iron. Maybe pad the other. Could give you a little more range and it's better for sweeping the area, but it ties up both hands. I want to see how you move with one." The sergeant briefly deigned to glance at her. "Had the sword made to match the size of the real one. You use that one-handed most of the time. Grip allows for two. Still means we should be doing something with the other hand occasionally. Biggest new problem is that you don't have full tail control. We can try to build up the muscles there."

"I know how to keep my tail away from the enemy." Having it come across as a protest would have required strength she didn't possess. "I just... if it's that horn light, they can pull it away from wherever I tucked it --"

"Corona. Field," the sergeant instructed. "Problem for anyone fighting unicorns, and that's why we're going to talk about backlash tomorrow. But that's not what I meant. You don't have enough tail control to mount a razorwhip. Not sure if you're going to be good for one anyway, because not everypony can master them. They're tricky. There's going to be a book of tail exercises in the barracks tonight. Have Nightwatch read it to you."

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Yes... sir?"

"YOU DO NOT CALL ME 'SIR'! THERE HAVE BEEN NOBLES WHO TOOK UP THE LIFE OF A GUARD, AND YOU WILL NOT CALL THEM 'SIR' OR 'DUCHESS' OR ANY OTHER TITLE, BECAUSE THEY ARE GUARDS! YOU CALL ME SERGEANT!"

"...yes, Sergeant..."

"I CANNOT HEAR YOU! SOUND OFF LIKE YOU'VE GOT A PAIR!"

Several questions were instantly raised.

"I'm --" She had voluntarily left the herd, found herself in a new nation, lived among humans who barely recognized what centaurs were, and she still hadn't needed to explain this part. "-- I don't have --"

"I AM LOOKING DIRECTLY AT THEM! THEY ARE RATHER HARD TO MISS! I AM ASSUMING THAT HAVING ALL THAT WEIGHT OVER THE RIB CAGE EXERTS SOME PRESSURE ON THE LUNGS, AND SO AIR CAN BE EXPELLED ALL THE FASTER! SOUND OFF! AND GET BACK IN THERE!"

Six limbs.

Four legs. Two arms. No matter how you worked the math, it added up to six. Cerea was fully aware of that and, after a day spent under the shield, had reached the point where she was aware of very little else.

Legs were trembling sticks which, for some strange anatomical reason, had been asked to bear up a mass which they had no business supporting: this was matched by the current amount of interest they had in actually performing the job. Arms were dragging weights attached to a pair of zones which were normally designated as 'shoulders': however, Cerea had been considering that terminology and, after some reflection, was prepared to redefine them as something more appropriate. This might mean needing to intensify her language studies, because her current choice took too long to say in French and there was a chance that in the pony tongue, 'a horrible mistake' was one word.

The rejection of the braid gave her hair more freedom of movement. It also meant that the sweat which had soaked through her garment eventually reached those strands, and they had plastered along her back. In Cerea's opinion, the effect of the moisture along the front would allow her to win any wet T-shirt contest which happened to be taking place in the area: something she saw as automatic even with the bra on because in any case, she would mostly be winning by default.

Her ears were drooping. Her upper torso had been reminded that swinging a sword was considered to be fairly intensive exercise, reaped some of the benefits, noticed the use of 'reaped', seen where it was going before her conscious mind did, and soon began begging for a stop. She had strained muscles she wasn't aware she had, which at least gave her the dubious benefit of knowing where they were now. Cerea had no idea how to stop being aware of them and all things considered, being told that you had a tongue in your mouth was an improvement.

They had only stopped when the sergeant had spotted froth beginning to slide down her legs. She liked the froth. It was cooling, it didn't judge her, and if it had been allowed to continue for a while, it would have potentially killed her. Death would have meant an end to the training and when viewed from that perspective, she was no longer certain why it was bad. But the stallion had simply sent her into a cooldown phase, which proved that he didn't want her to die and from that same perspective, made him into the single worst pony she'd ever met. Nopony had read her the articles, and yet she was fairly sure Wordia Spinner might want her dead. This meant Wordia Spinner was the better pony.

Six limbs. One, two, three -- there was a series of numbers along the way and so recalling all of them wasn't strictly necessary, as long as you knew what the last one was. The important part was that she had six limbs, and every ache told her that was just too many.

Also, her tail hurt. He'd decided to start some of the exercises early.

The pain would continue into the night. It would intensify as she continued her efforts to clear some part of the barracks, and then it directly affected the language classes because upon hearing what had happened at the training grounds, Nightwatch would decide that what Cerea really needed to feel better was some appropriate vocabulary.

Unknown to the centaur, the younger Princess would be within her dreams that night to observe the results in the name of both monitoring her condition and answering a question which the sergeant had been careful to ask. Those results would be reported as a positive. Because with hours in which she could do very little but ache, it was the pain which directed the majority of the centaur's nightscape -- and so Luna would, in what she decided wasn't truly a violation of her code, be able to tell the stallion that his streak was intact. For even with a class of but a single sapient to train, someone had dreamed of killing him.

But that hadn't been the whole of it. And Luna didn't tell him about the remainder, because there was a code, and...

Did she know the girl better than anypony? Did Nightwatch? Luna was at least the regional expert on the girl's past, and still felt that she didn't know anywhere near enough. There was something they had yet to reach, missing information which felt as if it might be the key to so much. But she had seen something of the girl's former life.

You had to be careful about your interpretations, when it was the nightscape. Even memories could be tinged by personal belief, and some were capable of tricking themselves into full visions of a false past. But the younger didn't believe Cerea was among them, and...

She'd seen more, when it came to the centaur. The girl, and those who had been around her. Enough to see some of what had been missing.

Cerea would dream of killing him on that night, because he was her sergeant and in a very real way, creating those dreams was his job. He wore it as a badge of honor, at least for those times when he hadn't taken it as a cherished token of horror. The sergeant had chosen a life where he would forever be the source of fear, where the girl had not. The Princesses (or rather, the Generals) had spoken to him about that, before everything had begun.

But something happened before she left the training grounds. Something which meant the dream of fully-justified vengeance was brief, and which carried the stallion's image into some of the dreams that followed.

"Cooldown's over," he gruffly stated. "Go wait by the cottonwood. Your escort should be here to teleport you back in about ten minutes. You can rest until then."

Something about the words bothered her, and it took several seconds of forced examination through blurring waves of ache before she spotted the implied singular.

"...you're not coming?" Because he had been waiting at the site when she arrived, the shield would have to be dropped eventually, and the protesters were still out there...

He snorted. "Don't like teleports. Tactical use, that's fine. Casual travel, I'll take the trot. Plus I just got reinstated. Anypony wants to tell me they've got a problem, they can talk. Anypony tries to show me, they're assaulting a Guard and I could use the exercise. Under the tree. Leave the ironwood here."

Collapsing into the cool shaded grass should have made her feel better. It didn't. It just created awareness of several new strained muscles along her barrel, along with establishing the horrible knowledge that eventually, she would have to get up again.

Her upper torso leaned against the trunk. Rough rivers and striations of bark registered through the soaked blouse as extra aches against her skin. The day felt too hot and nopony was doing anything about that. And she was showing weakness in front of him, but they had been going for hours, even centaur endurance only went so far, there was just about nothing left in her after a day of going again and again and again, failures stacked on top of each other because manure wasn't the only thing which could go that high, she was tired of failing --

-- he was looking at her. He was always looking at her, and having sunk so low just about put the two of them on eye level. She just wanted him to stop.

...he said something.

"Better."

Blue eyes just barely managed to focus upon brown.

"You got better today," Emery Board informed her. "You'll be even better tomorrow." And with that, the old stallion turned, silently trotting away.

He shouldn't have reminded Cerea of her mother.
He never did again.

Toxic

The citizenship classes would begin soon, and they would teach the girl something about how the nation actually functioned. A portion of what she initially learned would surprise her, because her limited experiences around the Princesses had mostly suggested the rule of royalty and to some degree, even with the mention of a 'Night Court' and the need to sign a law, it was something the centaur saw as an absolute.

The fault for this could be laid at the forehooves of stories. Her imagination galloped through realms in which a monarch's word was law: desires had a tendency to transmute into something closer to policy. In her experience, kings and queens generally did whatever they wished and in many cases, this went against the needs of realm, common sense, and sanity. (Her time spent in the dubious custody of Meroune's mother hadn't exactly helped there.) So there was a natural presumption that even with a visibly increased level of common sense, Princesses had an equal amount of free reign.

It was a natural presumption. It just wasn't how Equestria worked.

When compared to the governments of Earth, the most natural comparison was for those nations which had chosen to work with (and, as soon as the wrong people got into office, around) a trinary division of power -- but it wasn't a fully accurate simile. The sisters had legislative roles: each was free to compose their own bills, and they broke all ties in their respective Court. Some criminal charges forced them to watch from a judge's bench, and the younger had recently taken to hosting civil cases as a well-earned means of venting.

But it wasn't entirely unfair to see them as primarily serving the functions of an executive branch. They had the ability to issue orders (which, because there was still some aspect of royalty present, included occasionally telling citizens what to do). Both were at the top of the military chain. It was their choice as to whether any given bill would be ultimately signed into law, and it was also the final choice because neither had ever cared to implement a veto override system into the nation's founding documents. Both had agreed that 'no' had only one definition, and that was NO.

As with so many immigrants before her, the girl would carefully memorize that information and unlike so many of the natives, she would also fully retain it: both siblings had noticed that those who had to earn their citizenship tended to pay more attention to the functionings of a new government than the ones who had been born into it. But it wouldn't tell her everything, because the books she studied had been written for adults. Some facts were only learned by the very young, forever woven into their most basic understanding of the world around them. They weren't written down in books meant to be read by anyone older, because simply existing meant you knew them already.

But the girl didn't know. She had no awareness of those most basic things, information which nopony thought to tell her because no one ever needed to learn it. Some of the gaps in her education would take a surprisingly long time to fill, and the acceptance which natives gave the most crucial facts of their world...

That was some ways off. She would start with citizenship classes: the rest would only come with time. But it helped to think of the sisters as being the executive branch, because that gave her some basis for comparison. And there were ways in which the reflection was true -- including one of the most fundamental.

"So we just wanted to make sure we were on the record," Puff Weevil declared from his position at the ramp-aligned apex of the pony triangle. (There were fourteen others lined up behind him. The two most loyal had the best view of his tail, the three who had yet to fully master sucking up formed the next line, and so on all the way back to those who'd just gotten there, coming from the wrong shift, and didn't even know what his favorite snacks were.)

He forced his rib cage to swell as far as it could, because there was probably a way to substitute self-importance for height and the earth pony was going to figure it out any day now. Leaned his head back a little more so he could stare up the ramp towards the throne and, just as importantly, didn't lean back enough. It forced the occupant to change her own angle in order to properly look at him: something he regarded as having created control.

The alicorn on the throne tended to see it as punishment. (The usual silent follow-up question was 'Whose?')

"On the record," she carefully repeated, and automatically noted the position of her Guards relative to the gathering. "Fifteen of you, on the record. And that's mostly from the Night Court, Puff. I see three Day representatives in the group, but there's still a clear majority. So before you tell me what's going on the record, I have what feels like a very natural question. Why are you going on the record with me?"

Speckled white shoulders shifted. Combined with the rolling outskirts of a fairly overweight body, it gave him the look of cotton which had yet to have the seeds combed out. Rarely-seen faster movements tended to produce the impression of something which was being consumed by insects.

"Well," he tried, "it took most of the night just to get the basic form down. And then there were a few ponies in the Day Court whom we wished to confer with, in case there was any dominion overlap. So it just brought us into your hours. I'm sure you understand."

You stalled until you were sure you'd avoided Luna.

"Perfectly," Celestia agreed, and allowed the little smile to manifest at the same time her head tilted slightly to the right. Fifteen, and that's potentially just the ones who were willing to enter the palace. Enough numbers to imply they represent a herd. Puff is from a Tattler district, but some of the others... "So now we can talk about what's going on the record, especially since I'm sure the majority of you would like to get some sleep."

Her right forehoof politely gestured to the self-designated leader. He cleared his throat. She watched carefully, mostly to see if any bugs came flying out.

"We're against this," he declared, and stopped there because forcing her to ask the next question was also control.

"You'll have to be a little more specific," Celestia gently encouraged. Because you're from a Tattler district and that generally means whatever it is, you're against it.

There weren't many of those zones around Equestria. They typically formed when ponies decided that the truest sign of prejudice was others preventing them from openly indulging in their hatreds: this was quickly followed by the realization that an argument was something which implied others were allowed to speak against you, but an echo chamber meant every word coming back was one you were going to say anyway. Tight-knit, highly-loving neighborhoods were pulled together by a sort of spiritual gravity, aided by the fact that nopony else was willing to have them next door any more and if the property values were going to drop, they might as well all drop in the same area.

Put enough of those ponies together, and they would have an influence on Day and Night Court elections. So there were a few of what Celestia sometimes thought of as Tattler districts and because there were only a few, those representatives tended to speak all the louder. Volume didn't substitute for numbers any more than self-importance swapped itself in for height, but it did mean the stupidity could be heard at a greater distance.

She was used to dealing with representatives from those areas. (There was a lot of turnover, as their voters would inevitably decide that an insurmountable majority wasn't and therefore their chosen pony just wasn't getting enough done.) To seeing them enter her throne room in groups. Puff was from a Tattler district, and those representatives tended to cluster together in the same manner as those who'd voted for them. Also for the same reasons, and it was generally advised to pass that one office building at full gallop, preferably while holding your breath. He was capable of being truly loud, and so it was natural to see him playing at being in charge. It was just that... this wasn't his usual herd.

"The centaur," he stated. Several Guards shifted within their armor.

"Cerea," she corrected.

He ignored that. "You don't recognize what this is doing to Equestria," Puff declared. "You don't hear the Voices Of The People."

This was, to a small degree, true. The palace walls were mostly made from marble, and that meant sound only conducted so far. Being in the Solar throne room meant having to leave a lot of doors open just for the Voices to reach her as a background murmur. But there were others means of communication, and among the many reasons for wanting the contingent to leave was so she could get back to being wounded by the second kind.

"We do," he continued. "No matter what you may think it is, all anypony sees is that you've taken in a monster. One intelligent enough to wait for its moment to strike. Ponies are still thinking about Tirek, Princess. Some of them are still mourning, and now you've brought in a monster."

"An innocent," Celestia replied, mostly just to watch the words skim away from his ears. "Someone who committed none of his crimes, and is responsible for nothing he did --"

"-- we've written a bill," he bludgeoned. "Prohibiting it from serving. From living here, from being anything. It blocks all centaurs from entry into Equestria and deports any found within the borders. It's the only policy suitable to dealing with monsters."

She wondered how much effort it had taken for him to force the condescending smile.

"It's in the name of protection," Puff finished. "We're just trying to keep you safe."

Celestia took a slow breath, silently measured the temperature in the room.

"And do you have a majority?"

"It's not a question of --"

"-- actually, it is," Celestia cut in. "You would need a majority to get the bill in front of either of us. Princess Luna, for that dominion. And even if you do -- what makes you think she would sign it?"

Several of the ponies in the back row were fidgeting. Those right behind Puff were doing their best to both glare at her and not get caught doing it: in both cases, they had failed. And when it came to their leader...

His body shook for a moment: she wasn't sure if it was from sheer indignance or a failed attempt at weight redistribution.

"This isn't about whether it's signed," he stated. "This is about putting everything on the record. So that when it does attack, when we're finally proven right -- everypony knows who spoke against it. Who the only ones were to see sense. Even when dealing with a Princess who won't even let us protect her."

She thought about a few things, sitting quietly upon her throne. About how the worst politicians could be described as creatures which cared about nothing more than being reelected, along with whether it had ever been a good idea to grant salaries for such duties -- but of course, the other option had been dual Courts filled with nothing more than those who had no need for money, and that would kept so many of the best ones from serving. (Luna had foreseen one problem early, and so they were at least prevented from voting themselves raises.) She reflected on how Mazein's democracy had a dual recurring test for its voters: knowledge of the issues added to proof of basic sanity, and then she thought about how the Day Court had repeatedly voted down implementing any such thing in Equestria because it was probably going to take out their own bases. There was even a moment free for recognizing that this was just the first act of their little play, that which was being performed for the palace's record: the main stage would shortly be set up before the audience and printing press of their choice.

But mostly, she considered that no matter where you were in the world or which nation you might represent, if you were the executive branch, eventually, you were going to want to take the entire legislative body and punt.

"Done," she pleasantly agreed, and smiled all the more.

He blinked at her.

"You'll..." More blinking. Fundamental overturns of reality tended to produce that reaction. "...you'll sign it?"

There was actual hope in his voice, and it made the next part that much better.

"Still Princess Luna," Celestia smiled. "You really should know that, Puff. And I don't think she will, even if the majority comes in for you. I'm just agreeing to put it on the record. I promise, fully and unconditionally, that the names of all who vote to remove centaurs from Equestrian society will be permanently recorded. So that those who look back across history will know exactly who you were, and how you felt. I think that request is completely fair."

Anger quickly thrust through the veil of self-imposed delusion, then risked a hoof stomp as twelve additional ponies decided it was now worth openly glaring at her: the two most intelligent carefully began to back up towards the door. "But you're still not going to get rid of it --"

"-- and in the event that she should ever do something which adds the image of Equestria's newest heroine to the Hall Of Legends," she pleasantly stated, "or gains her own honor statue in the gardens -- that record will maintain. In the form of a plaque right next to it, something with exceptionally large lettering, as indestructible as magic can make it. The full list of everypony who felt she shouldn't have had that chance, and so it would also be the list of those who would have stood in the way of letting the People be saved. In the name of the People."

Thirteen were staring at her. Two tails desperately slipped through the doorway and flicked out of sight.

"That's not fair," Puff half-whispered -- then, at much higher volume, "If it ever -- that's not fair --"

"-- the record," Celestia informed them all, "is the record. And it's nice to see that you acknowledge the possibility of her making a contribution. I'll be watching the progress of your bill with interest, and that's as the pony who, strictly speaking, doesn't have to read the final result. But I will put it on the record. Because the record really doesn't care about what's fair. It just concerns itself with what actually happened."

Her smile met the force of his outrage, and crinkled a little around the corners.

"Go get some sleep, Puff," she told him. "I think you're going to need it."

She waited until he'd failed to kick the right-side door shut before dismissing her Guards for a while and sealing the Sunrise Gate behind all of them. A few seconds before the doors were closed, and then several more until her right forehoof stopped rubbing aching lips.

There were ways in which Luna's role felt like the easier. Somepony had to be the lashing tail behind the sunny smile, and somepony had to be the smile itself.

Strictly speaking, Celestia didn't have any problem with making threats. The hard part was stopping. Because a threat could feel so good, especially when everypony knew you had the ability to back it up. Threats made ponies react. The results could be immediate, and watching others scramble to obey came with a certain basic satisfaction. She could easily go through life threatening everypony and everyone around her to get what she wanted, constantly invoking pressure until it crushed anything which might have come from loyalty and love, simply ruling through forever turning up the heat --

-- and when that heat rose high enough to create a fever in those who could no longer stand her existence, the world would burn.

She sat quietly until the last of the anger had faded, because she knew that the next thing to take place would just make it rise again and there were times when it was better to start from the base state. And then her field fetched the bundle she'd hidden behind the throne just before the contingent had come in, carried it with her in a side bubble as she wearily began to trot down the ramp with every joint declaring that it had just recognized her true age and so the psychosomatic payback was long overdue.

It didn't take long to select one: random draw worked perfectly well when just about every possible result was the same. And then she opened the back exit from the throne room, reading along the way.

She didn't hear the Voice Of The People, at least not without heading towards a balcony first. But just before the legislators had arrived, she'd received the Words.

When you'd been trying to manage a society over the course of nearly thirteen centuries, there was a certain tendency to take personal responsibility for the ways it had come out. In this case, Celestia still wasn't quite ready to accept full blame for the postal system.

The palace received letters every day, and anything pertaining to the lessons which came from friendship was a distinct minority. For the most part, letters arrived with stamps, although some did their best to flow in on a tide of sheer rage. It wasn't quite a truism to say that nopony ever wrote the palace to say the sisters were doing a good job: for starters, there was always somepony who felt that the best service they could ever render to the nation started in that pony's bedroom, and those ponies usually felt the siblings were capable of providing a quality experience.

(Usually. There had also been a few who felt that they still had things to learn about sex and by an amazing coincidence, whoever had written them was the only capable teacher. Celestia had a secret filing cabinet stuffed with such letters, none of which were being saved for the historical record so much as they were being put aside for personal amusement and the day when Equestria found itself with a desperate shortage of the word 'fluids'.)

She often received letters from children: some wanted to thank her for Sun, others were laboring under a class assignment which said they had to write her and so tended to kick in just enough 'very's to fill out the minimum word count -- Twilight had started to receive some from that category and was under strict palace orders not to send them back corrected -- and a few were still operating under the illusion that she might stop by on Hearth's Warming to drop off a few enchanted gifts. All of those could be dealt with, and she sometimes took an afternoon to catch up on the most innocent of correspondence.

There were also those who felt that prayers whispered towards Sun might be lost in the susurrus of endless hope, and so chose to render their desperation in ink. Those were... harder. She did what she could, whenever she could, and knew it could never be enough.

But for the most part, it was complaints.

The palace had a known address and, until something over four years ago, a perfectly stable rulership. Ponies knew who was in charge, and so they also knew who to blame. The zoning laws had to be adjusted to their needs. A neighbor wouldn't listen to them, but might just pay attention to a Princess. There was Sun in their eyes and somepony had better move it.

Just about nopony ever wrote them to say they were doing a good job. But when something happened...

There was no sanity test for voting. You also didn't need to pass one in order to purchase a printing press, and so Mrs. Panderaghast had been busy. It was easy to pick out letters arranged by the head of Canterlot Unicorns Negating Traditional Swears (or, in the modern day, Canterlot Unicorns Need Equal Treatment, but Celestia was going to internally stick with the original name until it stopped being funny) because they were all the same. Mrs. Panderaghast claimed to speak for all right-thinking unicorns, which meant unicorns who agreed with her in every way about everything at all times. She also recognized that the best way to make sure she kept speaking for them was to make sure her donators never got a chance to speak for themselves, and that meant running off endless form letters for ponies to sign at the bottom. It was something which gave Celestia trouble in tracking the organization's membership count, but she had noticed several suspicious recurring styles of fieldwriting. It was always fieldwriting, because a group which claimed to be defending unicorn equality actually existed to make sure nopony else could ever be quite as equal, and so they mainly used their mouths for talking. It was just about impossible to make them stop.

Others had written her as individuals, and a moment of genuine curiosity brought her into the lower levels of the palace, still reading along the way. It only took a few minutes to reach the proper storage area, and then an hour spent in instructive contrast verified her suspicion: nearly everypony who was currently writing to protest Cerea's existence had also written the palace about Yapper. Some further research identified the near-total overlap in the set which had come in over Gerald Gristle's butcher shop. With the latter two cases, the only changes were frequently for the species being identified: however, when dealing with Cerea, a number of ponies (and others) had seen a need for fresh vocabulary, and Celestia lay down among the strewn debris of hate, reading along while she made a weary mental note to look at the nation's educational curriculum and make sure there was a year in which everypony learned how to actually spell 'apocalypse.'

The majority of the most recent letters were from Canterlot: those who mailed their fear generally didn't bother with express stamps. She knew she'd reached Ponyville when she spotted Thistle Burr's name, because he was one of the few who always put down a sending address: a stallion who knew the government was out to get him was also confident in its ability to figure out where he lived, and so felt he had nothing to lose through signing off on the lecture. By contrast, the Flower Trio usually tried to conceal their efforts in reporting fear, generally by using a mailbox on a different street.

The elder found a blank piece of paper, then spent a few minutes in tallying the number of times she was being accused of senility. There was a certain morbid curiosity about how many ponies were risking accusations of Nightmare, but that was Luna's mail and she would have to wait until the icicles started falling from the ceiling. There had been a point early in the Return when she'd tried to intercept anything sent directly to Luna, but the younger had caught her at it and...

...she tried to be there, so they could talk about it. That was the limit of what Luna would allow, at least for practical actions: a mutual visit to those who'd written her sister was generally impossible. Ponies who were accusing the younger of still being Nightmare tended not to provide a return address, just in case they were right.

Something over an hour just to skim through that portion of her mail, followed by just about nothing used for answering it: there was very little point in speaking to those who wouldn't listen to her, especially since any direct reply tended to reinforce their beliefs. (After all, if a Princess was trying to contradict them, then they had to be right.) Instead, she took the trot to the palace's Public Relations office and checked on the composition of the one-sheet, which was currently up to its ninth revision. They were still trying to figure out whether it was safe to include a picture and if so, how Cerea should be posed for it. There was an ongoing argument for nudity, simply because the majority of ponies favored it and so a centaur should reflect that. Celestia provided the counter-argument, which was that taking a girl who had a phobic reaction to undressing for measurements and putting her nude in front of a camera probably wasn't going to end well. And unless somepony with very high field strength was in the area, might not even end within the city limits.

She was still thinking about that image when she left the room, and only did so as a touchstone for all of the other short films playing out in her mind. There would be a terrified centaur galloping down the street, ponies would see her, and...

It took some time to get the screams out of her ears, longer still to banish the phantom scent of the girl's blood. And then she went back to the storage area, because there had been blank paper there and she had necessary correspondence to send.

...I recognize the reservations you probably have regarding this potential meeting. However, your class is an extraordinary one in many ways, and so I feel they may be well-suited as the first to greet her.

I know you're reluctant to step onto palace grounds again after what happened in the gardens. But I've never blamed you. For that matter, I don't blame them: we didn't know the bonds had been weakening. And in the end, that turned out to be a good thing.

Please tell Diamond and Sweetie that I can't give them an update on his condition.

I'm sorry

In this case, there's a single centaur mare, and I can safely say that no matter how nervous you are about protecting your students, she's equally as worried about doing something which might scare them. She needs somepony who can just trot up and face her -- and given all the things they've seen, that pony might be in your charge.

Please don't feel you have to say yes. No part of this has been an order. I'll understand completely if you decline, and I won't lie to you by saying you're the only teacher I'm contacting. But I've left the Gifted School out of it, because the only thing she needs less than fear is listening to first-years trying to verbally dissect her existence. I want everyday children who've had incredible experiences, because this will give them one more.

She's safe. More than anything else, she simply wants to go home, and the palace will do its best to help her. But until then, she needs acceptance. I'm hoping she can find a little of it in those who've already accepted so much into their lives.

Think about it, Ms. Slate. Please.

She watched the protesters change shifts.

It was easy to do, looking down from the tower. One group passed off the signs, the arriving parties fell into single file, and it took a few seconds to get the chants into rhythm again. A thin line of ponies marching in front of the palace gates, mostly getting out of the way when somepony needed to go in or out. Very, very slowly.

She couldn't hear the actual chant, and didn't want to. But the back-mounted signs indicated some degree of professionalism, along with the fact that Mrs. Panderaghast had been very busy.

They can't keep it up forever. Celestia had a great deal of experience with ponies who were trying to keep something going forever, some of whom had eventually resorted to working on a generational basis. The Equestrian record for a protest was --

-- winter's coming. We needed to balance the schedule after the snowfall and that made today perfect for protesting, but we'll be in the real cold soon enough. It's harder to protest in the cold.

They can't keep it going for three years.

Again.

...and it was down to that one old stallion who showed up every day to chant. It was the only thing in his life. Everypony else had accepted The Most Special Spell, or at least realized it was never going away. But he just kept showing up, because it was his Morals and The Last Thing He Could Do.

Nearly thirteen centuries of memories.

I looked down one morning and there was a body in front of the gates.

She'd never found a way to block any of them out.

...you should receive the full package today, but it's going to be sent physically: after several days of analysis and frantic conjecture, there's far too much paper to ask Spike to deal with any portion of it. I'm also going to arrange for Abjura to visit you tomorrow, as I feel you'll be better off if she explains her theories personally. She'll bring a transcript of Cerea's description for the passage.

Now, addressing Ms. Lulamoon specifically, and only in words which I know the other pony reading this should see:

I do in fact expect you to remain in Ponyville until the studies are complete. I am not asking you to live there for the rest of your life. It's possible that no matter what we do, there might be no way of sending Cerea home. In that case, you may return to the road.

However, this may still leave you in Ponyville for several moons, and you will be paid at the rate typical for a palace researcher while you stay. (I'm recommending you keep the caravan parked at the tree. I also feel you should move into the tree itself, for an extra level of security.) I recognize that this presents certain difficulties for you, and will be writing the police chief accordingly. There will be a town meeting soon, and it will concern a public announcement for the following: you are on probation, you are currently working for the palace, and anypony attacking you is going after a palace employee. That, along with the direct protection of Miranda Rights and her officers, should be enough to shield you from the masses. But -- and I'm being realistic about this -- I'm not expecting that you're going to be making a lot of friends. Not without taking the same apologies which you offered the Bearers and giving them to the townsponies. One by one.

I understand what drove you to the Amulet. I know how the device worked, and the fact that you were the one wearing it is the only reason nopony died. It's why I took a chance on giving you probation. But when it comes to Ponyville itself, it's going to take a lot more than a few fireworks.

To Twilight: I'm going to double the healing crew on the tree. Winter is approaching and while the current knitting rate shows the library is on the mend, I want to see more improvement before the cold sets in. Keeping a warm-weather zone intact for several moons is going to be a challenge for Rainbow's team, and it's natural for the tree to hibernate somewhat during the season. In that sense, it'll be better if it drops into its own sleep, rather than remaining at a forced higher activity level for much longer. I just want to make sure it's in a position where it'll be capable of waking up again.

For both of you: I expect you to eat. This may come across as a singularly silly thing to put in a letter, but it is also an order. I've had years to become familiar with what I'm going to charitably describe as Twilight's "study habits" and you, Ms. Lulamoon, have a storage locker full of spell theory in your hometown which is approaching some level of thaumic critical mass. It is a top priority to get Cerea home quickly and safely. Making sure the two of you don't work yourselves into a wandering half-coma of conjecture and dimming horn sparks falls under 'protecting a national resource,' along with keeping two mares alive. There will be no more than twenty hours per week spent in research for this problem, and that is ALSO an order. Spike will be tracking you, and enchantments will be provided to him which will create a means of kicking you both outside.

And part of that limit is because I have to ask you both to think about a side project.

We are going to need a working which suppresses herd instinct.

I don't know if it's possible, and I need you to keep that research secret: announcing that might go over about as well as the first journal papers released on Kalziver's Severance -- which was before we had this active of a press. I'm not going to be surprised if it has similar side effects for the caster, and I'll understand if you're both reluctant to pursue this. Because as with the Severance, I'm asking ponies to go against their most fundamental nature -- but also like the Severance, it's something we need. I can name three times in Equestria's history where a working which shuts down a single pony's talent for up to ninety-eight seconds was the only thing which staved off disaster. In this case, I need multiple targets on an exponential level, and what may need to be a significantly improved duration.

I know that on some level, I'm asking the two of you to think in a way which can nearly wound the soul. But we are currently in a situation where one misstep might set off a riot, and we only have so many ways of breaking them. If you can disable the herd response, then there will be individuals panicking -- and nothing more. We not only need that level of last resort, we may require it as preparation before Cerea can enter an area during an emergency.

It's asking a lot of you both. It always is.

I'm sorry

But I wouldn't ask if I didn't believe you could do it.

We'll all do what we can to keep everypony safe, until the day we can send her home.

Twilight, I'm going to be sending you a follow-up scroll in a few minutes. Please send Trixie out of the room.

The elder caught up on some paperwork. Two bills were signed into law: three were rejected, because 'no' still had a single definition and she was hoping that eventually, some ponies would figure out what it was. She met a class of fourth-year primary students who were taking a tour of the gardens and allowed them to get their pictures. A minor explosion at the Gifted School was registered and investigated, with the cause quickly determined as 'Gifted School.' Mazein's embassy asked for a meeting: she put one on the calendar and started to brace herself, because an ambassador who expressed what he felt didn't pull any verbal punches either.

All things she had to do during a normal day. But as her sister's hours approached, Celestia decided to take out the garbage.

YES. Yes, I am SURE. I recognize why you're worried. I was THERE. She is not Tirek. She is not related to Tirek in any way. The Doctors Bear feel she may not even be the same species as Tirek: still a centaur, but one which appeared independently, in a place we are unable to reach.

I read your letter. All of it. I understand your concerns. But that's why I'm not going to let you meet her just yet. Because until I feel you can be in her presence and see HER, the two of you are going to remain separated. And when it comes to the other, somewhat more directly justified problem --

The girl had just barely made a start on clearing out the barracks: there was a little hollow off the right of the doorway, and a circle of blankets on the swept portion of floor. But making that space had still displaced enough to drastically narrow the approach hallway: normal ponies could get past all the things which had been shunted into the corridor, and Celestia -- well, the palace was supposed to accommodate her passage at all times and therefore, she needed to enforce that. It also helped that she was one of the few who had the field strength to move all of the garbage at once and could recognize when something which needed to be saved had made its way down to the inadvertent dumping grounds by accident.

(She was tempted to just do all the work for Cerea, because there was still so much of it -- but she also knew that physical labor was a good way to settle the mind at the end of a long day, or -- to temporarily prevent certain thoughts from rising. It meant she would monitor the situation and step in if that level of help seemed to be required: for now, the girl would potentially find multiple benefits to the exercise.)

All she meant to do was clear the corridor, and she quickly discovered the need to make several trips: her field strength could manage the weight, but having that much trash floating about turned her into a trotting hazard to navigation. Teleportation didn't help: nopony teleported out to the trash pickup area because it was typically occupied by trash and even for somepony who could safely appear in midair, it was hard to be certain how high some of it had been stacked. (Springpole weaves for Lambvent were just about their own flight hazard, and that was when they were standing normally.) So she would trot, and the estimated total number of passages required would bring her to the start of Luna's waking hours -- along with what suddenly seemed to be an essential need to be there when the younger caught up on the mail.

But she was passing the barracks entrance with her first load of trash bobbing along behind her, and peripheral vision noticed the desk. The object resting on top of it, something she'd personally purchased --

-- she never would have opened it. The girl had so little privacy, and Celestia didn't want to pry. But it was already open, the cover turned aside to reveal the very first page. The initial image captured by the girl, something which suggested it had been the most important thing for her to draw. And there were erasure marks everywhere, faded remnant of lines begun and ended to the point where it seemed as if there had been a dozen attempts made upon the same page...

...but there was an image there.

She looked at it, because that much was automatic. Immediately felt shame, turned away --

-- glanced back.

She thought she could guess at what was being drawn, at least for the general category. There was a chance she even had a mouth grip on the intent. But she'd never seen that image before, she didn't know what it was supposed to look like, and...

It's wrong.
There's something wrong and she can't fix it.
She's been trying to fix that same sketch for...

It was all she knew. That there was something wrong, but not what. It made the image hard to look at, and when she tried to focus on --

-- maybe she hasn't started that part.

Back to trotting.

But she had to make several trips. She couldn't close the book, or the girl would know she'd seen something.

And every time she went by, that wrongness was still there.

I need you to trust me.

I know why you're angry. We all know why you're angry. It's so rare to see you that way. It has more impact coming from you, I think, just because it's so rare.

Reading your words means there's no way I can risk bringing you together. Until you're willing to have some faith trust me, you won't see her. It's not going to happen. So let Spike rest.

You have to understand that she isn't Tirek.

I also read the rest of it. I've been reading every letter you've sent me since it happened.

I still can't give you an update on his condition.

I'm sorry.

Disturbing

Bad things happened when you went out of bounds, and she'd spent much of her life wondering if one of them had been her fault. But those bounds were being redefined, and Cerea wasn't completely sure where the new borders were.

To a small degree, she (theoretically) had the gallop of the palace: a recruit was expected to memorize all of the hallways, and she'd been told that a full map would be delivered to the barracks for her study. But she hadn't done that much exploration on her own. The training sessions generally left her exhausted, whatever amount of strength she somehow retained had to be dedicated to clearing that much more of her sleeping quarters, and... the palace staff understood that to be her most typical location. If she wasn't on the training grounds, then she was likely in the barracks, or within a kitchen which she most likely had to herself. (The most frequent other option was an isolated restroom, because she hadn't quite broken through to the one attached to her quarters. The training grounds had a building off to one side for the cooking of meals when larger numbers of recruits were passing through, along with personal effects storage and toiletries. Lying down in front of multiple showerheads allowed her to wash up -- but once she was back in the castle, she had to go somewhere.) They wouldn't be expecting her in any other location, and...

...Cerea had taken several lessons away from the press conference, and one of the loudest echoes told her it could be a bad idea to put herself anywhere that an unsuspecting pony could just come across her. Or worse, a few dozen unsuspecting ponies, with every last one feeding the others with their fear.

It made her reluctant to explore. But the Sergeant had given her an order, and he'd also told a few ponies on the palace staff what that order had been. Nopony had been willing to even think about overriding him, and so Cerea was outside.

Outside and... alone.

How long had it been, without true privacy while under open sky? Count the time starting from the last seconds before the dark Princess had captured her in the forest, and the fever from the infection meant that most of what she remembered of that final desperate gallop was its conclusion. But she was outside in the palace gardens, because that was what the Sergeant had ordered. And she was alone, because...

"It's something a recruit should do," he'd told her. "They take the trot. Every class. Sometimes that's as a group, when there's nopony in the gardens to distract them. Others do it on their own. All of them get a statue to visit. A Guard to learn about. And that's when some of them decide they're not right for the job, because the trot is what makes them think about it. You're a class of one. So you're going."

In that sense, there had been no special accommodations made for her: if recruits were taking the trot, then the gardens were cleared. Those who maintained them departed for a while, no pegasi flew overhead, and she had been told to go early. Start the journey as the sun was still coming up, watching the sky shift from deep navy into rose and burnt orange before finally phasing into a brighter blue. Because the gardens were open to the public: the palace staff had made a special point of telling her about that. Schoolchildren took tours (and for no reason Cerea had been able to identify, two members of the staff had shuddered). They could keep visitors out for a few hours, until the time came to move her back to the training grounds. But it couldn't go on any longer than that.

She'd pictured it: coming across a touring class of colts and fillies, who hadn't been expecting to encounter

a monster

and it had taken a long time to banish the phantom echoes of their screams.

Her first time outside and alone in weeks, on a chill autumn morning. Her body temperature provided some degree of resistance to the cold, and the angora sweater -- white this time -- did the rest. (She usually felt the chill first and foremost on her human portions anyway, and it wasn't quite cold enough to be wearing gloves.) Trotting by herself, carrying a few books in a clumsily-rigged improvised backpack of looped and tied otherwise-useless blanket fragments (because she hadn't wanted to ask for anything better, and couldn't exactly shop), outside...

Too long in the cell, perhaps, and longer still on that lower palace level. Enough time for the combination of natural breezes, sunlight, and privacy to feel slightly strange.

But the breezes weren't natural.

It was her first time outside the palace while within view of it, and so she often found herself glancing back as viewing angles changed and the sun rose higher in the sky. She... hadn't been expecting it to be so large, not with so many towers rising that far into the air. A palace built during a certain age needed to be its own city, and this one was trying to do the job through occupying the space required for -- all right, not a city, and not even a town. But take the largest of sporting arenas, expand them to cover what would normally be a portion of the parking lot, render the whole thing in marble and then...

...split it.

It took multiple views before she saw what had happened, and most of that was based in the angles of the walls, added to some glimpses of structures rising from the mostly-hidden half. But the palace existed as something which had been cleaved. There appeared to be a central entrance (just barely glimpsed from the top of one minor hill), and that joining point rose what Cerea would have considered to be about eight floors into the sky: this seemed to be about right for the ponies, as the white Princess required a fairly high ceiling. There was a fair amount of structure around that entrance, enough to accommodate multiple offices on the higher levels and what might be a grand gathering space at the center. But beyond that... the palace split. A marble wing stretched out at one slightly-curving angle, and the alignment of visible, slightly more distant towers suggested a mirror structure on the other side.

She didn't understand the design. How it was supposed to work for defense, much less where anyone had found that much marble. There were ways in which it was two palaces joined at the center, and beyond that --

-- there were times when she also had glimpses of the city.

The majority of the buildings had to be smaller than the palace, and so were lost behind its shining bulk. And ponies seemed to build on a smaller scale than humans when it came to reaching for the vertical, perhaps because a third of them could seek the skies at will. Using the palace as a baseline... the tallest buildings were about twenty stories tall, and very few reached that high. Very little of the architectural styles she could try to identify from a distance could truly be compared against human counterparts, mostly for lack of detail. From what she could see, ponies seemed to largely be against sharp angles: there were a few blocked-off constructs, but the majority allowed the soft lathe of the sky to meet their walls on a gentle curve.

Stone and wood made up most of the identifiable materials. She could see very little metal at work, and most of that reinforced the sides of a rather stately clock tower. And yet there were ways in which it could almost be mistaken for a human city, at least from a distance for a few seconds. A city with great birds migrating through the upper layers --

-- birds with hooves.

How long would it take, for someone who was seeing it for the first time? To recognize that they were looking at flying ponies? How much longer to understand they were observing commuters who were taking an aerial path to work? That all of this had been built by ponies, four intelligent subspecies working together. And so many others populated the world, griffons and yaks and donkeys, holding their own nations...

She could get glimpses of the city, when she looked back. She could see a little half-circle of low-lying clouds on its northern edge, completely still on a slightly breezy day. But when she turned her attention to the west... that was when she saw civilization.

It came at the top of one of the little sculpted hills, that first truly clear view. Cerea had known the palace was built on a mountain: Nightwatch had casually mentioned it, and the girl's lungs occasionally provided reminders that full acclimation had yet to take place. The largest of multiple plateaus hosted the capital, while another held the training grounds: winding paths connected the level areas. But it was the artificial hill which gave her some concept of how high up they were, along with giving her an idea of the total scale.

For altitude... she could only guess, looking at the increasingly-sharp rise of stone as it slanted away from the city, narrowing into a peak for which winter might exist in perpetuity. But from base to snow-covered cap -- perhaps three and a half kilometers, and the city was roughly a kilometer up. It was sufficient height to let her look across a tremendous amount of landscape to the west, and nearly all of what she saw was forest. No power lines, no cell towers. Just about no roads. The trees grew wild and free, with very few signs of the desperate attempts at control which humans always seemed to inflict upon the landscape.

Forest: mostly deciduous, because it was autumn and she stared out across a riot of browns and red, with a few stray deep purples and the verdant shades which showed where the evergreens were. But she didn't see suburbs, or satellite cites. No homes were arranged around the base of the mountain, none of the little clusters of residences and businesses which would have been expected near a capital. She certainly didn't spot an airport, although an oddly-stable double-line cloud formation stretching off to the west looked a little like the borders of a runway. The capital almost seemed to be completely isolated, placed on a mountain at the edge of a forest the size of an exceptionally small country: she was sure she was looking at enough trees to create a botanical overrun of Liechtenstein. But when she looked towards the mountain's base...

No trees had been cleared for power lines, cell towers, or because a human just thought there shouldn't be a tree there. But there was a path stretching off to the west, and the reason she'd found it was because her ears had automatically tried to orient on the train's whistle.

They have railways.

Nightwatch had told her about them. But seeing the engine puffing its way along (oddly white puffs, which dispersed quickly), pulling cars behind it... it was the first real sign of technology. Closer examination found four other major trestle trails departing from the base of the mountain, and one awkwardly-angled glimpse suggested that at some point, the trains ascended towards the capital. But the one going almost directly west... that was the precious one, because it was the path she could track. The remaining four curved away after a while, leaving her sight. The western rail went on for kilometers and kilometers, until it reached a town.

She couldn't make out any real details, not from her current distance. Shapes suggested buildings, there appeared to be a dam structure off to one side, and a ring of farmland surrounded the whole thing. But there was a little pocket of life in the center of the forest.

Ponyville. She said that was the closest.... 'settled zone'.

Not that Cerea was necessarily looking at it, because there could be something closer still in another direction. But it was a new place, one which could be reached by train, and...

...Cerea had very little experience with trains, and quite a bit of the early portions had been bad. The vibrations from the wheels, the constant shaking under her hooves... centaurs knew a lot about human civilization and up until the moment of emergence, had directly experienced almost none. Looking at a train chugging along -- it gave her a choice of things to think about. France was

stay low

something she didn't want to recall. But in Japan... with her own size and the amount of space Rachnera took up, trains had been the easiest way for the household girls to move around the country, at least when their host had been with them: the typical other option had been no travel at all. And they'd fought for access to the windows, everyone except Lala because the dullahan would just quietly ask someone to hold her head near the glass. Battled for the best views, and the chance to watch the world go by.

To see

"You forgot how long you were flying again." Because someone had to admonish the harpy and in the total absence of any parental figures within the household, Cerea had more or less elected herself.

Technically, none of them were supposed to leave the residence without their host close by: the main exceptions were Cerea's (legal) morning gallops and the arachnae's frequent sneak-outs. But Papi could fly, and so she'd decided that not leaving the house only applied when she was traveling along the ground.

She usually got away with it. Papi could operate at high altitude: the majority of harpy gaps tended to be located in the most isolated parts of mountain ranges, and the species had adapted accordingly. It let her fly at levels where observers couldn't identify what she was. But that height also put her at a point where she could no longer identify major landmarks -- not that she tended to remember what those were in the first place -- and so the first months of cohabitation often found the others looking for a girl who could take a very long time to find her way home and had no real way to answer her phone while in flight, assuming she managed to locate the source of the sudden noise. And, if she became distracted enough, just might forget that there was a home waiting for her at all.

The household had finally convinced Ms. Smith to pay for a homing beacon while giving Papi an ankle bracelet which softly beeped as she neared the central signal: the key then became getting her to remember any need to put it on.

"Papi was having fun!" the slim girl had happily exclaimed, because a harpy was a creature which generally felt guilt and remorse for wrongdoing just got in the way.

"You are late for dinner," Cerea had patiently tried to explain. Food had a way of momentarily focusing Papi, especially if she was being threatened with its loss.

But the harpy had just tilted her head to the right, doing so at a speed which made it seem as if there had been no movement between the states. An upright skull at one moment, the angle at the next. Birdlike movements added to the very human expression of confusion.

"Flying is better than food." And before Cerea could react to what the harpy would normally treat as near-blasphemy, that statement was followed by another: something which emerged with an odd lack of mirth. "Flying is food for Papi's eyes."

She'd stared at the smaller female for a few seconds, even backing up a little so she could stare down more properly.

"I do not understand." Common enough when dealing with the thoughts produced by Papi's deadly combination of low intellect and horrible memory, but... the harpy looked serious. Utterly so, with even some of the larger flight feathers appearing tensed...

The cowlick curl at the front of the short-cut blue hair bobbed as Papi's head flicked back to a center position.

"At home," the harpy told her, "fly all the time. When Papi wants, without worrying about laws or Boss. But only so far. Fly over the same things every day, every year, for Papi's whole life. Beautiful, in the Carpathians. Want to show Cerea someday, take her to old home to see. But... looking at the same things, only beautiful so long. Only so many times you can see the same hollow, or stop because you saw the same outcrop. It's abhoring --" paused "-- boring. And when Papi realized it was boring, then... Papi wanted to leave. And now, can't fly as often, and Boss gets worried when Papi's gone too long, because Boss cares about Papi. Cerea cares about Papi, because Cerea worries too. But..."

The smaller girl was nearly half a meter under Cerea's height. It made the harpy's frequent spontaneous hugs exceptionally awkward, at least for how various portions of their anatomy aligned. But one loved to be hugged, the other loved to be the one who was hugging, and wings which were good for so little when their owner was back on the ground... they could still wrap a willing form. Sometimes the feathers tickled.

The harpy snuggled as close as she could, because Papi had very little sense of personal space and loved softness. Stretched up on the tips of her talons and angled her wings carefully, because the one thing Papi never forgot was how easy it could be for her to hurt someone.

"...Papi isn't there any more. New home. And when Papi flies, or when there's a train, or we're just all out together... it isn't boring. There's too much new to ever be boring again. Papi needs to fly, because Papi's eyes need food."

She'd pulled back just a little, looked up at Cerea's shocked face with the open love of a little sister.

"Papi flies," the harpy declared, "for the same reason Mero wants to swim in every new river. And why Cerea gallops." Hopefully, "Cerea understands now?"

She hadn't said anything. She'd just hugged the harpy back.

Because there were so many species. And for every last one, there had been a gap.

They had been freed, and so train windows had become worth fighting for.

This was a different world. One with a forest which stretched to the horizon, mountains and monsters and ponies. She could spend the rest of her life exploring --

-- alone.

She existed in the world, and did so without truly being a part of it.

Again.

Cerea silently turned away from the west, because a view was all there could be when you were gazing through the window of a larger prison. And after she squared her shoulders, breathed until she could imagine the familiar sadness had been driven back to its ancient home... she trotted down the little wooded peak, directly into the first dunes of the desert.

She tried to see it as touring the world, and doing so in a rather compressed format. What it mostly taught her was a little more about the range of what pegasus and earth pony magic could achieve, because human botanical gardens -- she'd insisted on touring one in Tokyo, and had almost managed to fully restrain herself from nibbling on a few samples -- needed a lot of help. It took precision to duplicate the soil balance required for growing plants so far away from their homes, enclosed areas were required for those from the most exotic climates, and then you had to worry about local insects and diseases for which the floral immigrants had no natural defense. It wasn't easy for humans to manage and you couldn't get a full range of offerings without shutting most of it within walls, relying on artificial sunlight and the kind of rain which only fell from sprinkler systems. But with magic...

It wasn't dunes being reproduced with mounds of imported sand: it was the desert. Step within and feel the heat rise, the morning sun seemingly concentrated upon cacti (with oddly-flexible, hollow needles) and those fragile blooms which usually had to lurk in wait for that precious burst of moisture. The air dried out as she crossed the border, because that was what the desert plants knew and at any rate, the moisture was being used about fifty meters to her left, in the little patch of rain forest.

She spent some time there, retreating back to the desert when her sweater threatened to become too damp. But it was hard to leave, especially when staying just another minute would have allowed her to hear that much more birdsong. And there had been a moment when bright yellow wings had flown right up to her, shining eyes hovering so close to her own, just looking at her...

A world which barely knew centaurs and had never known humans hadn't evolved a fear of that form. When dealing with monsters, it was a problem: for birds, she was a curiosity and unless she made a move which startled them... they simply looked. And so she stayed as long as she could, listening to the whirring of wings and snippets of songs as something deep within her searched for a glimpse of blue feathers and hoped for a welcoming hug.

But it could never come, not here. To the birds, she was simply something new, and only that which could think had decided to see her as a threat.

Back to the desert, just long enough for the fabric to dry out. And then she proceeded through glen, around a swamp and over a clear stream, paying more attention to plants and climate than the myriad of stone decorations. The pegasi created the proper environments for each section of the gardens, making sure they remained distinct from each other. Earth ponies ensured that every plant received exactly what it needed from the soil in order to thrive, and it made the gardens into the most variegated source of beauty she'd ever seen.

There were blooms which she recognized, things replicated in her own world. Others shimmered, or curved in odd ways while fruits of strange shapes sagged from low branches. She was careful not to touch anything, because she had to be a good guest -- and while neither poison ivy nor oak grew in France, she was familiar with the concept. She'd seen some of what the local forest could produce, and plants which knew magic could have their own ways of discouraging contact. And that was just the plants...

Nightwatch had called Ponyville a 'settled zone'. It was a term which would normally beg a number of questions -- but she'd also experienced a few of the risks to be found in the wild. Ponies trying to carve out places in which they could safely live, in a world where nature had many more means of fighting back.

Many of the plants had little signs nearby: she presumed those were identification labels for species and origin. Others had signs bordered in red: those were perceived as having added warnings. But she couldn't read them, and when it came to making any active attempt to decipher... that was waiting somewhere up ahead.

She trotted. There were places where it was more of a hike. Upslopes tended to have little hollows placed for hooves to find purchase, but hers weren't at the standard separation distance: it took some time before she spotted the side path of supports which had probably been intended for the larger Princess. She looked at the plants (but still not the inanimate which was hosted among them, or the words she couldn't read at their bases), found a few insects known and non sheltering within the miniature biomes, and carefully dipped her body low enough to gather one handful of soil, wanting to see if it felt as rich as it smelled. It did.

There was a section of the gardens which was almost like the south of France and upon realizing that, she quickly went around it.

And then she saw the little peak.

The air changed as she crossed the border, coming in from the little northern prairie. It chilled, and did so at the same moment it thinned.

There was already some degree of change present, this far up the mountain. Her initial step across the line had brought her forehooves up by about fifteen centimeters, resting on the first flat plane of snow-dusted granite: the lowest part of what was meant to serve as a staircase formation. It had also instantly elevated her lungs by about two extra (and virtual) kilometers, and she spent a few seconds in gasping, trying to acclimate to the lower oxygen level.

There was a miniature stone pillar on her left, one where the top had been hollowed out in a half-sphere of vacuum, with multiple clear partial bubbles of glass lying within. It would have come up to a place just below the average pony's snout, and that realization made her understand what the half-bubbles were for -- but she didn't have a snout, and so the one she managed to recover couldn't fully adhere over what didn't exist. She felt the magic trying to take hold, and the air she breathed from it was normal enough -- but the whole assembly kept slipping down her nose, and she eventually wound up using one hand to stabilize it at just about all times.

It was cold as she moved across stone and snow, becoming more so with every hoofstep. But her free arm didn't come up to cover the results, because the sweater was fairly plush and... she was alone. Unblinking eyes placidly watched her from the peak as she ascended, and she was still completely alone.

And then there was a statue.

She hadn't been entirely sure what an ibex was. A truly dedicated study of naturalism was like looking at tourism guides: she would have been learning about things which could never be personally seen and at any rate, animals didn't have the same power to inspire dreams as towns and towers. There were things she knew -- but they weren't enough and in any case, there had to be species which were native to this world alone. Not recognizing 'ibex' as a name had suggested that the latter was potentially in play. But when she saw it...

How to perceive it, when compared to something of her world? Her mind began with the concept of mountain goat, and quickly added full sapience. The stone hooves were cloven, but it was in a way which had left portions projecting forward in wedge formations: something suitable for being jammed against rock, or into the smallest of cracks. It was hard to pick up on the full shape of the barrel: stone suggested a rather dense coat of fur in that area, especially along the underbelly. All four legs were somewhat thin, but the shoulders and hips were powerful, and the tail was so short as to resemble a dusting brush.

The head... she hadn't been expecting the horns or rather, she hadn't been expecting their direction: they both arced back over the skull, the ridged cones curving along the length of their growth to the point where they almost touched the creature's neck. Both deer-like ears were fully upright and alert, carefully-carved stone hairs seemed to twitch within their interiors. Stone eyes possessed horizontal pupils, and that was the hardest part of the fixed gaze to get used to. But the mouth...

There were different hues of stone around the jaw. They suggested a lightening of fur on the muzzle and under that nearly-flat nose. The sunlight soaking into the motionless form added highlights and a degree of softening to that area. It was something which seemed to imply a smile.

The stone ibex stood eternal watch. Partially checking the approach staircase to see if anyone was on the way, with the rest of its regard on the distant castle. And at the base of its forehooves, there was a granite plaque which bore runes from two alphabets, rendered from gold and silver blended in twisting harmony.

She carefully reached into the backpack (and, just for a second, was glad no human had seen her left arm bend in such an unnatural fashion). Extracted a slim notebook, and flipped through the pages until she found the characters which Nightwatch had told her to trace.

(Nightwatch had seemed so distracted during that last lesson. Talking more at Cerea than to her, and the little knight's scent had told the girl that the pegasus was concerned about something -- but the small mare hadn't been willing to talk about it. Any attempts the centaur had made to ask if everything was okay had been deflected in favor of lessons, and the excuse was that there had been a day when the pegasus had taken her own trot through the gardens.)

Cerea looked at the first rendition: Equestrian characters. Below that, a language which no longer had a native speaker in the capital, placed both in memory and the hopes that someone from a lost homeland would visit. But in the decades of the statue's presence, only ponies had come...

...and now there was a centaur. Looking at two rows of runes, each with the same meaning. A name.

Blitzschritt.

She looked into stone eyes again, and did so from slightly below: staying on a lower step, allowing the statue to keep its watch unimpeded. Went back to the book, and eventually wound up bringing out the rest of her language class notes, brushing the snow off a step in order to give her a reading surface.

It was impossible to translate the whole of it. Nightwatch hadn't recited the inscription from memory: instead, she'd softly told Cerea that every recruit had to take their own trip into the centuries. And if the Sergeant had told her that Blitzschritt was the place where a centaur should begin... then all Nightwatch could do was point the way.

So all the girl had was her notes, and it wasn't enough. Entire lines were lost to her: all she could do was take out some carefully-wrapped charcoal and make a rubbing

a tombstone rubbing

of the whole thing, so she would be able to carry the words back. But she could make out some of it, because there had been lessons and... some words had come early. The pony written language had a very simple way of indicating the past tense, and a single character changed 'death' to 'died'. The Sergeant had pointed out 'service' engraved into the arch of the building entrance at the training grounds, 'Princess' had been one of the first words, and teaching Cerea about money had meant going into the realm of numbers...

She flipped between pages of multiple books, made notes in another, until a portion of a sentence yielded.

died in service to the Princess, so that all could live.

There was more than that, above and below: words she could not read. But there were also numbers and after a while, she assembled a few of them: 1127. Numbers which followed two words...

Her badge number? Not that she'd seen Guards wearing badges. Something about which shift she was on, and how long? Days of service, or...

...time. The name of a day. A month, or in this case, a moon. And then a year.

A hundred and forty-eight years ago. Which, if her guess was right and the date marked the ibex's death, made the current year 1275. (Not that she knew how long a year was, or how the ponies had chosen a point to count from.)

'in service to the Princess...'

That seemed odd, to have no mention of which Princess had been involved. But it was possible that the identification was in the portion she couldn't read. Or -- this felt like a possibility -- that the names were inherited with the position. If you held the Solar throne, then you were Celestia: similar to how human royalty liked to attach 'the Second' on up to titles, only without the need to keep count. Maintaining continuity.

Not that she understood how Princesses were chosen yet. Perhaps it was alicorns only ('alicorn' had been another early-arriving word), because they came from a single royal bloodline where the current rulers had yet to produce heirs...

...for all I know, they're elected positions. It would be in the citizenship classes. But for what she had before her, the statue and the plaque... a name, what might be a date, and a dedication of sorts. That was all she could make out.

And once again, she looked into the stone pupils.

Who were you?
How did you die?
Why did you make that choice?
Did you... the cold increased ...think about it? Was there a second where you knew you were going to die if you acted, but... she would live?
Did you doubt yourself?
Or was it instinct? Did you just move, and you didn't realize what had happened to you until...
Maybe you never knew. Maybe it was that fast. You were here, and then you were...

Cerea had been presented with teachings about the afterlife. They were, like so much of centaur culture, heavily modified from an ancient Greek base, and that had initially meant something so dismal as to have generations of religious philosophy working overtime just to soften the final blow. There was supposed to be a place waiting for centaurs who led good lives, or found a way for their deaths to help the herd. Something which served as a reward.

But the girl didn't know what she believed, because the teachings about centaur afterlife talked about centaurs. Occasionally, one of the other liminals would drift through a paragraph, and it was suggested that they had their own regions within the ephemeral realms. But humans weren't really mentioned at all, and...

...it felt like centaurs had decided existence after death was something which came with its own gaps.

It was hard enough to live that way. The thought of dying for the best of reasons and just finding herself... isolated...

There had been some unexpected side effects to the first wave of integration, and one of the least surprising (to Cerea, anyway) was seeing liminals taking up human religion -- in the same manner that someone visiting an all-you-can-eat buffet could be described as taking up food. You might try things from a single section of the long table. Others freely mixed odd ingredients on their plate, then covered it with a binding sauce while all the other diners glared at them. Some switched their taste every other week, trying to find something which would fit. Liminals had found Catholicism, and that had generally been followed by finding a Reform temple right next door which had better songs. (The Orthodox branch had been rejected by most species, in large part because some of the dietary requirements were impossible.) Anything with reincarnation was popular, because the thought of eventually experiencing humanity from the other side had a certain appeal. But when it came to what Cerea believed...

...she wasn't sure she did. Or if she ever had.

She didn't know what ponies believed: a single faith, or an assemblage as chaotic as human and liminal religions combined. There were other species, and that suggested other systems of belief. But it was an awkward topic to ask about, and in any case...

Everything she had been told about was a world away. This was somewhere else, a place with magic and ponies and what might be its own deities. If her promised afterlife had ever been real, it might not be able to find her, or she it. And if there was something true waiting for the dead in this land -- it might not have any place for a centaur.

The girl looked into the stone eyes again, and realized she was shivering.

You could be an ibex, or you could be a Guard.
You died for your Princess.
You thought you would be dying for something...

On the way to the false peak, she had been looking at the plants.

On the way out, she finally examined that which she had been overlooking in favor of the living. She looked at statues. And some of them were of monsters, and others of creatures. Animal species which echoed those she knew, only with an aspect of sapience in motionless eyes.

But there were also statues wearing stone armor.
Nearly all of them were of ponies.
There were so many statues...

Discordant

The siblings silently watched, gazing down at that unique figure as it slowly moved towards the palace again. They had no concerns about being spotted: most of the recruits who exited the gardens after their tour would trot with their heads lowered, everything within them weighed down by long thoughts. In this, as with so many other things, the girl was no different.

And in the event that she had looked up... not only would she have needed to randomly pick the balcony of exactly the right tower to gaze at, but she also would have been up against the most talented illusionist Equestria had ever produced.

Celestia had actually asked the younger about that: whether the girl might have any capacity to pierce illusion. Luna had thought about it for a time, then replied in the positive -- a rather tentative version. A touch from the sword would likely cancel out the magic holding a false vision together. But when it came to perceiving the true without the use of that thing -- illusions created by ponies were manipulations of light and, for those with the talent, sound. They didn't pass along their lies through a direct tap into the target's senses: that was a changeling's dominion, and so pony illusions didn't include scent. Luna could create a perfect mirage, as with the one which currently displayed an empty balcony (as long as those hidden by that veil didn't move too much). But it could only fool sight and hearing. It was possible that Cerea would be able to smell their distant presence, where a pony could not. And an alicorn's natural scent was a little like that of the other three races combined, with unique factors added in -- but it also smelled like nothing else in the world.

They were several stories above the ground, cloaked by illusion. But they still weren't entirely sure what the girl was capable of, and so Celestia had also redirected the wind. Just in case.

Eventually, the centaur was close enough to the walls to be hidden from sight. And about a minute after that, they heard heavy doors close.

"A longer tour than most," the younger quietly noted, her horn beginning to dim. "And that without having covered the entirety of the gardens."

"She had a lot to think about," Celestia softly countered. "I could almost see her counting statues on the way back, at least when it was possible to see her. And... she hasn't been outside in a while. Not by herself."

Luna's sigh wasn't truly chill: the younger's body warmed the air within her lungs, the same as every other pony -- but it was almost always a little cooler around her, and so that warm breath wafted through an aura of concern-created cold, becoming briefly visible as a rising cloud of personal mist. "Something for which there are currently very few solutions."

"Yes." The matching expression from the elder didn't quite manage to emerge as steam: she wasn't upset enough for that. But the siblings had been mutually dealing with various sources of stress, and Celestia was all too aware that she had to get back inside and under a tighter degree of control. By her rather experienced estimate, the two of them were one more piece of bad news away from potentially beginning to produce their own fog bank.

Wryly, "Want to talk about some of the other things we can't solve?"

"Ah," Luna sarcastically considered. "So with my already having been awake beyond my normal hours, you wish for me to both remain alert for a longer period and have reasons for a rather poor sleep, if only so that your personal state might gain company -- and what is that thought?"

"Sorry?" Celestia automatically asked.

Evenly, "Doctor Bear has his own way of indicating when an inner vision has taken him away for a time. As do you."

Which was when she realized that her head had gone up, and it made her look as if she was examining the sky -- but the purple eyes were fixed upon that which no longer existed.

White lids slowly closed.

The voices were soft, decibels worn down from the effort required to cross centuries. "I was thinking about how we used to push our beds together. Or the blanket nests, after we lost them. Under a single blanket on the best nights, when we were traveling. When it was all getting to us, when we had to hang onto ourselves. We had to know something was real, and the best anchor was... each other. Just sleeping with our bodies pressed up against each other. So it would feel safe enough to sleep, and... like we would still be ourselves when we woke up. But with the cycle, it's almost impossible to do that now. Something else which changed..."

The elder was now looking directly at Sun, and did so without pain. She was the only one in the world who could. And still the tears rose in her eyes.

A smaller body pressed against hers, and there was a moment when she could not reconcile the weight of the wings.

"You shared my bed," the younger quietly reminded her. "On the first night after the Return."

Automatically, "You were exhausted. We both were. I couldn't get you out of Ponyville for hours, I knew you'd been under Sun too long --"

"-- even knowing that the Nightmare was dead," readily interrupted the flow, "and I would be the one who woke." Nearly a whisper, "Or did you fear something else?"

The elder closed her eyes again.

"Fear." The word was almost heavy enough to crack the marble. "I was afraid that when I woke up -- it would be just that. Waking up to find that everything which had happened was no more than a dream." Whispering now, as the flow of semi-tangible mane and tail slowed, "Because I had that dream so many times, Luna. I didn't know who the Bearers would be, and when it came down to the last few years, my mind started to put Twilight into the group. But most of the time, you were saved by phantoms. There were nights where it happened in the ruins. One had the final confrontation at Star's old workshop. He was there in some of the dreams, with the others. And sometimes... you would be there. All of us together, facing the Nightmare. Dream logic, what there is of it: we were all together, so you had to be there. But I would always wake up, and it wouldn't be time yet, I didn't know if anything would work, and... I would always wake up. Wake up, and... you would be gone again. I..."

She took a breath. The huge rib cage shifted, and two sets of foreign feathers brushed against her fur.

"...shared a bed because you were back. Because it had been a thousand years, a thousand years, and I can barely think about that number. Not when I had to live through all of it, one second at a time, just for a chance. I stayed because I had to know you were really there. That it had worked, that I had you back after my mistake --"

Two sets of tears were falling.

"-- you did not know, Tia. It was the last thing you had to try --"

"-- I could have thought of something else --" And had spent a millennium of nightmares in wondering what 'something else' could have been.

"-- and I," the younger softly countered, "might have done a better job of seeking out somepony to speak with, in the last nights before it all took place. Before speaking with the last entity anypony should ever trust. I could have turned away. Question your actions as much as you might wish, sister: I had sufficient time during --" dark wings trembled "-- internal burial to do the same. But there is a saying in Protocera, is there not? Something which has never entirely taken root here, and might benefit our own citizenry if it had. We look back, we consider what might have been different --"

The younger's eyes closed, and every star dimmed.

"-- 'And no one would have suffered had they not been born.' The past is fixed, Tia. We cannot change a moment of it. But we are here, and this is now --"

"-- and that's what I was afraid of," the elder's pain broke in. "That I would wake up, and it wouldn't be now. It wouldn't be time yet, because getting you back was just another dream. I wanted to wake up and find you there. I needed that anchor. I..."

They stayed there for a time, pressed against each other. It was necessary and, just as much to the point, it was once again possible.

"More than four years," Celestia eventually whispered. "I should be better at dealing with this --"

"-- four," Luna interrupted, "weighed against a thousand."

Not without humor, "Everypony usually expects me to resolve a year's worth of disasters in about two seconds. I'm still off the pace."

"Yes. Well, we have what might be disaster sufficient for a decade brewing at our own gates," Luna wryly observed. "But as I have some personal experience with such things, I am prepared to allot us well over a minute. Shall we?"

They were using some of the secret passages. It granted them privacy and, in the cases of those travelways where they were the only ponies who ever used them, offered the opportunity to dust.

"I am hoping that the Tattler pursued its typical course of exaggeration," Luna declared as a field-held rag wiped down a trigger plate. "Even after having read both the article and the transcript of the palace's own interview with the one who was so unfortunate as to provide its base."

"A 'faction' within the palace," Celestia semi-quoted as her horntip scraped some built-up gunk out of a narrow crack in the stone. "Of true loyalists to Equestria, and that even fits in with the Tattler's usual definition of loyalty to the nation: going against everything we stand for."

"I regret not having been present when that one reporter expressed the sentiment in a way which Rainbow Dash understood," Luna dryly stated. "Fishing her out of the dam afterwards was somewhat less entertaining. Regardless, when it comes to our own staffs, I accept that there are those who are less than comfortable with Cerea's presence, and wish that she was not here at all. But I hardly believe they are working from within to rid the nation of centaurs. Orders have been followed: our keeping her within the cells would have 'leaked' long before the sighting. Those supposedly wishing to operate directly against us simply would have needed to capture a single image and send it to the press."

"But there were rumors," Celestia countered. "That we had her. Those were going around before Wordia."

"It was public knowledge that we were involved in the hunt," Luna reminded the elder. "To that degree, the presumption was a natural one."

"Rumors," the white mare darkly stated as the temperature flared within the shadowed passage, "still require ponies to spread them --"

Stopped.

"-- and this," Celestia quietly said, "is what they want. That we'll start doubting the ones who've sworn oaths, looking for enemies among those closest to us, and working to undermine them before they can do the same. I believe there's ponies on our staffs who wish she had never come here, Luna. Who hate coming to work in the palace during cycles when they know she's in it. But I'm not about to start questioning everypony as to where they stand, especially not when we know where this article came from. The numbers are being exaggerated."

Softly, the touch of moonlight sliding across stone. "And if they are not?"

"Then we," the elder declared, "are still in charge. Anything done has to get past us. They've been following orders, Luna. I'd prefer them to be happy about it -- but in this case, I'll settle for following."

"You will understand," the younger stated as the passage and cleaning efforts began to slant upwards, "if I continue to keep my ears rotated. In the event that we happen to be wrong."

With a small smile, "I don't expect anything else."

Several ancient layers of grime found new homes on cloth, which was followed by enjoying a fresh existence as ash. It was easier than sending anything through the laundry sixty times.

"How's Nightwatch?" Celestia checked. "I did see your notes."

Luna sighed. "'Stubborn' would be an accurate description. I have attempted to provide her with multiple courses of action. The first was to abandon the apartment for a time, while we set up surveillance to see who had been entering the building." Darkly, "Something which does very little if the one posting threats lives within, but hiding somepony on her floor would require an empty space. Such as her abandoned apartment."

"And she said no?" There was some genuine surprise in that, enough that it echoed longer than the accompanying hoofsteps.

"Even when offered the option to live at the palace," Luna confirmed. "I also stated that we would pay for a hotel room. Her excuse for refusing that was to say it could put the rest of those in the hotel at risk."

"Which doesn't apply to the palace, when they can't get in --" Celestia began to protest.

"-- and her excuse for that was that she did not wish for the threatening party to feel they had made her retreat. You might imagine that she combined the arguments when refusing to request the hospitality of another Guard. And as a final option, even knowing that you have had your eye on her at least once before with the prospect of cross-staff filching -- I proposed that she simply, and temporarily, move to the Solar shift. Twisting the hours in which others would expect her to be at home." Luna sighed. "However, 'stubborn' continued to apply. I did not quite reach the point of a direct order, not at this stage: some degree of her life away from the palace should remain her own. But I am sorely tempted. She believes they will do no more than threaten and leave behind things meant to trigger several kinds of nausea. And I would hope that she is correct, but..."

The younger fell silent, and so new echoes reached them.

"How far away are we from Apex Tower?" Celestia asked, because she knew the answer and several kinds of company were desirable when approaching the heart of expected misery.

"Another two minutes," Luna replied.

"And we're hearing them. Across that distance, through this much stone..."

"Yes. I suspect we will be soundproofing the forward offices tomorrow. This must be rather distracting."

And then they were looking at it. Something which took a lot of head turning and examination on multiple elevations.

The majority of the protestors were unicorns, because it was Canterlot and on her best day, Mrs. Panderaghast considered just about anypony cooperative from the other two races to be extremely temporary allies of convenience. It was in the same way a dirty face tried an allied napkin.

(It was rather hard for an organization which promoted the inherent superiority of unicorns to fundraise from earth ponies and pegasi: simply ordering them to donate didn't work, saying they weren't intelligent enough to decide how their own bits should be managed tended to backfire, and door-to-door visits meant talking to your lessers while being in range of the more physical counterarguments. However, CUNET did have a few non-unicorn members, which they trotted out at every opportunity to prove they weren't speciesist. Those ponies were real, tended to blush when somepony deigned to actually speak with them, and had signed on because anypony possessing that combination of deepest horn envy and near-fatal low self-esteem generally found a way of taking it out on themselves.)

But Canterlot had pegasi and earth ponies among its population. The capital had also been one of Tirek's first targets, and the sisters blamed themselves for that: all of the device and wonder shops in the Heart, the concentration of magic within the armory, and the chance to drain them. They'd done everything they could, and some of it had helped -- but the evacuations hadn't been completed in time. He had arrived much more quickly than they'd expected, even with everything they'd kicked at him in the name of mere delay, and...

It could be said, with complete accuracy, that nopony in Canterlot didn't know a minimum of one pony who'd been drained: the actual low number was closer to fifteen. Extend the connections across the social web, and it was also true that just about everypony had been at least passingly familiar with somepony who'd died.

They had been violated. They had lost friends, family, and lovers. The one who had done it was beyond their reach, and so all they had been able to do was seek help for their pain as best they could, at least for those who had been willing to admit help was needed.

But now there was a centaur in the palace.

CUNET's line was closest to the gates. Behind them, the diversity was considerably more scattershot: earth ponies, a number of unicorns who'd decided they had to be there and weren't going to get caught dead in the other line, those pegasi who'd reached the point where they needed a ground rest... and then you had intermingled zebras, yaks, several buffalo, and the city's one and only kudu family had decided this was a worthwhile use of a morning out. Higher up, pegasi were flying in protest formation, occasionally pausing to make room as the Aviary continued to empty itself out and Canterlot's near-microscopic griffon neighborhood found a new residence in the most mobile of the lines.

The first line started about six body lengths back from the gates. The ground-based crowd only began to thin out after an additional thirty, although part of that was because a buffalo was always going to want as much space as possible and few crowding ponies ever tried to deliberately trigger that droning protest chant twice unless they had found a way to use it as a weapon. And when it came to the air... they were looking down at all of it through a mobile cloud of feathers and fur. Along with a new veil of illusion, because neither sibling was stupid.

Both kept looking for a while. There was a lot to see.

"There are," Luna finally said, "rather more than I had expected."

Celestia nodded.

"Admittedly, there have been other times when the trend was for initial increase," the younger went on, keeping her words low. "Some are simply late to their public rage. Others wait for time off from work." She hesitated. "Regardless..."

"The numbers are going up faster than we thought they would," Celestia finished.

Darkly, "At least we are not at our theoretical maximum yet."

"Wait." And the elder failed to find a single tombstone's worth of graveyard humor in her own voice. "There may be ponies coming in on the next few trains."

They kept watching. Several zebras had brought cauldrons along, which turned out to be mostly full of water: this was the primary refreshment area for the non-CUNET protestors. Celestia wasn't entirely sure what was in the last specimen and 'lunch' was a possibility, but she didn't like the way in which the red smoke spiraled off the surface.

"We may have erred," Luna quietly considered. "I had hoped that our citizens would be able to see through the veil of their fear. But there are more ponies there than would be expected from the most local Tattler districts. More species. We brought her into the light, and they jump away from shadows which exist only in their memories..."

"You know what the other choices were." But the elder couldn't block out all of the doubt.

"Isolation," the younger nodded. "Two varieties from which to choose. But they remember Tirek, and apply all of it to her. Because they have no experience of her. They perceive a centaur, not even the same kind as before, and fail to see the girl..."

The smaller alicorn shivered.

"We must arrange for the first public meetings," Luna stated. "Quickly."

Celestia distractedly nodded, continuing to look down --

"-- oh, great." It was half a moan.

"Sister?

"Approaching on the far left. First touring class of the day." She was already turning. "I may need to send some Guards out there to make sure they get into the palace without a problem." Groaning, "And if there's anyone in that crowd who's angry enough, that makes them a target. With children around..."

"The police?" Luna inquired as she matched direction and pace.

"Already out there, at the edges. Supervising. And ready to make a move, but they're not wearing armor. The other option is that I go down there --"

"-- we --"

"-- my hours. You've arguably been awake too long already: you need rest." The mirth of the dead finally slipped in. "I'm also the bigger target."

"Who is seen as the lesser threat," Luna countered. "However, this is your part of the cycle, so the lead is yours. I simply stand ready to follow."

They hurried.

"I'm going to meet them in the gardens," the elder sighed. "Once they get through. Sun and Moon, anypony blocking them will just say they were trying to protect children from having to deal with a centaur..."

"I will join you."

"You," the elder firmly said as her right forehoof tapped the stone which opened the passage, "need sleep --"

"-- they are children," Luna evenly replied, slipping behind her sibling into the shadows. "The opportunity to meet the young seldom arises." Dark eyes closed. "And perhaps there will be no screams."

"Pegasi are usually the biggest problem," the sergeant snorted, wiry legs accelerating as he led the lone recruit towards the center of the racing track's oval and the new flock of training dummies which had been set up there.

There were also two buckets. It was very easy to spot the buckets, because they were the widest objects on the ground.

"Tell me why that is," Emery Board ordered, and did so without looking back. The words would come or the shout would demand to know why: either way, eye contact wasn't required.

It took a moment for the girl to sort it out.

"Range?"

"Is that a QUESTION? An observation? Or a GUESS?"

"...they can fly," Cerea tried, because experience was a teacher and in this case, the lessons came in the form of some very humiliating memories. "I've -- had to fight flying opponents before, and..."

That made him glance back, doing so just in time to spot the first wave of blush.

"What were their attacks like? When they were in the air?"

"...minimal," the centaur admitted. "One of them was capable --" her skin was beginning to provide an interesting contrast to the sweater "-- of sending insects out to attack for her. Stinging ones. I tried to block as many as I could, but... one got through, and --"

"One out of how many?"

She didn't know, and said so. "It was a swarm." Something which made it impossible to truly count.

"One," he repeated. "Out of a swarm."

The sweater was going to begin smoldering from the heat suffusing her skin at any second. "Yes. It meant I failed --"

"-- how were you fending them off?"

She briefly raised the sword.

"A swarm," the sergeant said. "Directed by an enemy, so it probably started going in from the front, then split off and went for your flanks. Trying to sting you in the areas which couldn't be reached. So you would have been moving all over the place to compensate, which meant continually exposing new vulnerable zones. Fighting them off with a blunt blade."

Cerea was silent. He'd described the situation accurately and as far as she was concerned, that removed all need for her to speak.

"And one got through."

Humiliation weighed down the nod, turning it into more of a head dip.

He was quiet for a moment. She wasn't sure how to deal with that.

"How about the rest of the fliers?"

"They had to descend to attack. Swoops, mostly. They relied on their talons. One of them had claws to go with them, but she also had six limbs. But none of them carried weapons, or tried to drop anything. The talons are weapons." Papi was kind, gentle, extraordinarily good with children -- and could gut most living creatures from shoulders to hips with a single swipe. "So they rely on hit-and-run tactics. It meant they had to close in before they could hit, but they'd also retreat if they thought I had a chance to intercept them."

"And all you had was the sword?"

"Usually, sergeant."

He stopped in front of the left-side bucket, which required some maneuvering to get around all the poles. "Look up."

She did. A dozen training dummies failed to look down.

There had been some extra attention paid to detail on the latest versions. They were meant to be pegasi and so they had been placed high in the air, with a single support pole under each belly -- but there were also wings. Flexible metal frames stretched out from the sides of every false pony, and each was adorned with what almost looked like the proper alignment of feathers.

Alignment -- but not hue. Just about every pegasus she'd seen had wings of a single color: the lone exception had possessed two. The training dummies had been decorated with the donations of dozens, and so the whole array looked as it had recently been assaulted by a suicide mission of psychedelic parrots.

"With one exception, your fliers had to close in," the sergeant summarized. "Tell me about pegasi."

"They... don't," she tried, and before the next shout could get past the inhalation phase, "They can attack from the sky and stay in it, because their attacks move to ground level without them. Wind, rain --" she hesitated, because there was something in her which really didn't want to say the next word any more than it wanted to experience being on the receiving end. "-- lightning..."

"They can," the old stallion allowed. "But it's more limited than they want you to think."

She held silent. Waiting.

"A pegasus works with what's in the environment," Emery Board told her. "They compress, disperse, and relocate. They can't create. A pegasus in the desert, with the sun blazing down and no humidity to work with -- the only cloud they're going to be weaving would be made from their own sweat. And the best can pull that off, but there won't be much in it. It means that most of the time, they'll rely on wind: gusts are something they can send ahead of them. But it takes a lot of wind to disorient someone your size. They'd have to get up to a tornado if they were going to get you off your hooves, and a funnel is something they have to stay with, flying around it to maintain the formation. Won't stop the smart ones from trying to drive dirt into your eyes -- but you're big enough to be wind-resistant, and you're not going to see tornado-level talents that often anyway."

He nodded towards the left-side bucket. She moved closer to it, carefully working her way around the poles so she could approach from a different angle.

"Any pegasus," the old stallion educated, "can learn any technique. All of them, if they care to try. It's not like unicorns, where they all have a personal capacity. But they don't necessarily have the strength to power the magic. Doesn't mean much if you understand how to create a funnel when you can't get the wind speed together. But there's another way they're different: they can operate in groups. Unicorns need to know a working just to put their strength together, that tops out at three, and everypony has to know the merger spell. Pegasi -- they just need to have the technique, and then they can contribute. But it's not unlimited, because magic is personal. Everypony works it in a slightly different way, and when you get enough differences in a small area, clashing against each other -- well, that's their backlash. It's called a tangle, and that's something Nightwatch can tell you more about. For now, I want you to focus on what a truly cumulative effort means when it comes to shutting it down."

He looked at her, eyes so close to stone under the brim of the unmoving hat. It was the sort of look which wanted an answer.

"Disperse the flock," Cerea said, "or lessen the numbers."

The sergeant nodded towards the left-side bucket again. "Take one. Don't squeeze it."

She looked down.

The light beige wood had been almost perfectly carved and fused into sphere form: she could just barely see the join lines on some of the closer balls. Each was about the diameter of her palm, and the first one she cupped shifted slightly against her skin as a tiny bubble of air allowed some of the internal liquid to move.

"A pegasus can send her weapons ahead of her, staying in the sky," he instructed. "But the only one most of them can really aim is wind. Unless you're dealing with one of the best, lightning does what it always does: seeks the tallest object, or goes for the right kind of metal. Guard armor is enchanted: it doesn't serve as a beacon. It means that unless you're the biggest thing in an open area --"

She wished he wouldn't talk about her size so much.

"-- there's no guarantee it'll hit you. Somepony with a mark for lightning -- they're the ones to watch for: they can pick out trees, and the best could choose a big branch. With the rest, most of the contact is going to be pure bad luck. But it can still put you out, if they're strong enough. So you need to shut that down. There's a few ways of doing that. And rain... heavy enough can disorient you, but it also makes it harder for the pegasus to see, even with their vision. Cools you off on the surface, brings you closer to the same temperature as everything else --"

She was staring at him.

"-- right," he brusquely declared. "Nopony got around to that with you yet, and Nightwatch didn't mention it because it's so natural to her, she didn't think about it. Pegasi can see heat. The adults, anyway. It's blurry for the youngsters, but it clears up when they're old enough for their own magic." Almost casually, while her eyes still refused to blink, "Can't shift the temperature around when you can't spot what you're working with. They'll maneuver on it as a last resort when the light goes bad, but the average flier hasn't practiced. And both of the Generals have their own version of a flash-bang trick to take that out."

She'd known Miia's vision went into the infrared: it was what allowed the lamia to home in on any source of heat in a room, such as a sleeping centaur who had retired to her rest with no expectation of being wrapped by scales. Cerea had once asked her what the colors looked like. Miia had thought about it for a few seconds, and then asked Cerea how grass tasted.

Miia could see heat -- and the tongue which occasionally flicked against the air possessed almost no taste buds. Lamias were just about pure carnivores: they could consume a few grains, but vegetables did nothing for them. They had no objection to half-rotten meat, because their bodies could process the stuff while never telling the brain just how foul it truly was. That was one of the factors which made Miia such a horrible cook: the inability to truly taste-test as she went along, and it was something she never seemed to truly learn from --

-- but she didn't know what grass tasted like. Or apples. Miia would never be capable of seeing a carrot as anything more than an annoying root which someone else insisted had to be added for imperceptible flavoring. And every so often, living among the other girls... the lamia would wonder what she'd been missing.

How did you describe a sense to someone who didn't really have it? They'd both tried. But all Miia had been able to manage was describing heat as being like the sort of chili pepper burn you could see, and only because she knew Cerea was so vulnerable to chili peppers. The centaur had tried to tell the lamia that grass was probably like having the world being carpeted in small mice. And that had been it.

Nightwatch could see heat, and hadn't mentioned that because it was natural for her. Cerea didn't talk about arms and hands and breasts because it was too awkward, and... she didn't know any other way to be.

"The worst they can usually do is hail," the sergeant continued. "Hail's the real nightmare, especially if they can get the stones up to hoof size. Hail can send an army running for cover. But unless they're hitting you on just the right day or got the area ready in advance, they can't set up for hail in a hurry. It takes at least a few minutes to tweak things that much: the hotter it is, the longer they need. And again, they need the moisture. So overall -- they can hit you from the sky, but the aim's usually bad. Unless they've got the whole area set up just right, they need to see you, and that means staying low enough that you might be able to spot them. A pegasus can look for heat through vapor -- but that's not always easy. So if they're looking down at you, it's probably through a hole they kicked in the cloud. That means you can see them. And once you see them..."

He nodded at the sphere.

"Checked with a zebra after the General contacted me," he told her. "I wanted a fresh batch for this. What you're holding is one of their weapons, and it's meant for use against pegasi. Closest translation in Equestrian would be whiffwings. Move out of the poles. Take the buckets with you."

She easily carried the twin masses along: the flat center of a raised grip meant for a jaw worked perfectly well for hands, and the weight was minimal. He stayed within the little jungle of poles.

"Stop." She did. "Take out the sling. I want to see how many tries you need to hit a wing."

The answer was three: the first sphere cracked open against a dummy's face, and thin purple liquid began to soak into the fabric. The second took a journey to the land of Utter Miss, and the last burst on impact as readily as the original --

-- the liquid thickened. Drips became stretching tendrils, those tendrils contacted the dummy's flanks, and artificial wings slammed against wooden sides.

Emery Board didn't look up. Didn't move, and certainly didn't smile. He just focused on the shocked expression of his recruit.

"Harmless until it touches feathers," he stated. "Then it turns into glue crossed with springs. A pegasus hit by this can flare their wings out enough for a glide, if they act fast. But it's going to be a constant strain, and as soon as they release the effort, that's it. Can't fly. The less they can move, the less magic they can access. So the natural followup, once you've got them on the ground, is bolas. Still waiting on those." He snorted. "Hard enough to find them around here in the first place. Needed to get those commissioned, and it's going too slow. But you'll try them out, once they show up. Brings us to the second type of sphere. That's the one I want you to squeeze."

She looked down again, face still locked into stun. The other bucket had white wood, even more fragile-looking than the first. She could see places where it appeared pre-cracked, and they almost seemed as if they had been arranged to line up with her --

"-- sized that for your fingers," the old stallion confirmed, and snorted again. "You give it one good grip before you load it into the sling: it'll crack on its own about ten seconds after that. The contents are called drydust. Sucks up moisture, holds it in a gel where the pegasi can't get at it. A cloud that's low enough for them to be confident in hitting you is one that's low enough for you to hit. Get enough drydust into the air and there's no cloud. Stationary targets today. Moving ones later. SO START THE SLING GOING! I WANT TO SEE WHAT YOUR ACCURACY RATE IS! AND THEN I WANT TO SEE HOW IT GETS BETTER WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE AN EXCUSE FOR IT! SCOOP, LOAD, SPIN, AND RELEASE! AGAIN! AGAIN! OH, FOR SUN'S SAKE -- AGAIN!"

She wasn't quite sure what gave out first: the contents of the buckets, the last of what had been in her stomach, or her eardrums. In the end, he allowed her to rest near the cottonwood long enough to take care of the second factor.

How to take on unicorns. How to neutralize pegasi...

"Sergeant?" His ears completely failed to perk. "Nearly everything we've been practicing is for... fighting ponies."

The old stallion nodded.

"We'll get to the other species," he steadily told her. "I've been working on that. You'll meet someone in a day or two. But we're starting with what you'll see the most of."

Someone: a sapient who wasn't a pony. But... "Are there other nations with ponies? Places which don't get along with Equestria?"

That triggered a snort. "Prance is just about all ponies. But having them separate is a case where we're all better off. Prance is... don't know if you've got it where you come from: that part of a country which everyone else wishes was outside the borders?"

She tried to tell herself the name was just a coincidence, and only mostly failed. Osaka. (It was supposedly full of idiots.) The United States was said to have Alabama, which didn't want anything to do with the other forty-nine anyway. And it was best not to bring up Belfast around Lala, because you really didn't want to hear a self-titled psychopomp talk about why an entire city needed to die. "Yes."

Another snort. "We got lucky. They never came in during the Unification, and they've spent centuries telling us it's because they wouldn't lower themselves far enough to be equal. But we've never had a war against them. They kick out insults, they tell us how inferior we are -- and they also know they're outnumbered twenty to one, so they usually say it while they're backing up. Prance's idea of a fight is to say they'll meet you outside and try to lock the door behind you." He slowly shook his head. "Came as a real surprise to the three I nudged out first. For the rest of the nations -- Protocera/Griffon Republic has a pretty significant pony minority, and we've had wars. Not for a couple of centuries, though. And the reason they've got so many ponies is because they don't leave kids behind. Anypony's or anyone's. The generations which grew up there... they just think like griffons. That modifies the tactics, and we'll go over that in a few days. Most of the other countries have at least a few ponies around. There's some exceptions. But you won't find many places that are just one species."

Except for the mountains. But that was presuming --

"You're starting with ponies," the sergeant neutrally stated the most basic of facts, "because the worst problems begin at home. That's how it's always been. Ponies are most of what you'll deal with. And with what you are -- there's going to be ponies trying to fight you. Because that's how they'll lie to themselves about not being afraid, or they'll decide it's the way they can get you out of the Guards." (She once again missed the implication.) "Because you took a swing at a local who'd tried to electrocute you, and they'll always find an excuse for their part: you're the one who's wrong for trying to live."

How do I go into the city?
How can I talk to anypony at all, away from the palace?
How do I make them see anything other than a monster --

"Lost a lot of Guards over the years, for a lot of reasons," and she tried to look as if she hadn't picked up on the scent again. "I'm not losing one to civilian stupidity." The old stallion slowly shook his head. "You know you're going to be fighting ponies soon. Guards. Already got a few lined up. But there's still some problems. Biggest one is armor."

Her ears perked.

"Armor?"

"DID I STUTTER?"

"...no, Sergeant..."

The living statue broke its one-pony formation, and began to pace. Back and forth, five of his own body lengths in each direction.

"Can pad you for the live combat exercise," Emery Board stated. "Just a matter of getting somepony to sew it all up, and you've already got a mare who knows how to fit you. Trick is not having it restrict the joints too much. But that's not what we'd normally use. Ponies don't come in the widest range of sizes: we can usually find armor that fits, or adjust a few pieces until something custom gets kicked out. But you --" his pace was accelerating "-- you're a set of engineering problems that nopony's ever seen before! Extra-flexible jointing on the arms! Sight lines like nothing they've worked with! And the upper waist -- what kind of musculature do you even have going there? How does anypony rig metal to turn that way? There's problems to solve, hundreds of different problems, and just because I can fix my own armor in the field doesn't mean I can stomp out yours! Been to five different smithies so far: three of them tried to close up on the spot, one of them is now booked for the next forty years, and the last stallion decided his mark wanted a change of career! Palace forge is the one which should do it and they can't say no, but there's too many problems for one smith! Nopony even knows where to start --"

He had been turning at the moment he said that word, each movement machine-precise. It meant he was equally smooth about coming to a rather sudden full stop.

"-- that's a smile, isn't it?"

She nodded.

"That's what a smile looks like on you," the sergeant observed. "You haven't smiled once since you got here. Why are you smiling?"

Cerea took a slow breath.

"I need some quills," she requested. "And ink. Plus a lot of paper. At least sixty pages. Please."

"And why," the old stallion asked in what might have been a false calm, "do you need all of that?"

"Because there are a lot of problems," the trained blacksmith told him. "But they've already been solved."

Celestia carefully nosed over to the next sketch. More staring ensued.

She was looking at the centaur's creations in her throne room, as the last minutes of her scheduled time ticked away. The throne's cushions didn't seem to be doing anything for the fast-building headache.

...I think that's for the fingers. Minotaurs didn't armor their hands: the general sentiment was that doing so cost them some degree of refinement for pressure and leverage. So if we split up the smaller pieces between multiple shops and don't tell them what they're working on, it'll go faster. But she wants to make the -- breastplate? -- and main back piece herself, along with the helmet. Which helps, because those are the giveaways on who it's for, and Barding is going to have his hooves overloaded with the lower portions. But... She cautiously flipped back a few pages. ...what does this even mean? Folding the steel and then reheating it, over and over? Adding a coating layer of carbon?

She'd never seen a forging process like this, not with extra ingredients and acids and just turning the metal repeatedly in on itself. But it was something the girl knew how to do...

An exchange student. But one who had been trained in blacksmith arts, who just knew how armor was supposed to be put together. Emery had come as close as he ever had to capering in place when he'd passed over the sketches: the hat had shifted by a whole quarter-hoofwidth. Who knows how to fight, who can make her own weapons and armor...

Was that what the summoners had been looking for? A new source of weaponry? A means of creating more and more things which could stand against magic --

...no. The girl had told the sisters that she couldn't replicate the sword's material. The armor was normal metal, albeit with a treatment which Celestia had never seen. The usual myriad of protective spells would need to be cast by others, and Celestia was dreading the discovery of how they reacted upon contact with the blade. The best hope was temporary neutralization.

We may need to layer this. Put most of the protection on the thinnest inner portion and hope the effect doesn't conduct. Her field took up a quill, added a few notes --

-- and the Sunrise Gate opened.

She recognized the hoofsteps before her head came up. "Hello, Glimmerglow," she smiled. "I know: I need to go greet my sister in a little while, and then there's dinner to consider. I promise I'll eat --"

But the pegasus said two words.

"He's back."

There was always a wind backblast associated with takeoff: the most anypony could hope to do was moderate it and in her rush to get off the throne, Celestia neglected any and all attempts to do so. The hardest-hit papers wound up plastered against tapestries, and most of the ink bottle was left soaking into the cushions.

She just didn't care.

"Where?"

"On his way up to the tower," the pretty mare said. "He thought you'd want to meet him along the way --"

-- and a very large body went directly over her head.

He had groomed himself before entering the palace: not because she expected him to, but because he had likely decided it would reflect poorly on her if he didn't. It meant that his clothing was fresh, the jacket elegant -- but he only had so many monocles, and nopony could wear one which was chipped around the edges without doing damage to fur and skin. Those which had been cracked were simply kicked away, he was waiting for his prescription to be ground, and...

The unicorn stallion squinted somewhat, when he turned to look at her landing upon the ramp, and it was the first thing he apologized for.

"Three weeks," he declared, "and it still wasn't quite ready when I returned. But she's the only one I trust to do it. She's simply been rather busy this season. Even so, Celestia, I should have been the one to take a chance on another, and so --"

She leaned in, nuzzled him before he could say another word. The nuzzle meant for friends, layered with heavy relief.

He nuzzled her back in the same way: one of the few who ever did. One of the only ponies who'd earned the right.

The white mare pulled back, looked down at him.

"You've lost more weight," she observed. "You can groom your fur, but not the body underneath. And there's fresh bandages under that jacket: I see the bulge." More softly, "You can't keep this up, Fancypants. Not indefinitely --"

"-- it won't be indefinite." It wasn't so much an interruption as smoothly tipping an extra ingredient into the conversational mix. "It ends eventually, one way or another." His head dipped. "Hopefully in success."

"You still can't keep this up. You're not meant for this --"

"-- speaking on another's behalf? Asking for help, when I can't explain exactly why I need it?" He slowly raised his gaze, focused directly on her in that special way: the one which made it feel as if they were very nearly the same height -- only with so much more determination in his eyes. "No, I am suited exactly for this. And before you can resume the remainder of the argument about how somepony else should take up this quest --"

He didn't stomp a forehoof: it wasn't in him. He simply leveled his voice, and that was worse.

"-- to the best anypony can determine, I was the last pony he spoke with before making his decision. I am responsible. And so I will not stop." The noble head inclined, and a foreleg briefly touched the bulge of a pocket. "Two."

"Two," Celestia breathed. "All right. Let's go up there."

"I am only here to pass these over and resupply," he told her as they moved up the spiraling ramp. "I believe I have a lead on another one. That requires setting out as soon as possible --"

"-- I need one day," Celestia cut in. "One day over and above what you intended, even if that was only an hour to start with. I don't know how much of the news you've heard --"

He didn't pause in his tread, and had to trot rather quickly to keep up with her longer legs in the first place. He simply suggested it in his tone.

"Yes," Fancypants said. "The girl." And with those two words, he reminded her of just why she cared about him. "I should have thought of that. My apologies. You need me to try and give her a chance among my own, yes?"

"As much as you can," Celestia agreed, picking up her pace. "You may wind up meeting her tonight, if you're ready for it."

The smile was a fairly weak one. "I've seen worse. Especially over the last few moons. A single centaur may turn out to be an improvement. How is she doing?"

"We'll talk about that on the way down." Because the top of the tower was coming into sight and with it, the edge of the carefully-constructed pegasus weave. "I have to let us in."

Her wings spread, began to subtly shift.

Two.

It was something. It just wouldn't be enough.

There was air in the tallest tower of the Solar wing, and it did not move.

The two ponies had half-bubbles clinging to their snouts. Air shifted within them, and small portions escaped to the world when each exhaled. But that air emerged into the tower, and -- froze. They did not move the atmosphere as they came into the room: they slid through it, and so all disturbance was minimized.

One of the most complicated pegasus techniques, to not only still all natural atmospheric movements within an area, but to have the air automatically shift in a way which allowed passage while nearly eliminating disruption. Something hardly ever used, because there was no need for it.

But it had been needed here, for the remnants of the storm were fragile.

It did not drift: it could not. Thin tendrils of vapor were held in place by the air, their colors twisting about each other. (The center had, over the course of several moons, assumed an increasingly-brown hue.) Tiny sparks occasionally showed themselves within the interior. They did so in the place of what had once been another kind of lightning, and always faded quickly.

The position had been oriented to the horizontal: if made to twist, it would be somewhat taller than Celestia. There were little suggestions of denser material within the curling mass, and hints of shape along the borders. It was possible, if squinting somewhat (which one was already doing), to imagine that some part of the western edge resembled a rather warped shoulder. An extension of mist and weakened, flickering energies suggested a tail.

But it was a storm, albeit one with odd colors. One where any air which touched it occasionally found itself trembling, nearly shifting to a liquid state. There had been a moment when Celestia had thought she'd briefly seen oxygen as pebbles, but -- it was too weak for that.

A storm resting upon an old, soft, salt-stained fainting couch.

The stallion's horn ignited, and two emeralds were brought out of the pocket: one roughly spheroid, with the other conical. But by the time they reached her, they were garnets, and they came to rest on the fabric as rubies. Something just as red as the twinned spots which sometimes appeared above the pillows.

The storm did not move. Did not respond in any way. The Doctors Bear had reported that there were times when one portion contracted and expanded, but -- irregularly, of course.

Charged. She'd had to train herself to sense the energies: it was a process which had a lot of vomiting involved. And now...

Her horn ignited. Sunlight licked at the edge of the shifting gems, sunspots flared --

-- something came out of the changing jewels. It was the sight of the invisible, the sound of vacuum, the heat of absolute zero, and it merged with the storm.

They watched as two small areas of vapor thickened, shifted, coalesced. One now looked something like the tip of a talon, and the other could be said to resemble a bit of antler.

But it was all that happened, and so they left the tower.

"We're running out of places to look," Fancypants softly told her once the bubble was off. "Safely, for the definition which can apply when searching for them. It won't be long before I have to sneak into places which are less than friendly towards Equestria, and then we'll be setting off for the unknown. And no matter what, there's only so many to find, Celestia, at least for what we can reach. It..." The breath came across as forced. "...may not be enough."

"Not enough on land," she corrected, her field setting the custom breathing mask down. "We know they're in the ocean. Mazein's supposed to be working on something which can stay underwater. I can talk to the Referee --"

It made him smile. "I suspect Rounding Moonsault will be less than happy if you request something without explaining why. Again."

"Then she won't be happy." Celestia was used to that. Mazein was Equestria's oldest ally -- but that was for the nation as a whole. The current Referee generally cooperated (and had to go along with the public vote), but had a few generally-unanswered questions regarding royal motives. "But I don't think most of the nations would donate willingly if they knew what we needed them for. They weren't happy about the parole to begin with: that's never changed."

I hated you...

She knew the thought had been in the past tense, and that it had also had the option to slip back into present at any time. But just then...

"They weren't there," the oldest mare in the world softly said. "They didn't see. I want the search to continue, Fancypants. I just don't know if you should be the one doing it. Going under the waves..."

"Something which can stay underwater," he repeated.

"Some kind of metal tube," Celestia reported. "With thick windows. Which may not completely work."

He considered that. Smiled.

"It sounds interesting. So. Is there a proper etiquette for greeting a centaur? Preferably one which Ms. Manners has taken no part in determining?"

It was a joke, and she wanted to laugh. But...
They keep asking about his condition.
Everypony who was there.
I hated you.
I hate you.
I don't want to owe you...

Insufferable

In the most technical sense, there had never been a king of Equestria.

The title -- there had been those who'd claimed it during the chaos of the Discordian Era, and those ponies generally hadn't done all that well in enforcing it: it was hard to claim absolute dominion over any amount of land when any given moment could see it turn into water. And during the Unification, when the sisters had been trying to stitch all the little pieces of the continent into the fabric of a single nation... well, that had been the time for every possible variety of egotistical idiot to turn their hooves towards conquest. When it came to recording the names of the thankfully-defeated, 'King' sounded just as stupid as 'Our Most High Exalt Above All (Especially Those Two Freaks)', although it did have the benefit of being considerably shorter.

There had also been a few concessions made to the original self-claimed 'noble houses' (which was usually just those families who had managed to stabilize their lands for the longest period) in exchange for their territory's inclusion within the new nation, and quite a bit of that had been the retention of titles: the nature of fully-independent selections was the lingering reason for the crazy-quilt offerings of the modern day. Some of those had dropped by the wayside along the trail of centuries: in particular, 'Prince' had quickly fallen out of favor. It was currently only being used by the most egotistical, stupid or with one relatively local example, both: everypony else had realized that their personal lack of both horn and wings took something away from the title's hoped-for impact. But when it came to kings... that had never really been in fashion. There were Princesses, and so for the nobles of Equestria, the use of anything which, at least in other nations, would have suggested a station above them... no.

So there had never been a king of Equestria, not when it came to the nation as a single, united entity (minus Prance). It just felt stupid.

Also, stallion blacksmiths existed and so when it came to the existence of petty dictators who treated the most minor offense committed in their terrority as a reason to call for multiple executions, kings were more or less redundant.

How to describe Barding? Most ponies wouldn't, because doing so required getting close enough for a long look at him and if you did that, you were probably in attack range. (Technically, the smith's domain stopped at the door to the smithy itself and like just about every other technicality, that one tended to escape him. The same could be said for most of the fleeing ponies.) The majority of the palace staff regarded him as being something like a moat monster, only with about two percent of the inherent geniality. There were arguments to be made that you didn't really need one, the ideal location for any you'd made the mistake of bringing in was much further away from the outer walls, and you still spent most of your time waiting for it to turn on you.

For the few who had seen him... it was just about impossible to determine whether he was bearing a near full-body coating of minor burns, or if his fur just naturally displayed the multiple hues of char. (There was a way to settle it, but hardly anypony had risked getting close enough for the determining sniff.) His grooming was perfectly even, at least in the sense that if nothing had been done to any portion of his form, then clearly an equal lack of effort applied everywhere. The eyes were the fierce red of a half-banked fire, his temper was always ready to surge towards the melting point, and you couldn't really watch for the lashing of his tail as a warning sign because he never gave anypony that much notice. Also, when it came to a visible tail, he really didn't have one. The smithing life had certain requirements, and chief among those was the protective garment draped over Barding's back. It stretched far enough along his spine to cover the tail -- or rather, the little bare extension of flesh and bone, because there was fire in a smithy and Barding really didn't feel like dragging around a fashionable fall of wicks. The tail had been deliberately shaved, the mane was gone, and nopony had ever felt comfortable enough to ask about the eyebrows.

He was well-muscled, which really said something when the statement was being applied to an earth pony. Even with the reinforcement provided by his mark's magic, his hooves still tended towards chips and minor cracks from all the hammering he had to do: something which didn't exactly put him in a good mood. Nopony had ever seen Barding in a good mood. The modern day had seen more eclipses than facial mood demonstrations from a visibly-happy Barding and given that an eclipse was an annual event which required the full magical attention of both sisters to arrange, nopony had any true concept of what it might take to make Barding happy. The most frequent guess was the death of every single living entity on the planet.

(Technically, this would leave him with nopony to make things for, but it also meant he wouldn't be dealing with the inherent stupidity of anypony's requests. It was generally agreed that having Barding as the sole survivor would leave a smith merrily humming at his forge for about two days, which was roughly the amount of time required for him to die from dehydration. Most ponies would have lasted longer, but it was exceptionally hot in that area and with everypony else dead, there would be none who could remind him to drink.)

Barding perceived the palace as a place which could host a forge: just about every other function was presumed to be incidental. He regarded the majority of ponies as loud things which didn't know how metal worked and so mostly got in the way. He was extremely, almost terminally single, because he had yet to find anything he loved so much as iron. (Equestria had the concept of 'clockwork automaton', mostly from Mazein: the majority of the local fantasy-based refinements had come from considering what Barding might find attractive in a partner.) And when it came to the Princesses...

The smithy was legally part of Equestria and, on that level which could only be recognized by the devotion of a soul which hadn't read the actual manual, still existed as a separate kingdom: one with a heavy emphasis on 'king'. Barding mostly recognized the rule of the Diarchy as something which regularly provided him with work while signing off on his pay vouchers. They regularly updated the smithy with the best of tools, always made sure he had access to the most current advancements and so as vassals went, they weren't all that bad. He was also utterly devoted to getting paid (especially for those few bits of work which could be seen as something other than stupid), because his kingdom didn't do much in the way of taxation.

And with Princess Celestia -- if Barding could have been said to truly love any mare, then when it came to the elder alicorn, you still wouldn't have been able to say it. But he did feel a certain degree of affection towards her, as he would with the most favored of tools. Because just about everypony on the palace staff knew that Celestia could generate heat -- not relocate or focus: create -- and when it came to the operation of a forge, having somepony around who could precisely set the temperature at will was a true blessing. Barding thought so fondly of the Solar Princess that on the best days, he actually let her stand in the doorway.

(Luna, whose flares of temper were known to spread ice, had been banned.)

He didn't let ponies into the smithy, because it was his. Barding understood how the tools worked, when the endless hunger of the forge needed to be fed and how to bank that fire in the name of necessity. Metal spoke to him through the half-hammered ingots of his mark, and that was most of what he needed: metal and a place to work it. Alone, because nopony else could truly understand unless they were a smith and if that was true, then they usually had their own forge. (Barding understood the concept of 'apprentice' and given what the learning process could do to his precious stores of metal, also understood it as something which needed to take place at a great distance.) He worked alone, he didn't entertain visitors so much as he punished intrusion and if you really wanted something done, you got a unicorn to float the written request towards the corkboard near the doorway while praying he didn't notice, because there was a chance that he would treat the corona's light as a distraction. In the Kingdom Of Smithy, distractions were punishable by death or, once Barding got out into the hallway, a very long chase.

Barding didn't allow ponies into his smithy. That wasn't just policy: it was law. The Princesses understood that or rather, unknown to Barding, they mostly put up with it because he was so good at his job as to be allowed some degree of leeway. Besides, all things considered, it was better to have him in the palace -- and there was an extra reason for that, one the blacksmith was no longer capable of understanding. The Solar and Lunar staffs (because the smith worked so many hours as to be considered part of both) understood that the death threats were just part of the routine: placing Barding into the city would eventually leave him explaining his rather interesting concept of territoriality to the police.

Ponies weren't allowed in the smithy. Everypony knew that.

And so after the latest provocation born of purest insanity had been explained to him, a split-second after he'd started to move on the intruder -- Princess Celestia had pointed out what, to any other pony, would have been the fully obvious. The moment after that had seen Barding's body seized within her field, levitated towards the doorway to Equestria as his desperately-clenching jaw had failed to clamp any level of anchor, and now...

He was in the hallway, in her domain. And in one sense, the Princess was being fair: from another, she was abusing linguistics to the point of sentencing terminal syllables to another form of death. For there was nopony in his smithy.

Technically, when it came to the status implied by 'nopony', the centaur didn't count.

It had been hours. He'd spent most of them with yellow blazing around his body while fire surged from his eyes, watching as a monster worked with his tools. Poorly worked and somehow, that had actually turned into the lesser offense. The truest insult came in what it was doing to the metal.

The Princess had attempted excuse: the claim was that the monster had brought knowledge with it from that unnamed distant land, a new way of working steel -- and because it was a non-smith talking about metal, he'd done his best to ignore all of it. But she was forcing him to watch...

Hours: the monster had the day off from its Guard training to do this. The Princess kept adjusting his neck to make sure he was observing the proceedings, and had already needed to pry his eyelids open twice because there was a basic means of defense and she wasn't letting him use it. At one point, while he'd still been able to talk, he'd irritably reminded the alicorn that it had been hours and there was a certain need for a restroom trench: this brilliant strategy had seen him released just long enough to get two hoofsteps into his furious charge and after that, she'd carried him to the facilities and used her body to block the door.

He was being forced to watch, as metal was abused. Tortured.

(Part of him wanted to watch. It was the same part which needed to. He'd never tried to ignore that bit of his soul before, block his inner hearing against something softer than a whisper...)

And the Princess wasn't the only one talking. The monster kept trying to explain.

It was a rather halting form of speech and just like what the monster was doing to the metal, it kept folding back on itself. It occasionally wound up trying to explain the same thing three times, which gave Barding some extra work in trying to ignore it. But he was being made to watch it work, or at least what the monster falsely thought work was. And when he had to watch...

It was supposed to be a trained blacksmith: that was what the Princess had claimed. The best possible way to see that was as insult, because there was trained, and then there was marked. It had no mark for the work: it had no mark at all and when he'd pointed that out, the Princess had gently explained that the thing would never have one. And that might be fine (or rather, exist as a barely-recognized nightmare) for those in the other nations, but this was his forge. There was a markless monster tending his fire. Working with his tools, as best it could -- and that was with no skill at all.

Well... strictly speaking, nopony would have reasonably expected it to work with those tools. When it came to the items which were made to be worn over the hooves, nothing had been custom-fitted for the monster's ridiculous dimensions. For hoof diameter, it was just about as large as the Princess. Other items had been designed for jaw grips, and what kind of jaw did that thing have, anyway? The face was just about purely vertical! You needed the bulge of a snout to have a proper jaw, and the monster's bulges were lower, plural, and stuck out so far as to get in the way of just about everything.

The bulges also took up extra room in his forge, and so they were just as offensive as the rest of the monster.

In an attempt to compensate for the monster's anatomical weaknesses, a number of foreign tools had been brought into the forge: an act which had made Barding wonder if there was something worse than the death penalty. But there weren't that many of those unwelcome items, because the availability hadn't been there. Some hoof work was being done, using whatever degree of shielding which could be achieved -- but most of the blasphemous attempt at 'smithing' required the monster's arms. That meant tools made for bipeds, and there was no smithy like that in the city. The monster was, in terms of what it was able to use in abusing the metal, improvising.

The process itself, however... that was exacting.
It was also insane.

There had been a sturdy box, something which could withstand the heat of the forge. The monster had packed the interior of the box with charcoal, something which clearly made no sense whatsoever because fuel went on the outside. And to further demonstrate its state as something which should not exist, it had followed that up with the open working of necromancy.

It had to be necromancy. There was no other possible reason for the monster to be using bone.

There were bones in his smithy. Or rather, once the monster had finished with it, there was bone dust. The Princess had told him that the remains had come from the butcher shop in the Heart: the griffon had been rather surprised by such a specific request, but the butcher was close friends with Sizzler and was always happy to accommodate the operator of the meat station. (That was another little kingdom within the palace, one where the borders were maintained by the fact that most ponies were too sickened by the concept for casual approach.) So the bones were supposedly those of the monsters which griffons used for meat: samples too large to be used as pet treats. Barding, who tended to view skeletons as armor's most basic support structure and was now completely sure that the monster was controlling Princess Celestia's mind because an alicorn who would let a monster into his smith clearly wasn't thinking straight, was prepared to treat all of it as a lie. There was a chance that the bones weren't from a pony. It was about the same as his chance of pushing through the field and getting away to sound the alarm.

The Princess had let a monster into his smithy. She was just watching it. Forcing him to do the same.

He'd been part of the team which had evacuated the armory while Tirek had been on the approach, voluntarily working with others for the first time in his life because there was enchanted metal in there and while the enchantments could presumably be recast, he hadn't been able to bear the thought of something happening to the metal. They'd just barely gotten all of it into the tunnels, and the success had only been possible because of a distraction. A distraction named Barding, who'd voluntarily gone out to serve as appetizer while the true meal was brought to safety. And now there was a monster working with metal, in his smithy, a process which could only be torture and necromancy and abuse, something it was already inflicting upon the dead because the bones had been shattered. It had broken them with what seemed to be a casual effort from those hideous hands, and then it had taken a mortar and ground them down. The remnants had been packed into the box with the charcoal, the metal had been added while the monster had half-stammered something nonsensical, which the hissing translator had eventually falsely rendered as carbon microtubes...

That had been after the smelting. It had smelted its own ingot, disrupting the process from the moment of the metal's corrupt birth. It had brought in leaves at one point, saying something about carburizing additives. But the ingot had gone into a box filled with the death of the world, the monster had heated the whole thing for a while at a temperature too low to do anything real, and then the metal had come out of the box.

It was easy to see where the metal had been corrupted (and whatever the penalty was beyond a death sentence, he now needed something past that). The steel had darkened, gone blue and black with hints of purple, with all the unwelcome hues in mottled non-patterns which could only exist when the natural order had been perverted. The only reason why a monster existed at all.

The Princess couldn't hold him forever. Eventually, her concentration would slip, and then he could -- all right, it wasn't as if he had any friends in the palace because metal sufficed, but there were other blacksmiths in the city. His lessers would understand, at least after he'd explained it for the fifth time. Enough blacksmiths spreading the word and everypony would understand --

-- but it had already been hours. And for so much of that time following the necromancy, the monster had been doing the same thing.

It heated the metal, to the point where the corrupted ingot glowed with a fire to match the rage in Barding's heart. Once the steel was ready, the monster hammered it: something which might almost look natural, if you didn't know about the evil which had already been inflicted.

But then the monster folded the metal.

It was a careful process: heat, hammer to about half-thickness, then turn the steel back on itself until there was something approximating the size and shape of the original ingot. The corrupted metal was then returned to the forge, reheated, and once it was malleable, the whole thing began again.

It did this over and over and over.

And it sickened Barding to watch. It made his head hurt while it produced a feeling of ever-deepening nausea, something which was accompanied by an inexplicable twinging from his flanks. The combination of sensations was something he had never experienced before, because he was a pony who lived by his mark. He often did so to the point of obsession, had nothing approaching a life outside the forge, and so Barding could be described as one of the fallen: a pony whose personality had collapsed into his talent, addicted to the joy produced through exercising his deepest magic. Not the worst of them, not to the point where he was no longer capable of considering the consequences of following his desires at all times -- but on the level where a smithy had to become its own kingdom, because the world outside simply felt too strange.

It was possible to rescue the fallen, bringing their minds and lives back into some form of balance. But that was something which required connection, and the acknowledgement of existence beyond the mark. (Barding had never recognized how many ponies had been sent to the forge in the name of trying to get him outside it for a simple drink: he only knew that he'd been chasing away more intruders than usual.) Until he could be saved, he had to be kept where he could be watched, and so the sisters had decided the palace was the safest place for him.

He was deeply connected to his mark. Too deeply, and that was something which had a price. But there was also a benefit, one he experienced more than most. It was a sensation which generations of pony scholars had tried to describe, and all had failed because it was both universal and unique. But to use the most base terms...

In the most base terms, it could be said that within the deepest level of his soul, a talent watched closely. It did so when its possessor would not. It did its best to recognize what was happening: even if metal was being corrupted, the process had to be learned just to prevent it from ever happening again. But the more it observed, the more the talent wanted to understand. And as the steel's hues changed, as it was folded over and over, when acids were applied for no reason the pony cared to think about... the talent did its best to convey what it was seeing to its bearer, and found communication which existed at a level both above and below words bouncing back. Something which triggered an ever-increasing internal imbalance.

There was a monster pretending to be at work in his forge. It had its hair tied back and bundled into an oversized bun: similar precautions had been taken with the blonde tail. It was wearing protective garments, clumsily-stitched ones rendered from the leftovers of a hundred smithing pieces: the seams overlapped everywhere, and the monster was having visible trouble getting a full range of motion with its elbows. The flexibility of poorly-made gloves was even worse.

It had its flanks similarly protected, sometimes jumped back as flying embers came down too close to its hooves, and the weight of that impact made the entire smithy shake. It had to wipe the sweat away from its forehead far too often, for it had no fur to absorb the first portion of flow.

The monster was sweating, and so its natural scent increased. An odor which was nothing like that which had arisen from Tirek, a blast of stench which had lingered in Barding's nostrils long after his drained body had collapsed -- but this was a female, and so the scent had a reason to be different. It was still the scent of a monster, something which had to be one of the reasons he felt so ill...

It wasn't.

Barding was a stallion who had spent his life listening to his mark, and so had no familiarity with the disruption which arose when a pony first tried to ignore it.

The monster had finished.

There was a single flattened rectangle of thin-hammered cooled metal strongly braced against the wall. If it had been reflective, the panel would have been just about large enough to serve as a mirror. But there were too many distortions for that, not all of which had been produced by the necromancy's corruptive hues.

The surface of the tainted work was... odd. There was a pattern woven into it, something which felt far too random to have been deliberate. It was like looking at the surface of a contour map which measured elevation changes in tail strands, or watching the flow of a million miniature rivers. Other portions of the mottling had rendered a visual effect which bore more resemblance to teardrops, and Barding understood the metal to be weeping for its fate.

"I'm sorry," the monster lied, sighing a little as it wiped the back of its poorly-gloved hand against its forehead again. "It's... not as good as it should be." The bare skin was now being underlit by rising red. "I haven't done this before by myself, not from first step to last. And I could have folded it a few more times, and the tools..." The blush was flowing faster than the sweat. "...I know that's not anyone's -- anypony's fault, but -- I should have done more with what I had. I couldn't figure out how to adjust for everything, and --"

"-- we'll get better tools," the Princess gently broke in. "Perhaps Barding can make them for you, after you sketch out your requirements."

He had just been asked to make things for a monster. It was something which forced the screams against the back of his teeth, and there they stayed because the Princess had kept his jaw clamped shut for a very long time.

"...maybe," the monster eventually said. "If he wants to. But..." It swallowed. "...I'm going to be working in his forge. So I wanted him to see what I'll be doing. How the process operates. Because I know you don't have it, and it probably looks strange, seeing it for the first time. I thought..."

Blue eyes glanced down at him. The eyes of a predator.

"...if he just understood..."

It looked away, refocused on the well-braced metal panel. The expression on the monster's face was unreadable. The posture of legs, barrel, and tail came across as something very much like embarrassment.

"Barding," the Princess steadily stated, "I'm going to let you go. I am not going to allow you to gallop down the hallway. I'm asking you, as your first action, to step into your smithy and look at what she's created. And then, as a blacksmith -- the blacksmith trusted by the palace to create and maintain Guard armor, along with so much else -- to tell me what you think of it."

Her field winked out.

The stallion blinked a few times. Worked his jaw back and forth. Considered every last punishment he'd come up with during his bondage and how they could be applied to the monster, then decided it was best to wait until he didn't have a witness.

A charred foreleg gestured across the border.

"Get out." It was all editing for Princess presence had left him with. "Get out. There's no room. I want space."

The monster slowly turned, left facilities which had been too cramped for it to begin with. And once it was in the hallway, just about peering around the edge of the doorway, Barding reclaimed his kingdom.

"It's rubbish," the blacksmith declared as his forehooves landed on his territory. (It was something which should have made him feel instantly better, and it just made the nausea that much worse. Monster scent was clearly that harsh.) "It doesn't make any sense! Not unless you're looking at it as magic --"

"-- I can't --" the monster tried, with desperate tones plummeting towards whisper. "-- I don't have any --"

The spike of his own decibels balanced it out. "-- forbidden magic! Something no one should ever work with, something nopony ever will --"

"-- Barding," the Princess cut in, "she can't cast. Whatever the process is, it's a natural one. I didn't understand how it worked, and that was after she tried explaining it to me. Most of what I got was translator overlap: endless amounts of it. She almost ran down the charge just from attempting to teach me, and that was with the platinum in operation. But you're a blacksmith. I thought you would understand more than I do, because your mind would be capable of grasping new concepts within the range of your talent --"

"-- bone!" It was all too close to a scream. "Charcoal and bone! The death of wood, the death of us! Is that how it treats steel, as a graveyard you can wear?"

The alicorn's eyes went hard, and did so at the same moment the monster pulled back. It would have been something Barding had never seen before from the Princess, if he'd cared to look at all.

"She," the Princess said.

"A monster," Barding hissed, because the fallen generally had trouble with social conventions to begin with and a stallion who'd been ignoring his mark for hours, who was dealing with an ensorcelled leader, had already reached the point of having nothing left to lose. "One who twists the world. Tirek would have stripped magic from metal, and you said this one is different? It is, because it corrupts the metal itself! Weakens," and his flanks were burning, "corrupts, twists, fouls! And all it takes to show you is -- !"

There was too much anger, too much sickness, and the weight of it combined to send his head down, bent his forelegs into the posture of a pony who was ready to charge. A stallion who needed something he could hurt.

But the Princess would have defended the monster. The mind-clouding combination of incandescent rage and thwarted talent still hadn't been enough to make him feel as if he could beat an alicorn. And so he took it all out on the other thing which shouldn't exist. The one which could not be allowed to remain in his kingdom.

He charged, spun, and earth pony strength magnified by years of exercise in the forge kicked into the endless river of steel's frozen, agonized tears.

There was a sound. It was considerably like that of a bell, a little like a wall collapsing, and very much like a lot of kinetic energy being rebounded the other way.

This was followed by another sound.

"AAAUUOGH!"

The full-body thump served as something of an anticlimax.

"Don't move!" the Princess ordered, and did so when she had no right because she'd just moved across the line into his realm. "Don't try to get up! I'll have the Doctors Bears here in a minute: if they get to the hoof crack quickly enough, they can seal it! Even when it's that deep --"

"DON'T."

The alicorn stopped moving.

Slowly, all too slowly, Barding forced himself to his hooves. It hurt, and it took too long, but... the metal wasn't going anywhere.

"Not yet," the blacksmith whispered, the voice of his desperate talent dropping back into his soul until it was needed again. "Not yet..."

He limped towards the panel. Facing it throughout the approach, instead of letting his hind legs attempt another final regard.

"There's some light scuffing here," the stallion forced out. "At the left impact point."

"I didn't do it properly," the girl began. "There's a little ritual I usually do with the water, but it's your smithy. I thought you would have your own rituals. And I couldn't adjust for the tools, and I should have folded --"

"-- light scuffing," the blacksmith finished. "There's no enchantments on this yet? No magic at all?"

"No..." the other blacksmith timidly tried.

"You swear."

"Yes."

"So anypony could do this. If they knew how."

"Yes..."

"I kicked this," Barding whispered. "Kicked it with everything I had. And there's some. light. scuffing."

She said something then, and he missed it. The words had been lost within the rising bars of an inner song.

"What was that?"

"Your hoof," the girl repeated. "The doctors need to --"

"-- it'll be even better with the right tools?" he cut her off. "Better than this? Then you need tools. You can sketch. Sketch your tools. I'll start making them tonight." The existence of the injury briefly registered, mostly as a source of potential future tool imperfection. "Tomorrow. And write out the process. All of it."

He looked at her. All of her, every last hideous hoofwidth and hoofheight, from the distorted features to the slow-shifting mounds and finally stopping with legs which were, for his tastes, simply too long. (He hadn't been aware of his own tastes in years.) And yet, in the face of all that ugliness, there was a moment when he thought about dropping to his barrel and proposing marriage on the spot.

(It was nothing romantic, and it never could have been. He just had the vague impression that in the event of someone acquiring a patent, the spouse had the long-term chance to inherit the rights.)

The Princess smiled.

"She needs to make certain portions of the armor herself," the alicorn said. "As none of us have ever tried to accommodate that kind of form, and asking anypony else to do it will reveal who it's for. But in the name of expediency, once the process is recorded and translated, we can consider distributing some of the more ambiguous pieces to the rest of the city. Just to avoid overworking you --"

"NO!"

The first time had been speaking from his mark. The second wasn't quite as pure.

"No..." the blacksmith considered. "No, Princess, this stays with us. It has to, until somepony else reverse-engineers it. If this stuff can be enchanted properly, the usual protections on top of this... then it puts us ahead. You know the rule, don't you, girl?" This without looking at the centaur. "That in the race of weapons versus protection, the weapons are always ahead? Because you can't respond to a weapon until it exists." And in a whisper of near-reverence, as centaur and Princess both stared at him, "Today, armor is ahead. Fit her first. See how the enchantments take. If that works, we can start reequipping the Guard."

The pacing began on instinct. The limp was forced by an ignored injury.

"They'll see we've got something new, anypony who looks closely enough," Barding declared. "Especially the smiths, even in the other nations. They'll know it's something special. But it could take decades before they catch up, and until they do, we're ahead." The existence of blacksmiths made kings somewhat redundant. But when it came to maintaining the actual kingdom... having a unique resource could only help. "And it needs a name. A name for something new, something forged from death itself..."

He was one of the fallen. His life, his mind, his soul was in the forge.
He didn't really think about social mores. There were ways in which he no longer could.
He thought he was paying her the greatest compliment imaginable.

"Centaur steel," he stated with open satisfaction. "So they'll know where it came from, all the monstrosity it took to make. And so they'll never want to recreate it."

He looked at her face again, incapable of recognizing the horror which had suffused those strange features. And after a moment, because he was in a good mood, he remembered how to smile.

Deviant

So much of it seemed to be about weight.

The Sergeant had decided he needed to know exactly how strong she was, and so the training area was now populated with raw mass. Most of that came in the form of stone: ones which were irregular enough for her hands to find a grip, smoother specimens that required her to forcibly press inwards just to get any degree of leverage, and shapes so awkward as to have limbs trying to pull them in while her own breathing attempted to push everything back out. There were also ropes tied around the loops of piton-like spikes which had been driven into larger boulders: the hemp trails eventually ended at a harness which was probably just about ideal for placing around a pony's neck and so could be used to test hauling limits. But when it came to Cerea...

There was but one rather dubious comfort in the attempts to shift her own anatomy past the part of the harness which came down over her shoulders: she was the only one who knew to be embarrassed. It was still enough to trigger the blush, and... the Sergeant hadn't really said anything about that. He'd watched the entire process, but that observation had been strictly clinical: he was trying to find the limits of her physical strength, and so had no interest in a capacity for personal humiliation which seemed to approach the infinite. The most he'd gruffly said was that some of the equipment was still being improvised.

Cerea, after having spent the prior day in the smithy, should have been used to that, if only on principle. And she lifted, hauled, kicked on command, briefly considered whether it was worth trying to summon the Second Breath --

-- but he wanted to know about her normal limits. He was memorizing every physical capacity she possessed, and... there was a strange, unwelcome intimacy to that. The training seemed to be systematically exposing every secret she'd kept from the household: the true range of her flexibility, her typical top speed, the fact that she'd had blacksmith training, and some part of her was waiting for the Sergeant to order her onto a public scale.

She told herself that she wasn't keeping it from him as a tactical move. That she wasn't hiding one final aspect of herself away because there might come a time when the ponies would think they knew everything about her -- followed by using all of that knowledge against her. When it came to standing against a full herd's worth of pony magic, the Second Breath wouldn't mean much more than potentially staying conscious long enough to count the exact number of field hues squeezing her body. She... just wanted to keep some part of herself to herself, for a little while longer. Especially when it seemed as if the only thing she truly had any chance to retain was the relative privacy of her thoughts, and blushing still exposed most of their nature.

So she moved the weights, doing so without the Second Breath. Lifted, pushed, and hauled until the stallion felt he knew where her limits were, or at least the limits which existed after the previous day had seen her pounding metal for hours. She had tried to let sleep restore her, but...

...she hadn't been sleeping well: something which had been true for just about every one of her nights in Equestria. Part of that came from dreams, and there were times when those nocturnal travels brought her home: most of that ache set in when she woke up and wondered if dreams were as close as she would ever come. But there were other kinds of dreams...

(She didn't know that the dark Princess had been observing her dreams.)
(She would learn.)

Centaur steel.

She was allowed to set the weights down. The harness eventually came off, and did so even more awkwardly than it had gone on. But the mass of the most recent nightmare had taken up residence within her skull, and nothing she did seemed to shift it.

The sergeant tilted his head to the left: about ten degrees of incline, just enough to indicate the cottonwood tree.

"In the grass," he ordered, and she slowly trotted in that direction, shaking her legs in turn to help the sweat slide across saturated fur. Some of the drops hit green blades and when she glanced back to see how closely he was following, she saw them glistening oddly in the shield-distorted light.

Cerea carefully lowered her body into the relative coolness of the greenery, picked up a canteen which had been resting against the trunk and forced herself to take slow sips. She needed to stay hydrated, and she also needed to take in water at a rate which ensured it wouldn't all come up again.

Emery Board silently watched her, brown eyes sent into something closer to black by the shade of the hat's brim.

"Thought there was going to be more of an imbalance," he eventually said. "There's some, but that's because you've got more mass in your lower half. It's where the majority of your muscles are, so that's where more of your power is. But it's the same kind of muscle all the way up. Compact. You were flexing there: no way around it, dealing with some of those weights. Saw some extra definition under the sweater, but not as much as a lot of species would show. Work out enough and you could probably add a lot of power without worrying about hurting your flexibility."

She nodded to that. When it came to muscular development, centaur mares would readily gain in strength -- but had a hard time manifesting true bulk. Stallions, at least for their upper torso, went the other way: they could happily bellow about the sheer number of centimeters it took for tape to wrap a single bicep -- and in Cerea's experience, all of that supposed power was mostly good for two things: lifting mugs of alcohol to their mouths and wrestling each other. (The first could potentially lead to the second, but the second generally didn't need that much of an excuse.) There were times when she'd felt as if the mares and stallions of the French herd were two separate species which had the capacity to interbreed. And as it had turned out --

-- don't.

But the thought wasn't so easily dismissed.

"Drink more," the earth pony told her. "Your head just went down. Took too much time in the forge yesterday." He snorted. "Not that you can really rush it. Barding was telling everypony in the Lunar kitchens about all the experiments he had to run." Again. "Real story there is that he got as far as a kitchen. Wasn't sure he knew where those were. And the talking part is new."

She forced herself through a few more sips. "He was talking yesterday." Even after she'd put all of her unanswered prayers into wishing the blacksmith would stop.

"He's better at cursing," the Sergeant stated. "Doesn't see ponies who can't work metal as something worth talking to. But he must have felt like he had to tell somepony and to keep the secret, he found some ponies who wouldn't understand any of it." The near-microscopic ripple of fur along his shoulders suggested a shrug. "Stopped by this morning, before I came out here. Looked at your sample."

She waited.

"Could have used that before now," the old stallion said. "Over and over. Might have led to a few less statues."

Don't let him see, don't let him know I smelled it again...

"You're studying Blitzschritt?" he sharply asked.

"I'm trying," was the best answer she could give. "There's something called -- the Canterlot Archives?" Which she understood to be like the Bibliothèque nationale de France, only occupying considerably more space and with a slightly less stringent loan policy. "I put a request in for the books. But it takes a little while to send them over, and then I still need help to read them..."

"But you took the walk."

Cerea nodded. She'd been expecting this -- or rather, she'd been expecting it on the day they'd talked about fighting pegasi. But you couldn't completely predict the Sergeant, and given extra time to think about all of it...

There had been a lot of dreams.

"Saw her statue?"

"Yes." And while bracing herself herself for any triggered shout, "1127 -- that was the year when she died? And it's 1275 now?"

She had thought he might respond to it with a spike in volume and temper: a demand to know why she was wasting training time on something so basic, because the best way to make him yell was to ask a truly stupid question. But he just... looked at her.

"Hadn't thought about that," the old stallion said as his tail failed to shift. "Someone not even knowing what the year is. There's foal questions, and then there's things which foals never had to ask."

She wondered if he'd ever had children. If the only living legacy he knew were those he'd trained and sent out to die over and over and --

"1275," he told her. "That's the current year. So you're right: Blitzschritt made her choice in 1127. What did you think of the honor statues?"

"There's... a lot of them." She hadn't meant for the words to be that soft.

"It all adds up," the Sergeant said. "Twelve hundred and seventy-five years. Wars. Assassination attempts. Accidents. The kind of stupid coincidences which can kill. Take enough time, enough chances, just exist long enough and there's going to be statues. The Generals could tell you every name. They need to remember. There's those who say that as long as there's somepony who knows what your name was, you're not completely gone..."

It was just enough of a head shake to register as one.

"So I remember mine," Emery Board told her. "You saw her statue. You saw some of the others." And with no change in volume at all, "And you're still showing up. Based on what you saw in the statue, how do you think an ibex fights?"

"Without factoring in their magic?" He nodded, and Cerea hesitated. "What is their magic? Does... everyone have some kind of magic?"

"If you're alive and you can think," the sergeant calmly stated, "you've got magic. Applies to everyone in the world."

Everyone except me.

"But it takes different forms," he added. "For an ibex... it starts with stability. All kinds. It's just about impossible to knock them off their hooves. Their minds can dig in pretty well. It's not always a good thing. There's ponies who say donkeys are the most stubborn species, and they're wrong. Donkeys just endure. They push forward because they think that's the way out of everything. But at least they move. An ibex is going to stand in one place because that's where an ibex has been standing for centuries, and there's no reason for anything to change now. You'll probably never fight an ibex: you might never see a living one. But keep that in mind, before we get to the other species for real. They're about stability. Hard to change, hard to fool -- unless you can get them to trick themselves." And before she could ask about that, "How do you see them fighting?"

"Mostly with charges." The horns had looked dense enough to do some damage. "Try to get some speed together over level ground --"

The stallion snorted. "Stability," emerged as a correction. "They live in the mountains. They walk all over the slopes, when gravity says they shouldn't. An ibex can charge you going uphill, and anything which isn't a sheer cliff is uphill. They're a terror in their own territory, especially if you don't hear them coming in time."

Oh. It took a moment before she could banish the image of an ibex charging up a seventy-degree slope.

"But that's their basic tactic," he confirmed. "Close in at speed, hit hard and fast. Ideally, once. Tell me how that differs from earth ponies."

And they were finally there. She'd been waiting for this...

"Physically, earth ponies are the strongest. They usually have the most endurance, too. But that's as a species: any earth pony will be stronger than somepony with the same build from one of the other races, but that means there's still some who are weaker than others. They're just always stronger than they look." Which won her another nod, and she used that time for an extra sip. "So for physical combat, an earth pony wants to close in. Pegasi can be impossible to reach. But if they can reach the point where they're right on top of a unicorn, they can kick hard enough to take out their opponent as long as they watch for the horn: backlash any attempt to cast a spell, or dodge if the unicorn tries to gore. But without the horns of an ibex, all they have for natural weapons is their hooves, limbs, and teeth."

"Or the full body, if we get up speed," the Sergeant instructed. "There's a little extra density to our bones, and everything else. We're not just stronger than we look: we're heavier. It's not that much of a difference, but it gives us a few more options in a charge." His right foreleg came up, and the hoof rapped against his rib cage before he lowered the limb again. "Head to head against a pegasus, the pegasus probably drops. Unicorn, we're in trouble if we hit the horn while it isn't lit. But the skull around the base can't take as much of an impact." A minor incline granted her permission to continue.

"But unless they're a lot stronger or hit in just the right place," the recruit went on, "the earth pony probably has to kick their opponent a few times. Because it's hard to knock somepony out with one impact, or put them in so much pain that they can't keep fighting."

He nodded. "There's powerhouses out there. And some of them are a lot stronger than they look -- even for the ones who look like they can haul half of the Lunar Wing. But being strong enough to break bone with one kick doesn't mean they're going to land the kick that does it. And with ponies, taking out a leg only ends the fight with another earth pony: a pegasus can still get airborne, and any unicorn is dangerous as long as they're conscious and unrestrained."

She listened.

"Wanted to find out how strong you were today," the Sergeant told her. "Got the answer I was expecting: you're closer to an earth pony than anything else. The main difference is that when I put you against most of them, you're stronger. There's still some ponies out there who can outhaul you, but they're the outliers. And they aren't working with arms. But you don't have that extra density. You're resilient -- but you can't take a hit on their level. So against earth ponies, you dodge as much as possible. Once the armor's ready, you try to let the metal absorb their worst. And then you come at them from the angle they can't do much about: overhead. Based on the reports I got from the ponies who tried to move it, touching that sword makes an earth pony lose some of their strength. Even with a second of contact, it'll disorient them. And once they're shaken, they can be dropped. You just have to watch for the one pony who can cave in your sternum. Either one, because that strength increase is consistent for their whole body. It's not just kicking: they jump higher. You won't see an earth pony try to go airborne too often, because it always ends the same way. But if a pegasus gets a little too low, thinks a basic hover has them out of range -- they usually wind up getting a little surprise." The fur around his snout seemed to twitch. "And with you, that means they might try going for the head."

The girl had taken it all in. Everything he told her was information which could save a life: there was no excuse for ignoring any of it. But his words led her to what she saw as a perfectly natural question, and she had learned that he only objected to queries under two circumstances: they interrupted him, or they were stupid. She was sure this question didn't qualify for the latter.

So she asked it. A question which, in all the world, only she could have asked.

"What about their magic?"

And he looked at her.

(It would be a long time before she fully understood the nature of that look. Mere hours before she recognized the aspect which had never manifested in his features prior to her words: the sudden tension...)

"What about it?"

Carefully, "Manipulating rock and soil? Controlling plants, especially the dangerous ones, so that they'll attack? Maybe making things grow so fast that they create instant cover? And --" relocating the energy of heat itself was for pegasi, but "-- bringing up lava flows from underground, or rivers, and..." With genuine curiosity, "...can you transmute elements, as long as they're rock or metal on both sides of the change? Is that why there's so much marble?"

His right forehoof shifted. A quarter-circle, twisting into the dirt.

"Why?"

It had been a single syllable. A word which stretched across the world like taut wire, pulled to the point of breaking. And the girl didn't understand.

"Sergeant?"

"Why do you think we can do any of that?"

She blinked. Looked into motionless, shadowed eyes, registered the way his nostrils were flaring...

"It's... the name," Cerea softly replied. "Earth pony. The pegasi are connected to the sky. Nightwatch told me about the crops, and what wasteland does. With that, added to the name, I just thought... you would have the same level of link to the land."

The girl blinked again. The stallion didn't. He just stood there, exactly like a living statue. A statue which was barely breathing, and so she instinctively slipped into the final defense of formality.

"I -- did not meant to offend, sir --"

"-- you don't call me sir," the stallion quietly stated. "You call me Sergeant."

There seemed to be no response for that.

And then the translator's wire hissed.

It wasn't searching for a term she would know. There was no attempt to render an unfamiliar concept into something a centaur might understand. It was simply straining to pick up on words which barely shifted his lips, emerging into the world as something so much less than a whisper.

"Questions foals don't even ask..."

"...Sergeant?"

He inhaled.

"Wasteland isn't much good in combat," the stallion told her. "You're not a plant. It's possible to force growth in a hurry, but it usually takes teams and it still doesn't operate at the kind of speed you're thinking of, plus a clumsy normal push can hurt the plant long-term. The rest of it..."

There was a moment when the old stallion gave her something which, when regarded across the chasm of time, came close to the supreme compliment of her life. He hesitated.

"...no. You let your imagination tell you things, because you didn't know not to. It's strength, endurance, and a few tricks with the local flora. That's it."

She didn't understand why she felt so sad. She had no way of knowing why his scent was so strange --

"But," the Sergeant continued.

The girl pulled herself out of the miasma of his sorrow, forced herself into focus as his head came up a little. Just enough to let sunlight restore brown eyes to their proper shade.

"You've got an interesting imagination there," the earth pony told her. "Been putting you through enough physical exercise. So let's do a thought one, while your body's resting up for the next round. Let's say, just for the sake of imagination... that there's wild talents out there. Pegasi come up with new techniques every so often, something nopony else in the flock had the chance to learn yet. Unicorns finish their manifest with a unique trick. So if there was an earth pony who could do something like what you just proposed, a wild talent out of nowhere, somepony who was desperate enough in a fight to use that kind of magic against you -- how would you counter it? I want to hear how you think on your hooves, when you're facing something nopony was expecting. And start with shifting the soil, because a pony who can change the terrain is going to be a thousand kinds of trouble."

It kept her under the tree for hours. They never got around to any other level of physical exercise on that day, because the girl had come from a world which had created videogames, elaborate systems of probability judged by a combination of dice and prayer, and so knew that the tactics of fantasy was a subject which could go on forever.

She thought he wanted to see how she would improvise in that sort of impossible situation. Just to find out how quickly she could think.
She didn't know.
She had no way to know.
And when she finally looked back...

The mare was in no way approaching the home of a pegasus.

She was almost at an apartment, and was thankful not to have been stopped at any point during her Moon-lit route: she knew it would have been almost impossible to explain some of the items in her saddlebags. But to the mare, there was a simple fact in play: a pegasus did not occupy that residence, and that made her planned activity into something which those of intelligence and insight would recognize as necessary.

The mare never would have moved against a pegasus. It was true that the feather-dusters were inherently inferior, but you could say the same about anything which wasn't a unicorn and besides, the pegasi as a species had one major point in their favor. They possessed the capacity to go away. Let them go back to the vapor, as isolated as they had been in the beginning: trade would substitute for raids, and then they could just -- stay there. Leave Canterlot to the unicorns, the way it should be.

But until that day arrived, the mare regarded pegasi as something of a contradiction: a necessary inconvenience. Weather manipulation... well, once they were gone (and she wasn't sure exactly how that was supposed to happen, but CUNET's leaders insisted it was just a matter of Creating Policy), there would be nothing to keep unicorns from inventing spells which did the same thing, correct? In fact, according to the near-facts which CUNET passed around to the core of its membership, facts which the Diarchy had suppressed and which qualified as 'near' because when you put all the words together in a dictionary, every term had some degree of adjacency -- unicorns had been making breakthroughs for centuries. Those casters were just targeted by the fliers, and their workings had been forced into obscurity. Pegasi could do things like that, and it was amazing how they kept managing to get one over on their superiors. It was one of the many reasons CUNET used to explain how historically, Canterlot's unicorns had found themselves in the eternal position of persecuted majority.

(If you believed the stories, there had even been a breakthrough something over a year ago, in Ponyville of all places. It was just that nopony seemed to be capable of identifying the caster. The flock's control was just that subtle, and of course when you figured in the corruption inherent to an alicorn's mere existence...)

You couldn't be friends with a pegasus: it would be like saying you were friends with a cat, because cats were only in it for themselves and in this case, a flying cat would be all too happy to target its owner with hairballs from above. But you could live with its presence, until the day you figured out how to get rid of it without attracting the attention of an animal rights activist. And you didn't attack pegasi in any ways beyond the social and ideally, those couldn't be proven in court. Because unicorn magic could do a lot and thanks to all of the discoveries which had been quashed, none of those categories seemed to apply with lightning.

She was doing something which Mrs. Panderaghast wouldn't want to be associated with, and so the mare had very carefully not told anypony about what she was planning: true plausible deniability needed that kind of helpful push. And she wouldn't have done it to any pegasus, no matter how inferior they were -- but...

There was a monster in the palace.
She'd seen the pictures. The monster on the dais. The feathered presence hovering close by. In times of stress, closer still.
Too close.

She had struck out under Moon, because that meant less ponies on (and above) the streets. Less of a chance to be seen. It had gotten her into the proper building, up the ramps, all the way to the door, and now she was ready to proceed.

The mare had told herself that she never would have hurt anypony, or even those whose pony status was somewhat lesser. She still felt this was true. But Moon had been raised, and so the Guard had gone to her shift.

(She didn't consider the possibility of days off.)

There was nopony present to be hurt. The message would be received at the moment they learned of the smoke, and that news would need some time to reach the palace.

(She didn't understand how fire moved.)
(She would eventually tell somepony that she had meant to light it. She just hadn't meant for it to spread. And if she hadn't intended that, then having it happen was in no way her fault.)
(It was supposed to be a warning.)
(She was innocent...)

And even if the apartment had been occupied... there was still nopony there.

A pegasus who would move to protect a monster wasn't a pony at all.

Isolated

The bath was huge, and she was less than two hours away from learning that it wasn't big enough.

There were ways in which the clearing of the barracks was very much like working a giant sliding puzzle: at first, you were happy just to have any degree of space with which to work. But then you discovered that shifting something to the left meant fifteen other pieces came crashing down into that area, you might just barely jump back in time (which had put her fast-moving buttocks into something else, and the crashing had pretty much gone on from there), and then there would be a new mess to clear. Getting something to what seemed to be its natural home at the rightmost corner suddenly meant there were seven segments which could no longer move at all. But if you persisted, if you kept pushing and, as with the worst sliding puzzles, eventually gave in to the urge to just pick a few things up and remove them from the problem entirely -- in this case, that meant the hallway -- there would be a moment of clarity. You would fight your way to an edge and having reached it, abruptly see that this went there, that went there, the other thing was hopefully going to be set on fire, and then everything in that section would just -- open up. All at once, at least when checked against the ever-shifting solution which existed within her inner vision: the actual hauling still took a few minutes.

Cerea had moved one thing, then one more, the ridiculous length of ribbon-wrapped metal pole had finally come free --

-- and the bathroom door had swung open.

She'd stared at it for a moment, watched it sway slightly under its own weight. And then she'd gone inside, mostly to see how much work had to be done there. Between training, the recent addition of the smithy, ongoing language classes -- Nightwatch would be due in about two hours -- and the endless clearing of the barracks, she'd left 'overworked' behind in the dust. She was rapidly closing in on the need for a forty-eight hour day, which would naturally need to go along with a centaur who could be awake and fully functional for about forty-three of them. The bathroom was a space which existed and based on what had happened to the barracks, it was therefore a space which could be filled with enough debris to push her temporal needs into the low seventies.

But all she found was a bathroom.

There was a pair of partial long wooden closets against the far wall, ones where the dark paneling had been raised just far enough from the floor to let someone observe hooves on the other side. They were large enough to host ten ponies each, they had multiple swinging panels available for entrance, and Cerea quickly confirmed the presence of continual-flow trenches in all of the compartments: ones which vanished into the floor instead of continuing into the next stall. It would have been just about ideal for her own toiletries, at least once she took out one of the inner dividing walls to create sufficient room.

The sinks were long and low: as with the one in the cell, she would need to drop down somewhat to use it. There were visible pressure plates in the floor near those elevated troughs: some were placed to be triggered by hind hooves, others by fore, a few more were built into the forward edge of the sinks themselves, and the first bit of timid experimentation discovered that a portion of the local plumbing was still functional. It took a little more time before she managed to stop spitting out water, along with a minute for using a hairpin to get the gunk out of the tap and let the liquid emerge in a direction other than up.

Mirrors: again, far too low for her use, although the reflection did allow her to regard the cloth over a seldom-seen upper abdomen. There were a few ancient brushes, and the straps stated that they were meant to be slipped over lower jaws and hooves: she learned just how ancient they were when the first one threatened to tear at her touch. She wound up staring at a rather complicated array near the sinks for about three minutes of total confusion, and would eventually need somepony to tell her how it was used for tooth-cleaning: a desire to avoid nausea meant she never asked about flossing.

But then there was the bath...

The walls nearby were covered in multiple panels of sponge: so old as to potentially be incapable of retaining moisture, but large enough for a pony to stand against without overlap, and -- she could see the little clear empty tanks mounted over each one. Water and soap dispensers: the sponge was moistened, the suds rose to the surface, and a pony just rubbed up against it. One more accommodation for a quartet of species which needed to find ways of operating without hands.

You soaped yourself up by rubbing against the sponge. You rinsed off in the bath.

They rinsed in public.

How large was the bath? The barracks had been designed to host at least twenty ponies: the sunken marble pit of a tub with ramps leading in and out, deep enough at one point to allow a mare of Nightwatch's size to swim -- that was big enough to let all of them wash up at the same time. It was something which could take place without the dividing wall which the girls had found at the hot springs resort: with ponies, the sexes could clean themselves in front of each other without shame, and perhaps they even cleaned each other. Cerea still hadn't spotted any anatomical trick valves --

-- they bathe together.
They clean each other...

In Japan... the bath had been large. Nowhere near this size: that would have required a completely separate house -- but any bath which had to accommodate Cerea and Miia needed dimensions to suit. But the girls had seldom bathed together, and one of them couldn't use the bath at all.

Suu's greatest fear came from huge amounts of water, enough to dilute the slime girl's form to the point where she would lose cohesion and, within minutes, her life. Rachnera tended towards quick dips, because anything which let the underside of her lower torso touch the water meant she had to hold her breath: the arachne had book lungs in her spider portion, and extended submergence gave her a doubled chance to drown. Lala was terrified of dropping her head in a place where her body couldn't recover it in time. Miia needed the water to be heated on a level where just about no one else could risk being in the bathroom for more than a minute: touching the liquid risked first-degree burns, and staying near the tub's rim meant inhaling pure steam. (This was just for quick dips, though: long enough for the heat to reach her core and then out.) Mero preferred cold water -- and all things considered, also preferred an environment where her gills weren't being told to breathe soap. And Papi would splash around endlessly for the sheer joy of it, had discovered one of the few things wings were good for in the water was sluicing long waves of splash damage at the others and generally couldn't be near any fountain without giving spectators a reason to think of birdbaths, along with quickly violating multiple public nudity laws -- but that water also soaked into her feathers. She couldn't fly until she was dry again, and dreaded the downpour which was strong enough to drive her out of the sky.

Put it all together, and there were ways in which Cerea was the most comfortable with the house's modified bath. It was large enough for her, the heat level she preferred was closer to the human normal -- just a little hotter, to match her increased body temperature -- and that meant she was the most likely to share the room with another --

-- there were pools near the sporting field.
We all washed up after the competitions were done. One pool for fillies, another for colts. The colts weren't allowed to get anywhere near ours. But the fillies washed up together.
Some of them washed each other, because it was faster than the brushes. They were laughing while they did it. They splashed and giggled and held hands.
I was always near the edge, away from the others. So I could get out quickly, after I couldn't watch them any more.
I wanted someone to hold my hand like that.
He washed me.
I asked him to.
I wanted him to get used to me. I... didn't think he would see anything appealing, not where there was fur. Not to start. So I covered myself for anything he knew, and let him use the brushes. He didn't know how to start. Then he didn't know where he should have been more careful about touching me, and...
I forgave him for that. I always...
...I wanted him to touch me.
I wanted him to love me.

She remembered his touch, and did so in a world where her existence meant it might have been the last one.

He never could have loved me.

It was the sort of thought she couldn't have for long, not if she wanted to exist at all, and so she wrenched her attention to the taps.

The water was flowing to the sink.

The majority of her waking hours were being spent in labor. She washed by lying down under multiple showerheads at the training area barracks, and that meant she was only clean for a brief part of the morning and afternoon. Cerea had been sleeping while dirty, it made her feel foul, she didn't like the way she smelled when she woke up and didn't think anypony else was all that fond of it either, she still didn't have any real long-handled brushes and anything she asked for was just one more burden she was putting on the palace...

If the sponge panels were replaced (because her pay had to go towards something, even if she couldn't personally spend it)... if the tanks were refilled, she could rub against the soaked resilience. It would take longer than the time required for a pony, along with some awkward angling -- but it could be done. And in the meantime...

There's only one way to find out.

She looked at the multiple water inlets, regularly-spaced holes around the edge of the bath.

There had to be a control somewhere.

And then, just as it had been in Japan, she immediately felt guilty about running up the water bill. Especially with a bath of this size, because filling it to a depth she could try to use meant filling all of it. She couldn't channel water into a single section and keep it there: that probably would have been the magical domain of seaponies, if they had actually existed. All Cerea could do was watch as the bath took on more and more steaming liquid, quickly reaching the point where she was convinced that she'd emptied out an entire water tower. That was the sort of thing which just had to create trouble, and she was now waiting for somepony to come in and complain about having had their shower drained away.

But the tub just kept filling. Not just with hot water, but with clean liquid: she'd dedicated one more round of labor to scrubbing the floor and sides, and so wasn't going to have much in the way of blankets for the night. It had taken time, created extra laundry -- but it meant no dirt was floating up within the tub. She wouldn't be soaking within the remains of ancient filth.

Cerea peered out into the barracks, found the lone working clock and checked the time. Still about an hour before Nightwatch was due. Backed into the bathroom again, looked at the tub and considered all of the water she'd already wasted before closing the taps. No matter what she did now, that water was here. So all things considered...

The centaur reached for the lower edge of her sweater.

She was on her knees in the water: all four of them, within a fairly deep portion of the tub. It was enough to let the warmth lap at the lowest part of her breasts. (She'd already finished that part of the scrubbing. When it came to staying clean, every part of the body was equally crucial -- but for centaur mares, there was a single prime location for fungal infections. Or rather, there were two.)

Cerea never felt the soft sigh emerge from her upper torso, losing the sensation in the warmth of the water she'd just splashed towards her shoulders. Feeling trickles of welcome heat run down her skin, offering a tiny hint of massage to her upper back.

Miia had massaged her shoulders once, but it had been an even exchange: they'd both been coming off a horrible day and the assistance had been needed on both ends. The lamia had been the one to suggest it. There had been nothing sexual about the contact, not with someone who qualified as both rival and sister. There had simply been a release of tension, and then a long talk about just how undignified food selling was, especially when your mutual living blouse gave up halfway through.

Her shoulders were sore, as was her upper back. However, contrary to what some humans had almost constantly voiced, it wasn't from the weight of her breasts: centaurs had evolved towards larger endowments, and so had also evolved the muscles and ligaments to support them. Her shoulders and upper back were sore because just about everything was sore. That was what happened when you spent nearly every waking hour at some form of labor, and even with the extended thought exercise of the afternoon to provide some degree of respite -- she'd just been cleaning the barracks. And the bath.

I wish someone would rub my shoulders.
I wish...

There was a human saying, one Cerea didn't have a point of origin for. You wished into one cupped hand. You spit into the other. And you watched to see which one filled up first.

She wondered if the ponies had an equivalent aphorism, and whether it involved the frogs at the center of their hooves. Properly speaking, a frog wasn't deep enough to hold very much.

The centaur wished she could hunch a little deeper in the water. (Her lower body wasn't really built for hunching.) But the deepest part of the bath had something of a slope to the floor, and standing on a slippery angle...

Cupped hands filled with water. She splashed herself again, wiped off her face, felt more water dripping from the tips of her ears onto her shoulders, and stared at the steam-covered flaking sponge on the walls.

I need to wash my hair.
I need to cut my hair. It's halfway back to my tail already.
I need to do something with my hair before the party.
If there is one.

She'd liked Fancypants. The scent of fear had risen from the stallion just as it had with virtually everypony else, but the scent had been the only thing which betrayed him: his voice had been perfectly normal throughout their brief meeting, and his posture had actually reached a state of visible relaxation. He'd spoken to her as if she was a person, and he'd felt that the best way to have others do the same was to arrange an Event.

(He'd also had a manner of speaking which made it easy to hear capitals.)

The noble wanted to host a party, and have Cerea there as both guest of honor and a rather mobile centerpiece. But it would take some time to arrange, plus he apparently had some true need to travel and the Solar Princess had felt that it might be best to wait until after Cerea had passed her Guard training.

if I

She didn't know when the party would be, or if one would take place at all: she was having a hard time picturing a positive response to the invitations. She was terrified of being at the heart of it, trapped for hours within a cloud of fear and whatever Ms. Garter decided was an appropriate dress. And no matter what happened there, the palace was still trying to arrange the first meet-and-greets with children...

Cerea forced her breathing to slow, found oxygen waiting within the clouds of steam. Closed her eyes, leaned forward enough to rub at that portion of her forelegs which could easily be reached and kept it up until that small portion of the tension falsely went away. Straightened again.

I need a hoof pick. They have to have hoof picks. Maybe not ones designed to be held by fingers, but hoof picks.
Would Nightwatch pick one up for me? If I gave her the money to pay for it?

She did her best to estimate the time remaining. Probably forty minutes before the pegasus was due. Plenty of --

-- there was steam in the air, and that presence did things to the local currents. It made portions of them swirl, used heat to push a portion out as colder air tried to get through the doorway, and it completely blocked out any scent encroachment from the fast-approaching source.

It meant there was a moment in which Cerea was trying (and mostly failing) to relax within the bath. And then there was one in which her dripping ears picked up the sound of wingbeats --

-- the pegasus flew in. Nightwatch did so at a speed greater than Cerea had ever seen the little knight use while indoors, even with the weight of laden saddlebags bulging along both flanks, and arrived in so little time as to give the centaur none in which to truly act. She registered that a pegasus was approaching and the water wasn't deep enough, she couldn't twist her body in a way which brought her upper torso deep enough under a clear surface, there wasn't enough time to try flipping a curtain of hair to the front of her upper torso and she was suddenly in a situation where she didn't seem to have enough hair...

But she tried. Her arms went back, and had to bend in what humans would have recognized as a truly unnatural way to do so. Her hands flexed to the precise wrong angle at the wrists, and the combination of movements thrust her shoulders back, stuck her upper ribs out with both shift and breath, of course she had to breathe and that was when the little knight saw her.

The pegasus didn't stop in midair: strictly speaking, she couldn't. But her path instantly diverted to the tub's rim, slamming her hooves into marble with the force of something more than gravity. And the whole time, the silver eyes stayed focused on Cerea. Refusing to blink.

"I didn't think you were coming this early!" the centaur frantically protested, and did so while arms more or less windmilled because a creature with six limbs suddenly had no idea what to do with two of them. Some of the syllables found her hands in front of her breasts, at least for what felt like the very small percentage they were able to cover. Others had her going for her hair again, and at least one moment of vocalization nearly had her tie her wrists into the center of a spontaneous blonde knot. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry --"

The mare whinnied.

Cerea stared.

And then she remembered that in order to make cleaning her face that much easier, she'd left the translator on the far rim of the tub.

It led to the most awkward trot of her life. She couldn't stand up and keep enough of her body below the clear water. She only had two hands and, as it turned out, nowhere near enough hair. All she could do was slowly, horribly shuffle towards the disc, feeling the weight of those silver eyes as that gaze roamed across every centimeter of a fully nude, completely exposed distortion.

In terms of distance, it was a few meters. Measured in the metrics of humiliation, it took forever.

The centaur reached the disc: a position which had her about four meters away from the staring mare. Put it on, and then repeated nearly everything. With extra apologies.

"-- good," the pegasus said. "You got the bathroom clear. That'll help."

There had been very little tone to the words, and the dark tail swished once as the sleek head turned away from Cerea. Moving towards a saddlebag.

"I'm sorry --"

"-- there's going to be blankets sent down in a little while," the little knight quietly continued, her voice fully neutral. "So once you get out, we need to pick out an extra place in the barracks."

The centaur, who still couldn't work out what was supposed to stay covered, abruptly found her arms falling limply to her sides.

"...why?"

The mare glanced back, just long enough for Cerea to see that her lips had thinned.

"I live here now."

Blue eyes blinked.

A repetition of "...why?" seemed necessary.

"My apartment isn't available," the pegasus softly said. "And won't be for a while. Neither are most of my things. Just about all of them, really. So I live here, because a Guard with nowhere to go can always use the barracks. It just happens that you were using them first. But there's room."

Cerea listened to all of it. Failed to pick up any emotion within the syllables, couldn't scent the mare's mood within swirls and steam, and suddenly wished to understand none of the body language expressed by tight muscles and lashing tail.

"What happened --"

"-- it doesn't matter." The black jaw delved into the saddlebag, extracted a book. "Go back to your bath. We can do the lesson here."

"I'm nude," the centaur protested. "You --" and she knew there was no good way to say it "-- shouldn't have to look at me --"

"You're a different species," the pegasus softly countered. "I don't understand where I shouldn't look. A taboo only exists if you know it does. And... I don't. Go back to where the water's a little deeper. Wash. I'll find where we stopped last time. Get ready to take the translator off."

Cerea listened to all of it, and it took her frozen ears a moment to pick up on the echoes of silence. The absence somehow seemed larger than the words.

She isn't hesitating. There's no pauses.
She's looking at me.

But that was wrong.

She's looking through me.

Had her appearance been that offensive? Was it whatever had happened at the little knight's home? It was possible that it was both, and --

-- if that was somehow tied to Cerea...

Immediately frantic, "Is it something I did? Is there anything I can do --"

"-- you," the mare quietly stated, "can go over there."

The centaur looked at the sapient who was the closest thing she had to --

-- turned away. Trotted. Sank back down into the water near her original starting point, as low as she could go. Adjusted the fall of her hair, and waited while the dark snout carefully flipped pages.

"'Date'," the mare read.

"Um," Cerea substituted.

All it got her was "'Date'. Take the disc off --"

"-- I don't know which kind."

The pegasus looked up.

"What do you mean?" Toneless.

The fast-spreading blush was heating her skin more quickly than the water. "It's a word which can mean several things, in some of the languages I speak. A kind of fruit. A point on a calendar. Going... out with someone you care about..."

"It's that last one," the mare softly said.

"Oh."

Some of the steam cooled, turned into droplets running down the walls.

"Did you date much?" the pegasus asked. "Where you came from?"

Cerea hesitated.

"Um..."

"It's a natural question," the mare quietly continued. "You have a species. Which means you had parents. There was breeding involved. And before that, presumably dates."

I don't want to think about...

Things were bad enough already.

"Not in my herd," Cerea softly said. You didn't have dates with centaur stallions. You had encounters and in order to make sure you came out on the right side of them, you carried something dense and heavy. And during the time given for love... there had been no one at all.

"And when you went to the other place?" was the steady followup. "After you became an exchange student?"

He never could have loved me.

"A few." She could feel herself forcing every breath. "They were... awkward." One of them had been spent waiting for an assassination attempt, and that had been among the less embarrassing examples. "It was... with the human who was hosting us. He wound up going on a lot of dates, because... there were so many of us..."

The mare looked up a little.

"He was dating all of you?" A simple question.

The answer took about fifteen minutes, and the pegasus listened to all of it.

"That happens here sometimes," the mare finally said. "It usually doesn't end well for whoever's at the center, and most of the ones around them wind up getting hurt. But the exceptions usually stay together."

"Whoever wins --" Cerea automatically began.

"-- it only works when they all win."

The girl's soaked tail twitched within the water.

"What?"

"Group marriages are legal," the pegasus evenly stated. "In Equestria. You can even bring in new members after the initial ceremony. But everypony involved has to agree to the inclusion of everypony else. Or it doesn't work. There might be four miniherds in the capital. Less than a hundred for the continent. But they happen."

There was a single instant when she could picture it, and that was followed by another where a mind which had been told to win tried to figure out what her status would have been in a situation where everyone had technically tied for first. Plus it would have meant the inclusion of the arachne, and...

He never could have loved me.

"They're not legal in Japan," was all she could say.

"Oh." The pegasus looked at the page again. "What's the weather schedule like there?"

Almost desperate now, "We don't have --"

"There's thunderstorms tonight," the little knight said, and the dark tail lashed again. "The Bureau schedules a few for autumn. We'll get thundersnow in winter. Just once. As a special treat. But tonight, it's a thunderstorm."

Frantic again, her hooves starting to push against the tub's flooring, "Nightwatch --"

"-- you'd think ponies would understand how lightning works," the pegasus evenly continued as her ears flattened against her skull. "The Bureau makes sure there's classes, even at ground level. But some ponies don't remember, or they never cared to learn. They see the first burst, they hear the thunder, and they -- run towards the nearest tall object. Sometimes that's something metal. They try to take shelter near the thing most likely to attract a hit. It's stupid, really. And if something happens, they never blame themselves. They just blame a pegasus."

"-- please, if something happened, if it's something I did --"

"-- but when you know there's a storm," the mare quietly finished, "and that the storm could go on for a long time, when you know how storms work, how lightning works, how it goes for the tallest thing in the area, and you still think there's shelter, there's a storm and you think the thing most likely to be hit is what needs shelter, so you try to protect it and you're the one who winds up getting hit..."

The silver eyes looked at the page, and nothing else.

"'Date'," she repeated. "The word after that is 'hopeless'."

Heretical

In some ways, all dreams were the same.

It was a true statement and like so many truths, there were exceptions continually lurking in hopes of gaining a chance to test the rule. The most frequent protective qualifier was to say that the statement applied to the dreams of sapient beings. The first moons of finding herself with what had originally been an extremely unwelcome ability had required the dark mare to test herself over and over again, largely as a means of finding some degree of control -- including that which she'd wished for more than anything. The capacity to stop.

It had allowed her to learn what the rules were, along with locating the limits. The dreams of sapient beings matched in many ways and for the dark mare, the most crucial was that those were the nightscapes she could most easily enter. They were also the dreams which were simplest to leave. She could visit the inner sleeping world of those animals whose minds had advanced far enough for dreams to occur, but the raw force of emotions which had yet to learn the lies of greater complexity... that was a tidal wave, and she had found herself tossed about as pounding waters wore away the thin coat of civilization. The others had done everything they could to retrieve her when the unnatural movements began, and she'd found herself whinnying for hours until language finally returned.

Animals had become easier: she knew the risks now, was better at shielding her identity. There were times in the modern nights when she chanced visiting the dreams of an animal, although only when the need was great.

Monsters...

The girl dreamed, spent much more time in the nightscape than the average pony. And there were ways in which the existence of those dreams proved a simple fact, something the dark mare would never be able to explain for those who had a vested interest in not believing it. They proved that the girl wasn't a monster.

Even when that was so much of what she believed about herself.

The previous night, after the time in the smithy... that had been especially bad. The observer had needed some time to figure out where that nightmare was going, and part of that was because she hadn't initially been able to identify a location. The girl had been trotting through...

...at first, all the dark mare had been able to think was Some kind of city, and that left out too many of the distortions. There was no reason for buildings to be that tall, she didn't understand the focus on glass and metal, and too many things moved. Some ponies had been known to pay for the placement of repeating illusions upon small portions of walls, mostly in the theater district: it could be an effective form of advertisement, allowing a few seconds of a play or cinema to show themselves over and over. But in the empty city, where the girl had initially been trotting alone down the center of a black street which seemed to both absorb and radiate heat... it was as if entire structures had been created to serve as nothing more than the screens for outdoor cinema. It was too bright, too frequent, created too much to look at, and generally served as the visual equivalent of having a thousand ponies simultaneously screaming for attention into a single ear.

But then the dark mare had spotted a familiar clock face, followed by a portion of a Palimyno street. It had let her realize that the girl was trying to visualize Canterlot, and had been doing so by mixing what was familiar to her with scant portions of pony architecture. She didn't have enough experience to truly picture a pony city: most of what she'd seen of Palimyno had been witnessed from ground level as she'd been dragged along, and the observer had added map and tourist guide to the things they needed to bring her --

-- and the city was empty.

The lights were too bright, the wind howled down canyons created by buildings which seemed to be stabbing at the sky, the air reeked and there were times when the girl desperately brought a sleeve in front of that minimal nose and tried to breathe through the fabric, for all the lack of good it did her. But she was the only living thing moving down the center of that dark road, with no one on the sidewalks, nopony using the air paths because the girl didn't know how to picture an air path. No one and nopony and nothing. Just a centaur, whose form showed a useless right arm with one step, hooves fracturing with the next, ears twisting towards sounds they could no longer hear. Always and forever something wrong, for the only inhabitant of a conjunctive city which had never existed.

And then a window had opened.

Girl and hidden mare had looked towards it. A pony head had fearfully poked out, frantically looking around as nostrils flared, looked down...

The pony saw the girl.

The window opened a little more.

The body hit the street.

More windows opened. Unicorns and earth ponies jumped to their deaths, because doing so was so much easier than having to exist anywhere near the girl. Pegasi locked their wings against their sides and made sure the impact would be headfirst. For something over a half a minute, the world rained corpses, and bodies rolled up to the girl's hooves so dead eyes could stare at the one who had forced them into a final decision.

It rained corpses.
Then it rained acid.

Flesh melted from pony forms. Fur simply evaporated: liquid muscle ran in red rivers into sewer gratings. Offal was left behind on the street. And the girl, her eyes streaming with endless tears, silently gathered the bones and put them in the saddlebag which rested against her right flank. The left bulged with ingots, the heat radiating from the dark surface was matched by a surge from the air as the city turned into nothing more than the supply house for a giant forge.

The palace smith told the girl that she was creating a graveyard which could be worn, that is what she took into the nightscape, and by the time the dark mare realized where it was all going...

There are dreams which evaporate upon contact with daylight. The visitor knows that wasn't one of them. The girl carried it with her to the training grounds. She may carry it for the rest of her life.

But she isn't having that dream again, not tonight. This is the time for a more subtle horror.

The girl's true body is resting on a single thin blanket, which was placed on the floor in an isolated corner of the barracks. It has become twisted under her barrel as the upper torso twitches and all four legs jerk. But in the nightscape... in dream, there are no buildings, no forest, no home in that hidden valley (and the dark mare is becoming roughly familiar with those streets). There are no roads or paths. There is nothing. The girl trots along vacuum so complete as to pass for the between itself. A place where no living thing should ever exist for long, but she runs across nothing with her sickly arms stretching forward, her drooping ears straining for any bit of sound, and there is something to listen for. When the dark mare follows, making an extra effort to stay hidden in an environment which offers no concealment, she starts to hear it. Wingbeats. Somewhere up ahead, out of sight, and moving with what could be described as deliberate intent.

Sometimes the girl gets close enough to catch the briefest glimpse of a black tail, just long enough to see it lash with rage before vanishing again. But when she gives silent, pleading chase, the wings flap all the faster. Always moving, and always moving away.

There is nothing.
No one.
Nopony.

And the endless weight of loneliness begins to press in, the girl's knees buckle, her lower back caves inward as her neck --

-- the dark mare twists.

(She's twisted more with the girl's dreams than she did in the last decade before her abeyance began. It isn't getting any easier with frequent practice.)

The twist is performed with only the most basic intent at the core: that the girl needs somewhere to be and because the dark mare is still learning about that strange life, she makes a mistake. She sends the girl to be with her own people, and so that body shrinks and stabilizes, but --

-- she's looking around, there is a moment when the dreamer knows something happened, she's trying to find --

-- but that moment ends.

And then there is a filly climbing out of a pool.

The dark mare had given very little direction to the twist, and so the girl had made her own association. In waking, she had been in water, and it had led to pain. And now she leaves the water, towel already wrapped around an upper torso which doesn't bulge anywhere near as much at the front: puberty has begun, and earlier than for a few of her age -- but not all. At best, she was second.

The girl glances back at the pool, and sees fillies at play. They splash each other, kick and flick tails at the eyes of friends because that can whip moisture as well as a sluicing arm, and with more of a choice for direction. They laugh and giggle and play-attack in pairs, because that's what's fun. And as the filly watches, two of them manage a simultaneous temporary blinding, mutually stumble forward while groping for support, and so trot into a wet hug. One where the embrace is welcoming, tender, caring...

But this is a filly who's just left the pool. Perhaps fifteen others are behind her. Seven pairs. She left alone. She entered alone. She stood near a partially-underwater wall because she's tried to play before this, and the others move away from her. The filly wants to be part of the game and the others know that at any given moment, her mother may appear and turn splashing into something closer to a live combat exercise. The filly is being pushed too hard and a body forced to move at all times is usually directed to move into something. They used to shift away from her because they didn't want to get involved, and now they move away because that reaction has reached the level of instinct.

Fifteen fillies still in the huge pool. Seven pairs. But there's one...

She's taller than the girl. Perhaps a year or two older, or just early to the vertical growth spurt. Visibly more powerful, and muscles ripple along her flanks as the black coat pushes through the water, with long dark hair plastered against the fur. But she has another distinction beyond her size. She's alone.

The filly glances back at her. Looks at girls who laugh and play and care about each other, because this is the start of the time for love: something which will be over all too soon. She looks at embraces and awkward rearrangements of hair and -- hands. Two couples simply stand next to each other in the water, holding hands. They're mostly quiet. Their eyes occasionally dart towards each other, they let the water lap at their flanks and they try to make the moment last because the time for love is a brief one and when breeding begins, the memories are the only thing they'll be able to keep.

Seven pairs. One alone. And the filly who looks at that solitary figure for just a little too long before turning away. Silently trotting with her head down towards a fast-approaching maternal shadow, as the nightscape begins to quake.

When the girl comes to memory in dream... it was the same as it is for every other sapient, because there are ways in which all dreams are the same. She replays that which was taken in through her senses and so for whatever she directly experienced, the display is a true one. But that reproduction is limited to what she saw, heard, scented and touched. And so at the instant she turns away from the pool, that part of the fast-ending dream turns into what she believes to have happened. What her deepest self felt had to happen, especially given what would take place in the days to come.

The others stop playing, stop holding hands. Palms cover their mouths. And as the girl is led away by the grip of perpetual disapproval, every shoulder shakes with the force of muffled laughter.

Given neutral conditions, flame would initially propagate up. Smoke, however... most of that spread depended on the air currents and when air began to gain heat in a confined space, those currents could twist. There was also ventilation to consider, because smoke in an area of high heat could move faster than anypony expected. Ponies generally thought of smoke as something which drifted, and that common definition was something which a narrow ventilation shaft and the pushing energy of heat loved to violate first. The second thing violated was usually somepony's lungs.

Fire wanted to go up. Smoke went everywhere. But the true structural damage would be limited to where the heat had been, and so the white mare didn't worry about the impact of her weight on the ramps as she steadily climbed towards the burn. If she reached a point where the floors seemed unstable -- well, she would know about that when the Guards who preceded her started to make the usual assortment of noises about her safety: those behind would then turn it into a chorus.

They cared about her. They were willing to die for her. They were also seldom willing to take 'I'll self-levitate' for an answer, especially when dealing with a hallway which would be too narrow for her full wingspan. Her Guards usually wanted her to have at least six ways out of any given situation, and always had the first entry on the list as Don't Get Into It. On a very real, just about surface level, they didn't want her to be here. And somewhere within the deeper ones, they didn't want her to be anywhere else.

She was alive because of the Guard. The world went on due to the actions of Guards. Every honor statue in the gardens was a life lost, and those lives had been voluntarily given to purchase decades.

The white mare seldom had a chance to return any degree of favor. But when it came to the current situation... in truth, she'd never really cared about the distinction of Solar and Lunar shifts, especially after the vast majority of her life had been spent in charge of both. (It was one of her weaker defenses when accused of cross-staff filching: she still saw all of them as working for her.) So it didn't matter that this was about a Lunar Guard. One of her own had been attacked. And Luna had every intention of acting -- but this was a case where the younger was willing to hold her temper until the proper target presented itself. They had discussed the matter, and it had taken almost no time before they'd agreed to let the elder take the initial lead.

There was a very good reason for that.

A rather irritated "Look," came from up ahead, just past the last bend of the ramp, and it reached her immediately after the lead Guards would have come into sight. "I know this is about your own and if it was one of ours who had something happen in the palace, you'd be shooing me out. But we're still working on this stage of the investigation, and it's crowded up here. We need some time to -- Princess!" A foreleg of flicker-yellow and orange slipped as it slid down the wall, turning the hoof-mounted tool's scrape sample into a freeform piece of art. "Nopony told us you were --"

"-- step away from the wall, please," she calmly said. "And the door." What was left of it. "As you've already noted, there isn't much space to work with, and I'm afraid I take up something more than your share. Who's the lead investigator?" A unicorn shakily ignited her corona. "Good. Would you --"

"We've already cast the primary spell," the mare forced out. "The one which detects the emotional resonance. Verifying intent. Er. I don't know if you're familiar --"

"-- and it came up as deliberate?"

(She knew it had been deliberate. She was also very aware that there were ponies who would take her saying 'I knew' as evidence, and so also remained aware of the need to actually back it up.)

"Yes," the mare verified.

"Thank you." Gently, "But I'm afraid that wasn't the question. I see five of you standing here, plus some equipment, two of my Guards, and there are two more behind me. Would you please tell me how you feel about the structural integrity of the floor? In your professional opinion, will it be able to take my weight?"

You usually had to watch closely to know when a pony had just broken into a sweat, because the first portions of liquid didn't reach the surface. If you weren't close enough to scent it, a slight darkening of the fur would be the first clue, and the portable floodlights set up in the hallway made that easy to spot.

"Er..." the very helpless mare said.

Politely, adding a reassuring tilt of her head as the pastel mane steadily flowed, "I'm about to address you by name." The oldest mare in the world smiled. "Which means I'd like to know what it is."

"...Backfire."

"Thank you. And I'm sorry. I know you're new on the job, and that you transferred in from San Dineighgo -- oh: please give my regards to Furnace if you see him again. But I didn't have time to learn much more." The tilt angle subtly increased. "Backfire, I know ponies are generally reluctant to discuss my size unless they can find a way to make it overwhelmingly complimentary. But I'm aware of how large I am, along with the fact that said size comes with an appropriate amount of mass. The fact that the floor is safe for you doesn't mean the same for me, and my Guards will probably form a living barricade unless you give the word. Can I trot here, would you advise me to take some of the weight off the surface through self-levitation, or should I come back later so my signature won't interfere with your readings?"

"...you can do --" Backfire stopped. "-- of course you can, you're the Princess..."

She waited.

"I... think for safety's sake, you should levitate," the unicorn told her. "We already checked for signatures, so you don't have to worry about us having to factor out yours."

"Thank you." Her horn ignited, and soft yellow surrounded her body: just enough to take some of her weight off the floor while keeping her hooves on it. "I'm going up to the door. Give me some space, please."

The investigators and Guards shifted, with nearly everypony winding up on the ramp. She stepped aside to let them pass, then approached the ignition point.

"A unicorn did this," the old mare softly stated as she looked at the hollow of crumbling char.

"Yes," Backfire called out. "The signature --"

"-- you don't need the signature to see that," the calm voice politely broke in. "An earth pony can't reach that high, even braced on their hind legs. It would have been a jump, and that means the liquid splashes. With a pegasus, no hover is ever completely level: you would see some vertical spread from the bobbing. Careful placement, almost no drip at the point of impact because they were trying to keep the brushtip exposed through the corona and most of the liquid which fell would have become tangled up in the field. But that means..." She stepped back a little, looked down at the irregularly-shaped splash of black. "Yes, here it is. The field winked out here. Fear, I'd imagine. And that meant everything caught up in it dropped. They recovered the brush so as not to leave more evidence, and took the ignition fluid canister for the same reason. But they couldn't exactly gather up the fallen drops. So there was a little more fuel available in this spot..."

It was possible to hear the blinks, especially when they took place as another kind of chorus.

"I -- I would have needed another hour to work that out," the lead investigator half-whispered. "How did you know --"

"I understand fire," Celestia replied: words which were perfectly soft, and so they were also words which had just enough carefully-placed insulation to contain the inner heat.

She looked closer.

"There's a pattern here," the alicorn said. "On the door. It looks like they were trying to use the ignition fluid to draw something. Part of that burned in. But some of it was ruined, because a portion of the illness potion used on the last notice soaked into the wood. That's the reason it caught so quickly, and went out of control. Following that trail. It's going to make it that much harder to make out what's supposed to be in the center. Fortunately for us, the ignition was somewhat below this, so it's not impossible. Glimmerglow?" Her pegasus Guard looked up. "Please come over and hover next to me. I could use an extra set of eyes. I know what the border is, but I think the interior is --" she squinted "-- overlapped."

"Overlapped?" the attractive mare inquired as she began to fly towards her Princess.

"One thing drawn on top of another. 'Superimposed' would have been a better word. My apologies."

"So what's the border symbol?" her Guard asked. "I can't quite spot it."

"Because of the burn," Celestia quietly offered. "Backfire, take a picture of it when we're done, please. Use conventional film, then examine the negative. I think it'll be easier to see that way. But the border is our own primary warning symbol for No. Being used as a circle."

She took a breath. The lingering stink of smoke was drawn down into her lungs, which processed it with something just short of draconic efficiency.

"So let's see what they were saying no to," the Solar Princess decided. "Multiple branching lines coming off the top: four of them. One shorter line off to the side, at an angle. Rather more circular in the center, with something of an implied depression." She slowly shook her head, silently forcing her mane's flow to remain at the same falsely steady rate. "Not much of an artist. But it had to be something which could be drawn in a hurry. Five total lines --"

"-- not lines," Glimmerglow breathed -- which was followed by a cough.

Celestia glanced left.

"Fingers," the Guard declared. "Thumb off to the side, more or less. That's a hand..."

Which suddenly made the poorly-rendered doubled shape of the center resolve itself. Not a distorted palm, but --

"A hand," Celestia said, "superimposed over a hoof. Somepony's idea of a useful visual shorthoof for centaur. Backfire, have you heard any updates from the hospital?"

She could also hear the unicorn swallow. "I thought..." Closer to a whisper, "Don't you know?"

The alicorn had sent for an update. But she would have needed to wait at the palace for it to arrive, and when it came to picking it up in person...

"We asked them for a report," the old mare softly told the unicorn. "We had to leave before it arrived. So I would appreciate anything you can tell me."

"Well..." Another gulp. "The occupant of the apartment was released already. She was in her bathroom, getting ready for a night out: she didn't hear anything over the water. But once she smelled the smoke, she cleared out through a window, tried to get back in from another angle -- oh, you know that, she's a Guard..."

"Nightwatch is fine," Celestia calmly said. In spite of her best efforts. A pegasus who was preternaturally good with wind didn't quite have the same degree of skill for heat-shifting. "Tell me about the rest."

"Well... she managed to wake up the others on this level, Princess. Got them out: the other pegasi helped her carry the earth pony family down. But while she was doing that, the smoke..." The shudder of anger went into the words, made the nearby scorch flake off all the faster. "We're told the children on the level below this should recover: they didn't get that much of it. It's the foal everypony's worried about. He was just born a few days ago, and..."

The lead investigator was young. She hadn't seen enough yet, she'd already seen too much, and that was why she didn't quite choke back the sob.

"...he might be in the ward for a moon. I... took the wrong ramp up. I saw the birth buntings on the door. I..."

Everypony went quiet: Guards, the other investigators, and a very old mare. Giving her time.

One last sniffle, plus thirty more seconds, and then Celestia asked.

"I'm assuming that you can show me severed copper," the alicorn deduced. "Whoever did this would know the building has a fire suppression system. So they found the channeling wire, and cut it. Meaning the wonder couldn't send moisture to the hallway, and their warning would burn long enough to leave an impression. Accurate?"

"They cut it in multiple places," Backfire half-spat. "Including a few on the way up. I don't think they understood how much they had to do there. Or how wonders work at all. It's part of why we evacuated the rest of the building: somepony has to restore that before it'll be truly safe to move anypony back in. But aside from some smoke damage, the other apartments are all right."

"And this one isn't," Celestia stated. "The door is burned -- but it's still mostly intact. Because Nightwatch didn't know the fire suppression was gone. This is an old building and the entire floor is on the same wiring. So she went out the window. And when she opened it, trusting that the wonder would activate -- she created a pressure differential. The underside of the door doesn't form an airtight seal. The fire was pulled. She looked back just in time to see the flames come in, and by then..."

She lost everything in the apartment. She keeps her most valuable possessions in a safe deposit box, but... she won't sell them. Because I gave them to her.

She could have tried to take some things out. But she prioritized for everypony else even after the top floors were evacuated, because she's a Guard and there are times when Guards think of themselves last.

"You recorded the signature?" the old mare asked.

"Yes."

Someone made a symbol.

"Princess..." The unicorn's voice was hesitant. "I... I don't read it, but I saw the afternoon edition of the Tattler. The front page column. It was hard to miss in the newsstall. I don't believe it. I know -- the palace -- the Diarchy would never -- just to raise sympathy, you wouldn't have faked..."

A foal.
In a ward.
The tiny bed. The monitoring spells. Sparks drifting from the surrounding field loops to alert the casters of any changes.
For a moon.

Celestia hated hospitals. Loathed the helplessness which came when ponies recognized she was in the area, friends and family of the ill flooding towards her because there was a Princess in a hospital and wherever Celestia went, miracles had to follow.

She hated hospitals because the wards were the first, best homes of prayer. And all too often, when she forever found herself unable to answer them, the last.

"Thank you, Backfire," the elder gently offered. "Let's see what we can work out about possible height before we go to the various hotels and start asking the residents if they saw anypony unusual on the ramps. There's only so much neck craning most ponies care to do. And after that..."

I hate it.
I owe it to them.
To be there for their pain.

"...I'll go to the pediatrics ward."

To give them somepony they can kick.

The Sergeant was watching the path which led in from the training barracks. It was the only thing he'd been doing for what felt like the last twenty minutes. He hadn't ordered Cerea to do anything except wait: she was doing so on his left. And with motion stilled, with exercises ended until whatever they were waiting for happened, something he wouldn't tell her about beyond a sharp bark of "YOU'LL FIND OUT WHEN IT HAPPENS!" -- when the body had been stopped, the mind was free to start working again.

All she could do while they waited was think, and being run around the track until her hooves were ground to dust was better than living with what was racing through her head. Around and around, over and over, until she wished to drop.

She hid her scent.

Cerea had moved her last blanket to a corner of the barracks. Nightwatch, who'd left the bathroom ahead of her, had already chosen a cleared bed by the time a dressed centaur emerged: one which seemed to be about as far away from Cerea's previous sleeping post as the room would allow. But then the Guard had needed to start her shift, Cerea had eventually fallen asleep (and the dreams had been horrible), she'd woken up for the fourth time to find the clock telling her to get breakfast, that meant heading for a kitchen --

-- and by the time she got back, the pegasus was asleep. Most of the mare's body had been visible: she seemed to have kicked the majority of her blankets off. It let Cerea see the way her legs kept shifting, the rustle of feathers...

...the ripples moving through the fur. Moving up.

There was a wind wall surrounding the bed, channeling all scent through a little ventilation grate. The mare knew something of what Cerea could do, and had arranged a degree of privacy accordingly.

It hadn't prevented the centaur from seeing. The sleeping kicks. The twitches.

She's... the only one who kept coming to see me --
-- it's her job, she's supposed to stay near me because it's her --
-- she was the only one.

The little knight no longer had a home, and Cerea knew it had something to do with her. It had to be something Cerea had caused, because the kitchen staff had reacted to her entry with a rather abrupt cleaning of the dining area. Something which disposed of every newspaper in the room.

It's me.
It's always me --

-- and the first musical note touched low-dipped ears.

It was a rather low C, quavering somewhat around the edges. It dipped a bit, rose too much, and possessed all the control of a greased slide whistle.

The Sergeant nodded. "That's him," the old stallion stated. "Little late. But he would have needed to find somepony who could let him in through the shield, and he probably took the walk before that. Can't fault him too much."

Him? She'd known her instructor had been planning to bring people in as part of the training, and so this was the first of them. But as for who it was, all she could do was watch the path, the little ridge which led to the dip towards the main building --

-- and the monster casually hiked into sight.

She almost reared back. Instead, her forehooves scrabbled against the soil, her right arm automatically reached for a weapon as she automatically shifted closer to the Sergeant, getting ready to protect --

-- the monster was whistling.

It was also wearing a tie.

She hadn't seen that at first: her attention had been focused on the horns. They were on the sides of his head (because she was starting to realize it was a male), jutted out over part of the broad shoulders before the silvery-grey sharply curved up. They were long enough to scoop, spear, gore, and possibly all three in that very short order. They also had little blue spheres of fabric impaled onto their points, and it gave him the look of someone who'd tried to put on a portion of clown makeup and stopped immediately after Step One.

He was thickly muscled, but the vast majority of that was in his upper body. He seemed to be about forty percent pectorals and thirty percent biceps, with the legs --

-- he's a biped --

-- not so much afterthought as having been installed on general principle without a followup government safety inspection. The fur... it took her a moment to pin down the color, and then it took a few more before she managed to put the Russian Blue's associated purr away. But it wasn't a completely even hue: there was some greying here and there, most prominent around the eyes. The mane (and it could just barely be called that: short and exceptionally narrow) had gone to salt-and-pepper above the flattop skull, while the bovine snout had no fur at all. Just a large gold ring pierced through the nostrils, which swung slightly as he casually walked along with his hands stuck in his pockets --

-- he has hands --

-- while trying to whistle.

The yellow shirt was relatively light for the weather, but there was fur underneath it. The narrow-legged pants were khakis. He hadn't bothered with shoes because they just didn't work with hooves, the striped tie was far too small against his broad torso and so mostly looked like he'd put a tie on because he'd shown up at a club without one, someone had told him they were mandatory, and this barberpole embarrassment had been the only thing in the emergency stock.

His eyes were a somewhat darker yellow than the shirt, forward-set and surprisingly round. And he couldn't whistle very well. He saw her, the note fell off a cliff and then rebounded into the kind of warble which made ducks give up on life. But he continued to advance, she caught his scent for the first time and realized it meant nothing because he was the first. She'd been able to work out ponies so quickly because some of their scents were close to those which she had known, and with him...

She had known something like him (and a toxic mix of inferiority blended with jealousy began to stir, with none of it directed towards the visitor). But as with the local gryphons, he existed as something which had seen every human aspect removed. Physically, it made him into a monster out of myth. Human myths: the creature they had told themselves was at the heart of the legend before the overbearing, unjustifiably-smug truth had stepped forward.

He walked right up to them. To her, stopping about a meter and a half away: enough to let her finish gauging his height: his forehead was about thirty-nine centimeters above hers, and it left her looking up into intelligent eyes. For his part, he looked at her for a second, paused briefly in one area and in doing so, became the first male to take what she quickly realized was a strictly casual interest in her breasts: he'd seen something like that before, was just verifying that she had them, but she wasn't his species and so that was where the curiosity stopped. And then the huge right arm came up, he casually stuck his fist out with the knuckles curled towards her --

-- stopped. Blinked once, and the big hand opened as it rotated. Fingers forward, prospective grip loose.

"Heya," the minotaur said, and offered a handshake.

Her well-trained reaction was automatic: reach out, grip --

I'm touching him.
He's touching me.

There had been a thousand thoughts trying to reach the starting gate. She wanted to know his name. There was a desire to learn about his nation. The toxicity, which was rather angry about having gotten it wrong during the press conference, really wanted to know about the average bra size of a female minotaur, and most of that was still completely misplaced. But she lost all of it in the feel of fingers gripping her hand (without squeezing), the sensation of someone touching her when no one had voluntarily touched her in --

-- strictly speaking, that wasn't true. The dark Princess had touched her, along with permitting contact before the teleports. But the alicorn had been the only one. And in a world of hooves and glowing horns, this was a handshake.

Someone was holding her hand, if only for a few seconds, and so it took a deliberate effort not to cry.

"Recruit," the Sergeant gruffly said, "meet Force/Twist/Torque Power. Mazein's current ambassador to Equestria. Want to guess what he's here for?"

The bull grinned. (It was possible to identify as a grin on first go.) Carefully released the handshake, then stuck his right hand back in the appropriate pocket and shrugged.

"Emery Board here --" a quick glance down "-- and don't tell me to call you Sergeant unless you're signing back up with us --"

"-- not happening," the earth pony stated. "Reactivated. Staying home."

The minotaur nodded. "-- anyway, he did some training for us. Worked out pretty well. And he dropped by the embassy, asked if we could send someone out to give you the basics. Me..." Another shrug. "...Sunbutt and I owe each other so many bucking favors --"

The Sergeant's spine locked. Cerea's ears went straight out, then back, and followed that up by having every inner strand of fur trying to retreat inside each other.

SUNBUTT?

She pictured it. She couldn't not picture it. And then she realized that there was only one pony in the world who knew what centaur laughter sounded like, which meant there was probably a chance to pass off what was about to happen as a coughing fit because I can't stop it I can't stop it I can't and her hands were in front of her mouth, her upper back curved and her chest heaved a few times and she wondered if there was any way to kick a few fake sneezes in for the full performance --

-- the old stallion was staring at her, and the solidity of his pupils told Cerea there were going to be laps around the track. Also that there were going to be a lot of them.

The mintotaur, however, very lightly and with utter casualness, slapped her on the upper back.

"Better?"

She faked one last small cough, just for the sake of appearances. "...y...yes. Thank you."

He nodded. "Anyway," he added with an equally-even regard, "I figure this balances a number in some book or another. He wants you up against a minotaur. Best way to keep it from being a diplomatic incident is to do it with a diplomat."

The Sergeant nodded. "Save you some trouble here," he told Cerea. "He's from the last country we'll ever go to war with. Because we've never had one. Equestria's oldest ally. Ponies and minotaurs got their nations at just about the same time, and they've been standing together ever since. They just do it on two legs. There's been a few combined units on the battlefield over the centuries. We guard their backs on magic, they watch us for everything else." Almost reverently, "Makes for great stories. I haven't seen it in my lifetime, and I don't want the war which puts us together again. But in the Hall Of Legends... that charge never ends."

"But Guards," the ambassador continued (and there was a new tone in the genial voice, something darker), "still get training in fighting minotaurs. Same as our military gets it for going up against ponies." Another shrug. "'course, some of our military is ponies. Makes it easier. But you need to know how to fight us."

And before she could stop it, "...why?" They both looked at her, and that was how she knew she'd screwed up -- but if she didn't voice the rest, the Sergeant would shout it out of her. "If you're the oldest ally... if there's never been a war..."

"The nations have never been at war," Torque told her, voice calm and laden with weight. "Bulls and ageládas go bad. We get our criminals. Our lunatics. Most of the second category gets uncovered during the voting exams, one way or another: if someone doesn't want to take the test so they can vote, it's usually a bad sign. Mazein isn't gonna attack Equestria, and the same goes the other way. Even when we have our bits of weirdness now and again, we've always kept talking. But there's minotaurs who act on their own, who've decided they're the only ones who are real. And when you've decided you're the only person -- the rest of the world becomes something to break."

She just barely managed to nod.

"This is a live practice round," Emery Board stated. "The Ambassador blunted his horns, and he'll be careful on his charges. Bashing only."

Charge. The snort was purely internal. He visibly had upper-body strength to spare, but with those short, thin legs...

"For your part," the Sergeant told Cerea, "you don't kill him. Common courtesy."

"And Moonsault would be annoyed about having to moderate a national referendum to vote someone else into the post," the ambassador added, grinning again.

"But he can take a hit," the old stallion added. "So you do fight him. Go to the training barracks. Fourth locker. Nudge the dials to 9-3-6-2. Got a surprise waiting for you."

Her sword was in its scabbard. Her real sword.

It couldn't be moved magically. Nightwatch had told her that, when she'd still talked to Cerea as she would to a person. It stayed where it was during teleports, and a pegasus who was directly touching it couldn't fly. It usually wound up being dragged in a net, and it had to be shifted in secret: the actual transfer had probably taken place during the night. There had also been a selection of other weapons available: she'd abandoned the sling because she didn't have enough control yet to be assured of not cracking someone's skull with a stone, and took the new set of bolas as a just-in-case, clipping them to the top edge of her skirt.

They were standing in the center of the oval track, with the ambassador about fifteen meters away. The Sergeant was standing on the left side of the track itself, watching.

"You go until I say stop, or until one of you surrenders," the old stallion ordered. "Understood?"

"Yes," Cerea said.

"Got it," the ambassador declared. Fingers flexed, and did so in a way which suggested a last-second counting of resources.

The dual assent won them a single harsh nod. "On four. One, two, three --"

Which was when Cerea recognized the presence of a vacuum in the field of information.

"-- Sergeant?"

"What do you want, recruit?"

"How do minotaurs fight?"

He didn't grin. He never smiled. But this time, she could see where the smile wasn't.

"WANT TO FIND OUT? FOUR!"

Cerea started to reach for her sword. She had all the time in the world to figure out her first approach --

-- which, in practical terms, worked out to less than three seconds.

The bull snorted. Then he charged.

He was fifteen meters away. Ten, and she was just barely touching the pommel. Five, she didn't have it clear of the scabbard yet and he was --

-- big hands went into her shoulders, gripped, tightened, began tilting her upper body to the left as the power of the squeeze increased, her right shoulder was being held too tightly and she couldn't move her arm --

"FASTEST THINGS ON THE PLANET OVER A SHORT DISTANCE!" the Sergeant bellowed. "CAN'T DO MUCH OVER MORE THAN SIXTY BODY LENGTHS! BUT TWENTY OR LESS? THEY CAN CHARGE!"

The yellow eyes were strangely calm. But they were also utterly focused, he was still pushing her left, four legs gave her more stability and she had the mass advantage, but he had height and leverage and one of the issues with the centaur body was that if the upper torso went too far in certain directions, the lower would eventually have to come with it. He just kept pushing, and his grip had the ease which came from a lifetime of practice --

"AND THEY LIKE TO WRESTLE!"

Of course they do, briefly flashed across Cerea's wildly-sparking mind. They're Greek.

Too much strength in his upper body. Too much --

-- too much in the upper body --

She kicked him.

The Sergeant had seen it during the testing: there was an imbalance in her strength. The majority of her mass was in her lower body, and so that was where she had more power. Force which could strike out with less fear of damaging the impacting point, because hands needed gauntlets and with hooves, the shoes were more or less optional.

She had more strength in her lower body. The minotaur was the reverse, supporting that broad torso and its thick arms on thin substandard-issue legs, and so she kicked the left one out from under him.

He grunted, slipped backwards as his grip released, an aching shoulder cooperated long enough for the blade to come free and she swung the flat of it towards the side of his ribs, his arm came up to block --

-- which still meant she made contact.

He staggered. The huge arms dropped as if sagging under their own weight, both knees bent --

"WONDERING WHAT THEIR MAGIC IS? IT'S STRENGTH! COMES IN A FEW DIFFERENT FORMS FOR THE OUTLIERS, BUT THAT MOSTLY MEANS MUSCLE POWER! AND WHEN THEY KNOW HOW TO USE IT --"

-- he couldn't seem to keep his own mass upright, he was going down --
-- he was a wrestler.
And a wrestler knew how to fall.

She was swinging again, trying to take him down, and he beat her to it. He fell backwards, started to roll before his upper torso impacted so the horns wouldn't interfere, used the momentum to get out of her range --

-- he's too low, I can swing that low but it's hard to aim, I can't reach --

-- got his wind back, dove forward and went for her forelegs, but that was the predictable move and so she cantered backwards, tried to put the flat of the blade into his neck, but he was already shifting to the side, getting up again --

-- he grinned at her.

It had been easy to initially identify what a minotaur grin was like. She would spend much of the next four minutes getting the chance to memorize it.

"Oh, Ancestors," the bull chuckled. "You are gonna be fun!"

And then he charged.

There are rules for fighting. All of the best books say that: a knight has a code, and that creates order within the chaos of combat. You offer mercy to those who deserve it. You do your best to avoid striking against a turned back. You act with dignity, and victory brings you honor.

In the waking world, the girl has been fighting. The dark mare gently nudged, and so the filly is entering combat.

It's a slightly unusual sort of arena. The spectator area (which has but three mares in it) is at ground level: the combat pit is about five meters below. The intent is to keep the fillies from jumping out. There are obstacles: things you have to vault, walls which can be used for cover. And today, there's a black-haired, black-furred centaur who's a year or two older than the girl, who just had the gate close behind her as she exited the ramp into the pit.

The filly is looking at someone who's stronger than she is. Who has more training, experience, and is going to win because that's what just about always happens. The filly feels as if she's never been put into a fair fight because her mother

(her mother is watching from above)

always pushes, pushes too hard and she feels as if the entire length of her back will break. She's going to lose again as her mother watches and this time, that's not even the worst of it. This is the one who was alone. Alone in the way the filly always is: she saw that at the pool only a few days ago. And when two are alone... if there was any chance to talk about it, to explore the only true cure which exists for loneliness: the opportunity to spend time with another. To have a --

-- an adult mare jams a dagger hilt into a curved metal plate. The sound echoes and before the note fades, the black-haired girl is charging. And the filly tries to get out of the way, buy time in which to think, but the other girl is bigger and faster and pushes her back, they go behind one of the cover walls and there's a second where the filly can't see her mother or any other adult, they're both completely hidden and that's when the filly learns why the other girl is alone.

The black-haired girl grins. Hands drop from the filly's shoulders. Go to her still-small breasts.

SQUEEZE.

She doesn't scream. (She should have screamed.) It isn't the worst pain of her life because she's crashed into obstacles which had been raised too high for her to jump, been put into matches against those larger and stronger, and there was a day when she cried herself out under the same tree where generations of centaurs had felt that final misery before her. There is nothing which will ever be worse than that.

She's hurt her ribs and legs and just about everything else, knows something about fighting through familiar agonies. This is pain in a place which has only existed for a few months, she has no experience in dealing with it, the fire burns through her and by the time it reaches her brain, the alchemy of humiliation has transmuted it into rage.

Her arms come up, get between them and push the black-haired girl back. And before she even can be surprised at the smaller girl having dislodged that horrible grip, the filly charges, gets her shoulders low and the impact disorients her opponent, the filly rears back and both forelegs lash on, the black-haired girl is driven back into visibility and the filly is right behind her, right on top of her as she rears up again, which puts the filly's own arms all the higher and...

It could be said that the opportunity for revenge presented itself, and so when it came to the combat, the filly ultimately wins.

The presentation, however, was fully public.

And so the filly loses again.

Her mother is still lecturing her. Most of the females in the herd seem to have been assembled to hear the verbal whipping, although it's possible that some of them just showed up to see what all the noise was about. Mares and fillies surround them, listen to every blistering syllable as the filly is told about things the honorable would never do in combat and she tries to protest, she knows she must have bruises rising and all she wants to do is get home so her parent can see that she was hurt first.

But the revenge was public, while the pain was private. She did not scream, and all her mother seems to hear now is the wailing of someone who could only win by cheating. Who, in a two-filly match, has once again come in second.

Everyone watches. Everyone listens. The filly can't look at them all because her eyes are on the ground most of the time, and so the population which exists in the portion of the tableau created by imagination has to hide their laughter.

She's dragged home, by tail and ear: sometimes in turn, sometimes together. Her mother still won't listen to her and because the filly keeps protesting, keeps begging for one chance at proof, she doesn't get it. Begging is seen as undignified.

Three days in her bedroom, while her mother refuses to look at her. And by the time she's released, centaur resilience means the bruises have faded to the point where they could have been caused by anything.

So the filly goes back on patrol. Beating the borders, or at least as much as she's allowed to do while trailing adults who won't look at her.

It means they don't see her eyes as she memorizes their routes.

No one truly looks at her for days, and it creates another kind of opportunity. Her spare canteen comes out of the storage closet, never to return. Fabric is commandeered, clumsily stitched together. The schedule is learned by heart, down to the last hoofstep.

There's nothing for the filly in the gap. There never will be. Dozens of generations have died upon this soil and no other, and she knows in the deepest part of her heart that in the end, she will suffer the same fate. There is no true escape from the prison which the liminal species have created for themselves, not with what waits on the other side.

She will die in the gap. Die as a failure. The black-haired girl was the final proof.

So she's committed her plans to a single day.

One day to go out and live.

Alienating

She couldn't talk to steel.

Perhaps that was a comment on her skills: something which, in her own herd, never would have seen her achieve anything more than second place. She'd been trained by what was still the gap's mistress of the forge, because everything smuggled into the gap was a risk and so in order to ensure that they would remain undiscovered into the next generation (a goal which had failed), it was necessary for the current one to learn how to create some things with the supplies on hand. That was why Cerea had been apprenticed to Trinette, because a filly who was never going to be a true knight could always serve as an armorer. The one aspect of her life where her mother had been willing to offer a silent judgment of 'close enough' while still treating it as a failure.

Trinette... the smith was about two decades older than Cerea's mother: dark-haired, deeply tanned, heavily muscled (for a mare), and always trying to get over at least three minor burns. She hadn't been a harsh teacher, although Cerea had trouble applying that status to anyone when it was measured against a singular standard. (With the Sergeant now in her life, she was having equal difficulty making it stick on anypony.) But she had a tendency to let students learn through making their own mistakes, and with Cerea... the girl still didn't understand why every error hadn't seen her ejected from the forge forever.

She'd learned, as best she could, and she still felt that hadn't been good enough. There might have been some general agreement on that front from the rest of the herd: it wasn't if as any of the arguments against having her enter the exchange program had been based on not wanting to potentially lose the next blacksmith...

But with integration slowly under way, it had become easy to get goods from the outside. Burner cell phones with weak satellite connections had been replaced by computers with open links to new wi-fi networks, and so the herd had begun to discover the joys of direct ordering. It had been for consumer goods, initially: a flood of scarves and decorative items. By the time Cerea had headed for the airport, some larger pieces were starting to arrive. And eventually...

Trinette might hold the smithy for the rest of her life, and there would undoubtedly be another apprentice: making certain centaur goods required direct experience. But given enough time... how much would be outsourced? Three generations, and would there be a smithy in the gap at all? One last practitioner, who was mostly there to serve as set dressing for human tourists who'd paid an admission fee so they could spend an hour taking pictures of quaint customs --

-- stop...

Cerea took a breath, and the heat of the forge soaked deep into her lungs. The latest ingot was beginning to reach the proper level of glow in the fire: perhaps two minutes before she had to extract it. But that knowledge was something she'd had to learn from instruction and error.

Trinette had said that a true smith could hear the metal speaking to them, and a filly facing atomic deafness had hoped that was some degree of exaggeration. Barding existed in a state where that statement was simple fact, leaving the girl wondering how poor her skills truly were.

Next step.

It wasn't something which most human blacksmiths would have seen as a necessary one, mostly because they didn't understand about the magic which lived in rituals. There was water in human forges, because there had to be. But only centaurs knew that you had to dip your fingers in up to the first knuckle and then flick the liquid in the four cardinal directions of the compass. It was a ritual of protection against having spirits of weakness enter the metal, and it had been proven to work because neither Trinette nor Cerea had ever seen a weakness spirit. Of course, it also helped to add a little salt. Spirits hated salt, which served as counterpoint to how much centaurs loved a truly pure deposit. Salt had been a casual secondary currency in the herd, and Cerea had never entered the wagering which took place before contests because a filly who usually came in second couldn't afford the losses.

(Trinette had taught her that it also helped to draw lines of salt at the base of the doorway and along the ledges of any windows. It just hadn't been done that often, because the herd's natural salt supply had run out centuries ago and when it came to getting replacements... every item smuggled was a risk, and getting that much salt meant winning a lot of bets.)

Back to the metal.

Color, time, temperature, surface tension: that was all Cerea had to go on when she was alone in the smithy -- and when it came to the floor space allotted for the workshop, she was always alone. She took up too much room. Only one pony was interested in watching her work, he'd already gone home for the night and when he was present, he stood in the doorway. Everypony else

only one pony

stayed well away. And with Barding...

She couldn't talk to steel. Barding, however, had questions, and so it could now be argued that the smith knew more about Cerea's world than anypony else in the palace. The smith was becoming letter-perfect on the subject of trace minerals in rare clays, could undoubtedly recite the history of the katana's invention from memory, and had already suggested a few means through which the Damascus process might potentially be refined. But he did so without understanding anything about the realities of riverbanks, samurais, or trade routes, because he saw none of those things as being important. She couldn't talk to steel, and she could only talk to Barding about steel.

...no, that was unfair. She could talk to Barding about any number of topics: it was just that every one of them had to center on metal. He could hear the steel, and so he seemed to exist in a state where any other communication had to utilize that wavelength.

(She wiped off her forehead again. She was sweating too much. She hadn't been resting enough. There was the training grounds and the forge and sometimes she ate in an empty kitchen before she went to meet a tutor who now only looked through her.)

It had allowed her to learn a few minor things. Cerea now knew that what she saw as the precious ores were somewhat more common in this world than they had been on hers -- which had led to Barding naming his own planet, and a near-endless hiss of translator overlap had ultimately landed on Menajeria. Gold was used for money simply because ponies didn't have all that many other non-decorative uses for it. Silver, which could channel unicorn magic, actually had more inherent value. The lack of electricity-powered technology normally would have meant bad things for copper, but that had turned out to be the pegasus conduit. Aluminum could be separated and refined, but the process for doing so was still at the stage which Barding had described as 'A pain in the tail' and so there wasn't that much of it around. She hadn't been able to make herself ask about the radioactives.

In terms of metal wealth, Equestria's iron supply could be seen as early-era industrial: it was around and being used, but there was no full-scale rush to acquire more. By contrast, the minotaur nation was sitting on top of multiple huge deposits, and so served as something of a manufacturing center for heavy goods: when it came to pure machinery, anything truly large and durable had probably been imported from Mazein. Ponies had apparently invented trains, but minotaurs had taken one look at the designs and come up with the rail spike driver. Their magic was for strength: a lack of spell-based shortcuts added to the possession of hands had created a species which produced engineers in bulk, and Equestria's allies were happy to help ponies build those things for which hooves would not serve and coronas hadn't been properly trained.

Barding had told her all of that. But ask him why minotaurs wore nose rings as opposed to what their favored material for such was, and... nothing. The stallion spoke to her as one smith to another (she felt he was elevating her far too much), and as far as he was concerned, there could be but one topic. The only topic he recognized, or perhaps even understood to exist.

She couldn't really talk to Barding, because every word had to stay in the same narrow channel and if any syllable sloshed over the sides, the stallion started to look as if he was drowning.

(He also brought in bones, because he was still under the impression that she needed a lot of them. The shelving on the left wall was starting to look like a miniature ossuary. Given that the smithy was technically underground, it also qualified as the seed for a full catacomb.)

Cerea extracted the ingot with newly-made tools, carried it to the anvil. Began to hammer, and felt the strain in her arms and shoulders with every swing.

There were other options, of course. For starters, there were hydraulic powerhammers, and had she understood more about water pressure, the creation of heavy-yet-flexible tubing, and how to do anything with one other than look at the picture in the scavenged book and wonder if the gap would ever see the real thing, she might have considered proposing it to somepony. As it was, the only other option was to let somepony else go through the labor. And there were portions of the armor which she could let Barding work on without issue: in particular, anything which would be set below her upper waist was mostly just a question of having him upscale. But with other sections...

(Her shoulders hurt. Her arms hurt. She felt tired all the time.)

...he didn't have experience. Hers was minimal, but at least it existed. And she felt that when designing for certain kinds of anatomy, it helped to actually possess it.

She was still trying to figure out exactly how tightly the final product should be fitted. Armor was meant to protect the flesh within -- but it still left the body surrounded by metal. Make the whole thing flush against the skin and anything which put a significant dent in the armor had also pushed it directly into the bone. Leave too much room and a major impact would leave the wearer rebounding inside the shell. It was possible to have a layer of padding between steel and skin, but that also trapped heat...

It was a balancing act, it was the first time she'd tried to cross the narrow bridge on her own, and centaurs weren't meant for tightrope tricks. She was reaching back for her lessons, trying to adapt them against the needs of having to potentially fight ponies (and so much else), and was completely sure she was getting everything wrong.

Layering.

Princess Celestia had been worried about the sword. What it would do upon contact with enchanted metal, and so there had been some rather reluctant testing: something which was still in progress. When it came to devices and wonders... hitting a charged item with the sword would negate it for as long as it was in contact. If any portion penetrated the interior, it generally forced the release of all stored power, as with the lock in the wine cellar and the fountain of sparks.

The sword cancelled out magic -- but not always magical effect. Cerea, who knew enough about American comics from the herd's random-draw reading material to find them generally inferior to French ones, had eventually recalled a principle she'd learned from one of the more passable efforts to reach the gap: Foglio's Hammer. Magic could conjure a hammer, and that hammer would then deliver a blow to someone's skull. The hammer could then be made to disappear, forced into another form, or soar away as a kaleidoscope of butterflies -- and none of that would negate the fact that you'd just cracked someone's skull with a hammer.

If magical heat set something on fire, then the fire was fully normal. A spell which made metal stronger? If there was no charge being steadily drained, then that potentially meant the metal had simply assumed a new state: one which might then maintain. So it was possible that the standard enchantments for Guard armor (whatever those were) would hold against incidental contact with the sword -- and even then, neither the Solar Princess nor Cerea knew what might result from long-term proximity.

So there had been discussions of layering. Putting the enchantments on the inside. They just had no idea of whether it would work, and so the testing continued.

Testing. Corrections. Adjustments.

(Her vision blurred sometimes. She felt sleep would restore that. She wasn't getting enough sleep and for what she did manage to find, the dreams were harsh.)

She still hadn't completely figured out what to do about the breastplate, especially when it came to the section where nopony knew to rudely crack what would have been the obvious human jokes. Her current plan was to make those two protective shells somewhat oversized. It would make her look larger than she truly was and require some adjustments on certain swings -- but that extra space also allowed for the installation of padding. She had already been trying to deal with the problems created by having her body potentially rebounding within metal: applying that to the portions which tended to bounce anyway had potential agony echoing backwards from the future in a demand to make sure she stopped it. Additionally, as Ms. Garter had noticed, Cerea had yet to reach her full size. Being fitted for new bras was bad enough. Allowing some extra space now meant not having to hammer out a whole new breastplate every two months

moons

although if she found a way to give it a modular subsection, she might be able to line up some replacement pieces in advance.

(She'd tried to ask Barding about ageládas, because he had been all there was. Phrasing the question to fit through the narrow channel, so that it was mostly about the kind of armor they wore, and... how it was configured. But he'd never had to protect a minotaur, didn't leave the forge, and so his interest ended there.)

She hammered the ingot, over and over, because there were too few hours and too many things to do. Every extra day seemed to bring more work. More study.

(She wasn't sleeping enough. It took too much time to prepare the forge if she trotted in during a period of insomnia. Her flanks had been sore for days. She told herself it would go away. Over and over.)

More ponies turning away from her.

She barely saw anypony, even within the palace. There had been the Solar Princess, and... there were always staff members around, if you went to the upper levels. But she hadn't been in a room with Crossing Guard since the press conference, because the training took priority. Ms. Manners had similarly been put on hold. With just about everypony else... they would see her or, more often, hear her coming: her hoofsteps might have been unique, along with being what she saw as singularly heavy. And they always had a door they needed to open, a turn they needed to make, or something four extra meters ahead that they just had to see.

A week ago, it had been three meters.
A week ago, there hadn't been a wall of wind around a bunk. Around a pegasus who refused to let the centaur acquire the faintest whiff of her scent during any language class.
A week ago, there had been more words between them than single terms and orders to repeat without the disc.
A week ago, Nightwatch had looked at her.
Not through.

Something had happened. Something which had to have been created by Cerea's presence, and the whole staff knew it. They created extra distance, so it wouldn't happen to them. And the one mare...

She could talk to Princess Celestia about the sword. Barding only knew metal. The Sergeant specialized in combat, which occasionally led into those parts of history which related to fighting. And when it came to those he'd been bringing to the training grounds...

She wondered how many of them were reporting back.

It had felt as if it should have been more difficult to bring those from the other species out to spar with her, because she knew what her reputation was: namely, it was Tirek's. (She still hadn't seen a picture of him, had been unable to ask, and longed to acquire one because it would give her something to punch.) She was a source of fear, and that made having others approach for what they knew would be a combat situation seem unlikely.

But Torque (casually genial and as with all of them, someone she'd only seen once) had merely been the first. She had finished her sparring session with the minotaur, he'd told her a few things about minotaur wrestling techniques and how they tended to use their horns when things became serious, and then he'd left before she could make herself ask him about the females of his species. She'd lost a lot of time apologizing for instinctively going after the nose ring: he'd assured her that it was a legitimate tactic when fighting for her life (and done so while still rubbing at the sore spots), but it had been a sparring session, some things had to be off-limits and it was just so undignified...

There had been a lot of laps. And on the next day, there had been a yak. This was supposed to have been followed by a kudu, but the Sergeant had irritably told her that there was but one such family in the capital, that nation didn't even have an embassy in Canterlot, and the local patriarch had decided he wanted nothing to do with her. So there had been a day of normal training before the buffalo had shown up.

Nations and embassies. She'd seen the embassies now, because somepony had left a tourist's guidebook in the barracks, right next to a labeled map of the capital -- something she couldn't read. There had barely been a chance to look at any of the photography within the guide, but it had been easy to identify the embassies: there was no other reason for that street's buildings to be displaying so many different flags. And it had occurred to Cerea that when the world knew Equestria was hosting a centaur, something every species had told itself to be afraid of... they would have a natural desire to scout. Send someone out to observe her, see what she was capable of, and... report back to the embassy.

Sparring partners. Instructors. Spies.

The Sergeant had to understand that. But he still brought them out to meet her, because she had to be trained. And on the level which produced so many of the nightmares, she wondered if it was because he also wanted them to directly experience that fear.

The most recent session had produced the first griffon. Introductions had been made (with no talon pressing), and now the new arrival was sitting a few meters away under a fast-darkening sky, tufted tail slowly swaying. Waiting.

"You're about to go up against the most dominant aspect of griffon magic," the Sergeant instructed her. "But this time, I want you to know what's coming. The goal is to resist it. Keep it from overwhelming you. Especially since we don't know what it's actually going to do."

Her lower lip was briefly under her upper teeth: a bad habit, a worse look, a reaction she thought she'd gotten past -- but she'd been so tired lately, and having been told that her teacher didn't know something had put her nerves on edge. "What does it... normally do?"

He took a breath. The hat didn't shift.

"Griffons have a little overlap with pegasi," the old stallion told her. "Not much. They can perch on clouds and when they put their minds to it, they can manage some molding. But that's about it. You'll see a few of them with vapor houses, especially the ranchers: it lets them get a little altitude over what they're raising for dinner. The majority like to live above the ground, but these days, that means treehouses." With a small snort, "Which can still mean mansions, because Protocera gets some huge trees. Some of the bigger cities put businesses on the lower levels, but they live up top."

Ranchers? She knew griffons ate meat, but she hadn't been told about the source. It wouldn't be anything sapient and when she considered how many species from her home could think here, the available choices seemed to have been considerably narrowed down --

"No weather effects, though," the Sergeant continued. "There's always been rumors about outliers who can do basic wind tricks, but I've never seen one. The core of griffon magic is just like the foundation of their society: the chain of domination."

The griffon nodded. "Who you're stronger than," he said in a voice which emerged with jagged edges: something which almost seemed to contrast with the steady scent -- but she hadn't been able to link that to an emotion. "And who's stronger than you."

Cerea felt that the earth pony still couldn't read all of her expressions. The little scrabble of forehooves, however, was harder to miss.

"It's not as bad as you're probably thinking," the Sergeant snorted. "The ones at the top have an obligation to look out for anyone on the bottom. And they're great with kids. The real scramble is in the middle: trying to get one more link between yourself and the end. Even then, unless there's a shift in progress, most of what you'll see between them is little nods and small bows. They know where they stand with each other, just about all the time. Real problem comes when they leave the chain. Come to Equestria, and they don't know how they rank against ponies. So they instinctively start challenging, because anypony who can't stop them is on a lower link and the ones who can get the upper. We don't get a lot of tourism from Protocera because the first week is figuring out the new system through pissing off most of it, the second week is the apology tour, and then it's usually time to head back."

"But there's a shortcut," the griffon declared. "We just don't use it much."

"Why?" was a natural question, which also had the benefit of briefly postponing whatever was about to happen. Adjusting her hair bought a few more seconds, especially since it had now reached a length which was starting to overwhelm the pins.

"For starters? Because it can backfire," the old stallion told Cerea. (The griffon nodded.) "Especially with a thinking species. Garet, tell her."

The left front limb came up. Talons went on display. Cerea, who had dealt with what Papi's casual passage could do to carpets, wasn't overly impressed.

"Are you a predator?" the griffon too-smoothly asked. "Or are you prey?"

Cerea forced her hooves to remain still. Waited for the rest of it.

"That's the core of it," their visitor almost lazily continued. "I make eye contact. And then I... give you a little reminder. Of what the cycle is, when it's predator and prey. The chain. With animals, with some monsters... it tells them just where they stand."

The beak half-opened, held the position long enough to let her see the small serrations along the edge.

"And they sort of -- act accordingly," Garet informed her. "Some prey just... waits for it. Rolls right over, which makes the next part that much easier..."

He was trying to scare her. She'd met bullies, provokers, those in the human world for whom a single blow struck back would have seen her deported. Something which had left her helpless, and that had been the majority of what had given them joy.

The griffon felt so much like what she'd seen in Japan. In France. He was utterly familiar, and so when the anger rose (something which shamed her later, she had to watch her temper, she was the guest of a nation and world), it turned him into a target. The focus of everything she wished she'd been able to do, and not all of it was earned.

"And when you get something stronger," emerged as something less than words and more like a projectile, "you just remind them of that. You've told them you're something they can beat. And they act accordingly."

The griffon blinked. The beak slammed shut, and talons scratched at the ground.

"...yes," he eventually said, doing so at the same moment his tail froze. "Some of the time. There's other factors: the strength of my magic, force of personality. How much I can bring to bear against you. Top-link griffons can cower more than the world's forge chain says they should. But with something powerful... it can backfire. Especially since there's usually some degree of effect, even when you resist the domination. And for centaurs, we don't know what that is."

The Sergeant nodded. "We know pegasi get tilted to favor instinct over thought," the old stallion partially clarified. "But that can help them in a fight. Unicorns go for speed-casting instead of more complicated workings: if the griffon's got somepony who's quick with their field, they're in trouble. Earth ponies stop thinking about little issues like inflicting long-term damage, and we get that much harder to drop because we're also not thinking about pain any more. Resisting a griffon can turn the fight against them -- but you're still not going to be yourself for a while." With a fully matter-of-fact, almost casual tone, "It's a mental effect, Recruit. It's invasive. A lot of ponies will do anything not to go through it because they don't want to find out how they'll come out on the other side. And even if you win... you won't be yourself for a while. That's why this is the last exercise of the day. No matter how it turns out, we stop after this." The pause felt deliberate. "It's also optional."

She looked at him.

"Optional." She hadn't been sure he knew the word. (She would have asked Nightwatch how to say it in Equestrian, but... things were bad.)

"Invasive," he repeated. "Something which gets into your head. When you don't want it to. What's the physical equivalent?"

She knew the answer. Nothing would have been capable of making her say it.

"That's another reason griffons don't use it much," Emery Board stated. "It's one thing to try it on monsters, and they're all capable of trying it on each other: when everyone has the same weapon, that can cut down on the number of times it gets used." He snorted. "Except for a few hardcore cases, and they don't last long. But with the rest of the sapient species, if they're not bringing it out in self-defense and the other party figures out what happened, there can be criminal charges. So this is optional. You say no, you leave. And that's it."

"Domination." Her voice felt hollow.

He nodded.

"You said... Equestria's had wars..."

Again. "They've been on the other side more than anyone else."

Because an entire society based around trying to be on top is eventually going to try and dominate another country. "What happens to the recruits who opt out?"

Steadily, "They live with their choice. Same way he lives with volunteering, if you go through this and the reaction goes against him. That's the chance he agreed to take."

The most frequent opponent. A potential source of conflict. Magic which had to have attacked hundreds of Guards. And if you couldn't deal with it, then how could you be a Guard at all?

"When he's ready," Cerea said. It would have been when she was ready, but she suspected the ideal answer on that one was still 'never'.

One last nod. "It's eye contact," the Sergeant said. "It doesn't have to be. The strongest can pull off a degree of it just by getting close, and blocking your own vision around an angry griffon isn't a good idea to start with. But proximity matters, and so does sapience: maximum range with something which can think is about three body lengths. They can work at a larger distance with animals. Monsters... depends on the species."

I'm not a monster.

She was just angry, and so much of that was misplaced. Humans could feel so much like an entire species of bullies, throwing their weight against the world around them -- and when the very environment rebelled, their only battle cry seemed to be "Stop hitting me back!" It was too easy to see griffons the same way, she was wrong, and it would take time to learn that. At that moment, she was under a darkening sky at the training grounds, she had a target, it wasn't her fault if her instinctive reaction was to pull out a few feathers, and she set her jaw while she waited for the griffon to do his worst.

The griffon took off, slowly approached through the air. (She noticed it took more effort than it did for a pegasus, saw his wings flapping harder.) Came within range, and the huge eyes locked onto hers.

She waited.

This would be more disturbing if he had horizontal pupils.

She thought about that.

That was almost the worst part of looking at the statue. I'm not used to those. Are there liminals with horizontal pupils? I don't remember any...

Her lower back was sore. Her legs hurt. Her buttocks needed to take the rest of the week off and based on the ache, they wanted to do it some distance away from her.

I... could work some of that out by going for a gallop?

No, that was stupid. She was -- tired. More tired than she wanted the Sergeant to see. She'd been tired for --

-- the griffon blinked.

"Something wrong, Garet?" The Sergeant was being casual again. Cerea wasn't sure if the griffon knew to worry about that.

"I know it's not working,' emerged as a protest, and did so at the same instant she decided to label his current scent as fear. "I'm giving this everything I have. She's just -- standing there." Eye contact resumed for a second, was broken again as the griffon's gaze went down. "Standing there and breathing..."

"Any impulses right now, Recruit? Instincts?"

She wasn't initially going to tell him she'd thought about going around the track, mostly because she felt it would probably lead to him making her do it. And then she remembered how good he sometimes seemed to be at picking out when she hadn't quite said everything. "I wanted to exercise for a second. That was it."

The griffon, beak just barely cracked open and with feathers in disarray, heavily landed.

"Sounds like we're done here," the earth pony decided. "Thanks for coming out, Garet. We're even."

"Glad to hear it," a stunned voice announced. "I'll -- I'll just go to the shield edge and wait for somepony to let me out?"

The Sergeant nodded, and the griffon turned away. It took some time before the slow walk took him fully out of sight, and the tail's tuft never managed to get out of the grass.

"Same as the neurocypher," the Sergeant mused. "Wanted to see if it would happen twice. Just didn't bother telling him that. They're not getting into your head. Doesn't mean the next one won't manage it, but for now... two for two." He slowly shook his head. "Might have to line up another griffon. Garet's way up their scale, but... Okay, Recruit: that's it for today. Go wash up."

She trotted towards the building, breathing slowly in an attempt to help the anger subside. Several blonde strands fell in front of her face.

I need a new hairpin configuration.

She could try to come up with something brand-new in the morning. She always took them out when she went to sleep.

...even if they were spies, the ones she met on the training grounds were still just that: part of her training. In terms of direct interaction, that was all they were there for. She evaluated them, they did the same thing with her, and it didn't really lead to conversation.

There was one pony who had spoken to her regularly about topics which lay outside a single chosen subject. A single pegasus who had said

she would fight for me

and that mare sat a little further away every day.

Nightwatch didn't ask about what life had been like in Japan any more. Didn't want to see sketches. Didn't do anything but provide a list of vocabulary words while that dark tail twitched and silver eyes looked through Cerea.

Nightwatch wasn't her...
...she isn't.

She was tired. She wasn't sleeping well. She hurt all the time, and still she pounded at the metal as sweat poured off her in the heat of the forge. There was no chance for rest because there was too much to do, all Cerea could manage was to keep pushing because she couldn't afford to stop and the only mare in the world whose fear had been fading, the only one...

She never was...

Cerea couldn't talk to steel. But the steel was the only thing left.

If somepony had been speaking politely about it, they would have simply said that Luna was fully familiar with the issue of spontaneous magical effects being created through strong emotion. However, just about nopony spoke politely about it because when it came to that particular Princess issue, just about nopony talked about it at all. It usually took a Guard to point out when her frustration was threatening to turn some part of the palace into a skating rink, and there were a few among her defenders who were ready to fling themselves in front of spells to protect her, would give their lives for her, and still weren't up to the singular task of mentioning "It's c-c-c-cold in here..."

However, there was still truth within the unvoiced observation: Luna understood the issues behind thaum leakage. Multiple frosted windows could attest that it didn't give her any advantage in solving them on the personal level, but at least she knew what was going on and why.

She was moving through the Lunar Wing: something which was becoming increasingly solitary. Her sister's time was approaching, and that meant much of her staff was heading for the exits: ready to go home, make their dinners, and take some time for themselves before the blackout curtains were drawn against another day. For Luna's part, she had thirty-two minutes before Moon needed to be lowered, followed by meeting her sister in one of the dining rooms: the last meal for one, the first for the other.

It was the portion of the night used for wrapping up affairs: something which had her corona steadily fieldwriting notes on a separately-carried scroll. Things she needed to discuss with Celestia, along with a few matters which her sibling could review in solitude because none of them should be allowed to ruin a meal. Staff members passed her going the other way as she moved down the halls: most silently dodged the floating inkwell, a few wished her a pleasant sleep, and she politely returned the sentiment as a wall-hung ancient tapestry came into view --

-- a rippling tapestry.

She frowned, with nopony about to see. Closed the inkwell, looked at the fabric as it continued to shift in an increasing breeze. Noted the complete lack of windows in the area, then checked the local weave through pegasus sight.

It took about three minutes to find the end of the trail, along with a single second to make her reaction into something more suitable for the audience.

"I would generally respect the need for privacy," she stated as she entered the little library. "However, I suspect the contents of this particular reading room would also appreciate not being knocked from the shelves, and you are only a few gallops-per-hour of wind speed from potentially casting the very last working we need at this moment: another summoning spell."

The little black pegasus, torso armor now awkwardly seated due to the vibrations produced by the awkward, compulsive shifting of wings, looked up from where her belly and barrel had been pressed against the floor.

"Princess..." The wet silver eyes were wide, and something about the gaze felt -- helpless. "I'm sorry..."

"Admittedly, this one would merely cause Twilight Sparkle to appear," Luna allowed. "Which does not sound like all that great of a horror until one considers what I have had to do in order to prevent her from reorganizing my library. I am not willing to risk having her reshelve a single palace room, because that may cause her to feel as if permission has somehow been granted. Calm yourself, Nightwatch. The wind will cease once you pay attention to its existence."

Her Guard slowly tucked her wings back into a reluctant, trembling rest position. Breathed, as the alicorn slowly trotted closer, setting ink, quill, and scroll down on a nearby table before her field winked out. And then Luna lowered herself to the floor in parallel with the smaller body, less than the length of an outstretched wing away.

She understood such magics. Something which was still no assistance in permanently halting all such manifestations from herself -- but it helped her to tell when one had been created. And given that the cause was always emotion...

"You have been through much of late, Nightwatch," the dark mare quietly said, her own wings settling into position. "And the understatement was deliberate. I attempted to offer assistance before this, and I understand why it was refused. But you were one of the first Guards hired in this new era. We have trotted and flown together across a quartet of years. And I would hope, that given so much time, you would feel that... you are able to speak freely with me."

Black fur trembled. Outstretched forelegs shook.

"A lost home," Luna softly continued. "More than sufficient cause for some degree of slippage, and with a mare so skilled... the effects are more pronounced. But is there more?"

There was no answer.

"I offer you this for a boon," the dark alicorn told her Guard. "That you may speak without consequence until I leave this room, and the words will not follow. Nothing you voice shall be held against you. My word, Nightwatch. Do we know each other well enough that you will honor that?"

The pegasus took a deep, shuddering breath. More armor shifted.

"...I..."

Luna waited.

"...I didn't consider -- what everypony else was going to think..."

The dryness turned out to be unstoppable. "Yes. Well, it is certainly well-known that the opinions of others are far more important than any thoughts one might personally have --"

"-- they are when those opinions affect me!"

The tail lashed. Silver eyes, whose reaction went unnoticed by their possessor, shed more moisture.

"It's right there in every photograph, isn't it?" Nightwatch half-whispered, fur twisting against its own grain. "There's something which everypony only sees as a monster. And then there's me. I'm the one guarding the monster. Somepony who moves closer when something bad is happening to her. Protecting a destroyer, the thing which everypony just knows only exists to end the world..."

The alicorn was silent.

"And they ask themselves... what does that make me?" Trembling forelegs spread, gestured at nothing which was present. "I... I spend hours with her, I feel like I might know her better than anypony, and it doesn't matter! Nothing I know matters when nopony else will believe it! When the opinions of the herd are stronger than facts! Does it even matter what she really is, when all anypony can see is the worst which could ever exist? Hours with her, hours every night, and I have to keep telling myself that there's no monster, there never was one, but there is. There's a monster because all anypony sees is a monster and when they all see that... then that's what exists. I'm the one who's next to the monster. Who tries to explain what the world is like to it, who tries to make sure it's okay, who's guarding it! What kind of pony does that? Somepony who's just as bad? Worse, because she's betrayed her own species? Somepony who has to suffer for that choice, because she can't be part of the herd, maybe she can't even be a pony, maybe she deserves..."

Luna breathed. Doing nothing more than listening, as silent a witness as the scattered books.

The sleek head slowly lowered itself to the floor, with a foreleg pressing in on either side. A streamlined body shuddered, and armor continued to slip away.

"I can't do this any more," Nightwatch whispered. "I can't be the one who deals with this. Not when all anypony sees is a monster. I can't. I... I need to stop. Please. Let it be somepony else. It has to be..."

There was a flash of light.

The pegasus automatically looked up, blinked, tried to refocus, and quickly located her Princess. The alicorn's teleport hadn't taken her very far. Just to the edge of the room, right next to the doorway. Long legs slowly began to unfold.

"Do you wish to remain a Guard?" Soft.

Nightwatch blinked.

"Yes."

"Very well." The alicorn finished getting up. "I will not deny my regrets. I had thought... that after so much time..."

The dark Princess took a slow breath. Her horn ignited, fetching the notes back, and did so as the stars in her mane dimmed.

"But I shall respect your decision," she finished. "After Moon is lowered, I will attend the morning meeting with Princess Celestia. At that time, I will inform her of your desire to switch to the Solar shift --"

It was just barely a whisper. "-- what?

"-- and I am certain she will accept. She had already considered filching you once, after all." More softly, "Which means we are unlikely to interact again in such a fashion, so in the event that our paths do not cross -- good day to you, Nightwatch. And a good life."

A metal-clad left forehoof shifted. Began to move across the threshold --

"-- Princess!"

Luna stopped.

"Was there something else?"

Six limbs scrambled to get their owner upright, and did so in open, frantic, stumbling desperation. "It... I don't understand how you -- I don't want to leave you! You're my Princess! I...!"

The alicorn's eyes slowly closed. Opened again.

"Ah," she said. "Yes, upon further consideration, it is possible to reframe your words. I will see what can be done." Started to trot --

Standing now, but with posture helpless, hopeless, every fur strand on edge, straining for a comprehension which would not come. "...Princess?"

And the alicorn paused.

"My apologies," Luna offered in the last instant before she departed for the meeting. "I could have sworn you were talking about me."

Combative

It had taken some effort to arrange the meeting with the overweight unicorn mare, and part of that had been from the need to make sure nopony else ever knew it had taken place.

(This had already failed.)

She had some fame in the city, at least for those who lacked the capacity for spelling 'notoriety': take the shrill voice, the flanks whose shaking bulges occasionally seemed to be trying to produce another CUNET member through budding, and that rotted-pearl coat which went with so very little... it was fairly easy to spot her. That was one of the reasons she seldom went out in public without the company of at least six shielding ponies, because Mrs. Panderaghast lived in the real world. She had spent most of her adult life creating it, and the best way to make sure it was real was to have others reinforcing it at all times.

She had built the border from Truth, which was defined as something she told herself. Furthermore, because she knew more than anypony else (which meant unicorns: the others were hardly ponies at all), then whatever somepony so incredibly intelligent deduced on her own had to qualify as Fact. Mrs. Panderaghast knew how others tried to treat Fact, which was by using all of the information. This didn't sit well with her, because those kinds of facts seemed to have an anti-Panderaghast bias. The way you got real Facts was to simply pick those things which you liked and separate them from any inconvenient context.

Take, for example, one of her single most frequent: griffon crime statistics. She generally used those to make the argument that somepony needed to order griffons out of Canterlot, Equestria, and perhaps there was a perfectly suitable extra planet out there somewhere. Mrs. Panderaghast had proven that all griffons were violent, because every last one of them had a criminal record. And when she put it that way (occasionally mentioning that it was backed up by data the police had collected), then how could anypony argue? It was just a casual vault of logic to move from 'criminal' to 'are going to start eating ponies as soon as they get the chance, maybe they're even doing it now and we haven't caught them at it, are there any unsolved disappearances in your area...?' and that sort of thing did a lot to encourage proper treatment of griffons. There just wasn't any point to mentioning that said records were typically juvenile, with nearly all of the charges labeled as Public Nuisance and the local courts knew to forgive them because when it came to establishing one's place in the world, griffon puberty was just a little more tumultuous than the average. However, as that was something ponies occasionally brought up, Mrs. Panderaghast had several defenses ready: ignoring it, declaring them as liars, or just making sure she would never be in a place where somepony could contradict her.

And unicorn superiority? That was self-evident! Unicorns could do anything which any other species was capable of, including those who had been falsely labeled as 'sapient'. She recognized that any number of discoveries had been quashed: things which would let unicorns replicate lesser magic, and it was amazing how those who were inferior managed to just keep getting one over on their superiors. The evidence for this? Was the fact that said magic hadn't been replicated. Clearly the only way that would be possible was if someone was stopping them, covering it up, attacking the creators of those spells... and of course all of those efforts had the support of the palace, because how else could they succeed all the time? You couldn't trust the palace. Mrs. Panderaghast had dealt with both sisters, and so knew they were not proper unicorns. The wings were a corruptive influence. She knew that for a Fact.

(She also knew that if she ever wound up with wings, she would prove immune to such corruption. Her heart was pure. But it still didn't change the fact that an alicorn was something like a pegasus and unicorn put together. It had to do something cruel to the blood. Still, she knew for an additional Fact that there couldn't be the smallest drop of earth pony in there, because telling herself anything else would have destroyed her.)

When you understood enough things, you recognized the true nature of reality. And then you further established that reality by surrounding yourself with those who agreed with you, so that the Truth was reinforced at all times. Mrs. Panderaghast had created a bubble of reality so solid that on the rare occasions when she had to venture out of it, it was almost possible to hear the pop. Less skilled ears generally had to wait for the screaming, because a mare who claimed that all who held her beliefs were endlessly discriminated against tended to find that those outside CUNET responded to her presence through proving her correct.

She didn't believe in equal rights, because she didn't believe in equals. She in no way thought anything which wasn't a unicorn had the right to claim full sapience. And she regarded windigos as a myth created to scare children into treating inferiors as something other.

Mrs. Panderaghast knew windigos weren't real. She also didn't venture out all that much during the winter, and knew for a Fact it was because pegasi didn't have the common decency to let their inferior abilities make the world into an eternal spring: something which she had told herself would do the planet no harm whatsoever. She was a pony who knew many things and in this case, she knew she hadn't been followed.

She'd reached her destination ten minutes ago. The other unicorn mare in the damp, dirty cellar (a place where Mrs. Panderaghast normally wouldn't have been caught dead and sadly, this made it the ideal place to be) was still talking.

"It's not my fault," the younger mare said for the third time. "I'm innocent."

Mrs. Panderaghast nodded. There were things you did during this sort of discussion, and nodding was most of it. The majority of the remainder was having an alibi which put her bobbing head a very large distance away.

"It was just a warning. A crime is a deliberate act, right?" With increasing volume aimed through the tones of emerging personal Truth, "I didn't mean to commit a crime, so there couldn't have been one!"

Another nod -- but this one was slightly uneven. The overweight mare lived in a bubble of reality, the True reality, which incidentally made it the one which had to be enforced upon the rest of the world. She had spread that bubble over others, making it larger and stronger. But unlike some of those who had been enticed by words which felt as if they made those who listened better, loving whispers which told them having a horn was the best thing about them and so they didn't really need anything else -- she retained some awareness of what life was like on the outside. You couldn't fight an enemy which you hadn't told yourself you understood.

Perhaps only a corrupted court would have disagreed with the mare's reasoning. But with the Princesses in charge, that was all of them.

Mrs. Panderaghast occasionally wondered why those who were intelligent enough to be her followers didn't consider things like that.

"Aren't some of the feather-dusters capable of moving heat?" the younger mare abruptly asked. "For all the good that pitiful so-called magic ever does, since it won't stop snow. Maybe she knew the fire was out there."

It was also amazing, just how quickly some of the newest recruits could talk. It was as if they were trying to prevent themselves from getting a word in edgewise.

"She moves the heat, she moves the fire," the younger mare frantically continued. "It's so obvious! She burned her apartment, to make us look bad! I was just posting a warning!"

Another nod. You didn't disagree with your own members unless they were saying something Wrong. And as a matter of general principle, you also didn't argue with a mare whose horn was now sparking so wildly as to cast most of the cellar into amethyst disarray.

"So anything which happens to the foal is her fault --"

The overweight mare knew she hadn't been followed. She knew this as strongly as the Fact that when compared to having everypony see sense about the centaur, the foal wasn't important, and so her stomach had no reasonable excuse for just having flipped over.

It had been the trot. A trot under a heavy concealing cloak did bad things to the stomach. Unicorns weren't meant for that kind of exercise. Teleports and self-levitation were superior, and the fact that she could perform neither magic didn't lower her status in any way. She was still a unicorn. She had the potential to master those workings, because learning capacity was a palace-created myth designed to keep unicorns down. Yet another Fact.

Mrs. Panderaghast had applied to the Gifted School in her youth. The Fact of her non-attendance had been laid at the hooves, talons, feet, and existence of guest lecturers. There was no need to treat her actual test results as Truth.

"-- don't talk about the foal."

"Why not?" Too sharply, because newborn Fact had a way of cutting. "It's the feather-duster's fault!"

"Don't."

The sparks dimmed.

"I'm innocent," the mare repeated. "But nopony understands that. I've been sneaking around for days. They know it was a unicorn."

Because you used your field. Why would you use your field, when somepony could get your signature?

(Part of her recruiting speech was the moment when she told them that they didn't have to use their mouths and hooves. They were too good for that. Superior.)

"And I was afraid to go home. So it's been hiding, until I managed to contact somepony. Somepony who agreed to get you here..."

I didn't know it was going to be you. All he told me was that a member was in trouble. If he'd told me who it was...

Plausible deniability. Anything felt plausible when Mrs. Panderaghast said it, but there were persistent rumors of spells which detected the lesser variety of truth, and a plant imported by zebras (because of course it was going to be the witches) which you shouldn't stand near. If anyone asked her whether she'd met the mare...

"I need help," that mare insisted.

The foal...

"Are they looking for you specifically?"

The tail was starting to wring itself. "I don't know. I passed a few ponies on the way down, but everypony was starting to run at that point. They may have just thought I was a visitor for somepony in the building."

They might have told the investigators about a stranger. Fur, mane, eye colors. Build. Wearing saddlebags to carry supplies. They already have species.

"The first thing to do," Mrs. Panderaghast ordered, "is getting you out of the city --"

It triggered a hoof stomp, and petulance vibrated the dust in the rafters. "This is my home! I shouldn't be forced out of my home! I didn't do anything --"

"-- because the investigation will be focused on Canterlot. We might be able to use the Grand Gymkhana. Put you on a train." An ugly necessity: trains were supposedly the invention of an earth pony. It was enough to make an intelligent being wonder which unicorn he'd stolen the idea from. "But we'll have to use fur dye. Get you dressed, put you in a hat. And you can't use your field. Mouth manipulation only --"

"-- a hat?" Which dislodged clumps of outrage from overhead, making them fall into both mares' manes. "Like some kind of earth pony? Touching things --"

"-- you used your field." There was no time left for subtlety. "Did you hide your signature? Distort it?"

The mare blinked.

"I... you can do that?"

It was possible. It also required a degree of field dexterity which only existed on the far right of the scale, and Mrs. Panderaghast longed for a single CUNET member who could manage the trick. "They'll have made an occlugraph! Of your real signature! Legally, they'll have a hard time forcing you to use your field unless there's a warrant. But the train station is one of the places they'll be looking, and if you just use your magic on your own, and they can compare it to their reading... that's it. They know it was you at that door..."

And shortly after that, they'll know she's a CUNET member.

She could find the membership paperwork. Burn it. Disavow in advance.

But she would have mailed letters to the palace. I make them all mail letters...

"Acting like an earth pony." The petulance was now threatening to light up the cellar, and the older mare glanced up: checking for any windows which might be set just above the dirt. "Bad enough that I'm hiding underground. I want the network: there's no risk there. Somepony can teleport me out --"

"The escort network," Mrs. Panderaghast cut in, "will have been told to look for unicorn mares leaving the city." The network also cost money, because unicorns who could take others with them through the between were a resource and if you couldn't pay for it, that resource started to feel like a very limited one. The older mare knew exactly how much money CUNET took in, and so also knew the best way to continuously track that total was through keeping just about all of it.

"But they're unicorns! If any of them are members --"

If she's caught...

"You may have to take the day trip on hoof," the organization's leader decided. And it would be best to do so with company, because they would be looking for a mare traveling alone. A false family could be constructed around her --

-- more ponies who knew the mare. Who knew what she had done. Who could, under sufficient duress, lash their tails in the very specific direction of the starting point.

"Trotting --"

"-- and a day trip means Ponyville. Close enough that we can keep an eye on you --"

"-- it's got an earth pony majority! Just having to... be there... if one of them starts trouble because I say something perfectly reasonable..."

Steadfastly, "You could beat them."

The younger mare eventually nodded. All CUNET members knew that any unicorn could defeat an earth pony, and made sure that particular Fact maintained by arranging for a personal reality in which they never really had to deal with any.

"Still..." she whined.

"Stay in the cellar tonight," Mrs. Panderaghast told her. "It's secure."

"This is dirty! I wanted to come to your house --"

"-- and we'll move you in the morning."

The younger mare blinked again. Her ears went back, forward again. The tail shifted a few times.

"It's just for the night?"

Mrs. Panderaghast nodded.

"I guess. It's just so dirty..."

"I have to leave," the organization's head stated. "To start making the arrangements."

One last little hoof stomp, something ten years younger than the mare, and so it matched her emotional age exactly. "...fine."

The overweight unicorn turned to leave, corona adjusting her traveling cloak to shadow more of her features. It meant covering her horn, but -- there were things you had to do when there was trouble. The younger mare didn't understand that.

She can be connected to us.
She's the sort who can slip.
She might talk without spells.

Her legs were giving her some trouble on the ramp. She didn't know who had invented those, but suspected earth ponies. That could be a Fact, once she got a little more Truth behind it.

If I knew it was her waiting for me...
There's a foal.

It was a fact: griffons were meat-eaters. It was a Fact that you could terrify ponies by making them believe they were on the menu. And just for a second, Mrs. Panderaghast considered it a pity that there were no cellar-hosted voracious violations of the Treaty Of Menagerie due in the next three hours.

"It's not fair," the younger mare whined in the general direction of a slowly-twitching tail. "Having to go through all this. Trapped in what's practically a cell. And does it really have to be Ponyville? I heard they let dragons live there! Even the capital got rid of the dragon!"

The older mare tried to trot faster, and found her speed was actually improving. But it wasn't due to any sudden surge of strength, or tapping into a previously-unknown well of fitness. The words were chasing her up the ramp.

"I'm innocent..."

She forced her legs to accelerate as she exited the gatehouse which had been built just inside the shield edge, well away from the general approach path. Made her spine go straight, and blinked a few times in order to clear any residual blur.

Cerea was getting used to teleports or at least, she was now fairly accustomed to telling herself that. But she'd been told that the Sergeant didn't want her on the training grounds until it was ninety minutes before sunset. She hadn't been able to catch up on sleep (and it felt like she was barely sleeping at all), waking hours had been available and...

There were those who said it was possible to lose true thought in the midst of manual labor, become nothing more than a drone whose biological machinery had been created to complete the task. Cerea had thought about that as she began a new round of hammering in the forge, and then those thoughts had led to all of the others.

She was in pain, and it was something centaur resilience didn't seem to be helping. She'd been in pain for --

It doesn't matter.

-- a while. But it was something which would get better on its own, because that was how a true centaur healed. And it was also something the Sergeant couldn't be allowed to see.

She never knew just where he would be when she arrived at the grounds: out of sight for the protestors, but still within hearing range. That meant it was best to square her shoulders immediately, force herself fully upright while trying to put a little shift into her tail. And in this case, her timing turned out to be precise, because he was a few meters away from the gatehouse doors.

"Probably wondering why it's starting so late today," the old stallion immediately began.

She nodded. "Yes, Sergeant." Her longest-lasting guess had been meeting with something nocturnal.

His hooves made a point of not shuffling, and the words emerged as something edged.

"Live combat exercise. Against ponies."

Which got her tail moving all by itself, and she managed to stop the blonde fall just before it lashed against her right flank. Today? And this was all the advance notice she was getting? If she'd known, if she'd had a little more time to work on strategies --

"That's a new skirt. And it's singed," the Sergeant off-handedly -- off-hoofedly? -- noted. "You were in the forge today?"

She nodded.

Neutrally, "How long?"

"I..." She wasn't sure what the right answer was. "...I had some hours... I wanted to..."

The brown eyes regarded her, forehooves to scalp and back again.

"Go to the training barracks," he instructed her. "Take what you think you'll need. Then report to the track."

It was all waiting for her. However, some of it was outside the locker: even folded, the padding just took up that much room.

She put it on carefully, while wondering if getting the morning clothing delivery from Ms. Garter should have been her first clue. This had been brought to the training grounds: dropping off the skirt had been incidental. The old mare had to have been working on it for... a while now...

...how long?

She wasn't sure. Since shortly after the training began: that was obvious enough. But there were ways in which the sessions felt endless. Days blurred into each other, while hours serrated trails through her fur before extracting their toll of sweat and froth. She was just... tired. She'd remember how long it had been after she'd gotten some sleep.

I have to sleep.
When I'm tired enough, that's when I'll really sleep.
When I'll stop waking up over and over.

Fighting ponies would make her tired. So the fight was a good thing.

The padding... it was a good fit, but it had also come up against the issue which the Sergeant had predicted: it was hard to shield her through puffed-out brown fabric without restricting her joints. The cloth armor was thinnest around shoulders (both sets), hips, elbows, knees, and upper waist -- but it still cost her some range, and the loss of cotton wadding also made those areas vulnerable. Additionally, the padding stopped at her wrists: it was gloves after that, and thin ones: the patchwork she used in the smithy didn't allow her the finer grip required for a weapon.

Connected panels of stiffer fabric protected her flanks and lower torso. (She wasn't sure what the material was: just that it wasn't leather. She hadn't seen leather once since her arrival, and suspected getting it from the standard source might create a charge of murder.) Some minor contortions were required to get her forelegs into the padded tubes, and then she nearly pulled half her muscles while trying to don those for the hind: the only way to do it alone turned out to be finding some loose repair rope for the obstacle courses, tie, and haul.

The locker... her sword was waiting for her, as were the plastic hairpins. She'd initially found the latter when the sword had been moved to the grounds, and felt that somepony in the palace had dictated that they had to be shifted together. The hairpins couldn't be teleported any more than the sword could, and she'd discovered that ponies weren't exactly happy about being touched by one in the wine cellar. But using a hairpin as a weapon wasn't easy, and... all things considered, it usually just meant that she had the easiest time managing her hair when she was training.

However, in a fight...

How many ponies? At least two, because the plural was already there. And it wouldn't necessarily be one at a time. Cerea's guess was a trio: one from each of the more populous species. (They hadn't talked about fighting alicorns, and her current theory for that was 'either royal bloodline, small population, or extremely rare recessives': either way, there weren't enough readily available for sparring.) A trio would include a unicorn.

So some of the pins went into her tail, with some effort at concealing them within a fall of hair which desperately needed a trim: it would give any yanking corona some trouble. The majority of the remainder were placed into the human section of her non-mane, and she risked placing one on the grip of a bola. Just in case.

Weaponry? That was harder. There was a selection waiting for her, and... presuming one from each species

which isn't safe
it could be less, it could be more
this is probably the day they tell me seaponies are real and then push me into a lake

then she had to choose accordingly. But there was only so much she could carry before things started getting tangled up with each other: her lower torso might give her the option of draping items along her flanks, but those things moved when she did and if the arrangement wasn't secure, the jostling could do more damage than the ponies. The bolas felt like a necessity, she needed a few of the spheres for pegasi and that meant bags attached to her upper waist, the sling took up virtually no room and still needed stones...

She couldn't bring everything, and whatever she did take was probably wrong.

Cerea chose carefully, arranged everything as best she could. Looked around the locker area for signs of previous pony presence and found nothing. Made one last check --

-- something's missing.

She had her sword. Secondary weapons were ready to bring down the Sergeant's wrath once he told her what she should have taken. The pins were in place, and they would give her head a measure of defense against direct attacks: she suspected they were largely responsible for having fended off the griffon's efforts, had probably done the same with the neurocypher, and wasn't sure whether to tell anypony because that would mean going through another griffon --

-- head protection.

There was no helmet.

She looked around again. There was no reason to expect anything of boiled leather, and just about as much of one for somepony to tell her about the resulting trial.

It was eventually located under a bench, having apparently become flung out when she'd unfurled the padding. And that was when she discovered where Ms. Garter's skills ran out.

She'd been hoping for something like a martial artist's practice gear, because that was mostly padding: the main issue would have been having the bulge of eye-rims block some of her vision. And in fact, that was the sort of thing which the seamstress had envisioned. The old unicorn, who wasn't used to creating anything which went above the neck (and as Cerea would later learn, was working so far outside the realm of her very specialized mark as to have sent her own magic into confusion), had just forgotten about a few minor details.

Like the fact that Cerea's ears were on the sides of her head.
Or that a centaur's eyes were set a little more forward. And smaller. Much, much smaller.
On the bright side, the bulge of padding at the front would have done an excellent job at protecting the snout she didn't actually have.

She tried putting it on. Her ears responded through arranging a meet-and-greet with her eyes, because two major sources of sensory input really needed to know each other a little better. For starters, her ears now wanted to tell everyone that they were in pain. A lot of it.

The post-desperate-removal thing to do was attempting emergency modifications. This was done by tearing off a few of the things which weren't supposed to be there, creating holes for that which actually was there, and Cerea considered herself to be making near-miraculous progress right up until the moment when the whole thing fell apart in her hands.

She stared at the fragments for a while. Let the remaining pieces drop from her palms, then slowly trotted out of the secondary barracks, heading for the track.

It had taken her about forty minutes to prepare: something she knew had been too long. The sun was low in the autumn sky, with bands of shield-distorted purple and orange streaking across a view which was fast approaching night. And she was trotting too slowly, because she had to save her strength for two things: the fight itself, and the moment she came over the little ridge into the Sergeant's view.

I'm tired.

She could be tired later.

I hurt.

A real centaur would push through it.

It's just a fight...

A sparring match. She could get through one of those.

If I win, maybe I'll be that much closer to being a Guard.

She didn't know if she could win.

If I lose, maybe they won't be so afraid of me.

She would have to watch for her tail: even if she'd managed to protect it from a corona, somepony's teeth could still grab it.

I should have done more tail exercises. She'd been trying a few in the forge, but... they hadn't gotten through the whole book --

don't think about her
not now

-- and so Cerea didn't have all of the necessary material.

My tail hurts.

It made sense for the base, and anything which extended as bone and muscle. She wasn't sure how that was even possible for the hair --

-- the ridge was in sight. Her shoulders squared.

The Sergeant, as the only pony in the center of the empty oval, took his time about surveying her.

"No helmet?" emerged when she was about fifteen meters away.

Which meant her choice of weapons was so poor as to be beyond shouts.

"It... wasn't suitable for use," Cerea replied.

He thought about that.

"Not happy about putting you out there without a helmet," he decided. (It didn't surprise her. She didn't really know what happy ponies looked like, because her presence didn't inspire that emotion. And if she had been aware, she was fairly certain that none of it would have applied to the old stallion.) "We can make it a rule: nopony aims for your head with anything past a bruising kick. And you could wind up in fights where the helmet isn't there to start with. But accidents still happen. I can put this back together for another day if you want to wait."

If I can't guard my head, I don't deserve to pass.

It was the sort of thought which felt as if it made perfect sense. Many things did when you were tired.

"I'd rather do it tonight, Sergeant," was the vocal end of that. "It's better than asking everypony to come out twice."

Where were they? Hidden by some kind of magic? About to come over the ridge behind her? Three: it had to be three --

-- he was looking at her again.

"Your call," he eventually decided. "Better not be the last one. EVERYPONY, COME OUT! I WANT HOOVES ON THE GROUND AROUND ME ON THE COUNT OF EIGHT AND IF YOU ACTUALLY NEED TO HEAR ME TO KNOW HOW LONG THAT COUNT TAKES, THEN YOU WILL BE IN A REMEDIAL TRAINING COURSE BEFORE THE END OF THE MOON! I WANT TO HEAR HOOVES POUND THE DIRT! FEATHERS FLYING! AND I WANT IT --"

There were three, emerging from the treeline. One did so by swooping out of the canopy.

Then there were four.

Six.

...no...

And by the time the last touched down six meters away from the Sergeant's left flank, she'd already lost.

There were nine of them. The only thing she'd gotten right in her prediction was that there was an equal balance from each race. And they were all Guards, every last one of them was a Guard, she spotted Acrolith, it was the first time she'd seen Bulkhead since just before the press conference, she had no idea who at least half of them were and it was too many, she was tired and in pain and it was going to be just like Palimyno all over again because she couldn't face down numbers like this. Even going one at a time, there were too many -- and that wasn't what was going to happen.

They were going to attack as a herd. Nine of them against one of her. Because the Sergeant wanted to see if she'd improved since Palimyno, she couldn't have improved that much, no one could and she'd already lost.

She lost because the last pegasus to touch down had been Nightwatch.

Silver eyes looked at her from the shadows of the metal helmet. Looked through.

The girl stood her ground, because it was the last thing she could still do. And as so many huge eyes stared out from the center of a cloud created by fear and anger, there was rage in that cloud and some of it had to have been created by Tirek, misplaced and aimed at the closest thing available, but a portion had to belong with Cerea alone because it was Nightwatch standing stock-still with her wings perfectly at rest and body waiting like a coiled spring, and there was so much rage...

"Explains the hour, right?" the Sergeant placidly asked from the center. "Along with the group. Solars getting ready to go off-shift, Lunars arriving a little early. Mixed crew. Every last one of them volunteered for this."

The unvoiced joke (which had no humor in it at all) was something she'd been thinking about since he'd first mentioned that there would be combat against ponies: Right. You said 'You, you're volunteering!' and they said 'Yes, Sarge!' But... it was Nightwatch...

The little knight's wings were still. And scents could be as personal as anything else: there were ways in which all pony fear smelled the same, but there were little touches in the olfactory world which helped to identify the source. The wings were as still as the air beneath the shield, there was rage and --

-- some of it was blazing from those steadfast silver eyes.

"Some volunteered early," the old stallion casually added. "Picked one up last-minute. Arranged to take over from somepony else. But they all volunteered for this, and they've all been through it from the other side. Against each other. Guards who aren't here, Guards who've left, Guards who are gone. Some of them had to face down Tirek. Buying time, so the Princesses could escape. Because that is the duty."

There was more fear in the air now, laced with memory. Part of the surge rose from a dark orange pegasus on the mid-left, somepony in silver armor, and a pony Cerea didn't know.

She didn't really know any of them.

"They knew you were training to fight them, Recruit. What does that tell you?"

There didn't seem to be any moisture on her tongue.

"IS THERE A PROBLEM WITH THE DISC?"

She had the answer. It was too obvious not to see, and that was why she hadn't thought of it until she absolutely had to. She simply didn't want to say it, because doing so would destroy everything.

It's practical.
they'll never
It's what they had to do.
this is about acceptance, about having anypony accept me and
It's what... my mother would have done...
she isn't scared
everypony is scared except the Sergeant and her
she's just angry

"...they've --"

"OR IS IT JUST YOUR VOICE? SOUND OFF LIKE YOU'VE --"

It took nearly everything she had to say it, and then it took out a loan against a future which had very little to give.

"...they've been training to fight me."

He nodded.

"Close enough," the Sergeant allowed. "Not like they could have a live scrimmage, because I still do not know where to get another centaur! But fair's fair, Recruit. You know something about what they can do, so they had a little talk about you! Plotted out some tactics together! Some very active debates, as I understand it! I have very little idea as to how much of it will actually work, especially as one portion was just about as last-minute as it could be without venturing into tomorrow! And for that part, I will admit to disappointment! You have been keeping a secret, Recruit, and not telling your sergeant or fellow Guards --"

It should have been impossible to hear the two derisive snorts through his volume. She didn't understand why it was nearly the only thing she heard at all.

not my fellow Guards
I won't pass
I can't pass
there's nine of them, the only question is how long it takes before they make me drop and then I'm
not anything because

"-- about what you can really do presents a risk to all of you! But that is a discussion we will be having later and rest assured, we will be having it! For now --"

She didn't know what he was talking about. She'd kept the Second Breath concealed, but there was no way for anypony to have guessed at it. And she couldn't seem to think about what it might be, because...

for every last one of them
I'm just a monster

"To those who have been through my tutelage before this," the Sergeant bellowed under the dimming sky, "I would like to call your attention to her head! We have apparently been through a minor failure of protection composition, and yet she is willing to proceed!"

They were in golden armor. Silver armor, reflecting what was left of the sunlight back to her eyes. Real armor.

"So if you are aiming high," he shouted on, "you pull your kicks and everything else when striking above the neck! She is going to show me how she does not kill you! It would be a courtesy for you to return the favor! More resistance to impact than a pegasus or unicorn, but less than an earth pony! Act accordingly! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"

It emerged from nine throats as a single voice.

"YES, SERGEANT!"

And then the herd fell silent. Waiting.

The old stallion looked at Cerea, eyes almost lost under the brim's shadow. It didn't matter. His eyes weren't the important ones.

"Last chance, Recruit." It wasn't a whisper, or pitched to reach her ears alone. Normal speaking volume -- but after all which had come before, it felt as if she had to strain for every word. "Nine of them. One of you. And you can just trot back to the barracks. Drop it all off, head for the gatehouse, and wait to be taken back. Nopony's blocking you. Step back. Or step forward. Your choice. You can tell me you just want to wait for better headgear, and I'll listen. But that's the only excuse. And once you make any other choice, you don't get to take it back."

She was going to fail.
I always fail.
There was no way to succeed. Not a single scenario where she won, and she would be doing well just to finish in ninth.
She hates me.
She was always going to hate me.
Her body hurt.
Her heart hurt.
Everything...
Get it over with.

The centaur took one hoofstep forward.

Outsider

Natural light slowly decreased, and did so even as natural colors returned.

There was a delay between commitment and combat, one which involved the adjustment of the future battlefield. The shield had been opened, at least for the upper level -- or rather, it had been reshaped. The Sergeant had told her about shields: the rough percentage of unicorns among the population who could cast one, along with how they were formed. They were generally immobile structures which had to be anchored, and the most natural shape was a dome: casters really couldn't maintain them as a flat plane. In this case, somepony talented outside the rim was shifting the energies into something closer to a ring. It was a risky step, because it gave any pegasi among the protesters the chance to make a break for the center -- but there were additional fliers posted beyond the training grounds, along with unicorns who were strong enough to pull somepony out of the sky.

A risky step -- but a required one. Three Guards needed full access to their own weapons, and that meant atmosphere had to resume its normal flow. It was the first time Cerea had felt an autumn breeze against skin and fur at the training grounds. (The speed trials supervised by the dark Princess had taken place on an exceptionally warm night.) The coolness did a little to soothe her aches, and it wasn't anywhere near enough -- but the breeze also made her a little more alert. And the process of opening the shield bought her time. Precious minutes in which to think about what would happen next.

She couldn't win: she knew that. She wasn't sure the Sergeant was expecting her to, because it was one against nine Guards. Palimyno's attacking mob

don't let them surround me

had been mostly composed from civilians, with a few police officers kicked (and kicking) in. These were not only trained combatants, but the ones who had found the Sergeant's acceptance. And if he'd gone looking for ponies he could make volunteer, he would have started with some of the strongest.

Nightwatch is strong...

She couldn't win, and the normally-loathed ranking of second place felt completely out of reach. But she didn't want to finish in tenth. They would take her down, because it was nine against one -- but there might be a chance to thin those numbers a little. And with time available, minutes in which she could think about fighting against a herd...

Cerea had some previous experience with that and as with just about everything else, it was something which had seen her lose. But she now understood more about the why. She would be attacked by magic once again -- while possessing some understanding of how that magic operated. It was possible to take the Sergeant's lessons and overlay them with the memories from Palimyno. The end product of those older attacks remained magic: it was just that she now recognized how a few of the tricks had been done.

Along with why some of them hadn't been used at all.

The pegasi probably won't try for major weather effects unless everypony else is clear. Using hail and heavy rain against me is going to mean targeting everypony else on the ground: a personal cloud would run out too fast and needs one pegasus directing it at all times, probably while in contact. That's another reason wind is the primary attack and even then, they might disorient their own with bad aim or if they're in the line of fire. So if they can't surround me, they might look for their chance when I'm isolated.

She couldn't be near too many of them without risking an overwhelm, and she couldn't back off too far without begging for a private drenching. This seemed to suggest a need to stay in proximity to at least one pony at nearly all times, and that meant she was always at risk of being kicked...

I don't know which spells the unicorns have. But if they're Guards, some of them have to be useful in combat. Even basic telekinesis is trouble. The smart ones will go for my ears, pull on one hoof: he said that. Guards are going to be smart. I need to be constantly aware of any coronas being projected towards me and move the sword to intercept.

Cerea, waiting at the far end of the oval, at the greatest possible distance from the little army on the other side, silently added that to all of the other things she needed to be constantly aware of.

Nightwatch is supposed to be better with wind than just about anypony else --

-- what do the earth ponies do, in a group like this? Primary close-up assault? Get me distracted fending them off, so the long-range magical attacks can start unnoticed?

Nine of them.

This is combat, but it's also sparring. Non-lethal attacks.

...there's still nine of them.

Nine Guards huddled at the other side of the oval, making plans for dealing with her. Not that they really needed one, when it was nine of them...

...Nightwatch is wearing saddlebags. There has to be something in there. But if it was a normal weapon, like a hoofblade or razorwhip, she would have put it on already. So what is she carrying?

There was a natural breeze blowing towards her: she was downwind from the herd, and the direction of the wind was a coincidence Cerea was willing to use. She was breathing deeply (and already knew that the Second Breath was just as much a lost cause as victory: adrenaline could assist her for a little while and push aside some of the aches, but she was just so tired). Memorizing, because the miasma of fear had eight identifiable components. The... anger would be easier to track.

That breeze rustled through her hair: carefully-arranged pins kept it in place. She'd gone for a bun style, and the rapid growth meant she now had a back bulge which was a few weeks away from trying to match the forward ones. But stray strands could potentially be grabbed, bitten...

She pictured a pony jumping onto her lower back and trying to bite the bun, getting a mouthful of hairpins. It made her worry about the consequences of having that pony swallow, just before she wondered why anypony would have even jumped onto that part of her in the first place. Besides, her lower back was one of the worst places to be. When it came to grips for staying mounted, even the unicorns would be down to their mouths. She could get rid of a rider, and do so much more easily than with a human.

Nine of them.

Sixth place: she was going to try for that. She would consider herself to be on the slightly less offensive side of failure if she could somehow manage to stop four of them. It wouldn't be enough for the Sergeant and a single night of poor sleep would show her all the things she should have done, but at least she would know she'd tried.

She was trying to figure out initial moves, and knew the others were doing the same: working on their own, along with trying to predict hers. But she wondered if that was as far as they were willing to commit for an absolute list of tactics, because there was a fact of combat so basic as to have made its way into a human saying. It could generally be assumed that if humans had worked it out, then everyone had.

No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.

She could think. She could create an internal list of contingencies and try to act accordingly. But once it started, she would mostly be making it up as she went along. And somehow, that felt like failure.

There wasn't much sunlight left now: perhaps half an hour's worth. Cerea distantly wondered if the Sergeant had chosen any of the unicorns because their coronas were the same hue as the dimming sky, just to make things that much harder to pick out.

"Waiting for me to count it down, Recruit?"

It took a second for her to focus on his words. "No, Sergeant."

"And why not?"

"Fights start when they start, Sergeant."

He never smiled. He didn't really laugh. But he wasn't bad at barking, and so that was how the sound emerged: as something with no true humor within.

"HA! THIS GOES UNTIL YOU STOP THEM, THEY STOP YOU, OR I CALL A STOP! THERE IS A STEP WHICH COMES AFTER FIGHTING AGAINST GUARDS! LET US SEE IF YOU CAN REACH IT! GO!"

The herd broke formation, with the pegasi moving forward and up. Horns ignited, the earth ponies took the ground lead as the fastest sprinters, almost got ahead of the first corona projections and Cerea was already drawing the sword, swatted away the first burst of violet light and saw that unicorn stagger, but there were still eight of them coming at full speed, something which was increasing and --

-- the coronas could move faster than the ponies. The same could be said for some of the wind gusts, and she could see wings weaving in patterns meant to rechannel available momentum while adding the pegasi's strength to the air: cumulative strength. She was up against a herd, one which knew how to work together. The first goal had to be surrounding her. Taking her down with sheer force of numbers, something which would be all too easy to do within the cleared terrain of the racing track.

She'd thought about what that would mean for her first move. The only thing she could truly control.

"Sergeant! She's retreating! She's --" and Cerea's rather unusual style of gallop allowed her to see the moment when Acrolith swallowed. "-- how is she running like that? How can anything --"

The answer was not easily. Cerea wasn't sure how many centaurs were capable of it, and the fact that she'd had to be self-taught probably meant it was normally useless. But there had been a time in her life when she'd -- been planning for something, and it had required being able to watch for as long as possible.

In terms of jointing, it was at least vaguely manageable. When it came to natural instincts, it left select portions of her mind screaming at the rest, and she had to resist the urge to turn her head as far as it would go because four legs were still vulnerable to one stone in just the wrong place. She had trouble looking straight down without involving some awkward twisting, going this way had even more blocking the view and no matter what she tried to tell her own form, a centaur body knew it wasn't supposed to be running backwards.

Turning her head was out of the question. The corona projections were still coming, and she deflected the next one away: it had been aimed low, towards her left forehoof. She had to watch for those --

"-- IT'S NOT A RETREAT! SHE'S HEADING PAST THE TREELINE! GETTING OUT OF THE OPEN! SO WHAT ARE ALL OF YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THAT?"

It was still taking time: she couldn't move at anything close to her full speed when she was moving backwards. It was enough for two of the pegasi to have gotten their initial gusts together and that was a case where the sword seemed to have a partial effect: swinging through wind dropped it back to its natural speed, but didn't do anything about the direction. She had to use the flat of the blade to keep the lofted debris from going into her eyes, it blocked her vision for a moment, and then she saw where Nightwatch was.

The little knight was fast. Something which had let her get almost all the way to Cerea, only while staying about six meters up. Her wings weren't shifting in a pattern which created magic. They simply flapped, and the lid of the open right saddlebag rippled as the black pegasus sharply twisted her head, doing so at the same time she opened her mouth and the fragile grey sphere clenched between white teeth was whipped at Cerea --

-- the centaur followed her instincts. She swung the sword, because any weapon couldn't be allowed to make contact with her body. Her aim was true. She hit the sphere.

It broke against the blade, and the olfactory world shattered.

The peppermint hit her first. That was followed by the sharpness of anise, and then the cross-world nature of biology stabbed her in the amygdala because she knew that some species existed in her home and here, she'd seen that and the contents of the sphere taught her that if there was a separate entity responsible for the creation of this place, it had been cruel enough to see durian as something worth duplicating. Given that attitude, the presence of corpse lily had probably just been perceived as an incidental extra.

There was more than that in the sphere: an essence of excrement had been gathered from somewhere, she incidentally learned about the local existence of anteaters because that was the only way to get their musk, and one of the last half-firing neurons experienced a moment of gratitude that Vieux Boulogne remained a product of France alone or else that would have been in the mix too. But it was one of the only thoughts, because she was stumbling and the assault on her primary sense had pulled attention away from all of the others. She existed as a near-mindless creature whose orbitofrontal cortex had turned into a fireworks factory, and the sparks were millimeters away from burning her to the ground from within.

She'd had to learn odor discrimination: the ability to block out the most noxious fumes which technology could create. It was the only way to survive in the human world, and some of the centaur exchange students had retreated back to their gaps when the act of crossing an intersection threatened to overwhelm. But she'd been in the new world for weeks, a place where nearly all of the substances were natural ones. That subconscious, constant control had found the chance to relax.

A flailing arm nearly threw the sword away, because the mix of oils had spread onto the blade and she had to get rid of the source, she had to or the madness would travel with her, there were knives stabbing into her skull and she was holding the largest one, she had to escape and she was already so close to the trees, she just had to get into the trees and get rid of the sword and gallop until she left the radius of the scent bomb behind, she nearly threw the sword away because she was just barely capable of thought at all and --

-- there were ponies after her. She retained that much, plus one other thought. And so she just barely kept her grip on the hilt as she reared up, crashed down with her hindquarters shadowed by the little forest. Trying to get out of sight, desperate to find safety and a place where she could recover.

She knew she had to escape. That, and one other thing.

Nightwatch.

The name of the only pony who could have told them to try it.

The centaur, still stumbling, just barely managing to deflect the next projection, vanished into the trees.

"It worked!" the other pegasus mare crowed. "Just like you said! Let's see if it dropped her!" And streaked forward, moving ahead of the herd. "If it didn't, I've got something I wanted Tirek to have, and this is my chance to --"

"-- Derecho!" the little knight yelped. "Don't! Stay with --"

The blue pegasus simply pulled her wings a little closer in, then flared them back into a swoop where the extended limbs had enough room to pass between the treetrunks, automatically slowing as she went into an area with more obstacles --

-- there was a sound.

This was followed by more sounds.

It would have been difficult for most observers to identify what had happened through hearing alone. Had there been a recording device available and endless replays for review, it might have been possible to eventually recognize the first as a sword very rapidly being placed within a scabbard, because any degree of enclosure would go a long way towards stopping the smell. Of course, this also suggested a centaur who had just disarmed herself, and so the only temporarily-conscious direct witness for the remainder of the process continued to close in.

For most ponies, the next sound would have required just about as much dissection, because it was a noise which didn't normally occur on that kind of scale. Reflectively-minded Solars, who had experience with their own Princess, eventually realized that when you subtracted out everything wing-related, it had been just like the sound produced by a very large body launching into an almost purely vertical leap. There were ways in which the centaur could be thought of as being something like an earth pony and in this case, the strength increase within the lower body applied just as much to the apex of her potential launch height.

Based on the followup evidence, the altitude gained had been exactly what was required for powerful arms to grab a pegasus out of the air with one free hand while yanking the helmet off with the other. (They mostly found out about the helmet when it came flying out of the treeline.)

There was a crash of large-scale impact against the soil, because an airborne centaur had to come down again. And then there was one more sound, just before the galloping resumed.

The remaining Guards worked out what the last one had been when they saw the results. The results had her wings splayed out across the grass. The feathers were twitching in concert with all four legs, which made the armor around equally-grounded belly and barrel pick up a few fresh stains.

"Derecho?" Acrolith was the first to move in, checking on her fallen squadmate. "Can you keep going?"

The blue pegasus just barely managed to raise her head. Slightly-spinning eyes appeared to give the matter some thought.

"Glick," Derecho expertly considered, and vibrated for a while.

"What was that?" the male earth pony asked. "What did she do...?"

Acrolith examined the fallen pegasus. Spotted unfocused pupils, just before she saw the flattened fur on the forehead, located over a fast-rising bruise.

"Centaurs headbutt," Acrolith groaned. "Good to know. A little late..." The next check was of the ground. "That way. She's too heavy to hide her hoofprints in this kind of dirt without slowing down. We can track her, even after the scent fades. Try to stay together. Best result is chasing her back into the open."

"It's not all dirt in there," Bulkhead pointed out. "There's some rock to move on: that's true all over the mountain. If she thinks about that --"

"-- she might not be thinking," Nightwatch quietly stated. "Not for a little while. And that just might make it worse. Carefully, everypony..."

The first true thought naturally concerned utterly-discarded dignity, and came with an accompanying internal lecture. Not that Cerea's mother had ever found the opportunity to tell her just why a real centaur would never resort to a headbutt, but the daughter had enough experience with other lectures to construct an accurate facsimile.

Most of the initial followups were about a deep wish for headache medicine.

Ow seemed inadequate.

Don't... don't ever try that with an earth pony. The extra bone density on the receiving end might have knocked Cerea out and when it came to trying the non-tactic against unicorns, the primary problem was obvious. Find water. Wash off the sword. Scrape away as much of the oil as I can against the trees on the way. I might have to drop the scabbard if I can't find a stream in a hurry: it's contaminated. Listen for ponies...

It was going to be mostly listening for a while. The olfactory world was something made from edges, and trying to pay close attention threatened to cut. At least ten, possibly twenty minutes to fully recover sensory acuity.

She hadn't told the Sergeant about just how strong that sense was. Only Nightwatch had possessed some idea, and the knight had used that concept against her.

Tired. Hurt.
I could stop. I could just stop right now and... maybe they could give me a separate smithy in another part of the palace. It's a skill. Employable. I could just stop and...
...hurt...

One possibly down: she couldn't be sure how fast the pegasus would recover. She'd promised herself that she would try for sixth place. She had to do that much just to not reflect too badly on the Sergeant. It wasn't his fault that he'd been stuck trying to train her...

...just keep going.

She glanced around, listened for hooves and wings. Wings would be easiest: pegasus flight wasn't exactly silent. Hooves on dirt --

-- my hooves. I'm leaving prints. Try to find water and rock. Something I can stand on or in. And their noses aren't as good as mine, but my sword and scabbard reek. They've got to be capable of following that level of trail. Prioritize for water.

The girl moved.

They were fighting as a herd.
That first one got ahead...

For pony senses, the scent trail stopped at the end of the stream.

"Sundamn it," Bulkhead muttered. "Check the other side, see if you can find her hoofprints. We could jump this, so we know she could." The large unicorn looked around. "Too many trees..."

"You don't like trees?" The male earth pony, openly teasing.

"Not when they're taking up this much space, Sedi. We're going to have a hard time getting a ring around her in this, wind gets broken up going through the trees..." Another check of the fast-darkening forest. "Wish Moon was full tonight. Nightwatch, do you know what her night vision is like?"

"No," emerged in full neutrality. "It... didn't exactly come up."

"Watch for her body heat," the senior Guard told the remaining pegasi: the orange male shivered a little. "You okay there?"

"Just..." The feathered stallion forced the next breath to be steady, and did so such in a way where all could see that the force had been most of it. "...I wanted to be part of this, after Tirek. You know why I volunteered. But she's still a centaur..."

"She's not Tirek," Bulkhead countered. "She's something else." Darkly, "Tirek would have had all of us down by now."

Sedi's brown ears twisted.

"Just playing a hunch here," the earth pony said. "But I'm not sure she would have jumped the stream."

"Stayed on this side?"

"Went in it. No hoof impressions left on riverbed stones."

Eight Guards looked at the flow of water, and the sharp left turn it took into shadow: something which was only fifteen body lengths away. On most of them, the deepest portion would have been halfway up their gaskins: an inconvenience to push through for the larger ones, and trouble for the smaller. When it came to degree of obstacle, it was debatable as to whether the centaur would have even noticed. It was possible that the temperature might have given her more trouble: most of the streams on this part of the mountain were fed by meltwater from the snow near the peak, and autumn meant it didn't warm up all that much on the way down.

"I want to check for hoofprints first," Bulkhead decided. "Following that means splitting up: half of us going upstream, half down. We need to stay together. So if there's any other trail --"

There wasn't.

"-- Tartarus chain it," the senior Guard muttered, and did so because in the mirth-filled opinion of both shifts, he'd given the centaur enough language lessons already. "No choice. You three --" a forehoof repeatedly jabbed "-- with me. You four, go that way. Move as quietly as possible."

He took the upstream lead, staying on the right edge of the riverbank mud. He'd been in the Guard for more years than the rest of them. It was his responsibility.

"Too dark," he whispered to his part of the split herd. "Getting too dark. Canopy's blocking too much, and it's darker up ahead. I can't see enough..."

He didn't have pegasus sight. He had taken the lead.

"Nightwatch? Anything up ahead?"

The smaller mare craned her neck, looked past his flanks: the trees were too close on the right for flight.

"I'm... not sure. It's just shadows. The canopy's too heavy. For heat..."

She squinted. Then she blinked a few times.

"...that's -- weird." And because Guards didn't leave that kind of statement hanging, "It's like the stream is rippling a little. For temperature. A fading warm spot."

With a deliberately-softened snort, "Maybe she decided she needed to move faster and dumped weight the easy way."

The black snout wrinkled. "That evens out in seconds."

"...I'll take your word for it. Stable location?"

"Yes..."

Every ear rotated.

"No splashing," Bulkhead decided. "So it wouldn't be an animal doing a crossing."

Silver eyes widened.

"Maybe --"

And did so too late.

Bulkhead didn't have pegasus sight, and nopony had brought any devices for seeing in the dark because nopony had anticipated that the centaur would do this. They had figured on a quick battle in the open: they would try to surround her, she would do her best to counter that, and the Guards would win. He didn't like working in the dark, because there was a centaur about and regardless of what he had said earlier, there was a learned response to being in the presence of that limb configuration. They were all nervous or worse, and he couldn't see.

But he was a unicorn. It didn't mean he believed his species was superior: he'd been through his original Guard training as part of a large group, and had thus experienced the honor of having his tail kicked by everything. He just believed himself to understand that certain species were better at given things. Bulkhead freely acknowledged himself to be rubbish at flying, although he did maintain that he had a certain expertise in short-term unidirectional air movement: those who had watched him get beaten a week before graduation generally reminded the senior Guard that gravity had to be credited with the assist.

He couldn't fly and regardless of his build, he would never be among the strongest. He accepted that. But no unicorn who'd been through puberty ever had to worry about the dark.

All he'd intended was a brief ignition of his corona, and not even at a particularly high level of lumens: he didn't want to ruin anypony else's night sight. Enough to let him get some idea of what was ahead, and then he could move on flash memory for a while.

His horn lit up, and a sodden mass of padding and limbs erupted from the water.

Those who remained active beyond that encounter would explain it to him later. The girl was too large to submerge herself fully below the chill liquid: her body simply didn't allow for that kind of position. But she was wearing cloth, the cold water had soaked deep, she must have splashed as much against her head as she dared before hearing their approach...

It had been risking illness, when nopony had any real idea how to treat her. It was something she couldn't have maintained for much longer. But shadows and cold had given her two temporary forms of invisibility, and now the centaur was charging, Bulkhead had a centaur coming straight at him and the others were behind him on the narrow stretch of riverbank mud, they would need seconds to get around and above him, the centaur was attacking and so his corona brightened.

He didn't have the raw lifting power required to levitate the centaur's mass. And there was a moment when he was about to focus his strength on a single hoof, yank on that and send her crashing into the mud --

-- the centaur's lips pulled back from her teeth.

For the Guards who were part of the combat exercise on that evening, Bulkhead had more experience than anypony. He looked out for everypony with less years: the Princess came first, the relative rookies were second. It meant he had willingly faced Tirek, so that others would be safe.

His Princess wasn't there and with ponies behind him, in the face of a charging, snarling centaur, he redirected his energies, building red light into the front edge of a dome wall, something which could shield them all, buy time. That was his instinct: to protect.

It was an instinct which, for a moment lost in the echoes of pain produced by memory, hadn't been thinking about how shields worked. He could get the forward part of the construct together quickly enough, but the full dome took more time. It would require another second or two to harden and even then, something large and powerful had a chance to push through.

His instinct was to protect, and so he tried to get the shield up at a casting speed he'd never managed. The centaur had something which cut through magic, it made a shield useless, his body was a living blockade and as it turned out, the sword never came out at all.

Bulkhead was trying to put a shield up at a speed which Shining Armor would have had trouble with. It meant his corona almost instantly went to the full single layer, started to swell beyond that and at the instant it did so, the sling began to whistle through the air.

There were plenty of stones in the riverbed. And by the time he fully recognized what was happening, the centaur had already used two.

The second turned out to be redundant.

Seven ponies were clustered around the slow-breathing form of the fallen unicorn.

"Calling it," the senior Guard choked out. "Muscle pulls, left foreleg and right hind. And... yeah, there's the migraine..." The wince was beginning to take over his body. "Calling it. I'd be out. Acrolith, you've got the lead."

The orange pegasus was shaking now, and every feather trembled out of tune with all the others.

"This... this isn't right," he whispered. "Nopony fights like this. Nopony..."

"She isn't a pony," Acrolith declared. "She knows she doesn't want to face another herd --"

"-- this isn't natural, it isn't right --"

"FOCUS! She galloped off after she took Bulkhead down, before the rest of us could get past him! We saw which way she went! She doesn't know this area: she's playing this blind! There's still seven of us! We just need to get her in a spot where we can go on the offensive!"

It got the group moving, and so they discovered the area had a few more streams permeating it: one of the reasons the trees grew so thickly, outside the radius of the Cornucopia Effect. One wide specimen had cut a channel through rock: shallow enough to wade across, but with no guarantee of being able to make a successful jump to the other side. Especially since most of the landing zones were slick with fresh moisture.

"She must have crossed here," Sedi decided. "And fumbled it. Or she's just dripping that much, because it would have taken some splash to wet all of this." He shrugged. "Better start after her. I really thought I'd be going home by now..."

He was the third pony to cross, and so found his desire's fulfillment delayed.

There was a cracking sound, like thin dry wood fracturing. Ears and eyes moved, trying to locate the source. It was something which took more than ten seconds, it had Sedi stop within the river in order to keep the sounds of his own movement from hurting their chances, and so he got to feel the little spheres hit two of his legs.

He automatically looked down, just in time to both feel and see the gel swelling.

"-- what?" He tried to pull himself free, and earth pony strength served -- but the drydust was being fed by the wealth of the stream's moisture. He got a foreleg up, found the gel rising to meet the new position, it had him temporarily locked in place and that was something one good jump would have cleared, but aiming forward would have put him onto a deliberately-slicked stone riverbank and by the time he aligned for a backwards effort, the bolas had come out of the trees.

On the bright side, when viewed against other takedowns, it was arguably the softest landing in Guard training history.

They pulled him free after a while. The two remaining unicorns tried to pick the gel out of his fur, and stopped after the first patch of fur came with it. A brief debate reluctantly concluded that normal limb movement would be impossible until normal drying occurred.

"She's not Tirek," the latest victim said.

There were a few reluctant nods.

"That's good," Sedi stated with indeterminable sincerity. "Because I wouldn't want to get the two of them confused. Not when I think I hate her more than Tirek."

And the orange pegasus, the youngest Guard there, who had matched himself against something the size of a building to expected results, simply shook.

"She's... she's picking us off..."

It was shameful. It wasn't the sort of honorable combat which a knight should strive for, and every false victory served to remind her that she wasn't a true knight at all. Plus she'd snarled. She'd known that pulling back her lips would be seen as a sign of aggression, and she'd done it anyway.

The Sergeant wanted her to use pony fear in combat, when it could make the difference between life and death. But this was just an exercise. She had been trying to frighten those whom she wanted to join.

Even when they wouldn't accept me.
None of them will ever --

She was shaking. She'd been in the stream too long, and the chill autumn air wasn't helping. Her natural body temperature provided a little assistance, and centaur resilience --

-- it should have been doing more than it was. She was still moving, but it was too slow. Cerea felt as if she was just barely picking out a path through the trees. She was tired

(she'd been tired for days)

and she hurt

(the pain never seemed to fully fade)

and none of this mattered because they would never welcome her into their ranks.

Not that they would have the opportunity. Not when her fingers felt numb, her flanks were shaking, the cold soaked into her upper torso from the still-sodden padding and she practically squished when she moved, she felt like she squished when she breathed and there was a chill trickle running through her cleavage, she wanted to tear the padding off before the cold got any worse, she was going to be sick and --

-- why am I doing this?
They won't
they can't
I think it was three, maybe they all got up again but it could have been three
I don't think I really hurt them
I don't want to really hurt them when they're all scared of me already and
stop
it would be so easy to just stop

The thing about having two sets of ribs was that it gave her extra opportunities to get a stitch in her side. Also a choice of sides. She didn't even know when she'd taken that injury. She couldn't think of anything which had happened during the combat exercise...

(It had been days ago. Strain from laboring in the forge.)

And she was disoriented. She didn't know this little forest, had no true understanding of how to move within it. She'd been using every natural hollow she could find, trying to make half-insane plans work, but... it wasn't fighting the way a knight would.

There was no true victory in the presence of shame.

-- hooves, off to her left and coming up fast. She'd found a trail, and decided not to use it because the path was too wide: it was possible that it had twisted to parallel her position. She had just enough space to move between the trees now, and she had to move faster because a path she couldn't see might leave its users able to spot her.

She was being chased, and so she ran.

(She would run until the moment when she would never move again.)

There was a huge bush up ahead, blocking the way: a thick coating of dead leaves hid what was on the other side. Tall enough to block her vision, but surely not thick enough that a jump would have her land in the middle of it. Bushes hardly ever came that thick, but this was a different world, a blind jump, no way to veer left or right and she would have to chance it, she forced herself to pick up speed and something in her right flank burned with the acceleration, she pushed because she was disoriented and she didn't know where she was and the only way out was forward --

-- she jumped and in doing so, began the final phase of the fight. The part where she nearly died.

The possibility of death flashed though her mind as her body began to ascend, because that was when she finally recognized just how disoriented she was from cold and exhaustion and pain, enough that up had just barely registered as a direction. She hadn't been the first centaur to fly: several herd leaders had needed to attend a variety of international conferences. It was just that all of the others had used airplanes, and it suddenly felt like she could have been disoriented enough to have come up against the mountain's edge. That would have been a different kind of flight, at least until she hit the slope. There would probably be a slope, and after that -- the centaur body wasn't meant for extended tumbling. A horse could roll once, and sometimes tried it as a means of ditching an unwanted rider. A centaur had an extra torso to deal with, which gave Cerea that much more which could fracture.

But she didn't find herself on the wrong side of a cliff: the shield's lowered rim still would have prevented that. She just barely cleared the bush, nearly tangling her tail in autumn-weakened branches, and landed on well-trimmed grass.

The grass on the border of the racing track.

She hadn't moved in a circle. She'd managed to reenter the training grounds near where the Guards had awaited the start of the exercise. That was also where the Sergeant was, and his head jerked up at the sound of her landing.

There was a moment when they were simply staring at each other (although she did so on the gallop, momentum carrying her along), with his eyes taking in soaked padding and shivering body. And then she was running, she was trying to turn and get back into the trees because she was out in the open, she could see the potential exit for that avoided path a few meters away from where she'd come out and if she didn't move, if she didn't get back to some form of shelter, she was going to --

-- they emerged.

Six of them emerged. (She was waiting for three more to exit behind them.) And they fanned out: two in the air and there was a blast of fear as the orange pegasus ascended, sheer terror climbing into the sky, but there were four more on the ground and they were fanning out as quickly as they could, forcing a living wall which blocked her most immediate entrance to the trees.

She still tried for it, because she saw it as her only chance to hold off defeat a little longer. She knew she was capable of vaulting any of them, it would take the pegasi a few seconds to get something together, she was alert for the chance of another scent bomb now and she galloped directly at Acrolith, planning a last-second swerve so the earth pony wouldn't jump into her from underneath --

-- the multi-hued mare's features tightened. Cerea, who still had trouble with pony expressions, briefly wondered if she was looking at something which her presence had been known to inspire: nausea. She'd just never seen it that intense --

-- and for six meters around Cerea, the grass died.

Then it rotted.

She just barely heard the Sergeant's little inhale, and it would be hours before she remembered the soft "Interesting..." Something else had the majority of her attention: the fact that she had just transitioned from galloping across normal ground to having her hooves trying to find purchase on something very much like week-old lettuce leaves.

Adrenaline surged for the last time on that night (because it was night now, her body fully exposed under moonlight), something which was just enough to let her steer the skid. Falling would have ended everything, she would have had them all on top of her before she had the chance to get up, and so she steered the skid just enough to push into a jump at the end, something which sent her off to the side and left slick hooves scrambling for purchase on the landing. Her arms helplessly flailed for a few seconds as she concentrated on her legs because to have one go out from under her was risking a break, but she'd cleared the dead patch and managed to stabilize --

"I see six!" the Sergeant shouted. "Two are back in! Sedi on the way, or did she get three of you?"

"He counted out!" Acrolith gasped, with the burgeoning nausea now fully audible. "Judged as dropped! She -- she doesn't fight like --"

Part of the girl heard that, and was shamed anew. The rest was trying to get her arms under control, because there were six ponies who could still come for her, she needed to draw the sword and --

-- the first gust hit her, automatically forced an arm into shielding her eyes. It made her look up, and her gaze met silver.

She couldn't scent the little knight, not with the pegasus above and the wind twisting. She couldn't read the expression --

-- she hates me
something happened because of me and she hates me

-- but the combat exercise was still going.

Cerea gave up on the sword, went for the other bag of spheres. It only took a second to get the sling humming, and then whiffwing was being launched into the air.

It taught her something about the difference between practice and fighting. During practice, nothing had been moving.

Nightwatch deflected the first sphere with a wind gust, casually dodged the second, and didn't have to do anything about the wild miss of the third. It was effort wasted, time which had allowed the ground-based ponies to start closing in, so Cerea abandoned that target and tried to move again, she couldn't let them surround her, the sling went down and the sword came out as she charged directly for the smallest unicorn, saw the corona coming and deflected the projection.

The other unicorn managed to catch her right ear and she bit back the scream as her hooves pushed, sheer strength pushing her forward and clear of the field. Still moving towards the unicorn mare, and that horn remained dark because she was just about right on top of the mare and the caster couldn't risk the backlash --

-- the caster also didn't have time to move.

Cerea slashed the sword in an arc, pushing the mare with the flat of the blade. The living obstacle went away, she galloped and --

-- she only registered the presence of the little hole under her left forehoof on the subconscious level (which was mostly surprised that the training grounds had one), caught enough of the edge to keep herself from pitching forward, kept going --

-- wind blasted at her from the back. That which hit her bundled hair lost a little strength, she risked looking back and up as another earth pony started to close in --

-- they're going to surround me --

-- which meant she didn't see the next spell coming, desperately hit her own left flank with the sword to make the sudden feeling of tingling combined with dizziness go away, she didn't have time to get the sling going again and so she scooped her free hand into the bag and threw the sphere, it hit the orange pegasus and --

-- she'd reached into the wrong bag.

The white wood cracked, fell to the ground. Drydust scattered across the grass. And the pegasus stallion reacted as if he'd been shot, recoiling in mid-hover, eyes wide and frantic as wingbeats went uneven.

"No!" the youngest Guard yelped, legs wildly weaving under his body in a pattern she didn't understand. "No, no, no..."

But she had too much else to worry about, and so her attention desperately spiraled to the earth pony whose name she did not know, just barely dodged the kick and doing so put her tail into the projected grip of the last standing unicorn, that light broke up on its own but they were closing in, Acrolith was coming and Nightwatch just kept blasting her with gust after gust, she couldn't defend everything, she was spinning and looking for a direction she could jump in, anything which would buy her a little more time and she was tired and she hurt and they were going to win because she always lost and she'd already lost she'd lost the one thing which mattered and she just wanted to stop --

-- it was the scent that reached her first, because that much of her had recovered from the burst of something so close to betrayal. A scent which traveled ahead of her death, because just about everything had a scent. Even humans on open ground were capable of picking up on petrichor: that special waft from newly-wetted soil. For centaurs, it went deeper. There were times when you could smell rain coming. Others when that warning told you to seek shelter, because Cerea could also detect ionization and --

-- she looked up.

Pony expressions were still largely unfamiliar to her. But there was one which she had been exposed to at the first, and so as the orange pegasus closed the last centimeters of distance to the fast-coalescing mass of blackened vapor, she recognized terror.

She heard the endless chant of his denial, through the magic of the disc. Recognized it as a plea for everything to stop and as she saw hooves desperately descend towards the thunderhead, understood that it would be the last thing she ever heard.

The tallest object in an open field, and a wet one at that. The electricity would seek her out. And at this distance, the time delay was practically nothing -- but the thunder would fall upon dead ears, with the last flash reflected in fast-glazing eyes.

She had failed. There was a price for that and in this case, she would only have to pay it once.

There was just enough time for last thoughts, and so the girl wondered where her soul would go. If her own afterlife would be able to find her, or whether there would be ponies fleeing within...

She wondered what awaited ponies after death.

She would never see her mother again. The household. She would --

-- Lala.

She'll be here for me when I die. She promised.

I'll see --

-- something dark streaked across the sky.

Orange hooves slammed into the thunderhead, and lightning blasted into fur.

It went into the black fur, something which gave it less than a second of sparking across the armor. It was pulled into the little knight's body, and the hovering form convulsed, wings curling in a way which seemed as if it had to drop the pegasus out of the sky, but then they flared back out and the tail went straight as the sleek head came up so fast as to toss the helmet off.

She spasmed as everyone watched, as the flying stallion's expression and existence began to collapse into themselves. Her eyes shot open, and silver was lost in the glow of incandescent blue --

-- her forelegs lashed. The hooves sparked.

Technically, they heard the thunder second.

"YOU IDIOT!"

They'd barely seen her move. The bare face was less than thirty centimeters away from the cowering orange features, and every half-spat word gave the next cloud weaving that much more to potentially work with.

"It's a combat exercise! You're good enough with lightning to do a static discharge! Stunning only, Squall, or did you forget that part? Did you volunteer just so you would have the chance to forget it, or are you just that scared? Scared enough to use the real stuff, scared enough to make me use what's just about the last technique any pegasus ever wants to use, and if I'd been any slower, if -- if -- you just -- you --"

It wasn't that her words really ran out: it was more than Squall's ears were now so tight against his skull as to create some question as to whether anything was getting in.

She stared at him for an extra second. And then she swooped down, went into a hover in front of a new target.

"AND YOU! Hours out here, hours in the forge on top of that, plus lessons and cleaning the barracks and everything else where she won't ask for help! Hours, you should have figured out how many hours she's been pushing herself, pushing hard enough to make them into days! She isn't sleeping! She's in pain, because nothing gets a chance to heal and she just keeps pushing anyway! She's shaking, she's cold, she's been in the stream and she has to warm up or she'll get sick! You're going to give her some TIME OFF! No training! No working on armor! Two days, at LEAST two days where the heaviest thing she lifts is a quill! Because if you DON'T, I'll -- I'll --"

The old earth pony's head came up. Very, very slowly.

"You'll what?" he calmly asked.

The mare blinked.

"Um," Nightwatch said. "Something. I'll... something."

"Two days?"

"At least."

A plume of smoke drifted between them. The centaur was the only one who really seemed to notice, and most of that was because she couldn't make herself stop staring at them.

She had plenty of company.

"Two days," the Sergeant decided. "Status check after."

"...oh."

"End of exercise," he casually added. "Got most of the injured back here already, but somepony should go fetch Sedi. Then everypony goes home or on-shift. EXCEPT FOR YOU, SQUALL, BECAUSE YOU AND I ARE ABOUT TO HAVE SOME MUCH-NEEDED QUALITY TIME TOGETHER! Nightwatch, make sure the Recruit here gets properly warmed up at the palace."

"Yes, Sergeant. I'll stay with her. Food. Hot bath."

"Not necessarily in that order."

"Yes, Sergeant."

There was silence for a moment, with the exception of a not-too-distant crackle.

"Um," Nightwatch said, and directed her helpless hovering stare above the hat.

"Something else?" the old stallion inquired.

"...I think..."

Slowly, inexorably, four species turned their attention to her newest point of focus. The rising glow made it easy to pick out, and harder to look away.

"...we should put that fire out first." The little knight winced. "That's the part they don't tell you about, with redirecting lightning. It has to go somewhere..."

"Do that."

Nightwatch flew forward. Then she thought better of it, flew up, and brought Squall along to help. Dragging him by the tail via jaw grip might have been a means of releasing extra frustration, or it could have just been the most convenient way of showing him where to go. It wasn't as if fingers were available for pointing.

The other ponies followed, with Cerea staring after them. And because her mind was trying to reconcile too many things (like existing in a breathing body, which it was pretty sure wasn't supposed to be happening any more), she then found herself looking at the Sergeant.

In a way, it was a pity. There had been generations of Guards upon the training grounds, and the one sapient who saw the briefest manifestation of his expression wasn't qualified to understand what it was.

"Two days off," he told her. "Check to see how you're healing. More time if it's needed. Better pacing on your schedule. And if you're ready, we move to the next part. Might as well, since you already put together a snout's lead on that."

"...what?" was all Cerea had left.

His right forehoof came up, subtly adjusted the hat to block some of the moonlight.

"The step after fighting against Guards," Emery Board calmly stated, "is fighting alongside them."

Taboo

It was a pocket of spring in the midst of autumn, and the girl had to keep telling herself it was a false one. That the warmth could depart at any moment, would leave as soon as the opportunity arose. The chill was simply waiting for its chance. A instant of thermal mirth, where it could mock her for believing in warmth at all.

But the little knight stayed close. (Cerea was afraid to look at any of the others as the partial procession shifted along under moonlight, not wanting to see how they reacted to that proximity,) It was necessary, because a mare who was more skilled than anypony else in the Guard with wind didn’t possess quite the same degree of skill for heat-shifting.

There had been another technique used before the mass exit had started, something Cerea hadn’t seen before. There were no seaponies, which meant the strongest manipulations for one substance probably belonged to a species which didn’t exist -- but weather manipulation required pegasi to be capable of shifting moisture. Rivers, streams, perhaps even the density of a tap’s trickle might have been beyond them: chill liquid which had dispersed throughout padding was scattered enough to work with. The little knight had done something, and then a still-stunned centaur had been carefully stepping out of a newborn mud puddle.

It was easy enough to dry her. Warming required more of a constant effort, with black wings taking fading heat away from autumn air and focusing it upon a slow-moving target. Within a few centimeters of Cerea’s skin, it became spring. It was also the kind of spring where winter wasn’t quite done with you yet and at the moment you started to feel comfortable, a chill breeze would serve as a reminder that when it came to seasonal change, equinoxes mostly served as a fairly strong suggestion.

(She didn’t know about the part ponies played in that shift within their own country, while so many of the other nations did perfectly well without. That part of her education would lead to questions. Just about everything did.)

The departing procession wasn’t all that united. Two of those who’d been fought had already been evacuated: Derecho and Bulkhead were being examined by the Doctors Bear. A rattled Casta was very carefully picking her way along at the rear, as being launched for a few meters while inside armor was the sort of thing which could give the receiving party some trouble afterwards, along with several questions about how many limbs they were meant to be working with. A muttering Sedi had been carried into the main building to await the attentions of a fur dryer or a chisel: some of the darker half-heard vocalizations suggested it was mostly a matter of whichever came first.

Squall had been left behind: the Sergeant wanted to have Words with him, and everyone was trying not to pay visible attention to the rather loud Echoes. The rest were scattered in Cerea’s wake. She could feel their gazes on her flanks, and refused to let herself look at their source.

It didn’t take long for the group to further disperse: Acrolith and the other earth pony headed towards the edge of the shield, preferring trot over teleport. The last unicorn decided to wait for a private escort trip, and that eventually put Cerea in the gatehouse alone because mass was a factor in teleportation: the pony who’d been taking her back and forth didn’t want to factor one small pegasus into the transport.

Distance also mattered in magic, and so the extra warmth faded as she moved into the palace, clearing the receiving room (inside the palace, on the main level, and so it was also designed to be flooded with fast-hardening foam at the touch of a hoof) for the next passage. The girl found herself shivering upon marble, while not being entirely sure why. Adrenaline dump: that was always a possibility. Energy with nowhere to go, because her body wasn’t entirely sure the fight was over.

But she knew the adrenaline was fading, because the rest of the pain was coming back. It seemed to have used its brief time off to go look for some rather cooperative reinforcements.

Just... get to the barracks. She hated going to sleep when she was still dirty, but she was tired and battered, alone in the corridor and there was a chance that the exhaustion from the fight would finally be enough to let her truly rest. The aches couldn’t possibly keep her awake throughout the entire night. Five hours out of seven, maximum. After that, she could go back into the forge --

There was a flash of light behind her tail, along with a sound: one she’d come to associate with teleports. Cerea’s main question was why it wasn’t louder. There seemed to be some degree of air displacement from arrivals -- but the departures she’d witnessed didn’t have atmosphere loudly collapsing into the sudden vacuum. She wasn’t sure if there was any degree of exchange on both sides of the process, especially since teleportation over anything more than a few meters required measurable time to complete: that suggested reaching ahead to the destination point for air would require the same duration. Magic was strange...

...she heard two ponies emerge from the gatehouse, just before the next flash signaled the escort’s departure. The unicorn immediately went left. The little pegasus trotted up on Cerea’s right.

“We’ll stop at a kitchen before we head down,” the true knight said. “I’ll go in. It’ll be faster if I place the order and tell them it’s for delivery. Then it’s straight to the bath.” Her wings began to shift again. “I want to warm you up before the Doctors Bear see you. If it's bad enough that they should.”

“I’m not hurt --“ was the automatic protest.

“-- liar,” emerged as a prepared counter.

Cerea stared down. Looking directly into furious silver which had found a new way to spark.

“You’re always hurt,” the little knight said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you on a single night when you’re not hurting one way or another. Paradigm’s heading for her locker room: she’s going off-shift. I’ve got hours before I can take a bunk, even when my whole body wants to lie down because I just redirected lightning --“

Nearly frantic, “-- I’m sorry, if I hadn’t hit him with the sphere, he -- I’m sorry --“

And with utter placidity, “-- stop it.”

There were multiple scents in the marble corridor. Some of that was fading trails: temporal remnants of prior pony passage. Lingering ozone had arrived with the little knight. Sweat could be detected, along with a deep weariness: those aspects were dual across the hosted species. But there was something else rising from the little knight's fur. Frustration, and a different level of anger.

“Please,” the pegasus quietly asked. “I know it’s hard for you to stop. I’m not sure it’s possible to do forever. But... stop, just for a little while.”

It was the go-to sentence. “I don’t understand...”

“The fight’s over,” the mare softly stated. “You aren’t going after us any more. But you’re a recruit, while I’m a Guard. One who's going to spend the rest of her shift with you. Here and now, until we reach the barracks, that makes me your superior officer. And if the only way you’ll take this seriously is as an order --“ feathers vibrated “-- then maybe that’s how you should hear it. But I’m not the Sergeant. So please, just for a little while... please stop attacking yourself.”

I don’t...

...she didn’t understand.

“Follow me,” Nightwatch said, and after a little while, the living six-limbed iceberg of confusion wavered enough for the girl’s hooves to move again.

Armor was being piled up at the edge of the giant tub.

Cerea had never seen a pony removing armor before, and it turned out to be a much less complicated procedure than she’d pictured. It was mostly a matter of some very careful mouth work, disengaging latches which had been virtually invisible until the moment of their use. (She wanted to ask Barding about how that was done.) After that, the little mare’s body started working through a rather exacting shake, and sections simply began to slip off.

Removing the protection was easy. When it came to earth ponies and pegasi, Cerea still didn’t know how any of it went on...

It was her first chance to examine the individual pieces, and her attention arguably should have been focused on that. But she couldn’t make herself see the armor as components and metalwork artistry. Her distant perspective (or as distant as the bathroom would let it be, with her tail framed in the doorway and slightly-vibrating hindquarters getting ready to demonstrate another backwards rush) was examining the condition.

There were no signs of electrical damage, at least when it came to the metal. But the saddlebags were covered in thin dark lines, she could smell the burn...

A blackened sphere slowly rolled out of the open one, and two sets of eyes briefly watched it skitter across the floor.

“I’ll get that,” Nightwatch softly said: a forehoof carefully guided it back to the fabric. “There were three, if you were wondering. I didn’t use the others because... you were doing too good a job at keeping me back, after that first one. And you were too close to the others. It’s horrible for you, but... it’s not all that great for us.”

Her head came up a little.

“It’s horrible for you,” she quietly repeated. “I didn’t think it was going to be that bad. I... didn’t know. Just that if you could scent emotion so easily, then scent could be a weapon...”

“You’re angry.” It was a plain statement, and a true one. The bath was empty, there was no steam in the air, and the little knight’s wings were momentarily still.

Nightwatch nodded.

“I’ve been mad at myself for a while,” the mare evenly declared. Her hips shifted, and the last piece of armor dropped away.

It let Cerea examine all of the fur, and it also made her wish the pegasus was any hue other than that nearly-pure black: picking out scorch marks was just about impossible. But nothing about the mare’s posture suggested pain. There was just a deep weariness, something which was all the more visible now that she was --

-- Cerea blinked.

“You’re naked!”

The best way to learn a scent’s emotional connotation was through getting the chance to match it with body posture and actions. Nightwatch’s slow head tilt to the left, followed by the gradual survey of her own exposed form and eventual casual regard of Cerea, gave the girl the olfactory context for bemusement.

“...huh,” the mare noted. “Look at that. Naked. Just like nearly everypony else.”

“I didn’t mean --“

“-- I know how you meant it,” the little knight cut in. “You’ve never seen me this way. Even in the bunk, there’s blankets. But being dressed all the time... there aren’t a lot of ponies who do that. Most of the ones who won’t ever let Sun touch their fur are clothists. And they’re weird.” She paused. “We’ve got something in common. Us, I mean. You and I. We’re... just about always covered when there’s someone else around. That can be a different kind of armor...”

Feathers rustled.

“But nopony can wear armor all the time,” she quietly observed. “No one, either. You should get undressed.”

Cerea did the natural thing --

“-- get your hooves back in here,” Nightwatch calmly said. “All of them. Please.”

The girl swallowed. Advanced about half a step.

“I thought you were going first. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt --”

“You need to warm up,” the pegasus stated. “To the core. And I need to see how badly you're hurt, and make sure you stay in long enough. So we’re going in together. There’s more than enough room. And... I’ve seen it before. All of it. Now I want to see it again.”

This gulp mostly brought down air.

“You want -- to see --“

“-- the good thing about your not having fur in some places,” placidly broke through, “is that it’s easier to spot injuries on bare skin. And I know how to adjust for the parts with fur, because that’s a lifetime of experience. Please get undressed, because I want to see how hurt you really are. If we need to finish the bath by going to the doctors. And when it comes to how you look...”

It was a small sigh, and so barely managed to contain all of the subtle power within.

“...you’re a centaur. I’m a pegasus. I don’t know where I’m not supposed to look, and that means even if I’m not used to seeing it, or don’t understand what I'm seeing -- for looking, everything is... okay.” And before Cerea could react, “I don't even know if you think there's a place you’re not supposed to be looking on me.”

She was exhausted. In pain, along with several kinds of non-fatal shock. The word slipped out.

“Genitals.”

Nightwatch blinked.

“...sorry?”

The centaur’s arms shot up at the speed of horror, and both hands interlocked in front of her mouth.

The little knight took a breath.

“We don’t know about each other,” she quietly said. “We don’t understand each other. The only way that starts to change is by asking questions, and that has to be followed by answering them. So... I think we need to say all of it. Even the embarrassing things. It's the only way we can learn.” With a peacefulness which scent told the girl had been forced, “Genitals?”

There was no verbal response. The red tide suffusing the girl's features served as another kind of answer.

“I’ve met minotaurs,” Nightwatch admitted. “And trained against them. I don’t know any single one very well. But I do know that arms have weight. You can’t hold that position forever.”

Slowly, the fingers pried themselves apart.

“It’s...” The girl swallowed again. “It’s rude to stare at someone’s genitals. But I’ve... I’ve never seen any, not on a pony here. It’s -- obvious on horses where I come from.” And just for a moment, wondered how ‘horses’ had been rendered by the disc. “So I thought you all had to have some kind of trick valve, or... the stallions... some sort of... sleeve...”

Nightwatch giggled.

The girl had been expecting outrage. The giggle nearly sent all four legs out from under her, and ears helplessly twisted against the bubbly caress of the last possible sound.

“It’s sort of a galloping joke for the new parents in the Guard,” the pegasus said. “How if you’re changing a diaper, you get one second of warning for the next barrage. The second it peeks out. It’s... all there, mares and stallions. It just doesn’t show itself unless it’s about to be used.” With a thoughtful pause, “Or unless it’s puberty. Sometimes there’s problems with control during puberty. When you see an adolescent in this weird crouch-trot, try not to laugh. Everypony’s gone through it. And you can kick males in just the right place, even if it’s hard to line up the shot, because that -- ‘sleeve’ -- really doesn’t work as armor. Distention/erection/boner, not bone.”

Another giggle, even as Cerea stared out from the heart of ever-increasing shock. A second level of locally-unreadable expression, viewed by a human, would have suggested someone who was trying to figure out how diapers were changed by mouth and really wanted to stop.

“We learn how to fight each other,” Nightwatch said, “Guards know how to be fought. Get undressed? I’ll fill the bath.”

The curve of the pool’s rim had Cerea marginally closer to the controls: the automatic movement brought her closer still. “I’ll get it --“

“-- do you ever stop?”

It had been a casual question, and only scent carried the pain.

“Do you let anyone do anything for you?” the mare asked. “Is it control? You have to be the one who does it, or it won’t be done right?”

I...

In terms of tone, the next question was even calmer.

“Is that what it looks like when you’re angry?”

...no.
I’m not --
-- she didn’t see, she wasn't there, she doesn’t know what the household was like, how all of the girls -- just having Papi and Suu around when they act like they’re younger than they really are almost constantly, and Miia can never remember how much her tail constricts, and Rachnera, just... Rachnera...
Someone had to try and take control.
Someone had to be the adult, just so there would be one.

“When your hands clench, and your whole body goes tight? Because with us, the tail lashing would be enough to give it away.”

I’m not my mother.

“...I...”

She tried to breathe. It took three attempts.

“Or do you feel like you’re so much of a problem, that anything you let somepony do for you is just another problem you've caused?" The little mare sighed. “I feel like it's that last one. Please... please calm down. Bruises hurt more when you’re tense. But we have to ask questions, both of us. Including the ones which upset each other, because those could be the most important.”

Silence, but for the swishing from the slowing movement of a blonde tail.

“We have to talk. It's the only way --”

“...I’ve...” She barely felt the first tear running down her face, and then it only registered as shame. “...since my arrival, I have done nothing except make things worse for everypony. I -- may have caused deaths. The Princesses keep telling me there were no suicides, but they would lie to me, would they not? The world is so afraid of me that parts of it think death is better than having to exist in the same nation I occupy --“ her shoulders twisted inwards, even as her hands began to shake “-- and the other nations watch through those they send out for training, watch in case a centaur means the need to attack, while ponies wait for me to attack and something happened to you, I know that, something happened which meant you had to come into the barracks, I do not know how you were attacked, but I know that you were, ponies are being hurt in every moment I exist here, ponies die --“

Perhaps the technique could only manage very small amounts of water, when that liquid wasn’t permeating the air as humidity or soaked into cloth. But there was a black-furred face hovering a short distance from her own, and the warm gusts created by flapping wings wafted across the girl’s dry features.

"Your speech goes formal when you're upset," Nightwatch softly observed. "It's... weird to hear, because it's the reverse of what I'm used to..."

The girl's shoulders and upper torso shook. Hooves awkwardly cantered in place.

“There were two suicide attempts after the press conference.” The words had been assembled from half-fractured glass. “Neither succeeded. The Princesses had the entire city monitored that night, and Guards were part of that. It was enough. And since then, they’ve been watching. Because ponies commit suicide sometimes, for reasons which aren’t you -- and they think the Tattler will try to blame everything on you. I think you'll try to blame everything on yourself. And I know it hurt you to hear that --“ wingbeats briefly faltered “-- but I think it would hurt more not to hear it. To think we were all lying to protect you, wondering what the truth is -- not knowing is agony.”

More tears, with both eyes freely flowing as the blonde head trembled, fought against turning away. More evaporations.

“And something happened to me,” the little mare softly confessed. “But -- I don’t want to tell you until tomorrow. Because you’ll blame yourself, when you shouldn’t. You don’t control how ponies react. What they do. You can’t. You're who you are, not what they believe. They just don't know you. Some have fear. Some of them are just looking for more things to be afraid of, and they lie to themselves to find extra reasons because the fear is easier than anything else. And one pony...”

The hover leveled. Wingbeats steadied.

“...is right here. Right here, Cerea. Please...”

The trembling slowed. Not by much. Just enough to see.

“Um.” Feathers vibrated. “This is -- kind of awkward. And I’m leaving salt on your face. I --“

“...may...”

The little knight waited.

“...may I touch you? Please? Just... not with my hands, just...” Fingers twisted, and the blonde tail twitched. “I just... I haven’t... it's shameful, you shouldn't have to go through this with me, but I... I haven't, and I...”

Two deep, half-shuddering breaths shifted black fur.

“I --“ and that was where the mare's words briefly paused.

The girl’s eyes closed.

“-- need to land first,” Nightwatch finished. “It’s safer.” The pegasus dipped, carefully touched down. “Um. You want to -- touch my fur? A wing? It helps if I --“ The centaur silently gestured, and it took the pony a second to reconcile the movement as an attempt to indicate direction. Hands were good for that. “-- over there? Okay...” She carefully trotted over to the pool’s rim, stopping where the fingers had seemed to be sending her: next to one of the deepest portions. “So where did you want to --“

The girl, producing no more sound than what came from her hooves, slowly trotted around the perimeter, down the uneven surface of the ramp, entering the empty pool. Came up to the pegasus, and the sunken floor left them on something very close to eye level.

“-- this is weird,” Nightwatch admitted. “Um. Seeing your face without flying or tilting my head. That’s what I meant. What did you want to --“

The girl leaned forward.

The pegasus tensed. Almost recoiled, nearly broke for the door -- but ultimately, she remained exactly where she was.

After a while, a wing awkwardly unfolded, curled as best it could until the wingtip just barely touched the back of the centaur’s head.

The centaur shuddered, and the pegasus held her ground. She had recognized the nature of that vibration. It was what came from dropping the smallest part of the burden, if only for a little while. The tremble of release.

Neither moved beyond that, not for several minutes. Not until the girl had finished crying into the mare’s fur.

"...I'm sorry."

Gently, "Why?"

Padded shoulders curved inwards. "It's shameful. To... show emotion like that. It's a weakness. And making someone else deal with any of it..."

"Who told you that?"

Silence.

"It doesn't matter," Nightwatch sighed. "Um. No, it does. But I don't think it's someone I can reach. Or kick. Will you get undressed? Please?"

Eventually, the girl nodded.

Most of the process took place in silence.

"Um..."

Cerea reluctantly glanced over, and saw the little highlights of red under black fur.

"...how do you cover... um... your geni --"

Hastily, "Skirt. Or tail. Mostly skirts."

The pegasus blinked.

"Oh."

The centaur just barely managed a single, horribly awkward nod. Numb fingers slipped off the first bra strap.

"You should probably keep wearing one. Um. In public. Um..." The color contrast now invoked charcoal embers. "The worst questions... things where it won't ever be any worse than this..."

Wings shivered.

"...what's your menstrual cycle? And do you need anything to help with it?" Almost immediately, "I shouldn't have asked that. I shouldn't. Sun and Moon, it's like I just made you change color --"

"-- twenty-eight days. Year-round. There's no..." The centaur hesitated and somehow, the words found a way to become even more awkward. "I don't know how this is going to translate. Heat? Estrus? In the -- sexual sense -- oh. It came across. So not from that. Some humans think we do. There's jokes. And -- trying to find out if we're in estrus. Thinking we'll just --" and stopped.

The pegasus managed a nod. "So you've had at least one already," just barely made its way into the world. "But you didn't ask for anything. Um. I know you don't ask for much of anything anyway, and that's a problem. But with that -- do you... um... have any trouble staying... um... clean?"

"Sometimes there's a little blood, but that's from the egg's release," the girl sighed. "We reabsorb the uterine lining. So I just... covered myself. One extra layer. With whatever I could find." A little more softly, "I didn't know how different it was for humans and the others until I became a student. Especially humans." She slowly shook her head. "They're obsessed with panties."

Black ears twisted.

"Lingerie," the pegasus eventually said. "For -- there. Um. That's what I got. Really?"

"That's what their comics and light novels say. The bad ones." With what she felt to be the natural distaste of a France native who was still trying to reconcile the casual perversions of manga, "Which is almost all of them. Did you understand 'comics'?"

More aural rotation.

"Graphic novels? We have those."

"Oh..."

The bra came off.

The females looked at each for a while, and did so without judgment.

"Do you have a year-round cycle?" the centaur forced out. "Or is it --"

"-- twenty-two days. Um. For me. There's a little bit of range. No estrus. For everypony. Some species go through it. Kudus do. The fighting among the males gets nasty when their females are in season. But we've just got the one family in Canterlot. Which has an adolescent male. So he tests his horns on other things. Like wrought-iron fences." Even for this conversation, the next part came across as an exceptionally awkward pause. "Crossing Guard's had to get him untangled a few times. He's starting to wonder if the kid's doing it on purpose."

"Twenty-two days," the girl made herself repeat.

Nightwatch nodded. A major percentage of the centaur's upper body went scarlet.

"...how does that work with the valve?"

The pegasus told her.

"...oh."

After a while, they both agreed it could never be any worse than that.

They were both in the filled pool. The blush was still easier to pick out on the centaur.

“This is sort of normal, you know,” Nightwatch declared. Her path had currently brought her to what Cerea perceived as the shallows, mostly to give her legs a moment of rest. The water had allowed them to do some talking just about face to face -- but for the pegasus, that meant a lot of paddling. “Bathing in groups. Canterlot has bathhouses. Sometimes it’s just easier to wash each other.”

“Japan has bathhouses,” Cerea told the little knight. “But the big ones are tourist attractions. Natural hot springs with inns built around them.”

“Really?” Genuine curiosity. “We have some of those in Eastern --“ the translator hiss went on for a while, and couldn’t possibly have meant to land on “-- Saddlezania. But they’re expensive. Did you go to one of yours?”

“With the others. And our host, because he always had to come if we were going to go anywhere at all. That was one of the laws.”

“What was it like?”

Cerea thought about it. A few extra seconds allowed the twin filters of distance and perspective to finally slot into place.

“It was mostly about girls trying to show themselves off to him. And using the springs as an excuse for it.” She sunk a little lower in the water: the portions which had once been vaguely intended for hot springs display took on a little more buoyancy. “It was... embarrassing. That we were all doing it. And... it was hard to tell who he was really paying attention to, so I don't think anyone even figured out if it was working.”

I hardly ever had him to myself, with all the girls in the household. Then there were more girls at the hot springs, and the snow woman, and...

It didn't matter.

Curiously, “Was it a group date? It didn’t feel like you had those.”

Eight minutes passed in explanation, until they heard hooves on the other side of the closed door.

“That’s the food delivery,” Nightwatch said. “I told them to send enough for a bad day and leave it outside. Um. That might mean a few more deliveries. But we’ll eat together once we get out --“

“You were angry,” Cerea said, because it felt as if it was finally time for that and it was better than talking about the hot springs any more. “Before the fight.”

“I’ve been angry with myself for a while,” the pegasus confessed. “There were... a lot of reasons for it. But the center was fear. A lot of things come down to fear, and what you do with it. If you give in, or fight it, or -- let go. I thought...”

The mare began to swim again. Pushing towards the centaur.

“...it would be easier to just leave. To let somepony else teach you. Be near you...”

“It would be easier,” the centaur quietly observed.

“Hating myself is always easier,” the mare agreed.

Swirling steam condensed. Water soaked into ancient sponge.

It was possible to hear the pain. “Why didn’t you leave?”

And then it was easy to pick up its echo. “Princess Luna... she said something to me, and -- I spent a lot of time thinking about it. She sort of said -- well, it’s not what she said, but I think it’s part of what she meant. I’ve got... Um. I guess it’s sort of a tendency.” The mare winced a little. “Or a habit, now that I’ve done it twice. I see something that’s big, powerful, and -- hurting... and I decide that’s what has to be sheltered. Protected. When a lot of ponies wouldn't.”

The pegasus sighed. Ears twisted, and water dripped from the fur.

“I still feel like I was right both times,” she reluctantly added. “For whatever that’s worth. But if I abandoned one, then maybe that meant I would fly away from the other if things got rough. I don’t want that to be me. A Guard who... abandons somepony.” Hesitated. “Someone.”

They were both quiet for a while.

“Jealousy would have been a better reason to leave,” Nightwatch said.

Cerea’s tail tried to slash: water resistance turned the results into a slow ripple of hair. “Jealous?” It wasn’t disbelief, because invoking the syllables of 'belief' implied that something other than fact could be at the core. “How could you --“

It was, at most, half a tease. “-- it feels like you've dated more in the last year than I’ve been out with anypony in the last four.”

A now somewhat sulky centaur sank a little lower in the steaming water.

“...I think your future prospects are better.”

Gently, “Even if we get you home?”

Silence.

it was, as encouragement went, slightly too open. “You had someone interested in you before --“‘

“-- are you pretty?”

The pegasus blinked.

“I don’t know,” Cerea quietly said. “I don’t know what ponies look for in each other. I know you’re healthy. But I don’t know what’s considered attractive.”

It made the mare put in some visible thought.

“Um,” she eventually said. “I’m not the most beautiful pegasus in the Guard. If we had a calendar, then Glimmerglow would be the Summer Sun Celebration and a couple of moons on either side. And night colors weren’t always in fashion anyway. But I don’t have much trouble attracting somepony. Not on looks. It’s getting them to stay that’s the problem.”

“Why?”

The explanation took less than three minutes.

“...oh.”

“That’s how it is, when you’re a Lunar and a Guard,” Nightwatch sighed. “And... I kind of got a reminder that I don’t want to switch shifts. Not just to look for that. Are you pretty?”

“...um,” the girl eventually echoed.

“I really can’t tell,” the mare admitted. “Health is easier. But most of what that says is that you may not need the doctors tonight, but you really need some time off. At least two days. Or you’ll be seeing the doctors over and over --“

“...I... have an...” Another swallow. “...unusual body. For a human --“

“-- because you have four legs, when they have two?” The nausea was briefly visible. “And feet...”

More quickly, “Even with the parts which match. I -- before I went to Japan, I looked at some of their magazines, trying to figure out what they liked. I’m not... and he was into legs...“

“-- what about for a centaur?”

“It doesn’t matter.” A little too strongly, “When I’m among humans, when it’s their nation, then it's about what they like. What they see. Centaur stallions just want -- they want." Decibels were rising. "That's all it is. Want. They want, and they don't care what anyone else wants --"

Which was when she saw just how fast Nightwatch was breathing.

The next words pained the mare: it was possible to both see and scent it. But Cerea recognized them as necessary, and almost felt that the question only could have come from a...

"Did something happen?"

"...no." The laugh was bitter. "They've been -- trained, sort of. To wait for the right time."

Don't think about it.

"And you carry something dense and heavy," she added. "Because they're all stupid, but you don't want to give any of them the chance to be really dumb."

The pegasus paddled in place for a while.

"Cerea?" The centaur waited. "Are your males even... sapient?"

Don't make me think about it...

But it felt as if some things could never be asked, simply because the pegasus wouldn't understand that the question could even exist.

"Technically," the girl admitted. "It's just that they mostly think about fighting. And drinking. And everything they think they can get after they've had a few drinks and the weaker ones are out of the fight. That's where the weighted baton comes in. Did 'baton' --"

The next question, however, was completely natural.

"-- is that why you became an exchange student?"

It took a few seconds.

"One of the reasons. I... never felt any attraction, for any of them. I didn't understand why. I wasn't comfortable in my own herd. But I'd spent my whole life in the gap --"

almost

"-- and I wanted to know what it felt like to be somewhere else. Anywhere. I... think a lot of liminals joined the program just for that. Papi did. But I didn't feel like I was going out to look for a human, or anything else. Not for romance. Centaurs are -- supposed to serve. But not as inferiors. All the old stories said we were meant to be a partner species. Instructors and guardians. No centaur had the chance to do that for centuries. At first, I told myself that I wanted to find someone I could be with as a partner. The... rest came later."

The search, every day and every night. For someone I could respect.
The chase, with him on my back and no idea where he was supposed to grab. Trying to catch something with an engine.
He took the impact for me...

But the filters were still in place.

"Or I was looking for both," she softly admitted. "And I just didn't tell myself. The first human in Japan to show me any real kindness, and a capacity for sacrifice... I thought..."

"You thought it could turn into love." Almost a whisper, "Or that it had to be love, just because... it hadn't happened before."

Blonde strands floated on the water. The girl breathed, and did very little else as her eyes closed again. Lids weighed down with humiliation.

"Kindness can feel like love sometimes," Nightwatch said. "But it's just a step into friendship. Which is its own sort of love. Just not... the other type." The little mare sighed, swam a little closer: something which registered as warm ripples and little splashes. "The buffalo have a saying: 'Love is friendship that catches fire.' I think there's something to that. But just being friends can be enough."

"Nightwatch?"

The pegasus stopped about a meter away. Blocked by the wall of the girl's rising fear.

The centaur wouldn't look at her. Didn't look at anything, and the strange neck turned so that closed eyes wouldn't have to perceive so much as a single backlit shadow.

"...are we friends?"

A few stray drops fell from the pool's inlets.

"Um," the pegasus said.

Shaking hands came out of the water. Moved to cover closed, averted eyes --

"-- I don't know how to nuzzle you."

The girl froze.

It barely rose to the level of whisper, and only the acoustics of the bathroom allowed it to be heard at all. "...what?"

"Um. There's a nuzzle. For friends. There's another one for family, and there's one for when you love somepony. But there's a friendship nuzzle. And. Um. You don't have a snout. Just about everything has a snout, and you don't. Even beaks project enough to work with, and griffons have their own way of showing when they're friends with a pony. Which happens, especially in Protocera, because there's so many ponies there. Who mostly think like griffons. Um. So I don't know how to nuzzle you. Or where. The only parts of you which stick out are... um. I don't... I guess I could nuzzle you there. But I don't think they nuzzle back... um. They're -- moving. Heaving? Everything is heaving. Um. Are you okay? Does having your lips pressed together like that mean pain --"

A centaur couldn't really double over: the jointing didn't allow it. But arms still slammed across the upper waist, that torso leaned forward, and then the sound burst forth, bounced within the confines of the bathroom and back to ears which were set to the sides and ears which were placed atop the skull, echoed over and over again as the helpless noise just kept coming because it had been over a month or a moon in this strange world, it didn't matter because she never did this in public, so few things ever felt like they could inspire it, and being so open could be considered as shameful...

But her mother wasn't there and for an endless minute, neither was that shadow.

The pegasus froze. Listened and watched, until it was over.

"Is that what it sounds like when you laugh because you're happy?"

A few last gasps.

"I think so."

(She thought it was right. But she couldn't be sure. It hadn't happened in a long time.)
(Not since the first moment of freedom.)
(Not until the last hours before she might have destroyed everything.)

"Oh. Um. ...good...?"

"Nightwatch?" The pegasus looked up at her, and the girl saw that because her eyes had opened again. "I..."

I want to hug you. It felt like she almost wanted that as much as she'd ever wanted anything.

But it also felt like too much, too fast. The girl loved to hug and be hugged, and... it was potentially asking the pegasus to be pulled against her breasts. Something the mare had no experience with. And she didn't know how she was supposed to be hugged back. Forelegs draped over shoulders felt like the only real option, and that would be an awkward position for the other to assume (much less hold), especially in the water. Plus that meant pressure against another part of the pony's anatomy, still from the same source...

"I'm -- going to come a little closer. And touch you. With my face. If that's okay."

"Um," the mare considered. "All... all right... Are you sad again --"

Cerea dropped as low as she could within the water: she needed to be just about level with the mare, so that her breasts wouldn't shift into the pegasus during the lean. Crossed the distance in a way that let her approach from the left, found an aching, very temporary way of getting lower still, and gently kissed the little knight's forehead.

"Um," Nightwatch repeated.

The centaur pulled back. Reoriented, and waited.

"That felt... weird."

"I'm sorry --"

"-- I didn't say it was bad. Just... weird."

"...oh."

"I'll figure out a nuzzle," Nightwatch decided. "It just might take a while. Um. I think we're friends. You... don't go through all of it and stay near someone unless you're friends. It's just that... it has to be about how we see it. Because other ponies are going to be scared, or upset, or... worse. And we have to show them that we're not any of it. With each other."

"You don't smell scared..."

"You're not scary. Um. Is that a bad thing for centaurs? You're crying again --"

"-- do ponies cry when they're happy?"

"...sometimes. Is that --"

The girl nodded.

"We're very different," the pegasus said. Wings flared, curled back in. "But I think most of that is shape."

Eventually, all of the best baths reached the point where it felt as if the water was holding you in place.

"I didn't mean to hit Squall with the drydust. I --" Cerea winced "-- got the wrong bag. Is it dangerous, getting hit by it? And that's why he reacted that way?"

"More dangerous than whiffwings, if you don't get the glide fast enough?" The pegasus idly floated. "It's not comfortable to breathe. It isn't poisonous, but there's enough moisture in your nose, mouth, and lungs that you're going to be coughing and sneezing up little bits of gel for a while, until it goes inert again. If you had a drink of water and swallowed some drydust right after -- that's when you need a doctor. But with Squall... Um. This is... he sort of wound up facing Tirek by himself. For a few seconds. I think he volunteered because he wanted to prove he could stand up to a centaur. But he was scared the whole time, and when you managed to hit him... I think that brought it all back."

"I'm sorry --"

"-- you don't control how others react. You shouldn't." Nightwatch sighed. "You faced a griffon. Magic which makes someone think or feel differently, if you didn't agree to it, is a weapon. And sometimes it's a crime. It's not magic anypony should want to have. Not good ponies. The spells exist, but... most of the best unicorns don't learn them. And they try not to use them unless they have to." The sodden black tail twitched. "The Sergeant may still be yelling at Squall. But in a good way. Like what Princess Luna does. It makes you yell at yourself."

And then the entire sleek body twitched.

With immediate concern, "Nightwatch?"

The horror, however, had been on time delay. The mare's forelegs made up for it through trying to go over the head exactly on schedule.

"I yelled at the Sergeant..."

"My shoulders hurt."

"Um. Which ones --"

"-- oh. Upper. 'Foreshoulders' for the lower."

"You're not bruised there."

"I think it's muscle pulls from the forge."

"You're working too much."

"I... work so I won't think."

"Does that happen?"

"No."

And even with the best baths, you had to get out sometime.

The dry centaur put on a nightgown. It was silky (although she wasn't sure it was silk) and showed cleavage, because Ms. Garter. Plus there were gaps over her hips, and Nightwatch finally explained the reason why: to show off a mark which Cerea didn't have.

They both ate, although Nightwatch had to keep nosing food towards Cerea: the girl was hungry enough, but exhaustion was claiming a false priority. It took multiple reminders that things would be that much worse in the morning without another two servings of carrots to keep the centaur chewing. By the time they finished, she was almost too sleepy to swallow.

It took her two attempts to get up from the impromptu serving area near the bathroom door, and Nightwatch had to keep her staggering in the right direction with a series of head nudges. The altitude involved tended to vary, as there was rather a lot to nudge.

"Can you sleep on your side?"

"...yes," the centaur yawned. "It's just... really uncomfortable to get up again. There's a lot of twisting." And because she was at the level of exhaustion which both allowed that kind of openly-expressed thought and prevented any memory of the words from returning until the worst possible moment, "It's funny."

"What is?"

"I spent all that time thinking about how to have sex with him --"

"Um."

She was also too tired to pick up on that. "-- and nothing about the after. I knew sex was possible, because --" and she wasn't that tired "-- it just is. But what was supposed to happen when we finished? I'm too big..." The rest was temporarily put on hold by another yawn. "...for his bed. That's just sleeping normally. On my side would be worse. And I'm probably too heavy for the mattress frame. What was he going to do? Come down to the mat with me? How do you cuddle, when one of you is vertical and the other's lying down? I didn't... I didn't think..."

There was just enough strength left for the sigh.

"...that he would have been cuddling with a horse."

"Um."

"I mostly think about the wrong things," Cerea's exhaustion decided. "All the time."

"Think about sleep," the little knight said. "Think about sleeping in. As much sleep as you need. And then at least two days off."

They reached the little pool of blankets. The larger body carefully lowered itself.

"I knew it was going to be more than one Guard. Just not... so many. All at once. I thought... three..."

"Three and you would have won." Which was where words stopped for a moment, because her teeth were busy pulling a blanket over the broad lower back.

Automatically, "I lost..."

The pegasus had to wait until she touched down on the other side, and hated the delay. "You won."

"I..."

"It's about how you lose," the little knight said. "You lost in the way that wins."

The words sank into oddly-placed ears. It would be some time before they were needed.

"Sleep," Nightwatch told her. "Just get some sleep."

The girl's eyes closed for the last time on that night. Arms automatically shifted, folded and locked under the breasts.

The pegasus watched as breathing slowed. It didn't take all that long before the eyes began to shift behind the lids, because the girl dreamed more than ponies did. Only a few more seconds until the trembling began, with the tail desperately lashing as a foreleg tried to kick --

-- there was nothing in her which could have known, not on the conscious level. But deep in dream, she felt the smaller body curl up next to her right flank. Pressing against her own, within waking world and nightscape alike.

The movements stopped. And doubly guarded, the girl finally slept.

Corruptive

She was sketching, and doing so in order to keep herself from thinking. That didn't work either.

But when it came to any real attempt at self-distraction, the sketchbook was all she had. Cerea was under orders to lift nothing heavier than a quill: any temporary load of ink had been calculated as part of that package. There were ways in which it frustrated her: the clearing of the barracks wasn't exactly complete, she wasn't training, she wasn't studying (or rather, she couldn't until Nightwatch came in -- although any such session might wait until after something had been read aloud), she wasn't doing much of anything...

In the household, a moment when you relaxed enough to stop looking for the next disaster allowed that probability to become the current one. Within the gap, she was supposed to remain busy at just about all times, because laziness was hardly a knightly virtue. Reading counted for activity and so had offered her some level of retreat, but with pony books... she could pick out a few words, here and there: trying to intuit everything in between was beyond her. She suspected her current reading comprehension level was somewhere between kindergartener and foal who had just grasped that the symbols might have some meaning: the only real question there was whether the local educational system allowed for a kindergarten.

She wasn't allowed to work, because it was supposed to be two days (or more) where she was just resting and healing. But the lack of activity within the barracks created silence. Without sounds to serve as another level of distraction, her ears twisted and turned, trying to focus on anything available. For the most part, they rotated into the past, and so heard her mother not-quite-demanding to know why she wasn't doing something.

But you had to follow orders, if you wanted to be a knight. She had been ordered to rest, and her body was doing its best to obey. Her mind just wouldn't cooperate. There was simply too much to think about, and some of those thoughts made her want to move. Ideally, to leave the palace: the recurring fantasy usually had the capital's ponies panicking just enough to clear a path. Something which would give her the chance to hunt, because there was somepony to hunt for. Somepony who had a new reason for fear.

Nightwatch had made a promise during the bath: that the little knight would tell Cerea what had happened on the next day. And when the Guard had come back into the barracks some time after what was guessed to be sunrise, weary and ready to close out her shift, the centaur had held her to it.

For an outsider who was sufficiently educated to read two sets of body language, it would have been hard to say whom the words hurt more. Both had been making some degree of effort at concealment: the Guard trying to pass off what had happened to her home and possessions as something utterly minor: nothing which couldn't be replaced, and the important thing was still being alive. Another centaur (or even a human, if it was one of the few who were capable of seeing from any perspective other than her own) would have looked away from legs which had been forced into a statue's rigidity and focused on the girl's hands: the wringing of fingers and twisting of wrists, all of which were bending just a little too far. Added to the slow inward curl of shoulders and the bowing of the upper back, it indicated a centaur who had taken on that much more of a burden, desperately trying to find some way of apologizing for her mere existence --

-- right up until the moment when Nightwatch had told her about the foal.

The pegasus knew more about centaur body language than anypony alive. Cerea was almost certain that exposure hadn't been enough to let Nightwatch spot the signs of a repressed panic attack.

It felt as if it had taken every bit of strength she'd had left just to keep her arms at her sides and her breathing at some level of regularity -- and that was just for the initial surge. She wasn't sure what she'd been drawing on to keep herself at tail flicks and clenching hands until the pegasus had settled into sleep, and then she'd still been unable to make a full-speed gallop for the nearest private space because the sound of pounding hoofsteps would have woken the little knight up.

She'd wound up in the bathroom. Half-collapsed into front of the sinks, staring at the mirror into the reflection of a monster.

And there she'd stayed.

For two hours.

When it came to what Nightwatch had suffered through... there were things Cerea could do, at least in theory. But the first had already been rejected: the pegasus had refused to accept the money from Cerea's training salary. The centaur had desperately argued that she had no personal need for it: she had housing, food, clothing -- and when it came to shopping for anything else, how was she even supposed to step into a store without starting a riot? She didn't need anything important, not when Nightwatch had lost nearly everything...

But the offer had been refused. Equestrian law allowed Nightwatch to collect some degree of restitution from the guilty party and no matter what Cerea might want to believe, that wasn't her. So when the unicorn in question was caught, several kinds of payback would be guaranteed. Now, when it came to Cerea's needs -- exactly what were those, anyway? Because Nightwatch could go into a store, and would bring back receipts --

-- as rather obvious attempts at changing the subject went, it had been an exceptionally awkward one. The only thing which managed to temporarily slow both of the trains hurtling down parallel tracks of embarrassment was Cerea timidly confessing some minor desire for a hoof pick.

There was nothing she could do for Nightwatch, or at least nothing where the little knight would allow Cerea to act. But they spent time together, and...

(She'd stared at herself in the mirror. Ears which didn't have the right shape or placement. Tears streaming endlessly, running down a face which was like no other in an entire world.)

...they were... friends.
She... hadn't really had those.
Not in the herd.
Never in the herd.
Not until...

...they spent time together. It meant there might be a chance for Cerea to repay some portion of the debt.

But with the foal...

Every moment I exist here, ponies are being hurt.

She'd said as much to Nightwatch, and done so for the second time in less than a day. The little knight had a simple response for that: it was nothing Cerea had done, and she didn't control what others did. She wasn't at fault.

Which didn't take into account the fact that none of it would have happened without her presence. She had inspired the act. And now there was a foal in a hospital, struggling to breathe. Because in every moment Cerea existed in this strange place, ponies were being hurt -- even if they were hurting each other.

She couldn't visit the hospital. (She had asked if it was possible to clear the area just long enough for somepony to teleport her in, while remaining silent about needing to see what she had done. Nightwatch had simply told her that the Solar Princess had been there already, met the parents, and... it hadn't gone well.) Her memory had delved for any medical knowledge acquired from every form of media she'd ever encountered, and it had turned out that ponies already knew about oxygen therapy. She possessed no magic of any kind, and any healing power sought in dream might as well be set to turning back time so that she would have never arrived in this world.

The bounds of reality gave her no means of atoning. But in fantasy...

It had been a few days since the arson and as with the signatures created by magic, scents faded: the heat wouldn't have helped. But if she could get somepony to take her to the burn site... every species smelled a little different, each gender gave off its own odors, and individuals could have olfactory signatures of their own. She already knew she had to pick out a unicorn mare. Bring every such resident of the building before her, then let her check the access ramps which led to Nightwatch's floor. Process of elimination...

Realistically, she knew it was too late: time, heat, and the hurried passage of emergency crews would have ruined everything. Even if she somehow managed to find some undisturbed pocket of air, she still would have needed to use the gathered information to track. Head out into the street -- and find thousands of criss-crossing trails. Plus if there had been some degree of wind, any rain at all...

She was a centaur and in this case, that didn't represent 'bloodhound.' If she had been chasing down somepony within a minute or two after the mare had left, there would have been a chance. But days after the fact, with normal weather, a city's population and the heat of the fire to reckon with... no. That was the reality of the situation. The best she could hope for with some faint impression of the mare's scent was matching it to an apprehended suspect. One more piece of confirmation, presuming a pony court would be willing to accept a centaur's senses as evidence.

That was the reality of it. But in fantasy...

...they scatter before her, clearing the path, and the target senses something is wrong. Ponies are a prey species, and the fact that centaurs are mostly herbivorous doesn't change the rest of the facts: forward-set eyes, ears meant for directional focus of sound, added to speed and strength and power.

There are many ways to create a monster, and the one the girl knows best is rather basic: you tell someone they're a monster over and over again, then wait to see how long it takes before they agree with you. But there are other methods. For starters, you could take any creature in the world and meld in a human aspect, because the girl has felt that monstrosity describes the worst of what humans are.

You could create a monster that way. But even with something which can just barely make itself consume meat, you still might get a predator.

Prey knows when it's being hunted, and so the unicorn glances back. Sees what's charging it, and the horn ignites -- but there is a sword, and every desperate attempt at projecting the corona is deflected, parried, rendered into the sort of fading light which might be seen in dying eyes. The centaur charges, it's faster than any unicorn in the world, and it can't be stopped. Nopony in the city will try, because there are invisible walls bordering that charge path and they are being maintained by fear.

The unicorn mare is small, because they're all so very small. The centaur could pick her up with one hand if she gets the leverage, slam her into a wall and then just because the sound produced by the impact is so pleasant, she could do it again and again and again. The ponies have magic -- but for so many of them, it's the only thing they have at all. Take away that power and what are they?

Something you could hurt.
Something you could dominate.
Something you could be in charge of, if you weren't so nice...

In fantasy, she could take revenge.

In reality, she had spent hours with the sketchbook, because if she kept trying to draw, then her mind had to eventually focus on that. And she'd tried. She'd turned back to the first page, the image which still wasn't right, and she'd blurred sections out and started over, repeated that action a few times, and nothing she did made the creation focus. She'd tried to capture the most vital aspect, the thing even her poor skills should have been able to render with no effort at all, and it just wouldn't emerge. Nothing she did with that sketch worked. Nothing at all -- but as soon as she tried to draw anything else...

Hours with nothing else to do. Most of them had been spent in the bathroom or the hallway outside the barracks, because Nightwatch was sleeping. It had meant they were hours which came with occasional interruptions. One of them had been expected, and felt somewhat overdue. (As a special bonus, it had been made by Glimmerglow, and Cerea had inspected the 'most beautiful' Solar Guard as closely as she could get away with. She just wasn't seeing it.) A second had come from Barding, who was somewhat out of the information loop and wanted to know when work would resume in the smithy. She'd had to tell him about the forced days off, and he'd left muttering to himself as he tried to find his way back to his kingdom: some of the darker vocalizations suggested he'd mostly located the barracks through process of elimination. Also that there were several mares in a locker room who weren't entirely happy with him, and he wasn't sure why.

Cerea still decided to count him as a visitor, if only for lack of other candidates.

She'd missed seeing Nightwatch wake up, and suspected she'd been taking one path back from the kitchen at the same moment the little knight had been heading towards it. But the empty bunk told her that the Guard was off getting her breakfast (or whatever Lunars called their first meal after waking), so all she had to do was wait until the pegasus got back. And until then...

There had been a lot of sketching. And all it had done was put her back on that first page, trying to find some way of fixing her mistake. The only thing in her existence which she could fix, and it wasn't yielding. Nothing she did made it right, every effort seemed to make it worse, all of that felt far too much like a perfect summary of her life and...

She could swear the paper was getting thinner.

The familiar scent reached her just ahead of the sound: approaching wingbeats. Cerea quickly turned the page.

"What are you working on?" the little knight carefully inquired, touching down just inside the barracks' doorway. (With the only other occupant awake and about, the centaur had felt free to go back inside.) And with a little smile, "Did you draw me yet?"

The blush instantly began to rise. "...no. I keep meaning to, but there's been so much else. It's -- not because I don't want to --"

"-- is that hard? When everyone can see how you're feeling without really trying, because you don't have fur there to block some of it?"

The question didn't hurt. There were too many other things hurting for the question to really get a word in and besides, they'd promised each other that they would both keep asking things. Because they were friends, and understanding each other was their best hope to remain so.

"Yes," Cerea sighed. "It's even worse because I'm so pale." A slow head shake. "According to the stories, centaurs originally had darker skin. But every herd changed a little, depending on where their gap was. It took centuries, but... the ones in my part of the world lost a lot of their melanin. Did 'melanin' translate?"

Black ears twisted. "'Substance which darkens skin.' It's probably a word which the doctors would have known."

That was possible: when it came to vocabulary, Barding had received more about metallurgy from the disc than Princess Celestia. "I barely even tan. I mostly just wind up with sunburn." Quickly, "Did --"

"-- yes. It's a problem for ponies with thin fur." Nightwatch began to trot forward. "Or anypony who shaves their coat a little too close to the skin. Um. That's been a trend a few times. Ponies shaving most of their fur. Sometimes almost all of it. Or trying to make patterns. It usually starts in spring. And stops in summer. You can draw me whenever you're ready, Cerea. It doesn't have to be any time soon. Just... before you go home."

I want to go home.

She recognized that the little knight was trying to keep her spirits up, making Cerea feel that a return passage was still possible. And because that was the tone which Nightwatch had come in on, the girl understood they wouldn't be talking about the foal for a while. "I should still do it soon. I need to start drawing anything connected to Equestria. It's mostly been..."

Blue eyes closed. Silver ones watched closely.

"Your home?"

I haven't sketched one thing from the gap.
One person.
I haven't even...

"...Japan," Cerea softly answered. "Maybe because that's more recent. It's easier."

As opposed to capturing things I saw day after day for just about all of my life.

"So what was it today?" the pegasus gently inquired.

The physical pain had lessened somewhat. But there was emotional agony added to a new portion of self-blame, and so the word slipped again. "Who."

And before she could even think about trying to recover, "Another one of the exchange students?"

Cerea's eyes opened. "Yes."

"Can I...?"

The girl nodded to a bunk, and they took up what was becoming the standard position: centaur low on the floor, pegasus standing on the mattress.

Cerea started to open the sketchbook. Hesitated.

"This... may be hard for you to see," the centaur said. "Like Papi was, only in a different way. It's how she looks. You had trouble with a human leg before --"

"-- it was mostly the feet," Nightwatch countered. "Um. I don't like feet. It's not being speciesist. They have all those wriggly bits at the end which don't do anything, and... there's usually a smell..."

Cerea, who had eventually begun to secretly sprinkle powder into shoes, declined to comment. "-- and when it comes to her body, she was the closest to human. She could have passed." Which led to some rather quick thought. "With a lot of makeup. On every bit of skin which was exposed. Plus hair dye. A scarf. And contact lenses. Did 'contact lenses' --"

"-- we use them for plays and cinema," the pegasus responded. "But nopony can wear them for very long. They're uncomfortable, and you can get all sorts of diseases when air doesn't reach the eye."

Which confirmed the local existence of movies. Cerea was willing to wait a while longer before asking if ponies had managed sound reproduction and color film. (CGI was lacking the necessary prerequisite, but there might be illusion spells. She hadn't seen anything resembling a television or radio.) And it meant that their contacts were likely made from thin, finely-carved glass: no air-permeable plastics...

Do they have plastic at all? Could you have film without it? Cerea didn't know what the chemical composition was for modern film, although she vaguely recalled silver nitrate being vital to some of the earliest productions. Also that such film liked to decompose rapidly or, just for variety, explode. "So when I turn the page," she cautioned, "for a black-and-white sketch, it's going to be just about like looking at a human. There's just... one vital difference."

It was possible to hear feathers vibrating. "Um. What's that?"

"Her head."

"She's human," Nightwatch attempted to summarize, "except for her head."

Cerea winced. "Her head is human." More than her own, since the ears were right. "It's just... misplaced most of the time."

"Um..."

The vibration had turned into more of a rustle, and bare skin had no trouble with picking up on the first gust of wind. It made her fingers move quickly, just to get it over with.

Eventually, Nightwatch blinked. It was particularly noticeable because it came following a rather long-seeming period in which that hadn't happened.

"...does it..." The pegasus swallowed. (Cerea tried to ignore what her nose was indicating about what had been swallowed.) "...ever go on the neck?"

"Yes. She uses scarves to cover the seam, or wears blouses and jackets with really high collars. But it can be removed pretty easily." Cerea sighed. "It's why I drew her holding it off to the side, as if she was about to frame it on a doorway or something, to startle whoever looked in that direction. She's a little... dramatic."

"How..." Another gulp. "...how does she eat? Breathe? How is she even... alive?"

"Magic." A little more quickly, "There's all sorts of theories. One of them has air and everything else sort of teleporting across, constantly. Another says there's no real gap on the spacial level: just a visual division which only exists in our world." (She was not going to try and find out what might happen when the disc attempted to translate 'pocket wormhole'.) With a faint smile, "She's sort of the worst person to ask, because she'll just say whatever feels most impressive on any given day. Lala likes to make herself sound like she's more mysterious than she really is. Most dullahans do. But 'magic' is good enough to explain it."

"Um. Is she... nice?"

Which was the same thing Nightwatch had asked about Papi -- but this time, Cerea had to give the answer somewhat more thought.

"She's kind," the centaur finally said. "That's not always the same thing as nice. She tries to dress it up in drama most of the time, but she's always trying to do the right thing. It's just that... her idea of what's right doesn't always match what anyone would think of as being nice. There's times when you almost forget she's there --" because the dullahan possessed something very close to an anti-aura, which made it surprisingly easy for people to dismiss the blue-skinned female with the fake scythe in the room "-- but once she focuses on doing something, it's almost impossible to look anywhere else. But she plays herself up too much, like she's a filly trying to get attention. The worst part is that she doesn't need to. Not with just being a dullahan. With what they all are..."

She trailed off. Looked down at the sketch, and the thin smile she'd put on the other girl's lips. It was almost always a thin smile with Lala, when she allowed herself to be caught smiling at all.

In immediate retrospect, "...what are they?" was a question she should have anticipated.

Cerea took a breath.

"I'm sure this isn't going to translate."

Carefully, "Try?"

"Psychopomps."

She waited for the disc to stop hissing. It took less than two seconds.

"Those who travel with the dying," Nightwatch quietly stated. "The companion for the last trot into the otherrealm/afterlife/shadowlands."

It was the centaur's turn to blink.

"Yaks believe in them," the pegasus softly continued. "That everyone has their own. Invisible, intangible, watching from the moment of your birth. Because they want to make sure you always have one friend who'll be with you from the first to the last. And when a yak dies... they meet that friend for the first time, and they talk about all the best times of the yak's life as they walk together into the final fields. Yaks believe in them... but they say there's only one way to see your friend. And it's the one where they don't get to tell anyone after." Just barely reaching a whisper, "Yours are real?"

The blue eyes slowly closed again.

"She says so. She says a lot of things, but..."

The household had been through a lot. Too much, in some ways. But there were those who said the experiences which didn't kill would strengthen bonds. And when you encountered something which could kill...

They'd been through a lot together. And the dullahan was too dramatic for her own good, put on airs like a middle-schooler who was one unneeded eyepatch away from claiming Mysterious Powers -- except that there was something at the core.

"...I believe her. I think most of us did in the end, except for Rachnera." With the smallest of snorts, "Probably because it couldn't be her. But Lala cared about all of us, in her way. And when it came to him, she didn't really see herself as part of the competition because as far as she was concerned, she'd already won."

With an extra decibel or two, "How?"

The smile surprised her. "One of us could have him in life. She got him after." And before the pegasus could think about that too much, "But she cares more than she usually lets herself show. She always wants to help. It just doesn't always show itself in ways which humans would see as nice, because... it's hard for humans to accept death."

"It's hard for just about everyone," Nightwatch quietly stated.

"It's harder when they start assigning blame." Her own volume was dropping. "If humans start thinking about dullahans too much, they usually wind up at the wrong conclusion. They decide a dullahan kills. That their presence causes death, or that they set people up to die. They don't. They don't bring the end. They just make sure someone's there to see it. So you don't have to go alone. And... that's why they retreated to their gaps. There were humans who hunted them, and --" the next part hurt "-- a few liminals. The craziest ones thought that if all the dullahans were gone, there wouldn't be any death. It's why so few of them came out when the program started: because they know some people still think the worst of them. The ones who are ready to blame them all over again."

The girl shivered.

"Sometimes I think she plays it up so much because she wants to look like a caricature. Something humans have to laugh at. If they don't take her seriously, then... they might not be afraid. Did 'caricature' --"

Gently, "-- yes. It sounds like you miss her."

I miss...

"I was almost looking forward to seeing her last night."

The black wings flared, and the left one hit the back of Cerea's head.

"OW -- !"

"-- see her? How could you see --"

The centaur's torso twisted towards the sound of tortured springs. "Nightwatch, calm down!" The pegasus couldn't just go compulsively trotting in place on a mattress like that -- okay, it was a pony mattress: there was a good chance it had been made to stand up to such abuse. But the reaction... "It's okay! You intercepted the lightning, you weren't hurt, and I didn't --"

But the silver eyes were wide, frantic, showing extra white at the edges. A pony in near-panic, and if not for speech and wings, it would have been the closest Nightwatch had ever been to acting like a terrified horse. "-- how?"

With a human, she would have gripped their shoulders, pulled them against her, rocked them gently until either calmness returned or a muffled complaint about oxygen deprivation drifted up. With the pegasus... the friendship was new, felt somewhat fragile --

-- she sang.

There were no words in the melody, for her knowledge of lyrics was just slightly more scattershot then her acquaintance with literature. It wasn't too hard to get a radio into the gap, at least no harder than anything else -- but intercepting and retaining signals could be just about impossible. There was also the question of lining up a never-ending supply of batteries, because truly portable solar chargers had only come into fashion just before the exchange program had begun. It meant there were any number of human songs which Cerea knew fragments of. The majority of those were in French. And when it came to centaur music... she was certain that the disc wouldn't allow any of the translations to maintain rhythm, meter, or rhyme.

So it was a series of notes, rising and falling across a portion of the impressive octave range provided by flexible vocal chords. Something slow and comforting, the sort of music which her mother had sometimes made when a filly had truly done her best before failing yet again, on those rare nights where second place had somehow been almost acceptable.

She sang as her mother would have, and so homesickness began to saturate every note.

Wings stilled, folded back into the rest position. Black-furred legs came to a stop.

"...um," Nightwatch said. "Sorry. Um... you sing for a really long time on one breath. I just..." One last tremble of feathers. "It was just the way you said it. Like you could go to see her at any time. But that would mean you know how to go home, and you don't. Unless there's only one way, and -- you said lightning..."

Cerea stopped. Sighed.

"I wouldn't go to her," the centaur softly explained. "She... made a promise, to everyone in the household. It was after... it was a bad day: that's all I want to say about it right now." Something where there had been more trouble than usual, and Lala had been most of it. "She was trying to apologize. She said... she loved us, all of us, and she just had trouble showing it sometimes. But she cared about every one of us, and... she promised that no matter what happened, no matter who won or lost, where we were, or how it all ended... she would be there for each of us when we died. So we wouldn't be alone. And that was the best way a dullahan could show how much they cared. So when I realized the lightning was coming down -- I thought I was about to see her. I didn't want to die. But... I believed her, in that second before you swooped in. That she could find me. I just..."

She paused. Brought her right hand up to her face, and wiped away the first tear.

"...don't know. Because I'm so far away..." And this smile was a weak one. But it didn't feel forced. "So I can't go home. I could just try to go see her. And then I'd never be able to tell you if it worked."

Silence.

The pegasus awkwardly nuzzled the back of the girl's head.

With open concern, "Did I hurt you?"

"The wing? You mostly just startled me." Which had been a deliberate understatement: with more distance to work up swing speed, it would have been like getting hit by a swan.

"Do you want me to read you some more of that story? Before the lesson starts?"

There were ways in which she wanted that more than anything. To lose herself in the life of another for a while, because reality was under no obligation to provide a happy ending and there was a chance the story's author would be somewhat more kind.

"Not tonight." Her right arm gestured. "Glimmerglow brought those down while you were sleeping. Somepony put bookmarks at the right pages. But I know I won't be able to read anywhere near enough words, and the Sergeant will probably ask me about it on my first day back..."

They both looked at the short stack of books. For Cerea, there was also the olfactory residue of a thousand other phantom volumes, waiting for their siblings to return. But in isolation, it was simply the scent of paper which was more than a century old.

Volumes were interred in the Canterlot Archives, awaiting their chance of being needed one more time. Unearthed when that opportunity came, with their contents laid out for final autopsy.

"Please," the girl gently requested. "Tell me about Blitzschritt."

It wasn't the usual route to the Solar Courtyard, nor was it Celestia's typical hour for hosting a press conference. She preferred to have the gatherings close to Sun-raising, because her own Courtyard existed in perpetual dawnlight -- at least for any hour during which it would have been under Sun at all. Part of the typical scheduling was to make the environment a little more natural, and most of the rest came from petty vengeance: if she had to be up at that hour...

(Night assemblies always went to the Lunar, because the Solar Courtyard under Moon was something which made ponies deeply uncomfortable. The grey light of the midnight sun came with centuries of emotional resonance attached, and spending more than a few minutes there would have ponies bringing back everything they regretted in their own lives. Celestia supposed it might potentially be a good place for extracting confessions -- if the pony asking the questions didn't keep stopping to wail over That One Broken Plate.)

In this case, it was about ninety minutes before Sun-lowering. Early-arriving Lunars were getting ready for their shifts, Solars had started to think about what they would do with the evening, and Celestia had gotten stuck with paperwork -- but she'd known that the deluge was coming, and had scheduled the gathering accordingly. It still gave her enough time to check on the protests and then get to the conference. She needed to survey the situation and -- this was the most important part -- had to do so before Luna got there.

So far, the protesters had been going home as Moon approached. But the exact time at which the crowd began to break up for the night had been moving progressively closer to Lunar hours. Celestia wanted to see the state of the (stlll-increasing) group because she needed to make an estimate: how long she had before retiring to her own bed would leave the whole still-active thing pressed solely between the younger's hooves. Or, in the worst case, under.

It left her trotting towards Apex Tower, and doing so along the public route because there was too much hallway traffic for casually slipping into a passageway. (Teleporting tended to be noticed: most unicorns could pick up on the burst of thaums from a departure, and there was just about nothing which could be done about the flash of light.) And she did so while casually dodging around smaller ponies on something very close to instinct, because part of her was still going over some particularly vital paperwork.

Emery had filed his post-exercise report.

He hadn't been the only one. Nearly all of the Guards involved had written a summary of their own actions during the fight, along with a few general impressions and reviews of personal tactics. The exception was Squall, because the counseling sessions took priority and Emery felt that filing an official report required being off probation.

'Centaur panic.' It felt as if her tongue had just coated itself in sewage. The counseling might help, and the extra training sessions with Emery might wear him out to the point where he can't even think about being afraid. Or about anything which isn't finding a bed. Most of the sigh was kept internal: the rest served as a little extra propulsion for getting her around part of the Solar accounting department. We've been so focused on getting Equestria to accept her -- and that reminded her: both sisters had to review the latest version of the still-undistributed one-sheet when it came off the printing press in the morning -- that we didn't look closer to home. Or in it. We might need to gather both staffs for a talk. Dryly, Shortest possible version: 'This is Cerea. Please don't kill her.'

Some degree of editing seemed to be required.

That may not be able to wait until after the training wraps up, especially not after getting the first teacher's letter back. If she's going to be meeting fillies and colts, she may need to meet some adults first. Her mind, which was already preparing for edit mode, managed a neat last-second removal of 'supposed'. And I have to contact the school, make sure all of the parents know exactly what's going on, this is going to be a permission slip for the ages and we'll be lucky if a third of them sign...

There was too much to think about: something which often held true when approaching the end of her hours. Some of it even concerned the press conference, because that was the chance to step into something approaching normalcy and besides, if she had to suffer through the details of negotiating trade revisions with Eeyorus, then she owed a Courtyard's worth of reporters the joy of writing it all down. But she was also thinking about Emery's quickly-jotted plans to explore the possibilities offered by Cerea's olfactory capabilities, a few brain cells were wondering when the best time to personally speak with Squall would be because he'd had a rough year-plus to begin with and now this, but she also had to find some way of talking to him where he could still be a Guard at the end of it. Because if things kept going forward --

-- how many will just quit?

The thought didn't make her break stride, mostly because it wasn't the first time she'd had it.

If she makes it through and joins the ranks, how many trot and fly away rather than serve with a centaur at their side? Not necessarily because they hate her, but because they can't live with the fear. They can't work when it's less than two body lengths away and casting a shadow across their backs. They can't think...

She suspected the number was going to be something higher than zero. Part of the fallout would be determined by shift --

-- her peripheral vision just barely registered the off-hues through the doorway, and mostly because the tail had flicked into sight at just the wrong moment. Celestia's horn ignited, and she took no small pleasure in the frustrated scrabble of elevated hooves.

"Two floors down, Wordia," she smiled as her field deposited the mare in front of her. "I know you're familiar with every last path to both Courtyards. And yet you still find creative ways of becoming lost." A small head shake. "Fortunately, none of them have ended with my locating you in a restricted section, because there's laws on the books about going into those without authorization, clearance, or possession of the proper workings. Try not to stumble into any?"

Her inner self, which felt free to be much more truthful about things, added Because I'm completely aware of the consequences which would come from a solid moon of Tattler headlines, and I'd still love to personally show you at least one trail into the cells. Just long enough to watch your face when you realized I was actually locking the door.

But you know that. And you've been careful.

So far.

"My apologies, Princess," Wordia openly lied, adding that special smile to the end of it. "But as it turns out, it all worked out for the best! Because I got lost looking for you. I was hoping to get a few minutes alone with you before the conference started." The sound of the notepad and quill emerging from her saddlebags was nothing like the sword emerging from its scabbard, mostly because the sword couldn't do as much damage. "Now. About the centaur --"

"-- tonight is for Eeyorus, Wordia," Celestia smoothly said. "The only news on Cerea is 'training proceeds'."

"Despite the injuries she's caused to the Guards?"

The Solar Princess maintained the smile. It had taken centuries of practice to keep that smile in place, and Wordia's presence tended to force the mastery time required into something closer to an eon.

Setting out bait based on knowledge of typical proceedings, or does she have another source?

"Combat scrimmages are part of normal training," the alicorn stated. "I suppose there's going to be one eventually, if there hasn't been already. The associated paperwork may even be on my desk. Which I would discourage you from attempting to reach."

Please try to reach it.

"And do you feel it was worth risking damage to the nation's relationship with Mazein? Having their ambassador injured in a 'combat scrimmage'?"

All right: that one would have been a little easier for her to learn about. "Ambassador Power likes to meet people," Celestia observed. "It's part of why he's an ambassador. And as with every minotaur who's been part of Guard training, he volunteered, and he's taken hooves to the legs before this. Some pony, some minotaur, and I'd imagine there's an assortment available beyond that. His only complaint to me was that he didn't get to ask her more about centaur wrestling styles, which he tells me are largely arm-based. And apparently involve tables. I'm not sure how."

Ponies flowed around them. When you had that level of immovable objects in the middle of a river, the water tried not to get too close.

"Incidentally," the Princess added, "I read your latest opinion column. The one in the late edition."

"It pleases the Tattler to count the palace among its audience," Wordia smiled.

At full subscription price. Which the owners have tried to raise for us alone and when that didn't work, they attempted to perfect the delivery charge. That got pulled back after I started trotting two blocks to the nearest newsstand every morning. "So, just to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your opinion, because they can be such subjective things..."

She took a breath, one deep enough to fully expand her rib cage while adding a touch of rustle to the wings. Tilted her head slightly to the right, allowing herself the demeanor of open, polite curiosity. And loomed.

"...you feel the foal's condition is Nightwatch's fault?"

Wordia looked directly up into her eyes.

"Well," the reporter calmly began, "if one happens to somehow believe that the fire wasn't started in a deliberate attempt to shift pity onto the centaur and those who... might be advised to not be so public with spending time in proximity -- then the fire wouldn't be Nightwatch's fault, because she didn't set it. The foal, however..." The unicorn shrugged. "It's rather basic, Princess. If one's chosen lifestyle is something which others might disagree with -- when somepony is, shall we say, standing apart from the herd -- then one shouldn't live near normal ponies. Because doing so, should others respond in their own, clearly-criminal ways to that perceived deviance, is endangering them. She certainly can't control whether somepony sets a fire, even if she should have had more discipline about behaving in ways which wouldn't make others consider the act. But she can certainly choose not to be around anypony who could be hurt."

The mare's lips curled.

"I'm sure you understand that, Princess," Wordia added. "Or the barracks wouldn't exist in the first place."

The temperature in this hallway is stable.
The temperature in this hallway is stable.
The temperature in this hallway is stable.

"The central purpose of the barracks is allowing Guards to sleep in the palace during a siege," Celestia calmly stated. "We haven't had a siege in --"

"-- oh, is that the reason?" Wordia merrily interrupted. "How interesting! Well, I'm sure they might come in handy sometime. Possibly soon, especially if any nation takes the centaur problem as a reason to -- well, I'm sure everypony hopes that won't happen. And knows the best way of preventing it, which the palace won't take. Actually, I'm not sure how much good the barracks might do against a rebellion from within. But I stand by my opinion, Princess. Those who are different? Shouldn't be around those who are normal. And Guards... they don't think like normal ponies, do they? They can't. So... perhaps they should take more care about what they associate with. Or simply choose to exist in isolation, so that the rest of us can lead our normal lives without fear."

The phantom points on the smile became sharper.

"Now that I think about it, Princess," the mare concluded, "you've been isolating yourself for a very long time. I suppose that means you agree. Well, that's my exclusive. I'll see you in the Courtyard!"

Her neck almost snapped back into a normal position, and she moved around Celestia's left flank, merging with the flow --

"-- that's not a good year for Tyrconnell."

The reporter's left hind leg momentarily hitched.

"They've made better whiskeys," Celestia added. "Far better. In fact, the general opinion is that since the 1258 was bottled at the time of the ownership change, that was as close as they ever got to rotgut. But it did come in the largest of their bottles, as they were trying to get rid of it in bulk. So if your goal as a consumer is sheer quantity, then..." The alicorn shrugged. "To each their own, I suppose. Even if it results in danger to those in the consumer's general proximity. Especially if that party is standing too close to a fire."

The mare's gait straightened out again. She moved --

"-- I'm going to ask again, Wordia," the Princess softly said. "The same thing Princess Luna and I requested on the night we introduced Cerea to the nation. You have sources which we don't: you've taken some pleasure in proving that over the years. So if you do learn something about the criminal matter of the fire -- we would appreciate being told."

-- stopped. Staring straight ahead, as the long tail twitched.

"Or," the alicorn added, "if you happen to know something now."

The silence was deep enough to hear invisible acid pouring into the diminishing flow.

"At a guess," Wordia Spinner finally said, "I know about as much as you do. Since there's been no arrests. Right now, Princess, all I can do is distribute the existing information. Spread the word into my readership, and -- see what they do with it. Maybe some of them will act on what they've read."

The unicorn took a slow breath.

"Wouldn't that be interesting?" she asked, carefully-groomed legs starting to shift again. "Until the conference, Princess."

The oldest mare in the world reached the balcony. Looked down at the protestors, without the protection of illusion or company, waiting to see who spotted her first. How they would react.

There were more of them, because there were more every day. And they marched and flew and chanted, because the truest subject of their fear was beyond their reach and so any suitable target would do. One which had been brought down in Palimyno, brought down by ponies and if they could repeat that miracle while adding a more suitable conclusion, the fear might go away forever...

Hundreds of them now. It would probably be a thousand tomorrow, moving in patterns of rage --

-- it was the lack of movement which caught her attention. And once she saw it, she couldn't stop. She came within minutes of being late for the press conference, had to teleport to make up some of the time, and as she smiled and calmly discussed trade, the image continued to burn against her mind.

There was a place where there was no marching line or improvised air path occupants trying to block the view. There were simply ponies standing in formation, silently staring up at the palace. At her. And the border had their bodies arranged in a surrounding circle, while the core gathering came across as something which had five living projections: four in one direction, another on the side at an angle. With a little hollow in the center.

It was very much like a hand superimposed over a hoof.

Selfish

Books freeze time.

With the fictional, reach a given chapter and the protagonist will always be in the same situation. They will have already suffered a given number of losses, there is still more which can be sacrificed or stolen, and the next danger lies before them. The same danger as the last time, and this will never change. The story can have twists, turns, unexpected reveals and final explanations which lay out where all of the little clues had been hidden — but once read, it will proceed down a single path forever. It takes a certain amount of love to repeatedly follow a trail for which one knows the ultimate destination, especially when the sights never vary. This is here, that is there. A procession of half-internal images which occur in a given order, with no changes allowed. It’s a quality which used to deeply offend the dying entity in the tower: at least with a verbal telling, there was the chance to spontaneously throw in a fresh lie. If only to see how the audience would respond, and the librarian’s reactions tended to be the most amusing. They never found that first degree of connection before he made his decision, and he would have been surprised to learn how much time she had spent in weeping.

But with books which retell history... in a way, that can be worse. The past is frozen: something else which used to irritate him to the core of the once-cohesive storm. Nothing any known entity can do will alter so much as a second of it. Even the time travel spell only allows about thirty seconds of witnessing what once was, a single trip for each user, and so it has almost no purpose at all.

(Almost. The sisters have used it. They were among the first to do so, and consider that half-minute to have been among the most essential of their lives. The chance which came after all hope of final contact had ended.)

The book which records history will show you what was. Never what could be or should have been. The reader’s cry of alarm will not echo backwards across the decades to give the doomed a single vital second of extra warning. One second might have changed so much, and... nothing in the frozen world can be altered. Ink forms a barrier more imperturbable than diamond.

Turn the page. Look at the first word, and the ibex is a minute away from dying.
Forever.

She will die on the mountain and in that, she will find the final link to her own species. Just about all of them have been born here, virtually every last one spends their entire lives on the slopes, and death creates the last connection to their homeland.

Ibex seldom think of themselves in terms of the other species, not even for the sake of comparison: for the most part, they are the ibex, and there is nothing else quite like them in the world. But there are two exceptions, and one comes from the earth ponies. Ibex tales go deeper than most, and so there are whispers of something called the contract. A pact made with the world itself: to emerge into life, to labor as caretakers of the land, and in the end, to return. There’s something about that which the ibex can respect, because they feel the same way about the mountains. They are here, upon the slopes. The stories suggest they always have been, at least to the extent which stories can capture. Go back far enough and the stories stop — but where words end, there still might have been ibex. Perhaps there was simply nothing worth talking about yet.

They seldom travel. They almost never leave, and those who do are regarded as the strangest of their kind: in some ways, barely ibex at all. Because the other comparison which the mountain dwellers will allow is with the buffalo and a society rife with traditions which exist on the installment plan. A buffalo doesn’t have a ceremony: they have a ritual leading into a rite that, if completed successfully, allows you to start thinking about whether to conduct the ceremony. And every bit of this endless stretching of time was deliberately forced, because buffalo are prone to act on impulse. There is no gap they cannot hurdle, as long as there’s a hasty conclusion on the other side of it. Their entire culture was created in a desperate attempt to force the species into collectively slowing down and in this, the effort has found some degree of success. (It also produces an endless series of those who leave it, because couples which truly love each other can’t always stand in one place for the sixty hours required for legal proof.) A buffalo considers no tradition to be real unless you can trace it back across twenty generations to the one who came up with it in the first place, and whoever’s drawing the line had better possess exceptionally steady control over their jaw.

Ibex can almost respect that. The core idea is there. It’s just that... for an ibex, that’s not going far enough. If the creator of a tradition lived recently enough to be identified, then those who’ve been dead for centuries are still young enough to be questioned. Ibex traditions begin at the point where history fades out.

They recognize (or feel they do) that there are likely two reasons for this. Their culture was either born in the Discordian Era, where all reliable tales twist into jumbles of syllables and screams — or it predates that time, having emerged from that part of history which exists almost solely as myth: the days before all of the true tales were broken. Rendered into nothing more than chaos.

They just don’t feel it matters.

Ibex, and the mountains, emerged on the other side. Intact. Certainly more so than any number of other species and locations were when the chaos storms ended, especially the equines who are still trying to get control of their own land. And if ibex ways brought them through all of that, saw them to the end of the worst that could ever be — then why do they need to change? Traditions, reliable actions, repeated patterns of thought: all of those things kept them stable.

The ibex do not change, or so they tell themselves. A species which views stability as survival is often all too ready to treat the new as death. But they also refuse to recognize that what they see as their history is constantly slipping across the slopes of time. Tolle Hörner was the greatest of them, the one which lived in the time unknown and created the rules which dictate just about every moment of their lives: how they farm, fight, and love. He fought in every battle and made every sacrifice for his people. He died a thousand times, because myths have a way of doing that. And on the very rare occasion when an ibex comes up with something new, the innovation is questioned. Viewed with deep suspicion. The same can be said for its creator, because ibex aren’t supposed to be doing that. The fresh arrival will be kicked a thousand times in the name of testing: on the worst days, this may also apply to the creator. And if it somehow catches on, finds a place to stand on the slopes while demonstrating it will never slip — then ibex culture absorbs it. And in a few centuries, the no-longer-new will be beyond questioning, because as it turns out, Tolle Hörner started that too.

It has been a mere one hundred and forty-eight years since the events of that day, and so this death has not been assigned to him. Perhaps it never will be. Only the greatest deeds are absorbed by those curling horns, and while the sacrifice was great and noble... it is hard for them to see as something an ibex would have done.

They honor her, for she saved the world. But she did so by acting as something other. They stay in the mountains, because to leave is to risk becoming like her.

They don’t understand.

She is a minute away from death, and she can feel the endless weight of their eyes. The armor does an exceptionally poor job of deflecting gazes: if anything, worn on her body (it had to be customized, and the helmet is unique), it pulls those intangible impacts in. She simply holds her place near one edge of this particular terrace: the part closest to the mountain, near a natural shallow trench in the stone, and allows her stability to absorb the blows.

Nothing her species can do will make her change position, even down to the smallest eyeblink. The Princess has come to the mountains, and Blitzschritt is standing guard.

None among her squad is particularly happy about this part of the trip. Yes, it says something for the alicorn to have been invited to stand upon this terrace. For starters, it means that the relationship between the nations is better than it’s ever been.

(It will never be so strong again.)

Just about no one who isn’t an ibex ever enters the terraces, because they are the key to ibex survival. An ibex can take root upon stone. The same cannot be said of their food. Farmable soil is a commodity at this altitude, and the ibex don’t descend to where it’s more plentiful because... well, she asked that once and got The Look. She’s been on the receiving end of The Look for just about anything in her life which ended in a question mark, and swears it’s worse when it comes from round pupils. (She’s still getting used to those.) But the only answer she got was that if Tolle Hörner hadn’t done it, then why should any of his descendants?

Descendants who won’t descend. (She was the only one who found that funny. No one on her mountain has ever let her forget that she said it out loud.) But she suspects that the real reason is that once you get closer to the base, you find the other sapient species. On the slopes, the advantages all go to the ibex. Descend, and it’s closer to — she’s also the only one who found this funny — level ground. She thinks they’re just avoiding competition, and it’s from fear of finding a way to lose.

The terraces are natural formations on the mountain: in this particular location, there are six of them at varying heights, each about the size of a hoofball field, close enough for ponies to jump between if they don’t mind a lot of stinging in all four knees upon landing. (She can just walk down the slopes. Her fellow Guards never get tired of seeing her defy gravity that way, and they will never see it again.). All have been emptied of additional quadruped presence for this visit. They have enough soil to support crops, and the ibex labor carefully to make sure the nutrients are never drained. Without the terraces, the ibex would face a choice: death or descent. And to just about all of them, those options represent nothing more than two different ways of spelling the same word.

The terraces are vital.
The terraces are the heart from which ibex existence flows.
The terraces are life.
The terraces are sacred.
And the Princess was invited to trot within them, at the side of the herd queen.
The Princess was extremely honored. Right up until she saw the tradition-mandated raiment.
Which was also the moment when the Guards began to collectively sweat.

Ibex tradition says that when leaders meet upon the terraces, ‘they do so with horns blunted’. The Princess only has one horn, and it’s still been treated in just about the same way: wrapped in soft fabrics and winding ribbons, only without the adjustments for a backwards curve. The herd queen has been adorned in similar fashion, because that’s part of the tradition. It’s just that for the ibex leader, the extensive metal wires and jewels which set off the look don’t serve as a barrier to magic. It might potentially take a few precious seconds before the Princess could dislodge enough of the covering to cast anything, and it brings the most vital entity in the world a little closer to the realm of helplessness.

Most of the remainder for that terrifying distance was crossed by the equally-traditional garb. ‘We stand under the weight of peace,’ after all, and in this case, that means the ceremonial trappings drape so far down the alicorn’s sides as to completely cover the wings. The straps which lock the heavy fabric in place by passing under her belly and barrel aren’t exactly helping.

There’s a double-edged hoofblade in play here. The ibex aren’t asking anything of her that they wouldn’t ask of anyone else in the world. But the fact that they would ask it of anyone else means they can’t see why it might be a bad idea to ask it of her. The Princess cannot enter the terraces unless she conforms to tradition, she felt that making a deeper connection with the ibex was worth the risk, it makes her somepony who’s willing to take a chance if doing so renders the world that much better and in this case, it also makes her into a very large earth pony who’s wearing some rather itchy decorations. The semi-tangible tail only stopped twitching with discomfort four minutes ago, but there’s only one ibex who knew to look for that tell in the first place.

The Princess is two-thirds of the way up the mountain, standing on the final piece of terrain which is remotely safe for pony occupancy: the rocks grow more unstable at higher altitude, and it’s only ibex presence which freezes them long enough to allow safe passage. While unable to fly, quickly weave pegasus techniques, cast a unicorn working at speed, or counterspell. That is how much she values this meeting, and so that is also the exact degree to which the Guards have been terrified for the three weeks which led up to it.

And the Guards include Blitzschritt. The living link between ponies and ibex.

( She has less than a minute to live.)

Her colleagues consider this to be an exceptionally grey day on the mountain: she heard a few of them grumbling during the air carriage ride. (Ibex tradition just barely allowed for the use of an air carriage, and the old ways mostly seem to be treating it as a rather solid cloud which happens to have reins attached.) She tried explaining how everything at this level can be described with one word: more. Sun feels brighter, because you’re that much closer to it. The air is crisper (and lungs which are about to stop working forever are delighting in the feel of proper air for the first time in years). When you’re cold — well, if you’re cold, you’re probably a pony. But there are highly-active storms in the area — some of the other grumbles concern how nopony was allowed to clear things out — and so what light remains is in fact on the grey side. Every so often, the soft discussion between herd queen and Princess (whose slow tour of the highest terrace is now bringing them close to Blitzchritt’s post) has to pause in order to let the echoes of nearby thunder fade.

The only ibex Guard has been doing what so many of her fellows occasionally engage in: keeping careful count of the seconds between any visible flash and the follow-up boom. The storm is around them (and a little too close), but not upon them.

It wouldn’t really matter if the rain hit. When viewing the concept from a cultural perspective, ibex don’t understand ‘rescheduling’ or ‘postponement’. You set a time on the calendar, and then you do whatever is necessary to make sure that event comes to pass. Thus is stability created. There are myths about ibex who managed to attend meetings after their death. It’s also generally accepted that the ibex afterlife is exactly like the living one, except the mountains are higher and you get a better quality of grass.

Blitzschritt is hoping that’s wrong. She’s unusual in many ways. For starters, she went down. She recognizes a concept which very few of her kind have ever voiced, even in the silent safe one which stays inside her at all times. It’s called ‘boredom’. Life is more interesting when you go down, because it’s more varied. She’s hoping that journey will also give her access to a better quality of afterlife, or at least one with different kinds of terrain. She’d like to get an ocean, because she got to travel across it once. Sailing was interesting, at least once the vomiting stopped. Stability doesn’t seem to mean a lot when the whole world is moving. It reached the point where she tried to use her magic on the water itself, and... well, it turned out that rendering one patch of sea motionless has a way of redirecting the energies surrounding it.

She was forgiven, eventually. After the rest of her squad watched her dry off absolutely everything.

The Princess has almost reached her, and smiles gently during the last stage of the approach. The herd queen — won’t look at her. Blitzschritt serves as the link — but no ibex understands why that link was ever forged. She drinks in the air of her home because the other option is to bask in the world’s most awkward silence. None dare to call her deviant with the Princess about, and so they say nothing at all.

They recognize what she has achieved and after her death, they will honor her — in their way. But they don’t understand her. They will never comprehend the events of the next few seconds, for she has less than twenty now. The choice.

The choice which never was.

The Princess has just spotted the herd queen’s reaction. It strikes the alicorn as something which has to be dealt with, because her Guard has come home and it would be preferable if someone made that feel like a good thing. So she starts to talk, keeping her tones soft and subtle. About how without Blitzschritt to show her how the bridge could be built, it never would have come this far —

They’re good words, especially when considered as the last ones she will ever hear. But they’re interrupted by a flash, which is followed by the usual burst of thunder. Too closely: the storm is closing in —

— but there are times when lightning strikes ahead of the storm.

The next bolt hits the mountain. Strikes it some distance directly above their terrace, where the rocks are unstable and only ibex can tread in safety. That environment receives a single jolt of change.

And then the boulders are falling.

Tumbling down the mountain, coming directly towards Blitzschritt and herd queen and Princess. Accelerating with every second, speed adding to effective mass, and there are Guards all over the terrace trying to respond. But the unicorns cannot combine their strength, and no single pony among them can manage that much weight. Reaching out to grab the Princess and pull her back is easier, but there’s too many boulders and the entire terrace is the impact zone. Pressure carries from the pegasi are ineffective against such a broad back. Teleporting her to safety would require somepony who was capable of both escorting and bringing along her level of mass: it might have been possible if not for the literal weight of ceremony pressing a full bale against the white fur.

Blitzschritt is aware of every last tenth-bit of it. Part of her even recognizes that it was just bad luck at the worst possible time, because when somepony has lived for so long, most of the long odds catch up eventually. She knows it will take precious seconds for the Princess to free herself from traditions to the point where escape is possible, and those will be the last seconds in which the cycle of Sun and Moon will exist.

The world will not end immediately. Momentum will maintain in the orbiting bodies for a few hours, and then... one half of the planet will slowly begin to freeze. The remainder will gain heat, slowly accumulating to the point where the burning begins and never ends. And in time, all will die.

There are those who will describe it as making a choice. The ibex ultimately understand her decision: just not how anyone of their blood could have made it. Instinct should have taken over, and that voice would have dictated a different outcome. So it must have been a choice.

It could be said that no one could be a Guard if they couldn’t make that choice, and any who voice that opinion are wrong.

There are boulders tumbling down the mountain, and an ibex doe who spent the early part of her life on the slopes sees where the first impact will take place. Just about all of them are following that same initial channel: that natural minor shallow trench in the rock. Those are the ones which will bury the occupied terrace. They’ll potentially spread out in a cascade once they reach the bottom, but the main entrance is in a single place, just a few body lengths away.

It might be possible for others to deal with the outliers. Or it might not. It doesn’t matter, because only the Princess is important.

Blitzschritt moves. Not very far. Just enough to get in front of the channel, at the moment before gravity finishes the first part of its cruel work. The last gaze she ever feels upon her is that of the Princess, desperate and frantic and full of apologies which never find the chance to be voiced.

She faces the landslide. The singular helmet, cut for two backwards-curving horns, lifts just enough to allow her to stare down her own death.

And then she roots.

The unicorns can’t raise shields in time, and the boulders might penetrate such protection even after the construct had hardened. There is no pegasus wind which would be strong enough to help. The earth ponies among the Guard... they desperately try whatever they can, without her knowing, and none of it works: the rock is too solid to respond quickly, and there is nothing they can do about gravity in that which is already moving.

But she is an ibex, the first and last of her species to serve in the Guard, and they tested the strength of her magic as best they could when there was just about nothing to measure her against. Every moon found her squad learning a little more about what she could truly do, and even she might not have understood how much power she truly possessed. Especially when it came to giving the last of herself, in the final moment before her death.

The heart of ibex magic is stability. The manifestations of that power can vary by the individual — but in a culture so dedicated to remaining the same, very few explore the full extent of their capabilities. Creativity can be directed by traditions, or it can be stifled. And she was very creative indeed, in the final seconds of her life.

She takes her stance, at the bottom of the channel, in a position which would have her receive the first impact. She stood against the falling world. The first, largest boulder. The one which would roll over her, crush her in the instant before it went on to end the cycle forever.

It hits her. Bale-tons of mass slam into the armor, and the amount of kinetic energy which conducts to flesh is enough to kill her long before factoring in the weight. None truly saw her eyes in that last moment, and so there were none who could say if she died in that instant, or somehow hung on for a few more seconds. If the strength of her will had anchored magic to mountain on a level which persisted beyond death, or whether she simply refused to die for a few crucial heartbeats.

They could not see her eyes.

They only saw the first, largest boulder stop.

For she was an ibex, and she would not be moved.

The next boulder crashes into the first, and the combined mass still cannot shift the small body. Another comes in behind that one and because the angle of impact isn’t quite as true, winds up tumbling off to the right. It falls onto the next possible target: a lower terrace. Soil fountains at the point of impact, begins its own tumble down the mountain. Crops are crushed. The boulders are going left and right because they cannot go forward, they find other things to kill, and it means the food supply is being wiped out.

Seconds. Mere seconds from beginning to end, and it’s possible that she was dead for most of it. But the Guards and Princess hang onto their desperate hope for one more breath as the last, smallest boulder comes to a dead stop in the channel and the sounds of crushing demise go on below. Right up until the moment when the little body falls.

Five of the terraces have been destroyed. (If she had not made her stand, it would have been one.) It will take years of free offerings from the Princess to keep the mountain’s population alive, longer before farming can begin again. Earth ponies cannot help, because soil which is magically enhanced loses its charge after some time without their presence and in any case, the ibex will not allow them to step onto what is now defiled land.

But the Princess lives. The cycle goes on.

There are those who say Blitzschritt couldn’t have been a Guard if she hadn’t been capable of making that choice, and they are wrong.

She couldn’t have been a Guard if she saw it as a choice at all.

Conspiratorial

It took them some time to trace the inciting party, and it turned out to be the other usual suspect.

The sisters didn't read all of the available newspapers during every last cycle. For starters, it was too much of a drain on their time: each could only read so fast (with that speed being distinctly higher for the younger), some papers published multiple editions throughout the day, they would eventually run out of local publications and have to start dealing with whatever had trickled in from the rest of the continent, and then there was the international press to deal with... The hours added up, and so did the stress. Journalists seldom led off the front page with good news, and when it came to filling the endless needs of the interior, nothing lubricated moveable type like a touch -- or flood -- of blood. There was always somepony hurting somewhere and if a reporter was somehow having trouble finding an example, they just ran it out to 'someone' and occasionally remembered to update the terminal syllable.

In the opinion of the siblings, to spend all of one's time doing nothing except keeping up with more-or-less-current events was to eventually find oneself peacefully wandering the hallways as the light from a triple corona coruscated around the horn, contemplating exactly which nearby dense object would be best for swinging it into. They made sure they tracked the most important stories -- but when it came to regular reviews of everything, they each had part of their staff assigned to reading, reviewing, summarizing events for them during daily briefings, and attending at least two parties per week during the two-moon shifts before those ponies were rotated back to something less stressful. Like platinum mining.

But this was a case where some degree of personal review seemed to once again be mandated. And once they galloped down the source...

Wordia and Raque tended to bristle whenever anypony compared them to each other. (The latter, if that comparison was made within sight of the sisters, would bristle apologetically. Both siblings were still trying to work out how that body posture was actually possible.) One could be described by anypony who wasn't among her devoted readership as being decidedly anti-Diarchy: the other went just as far the other way. They represented extremes of coverage, but their capacity for careful misinterpretation of events just about matched. It was just that Wordia was more careful about crafting her sentences or rather, took great care in torturing the syllables until something confessed. Raque usually worked on more of a subconscious level, as that was the best way to avoid putting any actual thought into the result.

The Tattler deliberately attempted to spread dissent. When it came to fallout from the Bugle, any resulting chaos was generally an unintended side effect.

There was no point to bringing Raque in, because both siblings knew how that would go. The reporter wouldn't have argued her position, because somepony like Raque wouldn't bring her tones anywhere close to the point of argument. Instead, she would have proudly stated that spreading necessary information to the public was her job.

(Necessary. Not classified. When the Guards caught Raque sneaking around the palace, it was generally because she had once again been trying to get pictures of anything which would Make The Princesses Seem More Relatable To The Laypony. Such as, just for example, a photographic capture for the contents of their respective bedside bookshelves. The fact that this meant getting into their bedrooms was either an incidental extra or a chance to see if her hooves were indeed worthy of trotting upon holy ground.)

Raque had her sources. Ponies who loved the palace tended to regard the chance of being quoted in the Bugle with at least moderate adoration. Those who felt that their duties required making unnamed contributions (as opposed to the often more sensible option of Not Talking) tended to bask in the same sort of self-generated glow which came when somepony anonymously donated to charity. There had been an unthinking loyalist in the arson investigation unit, one who had provided Raque with a few details above and beyond what had been initially released to the public. And this had just happened to include a photographic negative, which rendered beautifully when engraved and had been printed with so much detail as to allow just about everypony to make out the intended image: anypony who was still having trouble just had to read to the point where Raque had passed on Celestia's 'brilliant deductions, which could have been made by no other pony in the world.'

Tattler subscribers were more prone to deny it, but they read the Bugle for the same reason Raque's loyalists regularly peeked in on Wordia: if the opposition wanted to tell you what they were thinking, let them. Raque's intentions had been right out in the open: you didn't get much more blatant than a headline of Have You Seen This? She wanted her readers to search their collective memory, pick out any time they might have been in the presence of that construct. It might tell them who had set the fire. Identify the party responsible for a foal's hospitalization (that poor foal!) and a Guard's homelessness (somepony had to stand trial for all of it!), and naturally it would also indicate just who was so very hostile towards a poor lost soul (the various publications were still trying to work out an official spelling for 'Cerea': Raque had somehow managed to incorporate the Minotaurus symbol for 'pity') as to mindlessly punish anypony who had just been nearby...

Raque would have stated that she was just trying to expand the ponypower available to the investigators through including a good portion of Canterlot, along with every other settled zone which received the Bugle. Wasn't it best to spread the word, especially if the heinous party responsible (because Raque could use 'heinous' without missing a beat) fled the capital? And she would have let those words go into the world as she stood proudly with her tail at the loft of perfect peace. The sign of a mare who not only knew she had Done The Right Thing, but could make her audience hear the capitals on all of it.

The Bugle had been the publication which initially made the public aware of that part of the story. Several other papers had picked up the hoofbeat as soon as their own editions allowed it, and this would likely wind up including the Tattler: Wordia was probably still trying to figure out which size of fetlock screw was appropriate for twisting into an innocent conjunction.

But until she did, the angriest of Tattler readers -- the ones who were appearing day after day in the protest lines, because a number of them felt they were too good to work and a government which wasn't run by the sisters would have already been paying them for that -- had the Bugle.

Raque had given her intended readership nothing more than a clue. Flip that perspective around...

"Does it even matter at this point?" Celestia quietly asked from her place on the floor of the Lunar throne room, just as her flickering field deposited the last publication onto the sloping pile. "Whether the arsonist came up with it on her own, on the spot, or if it was planned prehoof at any level of meeting?"

"For what we can hope to be the eventual trial?" Luna responded, fully-prone forelegs wearily shifting across silver-shot marble. "Yes, in terms of the total number who might face charges. But in terms of how it may now spread..."

The world-weary shake of each head matched to the last degree. Siblings had a way of doing that.

"She wanted to give her own a clue," Celestia decided.

"And to the rest..."

Each mare automatically, almost compulsively shifted their gazes. Moving back along their own flanks, until they reached the hip. Returned to looking at each other.

"We had previously discussed ways in which we might identify how far the dissent might spread," Luna darkly reminded her sibling. "I can now add a factor: should any youths begin to manifest that icon, then we may be approaching a point of fracture."

The elder wanted to say It won't go that far, and found the words frozen in her throat.

"We'll have to see if it starts showing up away from the protests," she managed in its place. "Shaved patterns in fur, even with winter approaching. Capes and saddle blankets." With her own touch of added vocal shadow, "We're not likely to get hats with this many unicorns involved. But I'm expecting banners within the week."

Both heads dipped.

"Another year," the elder softly whispered. "Maybe just that. One more year between now and when she arrived, and it would have been easier. Five, simpler still. A generation, so that some only knew him from books. A century..."

"Not something she was able to control," the younger countered, with no force in the words. "If that had been within her purview, I believe she would have chosen not to appear at all. We are both reading the same reports, Tia. All of them. And when it comes to retaining fear, even for things one has not personally experienced..." Dark eyes briefly closed. "...there are some who manage to keep their jaw grip for a thousand years."

There was a moment when neither could look at the other.

"I need to get out of here," the elder abruptly stated. "Out of the palace. Do something else for a few hours, anything else. It's not avoidance --"

"-- removing oneself from the stressing environment for a time in order to regain focus," the younger cut in. "Yes. Would you welcome company?"

"Yes." The smile just barely managed to reach her lips. "Any ideas on where to go?"

"Assuming we can gain a degree of privacy at the destination point, and that site will be something which offers distraction? Several." The younger frowned. "Although given the state of the capital, to simply vanish from the palace instead of disappearing in such a way that the Guards know we remain within... that is perhaps not advisable." The next words had to be sent ahead of the elder's fast-emerging protest. "A token presence only... Sister?"

The elder looked up. "What?"

"Would you object to a small degree of additional company?" More quickly, "At a distance. We will be in our place, and they in theirs. Within sight, but out of hearing. For an activity which lasts a few hours, which still grants privacy."

Cautiously, "I know when you're working up to something awkward. And I also know the Guards are going to be upset if we leave together with no backup, but there's times when we both need to get out of the palace: just the fact that you're asking to come along means we're both going through the same thing. I'd rather get some time to ourselves --"

The younger sighed, and carefully explained.

"And now we need one more pony," the elder groaned. "And we have to hope she doesn't talk, because that's the next headline. For the rest of the moon. We should have refitted that part of the first sublevel. We've been talking about it for two years --"

"-- and we did not wish to be perceived as taking that level of personal indulgence. Regrets later, Tia. As with yourself and the Sergeant, I have a pony and venue in mind. And I trust her --" with the smallest of smiles "-- at least for matters where she is not attempting to write me with... friendly suggestions. It will simply take the usual amount of time to arrange. Tomorrow, if you are willing and able to wait? We depart near the end of your hours, and I will need to rise somewhat earlier than usual. Are you willing?"

The elder thought about it. The younger viewed the fact that said consideration took long enough for Moon to perceptibly shift as a measure of just how deeply the stress had penetrated.

"...yes. Which means I'm going to bed now. Good night, Luna."

"Rest well, Tia." With a small smile, "If you are willing, I shall do my part to aid in that."

The elder gratefully nodded, and both stood. Began to trot from the room: one towards the Moonset Gate and the long trail to her bedroom, the other leaving through the Moonrise doors.

But before they cleared the throne room, each glanced back. At the captured image which made up so much of the Bugle's front page, and then to their marks.

Raque had given her intended readership something which had been meant as a clue. But for those who stood in opposition, she had provided a symbol.

The sisters knew about the power of symbols.

"Breathe."

The girl took yet another breath, and marveled at the touch of chill in the air.

There were plants which appeared in two worlds, animals which seemed to have been duplicated, and perhaps there was an explanation for that. One barely-remembered book had discussed the concept of parallel evolution, which she had taken to mean 'the author is too lazy to create an entirely-new ecosystem from scratch, so here's a mostly-familiar one with a few stolen monsters kicked in.' Others had just postulated that a divine creator might choose to partially reuse a base model now and again, just to cut things down to five days of work plus a full weekend. And neither of those theories --

"Breathe more deeply."

She reluctantly did so. Multiple sections of anatomy shifted accordingly. Some portions bobbled.

The thin white unicorn stallion tilted his head up at her: she used the moment to assess the thinness of his neck versus the mass of a mane which had been soaked in a natural pharmacopeia of enhancement products, then carefully failed to understand how one was holding up the other.

"Are there any air sacks in there?" the diagnostician curiously asked. "Extra oxygen storage? That would explain the way they seem to --"

"-- expanding rib cage," the nearby brown-furred surgeon openly groaned. "Shifting diaphragm. We both went to Mazein, Vanilla, and I didn't see you asking any ageládas if they had secondary lungs. I remember every single time a female's kicked you across the room, especially during club nights. Having you get tossed would have stood out."

"Because their anatomical charts are available," the thin stallion protested. "We're drawing up this one from scratch! Similarity of outer anatomy doesn't necessarily represent --"

He abruptly stopped talking, and did so as his eyes unfocused. His head went up, and slightly to the right.

Eventually, after that posture had maintained for what she'd already decided was an uncomfortable amount of time, the girl risked a "...Doctor?"

The more muscular stallion sighed.

"He'll be like that for a little while," Doctor Chocolate Bear announced. "It means he's thinking so deeply about something that he doesn't have time to pay attention to anything else."

She wasn't always good with questioning authority, even with a subject where she served as the local expert. She knew that about herself, and the statement still mandated a "...really?"

"Best-case," the surgeon reluctantly admitted. "Next check is your resting heart rate."

Green light surrounded the end of what could just barely be identified as a medical instrument, pressed it against bare skin.

Cerea did her best not to jump, especially since he wanted a resting heart rate. And she marveled at how there might be multiple ways to explain the presence of duplicated animals and plants, but the only thing which seemed to account for a medical office always being a little too cold while utilizing equipment which had been half-rendered from ice was pure sadism.

It was, in at least one way, her fault. They'd had to come back into the palace after the gardens. She'd gone to sleep while Nightwatch had taken up the rest of her shift. Sometime after sunrise, Cerea had woken up and the pegasus had headed to bed. She hadn't wanted to disturb her friend, so leaving the barracks seemed to be mandatory. There had been no desire to spend two consecutive days in sketching, which meant...

...she was supposed to be resting. Lifting nothing heavier than a quill. Which, to Cerea, clearly still meant she was allowed to study -- but there were only so many notes to review, and any attempt to retreat into books left her facing a wall of incomprehensible words.

Cleaning the barracks meant making enough noise to wake Nightwatch. The only things left to be done in the bathroom were either tasks Cerea couldn't accomplish (restoration of the sponge panels) or ones which just produced too much sound (taking out panels between stalls). She didn't feel comfortable wandering through most of the palace on her own: Cerea considered the ramps up as her primary boundary, and was always worried about startling somepony who just happened to be wandering through the lower level at the wrong moment. The gardens had to be empty or cleared before she could use them, and she now knew that daylight often shone down on multiple class tours. Scaring children...

There had been a nightmare about that. One bad enough to jolt her out of sleep.
Then she'd thought about how the Solar Princess had wanted to introduce such a class to her.
Which had led to more nightmares.

She'd almost tried to sneak into the smithy, having convinced herself that it wasn't working as long as she did nothing more than check on how Barding was doing and maybe tried to get a few of the lighter bones out. In this case, the ultimate constraint on 'almost' came from discovering there was a functional lock, she lacked the key, and pressing her ear against the door was still awkward. Several desperate minutes had ultimately ended in the conclusion that contrary to popular belief, Barding lived somewhere else. The smith also had the day off, and she knew him just well enough as to be completely unable to imagine what he would do with one of those.

It had left her awkwardly wandering the lower hallways, memorizing extra passageways and trying to find some way of getting out of sight before any approaching hoofsteps reached her. (She didn't always succeed in time, and Solar staff members who had learned to associate day with the centaur is at the training grounds quickly lowered their heads and did their best to escape before the jaws of desperate small talk closed on their tail.) Hours in which she wasn't supposed to be doing anything, in which she had nothing to do, with every instinct screaming that she was just wasting time.

And then she'd met the doctors coming the other way.

They'd come down to retrieve a freshly-repaired medical device, and had done so with the intent of also corralling a centaur. Because they knew she had the day off, and the Sergeant had issued an order. (She quickly decided they weren't used to receiving those. The white stallion was still reeling.) The best way to determine whether she needed any extra recovery time was a medical examination -- except that the physicians were still trying to learn what her normal state was. As Chocolate Bear had been quick to point out, they had only seen her in two conditions: 'injured' and 'recovering'. And when it came to how her body functioned...

She was trying to become a Guard. Protecting a Princess meant a constant chance of injury, and they still didn't know how to treat her. The only sapient in the world without magic or medical plan.

So she was back in their office (the third level of the palace, some distance into the Lunar wing, and her imagination was still providing echos of frantic hooves and wings trying to clear the path), being examined. Questioned. And as with just about every visit to a physician, the more time which passed, the less clothing she had been able to retain. It was currently down to her bra, plus a tail which hadn't been trimmed yet and so thankfully gave her that much more to shield a vital area with.

Some of the girls had been through medical examinations conducted by human doctors, as a prerequisite for entering the program. It mostly seemed to have depended on their origin point. Cerea had managed to dodge that one, although there had been a checkup of sorts in Japan. (It had applied to every girl in the household: the openly-stated pretense was the need to see how they were all dealing with a foreign diet. Cerea had become suspicious at the moment the measuring tapes appeared.) Miia had spent nearly a full day being poked, prodded, and being forced to listen as herpetology references were carefully distorted into potential diseases created through slicing off half the word. And then a supposed documentary filmmaker had managed to temporarily infiltrate the household, claiming to be gaining footage which would make others more sympathetic towards them, when all he'd really wanted was to show the online world every last detail of a harpy suffering through the pains of laying an unfertilized egg...

With the Doctors Bear, she didn't have to worry about that kind of intent. They simply wanted to understand how her body worked, because that gave them the best chance of healing her. But there was only so much she could tell them. Any memory of being shown a basic anatomical chart for her own body belonged to a self who had been about nine years old and was mostly concerned about either forcing herself to fight on through the pain or, in knightly fantasies, was already planning on stitching her own wounds.

It meant she couldn't sketch anything for them with the required level of detail. It had them asking questions. Horribly detailed questions, for which she was only able to keep herself mostly still because they had no interest in her body other than the purely medical. She knew they wanted to help.

Mostly still. There had been a scale.

It had taken some time to apologize for the instinctive double back kick. But on the rather dubious positive side, the repair shop had recently freed up a slot.

The device was pulled away from her bare skin, and another flicker of green wrote down a number. "Lower than I'd thought it would be," the surgeon admitted. "Now, while we're waiting for him to get back..." He moved two hoofsteps, examining her bare flank: a tingle of energy rippled across her fur, and then the disc casually rendered the sound of a soft whistle.

"Doctor?"

"Just checking where the infection was," the larger of the unicorns stated as he collected more data: his partner was continuing to collect dust. "Not even a scar..."

"We're resilient." There was a little pride in that, because her healing was that of a true centaur. "We can recover from a lot of things on our own, if the wounds are clean and we can get them closed in time."

How had they treated her infection? They didn't have antibiotics for her. It had to have been some kind of spell --

"I was worried about your reproductive organs suffering long-term damage if it worked its way too far in," the surgeon admitted. "But you've been through a complete menstrual cycle, so the evidence points to your being okay there."

Her head dipped.

It wouldn't matter.

"Miss?" She automatically looked up -- then had to adjust for 'down, back, and to the side'. "I'm making an assumption based on pony anatomy. Where is your uterus?"

She distractedly pointed. His eyes tracked the strange angle of her shoulder.

"So just about a match, give or take for scale," the unicorn decided. "Which should give us the location of your ovaries as well, and does mean we were right to worry."

I had that dream.
About... him. About what it would be like if I won, and we...
I knew what a gravid mare looked like. I saw enough of them in the herd.
(at the same time every year)
But in the dream, I was carrying in my upper torso. Like humans do. Something which made me a little more like them, and

The thin stallion's head dropped, with the mane completely failing to shift.

"...so your foals are just that much bigger than ours, and require proportionately more milk," he casually announced. "Which means those are likely to mostly be glandular tissue."

my filly was so beautiful

She had healed. She was fully capable. But if there was no way home...

It doesn't matter.

And then the white stallion's voice softened.

"Are you all right?"

"...I'm still sore in a few places," she repeated from when they'd brought her in. "I don't think there's any muscle tears or other internal injuries. My shoulders are strained from the forge --"

"That's not what I meant," the diagnostician stated, quietly looking at her from the other side of the examination table. Something she was too large for. "I don't know minotaur anatomy, and I've got to fix that -- and then try to adjust. For starters, you have arms and forelegs, so you're going to have two sets of brachial arteries. We can try to track some of your musculature and bone structure based on theirs. I don't know their anatomy -- but I do know something about their posture. Slumped shoulders. A curled back. At the very least, you're tired. At the worst --"

"-- I am fine."

He had surprisingly blue eyes: just about aquamarine. It was easy to pick out the exact color with ponies, who seemed to present the world with six times the standard amount of iris. And for thirty endless seconds, every bit of that was focused on her.

"I want to take a vertebrae count," Vanilla Bear finally announced. "That much spine is that much more of a chance for a spinal injury. Let's see what your natural armor is like."

It went on like that for a while. The bra came off because it was covering an area which could bruise, went on again. Her hooves were examined for chips and cracks: the doctors did her the courtesy of checking her own frogs while they were in the area, and did so with discretion and sensitivity. It became necessary to explain the lack of nipples near her back legs: the upper torso had completely taken over that function, although there were a few males who had doubled their sets of vestigial uselessness.

The most awkward part came shortly before the knock.

"We've talked about your digestion," the surgeon began. "The good news is that you can vomit. There's species which can't. It means that if you get something which your body can't handle, we don't have to go in as the first resort. But this is the first time I've had the chance for a long look at your teeth."

Which was when she saw it coming, and a mostly-redressed body braced for impact.

"You've been sticking to a herbivorous diet," Chocolate Bear observed.

"We asked the kitchens to track what you were eating," Vanilla added. "It gives us a better idea of your nutritional needs. When it comes to calorie consumption, you're similar to Princess Celestia: that's just an issue of --" he glanced at the scattered fragments of the scale "-- body type. It's just about the same for keeping you hydrated, but we still have to work out how your body temperature regulates itself. There's two different kinds of sweat glands in play."

"You subsist on plants. Vegetables and fruit," the surgeon picked up the thread. "Can you eat grass?"

She managed a nod. Vanilla took custody of the verbal needle.

Far too casually, "Meat?"

Her right hand came up. Briefly covered her eyes.

"...yes and no," she softly told them. "I..." The hand dropped, doing so just in time to let her see eight hooves skitter a few centimeters backwards. "You're..."

It was something which held true in her own herd, because legends said that centaurs had produced the first physicians: the code had evolved to suit. She could only hope that the parallels were charitable enough to stretch that far.

"...my doctors," she tried to finish. "That means -- you won't tell anypony else the things I say to you unless it's an emergency." And she could hear the pleading in her voice, she hated it... "That's... right, isn't it?"

Both stallions nodded.

Cerea took a breath.

"It can be better for me on long gallops," she reluctantly said. "Extended efforts. I don't need to eat as much of it as I would with plants. It's just that... I have a lot of taste buds. A lot of them. When I eat a plant, I can tell something about where it was grown. The kind of minerals which were in the soil. It's easy for me to pick out something foul, and... there's times when I can't finish something which anyone else could. Because I'm the only one who thinks anything is wrong. And with meat... when I eat meat, I sort of get -- everything which the animal ate. And where I come from, there's..." She knew the word would translate for the physicians: she just didn't want to say it. "...drugs. Liquids and injections they give animals to make them grow up faster, or heavier. Things which aren't natural. So if I eat meat --"

Ponies could vomit: she'd already seen that. The fast-changing hue of both undercoats was making her wonder if she was about to see it again.

"-- unless it comes from an animal which was raised without any of that, it tastes like... it just..." She had to force herself to swallow or rather, to swallow it back. "...tastes like everything they went through. I can barely choke anything down. And fish who were swimming in polluted waters, when the chemicals get into their bodies..."

She wasn't sure what sympathy looked like, when it came to pony expressions. Having to sort it out from nausea wasn't helping.

"...I could eat meat," Cerea finished. "I just -- can't find any which I can eat. Sometimes I feel sick just from thinking about it -- and I just made you sick, I'm sorry --"

The stallions looked at each other. Both males took slow, steadying breaths.

"Omnivore," Vanilla Bear said, with the disc putting some mirth into his tone. "And a conscientious objector." But the tail was twitching. "You can get by without it? Nutritionally?"

"For most of my life." There had been a few dishes served in the herd, and the isolation of the gap allowed for what was mostly normal prey: air and water pollution provided the standard aftertaste. It was possible to choke it down, at least until she got out of sight. But in the human world...

It had taken her a week to recover from the flight to Japan. Part of that had been the chill of the cargo hold. The rest had been a cultural assimilation attempt. Which had taken the form of a bowl of gyūdon.

"If I ever get into a situation where I need a lot of protein in a hurry, the longest gallops or a big wound which has to be healed... I'm supposed to eat some. I just can't..."

They nodded.

"We'll keep that in a sealed file," Chocolate Bear told her. "Unless it's needed."

Which was when the knock sounded against the door.

Cerea just barely managed to keep herself from rearing up: the local air currents had prevented her from detecting the approach, and if anypony else heard me say that, they'll probably decide I've been thinking about eating them --

Vanilla Bear glanced at his partner, then moved for the door. A few more seconds saw Nightwatch working her way past the posted pony anatomical charts.

"Can I take her?" the little knight asked. "Um. I know my shift just started, and yours is wrapping up. But there's sort of a deadline."

"We can pick it up later," Chocolate Bear decided -- then backed up a little, providing himself with a better sight line on Cerea's eyes. "For basic medical information. As far as the exam goes --"

"-- you're on a restricted schedule for the next week," Vanilla continued. "You can go back to the training grounds. You can work in the forge. But you're not doing both in a single day. You get one category of physical activity, you get up to ten hours of it, and that's it. Most of the problem is that you haven't been giving your body normal recovery time."

"Too many hours awake," Chocolate decided. "And pushing too hard during those hours. You're trying to double-shift, and that's something a Princess shouldn't do. Any questions?"

If there had been any chance for the emotions to reach Cerea's fast-opening mouth, they would have abandoned the category of queries and gone directly for exclamations. She was a centaur. She was supposed to be capable of greater efforts than a human. Telling her that she could only do so much for a week, a whole extra week, was offensive. But these were doctors, Nightwatch was right there and --

"-- or rather," Vanilla casually added, "any questions which don't get you put on bed rest for two days?"

The girl's mouth closed.

"Right," both stallions said, with Chocolate adding "All yours, Nightwatch."

Cerea held back most of the fuming until she got into the hallway.

"Restricted?" jumped out at the moment the door closed behind her. "The armor has to be finished! There's days to go, and that's just for the rough form! Barding can't work on the upper torso! It has to be me or it won't be --"

"-- I'll be the first to tell on you," the little knight broke in.

She hated sounding as if she was begging, and suspected the disc was gleefully translating every last tone. "Nightwatch --"

"-- or report, since I'm your superior officer. And then there's probably a punishment. Like being reassigned. To bed. Um. Blankets. We still have to do something about your bed. But that won't be tonight. I really did have to fetch you, because we're going out. Um. 'We' is both of us. Plus two more. And we have to go meet an escort, but she won't stay after she takes us out of the palace. So the total is four."

Cerea stopped.

"We're leaving the palace and the grounds?"

The dark tail twitched. "Um. Yes. Gardens, Courtyards, training grounds, towers. Nothing associated with the palace. We're just -- going out."

Which was just about impossible. They couldn't bring her into the city. Cerea had already seen what would happen: a repeat for the start of the press conference, only on an exponential scale. Unless there was a public park which had been fully secured --

-- and who are the other two?

It was the most natural question in the world, and came with several follow-ups. "Where?"

Nightwatch's wings flared. Moved into a hover which let her look directly into Cerea's face.

The pegasus smiled.

Parallels.

In a human environment, she would have reasonably expected the dominant scents to be popcorn and salt: for ponies, the same held true. Admittedly, in Japan, most of those scents were outside: the majority of citizens didn't eat in while in a cinema, just in case the sounds produced turned out to be impolite. Such consumption generally took place after the movie, with the crowd milling near the theater and discussing what they'd just seen: the fact that they were now free to purchase the snacks somewhere else at a fifth of the price seemed to largely escape them. Humans were strange that way.

Popcorn and salt: those matched. But in Japan, popcorn was rarely flavored. There was only a hint of the American obsession with butter (or rather, the chemical concoction which so many had poorly decided was it) -- but with so little to compete against, that was still enough to give it third place in the olfactory battle. With ponies, that position was held by olive oil.

She suspected that by pony standards, the place was rather well-cleaned: the richly-padded benches still held what had to be their original deep red and black hues, there was no stickiness adhering to her hooves or -- anywhere else, and the wall draperies were being maintained. But to Cerea, the scent of olive oil saturated the air. It came from every bench, emanated from beneath most of them, and had even found a place on the screen itself: several small stains showed where popcorn had been used for criticism of the entertainment.

Cerea wondered if that background scent made the cinema anything like being in Greece. It was the original centaur homeland, olive oil was endemic in the region and... she'd never been there. Something which was a near-universal geographic statement and with one centaur, had the option to upgrade.

Olive oil. Salt. Sugar, so some kind of candy -- licorice. Taffy? Her nose wrinkled. Plus vomit. And urine. Probably very young foals on the last. Maybe. She hadn't really seen any of Equestria's children for more than a split-second: glimpses of faces at doors and windows in Palimyno, just before their parents had desperately herded them away. Or an adult who lost control during a horror movie.

She wondered if they had horror movies. Then she thought about the way the film industry tended to react to events in her own world, and decided there were at least ten suspiciously similar productions currently being filmed on various backlots. The youths from Nightmare Night had probably been recruited to give them advice on how not to create a centaur --

"Um. Sorry," came from the bench on her immediate left. "I didn't... we didn't think." The black head awkwardly inclined towards what, in a human theater, would have represented either the designated, elevated area for visiting dignitaries or just a very significant upgrade for a near-useless partial balcony view. "There's always a Princess Box in a cinema. Just in case. And it has to have benches suitable for the Princesses. Um. For the same reason. So there's always the one bench which fits, because you're just about the same size as Princess Celestia. Except she's here, using that bench. Which means..."

"It's all right," Cerea offered from her place in the aisle. "It was the same problem in Japan." Excepting the presence of that single suitable (and occupied) bench. Lala and Suu had no problems with human seats, Papi was fine as long as she tucked her wings close and Meroune just went into the portion of the theater which had been designated for wheelchairs -- but Miia's length created the same problem as Cerea's lower-body bulk: it left them stuck in the aisles, constantly apologizing to whoever had to work their way past them. Rachnera, who took up quite a bit of space and normally delighted in the chance to create small inconveniences for humans, had done so to the point where she'd been offered another choice: the ceiling or 'Get out.' "So this is what cinemas are like in Canterlot."

"Um. No." (Cerea blinked.) "The Princesses wanted to slow down the gossip, or make it go away for a while. That's harder in the capital. This is Ponyville. I know you didn't see that because the teleport arrival was inside the building. They just contacted the owner and said they wanted the place for one showing. It's the slow season, so he doesn't lose anything by renting to the palace. He's done it a couple of times before, so he doesn't think about it too much. And it's just us plus her."

The little knight's head turned, and Cerea followed the angle towards a booth: a pearl coat and horn were just barely visible, with the latter poking at bits of machinery.

"There's nopony else working here right now, on palace request," Nightwatch explained. "No ushers, nopony making snacks. All you really need for a cinema is a projectionist, because the Princesses aren't good with the equipment and anypony who isn't a marked projectionist usually winds up needing a new projector. So that's Bayleaf, up there. Um. She trusts the Princesses. She... cares about them. She writes them all the time, because... well, they both say it's caring. About one thing. And she was sworn to secrecy. Princess Luna says she'll probably keep quiet unless..."

Black fur scrunched under the force of the wince.

"Unless?" Cerea carefully asked.

The disc hissed. Wires became perceptibly warmer. The magic was struggling, and doing so because while it was fully capable of translating the words, it had no capacity for inserting spaces into something which had emerged in one breath.

"Unlesssomeponystartsmakingoutbecauseshemostlywritesthemwithherideasonhowtheycanhavebettersexohlookshesloadingthefirstreel!"

The centaur's sanity decided it was best not to have heard that. "...do you know what the movie is?" And then wondered why it mattered. It could be the greatest achievement in pony cinematic history and she still wouldn't have heard of a single performer in it.

"No," emerged at a thankfully slower pace. "Princess Luna just told me they were going out to see a film and everypony in the palace would be happier if there was a Guard along, so I was coming with them. Um. And... that you hadn't been much of anywhere, and -- it might help if you got to see it too. So you were coming. Did you get to see a lot of films? In your herd?"

"It really started with my generation," Cerea admitted. "We --" and stopped as she tried to figure out a way to put it which wouldn't threaten to drain the disc's charge on the spot.

We were the generation which had a chance at portable DVD players. So that meant something which could work with batteries, and that was just the usual problem. But if you managed to get the player smuggled in, and the batteries held up for a little while, you could watch a movie. VCRs needed generators and they were just about obsolete, we didn't have anything near the bandwidth for streaming, and old film reels -- you had to get the projector, and then it was the power problem again.

But it was the same issue we had with the books, only worse. We knew which movies were good -- one to two years after they came out. Because so many of the books came from remaindered sales, and most libraries were happy to sell off their old magazines because no one else was buying them. I got to read a lot of magazine reviews. I could tell you who won every award at Cannes, for just about every year of my life.

We got movies. But we got them from the same place. And the movies which get put into that kind of sale at a library are mostly the ones which they either have too many copies of and need to pare down, or the things which are so bad that no one wanted to watch them. Either way, it's a disc which is just taking up space. So it was usually either something which was really popular for a little while, or something horrible.

Those categories can overlap.

If it was a special night and there were batteries which could be spared, then there could be a movie. But we usually didn't know what we were getting. And if it was live-action, they always had humans. I could look at them. I heard what they sounded like. But it wasn't enough to let me understand them. It just felt like they mostly liked to hurt each other.

There was also animation. Do you have that? Slowly-changing drawings which you put in front of a camera and take pictures of, one frame at a time, so when you see them going by quickly, it's like they're moving? We got a copy of Fantasia once. It was the only thing which had centaurs. Or what the humans thought centaurs were.

I didn't know whether to scream or cry.

I waited until my mother couldn't hear me. Then I cried.

"-- got a few," was what emerged into the world. "We just didn't have a real choice about what we saw. The Princesses come here to see movies?"

"Um. They go to film premieres sometimes, because a lot of things premiere in the capital and the studios like to have the Princesses there. But then they get the press waiting outside the cinema trying to figure out what they thought, and of course they can't say much because too many ponies think their review is the only real one. So they started thinking about refitting part of the palace into a really small cinema. Just large enough for them and some staff. But it would be expensive, and since it's mostly just for them... there would be a lot of articles. They're trying to figure out a way where they can pay for it themselves, so nopony could complain. Um. For very long. The Tattler might be able to get three weeks out of it. But they don't have a lot of money. They both collect a salary, but it's -- average."

"Average," Cerea carefully repeated.

"The money earned by every working pony in the nation," Nightwatch carefully expanded, "divided by the number of working ponies. I earn more than they do. But they don't have to pay for housing or food --"

Silver eyes half-shut. Added to the sudden change of scent, it was more than enough to let Cerea guess at the thought.

And right now, neither do you.
Which is my fault.

"-- so it goes a little further," the pegasus finished. "But until they can work it out, they ask Ponyville's cinema for the off-hours. So they can see a film in peace."

Cerea looked up at the designated Princess Box. Princess Luna seemed to be regarding something which had been spread out on the balcony: it took a deep inhale to find the ink. The larger alicorn currently had her snout stuck halfway into a paper feedbag. And given the respective sizes of snout and feedbag, was possibly just stuck, period.

"Princess Luna just wanted you to see a movie tonight," Nightwatch said. "She thought... it might help."

The centaur quickly refocused on the screen. Royalty probably didn't want to be seen freeing itself with an awkwardly-scraping forehoof.

"Um. She... usually doesn't invite anyone..."

The house lights went down.

It was about who you spoke with.

There were many reasons for a zebra to leave Pundamilia Makazi: it was just that when you didn't have a true nation and your society consisted of a hundred frequently-quarreling city-states, each of which existed as an independent government... well, in that situation, the most natural solution to 'problems at home' was to pick another home some distance down the road. And if you had left one of the peaceful, less restrictive, sane kraals, that would be the end of it. Having to sneak out of a locked-down extension of Tartarus with slightly lower security meant those problems liked to follow you, mostly in the name of dragging you back for what the once-again-locals called 'justice'. Anyone going through it could also call it justice. Strictly speaking, if you managed to get a word out between the screams, 'justice' was probably as good as any.

One hundred kraals, and if you were truly unlucky, it would be one of Those Six. Or worse, The Three. Half of Those Six would wearily give up on you after the final border was crossed, because governments so localized were still capable of recognizing that the more organized nations got really upset when someone conducted their idea of a trial on another country's soil. The Three never forgot you. They even used your existence as a means of getting others to come home, because as long as that party crossed the thorn bush line while hauling you along, all would supposedly be forgiven.

But if you didn't quite have confidence in that kind of amnesty... well, each of The Three kept their own list, with a bounty marked next to each name. Zebras with even less morals than funds would venture out into the world, searching out those names. One of the largest payouts was attached to a mare who had set up a place in the Everfree, and no bounty hunter had tried to collect it in six years because having to drag yourself home across a few hundred gallops using three working legs was the sort of thing which encouraged a change of career.

The zebra stallion was familiar with the name, and had no intention of going to see her for anything other than extra advice. His had been one of the best kraals. He had been allowed to leave freely, everyone had wished him luck, and even if his funds and conscience fell apart at the same moment -- potioneers had to stick together.

Because that was the thing about brewing potions in Pundamilia Makazi: you were working with the local biome, and you were going to work with it for the rest of your life. Zebras didn't practice a lot of agriculture or agronomy, because you worked with what the land provided (or, for Those Six, what someone else's land provided). There were some around who understood soil balance and how to adjust it -- but on the whole, imported plants existed in one of two occasionally-progressive states: Expensive and Dead. The fact that there were almost no expatriate earth ponies around (and the ones who did exist charged proportionately for their services) didn't exactly help.

With the ingredients available around one kraal, you could do a lot. Complete the century set and more possibilities opened up, along with what was hopefully an open shot to the border if one of Those Six had caught you collecting one of their restricted substances. But by going to Equestria, moving to where the earth ponies were and the Cornucopia Effect was part of the background environment -- get a greenhouse set up in those conditions, and you could keep everything you'd managed to bring with you alive. And after that, you could start exploring the possibilities offered by that which grew in pony lands.

He'd been in Equestria for three years, was making sure to attend his citizenship classes and had just about reached the point where he could speak at three-quarters speed without losing everything within his accent. Culturally, he was still adjusting: zebras tended to work with the flow of the world, and that viewpoint turned just about every pony into a shivering control freak. It had taken some careful introductions and stammering attempts to remember how tenses worked before he'd learned that quite a few of them were actually rather nice control freaks. In general, everything was fine as long as you avoided some of the speciesists and were ready with a calming drought for your new friend when that first unexpected drizzle hit.

But whenever it was possible, he spoke with botanists: some of them made for great friends. He learned what grew where. And that included the wild zones, because that was where the best ingredients were.

On the technical level, he understood that he wasn't supposed to be gathering leaves here. The zebra stallion fully recognized the concept of 'forbidden territory'. It was just that he was from Pundamilia Makazi and forbidden territory could be a matter of stepping off the road because you'd just spotted a berry: trying to explain that at your trial generally led to justice. As far as he was concerned, any supposedly forbidden territory which didn't have anyone actively trying to kill him was more suited for 'unclaimed'.

Besides, he'd studied the maps. You didn't get in real trouble until you approached the center. And if you kept approaching after that, knowing what was at the center... then it could be presumed you hadn't been planning on coming back.

He wasn't really concerned. He had muted his scent with a careful drenching, was carrying several concoctions designed for monsters not to enjoy, and was at least a quarter-gallop away from the danger zone. (He was still learning to think in gallops.) And his saddlebags were full of leaves and bits of bark, he'd found a shed dragon scale which promised to be several kinds of interesting, and best of all, he had just spotted a rowan tree. A rowan which still had berries, halfway into autumn.

There were all kinds of things you could do with rowan berries, if you were a potioneer who was prepared to get creative in his experiments and didn't mind everypony asking where most of your fur had gone.

He carefully moved towards the tree. It had already been a good day for gathering: rowan berries would serve as a perfect topper. But you had to move carefully, because it was still a wild zone and even when he was this far away from the center, he never knew when something might emerge.

Nothing did.
Instead, something left him.

It took some time before he was able to reconstruct the whole of it. It had started at his hooves, which had just felt as if they'd gone a little deeper into the dirt than usual. But then his ankles and hocks had seemed to weaken, all four knees had been next, the wave of exhaustion had swept over shoulders and hips and mark, moved up his neck, his legs were folding and the juniper mix he was keeping against his right shoulder for ready mouth access shifted and he couldn't remember what juniper was for.

It was... black. Small and just about black in the skin. The smoke from burning wood of the tree was pungent. But his head was moving towards the dirt, he was just about dropped all the way into half-dead grass, and all he could remember was that you stomped on the berries and then they --

-- they --

-- he couldn't remember.

He'd begun to instinctively recognize its properties from the moment of his mark's manifest and he couldn't remember --

-- his head jerked back, and did so just as his forelegs resumed operations. It was just enough to keep the local pebbles out of his nostrils.

...preventing dizziness. It could do all sorts of things and none of them had been brewed into that mix -- but in the right infusion, it prevented dizziness. That felt... ironic...

He held his half-fallen position for a while, ears twisting as he listened for anything which might be approaching. Nothing. This was followed by carefully getting back up. And then because he was a potioneer and something had just happened to him, he dropped right back down again and began to examine the wild zone, one blade of grass at a time.

There had been an unexpected effect, and there was no monster in evidence. That meant he had potentially stumbled across something botanical. New species were discovered all the time: those who were truly fortunate lived long enough to write a name down. All he had to do was locate a single sprig which he'd never seen before, carefully harvest it while taking along a bit of native soil and get it home --

-- there! Something --

-- no. His attention had been caught by a flash of new sensory impressions -- but it had been bright, as if Sun had briefly reflected off something unliving. But he searched that area anyway, and found nothing at all. Light through quartz, perhaps: something the soil spray produced by his own movements had covered. There was no plant around which he wasn't at least roughly familiar with from books, and the majority were things he knew on the level of his mark.

Still -- there was a chance that it had been a conjunctive effect. He gathered a few of the natural growths from where he'd been standing, packaged them carefully, harvested the berries and then, because new species were discovered all the time, there was a chance for a monster with range, and he still didn't feel fully recovered, he called it a day and got out of there.

Over the next few weeks, the zebra would experiment carefully with everything he'd brought back and while the rowan was wondrous, he couldn't replicate what had happened to him in the wild zone. But he did think it was associated with the rowan in some way. Weren't there old stories about how rowan wood could, under certain circumstances, weaken magic? That sounded vaguely like something the yaks might have written about. He'd have to check the library for a translation (because he spoke Equestrian more fluently than he read it), then go back for some shed bark. And a dead branch, if at all possible. One which had already died, because working with the world meant not hurting the tree.

But he did some other things first, after he initially returned to that still slightly strange-seeming Equestrian home. He washed off. He made sure to have a good dinner. And then he took all of the defenses he'd brought with him and carefully disposed of them, because they were brews which didn't keep long: he hadn't put enough of his own magic into them to allow indefinite storage. They were potent now, and that was why he had to be so careful -- but in three weeks, when his next trip was planned, they would be worse than nothing. And simply allowing them to sit around as they slowly shed thaums... that was never a good idea.

So he did the responsible thing. And because he was still a little weak, he never realized that every last one of the potions had gone inert.

He didn't tell any of his botanist friends about what had happened, because that would have meant also telling them the where. There was a chance they would have turned him in, while saying it was for his own good. It probably would have resulted in nothing more than a stern word from the Immigration Department, but... he didn't want to take the chance. It was best to remain quiet. He could tell another potioneer the next time he saw one, but the ponies didn't have to know.

Really, it was all about who you spoke with.

Detached

Under different circumstances, it would have been the sort of early morning which served as a reminder that winter was coming. The sky over the training grounds was partly cloudy, and the sunlight which got through was warm enough. If she stood within brightness, made sure her entire body occupied one of the shifting patches of heat, it was possible to gain a temporary degree of comfort -- right up until the instant when the wind hit her. Each sharp gust felt as if it had inflicted an invisible wound, and fifteen crucial degrees bled out from her body.

(One of the few concessions Cerea was willing to make towards the Fahrenheit system was that the larger numbers could feel more impressive: saying she'd just lost something closer to twenty-seven degrees was closer to the spirit of the thing. The not-at-all hypocritical flipside of that argument was that she sometimes wished for her measurements to be taken in inches as a means of downplaying everything -- but that only worked when she was among those who were used to metric and couldn't actually see her.)

There was no way to anticipate the hits, especially since the wind seemed to be changing directions almost at random. If she was close enough to the treeline or paying special attention to the grass, it was occasionally possible to get a moment of warning: leaves rustling, green blades shifted in a new direction -- but that still wasn't enough to allow a dodge, and there was no way of blocking the impact. It was chill expressed as knives, cutting away at the warmth of the world. Carving autumn into winter, as a reminder that even a continent could experience its own form of death.

Cerea had learned agronomy: every mare in the herd studied the subject, and the stallions had been easily convinced that there were few better ways of showing off their strength than plowing and pulling the tiller. She understood the necessity of winter: that her little part of the world needed to rest for a time. The natural decay of leaves, a good solid snowpack -- it all had its part to play in refreshing the soil. As a farmer of sorts, she respected the long nights and quiet landscape, along with the chance to warm her body near a fire while the newest book tried to do the same for her soul.

The farmer respected winter. The girl hated being cold.

She didn't always mind the briskness of autumn: there was a special quality to the air in the heart of that season, something which ignited a different kind of fire within her lungs. She just couldn't pay attention to it for all that long, because doing so would begin pushing that flame through the rest of her body. Her legs might start to canter in place, her body preparing itself for the gallop, and there would be so many times when she found herself turning towards the south...

The girl had wondered if there had been a time when centaurs had been a migratory species, with the approach of winter setting off instincts which told them to travel into lands where the grass would still be green. (She knew Papi felt the urge: it had taken significant effort to keep harpy existence secret, and some of that labor had been provided by nearby liminals who spent crucial weeks every year in blocking the fliers from leaving those gaps.) If so, there was still enough left of that primal call to make her turn.

(Spring could be worse. It was a technical truth that centaurs had no mating season: the species had evolved beyond estrus. But spring was when the world around her began to remember the necessities of creating a next generation. There was always at least one spring night when the children of the gap were locked away in their bedrooms, with curtains covering the exterior of the glass and punishments for leaving the home. Nights which you were only allowed to learn about when the herd decided you were a full adult, and ready to bring that next generation forth. Ready to be told about what was required. And it almost always happened in the spring.)

(Unseen hoofsteps had gone by the girl's window on such nights.)

(More than hoofsteps.)

Crisp autumn air could refresh the body. But this was a day with autumn sun and winter wind. There was no way to truly dress for that kind of weather: shield herself against the cutting edge of air and it would very carefully not come for a time, allowing heat to build up under her clothing to the point where she wanted to push back sleeves, raise fabric away from her upper waist and even risk shifting her skirt just to let some of it out -- which, of course, was when the wind would come back. Putting on something lighter as a dare to the very world issued an invitation for the chill to move in. There was the option to add and remove layers: the main sticking point was that you spent your day carrying ten kilos of clothing, not all of which were actually being worn.

It was the sort of weather which made you alert, because you were constantly on guard against the next gust. She suspected the sergeant had arranged the conditions with exactly that in mind.

It was the kind of environment which made it feel as if the very world was attacking her and in that, it echoed almost every day of her life.

The Sergeant had been waiting for her to arrive. (He always got there first, and the presence of somepony whose default posture suggested stone made her feel as if no matter what the clock might claim, she was actually horribly late.) He'd let her approach to something near normal speaking distance, and then he'd ordered her to tell him what she'd learned of Blitzschritt.

She'd done so from a standing position, body unmoving as she carefully relayed everything Nightwatch had told her. As far as the wind was concerned, it made her into a stationary target.

Cerea had just finished. She wasn't sure what to do next or worse, what the Sergeant wanted her to do. But she'd told the story, and so there was more than one reason to fight against the urge to shiver.

She was expecting him to demand the voicing of perspective. What had she learned from that portion of history? Did it make her want to leave the training grounds? (Because he'd made it clear that she could leave at any time, of her own free will. She just couldn't expect to return.) Was there a lesson inherent in what had happened on that distant day? Did she understand why he'd told her to study Blitzschritt?

But he existed as something which thwarted expectations.

"Most recruits wind up with some questions," the stallion evenly said. "Might have a few of the answers. If there's anything you feel like asking."

She didn't blink with surprise. She wanted to, but suspected he would have seen it as a sign of weakness. Plus she'd recently been told that she had certain tells in combat: trying to work out what they were before he provided the indignity of filling her in currently had Cerea paying far too much attention to every other physical reaction.

The girl did have questions: she just didn't think they were the right ones. But the Sergeant had a way of letting her know when she'd asked a stupid question: namely, he told her so. But he'd also stated that very few questions could qualify, at least when they came from her. And then, if it was possible, he answered them anyway.

Another wind gust hit her: from the back, this time. Her arms automatically twisted, hands interlocking at the base of her upper spine. One more layer of inadequate shielding, along with a way of keeping the stallion from seeing her fingers wringing against each other.

"What are things like between ponies and ibexes today?"

He looked up at her. His gaze was completely steady, matched the utter fearlessness of his scent, and suggested that only the accident of physiology was preventing him from something more level.

"Couple of ways to look at that," the earth pony decided. "One's personal. The other's international. Normally, I could tell you to search the books on it, but you've still got some problems there."

She nodded.

(She had a thought then: a way to study more quickly, while she was still learning to read. But she didn't think the solution applied to any material so dry. Still, it was something she could mention to Nightwatch later. Just in case.)
(It would be less than twelve hours before she began to create another little change in the world.)

"There's classes in school about the other species and nations," Emery Board began. "They start pretty early, because the foals have to understand there's more to the world than Equestria." He snorted. "Maybe too early, because a lot of them seem to forget most of it by the time they're adults. Mazein is our oldest ally. Every generation of ponies wound up with minotaurs willing to guard their tails if anything went wrong. And if you send the average Mazein citizen down the main street of a small settled zone, you're still going to get at least two ponies running for the nearest door and locking themselves in until the monster goes away. It's been a problem for centuries. For species, Equestria's a mixed country -- but that's just barely. For citizens, last census had us as about ninety-eight percent ponies. A few of the smaller settled zones... anypony who stayed there their entire lives might never meet another fully-sapient species. Just tenants."

Tenants? It instantly created a dozen questions, and that led to a frantic scramble of internal herding as the calling words were locked into their pen to await Nightwatch.

"And that's a problem," the Sergeant stated. "When all you know is tenants, it gets harder to see a full sapient as being just that. It took centuries for the palace to get the nation fully integrated on the pony races, and we still wound up with a few near-holdouts at ground level. Had to brute-force a place near the east coast last year: set up an earth pony as their new chief of police because that was the best way to make sure the other new arrivals could look for justice. And it's too easy for the pegasi to isolate themselves, when it takes spellwork for anypony else to come up to a cloud city and stay up. We've got enough problems getting some ponies to live together. When you've got a nation with barely anyone else to integrate..."

The aged head slowly shook.

"Means we're missing a lot of potential," the old stallion told her. "When Protocera gets into a crisis, they can draw on nearly everything. Just about all we've got is ponies. The Generals have been trying to encourage more immigration, but it's not easy. Most of the ones who do come in aren't the first of their species. But they know that if they pick anything but the largest settled zones to live in, they're probably going to be the only. Which keeps them out of the smaller towns -- and that just makes things worse."

He didn't sigh. His ribs didn't shift in a manner which would have indicated regret, while the tail didn't move and the hat, as always, stayed exactly where it was. There was simply a brief waft of scent which represented all of it, and Cerea forced herself to remain still.

"Wanted to take you the long way around to the first part of your answer," he continued. "So you'd understand the why. Your average pony read a few pages about ibex way back in their school years, and more than a few of them held onto what they read just long enough to get past the test. Some adults could dredge up the species name after a while. A few of the dumber ones would just ask what an ibex was, and when they'd been discovered. Some would say there wasn't any such species, and if they hadn't heard of them, then they didn't exist. So our end of the relationship, on the personal level -- it's pretty basic. We've forgotten them. They stay in their lands, and most ponies don't have any reason to travel through the mountains. We don't go to see them, and they might never come down again."

Her fingers weren't wringing against each other now. The girl's hands had simply clenched together, the reciprocal grip steadily tightening until skin began to flush white.

Cold assaulted the base of her tail. She barely noticed.

"Doesn't quite work the same way with them," the Sergeant added. "Couldn't show you one of their textbooks and as I understand it, a lot of their history is oral. Makes things worse, because it's harder to keep an oral history from distorting. Once the original witnesses are gone -- that's when the tale gets spun to suit the teller. So I can't tell you exactly what they say about us now, and writing's out. But I've got the core of it. Their kids get told just enough to believe we're dangerous. And that's not just ponies: it's pretty much every last other species. They respect the buffalo a little, because that's a society with traditions. And earth ponies -- we get the best of it from them, because they see us as the most steadfast. But I went through the mountains, after I got decommissioned the first time. Went there when just about nopony else does. And when I'm planning to go somewhere, I study part of the language first. So I'll know what the curses are."

The girl's next blink got through her defenses.

"Soldiers curse," Emery Board steadfastly observed. "Some of them do it almost constantly. Mutter the words under their breath when they're keeping watch on a cold wet night and the nearest weather control is a dozen gallops away. Learn how a species curses and you can pick those sounds out of the dark. Gives you a little more warning. And when I'm going somewhere hardly anypony ever goes, where being seen as a little more steadfast doesn't mean anyone likes me -- I want to know what the locals are saying. About me and around me, when they're sure I won't understand. And with Ibexian, that wasn't easy. No native speakers left in Equestria, or anywhere else. But there's a few Archive types who kept the right records." This snort was rather small. "Records. Not recordings. Meant adjusting for accent."

His eyes focused on the silver wires which stretched across the surface of her skin.

"Take that off," he instructed.

"Sergeant?"

"Just for a few seconds," he clarified. "Because this is where it works against you. If I say it right now, you'll just hear the translation. I want you to get the actual sound."

Her hands came forward and up, reluctantly forced the disc to move as another gust of wind used the opportunity to hit her from the front. She was used to taking it off and on for language lessons, because the Sergeant was right: that was the only way to truly hear the pony intonations. But...

She knew it was self-charging, took magic from the very air in order to sustain power. It didn't keep her from dreading the moment when that charge somehow ran out, or having the device's magic neutralized. Something which would leave her barely understanding one word in every twenty, unable to communicate or recognize what others were trying to tell her.

Helpless.

The tips of the wire parted contact with her ear. (It sometimes felt sore at the end of a long day, and she'd wondered if that was because the wires made it harder for that ear to flex normally.) The Sergeant nodded, took a breath, and reminded her that he wasn't a centaur.

She could have replicated the sound almost exactly, if she'd heard it from the natural source: something which seemed impossible. He had been among the native speakers, and he didn't have a centaur's vocal chords. The Sergeant tried -- but there were still hints of neigh audible within his effort, and a touch of sharply-descending whinny.

Still, he had tried, and his effort was enough to let her hear what happened when a pony tried to recreate a rather complex sort of bleat. Something which would have had a sort of music within the sound, if it hadn't been for what felt like a permanent infusion of snicker.

He nodded to the disc. She put it back on.

"The actual word is changewinds," he told her. "When they use it normally, it's a shift in the mountain air -- but it's also an omen. It's supposed to signal a time when they have to stand fast against the world again, because the planet is going to try and take the mountains out from under their hooves. But if they say it about a sapient -- it means you're unstable. You can barely walk because the next second, you might try to fly instead and if they're saying it about a pegasus, they mean 'through rock'. They can't trust a changewind because whatever we do, it might not be exactly the same thing we did before. An ibex calling you a changewind thinks you're a leaf in a dust devil. You can't control where you're going. If you think you're directing the movement, it's delusion. Not that they expect a leaf to think much. One ibex calls another a changewind, it's begging for a fight. But they can say it about us without reprisal. All of us. Every last member of every other species, even earth ponies and buffalo, because that's all we've been to them for decades. We can go through their mountains, but it isn't exactly like they've set up a hotel industry. Sleep where you can, in the cold, on whatever halfway-level part of the rock you can find. And once you understand what they're saying -- you won't stay."

She didn't know why she felt so angry. She didn't understand why it all seemed so sad.

"Pretty much gives you the international picture," the stallion calmly added. "They're on their own: no alliances, no formal ties. They think they're better off that way. There's a little trade, but that's just about all going up the slopes: individuals who know they can't get some resources at home, and they're ashamed of it. They don't send much of anything back down. If you see an ibex creation in Equestria, it's either smuggled or it's been here for a long time."

"No alliances at all?" The liminal gaps had been isolated, and some of the species within had cordially loathed a few of the others. There had even been small, hidden battles over portions of safe territory -- but if the humans had come, they all knew the only hope was to band together --

-- all of us against their billions.

It might have bought the combined liminal forces three extra minutes.

The Sergeant shook his head.

"That was part of the reason for the last trip," he stated. "Issuing an invitation. Because Blitzschritt had come down, and she was still an ibex. Maybe that would make them feel like it was safe to add a few official representatives, on the government level. We knew they were nervous -- but things between us were as good as they'd ever been, and it felt like it was time to ask again. There was a site set aside for them, waiting on Embassy Row. Now it's a little park. The kids of the ambassadors play there. A dozen species getting together without thinking about it any more than it takes to adjust game rules for hands and hooves."

Her eyes closed.

We sent out exchange students. Teenagers. Young adults.
Maybe it should have been foals.

"...what was she like?"

The resulting snort was almost loud enough to jar her eyes open again all by itself. Nightwatch having provided the olfactory context for bemusement did the rest.

She told herself that she was mostly looking at him to see if there were any hints of the emotion in his expression and posture. There weren't.

"I'm not that old. And I wasn't assigned her as my Guard when I was going through training. I got Rampart -- wipe that look, Recruit. Got enough trainees who think I just grew out of the ground and somepony spotted a naturally-sprouting sergeant, so they built some training grounds around me and then went in for the harvest. I had parents. Guessing they had sex somewhere along the line, and kept having it until the spell took. So born. Not grown. Didn't show up at the heart of a meteor crater when the space rock cracked like an egg either."

Artificially-aided medical conception? It made sense. There were certainly ways in which the local magic substituted for technology.

"Knew I wanted to be part of the Guard early on," he continued. "Early enough that I figured it was going to wind up as my mark. But that wasn't all there was to me. I liked my teachers. I told them I wanted to be in the Guard, and there were four of them who gave me extra time after the usual classes wrapped up. Books and personal lessons, just so I'd have a little more of what I needed when I got there. I respected that more than anything, that they'd invested something in me. They cared about what happened to my life after I wasn't part of theirs any more. I thought about that, and I thought about being a Guard, and I wasn't sure which was more important. What was better for the world, because they were both good ways to serve. Then I realized it wasn't a choice between one or the other. And when I started acting on that..."

His gaze steadily moved along his left flank, to the icon of a megaphone with its rim pattern of alternating hoofblades and rectangular stone slabs...

...she followed that line of sight. When it came to looking at a pony, she was doing so for what wasn't exactly the first time. There were little icons, and the images served as something to regard. But for the most part, she had been treating it as an extra level of identifier: if there were a lot of, say, deep blue pegasi around and she couldn't quite get a look at their faces or pick out a scent within twisting air currents, then there was always the icon.

She looked. But unlike everypony around her, she didn't treat the image as an extension of the pony, let alone a visible portion of the soul. She hadn't been thinking about those icons...

...until now.

There were no stone slabs in the image. They would generally appear that way at first glance, but... you had to pay attention for a moment before spotting their spines.

Hoofblades and books. It was just that for the latter, every edition had come out in what could charitably be described as Extreme Hardcover.

"-- I got my mark. But the mark doesn't get anypony into the job all by itself. Still had to fill out the application, go through training, and I had my own Sergeant. She was harder on me than anypony else, because she knew that when she stepped down, I had to be ready to take those reins. And when somepony comes along with my mark, or one of the variations I know to look for -- that's the pony who gets assigned Drillbit as their Guard. So they'll carry her forward. Not planning to take it easy on that pony, either. That's not how she'd have wanted it."

A single extra second of looking at the symbol, and then his head smoothly came forward again.

"And that's not even the whole of it," he added. "Hear how I phrased that just now? With the mark. That's assuming my successor is going to be a pony. Might not happen that way, and maybe we're better off if it doesn't. But even if they don't have a mark, I figure I'm still sharp enough to spot the right person, if they show up while I'm around. BUT IT IS NOT GOING TO BE YOU, BECAUSE YOUR SKILL SET IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT AND MOSTLY SEEMS TO INVOLVE SHOUTING AT YOURSELF! BUT THAT IS WHEN YOU ARE OPERATING ALONE! LET US SEE HOW YOU PERFORM AS PART OF A TEAM!"

The last word spent some time rebounding off the mountain, and so almost completely managed to drown out the sound of ponies coming over the ridge. It took one more stab of wind to truly alert Cerea to their presence, and she automatically turned to see --

-- just four of them, this time, and she only recognized two. It was the wrong time of day to expect Nightwatch, and that was because 'day' had gotten involved. So she didn't know who the older pegasus mare was, and the unicorn stallion was equally unfamiliar. But the multiple layered hues made it easy to spot Acrolith, and when it came to the second pegasus...

She'd gotten a good look at him during the last stage of the fight. Looking up towards the darkest of clouds, scenting his terror and knowing there was no way to avoid the oncoming surge of electric death.

The fourth pony, looking exhausted, shaken, and wearing armor from which all silver had been stripped away, was Squall.

The quartet moved forward, stopping when they were parallel with her flanks: the new pair on the right, Acrolith on her left, and Squall on her very-very-very-very far left.

"Today, we are going to begin the process of learning about group maneuvers!" the Sergeant announced. "This rather naturally requires a group, and so I have assembled one! Two are volunteers! One did not need to be asked whether she was volunteering! And Mister Squall Scud is present because he must be!"

I'm supposed to practice a combat maneuver with somepony who almost electrocuted me?

She couldn't survey every pony's expression, not with the group spread out to the sides: the twisting wind made it just as difficult to gauge all of their scents. It meant she didn't recognize the agreement until the earth pony mare spoke.

"Squall's on probation," Acrolith's too-calm voice stated.

The Sergeant nodded. A shadowed portion of Cerea's heart darkly composed a few thoughts regarding a system which felt the best way to punish somepony who'd nearly killed her was through putting him on probation.

She looked at the young pegasus. Every last one of his feathers was shaking.

"Should somepony on probation," the earth pony mare almost sedately continued, "really be participating in this exercise?"

Cerea was expecting a shout. Something along the lines of DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS! felt reasonable.

"If he ever wants to get off probation," emerged as something which would have needed about forty extra decibels just to approach a dull roar, "then yes."

The "Why?" only served as an echo for everything going through Cerea's mind.

The Sergeant took a breath, and everyone else waited for the mountain to shake.

"The Recruit is progressing through her training," the old stallion firmly said. "Let us say, for the sake of theory, that she completes it and joins the ranks of the Guards. Under that situation, exactly what should our Mister Scud do? Switch to whichever shift she does not occupy, and hope unto Sun or Moon that nothing ever happens which would temporarily require them to be on the same squad? Does he request embassy duty? Assignment to the Empire, to occupy space until the Crystal Guard has sufficient trained natives to fully fill the ranks? Or should he QUIT?"

He didn't bother waiting for the flinching to stop.

"There is the very real possibility of having a centaur as a Guard! This means every other Guard may find themselves in a position where they must operate alongside her squad, or see her assigned to theirs! Every single Guard must be ready for that! Should she pass, she will swear her oath, the same as every last pony here! That is what makes a Guard! Not form! Not species! Devotion and duty! And if you are not willing to accept that as truth, you can leave right now EXCEPT FOR YOU, SQUALL!"

Wings slowly folded back in, or mostly so. The young adult didn't seem to have full control over his own limbs, and it left several feathers hanging low enough to obscure part of his belly.

There was a moment when Cerea, whose mind was looking for something to do which wasn't repressing the ongoing surge of anger, wondered if pegasi teenagers used that to conceal a loss of personal control. Then she decided that it was even more visible than the crouch-walk, and went back to being furious again. He'd nearly electrocuted her, Nightwatch had wound up redirecting the strike, and now she was supposed to be doing something at his side...

How was she supposed to trust him? A flying, soaring, shocking bundle of fear moving close to her flank. Or worse, above her, where she couldn't readily see what he was doing. And she knew there were ponies who were afraid of her because of what another had done: at least she was judging Squall by his own actions --

Almost casually, "-- problem, Recruit?"

She wondered what her posture had been, to create the question -- or if her own rising miasma of fury had just reached the point where pony senses could recognize the reaction. But she already knew there was only one acceptable answer to the old stallion's question and unfortunately, it was "No, Sergeant."

"Then let us consider how to begin!" Limbs almost audibly twanged into fresh positions as he began to march: left to right, about ten meters each way before turning around again. "Due to certain recent interruptions, the Recruit has yet to be issued a tactical guide! This will be corrected by evening! So she is unfamiliar with how Guards move as a herd! It means we need to start with something basic, especially as none of you are aware of how to keep in step with a centaur! And those of you on the ground will need to hustle, while she might need to hold back!"

He glanced at the section of the training grounds which typically held the practice dummies. There were several in place -- but the wooden forms seemed to have been rather haphazardly scattered around the area. Cerea's initial approach had found tight clusters in some locations, with a few single manikins (ponykins?) placed in locations which seemed to make the greatest danger into tripping over them. The totality wasn't anything close to an organized formation.

"However, as it turns out, the Recruit is not only fast, she is also larger than any of you! Which allows us to begin with something which the graduates have practiced for!"

The wind shifted, and so allowed her to pick up on the moment when the scents from the older pegasus did the same.

"We will begin with a Sunpiercer scenario," the Sergeant announced. "Recruit, this represents one of the standard formations. It is something which presumes your Princess is in a situation where she can neither fly nor teleport, but is still capable of both ground movement and doing whatever she can to assist the group. The number of ponies surrounding her is a variable, which means we can practice this with varying herd populations. And as this scenario sees the Princess as an active combatant -- is there something YOU would like to share with us, Quickstrike?"

The older pegasus took a very deep breath, and let all of the outrage ride the wind.

"She's going to be playing the Princess?"

"On the first run," the Sergeant verified. "And every fifth run thereafter. It will add a degree of reality to the exercise, as she takes up roughly the same amount of space as the General --" Cerea began to blush "-- and there will be times when the rest of you need to cover her. So the practice --"

Quickstrike's wings flared. Feathers beat against the air with raw fury.

"That's blasphemy!"

There was a single moment of silence.

"Oh, no..." the unicorn muttered: Cerea's ears just barely managed to pick up on the words. "Here we go..."

"A centaur," the old stallion placidly stated, "playing the part of a Princess, qualifies as blasphemy. I think you have forgotten what true blasphemy is, Quickstrike, possibly because it has been too much time since your previous encounters! Would you like to hear some blasphemy?"

The mare's wings slammed against her sides.

"I -- Sergeant, it was just --"

The Sergeant inhaled.

Cerea was never able to entirely reconstruct what happened after that. There were words, and then there were more words. She lost some of them as the wires hissed in a desperate attempt to keep up, but the majority got through. Her vocabulary expanded in new and profane ways, then gained extra density and kept on doing so until it began to collapse in on itself in a manner similar to a dying star becoming a black hole, only with somewhat more heat and acting mostly in self-defense. A number of trees tithed leaves as the bribe required to make it stop: the more desperate threw in some small branches. Clouds lost cohesion. Most of the wind seemed to pick a new direction, which was Anywhere That Isn't Here. Both pegasi spontaneously developed feather fade, which rather literally paled in comparison to what was happening with their skin. The unicorn raised a personal shield: this accomplished absolutely nothing in the way of protection, but did at least show her what his corona hue was. And most of the surrounding grass died. Again.

It took a while for the echoes to fade away, which coincidentally equaled the time she needed to figure out whether it was possible for her own tail to blister.

"Consider yourself refreshed on the subject!" the Sergeant offered. "Gather together! Stay close to her, as today, she is your Princess! No more than two body lengths away on any side! You will be running a route through the obstacle course, attempting to avoid or deal with the enemy barrage! We will judge your success by the degree of sullying on the other side! You have five minutes to plan, and then we begin!"

Gather...?

She didn't really approach ponies or rather, when she did, she usually got to witness their first attempts to gallop backwards. It left her awkwardly turning in place for a few seconds, with no leg entirely sure which way to go -- but then Acrolith slowly closed part of the gap, and the others eventually followed suit. With Squall, the 'slowly' aspect had been magnified.

Quickstrike was the third to reach her -- or almost so. The older pegasus stopped about two meters away, and seemed unlikely to come any closer.

"I didn't mean --" she began.

"Shut it," Acrolith pleasantly decided. "Cerea, we've been through this drill before. There's going to be more pegasi showing up in a few minutes. That's part of the barrage: they're going to be dropping things on us from above. If the Sergeant's in a good mood, we're looking at water-soluble fur dye. If he's pissed off, they're going to switch up to itching powder. It might be a mix. And since Quickstrike just pissed him off, try to deflect as much as you can. The standard bombardment spheres are enchanted to be altitude-sensitive: they only go off when they hit the ground. So you can swing the sword at them and try to knock them out of the way." A brief pause. "Try to make it look like you aren't aiming anything towards Quickstrike. The Sergeant doesn't like that. At least, he doesn't like when it's easy to spot."

"Hey...!"

"Did I say to unshut?" the earth pony temperately inquired. (The pegasus shut up.) "We may also get unicorns field-lobbing things in for angled attacks. So you have to look high and around, while keeping an eye on everypony else close to ground level and moving forward the whole time. You're the Princess in this first gallop, and that means you can't stop. The rest of us can be dropped: the real test is if we get you through. If one of us gets judged out, you leave them behind. Do you understand?"

On the instinctive level, she did: the actual brain was scrambling to keep up. "What if you fall close enough to me that I can pick you up on the gallop and drape you across my lower back? I should be able to carry somepony out --"

"-- and how are we holding on?" the unicorn asked. "Jaw grip on the skirt?"

The centaur winced.

"I can still carry one of you," she tried again. "Just with my arms --"

"-- and that means you can't use the sword," Acrolith cut in. "You're the Princess: you leave us. Because on the gallops after this, we may wind up leaving you. Just do everything you can to protect us. We'll be looking out for you, on this gallop as the Princess and on the others as a Guard." Which was when the mare openly glared at the two pegasi. "Everypony got that?"

Quickstrike forced a nod. Squall, from his position four meters away, just vibrated in place.

"Squall..." Acrolith warned.

"I know this is a punishment," the young stallion just barely choked out. "For what I did --"

"-- it's a training exercise," Acrolith cut in. "One you need --"

"-- but how am I supposed to do this? You... you were there, Acro. You were right behind me when it happened, I survived because you saw me going down and jumped high enough to knock me into the water. I... I know what the Sergeant wants, but --"

His scent was becoming overwhelming and in this case, it meant the ponies were picking up on it. The other pegasus had just pulled back, the unicorn's breath was beginning to quicken --

"-- I know what the therapist said about confrontation and exposure, about just being around her. But how am I supposed to think about working with her? How do I think about anything except what he did to me?"

It was, in many ways, a perfectly legitimate question. It was certainly a viable concern, and there were ways in which Cerea would have normally had sympathy. It was just that in this case, her end of the bargain was to work with somepony who had recently tried to electrocute her.

She spent every day trying to minimize the fear which was induced by her presence. The girl also did everything she could to be a good guest. Cerea genuinely wanted to reflect well on the palace for the kindness they had shown her: more than that, she wanted to earn it. And she was incapable of seeing that as one of the problems: that she had viewed kindness as something which she needed to earn.

Cerea was polite, often overly formal, did whatever she could to work within the rules, and tried to maintain dignity in the face of chaos, human stupidity, and far too many torn blouses. There were many ways in which she could simply be described as a good mare. It was just that...

It didn't come out often, and she was generally ashamed of herself afterwards. There had been very few incidents in the herd. The emotion had expressed itself in the household and when it came to the arachne, it had cause. And she had to hold herself back among humans, because 'at all costs' meant knowing what the price was for failure: losing the one she'd cared about forever.

She was a good mare. But she was in the company of somepony whose fear had nearly killed her.

Her head tilted slightly to the right, and did so as her ears assumed a position of total relaxation. Four long legs shifted forward, and the young pegasus stallion jumped, coming down in almost the same place he'd started.

"Did you ever realize," Cerea peacefully asked, "that you have wings?"

She was a good mare.

"...what?"

But she had a temper.

"Did you ever really think about that?" she placidly inquired. "Two whole limbs, just hanging off your sides. How much strength does it take to keep them off the ground? Because you don't seem to be doing a very good job of that right now. Is it something to do with the joints? How many joints are in there, anyway? Have you ever tried counting them? What about thinking about each one, individually, as you try to refold? You should really count your joints sometime, because they're part of those heavy, heavy wings. And your flight feathers! I know it might feel like they just adjust their position as needed, but really, you should be keeping an eye on them! Because they're so small compared to your body, and being asked to support so much of you. Ideally, you really need to be adjusting them one at a time. By thinking fast enough about each one to stay in the air, without dropping, during every flap you take. You should really think about that. About the feathers and joints, which have to work together, in those heavy wings which are just going to be hanging off your sides for the rest of your life."

His jaw dropped. So did a pair of limbs, all the way to the ground. Cerea simply turned away.

"So," she asked the unicorn, "what's your name? And is there any way to make that shield mobile?"

The young pegasus stallion, whose legs were sore because he'd never been able to get any part of himself further off the ground than was allowed by the most desperate (and failed) of jumps, tried to shake the itching powder out of his feathers. This failed. It probably wouldn't have worked if he hadn't been shifting them one at a time.

Squall glared up at the girl. He had no other choice. A direct line of glare would have required hovering.

"I hate you."

She tilted her lightly dye-splattered head the other way. Smiled.

"Are you sure you hate me?" the centaur asked. "Or is it Tirek?"

"You."

Cerea's smile widened.

"Good."

"I shouldn't have done that," she sighed, which allowed some more of the bath's steam to do its worst with her lungs. "I shouldn't..."

Nightwatch, floating a short distance away, answered with a shake of her wings. Then she shook them again, one joint at a time.

"...sorry," Cerea miserably offered. "It's sort of a verbal explosive. It can take out just about anyone in the vicinity." Another sigh. "It'll wear off after a while."

Another, somewhat desperate wing shake. "How do you make it wear off faster?"

"By giving your mind something else to focus on." The centaur's shoulders slumped. "I usually had to bank a fetlock into something."

"Banked fetlocks," the little knight said. "Um." Her feathers twitched. "That's still better than this. How did Squall get through it?"

Hands cupped together, gathered water and splashed more of the bright red dye out of blonde hair: the results thinned out across the surface of the water and vanished. "He lost track of his wings once the powder had him so itchy that he had to stop and hit the showers. After that, he just kept glaring at me. It didn't help when the rest of the Guards kept snickering at him. And there were a lot of Guards. The Sergeant kept cycling in fresh ponies from the bombardment team."

"That's standard," Nightwatch explained. "Keeps the group a little more fresh. How many times did you have to rinse off?"

"Twice," was the shameful answer. "The dye wasn't so bad, but even when there isn't a direct hit, the powder just -- goes everywhere. I should have dodged faster --"

"-- twice?"

Cerea forced the nod.

"How many hours did you run the exercise?"

"Not counting the rinsing? Three."

"And you washed off twice."

The girl's head went down.

"That's better than you think it is," the pegasus gently offered.

"I would have died twice. And I was part of the Guard group both times. My Princess..."

She stopped. More water was splashed towards her face.

"I'll show you the tactical books," Nightwatch eventually said. "Um. Read them to you. Part of them. There's a lot of diagrams, but there's also a lot of words. It's going to take a while."

Cerea sighed.

"I almost wish there weren't any diagrams."

"They're necessary. So you know who moves where. Um. Or how the movements start, because when anyone sees you moving in formation, they try to break it up. So there's variants."

"I know about playbooks." The wire didn't hiss. "And military maneuvers, and how no plan survives first contact with the enemy. So the diagrams are necessary. But you've had to read me a lot of things. Too many, and it takes a lot of your time." The sigh was starting to move into the dominant verbal position again. "You need to do it for the diagrams. But for some of the things which are words only, we should probably ask the Archives for some audiobooks --"

The wire hissed, and kept doing so for some time.

Black ears twisted.

"Stories," the little knight finally said, "read out loud by professional actors, recorded on gramophone albums?"

Cerea blinked.

"You don't have them?" She knew that ponies had means of recording sound: the movie had been in black and white, but it had also been what the early days of human cinema had termed as 'a talkie'. And the most recent sentence had just provided her with the state of musical capture: no computers meant no files, magnetic and optical recording were out -- but there were records. The disc having rendered 'gramophones' suggested hoof-wound springs. And still, even at that level of advancement... "They're fun! Some of them are read by a single performer doing multiple voices, but the best ones use full casts! Or a really good performer. Like Stephen Bri --" stopped. "Like someone I heard once. And sometimes there's sound effects. It's a way to just listen to a book, while you're doing something else. A movie where all the pictures are in your head."

"Um," Nightwatch carefully began -- but her eyes were bright. "Um. Books can take a really long time to read. The biggest albums only hold about ninety minutes of sound. You'd have to cut the book down to --"

"No abridging," Cerea firmly said.

"But --"

"No abridging," repeated the girl who had needed to scavenge stories from the ancient offerings of library remaindered sales, and so considered the foulest literary curse in any world to be Reader's Digest Condensed Edition. "Stacks of records. As many as it takes. You really don't -- ?"

The pegasus swam closer.

"Tell me more," Nightwatch requested. "Slowly."

It took the rest of the bath plus all the time Cerea needed to get dressed, and that was just to get them through cassette tapes and how a single snag could destroy eighteen previous hours of listening, generally five minutes before the climax. (That was another one of the problems with what the herd received in the bulk shipments: things which had been used to just before the point of self-destruct.)

"I want to think about this for a while," was next to the last thing Nightwatch had said before leaving to go on shift. "Um. And don't tell anypony else about them, because the wrong pony might tell too many other ponies, and then there's a whole lot of ponies who say they all had the same idea. And none of them are you."

"I don't understand --"

"-- just don't tell! Please?"

"...okay."

And then the Guard was gone, leaving a confused Cerea to try and settle onto the blanket nest.

...at least it won't keep me awake. She was tired out from the exercises, and tomorrow had been assigned as a forge day. A crucial one, because she was going to start on the gauntlets. She had to make sure the joints would flex properly. It was arguably the most delicate part of the process.

She took off the disc, carefully set it aside. Folded her arms under her breasts, closed her eyes --

-- and a hoof awkwardly knocked at the barracks door. This was immediately followed by a whinny.

The last sigh of the night was kept fully internal, and she reluctantly reached for the wires.

"Nighwatch went on shift," the centaur called out.

She smelled the hesitation before she heard it.

"No," the unseen mare said. "It's a message for you. From the Princesses."

She was already starting to stand up, and fast-opening eyes were searching for something more formal than a nightgown. "I'll come right up! I just need to put on --"

"-- just a message."

Her legs stopped unfolding.

"All right," Cerea said. Waited.

Stone eyes could not blink away falling snow.

The elevation for this part of the gardens was artificial: careful manipulation of the atmosphere thinned the air just enough, with establishment of the border and general maintenance performed by those who cared to remember. The night's extremely localized snowfall could be regarded as equally unnatural, in the sense that it had been crafted by a different use of pegasus magic. But the flakes were real, and stone eyes had no way to clear them. It was the reason another technique had been permanently placed, making sure the statue would always be at least one degree warmer than the critical mark. Cold stone -- but not so cold as to let anything accumulate upon granite fur.

The eyes could not blink, and there was nothing within the statue which was capable of watching as the centaur slowly climbed towards it, one hand pressing the half-sphere against her own nose. The other arm was -- twisting. Moving in what almost seemed like random directions, sent into an endless succession of strange angles by the pressure of inner agony.

It was deep into the night: the girl had been up for hours. Deep and dark, in gardens which had no need to be cleared. There was a rather singular girl, a statue, and memory. The memories had the bulk of the girl's attention, and it made her hooves stumble somewhat as she tried to approach.

There was nothing in the statue which could watch. But the girl had recently learned that ponies believed in an afterlife. A single key word had nudged open the door to future inquiry: shadowlands.

The statue could not watch. But the little knight went to that which was made in memory when she wished to truly think. And if the ponies believed in an afterlife -- then perhaps something lingered in the vicinity of this statue, curious as to whether any would visit. It might have seen the girl approach once before and been justifiably curious about what was going on. Staying to see if any further visitations occurred would be natural --

-- or perhaps there was simply a statue. The girl doesn't know, and she didn't seem to be feeling much in the way of faith. But when it came to thinking about things -- her only friend wouldn't be available for hours. One Princess was asleep, the other occupied, and she couldn't just ask for their time...

She didn't know if anything could watch and listen. But when it came to finding anyone she could speak with, she was just that desperate.

It took a while for her to clear off enough of the stone for resting: the process was much more awkward with one hand. And then she tried to sit near the statue's base, already feeling her body's heat being stolen away. It also seemed to be pulling the center out of her voice. Leaving behind something hollow.

"They found a class which was willing to meet me."

She wasn't aware of how formal her tones had become. But when viewed as a form of respect, the statue could be said to have earned it.

Flakes drifted down, settled into the girl's hair and tangled in her tail.

"There is no date set," she added. "That is still being worked out. But they will come. They are going to come. The Princesses are going to put me in the same room with children, and... I..."

There were no stars visible through the clouds. Strange constellations had been cloaked and in that sense, there was one less constant reminder for the strangeness of this world. Something which didn't matter, because the girl was speaking to a stone statue while holding a half-sphere which focused the air she needed to breathe.

She had never been so far away from her gap. That didn't matter either. The memories followed, and every time she closed her eyes against the falling snow, she was in France.

The uniforms.
The yellow vests.
Everything.

"...it is going to go wrong..."

Again.

Impudent

Dear Ms. Slate,

The answer to your exactingly passed-along request is 'No.' There won't be any need to relay that, as I'll be contacting the initiating party shortly after I finish drafting your letter. Which is probably going to take several drafts. I feel it's best if I tell her myself. I also just wanted you to know what the answer was, AND that she was going to receive her own copy. This will prevent her from trying an end-gallop around me by claiming she privately received permission.

Now, when it comes to the details of that decision:

I recognize that a number of parents have concerns regarding both supervision and the presence of other parties during the meeting, which is part of what allowed her to try that request in the first place. Let me try to answer a few of them.

First: the press will not be there. This is, for the most part, in spite of their best efforts, as a press corps which seldom finds reasons to fully agree on anything tends to unite behind the single issue of demanding access. In this case, I have several reasons to close them out, not the least of which is that I want this meeting to be between your students and Cerea: not a number of fillies and colts, a single centaur, and several dozen adults who alternate between calling out their own questions and writing down notes. The writing can be oddly loud.

I also had to consider the possibility of instigation. At least two different kinds, because I don't trust Wordia not to subtly drop a lit firecracker behind a nervous student any more than I trust Raque not to encourage a trembling filly away from the first hoofstep of brief physical contact and into the more open-minded, welcoming, and probably trauma-triggering embrace of a full hug. Also, there's every chance the trauma would wind up being triggered on both sides.

However, I also understand the desire for some public record of this meeting to exist especially since I'm already sick of reading the protest letters sent by those who have some very detailed ideas of what might happen when innocents are left alone with a centaur. So I'm going to be trying something new.

The palace will be filming the whole thing.

This wound up creating some additional requirements. We need to set aside a place for the meeting which can accommodate a single cinema camera, along with the necessities for recording sound: the current plan is to either use one of the larger Halls or a Courtyard. As for choosing the ponies who will be operating the equipment -- that was something which led to an argument in the press corps, because certain portions of it wanted to be the ones who assigned those posts, and their choices were the ones whom certain others wouldn't trust not to manipulate the editing.

After the fights were broken up discussions were sorted out, Princess Luna and I resorted to one of the oldest compromise tactics: something best suited for use with those incapable of normal reconciliation. We took two mares ponies at the extreme ends of the coverage spectrum, then asked each to name somepony whom they trusted to operate that equipment. The palace contacted those parties, brought them together in a small room, told them they weren't getting out until they had an agreement, and asked them to name the ponies who would actually record the meeting.

As tactics for reaching compromise go, it has a rather surprising rate of success. It might even have applications in the classroom and in that setting, would probably avoid the typical follow-up headache which comes from having to track multiple accusations of bribery. In this case, it has given us a fairly reliable crew. Because we won't be doing any editing for the recording, the film should be duplicated and provided to your school by late afternoon on the same day through express courier. Any parents who wish to see how things went can watch for themselves at that time.

I realize this isn't a perfect system. Film captures illusions (at least when they're cast by ponies), and so the possibility for fakery will always exist. Having certain parties accuse the palace of such is more of a certainty. But when it comes to a public record of the meeting -- something which can be reviewed by anypony in the world -- this is the best I can offer, along with a promise that the crew will be placed out of sight. They will play no direct part in the meeting.

Given the ongoing difficulties in finalizing the one-sheet, I'd also thought about the possibility of a full film. Something around the two-reeler level, which would introduce Cerea to any part of the population willing to sit through the mandatory short subject before the main feature began. Namely, I thought about it right up until the moment when Princess Luna inquired as to whether, given the typical pony's reaction to seeing Cerea for the first time, I had any ideas for a sequel to the government's own premiere horror movie. Possibly something centering on riots.

I'm also expecting at least one pre-meeting "opinion" article on just why the author feels a centaur should never be in the same room with children, with the option to upgrade into a full series.

Now, when it comes to adult supervision, I fully understand why some of the parents would want to be there. But once again, we're trying to limit the number of visible participants, because we want everypony (and everyone) involved to feel that they can act as themselves. Children in the presence of their parents are sometimes prone to behave in the way which they feel the adults wanted, or as trotting extensions of their elders. Let your class declare their own feelings: not those of another.

So when it comes to adult supervision: no, I will not permit the parents to attend. You'll be there the whole time, as their teacher: I'd never ask you to leave. And if they naturally feel that additional adult presence is required. please assure them that Princess Luna and I will both be in attendance. I personally feel that we qualify.

You probably aren't familiar with the ongoing Prance belief that all of their ambassadors are supposed to perpetually regard and treat me as if I'm in late adolescence, especially since I just managed to learn about it two years ago. Let's just say that if spending nearly thirteen hundred years on this planet doesn't qualify me for adulthood, then I really don't want to know what would. And I especially don't want to know about it from anyone who hasn't managed a respectable fraction of that number. Incidentally, I'd be the one defining 'respectable'.

Again: Cerea is essentially harmless. The Diarchy's task in supervising the meeting is to reassure all parties that everything is fully safe, and that very much includes reassuring a very nervous centaur. Princess Luna and I will be speaking to her shortly, because she has expressed a number of concerns about meeting your class. She is, put bluntly, terrified -- and what she's terrified of is scaring them.

About the request to consider postponement: I'm sorry, but I can't. It's been hard enough to find a date between your own schedule, that of the palace, and the demands of Guard training. The only other time I had remotely considered was almost immediately after Cerea's graduation from the training program (should that happen), and that's already been set aside for what might wind up as another type of meeting. I understand that you have concerns: you wouldn't have a teacher's mark if you weren't constantly looking out for your students. But I can promise you absolute safety in getting your class in and out of the palace. They'll never come near the protestors, and the same will apply in reverse.

And the longer we wait, the more protestors there may be.

The world, through the eyes of your class and the camera alike, needs to begin truly meeting Cerea as soon as possible. There are ways in which we simply can't afford to wait any longer. So the date and time I'm attaching to this letter is firm barring the actual assortment of potential semi-random disasters unless government business intervenes.

In conclusion: the passed-along request has been turned down. There will be an adult presence at the meeting. But it will not be the pony who asked you to pass along those words, while asking you to make sure I didn't realize you were doing so. Nor will it be any of her friends. Perhaps a 'chaperone' is required and if so, the Diarchy will stand in that role. But when it comes to 'somepony who is accustomed to dealing with potential chaos and the disruptions caused by the presence of monsters' -- no. I'm amazed that she managed to leave 'stopping wild animal attacks' off her own qualification list.

I hope you'll continue to contact me with further concerns and ideas for addressing them. But that one is not going to come up again.

I look forward to seeing you soon.

With hope,

Princess Celestia

The alicorns were waiting for her to talk and in that, Cerea already felt as if she was imposing on them.

She didn't have any right to... well, strictly speaking, she hadn't summoned them. All Cerea had done was mention a few of her own concerns to Nightwatch, doing so in the strict confidence which you were supposed to find when speaking with a friend. It... just hadn't worked out that way.

Nightwatch had no problems with keeping some of Cerea's secrets: anything truly personal would be held in the pegasus' exclusive custody, never passed along to another living soul. The centaur understood that. What she was having trouble with was finding the line between 'truly personal confidence' and 'something which may interfere in the execution of duty'. The former was the dominion of her friend: the latter plummeted into the territory occupied by Superior Officer and hit hard enough to leave cracks in the barracks floor.

Cerea would be meeting the class not just as a terrified girl who feared that any given word or movement would set off another panic, but as a representative of the palace. The secondary factor was what had led the little knight to snitch, and now the centaur was in front of the alicorns again, hooves awkwardly shuffling in place on the silver-shot marble of the Lunar throne room.

It was about thirty minutes past sunset, and her ongoing desperate attempt to find anything she could say was threatening to make it forty.

The white horse cleared her throat.

"This won't take long. We were told about your concerns, and I wanted to provide some general advice," the Solar Princess softly said, taking a half-step forward as she moved away from the ramp which led up to the throne. "Nothing designed for your specific situation, just because... that situation hasn't come up before."

Cerea still didn't have a grasp on the full range of pony expressions. The sounds which were closer to horse-normal already had their place in her vocabulary, and so there was a moment where she swore the dark mare had just repressed a snort.

"One might claim a degree of sarcastic gratitude," the Lunar Princess decided, "for living in a world in which it remains possible to encounter a unique situation --"

She stopped, dark blue ears rotating a little more forward at the same moment Cerea's went back. Hoofsteps were rapidly approaching the closed doors of the Moonrise Gate: unarmored, not too heavy, trying to make up for lack of mass with raw force, something which wasn't being fulfilled by the demands of the march --

-- the right-side door opened, because there were things which Guards stood ready to block and there were others when it was best to pass the Go Away over to somepony with a little more authority. It allowed the new arrival's scent to reach Cerea just before the piercing voice did, and served as a minor redirecting for the purpose behind her now-vibrating arms.

Scent meant that she had been trying to keep her hands from coming up to cover her eyes. Sound had turned her ears into the preferred option.

"I wish to know," the sharp tones demanded with carefully-measured outrage, "the reason why I had to learn of this via the streams of rumor! For the purpose of this meeting is to discuss Etiquette, is it not? The Proper Stance, both physical and verbal, which shall be required for the encounter with --" there was a hint of tremble in the next word "-- children! And as the palace's recognized Expert in all things Etiquette, I clearly should have been part of this gathering from the Very Start --"

"-- stop," the dark mare stated.

Four hooves immediately ceased all forward advancement. The rest of the mare swayed back and forth above them before centering again, then held the new position of obedient frustration about two meters away from Cerea's right flank.

"Ms. Manners," Princess Celestia gently said, "as the subject happens to be children... I do have a request. It's something only you can do."

The old earth pony squared both shoulders and hips, doing so against the force of an oddly-placed trembling. Waited.

"Would you please tell Cerea," the white horse requested, "about your theory for the ideal way of raising foals? From the absolute beginning."

The mare blinked.

"...really?"

There was something special in those syllables. Tones of wonder were just barely contained within the sounds, and had only been prevented from filling the entire room by the eternal bonds of Dignity.

Both alicorns nodded, and the grain of the grey-white fur spontaneously smoothed itself out.

"This is the ideal only, you understand," the old mare clarified. "A thought exercise which exists only in the realm of Theory and the most refined of dreams. I hardly expect that any of it would ever be put into true practice. And of course, I am personally beyond my birthing years, so any actual advancement into the bounds of Reality would have to be done by another."

More nodding.

"Well," Ms. Manners regally began as her tail adopted a posture of near-total equine contentment, "if we are to start from the true beginning... I am among those who believe in Natural Birth. Which in this case, means a total absence of potions and medications of any sort, unless they are essential for the health of the foal. Nothing which alleviates the pain of labor, for a True Mare should be capable of maintaining her Dignity even when locked within the worst of agonies."

Cerea watched her instructor in Etiquette, and so nearly missed the next set of nods.

"Additionally," the earth pony went on, "in order to make the transition into the next stage easier, the ideal birthing place would be a windowless stable. One with solid walls, to prevent any from having to watch the birthing itself. And a single door, with even more solid locks. But of course, there would be a single gap in that door. Something about the width of a serving tray, and perhaps a tibia's worth of height. Roughly an adult's sight line above the floor, and covered with a dark cloth."

The nods were becoming somewhat more uncertain.

"Now," Ms. Manners continued, "upon finishing the birthing process, the mare leaves the stable. The foal, quite naturally, remains behind, and the locks are on the outside of the door. All food is passed in through the cloth, along with educational materials. And of course, there is no trouble in having words travel into the stable. The key is to have the foal isolated in such a way that Proper Behavior is all which can reach it, through a gap which is too small for the foal to get out. The parents speak through the cloth. They educate. They make sure that there is no Contamination from those who do not understand proper foal-rearing, which very much includes --" and that was where she rather politely shuddered "-- the corrupted progeny of their own insufficient efforts. All such Education takes place on an exacting schedule --" hopefully "-- which I would require some two hours to describe in full detail --"

The alicorns mutually shook their heads. Cerea hadn't blinked for two paragraphs.

"-- very well," the earth pony regretfully said. "In the interests of time, then. The key to the Procedure is to reach the foal's age of adulthood without undue contact. At which point, they are tested on what they have learned. Should they demonstrate their ability to exist as a pony of manners, the locks are undone and the new adult is welcomed into the world. But in the event of what would naturally be a rather regrettable failure, in order to hide away the results from years of sadly wasted effort, one only needs to seal a single opening --"

"-- Ms. Manners?" the dark alicorn casually interrupted.

It didn't produce a glare, because the interruption had been made by a superior. There was, however, the most subtle of full-body twitches.

"Get out," Princess Luna stated.

The earth pony blinked.

"I fail to see --"

"Yes," the Lunar Princess nodded. "That would be one of the many, many problems. Get out."

Movement took place. There was a fading hint of Dignity about it, along with rather a lot in the way of Vibration. And once the closed door had stopped shaking in its frame, the white horse cleared her throat again.

"Surprisingly," the taller alicorn observed, "she's single."

Cerea finally blinked.

"And I say 'surprisingly' because I know there's a number of ponies who are attracted to exactly that degree of control," the white mare added. "I know she's been in a few relationships. It's just that all of them seem to stop well short of marriage."

"The true halt likely comes at the entrance to the bedroom," the darker presence failed to snort. "As it is rather difficult to conduct the proceedings required for conception in full Dignity." Several mane-held constellations exasperatedly shifted into new alignments. "At any rate, that is why she was not invited to this meeting. Children often exist as creatures of honesty -- and as Honesty lies well outside Etiquette, Ms. Manners has forbid herself from anything but the most minimal interactions with either."

"There's guidelines I can offer you," the white mare gently said. "But this is something which is happening for the first time. It means there aren't any real rules."

This time, the dark mare did snort.

"As I recall, she responded to what she saw as something happening for her personal first time through attempting to institute rules. In the first week."

The Solar Princess winced.

"They were rather thorough, especially given the limited amount of time she had in which to compose them," the younger alicorn went on. "Regardless, I prefer an environment in which it does not require a full two minutes of reciting your title prior to offering a simple greeting. But at least that could be memorized. I have yet to decipher the hoof pattern required for passing each other in a hallway." The left forehoof briefly ground against the floor: fresh marble dust fountained across dark fur. "The most common one. There was a secondary for encounters in the Lunar wing, and she had mentioned minimal progress on something designed for 'neutral ground'..."

Pastel borders visibly twisted for a moment, and then the white mare's mane and tail were still again.

"I can give you advice," she told Cerea. "But rules may serve as nothing more than a trap. We all need to be ready to improvise, because childhood is something which exists in a state where the rules are imposed from the outside. Just about every foal resents that. We need to make them as comfortable as possible when they meet you, and that's going to mean letting them set their own pace. No rules about who speaks and when, for how long, or what they can say. They have to be free. Because if they aren't..." The white head dipped. "...they might start to feel trapped."

The girl felt as if she was forcing every breath, and the newest sweater (light blue, and a little heavier to fight against the oncoming winter) stretched out from multiple sources of pressure.

"You said... this is a first," she shakily checked. "There were centaurs before Tirek..."

Both mares nodded.

"A scant number," the dark mare said. "But they did not reproduce so much as appear. I recall no true families --" and glanced at the white horse.

Who shook her head. "None," the Solar Princess verified. "No groups, nothing approaching a herd. A few scattered individuals, and none of them were ever citizens. The last one, prior to Tirek... he passed through Equestria on his way to the true destination, intending no harm. He startled many, because it had been so long since the last of his kind had been seen. But he didn't mean to scare anypony, and did whatever he could to calm those around him. Once the palace understood that he was simply traveling, the path was smoothed. And whatever he found, once he left our borders... he was either content to stay there, or he never reached the end of his journey, or something happened when he tried to make his way back..."

The huge rib cage shifted across the duration of the soft sigh.

"A long time ago," the white horse quietly stated. "Long enough to fade into something close to myth, when most never bother to look into that part of history at all. And with no citizens, none who ever became a true part of Equestria, with none of their children growing up among ours..."

It reached her then, and not for the first time. She couldn't think about it for long, she kept trying to push the thought away -- but it always found its chance to come back.

I will never have a foal.

It forced endless weight against her spine, made arms which would never cradle her child fall limp at her sides --

"-- Cerea?"

She looked up. Met the worried gaze of the Solar Princess, and squared her shoulders again.

"We're trying," the white horse said. "Please know that we are trying. For everything under Sun and Moon, there's a first time. Even when for so many of those going through them, their greatest wish is to have never been part of it. But until we can send you home, we have to make it possible for you to live here. Not survive: live. And the next stage of that... is meeting children."

The girl just barely managed to nod.

She was still learning expressions. But she knew enough to recognize that the dark mare was thinking about something.

"We may be still able to draw on experience," the Lunar Princess suggested. "Your own. From what we have been told, this is the second time you have been introduced to a society. Was there anything within the first occasion which we might apply to our own situation?"

I saw the yellow vests.
I didn't understand what they meant. Even in the herd, there were fashion trends. Someone would come up with a new look and because it was anything new, someone else would copy it. That might keep happening until it wasn't new any more, and then... it was back to the usual. So a lot of yellow vests was probably just humans deciding that yellow vests looked good. They just... stood out, because the color made it so easy to see them.
And then I couldn't see anything else.

She didn't sense the bitterness in her words until they reached her ears and by then, it was too late.

"Keep it away from the public."

And then she realized the mares were staring at her.

What was on my face just now?
Do they even know how to read my features?
They can't really recognize my scent...

"I did not mean to offend," the girl quickly said. "Limiting the scale and scope of exposure was already part of thy plan --"

"-- Cerea?"

She managed to focus on the white mare again, and so spotted what felt like a strangely uncertain position of head and tail.

"What happened?" the Solar Princess asked.

She wasn't a Guard yet. It felt as if she might never reach that goal. And yet, the words came across as an order.

Knights had to learn how to be very careful with orders.

"I was a token part of the initial group," Cerea stated. "My mother brought me along because there was a request to display a range of ages. Several adults, a few juniors. None younger than adolescence. I never had the chance to speak. The formal introduction was made in public, by the adults, before an audience composed entirely of adults. There was no sorting of those attendees, and some within it reacted poorly. And as the loudest, they became what anyone remembered."

It was the truth, because she had been given an order. It just didn't need to be the whole of it. And if they couldn't read her well enough to recognize that...

They can't know what I'm feeling just by taking a breath.

That particular thought also wasn't arriving for the first time.

"Understood," the dark mare slowly offered, wings rustling at her sides. "At least as far as it applies to the current discussion. So you did not meet any children at that time."

"Do you want to play?"

There was concern in the white horse's tones. The disc never had any trouble in rendering that. "Cerea?"

The blonde tail swayed. Twitched, and then stilled.

"Not then."

"And afterwards?" the dark mare inquired. "When you had become a student?"

It almost made her smile.

"Those meetings were -- largely dictated by the parents, when it was the youngest children," the girl softly remembered. "The friendliest had a way of reacting, which..." She hesitated. "I... don't know if this is going to translate. It probably doesn't even apply here and if it does, it might come across as -- offensive..."

"We shall consider ourselves warned," the dark mare solemnly stated. "The typical nature of such interactions?"

"Horsie!"

There were seven very different girls in the household, and that state had maintained in spite of Cerea's occasional wishes for something (positive) to happen which would bring the numbers down. She had been the third, and discovering a pair of rivals already in place had been bad enough: seeing that number more than double over time hadn't felt as if the population increase was doing anything to help her prospects. And that was just with the ones who lived there: kick in the members of Zombina's squad, then add all of those encountered on the street who seemed to feel that having so many liminals going after the same human target meant there had to be something worth pursuing...

Seven very different girls, each of whom had their own way of looking at the human world. There were times when the new society had equally differing treatments offered to the exchange students, especially when it came to its younger members. Things which happened when adults weren't present, or before they could intervene.

The experiences were different. But there were individual trends.

Miia and Rachnera had the most trouble with children: the lamia hated that, while the other idly spun webs between her fingers while claiming not to care. But it was something neither of them could control. Each of those bodies had traits shared with a species which was likely to set off a phobia -- and those fears could be particularly strong in children, who had yet to learn how to mask or control them. Snakes and spiders: the foreign touch of scales and chitin, a singsong mutual designation as creepy-crawlies. Some of the very young saw those two liminals as nothing more than their terrors grown giant and given clutching hands. All the better to drag their victims into the dark.

Mero generally got the best of it. When she was in her wheelchair, with fingers tightly pressed together and tail completely concealed under the skirt... when she was forced to be on land, she could pass for human. The reactions weren't always normal there, because there was still a wheelchair: pity was frequent, revulsion occasionally manifested, and more than a few people directed something close to baby talk at the chair itself because an inability to walk had to go along with an equal lack of capacity for understanding full sentences. But once she was in the water, she was a mermaid. The species which didn't get all the best myths, at least for those who cared to read the original versions -- but they did seem to wind up with the best movies. Mero typically met girls who had dreamed of being her, and with the boys... all she had to do was explain that she was still looking for her prince, he didn't have to be named Eric, and she didn't even like sheepdogs.

Lala tended to be uncertain around the young: the dullahan liked to pass herself off as something which could be feared -- but was reluctant to trigger the emotion in those who didn't know how to deal with it. By contrast, Papi and Suu were at their best around children: the youngest at heart, the most playful, those who could still truly relate on the level of youth. (With Papi, saying the playing field had also been intellectually leveled was... accurate.) Very few children looked at Papi and saw the talons: they focused on feathers, and so saw the dream of a bird who didn't fly away in fear at every approach. And with Suu... she was simply gentle, patient, mimicked their actions in an attempt to understand, and that duplication helped her fit in.

But when it came to Cerea...

The most common reaction usually came from the girls: the minimum age was around two, while the cutoff point typically stopped well short of twelve. They would look at her and, with the youngest, their arms would stretch out towards her legs. (She was just over two meters tall: they couldn't reach anything else.) They would stare up at her, eyes wide and pleading: something which required her to back up somewhat before getting a true view. And that most common reaction would be accompanied by a simple request.

They wanted to ride.

She... hadn't understood, the first few times. The innocent dream had come across as an insult. Centaurs didn't just allow anyone to ride them! The partner had to be worthy. Finding someone whom she could trust to be on her lower back was one of the reasons she'd come to Japan in the first place, and she'd been expecting her match to be, put bluntly, taller than a single meter. She wasn't a beast of burden, or something approaching a slave which had been bound with ropes to trot in a circle while hoping someone paid for a feed cup. She was a noble warrior, someone who dreamed about having the potential of a knight and to be greeted with a cry of "Horsie!" --

-- was a form of love.

They... were just reacting to the first thing which someone that short would see: her legs. And when they looked further up... the dream was still there. They didn't want to ride her as a form of conquest or domination, but because there was a horsie on the premises and riding was fun. The fact that their ride had a human upper torso and head just meant that this time, their ride could talk to them.

He'd had to explain it to her. That for the youngest and those who had taken the dream from a different media into their hearts, she was simply a source of joy. After all, when the only thing you had was images on a screen, you didn't understand about sore muscles and having to compensate for the jolting impact of hooves and finding a place to hang on...

She'd learned to stop pulling back. To stifle the instinctive rise of anger at having been disrespected, to understand. After a while, she'd even learned to welcome that reaction, because it wasn't one of -- the other ones.

But she'd never provided a single ride.

How? had always been a consideration. She didn't exactly go into public while wearing tack, and anything she would have considered commissioning would have been for his size. Even if she'd had a child-sized saddle... she was tall, didn't trot in the endless circles of a pony ride (and realized she could never, ever tell the Princesses about pony rides), and she didn't come with safety gear either. A rider had to shift their body weight in concert with her movements: a child didn't know how. Her lower back was broad: it meant they couldn't sit comfortably, they needed to grab something and that would mean her blouse or hair or -- well, the youngest had short arms and would be more likely to be clutching at her waist, but things moved up and forward with age.

Even after she'd understood, learned to welcome the simple greeting as an expression of the most basic love, she'd been afraid to allow any children on her back. Even with her beloved walking at her side, watching at every moment, there was the chance for a child to fall. To become hurt. She didn't want to risk that, she never would have been able to live with it, and --

-- it was the way the children reacted.

There were times when nearby parents looked embarrassed. Corralled their offspring while muttering apologies, scurried them out of sight. Others turned... fearful. Scooped up the youngest, placed them partially over a shoulder, and ran.

Fleeing in a way which allowed her to watch the faces of their children during every desperate step. Looking at arms which were still stretching towards her.

That was the most common reaction, and it usually came from the youngest. The majority of those were girls. But with others, or when they became older...

Some stared.
The teenage females tended to sneer.
A number tried to clutch.
And with so many, the jokes would begin to fly.
Sometimes it was insults.
And then it was anger.

She didn't have to tell them everything, and she didn't believe they could scent when she was holding something back. In any case, when it came to explanations, "Horsie!" was awkward enough on its own.

Eventually, the white mare managed what felt like a rueful sort of smile.

"It... doesn't really apply here," the Solar Princess allowed. "Not with our own children. There's a few biped species, but... for the most part, our respective sizes don't allow for riders unless we're dealing with the very young. That much is the same. But a pony wanting to take a ride on a centaur's back... I don't think we're going to see that reaction. So all I can do is provide you with advice."

Cerea nodded, tried to fight back the last of the blush, and waited.

"The first step is minimizing your size," Princess Celestia said. "This is --" and for the first time, the girl saw a tide of red beginning to underlight white fur. "-- something I have experience with. You're already taller than every other adult. It's worse with children. It's easy to loom, even by accident. If you lower yourself to the floor, it's that much less for them to deal with. I'd rather not build a ramp or have you standing on a lower level, because I want them to see all of you. Putting them at your eye level means they're only perceiving the unfamiliar. If you're on the floor, they have the option to start with your fur and -- work their way up."

The girl nodded, and thought about a food stall. Something which had been the opposite of what the Princess was suggesting: a few minutes in which all the humans had been able to see was the familiar...

"Do you want to play?"

...had she frozen again? Were her hands clenching? She hadn't heard that voice in memory for so long, and now it had come back twice in less than an hour. She'd thought it was gone, and the Princesses were just looking at her...

"I can do that," she quickly said, and immediately decided it had been too quickly. "What else should I try?"

"Based on my own experience," the white horse eventually continued after what felt too much like an evaluation-based delay, "if there's going to be any physical contact, let them go first. Some of them will ask, and others won't. If it's something beyond a touch, then nopony's expecting you to stay still and allow yourself to be kicked. Even with the gentle ones, you may have to tell them where they can't touch you. Calmly. But if they're brave enough to try and make contact, it's a good sign."

The dark mare's tail twitched.

"You are being given advice," the younger alicorn said, "by a mare who has been known to present herself to foals as something they can climb." And before Cerea could truly react, "In her case, that generally means resting on her side, as ponies generally make for poor climbers and no matter what she does, foals tend to tumble into each other. Especially once she starts giggling. But the principle maintains. To present no threat, to allow yourself to be seen as something which can be approached, or even explored. Unfortunately, neither is something we will be able to invoke at the party --"

Interrupting was rude. The girl knew that, and in the wake of that single, horrible word, was still unable to prevent the inevitable.

"-- party?"

Centaur vocal chords allowed their possessors to express themselves across an impressive vocal range. In this case, it took the disc a moment before it could successfully translate from the near-squeak.

"Yes," the white horse calmly offered. "I spoke to Fancypants yesterday. Currently, his plan is to wait until after your graduation: that allows him to partially frame the event as introducing the gathering to the newest class of Guards. And in order to counter those who'll say the party was for you alone, he intends to eventually create a tradition: welcoming parties for future classes. So that much is set, Cerea. But not the date, because he's been doing a lot of traveling lately: it'll take some time before he can commit to any specific part of the calendar: I was lucky to pick out one day we might be able to use. Fortunately, that gives us time to commission your dress."

The purple eyes briefly closed.

"We're... looking for a designer," the taller alicorn added. "We had one in mind, but..."

"There is an issue," the dark mare firmly stated. "We are attempting to resolve it. But until this can be accomplished, we will continue to search for a secondary source. Ms. Garter has done what she can for you, but we are hoping for a dress. Something which presents you at your best. And we have accumulated sufficient evidence to show that when she is asked for her best, her first instinct is to move into the realm of lingerie."

She didn't mind some of the lingerie. The bras held, and with the other pieces...

...she's a good corsetiere. I know she's worked with species which have breasts, because she understands support. Display. How much cleavage to show, which should probably be just enough to hint that a pull of a tie will reveal more. The fabric is soft, it moves with me, and...

...I wish I could have worn it for him. Maybe he would have reacted. Maybe he would have...

They were enticing designs. There was just no one to entice.

"But that's some time away, Cerea," the white horse told her. "And we need that time, because adults are going to be harder to deal with. Today, we're planning for children. And that's most of what I can tell you from experience: make yourself smaller, allow yourself to be accessible, and let them make the first moves. The rest..." A slow, weary-seeming head shake. "They don't grow up looking at your picture and reading about you in their first history books. I loom, sometimes when I don't mean to -- but even on a first meeting, I'll be familiar. You're something new to them, and that means there's only so far my experience can take you."

It still felt like good advice. As long as she was careful about where they tried to touch her...

...as long as none of them tried to kick...

The Solar Princess seemed to have finished, and so Cerea turned to the Lunar.

The dark mare took a moment to notice. Blinked, and --

-- why did she pull back?

It couldn't have been fear. The alicorn had never been afraid of her. It was almost as if she hadn't been expecting Cerea to look towards her at all.

"...I," the dark mare slowly began, "have very little to say regarding the matter. I seldom meet children. Part of that is due to my normal hours: very few youths are awake during my portion of the cycle, and those who are generally have other concerns. Avoiding their parents, or simply finding somewhere to be sick which is not their bedsheets. And when I do encounter them..."

The stars in twisting mane and tail were dimming, doing so as the white horse instinctively moved closer to her sibling. The dark mare, gaze low and focused on nothing which Cerea could see, didn't appear to notice.

"...perhaps we do have something in common," she went on. "After all, there are those who take pleasure in being scared. But..."

The wing joints visibly loosened.

"...there are also the ones who truly are frightened. We can expect a number to be afraid of you. It would be fortunate, if some only pretended to be. And should that degree of commonality occur..."

It was a moment which burned itself into Cerea's memory. The distance in the dark mare's voice, accompanied by the white horse trying to physically cross a gap which suddenly felt as if it could never be bridged.

She remembered it because it was the first time for witnessing those emotions, at least from the alicorns. To see the Lunar Princess... drifting, while the Solar raced towards the edge of terror.

"...please let me know of any means you might find to sort those states."

The dark mare turned away. From Cerea, from her sibling, from marble and throne room and world, in the last second before the final words emerged.

"The actual screams are -- difficult to distinguish. Good night to you."

Her horn ignited. The corona flashed, and she vanished.

Dear Fluttershy,

Nice try.

No.

The clubhouse near the edge of the apple orchards wasn't really used any more. When it came to those who had originally restored it, there were simply too many bad memories packed within the walls, and they tended to crowd out the possibility of casual visits. They were veterans of that clubhouse, and it had been for a war where most of what they'd done there was make exacting plans regarding their inevitable, single, final, and decidedly ultimate victory.

At least, that had been the plan. The reality worked out to carefully-sketched blueprints of endless failures, not all of which had been public. Some of the smaller disasters had taken place within the clubhouse itself, to the point where it could feel as if the walls themselves were laughing at them.

There had been multiple sources of laughter during the years of failure, and one of them was currently trotting in at the unicorn filly's left flank.

"It's pretty bad," said the pink earth pony with the white-streaked mane, glancing around at the failure-stained (and scorched, and peeling) walls, because learning some degree of empathy had not provided a matching improvement in tact. "For what it is. But that's why it's a good place to do this: because nopony else would come here for any reason. It makes this safe. So it's a good choice."

"...thank you," the unicorn filly half-whispered. "Just -- pick a part of the floor."

"It's all dusty."

"We ain't been usin' it," the soft yellow filly quietly explained as she entered. "Ain't been a good reason. An'... Ah know the place ain't jinxed, but it was really easy t' pretend that for a while. But now it's like y'said, Diamond. It's a good place, because there's a good reason. So let's do this."

The orange pegasus youth finished her glide (because there was a high, thick branch on a nearby tree and she always had to practice), swooping through the doorway and turning just in time to manage a smooth landing in front of the others. Gave them a single hard nod, and immediately settled onto a familiar patch of wood. One which was now a little too small.

Truffle carefully made his way in, thin legs having some trouble with the entrance ramp. Cotton quietly picked out a spot. The yellow filly took a place, and the unicorn sank down next to the pink visitor.

"We could wait a bit," the yellow filly proposed. "Ain't sure this is gonna be everypony."

"We're not waiting on Silver," the pink firmly stated. "She told me what her parents said when she gave them the permission slip. She tried, but -- she can't sell them on it." A soft, not-at-all angry snort. "Selling... isn't her thing. And they didn't listen to me when I asked for company, because they were so scared for her."

"Kinda surprised you're in this," the yellow admitted. "After what happened at the end -- " which was immediately followed by a massive tail twitch, something hard enough to travel up her spine and jolt the mane bow. "Ain't what Ah meant, Diamond! Not 'bout bein' scared! Jus' -- with your dad, when he was almost up t' you when it happened! An' Sweetie, y'know Ah would never..."

Diamond's lips changed position. It wasn't quite a sneer, and it was something less than a quirk. Whatever the expression truly was, it had a hint of resignation about it. There was the pleasure of getting one over on your parent, and then there was the sadness of realizing that the pony you'd seen as the most intelligent in the world was eventually going to be surpassed.

"-- 'confrontation therapy'," she told them. "That's how I sold it. I can't get to him, so -- this is the next best thing. It took a while, and he still really didn't want me going. Then he was trying to go with me. But Miss Cheerilee got that last scroll, and now we know he can't come. That'll... make things easier."

The solid form shifted to the left. Pink fur pressed against white.

"...for everypony," Sweetie softly agreed, the two-tone tail slowing its fresh tremble. "It'll just be us and her, won't it? Us and her..."

"The Princesses will be there," the orange pegasus reminded them, and did so with what would have once been surprising caution.

Truffle's eyes narrowed.

"That doesn't matter," the colt fiercely declared. "We're just talking, right? What are they going to do, clamp their fields on our mouths because they don't like the words?"

Cotton's wings vibrated. The sleek body curled up a little.

"That's it exactly," Diamond told them, and they listened because hers was a powerful mark -- when she chose to use it. Talents for leadership were rare, often subtle in their operation, and hard to stop -- but in the end, so much of it was about where she chose to lead them. Where and why.

They all had the same goal. It was her responsibility to bring them there. To make sure it was all done properly.

"The only thing we can really use are words," she reminded the group. "So this is when we figure out exactly what we're going to say."

To make it hurt, and to do so on behalf of the one who wasn't there. They never got any updates on his condition, no matter how often the question was asked or who was doing the asking. They had all been there, Diamond and Sweetie had been right next to each other and...

They owed it to him.

Insouciant

The first step in solving a problem was to acknowledge that the issue existed.

It was strangely quiet in the barracks’ bathroom, with the taps turned off and only a single centaur in the pool. It was possible to hear water lapping at the edges, or little drips hitting the surface of the water: condensed steam falling from the colder ceiling. (There was probably a pegasus technique to prevent that, but it hadn’t been renewed yet.). Any sound made tended to echo: the smallest of splashes created by her own movements, breaths which felt as if they were being broadcast to the entire palace.

She was trying to stay as quiet as possible: something which was becoming natural for a girl whose mere existence qualified as a disturbance. But it wasn’t enough. No matter what she did, a bathroom without Nightwatch in it seemed to be searching for a source of sound to fill the space, and everything she did expanded accordingly. Her breathing was too loud. Thoughts seemed to echo.

So did pain.
Pain was most of what she’d been thinking about.
Pain and helplessness.

Knights were supposed to understand strategy, and so Cerea had taken up those studies. Stories had helped a little there, although not as much as their authors might have wished. (For starters, while the girl was fully familiar with how plans unvoiced on the page were the ones most likely to succeed, she wasn't sure how that was supposed to work when it came to giving actual orders. At best, there would have been a lot of gesturing involved.) But it meant she understood that there were times when people could truly be too close to something to perceive it for what it actually was. Stand centimeters away from what appeared to be an impassable barrier and conclude that there was no way to deal with it: back up by a few meters and spot the gap in the wall.

You had to understand strategy. You were supposed to protect your liege, and that didn't just mean defending against sword blows. A worthy knight had to make sure their master (or, for the Guards, mistress) was sound emotionally. A knight was someone who could be consulted in confidence. A sounding board, an emotional bulwark, the one who would always do whatever was required to make sure their liege was of sound body and mind, because the head which bore the crown often found all resolve pressured into near-collapse by its relentless weight.

So you watched your mistress. You listened to her words, and tried to hear the ones which hadn't been spoken. You were always ready to step in, prepared to do whatever it took to make them feel better --

-- all four of Cerea's knees spontaneously bent, placing her a little lower in the pool's steaming waters. It wasn't quite enough to stop the shiver.

...all right: it wasn't always 'whatever it took'. If a knight truly explored every last possibility offered by the boundless realms of 'whatever', then they would quickly find themselves in Arthurian territory and from there, it was usually just a question of what kind of tragedy would come out in the end. Mero basked in stories where love led to everything going wrong: Cerea had a few concerns regarding those who were caught up in the nation's fall. A knight had to recognize where the boundaries were. But at the same time, they had to do whatever they could in fighting against their liege's enemies... including those which attacked from within.

They were long thoughts: concepts which could be drawn into fine wires, with inner syllables whipping against her flanks. The impacts from those thoughts had chased her to the bath, because the white horse had left the Lunar throne room in too-casual pursuit of her sibling, leaving Cerea with both nowhere to go and nothing she could do, with the echoes of another's agony still resounding within her ears.

The bath had... just been there. It was somewhere to go when you were hurting, and the heat of the waters were doing what they could. But the liquid didn't understand. It was incapable of recognizing that someone was injured, and it could never act deliberately. It had no concept of its own warmth, or what that heat did for sore muscles while never reaching the finer agonies produced by those thoughts. It would have been like expecting medicine to act as a thinking, feeling entity while combating an illness, and she hadn't thought much of that movie either. Ultimately, it was just the interaction of forces.

A pool couldn't talk about emotions. Steam wasn’t disgusted by her nudity. The newly-restored sponge panels were incapable of shivering with revulsion when they touched the bare skin of her upper torso.

Cerea had entered the bath alone, while carrying the pain of another. And there they had both stayed, because she had recognized that a problem existed -- but she didn't know what to do about it. What the cause was, or whether it was possible to do anything at all. She didn't understand how to help --

-- she isn't my liege.

The girl immediately recognized the nature of that thought, and kicked the inner enemy away. She was an immigrant, and even with the prospect of full citizenship being... some time away... merely starting the process meant she had effectively sworn her loyalty to the new nation. Legally, she was among Equestria's subjects. She just wasn't the dark mare's knight. Which implied a lesser level of responsibility...

...stop.

Her hands came up to her head. She began to run fingers through the too-long hair, separating out strands before the proper shampooing began.

A knight was, in many ways, someone who existed to bring comfort. To make the world a little better, and all of the lives in it. But not everyone wanted to be helped. She had felt the waves of pain emanating from the dark mare's fur, and it had made her want to help, but... it didn't mean Princess Luna would accept it.

If I could help at all.
If I didn't just make things worse.
Why do I even want to --

-- well, that last one was easy enough. She had recognized that Princess Luna was in pain, and... to be in the presence of hurt that deep was to wish for some way to help. In Cerea's opinion, you couldn't exist as a living being if you didn't respond to some kinds of pain with a desire to aid. She just didn't understand where the problem had come from, or how to deal with it at all, or if she even should. She... wasn't very good at dealing with pain. Not when it came to the agonies of others.

How would I even start?

The image flashed through her mind, almost too quickly to be recognized. It didn't prevent her from chasing the thing down and furiously shredding it into something less substantial than the steam.

...not that.

Cerea's teachings had centered on the inflicting of pain. When it came to learning about its healing, all she had was books, and they were mostly stories written about a species which hadn't believed anything like her could be real. And with personal experience...

...it would have to be one of the worst days. Something where I'd lost so many times as to feel like I was losing everything. And she would come into my room, sink down next to me, cradle me against her, and just... sing.

I wished for that. I wanted her to come. Because when she held me, when I could hear her heartbeat as another rhythm within her song... that was when it felt like I wasn't her project or tool or burden. I was her daughter, just for a little while. And she never talked to me when she held me, or criticized, or told me everything I'd done wrong, which was everything. She just sang.

I longed for that.

But the only way to have it happen was to lose.

I... thought about losing on purpose, at least once. Just to have her hold me. But I didn't, because I loved it when she came to me and hated the reason why. That she was comforting a loser. I... wanted her to celebrate my victories. Rejoicing together. I kept trying, kept fighting because I wanted to find out what that was like, and...

...win a fight, get placed into the next weight class.
...pass a subject, and fifteen more books were on my shelves.
...clear a jump, turn around to see the bar being raised.

It was never enough.

And when I was nine, she stopped coming to me.

I was supposed to be old enough to deal with my own problems. I had to fix things by myself. When you were old enough, just showing pain became shameful. Letting anyone know that something was wrong cost dignity. You were supposed to keep control over your scent and posture. All the time. Even when I was failing over and over again, because the bar kept getting higher.

The other fillies kept it concealed until they could reach each other. They comforted each other. But none of them would talk to me. My father...

a desperately waving arm, a voice calling out a name it has no means of knowing as the yellow vests surge forward

...was just something on the other side of the house. And when I was nine, my mother decided I was old enough to never hear her sing again.

I don't know how to talk to someone who's hurting. I just know how to hold them.

She slowly made her way over to the pool's rim. Gathered up a shampoo bottle, found the protruding edge and used a finger to flip up the lid while wondering whether the usual work was done by snout or tongue.

It's the Princess.
She isn't afraid of me. She was never afraid, not even on that first night in the forest.
She was talking about screaming children. As if it was something which had the potential to happen every time.
Why would anyone ever be afraid of her?

It wasn't the alicorn's aura. Cerea was convinced ponies had no capacity for sensing the sheer force of personality and power which radiated from the dark eyes and in any case, it wasn't something threatening. It existed as a simple statement: there is strength here. Nothing about that implied hostility.

Were alicorns so rare as to be seen as something frightening? Too different from the average citizen, too strong, existing in a state of isolation where ponies who didn't visit the palace might never know one as anything other than distant legend? A single bloodline which had somehow managed to acquire political power, possibly in self-defense. But that was the sort of situation which generally led to revolt -- and if it was just one bloodline, then who were they breeding with?

(Her mind automatically attempted to picture ponies breeding, and then just as automatically shut the image down.)

Was it the association with the night? Fillies and colts who were afraid of the dark, transferring the phobia to the one who ruled over those hours? That seemed like the most likely possibility, but it also didn't feel common enough. And when it came to the Princess herself...

She was strong: ponies would know that on the intellectual level. But there was a purpose to that strength. In her interactions with others --

-- Cerea blinked. Then did it again, because some of the shampoo had gone into her eyes. It wasn't as harsh as Japan's blends, and she wondered if that was because pony eyes were so much more of a target.

The press conference.
When she was maintaining decorum. Keeping them all from yelling over each other with her field keeping their mouths shut.
There was fear at the conference, in every moment I was there. But when she was holding them -- it surged.
...were they afraid of her?
Why?

Cerea had spent hours near the dark mare. She didn't consider herself an expert on the Princess, because she was lost in a world which found ways of shocking her every day and she would consider herself lucky if she could work out how earth ponies styled their own manes. But she felt that she'd been in proximity long enough to learn a few things.

There were ways in which the formality felt like a mask. Listening to the Princess speak was frequently the audio version of watching a mathematician assembling a very complex equation. Those witnessing the process might wonder why it was taking so much work to simply solve for X and in that moment of self-distraction, find themselves ambushed by a well-placed integral.

The Princess could be emotionally blunt or brusque, but it wasn’t from lack of empathy. She understood how others were feeling: she just didn't care to spend five minutes on the slow approach before the true discussion began. If someone was angry, then they were angry: now what were they going to do about it?

She... acted quickly. Directly. Perhaps too much so. There's a bad reaction to being measured? Then you're going to be held still until the measurements are taken, because that way, it'll be over sooner. There was very little which was diplomatic about the Princess, perhaps because diplomacy would have been seen as a waste of time. Here are the issues, and here's how we're going to solve them. Cerea imagined that level of directness would be uncomfortable for many, especially in the press. She wasn't personally happy about how the measuring issue had been dealt with, but... she couldn't deny that it had been over sooner. It had just wrapped up in what felt like the most humiliating way possible, and...

...she didn't hate the Princess for that, because she didn't feel that the alicorn understood. Malice required comprehension. It was like Nightwatch saying that no part of a centaur's body could be vulgar for the little knight, because the pegasus didn't know where she wasn't supposed to look.

As with Cerea and the measuring tape, the reporters had found their agency temporarily restricted. That could bring fear. But... so much of it?

I don't understand.

Simply thinking the words to herself didn't make them any less shameful.

How do I feel about the Princesses?

She...
...she wanted to like them, and part of that was because they weren't afraid of her. There were only four ponies in the world for whom that could be said. But one was her instructor, a status he partially shared with the second. And when it came to any potential overlap between Nightwatch and the third and fourth...

...even as an immigrant, they're my lieges.
They...

Her fingers twisted into her hair.

...aren't my friends. It would be arrogant to think that way. Selfish...

But she had felt the dark mare's pain. And when you were in the presence of pain...

In the household, Cerea had been just about as helpless. For starters, she was the one who was in charge, because someone had to be. When you were trying to ride herd over five girls who usually displayed the group emotional maturity of -- well, Papi -- and possessed the collective damage capacity of drunken Bérets Verts on holiday, you couldn't afford to show weakness.

Compassion wasn't weakness. Compassion was supposed to be one of the defining qualities of a true knight. But compassion didn't mean staring down into the strange reflections of Suu's large eyes and falling for "It won't happen again," especially when the slime girl was probably just earnestly repeating what Rachnae had told her to say. And there was also this: at the core of everything about the household was conflict. They were rivals, every last one of them fighting to win a single heart, and to grant too much clemency was giving aid and comfort to the enemy --

-- to a sister --

-- it didn't matter. There had been only so much she could have done at all, and when it came to helping others through their pain... all she knew how to do was hold them.

It had been easiest with Papi: the harpy was in the same general age category as the rest of the group, but emotional youth meant the harpy both wanted to be held and was the most prone to wind up in situations which brought tears. Miia often guarded her deeper emotions, because lamias had their own opinions about weakness. By contrast, you couldn't talk to Mero about sorrow because she would enjoy it too much. Confiding anything in Rachnae meant giving aid, comfort, and information to the enemy: the arachnae seemed to feel the same way about Cerea, and never would have allowed herself to look weak enough to truly need anything. Lala often wanted to explore implication more than emotion, and with Suu...

There was empathy, when it came to Suu. Perhaps something about the chemical signature of drifting emotions triggered a reaction upon contact with the membrane, because anyone feeling horrible would often look up to find Suu nearby, silently waiting to see if there was anything she could do. It just wasn't as comforting as it could have been, because anyone feeling both horrible and sweaty would discover that Suu might try to comfort from desire, but she went after trace salts on instinct. The instinct always won.

And when it came to him --

(She sank lower into the water. Most of the heat seemed to have vanished.)

-- I held him because I wanted to comfort him.

That was what the centaur who had lived in the household would have said, generally in angry protest to five glaring girls. The one who was regarding her past self from a world away had a different perspective.

...do you feel me?
You're so much shorter than I am. Twenty-six centimeters. It means that when I hold you close with one arm and cradle the back of your head with the other, you're...
...I have to be strong. I have to be the one who directs the herd, because no one else will. They claim to listen to you, but they listen as part of the competition. So if they decide that doing what they want is what will win your heart, they'll go their own way every time. It means I have to be the one who's loud and angry and pushes and...
...I have to be strong.
I have to be cold. Hard. Steel.
But you hold my hand.
You hold my hand and I don't ever want you to let go.
I'm holding you.
I have to be so cold and hard.
But this is where I'm soft.
Do you feel me? I give way a little against your weight, but not too much. Resilient, even here. Firm. But I give way as much as I can, to let me bring you in.
I'm not cold, not like this. You're a little cool against me, and I'm still trying to get used to that. But I'm warmer than you. I burn hotter. I could show you that heat. I want to show you.
I'm soft and warm and...
...could you come to like this? I know you said legs, but that's not my fault, it's not how I was born, and....
...I'm soft. I am.
If you liked this... I have the most to offer. Not the minotaur because she doesn't even live here, she's finished and I'm not done yet, I see the difference every month, I know I'm not done and
if you came to like this
if you came to love this
if you came to love me

She had held him against her because it was one more excuse for having him touch her.

The dark mare had been in pain. Cerea hadn't understood why. But the pain had been there, she had wanted to do something and... she didn't know how to be comforting. It was the sort of thing which you learned from your parents, and all Cerea understood how to do was hug and sing.

(She'd hugged Papi. But she'd never sung for the harpy. For anyone in the household. Not even him.)
(She had sung for Nightwatch.)

The alicorns weren't afraid of her. But she was still a centaur. One of their subjects, but the wrong species. Someone who had been forced into their world, and the rulers never would have wished her to appear after knowing everything which had come from it. She was a live-in problem, she was causing more problems with every passing day, she was a source of pain and...

...she wasn't their knight. There were no guarantees that she would succeed in her training, especially given all the difficulties that passing would create. (In accordance with what the Sergeant had said, Cerea was now expecting multiple staff members to quit.) And even if she somehow did...

...there was pain. But she didn't know what had created it: she might not even have the right to ask. Inquiries were intrusive. It would make Cerea look as if she thought too highly of herself: look at how important I must be, to believe I'm capable of helping anyone at all! And even if she could somehow get past all that, even for a second...

...she wasn't good with words, especially not when formality had been ordered to depart. She hadn't spent a lot of time around anyone until she'd come to the household. She hadn't had friends or relationships, she hadn't had a single filly holding her hand during the time for love, she didn't have anyone and she couldn't hold Nightwatch's hand because the little knight could offer nothing more than hooves. She only understood how to hug and sing, that wasn't enough and even if it somehow had been...

...she couldn't hug a Princess.

The centaur carefully made her way out of the pool. Rinsed her hair by splashing water up from the sink, dried off as best she could because the sponge was new, but the drying vents in the walls apparently needed a recharge before they could blow hot air again. She put on her nightclothes, and then made her way to the patch of floor-spread blankets which served as her bed. And while she did so, she told herself that she was only recognizing the limits: both her own and what the existence of royals imposed upon the world. That to not act was the proper thing, and she told herself that because in some ways, she truly believed it. She felt that she was doing her best, had reached the proper conclusion, and there could be nothing wrong with that lack of action. She shouldn't act outside of proper bound, especially when she clearly wasn’t capable of doing so. That was all.

The first step in solving so many of her own problems would have been to fully admit that they existed.

It was a forge day, and the bottom edge of the croupiere was just about done. It was important to leave some space for movement within the backpiece: her hindquarters would be encased in that section, and that meant she needed room for her hips and buttocks to have full normal play.

(There had been some jokes about the size of her buttocks in the household. Cerea had finally become irritated enough to point out that when compared to humanity, most of the girls had their own anatomical issues. For starters, the vulgar human male desire to 'get some tail' probably didn't mean they wanted several scale-covered meters of it.)

Like so much else about the armor, it was a balancing act. There was only so much jointing and shifting, overlapping panels she could install in that section: even the narrow gap between plates was an invitation for a blade to get in. And allowing too much space would simply have the metal bouncing against her flesh: bruising would be guaranteed, and using too much padding in the name of preventing it would lock her joints all over again. It was an issue which Trinette had repeatedly solved, which meant it was something which the apprentice was desperately trying to work out.

She needed full flexibility for her hind legs. It wasn't just running and kicking backwards: it was jumping and, if necessary, rearing up in the name of bringing the whole of her weight crashing down again. (The raw mass of a centaur was the foundation for another group of jokes, an enemy to scales everywhere, and tended to look a lot more serious when the power behind all of it was directing fast-descending forehooves to land in the center of someone's rib cage.) It meant the piece had spent a lot of time out of the forge, moved into a more open area so she could try all of those motions while wearing it. An intricate system of knots had placed the croupiere against her fur, and not having anyone to help with them meant the metal had spent a lot of time impacting the walls.

Barding had watched a few of those trials, mostly to see how much damage the walls were taking.

"What's the holdup?" came from the hallway, and did so at a somewhat greater elevation than before. The smith always wanted to watch her working, but... as with every other pony but one, there was something of a difference in their heights. He'd eventually pushed a portable ramp up to the door and called it solved, because the opinions of everypony who had to vault the barrier didn't count.

"The tail." Because she could only speak to him about metal -- but that was a topic which came with subcategories.

She could almost hear the char-coated ears twist. "What about it?"

"I'm not sure whether to conceal it or not," Cerea reluctantly admitted. "The exercises which the Sergeant wanted me to do..." She'd been trying. Nightwatch had provided a length of thin rope, one which had a little bit of metal braided into the hemp. It was meant to match the approximate length and weight of any razorwhip which would have been mounted on someone of Cerea's size, and the deliberate lack of edge meant the mistakes did nothing more than pummel against her humiliation. (Every impact technically raised blood, but most of that wound up in her face.) "They're not going well. I don't think I'll be able to use a real razorwhip before the training ends."

"They're a tricky weapon," said the smith who'd made a number of them. "Hard to control, and that's just when I'm testing flexibility before they go into the armory. I'm not sure anyone could get them down in less than ten moons --"

"-- and if I can't use one," the girl's inadequacies cut in, "then my tail isn't serving as the sort of weapon which the Guard knows. It's just one more thing which can be bitten or grabbed."

It was a subject better suited for the Sergeant. But Barding thought about it.

"Default on Guard armor is exposure for the hair," he said. "But you've seen that. Ring of metal around the base, to protect the coccygeals --" paused. "What kind of weapon do centaurs use their tails for?"

Because weaponsmithing was some part of metal's many uses, and she had just implied that there were different options. "It depends. Some of us braid flexible metals into the fall. Adding weight. So if we have to whip someone across the face with our tails, they'll really feel it." She could almost hear the approving nod. "Other mares just tightly braid the hair, and then soak it. And I know a few who --" she hesitated "-- liked to go with mud. Fresh, near the end of the fall. Because if you whipped someone, the mud might get into their eyes. But it dried too quickly, it really didn't stay on for long, and it was just undignified --" which was when she heard the pace of his breathing change, and knew she'd lost him again. "But it was mostly weighting."

She'd already decided not to tell him about the two who swore by something worse than mud. Generally at a great distance, because no one in the herd wanted them to get any closer until they'd finished washing up.

"So no one came up with razorwhips?"

"Not in my herd." He was just about the only pony she would use 'herd' with when discussing centaurs, simply because he didn't think about it. The Princesses wanted the public to, if they thought about any additional population at all, regard it as something very far away: the fact that it was true probably wouldn't do much to keep the panic down. "Combat among ourselves was mostly about surrender. Anything with an edge had a greater chance to kill." And when it came to any possible encounters during a patrol...

You tried not to leave too many wounds or rather, if inflicting injury became necessary, you tried to make sure those wounds looked as if they had come from a single source. Hooves or hands. Never both.

Both was evidence.
Both was danger.

The smith thought about it.

"Tail's a problem near a forge," he eventually said. "But the Guards keep theirs exposed. You might as well fit in. Leave it free. Just give yourself space to tuck it if you need to."

Cerea tried to picture herself standing in a Guard formation, with all of them wearing their own version of full armor. With her at the center, nearly twice the height of anypony there, possessing two limbs which nopony else had. Fitting in.

She almost laughed at the inner sight, and just barely managed to hold the bitterness back --

-- wait. It wasn't just the forms which didn't match...

"Barding? How does Guard armor get its color?" Because there were two different hues, and neither smelled like real gold or silver would: pony spines also weren’t collapsing under the weight. Her own creation was currently the typical mottled blue-black with hints of purple: something which didn't exactly indicate allegiance to either shift.

"Two ways," he immediately said. "The second one's out, because we're keeping centaur steel a secret. There's a pissed-off unicorn filly who comes into the palace with about six Guards flanking her. She can make anything solid into any color she can think of, and the change holds after she's done. That's how we've been doing it for the last --" he audibly considered it "-- year or so, I think. I don't let her into the forge because she's supposed to be on probation for something, and getting armor into the right hues is part of how she's working it off. That still means she did something. I can tell quality through more than just the color. It doesn't mean I want her getting the chance to pattern anything with rust, because somepony else is going to come along and get it wrong."

She nodded. "And the first?"

"Chemical wash," the smith replied. "That's what we're going with for yours. I already took a few scrap pieces and put them through. Works fine, even if it winds up needing the usual renewal every few years. If you get onto a shift, you'll have the right color. I just don't want to process the whole thing until you're assigned."

It didn't surprise her that he'd been doing his own testing. He wanted to know everything about what he called centaur steel, was trying to figure out ways of refining the creation process, improving the results. And with the magic of his mark backing those efforts...

She had brought the new technique into the world. And once the true smith fully understood it, she would be no better than second --

"Cerea?"

It had almost been -- awkward.

Her ears perked. Twisted backwards.

"If you don't get through training..." The earth pony hesitated again. "The metal's working out. We still have to see how it does in combat conditions, plus everyday wear and tear. And the usual spells haven't been fully tested on it yet. But when that all gets finished, once it goes through... the whole Guard still needs to be reequipped. It's a lot of work. A lot of metal. And..."

She could hear hooves shuffling at the top of the ramp.

"...it's a good excuse," he finally continued. "It makes the palace expand the forge, pay for fresh tools and a better fire. They'd have to. Carve out a new hollow, or dedicate some extra space to this one. Because there isn't enough room in here for two smiths working together, and -- it would go a lot faster..."

Stopped. She heard the bare little extension of muscle and bone scrape against the underside of the protective garment, and then the rest came out all at once.

"I told the Princesses that if you're not a Guard, then I want you as a smith. Working here. We can't let any other nation have you. It's centaur steel, but it's Equestrian steel too. They said yes. They just didn't want you to know that yet, because they wanted you thinking about the stupid Guard stuff. But I thought you had to know."

The girl blinked.

And then she blinked all the faster, leaning her head back so that the tears wouldn't fall away from her face. Running down skin and into cloth, unseen and unscented.

"Just so you know that... if you don't get through, you've still got a job," Barding awkwardly finished. "A place."

Down in the cellar. Where nopony has to worry about just coming across me by accident. Out of sight, away from open sky. Nowhere to run. No gallops, no exploring the new --

-- there's so much new out there --

-- just confined in the basement, surrounded by bone while I hammer out death. For the rest of my life.

It was putting her into another kind of gap. It probably wouldn't be a gap with a commute: she doubted non-Guards were allowed to use the barracks, but she didn't think the palace would want to risk the consequences of having her jog to work every morning. They would probably modify a cell for permanent residency.

That was the darkest way to look at it, and so the girl's mind tried to go there first. But there was another thought present, and that was the one which had brought the tears.

But...

"Because a smith needs a forge," the stallion stated. "And yours should be here."

...he had offered her a place. A role. Salary, value, shelter. Existence.

Not just that: he'd gone to the Princesses. Asked that a place be made for her.

Barding had done that.

Barding.

"...Cerea?"

It was probably just for the sake of the metal.

She recognized the cause of the uncertainty, and it hadn't been from his spotting her shaking shoulders: she'd simply been silent too long. "I understand." A thin trail of salt ran into her mouth: she took a moment to swallow. "Thank you."

"I don't even know why you'd want to be a Guard at all," he irritably added. "Not when you can be a smith. It's not like you've got a mark telling you to put on the armor instead of just making it."

The next question felt natural, at least up until the moment her voice released it into the world: after that, she immediately decided it had been offensive.

"Do marks talk?"

The sounds of breathing from behind her slowed.

"Not with words," the smith eventually said. "And it's soft. Less than a whisper." The disc warmed against her throat. "You really don't know what that's like, do you? You're never going to know."

She wasn't sure whether nodding or shaking her head would have been appropriate, or how much of either Barding would really register. "No."

It made him silent for a time, and the pounding of the hammer filled the forge.

Eventually, "Anyway, color is next to last. Then you mount the Solar or Lunar insignia. And that's it."

Insignia. She hadn't really thought about that, simply because it was so universal. The little sigil over the sternum.

"Is that the only heraldry?" And waited for the wire to hiss, because it was a word which suggested a world of knights, different powers warring over territory and belief...

It didn't. "Usually," Barding admitted. "Most Guards don't customize their armor too much, because that usually means telling me to alter it and I've got better things to do. But a few of them go to the city smiths." The snort was automatic. "For whatever good that does them. But they're allowed to tweak it a little. Heraldry, though -- most of that is in the armor for the Houses, and you only see that during Founders Day parades for a settled zone because the stuff isn't used. Too old. Mine brought it out on the holiday."

Cerea waited for it.

"Stupid," the smith added. "They worked their crest right into the criniere. Embedded it. Weakened the whole thing." Which triggered another snort. "And when it's right over the throat... Anyway, some Guards do a little heraldry. The ones from Houses don't advertise, though. It's just about always hometown pride. You'll get a city flag at the lower edge of the peytral. Patterned discoloration of the metal, because that doesn't weaken it. I've got an acid which does the job, because all it does is discolor. The difference holds up through the wash."

Houses. There had been talk of nobles, although it hadn't felt like any discussion of a ruling class. Cerea, with very little evidence to go on, had still been thinking of it in terms of the British system: a lot of leftover titles, none of which really meant anything -- except for a somewhat enhanced ability to get your personal humiliations into the tabloids.

She was completely certain that Equestria had tabloids.

"We should try the acid on centaur steel," Barding decided. "That's something I haven't done yet. Want to test it now?"

Cerea nodded, and hooves trotted down the ramp. The sounds entered the forge, and she heard the smith's snout pushing things aside on a shelf.

The vial poked her in the left foreleg. She carefully lowered herself until she could take it from his jaw.

"Don't need eye protection for the fumes," he told her. "Got to keep it sealed all the time because once any drop completely leaves the vial's spells, you've got about six seconds before it evaporates. And the fumes don't go more than about a quarter hoof-height before they're too weak to do anything. Just don't get it on your skin." A little more trotting, and he came back with a thin brush: she had to pick up it just below the tooth grip curve. "Bristles don't react. Go ahead."

She picked up a small piece of scrap, carefully opened the vial, dipped the brush, and gently swept the results across steel.

Colors shifted. Black and blue receded into the background, and the soft hiss drew purple out into the world.

The girl silently considered the results, then lowered the scrap for Barding's regard.

"Interesting," he decided. "Wasn't expecting that color. And we'll have to check it later, make sure there isn't any residue working in, when it would just evaporate off normal steel. But it's a similar effect. I'll see how the treated area responds to the wash tomorrow "

Cerea nodded. If the Guard was reequipped, hometown decorations could continue. There just might be a lot of purple involved --

-- it doesn't matter.
No one will even know --
-- I'll know.

She picked up the vial and brush, gathered another piece of scrap. Sketched slowly and carefully, because drawing with acid didn't leave a lot of room for mistakes. Looked the results over, then lowered them for inspection.

There was a long silence.

"Looks like Griffonant," Barding eventually decided. "One of their symbols. Couldn't tell you which, but they work some of them into their own armor. Is that centaur writing?"

She shook her head. It didn't surprise her too badly: realistically, there were only so many shapes in the world -- or worlds. If species could be duplicated...

Cerea raised the little piece of scrap. If nothing else, it showed that she could render the shape -- but duplicating it repeatedly and exactly by hand along the fringe of the armor was too much to expect. She'd need to make a stencil.

"So what is it?"

She looked at the purple fleur de lis.

"A reminder of where I came from."

The girl had been born in France. (She had expected to die there.) She wasn't the same species as the majority, and she'd still thought of her nationality as something she could take pride in. So she would carry the best of her country with her, in the form of a simple symbol.

But she would only be carrying the nation.
Not the people.
It had been an exchange program. Something which sent students to distant lands.
There was a reason for that.

Threatening

Fear distorted time.

It happened over and over again in the days preceding the meeting, and it eventually reached the point where Cerea realized she needed some means of tracking the true. A few hours of both waiting for sunset and trying to swallow back any portion of her guilt, and then she reluctantly asked the little knight for help again. It would be Cerea's money, because the training salary was still coming (and she was having a hard time finding places to secure the little bags) -- but she couldn't go out to shop. And it meant asking her only friend to be awake during strange hours, venturing across the city on Cerea's behalf while searching for something which might not even exist...

It did.

The timepiece had been manufactured by minotaurs: it had been the easiest way to acquire something which was made to go around a wrist. The girl had been careful in articulating that part of the request: an item created to encircle the diameter of an ankle wouldn't really work for her, and when it came to the typical alternative... in her opinion, few things looked stupider than a centaur fishing something out of a breast pocket, plus Ms. Garter hadn't been making those anyway. Additionally, her current skirts came with a similar lack of storage, she really didn't want to give multiple ponies the experience of watching her fish something out of her cleavage (which could take so long as to turn the question into 'What time is it now?'), and she quickly realized that just like nearly every other adolescent in the world, she'd become far too used to simply glancing at her phone's screen.

So it was a wristwatch and in that alone, it could be described as similar to what she'd had in the herd. But the gaps had scavenged what they could from what humans no longer wanted, and that meant the majority of personal timepieces had been cheap plastic: single-line flashing digital displays with two tiny side buttons controlling nine supposed functions, none of which worked out to 'Set Current Time.' They were barely functional, fell apart under the force of a hard stare, and it was best not to ask about the ones which claimed calculator functions -- but on the rather dubious plus side, they were cheap and plentiful. They had to be, because you generally wound up replacing them every ten days or after one drop of moisture, whichever came first. Which presumed the corroding inner battery held up that long.

Compared to what she'd known, the current piece was a wristwatch in the same way a native of France could look at a KV Mini parked next to a Bugatti EB 110 and say, with a mostly-straight face, that they were both cars.

It was a wristwatch: that couldn't be denied. It also had the option to be something other, because it came with a long, strangely-flexible cord of braided metal, along with the option to remove the thick fabric straps in such a way as to make it look like they'd never been there at all. Cerea had initially considered that the design was meant to provide minotaurs with a pocket option, and had continued to do so right up until the moment when she'd actually picked the timepiece up.

It was heavy for a watch: at least a sixth of a kilo. It had a flip-up lid covering the face, and a pair of little steel domes moved when she pushed her finger against the tab: layered protection.

The metal tines were driven by clockwork alone, and that was part of the reason for both thickness and weight: there wasn't a single spell involved in the watch's function. That aspect was something else she'd asked for, if it was possible at all. She would be carrying the sword, and while she generally trusted herself not to be clumsy -- things happened in battle. Even if the blade wasn't turned against her, it was possible to reach for it in such a way as to have a wrist scrape against the hilt. Clockwork meant no chance of disruption (other than that caused by impact), and that made it safe.

The watch kept surprisingly accurate time. According to the little knight (who was passing along the seller's assessment, and also had to read out the instruction manual), it lost about a second during each usage cycle -- which in this case meant two days, because it also came with a little key: the clockwork had to be regularly wound.

Cerea had carefully examined the purchase. Noted the little touches, like the fact that there were fully-unnecessary spiraling lathe patterns spun into the inner surface of the metal, simply for their beauty. One small dial on the face noted whether it was day or night, and tiny alicorn Princesses prodded the sun and moon into position at need: something which struck her as an interesting artistic interpretation. But when she'd looked at the rather long braided metal cord, seen the sheer density of the watch and the amount of protection given to tiny internal gears...

Minotaurs possessed hands. Their nation had access to more metal than just about any other location on Menajeria, and the species could supposedly display a collective mindset of 'So what happens if we try this?' According to both Nightwatch and the Sergeant, the traits combined to give Mazein the rough majority of the world's mechanical engineers. Minotaurs produced technology -- but they were creations which often worked by clockwork alone: no electricity, and getting a watch to run on steam meant putting a tiny boiler against your wrist. Still, they did what they could within those limits: complex calculators, limited-function automatons. And they were practical.

The watch was heavy and dense because it had been manufactured by minotaurs. But the species had its own way of considering the world, and so there were two reasons for the timepiece to come with a metal cord. One was to offer the option of pocket use, and the other was that in a moment of crisis, it took very few carefully-measured seconds to turn the whole thing into a fast-spinning flail.

It gave Cerea a timepiece. (It also provided the chance to carefully ask Nightwatch about the seller -- who had unfortunately been a male.) Something she could use to judge the true passage and, when her own terrors were at their worst, provided a localized source for declaiming lies.

Because fear distorted time.

There were only a few days left before she would meet the children, and every identifiable section of that duration seemed determined to turn its own segment into a lashing variable.

She trained, and those hours often passed far too quickly. There were always Guards coming in and out now -- but she quickly realized the actual pool was limited. Some of that was due to the schedule: it was unreasonable to expect too many Lunars. But a portion of the rest was her fault, because there had to be those who didn't want to be close to a centaur unless it was absolutely necessary. Realistically, she was fairly certain that when it came to falsely overriding that desire by direct order, the Sergeant could only shout at ninety percent of the palace during one go.

Guards arrived, participated in the training. She learned how to move alongside them (and, rather frequently, under). Formations were reviewed, considered in terms of her potential presence, and were then carefully adjusted. There was a day where the Sergeant created the thin outline of a building in the track's center oval, bare suggestions of walls surrounding borrowed furniture, and then had her evaluate the area for potential danger. (It had been scent which betrayed the occupant of the carefully-dug section of trapdoor-sealed tunnel, and she'd taken some small pleasure in extracting a rather surprised earth pony from the ambush hole.) A separate lesson covered moving through a simulated street, and flowerpots regularly crashed down from false ledges: the task was to make sure none of them hit whoever was designated as Princess. Catching was an option. So was taking the hit with your own body. And regretfully, ponies had discovered terracotta, even when working with a fully-separated terra.

(That exercise reminded her of a cheap videogame, something with a liquid-crystal display and no actual frames of animation because each frame was in a separate location. Press down on a tiny recessed area, perhaps with a hairpin, and every black image would appear at the same time, showing how the tiny character didn't actually transition between states. Press twice and the whole thing would probably fracture under the pressure, because it was another category where the gaps mostly received what humans had no further use for, sometimes in bulk. Cerea's foulest literary curse was Reader's Digest Condensed Edition: Papi, forever trying to figure out ways of working modern controllers without true hands, occasionally reacted to hard-coded current-generation foulness with a near-screech of "TIGER ELECTRONICS!")

They were still working on having her fighting against ponies, only now there were actual ponies to fight. Moving, thinking targets, and it was something which wound up shaming her because she couldn't adjust fast enough. The review on inducing backlash was especially bad. A unicorn who was trying to gallop in fairly random patterns was considerably harder to hit than a wooden statue, and remained so no matter how quickly she spun the sling.

"About three out of every ten," the Sergeant had announced when it was over, with the recently-targeted unicorn in question slowly making her way to the showers under a fast-dipping sun. Part of that lack of speed was due to exhaustion: the remainder was produced by armor. A stray sling stone could potentially hit anything, and so the pony had more of her body covered than usual. The eyes were partially masked by metal grills, and when it came to the horn... the intent was to show that Cerea could potentially induce backlash: not to cause inconvenience through injury through actually setting it off. The pony's helmet came with a built-in cone of metal thoroughly covering the horn. This was something which prevented all normal casting, because the corona couldn't pass through a fully solid object. It also stopped backlash, as there was no way to reach the actual horn.

The helmet was enchanted to randomly display a false corona, at varying levels of intensity: the metal simply (and randomly) glowed with the necessary layering. And when that happened, Cerea was supposed to hit it with a sling stone.

"Got a formal name for that tactic?" the old stallion inquired. "Galloping around the target at a distance while you try to center your aim?"

"Circle-strafing," the girl wearily replied. Something which hadn't --

"Three out of ten," the Sergeant semi-repeated. "For a moving target the size of a horn, with you on the gallop, while the helmet was launching bursts of light at you. Sling in one hand, sword in the other."

She closed her eyes.

"Which, in actual combat," Cerea stated, "means my opponent got seven spells off."

She felt the pressure of his gaze, opened her eyes again...

...he was looking at her, and that was all he was doing. He just... looked, and his eyes were as unreadable as the new scent.

"Ambidexterity," he eventually recovered. "You don't have it."

She reluctantly shook her head. "I've been training for it. Most centaurs do. But I still have a dominant side --"

"-- sling was in the dominant hand?"

Cerea managed a nod. She was still learning the weapon: trying to master it from the weaker side would have slowed everything down.

"Sword in the off-hand," he added. "Deflected four of the seven which got launched. And you had to keep sheathing it in order to load new stones."

"Seven out of every ten spells got off," Cerea adjusted the review. "Three of those got through. I'm still dead. My Princess is exposed and vulnerable. I know it's not good enough. I'm sorry --"

The strange expression hadn't changed.

"How many spells do you think a Guard is supposed to block?"

Automatically, because there could only be one right answer. "All of them."

"Like blocking every insect in a swarm," the Sergeant suggested.

"What if somepony's allergic to stings? If I miss one..."

He'd backed up a little, just to favor her with that strange expression a little more directly.

"Usually run that drill with unicorns against unicorns," he told her. "Levitating rocks, or whatever else they can find. How do you think they do by comparison?"

"Better," was equally automatic. "The field would give them more control. Can they adjust the stone in flight?"

"If they want to hold onto it," the Sergeant readily admitted. "And their field dexterity is high enough. But it's best to give it some speed and then let go, because a stone moving freely means their field can go down again. Guards train in fast-casting. Keep the corona up just long enough to do something, then drop it. You can't backlash a dark horn. But you're working with a sling. That changes things. Three out of ten on a narrow moving target --"

She beat him to it for two reasons: because it was true, and voicing it herself might block the fully-justified shout. "-- isn't good enough."

But the next words didn't emerge as a shout. They were soft and somehow, that was worse.

"What if I told you," the Sergeant quietly said, "that thirty percent was higher than expected for the first time running the full drill?"

She shook her head.

"It doesn't matter. Unicorns against unicorns. There's no real comparison. Anything less than a hundred percent is a dead Princess --"

One patterned forehoof stomped against the ground. She swore he was keeping a succession of half-hidden, partially-hollowed stones around the area just to get the extra echo.

"Go wash up," he told her. "We'll run it again tomorrow."

Her shoulders slumped. She slowly began to trot towards the barracks as the sun dipped lower in the sky. Another day of proving her unsuitability was drawing to a close, and it had brought her that much closer to --

"Sergeant?"

"Tomorrow, Recruit. When you're fresh. After you've gotten some sleep, and thought about things --"

"I'm... going to meet the children soon."

Her ears twisted towards the sound of the steady breaths.

"Cleared the time for it," the Sergeant simply stated.

"Is there... anything you can tell me? About what I should do?"

The pace of the rib cage never changed, as she waited under a sun which now felt too cold.

"Never had foals," the old stallion told her. "Haven't been one for a long time. Don't really meet them that often."

There was another scent now, and the wind just barely carried it to her. Something which made her want to move all the faster, because his only legacy was those who had passed through his training. Off the course, into the armor and then, so very often, into the gardens.

"What I would have done as a colt, same circumstances, if I met a centaur..." It was now possible to hear him thinking it over. "Evaluation. I would have made sure I had a plan. What to say, and what to do if I didn't get the right answers. So try to have your own. What you think they might do, and how you'll respond. But it's going to be like every plan, Recruit. It breaks when things start. Plan, adjust when you need to. But be ready to make it up as you go along. Because I remember a little about what it was like, being a colt. When the world is chaos, and you have to tell yourself it isn't because that's how any of part of it can make sense."

She listened to the deep breath.

"They know they're going to be scared going in," he told her. "You have to figure out how they've decided to manage it. The kind of lies they're telling themselves, so they can pretend they've got any control at all. Because thinking like a kid means remembering a lot of fear. Hit the showers."

And she did.

She could remember her own fear: even without knowing what the pony lifespan was, Cerea was completely certain that she was closer to those years than the Sergeant, and so the memory was clear, detailed, and -- layered. There had been a lot to be afraid of, and she could draw on a portion of empathy because there had been ways in which some of that terror had centered on herself. That she didn't fit in with the herd, thought too differently, should have never had certain thoughts at all...

(There had been a plan. It had fallen apart.)

She understood why the children were afraid of her. But she couldn't look at herself from the outside. She didn't know what they were truly thinking...

(She would learn.)

Guards coming in and out -- but Squall had a part to play in most sessions, and the scent of his frustration helped to keep her alert because it wasn't just about hitting unicorns who were on the move. Pegasi were a greater challenge, and came with an even more dismal miss rate. He wasn't her only airborne target, of course -- but he did have the dubious honor of being the one whom she hit the most, and any responding sparks of anger had to stay entirely within his eyes.

There was discussion of restraints: putting a metal cone over a unicorn's horn in order to block magic. Guards occasionally carried a few, and using one against a powerful specimen could be like trying to cap a geyser which was aiming every high-pressure gush directly at you. She had the benefit of being able to deflect some of the bursts with the sword, but getting the thing on could turn into a two-handed operation. Fortunately, the buckles were enchanted to close themselves.

She began to study maps of the palace, and so learned that each Princess had her own section: there was a common area connecting the marble wings. Some building functions were duplicated, while others were unique to their ruler. Multiple channels existed for getting to various sections in a hurry and because they all had to accommodate the white horse, they could host a centaur. Figuring out how to open the secret passages was another lesson...

The training offered endless distractions and when that wasn't taking place, she had the forge. (Barding mostly seemed to treat children as an annoyingly necessary biological intermediary stage which was required before you could put armor on something.) After those hours concluded, there was time with Nightwatch, and...

...she hadn't meant to eavesdrop. She had simply been taking a different path to the barracks, putting her increasing knowledge of the palace into practice by choosing a route which might avoid more ponies. And she'd heard the Sergeant before she scented him, followed by picking up on Nightwatch...

The girl had turned back, trying to minimize the impact of her hooves as she turned: making it sound like somepony with much less mass was using that passage. Because she had made out but a single word, and she understood the dual nature of her relationship with the little knight. The friend (somehow, her friend) -- and the superior officer, because that word had been evaluation. The Sergeant likely wanted Nightwatch's opinion on Cerea's training, and she wouldn't listen to any of those words. She didn't want to know what the associated scents were. At her core, she understood that Nightwatch would be honest, and...

...she didn't want to hear any of it. Not then, and not when she reached the barracks twenty minutes late and found the little pegasus upon the self-assigned bunk, within a personally-created, somewhat unsubtle upwind draft. Not after she measured out the six minutes required before Nightwatch could truly look at her again, followed by both centaur and pegasus very carefully failing to discuss it for the rest of the evening.

Time was passing: she had a means of measuring that now. The barracks were just about clean, although the question of centaur bedding arrangements had yet to find any degree of long-term answer. Somepony had replaced the soap dispensers in the bathroom, and the removal of dividing walls had provided a restroom trench large enough for her. Two mirrors had been adjusted in height. It felt like she was approaching the end of her training, with so many sessions now being spent in review. The armor... it was down to the helmet and breastplate, both of which she had to do herself. Her hours were filled, and some of them had to be filled with rest because that was what the doctors continued to order.

But every day which passed brought her that much closer to the children.

She woke up in the middle of the night, driven back to wakefulness by the whips of young screams. After the trembling stopped, her eyes would close again, she would force her breathing to slow, listening to nothing more than her own heartbeat for what felt like hours... and then she would open her eyes again, flick the lid on the watch, and two minutes would have passed.

Training sessions raced by at a rate which made her lunge after them, desperate to catch fleeing seconds by a virtual tail and drag them back so she could go through it all over again. Each hammer swing in the forge could take an hour: longer if Barding had questions. The nights dragged, while any sleep she found was still over far too quickly. The pages on the calendar kept turning, and she had one of those now because it was another means of trying to see through the distortions. She thought about how moons were twenty-eight days long, wondered what kind of parallel allowed an hour to be an hour, and her mind refused to let any one second equal another. She trained, she learned, she did her best to deal with fear both caused and felt, and no part of that permitted her personal sense of time to simply flow.

There was an hour in the barracks (or five days, if left to herself while waiting for Nightwatch, with a thousand scream-filled futures clashing in her head) when she'd had a surprise, because any visitor had to count as one. The dark blue unicorn stallion had quietly stepped in, red corona bearing paperwork, and Crossing Guard had told her there were more forms to fill out.

His head had been down when he'd said that. They'd never finished, and...

...neither of them talked about it.

He'd asked questions, transcribed her answers. Gathered up the results within what looked to be slow-sagging bubbles, started towards the exit --

"Mr. Guard?"

-- stopped. Still facing the door, not looking at her.

"I'm supposed to be meeting the children soon." Hesitant, worried, but -- she was running out of ponies to ask, and he was there. "I was wondering if you had... any advice."

His fur rustled as the muscles underneath shifted. The dark tail twitched --

-- the bubbles drifted left, and paperwork was deposited on a nearby empty bunk. The field winked out, and the middle-aged stallion slowly turned to face her.

"I need to talk for a few minutes here," the head of Immigration stated. "You listen."

She nodded --

-- and his eyes briefly closed.

"Unless you need to say something where I should be listening," he added.

Another, more uncertain nod, and his tail gradually steadied.

"Part of my job is monitoring/keeping tabs on the ones who come in, and that can keep going until the day they become citizens," he carefully said, and she wondered if it was the disc which made it seem as if each syllable was being granted a personal weight. "I'm in charge of them. It means I'm part of their lives, and it also means that... I don't get too close. We're not friends. It's not a good idea, letting it be that personal. It's harder to do the job when it becomes too personal."

She was resting near another bunk, one which they'd been using as an improvised desk. Some of the blankets had a few fresh ink stains, and it was easier to look at them than his eyes.

"You said you had something like an immigration officer, as an exchange student," the unicorn abruptly kicked in. "What was she like?"

Cerea tried to think of the most tactful way to summarize Kuroko Smith. Then she remembered that the government official was a world away, and found herself wrestling with the choice to deliberately fail.

"The title was Cultural Exchange Coordinator," the centaur tried. "But it was a branch of immigration. She was usually..." Hesitated. "...absent."

The stallion did the worst thing. He waited, and it forced her to keep talking.

"She didn't want to get involved that much," Cerea reluctantly said. "She would visit the household to get a meal, or --" she didn't want to picture the adult female flirting again "-- talk to our host. But she hated filling out forms, or making sure we had all of our identification, or -- anything: she hated anything which created work. She kept passing things off to other people, because she said there were too many liminals to look after and it would help if a few of us looked after ourselves." The words were coming more quickly. "Anything so she could get back to her bath all the faster, right after she grabbed a full plate out from under someone's nose and took it home with her." They never got the plates back. "But there were a lot of us, not very many officials, and..."

This time, her head dipped. Shoulders slumped, and she found herself looking at the sweater-clad swell of her breasts. The current bra was getting a little tight. She had to ask somepony to tell Ms. Garter about that. Maybe an adjustment could be made without a fresh round of measurements. And as for making the armor...

...it was fear, and so she recognized the steady deceleration of time as it scraped across the field of deliberate internal delay.

"...our household was... one of the worst, when it came to creating trouble," she softly finished. "She usually showed up too late, but -- she almost always tried to show up. I think -- in her own way, she cared, as much as she could. But she was just tired. And... it was easier to make us do so much of the work because that way, at least it got done."

Except for those aspects of bureaucracy which no household of liminal girls could manage. Just for starters, there had been no designation or category for 'slimes' when the exchange program had started, the species had existed as bare rumor within every gap and when it came to the unexpected, confirming discovery of Suu, Cerea wasn't sure Ms. Smith had ever filed any amount of paperwork.

She brought her head up just in time to see the stallion nod.

"I can understand being tired," he told her. "I'm tired most of the time. But I still would have fired her. Because you don't get the job unless you're willing to do the work. And that's what it is: work. It can't be too personal, not for me, because -- there's so many of them. Even with how few non-ponies there are in the total population, this is the capital: we've got our share, plus the shares for some of the other settled zones, and then you have to kick in the embassies and all the conflicts which arise when new members of those staffs don't know how to interact with ponies. And that goes both ways. Canterlot is -- active. So it can't be personal."

He hesitated again.

"Not for me. But with my kids..."

His lips abruptly quirked.

"I'm still trying to figure out your expressions," the unicorn admitted. "Was that surprise?"

Cerea reluctantly nodded.

"I'm married," the stallion shrugged. "I love Tarter. She loves me. Still, for some reason. There's a galloping consequence for that or, for our house, three of them. And some of the immigrants arrive as families, with kids of their own. I can't get too close, and their kids are just a few more charges I have to look out for. But there's something to be said for getting outside of the little neighborhoods, because we all have to speak with each other eventually. And it means that for things like Homecoming, when the new ones are trying to learn our holidays..."

Another pause. He pulled a slow breath in between his teeth, stretching out the oxygen.

"They're a long way from their old homes," he told her. "And they don't quite have a new one yet. So Tarter sets extra places at the table, makes room in the kitchen so the guests can prepare their own dishes. Sometimes we need new kinds of tables. And when the meal is over, the kids always wind up in the yard. I've had a lot of different hoofprints in that yard, along with a few paws, talons, and feet. Different shapes. Different species. Sometimes you get a divot in the dirt, or a rough patch where everyone tumbled on top of each other. So what I've learned about kids is... the shapes are different. The cultures need to be sorted out more than I'd like. But once they start laughing..."

Clear eyes focused on her. Directly upon hers, without hesitation, as the miasma of fear found a moment of ebb.

"...when they're laughing," Crossing Guard stated, "all kids are the same. So when you meet that class, treat them as children. They're pony fillies and colts, scared ones, and that means they might not react in the ways you're used to -- but somewhere under the full-body fur and local lack of arms is a kid. Give them a chance to show you that."

He began to turn away from her --

-- stopped.

Not quite casually, "What's your full name?"

She stared at him.

"The disc just renders 'centaur' twice." No matter how badly time might be distorted, there was always a moment available for blaming her mother. "It doesn't matter what I say, unless it's --

"-- not what I meant," he quietly interrupted. "And... my fault on the phrasing. It's the disc. I've never heard your language, because all I get is Equestrian. So I've never heard you say your name. And I need to put something other than 'centaur' on the paperwork. So what I'm asking for is this: take off the disc. Then say your name. That'll give me the phonetics, and I can put that into the forms." One more pause, with his eyes steady again. "I also want to see how close I can get to saying it back."

She hadn't thought about that: whether the pony throat could manage any degree of French -- or Japanese, English, any of the myriad languages which had been created by humans. But then, she had to learn their means of speaking: they had no need for hers.

...except for this.

Her right hand came up, carefully separated silver from skin as the unicorn watched. She waited until the final wire tip lost contact with her sore ear, and took a slow breath.

"Centorea Shianus."

The unicorn blinked a few times. Brought his left forehoof up, and awkwardly rubbed at his throat until the keratin pushed out something halfway between neigh and pained groan.

"Shhhyenerrrrea Hzenannust," the pony just barely said, and that after a gigantic offering of aural charity.

The girl didn't quite manage to hold back the wince, and did little better with the blush which was so close behind. The disc went back on.

"I'll figure out a spelling," Crossing Guard decided, and the blue eyes rolled up. "What you do to vowels..." Turned again as his field gathered up the paperwork, and headed for the door.

She began to gather the ink-stained blankets for cleaning, having already decided it was something she needed to do herself because the palace laundry (which was in the Solar wing, and had but one hidden passage nearby) surely had enough labors, even in a society with so little clothing. It meant she wasn't looking at him when he began to step into the hallway, and so had to twist her ears to catch the final words.

"They're all just kids..."

She would have occasion to remember that, as the final hours rushed and stalled and did their best to grind against skin and fur. Time passing at a rate which the fear insisted was variable, while never stopping. Nothing she could do would prevent the meeting, she felt as if she would have given almost anything to postpone it a little longer, and whatever she somehow had left over from that payment could be used to purchase something she could say...

And then it was the day of the meeting. The morning, with time running out and no amount of desperate hope or prayer able to buy her so much as a single second or syllable. Knowing only that something would go wrong, because something like it had happened once before, she had been involved, and it had gone wrong. Any degree of precedent could only work against her.

But Crossing Guard had been right. In some aspects, regardless of species or world, all children were alike.
There were ways in which all children were monsters.

Narcissistic

Dear Miss Cerea,

How to describe Discord? Were he truly among us, there would be very little point to making the attempt. He might laugh at any who tried to do so, and not kindly. There are ways in which he existed as something which actively defied any attempt at definition, and altering his physical form was simply another way of shattering the bonds created by confining words.

I intend to attach a picture behind the final page of this correspondence, so that you will at least know what his most typical appearance was. But I am requesting that Miss Nightwatch only display it after the final word has been read aloud. And that when you do see him... it is understandable if you find his appearance comedic. The Princesses themselves believe even that form is a choice, and that he might have initially wished to lure others into a false sense of security.

Once upon a time. In the current era, it is equally possible that he simply believed the countenance of the jester would be somewhat less threatening.

I do not wish to tell you too much of his past: that is something for the history classes which come as part of the long gallop towards citizenship, and it does not speak to who he was at the last. Who, and what, he chose to become. But I will say this: there was a time when he was the enemy.

It would have been very easy to describe him as a monster.

He was the enemy. But it may not have been malice with deliberate awareness. I have spoken to many about him, including the one he was closest to in life. She is of the opinion that in many ways, despite his great age (at a minimum, something over fourteen hundred years, and perhaps much more) and occasional displays of surprising wisdom, he is still very much like a child. A rather petulant one, forever demanding attention -- but a child.

I ask you to imagine a child happily playing with their toys, moving them about an imaginary world, kicking them to the other side of the room if that movement is not happening quickly enough, swapping parts of figures here and there while rearranging the gameboard with no regard for anything like rules.

Now imagine that one day, that child realized that the toys, which had been distorted and warped and sometimes broken, could THINK.

She believes that he was still trying to come to terms with it. That given enough time, he would have truly looked back at what he had done, and mourned. The skies themselves might have wept, although 'what' is a question none could answer. But he never reached the opportunity.

Or perhaps he simply found a way to atone for every last tenth-bit of it, all at once.

The most typical description of Discord is as an incarnation of pure chaos, and I feel he defies even that. True chaos must by definition contain everything, and so it also contains the hint of order which allowed him to exist as something which possessed thought. Call him an incarnation of change. He chafes against stability, feels rules require constant testing, and will take a new form for an hour simply because the last one was held for too long. He MUST create change in the world around him. All things change: he would insist on that, and that for the world to exist in a state of pure changeless order was the truest form of death.

All things change. He was once the enemy: you will learn of that, in time.

I have asked the Princesses about why they gave him his chance, for they both have reasons to hate him: more than anypony who still lives. They have only told me that they felt he was essential to the future of the world -- and that with an entity who embodied change, there was the potential to change for the better.

I cannot say they were wrong.

He made a connection. Found a friend: one of the Bearers, our Miss Fluttershy Phylia. And to make a friend, as opposed to simply deciding that one has a FAVORITE toy, or a pet -- one must see them as real. As being, in some ways, an equal. And with that realization, he began to change.

Discord had power. There are ways in which his strength was greater than that of any pony known, although the Princesses have suggested that he possesses a few vital weaknesses: in particular, there currently exists a means of placing him in near-stasis at any time, and he was fully aware of that. It is one of the reasons why he did not push the limits of his parole too much: the other was wishing not to disappoint his friend.

He had power. More than that: he WAS power.

Ponies, and the other sapient species of our world, possess magic. But as Tirek inadvertently taught us, when that magic is pulled away, something of us remains: wounded, but capable of trying to carry on. The magic is in our souls, but it does not necessarily comprise the whole of them.

The Princesses -- and, in the time since his sacrifice, a number of other parties -- believe that in some ways, Discord WAS magic. Magic which could take on a form that moved, touched the world more directly, appeared to breathe (if the mood struck him) -- but ultimately, magic. A being of thaums and thought.

He had made a single bond, at the start. There came the chance to begin forming others. I cannot speak of what he might have become, should there have been more time. For he existed as something which could think, and the capacity for true thought, added to the recent realization that others were REAL... led to a choice.

I brought him to that choice. And the one who had once been the enemy of a world entire -- saved it. Everyone and everything which exists upon this planet.

I speak of him in the past tense, because there is so little left. Nothing which displays awareness, or the potential to think once again. I have spent the moons since his sacrifice in a quest to change that.

A hero deserves no less.

It's harder to run when you have to stay with somepony.

My daddy and I talked about evacuation stuff a lot, because there's times when he has to travel to some of his stores and when there's fifteen of them, it means he has to be on trains a lot. The escort network helps, but he says it costs too much to use all the time, even for us, and that it's more important to see the world between the settled zones because that can be the really important part. Plus using the network makes him feel all sick. I used the network with him once and air carriages are better because you know the world is still down there. Teleporting means there isn't anything.

It makes him sick, and I don't want my daddy to be sick. But I still think if he used the network more, he could be home more. But my daddy likes to feel like he's a normal pony, even when he isn't. Sick is just for a minute and home is for whole nights. But normal ponies take the train a lot, so that's what he does. And he gallops with me, because that's what a daddy does. But sometimes we reviewed the evacuation routes, because Ponyville is kind of weird. It's mostly been like that since the Bearers got their jewelry, and it hasn't gotten much better since I lost mine.

If you live in Ponyville, you're supposed to know how to get out of Ponyville really fast, because the weird stuff doesn't wait for anypony to pack. My daddy and I had a too-big house near the fringe, so the fastest route meant we could get out really easily because the border is right there. But that means we're going directly into the Everfree, which is bad, or towards the Acres, which used to be worse. We're supposed to try and reach the train tracks because those have some spells protecting the route, or use the old road which purels parallels it. That takes longer.

But if it's just getting into the woods, we can get out really fast. And because we can leave so fast, we're not supposed to. We have to check on the ponies who can't move that fast, because some of them need help. There's a few pegasi who find the oldest and slowest ones and do pressure carries, and a couple of unicorns who aren't Miss Twilight and can teleport with other ponies going with them anyway. They go for the riskiestest highest-risk cases. But that still leaves a lot of ponies.

When it's just me and my daddy running, it's okay. We're both earth ponies and he's always been faster than he looks, mostly because he needs to get from Cookery to Candy before the customer really starts screaming. But when we did the drills, we had to run with all kinds of ponies. Pegasi can take care of themselves, but unicorns are kind of slow. I think that's because so much of their strength winds up in their horn. It's hard to keep up with a unicorn because most of the time, you keep getting ahead and then the unicorn is evacuating all by herself and that's bad.

My daddy was in Canterlot when Tirek came. I told you that. He didn't get drained, not then. He was trying to take care of his employees and customers because that's where he was, and he got most of them out. It's not his fault for being in Canterlot, because he's just so busy. He did everything he could to get home and he nearly died.

When the town alarm went off, I had to do evacuation at my house and all the servants got out okay, after I made sure they were going the right way and took Cameo with them. (She's my pet and she can fly, but she might have gotten lost. I have to keep an eye on her all the time when we're outside because she's so small. So I sent her ahead, just to make sure.) But there's more ponies than that, and when I looked towards Canterlot and saw Tirek, I thought some ponies were going to be really scared. I was really And they couldn't run if they were just standing in one place all shaking and stuff, or if their wings were locked or they couldn't fly at all.

Evacuations have to be done properly. If one pony doesn't get out, then it's all gone wrong and because my daddy wasn't there, somepony had to make sure it went right.

That's important.

He would not act.

Miss Fluttershy has told me that he jested about it: that to act directly would surely lead to a violation of his parole, because nopony recognizes when he is trying to do good. All of that vast power was largely used for his own amusement: something which still created problems because much like the entity, that sense of humor also existed in the singular.

He has, on at least one occasion, asked others to move on his behalf: the sole time I am aware of came with multiple extenuating circumstances. But when it comes to the sort of thing we ask our Bearers to do, or the Guard, or any pony who might simply see another within a moment of danger -- he did not personally raise a single talon.

We did not seek him during the evacuation because he was perfectly capable of moving himself. And we did not think to request his help, because no help would have ever been expected.

I did not mean to find him.

I thought I had to find somepony who couldn't make it out on their own, or just galloping all over town was going to feel really stupid. Especially with all the adults yelling at me to come with them or just leave already. They didn't know what I was trying to do and it takes too much time to tell them.

I found Sweetie.

I wasn't looking for her specifically. Just anypony who needed somepony to show them the way out, and the Crusaders sort of needed somepony to show them just about everything, at least until they started seeing a few things for themselves last year. But I thought they would be together, because they almost always are.

After, I found out Apple Bloom and Scootaloo got herded out early. Sweetie's father was in Baltimare. Miss Rarity had to go find the other Bearers so they could figure out what they were doing before the mountain reached us. I'm not sure where her mother was, but I saw her after everypony started to come back into town.

Sweetie told me after that she didn't mean to get separated. There were a lot of ponies moving at once and sometimes the little herds move through each other, which is part of why the evacuation drills really need somepony to make sure they're being done right. She's kind of small even now when she's starting to finally get taller, because unicorns are kind of small a lot of the time. So when one group went through hers, it knocked her away and by the time she got up again, both of the little herds were gone and Tirek was getting close. She was sort of bruised and all disorientated and she didn't look like she could get out by herself, so she needed somepony to lead her and I was the one who found her, so that obviously had to be me.

I thought it would be easy. The mountain wasn't moving very fast, and there were two of us now. So she helped me look for other ponies and we found a few. They got sent ahead.

But the mountain doesn't have to be fast. It just has to get there before you're done.

The shadow was on top of us and we were out of time.

We nearly died.

I told you that too. We nearly died, and my daddy almost died because he was trying to reach us, all the way up until the end he just kept trying to reach us because my daddy loves me and he never stopped trying. But he just would have died with us. So many ponies would have died.

If it wasn't for him.

For Discord.

I had already evacuated my own home. There are a number of children residing there, ones who are engaging in special studies within the city or simply have nowhere else to go. They were safe -- for a little while. Tirek had turned his attention towards the west, perhaps seeking the energies of the Everfree. Or he might have believed that Ponyville might not have evacuated so completely, or that he could catch up to those who were still on their way out. We have the mountain in the capital, and so we have myriad tunnels within the stone: seldom used, unsuspected by most of the populace, but carefully maintained. (I thank whatever magic placed them there.) They can lead to safety, or serve as places in which to shelter. Our nearest neighbor does not possess that level of benefit.

Intellectually, I realized that the Princesses would have already cleared the area. But I needed to hear it from a Guard, because I know something of how my friend thinks. The Guard would have been trying to get Princess Celestia out first, and she would have been trying to stay as long as possible. The same would have been true of her sibling: both trying to help until the moment their presence began to risk all.

Tirek was well along his new direction. But I had to be SURE. I needed to know that my friend was all right and once I entered the palace grounds, that took but seconds. So after that, I did my best to tend to those who had remained behind, to ensure the evacuation succeeded. They required comfort, those who had been drained. Some needed more than what I could provide, but those who remained were doing whatever they could.

There were some for whom no help could be offered. I closed their eyes.

And after a time, it reached the point where I was searching the palace for the lost. The drained. Those who might have decided that there was no way forward.

It brought me to the tallest tower.

You think of the dumbest things when you're about to die.

Did that ever happen to you? You've got that sword, so I guess you've fought stuff. Other centaurs, or stranger things. You talked about where you came from as if it was a place where being attacked could happen any time, and maybe that's why you have a sword at all. And if you get attacked, you can feel like you're going to lose. That really only happened to me with Tirek, at least for dying. I felt like I almost lost my daddy once before, but it was the kind of loss where we had to talk for a really long time and then I got punished. But I had my daddy when the punishment was over, so the bad stuff was sort of worth it.

Even with all the things which happen in Ponyville, Tirek was the first time I felt like I was going to die. And I was looking up at his hoof, because it felt like that was where the pulling was coming from. I was trying to move and get Sweetie moving and get my daddy to stop moving, but I was looking up too because the hoof was coming down and I had to see how close it was. How long we all had. And there was a lot of shadow, but Sun was still going to be up for a few more minutes and so there was some light too.

I saw little glints of metal in his giant hoof. Like he'd stepped on a bunch of really tiny nails with the points all up. Or maybe it was Guard armor. Lunars, because the glints were almost that kind of bright. And then I was thinking about how if you get metal in your hoof, you have to get it out fast because if you don't it's an infection.

I thought he might die from infection, with all that metal in his hoof, because he was too big to try getting any of it out. I hoped he would.

I thought I should help that happen a little faster because I was going to die anyway.

I used to have a tiara. It was my mommy's tiara when she was my age. She gave it to me when I was born. It was really pretty. Cameo liked to ride in the center of it, like a living jewel. (She's a scarab from Saddle Arabia. Maybe I should have said that earlier.) My daddy keeps asking me if I want to get another one and I think the only reason I should is so Cameo can have a new place to rest when we go out together, but I can't find one I like.

I used to have a tiara because Sweetie and I gave it to Tirek.

His hoof was so big, and it was like everything about the hoof had gotten bigger at the same rate. You have hooves. You know all about the little cracks and imperfections, things you only see with a really good magnifying glass. (I guess maybe you can feel them with your fingers? Can you bend that way? It looked like stuff might get in the way when you bend too much. But those looked sort of soft under the sweater, so maybe you can push them aside?) They're flaws which are too small to worry about most of the time. I'm not sure I have any because my hooves are perfect, but I know other ponies do. And centaurs, because Tirek had them and they'd gotten bigger when he did.

Sweetie was looking up too, because she was scared and her soul was getting pulled right next to mine. We weren't going to have our magic for more than another second or two, and then we weren't going to be alive. So I yelled about my tiara, and she understood.

I didn't know Sweetie was so good at understanding stuff. I barely had the chance to yell anything before she knew what I meant.

Her horn lit up, and she jammed my tiara into one of the cracks. Tirek even helped a little because her magic was sort of pulled up towards where the glints were, just before she lost her corona. I heard my tiara bend and break as it went in, and it made me happy because he'd never get it out again and his hoof would probably be leaking pus in a day or two. Pus is gross. I bet it's worse to have a hoof infection when you're as big as a mountain and your leaking hoof has to take all that weight.

I would have been okay with dying next to her after that if I could just get my daddy to leave.

I went back to screaming at him and he wouldn't stop trying to reach us.

He almost could have been watching the sunset.

Sun was a few minutes away from dipping below the horizon. (I told myself that we'd won that much.) The sky was streaked with orange and rose, in those portions where Tirek's giant form didn't block it out. He was just starting to come into Ponyville, and Discord was in the tallest tower, staring into the west. Watching Sun descend, or watching him.

It is surprisingly easy to spot emotions upon his features, and I think that is because he exaggerates them. His face is like no other in the world, and that should make him harder to read. But a child hardly wishes for anypony to guess at what they might be feeling. Or... perhaps I was simply trying to understand chaos, up there in the tower. Applying my own interpretation to what I saw, just so something would make sense at the end of the world.

I can't say what he was truly feeling or thinking when I came across him, with his arms hooked over a balcony which had raised itself to suit his curving posture. But I have spent too many hours of my life trying to negotiate settlements to end the often-petty conflicts between those who can claim 'noble' in bloodline only. And to my eyes, he seemed strangely like an entity who had been considering an offer.

I did not expect to find him there in the tower. (Even after his parole, he never truly lived in the palace. Rumors claim that he has a home of sorts, which his power allows him to visit at will. But if so, perhaps only one has ever seen the modern version, and I am reluctant to ask her for details.) I did not expect to find him anywhere. But you frequently come across chaos when you least expect it.

He was looking to the west, seeming oddly thoughtful. And I had moved among those who remained, so many of whom were part of the palace staff. Walked through the ghosts of rumor. Tirek was almost in Ponyville. The Bearers would be waiting there, and the rumor said they were going to try something. Our heroines (and hero) had never truly failed us before, but -- this was Tirek. The greatest weapon our Bearers possess is the strength of the bonds between them -- but that strength expresses itself as magic. None knew what they meant to try, and none knew if it could work.

He looked like someone who was mulling over an offer. But his first friend was perhaps moments away from the fight of her life, and it would take place in the west.

I asked him what he was doing. (In retrospect, the words slipped out.) He glanced down, and he seemed rather surprised to find me there: his eyes came within tail strands of my monocle before going back to their sockets. But then he casually snapped a talon, and the floor rose up beneath me. It brought me closer to his normal sight line. I suspect he was trying to be accommodating.

He told me that he was just thinking. And he kept looking at the sunset. At Tirek's back.

It was strange, looking at Tirek. The growth almost matched his pace of travel. He didn't shrink into the horizon: he just took up the same amount of it as he moved.

I thought about Discord's power. All of the things he had done to the world when he was its enemy, and all the things he might be able to do for it. But he was just watching, when his friend was potentially on the verge of death. Doing nothing more than serving as audience, for a play in which he still might not see most of the roles as being REAL.

The Bearers might have a plan. But it was Tirek, and in that moment, in the presence of power, I thought of Discord as being our last, best chance. A chance which had chosen to simply watch, and one I had found after a long climb of trotting past the dead.

It made me angry.

I want to believe that it would have angered anyone.

I have been angry before when serving as intermediary, for so many nobles can be petty and their little grudges grind against the soul. I do my best to remain calm while planning suitable channels for the emotion.

For what happened next, I planned none of it.

I told him that Miss Fluttershy was out there. He hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

"She can take care of herself," he said. (I have reviewed it so many times as to remember every word.) "She always does. And if it all went wrong, if it went that far --"

I remember his talons drumming into the edge of the balcony. Through it, with no damage to anything.

"-- I could go save her," he shrugged with uneven shoulders. "That IS what friends do, correct?"

"Save her."

"Yes," he casually said. "That much would be simple enough. If I was quick. I could take her somewhere that he could never reach --"

"-- what about her charges? Her animals?"

His tail nearly lashed into my flank.

"...yes," he half-spat. "I suppose she would want to bring them along, if only to have something pointless to do when she should be spending that time with ME. Very well: Fluttershy and the animals. All of them. Including the rabbit. And I suppose she'll mope behind her mane for moons if I don't also take the OTHER thing which, for purposes of amusement only, we could describe as her half-tamed pet --"

"-- which means they'll need land," I interrupted.

A burst of air emerged from his lower lip and ruffled the antler.

"This is becoming unnecessarily complicated," he declared. "Very WELL: we also take the cottage. Grass and gardens and growing things in the sod of her roof. Are you quite --"

"-- and her friends?"

"She has ME. Personally, I feel I'm being unusually generous just by agreeing to bring that semi-feral --"

"-- she wouldn't have met you without her friends! You wouldn't know her, or be anything to her if it wasn't for what they all did!"

I remember the edge of the balcony glowing with something which was not quite heat.

"FINE! For services rendered! Her friends, and I suppose you'd like me to include their FAMILIES in that? Regardless of the risk? Don't you UNDERSTAND?"

He hesitated again.

"Every second I use my powers within range of --"

"And where do they live?"

"So we're up to the TOWN now? We started with --"

"IT'S ALL CONNECTED!"

I didn't mean to shout. I regret that.

"If you save her alone, she'll hate you for it! Save the animals and she'll hate you for leaving her friends, bring them along and it'll be resentment for sacrificing the town! Protect the town and she'll never forgive you for giving up the nation! Save the nation and lose the world! If you're her friend, if you ever wanted to protect her, then you have to try to understand! Everything is connected to everything else! You're tied to her, to more than just her, and that ties you to the world! YOU CAN'T CARE ABOUT JUST ONE THING --"

"TARTARUS CHAIN YOU!"

I know how that must look on the page, Miss Nightwatch. But that is how it felt. As if the words took up the world. He was staring directly at me, leaning forward, overshadowing me as his form began to twist against itself, and I could feel the rage in those red eyes. I could see a million deaths within them, endless varieties of my own demise playing out within near-infinite reflections. The very tower was catching fire around us, and yet the only heat came from his heart.

It took me days after it ended to realize what the real emotion had been. That there was hatred, and nearly all of it had been directed towards himself.

His last words to me were a scream. The boundless anger of a child taking the first step into adulthood and leaving the protection of petulance behind.

"WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE RIGHT?"

And he was gone.

The fire was gone. The tower was just as it had been, leaving me at the normal level of the floor.

I was disoriented, from fear and confusion. I didn't know where he had gone. I tried to hook my forelegs over the balcony's rim, to see what was happening.

Light travels faster than sound. I saw it begin.

Then I heard it.

I did not think about what he truly is.

About what would happen.

I am responsible.

There was a flash of light. I see that light in my dreams sometimes, just so there can be somepony who could see it again.

And then Discord was there.

He was a little bigger than he usually is, but not much. I think it was just so Tirek could see him better. He showed up between me and Sweetie and my daddy, so he was sort of in the shadow. But the light got Tirek's attention, and I guess he must have looked down or something. I didn't have a good view for that.

The last thing Discord ever said was "A world where YOU'RE the only one with magic would be very boring."

He snapped his talons.

And he sort of expanded, only he did it without getting bigger. It was like watching ice becoming water becoming steam, all at once. He blurred at the edges, and Tirek was pulling at everything, everything and everypony and everyone. Discord turned himself into something which would be easier to pull, and he got pulled first.

Tirek just took him in. All of him. Some of it went into the hoof, around the glints. And he laughed, and his muscles swelled more, and the hoof started to become the sky.

Then he screamed.

Ponies, and the other sapient species of our world, possess magic. But when the magic is taken away, something of us remains.

I have spoken to the witnesses who were there that day. The children and Mr. Rich, of course, but also those who were closing in. The Bearers were starting to make their move: they came close enough to see most of it. And of course, at the size Tirek had attained before the end, it was easy to see what was happening to him.

Discord IS magic. Thaums which have the capacity for thought. He allowed himself to be absorbed: the whole of his power, everything he was.

That included his consciousness.

There was a new power in Tirek's body. But there was also a mind directing it, and that mind worked as quickly as it could.

There was a hoof above us, as big as the sky. Then it was a fluffy white pillow with feathers drifting down. Then it was a hoof again.

But the pulling had stopped.

I got up, even when I felt weak and sick. I got Sweetie up, and Tirek's hoof crashed down behind us because his legs were going all over the place. He didn't have any control over them.

And when he tried to walk, he didn't always have legs.

Tirek had taken in the power of change. That power began to change Tirek.

I saw his back distort. There were scales for a moment. Long spikes, like those of a giant cactus. His arms lost their bones, then gained them back in new configurations. He was screaming in agony as his skin bulged, distorted, and stopped being skin entirely.

He had absorbed Discord. But he had no control over what he had taken in. That magic had permeated him with a simple plan, because true chaos contains some small amount of order and so plans are possible.

Discord took Tirek apart from the inside. Flowed through his body, going for all of the magic which had been absorbed before, and redirecting it.

Sending it out.

Sending it home.

There was power going everywhere. Some of it was visible, like unicorn coronas. There were things like flying heat haze. And there's stuff besides that, because some of it went into me and then I was strong again. Some of the light part touched Sweetie and her horn lit up.

But it wasn't all controlled. Tirek was fighting, clawing at himself to make it stop and that was easier when his hands were turning into claws. All kinds of light and haze were flowing over his body, mixing together. Sometimes, a burst would come off. One big one made a crater where the best swimming hole used to be. I saw another head right towards the library, but that's where Miss Twilight was coming from and she managed to deflect some of it. A couple of other buildings weren't so lucky.

(I didn't know I'd lost my house until I got to where it used to be, but we stayed with the Belles for a while and there's enough rebuilt to live in. It's smaller now, but my daddy says it's nice to have a dining room where you don't have to shout. Anyway, Cameo and the servants got out, so it's not like we lost anything important after my tiara was already gone.)

My daddy was trying to herd us away from Tirek because his hooves were coming down everywhere, and so were the feet and claws and whatever those flat things were. But I still saw most of it. His eyes were glowing, but glow was streaming out of them. And he was screaming all the time, but I didn't care because he deserved it.

I saw a few more ponies get their magic back. Then Tirek's head jerked back like somepony had just kicked him in the chin, and something big came off him. A really giant burst, which just streaked off as every color and no color and sort of went into the sky where I couldn't see it. It was like it was turning invisible as it moved. I think that was most of the part which was going to Canterlot, because some more came after it, only not so intense. The directions changed as he got smaller. Different parts of the capital, or maybe going into the Everfree because he got magic from there too.

He was getting smaller and smaller, coming down at the same rate as Sun. But his body was also going back to just being a centaur, only his kind of centaur where it's like he's stone everywhere. And when he was down to about your size (or his size because I never saw him when it started), there was something like steam coming off his skin.

Tirek fell over. That one hoof was split and bleeding, because it sort of shrank around my tiara. I hope it still hurts.

The Bearers were there by then, and Miss Rainbow swooped and tried to cave in his forehead, but Miss Twilight stopped her with a field bubble because she was saying something about not knowing if everypony had their magic back yet and she couldn't be sure what would happen if he died while he still had some of it.

The steam kept coming off Tirek after he was on the ground. And then the steam sort of clumped together, and there was almost light. There should have been light, because the steam wanted to become Discord again.

It couldn't.

I never thought about what he truly was. That he was at more risk than anyone.

We have magic. He IS magic, the most powerful entity we know to exist -- but that power still has limits. The Princesses say that magic and minds assembled in bulk could stand against him to some degree, and perhaps that is why he did not choose to face Tirek from the outside: because so much power in a single place might have resisted. Even as the enemy, he never affected the world entire, not all at once.

There is a core at the heart of his power, and that power would normally rebuild over time. Lost thaums are restored. But until then... does each effect he creates cost him the tiniest fraction of himself, until energies can return? The best of our thaumatologists have studied what happened, and most now believe that is the case. Like ourselves, he uses his strength to create magic. It is simply that with Discord, his strength is also his self.

He might have thought that he could step in just long enough to save that which was precious to him. Even then, there would have been a risk. But to do what he did...

I have also wondered if the restoration of our magic did as much damage as the battle from within. He had to send every portion of power exactly back to where it belonged, after all. Something he would have regarded as agonizingly orderly.

There was enough left of him to try and separate from Tirek. But just enough for the attempt. There is no consciousness, no thought. The threshold of his energies is below the point which would allow them to rebuild of their own accord. He exists as the barest remnants of a broken storm, carefully moved back to that tallest of the palace's towers for protection.

He was the enemy, once. It would have been so easy to call him a monster.

He saved the world.

He may have died for us.

It's my fault.

Miss Fluttershy landed right next to him, and her tears were falling all the way through him. Miss Twilight had to keep her from trying to nuzzle, just in case that made things worse. And everypony started to come back into town, Sun was down and Moon came up, the Guards just kind of appeared and put all sorts of chains on Tirek, and all of the pegasi got together and started to move what was left of Discord.

They said he might not be dead yet. But he didn't move or talk, and all that's there was something less than steam. There's no light. No magic. He doesn't laugh. I think that's how we'll know he's okay, if he thinks something is funny.

We keep asking to see him. To know how he's doing, because the palace says they're trying to make him better. But nopony will tell us, or tell Miss Fluttershy when she was his friend.

He did it all for us and we're not allowed to know if he's ever going to be okay.

I know it was wrong to hate you for what happened. I know it wasn't you there, because you're not that big and you're softer. But no one ever gave their life for me before. I can't get at Tirek because he's in Tartarus, and I can't see Discord because nopony will let me, and you're just sort of there. I don't know why you're here, or how you got here. But you're here when Tirek isn't and when Discord should be.

But I believe you, when you said you miss your mommy. I'm sorry you look so scary. I don't think you mean to.

You cried for the ones who died. Maybe you'll cry for Discord. I don't think centaur tears are the cure, but he might appreciate it anyway.

You can write me back if you want. I think you need somepony you can write to. But please write in Equestrian. I don't think any of my daddy's clerks know how to read Centaur.

And if it's okay, could you please ask the Princesses how Discord is doing? Maybe they don't have a rule yet which keeps you from asking. That sort of thing only comes after it happens. I know.

If yes, please tell me. I can teach you how to ask properly.

Sincerely
Yours Truly
With Oh Whatever
Diamond Tiara Rich

I suppose that in some viewpoints, what I am about to tell you would be seen as classified information. But as it is something which Guards have clearance to know, I am choosing to regard it as informing you slightly in advance.

In the time of Discord's enmity, portions of his power would linger after the active (or passive) effects had departed. This energy soaked into the land itself, along with certain portions of the seabed. Where things were at their worst, it left behind what we call chaos terrain: patchwork nightmares where the environment -- and sometimes, the rules -- changes every few hoofsteps.

But it also left something else.

A rather odious font of information once advised future researchers to think of the world as an oyster of sorts, and Discord's energies as the irritating sand. As much as I loathe the source of this comparison, it remains accurate. Over time, protective layers are built up around those lingering thaums, isolating them. The final result is an ever-shifting jewel: the chaos pearl. Each one encapsulates a small portion of Discord's power.

Each one, with that energy discharged into his form, brings us that much closer to restoring him.

They are the rarest of jewels, and can only be found in the most dangerous of locations. The palace has been carefully acquiring whatever it can for those known to exist -- but for the most part, we find ourselves needing to hunt them down. Even so, the maximum supply may be decidedly limited.

I have consulted with the Princesses on the possibility of finding new pearls, as Tirek was generating a number of strange effects during the battle: possible attempts to fight off the intrusion. This has led some of our researchers to believe that a portion of Discord's power may have been scattered. However, the Princesses have told me that the pearls take decades to form.

Ultimately, it does not matter. There are either enough pearls out there, or there are not. The only way to find out is to track and acquire them all. I will collect all of those available in my lifetime and should that not be enough, I hope for somepony else to take up the quest should new ones appear after my death. For now, I will do what I can. I have learned how to track them down, I am traveling with extremely capable, multi-talented and versatile company, and I can see the change in the storm with every portion of energies returned.

I will stay in Canterlot long enough to both arrange and host your party. I look forward to seeing you there and invite you to ask me anything you might need to know at that time: it would simply be best to do so in privacy. After that, I will do my best to remain in touch, although I hope you will understand that my travels make it difficult to maintain a regular correspondence. And until we gain the chance to speak directly once again, I ask you to remember this: no matter what anypony might try to make you believe, Miss Cerea, no portion of the multiple tragedies produced by Tirek could ever be your fault.

But one of them is my responsibility.

And I will not stop.

In Hope, I Remain
Fancypants Legatus
House Paldinia

Delusional

It's someone else's fault.

She keeps thinking about that, as she huddles in the near-darkness of unfair exile. There are ways in which the unicorn mare hates that thought, especially in the formatting of it -- but the repetition is a necessity. She did not mean to commit a crime, and so there was no crime at all. All she did was start a fire, a little fire, and the fact that it spread -- well, she already figured that one out, didn't she? The feather-duster moved the heat. Burned down her own apartment to make the sensible ponies who share the unicorn's beliefs look like criminals.

That's what fanaticism does to Guards. Devote your life to the wrong cause, regard the world through the tiniest possible pinhole of a viewpoint, and all possible sanity collapses into that single gap. The unicorn's also been thinking about that, because thinking is so much of what she gets to do in her exile, trapped in something very much like a prison. A prison for the innocent.

She's been thinking about the nature of fanatics, and it makes her grateful that she isn't one. But when the only view her cell (because it's a cell, she knows it's a cell now and nothing told to her by those who occasionally visit can change that) offers is a vista upon madness...

There were CUNET members who helped to move her out of Canterlot, keeping her ahead of the misinformed search for somepony whose only crime was thinking properly. (She had spent her entire life before that in Canterlot and, after finally realizing just how mentally ill the majority of its residents were, had confined most of that life to a few safe blocks of it.) But they moved her into Ponyville.

She's currently in the upper floor of a rental house, only it hasn't actually been rented because that would apparently create a paper trail and so sneaking her in was just one more way of making it harder for others to track her. At least, they called it a rental house. It is, in her opinion -- no, her knowledge, something which has only been reinforced through the repeated accumulation of facts -- an extension of Tartarus. Because the ramp to the upper level is treacherous and one of the bedroom walls slants harshly inwards, the pipes creak horribly when used and that means she can only risk using them when there's either nopony around or there's so much noise on the street as to cover for her. She can't even have light unless she's so far away from a window as to fully confine all traces of illumination, and that light can't come from her horn because a device might malfunction long enough to activate itself, but those lumens aren't going to have sparkles.

At night, most of what the unicorn gets to do is sit in the dark. (She doesn't sleep when she should, and her waking hours are becoming more irregular by the week.) She can't go to the cinema, not that she did much of that in the first place because the entertainment industry is filled with those who hold pro-Diarchy views and so nearly every production is unsuitable. It's the same reason she didn't read much, not when it came to novels and schoolbooks. In both cases, the stories she told herself were so much better.

She doesn't go out. There's a rear exit from the building (and for some reason, it was the only door that was well-oiled at arrival) and she's been given a disguise of sorts, but... her natural hues are perfect, and she refuses to trap herself in the minimal ventilation of her cell for the hours required for the stink of fur dye to go away. Additionally, she is under strict orders (orders!) not to use her field, her birthright, and to expect her to exist among the freaks while wearing a hat...

Sometimes unicorns sneak in through that back door, deep under Moon. They bring her food, and that's just about all they ever bring. She doesn't understand why they refuse to make her more comfortable. Yes, there isn't supposed to be anypony in the house, but she had an idea! They can just claim to be renovating the property. Surely a furnished home would rent for more bits than one which was empty, right? Especially if decorated by somepony with taste, which she's sure will make it the only desirable residence in the entire so-called town. So they can bring her a bed, and a couch, and --

-- but they say that's too suspicious.

It's almost as if signing over control of her bank account didn't mean anything. (She agreed that it was a good idea, after a while. There are obviously certain expenses in keeping her safe, even if she isn't sure what most of them are.) She would be buying her own furniture, at least if those who should understand the unfairness of her plight didn't donate to her from the pureness of their unicorn hearts. She was waiting for that to happen, and...

...apparently still too suspicious.

They aren't even bringing her newspapers.

Actually, that part doesn't sting so much any more. She used to think she needed the articles. It's a big world, and that means it takes a lot of words to tell you which parts of it have to be excluded. Twice-daily updates on why the majority of 'sapients' aren't allowed her to direct her energy in needed turn: it's certainly possible to hate just about everyone on principle, but doing so all at once is exhausting.

Every edition gave her a target for the day. A schedule of sorts. But now she's on her own, and with no fresh suggestions for targets...

She's been... focusing. That feels more efficient.

At night, she huddles in the dark and suffuses the shadows with the strength of her loathing. Whenever she feels tired, she retreats to the darkest part of her cell and uses her field to charge the precious device which is supposed to protect her nightscape, keeping the public mask of Nightmare out. But during the day, she can find herself feeling the need for reminders on why that loathing is the only sane response, and...

There's a risk. There's always a risk. (On two occasions, that risk almost came right up to the door.) Those who visit tell her that, over and over. They repeat themselves so much that at one point, it almost felt as if they'd decided she wasn't capable of truly understanding. But she's a unicorn, the equal to her fellows (although increasingly, it feels like she's the only one who sees sense) and the superior above all others. She understands risk perfectly, like the fact that there was just about none in starting a fire upon the feather-duster's door. And besides, no CUNET members are ever around during the day, so it's not like they're going to catch her at it, now are they?

There's a window on the upper level at the front of the rental. It's in a small room which shows signs of having had a carpet poorly stripped away, a space which stinks of dust and old yarn. The curtains drawn across it are thick, but they're not so heavy that they can't be nosed (and the base level of that insult!) aside. Just enough to let her peek out.

Under Moon, she hates. Under Sun, she seeks reminders for why that hate is necessary and for that, Ponyville provides.

On the street below, children play. The worst part of that is that they play with each other, possessing no regard for exactly how the group has come together. They haven't even recognized that there shouldn't be a group at all. And then they can't work out just what the rules should be for the newest of games, but that problem is solved through the advice of a passing donkey and they're listening to him, they're listening when she can't share anything brought to her by the elevation of perspective, including her knowledge of just how badly the toupee sits upon the bald head.

There are times when it's worse than that. Mixed-species playgroups can be blamed on improper education, but looking at the street later in the day gives her the chance to spot couples. Associating with proper unicorns meant not having to deal with that, and every sin which trots by has the chance to produce the next generation of corruption.

But it's all she has to watch. So she makes up stories in her head about the ponies she sees on chill autumn days (the cell leaks heat), because at least a suitably painful ending can be arranged in fiction. And every so often, the street provides a moment which could almost pass for drama, if the results just weren't so nauseating.

There's a unicorn family who lives close by. Entirely unicorns, for the very little that's worth when the youngest freely associates with an earth pony. She's watching the two fillies trotting towards that house now, too close together, always too close together, and the unicorn is holding her head a little higher today. The tail is closer to a natural loft and if that's been produced by the proximity of the young clod, that's wrong --

-- but then she sees the familiar.

The familiar comes in from what she thinks of as Stage Left, and she wants to shout. Alert the reporters to her presence even as she takes comfort in their faces, she doesn't know why they're here and advancing on the children, but she understands that it has to mean punishment and she's a direct witness to the righteous at last...

"Just a few questions," the unicorn without the camera says, field whipping a notepad to the ready position. "For those who risked everything because the palace lied to them about the centaur. Now, when you first entered the ballroom, exactly how close would you say you came to dying?"

The centaur? Somepony really brought children into the presence of that monster?

The filly clod looks at the stallion. Just... looks at him. It's all she does, and so the observer doesn't understand why he pulls back by a half-hoofstep.

"You're very boring," the little clod decides. "I could ask a better question than that. Like this one. Did you have to go to school to be that boring? Is there a class where they just take all of the interesting out of you, and then you're just stuck with the same things everypony else says? You can quote that if you want. You can even change a pronoun if you like. So instead of having the paper say 'You are boring' and just making the readers feel that way, even if it's accurate, you can say 'I am boring.' About yourself. Because my daddy says newspapers should have truth in them, and that's a good place for yours to start."

The field around the reporter's horn is beginning to show spikes. The observer likes that. Spikes means anger, the anger is justified, and both the little clod and giggling traitor need to be taught a lesson.

"Do you have any idea," the reporter says, making sure to step out of any potential picture taken by the mare so that any lunge will make it look like the fillies are attacking nothing at all, "what my publication could write about you? If you don't answer a few simple questions? Because without answers, we have to start thinking about what might have happened. Something so horrible that you can't talk about it. When ponies don't have your words to work with, they can imagine just about anything -- "

"Yes," says a stallion's voice as a middle-aged brown body enters from Stage Right. "So let's try to work with words."

He would be handsome, if he wasn't so old. He would also be handsome if he wasn't bearing the exact fur shade to make his clod status into something very nearly redundant.

"And who are you? Somepony who just follows fillies around town --" the reporter begins to challenge -- then stops, as grey eyes narrow. "I know you. Where do I know you from?"

"You can call me Mr. Rich," the brown clod calmly states. "I would give you my first name, but I'm sure you know it. And that in any resulting articles, it's all you'll use. But right now, we're working with words, aren't we? So here's a few to start with: you're harassing minors."

There are other ponies on the street: the observer is just beginning to focus on that. She lost them in the welcome sight of the familiar, didn't know they'd stopped to watch what was taking place. She also completely missed the first stages of what's continuing to happen now. Something the reporter and photographer have yet to notice.

"They're the subjects of a news story," that reporter declares as the spikes become more intense. "I have every right to interview them."

"As Diamond's father," and the voice is far too calm, the tail utterly still, "I have every right to intervene. As a former guest of the Belles, I also consider my daughter's friend to be under my protection. They're minors. You're harassing them. Once is questioning. Twice is persistence. Three times seems to qualify for harassment. It was bad enough that you came onto school grounds -- and by the way, how is your fellow reporter doing? Ms. Slate is surprisingly quick with her back kicks -- but now your team is making the attempt directly in front of me."

"The public wants answers. Unless the public gets them --"

"-- what portion of the public?"

The reporter seizes on the word in a way which almost requires another flare of field. Something which can surround and crush. "The part which shops at your stores! I know you've got money, Filthy, and I also know where it comes from. Other ponies. Right now, you're purchasing --" and the next part is almost a purr "-- let's call it... anti-advertising. I'm sure there's all sorts of articles which can be written about a chain store with thirteen branches --"

"-- sixteen," is still far too calm. "As of next moon, anyway."

"-- and their poor treatment of customers. Customers who'll be happy to tell us all about their miserable experiences with being overcharged and ripped off and dismissed. One customer with a bad story knocks out ten with a good one, isn't that how retail works, Filthy?" The spikes are starting to fade as self-satisfaction puts little ripples into the field's borders. "Customers who won't be coming back. Enough articles, and everypony will stop shopping at your stores -- and you know it."

The pink and white fillies glance back at the brown stallion, who simply holds his ground.

"So it's a choice between my income -- sorry, my customers -- and my daughter."

"Right --"

The brown stallion moves.

She barely sees it happen. Somepony of his age shouldn't be able to move that fast, especially when he has to jump two adolescents in order to narrow the gap. But he moves so close as to be within hoofwidths of the reporter, a surprisingly broad chest just knocked the notepad out of the field and onto the ground, and he's only hoofwidths away, hoofwidths...

The clods aren't a threat. They're nothing to worry about at all: CUNET teaches that and in all cases, it's just reinforcing the obvious. Nopony at casting range ever has to worry about a clod.

This clod is close enough to make sharp contact against a lit horn, and just happens to possess what might be twice the reporter's physical strength.

"You're right, in a way," that too-calm voice continues, breath blasting into the reporter's nostrils. "I get my money by exchanging goods for it. Some goods. I occasionally need to revise my inventory, because I never want to carry suspect products, or anything which could cause harm. For example, I'm about to drastically cut down on my periodicals section. And you can call that censorship, but... I'm a business owner, the same as your publisher. He chooses which articles to print, and I get to decide whether I'm selling them. Admittedly, sixteen stores isn't much of a dent, but... he'll see it. I have money: that much is true. I get to decide how I'm spending it. And perhaps you're incapable of seeing what you do as harassment -- but I think your employer has his own definition. Something which includes his being dragged into court a few dozen times. Because you made this a choice between customer and daughter, and when you did that, you forgot a few things."

The reporter is pulling back. Shrinking into his own withers. The observing mare is ashamed of the display, the lack of resistance, not to mention the way the photographer hasn't gotten any shots of a mad clod. She knows she would have been stronger than that.

"You have an interesting definition of 'everypony'," the clod peacefully states. "And 'public,' for that matter. You want me to hear it as everypony in the world. But you really mean 'everypony who agrees with you.' And that's not enough. I'll lose business: I accept that. Income. But by offending you, I might just acquire a few new friends, because some of those who don't agree with you might wonder if somepony who's made you this angry is a pony worth buying from. Because in your way, you just declared war. And you also forgot it's a condition in which there are multiple sides. Your idea of a war is one where the other side never fights back. I can fight, you know. With words, and to the very last tenth-bit, if it comes to that. Because you just asked me to choose between my customers and my daughter."

Less than a hoofwidth away now.

"And I can only afford to lose one."

The reporter stares at him. Looks to the photographer for backup, for assistance, for anything --

-- and finally sees the other ponies on the street. The ones who've been using the last minute to come that much closer.

"You..." the reporter stammers. "You..."

The clod pulls back slightly. Looks behind him, to meet his daughter's eyes.

"Apparently he missed the class where they would have taught him a second word."

She laughs. So does the unicorn filly, and a good portion of the crowd. They're laughing at their betters...

"...you don't know what the centaur might have done to your precious daughter. You don't care..."

"I recently saw a rather interesting short film," the clod states. "I don't think it would be to your taste. But because I am a businesspony and you're new to this settled zone, let me just say --"

He smiles, and all of the warmth goes out of the world.

"-- welcome to Ponyville."

The right foreleg is raised. Then it comes down, and chips fly from the stone at the same moment the circle of ponies begins to close.

"Now leave."

The weaklings do. The knackered, good for nothing except being kicked onto a scrap heap. She just came up with that insult based on a number of truths about the butcher shop in the Heart which nopony of stupidity has ever accepted and as far as she's concerned, they deserve it.

Unlike some of the other natives, the brown clod doesn't give chase. He just shrugs to himself, then accompanies the fillies on their journey until they're all out of her sight. And then there's nothing familiar except for a street which she's just about got memorized, nothing to watch, nothing to do except think.

She isn't keeping track of the days. (There doesn't seem to be much point, especially given how odd her sleep hours have become.) Doing so just reinforces the walls of her cell. But there are times when her Canterlot life begins to feel like a dream, as if she's been unfairly locked in this prison forever --

-- there's a bright color coming in from Stage Right, something moving with joy and confidence, she misses it for a crucial moment as the hated words once again blaze through her mind --

-- it's almost like she lives here --

-- and the bright pink body suddenly stops moving.

The clod mare's head turns, and the curly mane bounces. Blue eyes look up and the unicorn is already pulling back, she has to pull back because this is the third time, the third time the clod has stopped and it's a fat clod, the fattest thing ever, a tenth-bale over the ideal for that build (not that anypony should ever want an earth pony's build) and Mrs. Panderaghast is simply stately, but the clod is fat.

The unicorn must have pulled back in time, there's no way the clod could have seen the curtain drop into place...

She can't see the clod any more. It... it has to be leaving. It has to leave this time.

And then it feels like the house is shaking.

There's a little vibration which comes up through the wood of the front ramp when somepony climbs it. She found that out the hard way, because this is the third time and the clod is clearly just that fat. The first time, it stopped just past the base. The second felt like it came halfway up. And this time, this time the unicorn can hear the hoofsteps making their curious way towards the door, coming all the way up and it has to leave it has to leave it has to leave...

It knocks.

"Hello?"

One forehoof rap exactly.

A proper unicorn would announce themselves by... doing something else. She can't seem to think of what. The same thoughts are going around and around in her head and she doesn't live here she doesn't she lives in Canterlot she's going back to Canterlot not here this isn't her home it's a cell a cell she doesn't live here she doesn't.

The next sound is -- it's like part of a knock. Like the clod found some way of stopping halfway through.

"I..." comes up to her from outside. There's an odd amount of pain in it, as if the clod is fighting off a sudden headache. Good. It's deserved. "I... Hello? Is... anypony home? I just thought..."

Silence.

And then the too-heavy hooves are making their way down the ramp.

The unicorn risks a glance through a new gap, just long enough to see the clod looking at the prison with open confusion. And then she leaves, exiting to what, in the best of all possible worlds, would be Stage Nowhere.

It's the third time, and the clod knocked on the door. It's as if it knows there's somepony inside. But it can't know...

She has to get her out of here, soon.

There must be somewhere they can take her. If Trotter's Falls just hadn't been compromised by the palace...

...there has to be a safe place left. There must be. She knows it, and so it becomes true. She'll make them move her. They can't risk having her found, even when she's done nothing wrong.

She hates this so-called town. There's mixed couples and no standards and the weather is always late. Last week, just before the half-approach up the outer ramp, the bright pink clod was talking to a witch. They have witches and the zebras need to go back where they came from. She's surrounded by mindless fanatics who don't even know how corrupted they are. She thinks about the same things over and over and it makes her smarter, but she still doesn't get her newspapers and so she never gets to find out who she's supposed to be hating now.

But maybe she doesn't need that part.

She could try to hate the foal's family, because they chose to live so close to a deviant. But maybe they didn't know...

...actually, they had to have known...

It's someone else's fault.

Someone. She has to think that word, over and over again, when nopony ever should.
It's the centaur's fault for existing. That's what forced her to act. Anypony of sense would have acted, and she just got there first.
The centaur continues to exist.
All the others are doing is marching and writing, and the centaur is still there.

...somepony has to do something about that.

There are those who, if they knew about what was happening in the palace on this night, would claim that the sisters are putting too much thought into it. Too much effort, too much time, too much of everything which could clearly be devoted to granting what the claiming party wants: something which should obviously be done with no thought at all. Those parties are wrong.

The siblings have been thinking about this for some time, because it's just that important. There was a period of individual consideration, they eventually found a chance to speak with each other, and now they're talking to somepony else. A mare who knew it was coming, and isn't exactly happy about having to deal with the moment when the inevitable called her away.

Guard armor offers many kinds of protection, and one extends into the social. It can be somewhat difficult to read the body language of somepony who has that much of their form covered by metal: it's the central reason why so many Guards often come across as stoic. But for a pegasus Guard to be effective, there must be two limbs which remain eternally exposed. It's a gap in the armor, a necessary weakness built into that protection, and in the presence of the sisters...

The discussion is taking place in one of the palace's larger secret passages, all the better to accommodate the forms involved. The arcing ceiling is more than high enough for the elder, the width allows the siblings to stand at each other's side, and it still isn't enough to fully contain the sheer amount of awkwardness conveyed by a pair of black wings which seem to have every feather wringing against itself.

The Guard, given a choice, would likely wish to be appear stoic as she fulfills the request: to, as the superior officer, speak with utter honesty about a recruit. But she's also talking about her friend, and so hesitations nearly take over every utterance. Syllables wind up having to chase each other into the musty air of the passage, just to clear the logjam of self-loathing in the mare's throat.

If it had been just about anypony else making the request (something she rather accurately sees as an order), she would have refused. But she knows exactly what's at stake here. Nopony is brought into the Guard unless they can fully recognize exactly what might come of their actions.
Their words.
For so many across the centuries, their death.

"It's the last question, Nightwatch," the elder gently offers. "Take your time."

Silence stills the last of the air's natural flow.

"Um," the pegasus finally resumes. "She... she is kind. Or she wants to be. I think... I think when she was in that house, it was... a lot of chaos, most of the time. No one was doing much of anything to stop it, so she thought she had to, and with everything else that was going on... she had a hard time being kind to the other students, because she had to be an authority figure when she really didn't have any power to enforce it. She just..."

They wait for her. Most of the evening has been cleared for this, and they can wait just about all night if necessary. The pegasus knows it, and the endless weight of patience and duty is what forces the rest of it to emerge.

"...she wants to be kind," the Guard softly tells them. "I think it's something she would offer freely, if she ever had the chance. She's... lonely, I know she's lonely here, but sometimes I think it was like that before. That she was lonely in the household a lot, even when she was surrounded by the other girls. That she might have felt alone in her herd, and..."

The twisting of feathers smoothly transmutes into the vibration of rage.

"...no one should ever feel alone in a herd...!"

The dark tail manages one hard lash before its owner brings it back under control. The sisters wait.

"...um. I'm sorry --"

"-- a natural reaction," the younger smoothly cuts in, "expressed in both privacy and secrecy. The remainder, Nightwatch. When you can."

The pegasus manages a slow breath.

"A suitor -- they would have to impress her," the Guard finally says. "But that's..." and silver eyes slowly close. "...not going to happen now. But she doesn't need that to happen, just to be kind. I think there's something in her which just wants to be kind, to be gentle, and... not scare anypony. That if things had been different in her life, maybe she would just want to sing or read stories. But someone told her to be hard. To fight. And..."

The pegasus' head tilts down, and closed eyes regard the dusty floor.

"...nopony has to earn her kindness. Her respect -- but not kindness." It's almost a whisper. "I... think she feels she has to earn it from everyone else. That she can't ever do enough to keep it. She has to earn it every day of her life..."

Gradually, the wings refold against the mare's sides, until the only movements are those necessary to maintain life.

"Thank you, Nightwatch," the elder gently offers. "We know it isn't easy."

"You have provided the answers we sought," the younger states. "That is all we had asked."

The mare's head comes up a little.

"Is she --"

"-- we have yet to decide," the younger tells her. "But that decision will be made tonight. So there is one additional request: bring her into the gardens for a time. At least two hours."

"We're going to be wandering a little," the elder adds. "Some of that will be on the lower levels. We've already cleared everypony else out of the area. All we're asking is that we know we won't be running into her for a while."

The Guard nods. Begins to turn --

-- stops.

"Um."

The sisters wait.

"...is it all right if I start my shift a little late tomorrow? Um. I know I don't have a commute right now, but I sort of have to go out and do some things before my shift starts, and I'm not sure I can wrap them up in time. It's out in the city, and... um. Maybe thirty minutes late if things don't go all that fast, and they probably won't. So... um..."

"Where in the city?" the younger inquires, and perhaps not as casually as she might have liked.

The black wings begin to rustle again.

"Saratoga Way."

"The theater district?" A dark eyebrow goes up. "Very well. I would hardly deny you the chance to purchase the use of a desirable bench. For which show had you been contemplating attendance?"

"...it's not that," the mare awkwardly replies. "I just need to see some ponies there. Um. Try to see them. Is it still okay?"

The siblings glance at each other.

"Yes," the younger finally says. "Thirty minutes leeway, if need be. Good night to you."

The pegasus offers thanks, turns, departs from the passage. The sisters wait until they hear the last lock click into place before speaking again.

"Saratoga Way?" the elder repeats. "Without looking for a ticket?"

The younger demonstrates a rather elegant shrug. "At a guess? She is attempting to gain an autograph. Easy enough to allow her that time, sister. She has lost too much: granting half an hour to gain anything back is very nearly the least we could do for her." Stars slowly shift in the twisting mane. "And very nearly the most she will allow us to do."

"So we wait," the white mare quietly says. "Until they're both clear."

It's something they do together, because time spent in the passage is still time in each other's company. And when they're sure the pegasus has managed to get what's probably a rather confused centaur out of the area, they begin their trot.

The younger has no duties scheduled: the elder will postpone sleep for as long as necessary. Hours pressed into service, in which they can do nothing more than think about the decision.

They have waited until the only voices will be their own. It makes it all the easier to listen to the echoes of the world.

Out of the passage, moving through the ancient halls. One of the oldest structures still standing -- but they seldom feel the weight of that age. Others do, but... for the sisters, there is a greater mass of years forever trying to press itself against their spines.

They cannot win any race against the clock. But if they run fast enough, manage to keep up -- it prevents stagnation. They will only be old at the moment they pick a point on the dead calendar as the ideal and fasten their views to it, never to move again. Both have told themselves that as the centuries stretched out ahead of them and as philosophies for preventing internal death go, it seems to be working so far.

But it means they have to keep moving, and doing so when their nation so often prefers the comfort of stability. That tomorrow will be very much the same as today, with Sun and Moon existing as eternal constant.

Both sisters fight for change, whenever they can -- if change is what's needed. But when it comes to the second part of their nation's collective desire, the wish of a world... there is a price to pay for that gift. There always has been, almost from the first moment when they seized control of the cycle.

There is a price, and they are about to decide who might have to pay it.

Nopony is present to hear their hooffalls echo in the halls. Nor are there any to eavesdrop on the words, and so they speak freely.

"She hated doing that," the elder quietly observes. "She wasn't making any attempt to hide it."

"Verbal concealment has never been her strong suit," the younger states. "But... yes. It was difficult for her. And yet she fulfills her duties, Tia. Whatever we have asked, whatever she could provide."

The white head slowly nods.

"There's times when it's a lot to ask."

Quietly, "There are times when we ask for everything."

Proceeding at their own pace, until they reach the barracks doors.

They're open. The residents are out, but... nopony who works in the palace would commit theft, they're both sure Wordia has no idea how to reach this level (but might manage the feat by accident while trying for something more classified, and so both internally vow to commission new locks), and the presence of one resident creates a protective effect: one born not of magic, but from fear. Few wish to intrude upon a centaur's vacant lair, lest the normal occupant return unexpectedly.

Neither sibling is afraid, and so they simply look into the room. Somehow, it feels a little smaller than before, and that's with all the space which had been opened up by the cleaning --

-- no. Not smaller. More... homey, to use a word which is only likely to pass the lips of the elder. It's obvious that someone's living there now. That quality is visible in the set of one bunk, added to the scant possessions arranged around it. And close by, almost within reach of outstretched wing...

They both look at the little nest of half-compressed blankets on the floor. Seeing how thin it is. There's barely any protection against the chill of the floor.

"It was a mat of some sort," the younger quietly offers.

The elder immediately looks at her sibling.

"In her last residence," the dark mare adds. "Something resilient, which covered most of the floor. A far warmer surface than stone..." Which is when she feels the weight of that gaze, and wryly meets it. "My code is not violated, sister. There are things we must discuss on this evening, and that means granting some of the information I have gathered. Doing so for... the usual reason. Given that, revealing the nature of her prior bed hardly feels like a breach of her privacy."

"Blankets?" The word serves as a probe of sorts. Testing to see where the line is.

"Across her back on cold nights. Not on the floor itself." The dark eyes continue to survey the barracks. "When it comes to sleep, comfort for the sake of comfort alone is the dominion of her roommate. I would hope for one to learn from the other --"

-- stops, as dark eyes widen. Narrow again, focusing...

It only takes a moment for the elder to track her sibling's gaze.

"It's not the first time," the taller mare says. "She keeps leaving it open. I've come by a few times, and it's always at the same page."

The younger is now openly squinting at the first page of the sketchbook.

"There is..." It's rare for her words to fade out, almost unknown to catch her struggling for another -- and yet there's a moment where she can be caught trying to find the next. "...something missing."

"Still," the elder quietly states. "It's the first thing she tried to draw. Something which suggests it was the most important. It's been over a moon now, and... there's still something missing."

The younger is still squinting, and the expression has acquired half-tones of something very much like recognition. It makes the older sibling take a chance.

"Do you know wh --"

"-- a theory only," the dark mare replies. "One which has no place in tonight's proceedings." The gaze shifts targets with what certainly isn't indecent haste. "Is that a Guard application? It looks rather old. And the writing --"

"-- it's Blitzschritt's." There's something new in the elder's voice, and a hundred and forty-eight years haven't been enough to let it heal. "The Archives must have sent it over. Even from here, I can spot ibex writing. Every letter almost exactly the same. And it's 'almost' only because it was Blitzschritt. A little hint of curve at the bottom of a character was just about an open act of rebellion."

They're both looking now. One is doing so through a thin layer of moisture.

"A great among the Guards," the younger says.

"A good person."

Silence for a moment.

"I wish I had known her," the younger offers. "I regret --"

"-- something you have no reason to regret," the elder stops her. "This time, Luna... this time, all the regrets are mine."

Two minutes pass, in which they do nothing more than stand together. And then, if only in location, they move on.

The armor is finished.

That's what the girl has been doing for the last few days. Training is over and with the results yet to be determined, there was time to complete the project. Every piece has been rendered by hand-wielded tools and, once they managed to get her something which fit, the occasional kick.

It's finished -- but it isn't assembled. Guard armor can be put together on small statues which exist for nothing else. No such thing was made for a centaur, and so the finished pieces are mostly scattered across the smithy floor. All of them are the same mottled blue-black in hue: a blend which seems to weep steel's frozen tears. Something which didn't exist in the world before the girl entered it. There's an argument to be made that it shouldn't exist at all. You can use chemicals to color it, make it match in that alone, and all of the distortions will still lurk beneath.

The younger's horn ignites, and the dark field surrounds the helmet. Lifts it, carefully rotates the creation along multiple axes.

"Such a strange shape," she mulls. "And this visor. It will cost her range of vision so much of the time. Eye protection, but at a price..."

The elder is looking at the lower fringe of the half-familiar sections.

"That's a Griffonant symbol. One of the oldest ones. Why would she --"

"Coincidence," the younger decides, flipping the visor back and forth as a means of testing the hinges. "There are only so many basic shapes in the world, Tia. Something which might now apply to the plural. I have seen that shape in her dreams, here and there. Simply not with sufficient context to say what it means. However, given the Guard custom, the usual indication would be a symbol associated with her homeland."

"Even so -- acies," the elder pronounces. "Somepony should tell her."

"Agreed," the younger decides. "But not in the name of having her change it. Hardly anypony in our nation would know the symbol --"

With the smallest, briefest of smiles, "I can think of one..."

"-- and," the younger presses on, "even if they should know it, there would be no harm in having her trot about bearing the shorthoof for insight upon her armor."

"Quicktalon," the elder absently corrects.

"As you say." The younger's eyes briefly close, open again, find a new target as the elder shifts to match...

...they have to call this piece what it is, although it takes a moment for each to dredge up a term which generally doesn't get used in this context or rather, in this configuration. As a certain author in the girl's world might have said, you take a piece of metal and beat it out really well there and there and in the case of the centaur's breastplate, you would have to keep on beating for a very long time.

There's also an extra off to the side, rendered with a number of additional beats. (The pegasus had already told them about sending off a request to Ms. Garter upon seeing how tightening straps were cruelly cutting into the bare skin of the girl's upper back and shoulders, and had sealed it with the desperate passed-along hope that replacements could be made without new measurements.)

Attention is paid to the armored gloves (or gauntlets: a word which barely has a local reason to exist). They examine the upscaling of the lower body protection. Each estimates a time for donning, added to another for removal.

The armor, like the girl, is both something new in the world and a distortion of the familiar. But they can see how it would work. They know it will work. There was skill in the creation: perhaps not on the level granted by extra years of experience added to a mark, but the crafting party knew what she was doing.

The crafting party also spent most of the previous day before this trot in the smithy, desperately trying to fix everything which wasn't actually wrong. Right up until the moment when Barding finally shoved her out or rather, shoved as much of her as he could reach. Actually getting her to move had apparently come as something of a surprise -- but Barding is the authority figure in the smithy, and when it comes to dealing with authority figures...

They look at the armor for a little longer. Regarding something which should not exist, while trying to reconcile how it might change the world.

A brief stop is made at one particular cell. The most recent occupant tried to clean it before she left.

A mutual teleport brings them to the outskirts of Palimyno, where a resting town pays them no heed. They stand next to the tall bush which the girl vaulted as a means of first introduction. The last thing she did before the attack began.

Back to the palace.

In time, they come to the balcony of Apex Tower again, and look down upon emptiness: the protestors have gone home, and the staff is always quick to clear the debris. There is almost no sign that anypony had been there under Sun at all, not which would be visible under watchful Moon.

But the younger can see perfectly in the dark, and so she tells her sibling about the little deliberate discoloration to one patch of cobblestone. Something created as a means of telling those who occupy it on a daily basis about just where they should stand.

It's also a symbol.

Most of the capital lies dark. So much of their nation is sleeping. Some of their citizens are about to begin reliving the terror which has haunted their nightscapes for moons.

There's an aspect of peace upon the land, and the sisters recognize it as a falsehood. No matter what they decide tonight, the fear will continue. All of the myriad disguises for that emotion will maintain their focus.

The sisters have been giving this a lot of thought. Some would say too much, that they're taking it far too seriously, that the conclusion is obvious.

They are giving the decision no less than what is required. What it deserves.

"It would have been nice to use the Twilight solution again," the elder finally begins.

The younger favors that with a small snort.

"There is a certain degree of irony present."

"There's a certain lack of five other centaurs --"

"-- not my meaning, Tia." Another, slightly louder snort. "In the case of Twilight Sparkle, each of the five made the choice to initially reach out towards her, for she lacked the ability to do the same -- and the capacity to recognize that such was necessary. In terms of base starting position alone, our current problem is actually more socially advanced. She longs for companionship, for connection, for... friends. But for others to stretch a foreleg in her direction, when four to six limbs have been directed to flee..."

"The --" and the elder stops herself. Shakes her head a little too quickly as the younger watches, and goes back to looking out over the cold city. "I almost said 'the worst part.' There's a choice for 'worst part' stretching out to the horizon."

"And the choice of the moment?"

"If you'll allow me a little more irony," the elder mock-requests, adding just a touch of fully unnecessary foreleg bend. (The younger's answer comes across as 90% smirk.) "The 'worst part' is that she makes friends so easily --" and before the dark mare can say anything "-- once you consider just how much is in the way. If anypony manages to clear those hurdles, then... it's just like Twilight. They want to help her, because they can see how much trouble she's in. How much..." Hesitates. "...pain. Only this time, there is someone reaching back. She connected with Barding, Luna. Barding. No one's ever gotten that far. He's fallen, and she's guiding him out..."

"Nightwatch protects her," the younger observes. "Recently, Acrolith has been watching out for her during the training exercises. The Sergeant did his best. And now a child wishes to be her correspondent, simply so somepony might be listening to one who is so far from home. Who lost her..."

She stops, and the first wisp of fog rises from chilling fur.

"Luna?"

"I am -- trying to decide what I am permitted to say." The words are tight. "This is about our nation, sister, and so much more. That is why I can speak at all, as I did for previous nights when the enemy was at the gate and I alone had gleaned a suggestion of their plans from dream. But for this..."

The elder gives her a moment. As many moments as the younger needs.

Finally, "You once asked me if she was beautiful."

It's not what the taller mare was expecting, and shocked purple eyes slowly focus on the dark face.

"I have seen her mother," the younger continues, with nearly all of her attention directed towards the sleeping city. "Easy enough to describe her, for the daughter nearly is the mother. Simply somewhat smaller, a gap which will naturally close over time. Smaller, and... softer. For to picture the mother, increase height, add to dimensions, and -- grant severity, Tia. Take every gentle line of the daughter's face and etch it with the contours of demand. Frustration when those demands are not met to the expected level, anger in the face of a filly's failure, and..."

The stars in the mane begin to dim.

"...something else. It has been easy to learn more of their expressions, when I see them in the nightscape. The mother is demanding, angry so much of the time, never satisfied -- or so the daughter perceives her. But there is something else there in the harshness of those lines. Something which the daughter has yet to recognize, and so it is also something which I cannot identify. Something almost constant, forever lurking..."

A few subtle shifts of the elder's wings alter the breeze, trying to carry the chill away. More arrives right behind it.

"Strange, for the daughter to resemble the mother so," the younger softly considers. "From what I have seen of their herd, all the stranger. Something... odd. But this is my point, Tia. In appearance, the daughter nearly is the mother. May very well become, given enough time. And the daughter sees her mother as fiercely beautiful. Not just the most beautiful of mares: something perfect. The ideal. A height which she can only aspire to. The daughter nearly is the mother -- and the daughter thinks of herself as ugly."

There's a moment when the elder's forehooves are cantering against the stone.

"...what?"

The younger simply sighs.

"Perhaps not the ideal term," she decides. "But it is in her nightscape, Tia, at any moment when she allows herself to exist in a dream's offering of now. Her form distorts. She continually takes on new fragilities, fresh flaws. There is always something wrong with her, something which she feels renders her unappealing. When it comes to making friends... she might see a mass outreaching towards her as pity: something which might drive her off. I believe she perceives aspects of that in her current relationships, and clings to them simply because they are all she has. And yet, she makes friends easily... for someone who seems to see herself as being unworthy of so much. Of friendship, because she feels she has cost Nightwatch too much simply for knowing her. Of love. In the worst case, it is as the Sergeant suggested: forever chasing a goal which she will never allow herself to reach. And yet, the solution applied to Twilight Sparkle could work -- but how many would be willing to know her? To see her? Even with everything which holds her back from within, she could make friends so easily..."

She stops. Shakes her wings, and tiny pellets of ice fall away.

"...if only she were not a centaur. And that is simply here. I have seen no friends among her herd. No connections at all until the moment she entered her household."

The elder takes a moment for simply breathing, until the increasing warmth from white fur removes all touches of sleet.

"Why didn't anyone reach out to her before?"

Starkly, "I have yet to identify the full reasons. And the partial image I have assembled shall remain within a private gallery. But something happened, Tia. Something crucial, something I have yet to reach. I have delved deeper in the nights before this meeting, and I have not come to it. All I can tell you is that she never truly felt like part of her herd, and... something happened. Something which may have led to the distortions she places upon herself in dream."

Three of the tail-streaming stars go out.

"All distort reality around themselves in their nightscapes, Tia. In their waking minds, for that matter." The mane is beginning to lose its inner glow. "They change reality to make their lives into the focus of it. The hero of their own tale, and that process is often described as 'living'. But with her..."

A slower head shake, and the dark mare looks up at a passing cloud. It gains mass from the weight of her stare, becomes almost invisible against the night sky.

"I speak of this because the risk is that great," the younger finishes. "As it has always been."

"We could just leave her in the smithy." It's not quite a proposition. The elder is listing the option simply because the time has come for that possibility to arise, just as surely as the next few seconds will see it rejected. "Expand the area, give her more room to move and Barding space to move around her. There's enough steel work available."

"Isolation," is the counter. "The monster in the basement, pounding out its weapons. Seldom seen, forever discussed, as rumors fly as to why it does not emerge. What it is planning. She can spend time there -- but not a lifetime."

"Diamond talked about the other nations," is the next stage of the inevitable. "Tirek didn't reach everyone. If Torque intervened, Mazein might --"

"-- even with our rather dismal numbers for outgoing tourism," the younger cuts in, "there will always be Equestrians passing through. Always a chance for the stampede, if the local ponies are about. I am not arguing that it would fail to improve her situation, Tia, at least in the short term. But stories travel, even when so few of ours follow. All it takes is one wrong word in the right place."

"Probably spoken by Wordia." It's getting a little too hot on the balcony. "Chase the story as long as it's selling papers, and fear always sells. A riot set off in a new nation..."

"Then perhaps what she needs is the opportunity to create a new tale."

They both think about that for a while.

"There's no guarantees."

"The second Bearer age," the younger points out, "has been, put somewhat too charitably, an active one. She might gain her chance."

"Which is part of the problem."

The shift in a mane gone almost completely dark is just barely visible with the nod. "Yes."

There are those who would say they're treating it too seriously. The decision is obvious, and can be made in an instant. But they need to talk about it, because they know what they're really discussing.

The hiring of a new Guard is a matter of national security, and so the younger can discuss aspects of dream. It's a potential turning point in history, something which makes the elder reflect on every fulcrum moment which came before. Decisions which ended with a white body rising towards Sun on one end of the lever, and a pool of blood spreading out from under the section which had just rammed into ground and grave.

"She's a risk."

"In every aspect. Yes."

Almost a whisper, "We may not be able to help her. It's possible that nopony ever could."

And just as soft, "There are two sides to the vow, Tia. She swore hers. As did we."

"If she hesitates -- if she second-guesses herself at the wrong moment..."

"If her issues cause her to choose the wrong spell, casting a working which fails to meet the needs of the moment, allowing the menace to win..."

"...what?"

"My apologies. Were we still talking about Twilight Sparkle?"

The hiring of a new Guard requires this level of consideration, because the wrong decision will end the world. And they stand under the vault of the sky, each waiting for the other to voice it.

"...Solar or Lunar?"

A tiny star twinkles near the tip of the dark mare's tail.

"Ah. Does this represent my actually being granted a choice? Or do you simply wish to see what I feel is proper before you make any attempt to filch --"

The sigh dissipates one of the clouds. "-- Luna..."

"With me, then," the younger decides. "To keep her alongside Nightwatch. To place her within the public eye, but at an hour when less ponies will actively observe." Gradually, the temperature begins to even out. "And at this point in her life, Tia, with everything which has happened here and in her home, with all that I know of her and have yet to discover..."

Looking at the sky now. At the scant stars visible through the gaps in carefully-arranged clouds, and a bright Moon so close to full.

"...I feel she is one of mine."

Imposter

There are multiple reasons for both animals and monsters to avoid this part of the forest, not all of which came from the ponies -- but some of those associations help to keep the area clear. Evolution allows the survivors of encounters to pass on desired traits, and some base level of knowledge can be granted to the youngest in the form of instinct. It means there's quite a few species across the continent who don't react well to the sight of sparkles in the air, along with a number who treat any thunderstorm as the potential first wave of an attack. Add that to the unnatural sight of the gatehouse, something both clearly constructed and stinking of ponies, and the majority of the midrange predators have decided to steer clear for a while.

It isn't just that, of course. The neurocypher's body has been removed: both shell and meat can be key potion ingredients, and that's something where all one hundred kraals in Pundamilia Makazi will talk trade -- although The Three tend to feel that the selling party should settle for a price of 'And you may get out alive.' But a dying neurocypher, one brought down by violence, will release a pheromone with its last breath, and there were still traces of that in the forest. A signal which lurked below the level which could be detected by pony senses. (The girl, who doesn't know what the pheromone is for, would simply register it as something odd.) Neurocyphers are solitary hunters: they never work in packs, sometimes quarrel over desirable territory, come together just long enough to breed, and any offspring are on their own from the moment of birth -- but there is one way in which they cooperate, and it only comes upon their demise.

The pheromone tells every other neurocypher that there's something in the area which can kill them. It has a way of discouraging claims for what would otherwise be a newly-open territory. And for the species which can register that scent, have some instinctive awareness of what it might mean... well, they know there aren't any neurocyphers around, and the question of just what managed that is going to haunt them for a while.

It will be some time before the normal range of carnivores returns to this part of the forest, and the two mares who are just stepping out of the gatehouse (almost at the exact moment of local dawn, and the little alicorn has been caught yawning) on a chill late autumn morning have been afforded some protection. However, each feels herself to be fairly capable of looking out for her own safety. (The librarian has spent a few years learning when to ask for help, while the performer spends the majority of her travels in solitude and has already learned that when calling out in desperate search of aid, the air doesn't respond.) With the two of them together, a pair of rare magic-related talents more-or-less united for a single purpose... it could be said that anything in the forest which still wants to take a chance on that meal might remain conscious exactly long enough to regret it.

In that view, the Guards who emerge behind them might be seen as unnecessary. In the best case, redundant. And in reality, they're here because with these two mares, there's a very real chance that any major attack could lead to fourteen seconds of excited discussion regarding exactly which spell would be best to use, followed by a lot of bleeding because the brief debate used up all the time available for actually casting any of them.

The little alicorn slowly advanced on the scrap of fabric, which was fluttering somewhat in the forest's breeze. It was dirty now: carrying particles of dirt and fragments of leaves, with a stain worked into the knot around the bark -- but it was still cloth, and that made it easy to distinguish.

She took a few careful steps forward and, because she was so small, what had been a low branch for the centaur wound up involving some rather awkward craning of the librarian's neck, along with a few mostly-unhelpful wing flaps in the hopes of getting a little extra height without actually having to rear up. Rearing up meant eventually crashing back down again and besides, her teacher in all things flight always wanted her to practice.

The performer hung back, staying about six body lengths behind. Watched, and a twitch of corona adjusted her cape into a shield against the chill. It was clearly meant to come across as a dramatic twirl of fabric, and mostly wound up serving as a lumpy drape across two well-packed saddlebags.

"Any reason?" she called ahead. Followed by, with a mix of merry sarcasm and genuine curiosity, "Or is this one of those alicorn things which a mere unicorn wouldn't --"

"-- it's as close as I've come," the librarian quietly said. "To her. I wanted to know what it smelled like." A little more softly, "Tirek had a scent. It was..." Purple eyes briefly closed, and her forehooves dropped back into natural mulch. "...unique. And the larger he got, the stronger it became. Ponyville reeked of it. For weeks. The pegasi did what they could, but there's still times when I find an pocket of undisturbed air. Or I'll see another pony go through one. It's faded, but... it's still enough to set off the memories. And then some of them react all over again."

The performer did something which would have surprised those who thought they knew her. She kept her silence.

"I wanted to see if she smelled like him," the little alicorn finished. "I had to know."

"Does she?"

(The Guards fanned out to secure the perimeter, making no noise and pretending they weren't there.)

"It smells like dirt and leaves," the librarian half-grumbled. "It's been here too long. And I've never had the best sense of smell to start with."

The performer automatically smirked, began to advance. "Well," she proudly announced, "where an alicorn snout has failed, let the world see if the Great And Powerful --"

Light flowed from the librarian's horn, located a small dead branch among the leaves.

"-- ow!" The unicorn mare rubbed at her freshly-bopped snout. "Twilight, do you have any idea how annoying that is?"

"Yes," the librarian calmly replied. "That's why I do it every time you go third-person. Because it's annoying. Come over and take a sniff if you want to. I'm just not sure if it'll do any good."

The taller mare muttered to herself, and greyish-tinged magenta projected from horn to saddlebags as she approached. "Fine..."

Twilight moved aside. The unicorn stepped in.

"Dirt and leaves," she announced after a moment -- followed by a squint. "But there's something else."

"Centaur scent?"

"I don't think so." Light rummaged a little more, and a magnifying glass emerged from the right saddlebag. Examination occurred.

"It's a weird weave," the unicorn decided. "I haven't seen that with any normal fibers."

Twilight sighed. "For whatever that's worth. But I don't think it's going to put us any closer to getting her out of here."

"I'm still taking a picture," the performer announced. "With the magnifying lens." Rummaging resumed.

"Go ahead. I'm just going to look around the area."

The little alicorn began to slowly trot away. Every few steps saw her stop, test the air with unlit horn.

"I don't even know why we're here," she eventually muttered. "All of the residue's faded by now. There isn't a device in the world which could still pick up the faintest trace, and I know nothing living could do it. What are we supposed to learn by looking at the arrival site?"

"Whatever we can," the performer firmly said.

"I don't think that's anything. It's too late. We'd be better off in the basement, trying to think of something based on the evidence from the original team."

"We can think anywhere." The performer's tone had gone soft. "You've had to think in a hurry on missions. I've... got the road. It's always the road, and there's been too many times when I wasn't the only thing on it. Think outside the lab."

The little alicorn began to pace. Small hooves steadily cut a deepening groove into fallen leaves.

"New fabric." It was as good a place as any to begin. "We could take a sample. Show it to Rarity. See if she can replicate it." The slim head slowly shifted back and forth. "It would give her a challenge. Something she can think about, other than..."

Twilight stopped. The performer waited.

"...other than the fact that she's been pushing off a commission from the palace," the librarian reluctantly finished. "That's one of her dreams: to do custom work for the palace. And they reached out to her, and she's just been making excuses. Invoking customers she doesn't have, just to put it off a little longer. Because she'd have to go in for that one -- well, you know her: she's not just going to take the word of somepony else's measurements! It would mean seeing her, and..."

The performer was often grandiose, and that falsely. Egotistical, although some of that was stagecraft. She could easily seize control of a conversation, dominate to the point where multiple fields would try to clamp around her jaw just to let somepony else get a word in.

But the unicorn had gone through her own nightmare: a torture which had begun as something willfully self-imposed, right up until the moment when her will had no longer been her own. It had taught her a certain amount of patience. And besides, any performer who wanted to make a career of it needed to learn when to let the audience do most of the work.

"...it's not just Rarity," Twilight reluctantly finished. "It's Fluttershy."

"Still," Trixie quietly said. "I'm going to cut off a small piece of this. If you think it's safe."

Which got a distracted nod. "It's always Fluttershy these days. As soon as Rarity tries for the palace, she's going to have an assistant." The imitation was expert, and a little bit more. "'...I've watched the Boutique for you a few times, I've been your model, and I just have all this freaky knowledge of sewing! Isn't it better if there's two of us?' Because it's an excuse, any excuse to get in the palace and try to find -- her. Only if it was the dress, a dress for a party, Fluttershy could go right up to her and she knows it."

Scissors went to work. The results were carefully sealed in a glass vial.

"Trying to get out of a palace commission," Twilight softly sighed. "But it's Fluttershy. It's... harder to say no to her now, so Rarity's just avoiding the chance. And it's Sweetie, because Rarity was just close enough to see where Sweetie was, right before..."

Her eyes closed again, and the pacing stopped.

The performer put the vial away, glanced back at the alicorn. "You never said what you were all going to try against Tirek."

Without looking, "It was stupid." Her legs went back into motion, leading her in blind circles. "This is all so stupid. Summoners? There's barely anything in the Archives about that kind of magic! How are we supposed to figure out what could have gone wrong, or right, when the Princesses don't want us trying any of those spells just yet, not without --" and the quotes dropped into place around the next word like a cross between prison bars and a guillotine's blades "-- 'supervision.' And if the casters were trying for a centaur, then why haven't they --" stopped, shook her head again. "-- no. I know what the answer is there. They haven't tried to get her because of the palace. Nopony would want to try getting in --"

"-- you're wrong."

It had been a statement, and the calm, factual nature of the words was what got her eyes open again.

There was just enough anger to pick up on and with Twilight, that generally meant there was a lot more lurking below the surface. "What do you mean, I'm wrong?"

"Deliberately summoning a centaur after Tirek would be insane," the performer stated. "When you've committed to insanity, you don't give up that easily. Because you've done one crazy thing, so you've already gone past the boundaries. And if that insanity failed, then you have to justify it. Because if you don't, then..." The blue fur shivered. "...you have to stop. As soon as you stop, you have to account for whatever you tried. But if you keep going, then you're pushing it off. You do the second crazy thing to make sure the first was worth it, and then you do something else, and something else, all so you never have to stop and think." Her head was beginning to dip. "The more you do, the harder it is to stop, because part of you knows what's going to happen. That you can't explain it to yourself, not once you're thinking again. You'll do anything to keep going, no matter how bad it gets. Because anything's better than looking at yourself. Anything."

"And you'd know," demanded a future lesson waiting to write its scroll.

The streaked tail dropped into the leaves.

"Yeah," Trixie Lulamoon answered, as her left forehoof touched her sternum. There was still a little discoloration there, if you looked for it: just a slight twist to the fur, and the skin beneath. Something which was still healing, because metal and madness had left their own mark. "I would."

Twilight blinked.

"...sorry." And it wasn't enough.

Trixie sighed. When you were a little older, somewhat wiser, and had a lot of probation time left, sighing could be the best response.

"Let's just keep looking around. They wouldn't want us out here if they didn't think there was something we could still find."

The mares continued their inspection. A map was brought out. The distance to nearby settled zones was measured, followed by a quick examination of clipped news articles, looking for signs of disturbance in the region at the time of summoning. Leaves were overturned. Several startled bugs wound up being inspected for magical contamination, and were then sent on their way.

But there were no traces of magic left to feel. The impressions of what had been believed to have been the centaur's first steps had been preserved, but all that told them was the direction she'd been moving in upon arrival. Dried blood drawn by a badly-angled branch had flecked away well over a moon ago.

"Let's try the occlugraph again," Trixie proposed.

Twilight nodded, trotted back into the gatehouse. After a moment, the doors opened again, and the glass floated out ahead of her.

It was roughly seven times larger than the standard occlugraph: the usual pane of glass would fit comfortably between a pony's outstretched forelegs, and trained eyes would have little trouble tracing the trail of deep scratches in the glass. There would be traces of color at the bottom of the little channels: hues which were usually a match for the caster's natural field hue. Width could be an indication of power, curves and angles demonstrated intent. A few spells were known to form unique patterns.

It took moons of study to learn how to read an occlugraph, and there were those who never mastered it. But these were mares whose marks and talents related to magic itself: one for comprehension, the other for innovation. It made the subject a little simpler for both, and it also had the potential to turn them into one of the most formidable research teams the world had ever seen.

(The Princesses had done a lot in the name of repairing the relationship. They also had Spike sending in food regularly, and had issued the little dragon reins so he could drag them off to bed before the 'we can get in three more hours' fainting began.)

Ponies usually had to learn how to read an occlugraph: that mark was one of the rarest known. But there had been an expert called in for this one, fairly early on. Luna's chosen devices had been connected to a fourth, the results had been transcribed onto glass, and the stallion had spent a full six hours trying to sort through it all. The resulting migraine had escalated accordingly.

A normal occlugraph would consist of a single scratch winding its way across the glass, with just one hint of color. This pane looked like the surface of Pinkie's favorite ice-skating pond after most of Ponyville had dragged ink-coated blades across its surface.

Very few of the settled zone's residents actually knew how to skate, but that just helped to explain all of the little gouges, along with most of the places where it seemed as if miniature ponies had spun out. And then you had the colors: just about all muddy browns, but with tiny hints of brighter things within the river...

"Does it make any more sense?" Trixie eventually asked, doing so at the exact moment she felt her eyes beginning to water. "Looking at it here, where it happened?"

"No," Twilight firmly stated. "And the more I look at this, the more I think we need a summoning spell. Even if the Princesses won't let us try one, they could always cast a minor version themselves. Get the pattern for it, show us what that looks like. We don't even have to be there when they do it, and then we could at least try to pick it out of this mess."

Her gaze tried to follow the channels, became lost in cross-cuts and wild spirals, nearly surrendered --

"-- wait..."

The librarian squinted. Trixie's field went for the magnifying glass again.

"What is it?"

"This bit here -- this color -- oh, thank you..." Custody was transferred. "Do you see it? It's just about a single grain, but... it's sort of a mint green."

"There's just about every color in here," Trixie pointed out. "Where you can see color at all. What's so special about mint green?"

"I'm not sure," Twilight admitted. "It just..." She squinted again. "...looked familiar..."

She stared through the lens. Sighed, and carefully set the glass down among the leaves.

"I'm going to ask for that summoning occlugraph," she announced. "The very next scroll. They at least have to give us that. They can try to summon a kitten or something. Anything harmless."

The little alicorn took a slow breath.

"They say she's harmless," the librarian slowly tried. "And they sent us out here in case there was anything they'd missed..."

The performer, a little older and wiser, remained silent. The alicorn began to pace again.

She'd been shown pictures of the one whom the palace described as the victim. They all had. In the course of her research, she looked at one of those images at least once per day.

Trixie, who'd been halfway across the continent at the time, occasionally claimed to see a very different kind of centaur. But Twilight had examined the pictures, over and over. It was never enough to take away the horns.

Nearly all of the images held by fast-yellowing newspapers were in black and white, because that was less expensive to print. Some of the private shots captured by Canterlot photographers were in color, and a number of those ponies had held their ground (or sky) for a surprisingly long time. There was a delusion which crossed worlds: one which said that if you were taking a picture of an event, then it either had to leave you alone or, at the absolute maximum, would take a moment to pose while looking for more helpful lighting. (The girl was fully familiar with that portion of insanity, because every human who tried to get a picture of a fast-galloping braless centaur with a phone held up to a gap in house curtains worshiped at its altar.) It was a belief which had kept cameras in place for far longer than normal ponies should have dared to remain.

The little knight had brought in the pictures for her, because it had been time or rather, there had been time with nothing else to fill it. Her training seemed to have been concluded, the armor was finished, language studies were being held off until the evening, and she didn't want to face the sketchbook again: not when the most vital image still wouldn't allow itself to assemble on the page. Nightwatch wasn't quite ready for bed after finishing her shift, and so the morning had found the girl looking for something to do together in the scant hours before her only friend (the one she'd hurt just through existing, the friend she didn't deserve) would be asleep again.

So it had been time, because if she was going to see the face of the one she hated, it might as well be now. It was something to do. It was also the chance to gain a focus for the slow-boiling rage towards the one who'd destroyed her chance. And if her reaction to viewing the face of an uncaring murderer was something which grounded itself in shameful inner fire...

She'd admitted that to Nightwatch, just before the pegasus had gone for the pictures. She hadn't wanted to, but she'd needed to explain why she'd stalled so long, she owed the little knight much more than simple truths, and shame became all the worse when someone -- somepony else knew you were feeling it. But Nightwatch had reacted to the horrible admission with a flare of confusion, and...

Cerea picked up the largest of the color prints. Held it with fingers gingerly gripping the farthest possible edge, and raised it to eye level.

"Um..." the little knight ventured. "So. Um. Now that you see him, do you -- um. Do you want --"

Firmly, "Not even once. Not if he was the last stallion in the world. The only stallion in the world." There were human jokes about final pairings, none of them ever seemed to recognize the inevitability of genetic collapse and even if that somehow hadn't been a factor, to look at Tirek was to choose extinction.

"Are you..." The little knight's hover adjusted to be somewhat closer, and the wind produced by wingbeats provided the mercy of blowing a few pictures away. "...angry? Because ponies think you're the same as him, when you look so different?"

"Sexual dimorphism again," Cerea sighed. (She wasn't quite ready to set the picture down yet. Some hatreds needed to be memorized.) "Remember when the Doctors Bear were ready to try and sell that at the press conference? Some of the liminal species really do have it. The orcs are pretty bad that way. But nothing's worse than the trolls."

"Um. Something about bipeds who look sort of like they're made from -- soft rocks?"

"Well, the men are trolls," the girl tried to explain. "The women are trollops --" She paused, waited until the wire's hissing stopped. "-- never mind."

"No, I got the last part," Nightwatch managed to smile. "But with Tirek?"

She searched for the most appropriate word. The hunt didn't take long.

"He looks like a baboon." Quickly, "Do you have --"

"-- yes. I've seen them in a zoo. Um. Once. Most of the simian species are in zebra territory. They're very careful about what they allow to leave the borders. So most ponies won't be familiar with them." The little knight shook her head. "Which isn't the worst thing, because most of what I saw them do was fling -- um. Fling... um. Fling. They fling things. And some of them were -- um..." Feathers vibrated from sheer embarrassment. "Nopony ever wants to see them more than once. They're horrible. Maybe every simian species is. None of them are sapient, and I don't think they ever could be."

A number of textbooks raced through Cerea's mind, with every last page pausing just long enough to laugh at her. The vocal end of it emerged as "Um..."

Nightwatch glanced at her. "What?"

...I can't explain.
I could never explain.
There were evolutionary biologists having nervous breakdowns on the first day when the gaps opened. Some of them switched to creationism on the spot because the only way to explain all of us was if there was a divine power in charge which wanted to do nothing more than prove them wrong.
...anyway, if you looked at one of the great apes and then spotted your first human, you wouldn't see it.
I don't even know how centaurs evolved. There's a creation myth, but there aren't any fossils --
-- actually, keeping the gaps secret would have meant any fossils were destroyed...

"...nothing," was her only answer, because there were times when she owed Nightwatch more than the truth, and there were also a few where the truth was just too complicated.

The little knight blinked twice. Slowed her wings, and carefully touched down. Silver eyes regarded the spread of pictures and articles on the barracks' little table.

"You're right, though," the pegasus decided. "He does look like a baboon. None of your males look like that?"

"I'll sketch one later," Cerea promised. "And there's no horns." She bent somewhat, carefully set the picture down on the too-low surface. "That one where he's almost skeletal. When was that taken?"

"After Discord beat him," Nightwatch explained. "I told you he got bigger as he pulled more magic in. That's what he looks like when he doesn't have any power. His base state."

Ugly and old...

It was something which didn't change much across the images. After some examination, it was possible to see just how much power Tirek had accumulated just through the shade of the fur: for the color images, magic absorption brought the strands steadily closer to red. The length of the horns (and why horns?) was another indicator, as was overall muscular development. But when she looked at the background, used that to infer size...

From what Cerea could see, the stolen power had allowed a number of laws to be violated. Square-cube was clearly one of them. She didn't think Tirek would have been able to get around the one about excess muscle restricting joint movement quite so casually. If she had somehow been on his scale, able to charge in...

There's ways to attack him. I don't think he's double-jointed and with the trapezius that swollen, he can't even look around completely. Go at him from a little behind, where his arms can't reach --

There were pictures in which the magic had made him fit, or overly so: a parody of what fitness could be, even more than some of her own stallions. (Those in her herd at least tried to make sure they always had a full motion range available for arm wrestling.) But the age was never far away, the ugliness was a constant, and when she looked at his eyes...

She had been prepared to see intelligence. But the only thing reflected back to her from the photographs was darkness. Pools of ink with tiny yellow floating islands of malice.

The images saw him swollen with power. Reveling in the world's despair. Forever taking, never caring, and always, eternally, ugly.

A body which matched the soul.

"There's going to be a picture in the Hall Of Legends, in a few moons," Nightwatch told her. "It's already started. It's just taking a while because... um. Because nopony ever tried to make Discord look heroic before. All of his pictures there are from... before. So the new one kind of has to carry a lot."

Cerea nodded.

Someone who was the enemy once.
Someone they're trying to honor. To heal.
He fought for something...

"I should put the pictures back," the little knight decided. "The palace has a lot of little reading rooms, and places where... um. Where information is stored. But these were mostly from one of the smaller libraries. I don't think you've been there yet. Do you want to come?"

It was something to do while she waited for the verdict, because training was over and so judgment was due. Something which was going to be rendered any hour now, and then...

...the forge. They would let her have part of the forge, at least for a while. Until she made a mistake.

"Yes."

It would make things easier on Nightwatch, at least. Most of the pictures had reinforced corners to create places suitable for tooth grips, but... hands had their advantages.

Eight hooves trotted through mostly-empty halls. Every so often, a staff pony would spot an approaching centaur, and then the closest available door would be used to make the halls a little emptier. It was leaving a few ponies in restrooms, but at least those who also found bile in their throats had immediate access to sinks and trenches.

"Could a changeling try to look like Tirek? To frighten ponies?" Changelings had been one of the Sergeant's final lessons, and no cooperative willing participant had been available. Cerea hadn't been all that surprised by their existence: there were liminal species which knew how to work with illusion. And when it came to how the changelings did it...

"Um." Nightwatch thought it over. "It's a good question. Most of them sort of mold everything to their own bodies, because they can't fool the environment. Just the senses for whoever can see them. So even if they could made themselves look a lot bigger, nothing's going to be knocked over when they swing out an arm they don't have. And most of them tried to stay the same size during the big fight. Even Chrysalis was trying to pass herself off as somepony who was taller than normal." More consideration furrowed the black fur of the brow. "I guess they could do it, but they probably couldn't keep it up for long. Especially the weak ones, who can only trick sight. They wouldn't even be able to make their hooves sound like there was more weight behind them. You pick up on that sort of thing pretty fast. During my part of the battle, they were trying to make themselves look like Guards. So we'd be afraid to attack, just in case we got one of our own."

The little knight got ahead as they neared an intersection, tilted her head towards the left branch. Cerea turned accordingly.

"What did you do?" Her approaching failure wouldn't exactly eliminate the chance of a second attempt, or a strike by another hive. Knowing about tactics remained important.

Nightwatch snorted. "Just about none of them remembered that ponies fighting in armor make noise. Once we started relying on our ears over our eyes, they went down pretty fast. And there's a smell. It didn't mean much for us in a big battle because the smell was everywhere, but changelings smell. The ones who can only trick sight can't hide their scent either. Did the Sergeant --"

"-- he gave me some shed chitin," Cerea admitted. "It still had some of the reek." And then he'd hidden pieces of lost black shells all over the training grounds, to see how long it took her to track them all down.

With faint amazement, "...you can pick up on that? I thought it faded fast after we got the pieces out of that one pit we found... oh, of course you can do it. Can you tell where the library room is just by sniffing for paper?"

"There's still air currents involved." She managed a smile, and was careful not to let it show teeth. "And those are a little strange in most of the palace. I think it's because of the way you do climate control. And when there's just about always somepony flying -- like right now. I can't smell anypony coming up behind us, but there's definitely wingbeats on the way." She automatically got ready to duck her head.

Big wings. Almost on Papi's scale, but stronger --

-- and worked it out one second after the cool hooves landed behind her, tapping silver against marble.

"Good," the voice of royalty half-yawned. "You have been located. One would normally presume that a form so unique would be easier to find, but the rules change when that body is mobile. Exactly where were you --" which was presumably when royalty caught sight of what was pressed between Cerea's fingers. "-- ah. Well, I shall not detain you for very long. This will be brief."

And she knew.

There was only one reason for the dark mare to come looking for her. Just one and even in the Equestrian language, the syllable took very little time to say.

Slowly, Cerea made herself turn. There didn't seem to be quite enough hallway available for it, and she heard Nightwatch quickly flap away from twisting hindquarters.

The younger Princess looked... tired. Some degree of natural weariness could have been reasonably expected, because Cerea knew about the dark mare's natural hours. Royalty was all too close to its bedtime, and that could have a visible effect -- but this was beyond that.

There was no scent of sweat rising from the fur, or a single hint of froth: nothing suggesting exertion had been involved -- and from what Cerea had learned, overextending a magical effort could express itself in physical effects. The mare simply looked as if she had been thinking. Doing almost nothing except thinking, and maintaining that horrendous level of hideous necessity for an entire night. When combined with the cessation of Cerea's training, it provided a certain suggestion for the topic.

The dark mare was tired, with faint lines creasing fur under weary eyes. And there was a field bubble bobbing along next to her left flank, with the natural color of the energies making it hard to see what was inside.

"For you," she stated, and floated it forward -- then took another look at what Cerea was carrying. "Ah. After you put those away, then." Which was followed by a small snort. "Somewhere. Nightwatch, if you would take custody? A species which fails to use saddlebags, wearing a style which is rather short on pockets. At the very least, somepony will need to find some way of outfitting you with a courier's pouch. Although slinging the strap across the upper torso may encounter --"

Careful teeth nipped the pictures away from Cerea's fast-numbing fingers.

"-- but that is a matter for another day. On this morning..."

The bubble crossed the remaining distance, waited. Cerea carefully raised her arms, straining to keep them from shaking, brought them together above her breasts to prevent squeezing, one more thing which could make her look and feel stupid among humans and it never seemed to matter that the ponies didn't know...

The corona winked out, and the bubble's contents dropped onto the girl's tight-pressed hands.

Cerea stared.

"You will need to sign," the dark mare stated. "In three places. Nightwatch will show you where. And read the contents to you, of course, as none should ever sign a form before knowing exactly what it contains." With open irritation, "A rule which far too many fail to recognize, followed by attempting to defend their willful ignorance in court. But as this is the same contract she signed, familiarity will allow her to offer assistance."

The little ink bottle vibrated on the girl's left palm, as did the quill. Papers threatened to overflow the other.

"Additionally," the alicorn continued, "there are tax forms. Somepony neglected to deliver them to you when your training began. I have taken the liberty of filling in that section for you, as I am familiar with the numbers involved. There will be two signatures involved there. In all cases, I encourage you to use your own written language, as that is the most legally binding." With a small head tilt to the left, "Presuming you wish to sign, of course. The choice remains yours."

...right. A smith draws a salary. There's probably a privacy clause, or something swearing me to secrecy about the steel --

"And," the mare added, "this is but the legal aspect of matters. Should you choose to sign, I will expect you in my throne room at half an hour past Moon-raising. In full armor, with your sword, in front of the assembled Lunar Guards, to swear your oath." The head tilt subtly increased. "The sword is in transit at this time and should be in the barracks well before Sun-lowering. You will be told about the measures we have taken to store and secure it within the palace at that time. Please memorize the combination to the safe, and no matter how frustrating the dials may be, do not hit the clockwork. It has already been rebalanced. Three times."

I...

She was holding her dream.

I...

Full armor. In front of the entire Lunar Guard. Swearing her oath.
She was distantly aware of the sound produced by small hooves shifting over and over again at her side. Nightwatch was just about cantering in place.

I...
no...
...I don't deserve...
...I failed so many times, three out of ten, maybe it got to four but that's six spells past me and she would be dead, the Princess would be dead...
...the other Guards could cover for me, try to back me up, but they're still not used to working with me. They don't know how I fail. Maybe they could keep me from making the last mistake, or save her if I did something wrong, but... if it's ever just me with her, if there's nopony else...
...they're only doing this because they can't make it look like they made the wrong decision, they took a chance on me and they have to justify it in front of the nation and the press, this is a forced pass, it's like the exchange program pushing Papi through even when her grades are bad because they have to make it seem like the program works...
...this is wrong...

The dark mare's gaze moved back to center, and... Cerea wasn't sure just what she was looking at. She didn't think the alicorn knew how to read all of her expressions, wasn't familiar enough with centaur scents to gauge that way, her tail was as still as she could make it and surely nopony knew what to make of shaking shoulders...

"You have the day to think about it, of course," the alicorn said. "But I would ask that you send the paperwork ahead, as I would prefer to avoid the experience of a ceremony with a single missing piece. Should you choose not to join, the papers required for the smithy are at the bottom of the stack. I understand that Barding informed you of the 'fallback' position ahead of time, and that he is rather proud of himself for having done so." With another small snort, "He gained another piece of information well before I found you, and the results should be awaiting you now. I presume he managed to finish the basic task, even in the midst of his disappointment. But you are of course free to assist him part-time in a few of your off-hours, with a corresponding boost to your salary --" and her tones went low, dropping into the realm of half-echoed warning "-- as long as you do not flirt with the edge of exhaustion again. Do I make myself clear?"

She nodded. She was capable of nodding to that. It wasn't committing to anything else and the palace policy about working too many hours had already been explained, so nodding was possible.

"Gratifying," the dark mare stated. "So after you return images and articles, report to the smithy. Because if you are going to attend in full armor, this would be an excellent time to make sure it all fits. And following the ceremony -- again, should you choose to attend -- we will need to see about making you a Lunar 'the hard way' or rather, in the most old-fashioned one. Because that is the only means available." With one last snort, "This may be the first time I have ever been thankful for the swill which some mistakenly call 'coffee.' Good day to you both."

And without another word, the alicorn turned. Trotted away, with every star in the tail twinkling steadily across the breadth of the massive yawn.

Cerea stared. It was all she could do, because chasing after the mare to explain about the horrible mistake would breach all etiquette, it was something which had to be managed in privacy and Nightwatch was right there --

"Lunar!" There were very few aspects of the pegasus which came across as birdlike: every shift of legs or head was something equine, along with every movement of the tail. It came as something of a shock to realize the little knight had the capacity to crow. "I was hoping for Lunar! They're going to keep us together, Cerea!" And now it was cantering, hooves outright dancing upon the marble as wings added their own rustle to the growing beat. "You made it! You're the first non-pony in the Guard in -- well, you know!" Quickly, "Not the only one on staff, not right now. There's Yapper. And a couple of griffons. We don't have a potioneer right now, so we've been ordering from a zebra in the city because after Tirek, our last one went home. Um. There's one yak. I don't know much about the yak, because she's Solar. Somepony said her daughter is really nice. But the first non-pony Guard after so many years --" the sounds of cantering hooves had stopped, mostly because the wings were now moving quickly enough for takeoff "-- and it's you. the first centaur Guard, I was hoping you were going to make it but I didn't want to say anything because jinxes --"

Lunar.
Keeping me with her.

Nightwatch could try to cover for Cerea's mistakes, at least for a while. But if the error was crucial...

Keeping me in the shadows. Out of sight.

...which was just another word for 'fatal'.

"-- and your armor! We've got to get you into your armor! Putting the pictures back first, because that's what the Princess said and you have to follow orders now, but then it's the armor!"

Knights wear armor.
I'm not...

"Cerea?"

She didn't say anything. To risk a single word would have been to release everything unspoken.

"You're not moving."

The papers felt cold in her hands.

"We should really get going. I have to sleep soon, especially if I'm going to be fresh for the ceremony! And you need to -- oh, no..." The little knight groaned. "Lunar the hard way. That's what the Princess meant! You can't use any of the potions! So the only way to make you a Lunar in a hurry is... oh, we have to go into the kitchens. All of the kitchens. I don't know if there's enough coffee!"

Was the ink frozen? An inkwell that small really shouldn't have so much weight to it. Maybe ink was denser here. Or it was just the glass.

"Cerea?"

A breeze ripped the top length of her skirt. The crest of a metal helmet pressed against the small of her upper back.

Cautiously, "You should really move. We don't have a lot of time..."

The pressure increased.

"You're -- kind of hard to move... Oh, and then there's the party to think about! Do you have any idea what you'd want for a dress?"

Afterwards, she was never certain as to just how she'd reached the smithy. She just knew that the pictures and articles were no longer with them (because Nightwatch was still at her side), so there had probably been a stop along with the way.

The smithy itself was empty, at least for pony presence. It was still somewhat too early in the morning to expect Barding without a major project under way, or if he wasn't twisting his own hours to match a few more of Cerea's. But he'd been there at some point, and... whether he'd been grumbling all the way through the last task or not (and Cerea was having a hard time picturing any other reaction), he'd finished.

The completed pieces of armor had been carefully placed against the far wall, under the most densely-packed shelf of bone. Bright and gleaming with the false silver which had risen from the chemical wash. The purple of the fleur de lis stood out especially well, especially next to the gleam of a newly-made Lunar insignia. Something which rested alone upon the floor.

"Don't put that on," drifted up to Cerea's half-wilted ears. "You bring it with you to the ceremony. Princess Luna will mount it."

The girl was in front of the doorway, because long legs couldn't quite seem to find the momentum required to enter. It let the little knight trot past her.

"But you need to check the rest," the pegasus happily declared. "Put it all on now, make sure everything fits. That it all goes together and stays that way. You might want to take a test gallop in it, if you haven't tried that yet. And you'll have to put it all on yourself, because it's probably been secured already."

"Secured," emerged as something hollow.

Nightwatch was too excited to notice. "It's something we do with everypony's -- everyone's armor! Because we're wearing metal and even if there aren't that many unicorns who can lift us while we're wearing it, there's plenty who can just twist on a helmet and send it out of alignment! Make it hard to see, or wrench somepony's neck if it's really bad. So there's a securing enchantment. It means fields which are being used for movement just slide off. Only authorized casters can move armor with a corona, and that's Guards, a few ponies on the palace staff, and the Princesses. It's just one more form of protection. Come on! I want to see what you look like in it!"

She didn't know how she'd reached the smithy. She had even less of a concept as to why she was now inside. Perhaps it was simply not wanting to disappoint her friend, not when it came to something small.

The armor could be put on without failing. She was almost certain of that. She'd tested the pieces one by one, she'd even done a few partial assemblies to make sure it all went together -- but she hadn't put all of it on, because that was what knights did and this wasn't meant to be training armor. It was protection for a warrior -- no, for a Guard, and Nightwatch's aura had already told her that was just a knight under another name.

If the armor was flawed, then it suited her.
If it was perfect, then she didn't deserve...

She put the papers down, well away from the ashes of the cooled forge. Found a place for inkwell and quill, then trotted forward. Long legs folded, brought her to the floor, and numb hands reached for the first piece.

It wasn't a fast process. Some sections needed to be interlocked. Joints were tested, from outside and in. A few strategic metal pins were placed, then twisted until they clicked into place.

"...and then there's the locker room! Because they'll have to give you a locker. Um. Which is going to be a bigger locker than anypony else's. ...are you okay with putting this on in front of everypony? And taking it off? I mean, you've got all this padding underneath. It's thicker than ours, but we mostly use some cushioning effects. And you'll still be dressed, unless that means you'll get too hot. Is this too hot?"

The padding had to be adjusted there and here, to prevent it from bunching. It was the part where she'd done the least, and she could already see where she would need to pull some of it out near the elbows. She shouldn't have asked ponies to deal with elbows.

"The front's a little weird. It makes you look... um... bigger? I mean, we did just order the new -- bras? I think that's the word. Bras -- for you. But it makes you look even bigger than the bras would. If bras do that. I'm not sure. But I guess that makes sense, having it do that. I mean, it's all a shell, right? Guards always look a little bigger in armor."

Metal just about sprang into place across her lower back, because that was what it was designed to do. When dealing with the sheer length of the centaur lower body, double-jointing only went so far. Spring-loading a few of the panels was just about the only way to get that portion into place without help: the awkward part was getting it off again.

Things she'd done before. But never with her own creation, something she'd made. She was waiting for everything to fall away, a single poor decision to escalate into a cascade of crashing failure --

-- but then it was done, or almost so. There was just one piece left, with girl and mare looking at what was in the centaur's hands.

"That's the most different piece," Nightwatch quietly said. "Even when yours has to account for arms. Ours..." Her right forehoof awkwardly came up, managed to contact her own helmet. "...well, it's right here. The sides of our faces are guarded more than the front, because the first designer thought vision was too crucial. But with you..." With open concern, "How much can you really see?"

"Enough." Not enough. "I can lift and lock the visor. It comes down when things are too dangerous to risk exposure. Besides..." and her eyes wanted to close because the chemical wash had created a polish, the metal was reflective now and that meant looking at the helmet also had her looking at...

...herself.

There had been times, lost in isolation with her own herd after her greatest failure, when she'd wondered who she took after. Who she looked like.

She didn't look anything like her mother.

"...nopony wants to see my face."

Her mother was beautiful.

The little knight took a slow breath.

"Put it on, Cerea," the pegasus softly asked. "Just to finish. And stand up. Let me see what a centaur Guard looks like."

She could never comply with the last part of it, because she knew she'd failed: that the Princesses were simply trying to present an illusion, and illusions could kill. But she was still capable of standing, a body stronger than a wavering soul bearing the mass of the metal more easily than the hideous weight of responsibility.

The girl turned slightly, rotating her upper torso as much as she could without twisting her lower body, so that the little knight wouldn't have to see her expression. But then the helmet was lifted high, carefully lowered, locked into the slide of turning joints as the visor was dropped, one final check to see what was left of her vision as she heard wings flare out and flap, the pegasus gaining altitude and --

-- she turned. Faced her only friend, the one she didn't deserve.

And the little knight pulled back.

It happened in an instant. Wings adjusted their hover, scooped for air and thrust. Pushed the black body and silver armor about a meter backwards on instinct alone, and then the pegasus was trying to recover, pretending it hadn't happened -- but the scent was already filling the room.

But the girl understood, and did so instantly. Because the little knight felt that she knew the centaur, was perhaps the only one who had even come close to that singular feat. The pegasus had learned not to be afraid of strange joints and foreign limbs. Perhaps she'd even come to terms with the face, something which a pony could surely only see as ugly: all the right parts in all the wrong proportions.

But those features were gone now. There was a mask of metal, somewhat peaked at the front into a merciless ridge. A dark hollow to allow sight, and shadows concealed whatever might have been within. At the back, just enough of a gap to allow a ponytail free passage -- but to look at the rest of the helmet was to find nothing warm. There was simply cold, featureless, cruel steel.

It was the visage of a monster.

The mare is at her desk. She's already checked the typewriter three times, because the next article will be among the most crucial of her life. Accordingly, she's also checked the liquid level available in the bottle. This also happened three times, and she's wondering if she tipped it a little too much during one of them. There seems to have been something of a drop.

She has her sources. More than she used to, at least for this, because there are those in the palace who are less than content about having to share their workplace with a centaur. On this lone topic, there are new ponies talking to her, and so she knows what's coming. Well ahead of the official announcement, which will be made tomorrow. After the centaur is sworn in, and so it's crucial that her words reach the public before that happens.

In one sense, it's not as if it'll change anything, at least not immediately: the mare recognizes that. The alicorns have made their decision -- had probably made it before that first press conference, and she makes a note to push that angle -- and so the oath will be taken. But even the palace can be pressured by public opinion, and in this case... she just has to tell the public what that opinion should be.

She doesn't think she can force the government to correct its error within a day. A week feels unlikely. But when she looks beyond that...

The mare has her sources. The palace is difficult to enter -- well, some portions are. But with the centaur having been falsely taken into the ranks...

...the centaur will have to leave the palace.

An event. Something designed to force the nobles of Canterlot into publicly pretending that this level of insanity is the new normal. Everypony will know about it, and only a relative few will be able to attend.

Fancypants will control the guest list, and that one is cagier than he allows himself to look. But the centaur will be out in public. The guest of dishonor, a living centerpiece of propaganda.

One noble will be on watch for trickery. But there's all sorts of nobles. And when it comes to parties, what's essentially a public event... the mare knows a few tricks of her own.

Heedless

Winter was coming, and the world approached its death.

Perhaps there were parts of the palace gardens which never knew a true winter: those portions where pegasi had told the environment to simulate a rain forest, or some other section of the tropics. Any area themed to the equator would exist in something very close to atmospheric stability. And that was a lie of sorts: the artificial placidity of the air representing a temporary victory in the eternal war which had been created by pegasus magic. Techniques which were forever going to battle against thermodynamics and entropy, because with the exceptions of their own body temperature and that which was generated by exertion, the species had no means of creating heat. They could only move it from one place to another. For every warm zone, there would be a corresponding pocket of cold, with the energies always trying to find ways of evening each other out. The gardens were a balancing act consisting of a thousand shaking poles balanced across delicate fulcrums, and only magic prevented the entire system from crashing down.

There had to be cold regions, for heat needed to be taken from somewhere. The girl understood that much now, and so thought she knew a little more about why snow was always falling on the little portion of false mountain, flakes drifting through artificially-thinned air to land on stone which would not allow them to melt.

But... summer came to the mountains, in time. Depending on the relative elevation of the ibex homelands, it wouldn't be a particularly warm summer. Even in this world, there had to be places where no amount of sunlight ever truly shifted snow from its home, peaks forever capped in white. But there could be warm breezes, muzzles stretched upwards as fur-rimmed nostrils sniffed towards the waft of far-carried unfamiliar scents.

The girl could picture that. It was easy to do while huddled against cold stone, her low-lying body partially covered in white. Her own heat should have been enough to melt most of it away, for her natural temperature matched that of a horse -- but she had been there for some time. Enough to watch the sun shift across the clear sky, light always reaching her while never bringing any warmth. She could picture the scene, and the ibex. The ibex was especially clear, right down to the last strand of fur and the careful regard of horizontal pupils.

She could imagine the ibex scenting those foreign vapors. But she didn't know what the dead had thought about any of it. What had lured someone to... come down.

To come to her death.

Perhaps two hours left before sunset: the girl could track that much from the sun's movements. The days became ever-shorter as winter approached, and she distantly wondered what that did to the relative lengths of Solar and Lunar shifts. Mandatory overtime at one end of the calendar, balanced by going home a little early at the other? It wasn't as if she would get a chance to find out. She hadn't earned that.

What would summer be like, on the artificial piece of false mountain?

She didn't know. There might be storms, much like the one which had killed the Guard whose frozen stone eyes forever stared out across the world. There was one now, and it existed in a clear sky. Turn her ears towards the palace and there was a constant rumble in the air, thunder which never faded, low and steadily building an electric charge of anger. Something which grounded itself through her, over and over, arcing through her shivering body and failing to discharge into the snow.

That part of the girl which had been trained as a farmer understood the need for winter: that some level of death was necessary for life to go on. Step away from the tropics, and there would be no spring without the snow. She knew that. But she hated being cold.

And yet she huddled in the shadows of peak and statue, collapsed so that lower body pressed tightly against the stone. Snow covered the fur of her legs, draped itself across her skirt in a falsehood of a blanket, broke away from the sweater when she breathed into the half-sphere pressed against her mouth and nose. There were times when she looked into that frozen gaze, searched for anything which could look back. Spoke to it, seeking counsel.

But there was only silence. The quiet of the dead, and the distant rumble of rage from the living.

She hated being cold. But winter was coming, would always come. The death of the world approached and when you were already feeling so cold inside, dead within...

She almost felt at home on the mountain. The perfect environment for her. Total isolation, with only the dead for company.

Perhaps two hours before sunset.

She could just... not show up.

...no. The entire Lunar Guard in attendance, the Princess waiting for her, and vacuum where they had expected a centaur to be? It was the height of rudeness. At the very least, she had to send a note ahead: something to prevent the assembly. There was even a chance that the Princess was expecting it. A test issued, to see if the girl was mature enough to recognize the need for refusal.

Yes, she had to send a note: that was the minimum.

Which meant finding somepony to write the note for her.

...and getting up from the snow.

...later. She had at least two hours: she was sure of that. She could stay a while longer, huddled in cold and a false winter which was but a preview of the true.

The world would eventually turn towards spring. The real winter was within, and so it was forever --

-- she scented nothing from the approach. Maintaining the pockets necessary for artificial environments required doing strange things to the air at the borders. But when it had been hours with a distant rumble for company, any other sound stood out. The noise produced by wingbeats made her ears perk strongly enough to dislodge flakes, and then black feathers crossed the border.

The pegasus touched down on cold stone, began to slowly make her way up the staircase of rock. But the wings did not refold, nor did her snout press itself towards one of the half-spheres. Instead, the extended limbs continued to slowly, subtly shift, and the girl thought she understood that now, too. Concentrating the atmosphere, making it easier to breathe for the pegasus alone.

"Thou should'st not be awake yet," the girl protested. "Thy rest is far too precious. To bed with thee, while comfort might still be found --"

"-- I couldn't sleep." Nightwatch's soft words almost seemed to waft up the little mountain, like a gust of summer breeze. "I'm not sure anypony could sleep right now, not if they live close enough to the palace to hear it."

The dark head turned for a moment. Silver eyes regarded the distant marble walls, then returned to the girl's face.

"And right now," she finished, "'close enough' might mean all of Canterlot."

Cerea shivered.

"You know that the story leaked," the little knight said. "The noon edition of the Tattler, that was first, so there's a really obvious primary suspect. At least for who it was leaked to. The Princesses really want to find out who's talking, because that is a part of the oath. For everypony, not just Guards. To protect palace interests, and -- somepony's violating it. Maybe they're doing it over and over."

"Mayhap they believe 'tis in best interests to speak," the centaur softly countered.

"And maybe they're wrong."

Silence and flakes drifted across the artificial peak.

"How did you find out?" Nightwatch asked. "Because you left before the reinforcements arrived, the ones who only joined the protest because they found out you'd been hired and... they must have thought that wasn't going to happen. So you didn't hear it, and you still can't read well enough to finish an article."

"'Tis rather easy to perceive when all art attempting to hide the missives," Cerea quietly said. "Papers shredded as I approached. Chewed, in some cases. I... offer my apologies for the foulness of the ink --"

It was just above a whisper. "-- I don't think I've ever heard you this upset."

Instantly, "Prithee, but within my form shall be found no trace of --"

And with enough dryness to take multiple flakes apart, "'Prithee'."

The centaur's awkward expression somehow suggested a poker player who had just been informed that she had a tell, and wasn't entirely certain how to go about putting it away.

Finally, "How did you find me?"

Nightwatch sighed.

"You kind of had to tell ponies where you wanted to go, in order to go anywhere at all. At least until after tonight. And I didn't think you'd tried to hide in one of the passages, not when you're still memorizing them and learning all the ways in. Asking somepony to make sure there was a clear path to this statue, and making sure no tours went near the mountain for the rest of the day? It sort of creates a witness, Cerea."

"...oh."

"And I thought you might be here," the little knight gently finished. "When you're friends with someone, you learn a little something about how they think, and... I thought you might be here. Because I was sleeping, and... there's things you wouldn't say to me, even if I had been awake. Sometimes I think she's the only one you really talk to..."

Hooves climbed a little higher. The shivering centaur remained in place.

"How often do you come out here?" Nightwatch asked, wings still shifting.

"...every so often," Cerea softly admitted. "Every few nights, after you go on-shift and the gardens are clear. I don't really keep count --"

"-- does it help?"

Blue eyes briefly closed.

"I don't know."

The pegasus nodded, mostly to herself. The slow ascent continued.

"The protestors are just about up to the gates," the little knight told the centaur. "There's never been a protest that large, not while I've been a Guard. Um. There's been a few in the past which beat it, from what Princess Luna said. Ponies who didn't like spells which -- well, they're pretty much gone now, or they don't talk about it out loud any more. But it's a lot of ponies, and -- other sapients. There's also a lot of Solars standing watch. The unicorns are hoping they can get shields up in time, if one idiot makes a move and a hundred other ponies decide to be exactly that stupid. Shields up and hardened, quickly. It's... not as easy now, with Captain Armor gone."

A name which had drifted through a few lessons, one with very little meaning attached. Somepony who'd been essential during the changeling assault. And there had been something about a wedding, but she'd been tired and besides, weddings weren't all that special for centaurs. You chose a mate, you announced it to the herd, and then you concerned yourself with breeding. That was it.

They meant something to humans, though. A wedding came with its own kind of tactics, and plans which also fell apart on first contact with the enemy. Or, more frequently, the caterer.

She'd had a dream. One where she'd pictured herself as a bride...

"You know why they're here," Nightwatch softly continued. "When they know the ceremony is tonight. Why they're so loud, why we can hear part of it when we're this far away. They feel like it's their last real chance to stop everything. Shouting loudly enough to wake the Lunars, to reach inside the palace. Trying to talk us out of it."

And without thought, as a phantom bouquet fell away from a limp hand, "You should listen to them."

The rumble washed across their fur.

"I was assigned as your supervisor," the pegasus stated, forehooves planting on the next stage and pushing. "Every new Guard gets one. A senior partner, keeping an eye on the rookie." Somewhat disgruntled, "I'm not old enough to be a senior -- Cerea, you can drop the breathing aid, I concentrated the air for both of us --"

The girl's right arm slumped down, and snow drifted into glass.

As whispers went, it was a rather melodious one. "-- it was a foregone conclusion, wasn't it?"

"Um. Sorry?"

"They had to hire me." Small blue eyes closed again, just long enough for snow-covered lashes to exchange flakes. "After what Princess Luna said during the press conference, when she basically assigned me on the spot. It would have been then and there, if the reporter hadn't said something: the training would have just come after. There was no choice, because they'd already made one." Speech was beginning to emerge more quickly, chill words blasting into fur and skin. "Even when I'm not suitable. Everyone knows it. Everyone, everypony --"

The little knight's question felt far too steady. "Why don't you think you're suitable?"

"Three out of ten." It was half a snarl, and it was all directed at herself. "Four on a good day, or when I got lucky. Six or seven times when my Princess is dead --"

"-- do you really think anypony's ever stopped one hundred percent of every possible attack there is? Guards work together, Cerea. We have to. We cover for each other's weaknesses, because no one can do everything. I can't stop a spell, except by trying to block it with my own body. There aren't any earth ponies who could redirect a lightning bolt. You're a centaur. We can do things you can't. You can do things we can't --"

The girls hooves were beginning to scrabble against the stone now, as if trying to find a position from which to push. "-- the sword does it! I just swing it, I'm not using it well enough, and without the sword --"

Which was when memory came to what she considered to be her aid, because the strongest betrayals always rose from within.

"-- Princess Luna disarmed me! On the first meeting, on that first night! She barely had to do anything to stop me, and without the sword, I'm helpless! I can't do anything, not a single thing which any pony could do --"

Nightwatch snorted.

"-- lift."

"...what?"

"Lift," the pegasus repeated. "Encircle, enclose." Nodded towards the centaur's right hand, where skin was reddening against the snow. "Throw --"

"Any unicorn past puberty," was a natural counter.

"On a secured object?"

Fingers began to close around white, compressing it. "She had me secured. My arms were pressed against my sides. I couldn't move. She could have done anything to me, anything she wanted. She could have --"

Cerea stopped.

"-- she was kind," the girl whispered. "The same way the police chief was kind. Capture instead of kill." She didn't know what she'd done to earn that --

"Cerea..." The little knight was less than a meter away now, with most of that on the vertical. The lithe body was stretching forward, snout projecting from the helmet. "...you're a centaur. There are sapients who can match pieces of what you can do. A minotaur could manipulate the same way, a pony could gallop. Um. I'm not sure anyone could do what you can with scent. Maybe some sapient I don't know about. But you're still the only one who puts it all together. Even if you think it's all the sword, you're still the only one who can hold it without fear. And you can learn."

"I failed." Her most instinctive counter, perhaps because it was also her most natural result. "I --"

"-- against Princess Luna? Just about everyone in the world would lose! But you wouldn't fall for the same trick twice --"

"-- and I'm supposed to hold off things she can't beat? When I fail --"

"-- we're a unit, Guards are a herd, we cover for each other --"

"-- you don't know how I fail!" Hooves still scrabbling, failing to find purchase because that was the best way to keep her low and cold. "And I fail all the time! And what if it's just me? What if everypony else is down, I'm all that's left and I -- three out of ten, there's going to be more than three and no one ever said it would be three in a row, three out of ten isn't good enough --"

The pegasus was right in front of her now, and the girl's upper torso had slumped in such a way as to make the silver gaze into something doubly level.

The little knight stared at her.

"I'll go into the smithy," Cerea whispered. "Barding can watch me, make sure I don't mess anything up. He's already improving on everything I taught him. I don't mind being his assistant..."

Wings flared out. There was a downdraft blast of wind, and the pegasus vanished.

The girl's eyes closed again.

Good.
She'll tell the Princess.
It's better this way.
It's safer.
I'm protecting them from me --

-- she'd never gotten around to trimming her hair. And even if she had, the normal length still would have been more than enough to work with.

Teeth clamped down on the end of the false ponytail, and the hovering pegasus yanked.

"OW!"

"Get up!" The words were relatively clear, at least when they emerged from the disc -- but then, ponies were probably used to speaking with something in their mouths. "Get up, right now! I'll pull you all the way in if I have to, but you're going to get up! We're going inside, and we have to be in before Sun goes down! So we can still get you into your armor and make it to the ceremony in time, after the next talk!"

She couldn't try to reach the hovering pegasus, not without twisting her body in ways which even a centaur couldn't maintain for long, and the sheer length of her hair let the flying body keep a consistent distance away from clutching fingers. "What are you doing? This is the right decision, it's the only decision! It keeps everypony safe, it makes some of the protestors go away, the armor can be upgraded --"

"-- you won't listen to me!" the straining pegasus gasped past a mouthful of blonde strands. "Maybe there's only one person in the world you might listen to at all!"

The little knight pulled, and long legs went upright in a desperate attempt to relieve some of the tension.

Cerea was still learning to read pony expressions. Even with the hank of hair in the way, the pegasus' smile still struck her as a rather grim specimen. It became all the more so as the wings changed angles, with the new direction of flight forcing Cerea to move down the slope as snow fell away from her and cold merged back into the false peak. It was that or have her hair yanked out at the roots.

She followed, moving towards the rumble of the storm's fury. She had no choice.

"And if you won't listen to me...!"

The little stack of papers had been given a place to themselves in the barracks. Nothing else touched them, because they were more than a hundred and fifty years old: a spacial buffer against incidental contact had seemed necessary. They were also slightly elevated. Had they possessed senses, they would have been able to survey just about every empty bunk, along with the little puddle of blankets on the floor. Keeping watch.

It was, in some ways, a place of honor.

The girl stared at the writing.

"I don't understand." She had thought it on the first day. Said it over and over. Learned how to speak the words in Equestrian. It was the most reliable sentence she possessed, and it still meant nothing.

"It's changed over the centuries," were Nightwatch's first words after finally spitting out the hair. "Different questions, or new ways of phrasing old ones. Some parts aren't used much any more, or they aren't given the same amount of regard."

Armored hooves lightly touched down.

"It didn't seem fair," the little knight softly decided. "I didn't think it felt fair, when I did it. To judge how somepony might do as a Guard, based on another skill entirely. Something I wasn't any good at. I'm still not. And we didn't ask you to do it, because you couldn't yet..."

Her hands had fallen open at her sides: reddened flesh reluctant to tighten on itself. "I don't --"

The pegasus trotted past her, and black fur gently nudged the old pages into turning. Stopped at a place which was just completely covered in mouthwriting: characters almost completely even, but for a little flare of daring curve at the edges.

"The application," Nightwatch quietly told Cerea, "has an essay question."

She stares at the words, and their very existence seems unfair.

It's a trap. It has to be. She came all this way, she's doing something no one has ever done, she had to push herself to come this far, she pushed herself away from everything she'd ever known and what did it let her find? A simple sentence whose jagged-seeming lettering is just waiting for the chance to clamp down on her hocks. Draw blood, send her whimpering back out into the city to see if she can hold onto her job a little longer, because the mountains may be closed to her now. She came all this way in the pursuit of a dream, there's still a thousand barriers between her and any chance at reality, and the most crucial blocking gate is now formed from unbreakable ink. And all around her, she can hear quills scratching their way across paper.

In reality, some of the applicants are almost guaranteed to be working on a different section. Others are doing battle with this one. But there are so many of them in this room with its desks and benches and lights which flicker somewhat with the newness of a too-fresh charge, it sounds like they're all writing, and it's so easy to convince herself that every last pony is speeding through that single question with intent to overtake her.

The desks are evenly spaced. There's just enough room between them for copying answers to be effectively impossible. And yet it feels as if there's nopony sitting near her, like there are forty-nine other applicants (because in her present, everypony applies on the same day, something which only comes once a year) existing as their own herd and then there's her. Alone in a crowd, as they all write out their dreams in a palace room (within the Solar wing, not that it's called that because there's nothing else, nopony else) and wonder who's going to make it.

Other than her. They know she isn't getting through. What they don't understand is why she even bothered to show up...

Once a year, and she didn't know that. She arrived three moons early. It meant having to find work, and that hadn't been easy until she'd figured out what kind of service she could offer. A place to live. Trying to master Equestrian while grinding the accent off the relatively few words she'd already known. She often suspects she sounds somewhat comedic, especially because she sometimes catches ponies snickering across her consonants.

She found a job. A place to live. There's even a few of her kind in the city -- well, three. But she hasn't made any connections outside of those implied by work, shopping, and needing to nose over the rent.

She doesn't have any friends. And now she's surrounded by those whom she's supposed to form a herd with, and they'd just been looking at her. Staring, in the time before they entered the room. Some were initially convinced that she'd shown up by mistake, and she knows that because they were equally convinced that she wouldn't understand anything they were saying. And now she's at a desk, while everypony else is writing and this question, this stupid question is the next barrier which blocks her dream.

There's a moment when she wishes she was a yak. A yak would break through a barrier. Which doesn't mean a yak could answer the question, but the paper could be destroyed in a variety of interesting ways.

Horizontally-slit pupils force themselves to focus on the cruel words.

Why do you feel you would be a suitable Guard?

No one said anything about this. She was ready to be judged on her skills in combat, anticipation, cooperation, improvisation (which she sees as being very rare for her kind), and tactics. Having her entire life to come depend on her dubious skill as a writer is just unfair.

She stares at the question for a while. Her eyes move to the clock on the wall, and then she wonders why she bothered to look. There's no time limit here. The applicants finish when they finish and in her case, she'll be exactly that: finished...

She's aware that her neck is stretched forward somewhat more than it should be, along with the fact that her legs are starting to feel stiff and she's mostly breathing through her mouth. Anyone in her trip (because that's the word for a gathering of her species: a trip, and she finds it ironic that it's used for those who never go anywhere) would be able to recognize those things as a sign of stress. Among ponies, she probably just looks weird.

...weirder.

But the question is there. It has to be answered, or there's no going forward at all.

...she just remembered that all applications are personally reviewed by the Princess.

Doubly unfair. Possibly with additional exponent.

She chews on the quill for a while. Words fail to trickle down her throat.

And finally, because there's nothing else she can do, she came this far and the only thing she'll hate herself for more than failure is never having tried... Blitzschritt begins to write.

At first, I told myself I wanted to do something different.

Anything different.

And as long as I was doing something different, then it might as well be something important. Something which made it worth BEING different. Being different is hard.

(She is still new in this land. She doesn't know what the little pot of whitish-brown on the desk is for, and so all crossed-out words remain legible upon the page.)

I thought I could be good enough. I don't think anyone anypony anyone in this room would be here if they hadn't thought, at some point, that they were good enough. I thought I was good enough when I was waiting outside.

Now I'm not sure.

Because up until now, it was just a dream. But the closer I get, the more real everything becomes, and there isn't much that's more real than death. Than your HER death. That's how important the job is, and I feel like I just realized how real that was. That the only thing between her and the worst could be me.

What if I make a mistake?

How should someone like me act as a Guard? Does anypony even know how I should be trained, or how I might work as part of a herd instead of a trip? That's the word for a group of What can I do which somepony else can't? What is it about me that should place me in a situation where a mistake could be made?

What if I make the LAST mistake?

I'm scared.

I think that might be a good thing.

There were a lot of ponies outside the room who were laughing before this started. I'm still trying to get used to the sound of ponies laughing. It didn't sound like nervous laughter. From one of mine, it would have been bravado. Overconfidence. Like they've decided that they were already hired, and I don't like that. Because if you think you'll always succeed, you'll never think about any of the ways you could fail. You'll just think you've already won, and you won't see any need to adjust. If you're already perfect, then why learn anything?

I left an entire mountain of 'already perfect' in order to

I'm scared, because I figured out what the real stakes are. And that I could fail. But knowing I could fail means I'll try whatever I can NOT to. It means I'll learn, and that I'll be careful. And fear doesn't paralyze me. I've heard the jokes. All of them. I'm still waiting for a funny one. I can still act when I'm scared, or I wouldn't be here.

I'm terrified of making the last mistake, and maybe that gives me a chance to be a good Guard. But there's more than that.

I came down. I went into the world, when everyone said I shouldn't. And sometimes that feels like it was stupid especially when ponies are staring. It's almost egotistical. What's so special about me that I should go anywhere? That I should think I'm anything special at all?

That I should be different.

That I should be here.

But I'm the only one here. And maybe this is me just writing because I don't know what to write trying to justify everything I've done when I still don't want to go back, but... what if there's a reason for it? Something I don't know about, something nopony expects, but... a reason?

We're just about all in the mountains. But I'm DIFFERENT. I'm HERE. The mountains aren't everything. There's so much more. The Princess is part of that, and so is Equestria. Part of a whole world.

What if the world needs an ibex?

There's only one of me. One who can try.

I want to try.

I came all this way.

I don't know if they would ever let me come back.

I'm scared. But maybe that's the best thing. I'm scared and I'm still here. I'll always be there if I get through, no matter how scared I am. I promise. I'll always do whatever I can.

Please let me try.

She looks at what she's written. Nearly crosses out all of it, realizes that unlimited time probably still runs out if she's the only one in the room when Sun is raised again, almost gives up on herself right there, then recognizes that she's filled out the whole of the answer section and she still doesn't know what the other pot is for.

The rest of the application is finished. The lone set of cloven hooves are the fourth to depart from the room, and their owner is thoroughly disgusted with herself. Trying to figure out if there's any life in continuing to offer extra stability to potion brewers, because some of them might eventually decide that normal shelf life is enough. You don't sell replacements as often when things keep.

Four days later, she will be on the training grounds (mostly while desperately trying to figure out the why), and the smith of the era will be trying to figure out some means of adapting training armor to her. Creating something which will fit. The helmet winds up needing a nearly-full redesign.

She wrote the words which led to the rest of her life.

She wrote the words which led to her death.

She wrote words which saved the world.

Silver eyes closed in respect. The sleek head raised, and then renewed vision regarded freshly-weeping blue.

There was a question. Just one, because one was all which was needed.

"What if the world needs a centaur?"

The ceremony flowed over her like water, and so there were ways in which Cerea had trouble retaining the details of it. Looking back found her regarding something where memory had blurred. Because if it wasn't clear, then it hadn't happened, she hadn't done it, she'd hadn't been so foolish as to take up the role of a knight when she wasn't one, would never truly be...

But she had.

There were excuses. It was hard to take in the sights when visions of future failures kept intruding, almost impossible to listen with phantom screams filling her ears -- and when she did manage to focus, she mostly saw the dark glow which surrounded the Lunar throne room. A shield raised against sound, so that the only words would be the important ones.

The scents... they were with her, though. Some of them changed a little as they drifted past the Princess (her Princess), because it was always a little cool around the alicorn and temperature made a difference. But she could still recognize all of them, especially those which rose from the assembled Lunar Guards as they watched. Uncertainty. Concern. And always, always fear, but for a little vacuum where the Sergeant stood.

From her left, where Nightwatch stood... the concern was echoed, and that was expected. But there was also some pride there, along with a certain amount of exhaustion because hauling a centaur through most of the gardens and a good part of the palace was tiring work. And with the Princess... cool patience, which almost managed to hide the deep undercurrent of worry.

At one point, glow moved the new insignia towards her upper waist, and she was given words to repeat. To swear.

She did.

"My life for your life..."

The mounting pins made contact. Screws began to twist themselves. Locking in.

"My life for all lives..."

Offering her life.

The whole of it, until the end.

Winter was coming, and the girl approached her death.

Nocturnal

She tried to tell herself that nopony was hurrying out of the throne room just to get away from her, and she almost succeeded.

On the purely intellectual level, she recognized that the night shift was already under way, and the Guards who'd attended the ceremony needed to reach their posts. (Also that she hadn't been sworn in with every last Guard present, because some degree of minimum staffing would have been maintained during just about any situation.) They were leaving because they had places to be. It was just that... the majority seemed to be departing in something of a rush. A number flew from the room, and some of those who lacked the required limbs exited on the gallop.

It wasn't all of them. A number of the attending ponies had participated in her training sessions, and some of those favored her with a curt nod. She was under the impression that one or two might have even said something as they passed, but the actual words didn't really register. Too much of her attention was being directed towards her own legs, where a steady effort seemed to be required to keep them from collapsing under the weight of duty, armor, and mistake.

A dead ibex had talked her into it, just for a few seconds. Made her somehow feel as if the greatest failure would have been to never try at all. But her efforts always seemed to end in some degree of failure

(and deep within her subconscious, a memory prepared itself for dream)

with some of those turning out to be more drastic than others. She was now responsible for the life of another. And yes, that had always been true to some degree in the household: she'd forever been trying to look out for everyone. (Even the arachnae, who neither wished for such protection, nor strictly deserved it.) And she certainly had more freedom to act here, there were ways in which she was actually allowed to act, but somehow...

She'd been trying to protect the one she loved. Those who were her rivals, and what if a momentary thought about thinning the numbers had somehow slowed her hand? And with those emotional bonds in place, something which should have given her strength -- she had failed, over and over.

If she failed again --

-- and as she stood stock-still while ponies streamed by and the dark Princess gathered up some paperwork, a familiar scent paused before her.

"Still activated."

Cerea looked down, failed to initially adjust for the phantom increase to her bustline provided by the armor (although enough time would make that real, along with providing the need to install the next level of metallic illusion), and backed up a little. The Sergeant was looking at her, eyes placid under the brim of the hat.

"Part of the deal," he added. "That I wasn't coming back just to train you. I'll be around. So if you think of something you need to ask, come find me. And if I think of something you need to know, I'll find you."

She managed a nod: something which was fully visible because she'd taken the oath with her helmet off. It was currently sitting near the small of her upper back, held against the metal of the first plate over the lower by rotating lock-pins. Placing and recovering it looked somewhat awkward in public, but it was better than having one arm tied up with just holding the thing all the time. And when it came to the location... it wasn't as if she had to worry about a rider.

"Sergeant..."

And that was where her words ran out. She didn't know how to thank him. Thanking him might have been the worst thing, because she felt as if a horrible mistake had been made and she wasn't sure how to call him out on that either. So she wound up just standing there, shifting increased weight from hoof to hoof.

She could feel Nightwatch's presence on her left. A lightly-vibrating bundle of sheer awkwardness.

The old stallion looked directly into her eyes, and she didn't know what he was seeing there. Said three words.

"Do the job."

And then he trotted away, the last of the attending Guards to leave.

The shield had been dropped to allow their exit. It meant there was a certain degree of background rumble in the room, and every time the doors of the Moonset Gate opened, the very world told her what it thought.

"Traditionally," a calm voice stated, "providing your first assignment would fall to me. I see no need to violate that custom, especially as there are things I would prefer to directly explain."

Cerea focused, watched the dark mare approach. A bundle of papers was being held in a bubble of corona near the left flank, while a few small books bobbed along at the right.

"Part of this is your schedule," Princess Luna told her, stopping about a meter away, directly in front of Cerea and the little true knight. "However, this now must include the next portion of your education. As training has concluded, you have effectively gained the time to begin your citizenship classes --" a little snort fogged the air "-- and undoubtedly there is a single small paragraph in tomorrow's articles which has been reserved for querying as to why those are so overdue. Followed by the writer insisting that you should never be permitted to attend, and carefully ignoring any implied contradiction."

Nodding worked. Nodding was good. It seemed as if just about every species nodded, although the girl possessed a vague recollection suggesting that some human societies had decided it meant 'No.'

"As some of those who have immigrated labor within my hours, such classes have Lunar sessions available," the Princess added. Feathers ruffled with irritation. "However, despite my approaching the absolute border of request, none were willing to gather in the palace."

Nightwatch rather audibly inhaled.

"Um," the pegasus said. "It's because of the protestors, isn't it? But that means --"

The Princess nodded and somehow, that was enough to cut off everything.

"They did not wish to move through the living barriers," emerged as a rather disgruntled announcement. "Despite my promises of sending Guards out to guide them through and their knowing that the false ranks must give way when someone desires to enter. There is less of a presence under Moon, but... it was still more than the teachers and their students were willing to risk."

But if the classes can't come here --

"Which means that we are now tasked with providing security beyond the walls," Princess Luna added, just before returning the focus of her attention to Cerea. "And ensuring that you can reach the sessions." Thoughtfully, "At some point, you will have to enter the capital. In fact, when you do so is now partially a matter of your personal choice -- but I would ask that you wait for a time before venturing into the streets." With another little snort, "Nightwatch will explain the details. And we do not wish to have palace staff teleport you back and forth. Not only is there something of a mass issue --"

The girl was now horribly aware of exactly how much mass was being shifted between hooves.

"-- but when you are in the city, it is crucial that you possess your weapon. Teleporting means leaving the sword behind, and I am as yet reluctant to have you take the trot." The head shake came across as a somewhat irritated specimen. "So we are compromising: a covered air carriage, with multiple pegasi serving to tow."

Several questions arose regarding the exact number of pegasi required. All died under the crushing weight of embarrassment, and also of centaur.

"However, you may find the classes themselves somewhat comfortable," the dark mare considered. "Necessity requires that they be designed for those who do not always have full capacity for reading, writing, or speaking our language. The classroom can accommodate multiple species, and the teacher is already considering how to host a centaur." Rather directly, "Additionally, some of those attending may have arrived in the city after Tirek's departure, and so their reactions may be somewhat lesser."

The dark gaze moved across Cerea's face. Went down, and didn't so much travel over curves as navigate past burgeoning obstacles.

"I have also arranged for you to meet a new designer," the Princess stated with what Cerea immediately interpreted as a total lack of mercy. "As the new tradition of having the city itself welcome Guards will be a formal affair, and you shall therefore require a suitable dress." The dark eyes relentlessly focused. "I will take you to that meeting, I will remain present throughout, and I believe myself to be fully familiar with at least some of the ways in which you break for the nearest available exit. Have I made myself understood?"

In this instance, the nod said that understanding existed. It didn't have to indicate a single thing about happiness.

"One final detail, before I provide your first assignment and turn you over to Nightwatch's custody." Stars shifted within mane and tail. "Prior to the party: trim your hair. It is currently beyond all hopes of control. Or pins. Perhaps especially pins." The dark head tilted slightly to the left. "The pins shall be in the safe before Sun-raising, but I ask that you not use them tonight, and to be careful about wearing them within the palace at all. They must observe the same safety protocols as the sword."

Cerea managed a blink. "I don't understand --"

"-- I'll explain," Nightwatch hastily cut in. "I was supposed to explain."

The Princess nodded. "So. Your first assignment --"

The girl wondered how much dread weighed, along with whether the new mass pressing down on her form would force marble to crack beneath her hooves.

"-- is to become a Lunar. 'The hard way.' An assignment which, by its very nature, shall require every last one of this night's hours." Wings flared out. "Nightwatch shall ensure that you complete it on your hooves. Assuming we have enough --" and the word was almost spat "-- coffee. Good night to you."

The alicorn's takeoff produced an almost singularly powerful backblast of wind. It also wound up being a nearly unique reminder of just how badly Cerea needed to find a way of obeying the trimming order, and her arms automatically went up to her head. Fingers straightened strands here, sorted there.

"I don't understand." Because there was no better way to officially begin the mistake of her new career than with the words which so often defined her life. "Becoming a Lunar? But I was already assigned --"

"-- you have to stay up all night," Nightwatch clarified. "Um. I guess I didn't make that clear before? We have potions to flip somepony's sleep schedule, but that's the problem: they're for ponies. Nopony wants to try any potions on you unless it's an emergency. And from now on, as a Lunar, you're awake at night and asleep during the day. So it has to be a forced change. Keeping you awake until at least an hour after Sun-raising. No matter what it takes." With open worry, "It's not going to be easy..."

Cerea blinked, which was the only outward sign of the sudden outrage.

She'd demonstrated what centaur endurance could mean during her training, over and over! Yes, she'd been just about wiped out or -- worse -- when Princess Luna had found her, but that had been at the end of an hours-long chase, and if it hadn't been for the infection... A true centaur wouldn't even bother to laugh at someone regarding staying up all night as a challenge, because the victory was so obvious as to make the actual mirth redundant. There was no way she wouldn't be able to --

-- outside in the snow.
For hours.
I cried a lot.
I didn't exactly come back in for meals.
...I'm hungry, and I'm emotionally exhausted.
...oh no...

"Cerea?"

She forced her arms back down: a solid minute of work in restoring matters had only found that there were at least five more to go.

"...I think," the girl rather distantly said, "I'm going to need some coffee. A lot of coffee. Espresso --" and waited until the wires stopped hissing.

"Concentrated coffee?" A glance down to the left found Nightwatch's snout wrinkling in a way which was trying to take the rest of the body with it. "How is that even --"

Cerea sighed. "-- filters. Double-chambered pot: boil on the lower level, collect in the upper. I can probably improvise something. But it has to be espresso. Mugs of espresso."

Coming from the silver eyes, it was a blink of purest horror. "Why?"

Because it's very hard to get a centaur drunk. And when that same body mass went to war with caffeine...

In theory, it would have taken multiple energy drinks to bring Cerea to a faint buzz, and that never happened simply because there were multiple energy drinks involved and a centaur could taste exactly what had gone into every last one of them. There was certainly enough coffee in the world to give her a caffeine high: she just wasn't sure about the palace. It felt like this was going to be the night when she finally wound up trying wake-up juice...

A French press. At the very least, I should be able to find something in the kitchen which works with an internal plunger and if I can't, that won't be hard to improvise.

"Because it's going to be a long night," was all she allowed herself to say. "We'd better check the kitchens."

"Okay." The little knight took off, created enough distance to allow a hover and maintained her altitude at Cerea's eyeline. "And then I have to show you the safety protocols."

Cerea took careful sips from the steaming mug as they trotted away from the kitchen, with multiple chefs staring at her retreating tail. Among her own herd, it would have been possible for the males to have been watching her retreating (armored) buttocks, but... ponies. She would never do anything more than repel them, and she had...

...she'd told herself that she accepted that.
Over and over.

On the other hand, it was now possible that she was carrying another kind of repellent, because the first pony they came across in the halls was one she'd seen before, a mare who usually did no more than press tightly against the walls in Cerea's presence. And that was the only thing which happened, right up until the moment when red-fringed nostrils flared, eyes widened, and the earth pony immediately did everything she could to get upwind. Except for turning her body, because that clearly would have taken too long.

Cerea had trained herself to run backwards. Ponies didn't seem to have a natural capacity for it.

It was good espresso, and she gave all of the credit to the beans. (She'd managed to improvise the press, but hadn't thought much of her results -- although she'd noticed the cooks watching very closely, probably to see if she was damaging the equipment.) There didn't seem to be anything missing from the flavor, either. Her first guess was that the materials had been imported.

"So we're going to keep you moving," Nightwatch told her, now carefully flying along. "It's a good chance to explore. Um. Explore the palace. You're... sort of allowed to leave the grounds on your own now, but..."

Feathers twisted from sheer awkwardness. It did horrible things to the hover.

"The protests," Cerea quietly deduced. "And just scaring ponies in the capital, if I got past them."

The little knight nodded, then recovered altitude and did it again, only more strongly. "The protests haven't been going all night. Um. Well, not with everyone there. There's a few who stay late, but I think that's just to let us know they're keeping it up. About ten of them. Tonight is -- different, but you can sort of hear where it's getting a little quieter now."

A nearby tapestry shifted with sympathetic vibrations, all triggered by 'a little quieter now.'

"And it's not like there's just one way out of the palace," Nightwatch added. "So we could get you out if we had to, and we'll need to for a few things. But just trotting around the city... it isn't a good idea." With extra haste, "Not yet, I mean! Ponies don't know you. The Princesses haven't even sent out the one-sheet yet!"

Which was worth a blink, because it had been moons now and --

"There were a lot of revisions. And just about as much recycling," Nightwatch admitted. "But I think they decided to wait until it could say 'Guard'. That added something important. So it could go out in a week or so. Anyway, I know Princess Luna wants to get you into the capital, but she also wants to make sure ponies are ready for it. And that there's special measures in place, just in case anypony..." Stopped, as her tail began to wring against itself.

"I remember the press conference," Cerea softly said.

"...yes."

They moved in relative silence for a while -- but that was something which only applied to the two in armor, because there were other ponies in the corridors. Cerea had never been this deep into the structure at night, hadn't seen just how many ponies worked on the Lunar shift. It was a full separate staff. Ponies looked at her through open doorways. Ponies scuttled down the halls until they found something they could close behind them. Ponies scrambled into restrooms and from the sounds produced, had no intention of emerging for a while.

"I want to show you some portions of the palace which you've only seen on the maps," Nightwatch eventually continued. "Places you'll need to be familiar with first. And there were a few which you couldn't enter before, but now you can. After the protocols. And once Sun is raised, I'll show you where to put the sword away and store your armor." With a little smile, "Before we both go to bed."

They were approaching a T-intersection. A pony started to turn into their hallway from the left branch, saw Cerea, and only got three legs redirected in time.

The two mares awkwardly waited out the delay. One didn't want to call too much attention to what had happened through helping to nudge the stallion up. The other possessed limbs which were exactly suited for offering aid, and fears which told her that touching anypony was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Every time.
For the rest of her life.

"So what are the protocols?"

The protocols took the form of two silver hooks which had been set into the marble, just below the level of Cerea's shoulders.

"A lot of rooms have magical protections," Nightwatch explained. "Most of those are attuned to let Guards go in: they recognize an enchantment placed on your insignia. But the Princesses are worried about what could happen if you bring the sword through." With just a hint of weariness, "There was some testing, but.. it was hard for anypony to carry it, and most of the net drags wound up touching the sides. So unless you have to go charging through, you just hang the sword from the hooks until you come back out. Um. And the hairpins. You should carry a little bag for the pins."

Cerea nodded. She knew they gave her a little extra protection: wearing them on duty was simple common sense. But she would need to work out a configuration where they could be placed and removed in well under a minute. (Well, placed: a true emergency would see her yank, and a single hard pull could send pins flying in all directions.)

"Ponies are working on ways to put a temporary shield spell over the sword when it's hung," Nightwatch added. "Um. Which doesn't touch it, because then there isn't much point. And it can't be magically triggered by the hooks, because the sword is touching them. Plus you still need a way of getting it back after, and that could be attuned to your insignia too. I think. I'm not a unicorn: I just work with them. Anyway, right now, the biggest protection should be that nopony wants to touch it. But we do get some ponies trying to sneak into parts of the palace where they shouldn't be, and -- they're probably the ones who'd want it most. So we just have to be really careful for a while. Princess Luna only had the hooks put in today. The enchantments might not be cast for weeks."

She tried to picture ponies with her sword, when simply touching it made them ill. What would they even do with it?

What could humans do with radiation, when it can kill them?
Once they saw it as a weapon, they did everything they could think of.

"So what's in this room?" She was trying to recall the map, and she was currently recalling that she hadn't gotten translations for every label.

"Records and documents. Classified things, but that's just barely. Nothing too crucial: if anypony managed to get through, they wouldn't trot away with anything real." Proudly, "The Princesses have this room as a sort of decoy. So that anypony looking for papers would go here first, and think they'd gotten everything. But it still needs protection. The enchantments get more complex in other areas, where the patrols are heavier. The critical areas."

The little knight took a slow breath.

"And there's nowhere more critical than where I'm taking you now."

They went up two ramps. Passed through three layers of Guards. The two mares were scrutinized. Insignias were touched by silver rods: Cerea watched unicorns carefully examine the pattern of sparks generated by Nightwatch's, and had no direct view for what was happening with her own. At one point, a stallion suggested kicking a bucketful of water at their legs: the pegasus irritably summarized their earlier conversation regarding changelings and then told Cerea to go through it anyway, because they weren't going outside into the cold and it was just good security.

The resulting splash against her limbs failed to pass through any holes, and the centaur shook each leg in turn as she moved past the final barrier. Shed moisture hit the marble and, rather than pooling, instantly arose as a sort of cold steam. A simple loss of cohesion. Pegasus magic again.

And then they were at the door.

It felt like an oddly simple door. The Moonrise and Moonset gates had intricate patterns worked into their surfaces, with weaves of silver forming an ornate frame. This was just a door. Plain, silver-tinged white -- with a very familiar icon set dead-center in the stone.

"Her bedroom," Nightwatch reverently whispered. "It's... a little less watched at night, since she usually isn't there now. There's also an outside patrol, because she has a balcony. Well, they both do, just in case they have to get out by air. But that means somepony could try to get in that way, so... there's always ponies outside. That includes the day-shift Lunars."

That was worth a blink. "The --"

"Somepony has to watch her under Sun," the pegasus quickly explained. "If I took you to Princess Celestia's bedroom, we'd start running into the night-shift Solars. Usually you'd do a day shift eventually, but -- it won't be for a while, not when it's so hard to change your hours."

"I understand." As utterances went, it didn't exactly feel like a refreshing change.

"And you won't take a direct night turn with her for a while, unless she asks for it." With just a touch of snort, "I'd worry if she asked for it too early."

Because that's when something would happen. Because I'm not up to it --

"Because what the Sergeant probably didn't tell you," a frustrated pegasus declared, "is that there's times when Princesses try to ditch their Guards. And Princess Luna almost treats it like a game. A game she keeps winning, because she's so good with illusion and ponies don't always think to check. If she asked for you too early, it might mean she was trying to get into the city by herself. It's bad enough when she goes into Ponyville: we know the Bearers are usually with her, but..." The snort was surprisingly loud. "...that's the Bearers. They've never found a disaster they couldn't save somepony from."

Who? Cerea had heard the title a few times before, had one name from Fancypants' letter. She had been picturing an elite military unit.

"And they've also never found a disaster they couldn't create," stated a disgruntled knight. "Everypony always tells you they'll save the day, and they're right. But what nopony hardly ever says is that they're usually saving it from themselves."

"...um," Cerea borrowed.

"And sometimes I swear the Princesses enjoy it!"

"...er?"

"Like at that one Gala!" Forelegs were now beginning to make extravagant gestures, mostly because the wings couldn't fully join in without creating a crash. "Because of course Lunars have to monitor the Gala, with so many ponies coming in! But the invitation list gets cleared moons in advance! We even kept passing Blueblood through for some reason, at least until he finally stopped coming! We have to watch for everything, but the guests were already cleared..."

The lashing black tail was whipping up its own breeze, and that wind was threatening to turn into a dust devil.

"Who was supposed to be looking out for the columns? The central statue? Flying cakes? And then when the animals got involved --"

Silver eyes blinked. Slowly turned, and focused on helpless blue.

"It's palace gossip," Nightwatch said. "You'll catch up eventually."

"Oh."

"Most of it is only slightly classified."

"Okay..."

And with a blast of frustration, "But if the prismatic one ever tries to catch something on her back again? Tackle her!"

The proper word for the barracks' bath was 'pool.' With Princess Luna's washroom, it was possible to add a few more. Like 'Roman fantasy, major pressure draw problem, 90% of whatever the water heating bill is' and, just in case any of those came across as understatements, you could kick in 'Olympic'. Cerea wasn't entirely certain what the disc would do with 'Olympic'. It still left her with the option for 'lake'.

The mares looked at the tile-rimmed deep-dive silent testimonial to all things wrought by plumbing. There was some form of grout between the tiles. Cerea was trying not to think about how long it would take to scrub it.

"They both need some kind of luxury in their lives," Nightwatch finally said. "They... live a lot more simply than most ponies think. They don't indulge very much. Sometimes I think I take better care of myself than they do, at least when it comes to just doing things which would... make me feel good. Most of the Guards feel that way. That they need to let themselves be a little more -- free. Not acting like the worst nobles, not kicking the palace budget into frivolities." And now it was possible to both hear and scent the regret. "They want to be closer to normal ponies, and... a normal pony would have a little more fun."

"And this is Princess Luna's luxury," Cerea observed. A giant bath...

"One of them. The others are mostly fruits. Exotic ones, but she grows them herself. We'll get you to the greenhouse some other night. And ice cream, but she's still getting used to making her own. With Princess Celestia, for food, it's baked goods, all kinds. Pastries, cakes -- but what just about nopony on the outside knows is that she loves bread most. A simple loaf, as long as it's made well and served warm. And she loves just standing in the gardens, under Sun. She likes quiet, where it's just her for a while. When the nation isn't calling, and... quiet never lasts long."

The centaur was still looking at the sheer scope of the pool. "How many ponies does she have using this?"

Nightwatch's expression arrived just after the change of scent: something which had Cerea prepared to deal with the advent of open surprise. "Just her. Sometimes the Princesses take a shower together. It's like when you got that one spot by the base of my tail for me, Cerea: it can be hard to wash up by yourself. But when it's the bath, it's always just her."

They were looking at each other.

"It's private," the little knight tried.

It's sad.

The girl felt that. She believed it.

But she didn't know why.

Up ramps. Down corridors. Ponies scattered. Some of them skittered, and that was hard to do with hooves.

Cerea was taken to multiple balconies. Some of them afforded new views of the gardens. None of them overlooked the city, because that was where the rumble remained loudest and nopony wanted to chance having the remaining crowd see her.

Several areas were designated as frequent ditch points.

They returned to the kitchens and found three chefs trying to modify the new coffee press. Another mug was created. After a while, they went back for yet another mug. When the effective mug limit was reached, a restroom was located, effectively and inadvertently evacuated, and then wound up being fully occupied by a party of one because centaur bladder capacity meant the ability to hold it for a very long time and, once that capacity was reached, staying over the trench for what felt like an even longer one.

Tears and snow snuck up on the girl, clutched at all four legs and tried to drag her down. Hooves stumbled, drew on what didn't feel like enough caffeine and dwindling reserves of stubbornness before every knee straightened again.

The armor started as something she was just wearing. Then it existed as a reminder of weight, the same as it had during her training in the gap and at the end of so many patrols. This was followed by having it disregard the padding, press directly into her skin, phase through to the skeleton, and having the metal place phantom stress fractures into her bones.

Her hair weighed a ton. This naturally started as a metric ton, but hair was the sort of thing which grew and the lengthening night found it approaching the British long ton. Cerea hadn't even been aware that her hair knew what that was.

The sword was kept in the scabbard most of the time. Occasionally, the girl tried to quick-draw it in different spaces, making sure she could get it free without hitting any doors or walls. She thought she'd set a new world record on one weightless pull until she realized her weary fingers had missed the hilt and she was triumphantly slashing against air.

Nightwatch took her into some of the secret passages for the first time, and there was no problem with fitting through the entrances because all of them had to accommodate Princess Celestia and Cerea didn't even have a wingspan. She was almost certain of that. Whatever felt so heavy on her flanks probably wasn't wings. No one spontaneously grew wings. Not even Suu, who had to do it on purpose and never got the aerodynamics to work anyway.

Fancypants had mentioned tunnels. The little knight was reluctant to take Cerea fully within (and seemed uncomfortable in the secret passages, becoming more so in dimmer lighting and tighter turns), but did indicate the necessary path and instructed the centaur on how to open the last gate -- and not to do so unless there was no other choice. The tunnels were reserved for the most dire needs of getting out, and had significant protections designed to keep anyone from using them to get in. Most of them were simple detainment measures, alerting those above to come and collect the trapped. The ones for those portions which ran far below alicorn bedrooms were potentially fatal.

She was still waiting on Ms. Garter to send the new bras. She'd put off ordering them as long as possible, Nightwatch had been the one to push the request out the door, and so tightening straps added a few grace notes to everything else happening around the shoulders.

The little knight tried to talk to Cerea about the dress. It was a good topic, because the centaur would make an automatic attempt to escape from it and that kept hooves moving.

There were also talks about Japan, and the household. That was slightly better, except for when the topic turned towards rivalry and her fists wanted to clench: something which wasn't good for passing ponies to see. Or she would think about the one whom she'd loved, which tripled all of the weight.

Sometimes they spoke about the sort of topics which friends might discuss, and pony ears rotated towards doorways while the rest of the body froze in shock.

But Nightwatch kept her going. Nightwatch was alert and vivacious and awake, because these were the hours the pegasus had known for years. The rookie pushed herself forward one half-dragging hoof at a time, wondered just how much exhaustion had been brought by emotion as opposed to that wrought by weakness, thought about how a true centaur would have dealt with it, and then found herself too tired to push all of the resulting thoughts away.

A true centaur.
A true knight.
She shuffled through the palace for hours, existing as little more than a pair of unified lies.

There were two last stops before she was allowed to sleep, and she didn't actually enter the first one.

"...and that's how you open the armory," Nightwatch said as the red glow around the basement door winked out -- which was followed by taking a worried glance at Cerea. "Um. I'll show you again tomorrow. I think you're too tired to memorize that. Did you know the skin under your eyes sort of gets dark when you're tired? And you shouldn't go inside yet, because we're still labeling things for you."

"Labeling?" She was still alert enough for a few words. "I can't read. Not enough." Although she hadn't needed the ability very much on that night, because a pair of events had sent them into the lower levels: the approach of sunrise and spotting a few members of palace staff racing through the hallways, desperate to keep the morning editions away from curious eyes. Cerea hadn't been able to make out more than a few characters, but a mind trained by Japan's media knew a headline font of that size was usually reserved for war or celebrity weddings. The briefest glimpse of a sweater's sleeve suggested ponies had recently added a third category.

Nightwatch's response was to land under the recently-installed silver hooks -- followed by carefully pushing open the door.

The first rainbow went into Cerea's eyes.

It was more caress than assault: a simple reminder that hues existed. Indigo wrapped her neck, violet curved across her torso, and it still woke her up for a few extra minutes.

"Color-coding," Nightwatch said.

Cerea stared.

There was silver everywhere. A very few pieces of ivory, the first time she'd seen any here, all in spiral shapes. Gold. A muted shine told her that the world had titanium. But there were also soft woods, a few harder specimens, some scant stone, steel shaped into what she now knew as hoofblades, which were close to a full rack of proper razorwhips. Shelves and cubbyholes and areas which gleamed with their own corona-cast shields, and that was just what she could see. There was enough room for her to travel through the visible section: something about the size of the dining area in the main kitchen. But light clustered, blurred out details after a certain distance, and all she could truly tell was that the space went on for a very long way.

Ultimately, she didn't know exactly what she was looking at, at least for what any of it did. Shapes and curves and sparkle, added to glow: that was the crux of it, and would be until she actually got inside. But the air itself shimmered, and there was a scent coming from the room: something not quite ozone, a little less than petrichor, with hints of ions. It washed across her in waves, put every olfactory nerve to tingling while her hooves cantered in place, unsure of how to respond.

Energy and storms and a waft of freshly-wet soil. The scent of magic.

"See the glass beads?" Nightwatch was already inside, and a wingtip proudly poked one of the mentioned bumps. "The glowing ones? That's how we're setting things up for you, and it just might become the new system for everypony because it's so easy to recognize the categories this way! Blue always means it's safe to hold. Blue is also generally a piece which was enchanted to be accessible for anyone, but..." A light musk of embarrassment joined the mix. "...it hasn't been used by a centaur, so we can't be sure if you can activate it yet. Violet is safe, but it's a wonder: one which isn't open use. It would take a pegasus to reach the magic. Gold is the same thing for unicorns. But red means the things which are dangerous. For everyone. Red are the things we just know how to store. Like that sphere. The one inside the shield dome. Never touch that sphere unless you want it to become a bunch of pieces which used to be a sphere. Um. Which expand outwards fast, and then collapse into the sphere. Before it explodes again. Twice. I think seven was the record before the charge ran out. There's also a section with really deep red, locked separately in the back. We don't even know what some of that does. Um. We should really go over this when you're more awake --"

"-- so what's tan?"

The silver eyes blinked. And then slowly, slowly shut.

"There's only one tan piece," Cerea quickly said. "It stood out. The one on that shelf, all by itself. If there was just the one, I thought that meant it was --"

"-- different," the little knight quietly said. "It's... different. I -- I think I should just bring it out to you."

The pegasus opened her eyes, turned, started to slowly move towards the shelf and its soft tan glow. Hooves just barely shuffling, wings folded and still.

"I --" Cerea's mind was trying to scramble, and was finding that it was too weary to do anything other than scram. Or scrum. Or try to remember what a scrum was, while being unsure as to how it had gotten there in the first place. "-- I don't want you to get in trouble! Not for removing something when you shouldn't! And if nopony knows whether it's safe --"

"-- it's safe." Barely a whisper of breath, and brown ears strained for the rest. "It just... sits there. They gave it a unique color because there's only the one. We know what it does, Cerea. But we can't use it. Nopony can..."

Which was where words ended for a while, because the object was grasped in gentle teeth. Carried out, and the pegasus angled her neck up. Waited for the silent offer to be heeded.

Slowly, Cerea bent and dipped, feeling the weight of new steel with every movement. Something which paled compared to the mass of the little object which was taken up by her right hand.

It weighed less than half a kilo: she knew that. And yet, somewhere in the back of her weary mind, the memory of a book suggested that she had taken custody of several thousand very small tons.

It looked like a slightly oversized hoof. It almost could have been, because the surface was cold keratin -- but there were also hints of ridges. Not a hoof: simply carved to resemble one, with little characters engraved around the edges. Rigid, unyielding --

"-- we don't know much about how they create anything." The little knight's tones were soft. Reverent. Almost mystical. "But they use themselves. Donations from the dead: I saw that somewhere. There's new horns in their shadowlands, so... someone should give the old ones a purpose..."

"Blitzschritt made this."

It had been a statement.

Nightwatch blinked. "Yes. How did you know? That wouldn't have been in anything the Archives sent yet --"

"-- it's the little curves at the bottom of the letters," Cerea quietly observed. "It was the same with her application. What does it do?"

"It's called a piton. It..." Feathers began to rustle. "She wasn't my Guard, Cerea. I don't know if I'm remembering this right. I just remember this kind is called a piton, anything she would have enchanted is a talen, and... if you sling it to the ground in front of something living and moving, it's supposed to get a lot harder for them to move at all. It sort of forces them to stay in whatever positions they were in for a little while. And it worked on groups. The more it had to affect, the less time it lasted, but... it could slow down a small army. Just long enough for someone to act. But it was her magic. She must not have known how to make it accessible to ponies, or if she even could. There's no platinum, and -- we can't even tell if it's still charged. And there aren't any ibex who would help us. So we just -- keep it. In case there's ever someone who can use it again."

She held it for a while, her fingers pressed tightly against the ridges. Feeling the cool weight of the dead. And then she lowered it again, so Nightwatch could put it back.

There was a locker room, and she was almost completely spent by that point. She just barely registered the presence of multiple ponies as Nightwatch led her in, Lunars going off-shift and using the assigned space for making the change back to civilian life for a few hours -- but they picked up on her. The shadow which entered the room before she did, the clop of hooves against a floor which was being asked to host someone larger than it had ever borne before.

She barely recognized how many ponies were in the room as she entered it, right up until she felt the weight of their eyes.

They had been chatting with each other. They weren't any more.

Some of them had been getting out of their armor, and she finally saw some of how that was done. Unicorns offered help here and there, and a number of ponies were using their teeth on the latches. But for others -- there were places marked on the floor for standing, and then you stood there, made sure your body's size precisely matched the designated outline, pressed your forehoof onto a pedal, and held very still. The clockwork took over from there: pincers descending from the ceiling to press, lift, and sort in mechanical movements which worked precisely as intended and had no means of making even the most minor adjustments for, say, a Guard who had jumped a little when a centaur trotted in and now had a brass manipulator trying to put away his right ear.

Cerea moved to help. Two unicorns closed in before she could and glow saved her the trouble of having to touch anypony at all.

She was shown where the safe was, as ponies got out of the way to let her pass. Fumbling fingers tried the dials, and had to do so three times...

...the ponies hadn't needed to move very much.

There were lockers: she had recognized that on entry. She didn't have a lot of experience with such rooms: a brief trial at the all-species sporting arena run by the kobold, with a more awkward one used before a supposed medical monitoring session and then there had been the one before... the fight. (When it came to the lockers at the Guard training grounds, she'd usually been the only one using them.) But she understood their purpose. You kept your things here. Armor was stored during the day, civilian clothes at night -- at least for those who wore such things in the first place. At the very least, saddlebags could always be secured, or a book you'd meant to read during your break. But...

There were lockers. Some of them had been moved, or shuffled, or just squeezed aside because now she had a locker, one with a bundle of wrinkled fabric dangling off to the right. And her locker had to accommodate her armor, which had to fit her body, which was larger than that of almost every pony she'd seen. Every pony but one.

Everything on that wall had been rearranged for her. It meant some things had been displaced.

The rest of the lockers were smaller. You could tell which one was hers just by the number of square meters consumed by the door...

There were lockers. There was also a scent of steam, and pony sweat. (Each of the three species had their own scent for sweat. She had yet to catch an alicorn sweating at all.) The splashing of water, and the sound of spray. Showers, off to the right. Ponies washing up together. Happy babbling, because none of them knew she was in here yet, and the two going off to tell them hadn't quite cleared the room.

Lockers, except for where there were recessed shelves.

The shelves were the same width as the majority of lockers, and she imagined that the tradition had started as just that: full lockers, one to a Guard. But the nation she had sworn to serve was centuries old, and... Guards died. Given enough time, so many Guards would have died in the line of duty. There was only so much space allotted for the locker room (and she was taking up too much of it, she hadn't earned) and with the passage of generations, the dead would have outnumbered the living.

So it had probably started as full lockers. But now it was shelves: five in each space, and there was a silver plaque attached to each shelf. A few possessions, sealed behind glass. Soft, muted lighting. And the items simply... sat there. Waiting for those who would never return. There were books here and there, saddlebags whose contents hadn't been touched, a hat and a jacket and what looked like a sort of cape. A few timepieces. Armor, never to be worn again. A favored hoofblade, precisely fit for the dead: useless for the living...

She stood in front of her locker after the sword was sealed away next to the hairpins, numb fingers on the lever, realizing that she had to take the armor off and nopony had any thoughts regarding her body other than revulsion, but they were still staring at her, they didn't want to see any of it and Nightwatch's locker was halfway across the room. There were ponies at her flanks and ponies off to the sides and directly behind her was...

...she was wearing padding under the armor. More than enough to pass for clothing, and that which rested on her lower torso had a skirt peeking out from beneath. It wasn't as if she would be exposing herself. But she was so tired, she wanted to wash because to pony senses, she hadn't perspired all that much during the night, but she had yet to find a deodorant in this world and to her own senses, she reeked.

She wanted to wash the padding. She wanted to wash herself. But to go into the showers with the others, when no spray was high enough for her, lying on the floor in front of...

...in front of everypony.

Nude.

She might wind up clearing the entire room. And if she didn't... for those who stayed -- even in their revulsion, they would stare.

She wanted to be clean. She felt filthier than she had ever been, encrusted by gazing eyes. She didn't understand why there was wrinkled fabric at the side of her locker...

Cerea looked up.

Her right hand reached out. It took some turning in place to fully guide the privacy curtain around the ceiling-mounted U-bend, and then she began to remove the armor. Fingers numb, eyes half-closed, just barely getting every piece to where it belonged. And all the while, even through the cloth, she felt the weight of the eyes.

It was worst from the place where no eyes existed. The hollows from the helmet on the glass-shielded shelf. A unique helmet, cut for a pair of backwards-curving horns.

Alone in a herd.

She was almost at the blankets.

"I'm dirty..." Half speech, half yawn. The disk managed the translation either way.

"You can wash before Sun-lowering," Nightwatch insisted. The helmetless head nudged at her back left leg.

"Gonna stink up the blankets. And my nightgown. Changed into my nightgown when I was dirty."

"So they'll get washed too. Cerea, I can't smell anything --"

"I stink." She slumped across another meter. "Always stink. Fouling. I. Foul things. Get it wrong."

"You didn't do anything wrong tonight." The words were as firm as the skull. "Lie down."

Long legs, issued an order, slowly began to fold. Arms came up, locked under the breasts.

"I'm gonna mess up..."

"You made it." They were almost the last words the girl heard before sleep, and if there had been no more to come, her dreams might have been different.

But there were more words.

"You made it," Nightwatch proudly repeated. "Your first night as a Lunar, Cerea, all the way to Sun-raising and day again. You'll understand, a few moons from now. That it's almost like the first real day of your life..."

Her eyes closed --

-- too many of the girl's preparations are about arranging for belief, and of course that's the hardest part. There's so much to do in the gap and since the colts are only going to pull anything approaching their fair share via rope after someone's dared them for the third time, the fillies wind up doing far too much. Old enough to learn is old enough to have chores, and those come on top of classes, which occupy the time between training sessions, further serving as a filler until she's due in the smithy again, and one of the few consolations to failure in the years since her mother stopped singing to her is that it places the filly in the bedroom. At least she can read.

So she has to set things up very carefully. Creating a gap within the gap: a temporal one. On the chosen day, no one can need her -- directly. There are none who would be teaching her, expecting her, trying to find her, and if anyone does happen to believe she's doing something, then they have to equally believe she's doing it on the other side of the gap.

And she can't control what any of the adults do. She can arrange, and she's being so careful about that. But she can't guarantee. It's a criss-crossing network of mutually supportive false beliefs, and every last strand of that weave feels fragile. She has no way to guess what might take place after it all starts. If something happens... if someone has an unexpected cause to look...

There's only so much space available, a limited number of places to hide, and all of them are known because when a species has lived in the same place for centuries, someone's hidden there before. Once those run out, they will realize what's happened. And once they know...

...there are cells.

She knows where the cells are. It's the patch of ground where the screaming used to be. The screaming stopped, because the mare died.

She wonders how long a filly can scream.

She keeps planning anyway.

And then it's the day. Or rather, it's the night, because that was part of how she set things up. Her mother thinks she's going out early, and she is. She just isn't going where her mother expects (at least not after the first stage), and her mother checks up on her almost all of the time -- except for when she's with a particular mare or two. Or doing a job which her mother never goes near if she can possibly help it. A species with a universally-sharp sense of smell frequently treats fertilizer spreading as a punishment detail. Volunteering is seen as taking significant pressure off the community.

So that's the first carefully-drawn piece of thatch in the roof, and she goes out under moon and stars somewhat earlier than she was supposed to: an aspect no one will question because at least she's getting it over with all the sooner. And she does spread the fertilizer, choking and gasping all the way. But she almost smiles, when no one else ever would.

Almost.

She finishes the job, well before sunrise.

And then she takes the last bit of fertilizer. Reaches into a pocket, sprinkles a few carefully-chosen herbs and chemicals on it, drops the lot, and runs.

The blast is fully invisible to the eyes, creates no heat or air pressure, nearly blows her across the clearing. It's something which is always done after fertilizer is spread: muting out some of the scent for what happened. But it does so through creating a drenching, initially almost overwhelming counterscent which drowns out everything which had been in the vicinity. It drifts, and makes it impossible to track anything which was moving through.

She moves with it.

There had been no way to know the exact direction of the wind in advance, and she had been dreading a calm day. But she had planned, and so she has a route for the northwest.

The filly doesn't gallop, because that would produce too much noise. Objects are removed from her carried bag, dropped to the ground: some careful alignment gets her hooves into the molds. From this point on, she is producing the wrong tracks, and she knows she can't keep it up for long. She's further into puberty now: taller, stronger, and hooves grow like everything else: she just hadn't thought her hooves had grown that much. The molds are pinching her, and she can't risk cracks to the rigging or the keratin within. They'll have to last long enough to finish this stage, and then she'll need to take them off. She's already made a mistake --

-- it's not a mistake unless it makes the whole thing fail.

She moves, careful to plant her legs a little differently. Just a sika deer, and simulating that scent is a matter of sprinkling carefully-scavenged hairs along her path. Another species displaced from its original home. It just doesn't know...

There are patrols. She's aware of where every last one is, because she's trotted with all of them. None of them come closer than fifty meters, and she's always moving in a way which lets the wind help her. Not a single mare turns in her direction.

She trots under moonlight. A half-moon, because she had to be careful about that too. Enough to see by, but her outline is a little blurred to anyone who sees her from a distance. It's easy to navigate, because she's moved through the same terrain for her entire life.

Trails she's trotted down a thousand times before.

Then a hundred.

A dozen. Scouting the edges.

The ground is... beginning to rise. Elevating her hooves.

She starts to mark her trail. It's subtle: it has to be. A bent branch here and there. Leaves hooked under each other, the stems supple under her fingers.

The sun is coming up now. Rising into the sky, as she rises...

...there's a flower.

It's a sort of deep blue, verging on indigo. It grows tall in something closer to a spiral, where you have a green leaf and then there's a bunch of mostly-closed petals a little above it, then you go around the curve and repeat the pattern over and over until you reach the top. The top is an explosion of petals and stamen and pistils, multiple flowers coming off the same plant, all in a bed of leaves.

She was born in the gap.
She believes she will die in the gap.
She has never seen this flower before.

It will take an upheaval to the world before she learns its name: gentiana. In human lore, it symbolizes victory and in the time to come, that knowledge will bring bitter tears.

But the filly knows nothing of that, not in dream when there is only a now and, unknown to her for a little while longer, an observer watching from the shadows: one she could never hope to scent. She is here and it is now. It isn't that the future hasn't happened. She's reached her future, a single day of it, and it happens to look like a flower.

She gets as low as she can without disturbing anything. Smells it.

And she doesn't laugh, because perhaps there is someone who could still hear her. But her soul leaps, and her body goes upright too fast and she puts out a hand to steady herself, her palm touches bark which no one has ever touched before and the sun is warm on her skin. It puts new highlights into hair which drapes freely across her shoulders, it sparkles in the tears of joy which are flowing from her eyes and she's cantering in place now because that helps to get the molds off (and deeper into puberty, more is sent into mostly-unfamiliar bouncing) but she also just has to move, she only knows dancing from the stories and dreams of another species --

-- she's dancing now, in her way. As close as the filly will ever come, because it's the best moment of her life. The instant when she knows, knows that she's won. She has a day, only a day but a whole day, there's a flower and sunlight and she's going to go out and live.

But that joy is only here and now, because the filly knows nothing of the future. The celebration can only exist in dream, for the mare cannot look back on this moment with anything other than aching pain, endless regret, and a self-loathing which has never faded. Something which has only a few hours before it begins.

The best moment, with the worst to come. But until then, there is joy. Something which will not last, and it will take years before it truly returns.

She does not know.
Her future is before her.
It's the first real day of her life.
The filly leaves the gap.

Foreign

In some ways, 'Guard' was just another means of saying 'knight'. The girl hadn't truly assigned herself either status -- but she also didn't feel the entire Lunar shift qualified for the second role. To her, the true knights were the ones who had the auras to match the title. Nightwatch had that aura, as did a number of the others: it just wasn't everypony.

Cerea could sense auras: most centaurs had that capacity, and the exceptions were typically those stallions who automatically ignored every other aspect of reality. But she wasn't always entirely sure about what went into creating one.

Rank never factored in and despite what so many humans seemed to subconsciously believe, you couldn't invoke an aura with an excess of self-awarded medals. Force of personality was always an aspect -- but in this world, did strength of magic also play a part? The power of certain emotions could boost an aura, or even flicker one into temporary existence for those who usually didn't possess that radiance. Anyone who was doing what they truly loved most, uniting skill and instinct within an internal song... it was possible for an aura to come about under those circumstances, but it would only last as long as the activity did, and just about any centaur would be able to tell what had generated it in the first place.

A constant aura, of the type which Cerea believed designated a true knight -- those were rare. Among the Lunar Guards, it worked out to a little less than one in five ponies. It didn't mean that the others weren't capable of serving in their role, or wouldn't manifest the invisible radiance under the right circumstances. The fire was there: she was sure of that, or they wouldn't have become Guards in the first place. It just didn't burn quite as bright.

And then there was the other aura. Something she'd made sure to look for, in the hopes of never finding it.

A sapient could potentially generate an aura through focus: emotional, spiritual, intellectual. But there was a difference between a mind which could focus and one which had chosen to regard the world through a pinhole. If every sense, every thought had been forced to operate using the same tiny lens, then anything passing through would be... concentrated.

If you could only see things in one way... if every portion of what should have been your psyche was channeled through a lone, permanent belief...

Nightwatch had eventually talked to Cerea about what the ponies called falling: a discussion which had only come after multiple sessions in the smithy. The mark wasn't just a sign of skill, it also provided a magical boost to the linked abilities. (It was another reason why the girl considered herself to fall well short of true knighthood: in this case, it was simply a strictly local one.) There was pleasure to be found in exercising one's talents and with anything which brought pleasure, there would be those who took it too far. Do that which you were best at until you were effectively doing nothing else, and everything outside of that narrow range might start to feel as if it didn't make very much sense any more. You were so much better off sticking with what you knew...

Barding was supposed to be one of the fallen. You could communicate with him in the language of metal, and very little else. And Barding had an aura -- when he was at the forge, during those times when he was caught up in the heart of talent and rapture. The same as any other artist who touched the flame which burned in the core of their soul. And when he stepped away from the forge, it faded, leaving a normal pony who was missing most of his fur.

Cerea had been taught about falling. But that level of focus wasn't enough to generate the other aura.

There was an aura which arose from the strength of one's soul. Cerea felt there might be another for magic. (She wasn't quite sure. The potential for overlap seemed to exist.) The most common, strictly temporary one flickered into the world through passion and devotion to one's cause, whatever that might happen to be. And you could speak to Barding through metal -- but with the smith, metal occasionally led to softer topics, if only for a while. And he came out of the forge, now and again. He knew where the barracks were, and buying celebratory drinks (although he never spoke about exactly what was being celebrated) had required him to locate at least one bar.

He was fallen, at least to some degree. But he didn't have the other aura.

The other aura arose from the toxic fumes of a soul which had turned into bubbling magma, angry heat radiating through the cracks in the blackened shell of normalcy. Something which never held together for long, because anything could cause an eruption. Anything at all.

The other aura was something like a laser in that you took everything which might have existed in gentle warmth and narrowed it down to the point where the world began to burn.

It wasn't simply ignoring those things which were no longer comfortable. The other aura scorched its way through the pinhole while demanding that the world could match its limited vision and if anything about that resisted, then the only solution was to take everything which didn't fit and sear.

The other aura came from fanaticism.
Monomania.
Madness.

Most of the girl's exposures to such auras had come in the human world. (The first true incident had seen her encounter them in bulk.) There might have been flickers among the protestors outside the palace, brief moments of self-loss as herd instinct threatened to take over, but -- she had to be within a certain range to pick up on an aura, and any such positioning would have allowed those screaming against her presence to see her. It was something no one wanted to risk.

Flickers: those were always possible. They could appear in humans, because herd instinct and mob mentality weren't all that far apart. But the full horror of the other aura...

She'd checked the Lunar Guards, because just about any cause could call out to fanatics. The other aura hadn't been there.

The girl had been relieved. No matter what happened, no matter how badly she might fail and how much the others would inevitably hate her for it... at least she wasn't dealing with that. There were true auras, and those were the knights. But for the opposing aspect -- even those who had been described as fallen didn't generate it. She was starting to wonder if ponies were even capable of creating one.

They were.

She would know the madness was in the palace, shortly before it wrapped itself around her throat.

The life of a true knight was adventure, daring, repeatedly almost dying, and (in so many of the best stories) making the final sacrifice for one's liege, who might not even know it had ever happened.

The life of a rookie Lunar Guard mostly seemed to involve trotting around a lot.

Cerea eventually found herself saying a few things to Nightwatch on the subject, because 'trotting around a lot' began to grate after a while. The little pegasus had countered with a simple fact: knights might go out in search of adventure, but the Guard ideal was a career where nothing happened. 'Nothing' wasn't going to get a Princess hurt and no matter what anypony might claim regarding the topic, nopony had ever died of boredom. If any given night passed in relative silence under scrutinizing stars, with the worst which happened to a Princess coming from having to review a particularly odious piece of legislation just before sentencing it to death... then that meant the Guards had done their jobs, and the ones who worked in the closest proximity to the dark mare's office eventually got used to the sound of frozen papers shattering upon marble. (Not that the centaur had heard it yet, because the closest she'd been to 'her' Princess during a work shift was when the first assignment had been passed over.)

So Cerea trotted around a lot, just about always with company. There were exceptions, because the first nights of her Guard duty represented a form of extended training. Nightwatch didn't just want Cerea to learn her way around the palace: she wanted a centaur who couldn't fly or teleport (or, when carrying the sword, couldn't be teleported with it) to master the fastest means of reaching just about any location within it. The most empty portion of each night had been reserved for time trials: Cerea would be taken to a given location, provided the name of another, and then she would have to get there. This usually wound up involving at least one of the secret passages (which also tested her ability to get into them), judgment calls about going around spell-secured areas, not that much in the way of full-speed gallops because she seldom had enough time to reach her top speed, and Nightwatch waiting with a stopwatch on the other end because wings and experience both had their advantages. Plus when you considered that the pegasus could move over most of the traffic and Cerea had to gallop past it, move around any living obstacles, there were ponies who tried to shortcut through the passages and avoiding a collision without losing speed occasionally meant going into a leap...

The time trials gave Cerea something to do other than trot, and one of the extra activities came from slowly backtracking along the trail so she could apologize to everypony she'd startled along the way.

She didn't like the trials, and continued to not like them no matter how many times Nightwatch told her that every rookie Guard had to run them, with veterans undergoing a yearly review. She knew they were meant to help her learn the layout and there might come a time when that knowledge was crucial, but what they were mostly producing at the present was shivering curls of pony life in dark passages, trying to reconcile themselves to the fact that a centaur's barrel had just passed one meter over their heads.

(At one point, Nightwatch had tried to argue (insofar as the sheer number of 'Um's' would allow it) that going back to apologize was at least giving Cerea the opportunity to introduce herself to much of the Lunar staff. The girl's counter was that the full mechanism probably wasn't endearing her to anypony.)

The time trials were also a way to wake her up in the middle of a shift, because she was still dealing with some amount of temporal jet lag. She had been made into a Lunar 'the hard way' and while her assigned working hours respected that, her body was still experiencing a certain amount of doubt. The first few nights of work passed in a partial stumble of frequent fogginess, where the obscuring fumes were only temporarily burned off by the steam which arose from mugs of espresso -- at least, for what little was available. The mares often came into a palace kitchen to find chefs tinkering with tubes, springs, and burning off some precious amount of the limited supply by running through it whatever the experiment was this time. Cerea was convinced that the palace was going to run out of coffee, and had certain suspicions regarding any replacement costs potentially being taken out of her salary -- which would at least mean the money was being spent on something.

Nightwatch noticed the stumbles, asked her how she was feeling just a little too often: even for those who could use the potion, the abruptness of the schedule flip could cause upset. Cerea insisted that she was capable of adjusting, and the little knight's response for that was to get the two of them out into the gardens shortly after every sunrise. Like humans, centaurs needed a certain amount of sun exposure to stay fully healthy: Nightwatch suggested the same was true for ponies, accompanied by a need to avoid awkward fungal infections.

They trotted throughout the night, greeted the world in the morning. And then Cerea would stay in the gardens for a while, because she'd already told her friend that centaurs needed some sun exposure now and again, she hadn't said how much, the tours never started before a given hour and...

...eventually, Nightwatch would go in. Doing so ahead of Cerea, because somepony had to go inside in time to start running the bath. It left the girl alone for a while, as much as that was possible when a now-softer rumble was still sounding from the front gates. She would stand in the cold, occasionally pressing her cheek against a shoulder pad: testing to see how chill the metal had become. Scenting the crisp air, staring out across nothing in particular, until...

...she was still trying to work out exactly much time she had to consume during those solitary vigils. What was required before the locker room would be completely cleared, because every trip back to it still found a few Lunars present, talking and showering and changing out of their armor and just... there.

She tried to be the first one to arrive, when shifts started. But there was always somepony who'd seen the need to punch (or kick) the clock somewhat ahead of schedule, and they had to be leaving their homes at a truly ridiculous hour because they were beating Cerea to the lockers and the centaur lived in the palace. She was doing everything she could to make sure nopony was present when she drew the privacy curtain, that she could just get in and out of her armor without causing offense or feeling the weight of eyes passing through fabric, but there was always somepony there and...

...she hated the locker room.
She hated having Blitzschritt's helmet directly behind her. Something which made it feel like she was always being watched.
She hated hearing laughter coming from the showers when she knew that trotting within would make all of it stop.

The girl moved through the palace and even when she wasn't running time trials, ponies moved away from her.

The life of a knight was adventure. The rookie life of the first centaur Guard mostly centered around holding back the tears until after Nightwatch had fallen asleep.

She had to do that five nights per week, and not the whole of those nights, especially with winter approaching: nopony expected Guards to pull fourteen-hour shifts. A portion of each cycle was allotted for personal activities: language classes hosted by Nightwatch, stories read aloud, time in the smithy. (She was seeing less of Barding now, because the smith had to sleep sometime.) But it was all being done in the palace, or on the grounds...

Cerea was now permitted to go just about anywhere in the structure (although entering the Solar wing could lead to a few awkward questions). She had the gallop of the place, and it had never felt so much like a prison.

Like a gap in the world.
Perhaps that was why her dreams kept going back to the same point in her life. Over and over.
Five nights.
And on the sixth, the palace gave her no choice but to leave.
Bad things happened when she went out of bounds...

She had no choice but to leave the palace. However, she was freely permitted to obsess over picking out clothing for her first day of school.

Nightwatch had already left the barracks, flying out on the current produced by the backwash of a hasty sentence: something about the theater district. It gave Cerea privacy, along with one extra bunk for hosting rejected items.

I have to make a good impression.

She was a centaur in a world which reacted to her particular configuration of torsos and limbs with terror. Making a good impression was effectively impossible, and so the blue sweater draped itself across a vacant mattress.

I need to look as non-threatening as possible.

Princess Luna had ordered her to carry the sword whenever she left the palace. Just in case.

...how did I pick out clothing in Japan?

Well, that had been easy, because the airline had lost most of her luggage. Few things were simpler than choosing her daily wardrobe from an options list which had been brought down to four.

...for the first gallops through the streets. When I was looking for a suitable host. For someone I could devote myself to...

There was a white blouse among the choices. Not the one she'd been wearing when the terrain had begun to change: all of that clothing still needed significant repairs before it could ever be used again and with Ms. Garter's replacements, there had been no need. But there was enough of a resemblance, save for two facts: a full lack of strained buttons passing down the center line, and a total presence of sleeves.

I was trying to... show off my arms.
They aren't bad arms. Not in Japan. The muscles only show when I exert myself or flex. Slim arms, proper arms, just like all the magazines said. Maybe they would have seen them as my best feature...

Ponies had very little reason to care about anyone's arms.

A sleeveless blouse, and a tie. Because she'd come to Japan as an exchange student, and so she'd wanted to have her clothing look at least a little like that of a high school student: the tie had made it feel as if she'd been wearing something from a uniform. Additionally, ties were formal.

As part of the preparation for making centaur clothing, Ms. Garter had taken Cerea's measurements. (The girl wasn't exactly looking forward to having that happen again.) But somepony had to have shown the designer what the original pieces had looked like, because Cerea's current options included a new tie. Still red, somewhat thicker than the original: about halfway to becoming an ascot, and somewhat longer than what she'd had before -- but it was a tie.

She knew ponies wore ties: she'd seen a few on the Lunar staff, and Fancypants used a bow style. The dangle on the classic model was somewhat awkward when applied to pony bodies, but the mere existence of the accessory meant ties were accepted. All she needed to do was...

The white sweater, because it was too cold for a normal blouse. A brown-black skirt. But the sweater had a fairly high neck, so if she folded it over, then ran the red under that and --

-- it was longer than what she'd had before.

It was mostly lying flat. Or flattish, because the portion of anatomy it was very partially draping decidedly wasn't.

It looked stupid.

She sighed. Removed the tie, gathered up the new, mostly-empty backpack (because getting one had mostly been a matter of finding the strength to ask), slipped her arms through so that the visible straps were resting over the hidden ones, and left the barracks.

Nightwatch had explained air carriages to her. The Princesses mostly used them as a means of formal travel: using a carriage saved a little royal wing strength during the journey and made it easy to bring Guards along. The average pony treated them as a semi-luxury method for mid-range travel: they were more direct than a train, and could travel somewhat faster over a smaller distance. Earth ponies didn't always care to take the gallop, a number of pegasi were no good at endurance flight, and the percentage of unicorns who could teleport was a rather small one: an option which also required the caster to have a clear space on the other end and know exactly where they were going. It wasn't a form of transportation which allowed stopping to ask for directions.

A taxi, then: one which could get in the air. (She hadn't really used taxis in Japan: trains could offer enough room for centaurs who wanted to travel, but car transport required a minimum of a very large, extremely empty van -- or worse, a horse trailer. Which offered plenty of space, but always wound up stinking of horse.) But as she shivered in the wind which blew across the level portion of the tower's roof, she thought about helicopter landing pads.

It made sense for the designs to be somewhat similar: something was touching down atop a vital structure, and space had to be arranged for that. The only real differences were the lack of centering lines painted onto the roof, added to a small amount of approach space. There was even a little hut-like structure off to one side, allowing future passengers to shelter while they waited. She just hadn't wanted to ask anypony to open it for her, she could already see the carriage approaching, and...

A landing pad. A necessity for certain kinds of government buildings. Quick exits, potentially fast entry. She wondered how strongly it was watched.

The carriage came in, towed by -- she tried not to wince -- six pegasi. Skipped twice as it touched marble, quickly slowed as hooves found purchase and a shift of wings bled off speed.

It was covered, of course. A dome of rigid fabric curved out from a raised metal base: the door switched materials in the center and seemed to be held together by static. She still resolved to be careful about not touching the sides during entry. Keeping the sword in the scabbard seemed to provide some protection from the consequences of accidental contact, but the hilt was always exposed. If the pieces were enchanted to stay together...

There were windows built into the dome. She didn't know what they were made from, and it didn't matter because every last one of them had been draped over from the interior. There was no point to letting any night flyers see who was traveling, after all.

"Thank you," she carefully offered to the waiting pegasi. For the ride. For putting up with the inconvenience, and for being willing to deal with her weight.

Three of them nodded. Two waited. The lead stallion spoke.

"There's going to be four of us posted there," he told her. "We'll rotate until it's over. Shouldn't be any trouble. But we've got a flare ready to go. If you see a burst of green through the curtains, that's your signal to get everyone out of there. And get ready to defend yourself."

She forced a nod. And then, hoof by hoof, feeling the backpack vibrating against her neck, she forced herself to board.

There was a jolt, and a sensation of gaining speed. And then they were up and over the walls, with wind and the constant rumble of pony anger shaking the dome.

It was a fairly short flight: just a few minutes, and it struck her as being unusually smooth, especially when the pegasi were connected to the carriage by nothing more than what had appeared to be a fairly standard harness arrangement. More magic in play.

There was nothing to look at during the trip, and she kept right on looking at it because there was a faint glow within the fabric dome, coming from a small glass bead at the apex. It allowed her to scrutinize the colors, which ranged from indigo all the way through indigo. And then there was a little bump and a jolt, just before the whole thing came to a stop.

"You're clear," the lead pegasus called out. "Nopony in viewing range. Door's just about in front of you. Get in fast."

She disembarked --

-- there was barely any time for looking around, and the one glance she managed to the right found her all of three meters from the edge of the new roof. It also gave her an angle for looking down, and so she saw a flag which was gold and brown with a few liquid highlights of red, shifting slightly in the chill breeze. There was light in that ornate building, faint voices coming up from the street somewhere below, a hint of squawk --

"-- get in!"

Her fingers fumbled, and it took an awkward foreknee bend before her searching hands located the lever: something which was much lower than she'd been expecting --

-- the girl, not quite looking at where she was going, stumbled through the opening door, and her arms went in before her head.

She had spent just about every day since her arrival in the same building. One that not only offered her whatever degree of shielding the palace could provide, but which had been built around a core design philosophy: Everything Here Must Be Capable Of Accommodating Princess Celestia At All Times.

"OW!"

She wasn't there any more.

Cerea awkwardly rubbed at her forehead. Wondered if there would be any visible bruising, and then ducked.

The hallways are dimly lit, because there's no need for anything more than that: Nightwatch has told her that devices are often designed to conserve their charges at night. Anyone who's here at this hour knows where they're going. The centaur has directions, knows which ramps will take her to the right floor and where to turn. Even in tightly-clustered shadows, if she was moving at her normal speed, she would reach her destination in less than three minutes.

But she slows in her trot. Stares at what's around her, does everything she can to resolve images within the darkness. And what she sees is...

...almost -- normal.

Here: a bulletin board. Images on the pinned papers suggest different kinds of activities. Racing. Flight. Art, and that poster is naturally the best-drawn of the lot. There's no tearaway fringe at the bottom, not in a world which exists without phones -- but the degree of literacy she's acquired lets her make out room numbers. Meeting times. There are always clubs, and they're forever recruiting.

This image has the silhouettes of two ponies facing each other. Their legs have been raised into unusual positions, almost like... they're dancing. There's a date on that one, about five weeks off. The characters denoting the time seem to have been rendered with some urgency.

There's a trophy case or rather, she imagines that the ribbons are meant to represent trophies. Some of them have accompanying pictures of youthful ponies on the shelves. Older specimens come with sketches. Photography is a recent invention.

Classroom doors. She can smell ink. Old wood, somewhat porous: the sort of thing where sweat soaks in on the first day of use and never ever completely comes out. There are lockers along this hallway: they're just a bit lower than the ones in the room she's been trying to avoid, not quite as wide because armor doesn't have to go inside, and right in front of this one is a lingering patch of scent which speaks of hormones and flustered words and desperation. All with a stallion's signature, which overlays the impression of mare breath arising from the locker's lever. If she had to guess, it probably has something to do with the dance.

She can't tell if the stallion succeeded or failed. Desperation can also reflect having to make an unexpected 'Yes' work.

Pony scents. But that's just the start of it. She has some familiarity with yaks, griffons, donkeys, minotaurs, and so many of those musks are drifting through the halls. A few lockers are taller than others. Every so often, levers swap out for knobs. A few of the posters feature different outlines. Restrooms emit a miasma of confusion, which is actually one of the better options.

The girl knows very little about this school. She was told that it's just off Embassy Row: something which has apparently led to it being the single most species-mixed assembly of students in the capital. It's why the building hosts citizenship classes at night: because there's already different styles of desks, a few seats replacing benches, and if there's anywhere available to wash up after school sporting events, it's probably really complicated.

...she's never been to school.
Not like this.

She was supposed to go. That was part of the intent with the program: she was an exchange student, they were all exchange students, and students went to school. But some of the school managers fought. They didn't want to refit their buildings, they didn't want to host extra classes, they had power and influence and graduates in high-ranking positions who had vested interests in keeping things exactly the way they had been. There was prestige, parents proclaiming that they would pull their children out if a single non-human limb crossed a threshold and where there was none of that, there was bribe money.

The program was already in place. The students were coming: there was no way to stop that. But the schools said they weren't coming here, and rather than continue to fight, those in charge of the integration had decided to wait. Let people get used to liminal adolescents in the streets (always accompanied by their hosts, or there would be trouble), in businesses, and once that happened, the schools could be tested again in the following year. For now, classes pushed through hosting websites, attending via webcam, sending in homework through email... that would be good enough.

She only found out about that part after the plane touched down.

She had been ready -- she thought she'd been ready to try. To trot (very awkwardly -- she could never picture it as anything but awkward) through hallways which were teeming with humans. All the media she'd consumed suggested that even if she was completely isolated by the cliques, someone would have eventually assigned her a lab partner. Working alongside someone on an experiment was apparently a very good way to find love. Rivals were also an option, although it was possible to have a case where that was just love which had been postponed, usually through being pushed back by the force of denial-based shouting. Either way, the explosions and embarrassed-looking blackened faces tended to be the same.

Themes repeated across the books she'd read, the manga she'd managed to find, and all of the shows she'd crammed before departure. Repetition made something true and if that was what the stories said schools were, then... that was what they had to be. She didn't know them any other way.

But she'd never reached a school. Her books had been assigned, but the carrying distance had been limited to the range from her room to the front of the house. It was a good day when the household's internet connection allowed six girls to stream multiple classes without losing more than a tenth of the frames, and she usually wound up having to go back and check for dropped audio. And that was assuming some prankster among the human students hadn't pointed the camera at the floor.

If the intent had even been to prank...

Lockers. Clubs. Ink. Books. Dances.

She's moving through the ghost of her own dead future.

Finally, she sees the lit door -- or rather, a door with light streaming out around the edges. There's a window panel in the center, at pony view height, and it has been blocked by fabric. She knows that any glass within outer walls will have been equally covered, because no pegasus (or, in this part of the city, griffon) can be allowed to glimpse the interior. All it takes is a single sighting, followed by one word in the wrong place, and the protests will begin to gather here. The palace is offering security to the assembly, and at least half of that protection needs to come from no one knowing she's here at all.

There are a lot of scents coming from that room. All of them took a different approach route, coming up a ramp.

One of the drifting signatures seems -- familiar.

It takes a moment before she can open the door. The time required to adjust her grip height, along with forcing her hand to stop shaking. And then she ducks before going in.

There are nine sapients in the room. Every last one turns to look at her. They stare at her face. What's visible of her flanks. One goes to her breasts and eventually, they all wind up at the sword.

She can only connect scents to the emotions which create them through witnessing associated actions. There are too many new scents, a variety of species creating them, and multiple forms of body language. Shudders, however, seem to be more or less universal.

The one at the blackboard (the oldest, a cream-toned earth pony stallion with a thickly-curled black mane) has a sort of metal extension gripped between his teeth, and there's a thin white stick at the end of it -- chalk. A species which has to carry so much by mouth is still going to do their collective best to avoid biting down on chalk. Something which just got easier, because the pony's mouth has fallen open and the extension is heading for the floor.

She sees a zebra: a male. He's squinting at her, and his scent is unusual. It's as if he spent the day rolling around in a cross between a greenhouse and a chemist's shop, with portions of his fur discolored to match.

There are two griffons: one male, one female. They're sitting on opposite sides of the classroom and will look at her, but not each other. The female is larger, and has more gloss to her feathers. The male seems to shrink into himself at the moment he realizes that the centaur is looking back.

One minotaur. A -- oh, it figures: a male. Much shorter than the ambassador, considerably younger. His sweater is almost a match for hers, and she briefly wonders just how insulative the blue-gray fur is.

A single yak: female, strongly built across the shoulders. (She wonders how the hair ribbons were placed.) One donkey jack. And...

...this is the first cattle specimen she's seen. A bull (if they share the term with the minotaurs): black, smaller than she would have expected (although larger than the earth pony), with short horns that don't seem to be pointing in the right direction. His fur is somewhat shaggy, hangs low from the belly, and he mostly gives off the impression of having recently wandered through a car wash: the escape only came after losing the battle with the blow drier. She can see fear in the wide green eyes, because that's so much of the basic cattle reaction -- but there's also something else, that which stops the tremble in his legs and puts him to facing forward again. A certain basic fierceness, determination...

...but there's one more student.
And the canid is looking directly at her.

It's only for a moment. A few seconds at most before the brown eyes (smaller than that of a pony, but liquid and round) quickly dip, shift right and forward. But this is the only familiar scent in the room: it's just one which the girl has never been able to connect with an appearance. She knew there was a canid working in the palace, and this is the...

...'bitch' is probably the right term. She just doesn't want to find out what the disc would do with it.

The centaur doesn't have a lot of experience with dogs. Her gap wasn't exactly much for pets, and once she came to Japan... well, for once, the sensory problem was going the other way. Centaurs have their own scent: something which is a little like that of a horse, somewhat resembles a human and for a dog, represents a lot of confusion. Dogs usually needed a minute to work out how they were going to approach her, and the smallest breeds were the most likely to snap. But those were just about all Japanese dogs, which meant she was largely dealing with Akitas, Shiba Inus, and something in her just feels pity whenever she thinks about a Chin. It's easy to focus pity on a Chin, because the dog won't be focusing on anything. Ever.

She doesn't really know dogs, and the majority of her limited experience comes from pictures. Now she has to apply it to a dog which exists in a bipedal form, a dog with hands...

...no. Not quite.

Start with the paws. The canid's natural posture is that of the biped, and she can see that the hind paws are considerably broader than would be expected from a normal dog, can bear quite a bit of weight. Not that they need to: the dog is slim, perhaps a hundred and fifty-four centimeters tall, and both of those are guesses because she has to work out where the actual body is within the fur. The head is sort of -- fluffy --

-- back to the paws. The hind ones are broad, but they don't quite rest flat upon the floor. The canid has a seat, one of only two seats in a room full of benches, a seat at a desk with open sides and it's enough to let the girl see the natural position of the legs. Digitigrade. When standing, the canid would take most of their weight on the front of the paws and large toes. The centaur isn't sure it's possible for flat-footed standing to happen at all, and any effort in that direction might result in pain.

The forepaws are not hands. Imagine a computer graphics program which is given a picture of a paw, another of a hand, told to change one into the other, and freezes when it's seventy-five percent of the way to completion. Stretch the front phalanges, bring one around to the side and allow it to turn inward -- but don't let any of that finish. The results are too broad to be normal fingers, with joints which seem too thick to be truly supple. The canid can use her forepaws as hands: the centaur just isn't sure if it can be kept up for long. The left forepaw is currently holding a quill, and it's pressed tightly between two phalanges: the pseudothumb isn't involved.

Examine the fur. It's going to take a while, because there's a lot of it. The canid is a sort of off-white, and it's the kind of off-white which results when you've washed the world's dirtiest piece of clothing one, two, a few hundred times in an attempt to discover what the original color was: by the time you finish, the detergent has pretty much eradicated whatever that hue might have been. From the elbows up, the fur is thick, with a touch of curl to it. It's especially heavy on the cheeks, to the point where it's hard to tell just how wide the jaw might be. An initial estimate says a fourth of the head might be fluff and when the girl finally sees the canid in a soaked state, the truth is closer to a third. It's a narrow face under all that fur -- or rather, hair, because the canid needs to have herself shaved down every couple of moons. The slightness of the jaw, added to soaked hair making the head into more of a pointed shape, eventually winds up suggesting there's some poodle in the cosmic mix.

That's from the elbows up. Work down, and you see why all that washing was necessary in the first place. The hair has been shaved to a near-minimum, and it would be possible to see pink skin underneath if it wasn't for the other colors. Every day of the canid's working palace life involves working with dry pigment powders. Some of them are going to drift, and it means the canid is only off-white from the elbows up. You could make a full rainbow from some of the little stains in the shaved areas, extend the extra hues onto a palette, and then you're probably going to need an empty frame to host the rest. The portions near the short claws are currently suitable for landscapes.

The canid is wearing clothing. There's a blue skirt (and if the girl knew a little more about human fashion, 'poodle skirt' would have been irresistible), but the main focus is the soft yellow vest. It doesn't quite close in the front, although loose-hanging ties suggest the option exists. There are little cradles of threads where a right breast pocket would be (not that the canid has visible mammaries), and they hold chips of colored stone.

A vest, and a skirt. The centaur is almost expecting a collar, and none is present. But to go up from there is to find those liquid brown eyes, now staring at the blackboard as if it's the only thing they can do. The nose is small, black, and has the fold between nostrils which suggest the nares can wriggle independently. The ears are long, floppy, and fringed. And it's hard to tell just how large the head is, as opposed to how much of the bulk is thickly-clustered hair -- but move just above the eyes, to where the forehead is and --

-- the hair bends. Warps, with strands parting just enough to see the thick line of scar tissue underneath. Something which has been discolored by more than injury and keloid tissue. It's as if dirt had been rubbed into the wound...

The girl can see all of that: her height allows extra angles of regard, at least once some frequently-awkward shifting is accomplished. But there's only a few seconds, and then the teacher's voice requests her attention.

His name is Mr. Trotter. (She immediately memorizes the scent of his fear.) And she is somewhat late. But it's only a little way into the lesson. They can start over.

She's waiting for what all of her reading (and viewing, and mistakes) suggest must happen next. That she'll be called to the front of the classroom, made to introduce herself, and she doesn't even know how she's going to find enough room to turn and face forward --

-- but he doesn't ask for that. The stallion just nods towards the only empty desk, and she realizes there's no need for introductions. It's something children do. Everyone here is an adult...

(She isn't the youngest in the room.)

...and no one ever has to introduce her.
There's only one centaur.

The desk is a high, flat surface. The legs appear to be adjustable: metal tubes which slide into each other. She's just not sure how to go about adjusting it. Whoever set this up seemed to believe she would stay on her hooves for the entire class and there's barely enough room for that. Her upper torso can turn more than that of a human, but it sort of leaves her standing sidesaddle to herself and if she does that, the lower torso is going to hit a cabinet. Face the room straight-on and her buttocks will be pushing into the wall...

She tries that first. It's just barely possible to move her tail enough to keep the base from being jammed, and the wedging lets her discover that the raised desktop was raised to exactly the wrong level.

The other students are watching her again.

After a few eternities, she manages a partial shift: enough to get the back of her skirt clear. Her breasts are still resting on the unintended shelf. The sword's hilt is clattering against the wood.

Her arms awkwardly bend (and they're watching that too), fetch an empty notebook from the backpack. She places it off to the side, pins an edge down with one of the textbooks which were left on the desk for her. Gets quill and inkwell ready, curls an arm, awkwardly looks down and to the far right. She needs to see what she's writing, and having an excuse to look anywhere which isn't the other students can only help.

The teacher says a few words, and she automatically jots them down. In order to keep immigrants from having to wait too long for a particular subject to open, the material is designed to be taught in a cycle: you come in at a given point on the circle, and the end is at the same place you began. So she doesn't have to worry about catching up. She can just read on her own time.

(She can barely read.)

Tonight's class is going to be about the division of powers between government branches. The stallion retrieves the chalk: something which is mostly used for drawing diagrams. The lesson begins anew.

She writes her notes in French. (Part of her insists that she should be working in Equestrian, but she doesn't have the vocabulary yet.) The subject matter has to be learned. She works for the government: she needs to be capable of understanding it. And she has to pass the class. The first in a series, something which will stretch out across --

-- five years.

The quill falters.

(They're staring at her.)
(All of them. Whenever they can get away with it.)
(She can feel it.)

It's a citizenship class. It teaches things which adults need to know.

It doesn't cover anything which only foals would learn. If you're not a foal, then the world assumes you know it already.

There are things she will need to learn elsewhere. The secret which isn't a secret, and the impossibility which lies at its core. She'll almost lose the smaller shock in that.

Right up until it leads to the greatest betrayal.

Outcast

"Would you please tell me about Diamond Dogs?"

The voiced request somehow managed to be significantly more awkward than the versions she'd played through in her imagination, and a few of those had found a centaur using her own inner stage as a place to practice cringing through the barracks' floor.

There had been plenty of time in which to rehearse. In order to keep the rookie with her supervisor as much as possible, Cerea and Nightwatch were currently utilizing the same work schedule. A night off for one was matched by the other: Cerea had gone to her first citizenship class, and the little knight had headed -- somewhere. Cerea hadn't really asked for details, because the pegasus didn't get a lot of centaur-free hours and given what had happened in order to place the pony in the barracks to begin with, the girl tried to offer as much privacy as possible. She was aware that a number of places remained open to accommodate those on the Lunar shift: ponies could shop, socialize, enjoy a nightlife which was really more of a daylife which had been flipped over, and manage their affairs at government offices which had been expecting their traffic. But when it came to the specifics... whatever Nightwatch did during those hours in the city wasn't Cerea's business. The girl was desperately hoping that the pegasus was managing some degree of a dating life, and partially did so for the same reason she (rarely) requested that Nightwatch shop for her: at least one of them could do it.

All she knew about whatever Nightwatch had planned for the evening was that a traveling cloak was involved: something designed more for warmth than fashion -- and even then, the primary requirement lost something because wings had to be capable of flaring into full flight at any moment. They'd both left at the same time: Cerea to her classes, the pegasus heading for -- something -- and the centaur had come back to the barracks first. But it had been time partially used for rehearsing what had felt like a necessary question, it had still emerged as something other than a casual query...

The little knight blinked at her: something which was a little closer to level than usual, with the pegasus in the air and the girl resting upon her blankets. Black feathers rustled as the sleek body went through a rather precise sort of shake, quickly depositing the cloak on the floor.

"Um," Nightwatch awkwardly tried.

Cerea waited.

A neutral observer would have been able to make a minor sport out of seeing whose blush was moving faster, although it might have taken a pony to track the pegasus' tide under dark fur.

Nightwatch's wings slowed. The small form carefully touched down, and the left hind hoof kicked the cloak in the general direction of a corner.

"It's about Yapper, isn't it? That's why you're asking? You finally saw her? And --" silver eyes squinched across the duration of the hard wince "-- she's in your class, isn't she?"

The girl managed a not-quite-as-practiced nod. The little knight sighed.

"I forgot," the pegasus said. "That she's taking classes. I should have realized the two of you might wind up in the same one. And you didn't talk to her?"

The more visible blush was accelerating. "I couldn't. She --" the appropriate word was scurried, and nothing would have made her use it "-- got past me before I could get away from my desk." Something which had been true of everyone in the class, but the white body had been the fastest. "And after that..." Cerea sighed. "She went down. I had to go up." The canid could use Canterlot's streets: the centaur wasn't even allowed to look down upon them as the air carriage made its way back.

"It might not have made a difference," Nightwatch reluctantly admitted. "She's not always good with new people. Um. Or ponies. Or..." Feathers rustled again. "...almost anyone. What time did you get back?"

"A while ago." Hours of isolation, mostly spent in going over her own notes because that was easier than struggling through the tiny portions of the textbook she could actually read. (Mr. Trotter had covered the election cycle for the Courts and assignment of the judiciary -- but there had been no such discussion for how Princesses gained their posts. Cerea, who couldn't quite decipher that section of the book and hadn't managed to raise her hand once, was becoming increasingly convinced that the positions were hereditary.) "And I didn't want to try looking for her --"

"-- there wouldn't have been any point," the little knight softly offered. "She lives in the city. Um. Technically. Can we go for a trot while I tell you? Just around the lower levels. I just want to move a little more. Most of what I did tonight was sit and wait."

Cerea's first guess was concert ticket line because it was a world without online resellers and in that, it was a world which was much better off. "Yes." A superior officer had given an order, and long legs immediately began to obey.

The pegasus waited until Cerea was just about up to the door, then reoriented her own body and led the way.

The initial portion of the trot passed in silence, and continued to do so until the sounds of the mares' hoofsteps were abruptly cut in half.

Cerea had noticed that Nightwatch was prone to organizing her thoughts on the ground before launching them from the air. There was something about the rhythm of a trot which could make it easier to find focus -- but when it came to not forcing words across the height gap, a little bit of altitude was helpful.

Neither of them was in armor: a mutual night off from their duties, and so there was no faint rattle of metal as the pegasus maintained a traveling hover. She tended to stay about two meters out from Cerea's left shoulder: close enough to make discussions easy, but offering enough room for the efforts of a full wingspan. There didn't seem to be anything which could be done about the breeze.

"You've probably been wondering why the Sergeant didn't give you a briefing," Nightwatch finally began.

Cerea nodded. "I really didn't think about it until tonight. But it felt strange. Having him leave out a whole species..." She'd never thought of the stallion as being anything less than thorough, especially after having listened to him breaking down every last aspect of her mistakes.

"He probably left out a lot more than one," the pegasus awkwardly offered. "Um. Part of that is because we're still finding species. Or they find us. And there's a few which you just don't deal with as a Guard, not when it comes to having someone cause trouble. Like sheep. The last time somepony tried to use sheep against Equestria didn't work out. For them."

"Sheep," Cerea carefully tried. She knew they were one of the species which had been labeled as 'tenants': those who either weren't quite sapient or had something holding them back, a flaw which prevented them from establishing their own nations. But one of those listed had been cattle, and her class --

"The males can do some damage in bulk," Nightwatch explained. "Especially the bigger ones, if they have horns. Not all of them do. And it's easy to get them on your side, because they'll always listen to anypony who speaks with authority. They believe you. All the time. So somepony told them that they were an army. Spent a few weeks training them. And when they reached the gates, the Princess told them they were fighting for the wrong side. With more authority. Um. After the unicorns had pulled out their earplugs for a few seconds. And then the earplugs went back in. Because they believe the last person who spoke to them, every time. And that's how you stop a sheep. You tell them to stop. Firmly. But since they couldn't hear again, they did the last thing they'd been told. And they still remembered their lessons, so they did a really good job of bringing their own commanding officer down."

"...oh."

"Nopony's put that in the Hall Of Legends, though. It's not much of a story, and it's probably hard to render trampling in rock crystal."

The girl trotted in silence for a while, which still didn't give her enough time to dismiss the image of gullible wool on the attack.

"Anyway, there's probably two reasons why the Sergeant didn't tell you about the Dogs," the pegasus continued. "I have to guess on one. But I think I know what the second is. He was trying to bring in someone from that species every time, and all he had for the Dogs was Yapper. Um..." The hover developed a bop. "I heard somepony say he asked her. And he probably tried to do it in a way which wasn't so -- sergeant. But she's not good with new people, and he never completely goes off-duty, not really. So it was probably a little forceful. From what I heard, he asked her when they were both outside, and... then there was a hole."

"A hole," Cerea repeated.

"They dig," Nightwatch helplessly said. "Fast. If they're on soil and they don't have to stabilize the tunnel behind them, it's really fast. He asked her when they were both outside, and then he was just standing next to the hole where she used to be. But that's just what I overheard, so it might not be completely accurate. I haven't asked the Sergeant, and it was just two ponies talking to each other. Not to me. There aren't many ponies speaking to --"

Technically, it was only the girl who stopped on the spot: the hover simply became more localized.

"-- because I'm living in the palace!" the little knight frantically pushed on. "So I don't see the same ponies when we all come in, or when we all go home! It still leaves a lot of ponies! Like Bulkhead. I still see Bulkhead. And Abjura. Acrolith. Obviously not much because of their shifts --"

Ponies who either helped train me, went out to my arrival point, or both.

"-- but we all talk! And you shouldn't blame yourself for me living here, because that's nothing you did -- anyway, Dogs. We were talking about the Dogs." The hover was recovering more easily than the words. "I think the Sergeant wants to ask Yapper again. Later. When he's not so -- sergeanty. And then he would bring both of you to the training grounds for a quick session. But there's species which usually only get covered when we're moving into their territory. If the palace knows there might be a problem, or we're traveling... then there's a briefing. And that's the Dogs' category, because they don't come to Canterlot. Ever."

The pegasus paused. Several badly-needed breaths were taken, briefly cherished, and released back into the world.

"...not to stay," Nightwatch quietly corrected herself. "Um. I'm not good with history. But I remember all the talk when Yapper came in, because she was the first. The first who -- wanted to stay."

She's alone...

There were ways in which the canid's presence had registered with Cerea as a distorted echo. Menajeria had minotaurs: they just had very little resemblance to the ones she had known. And she'd met a kobold in Japan, but there was a human aspect to some of those features and with Yapper, it was just -- a canid.

A distorted echo.
The centaur, alone.
The Diamond Dog, alone.

"So. Um," the little knight eventually continued. "About the Dogs. You usually don't see them. At all. The palace isn't sure how many are out there, and there's warrens in a good part of the world. There's even a few within ten gallops of the Empire, when the ground is so much harder to dig through. Those Dogs have thicker fur. But they live in warrens, Cerea. Subterranean. And they don't come out."

"At all?" A number of questions were instantly begged. "Can they see in the dark? Where do they get food? How do they breathe?"

"Um..."

Two sets of ears twisted, and the mares automatically moved aside. It took a few seconds before the earth pony stallion passed them from behind, towing a large, lumpy sack via rope. Nightwatch waited a few seconds before resuming the path.

"...they -- don't do well under Sun. Or Moon. If you're more than a fifth of a gallop from a warren, you'll never see one. They'll peek out, because there's a few things they have to do on the surface, but -- they get stressed. The longer they're in the open, the worse it is. So a fifth of a gallop is usually the limit, and that's with the strongest-willed ones. Some of them stay in the warren for their whole lives, because the pack doesn't ask them to do anything else. Um. They're a pack species. And it's not like it is with us, and herds. You can be a pony by yourself, because the herd is somewhere out there. Without their pack, most Dogs barely exist. They need to be with each other, or at least with someone. I heard they even commit crimes together because that way, if they get caught, they won't be punished alone..."

Alone.

It was the sort of thought which echoed.

"Anyway," Nightwatch continued, "they can't see in the dark, but they're really good with low light. They've got some stones which glow, and there's other things which can produce light underground. The same tricks which changelings use in the biggest hives. But it's another reason they don't come up much, because Sun gives them trouble. They usually aren't on the surface long enough to adjust. Breathing... it's easy to hide the ventilation holes. And --" the pegasus swallowed "-- eating..."

The small mare stopped again. The centaur matched the pause, waiting.

"...have you ever owned a dog?"

Cerea shook her head. "There weren't a lot of pets in the gap. No dogs." It wasn't the dubious reactions which canines had to centaur presence: that was generally a first-encounter thing. The real issue was maintaining domesticated stock without the ability to bring in new bloodlines at need. It was hard enough to sneak the inanimate into the gap: smuggling the living

at least one night every spring

was considerably more complicated. You couldn't just casually order a puppy. And without that influx of fresh blood...

Cerea knew something about the science of breeding. With what she was reasonably projecting to be a scant number of potential herd-hosted dogs, it only would have taken a few generations for the negative recessive genes to effectively become dominant. The population pool just wasn't large enough to stay healthy. It took a significant starting number to prevent genetic collapse and even then, if you didn't have new people --

-- new people?

-- new dogs coming in every so often...

Nightwatch was looking at her. Waiting.

"There were a few mares who kept birds," Cerea finally said. "That was just about it. And most of them just fed the ones who came by. There were names, and the birds would come when they called -- but they would migrate in and out."

Most. A few mares had used cages, and all of those had argued against sending an exchange student out into the world. As far as Cerea was concerned, it was the same core philosophy: if they couldn't go anywhere...

The little knight nodded. "Not many ponies own dogs," she stated, flying on -- but just for a moment, and then they had to wait for another sack to be dragged by. "It's hard to find homes for puppies. They're loyal. They're loving. But they're also carnivores. You can't feed a dog on sweet potatoes, not forever. Most ponies don't do well with meat. Canterlot has a butcher shop in the Heart now, and on the first day it opened... the owner didn't think about the scent of blood, because he's a griffon and it doesn't mean anything to him besides lunch. But he opened early in the morning, the smell got out, all of the commuters picked it up and -- it made a few of them think about wounds. About bleeding, about something coming for them. You saw it at the press conference, Cerea. Sometimes, if a few go off, and there's enough ponies close enough, when the panic just takes over..."

The dark head dipped. Silver eyes closed with shame.

"There was a stampede," Nightwatch quietly said. "Then there were protests, until Princess Luna and Crossing Guard did -- something. I'm not sure what. But the butcher shop's been there for a while now. There's enchantments on the glass, because it was clear on the first day and looking at fresh meat dripping blood into catch-pans didn't exactly help. Now you have to be a carnivore to see through it. Or an omnivore, I guess."

I can't tell her.

"And there's other effects to negate the scents when they leave the shop," the little knight went on. "The people who need to buy meat go inside, and that includes a few ponies. Getting food for their pets. The palace orders from there: Sizzler says they have the best cuts. But the ones who don't go inside -- most of them don't even look at it. Some of them just... pretend it's not there."

The doctors can't tell anypony --

"It's hard for griffons and ponies to meet for the first time, outside Protocera," Nightwatch softly continued. "Because most ponies get unnerved when they think about meat-eaters. And the Dogs are carnivores. Carnivores who can't get enough meat underground, because most of what they can find is rabbit. Um. Most ponies don't know about this, and I only found out because Princess Luna had to tell everypony about Yapper going into the kitchens. If you eat too much rabbit..."

It triggered a gulp, and Cerea tried to spare her friend.

"Protein poisoning," she gently said. No one could survive on a diet which considered entirely of lean meat -- at least, not for long.

"...yes. So they have hunters. Those are the packmates which go up to the surface, usually under Moon so the light won't be as much of a problem. They catch animals and bring them back down. I don't think they ever managed to domesticate anything, because they can't keep those species in the warrens and the Dogs can't stay on the surface long enough to take care of animals there. But the warrens are in wild zones. It means they have to deal with a lot of monsters. With pack tactics, I guess. And..."

The pegasus stopped. Nodded towards a door, and the girl moved to open it --

"-- are you okay?"

"Wine cellar," Cerea half-choked, and indulged in dark thoughts about the pegasus techniques which had kept the scents confined until the threshold had been breached. "It's good wine. There's just a lot of it. Give me a second..."

It was granted, and the females eventually slipped inside, closing the door behind them. Came to a stop in an aisle between the wooden racks of exposed bottles, where light illuminated labels which could not be read.

Some of the rays passed through those bottles. Amber and rose played across skin and fur. The latter tended to stain more than it tinged. It was something very much like standing within the flow of glowing blood.

"This doesn't leave the room," Nightwatch softly ordered. "It's something a lot of ponies know about, but -- we don't talk about it any more, not in the palace. I want you to hear it because you haven't heard it yet and if you didn't know, then... eventually, the wrong pony might say something stupid. So you have to know the real story. What there is of it."

Cerea managed a nod. Phantom trails streamed down her neck.

"I'm not good with history," the pegasus quietly began. "But there's a few ponies who are. And there's a lot more who make things up and say that because it happened a long time ago, nopony can prove it wasn't history. Plus there's stories, Cerea. Things which you tell foals to give them a good scare, because some kids like to be scared. As long as it's things which are just in stories, things which never really happen. Old stories..."

And she knew.

The centaur looked into her friend's eyes, blue on silver in the midst of red. Waited, as the black tail began to shiver.

"We don't have a lot of contact with the Dogs," Nightwatch forced out. "There's a few warrens which are really close to settled zones. Maybe three of them have trade. Ponyville's one of them -- now. But ponies normally don't go near them, because there's stories, some of the oldest stories which still exist. Stories so old that nopony knows the truth of them any more, and in those stories... Dogs captured ponies. Kept them as slaves, forced them to work all the time, work which never ended, and..."

The shivering had reached the feathers.

"...when the slaves couldn't go on -- the Dogs still needed meat."

"They will look at you, and they will see nothing more than a monster. That is what we face, centaur. We are battling an enemy formed from imagination. We are fighting stories. And so many will have already decided which tales to tell themselves."

"...Cerea?"

"Just -- remembering something Princess Luna said." Her voice seemed to echo off the bottles. "So when Yapper came in..."

"Everypony who didn't remember the old stories got told about them. Usually in the newspapers." The last word had been spat. "You can guess which ones. It was one thing to have trade, and that's rare enough, Cerea. Most ponies had never seen a Dog, let alone tried to buy anything from one. But even if you knew about trade, there was a Dog who wanted to live here. And she didn't come in at a good time." Forehooves were beginning to gesture. "I don't know if there ever could have been a good time, but -- when I said that Ponyville has trade now? Before that, they had a kidnapping. Which only got into the news after, because --" Dark fur creased around the frown. "-- I'm not sure. Princess Luna said the Bearers settled it, but I don't know what the details are, other than nopony really getting hurt. The Bearers have two earth ponies, and it's usually the earth ponies who deal with the Dogs. It's just that when Yapper came in, there were reporters looking for any reason she shouldn't, and somepony found out about the kidnapping. I think the Tattler broke the story. So now there's a Dog who wants to live in the capital, there's old stories about ponies being eaten and a new one about a mare who got snatched away..."

The shiver had transmuted into the shaking produced by rage, and a lashing tail nearly knocked three vintages off a shelf.

"You don't want to know how ugly it got." The words had been half-formed from snarl, and nothing was more canine than the momentary glimpse afforded of the pegasus' teeth. "Letters, protests... and over Yapper, Cerea! Yapper, who goes into a hole if somepony looks at her for too long, with ponies shouting at her every day! She had trouble getting to work, she could barely rent a place to stay and when she did, she got kicked out of her rentals over and over because she kept digging out private warren rooms under the buildings! Somewhere she could recover from the strain of just having to be on the surface every day! Imagine what it's like, being agoraphobic when the whole world is an open space and when you try to get away from it for a while, everypony tells you to stop...!"

Wings almost slammed back against the pegasus' sides, and the furious landing made bottles dance.

"...how long ago?" was all Cerea could initially manage.

Nightwatch presumably stared up at her. Then the little knight backed up a little, and the effort became visible. "About -- a year and a half now."

There was a next question, and it felt almost too crucial to voice. As if the sentence was about to contain some of the most important words of her life.

"Why is she still here?"

The pegasus blinked, and the answer emerged as if it was something being explained to a foal. One of the fundamentals of the universe. The sky is blue. Water is wet. Stay in the gap.

"...because she's still here."

Which brought Cerea back to the basics. "I don't understand --"

"-- nopony was kidnapped. Nopony was enslaved," Nightwatch slowly told her. "Nopony was -- eaten. The Princesses backed Yapper up, in public, every chance they got. Mostly Princess Luna, since she's the one who let her come in to start with. But Princess Celestia took the day shift. They spoke to one of the banks, and helped her get a loan so she could start paying for her own home. Which wound up being on the outskirts, but -- it was her land, it was still in the city, and nopony could complain about her digging under her own property. Not past the point where the courts told them to stop, anyway. She came to work every day, while nothing happened. And after a while..."

The dark head slowly shifted, back and forth, and silver eyes never lost contact.

"...it was like the butcher shop. There was a stampede on the first day. Then there were protests. And then it was a week, a moon, a year, and it was still there. Ponies trot past Gristle's without thinking about it and for a lot of them it's because they didn't want to look -- but there's something else. It had been there for a year, and..."

A slow breath. Rage-disrupted feathers and fur began to settle back into their natural lie.

"...the Princesses said something once, when they were trying to rearrange some of the decorations. They said the palace has inertia. If something's been in one place for a while, then ponies start to act like it's always been there. Like it shouldn't be anywhere else. They moved things, and other ponies moved them back. Maybe it's the same with cities. It started with a stampede, we didn't get another one, and after a while, the butcher shop was just -- there. Maybe it hadn't always been there, but it wasn't going anywhere and if you didn't like it, you just trotted past it. And you had to remember where it was, so you'd know when not to look -- but maybe you remembered because your friend had a dog, or a cat, and you might want to bring some fish the next time you visited, or a bone..."

One more breath.

"She stayed, and nothing happened." Which produced a small smile. "Well -- a lot of things happened. Because it's Canterlot. But she didn't cause any of them. And if something did happen, she was right next to us. She's a very fast digger, Cerea. She... can get a lot of ponies to safety in a hurry, if the soil is soft."

The pegasus exhaled. Twitched her tail once, bringing stray hairs back into alignment.

"She was here. And when ponies come into Canterlot for the first time, when they see a Dog walking down the street --" with a little sigh "-- not that she uses them all that much, still -- she can startle them. There's always going to be somepony new, another first time. Over and over, for the rest of her life. But for the ones who live in the capital, she's here. She's traveling with a pony most of the time when she's above ground, because that shows ponies can be near her. She goes out with her friend. The palace says she has the right to be here, like the butcher shop. They back her the same way, and it's been a year and a half. So maybe it's starting to feel like she's always been here. And there's ponies who still don't like that, ones who move away from her or mutter under their breath. The ones who keep telling stories to their foals. But when the foals see her, she's white and fluffy and her tail sort of moves in a circle when she's happy. It's like a rotary screw's blade more than a tail. It's funny. Foals giggle when they see her happy. And she's happy when she works, her shift goes into the morning hours and sometimes, the first tours through get a glimpse..."

Amber shifted across shrugging shoulders.

"Inertia," Nightwatch said. "It's a weird way to say 'normal'."

The little knight shrugged again, trotted towards the door. After a moment, an exquisitely confused centaur managed to follow.

"If you want to speak with her," Nightwatch told Cerea, watching the wine cellar door swing shut, "then try to find a place where she has ways out, and -- go slowly. It's not because you're a centaur. She's shy. She has a lot of reasons to be."

"...okay."

Back to trotting, at least until another sack needed to go by.

"What are those?" Cerea asked. She knew where the palace's garbage pickup area was now, and usually did her best to avoid it at all costs. The actual trash was removed three times per week, but the olfactory afterimages tended to linger.

And Nightwatch, whose posture suggested distraction, with a scent which indicated a pony who was rather satisfied with herself, made a mistake.

"That's just your mail."

The heavier hoofsteps stopped.

It took a few seconds before the pegasus recognized what had happened and by the time she turned back, it was clear that the slow horror which suffused her features was going to take its time about departing.

"-- well, ponies know you live here!" Nightwatch desperately rushed forward. "So you have an address! And that means there's a place where you can get mail. That's how Fancypants and the Rich filly got their letters to you, right? With private couriers. But other ponies just use stamps. So if they want to write you, or write the palace about you, they -- send everything here." The words were getting faster. "But you can't really read that well. Not yet, I mean! So there isn't much point in showing it to you, right? Somepony just sorts out everything you might want to see, which is usually just the private courier stuff anyway and that makes it really easy! And the rest is just -- stored. Until you're ready to read it."

Feathers appeared to be wringing themselves. Some of the formations briefly suggested a shovel, which made it all the easier for the senior Guard to dig herself deeper.

"But this is just what's left," the pegasus erred. "After the inspection."

"The inspection," Cerea repeated.

With the blurring speed which suggested the only way to survive the acid pit was through racing over the surface, on hoof, while hoping gravity wasn't actually looking at the time, "Some ponies think the palace won't check for magic! Or potions. Or... um... anyway, we just store it! Until you're ready to read it. Not that you probably should. It gets repetitive. Some ponies just copy out the same letter over and over, then add a signature. Actually, we've been getting less of those lately. It's a little weird. There were bale-tons at the start, more than we ever got for Yapper! Um. Some of them were the same signatures, I think. But for the duplicated ones, the numbers are going down. I don't know why --"

"I want to see them."

The words had no way to express themselves as an order. It had still been somewhat stronger than a mere request.

"Um. I don't think that's a good idea --"

"-- I don't want to try reading them," Cerea softly said, and did so at the same moment the blonde tail lashed across the majority of the hallway's width. "I'm not asking you to read them to me. I just want to see them."

"Um..."

"-- there's only so many rooms down here, they were using canvas sacks and if that fades, I can follow the scent of paper for a very long time," the centaur explained with false peace. "Just... show me."

It was three turns, passing two doors in the final hallway, one surprised earth pony who cleared out of the area, leaving his sack near the door --

-- there were sacks.

Most of the canvas bags were empty. They were piled near the doorway, awaiting another trip to the upper levels. There was only one full sack, and that was because the stallion had decided to hold off on his sorting until the mares were done. Sorting which was done through placing envelopes into bins and boxes, which were then arranged upon shelves.

Cerea wasn't sure what the sorting categories were, much less how a given box was assigned to one of the ten overflowing shelving units in a room half the size of a Lunar kitchen. It presumably took something special to qualify for a filing cabinet. There were only six of those, and five were having some trouble closing.

Of course, not everypony had bothered with a letter. Some had gone to the trouble of sending scrolls. A few exposed sheets of paper displayed characters so mechanical as to suggest typewriters, while others had a sort of forced block print. Several ponies had decided to express themselves via what Cerea was guessing to be cocktail napkins: those tended to be stained, stunk of low-quality alcohol, and the smaller stamp suggested they had been sent at something approaching a postcard rate.

"...we got a lot of duplicates," Nightwatch eventually semi-repeated. "Especially at the start. And you can see the postmarks. Um. Yapper was mostly just Canterlot, but with you, we've been getting letters from all over the -- um. You can't read the postmarks. I don't even know if you can tell which part is the postmark. The actual packages are in another room. There's only a few of those, after you subtract all the ones which had to be countered or neutralized --"

"-- that's not a postmark."

The pegasus carefully followed the centaur's line of sight.

"No," the little knight eventually said. "It isn't."

"Then what is it?" the girl placidly asked.

"Um. Well. There isn't any official spelling for your name. Not a public one. And ponies still have to address things to you. So that the palace knows it's for you. So I guess they just -- came up with something. Which means you. And once one pony does it, it spreads. So it's something which tells the postponies that the letter is going to 'Cerea'. And... that's all."

I spend more time with you than anypony.
I could probably pick out your scent in a crowd at twenty meters.
I know when you're nervous.
I think I'm starting to figure out when you're lying.

She looked at the symbol again, that which appeared on letter after letter. The image which resembled a stylized hand superimposed on a hoof.

"There's... nothing there you need to see right now," Nightwatch carefully offered. "The Princesses will let you know if there's something important. Do you want to review your class before dinner? I can help with any assigned reading."

'Do you want to let me change the subject?'

She knew where the letters were being kept now and when it came to enchanted locks... Cerea had hairpins.

"Yes." The centaur carefully turned, making sure to keep her larger lower body well away from the little knight. It was something of a learned skill. In Japan, she had once turned in a hurry while standing too close to their host, and... the impact had echoed for a while. "But I'd rather keep it as an oral review until we reach the reading lesson. That way, we can do two things at once." She sighed. "Which means I'm asking for more of your day off. It would be so much easier with an audiobook..."

"Um."

"What?"

"...nothing."

The stallion smiled and nodded at those he passed under Ponyville's fast-fading night, because smiling and nodding was a superb way to get through life. If anypony were to somehow be asked whether they'd seen somepony trotting towards what was supposed to be a vacant rental, well... they would remember that he had smiled, and he had nodded. The chill of deepening autumn justified covering most of his body in warming clothing, and when it came to his features... the brim of the hat created its own version of Moon-shadows. Even under Sun, there were times when the smile was just about all anypony could actually see. And nopony ever truly expected a unicorn to be wearing a hat.

The hat was a little on the gaudy side, as was the clothing. The colors were somewhat too bright, the pattern a little too strong, and those factors combined to distract ponies from the stallion's face. The clothing had several advantages over his features, and chief among them was that he couldn't get rid of his jawline in less than twenty seconds. Remove the only thing anypony knew to look for and he was just another stallion moving through the Ponyville night, towing a rather small cart because most unicorns would carry groceries in a corona bubble.

He smiled at those he'd never met, and he nodded politely to complete strangers, because both were a very good way of keeping certain ponies from knowing how much he secretly hated them. You had to figure out a way to get along in life, when you were surrounded by those you despised. He'd found one of the keys was to never let any of it out until you were equally surrounded by friends, in an isolated location where, when it came to those who might want to turn the story against him, there were no credible witnesses at all.

It was, in many ways, an art. Move through a settled zone with an earth pony majority while doing nothing more than taking some rather detailed mental notes on what the world should be like? Easily managed. There were those who felt that perfectly reasonable viewpoints weren't, and they had a strange jaw grip on the majority. So he had learned ways to make himself look like one of them, sound like a Diarchy idiot during casual conversations, and he did it because he was fully aware that reasonable viewpoints were exacting, truthful, necessary in order to correct the course of the world and, in what often felt like a touch of cosmic irony, were also heavily outnumbered.

He could pass, and it helped him to simply pass through.

This particular journey had placed the stallion in a rather rare position, and that was after he discounted having had to venture outside of Canterlot. He wasn't just bringing supplies to the rental's secret occupant: he had actual news. Something he was hoping would cheer her up, or at least... calm her down. It was the third time he'd made the trip, and the last two...

...he supposed anypony would become a little tense, left for so long in isolation. But this was more than that. He'd met the mare a few times at CUNET assemblies, had a rough familiarity with her. She was, at the best of times, something of a one-note instrument and if the goal was to assemble a selected orchestra, then you were probably going to need an extended wail of high C somewhere in the mix: you just didn't use it too often. But once she'd been left to herself --

-- tension. He didn't want to judge her too harshly, because she was one of his own and besides, he'd never had to suffer through such circumstances. It meant he didn't know how he would have reacted. But it felt reasonable to assume that tension would have been some part of it.

Still, he felt he had the chance to boost her spirits. There were two pieces of news, and the much lesser was something which he thought might draw out a smile. (He hadn't seen her smile for some time.) He was already anticipating the need to be very careful about how he broke the major one to its intended subject, and had come up with three apologies to be offered after he released the field clamp from her jaw. Spontaneous cheering in the face of such news was perfectly understandable, but it just couldn't be risked.

There were still a few more homes to pass before he reached her. (A pegasus went by going the other way: he smiled and nodded.) It was time in which he could internally rehearse.

The centaur is going to be leaving the palace at least twice a week.

Good news indeed, although it was information which required somewhat more refinement. CUNET had been told that citizenship classes had begun -- but not where, and the palace had regretfully thought ahead. Class sizes were limited to start with, and with the alicorns having thought to multiply the confusion of numerous host buildings through creating a few decoy sessions around the city... it was a matter of not quite knowing where to go.

There was a certain pleasure in the thought of keeping non-ponies from becoming Equestrian citizens to start with, but... you smiled, you nodded, you got along, and you tried to avoid doing things which could potentially focus Princess attention directly on you until it was absolutely necessary. In that sense, the mare in the rental had made a mistake, but -- she was young. She had the fire, but she didn't know how to properly bank it yet. He had forgiven her for that, because CUNET was managing, the consequences were being held off, and nopony had been hurt. Nopony real, anyway.

Their source (and what a source!) knew the centaur had started school, but wasn't sure where. They weren't going to act until they knew exactly which building they were after. And in any case, it was just a matter of patience and waiting to find the right pony to ask. Politely.

Still, it was good news. The centaur would be outside the direct protection of the palace, watched over by smaller numbers. Surely a plan could be made from there. And when it came to the other tidbit he'd been waiting to give her...

It'll make her happy.

He wanted to see her happy again. To see her smile. She had a rather lovely smile. He could stay for a little while, bask in it -- but not too long, as he needed to get back into Canterlot. There were letters to write, and that was becoming more complicated than it had once been. He'd already dropped a few off in the collection bin outside Ponyville's post office, because there was no reason not to double up on his reasons for the trip.

(There had been a pegasus there, just getting in for her shift. Visibly defective, and so he'd smiled, nodded, and made a few silent notes.)

Canterlot held so much for him to do, though. Just for starters, he was still trying to run down the film. There had to be some way of creatively editing the meeting with the colts and fillies, something which could be shown to prospective recruits -- but they would need a copy of the original first, and that was something the source couldn't currently manage. Regrettable, but also understandable. And as for fully faking their own version... CUNET was cooperating -- temporarily! -- with delusional earth ponies and pegasi, in the name of getting the centaur out of Canterlot, and learning a lot along the way. Finding a talented changeling was probably too much to ask for, even when the film just needed to capture sight, sound, a recreated palace backdrop, and several creative scripted threats against pony civilization.

Would you like to hear some good news?
I thought I'd give you something for your stomach and spirit.
It's okay. Anypony who heard that would drape their forelegs over my shoulders. I don't mind...

And there it was. He checked the street, made sure nopony was watching, then darted around to the rear entrance. Something which was considerably newer (or at least better-maintained) than the rest of the rental, but he wasn't exactly complaining about its presence. It was always good to have more than one way out, especially when you couldn't teleport and your field strength was somewhat below what self-levitation required. Besides, even if he had been capable of either one, the corona glow would have been noticed. Just going in the back was simple.

He carefully, quietly unloaded the groceries into the kitchen, working by mouth: the hat was still on. Listening.

Silence. Nothing from the surrounding homes, but also a lack of sound from within. It was possible that she was sleeping, and -- he didn't want to disrupt her rest, but he had good news.

I know you feel like so many ponies don't understand...

He placed the foodstuffs on the shelves for her, noticed that the refrigeration device had a slightly-too-warm interior. There had to be some way for a unicorn to recharge wonders -- or better yet, to discover a means of creating something better -- but until then...

We have allies, at least until this is over and we know exactly where their leaders live. Maybe I should bring one along. Just for that.

Use before abuse. The thought made him smile, and he carefully took off the hat, leaving it on the dusty kitchen table before trotting to the base of the treacherous ramp.

"Are you awake?" he softly called out. "It's me." Of course she would have known it was one of her own: the alarm hadn't gone off. "I just brought you some food, but I've got a few minutes to talk. I think you'll like --"

"-- come up."

There was something tense in her voice. Something... strained. And now that he was listening at a smaller range... there was a sort of scratching sound. He wasn't sure how to account for that. The plumbing in the rental made all sorts of noises, but -- scratching?

...possibly insects. He'd have to bring her something for that. And the tension -- well, that was reasonable. She'd probably heard him moving around, and the alarm not having gone off wasn't exactly a guarantee of friends. He should have announced himself upon entering, but he had hoped she'd be resting and...

...it didn't matter. The proper thing to do was apologize. After he gave her the news.

"I'm coming." He tried to project the smile through his voice, and then started up the ramp. It required exceptional care with hoof placement, at least if he didn't want to go back down in something of a hurry. "You're in the bedroom?"

"Yes," said the tight voice. "Come in." The scratching repeated.

He reached the upper level, turned towards the hint of grey light. (Sun was coming up now, and the first hints of that light were fighting their way through thick curtains.) Went for the doorway, and let it frame his smile. "I thought I'd bring you something for your stomach and sp --"

She turned away from the fresh gouges, and splinters of wood dropped away from her horn.

"What do you think?" she asked, and the smile was something other than lovely.

Slowly, he looked at the multiplicity of deep lines which had been carved into slanted wood.

It took a full ten seconds before he found words, and "...I'm sorry, but -- what is it?" was the best of a bad lot.

The smile became a little wider.

"Oh, you can tell me it's bad," she said. "I've never sketched before, not like this. But... well, catch a clod or a feather duster doing this, right?" The laugh was soft. "Not that they ever could. But that's the point. This is a unicorn sketch."

She turned back to face it. Looked at the rough, splinter-edged lines, as if nothing else mattered. Like he wasn't even in the room.

"The point," she added, "made with a point."

The next sound could have been a giggle. It also could have been a number of other sounds, and he assigned 'giggle' in order to keep every other choice away.

"Anyway," she told the wall, "there's these two fillies who go by the front window, almost every day. Bad fillies, because one is a clod who thinks she has power, and the other's a unicorn who doesn't deserve it. Because she trots past the window with a clod at her side. You can see which is which, I hope. I know I'm not good at this yet, but the unicorn's the one with the horn."

Another giggle.

"So I usually write things down," was addressed to one of the deeper gouges. "But I don't have any paper, scrolls, quills... and do you know what I do have? Time to experiment! So -- art. I'm drawing my thoughts. And I was thinking about two bad fillies, who shouldn't be together. And how I could -- break them up."

There was a new sound. He recognized it as hoofsteps skittering backwards, and needed another moment to realize they'd been his.

"Can you tell what's happening to their throats?" she asked, and angled her head to let the horn point. "That was hard to render."

"I --"

She turned to face him. There was a smile and a shrug, or at least there was a shrug. He wasn't sure about the smile. There was thick grey light fighting its way through the curtains, it did strange things to her fur and eyes and teeth and when it came to the smile...

"Did you ever think," she inquired, "about field loops? I know how most unicorns treat them. As a way to divide up the weight on something heavy. I loop this, you loop that, and eventually, we all carry the load. But they're not quite solid, are they? You can grip. But unless you know something about shields, you can't make them into something which could be touched. You can't really tighten. I've been trying to remember everything I ever knew about shields. I've been practicing. Because field strength isn't always enough, is it? A little reinforcement, and you could -- really drag two bad fillies apart. Because they need to be separated."

Back to the gouges, and her tail twitched once before falling into a posture of perfect contentment.

"Reinforce," she observed, "and dragging would be easier. It just takes a slightly-cracked window, doesn't it? And they go by the window just about every day. Reinforce, and drag."

"I --" wasn't any better the second time around.

"-- but it's just a silly thought." Grey coated her teeth. "A fantasy. So I sketched it out to pass the time. Oh, look: I should have put an extra line there. On the throats again. Necks are complicated."

She lunged forward, just by a hoofwidth. An unbreakable horn stabbed into soft wood. Slowly, carefully gouged to the right.

"Reinforce, and drag," she half-sang. "Reinforce, and..."

The sound of scratching. Scraping. It felt as if it was getting louder --

"-- I've got good news!"

She pulled back just enough to free herself, turned to face him with bright eyes. "Oh?"

He hastily told her about the centaur having started classes, and it made her happy. At least, he presumed it made her happy, because the smile had already been present and its nature never changed.

"That is good," she decided. "Tell me everything after you find her. Is there anything else?"

The words froze on his tongue.

Not yet.
Not without a script.
She has to memorize it. Somepony has to be there watching her, making sure she doesn't deviate. Not a single word we haven't written out for her.
She can tell her side of the story. We'll give the world the exclusive. But she was never the best talker, not on her own. She didn't figure out how to smile and nod. She's one note.
One note under tension.

A single note, played over and over...

Tension.
Intensity.

"Maybe later," he told her. "We're trying to set something up. But it's not ready yet."

She didn't look any less happy...

"Can you stay a while?" she asked. "I hardly ever see anypony..."

He did, although not too long. There were things to do in Canterlot, and there were no insects in the rental. It meant that nothing was crawling through his fur, and he couldn't seem to make his skin believe that.

But he stayed until the light was a little stronger. Until he heard the sound of colts and fillies going to school. And when he heard it fade away, he let himself depart with a smile, and a nod, and a promise to come back.

He had to come back.
A slightly-cracked window.
A unicorn who was thinking about loops and shields.
Over and over.
There had already been a foal.
Two fillies, who went by almost every day...

We have to move her.
Soon.

Threatening

Some small part of maintaining their friendship was about being willing to ask the embarrassing questions, and that was something which had to come from both sides.

Doing so was just about equally hard for both mares. The pegasus tended to preface such inquiries with a storm of 'Um's, and the girl had multiple ways of indicating when she was trying to (poorly) sneak up on the border of an awkward subject: even when there was only one pony who had any true knowledge of what her body language meant, more than a few had learned to watch for the rising tide of red suffusing exposed skin.

The two mares recognized that the questions themselves could be painful: the answers frequently made it worse. But they also knew the questions had to be asked. It was the only chance they had to find some true level of understanding, because they were trying to bridge a gap which stretched across worlds. And there were times when both questions and answers made the translator's wires hiss, desperately trying to find terms which would be understood on the other side --

-- but on different occasions, the words would already exist. They just didn't get to find that out unless both question and answer were allowed to reach open air. The terms might not be everyday ones: each had an inadvertent tendency to dip into the deepest recesses of the other's vocabulary. But the mere fact that some form of entry had already claimed part of both dictionaries... it seemed to suggest that there was a chance to claim some level of common ground.

They had to ask the embarrassing questions, even when the words triggered hesitation and blush. Being able to ask meant they were friends. Finding the means to answer was how they stayed that way.

"So. Um. That... gap. At the top of the dress. Well, not the absolute top, because that's your shoulders. Even with..." Feathers awkwardly rustled. "...one of those sort of exposed, it's still... um. The gap in the fabric. That's a place you usually keep covered when you're out in public. Because you always stay covered up. Um. And it's a lot closer to winter now, so even if you wear less when it's warm, that's not now. Not with Homecoming this week. The day after the... um..."

The centaur's hooves pranced somewhat, but did so in one spot: the larger form made no attempt to retreat for any other part of the barracks. There wasn't much point in doing so. The mares both worked and lived together. Any attempt to escape from an inquiry was always going to be temporary and in any case, it felt best to get this one over with.

Cerea tried to keep her gaze calm, patiently regarding Nightwatch even as the inevitable flow of blush infused the lie into her own skin. And she had the option to fold her arms, but that was usually seen as a sign of both defensiveness and impatience --

-- actually, Nightwatch probably hadn't figured out that particular phrase of centaur body language just yet. So Cerea had the freedom to fold her arms as much as she liked. It was just that when she folded them in front of her, there was some awkward angling involved. Or squeezing. The other option was usually squeezing. And currently, there was a third possibility on the partially-occupied table --

"...so. Um. The gap. Where your breasts are exposed. The upper surface." The rustling accelerating. "What that gap is supposed to do, since it's obviously deliberate. It has to be deliberate, because I can see how the edges were hemmed. Um. I'm mostly looking at the edges..."

-- but folding her arms above her breasts would just make it look like she was trying to cut off the view.

A slight breeze began to shift one of the occupants of that table. Light reflected from the more gilded of the two envelopes. It didn't make the papers loom any less.

"What the gap is doing," Nightwatch tried to finish. "It's on purpose. So what's that called? Um. What it's doing. Does that have a name?"

The girl winced. A partially-exposed right shoulder momentarily displayed multiple muscles in tense relief.

"...showing cleavage," Cerea eventually said, and the wires failed to hiss.

"Um. Okay." The pegasus' wings flared, and the black mare took off from her standing position atop the mattress. Got just enough altitude, and carefully looked down at the lace-framed display. "Are you supposed to show that much of it?"

The girl sighed.

Princess Luna had a way with schedules. It was something which, when looked at from the outside, only faintly resembled torture: sure, it may seem as if this clock only has so many hours available, but let's just put a little pressure on it from all sides and we'll see what can be squeezed out! It was a talent which meant that between Lunar Guard duties, citizenship classes, study sessions following the previous, the odd hour in the forge to help Barding get ready for the prospective mass armor refit, and royally-enforced time off because nopony was going to let Cerea work herself into an emergency going-nowhere vacation again....

The centaur would have thought (and had in fact been frantically hoping) that there would have been nothing left over for another fitting session. Princess Luna had a different opinion on the matter and when a silver-clad forehoof was put down, rookie Lunar Guards didn't argue. Neither did the senior ones. Time itself effectively scurried into a shadowed corner because it had just bled out an unexpected extra hour and the wound would require some privacy to heal.

So there had been a late-night teleport to some sort of studio, one where the cool lights were absorbed by multiple waiting bolts of fabric, piled on top of each other in a way which suggested that the landslide was just waiting until the moment when it would be the most funny. The Princess had served as escort. Cerea had taken her clothes off, mostly doing so because there was a dark corona on standby and she knew what the other option was. Her liege had looked away from everything which had just been displayed, eyes closing just as the bra was starting to come off. The earth pony and donkey had not -- well, they hadn't after the trembling finally stopped -- a mobile ramp had been pushed into multiple positions around the centaur's body to allow smaller bodies necessary height, and measurements had happened.

One series of increased numbers had confirmed what Cerea had already known, and those altered statistics had been forwarded to Ms. Garter accordingly. The complete group had been set aside, the two designers had asked her a few questions, she'd gotten dressed, the Princess had teleported her back, and then the girl had done her best not to think about it for a few days. Something else where she'd failed over and over.

But this was the evening when the results had shown up. There were two envelopes, and one of them carried a subtle level of gilt: enough to distinguish it within any group of missives, but nowhere near enough to be ostentatious. A pair of boxes had accompanied them, and one had been from Ms. Garter because the lingerie specialist knew a growing girl when she saw one and had simply been waiting on fresh data.

The other had held the dress: the one which the gilded envelope had made into both necessity and inevitability. And when you received a new dress in the presence of a friend, there seemed to be a certain obligation to try it on and let her make a few comments. Several forms of media had suggested this was proper and since those stories had been coming from multiple continents, it also suggested a global agreement regarding procedure. Additionally, they both had some time before their shift began, Cerea had to inspect the dress through donning it immediately and if things ran long in the barracks, there was a chance to find the locker room empty when they arrived.

It had taken Cerea about three minutes to put the dress on, followed by roughly one extra heartbeat in which to decide she was doomed.

"You've seen me naked," emerged as a form of desperate protest, one which had been mixed with a fervent (unheeded) prayer to make things somehow not be as bad as they seemed. "When there's no taboos. You're used to me!"

"It's different when there's clothing," Nightwatch insisted from mid-hover. "It's more -- enhanced. You're sort of... bubbling up? Um. And... out?"

Which was when the pegasus spotted exactly how far the tide of red had gone, along with the exact shade. There was a lot of blood in a centaur body and judging by the visual display, roughly forty percent of it was currently flowing through the girl's skin.

"Um... hopefully not out? Except that..." The hover carefully shifted backwards. "...even if you don't come out at the front..."

The girl silently buried her face in her hands.

To design a dress of quality for a centaur... it was something which required the creators to look beyond the numbers. Any hope of success was inextricably tied up with a group of facts: there was a homid portion, there was an equine section, and if you couldn't do something which would allow the whole of the body to work in harmony, quit.

The vast majority of human fashion designers in Cerea's world had mostly responded to the existence of liminals by doubling down on their most frequent belief: that there was exactly one body type which any garment wearer should ever possess and if you didn't have it, then you didn't exist. Some of them had continued to insist on that non-existence even when there were dozens of liminal females shouting at them from outside their offices. Certain levels of willful self-blindness required true dedication.

It had left a significant gap in the widened industry: one which, at the time of Cerea's kidnapping, was still being filled in. Liminals designed for themselves and each other -- but that was a business, and very few people had come out of the gaps while bearing significant amounts of acceptable currency. Some banks were issuing loans for those who wanted to try start-ups, but the interest rates tended to be higher than those offered to humans: if you couldn't make an impact in a hurry, then the mounting payments would eventually rise over your head. They were trying to become part of human society, and apparently nothing said the liminals had truly joined the race more than allowing them to drown in debt.

Still, there were a few specialist clothing shops: places where those participating in the great experiment could at least try to get something made. A few humans had even given it a go: when you found your designs roundly rejected by those of your own species, why not try another? And there was almost always a baseline from which to start, because just about every liminal possessed a human aspect. Something about the face, torso, arms... and when you got to someone like Lala, all you needed to do was incorporate a fondness for high collars.

You started from the familiar and then tried to work outwards. And in Equestria, 'the familiar' switched locations to Cerea's equine aspect. Ms. Garter could at least make everyday clothing which worked: something which suggested more of the locals would be capable of adjusting. Begin with what you knew...

They had.

If nothing else, the color arguably worked. The duo had looked at a centaur whose dominant colors were a rich brown, blonde, and a sort of pale peach, then decided to set the whole thing off in light green. The fabric was silk (and Cerea was already waiting for any amount of flop sweat to begin staining it), wonderfully soft against skin and fur. A precision fit had been crafted to drape the full length of her spine, doing so in a way which caressed both upper and lower torsos while smoothly working its way through the transition area. Her upper waist had been exactingly surrounded: room to twist, space to turn without having the dress tighten against her skin. And for color -- the green was well-set, and the designers had taken the further step of working with what they'd decided to treat as an accessory.

The disc would be taken to the party. Cerea had no choice in the matter: whenever she was in public, she had to wear the translator. It meant hardly anypony had ever seen her without thin silver wires against one side of her face. And if she was going to be wearing it anyway, then...

The dress was light green -- but there were narrow streams of glittering silver threaded throughout the length and breadth of the garment. They twisted in gentle patterns suggestive of artificial vines, worked around a few curves while setting off others, and they wove across Cerea's body in a manner which suggested the metal overlaid on her skin was just an extension of the dress. In that, the designers had succeeded.

Which left the problems as Absolutely Everything Else.

For Cerea's human portion? You usually had to go by the tastes of those you were living among and when it came to centaur cleavage, the majority of Japan seemed to prefer an all-and-nothing system: apply all of the fabric and make sure any witnesses saw nothing. (There were ways in which this echoed the fashions of Cerea's herd, because stallions needed very little excuse to attempt a transition from merely looking: the single most important accessory was the fabric loop which carried the weighted baton.) But the newest designers had responded to the existence of a bustline by deciding that everypony else needed to see exactly what most of it looked like. It might have been an attempt to turn the party into a sort of group confrontation therapy: look at them, look at them, we want you to look at them. As it was, Cerea had already been expecting a few of the invited parties to respond to her presence via RSVP: Ready Scram Via Portal. (Actually opening it first was optional.) Any deep breath taken in the dress felt as if it had a chance to push her breasts fully into the open, followed by ramming most of the invited guests out the door: the pegasi might go for the windows. And when she turned to regard her lower torso...

He was into legs.

It was still a bitter thought. From a certain perspective, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Cerea's legs. She'd been examined by a medical team before being allowed to participate in the program, and the farrier had been fully complimentary. But their host had possessed an exploitable fetish, and Lala had been the only one capable of exploiting it.

(Suu's legs were human in shape -- but they were also copies, and the same thing applied to any attempt she appeared to make towards open sexuality: simply duplicating the behavior of others. With Rachnera, the question was whether the arachnae was truly participating in the rivalry: turn to Suu and the query became whether the slime girl even recognized that the competition existed.)

Their host had been into legs. Presumably there were ponies who felt the same way, especially since interests in breasts and arms were going to be rather hard to explain. And the designers, confronted with the length and proportions of Cerea's lower body, had decided to... show off a little.

...a lot.

It was hard to say if the cleavage window (or, to be more accurate about it, the gaping portal to a soft chasm of shadow) was scandalously low-cut, because the girl had yet to see any local species with a bustline and didn't know how much of it they displayed. But she'd seen a few ponies in everyday wear which wasn't their fur, and so she felt safe in assuming that when it came to the dress's hemline, it had been cut scandalously high. Anypony observing her could get a look at her legs. If Cerea moved in exactly the wrong way (and she was still trying to figure out if there was a right one), there was also the chance to get a look at her foreshoulders. The hips would take slightly more effort, but Cerea suspected the few extra millimeters of fabric in that area were mostly present to conceal her lack of mark.

And then you had the buttocks or rather, if Cerea didn't spend the entire night stepping very carefully, you were going to have her buttocks. Given how ponies treated clothing as an optional exercise, the party felt as if it had the potential to be filled with buttocks and somehow, all of them would be hers. Because the designers might have been confused when it came to working with cleavage (or possibly just duplicating the fashion for the local bipeds, none of whom had appeared in front of Cerea to present a size chart with attached bell curve), but they had reacted to buttocks on Cerea's scale through deciding to come within one hasty turn of presenting them to the world.

She had the option to spill out of the front. She stood just about as good a chance to spontaneously pop out of the back.

"Cerea?" The hovering tones were weighted with concern. She appreciated that. At least somepony cared. Nightwatch probably didn't understand exactly what was wrong, but she at least knew when to be worried.

"I don't have a trick valve..."

Strictly speaking, she couldn't see the pegasus turn to look at the back of the dress. She had no real way of feeling it happening. But it felt like a fairly safe assumption to make.

"...oh."

"...panties," the girl wearily muttered into her palms. "I need panties. And some ties. Something I can pass under my barrel to keep this thing from creeping up my flanks. They can see my legs, they can see all of my legs..."

"But you have nice legs!" Nightwatch quickly insisted. "Better than mine --"

"-- it's too much leg!"

Carefully, "Is there really such a thing as too much leg?"

"YES!"

The word echoed for a while.

Eventually, the last vibrations pushed the pegasus back to floor level. She slowly trotted forward, nosed around in the open box. An invoice moved out of the way, and silver flashed.

"There's a scarf in here," she observed. "Um. I think it's a scarf. It's long enough, and the edges have that fringe you usually get on scarves."

The girl's fingers parted just enough for her to peek between them. Her ears drooped.

"Oh, good," she muttered. "A scarf. I can just drape it over myself. All night."

"I think it's mostly meant for when you're traveling to the party," Nightwatch said. "Since it's going to be so cold. I know Ms. Garter was going to send over a heavy jacket --"

"-- all. night."

Neither mare moved for a while. Eventually, the girl's hands lowered. The blush refused to recede.

"I looked at the invitation," Cerea softly moaned. "I... need to be sure I read the date correctly. The party is --"

"-- two nights from now."

The moan got louder.

"And the invitation just arrived!" Clenched hands were now beginning to wring against themselves. "There's no time to send the dress back! To have it really altered or adjusted --"

"-- I think it's because you get so much mail," the pegasus valiantly tried to help. "It takes a lot of time for everypony to sort out the things you should actually see. Even when it's Fancypants, and somepony really should have spotted his crest -- um. It probably just got stuck in processing, Cerea. And I'm sure he would have wanted to give you more notice, but... he'll probably get in the night before. This was probably sent by his staff. He would have delivered it personally if he could, but... at least we've -- got some warning? Um. You've got a really deep moan..."

The centaur took a slow breath. Forced herself to look at the invitation, which took some awkward angling. Most of her lower field of vision was occupied by cleavage, and she was already familiar with the view.

"That line there." A trembling finger pointed. "I've been working on reading numbers. And equations. I think the pun works the same way in both languages. Does that really say --"

"-- it was just a mistake --"

"-- does it really say that?"

The pegasus looked up at heaving breasts and slipping fabric. Reluctantly squinted down at the paper, and read the line aloud.

"'Plus one' -- Cerea, please don't rear back like that! They're bulk-printed, and then somepony fills in the names by mouth! Everypony got that on their invitations, just in case they wanted to bring somepony! Only they would have gotten theirs sooner, because any guests need to be screened by the palace. Um. I know we're doing some screening. And there's ponies Fancypants couldn't have invited, but there's others he sort of had to. There isn't much point to bringing in the ones who are just going to hate you, but when it comes to the ones on the border -- anypony who could still change their mind -- he had to try. It's just really hard to guess who they might invite along, so the Princesses told him that the palace would have the right to reject guests. It's... not really going over well..."

Scrabbling hooves managed to momentarily stabilize.

"Plus one." Which, at least in French, managed to emerge with the exact same tone and cadence as 'I'm dead.'

"You don't have to bring --"

Morbidly, "-- well, it can't be you..."

Silver eyes blinked. "What?"

It was only a smile on technicality. The ghost of mirth, which could only appear after all true humor had died. "You were seen hovering near me during the press conference, and it got your apartment set on fire. I don't want to think about what might happen if I brought you as a date."

The pegasus' lips still quirked.

"I'm afraid I'm busy that night," the mare solemnly said. "Advance commitment, special work shift. You understand."

The centaur did. Nightwatch didn't have a place at the party. The senior Guard's assigned location was just outside it.

Within the capital's culture, Fancypants was something of a celebrity. He had the ability to slip out of it, was less frequently recognized while on the road and could apparently become just about anonymous simply by discarding the monocle for a while -- but when he was in Canterlot, ponies paid attention. He wasn't the sort of pony who could truly hope to host an event in secret, and once the guest list started to come into play -- well, somepony would have talked.

There were topics which the palace's staff was reluctant to discuss around her and that list often seemed to include just about everything under Sun and Moon, which meant it also covered not talking about why everypony treated the words as proper nouns. It was possible that everypony else had known about the date of the party for a while now, with multiple headlines happily informing the whole of Canterlot as to just what was going on and who would be showing up. The supposed guest of honor was potentially the last to get the news, because Cerea still had ponies hiding newspapers wherever she went. She darkly suspected the increasing speed of the removal was directly tied to the palace's growing awareness that eventually, she might be able to read them.

It was possible that Cerea was the last to know (and another shadowed thought wondered if the staff had been trying to cut down on her potential running time). But the capital had the news. Something which came with a date, location, and the fact that for one night, the centaur would be outside the palace and everypony knew where.

The party was what the Princesses saw as Cerea's best chance to make a good impression on Canterlot's upper class. It just happened to double as a massive security risk.

So there were going to be Lunars outside the building. A few would stay closer to the party itself, and those numbers would be reinforced by carefully-chosen members of the police. They would all be watching for trouble, and they expected to find quite a bit of it outside the party. Because the entire capital knew where that was, which meant any truly accurate invitation would have needed to read Plus One Mob.

On the bright side, the palace would get a night off: just about all of the Lunar protestors were guaranteed to gather outside Fancypants' home, and Cerea fully expected them to be joined by a significant portion of the day shift. But the party had to be kept safe. A joint effort between Guards and police, making sure guests could get through without being accosted --

they're beating on the doors

-- and once within, could at least try to pretend things were normal.

A known location was a risk. Any leaked guest list might see the mob subdivide for a day or so, gathering outside the homes of attendees to -- express their opinions on the matter. And there were still ways in which it could become worse, because it was a single night where everypony in the capital knew where Cerea was and...

...it may be the summoners' best chance.

The Princesses had spoken with her about it. That even with all of the security being provided, screenings conducted on every guest... they couldn't be sure. Somepony had called Cerea into this world, and there would be a single night where if so much as a single pony had access to news from the capital, then all of them -- every one of the dozens it had taken to warp the road -- would know exactly where she was. If they had any intention of striking, trying to get her back...

Admittedly, there were ways in which a kidnapping attempt

second attempt

was the best possible result. All the palace needed was a single capture, and they could truly begin to track down the group. They might even get lucky enough to lay hooves on a leader.

-- if ponies don't get hurt during the attempt.

She had to trust in the Guards.

If they don't succeed. Because if they manage to take me...

She wanted to believe in the Princesses.

...if I find out what they wanted me for because now they have me, now they can do whatever they want...

She'd had dreams about that. There had even been three when she hadn't woken up just before the circle of casters began to close in.

The protestors would know where she was. The summoners had to know. And then you got into the smaller categories of disaster, like having a guest come into the gathering, take a single look at her, and break. And where one pony broke, another could follow. And another, and another...

The palace hasn't found a single clue as to who the summoners are. Anypony there could be part of it. Anypony...

...but if we catch one, the right one and nopony's hurt in the process...

Getting the right summoner meant acquiring a pony who knew how the spell had worked. And if that information could be acquired, given to the researchers...

Everything about the party was a risk on a scale which Cerea barely wanted to think about. She'd spent days in hardly sleeping from not having thought about it.

The party felt like a precariously-placed weaving line of weighted dominoes which had been assembled on top of a minefield: a single light push, and the explosions might never end. But it also potentially represented her best chance to go home.

Even the Guards who don't want me here should try to get me home. Squall would probably do everything he could to capture a summoner. At least it gets rid of me.

And all she needed to potentially accomplish that was for her presence to risk the lives of everypony there.

Try to trust in the Guards.
Try to believe in the Princesses.
Try to feel like it won't all go wrong...

"Cerea?"

She forced her hooves to stop moving again.

"Plus one," the centaur miserably repeated.

"Nopony's expecting you to bring a guest," Nightwatch tried to assure her. "It's just a bulk printing. Um. I know I said that already, but --"

"-- I could ask Barding."

Black hooves briefly skittered backwards on the floor.

"You -- you'd..." The pegasus was breathing too fast, ribs shifting in and out as the dark tail tried to curl in on itself. "You'd actually..."

"It's a joke," Cerea sighed. Or it would have been if I was even a little funny. "He wouldn't want to go. There probably isn't enough metal to keep him interested."

"Plus you'd have to get him into a suit," Nightwatch half-gasped. "I'm pretty sure most of the stallions will be wearing suits --"

Two very different species momentarily flashed on exactly the same image.

"-- no suit," Nightwatch finished.

"Because he'd get in some extra work before we left," Cerea stated.

"And set it on fire."

"Parts of it."

"And then go to the party."

"While the holes were still smoldering. Not understanding why anypony was looking at him..."

Both mares briefly giggled, and then the taller smoothly transitioned into a sigh.

"I have to get my hair cut," Cerea announced. "Tonight, if I can. The mares who styled me before the press conference --"

"They're not part of the staff," Nightwatch told her. "They come in sometimes, and they were sworn to secrecy for the night. But the palace doesn't really have a full-time groomer on staff. Not for manes and tails. Um. Well, it's the Princesses. There really isn't much point. But I can ask somepony to send for them."

And maybe the stink of their fear will be a little lighter...

The centaur knelt a little, trying not to lean too far forward in the process. Anatomy perilously shifted.

"I'm going to say something just to see if it translates."

"Okay..."

"Double-sided clear adhesive skin tape."

"...huh?"

"Never mind..."

She picked up the gilded envelope. Turned it over in her hands, picked out the few words she could read.

Two days.

Then she looked down again.

"That came with it," Nightwatch said. "Um. It looks like it had a rough trip. I don't think the pony who brought it down was wearing a mouth guard. Ink has to be saliva-resistant, but some of the cheaper stuff... Anyway, you can see where the return address got blurred. Um... that section is where ponies usually put a return address."

Most of what Cerea could make out was in the center. Also the lower right, one corner, and then the endless trail of consonants did its best to wrap around the paper and gave it another go. Somepony had tried to write something on that part of the envelope and much like a certain fictional witch trying to spell 'banana', they hadn't been able to work out when to stop.

"But I guess it's for you," the pegasus added. "If somepony brought it down here."

"Do you know what that..." with some reluctance, accompanied by a desperate wish for a better term "...'word' in the center is?"

The pegasus squinted again. Silver eyes required several seconds to follow the full trail.

"No."

"It's probably just more hate mail," Cerea decided. "Somepony picked it up by accident when they were biting on the invitation."

"Um. They've been screening. I don't think they'd send --"

Ponies at risk.
Everything at risk.

And, on a much lesser note:

Cette putain de robe.

(At least she hadn't said that part out loud. It was bad enough to be so vulgar in her thoughts. She already knew what the disc would have done with the words.)

"I'll look at it later," the girl sighed, because there had been enough bad news for one night and she was feeling a certain need to stretch out the load. Besides, anything truly important would have had somepony on the palace staff tell her directly. It seemed to increase the chance of the second envelope having arrived in error. She could just ask Nightwatch to check the contents and figure out where it should have gone. "Right now, I have to get out of this thing." The gilded envelope was set back down, freeing nimble fingers to begin progressively gathering in scoops of dress. "And figure out how we're going to adjust it with what we have, because one wrong move and..."

One last moan.

"This is going to be a disaster," Cerea stated.

"It won't be," the pegasus decided. "We won't let it be."

One of them would be wrong.

The stallion hadn't really spoken to this mare before. He knew of her, because you couldn't be part of CUNET and not know about the mare. He had admired her work from afar, respected her ability to craft a finely-turned phrase, and sometimes wished for an equal ability to mask his own beliefs with layers of open doubletalk. The additional ability to shield it all under the protective umbrella of Opinion didn't exactly hurt.

He liked her, as much as you could like somepony whom you only knew through their words. She was one of the greatest assets CUNET possessed. Of course, necessity required that she hold that status without actually being a member of the organization, as journalists were supposed to pretend towards neutrality. Something which obviously existed as nothing more than pretense, because he read the ravings of the Marshdew traitor just about every day and there was nothing less neutral in all the world -- but that reading was a nauseating necessity. After all, if the enemy wanted to tell you what they were thinking, let them.

The stallion liked the mare, and had been looking forward to actually meeting her. It was just that he had maintained what should have been a rather pleasant anticipation stage for somewhat longer than he'd expected.

It was a quiet location, along with being fully shielded from sight and, since he was waiting in the depths of the Tangle, it was rather difficult to track. Canterlot's oldest section had been created at a time before the concept of city planning: something which meant the local criminal element ran a happy side hustle in the art of not quite giving directions. Some said that if you paid them enough, they might even lead you out of the twisting streets on the first attempt.

He would have understood if a first-time visitor got lost on their way into the Tangle: arriving while considerably low on bits was another possible side effect. But the mare supposedly knew it as well as anypony, and if she was recognized, then she was left alone. The risk associated with disturbing her was simply too great.

An angry, underpaid crook would merely kick their victim a few times and then stop. The mare would write.

He waited, because he had things to tell her, he wanted to meet her, and he was willing to put in some extra time for that. But he stayed under Moon's shadows for what felt like far longer than he should have. And when he finally saw somepony on the approach, the cold wind wafted the scent of alcohol into his snout.

The stallion didn't see any need to remark on that. He assumed that there were times when the best sources had to be lubricated first, especially if you didn't want them to remember that they'd been the ones who had talked. Instead, he simply waited until she was close enough to fully identify. And then he smiled, followed that up with a nod, and relished in the rarity of complete sincerity.

"It's a pleasure to meet you." The smile got a little wider. "A true pleasure. I've admired your work for years. I'd take off my hat in the presence of a lady, but..."

The mare nodded, and the white mane caught a little of the remaining light. "Always nice to meet a fan." Returning the smile with one of her own --

-- there was something odd about that smile.

He couldn't quite pin it down. It just made him want to make her smile again.

Well, he had the words which could do it. He just had to hold them off for a little while. "You weren't followed?"

The snort was a rather soft one. "Good luck following me through here. Born and raised in the Tangle. I know shortcuts which the sisters don't remember. Assuming they ever set a hoof on these stones in the first place..." A slow head shake. "We're secure."

"And even if somepony found out that you'd had a meeting," the stallion smiled, "you would never give up a source."

She nodded. "Makes it a little hard to get any other sources. Why did you want to meet me?"

Straight to business, then. "You know about the party, of course. The one where they're going to try and make it look acceptable."

Her left forehoof rotated somewhat, ground against ancient stone. "Like the rest of the capital. Like most of the continent, once the story finishes traveling. Why?"

"And you know about the security --"

"-- enough," the mare cut in, "that I know I won't be able to get through. Not personally." Her lips briefly quirked. "Not that I may need to be there, given the ponies who will be attending. But if you were asking me to make an appearance, there's no point. I can't get an invitation, and Fancypants would screen me out as a plus-one."

He didn't even mind the interruption. There was something about a mare who got right to the point...

The stallion casually leaned against the chill wall. Basked in the shadows.

"Here's what you probably don't know," he smiled. "Because it comes from our source on the palace staff."

"The one who's been so very accurate," she immediately said. "I'd love to know how. And who."

"I have to protect them for a while longer," he lightly teased. "I trust you not to print their name, but they would be very upset if they thought I'd dropped it. Besides, they're going to be rather busy for a little while. Party preparations." And because you always had to think about tomorrow, "Of course, there are times and places where we might discuss it. After this is over."

Another nod. "Or earlier," she half-negotiated. "So what did this source tell you about the security? It can't be a route in. If you got caught gatecrashing --"

He gently shook his head.

"They probably have enough ponies to cover everything," he told her. "And that's the problem. For them."

She frowned. Took a deep breath, and the alcohol emerged on the exhale.

"How?"

Yes, she went directly to the point. Plus she wasn't exactly unattrac -- well, her personality was most of it, but when you also considered the mind behind it and how that directness might come into play in the bedroom...

Looks were one thing. This mare's intellectual appeal existed on a level which overlapped the sexual.

"They're using a combination of Lunars and police officers," the stallion informed her. "But they can't weaken their watch on the palace or city, not as tumultuous as things have been with the protests going on. We're going to leave a good-sized group in front of the palace gates that night, just to split their forces a little more. Ultimately, they're drawing on limited resources. Which meant the only way to meet their target herd population number was to pull a few ponies in from the outside."

He saw her figure it out. That intelligence was just so refreshing, especially after a few of his more recent exposures.

"Ponyville," she definitively stated. "They're taking the extras from Ponyville."

The stallion nodded. "Which creates a certain opportunity."

I briefed her.
(He'd been stuck briefing her for days. Trying not to flinch from the heat of her thoughts. It made the presence of any other mare into the intellectual equivalent of dipping his mind into the perfect swimming hole.)
She'll be accompanied the whole time.
As long as there's somepony to supervise, we can keep her on the script.
It's our best opportunity

The mare waited. He tilted his head a little, and watched for her smile. She had to smile when he told her. Who wouldn't?

"You won't be at the party, and you might even be better off for it. So if you don't have any other plans for that night... how would you like an exclusive?"

Feral

The final night before the party existed as something which had its own weight. Minutes pressed against Cerea's skin, hours drove their mass into her shoulders. To look out a palace window and see Moon starting to dip was to feel as if the orb had just landed in the center of her lower back. There was too much to do, too little time in which to do anything. Even with Princess Luna torturing the clock, all it could confess to was not having anything left to give --

-- well, technically, this was incorrect. Cerea had been provided with a schedule for that last night of planning and preparation: something which had fully overridden all of her Guard duties or rather, had trampled those duties into the marble through the casual passage of silver-clad hooves. The schedule allowed for everything to happen at a royally-assigned pace and because the Princess had been the one drawing it up, it even had temporal zones which had been designated for recovery. A chance to breathe after something stressful wrapped up or, given the way the night was going, something else. But a true opportunity for calm would have required something more. Like pushing the party off by another day. A week. Two, maybe three decades. Or, in the ideal scenario, somepony would have found a way to send her home in the next five minutes and then she wouldn't have to go at all.

(They could still have the party after that. Cerea was sure there were ponies ready to turn the whole thing into the loudest She's Gone! celebration in Menajeria's history.)

But that last night contained deliberate vacant spaces: zones meant to be filled by slow breathing as the tide of her blood gradually retreated from the skin. Cerea, who'd just staggered out of a conference room, had just entered such a relaxation period. The most recent encounter had mandated it.

The government-issued one-sheet which would explain her existence to the populace had been a work in frequently-revised progress for moons. But now that the Princesses could officially add 'Guard' to the text, it was finally going to be printed -- and Fancypants' party would double as the one-sheet's release event. (Cerea had been picturing guests being given a copy just before they went in, followed by some granted reading time in a private alcove so they could decide if they were going right back out.) And most of that printing would be done at a dedicated facility -- but the palace had its own small press, used for some of the paperwork which was generated in-house. It allowed the final inspections of mock-ups to be done on site. You could see how the text was going to be laid out. Make sure all the sections lined up correctly. Check to make sure there had been enough room left over for pictures.

And then somepony had remembered that there were supposed to be pictures.

The conference room was a normal part of palace functions. The makeshift photography studio within was understood to be strictly temporary and every time the shivering camera operator told Cerea that she needed "just one more shot," the girl had to willfully restrain her back hooves from ending that short-term existence right there.

There had also been a curtain-created area which allowed her to change clothing. Put on the armor, then take it off again because an armored shot wasn't going to be all that reassuring. Dress in something softer. Oh, and maybe we should bring up the dress...

It had been nearly ninety minutes of being captured from multiple angles. There had been a period designated for aerial shots, because the photographer was a pegasus and so naturally an overhead take was going to be collected. Cerea had gone through most of her wardrobe, done her nerve-wracked best to move on command, and had never quite figured out how to answer an order of "Now look reassuring." Being told to appear friendly hadn't gone any better. And judging by the mock-up, she had done all of it in order to allow the possibility of up to three engraved images, one of which would be roughly nine centimeters square.

Cerea had been told that the camera loved her. She'd believed it. Most photographers longed for the opportunity to get that single award-winning capture of a natural disaster.

She staggered down the hallway, feeling as if no leg was going in quite the same direction as any other. And it was less than a day before the party, nopony had flown in to report miracle while also asking her to make sure she took everything with her because it was best for the palace to retain no proof of her time within, and it felt as if the final draining seconds were slicing against her skin.

The girl could feel the weight of the last hours. Having recently lost a less subjective portion of mass didn't seem to help.

Princess Luna, fully aware that Cerea's hair was at the point of crisis, had arranged for the stylists to be waiting in the conference room. The centaur's tail, which tended to be more stable in its length, had been given nothing more than an expert trim. Her neck, however, felt as if it had just dropped a three-kilo weight and was still trying to figure out how to adjust for the loss of burden. The stylists had -- after some discussion, which had eventually included remembering that the centaur might have an opinion -- decided to leave things on what, for a human, would have been the long side: the new fall stopped at the middle of Cerea's upper back. But it was still a considerable cutdown, one which made even the smallest nod feel as if it was on the verge of turning her into the first centaur dullahan.

She had an hour in which to breathe. To reach the point where she wasn't constantly fighting the urge to tremble, or shake, or bolt for the horizon because there hadn't been any measuring tapes, but having light meters held next to her breasts hadn't been much of an improvement. And once that time was up, the next part of the schedule said torture or rather, Torture because it was going to be an hour spent with Ms. Manners. They would be reviewing the Proper Behaviors used when dealing directly with The Nobility, because Cerea had to Reflect Well Upon The Palace.

Ms. Manners didn't like Cerea very much. Or at all.

It had started as fear, because it had started as fear with just about everypony. And with the Etiquette Expert, there had been a degree of emotional transmutation -- but the final result of that internal alchemy had a heavy layer of distaste bubbling upon the olfactory surface, with darker aspects lurking underneath.

Cerea understood that. She existed as something which broke all standard rules of etiquette, especially when it came to Proper Posture because nothing been designed for a combination of four legs and two arms. It meant quite a bit had to be improvised, and when it came to somepony who lived by Tradition...

She staggered across silver-shot marble, looking for an empty room. Somewhere she could be by herself for a while, because an hour wasn't long enough to safely reach her favorite part of the gardens and return on time. Ms. Manners had Opinions about those who Turned Up Late, and no portion of them allowed Cerea to claim she was just being Fashionable.

It would have to be time spent alone. Nightwatch had her own preparations to complete before the party: something which apparently involved an armor inspection. Cerea was unclear on the details: there hadn't been all that much time to discuss it before her own schedule had kicked in. She'd gotten the impression that there was a second set involved: something which only got used for assignments outside the palace. Parade armor, perhaps: something much more ornate than the usual Guard arrangement. She was just hoping there weren't going to be any feathered plumes getting into Nightwatch's eyes.

...actually, given pegasi, there seemed to be a chance for some of those feathers to be the wearer's own --

-- an hour. She could go back into the barracks, continue her desperate attempts to modify the dress. Or simply step outside. She didn't need to go all the way into the gardens: finding a balcony which faced them might be enough. Fresh night air, crisp and cold. Something to negate the heat of embarrassment.

Cerea forced her legs to stop. Tilted back her head, took a slow breath. If any outer air seal was less than perfect, she might be able to use the palace air currents. Track down an appropriate exit --

-- canid.

The scent wasn't fresh, because 'fresh' implied that the original source had recently left the area. The Diamond Dog was somewhere ahead of her. Working, because Cerea was also picking up odors from the pigments...

The centaur, alone.
The Diamond Dog, alone.
But she has a pack. A warren. She's only alone here. The only thing the other singularity needed to do in order to find her own kind again was leave the city. Looked at from that perspective, there was a considerable disconnect between their respective local existences.

And yet...

"If you want to speak with her, then try to find a place where she has ways out, and -- go slowly. It's not because you're a centaur. She's shy. She has a lot of reasons to be."

If I go slowly... if I step as quietly as I can, try to get a look at her before she sees me, assess the area...

The centaur took another breath. Slowly moved forward.

The first thing she saw was the base of the portable scaffolding: something which could be assembled quickly. The parts had been designed so that they could be interlocked for safety, frozen at variable heights. But there had to be a way to reach those heights, and it was what which told her just how much the palace had tried to help the canid fit in.

How would a unicorn have approached the restoration work on the ceiling frescoes? Probably through using their field, making sure to keep the energy's grip on the handle alone: applying powders through a corona was presumed to be a problem. But they would still want to be close, because it was detail work: standing on the floor and squinting eight meters straight up would sacrifice too much resolution on what they were seeing. An earth pony would have simply held the brush in their mouth, and that begged the question of approach angle. Pony necks could only bend so far, and as for the human method for overhead painting -- how long could a pony lie on their back? And how close to the ceiling would the platform need to be? Could the legs be curled in enough to fit within that minimal space, staying out of the way while the neck strained to reach forward? And with a pegasus... even with wings, the scaffold's top platform would have been used. From what Cerea had seen, no hover was ever completely stable or utterly level: there was always some bobbing involved, and it would have made the work impossible. Besides, even if there was a pony capable of keeping themselves totally still within the air, the job still would have required them to be flying upside-down.

So it was easier for the canid, who could just lie on her back and reach -- or, in this case, stand and look up: the scaffolding wasn't quite at its maximum height. But when it came to claiming that level of elevation in the first place...

There were stairs in the palace, here and there: a rather visible architectural minority. For gaining and losing height, ponies favored ramps: ones which weren't fully smooth, with carefully-placed indentations to allow the planting of hooves. (In both cases, these were also security measures. Cerea had been told how to activate them, and had very carefully passed up every opportunity for doing so. Pranking the Lunar staff wasn't going to make anypony think better of her.) And with a scaffolding -- you needed a portable ramp. Something where the maximum ascent angle meant it either had to stretch a long way off into the distance, or work with the kind of zig-zag which had a frustrated pony marching back and forth six times to climb one meter.

But there was a canid working in the palace, and the Princesses had accommodated her. There was no other reason for the side of the scaffolding to be sporting a rung ladder.

Cerea paused at the entrance to the vast arcing hallway. Part of that was giving herself a chance to access the situation. The rest was trying to dismiss the image of an earth pony attempting to perform multiple lunging jump pull-ups with their jaw.

There were six ways out of this particular hallway: five visible, and one which was only available to those who could open the hidden passage. It would have seemed to qualify for Nightwatch's conditions, but -- reaching any of them meant the canid would need to come down. Given that, Cerea wasn't sure this was a good place for a first true meeting.

I can find her again on a different night. Somewhere that she'll be more secure.

But she stood within the entrance arc. Watching as bright round eyes focused on the ceiling. The brush went to work on freshly-applied portions of repair plaster, and the colors quickly soaked in. The canid nodded to herself, the tail moved in something close to a circle, and then the biped turned towards her supplies: multiple small fragile-seeming, half-crumbled bricks, and a mortar to grind them down. Pure water, for mixing the fresh powders. Brushes --

-- the flanges around her nostrils visibly flared.

The canid looked down. The centaur, who didn't really have the jointing required for the act, fought the urge to kick herself.

Later that night, she would wonder why she hadn't thought of it. A canid: the body type alone should have suggested that the biped's olfactory sense was stronger than that of a pony. As it would turn out, Cerea's detection ability was still the superior by near-geometric degrees -- but a centaur's scent was still like nothing else in the world.

The canid pulled back. Took a half-step on the platform, instinctive retreat --

-- stopped. Looked at the platform's little work table and slowly, carefully put the brush down. And then she stared at Cerea.

"I'm sorry," often felt like the centaur's own base level of instinct. "I didn't mean to startle you." The blush was starting to rise again, and her hooves were beginning to awkwardly canter in place. "I'll just go --"

"-- centaur," the canid softly said. Still staring down.

The girl wasn't quite sure how it was meant. As observations went, it was a rather obvious one. There hadn't been enough decibels to back a cry of alarm. Her best hope was for a form of greeting, and those hopes seldom seemed to work out.

"Yes," the girl said. "I'm Cerea --"

Just as quietly, "-- know who you are."

The urge to kick herself came back.

"Work in same place," the canid observed. "Go to same class. Can smell you sometimes, when air is right. Yapper hears ponies talk. About you. Night after night."

She distantly remembered having once wondered what, if anything, the disc did with sentence structure. If it rearranged syntax into something she was more comfortable with. The translation of the canid's speech suggested such operations were fairly minimal.

"Yapper hears," the canid quietly added. "All the time."

It definitely didn't seem to do anything about someone who was speaking about themselves in the third person.

"I don't know what you've heard," Cerea said. And then wondered if she truly wanted to know. "I -- I can just go --"

"-- ponies talk," the canid repeated. "In front of Yapper." The fluffy head tilted slightly to the right. "Centaur knows about pony pets?"

She's talking...

It still felt like the wrong place for a first true encounter. As if she'd treed a startled squirrel, and it was just chittering at her in the hopes that the sounds would make her go away.

"You're safe," Cerea quickly said.

"Safe," the canid dubiously repeated.

"From me --" No-no-no, don't make her think about me that way, not as a threat... But if she added an explanation, tried to make it sound like a joke... "-- I mean, I can't exactly climb a ladder --"

"-- pets," the canid verbally doubled back. "Pony pets. What does centaur know?"

It felt like an honest inquiry. Cerea concentrated.

"I know Princess Celestia is supposed to have a phoenix," the girl replied. "I haven't seen it yet --"

"-- better off that way," the canid evenly cut in. "Entire staff has permission to take a swat if it tries anything. Or it will."

"-- and nopony's said anything about Princess Luna," Cerea continued. "But for most ponies... do they favor the herbivore pets? Rabbits might be popular --"

"If yellow Bearer is visiting with company," the canid informed her, "can also take a swat at the rabbit."

Cerea blinked. The canid slowly crouched, lowered herself until near-hands had their palms flat against the platform's wood. Carefully sat down, with her knees draped over the edge.

"Some carnivores," the canid quietly went on. "Cats. Dogs. Dogs give some ponies a way to think of Yapper. Wrong way. Think they can say anything. Like talking in front of a pet. Yapper won't understand. But she does..."

A slow head shake. The floppy ears were oddly still.

"Ponies don't understand Diamond Dogs," the canid said. "Dogs don't understand ponies. Yapper trying to learn. Ponies... slower. Don't want to learn, some. If ponies still have to learn? Don't know everything. Some don't like that thought. So won't let themselves have it."

Cerea blinked.

What kind of mind spots that --

-- a sapient one.

"Know centaur wanted to talk," the canid casually revealed. "Was told. Didn't want to meet after class. Had to get home, and... centaur can't go down. Not to street. Yapper can. Sometimes, at night. Tunnels under city, did centaur know that? Evacuation paths. Yapper allowed to use them. More comfortable that way. But at night... try to stay on surface. A little longer every time. But even in tunnels, have to come up eventually. Up here..." She looked at the scaffolding, and the ladder. "...have to come down. Sometime. But centaur can't come up. Sun always comes up. Always. Sun comes up and centaur goes to sleep. So --"

Liquid brown eyes stared down at the girl.

"-- talking," the canid finished. "Yapper talking to centaur. Talking about what?"

Don't fall into the trap. She's telling me not to trick myself that way. Her body is canid, more than a kobold's would ever be. But this is a person...

Softly, head tilted back to let her pitch the minimal volume towards those fringed ears, "Why did you come here?"

"To ponies," the canid guessed. "Instead of staying in warren. When everyone stays in warren." Her eyes briefly closed, and long lashes tangled. "Always."

Cerea nodded.

The canid's legs kicked a little, like those of a child on the edge of a swing.

"Colors," she said, and looked at the ceiling.

Cerea's head tilted further back.

Vines. Twisting across low stone, and there's a hint of a back wall -- parapet, it's like a castle's parapet. But it's not the palace, because the base material is wrong. There's flowers blooming along the vines, so many flowers --

-- thorns falling away from the vines.

Every flower is displacing a thorn. And where the flowers bloom, the stone seems younger. Brighter. But there's so many vines, and the flowers can only grow so fast...

...the canid was looking at her.

"Colors." Another little kick, and Cerea caught a glimpse of well-trimmed claws. "Ponies not know Dogs. Centaur has excuse. Yapper was -- green hunter."

She didn't understand. Her default state.

"You came up," Cerea tried, "to look for the color green --"

If it was a laugh, then it was the kind which emerged as a bark.

"Dogs eat meat," the canid stated. "Ponies don't like that." A little more softly, "Most ponies... But not just meat. Need grasses. Don't grow in warrens. So -- green hunter. Sneak up. Harvest. Warren doesn't respect, because meat hunting harder. But still want the grasses. Still angry if harvest is small, and didn't dry enough for winter. Send up omegas. Under Moon, always. Sun too... bright."

The girl listened.

"Grasses not have much scent," the canid admitted. "Not when alive. Hard to find. Surface, too many scents. Too much. Color easier, but... under Moon, colors different. Yapper learned. Became great green hunter." Darkly, "Best of worst. Most popular of least useful. Gave Yapper place in pack. Learned to stay up longer, so brought back more. And still omega. Always. Because only green hunter. For life."

Brown eyes moved to the ceiling again.

"Longer every time. Under Moon. Other Dogs go back to warren. Won't stay up that long. Afraid. Supposed to hunt as pack, even green hunters. In case monsters come. But other Dogs afraid. Stay under Moon too long, Moon goes away. Left Yapper. Pack of one. Staying longer every time. Until..."

There was something deep about the canid's voice now. Thoughtful. Almost reverent --

"...Sun brought up," the other female quietly finished. One forepaw briefly rubbed at the vest. "Could barely see, first time. Eyes hurt for hours after. But saw green. Saw red. Saw all of it. First time. Wanted to see again..."

-- pained.

"So pretty," the canid half-whispered. "Ponies don't know. See every day, whole life. Stop thinking about it. Stop seeing beauty. Yapper had to hunt. Every night Yapper could, to every morning, to every day. Easier each time. And Yapper thought -- omega. Part of pack, but -- part other Dogs forget. Don't really look at. Don't breed. No one notice Yapper. Except... notice when omegas aren't there. No one to snarl at, to give orders. Yapper had to --"

sneak out
explore the boundaries
find out what security was like, memorize it, guarantee no one would catch you coming back at the wrong times
don't think about it
don't think

"-- use old tunnels," the canid softly continued. "Then made new ones. Secrets. Started to do more than look at colors. Touched them. Fur got stained. Then thought... bring colors down. Stain walls. Dogs use gems, but -- gems belong to pack. Colors brought by Yapper. Make them right. Thought it would be for every Dog. Once they were right. Tried in a new tunnel. Didn't look the same. Not bright enough. But... could try to make a little more light. Colors with colors. Next to colors. In patterns. Patterns of life under Sun. Hours in the tunnel. Hours where alphas wonder where Yapper is. Yell for Yapper. Get back, get yelled at. Thought..."

She stopped. Pseudohands tightly gripped the platform's edge, and bits of powder dropped away from shivering fur as she looked down again.

"...knew," she corrected. "Maybe knew. What would happen. Thought about it. Dogs... do same thing for centuries. Still Dogs in world. So same thing works. Dogs -- have trouble. Looking forward."

Cerea automatically focused on the brown forward-set eyes --

"-- not what Yapper meant," the canid immediately said. "Forward in time. Every moment is now. Commit crime? Not get caught for hour? Then won't be caught forever. Plan for winter because pattern on wall says plan for winter. Follow pattern. Not think about it. Pattern always been there. Do what it says. But don't think. Most Dogs can't look forward for whole day. Can't look forward? No consequences. Everything now. Can't get caught in now. Caught is future. Future same as now..."

The canid sighed, very softly.

"Not sure how much disc tell you," she considered. "Sentences harder, Equestrian. Canis more sensible. Compact. But Yapper thought about future. Not now, but then. Everything now to alphas -- but in now, can't find Yapper. Getting angry. Yapper going up too much, because best colors are under Sun. Extra green hunting? Don't believe Yapper. Thought about... what happens if caught. Then thought about when caught. Seen, eventually. Every tunnel comes out somewhere. Seen coming back in, or going out. Alphas set rules. Rules say... omegas don't go under Sun. Always that rule. Alphas don't change. Because pattern on wall say not to. Say alpha this, omega that. No change. Ever."

The right paw released the edge. Reached up to the little table, lightly touched a fragile brick, and then the canid put the limb forward. Displayed the spot of deep red.

"Yapper thought... pack never accept. Pack never change. So what if... no pack? But -- too scared. Pack is life. Colors are life. Can't have two. But kept going up. Knew consequences and --"

don't think
don't REMEMBER

"-- caught Yapper," the canid told the centaur, and the words were far too even. "Wrong Dog, wrong place. Found colors. Whole tunnel was colors. Confused. Angry. Said Yapper wasn't proper omega. Proper Dog. Dog would use gems, and gems belong to pack. Tunnel was Yapper's. Tore... tunnel apart. Was going to be first part of punishment. Made Yapper watch. Second part was demotion. Lower than omega. For now. In pack, now can be for life. So Yapper said..."

The canid's forehead creased.

"...no pack," she finished. "Told them no pack. And -- took consequences."

Tightly, painfully, outlining the scar in sharp relief.

"Can't go back. Anywhere. Any warren know wound. Exiled to Sun. All Yapper had was the colors. Green hunter. Couldn't get meat. Hungry. Followed meat scent. Found town." The next words were almost spat. "Pet food. But was only meat Yapper had found. Tried to get it from outside bowl." Followed by a sigh. "Ponies saw. Bad impression. Hard to explain. But one listened."

"Do you want to play?"

Her blouse is becoming stained. Stained with new colors.

She has to move --

"Centaur?"

There was a little confusion in the canid's translated tone. Confusion, and -- something else.

How long was I --

Cerea forced herself to look up again, found brown staring down at her. Eyes wide, focused -- and, on a first meeting, impossible to read. There were scents, but Cerea hadn't had a chance to work out the proper associations. The tone was all there was.

"One," the girl made herself repeat. "Princess Luna?"

There was a hesitation before the canid shook her head. The natural delay of someone who wasn't fully bilingual and had to remember the proper translation for a given response.

"Took time," the canid carefully told her. "Wasn't near Canterlot. Time to travel. Meet Crossing Guard. Then Princess. Problems, whole time. Problems just coming into city, even with first pony. But pony had to go home. Did too much, just coming with Yapper. Went home, and -- Yapper stayed. Hard to stay. Princess had to speak for Yapper. Then both. Speak loudly, because ponies kept shouting. Wanted to dig. All the time. Go back. But... no pack. Only ponies. Ponies who don't understand. Pony who understood a little went home. This is where chance was. Chance and..."

Her volume dropped. Almost vanished.

"...Sizzler."

Cerea had heard the name before. Scented the distaste which so many ponies associated with it, the disgust. And even with Nightwatch's cautions, she'd eventually asked why --

"The cook," the girl tried. "The one who runs the meat station. For visiting diplomats, dignitaries --"

"-- for griffons of staff," the canid partially corrected. "For -- Yapper. Sizzler wants... happiness. Happy to eat what he cooks. Happy to thank him. Happy for him to be part of palace. Sizzler... go to butcher shop with Yapper. Teach Yapper about cooking. Goes with Yapper into streets. Pony with Yapper, so other ponies not as scared. Sizzler --"

Every strand of the white fur shook.

"-- stand between Yapper and ponies who don't want Yapper here. Almost got hurt. Had to dig. Bring him under. Make him safe. Ponies say Sizzler not smart. Yapper not care. Smart enough to see Yapper and not Dog..."

One last sigh, and then the canid was staring down again.

"Could have left. Over and over," she stated. "Hard to stay. Princess only gives reasons to stay. Sizzler reason to come back." And with volume spiking, as the nostrils flared again and lips pulled back into a snarl, "Centaur alone. Dog alone. Centaur wants to speak with Dog, because centaur thinks she and Dog are same? Ponies talk about centaur. Talk about party. Big welcome. Nobles. Trying to make whole city accept centaur --"

She didn't know why she was pulling back, why hooves were skittering across marble. The canid was all the way up there, no threat to her at all. She didn't understand why the other sapient was so angry --

-- and then she did.

Frantically, with arms beginning to gesture in ways which probably wouldn't be recognized or understood, futile and stupid and all she had, "Yapper, it wasn't my idea! They're just trying to --"

Every word was its own snap. Bite wounds targeted at the world, as scent combined with posture to give the girl a signature for canid rage.

"-- but Yapper? First pony had to go home. Better for her, to be home. Crossing Guard tries. Princess always try. Sizzler stays. Other ponies tell Sizzler to leave, and stays. Yapper knows they all try! But still stared at! Stared at now, stared at always! No nobles, no welcome! No party --"

"-- do you want to come with me?"

Cerea blinked. So did the canid.

What did I just --

They were both sapients. But there were times when words arose from instinct alone, something which left the conscious mind desperately scrambling to catch up. On one level, Cerea was fully aware of what she had said: she was just trying to work out the why --

"-- centaur not funny," the canid softly declared, with tone in direct contrast to fully-risen hackles. "Not."

"The invitation said 'plus one'," the girl verbally scrambled. "I can bring whoever I like." A little faster, "Well, there's supposed to be a screening. But you already work for the palace, so I'm sure you'd pass --"

"-- still not funny." The claws on the pseudohands were starting to put shallow gouges in the platform's wood. "Why bring Yapper? Someone else for ponies to stare at? Ponies stare at Yapper. Still. Always."

"You never got a party," Cerea frantically tried. "You can share mine. They can meet you, all of them can finally meet you. And you can tell them about colors, and Sun --"

"-- centaur with Yapper," the canid harshly cut her off, and the claws gouged that much more deeply. "So ponies will stare at Yapper. Ponies always stare --"

Stopped. Took a slow breath, as the hackles on her neck began to sink back down.

"-- at Yapper," the canid finished. "At... anypony with Yapper. Stare harder at the pony. Don't understand why pony wants to be there. Always..."

She stood up, as Cerea watched. And then she moved across the platform, went to the ladder...

Slowly, the canid climbed down. Rung by rung, pseudohand over paw. Every so often, she would pause and glance down, as if trying to verify that the centaur was still there.

But then the digitigrade legs reached the floor, with weight supported on the front part of the tilted paws. The canid took a few slow, cautious steps. Towards Cerea.

The centaur automatically backed up.

"Afraid?" There was some bemusement in it.

Cerea winced.

"You're short. I'm trying to see your face..."

The vast majority of ponies were shorter still. But the height difference somehow felt more extreme with the canid. Maybe it was because she was trying to look at a biped. Or she'd just become accustomed to the viewing angles required for three species which mostly existed on the horizontal.

"Party is tomorrow," the canid noted. "Not much notice."

Automatically, "I'm sorry --"

"-- asking a lot of Yapper. To clear schedule." The white tail shifted a little. "Need to check. Is this date?"

Cerea's eyes went wide --

"-- centaur not funny," the canid decided. "Not have sense of humor either. So not funny makes sense." And sighed. "Yapper not working tomorrow. Ponies... stare at whoever is with Yapper. Stare at centaur, Yapper knows. Not less stares together. Just -- shared."

The furry right arm raised. Began to reach forward, towards Cerea's hand --

-- dropped back down, and the canid's eyes followed suit. Stared at silver-shot marble, and the reflections of distant hues.

"Yapper will go."

Antisocial

Frequently, there would be a certain question regarding exactly who was guarding whom.

Cerea often felt that there were heads of state who could change locations with less precautions than were used for moving a single centaur. (The fact that she worked for such a leader would have theoretically given her the chance to prove it, but her rookie Guard duties had yet to see her follow Princess Luna outside the palace, for... rather obvious reasons.) It was the final hour before she would leave for the party, and the dwindling time had put her in the barracks with only documents for company. The current position in the center of the blanket nest was her last chance to review any of it, with no way to stall or postpone or --

-- I could say I'm sick.

Her digestive system was churning somewhat. Nerves. And a churning stomach tended to produce gas, and if she wound up producing enough of it...

There was a certain tackiness to the majority of horror, especially when the genre was given to humans and expressed as an unstoppable serial killer who was quite literally too stupid to understand how hydrostatic shock from bullet impacts worked. In this case, that quality was expressed as something closer to glue. No matter how much effort she put into forcing away the image of being at the center of the party, with dozens of eyes upon her waiting for a single mistake or cue for fear, and her body just letting one rip... it stuck.

When it came to centaur-based fear, she was fully expecting at least one attendee to succumb based on her mere presence. Cerea really didn't want to clear out Fancypants' estate through startling the entire gathering with a centaur's fart.

She could tell them she was sick. There was an option to describe the exact symptoms. And then the Doctors Bear would remind her that while some illnesses constituted the sort of risk which required them to isolate her and hope that Cerea's body fought it off unaided, stomach tonics for the mostly-herbivorous were effectively universal.

Somepony still might run.

Which just meant that they would wish for her current reading material.

Not that she could truly read. Cerea was starting to once again wonder if partial literacy was more frustrating than not being able to make out so much as a single word: a problem she'd originally faced prior to departing for Japan. Being able to spot a few understood terms here and there left her trying to work out the rest via context clues, which was more accurately known as 'guessing'. But with the current group of papers, there were very few actual words involved. Diagrams made up just about all of it, added to some helpful lines sketched out in red. Plus ponies had invented map keys, and it hadn't taken Cerea all that long to work out which symbol indicated the doors. Another represented windows, although the majority seemed to be too small for a casual crash-through. And when it came to the roof...

Evacuation routes. Cerea would only be brought through a fairly limited amount of Fancypants' estate. She had to memorize a way out from all of it.

Not that the palace truly expected her to need the information, because the area was being secured. There were usually a multitude of reasons for Cerea to be alone in the barracks: this time, she had been forced to go through the final review on her own because Nightwatch had been sent ahead. The pegasus would already be patrolling the exterior of the estate, keeping aerial watch on the protesters. And nopony felt that any of them would breach the perimeter

the yellow vests
we were told how the government wanted everything to go coming in
they're pounding on the doors and we may not have any way out

but Cerea still had to be prepared. She looked at the ground-floor diagram again.

Outdoor area... Judging by location and shape, it appeared to be an extended patio. Not that she would have any real chance to see for herself, because that region had been designated as a Recovering From Centaur Zone. Anypony who became too stressed in her presence to remain was welcome to head into that section, because Cerea would only go there if an evacuation required it. Something which would turn the patio into a Centaur Recovery Zone, and she doubted anypony would appreciate the twist.

She had diagrams showing her ways to escape from any portion of the estate. There had been another briefing book: the names of known attending guests and some of their listed plus-ones, along with their occupations and any known political position regarding her. According to Princess Luna, the original intent had been to go over that list with Fancypants, who would have come to the palace for the occasion -- on the previous night. But the noble had encountered some difficulty in returning to the capital. Not enough to postpone the party: merely sufficient to guarantee that he'd only reached his home about three hours ago.

Another briefing book, and Nightwatch had helped while she could -- but the pegasus had her own duties. It had left Cerea going over some of the names with Ms. Manners, and -- the girl felt like that had gone very badly. She'd been quizzed on names at a speech rate which had made it feel as if she'd been asked to train in catching arrows and started by facing down an assault rifle. The mare had been exceptionally curt with her, the rising anger had been easily discerned within the twisting scents, and... if there was now a Proper Procedure for speaking with centaurs, it was a furious one.

Cerea had tried. She'd been trying for some time, using quiet moments during patrol to slip the briefing book out of an improvised backpack so she could review the contents again. But the pages kept changing. New guests were brought in, while some of those who had previously been expected found themselves abruptly called out of the city. The nation. Cerea suspected the ponies didn't have a space program, but there was a chance to get a head start if anypony decided the only way to avoid her was through achieving orbit.

It had left her continually trying to update her memory, and that still wouldn't account for those who changed their minds on coming at the last possible second, or just tried to get an unscreened plus-one through the doors. There was no true means by which she could ever hope to memorize all of it, not when her recollection was less than eidetic. And yet Ms. Manners had taken every slip as a personal affront, while the names which Cerea had managed to recall were dismissed with a sniff -- or worse, a sniff and a comment about her pronunciation. Cerea didn't even understand how that worked. Her speech was, in the translated form, artificial. The disc spoke for her, and she didn't think the magic was putting any of the syllables out of order...

The guest list had told her many things. It said there would be nobles at the party, although Cerea now understood that the designation mostly indicated descendants of early landowners. A number of politicians. Several ambassadors, which also represented sparring partners and spies. Torque would be in attendance, and part of her was hoping for the minotaur to bring a spouse, or a date, or anything which was his own species, female and, when it came to endowment, a perfectly average representative.

Absolutely nothing on the list had said 'potential summoner'.

The girl sighed, mostly because it was both quicker than screaming and decidedly easier to stop. Traced a potential departure path with her right index finger, then checked her watch --

-- running out of time, have to get up there early, find Yapper, tell her I made a mistake, that dream yesterday, I have to tell her I made a mistake --

All four legs spontaneously bent, got her hooves into alignment so they could push against the floor. Cerea moved for the bathroom.

She didn't want to take any longer in front of the mirror than absolutely necessary, mostly because nothing she could do there would truly help. It was mostly a matter of making sure everything was in place, followed by another round of desperate prayer to try and force it into staying there.

For her basic look... creating the illusion of something different had felt like a lot to ask from basic cosmetics. Nightwatch had told her that there were products available for ponies: powders which could be layered into the fur. It blended strand hues, created artificial highlights, the occasional touch of sparkle, and just about no Guards ever used them because to apply cosmetics was to challenge the world into finding a way of taking them off: the planet was generally up to the challenge.

Cerea had never worked with anything designated for that portion of her form, because no such products had been created by her herd. When it came to attracting a male, most of what you had to do was breathe. And not run. Taking your hand away from the baton's grip might be seen as highly erotic, but it was also somewhat ill-advised. It was easy to attract one of the herd stallions, especially when you didn't want to. Inciting their arousal didn't exactly represent a bump in the difficulty rating. And when it came to the fact that nothing about them was capable of making her feel anything other than disgust --

no

-- they generally didn't seem to care.

So her mother had never taught her about cosmetics, because the herd didn't use them. There had been no need. And once she'd reached Japan...

It hadn't mattered. The local magazines had been happy to educate her about what could be applied upon bare skin (and ponies didn't consider that at all), but tended to work with a different base hue. Her minimal budget hadn't really allowed her to try any true experimentation, and no matter what she did... eventually, her efforts reached the fur. So did the viewer's eyes.

She didn't really know how to put on makeup. Equestria wasn't a particularly good place to learn. And no matter what she tried, she would remain a centaur. There was no point in trying to look attractive. Not when no one was ever going to be attracted.

So it had been mostly about making sure she was clean. Her natural scent had been minimized, especially since nothing else about her could receive the same treatment --

-- the girl automatically glanced forward and down, failed to suppress the wince. Centaur and pegasus had combined their efforts, done the best they could with the dress in order to make it somewhat more stable. And with the subtle modifications in place, it was a little easier to deal with. Cerea just wasn't sure how long any of the changes were going to hold.

Nightwatch had needed to purchase the supplies they'd used. (Cerea felt guilty about sending the pegasus on yet another shopping trip, but... at least the mare wasn't spending her own bits.) Large silver sequins had been placed at strategic points along the fringe, not quite flush against the fabric. Green silk had been cut into long, thin strips, passed under Cerea's belly and barrel, secured around the sequins with end loops, and... well, the good news was that Cerea could now move without having anything on her lower torso ride up or rather, up more. The bad had seen her don the dress shortly before Nightwatch had departed, because no amount of centaur double-jointing was going to allow the girl to casually place her hands in a way which let her pass fabric under her own hips. It had taken two females to don a single dress, and it was understood that any attempt Cerea made to remove the thing by herself was effectively going to be both tearaway and permanent.

When it came to the upper torso... Ms. Garter had apparently consulted the dress designers at some point, then sent a package accordingly. There had already been some support filaments worked into the basic bodice: Cerea had felt the flexible fibers when she'd initially put the thing on. But the silk had arranged for a mostly-bare shoulder, and so Ms. Garter's contribution...

Somewhere upon Menajeria, strapless bras existed. Cerea was wearing the proof: something Ms. Garter had cut to precisely work with the dress. Not a single millimeter of undergarment was visible at the edges of the yawning cleavage window. Strapless bras existed and when it came to the basic engineering required, the rules were presumably universal -- but Cerea darkly suspected that particular subsection of physics had a load limit. She was still a growing girl. At some point, she would move beyond the realm of such support: she just wasn't sure if any particularly energetic movements would be enough to overwhelm it now. But when it came to that which emerged from the heart of the pony's decidedly specialized talent, Ms. Garter's creations hadn't failed yet...

The bra had provided a second level of assistance in the form of an extra clothing layer: something which could serve as an attachment point. The tape Cerea longed for (and which might not have held up anyway) didn't exist: pins were readily available. Dress and corsetry were now anchored together, which would theoretically help to prevent slippage and in reality, probably just meant it all had the chance to fail as a single coordinated unit.

The girl had brushed her fur. Her tail was clean, and the fall was as good as it was going to get. When it came to her hair...

She made herself look at the reflection. Getting her head into the proper line required some awkward foreleg bends.

...I should be okay.
There's a lot less of it. If I turn too fast, it'll mostly whip over somepony.
...maybe I should pin it up. At least a little. Just in case --

-- the hairpins were in the locker room safe. Left behind, after she'd quickly ducked into the vacant space shortly after waking. Collecting the sword, because Princess Luna had ordered Cerea to guard herself.

The sword was casually resting atop a mattress. The plastic hairpins weren't. Locked away under guard, as a toxic substance which nopony could safely touch. There were some metal ones in the barracks, and some of them were stronger than Cerea's own: more solid, as they were designed to support the often-greater weight of a mane. And a glance at the watch told her that the locker room would be occupied, with those Lunars who hadn't been dispatched to watch the estate's perimeters coming on shift...

...an occupied locker room, and only a few minutes left before Cerea had to head for the upper levels. Before she had to leave.

I'll just bring a few metal ones. If I need to, I can ask to use an estate bathroom and apply them there.
It's an excuse to get away from everyone for a few minutes. I'm probably going to need one.
...remember to duck going through his bathroom door.

She carefully used a small brush to straighten a little fur on her ears, winced as the bristles touched the sensitive skin. Back into the barracks, and it took a few extra seconds to locate the scarf. Something about the living area seemed so much larger when Nightwatch wasn't there. More barren.

She carefully wrapped the long fall, cautiously tucked and secured one end at the edges of her cleavage. (Despite the greater pressure available, 'into' was not an option.) Coverage was established and after that, it was just a matter of putting on the jacket. Canterlot had been placed into a state of exceptional autumn chill: something intended to encourage a few protesters into keeping their anger close to their home's heating vents. There would be pockets of carefully-constructed warmer conditions confined to a few sections of the estate, but stepping out onto the palace roof would be a trot through gaseous ice.

The garment was located. Warm, plush grey fur soothed her skin. She briefly wondered where it had been taken from, as the strands were too long for angora, and it didn't smell or feel anything like wool. Perhaps some monsters had soft coats.

One last flurried flip through the briefing book. At best, she remembered three names in five while recognizing one word out of every ten.

The girl tossed the wirebound pages towards the nearest mattress, made sure her scabbard was properly balanced, retrieved and sheathed the sword. Four legs scrambled for the door.

Yapper wasn't waiting at the door which led to the roof's air carriage pickup area. Princess Luna was.

It was something which almost gave Cerea a moment of hope. There was a chance that the party had been called off, with the reason for cancellation not involving so much as a single pulled strand of tail hair. The security logistics, once put into practice, just hadn't worked out. They would try again somewhere else, on another night. Or, in the best case, never.

But the Princess was... calm.
Mostly.

Nightwatch had told the girl about some of the things to watch for. Quite a bit of it centered on the mane and tail. For a calm Princess, you were looking for the flow's borders to be smooth, with all shifting through steady ripple. The held stars would softly glow: for a happy Princess (which Cerea had never seen), you might get twinkling. By contrast, it was generally agreed that the best place to witness a meteor swarm was from a long way off, and anyone who set off a supernova probably should have left an hour ago.

The borders were fairly smooth, and the flow seemed steady. But several of the stars flickered.

"Princess --" Cerea began.

"We await your companion for the evening," royalty casually took over. "And then I will speak to both of you. Prior to your departure."

This time, the girl managed to keep the wince away from her features. Most of the redirected energies wound up in her tail, sending it into a single massive twitch.

"I could have hoped for more notice on that companion's identity," the Princess almost serenely added. "I do understand that the two of you had yet to find an opportunity for communication prior to last night, but it would have helped Yapper to gain a little extra preparation time."

"I need to talk to her," Cerea rushed.

A dark eyebrow went up. "Oh?"

"I have to let her out of this --"

And from behind her, "-- let Yapper out of what?"

Cerea took a moment to silently curse the palace's air currents: something which was designed to weave away from the chill which might try to enter through the door on a cold night. She'd had no olfactory notice of the Diamond Dog's approach, and when it came to the sound of movement -- soft, padded paws, added to claws trimmed down so as not to constantly click upon marble: a void within the noises which were almost constantly produced by hooves. Add that to what had probably been at least a few months of trying to sneak through the warren's tunnels, and the canid could move very quietly.

But then the girl turned.

The canid had clearly groomed herself for the occasion. All of the off-white fur was clean, and the pigmentation stains around the forearms and pseudohands were down to faint suggestions of color. The fringes of the floppy ears had been brushed. And for the outfit... a long, velvety black skirt, added to a shimmer-grey vest. The latter had small, semi-precious stones bound in cradles of thin thread, working up the edges where buttons might normally have been.

"You don't have to go," Cerea hastily said. "I was thinking about it." Along with dreaming, and that nightmare was still echoing. "I made a mistake. I shouldn't have asked you --"

"-- centaur," the canid cut in, "made a mistake by asking Yapper. What was mistake?"

The Princess silently watched, and the borders of the alicorn's tail flowed a little faster.

"You shouldn't be seen with me."

The canid thought about that.

With audible sarcasm, "Not sure which of us makes other one look bad."

Urgently, as the girl's hands began to gesture, "Yapper, just being seen with me got Nightwatch's apartment set on fire! Somepony could come after you --"

"-- pegasus had apartment," the canid calmly stated. "Yapper has house. Private property. Easy to see, when somepony approaches. Gets noticed, because most ponies won't. And house mostly ornamental. Yapper's main rooms underground. Ponies don't come close. Because they heard about pits in soil. For ponies who don't know where to step, pit traps."

Cerea blinked.

"Yapper was here before centaur." Softly, "Had to learn a few tricks. Pegasi land. Unicorns can't float. Earth ponies know soil belongs to Yapper. Nopony comes close. Not unless Yapper tells them where to step. And Yapper changes things a little, every day. Yapper will go to party."

Strictly speaking, the canid couldn't smile. Her lips weren't quite flexible enough, and the muscles around the eyes didn't entirely cooperate. But there was a slight parting of the jaw, and the fringed tail rotated.

"Anypony with problem," she finished, "can tell Yapper. From bottom of pit. We go?"

Princess Luna solemnly nodded.

"Although I will have your home watched for a time," the alicorn stated. "From a distance." She looked from one female to the other, gaze smoothly traversing the incline twice before stopping on Cerea.

"I understand your concerns," Princess Luna quietly told her. "And I am thankful that you voiced them at this time. But Yapper recognizes consequences, where many do not. She accepts the possibility of reprisal and is prepared to deal with it: the palace will do what it can. I expect you to honor her decision. Is that understood?"

Cerea forced the answering nod.

"And if any are so foolish as to attempt an attack within your sight," the alicorn added, "I expect you to move against them. You go forth armed, in spite of Wordia Spinner's wishes. Regardless of what those whom she attempts to direct might long for, you retain the ability to defend yourself -- and those in your charge. Try not to start a fight, Cerea. But for those who open hostilities -- you may feel free to stop them. Again: do we understand each other? And this time, place your answer within the verbal."

"...yes." And at that, she felt she'd been too late in her reply. Fighting in public, in front of those who were already afraid... "You're -- expecting trouble?"

"One should always expect complications," the Princess gravely observed. "In the ideal, such a belief arranges for pleasant surprises when such fail to manifest. Far more often, it allows preparations to be made."

"Look forward," Yapper stated. "Alicorns good at that."

Being trapped between alicorn and canid was somewhat like suffering the verbal equivalent of being alternately cut with a rapier and pounded with a rock.

"By way of example," the dark mare added, "I had some concerns about your attending alone. At one point, I found myself considering the hire of an escort -- ah. I see that translates rather well. So before the tide of your blush advances any further: for the duty of providing accompaniment." Just a little more softly, "I was also hoping for that companion to spread stories of a positive encounter. Something which might turn disbelieving ears. But the most suitable candidate remains retired, and... there was an argument." And quieter still. "A rather fierce one, especially considering the nature of the protesting party..."

She slowly, almost wearily shook her head. Looked up at Cerea again.

"But the two of you will travel together," she finished. "And I will not accompany you, nor shall Princess Celestia. Portions of both press and citizenry perceive us as creating pressure to accept you. A direct appearance would add to that. The more they convince themselves that we are pushing them, the more they will push back. On this night, we shall not allow ourselves to hover over the proceedings. Nor shall we loom, which is surprisingly easy to do. They already gather under the weight of palace security. Let them at least be unable to say that it was joined by the direct weight of our gaze."

Her horn ignited. Dark energy projected forward, surrounded the door's lever. Centaur ears picked up on soft clicks, and a touch of fizzle as security spells were placed on hold.

"A safe trip," she wished for them. "In each direction. And may all parties involved understand each other somewhat better upon your return. Luck to you both."

The door opened onto the night. A gust of cold tried to blast through the gap, was redirected by pegasus techniques. Centaur and Diamond Dog stepped into chill, and two sets of arms wrapped against their respective torsos.

Cerea glanced back, just in time to see the door closing again. Cutting her off from the cool, patient concern of the alicorn on the other side.

Her Princess.
Her liege.
In less than a day, her opponent.
They would both lose.

Yapper was staring at the covered air carriage. Shivering, as was appropriate for the weather (and Cerea didn't know how insulative the fur was, or how warm it might be underground)... but there was something else. The canid's eyes were a little too wide, and the tail had just gone almost straight down.

"You don't have to go," Cerea tried. "If you've changed your mind --"

"-- not the party," the canid immediately stated. "Carriage."

"They're secure," the centaur attempted. "I've been taking them to class. The pegasi keep everything level. And you don't weigh very much. I'm sure if they can get me in the air, then --"

"-- flight," Yapper snapped, and sharp teeth clicked against each other. "Dogs stay on ground. In ground. Barely come up to surface. Going into air..."

Oh no.

"Fancypants sent me a letter," the centaur urgently said. "I think there's a tunnel which runs near his estate. You can meet me there --"

The unfair way to describe the next word was 'bark'. It was also the accurate one.

"No."

Protesting, as the pegasi in front of the carriage watched them and wind whipped against fur and skin, "But you're scared --"

"Yapper does things Yapper is afraid of, every day," the canid snapped. "Yapper comes to surface. Goes to work. Every day. Yapper may have to fly again. So Yapper flies today."

And with that, the canid marched forward. Broad toes slammed against the roof, over and over, until she reached the carriage's fabric door. Wrenched it open, and went inside.

The centaur made herself follow.

Yapper jumped a little when the carriage left the roof. There was something of a jolt to takeoff: less than that of an airplane, but perceptible. It made the canid jump, and Cerea understood. First flight. Every meter they ascended probably represented a personal record for Yapper, and it was the sort of record which just kept breaking itself.

At least it's warmer than a cargo hold. Even with the chill outside, pegasus magic granted that.

The carriage kept climbing. The passenger portion had some means of staying level: most of what Cerea felt in the ascent was in her lower abdomen, as if she was in a freight elevator which was rising too fast. Something she was almost accustomed to, since any elevator she got to use was generally going to be a freight specimen --

-- Yapper whimpered.

It was a strange sort of sound. Small, pained, with its nature instantly recognizable even to someone who hadn't grown up around dogs at all. The instinct for Cerea was to immediately look down and to the right, checking on the canid: that was normal enough. She didn't understand why her right hand had just reached out...

"Yapper?"

She didn't see the canid, not at first glance. But then the carriage shook a little: a wind gust which hadn't been entirely deflected away. It made the whimper sound again, Cerea's ears rotated down, her head tilted a little more --

-- the canid was crouching. Pseudohands had been pressed against the sides of her head, and the torso was close to the knees. It wasn't an easy posture to maintain, not on digitigrade legs.

Cerea heard doubled wingbeats beyond the fabric: another carriage, passing close by. Disturbing the wind currents. It made their own conveyance jerk.

Yapper didn't quite fall. It looked as if that was going to be the ultimate result, and Cerea couldn't lower her own body in time to catch the smaller female -- but it didn't happen. Instead, the canid just tucked herself into a tight, trembling curl of life, as brown eyes squeezed shut and claws failed to puncture a grip into the base wood.

"Small space," she chanted. "Small space, small space, small space..."

The girl had been through panic attacks, understood some of the basics about how to fight them off and dearly wished that one day, some of them would actually work for her. You were supposed to calm your breathing. Force your focus away from the source of stress, try to think of something reassuring. For a Diamond Dog, who had been born underground... claustrophilia? The desire to be surrounded by that which was unyielding, with paws planted on stable rock.

Cerea couldn't give her that. There was almost no way to communicate with the flight team from inside the carriage, not through fabric and wind. She had no means of making them land, bringing Yapper to a place from which the canid could draw strength. The fabric walls could be tucked against, but they rippled...

She acted.

It was instinct: that was what she would tell herself later, just before doing her best to decide that it had been a mistake. She'd moved on instinct. Dropping down, bringing her lower torso to rest against the carriage floor, one arm curling out, and she felt the tightness in Yapper's body at the moment of contact. Felt it increase, and told herself it was because Yapper had been in Tirek's presence, had... gotten ponies to safety, because the soil had been soft. The canid was already terrified, so far above the earth, and now there was a centaur touching her --

-- but Cerea couldn't override her instincts, not in time. Her arm pulled Yapper in towards her flank, and then the girl's right hand gently stroked the fluff of the head fur.

Afterwards -- quite some time after, because there was just so much else to sort through -- she would feel horrible about what she'd done. It wasn't just the contact, touching someone for whom her presence could only make things worse. She'd treated Yapper like... a dog. Petting her, even as the centaur softly began to sing.

There was, perhaps, a certain hypocrisy there. The girl loved it when she was brushed by another, as long as that party took some care. She found it soothing. And yet she'd already decided that she'd done the wrong thing, her hand pulled away from the white fur as the wordless notes began to falter --

-- the canid tucked into a tighter curl. Pressed against Cerea's flank, as if the girl was the last truly solid thing in all the world. The left forepaw shifted away from the head, went on top of Cerea's hand, pushed it down onto the fur again.

And that was how they stayed, all the way through the trip. As the carriage rocked again and again, because so many were traveling towards the estate on that night. But all of the others had to land outside at a designated security area, only one could pause and wait to go over the walls --

-- the girl didn't see them. (Not then.) But she heard the gathering of anger, the great cry which came up as the protesters realized which carriage was theirs. It shook the fabric, it triggered another whimper, and it almost stopped the song.

The carriage slipped across the barrier. The shield hole closed behind it, blocking out part of the wind. Almost none of the sound.

A little after that, the descent began. And as the roof landing zone of Fancypants' estate came closer, Yapper slowly straightened herself. Stared up at Cerea with liquid brown eyes, and said nothing at all.

But the tail rotated.

They were both standing when the door opened.

Fancypants had the sort of natural dignity which could survive cold, ice, wind, and the occasional drink stain. He also looked somewhat weary. There was a worn aspect to the stallion's appearance: dignified, but... tired. It was in the grain of his fur, the slight rumple of the formal jacket, and it very much expressed itself in a tiny wobble of the monocle.

Those were the visible attributes. For Cerea, there was also the scent of dried blood: something which linen wraps had failed to lock away. A healing wound, covered by bandages.

"Lady Cerea," the noble politely offered, and then calmly turned his attention to the canid. "Peeress Yapper. Welcome. Please take your time about disembarking: we have a few small matters to discuss, and --" with a small smile "-- as nothing can truly begin until your arrival, the schedule is more or less yours to set. At your own pace. Please."

He stepped aside, clearing the opening, and blue-tinged moonlight streamed through the gap. The two females glanced at each other, then started for the door. Yapper, smaller and a little quicker, got out first.

It was a clear night: something which had been arranged through the shift of the weather schedule. The more chill, the less clouds, and so a waxing Moon shone down through a shield which flickered oddly and rippled along the surface.

Cerea had been taught that the most natural shape for such a construct -- just about the only natural shape -- was a dome. Also that those who could cover a building were rare, there was supposedly but one who could manage a city, and the now-departed Captain Armor had just about killed himself in trying to maintain it. Something on this scale was already difficult to manage, and when it came to the shape -- the rising walls of energy had been angled, and they were also fighting it. Trying to curve out, as an unseen caster battled to hold the warped construct, moment by moment.

The noble tracked what she was looking at, wearily smiled. "Most of the security it grants is through illusion," he told them. "The value of appearances." With a small sigh, "Part of why so many of your fellows are on patrol, Lady Cerea. I had thought my neighbors to be more accommodating than this. That a shield edge anchored on their property would not offend, especially if that was the only part I asked them to play in the proceedings. But..." This sigh was louder. "...rather than lose time to a rather pointless small claims suit, we did this instead."

"I'm sorry," was about as automatic as it got.

"For the actions of others?" The noble's head tilted slightly to the right. "Curious. Which part of another's idiocy did you feel was your fault?"

The centaur's initial search for words came up empty. The canid went with "Inside?"

Fancypants nodded, turned and led to the way to the door.

The noble's landing area was a fairly ornate balcony, with a curved stone railing surrounding the entire thing: for Cerea, the guard rail was a bit over knee-height. There were multiple padded benches in the area, a phonograph, and a grill. The last still had a fair amount of summer char, and the ghost of dead smoke told Cerea about cooked peppers.

"All adults tonight," Fancypants told them as they slipped inside -- the centaur ducked -- entering what Cerea considered to be a rather simple hallway. Warm browns, good lighting, a lovely burgundy carpet -- but the lone visible painting seemed to have been rendered by a first-grader with more enthusiasm than talent. "My youthful guests are in a hotel." Regretfully, "I've been told that you do well with children, Lady, but... I can't say the same for all of those waiting below. Asking them to meet you is a simple matter. Moving among politicians, and doing so past their bedtime -- that's somewhat less reasonable. And that's part of what I wanted to tell you, before we go down. We do have politicians in the group."

"I saw the ambassadors in the briefing book --" Cerea began.

The stallion shook his head. "Night Court," he specified. "To some extent, I tried to place those who would be willing to think within the proceedings. But..." With open regret, "I couldn't get as many as I'd wished. So some of them are the foolish: those who listen to the last thing they heard, or support anything where they see enough of the powerful putting their weight in front of the reins. Others are balanced atop the stile, trying to decide which side of the fence looks more favorable. And there are those who are less than fond of your presence -- but have learned to hint towards neutrality in public. I could try to block those who lie about journalism and unless one of them is better with illusion than Princess Luna, I have. But telling certain members of the Courts that they're less than welcome here... that turned out to be unmanageable." The regal blue mane seemed to sag. "They cry discrimination, you see. While longing to practice it every day, until it becomes perfected -- and all the time, claiming the only true ostracism is solely directed against them. For their common sense..."

"I've met the type," simply slipped out.

They were always together. A couple. Love within self-assigned superiority.
Not natives. Their accents were too harsh, and their skin... one pink, one brown. Expatriate Americans, I think. Working in Japan. They learned the language because they had to. And so they could insult others in a way which was always understood.
When you see enough prejudice... when you've been attacked by those you can't strike against...
We had computers in the household. It was hard to stream anything, with so many different pulls on the wifi. But research was easy.
Two Americans, far from home. One pink, one brown. In love, united by their hatred.
Until 1967, half of their country said that relationship was illegal.
And they don't care.
Because now they get to do it to us.

Fancypants nodded. "I believe you," was the even reply. "I wanted a better crowd, and I apologize for my failure in making it perfect. I wanted those who could think, and I know Puff Weevil won't change his mind."

...so that was his actual name.
I was just hoping somepony was trying to make a joke.

With a small smile, "I'm just hoping you can give him a small assist towards embarrassing himself yet again. Now -- regarding introductions --"

Cerea was fully aware that there had been a lot of debate on how to do it. Have her arrive early, take up a center position in the main room, and allow each guest to approach in turn? It had worked for the children: with adults, the whole exercise could easily turn into 'Do you have the courage to meet the monster?' The other major option had been to bring her before whatever degree of crowd was present at this point in the gathering, entering at Fancypants' side -- which risked a group break on the level of the press conference.

She currently understood that something had been put together which might allow her to step before a gathering. It was just that nopony had specified just what it was: an atmospherics trick similar to that which had been used with the children, or something else entirely. Word on whether it would work had also been noticeably absent.

"-- together?" Fancypants asked. "Separately? Any particular style?"

"Not 'date'," Yapper promptly replied. "'And guest.' Yapper's life complicated enough already --"

"-- I think you should go in ahead of me," Cerea cut in. "You never got a party --"

Fancypants' head dipped. "And I offer my apologies," the noble quietly told them. "An omission on my part. It won't happen again."

"-- and this way, you can at least have your own moment." Before I make any of them run. "With introduction. Please?"

"For what it's worth," the noble offered, "I agree with both idea and sentiment. Peeress?"

The canid needed a second to adjust for vocabulary. "Yapper first. Then centaur." She looked up at Cerea. "No dances when inside. No kissing."

The girl, who had been excluded from the time for love, still couldn't picture it. The dancing was giving her trouble.

(She could picture the kiss. It would be like kissing a dog. Not that she'd ever had one, but she'd seen humans do it, mostly with a pet's forehead. Once you looked past the chance to demonstrate a canine expression of exquisite confusion, Cerea still wasn't sure what the dog got out of it.)

"Take her in first," Cerea requested. "A few minutes where it's just her. If that's okay --"

"-- it's more than merely all right," the noble told her. "It's considerate. Wait here, then. I'll introduce her, make sure she's settling in, then come back for you. It may take a few minutes." With a small smile, "Patience. Please. Peeress?"

He swished his tail. The canid nodded, stepped up to his left flank, and the pair made their way down the hall. Turned left, and vanished.

Cerea, given a few extra minutes, stood still within warmth which was barely felt. Tried not to tremble, and found herself trying to think of everything which could go wrong. It had been barracks-bound hours spent at that, trying to anticipate...

She'd guessed part of it. Not the whole.
There was no way of stopping it.
So much of the party would feel as if it had almost worked.
Until she heard the wrong words.
(They hadn't been spoken in malice. Just from stupidity, confronting a casual fact which had to be altered to accommodate ego. Somehow, that made it worse.)
Until everything she knew about the world inverted.
(But that would happen before the eyes. Prior to the screams.)
(Before the nightscape.)
Until her sanity came crashing down.

Ersatz

There was no way to claim an emergency at the palace, something where she absolutely had to leave immediately and could somepony please show her where the tunnel entrance was? In a world without phones, where the most advanced form of non-verbal long-distance communication seemed to be the postal system... somepony would have had to come and tell her personally. Faking a received smartphone call, hanging up at the moment she could be seen -- it just wasn't an option and even if she'd gone so far as to pretend that the pegasus courier had just left, Fancypants could readily consult with the Princesses. It was the sort of lie which was destined to be shattered into fragments, and every shard would inflict her honor with a bleeding wound. Barring the sort of world-class emergency which no one should have ever been selfish enough to wish for, the party was about to begin, and she would have to attend. Cerea no longer had any realistic ways out.

Regardless, she was in the middle of reviewing escape plans when the stallion returned and to her distress, found that the majority would have required going through him.

"Asking if you're ready," the noble quietly said, "would be a rather foolish question. So instead -- do you feel that you can face this?" A warm gaze carefully focused upon her: the eye which had to work with the monocle had a slight squint. "Because I will understand if you want to stop, Cerea. Especially given my own failure when it came to returning on a date which would allow me to directly provide you with a longer briefing."

...no realistic ways out...

"You arranged everything," emerged as something automatic. "So much of the effort was thine. I woulds't not wish to reflect poorly upon thee through errant behavior, which would mean rendering mine own location into that of the Guard-errant --"

His ears twisted a little. Rotated, lifted themselves fully, then lowered again. And that was all.

I'm not funny.

"Breathe, Lady Cerea," he gently advised her. "Slowly. There is fear awaiting you below -- but there is also a significant portion of stage fright trying to shift her nerves from hoof to hoof upon my carpet. Let it pass."

"'twil offend," was her next protest. "So many of thine guests shall feel their time was wasted --"

"-- it's somewhat like asking the Bearers to attend a party," the noble bemusedly shrugged. "There's no guarantees that they'll be able to do so. And like the Bearers, if the claim is something happening at the palace -- something low-key, as to not stress those in attendance -- the absence can be excused as being for the good of the nation." With a slight twinkle in both eyes, with one spark shimmering through glass, "Although Princess Celestia has suggested the lack of their personal appearances is better for the survival of the party. Excuses can be made, Lady Cerea -- simply not forever. For my part, I feel that this event is necessary -- but necessity does not absolutely dictate tonight."

I can --

Both upper shoulders squared.

-- I can't.
He went to so much trouble. He's hurt, and he's still going through with this anyway. If I make an excuse, then he could lose status. I can't...

"We should head down," Cerea quietly said. Before I change my mind. "But... thank you."

He nodded, turned his body. Started to lead the way.

Cerea imagined that this portion of the estate would have been an oddly comfortable section, at least for anyone who wasn't in her situation. The hues were warm ones, any apparent antiques appeared to have gained that status over several lifetimes of loving use, and --

-- it was the brightness of the colors which caught her attention, followed by the softness. The hallway wasn't all that wide, not when it came to accommodating a centaur, and so the plush toy tiger rubbed against her right front pastern.

"May I take your jacket?" her host inquired.

She nodded, carefully removed and folded it. A corona projection recovered the garment, and the skin of her palm briefly tingled as the energy brushed against it.

"And your scarf -- ?"

"-- no."

He blinked up at her. She winced.

"I'm... still warming up," Cerea lied.

"Ah," was all he allowed himself.

Another projection of corona opened a door on the right, and the jacket was placed inside what appeared to be a small reading room.

"To keep any of my staff from becoming too curious," he told her. "There's a cloakroom, and none of mine would ever riffle through saddlebags, but -- I imagine at least one would want to examine the stitching pattern." The door closed again. "If you'd like a moment to review some portion of the guest list? I won't be able to stay at your side for the entire evening, and that will make it difficult to subtly brief you --"

"-- only if there's somepony crucial," Cerea managed. "Who just got in at the last minute." She had to make herself remember, and any delay caused on the front end would probably be echoed moment for moment on the back one. Although now that she thought about it, there was something the noble had to do --

"It's as much about categories of attendee as specific parties," Fancypants admitted. "And 'someone', for the full group. We do have a number of ambassadors, along with a few businesspeople and those who simply represent their neighborhoods within the capital. I can provide sorting criteria before we enter."

Sparring partners and spies.

"But if you do find yourself in distress," the noble thoughtfully considered, "we should have a signal." His gaze shifted, back and up. "Do you know how to snap your fingers?"

Cerea shook her head.

"Pity. The sound carries well, and it isn't quite like anything else. Perhaps a certain stomp of the hooves --"

"-- that's a restroom up ahead," Cerea softly broke in.

He blinked.

"Your memorization of the layout is admirable. If you wish to use it --"

"-- you should change the bandages."

She didn't think the smell was strong enough to be registered by ponies -- not on the conscious level. But her presence was going to put the gathering on something more than mere edge, and adding any degree of bloodscent...

The stallion stopped moving. Sighed.

"...yes," Fancypants considered. "A moment..."

It was closer to five minutes.

There were a few last topics of discussion before he brought her in, and her careful study of the estate's layout told her that she was being brought in via the long way around. Just in case.

They worked out a portion of her introduction: she was certain about none of it, and also wasn't sure how to override him. A hoof stomp signal was arranged. But there were other topics...

"How are they planning to prevent everypony from -- being set off?" seemed to be the maximum awkward politeness Cerea could bring to the inquiry. (The timidity, however, was more or less built in.) "When they see me --"

It made him sigh again. "How to fight instinct," the noble wearily said. "A question which has chased ponies down across the centuries, targeting those who refuse to acknowledge that the race exists. It's something new tonight, Lady Cerea. A sort of perfume blend, which was offered to all who entered. Because there is a scent-based component to the spreading of a herd reaction, and the researchers say the droplet will help keep such production to a minimum for a single evening." With a deeper exhale, "Of course, a number of guests refused it."

Which means some of them are going to break --

"Some claimed it would clash with their own chosen scent, and did so without ever taking a single sniff," Fancypants continued. "Others did not want to be part of anything which could be seen as experimental." With mixed exasperation and bemusement, "A few said the palace was looking for a way to control their minds, which seems to be rather a lot to ask of perfume. But I feel a number are simply terrified to be in a position where no matter what happened, they would have to admit they were truly thinking for themselves."

"And if those people --"

He saved her from having to say it, and did so casually. "So what we have are shield deployment devices, similar to those used in the Gifted School -- only somewhat weaker, as they do not have to block off explosions. It also allows them to be set off multiple times, and they have been coupled to kinetic detectors. Anypony moving over a certain speed will find domes briefly flashing into existence: not over them, but at their sides. Creating a corridor, which leads to the patio. They can recover there. I can safely state that the combination is working, because I tested them myself before allowing the first guest to enter."

Cerea took a slow breath. (The scarf held. The bra held. Her confidence sank.) Wondered just how many were about to break, along with the number who would do so as a fully personal and rational decision. Committing to the act in the hopes that others would follow.

A little more softly, "How's Discord? Is he... any better?"

Both immediately and evenly, "Did Miss Tiara request that you ask?"

There was no point in lying. "Yes." Twice now. "But I understand what classified information means, sir. I won't tell her anything which the palace doesn't want to reach the public. I just..."

He stopped Tirek.
A knight dies for something...

"...wanted to know."

He silently nodded, dropped his pace somewhat. The mustache drooped.

"It can be difficult to gauge true improvement," the stallion admitted. "Each chaos pearl discharged into his form creates some stability within the storm -- and I am fully aware of the irony in having to judge the condition of chaos incarnate by how stable his form might become. But that is all we have to go by, Lady Cerea. The degree to which he loses the aspect of the storm, and comes closer to the body we knew. Attempting to assume that form was..." A deep, slow breath. "...his last deliberate act. It might be reasonable to say that what we channel may be going into completing it. And in terms of granting him enough power to recover -- each pearl holds only a small amount, and there are only so many in all the world. It's not a question of full restoration." A little more quietly, "Princess Celestia told me that she's seen him -- push too far. There are certain signs which indicate when he's approaching his limits: things which have a few commonalities with his current condition. A loss of cohesion. But he had always recovered. It means there has to be a threshold. The point where his energies can rebuild of their own accord. If we can just push him across that line..."

Or it's like keeping a patient on full life support. As long as he's being constantly looked after, he'll survive. Turn away for so much as a minute...

But she didn't say it.

There was an aural tide washing towards them from up ahead. The babble of nervous conversation and, for Cerea, it was added to the scent of terror.

"It wasn't quite the full gathering when I left to fetch you," Fancypants admitted. "It likely still isn't. Some are caught at work, at least one is probably trying to figure out a path through the protests, a few turned back upon seeing that gathering -- and based on past evidence, I believe a number feel that lateness is the seventh pony virtue. So I can't bring you in last, not without significant stalling, and... for some of the final arrivals, herd instinct would never be an issue. So..."

He stopped for the last time. Looked at her...

...there was something strange about the way he did that. He was on the tall side for a stallion, especially a unicorn. It was something else which made him distinctive. But he was still so much shorter than Cerea, something which was true for everypony but one, and... when he looked up at her, it was in a way which suggested the gaze only had to travel across a few centimeters. As if they were very nearly the same height.

"...this is about having them meet you," the noble quietly went on. "Not as a concept or something half-hidden in the palace basement: as a person. Putting them in a place where, in the ideal, they would have to acknowledge an individual. But some will stick to their own definitions in the face of all evidence. We simply have to arrange for them to be outnumbered. And others..." With a thin, wry smile. "Acceptance takes many forms, Lady Cerea. You're aware that we have the cinema, yes?"

She nodded. Tried to keep her ears from rotating too far forward, straining to pick up on specific words within the fearful susurrus of the gathering.

"There are those who claim that Canterlot takes advantage," Fancypants noted. "We're famed for it, and not always unjustly. The most typical definition of a monster is something which cannot truly care. But for a few of those in that room..."

The smile was an exceptionally thin one.

"There are two producers present," he told her. "Each of whom wishes to formally acquire the license to use your likeness in their own rather tasteless horror film and, because they are from the cinema, they are both fully prepared to underbid the other. I encourage you to reject everything, while signing nothing. But do let them talk for a time. Provide them with the illusion of hope, that their offer might have been accepted if only it had been higher. Or sane. Because to some, the only real monsters are those things which cannot be exploited."

Only four broke when she entered. Just four, out of what she later learned had been nearly a hundred, and... she tried to tell herself that it was a good sign. If nothing else, the droplets had provided some beneficial effect, for a mere three to gallop towards the patio, while a dozen shield hues flashed in and out of existence and the one airborne pegasus frantically tried to work out some way of steering through the abrupt corridors...

Perhaps it said something, to have that as her new standard. That a mere four sacrificed their sanity in the name of getting away from her, and it could be seen as an improvement.

Doors opened. The sounds of anger blasted in from the outside. Doors closed.

She wasn't quite sure how to feel about Fancypants' introduction, especially as she didn't understand about three-quarters of it. Cerea had studied all manners of titles, a hundred means of formal address, and the noble's chosen means of describing her still set the wires to hissing. It left her standing motionless on his right throughout the whole thing, trying to work out whatever she could without so much as an ear twitch -- especially because she was convinced that any abrupt movement had the chance to set off another exodus. And one of the few terms which did fully register made her blush -- something which just made her look for the next pony to break, because now the monster could change colors and perhaps red was the hue which drained magic at a distance.

'First Daughter.'

In the roughest sense, Cerea did understand the term: the Americans had been in a position to use it now and again. 'Princess' had a different application in this world, and what she saw as the original definition couldn't be applied: her mother never would have accepted the designation of 'queen'. So, even without any election involved... First Daughter. The eldest female offspring of a nation's leader. But an identical translation implied a nation: something the palace had been trying to avoid. It was also a title which indicated nothing about Cerea other than the luck of birth order, with all achievement legitimately placed upon the parent --

legitimate

-- First Daughter.

First and... only.

The centaur herd's population had to be carefully managed, so as not to overwhelm the limited resources of the gap. If you were capable of breeding, then there was an obligation to do so -- but at the same time, the number of children in each generation was strictly limited. And in order to make certain that the best traits were passed on, the right to the largest families was often granted to the strongest. Her mother, as the herd's leader, had been entitled to four.

But Cerea had been a lone foal. Something the herd might have questioned, but... not to her mother's face, especially not after those extra birthing rights had been distributed as gifts.

legitimate

'First Daughter'. The words mostly made her feel like something which wasn't quite real.

Most of the crowd was staring at her. A significant minority had been caught in checking their paths to the exits.

What had the space been, before Fancypants had refitted it? Perhaps another ballroom: the area was certainly large enough. The palace had more floor space, a higher ceiling, and a seeming monopoly on marble -- but the newest chandelier was equally rich, and if the goal was a place to dance, then this part of the estate could accommodate. It just hadn't been allowed to remain in a matching base state.

The results put her in mind of a gigantic sitting room. An upscaled version of something which might have been found at the Reform Club: the launch point for a gentleman's adventure, one last place of comfort before Mr. Fogg dashed out the door to begin a madman's journey --

-- she pictured most of the attendees engaging in such an evacuation, wondered if eighty days of this world's fastest non-teleport travel would allow a complete circumference, along with whether any of the desperate would realize they were only making their way back towards her --

-- the image still held up. Furniture and tall floor lamps had been bundled into careful assemblies on the warm floor, creating multiple alcoves within the larger space. There wasn't one food serving area: there were at least seven, and drifting scents suggested that two had been designated for omnivores. A dozen servants moved between the zones, keeping everything refreshed. The only thing which appeared as a non-duplicated unit was the band, currently located in the far right corner: eight assorted sapients, set in a location where their music could try to drown out some of the exterior chants. The composition was a steady, soft one: something she felt was meant to calm, and therefore an attempt which couldn't possibly work.

(Cerea briefly spotted the local equivalent to the harp: something which was rather hard to miss, because the musician was standing in the center of a stringed cage. Griffons apparently liked to pluck the strings with their talons. And claws. And beak. Some notes required using all three at the same time.)

The actual seating arrangements could best be described as 'assorted'. She'd learned that ponies preferred to use padded benches -- but based on what she saw within the meeting space, at least one species wanted giant throw pillows, arranged into something very much like a floor nest. Anything with a rising back was probably meant for a biped. One yak was resting on a rock. (A rock with a pair of draperies tossed over the sides and a carefully-carved hollow for the fanned tail, but still a rock.) Three truly giant benches in the pony style had been carefully placed into widely-separated areas, and both of her guesses eventually held up there: that they were meant for her, and had been repurposed. Most of their existence had been spent in waiting for a Princess to visit.

The size of a furniture cluster was a variable. Some areas (including one with a centaur-designated bench) were meant to host gatherings of no more than four, although it would have been hard to prevent people from listening at the edges. Others could accommodate two dozen. A few small, shadowed areas around the perimeter had likely been intended as private recovery zones for those who didn't feel they could reach the patio. Cerea wasn't sure if any of them were large enough for her.

All of the area's lighting felt warm, but there was a faint tan cast to the illumination: something which brought the hue of Cerea's skin just a little closer to that of her fur. The ambiance had a natural softness to it. And the air reeked of fear.

...at least, she assumed it was all fear.

She could scent the terror emanating from the ponies. A number had chosen their masks: hard stances, tense muscles, determined stares -- but none of it changed what rose from their skin. (It was possible to pick up on the perfume: scattered tides of chemicals mixed into a peace lily base. There was also a lot of paper, and a stink of fresh ink: quite a few of the attendees had copies of the one-sheet.) But the elaborate, we-all-got-dressed-up-for-this clothing was covering yaks, donkeys, zebras, one furniture cluster was hosting six additional griffons, something out of her sight range smelled bovine, Yapper was somewhere in the visible area... and in several of those cases, she still hadn't been through enough exposure to those species to truly know what their fear smelled like.

A cross-section of the capital was within that room: given how low Canterlot's non-pony population was supposed to be, an exceptionally mixed one. Fancypants had tried to make all of them comfortable, in just about every way -- except one, and it was something she had to be told about, long after the disaster. There were no cloud alcoves within the room's upper atmosphere, and a complete lack of vapor furniture floating above the main gathering. It was something which was done at many parties, and Fancypants had felt it just allowed the pegasi and griffons to segregate themselves from the masses. And from her.

He talked about her for a minute, and she tried not to wince. As far as Cerea was concerned, there were no true deeds to speak of. She had been the one to hit the statue: the most she had done was save others from herself --

-- but then he spoke about the Guards, and how the capital only knew of them. A constant presence -- but one which was almost perpetually relegated to the background. Those who stood ready to sacrifice themselves without thought, so that all could live.

The city knew about Guards. But only of them. It had never truly been introduced to those who could make that choice. And so, from this night forward, a new tradition. To greet those who had taken on the duty. Celebrating them in life, and hoping that the next gathering would be for their retirement. The alternative was... something which he knew none wished to think about for long. But the city certainly owed each recruit class a greeting. That, and perhaps somewhat more.

The noble managed a smile. Something which came across with a certain dignity, and also just a little embarrassment.

"It just so happens that this was a graduating class of one..."

Someone laughed.

Then it spread. At least a half-dozen different kinds of throats and with the disc in operation, so much of the mirth sounded the same.

Laughing while in Cerea's presence. Some part of that could have been the tension: stress could make the strangest things seem funny. But -- laughing.

He finished by declaring that the evening was officially under way, then casually moved a few meters away from Cerea. Checking on a server, one whose tray was carefully balanced across the earth pony's back. It left her standing within the arc of the entrance, opened double-doors trailing out behind her like a reversed starting gate. She knew how to run backwards. She had a clear shot at -- something, and so many of them were staring at her. Just -- staring, with those huge eyes. It added something to the force of it. The fearful mass evaluation of the monster in their midst.

More than a few seemed to be focused on the sword. The weapon, that which struck at something so close to their core. She'd brought a weapon and it had been on orders, but the sword was with her and that just gave them something else to fear. It felt as if they were all staring, everyone from every species, and Fancypants had been the only one who'd moved --

-- a donkey near the front shook his shaggy head. Casually shrugged to himself, and Cerea thought about what Nightwatch had told her: an entire species where just about every member could find the worst-case scenario in anything, and this one was right in front of him.

Another head shake, a little quicker this time. And then his right foreleg shifted. Moved forward, nearly pulled back to vanish under his garment's long grey fringes, arced again --

-- he was trotting. Unsteadily, but with good speed. Coming towards her...

(She almost backed up, and told herself it was because she was trying to retain the proper sight line.)

The introduction was quick. His name was (or translated to) Subtle Toxin, and he was a chemist. He recognized that there were probably things she wasn't permitted to speak about, but he'd seen pictures of the sword, and... something about the look of it, even in the newspapers, had seemed odd. What was the material composition?

She was so startled to be addressed at all as to almost temporarily misplace the concept of 'classified', even though she wasn't sure the answer fit. But there was a one-word answer, something half-stammered in shock, and all it did was make the wires hiss.

It was a sound which made a number of attendees pull back. But the donkey simply looked puzzled. He tried to ask for clarification, and that just made the wires hiss again. And Cerea did her best to explain, but she was a blacksmith. Her knowledge of advanced chemistry was largely restricted to the ways in which it interacted with metal, and some of that had been classified.

All she could ultimately do was weakly suggest that it had something to do with oil, she wasn't even sure how that worked, and then a tradespony wandered closer because there was a new material under discussion. Were there any other uses for it? Ones less... dangerous?

She tried to think of a few safer applications. Sporting equipment -- no, that was just going to make them think about centaur sports, and too many of those focused on personal combat. How about... dice?

...oh. Centaurs had dice games? (And now there was another pony on the approach, along with two zebras.)

Well -- sort of. When that kind of game was played (at least among mares, and she spent a good part of the night in deliberately not talking about her herd's stallions), the natural favor was given to strategy. Dice usually added too much randomness to the mix. But it was possible to combine the factors, and that meant there were a few backgammon sets around -- oh. Right. Of course that didn't translate. Did anyone have some paper -- something other than the one-sheet...

-- it took her less than a second to decide that every photo had been the worst possible choice, followed by nearly ten of the horrible intervals before she could fully wrench her gaze away --

-- oh, thank you. Paper and a quill. At any rate, she didn't play that sort of game at home.

(There were a hundred little games in the herd. Some were physical, others mental, and every last one possessed a requirement she'd never been able to meet: that of having somepony to play with.)

But as an exchange student, living with the others in the household -- no, she was the only centaur --

-- it's... probably best if they just focus on one subject...

(A yak had just pushed her way in.)

...anyway, there were a lot of little clashes. Some of which weren't so small. Conflicts of personality. Culture.

Desires.

And they had to find ways of resolving them. Contests where no one had any real advantage going in -- those helped. And since Papi usually had the console tied up... right. Console. The wires were never going to stop hissing on 'console'. Um -- so this is the gameboard, and here's how the dice factor in. Oh, and the doubling cube. You need one of those. Now by comparison, for strategy games, when it came to the nation which had hosted her as a student, you wanted shogi -- and naturally that hadn't translated either... all right, it was going to be easier to sketch if she just lowered herself to the floor and used this table, there were more sapients coming up and she had to lean so awkwardly for both view and leverage on the sketch, but none of them seemed to know that -- all right, this is shogi. But when it comes to a dice game in that country, you're looking at sugoroku...

Their fear was based in so many things, and nearly all of them had originated with Tirek. A monster dedicated to a single purpose: the theft of everything vital, taking it for his own. Forever and always, until the end of the world.

They were afraid of her. Part of that was how she looked. Because of the way she could attack. But there were at least ten sapients around her. She couldn't read every scent or expression -- but the tones indicated at least a modicum of curiosity. Something which felt as if it was increasing.

During that portion of her training which had been done with non-pony species... she'd perceived the truth behind why so many had been willing to participate. Sparring partners and spies. And it brought her back to the one human in Japan who had claimed to be filming a documentary about the household. A way in which thousands of humans could come to know her and the others, as long as every possible method of familiarity involved the removal of their clothing.

Could you learn about another, through examining them in nudity? At the very least, you could probably figure out where all of the joints were -- although in her case, probably not how some of them bent. But when it came to learning who they were as a person... a blush would indicate embarrassment, tensed muscles could be seen as a desire to lash out at the one capturing the image, and anything beyond that would require some familiarity with posture and gestures alike. Something which meant the viewer already had to know a little, or -- allow themselves to see.

The designers of her dress had emphasized her legs, and the whole of Cerea's tail was on prominent display. A view of the familiar, potentially meant to distract from everything which wasn't. The (covered) display of cleavage? Confrontation therapy, or a point of reference for any disinterested minotaurs in the area. But there was only so much anyone could learn through vision alone, and most of that would be projection of their own beliefs onto her form. The majority might simply be reinforcing what they'd already decided.

If you wanted to know someone...

Sparring... you could pick up on certain aspects of a personality that way. (Or, with one hated memory of a dark-haired filly, the void where a personality should have been.) It was often a way to determine how they sorted priorities, along with recognizing a certain base level of honor. Pragmatism could come in rather quickly. But in the end, it was 'Show us how you fight.' It provided hints on how to beat her. The means of taking down a monster. And it built upon the ways in which their fear demanded they perceive her: as something which existed to hurt.

That was all Tirek had been to them. A mobile, ever-increasing source of pain. Not even something that would truly fight, because there were ways in which a fight implied a chance. His mere presence had been something which threatened to defeat the world. His central tactic had been existing and in doing so, demanding that everything else stop. Not a force of nature, but a backlash against it. The natural order sundered, and... perhaps he'd had a reason for that. An excuse provided from the core of a void, which did nothing more than echo about the hollow until the toughening from repeated impacts against the edges rendered them impervious to reason.

He might have provided his excuse, if any had asked. Or he might have laughed.

How did you come to know someone?

Show us how you look.
Let us see the way you fight...

...she needed more paper. Actually -- how about wood chips? Something more solid, which she could attach the paper onto.

(And now it was easily a dozen. Watching. Listening.)

Because it's never just the board, it's the game pieces. Now, if she explained the rules vocally and someone else wrote them down, they would be in a form which everyone could review at need. It would have to be a paper board at the start, but that provided the form in case anyone wanted to carve one out later. So... start with backgammon, because that was the dice game where the rules were the least complicated. After that, they could move on to Go: a game so simple that it could be learned in five minutes. Mastery apparently required about sixty lifetimes, but given that anyone at the party had the option for the first head start...

'What do you look like?'
'How do you fight?'

Both were questions which could have been asked of Tirek. But perhaps he never would have found a way to give an answer to a third inquiry, because it was a thought which might not arise in the mind of a true monster. Not if the base concept had to include anyone else.

The girl, with the lower part of the long body flush against the floor and the upper torso half-hunched over a too-low table, sketched and talked, almost becoming lost within both acts. The nature of the audience was almost immaterial.

(Three ponies, deciding that the gameboard had to be close to completion, tried to get in line -- only to find that the yak had already claimed the front of it. The yak wasn't moving. It was cold at home during the winter, and this would be something new to do. Besides, if the game had a board, then the board could be flipped over. That alone opened up all sorts of possibilities. And there were now two griffons coming closer, because any new game was a fresh way to dominate.)

There was a third question: something which a monster might not have been able to answer.

'How do you play?'

And all around her, for those who had been willing to risk approach, to listen... the scent of terror was slowly beginning to fade.

So much about the party would feel as if it had almost worked...

Heretic

If they could exploit her, then she wasn't a monster...

Cerea had never really become accustomed to one rather frequent human belief: the one which said she had to be stupid. There were times when she could see it lurking about the corners of their eyes, the collective delusion just about had its own olfactory signature, and some of them saved her the trouble of trying to work that part out by just saying it. Given how often the delusion manifested, it could be argued that she was at least used to hearing the words -- but they never failed to rankle her. Especially when they were coming from a species whose average intelligence usually worked out to 'Maybe.'

She did recognize a few of the sources for that delusion. Part of her body matched that of an animal: apparently that was supposed to have a draining effect. Something about neural activity running down her upper back, into the lower, and presumably out the tail. Cerea was perfectly capable of nickering, and could easily manage a neigh. Newborns did it all the time, and a truly frustrated adult might add such vocal touches. The exchange students did their best to avoid that kind of expression, lest anyone believe they had suddenly lost all capacity for (mimicking) speech.

Additionally, she had been locked away in a gap for just about all of her lifetime, so how could she have any understanding of how the modern world worked? And for that, she had to acknowledge a few actual issues. On the programming level, Cerea didn't fully recognize how a smartphone operated. She would readily admit that whenever a human brought up the technology issue and, just when they were settling into their triumph, would politely ask them to explain the matter. The majority of them could give some details on activating the touchscreen and, when pressed on how their body's electrostatic charge allowed them to do that, began to falter. A number could explain binary, at least in that there were ones and zeroes involved. Somehow. And far too many felt that certain levels of broadcast signal caused cancer. Or controlled minds. Occasionally both.

The gap had brought in books, as many as it could. The girl understood something about physics, chemistry, and biology: she was a student. Centaurs (and the other hidden species) had done their best to keep up with what the humans were doing, because there was a chance to see it used against them. Cerea didn't understand how the most advanced technology worked, not on the deepest levels -- and in that, she matched just about every human in Japan. She didn't have to be capable of constructing a logic gate in order to operate a smartphone: she just had to be willing to read the manual and compared to the humans, when it came to that simple bit of research, she was ahead.

And then you had the snickering belief which said that in order to calculate the intelligence of a female, you measured the overbust and subtracted the results from one hundred. It was cruel, it put even the smallest women (who were frequently the ones invoking it) into the realm of those who wouldn't have been able to do the math, using the English measurement system didn't improve matters much and when it came to metric, Cerea had wound up in negative integers, steadily moving deeper into the depths of the imaginary. When it came to that particular measurement of IQ, the only thing she would have been capable of was death because at that level, she would have been quite literally too stupid to breathe. The resulting math also didn't seem to send her all the way around the curve and render her into a supergenius, but she was confident of at least being more intelligent than those who kept trying to make the non-jest work.

And yet, so many of the humans had felt she had to be stupid. (She had thought that in Japan, the use of archaic, overly-formal terms would counter some of them, because you had to research those. She'd been wrong.) Several had tried to take advantage, especially when they knew she couldn't strike back...

With those at Fancypants' party -- they knew that in the event of an attack, she was allowed to retaliate and for that alone, there was an argument for this world to be the better one. And a number of attendees had just watched her both dictate and explain the rules for multiple strategy games: this seemed to potentially suggest she wasn't entirely stupid.

(She also understood more about some aspects of metallurgy than the locals, but she wasn't allowed to talk about that. And while she was still trying to figure out how this world's magic worked, all indications had her as the regional expert on the ritual version -- mostly because she hadn't seen any. As with the humans, Cerea was still trying to figure out how they were all getting along so well without it.)

So they needed another way to think of her and after a few minutes, several guests had come up with the same one.

It was possible to watch each of them trying to work up the courage it took to approach her. The majority were dressed and for the mares, that meant she had to interpret the weakness of the knees through the vibrations of the dress: with the stallions, each leg could sometimes be caught shaking in turn. A number stumbled over their first words or, if the disc was translating properly, simply got stuck on stuttering the same letter six times. Two of them visibly decided that they hadn't consumed quite enough alcohol for this and went back to get more.

But for those who did reach her...

"But just think about the benefits! Once you sign over the rights to your likeness, we'll be able to effectively put you in the film! -- no, of course we don't need you as a consultant. I'm sure you're much too busy at the palace and besides, we've already got a script. There's no need to use a second writer. It's bad enough having to pay one -- anyway, don't you see that having it as a horror movie is the real benefit? We make you as terrifying as possible and then if anypony who saw the film meets you, there's simply no way you could ever be that bad! -- no, don't look at the contract, a signature will be enough -- and incidentally, if you happened to find two adolescents on a date where they were, shall we say, nuzzling in a way which their parents didn't intend, what's your go-to attack? No, this doesn't count as consulting. I'm just making conversation and anyway, a consultant would have to be paid. Are you going to sign that?"

"Oh, I've just heard so much about this place you're from! It's in all of the papers, you know. I've done my best to keep up, and I'd like to consider myself an expert. But there's so many articles, it's just hard to keep all of the facts straight! And since you're here... oh, I know! Why don't you just start telling me all about your homeland, and I'll just tell you which things you have right?"

"The Lunar shift, is it? You're lucky, you know. There aren't a lot of sapients who get the chance to interact with Princess Luna on a nightly basis. To the average pony on -- or over -- the street, she's still something of a mystery. Especially since the average pony is out and about under Sun. But for those in the palace, who get to see so much more of her... forgive me my curiosity, but... does she ever talk about... the thing? ...yes, I know I'm sweating. It's a little hot in here. Somepony really needs to tweak the weave in this room. So. The... thing. Which happened... that one time... oh, they just make everypony -- everyone sign those confidentiality agreements to scare them. I'm sure it would never hold up in court. We were talking about... the thing..."

("The thing" came up three times. Nopony ever managed to narrow the massive category down before dehydration began to set in.)

It took something of an effort to see her as stupid, and that was an effort which a few were still willing to make. Cerea got to overhear two such false observations: both parties felt she had simply been parroting the rules for some of the palace's private entertainments, and one determined that he could declare that in public because he knew the disc only worked on anything which was directly said to the centaur. But for the rest...

She wasn't stupid. But she was still something new, trying to adjust. The assumption was that she didn't comprehend how anything about the new society worked and as long as that held true, then she was simply naive.

(She'd missed one of the fundamentals.)

If she was naive, then she could be exploited. And if she could be exploited, then she wasn't a monster.

She understood how Fancypants had meant it. Cerea just wasn't sure that when it came to her status in the world, a change to 'victim' represented an improvement.

The girl tried to circulate. But she usually wound up doing so on her own. Fancypants had to greet certain guests as they arrived, make the rounds of the party and see that everyone was comfortable. As he'd warned her, there was no way for him to be at her side in every moment. It left her trying to circulate, and... she didn't really understand how parties worked. Most of the ones she'd attended had been in the household, and the basic goal there was to try and keep the walls intact: they usually failed.

In the gap... stallions had their own ways of partying, and a sane mare avoided all of them unless there was a need to either end the affair or get in some serious baton practice: the two purposes were usually able to double up. Mares gathered in quiet groups to discuss the state of the gap: fun was no part of that, with both joy and fillies left outside the door. And for those of her own age... it had been understood that she could get into most things simply based on who her mother was and because that had been the only reason, she hadn't.

When it came to circulation, Cerea spent most of the party feeling like an aortic clog.

She was too big. There were multiple species in the modified sitting room, and none of them approached her size. Those who wouldn't come up to her still had to indulge in some effort to get around her, and more than a few were willing to put in the work.

It was hard for her to find good viewing angles. Even in Japan, most of the adult population had been within forty centimeters of her height: everyone at the party was shorter than that. A significant portion of her time was spent with her barrel and belly against the floor, trying to make it easier. She was getting worried about what the friction was doing to the securing fabric strips. And wherever she stopped, everything seemed to stop around her. Guests seemed to be a little less nervous about approaching a lowered, immobile centaur -- except for her left flank. There was usually a visible amount of open space radiating out from that part of her body, because that was where the sword was.

She readily identified pockets of guests which served as rocks in the party's shifting tide, unmoved by almost anything around them. They remained together in carefully-isolated groups, speaking only with each other. Some of them would glance out from time to time, trying to discover just where she was and, if necessary, moving the entire knot sideways. Cerea caught repeated sight of a face from the briefing book: the speckled white stood out in the crowd, as did the suit which wasn't managing to hide the bulges of a rather overweight body. He was one of those who seemed to be on the active lookout for her, and whenever their eyes made contact...

Cerea saw his lips move a few times, doing so in utter silence. It put her in mind of a performer rehearsing his lines.

She seldom got more than a glimpse of the canid. Even in the olfactory world, it was hard to track her companion for the evening: there were well over a hundred guests of multiple species, added to staff and host and a ventilation system which seemed to work at least partially by magic. It left the currents twisting around each other in unfamiliar patterns, and a centaur still wasn't a bloodhound.

Yapper moved on her own, and often did so rather quickly. ('Scurried' felt both vaguely derogatory and distressingly fair.) But on the whole, she seemed to be circulating more freely than Cerea. The Diamond Dog was taller than the ponies, but she took up considerably less space, could slip through narrow gaps, and appeared to have a habit of abandoning groups without pause or anything in the way of either excuse or apology. When Yapper was done with a discussion, she was done: anyone who wanted to continue talking about the matter was free to extend the debate with a pocket of quickly-collapsing social vacuum.

But Yapper was being approached. She was a guest, Fancypants had a way of casually strolling past anyone who seemed to be avoiding her, it served as a herding method, and... even for those who might have seen her as a monster, the canid was both the lesser horror in the room and the familiar one. Something they told themselves was understood, and if an attendee couldn't get within speaking range of a centaur, then that was just because there was somepony there already. Surely having a talk -- a careful, slow, extremely dumbed-down talk -- with a Diamond Dog would readily prove their courage!

Cerea seldom saw Yapper during the party, not for more than a glimpse. It was rather easier to hear her.

"-- of course Yapper has been in bedroom! Have to be very careful, entering Princess Luna's bedroom. Doors squeak a little. Not many ponies know that. Prisoners chained to ceiling over her bed also squeak. Didn't think ponies could squeak. Chains just that tight. After Yapper finishes adjusting them. Plus funnels also have to be twisted. Every night." Irritably, "Stupid prisoners, always twisting in the chains. Making them loose and pushing funnels out of line. What good is prisoner sweat dripping down in wrong place?"

"You..." There was a swallowing sound. Then there was a second version, which had considerably more trouble in forcing a greater mass down or rather, down again. "...you can't possibly be serious --"

"Serious as palace hire contract," the canid solemnly declared. "Especially part about confidentiality. Pony know how contract work? Punishment enforced on one who listens. Big bedroom. Room for extra chains. But Yapper sure nopony ever find out you know. From anypony here."

Just barely audible, especially with most of the syllables feeling as if they'd just burbled up through thick liquid, "...you're not a pony..."

"Details." A white pseudohand casually swatted the concept away. "Want to know about bath?"

Desperately, "...you're making this up... I know you're making this up..."

"She's a Dog," one of the mares rather poorly whispered. "She can't be smart enough to lie like this..."

"Most ponies want to know about bath," Yapper casually stated. "Ponies asking Yapper to break confidentiality should know about bath. Bath is where the blood goes."

Fancypants had multiple jobs at the party. One of them was announcing important arrivals. And when it came to words which could get Cerea's attention...

"So it's usually best to turn the doubling cube when you're sure you're ahead," she told the pegasus mare. "And can stay that way. Remember, it increases the points scored for the other player as well. So one bad run of luck --"

"-- and I've just dropped behind by that much more," the mare groaned. "I wish I'd thought about that fourteen minutes ago." A frustrated wing flared out towards the room's far right corner, which was now occupied by hastily-duplicated paper sheets, wood chips marked with ink, and an increasingly-audible debate regarding strategies: several griffons stood close by, visibly taking mental notes. (She'd noticed that the group tended to move as a flock. Or possibly a pride. She didn't know how to ask for the right term.) No one in that section seemed to be particularly interested in leaving, and they had all decided that as names went, 'board game of surrounding' (which was what they'd all heard when Cerea had said 'Go') was too generic, and Centaur Capture just stood out.

Cerea was still trying to figure out how she felt about that, especially since her first reaction had been so crude as to mandate instant dismissal. Besides, when it came to revenge, an introduction to dice-based property management seemed best reserved for somepony she loathed.

"And you can't turn it back to a lower face?" the burgundy pegasus sighed. "Ever?"

"Not until the points goal is reached," Cerea repeated. "I'm sorry --"

"Ambassador Torque Power of Mazein!" readily carried across the room. Fancypants had a special skill with that, too. "And guest!"

Yes!

Her head turned so fast as to nearly give herself whiplash, shortened hair sliced through the air --

-- minotaur. A nicely-cut black jacket, with plenty of room for the biceps. The tie still looked somewhat stupid. But she didn't see anyone next to him --

-- it took a moment before Cerea looked down. The pleasantly-trim seagreen earth pony mare at the ambassador's side was caught looking back at her, and winced accordingly.

...merde.

The big bull looked out across the crowd. It only took him a moment to spot Cerea, and then he knelt down next to his companion. Said a few quiet words, stood up again, carefully picked out a path through smaller forms...

The centaur wasn't quite done with the rulebook by the time he caught up, and the minotaur waited patiently. Watched the pegasus leave, and then gestured Cerea towards one of the open private alcoves near the edge. A region hidden partially in shadows.

She got back to her hooves, carefully followed in his wake. (She could clear a path just by existing, but his method triggered less fear.)

He stepped into the shaded alcove, leaned his back against the warm wood of the wall. Cerea followed him in, tried to orient her lower body to place the majority of it within concealment. There didn't seem to be anything she could do about her tail.

There were other guests nearby. Then there weren't.

"Wanted to check on you," Torque brusquely stated. "Figured it was starting to feel like a long night." With a snort, "Took us nearly forty minutes to get in here. I don't use air carriages much and with Fancypants, I like to take the walk. It's a nice neighborhood, as long as you keep most of your appreciation on the architecture. Figured the protestors would let us get up to the gate and shield without a problem. But there's more than I expected out there, even in the cold." With a small shrug, "The most ornery. And some of them decided it would be fun to get in the way, because they also think a minotaur who has to get past a pony is always going to be in the wrong."

"I'm sorry --" arose from the level of instinct.

"Pretty sure you didn't ask them to come," the ambassador decided: this was followed by a rather casual shrug. "Not my first party. The Princesses like to get all of the ambassadors together. Once every couple of years if it's quiet, or if more than a third of the envoys turn over. That band over there? It's the one which usually plays these events, because they've got more than one species in the group and they'll handle music from everywhere."

The shudder looked strange, coming from such a large body.

"Even buffalo territory," he reluctantly finished.

"Buffalo," Cerea carefully repeated.

"It wears on you after a while," the minotaur told her. "In this case, 'a while' is about ten minutes. My first posting was to the Territory. Three standard beats, no waiting. The wedding is the fourth. And ambassadors get invited to a lot of weddings." This shudder was stronger. "Good people. Lousy music. But -- sorry I'm late. I wanted to get some time with you. Guess this is it."

Sparring partners and spies --

His knees bent again. The broad back slowly slid down the wall, until calm yellow eyes were level with her own.

"How are you holding up?" Torque asked, and waited.

The scents of pony fear drifted into the alcove, mixed and mutated.

"'tis... something of a trial," she reluctantly admitted. "To be under so many eyes, to be watched. Some cloak themselves in bravery, but --"

The chuckle was unexpected.

"Not gonna tell you how that came across to these ears." Both of them wriggled. "Old Form ain't used much. Vocabulary's a little too limited. It was mostly for passing the word, in a way no one else could pick up on."

He looked out through the shadows, at the crowd. Searched for a moment, and then stopped with his gaze resting on elevated white fur and fringed ears.

"For a given value," he softly said, "of 'no one'."

The clenching of the big hands was almost audible. She could swear she heard muscles swelling under the jacket --

"Ambassador?"

Slowly, the fingers relaxed. Fell limp.

"Long time ago," the minotaur softly said, still not quite looking at Cerea. "She wasn't any part of it. The way I'm trying to see it -- the dactyly species need to stick together. There ain't that many of us. But -- usually don't get anywhere near this close to a Dog. And that's the other reason I came tonight. To go up to her, and change that. It's overdue. So..." He turned back, and it was easy to identify the grin. "...thanks for bringing her. Seriously."

"You brought a pony."

It had more or less slipped out.

Another shrug -- but something in his eyes had clouded.

"Widower."

A single word. Calm. Practiced. Most of the edges had worn away through the lathe of time, and yet she watched the last one cut him.

"I'm sorry --"

"-- it's been a while," he softly added. "But still not long enough. She's with the Ancestors, and I can't get into those parties yet. So I come with an escort, or a friend. Lets everyone know where my heart is." With no more than an extra decibel or two, "I know a party like this is hard. Speak straight this time, as much as you can: how are you holding up?"

The blue eyes closed.

She was already tired, even as a supposed Lunar so close to the start of her shift. For what she said next, it might have been an excuse.

"I keep waiting for something to go wrong."

"Bearers stayed home."

"...sorry?"

She heard him shrug: it was an audible shift of fabric. "Private joke. Any reason?"

"I -- did something like this, once before," Cerea quietly stated. "Or what was intended to be something like this. An introduction, and then a party. It --"

they're pounding on the door

"-- didn't work." Her tail twisted, tucked itself closer to her lower body. "We never reached the party."

"We," emerged as something cool and neutral.

"My mother," Cerea clarified. "A few others."

"Father?" was a casual inquiry.

there was no way for him to have known her name

"Just mares." It was an effort to keep her hooves flat against the carpet. "The people introducing us thought that would make a better first impression. And it was a public introduction, because everyone thought it had to be. But there were protestors. That was..." She forced the breath. "...expected. Just -- not so many. They outnumbered the ones who were there to protect us, and..."

Her head dipped: something she was just barely aware of. Most of her attention was focused on the way her right hand had just clamped down on the sword's hilt.

Gently, "Anyone get hurt?"

Some of them trampled each other in the rush to reach us. Then they hired lawyers, and tried to sue the herd for... inciting their reaction.
I only found out about that when I reached Japan. My mother hid that from me.
My mother hid a lot of things.

"A few," she made herself answer. "It just..."

Her ears twisted. Went backwards.

"...I can hear them outside," Cerea softly told him. "When someone goes to the patio. The shields distort sound a little, I think. But they don't stop it. I didn't see them from the carriage, because all of the windows were covered. So I don't know how many there are. I just hear them, and... you had to come in through that. I'm sorry --"

"-- is this part of centaur culture?" the ambassador evenly asked. "Taking responsibility for what everyone else does?"

We're supposed to be teachers. Guides. Partners. So when it comes to the humans... yes, a little. If you give someone a lesson, you hold responsibility for how they utilize it. But no one had the chance to do that for a very long time.

He doesn't know what the household was like. How much damage the other girls could do, without even noticing. Someone had to be responsible, and it wasn't going to be anyone else. Someone had to be the adult --

-- I know I'm not responsible for my being here.
I've been looking for summoners all night.
I keep waiting for somepony to ask me if they can have a moment alone, away from the main party. Go into a room off a hallway somewhere, and... that's their chance.
And I would think about going with them, even when I can't snap my fingers to signal anypony. Because the sword can do something, and...
...maybe I could capture one.
Maybe they know how to send me back.
I'm not responsible for my being here.
A meteor crashes into the world. The meteor wasn't responsible. It didn't choose its trajectory. It couldn't.
But the impact still cracks tectonic plates. Giant clouds of debris go into the sky and don't come down. Sunlight is blocked. Plants die. Animals follow.
The meteor didn't intend that. But it's still an impact.
Extinction doesn't care.

"Someone has to be."

He was quiet for a few seconds.

"If it's too much," Torque offered, "I can tell Fancypants. He'll get you back to the palace."

Which left Yapper alone --

-- actually, Yapper could probably handle herself. It just reflected badly on their host. On the palace. On everypony who'd tried to get her this far.

This was her post.

"I will stay."

He looked her over, up and down. No significant pause was taken at her breasts, and she irritably wondered if there was any appropriate way to ask a male of the species about typical female endowments.

"Get back out there when you're ready," he suggested. "Come over to me if you need a minute."

It was a kindness. She knew that. She wanted to welcome it.

But then she had to go back out there...

At one point, she took the disc off.

It was during a quiet moment, at least for when it came to attendees interacting with her. Some had approached, and... it was starting to feel as if she'd seen all of the ones who were willing to make the attempt. Most of the rest were keeping their distance and, if she started to come near them, did their best to make that distance a constant.

Fancypants was occupied. Yapper was out of sight. Cerea didn't see anyone she knew (and she just barely knew anyone), she was near a far wall, well away from band and refreshments and roving servants. No one was trying to speak with her: outside of getting pulled into another game rules resolution, she wasn't sure anyone else would even try. She was alone at the edge of a crowd, and... she took the disc off.

There was a sense of relief as the wires began to part from her skin, something which twinned oddly with the surge of anxiety. Comprehension could feel like its own burden, and yet she'd just shed the only means she had of knowing what others were saying about her --

-- but she wanted to hear the reality. Not what the disc told her, but what actually was.

Cerea risked closing her eyes, as the last of the wire came away. Listened...

Griffon beaks clack.

She can hear a little of that when the disc is active, but -- it's something which almost gets forced into the background, buried under the weight of offered words. Subtract the magic, and the faster sentences take on aspects of gunfire. The girl is almost sure that the clacking is more than just the mouth opening and closing. It feels like part of the language: perhaps something used for accenting syllables, or in place of a sound which a limited tongue and inflexible edges will not permit to exist. This is added to wafts of birdsong and the occasional mew.

All around her, there are neighs and whinnies and nickers: with the majority of the party being populated by ponies, those sounds are the dominant ones. Sometimes a hoof will stomp for emphasis. The band has been politely applauded a few times: that comes in the form of a rapid foreleg patter. And there's a squeal in the room, because ponies do squeal at each other. In the girl's world, it usually indicates irritation, which makes the gaming tables a natural emanation point. But her horses will also scream, and... there's a sound which arises from the deepest of distress and pain, something like a trumpet which has learned to roar. None of that horror is in the room right now, but... she knows the ponies can make that sound. She heard it after she vaulted the bushes. Over and over.

The yaks grunt. Some of those sounds are deeper than others, a few are quick, and there's a definite meter to it all. But it's grunting. In some ways, they're famed for it: turn to Latin and the species name translates to 'grunting ox'. A donkey listens to all of it, then brays back.

Can she find the ambassador? Yes. Her ears twist, and -- it's an odd sound. She'd expected lowing, and there's at least an undercurrent of that. But there's something else mixed in. A bit of chuff, hints of carefully-muted roar. At one point, there's something like a normal syllable: 'kiy'. Flexible lips, a well-honed throat. She wonders if he's capable of learning to say her name...

Listen. The minotaur lows, and the canid barks back. Nearby, a pony is snorting. She hasn't seen any buffalo at the party, and wonders if they would add bellows to the mix.

Neighs and lows and barks and nickers and grunts and mews. All of it representing the sounds of intelligence. And the band plays on, because music remains music. Everywhere.

It makes her think about the strangeness of it. Just to be on the outskirts of this gathering. But... is it any stranger than an assemblage of liminals? And even now, it still feels as if there's nothing odder than the variety to be found among the humans, simply because they insist that the smallest cosmetic differences create irreconcilable separation. That one species is a dozen or more, and need to stay that way.

Humans, brought together in bulk, are sort of stupid.

But this is still strange. And she wonders, just for a moment, what her mother would think. To see the daughter as part of this kind of gathering --

-- but she has the answer for that.
Her mother would be disappointed.

The girl's eyes open. The disc goes back on. She has heard. Now she has to understand.

And the first words she hears...

"-- and if I simply had the chance to speak with her," proclaimed a blast of purest Ego, "I know she would understand! Clearly none of you have truly thought about the benefits!" With clear self-amusement, because the stallion had already decided that somepony had to be amused and he was obviously the only one capable of appreciating the complexity of his own jokes, "Perhaps if I go over it just one more time. For those in the group who might be a little, shall we say, slow to catch on?"

The unicorn was a sort of greyish-purple, with the type of mane which traveled down the back of his neck in a series of waves. None of the swoops and curves ever quite crashed into each other. It was his voice which did that. Even with the disc in action, syllables seemed to pile on top of each other, attempting to accumulate authority through frantic weight.

It was the sort of voice you got from those humans who'd decided that an expensive car effectively substituted for looks, personality and, for the worst of them, bathing. Given that automobiles didn't exist in this world, Cerea wasn't sure what the stallion had been using for his own substitute. Perhaps it was the tiny glasses perched (somehow) on his snout. At least Fancypants' monocle was sized in a way which let it do something. The lenses on the stallion's glasses were so small as to provide no clear view of anything. He certainly didn't seem to recognize the way in which the other five in his reluctant group were reacting to his words.

Those ponies were trying to shift away from him. He just kept moving forward, not letting them gain a centimeter. And around them, griffons and yaks and a lot of bemused ponies listened in.

"An extra hour, that's all it is!" he grandly stated. "Even with the Weather Bureau doing what their complaints department keeps insisting is their best, there are days when my poor fur practically bakes in the summer! And why does that happen, I ask you?"

"Because," an earth pony mare proposed, "you send two letters a week, Jet Set. And they're a little sick of it, so the area around your house wound up designated as a thermal dump zone --"

"-- Sun!" the stallion automatically ignored her. "We bake under summer Sun, because it just hangs around in the sky all day! So why can't the Princesses do something about that?"

...and he's about to invent Daylight Savings Time, Cerea darkly thought. France had it: Japan didn't. Her host country had never been so foolish as to believe it could control the clock.

"And winter days? Too short, not enough Sun! And why does Moon need to be raised so early?" He reared up, briefly spread his forehoofs in a gesture of authoritative stupidity before crashing back down. "So the solution is clear!"

She was almost used to the way in which ponies talked about their planet's star and natural satellite. Giving a formal name to a celestial body was an expected part of just about any culture, and she supposed the disc just translated those terms back to what she knew. The audible capitals became a remnant. In that sense, the only unusual part was the way they discussed the movements --

"-- so in summer," Jet Set happily went on, "we make the Princess raise Sun an hour later. One less hour of heat! And in winter, an hour earlier. Is that really so much to ask? And of course, Princess Luna adjusts Moon accordingly. That's balance!"

...what?

"And how about the other side of the planet?" another stallion challenged. "How do you think they're going to feel about it?"

"Who cares?" Jet Set sniffed. A rather dismissive forehoof took the trouble to wave. "It's our Sun, isn't it? And our Moon. They should just be glad to get anything."

"Everyone's Sun," a nearby yak immediately declared. "Part of agreement. Equestria just controls. Sun and Moon are gifts for world --"

The full nature of his audience didn't quite dawn on the stallion, possibly because he was still trying to schedule dawn and light never managed to fully break through the clouds around his brain.

"So they also make them move a little faster once they reach you," he decided. "Or slower, I suppose. Whichever one is required. I'm sure they know. Which means nopony of intelligence ever needs to."

There seemed to be a certain amount of fireworks going off in Cerea's brain. She distantly wondered what the exact mix formulas for the powders had been.

...he's talking about --
-- they're just accepting it, the request is the crazy part, but the rest of it is being treated as if it's --

She was barely aware of her hooves beginning to shift. Four long legs slowly moved forward.

"I'm trying to figure out," the earth pony mare sarcastically announced, "if this is actually stupider than your anti-Tirek plan. Of course, in order to know that, we'd finally need to hear your anti-Tirek plan --"

The girl carefully worked her way through the crowd. The knot she needed was about twenty meters ahead. Eighteen...

"-- I had to stay, in order to enact it!" Jet Set declared. "It hardly would have worked if I'd evacuated, now would it? How can a plan be brought forth without its creator?"

"In the same way you can't evacuate," a donkey announced, "if you can't remember the route --"

Her head was spinning. She wanted to bring her hands up, press them against her temples. Make sure nothing actually came off. A centaur dullahan would just look stupid. Headless Horse-Woman.

"But of course, the point became moot," the unicorn stallion shrugged. "Which means that in the name of national security, I have to withhold my plan from the public eye. In case it's ever needed again." His voice dropped. "Since we do have another centaur."

Twelve meters. She now had a good view of his tail, as he was facing away from her. Many of those who had been looking at him with visible disgust were now beginning to raise their sight lines.

"And some of you are frightened," Jet Set saw fit to declare. "When there's clearly no need to be, not when there's already a plan in place! Bearers?" His voice dropped into the half-whisper of somepony who was expressing a confidence, at least as applied to total confidence in his own opinion. "Completely overrated. I've seen a few and believe me, if they ever have to save the world from their own manners, we are doomed. We don't really need them at all! Not when we have my plan to fall back on!"

Six meters. Assorted sapients were moving out of her way, and rather quickly.

"And it's not as if centaurs are even scary --"

The path had been cleared. He was the only one talking, and the band seemed to have been caught between performances. For all intents and purposes, there might have been one set of hooffalls in the huge room, and they just happened to be the heaviest ones.

Jet Set stopped breathing.

The last air in his lungs offered up "-- she's behind me, isn't she?"

Multiple sapients rather peacefully nodded.

A select and suddenly-mobile part of the world blurred, propelled by the blast of a punctured Ego. And then Jet Set was gone.

Everyone exhaled.

"He actually topped himself," the earth pony mare decided. "Or bottomed out." Darkly, "It's hard to tell, because he does seem to keep digging. Sun and Moon, now he wants to kick them both off-course and schedule because he can't be bothered to wear a back canopy --"

The air shifted a little. She could scent Fancypants now: the tinge of blood helped in sorting him out. The noble was potentially on the approach, and -- it didn't seem to matter.

Nightwatch in the forest.
"Sun-lowering."
The only part of that which they see as being unreasonable was the demand...

"Excuse me."

She barely heard her own voice, wondered just how weak it had been. But perhaps the disc compensated for that too.

Multiple heads looked further up. The earth pony mare winced.

"We can explain about Jet Set," she began. "It won't take long. I'm guessing you'll understand the word 'moron' --"

Her words felt hollow. So did her throat. Her heart.

"-- Princess Celestia raises the sun?"

They all looked at her.

"Is the translator running low on charge?" a scholarly-seeming unicorn asked. "It does have to manage a lot of voices tonight. Even with the platinum --"

"-- and Princess Luna," her inner echo pushed on, "raises the moon?"

The looks had become stares.

"There's something wrong," the unicorn decided. "It shouldn't be adding a definite article."

"...that's not possible," the girl heard herself say. "It isn't..."

And the scent of fear surged, as they all pulled back from her, every last one pulling back --

The earth pony mare was staring at her now. Staring with something very close to terror.

"That's how things are," that pony stated. "Our Lady Of The Day tells Sun to grant us just enough heat for life to go on. And too much of that would kill, so -- the Mare Of Dream makes sure Moon brings relief."

this
this is
this can't

The fear surged one more time, and a trembling mare forced violet eyes to focus on blue.

"Don't you know that?"

The girl didn't seem to have an answer. And they were pulling away, all of them. She couldn't even hear the sounds of arguments from the gaming area any more.

But there was one more question from the mare. The sort of thing which arose when you knew the sky was blue, and had just been told that someone saw it as black every day.

"How do you think it works?"

By the time Fancypants reached her, a girl who had been effectively forced into astronomy studies as a cultural habit was fully engaged in a dizzying explanation of orbital mechanics. There were numerous hand gestures involved, she kept looking for anything spherical she could demonstrate with and some unicorns who would be willing to get it all going, and the disc was hissing its way through anything associated with Kepler. She'd gone over elliptical orbits, was about two minutes away from trying to explain a Lagrange Point, and had already passed through Ptolemy at speed, apologizing all the way because any centaur could have straightened him out in a minute.

'Dizzying' was the correct word for her display. The entire audience was reeling. Wings had sagged at the joints. Tails of every description had sought refuge between their owners' back legs, and the majority of ears were pressed flat against skulls.

"-- and then you have to consider mass!" the girl desperately insisted. "The Sergeant taught me about unicorn magic! Even at the top of the scale --"

"-- Lady Cerea?"

She looked down. The noble stared up, and the side which had to focus through the monocle showed magnified concern.

"Have you eaten?" Fancypants carefully asked. "I needed to ask, because I haven't seen you near a tray all night. I did ask the palace kitchens about your diet. Perhaps a bit of nourishment?"

Her head was spinning. Her stomach was churning --

There was one place in any home which just about guaranteed temporary privacy.

"-- restroom," the girl forced out. "I need a restroom --"

"-- I can lead the way," Fancypants smoothly cut in. With a smile, "Just another way in which we're all alike, everyone. Please give her a moment --"

But she was already moving. Not too quickly, because there was a lot of digestive system in her body and she didn't need to jolt any part of it.

The crowd cleared again. It seemed to happen faster.

She had to bend awkwardly to reach the sink, didn't stop splashing her face until water dripped from every part of it. Most of it soaked into the catch-towel she'd draped across her breasts. Some didn't. She hated that. Water could stain silk --

-- impossible.
This is impossible.
They all believe --

The girl stared at herself in the mirror. Instantly hated everything she saw, and forced herself upright.

Think.

The most obvious answer was... the con? Had anyone in her own world tried it? She wasn't completely sure. It felt as if some human rulers had claimed to be incarnate gods, with others saying they were the representative of the pantheon and wouldn't actually join it until their death. But to claim actual control, probably as a means of scaring off anyone who would try to take the throne...

'Do anything to me and the sunrise gets it' felt like a very human thing. But she'd been around the Princesses, and... she didn't want them to be like that...

...they could have fooled me. Bitterly, They seem to have fooled everyone else. Everyone out there believes this. Believes it like they believe in --

-- sunrise...

How could anypony sell this lie to an entire planet? Menajeria's science wasn't as advanced as that in her home, but she knew there were telescopes. Everything required to disprove a geocentric model seemed to be in place. And there was another factor: mass.

The Sergeant had taught her about unicorns and, in the case of the Princesses, those who could use that form of magic. There was a scale for measuring raw strength: the alicorns were at the top of it. And the scale didn't go up that high. From what Cerea understood, the strongest fields known to exist were capable of managing several metric tons. Nothing more. And with no more than three such ponies able to join their power for a single effort --

-- it's impossible. By magnitudes. Her head was now reeling from the sheer math of it, trying to figure out just how far short the greatest possible attempt would fall. The decimal places required seemed to stretch out forever. It can't work. Somepony should have figured that out. A lot of ponies, and everyone else. Unless the previous holders of the thrones silenced every voice...

A hoof politely knocked on the door.

"I don't mean to disturb you," Fancypants began (and she could hear the fear in his voice), "but some of the guests have been coming up to me. Are you quite --"

"-- a few minutes," Cerea choked out. "I just need --"

She stopped. Froze. Listened.

Finally, she heard the hoof touch the floor.

"...very well," the noble said. Audibly backed away.

She splashed more water at her skin. Rivulets ran down her neck.

It can't work. It's so easy to prove it can't work. Gravity alone... someone should have...
...magic, this is a world of magic, more magic than mine has --
-- there isn't enough magic. It's still impossible. A sun is a sun. I've seen their moon: it looks like it's about on the same scale to the planet, and you can't move that much mass --

The girl had been born on another world: something which provided her with certain weaknesses. The only sapient with no magic of her own.

But she hadn't been raised in her current environment.
The centaur had never been taught about things only told to foals. That which everyone grew up with, and never questioned at all.
Her world was a place with its own rules, and a particular set of sciences.
She didn't know enough to dismiss what was possible.

-- you can't move that much mass.
What if you don't have to?

no

You can't move that much mass.
But you could tell the mass to move itself.

no

There's a way this could work. The only way. Where they control the sun and the moon as Sun and Moon, and everyone believes it because it's real.

Because it's not moving them.
It's issuing a command.
Maintain orbit.
Run self-check.
Fire engines.

She was the only one in the world with the background required to recognize the truth, because it was an education which hadn't started on that world.

The thought only she could have.
The secret which wasn't a secret. Not to her.

She reeled. She wanted to vomit, and her stomach was churning so quickly as to force her into a desperate fight for control of both ends.

She wanted to go home. She didn't know what kind of place she'd found herself in, what had happened in order to make the world work like this.

But there was only one way it could work at all.

Sun and Moon are artificial satellites.

Intractable

The mare feels she's learned many things in the years she's spent working at the Tattler, and one of them is that there are times when she has to pay exacting attention to everything going on around her. It often helps to have all of the details before deciding which ones her opinion column is going to ignore.

For example, take the conveyance she's currently riding within and if she had any real choice in the matter, she would have had somepony take it back to the seller for a full refund. It's a carriage: an actual ground carriage, and resting rather poorly within this specimen is something like spotting one last representative of a biting insect species which most ponies wish to have gone extinct.

The rail system is still relatively new: the first trestles were laid about a decade ago. But ponies have needed ways of crossing the continent for centuries, preferably those which don't involve constant hoof effort or worse, waterways. Ponies make for poor swimmers, and the vast majority make even worse sailors. Add in the fact that just about every major river has sections which constitute their own wild zones, and Equestria generally prefers to shift both citizens and freight through land, air, and aether. The last is effectively instantaneous, while first two offer multiple directions in which to potentially escape any hazard. Encounters upon water generally offer a single choice of final voyage: straight down.

In this case, the escort network isn't available: those who are capable of bringing passengers along during a teleport are invaluable and when it comes to the meaning of 'invaluable', the mare can usually add in 'and they try to charge accordingly.' They also keep exacting records: every hiring party, every destination, and the mare knows the palace is watching. Air carriages... that might have been possible. But anything moving through a clear sky at night can potentially be seen from a good distance off. It could have been painted in the proper camouflage colors, towed by those with dark fur who were letting thermal sight guide the way, and the most crucial passenger would probably still insist on a light source. That one keeps adjusting the lumen level which emits from the device mounted in the ceiling of the passenger compartment. There's been times when she's tweaked it six times in three minutes. Over and over --

-- long before the railway, there were roads. And for those who didn't want to take the trot, you had the ground carriages. They could be a rather luxurious form of travel: the best were like occupying a rather small hotel which just happened to be mounted on oversized wheels. Some of them would travel in convoys: not just for mutual protection, but so that the procession could stop every so often and let everypony transfer over to the dining carriage. A number had ponies towing them, while others were self-propelled.

Being a carriage master usually required an appropriate mark. They had to understand the threats which bordered the roads and be ready to deal with anything which surged through the layers of protection. It helped if they could fight, or at least knew how to direct any accompanying security detail into battle. However, the capacity to conduct emergency repairs was an absolute necessity: not just the carriage itself, but anything cast or woven into it. Any carriage which didn't have an extensive array of defensive enchantments wouldn't last for long, and the same could be said for most of the passengers.

But then the rails had come. Which were so much more reliable, with the train cars capable of outracing a number of the more frequent threats. There was more space available within, a chance to stretch during long trips and with shorter ones, that reliability had offered something new to those few settled zones which were in close proximity: the option of the morning commute. Roughly a decade for the rails to just about take over, and where one ascends... another falls.

There's still a few carriages around, because it's hard to make an entire species go extinct at once. Some ponies prefer slow trips: something where they can get a good look at the countryside, or whatever's charging at them from the treeline. Others may enjoy being in a more enclosed space: one where fresh air is readily available, and yet pony body odors circulate forever. Sometimes, it's just the cheap option: the surviving carriages need a means of competing with the railways, and 'price point' is often it. A few just refuse to use the trains because the inventor was an earth pony. (The mare knows a number of ponies whose excuse for never having photographic evidence can be summed up as 'Mazein'. You have to use what the world gives you.) Or... it's the luxury of it. The comfort of existing within a carefully-crafted bubble.

The mare never got to use that kind of carriage: growing up in the Tangle generally isn't a ready path to the softer things in life. And when it comes to protective bubbles... that's how she sees the palace. The real Guards are the marble walls, and they keep reality out.

She's never taken a true luxury ride of any kind. The mare is one of the very few for whom the Tattler will grant an expense account, and every item she lists upon it also gives her up to ten minutes standing in the Accounting department so she can explain why food and water are necessary: this includes frequent jaw-tightened reminders that their precious numbers don't strictly need to eat. But she knows about carriages. Experience, witnessing, and envy.

In the hierarchy of fast-vanishing carriage species, this one has its own entry. It's a rattletrap.

(The mare is going to leave that part out.)

She supposes it might be good enough on a smooth road, and portions of her spine would like to know exactly where they might find one. Or any road at all, because the requirements of this journey...

They picked her up in the dark, quite some distance from the carriage's starting point. She can't say exactly where, because she was blindfolded at the time. Willingly. And because she isn't stupid, she made sure those who arranged for her to be picked up also provided her with sighted company. She needed a bodyguard, because the area assigned was already somewhat off the road. It meant she heard the carriage before she saw it, especially with her ears straining to find anything which might be a threat. Springs not quite adjusting to the irregularity of the changing surface, expansion and compression spells failing to react in realtime. There was a lot to hear.

It's only gotten worse since she's been inside. There are two pairs of double-doors, left and right, and they don't seal very well. They keep jumping up and down within their hinges, while the pressed-in snap-lock keeping them together looks as if it's about to part from the wood entirely. The benches are poorly padded: combine that with the lack of kinetic compensation below, and any jolt to the wheels usually winds up grounding itself at the base of her tail.

There are times when the interior light flickers. This may indicate a substandard spell, a failing one, or that the one she's here to see should have stopped trying to adjust it forty minutes ago.

From overhead, she gets hoof stomps. Occasional mutters, frequent curses, both poorly muffled through wood. This carriage is one of the self-propelled varieties, which means it moves through unicorn enchantments. Slow ones. There's nopony outside hauling anything. But there's still two riding on top, because the carriage is off the road.

The interior compartment is lit, at least to some degree. But there's heavy curtains pulled across all of the windows, because the mare has been told that she can't be allowed to see the exact path. She'll ride until her current part is over, they'll blindfold her again, drop her off in a safe place (and she insisted on having somepony waiting there to watch over her), and then she'll get a ride back to the capital -- but the precise trail taken has to remain a mystery.

She can't see what's outside. But the two riding atop the carriage have their own means of examining the area, checking the rough trail which is taking them through the wild zone. Those devices are aided by a waxing Moon, something which is just about full, and all of it lets them keep watch for anything else which might be moving through the night.

There are times when she hears the outside watchponies shivering. Others when her own body threatens to match that rhythm. They are well outside the zone of weather control, and it's a cold night: far too chill for what the mare sees as a normal autumn under Moon, with blasts of wind trying to send ice into the blood. And the carriage leaks. The best ones are thermally sealed, something which should maintain integrity against physical gaps, but... that's pegasus magic, and nopony kept up the charge. There are blankets within, she was offered one, and it's far too thin.

The stallion on the opposing bench isn't using a blanket. She presumes his face has been warmed through having most of the heated air of his breath fail to get past the cloth which hangs low from the brim of the hat. The small gaps are just enough for her to get occasional glimpses of his pupils and because she recognized his voice, she suspects he's smiling.

The other female in the carriage didn't take a blanket. Perhaps she no longer needs one.

That unicorn does smile. Rather frequently.

This is her interview subject. The reason why the mare is here and desperately fighting to keep her notepad fully stable within her field. Without concentration, it would be jolted in near-perfect concert with her body. (Earth ponies and pegasi generally attach notepads to collars via flexible springs. It wouldn't exactly help.) But part of her attention is carefully being focused in that direction. When you only have one weapon, you need to take care of it.

She couldn't attend the party. And perhaps it would have been better to lurk outside the estate, waiting among the protestors to ambush any guests on the approach or during their departure. It'll certainly take her more time to assemble a proper picture of events once she returns to the capital, followed by still more hours used in properly distorting it. But this was a chance at an exclusive. Somepony else on the Tattler staff will get to be in competition with every other newspaper for the first pieces of party coverage. This interview belongs to the mare alone.

It just hasn't started yet.

Her subject greeted her before the blindfold came off, doing so in a rather familiar way: the mare knows when she's in the presence of a fan. But she was told it was going to be a long trip, starting the interview too early meant a good part of the journey might pass in silence... even with a fan, it can help for her subject to feel comfortable.

And her subject, who had just greeted the mare as if she hadn't seen another living pony in moons, was hungry for gossip.

It quickly reached the point where the mare apologized for not having brought a newspaper. Several newspapers. But her subject doesn't care. Any news about the capital. Anything that's been going on. And the mare obliged with little stories, small scandals, celibriponies who have yet to understand that there are multiple prices to pay for fame and one of them is the mare. Anything to put her subject at ease, because the other female in the carriage can be a little...

...'intense' won't reach the article's final draft. 'Focused' winds up surrounded by several layers of shielding qualifiers.

The mare has been trying to provide gossip, because that's what her subject claimed to desire. But somehow, the topic keeps coming back around to the same thing.

"So that's what really happened at the publisher's party?" Her subject's eyes are bright. There are times when they're brighter than the light source in the ceiling.

"It's what ponies will believe happened," the mare replies.

There's another jolt. Several pieces of somewhat old fruit fly out of the bowl built into her subject's side of the carriage. The other unicorn mare, who's used to it, ignites her horn. Projections carefully collect the scattered foodstuffs, three at a time. There's.... something odd about those projections...

The food gets put back into the wall-mounted wooden bowl, which rattles as they pass over the next rough patch. Everything rattles.

"I've missed so many parties," the subject muses, mostly to herself. "So many..."

Stops. Stares at the heavy, swaying curtain covering the nearest left-side window.

"It wasn't my fault," the subject abruptly says. "It was an accident. I'm innocent."

She smiles. The mare's subject does that a lot, almost as often as she repeats those same ten words. They'll be in the middle of talking about anything else, and here come the phrases again. Sometimes she shuffles the order of the three sentences, perhaps for variety.

The stallion on the subject's right takes the same action he's been repeating since the second go-round: a hoof nudge to the flank. It makes the subject stop. But the smile, directed at cloth, lingers.

The smile has yet to line up with the words.

"It's tonight, isn't it?" the subject suddenly asks. "The other party. For the monster."

"That's why you're being moved now," the masked stallion tells her. "This is when it was the most safe."

It's stretching the definition of 'safe' by quite a bit, and the warped boundaries still don't manage to encompass going through a wild zone in a ground carriage. The mare is fully aware that she's taking several levels of risk tonight. And she would prefer an extra bodyguard, but... the agreement was that it would be just her in the carriage. She's not happy about that, but she's willing to work with it. If a monster attacks, she'll be on her own, but -- a mare who grew up in the Tangle has a better chance than most to take care of herself.

She doesn't want to think about this.
The mare's typical means of redirecting thought isn't present --

-- her interview subject is being moved tonight because the palace is focused on that party. More than half of Ponyville's police force is reinforcing the Guard: the mare assumes this includes their chief, and would feel a lot better about that if she could spot that particular pony in the dark. But with the capital concentrating on the noble's estate, and fewer ponies watching the borders... it was the right time to get her subject out of Ponyville and into a carriage. Something which will be described as if nopony had hired the conveyance, with the female on the opposing bench having been accompanied by ghosts. For the purposes of the article, the mare will have no idea as to whom the hiring party ever could have been, or if they even exist at all. That's going to mean ignoring a lot of details --

"They're celebrating it," the interview subject states. "Celebrating a monster. Something which has to be separated from society. Not invited within. Not even when it's just the palace forcing ponies to pretend." The other female angrily shakes her head, then returns the focus of that intense gaze to the mare's eyes. "Not that anypony who'd be willing to pretend should even be considered as a pony at all --"

The stallion nudges her again. The subject stops.

"Some of the ponies are there for their own reasons," the mare says. "Business. Even a centaur can be exploited." She was able to get a leaked script for the cheaper of the two projects, and wasn't impressed. "And others are there to... see if they can bring ponies around to a different point of view. The sane one."

"The one which removes it," her subject quickly tries.

"Once the pressure rises."

The mare has multiple sources, and understands something about the nature of the fragile alliance: something which will only hold until the centaur is gone. The parties involved are only working together because none of them are entirely sure that the feat can be managed alone and to that degree, they are cooperating. But the base state of their feelings regarding each other... that tends to manifest in subtle ways. Sometimes they aren't subtle at all. And when she considers just who some of the players are...

It's easy enough to work out how it was done. A Night Court representative just about always has to run for reelection eventually. Even when the representative is from a Tattler district, there's a campaign. And because it usually doesn't have to be all that much of a campaign, it mostly serves as an opportunity to -- look towards their eventual retirement. You just send the required funds ahead.

The mare is certain that Puff Weevil was offered a rather hefty bribe, along with a script to memorize and plenty of lead time for working on the lines. But she believes herself to know about everypony involved, and understands something about Puff's intellect. He would have been offered a bribe, with the transfer to be made after his performance. And once he made contact again, he would be told that the funds were on the way. Eventually, once the hoof knocking became too loud, he might be informed that they'd been delayed. This status would last for most of his remaining term in office, which might somehow be enough time for him to realize that a deal made without a contract involved was under no obligation to ever provide a payout.

She could picture him protesting. Screaming that he'd held up his end. He had. He'd been exactly as stupid as the situation required. And even Tattler district representatives tend to be... fungible.

If he somehow managed to take away any wisdom from the experience, it would be a free lesson regarding not trusting those who considered themselves to be his betters. It had to be free, because he would never see a tenth-bit from it.

"It's still hard not to see anypony who'd attend as a traitor," the interview subject says -- and, just ahead of the nudge, adds. "To all ponies, I mean." (The approaching hoof stops.) "But maybe they're just scared of the palace, when they shouldn't be. More than they are of the monster." A slow head shake. "It makes you wonder, doesn't it? How much fear they inspire, both of them? If it can force ponies to something like this? Love wouldn't be enough of a motivation. Not even respect would do it, and friendship..."

It's now possible to measure the speed of the negation in wheel jolts per neck shift. The first number is rising.

Something howls outside, and the hooves on the roof release a sudden patter of tension. The mare prepares to intensify her corona. Her subject doesn't seem to notice.

"It has to be fear," that unicorn says. "Nothing else."

The mare offers an encouraging nod. Listens for more howls.

"But there's more than just traitors in the world," the subject decides. "There's also the ones who might be tricked. Corrupted, or scared into cooperating next. The monster has to be separated from the worthwhile." More softly, "From children. I did hear about the children."

Another howl -- but it's moving away. The mare doesn't relax. She doesn't do that very often. True safety is a rather rare commodity in the world.

Wind blasts through the carriage, and does so at the same moment as a jolt. Her subject's corona passively gathers old fruit again.

The mare asked about refreshments shortly after coming in. Old fruit and water. It tells her even more about who hired (or more likely, rented) the carriage. Somepony who might understand that a proper drink helps interviews flow, but certainly wasn't going to pay for it...

"It has to be kept away from children," her subject quietly observes. "Separated."

The mare nods.

"Children," the subject calmly decides, "need to be separated from each other..."

The hoof nudges a little harder this time. Her subject doesn't seem to notice.

The mare... doesn't look at her subject's eyes, not as they were when those words came out. She will spend quite a bit of time in not writing about that unicorn's eyes. Some details need to be ignored. Or, once the mare reaches a degree of safety again, drowned.

"I was thinking about that," her interview subject peacefully adds. "I had some ideas. I could show you."

The other unicorn female turns her head again. Leans towards the dancing doors. The tip of her horn touches the wood, pushes, nearly knocks them open, begins to scrape --

-- this time, the nudge goes into the ribs.

"Perhaps," the stallion calmly offers, "we should start the formal interview now."

The subject blinks. Slowly turns back, and the timing of it added to the next jolt sends a heavily-bruised apple off her chin.

"Ow," the interviewee passively decides. Her horn ignites again. Projects...

...she catches the mare looking. Tilts her head a little to the left.

"Something wrong?"

"I just noticed that you have an unusual field," the mare evenly notes. "It looks a little more -- solid at the edges."

(The subject has yet to pick up anything with her mouth, even when it's in easy reach. A seated unicorn isn't even using a double forehoof inwards press. It's always the field.)

Her subject smiles again.

"I've been practicing," is the utterly calm reply. "I feel like it'll be important. Eventually."

Another gust of wind. Under the blanket, out of sight, the mare shivers, and her fur shifts against the grain.

The stallion's hat tilts forward, and the audible smile intensifies.

"It's a long trip," he states. "But we do have to drop you off eventually." This arrives at the end of a further incline towards the mare. "So..."

The mare nods. Drips the quill, stabilizes the pad again.

"I'm innocent," her subject begins. "It's not my fault. It was an accident."

Which finally gets written down.

"What was your actual intent in going to the apartment?" the mare asks. "I think that's what most ponies will want to know. Some do say intent is everything." For example, the mare intends to acquire a solid base for every distortion to come. "Especially if things come down to trying for Not Guilty By Sufficiency." It's a recognized clause in Equestrian law. You can break into a house if you know somepony is in medical distress within and can't reach the door. Setting that door on fire is going to take a little more explanation.

The interviewee has a rather odd expression now. It's like watching a performer search for a prompt box on the inside of their skull.

"She was keeping company with a monster," the subject carefully intones. "It's as if she didn't realize what that meant. We all remember what happened to anypony who got too close to Tirek. This one is just a little more... patient. It's trying to work its way in. But you have to care about ponies, don't you?"

"Whenever possible," the mare smoothly says.

A little faster than the previous words, "Even the ones who can't properly care about themselves. Or anypony else."

By contrast, it could be said that "Properly?" almost slips out. The mare hates that. She blames the water.

"When you think about it," the inteviewee calmly offers, "Guards are outside the herd. They think of one pony, maybe two. But when it comes to the herd, they don't care. And isn't that supposed to be the definition of a monster? Something which can't care properly?"

Her flank ripples from the impact. She doesn't notice.

"It would be very easy," the subject decides, "for a Guard to become a monster. Especially when you associate with a real one. So I wanted to warn her. To pull her back, before it was too late. The symbol was just... to make her think."

"About what?"

The words are accelerating. Taking on a rhythm. A verbal canter, almost like they're being half-sung. "About what she was doing every day, and whether she should step back. Fly away, because they can do that. I'm sure she could have found something else to do for a living. We always need more weather control in the world, don't we?" A sniff broke up the note. "They sure need it here. But she didn't understand that. Or she didn't care. If she cared, she would have lived in a cloud home. Away from real ponies."

It's as if the next impact bounces off armor.

"They could all live in the clouds," the subject states. "So could we, if they hadn't sabotaged the cloudwalking spell to make it wear off all the time. The same way they managed to ruin self-levitation."

The mare plans a number of edits.

"The symbol," the stallion prompts (and for the first time, his tones are nervous). "Stay on the symbol."

"But I guess that might not have been her," the interviewee allows. "Personally. She's too young." The prompt box is located. "So the symbol was a warning. Please think about what you're doing. Before it's too late. Before you lose yourself."

"And the fire?" Carefully, "To scorch it into the door, make it more visible?"

The interviewee snorts.

"That was her."

There should be a bottle. The mare thinks a little differently when the bottle isn't there, or when she hasn't been near one for too long. The wrong words come out.

"How was it her?"

And before the horror can reach the mare, her subject answers.

"They do things with heat, don't they?" A dismissive forehoof briefly kicks out at the air. "Part of their overrated weather sub-magic. And air currents, I've heard about that too. Probably feel things moving around, as long as air is being disturbed. So she knew I was outside, and she'd already been corrupted. She concentrated some heat into the harmless paint. And it caught. So it was all her in the end. All her fault, because she needed to make me look like a criminal." Just a little more softly, "Like a monster."

...somehow, the most amazing part of that is not having seen the stallion's foreleg move at any point.

Yes, that would be what certain parties would want the world to believe. But the mare has seen the reports. Read about the accelerants --

-- of course, those could be claimed to have been planted after the fact. Or falsified in print.

"Her fault," the subject half-chants. "For concentrating the heat. For living near other ponies." With a surge of volume, "They could all live in the clouds, away from us! Why don't they?"

The mare has several answers. Because some need to work on the ground, and a number come to love it. Because when it comes to the capital, putting every resident pegasus into the clouds is going to require -- well, just for starters, you're going to need a lot more vapor. The city would either be perpetually overcast or at the center of a view-obscuring ring, with the light of Sun and Moon only true for a few hours every day. And because a mixed family always has to descend --

-- the mare is instinctively aware that she shouldn't bring up mixed families.

And there are more words to come.

"She chose to be around somepony who could get hurt!"

...the mare knows those words. They're hers.

"And it's the family's fault, for not moving away when they found out she was a Guard," the interviewee expands the guilt net. "Or hers again, because maybe she didn't tell them what she did. Or lied. And it could be the foal!"

The mare blinks.

There's... sort of a boundary, in her profession. She wouldn't call it an ethical one. More a matter of practicality. She's always felt free to go after adults. Children can get in trouble, and there are generally no issues in calling attention to that because it fills layout space: besides, she can go two-for-one and also claim the parents were neglectful for not stopping them. Both children and adults have learned enough to know better, if not necessarily to agree with her.

But a foal hasn't learned anything. Something new in the world, waiting to be taught the right things. It can't make a choice because it doesn't have the basic information required for doing so.

(The mare has no children.)
(There have been times when she's thought about it. Briefly. But she has a job, and that takes so much of her time. She wouldn't be able to raise a foal, and she can't be confident in finding a mate who would do it properly --)
(-- the mare hardly ever dates. Even her biggest fans seldom stay for more than a week.)
(For longer than two bottles.)

All things considered, "How?" is the wrong word.

The subject waves her foreleg again.

"It could have decided to be born somewhere else." And before the mare can reconcile that, "The pegasi could all leave. The earth ponies, too. Just send weather and food in: that's all they're good for, so let that be what they do! It's living together which makes this happen! Being told we have to live with a monster!"

The stallion is now looking at his hoof as if something about it has stopped working.

"And there's no such thing as windigos, of course," the subject dismissively declares. "Just something to scare us into acting against our natural instincts."

Another blast of chill sluices through the carriage. Her subject has shown no signs of being cold. All of the heat comes from within. It seems to insulate the other unicorn mare from a number of things. Shields, really...

This wind is enough to get through the mare's field. The notepad flips through pages. She thought she was focusing more intently than that.

"Take a moment," the stallion smoothly offers. "We can wait."

"It's not a very good carriage," the interviewee petulantly declares as the mare begins to sort papers. "Why isn't it any better?"

"Camouflage," the stallion just as smoothly lies. "Something too fancy would have been noticed."

The mare very carefully redirects her own snort into a purely internal expression.

She will omit a number of things in the article, especially since she's about to have something very important to write about. But she never intended to identify the party who acquired the carriage, even when that pony has already so thoroughly identified themselves. All the mare had to do was think about it.

A number of ponies, including quite a few among the opposition, don't believe the mare is capable of true thought. She always tells them that if they could think for themselves, they'd be agreeing with her. And when it comes to the carriage...

The mare knows a lot of things about anger, and the most important is that it's profitable.

Take CUNET as an example. What do they actually do? Well, if you look at the membership as a collective, they get involved in protests. They write a lot of letters or rather, they send a lot of prewritten copies. But for the pony at the head of the organization, it's not just about what they do.

It's about what they dues.

Anypony can hold views which mirror CUNET: with pegasi and earth ponies, this takes some serious self-loathing. But if you want to join? It isn't free. The organization costs bits to operate. Picket signs don't assemble themselves. If you're going to book a meeting hall, then you're paying somepony temporary rent. There's also a newsletter: that goes out once a moon at the very least, or more often if there's a Crisis. (The centaur constitutes a Crisis unto herself.) That certainly costs money to print. And since there is a Crisis (and in fact, there always is), the pony in charge will use the newsletter to ask for help. After all, you can't expect the persecuted majority to fight on behalf of the deserving (and those unicorns who have yet to see the light) using just what comes in from the dues...

There can only be so many membership drives: ultimately, the list of ponies who might potentially want to join is a limited resource. But if you convince those who are already there that the Crisis has become Crises... you can hold a fundraiser. Then another. Donate to help solve this problem, all money given goes towards fixing the problem...

What does a pony get for their membership fee? A sense of belonging. The chance to interact with others who also feel that the world would be better if everypony in it would just acknowledge how superior the members have been all along. And you get a card, but it's pretty shoddy and tends to fall apart in a few moons. The one in charge always apologizes for that, but she has to budget: it's the same reason why the newsletter goes out on the thinnest paper possible, the sort of material where the right light lets you read a story on Page One and Two at the same time. If you want a card that will last, please upgrade to our Deluxe Membership...

The pony who joins gets to be part of a herd. To have their superiority reinforced by the walls of an echo chamber. The one in charge gets to tell them what the problems are. Because when the persecuted majority learns that everything wrong about their lives was caused by the rule of inferiors, there's always a problem. She tells them that their donations will help, she promises to put those funds towards the solution and here's the key: if you're the one in charge and you really want to make this work, you never win.

What would happen if CUNET fully won? If the Princesses found a way to step down, or agreed to become living gears doing nothing more than shifting the sky? If every belief the members had was manifested into reality, with the other species leaving the city, while pegasi and earth ponies were openly humbled before their betters? What is the first possible result of their perfect world?

Well, for starters, there's clearly no further need to donate anything.

The profit margin of hate requires eternal aggrievement. You find the angry ones, and you keep them angry. Tell them that new weapons are being purchased, and then dash those against the unbreakable wall. Oh, you need the illusion that something is being done -- so once in a great while, you might make a real effort in a minor skirmish. Claim that a district has just gone Tattler because of CUNET's efforts (when it's been tilting that way for five generations), or point to a protest which made the target move to a quieter settled zone. But when that happens, another problem has to be lined up and ready to go. The base boilerplate for the necessary fundraiser only needs a few minor adjustments.

The thinnest paper. Shoddy calling cards. And they're being passed out by a mare known for her lovely home, its expensive decorations, a kitchen which stocks the most exotic foodstuffs and if the hostess actually deigns to allow a favorite sucker the favor of a sample, she does so while wearing a beautiful dress.

What does it cost on a moon to moon basis, to be Mrs. Panderaghast? The mare imagines that CUNET's head doesn't worry about that too much. It's not as if the one in charge happens to be the one paying. Ask for as much as you can get away with, do as little as possible, skim the maximum amount off the top, and no matter what happens, keep them running on the treadmill. Paint the scenery of persecution on a looping roll of canvas, surround them with it. That's the echo chamber: running in place, contained by rage. And if you do it properly, the majority will never notice that they've been running for years and haven't gone anywhere at all.

So the promised bribe money won't be nosed over. And with the carriage? The cheapest one available, where any thaums placed into charging the defensive spells probably had to be provided by passenger and watchponies, plus it's not as if anypony was going to trouble a pegasus for a donation of power into the channeling copper. So the wind gets through, the shock absorption is horrible, the fruit is old and you take a very small ready-to-spit sip of the water before you risk swallowing, because that is how Mrs. Panderaghast pays for the next dress. One which is going to require a lot of extra fabric.

The shoddiness of the carriage tells the mare who arranged for it, because that's what anypony who can think would realize. But... there's another layer to that.

They're going through a wild zone.

The mare is fully aware that the drivers are trying to disorient her. She also knows that if asked, they'll say it's for her own good: after all, there's a chance she's going to be questioned after this -- it isn't a small one -- and she can't tell the palace about the path they took if she honestly doesn't know.

But the mare can think.
The hard part is stopping.

First: based on how long it took her to reach the pickup point, she has a very good idea of how far she went. Also, she would have had to be somewhere near Ponyville, because that's where the interview subject was.

Second... there's only so many places she could be left to wait, even with a bodyguard.

Third: the carriage has a top speed. It wouldn't have been a high one on a smooth surface, because the spells are just that weak. And it's going through a wild zone, where the ponies atop it have to keep checking the trail. There's only so much food in here, getting out to look for more isn't the best idea because any monsters will decide the ponies have fulfilled that goal for them, and every stop in a settled zone risks being noticed. This means the odds are that this is a more-or-less straight run. Drop the mare off, then proceed directly to their destination. Since there aren't exactly a lot of safehouses in wild zones by definition, that would indicate the other two passengers are heading for a town. The range offered by carried supplies doesn't provide a lot of options there: two of those are lost because the mare knows they aren't cutting through the Everfree. The howls are all wrong and besides, carriage-worthy trails barely exist. They would have cleared either of them by now.

Add in the fact that she can easily feel when they turn, has a very good idea of just how fast that horrible top speed is, and has more than a base guess at what her starting orientation was...

In terms of the settled zones, she feels they're currently off the map: that's been true for a while. But portions of the void between acquire labels, and the mare is almost fully certain that they're moving through an area which has been designated by the palace as Classified. And it's being traversed by a small crew, in a carriage with substandard, potentially undercharged security spells and not a working pegasus wonder to its name.

There are many reasons to designate a portion of the continent as Classified. None of them are reassuring. Just about any last one could lead to everypony on the trip becoming lost.

Getting killed.

Ever since she heard the rattletrap approach, she's been thinking.
'Trap' is most of it.

Perhaps this is what was truly seen as the best way to avoid being sighted. Risky, but... no witnesses.

Or perhaps Mrs. Panderaghast has decided having everypony on this trip being lost is an acceptable result. It might even be the preferred one. Let the wild zone do the work: the worst which happens to CUNET's head is losing any possible deposit on the carriage. The mare doesn't think that pony would personally attempt to kill, but if there's no effort involved in just letting somepony die...

Ponies who might become members -- that's a limited resource. But there are times when you can afford to lose a few. It's a lot like Tattler interns. The same way the newspaper's owner regards just about everypony on staff. After all, when it comes to those who hate, the vast majority of vessels for the anger are... fungible.

The mare has skill. It makes her somewhat more vital than the majority of the staff. It doesn't mean she can't be replaced. Without notice, without fanfare or much in the way of a career retrospective. The Tattler would pretend she was on vacation for a moon or so, then post the obituary. Her replacement's first task would be to find a way of insinuating that the fault for the mare's loss can be placed at the forehooves of the Diarchy: if there was no means of doing so, then the obituary would be in the smallest font available. And after that... somepony else would be running the boiler.

And yet the mare entered the carriage.
Some part of that can probably be blamed on the exclusive.
...she wants a drink.

Another bump. A jolt. The doors rattle. Fruit is fetched.

"Ready?" the stallion asks.

The mare nods, positions the quill. Her subject leans in. Waits.

Being looked at by the interviewee is... distinctive. It's as if the other unicorn isn't doing anything other than gazing in. Blinking certainly doesn't seem to be a frequently-chosen option.

"If you could say anything directly to the Tattler's readership," the mare asks, "what would it be?"

Her subject takes a slow breath.

"It's not my fault --"

There's a jolt from the wheels as they enter a turn. That goes into the base of the mare's tail.

The next is insubstantial, and reaches into her soul.

Twinned horrors accompany the sensation: something which drills through her skin, ignores muscles, pushes through long-healed fractures in bone and pulls at the heart of her, tries to pull her away. And the first is that she's trying to fight, she's distantly aware of gasps and screams all around her and above, everypony is trying to fight because that's the only possible response to this and she's losing. The core of her has been hooked, it's being pulled away and she twists and writhes, notebook and quill crash to the carriage floor as her field winks out, the carriage jolts to a stop and the sudden halt sends her off the bench, she barely feels the impact because everything is the pull and the loss.

But then she's sliding. The carriage was in a turn, it stopped, momentum has made it lean, and the mare goes into one set of doors. Her weight knocks them open, and she drops. Her notepad tumbles out after her, the ground is --

-- the pulling stops.

It's a surge of near-exaltation, all arising from having been released, and it almost makes her overlook the new wetness of blood within her fur.

The mare quickly forces herself to look up, makes sure the carriage isn't leaning any more: if it's going to come down on top of her, she has to move --

-- it's shifted back. Sonic propulsion: the unicorn female who's still within has yet to stop screaming, and the ones who were riding atop the carriage are cursing: shock, disorientation, and fear. The mare looks around --

Moon is nearly full: more than enough to see by, in an area where the vegetation is this sparse. There's only a few trees, none of them have leaves any more, and... there aren't any leaves on the ground, either. In the wild zone, they fall on their own. Even with the chill wind, something made worse by ground and pain and blood, the mare feels there should be some around. It's as if the trees haven't had leaves for a very long time.

But they don't look dead. Just -- warped. Twisted, trunks and branches as uneven as the ground --

-- she landed on her left flank, got her head raised in time to avoid having that slam into rock. It saved her from more wounds, because the ground is oddly rough. There's little nodules everywhere. Rock peaks into tiny mountain ranges, dirt refuses to smooth out. Pebbles are displayed to the world, and too many of them seem to end in small points. She's bleeding from a dozen tiny pinprick wounds, and it feels as if every one is leaking more heat than the carriage ever did.

Blood. Edges visible on just about every surface: even some of the bark has splintered outwards. Pain. Something metallic --

-- she automatically focuses, stares as the never-ending scream tries to distract her --

-- no. She thought she saw a reflection. Moon's light on metal. Something in the ground. The mare can't see it now.

She tries to get up. It requires two attempts, and she takes a few more tiny wounds for her trouble. Her blood is being absorbed by her fur. More was taken by the ground. Her horn ignites (and she almost wishes for something to thank, that her corona went ablaze at all), she gathers in her supplies as she risks a step...

The mare can walk. But the ground now seems to be aiming for the center of her hooves.

"Move!" one of the watchponies desperately shouts. "I order you to --"

"It's drained!" the other declares. "Every thaum's gone!" And then the fear begins to advance into terror. "We're stuck out here, and we can't move --"

From inside the carriage, a rather loud forced calm announces "We can move." The cloth-rimmed hat pokes out. "We'll recharge the spells right here. It's easy. If nopony here knows the trick of it, I'll teach them." The brim points down. "Are you all right?"

The mare makes a very rare decision.

"No." As it turns out, there's nothing refreshing about Honesty, even when it has to be released at high decibels to get through the still-ongoing scream. "Some blood, and I'll probably bruise. But it's minor. If anypony is prone to being set off by bloodscent, I'll go downwind. But that's not the worst of it --"

"You should at least take the other side of the carriage," the stallion decides. "For the charging --"

"-- I can't."

She wonders how he made the smile that audible. "It's not the least common gap in a magical education. I'll teach you --"

"-- I can't."

Stallion and watchponies are staring at her. The mare serves as a distraction from their own terror. But she holds fast. An interview is one thing. If anypony else can charge the carriage, then for her to do so would be -- aiding and abetting. She has to trot along the exact line between what's barely legal and what distinctly isn't. And adding her signature to the mix...

"...all right," the stallion finally says. "The four of us should be more than capable of --"

-- which is when the last scream resolves into words.

"YOU FELT THAT! I KNOW YOU DID! OUT OF NOWHERE! EVERYTHING GONE, EVERYTHING WAS GONE AND IT NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, NOT BEFORE HIM, BEFORE IT, YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED, AND IT'LL HAPPEN OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL IT'S GONE --"

The mare hears all of it. More than that: she gets the notepad open, and writes it down. She's already decided to make it into the heart of the opinion column -- no, the article. Because she can't prove every last bit of that statement -- but when it comes to suggestion, insinuation, and making so many others believe -- there's more than enough to work with.

There had been twinned horrors.
The first was that it was happening.
The second was that it was happening again.

Estranged

Afterwards, there was a certain difficulty in reconstructing the final series of events.

Some aspects of the issue were based in microscale geography. Others were sociopolitical, and there also tended to be a certain overlay of species. At one point, after the sisters had returned to the palace, Luna irritably noted that they hadn't so much been laboring to assemble the details of a mystery as they'd laid the groundwork for what was probably going to be somepony's thesis paper. Because there had been a confrontation, and then there had been fear. Or rather, there had been more fear. Things could happen to the pony mind when rationality found itself clamped in the jaw grip of terror and as far as the siblings could determine, the conclusion of the party had involved every last one.

The sort of panic which triggered survival instinct -- that could create a sort of hyperfocus, where a pony was aware of everything which might hurt them -- and very little else. It was a state which effectively discarded sapience in favor of something faster and when a pony came out of it, they would often have trouble recalling the exact details of what had set them off in the first place. And there was a ready solution for that kind of confusion: if you weren't sure as to just what you'd seen, then you turned to your neighbor for a second opinion.

If witnesses could be quickly separated, isolated long enough to let them truly plumb the depths of memory -- that was when you had the best chance to get the truth out of a group. But if you put enough recently-terrified ponies in a small area, it created a sort of free-roaming improvisational story troupe. Anything which had truly taken place would rapidly be replaced by what they thought they'd seen: for some, this would automatically include anything which made their own actions more excusable.

The siblings sent Lunar staff members and extra Guards into the disrupted area, then personally joined the proceedings: if nothing else, there were still ponies who had trouble holding on to self-imposed delusion when being glared at by angry dark eyes or worse, patient purple ones. And it was possible to discard some witnesses immediately: in particular, both siblings had no interest in learning what Jet Set's brilliant-but-sadly-unexecuted plan to save everything had been, especially when he was still trying to figure out what it was.

But they also joined the questioning because it was something which needed to be done quickly. The facts had to be sorted out before the stories took over, and when it came to the spread of lies... it was quickly acknowledged that fiction had gotten a major headstart.

You had to work fast, when it was ponies.

Fortunately, there were other options available.

They didn't get all of it, not on that night, and... perhaps it would have changed something, if they'd acquired just a few extra facts. But Celestia never really had the chance to speak with Fancypants, not when it came to what the confrontation had been about. The noble had been too distant when everything had started, hadn't picked up on all of it, and... he was trying to look after those who had been his guests.

The Solar Princess knew she could trust her friend to provide whatever he could. She also believed that she could allow that to take place after Sun had been raised. So the noble went his own way for a while, and when that was combined with the way in which the party's conclusion had dampened just about everything which had happened earlier... it meant certain details were initially missed. The most the sisters heard from the other attendees was that the centaur had seemed upset about something. Words like 'orbital mechanics' were lost in the flood.

Of course, that was for those who were still willing to describe her as a centaur --

-- you had to work quickly, when it was ponies. With griffons... herd mentality never got involved, and predatory tracking instincts could offer certain advantages. Under most circumstances, you could easily trust a griffon to tell you about how someone had been moving.

The centaur had been in a clear space, bordered by living bodies. Most of them had been trying to shift with her, and one hadn't quite kept the pace. The kick -- purely accidental. One of the senior griffons readily described how the centaur had turned to check on the impacted party: the lower torso had effectively been humped, pulled inwards as much as possible in order to minimize the radius required. (Celestia, whose centuries of existence among a population of much smaller bodies occasionally mandated making herself into a four-legged curve, had managed to suppress the wince.) The tail smack... in their opinion, there had been nothing deliberate about it. But when it came to the bite...

A pony who'd been hit in the face was probably going to take a snap at the offending party. The siblings were aware that the politician's reaction could easily qualify as instinct. There was just a certain difficulty in granting Puff any benefit of the doubt. And it wasn't as if they could ask him, because the Night Court representative had already checked himself into the protection of a hospital.

(No one was sure if he'd actually taken a tumble from the table after the centaur had shaken him, but it wasn't as if injury was a requirement for medical examination. If there were no actual wounds, then he could always fail to be treated for emotional distress. Celestia was darkly confident that Puff was carefully having himself checked over for anything which might have been caused by the never-before-suspected toxins in centaur tail hair. But until the doctors cleared him, he was effectively shielded from investigators. All Puff was currently permitted to see were those who might make him feel better: namely, his physicians -- and, in Luna's opinion, any reporter who was guaranteed to agree with him.)

It could be easier to interview griffons, at least if you got the right ones. In its most ideal state, the chain of domination wasn't just about power. It also asked for the strength to use it responsibly, to lift up those who could not elevate themselves. And with the ones who had seen it all, who had reacted...

In some situations, a griffon could be held legally responsible for the actions taken by their victim, because the status of temporary insanity had been inflicted from the outside. It could often be a difficult thing to prove, and any number of ponies had tried to excuse their actions through claiming to have made eye contact an hour prior. But with those who had attended, who knew what would come from honesty... they dipped their heads, curled their tails against their bodies and with a simple, open admission, truly earned their links.

None of them were sure as to just which one had gotten through -- or if that had been anyone at all, and the centaur's reaction was simply the effect from having resisted so many in such a short span. Two had been openly surprised that anything had happened: a rumor in the Aviary claimed the centaur was immune. But all admitted to having reacted on instinct, and all were ashamed.

A griffon could potentially be held legally responsible for the actions of those affected by their magic. This came as a disappointment to most of those who'd been outside, as they'd been collectively planning on suing the centaur.

When it came to what had happened inside the mansion, right after it had all gone wrong? Fancypants wasn't available for a full interview because the duties of a host included tending to minor injuries -- none of which had been directly inflicted by the centaur. Attendees had pushed to get out of the way, and several of them had pushed into each other. (One argument-prone gaming table had fully missed almost everything, only noticing that something was happening when the wind kicked up by fleeing pegasi scattered paper tokens everywhere.) And Torque had merely been thrown to the side, something which had happened in a way where he hadn't actually landed on anyone: the big bull was mostly embarrassed, and kept asking about whether everyone else was okay. So within the building... some bruises. Sapients had been knocked around by fast-forming shields. There were a few small cuts because multiple fleeing species possessed horns and hadn't been keeping exacting proprioception track of them. And -- that was it.

Events would conspire to prevent the siblings from truly discussing the matter for quite some time. But when they finally did get to talk, each would find the other had reached the same conclusion: for the results of the centaur's escape, when it came to the portion within the walls -- it could have been so much worse. Someone of that size and mass, moving so quickly through a crowd which hadn't fully managed to scatter in time? Multiple tramplings were the least of what might have been expected. Even when brought down to a base level of what might have been fight-or-flee, the girl had shed no blood at all. A priority which, for her, potentially existed at the level of instinct.

But when you followed the trail outside...

Go outside, and the sisters could rely on the reports of Guards: those trained to separate themselves from the herd. Observe, reach a conclusion, and act. And according to the protestors, it also left those in undeserved power listening to biased accounts from those who were essentially being paid to make the real citizens of Equestria look bad. Plus if you were talking to non-pony species about what had happened, then that was the surest proof of being a bigot -- against your own kind.

Why hadn't the protesters managed an effective offense? Luna was the first to note the irony of the true answer: centaur panic. They had told themselves that the only sensible response to the girl's existence was fear -- and at the moment she'd come through the shield with sword unsheathed, she'd given them something to be afraid of.

There had been no perfume or bubbles of pegasus-created atmosphere, nothing which could try to isolate the reaction. The protesters had worked themselves into a state where they almost had to react with panic, and the majority had chosen to use it through putting everything they had into speed. Too much of the herd had been dispersed, and for those who had attacked... they hadn't been able to organize.

It had left them attacking as individuals. And she'd stopped them all. Instinctively.

Of course, every last one of them was already claiming that the centaur had attacked first.

If approached by police, the protesters usually claimed they had the right to remain silent, immediately followed by steadfastly refusing to use it. They wouldn't answer all that many questions, but when it came to the fictions which had already been written, they were more than happy to support each other with a series of positive reviews. Should the queries arrive from the Lunar staff, then the exact offering of non-silence would change: the palace could feel free to speak with their attorneys. Which they were absolutely going to acquire any minute now and for some, the delusion of exactly what their rights were somehow extended to having the palace pay for legal representation. Because that was obviously how the law worked and, for those who'd made it all the way to their fifth year of primary education, how civics studies hadn't.

And if it was the sisters trying to speak with them...

They only tried that with two. Both turned their heads, stared at their own flanks. Talked about their rights again because somehow, being approached by an alicorn apparently violated all of them. And then they demanded an attorney.

A number of them could claim injury. Emotional trauma from having one's magic negated was probably a matter for a massive civil suit, but physical injury was assault and besides, they'd clearly been attacked first. The Guards did verify that the centaur had moved a number of them, always with the flat of the blade -- something which had still led to a rather impressive launch distance. It was easy to see when a fast-rising bruise had been produced by the sword. It was even easier to spot the patterns of cobblestone dirt in fur, most of which had been produced by those who'd dropped to the street over and over again: the exact equation involved was Pain Now = Paid Later. None of those would allow their injuries to be inspected by any but that overdue attorney, whose lack of medical degree would only help.

A number of hurt protesters, plus some minor wounds among the party's attendees. And... one injured Guard.

There was an option to issue pardons and when it came to the griffons, that was tempting. But the acceptance of a pardon could be seen as an admission of guilt, with the issuance declared to be an abuse of power. (And that was just with the griffons: trying to use those tactics with the girl would be worse.) Anything the sisters did through the courts would see multiple newspapers claiming manipulation of the system. And no matter what happened, there were only so many preemptive moves they could try to make. The best way to deal with the fallout was through first seeing what all of it looked like.

There were going to be lawsuits.
The protesters would talk to the police, to a degree. It was the best way to try and press charges against the centaur, along with giving them somepony to scream at when no chained body was dragged past them.
And the centaur wasn't there.

By the time they returned to the palace, the elder had reached that point of the night when it was already far too late for her to be awake -- and still knew she was going to have trouble sleeping. The younger, in what should have been the heart of her hours, still felt as if she had undertaken the sort of ill-advised temporal voyage which had only existed in the ancient days before the manifestation of her mark.

The dark mare knew there was too much to resolve before Sun was raised, and she needed to remain active accordingly. But somewhere not too far away from her core, the ghost of a filly was hoping to deal with all of it through going to bed and hoping the grownups sorted it out in the morning.

They silently entered the Lunar throne room, for it was the younger's hours. Both carefully arranged weary bodies upon the floor, faced each other. Twin surges of corona closed the doors.

"Well," the elder quietly began, false lightness failing to suffuse her voice, "if you're looking for signs of progress..." The white head dipped.

"At this point, I would welcome a failed jest," the younger softly stated. Her wings unfurled, refolded again. "If only to know that there was still enough levity for an attempt to have been made. Finish, sister. Please."

"Only three Guards broke when she came through the shield," the elder dejectedly finished. "Progress."

Each stared at the floor. Then they both raised their gazes to the ceiling, because pegasus magic had a way of interacting with dark moods and every so often, you had to check for the more external variety of storm cloud.

"I have been pondering," the younger eventually announced.

"I don't think we can rewrite the pardon system either."

"Not that, Tia." Evenly, "We all agreed that this night was, to date, the strongest opportunity for the summoners to make an attempt at acquiring her. We were watching for that. And she was in the open, fully exposed within the streets for the first time since her arrival in Canterlot. Guards and police present, but -- the fear was spreading, too many ponies moving to be truly tracked -- that was their chance. Why did they not take it?"

The elder ruffled white feathers. A half-tangible tail slowly shifted across the floor.

"Too many witnesses," she offered. "Caught up in the fear: they couldn't focus. Didn't have enough of a presence after the scatter to be sure of taking her. They might not have believed they could deal with her when the sword was out --"

"-- or they were not present," the younger interrupted. "We search for them, and we find no signs. When it comes to the centaur presence in our nation, the only magical conspiracy our spies have uncovered is a rather poor and decidedly uneducated attempt to invent something which might banish her." With the smallest of snorts, "I understand that they have done little more than manage to drain the charges on a number of enchanted gems."

"Not before the enchanter tracked them to the proper tent," the elder sighed.

"There were no fatalities," the younger noted.

"They got lucky. When it comes to finding thieves and reclaiming their property, most dragons aren't anywhere near that calm." Another sigh. "Getting to take everything else they were going to drain for the attempt probably helped."

"Still," the dark mare pondered. "Your offered possibilities are valid -- and yet, I was expecting something. A level of fanaticism which had reached the point of summoning would be rather unlikely to stop --"

A hoof awkwardly rapped against the exterior of the Moonset Gate.

The sisters glanced at each other. Mutually stood up, then arranged their forms to face the doors.

"Announce," the younger ordered.

"Moonstone," just barely managed to breach the throne room. "With the report from the Doctors Bear."

Another glance. "Enter," the younger declared.

The earth pony Lunar Guard didn't quite make it. The doors shivered, and then a silver helmet pushed its way through a slowly-increasing gap. The rest of his body elected to stay outside: the head just got it over with.

"Nightwatch is grounded for a few days," he told them. "The bone-glow screen says no fractures, not even hairlines. But the bruising from the tumble is severe enough to keep her out of the air. They were getting ready to release her when I left."

Both nodded. It was all they would allow themselves, at least while a Guard was watching.

"And Cerea?" asked the elder.

"She... wouldn't let herself be examined," the stallion reluctantly told them. "Not while Nightwatch was in the room. She's just been pacing back and forth in front of the office door. For... a while. It's..." He forced a breath. "...down to staggering. I think she's exhausted. And she wouldn't go in. I tried to talk, just for a minute, and all she said was that... she was waiting for the two of you. For debriefing. And that there was something she had to tell you."

"And by 'you', the full Diarchy has been indicated?" the younger checked, and the Guard nodded. "Very well. Return to the medical area. Tell her that the doctors must be permitted to examine her. Once that is done, her only assignment is to enter the barracks and rest. We will speak with her after she wakes."

One more nod, and the silvery-white head withdrew.

"After she rests," the elder checked, doing so at the moment when the doors were completely shut. "Are you sure?"

"Let her recover, as much as she can," the younger quietly said. "Spend time in the presence of a friend, who will try to tell her that no part of the blame can be locally assigned." A little more softly, "I may claim a portion, once she is in our presence. It is not as if I informed her regarding the properties of the thestral armor. But when it comes to what happened with the griffons... I feel the Sergeant falsely reported her as immune. Or perhaps there is a limit to her resistance, or --" The left forehoof almost made it all the way to the dark mare's chin. "-- the hairpins, sister. I suspect she did not don them on this night." The younger sighed. "Something we can add to the inquiry. But until then... I retain a potential means of gaining the initial recounting."

"One she doesn't have to be awake for," the elder concluded.

A small nod. "To your own rest." And with just a little less force, "Please. The latest crisis will still be present in the morning."

The elder forced the smile, started to trot away. It was true. The disaster would still be waiting for her when she woke up: that prediction was safe enough.

It would also be plural.

The girl, forever obedient to the voice of authority (and all the worse with it when that voice is parental, imaginary, and rises from within) chooses the oddest times for insubordination. Several of them have taken place in the last few hours. She refused to remove the dress before the doctors examined her, she wouldn't stay in the office for longer than it took for a cursory inspection, she didn't want to talk about what happened with the griffons and insisted that anything she said regarding the topic would have to wait for royalty...

Coming from her, that's a surprising amount of disobedience. And it was immediately followed by disregarding multiple orders from a superior officer.

She wouldn't look at Nightwatch. She refused to talk about what had happened. It was an hour of that, with both of them in the barracks. The pegasus washed up: the girl kept the now-dirty dress on because it was a reason to not share that room. And once the pegasus had departed from the pool, soft moans fading as the pain medication had truly begun to take effect...

There can be side effects, when the potions are fairly strong. The girl assumed her usual position within the thin nest of blankets on the floor. The pegasus looked at her own mattress, glanced at the girl, tried to close in...

It was something like a dance: one moving forward, the other shifting away. But the medication won in the end, and so did the girl. Her only victory of the night, staying away from the pegasus until the potion had put the wounded equine to sleep.

The pegasus is on the floor, covered in blankets. The centaur is as far away as the barracks will permit. She took nothing with her, not when it came to fabric. Not a single layer offers the illusion of comfort. It's the girl, a dress whose seams were never asked to go through so much, and a sketchbook.

She opens it. Looks at the partial image on the first page, then closes the book again and slings it onto the nearest mattress.

The dark mare receives all of this as a series of flickers: a film with most of its frames missing. She tried to make the girl review her day, and the process began at the end. The refusal to speak with her friend, the isolation, the tears which only seemed to run out when there was no water left to offer. But emotional exhaustion can be every bit as real as the physical. Eventually, the arms folded, the spine locked, and the girl slipped into dream. A place where a new order was given, and she began to obey...

...stopped.

The full dream is forming. But it is not the one which the dark mare tried to direct her towards. Because the girl fell into the nightscape on the sliding debris of a crumbling thought. It isn't just an echo, it's just about the whole of her now, it seizes the reins of memory --

-- and the dark mare, who watches from hiding, lets it happen.

There are inquiries to be made. But the dark mare has been observing the girl's dreams for moons. Watching, hoofstep by hoofstep, as they approach something which feels as if it might be crucial. Something about the night has brought the girl to this.

The centaur, as with most sapients, will dream multiple times in one night. If the first one brings them here, then there will be other chances before Moon is lowered. For now, the dream is forming, that repeated thought is directing it...

She went out of bounds.
She went out of bounds.
She went out of bounds.

She's out of bounds.

It's the single best feeling of her life.

The filly is making her way through unknown territory. Every hoofstep is planted into soil which no centaur has ever --

-- all right, she has to be fair about this. The gap didn't always exist, not as a place of lifelong confinement. There was a time before the liminals went into hiding and during that era, it's possible that centaurs trotted across this part of the land every day. She may just be the first to touch it in a very long time.

The date of her temporary escape was designated in advance. She had backups, placed on the calendar in case of patrol route changes or exceptionally poor weather. As it is, the sun is pleasantly warm, and she can get a good view of it at any time because the sky is almost completely clear. There's just the one cloud --

-- why is there one --

-- plus she's got a bit of breeze dancing under her nose, and that leaves her trying to sort out new scents. Some of the plants are new. And the trail? That only exists because she's making one. The filly is fully aware that she's off the map: a situation which calls for some degree of improvised cartography. Dead branches are carefully bent in new, subtle directions: quickly-harvested fruit creates stains on selected trunks. It's crucial that she be able to find her way back, and just about as important to have one good rainstorm wash away any evidence that she was here at all.

She has to pause rather frequently, making sure the blazes are visible enough for her to track them, while sufficiently subtle for anyone else to miss. It slows her down. But with every step, she goes further into the new. And it doesn't really matter that the new mostly resembles the old, because she hasn't gone far enough for things to change all that much. What counts is that she's here. A here which isn't anywhere she's been before.

There are still certain difficulties ahead: things which aren't so much lurking in her future as camped out next to designated signposts on a new road. For starters, she's fully aware that she has to clean everything. The filly is noting every single stream (and she never thought there would be so many little ones in the area, all of which seem to be flowing a little outside of their normal banks) and plant with a scent-masking property. There's a hidden cache' of cleaning supplies and replacement clothing near her designated reentry point for the gap (plus another for a secondary route, because you never know), but... she has to anticipate that she might need to improvise. That's just proper planning.

It was her planning which got her this far. Which got her out. And the sunlight feels new, the air is so fresh as to make the Second Breath into something automatic, the soil caresses her hooves and the air has a taste, it's sweet and welcoming and it calls out to her, tells her to keep going forward...

The girl had her first taste of wine when she was six. Her gap makes its own, because they're French. With mares, it's mostly used for flavor. Even fillies have enough body mass to absorb a little alcohol without consequence. It's hard to become drunk -- although stallions always seem to find a way, and some of the older colts are trying to join them. But the filly has never been even slightly tipsy --

-- until now.

Her original sip of wine was nothing special. The first taste of freedom is heady, intoxicating, and instantly addictive.

She's only had a little. She wants more. She's sure she can arrange for more. If a first trip out was planned, then how hard could be a second be? Why live for only one day? And yes, extra voyages will come with a returned burden of risk plus she's hardly back safely from this one, but -- the more she does this, the more she'll gain experience. She'll know how to work around the hazards. New excuses for not being present can be constructed. As long as she limits herself to, say, once a year --

-- maybe once a season, and that presumes being incredibly careful about the weather in winter --

-- she moves through a new forest. There's plenty of gaps between the trees, but there's also a lot of bushes: she has space to move, but she can also drop her body behind concealment in a hurry. The leaves are spotted with raindrops: it probably rained here overnight, a storm so small that it never touched the gap. The air is wine and every breeze is song. The gap is ancient, the world is new, every hoofstep comes as close to dancing as the filly may ever know, and she's happy. It may be the first time she's truly been happy since she felt the trap of her set future close around her hocks.

(The observer has never seen the filly like this. Not once.)
(What would the girl look like, if she was actually --)

It could also be argued that she's a little bit drunk.
There's laughter in the forest.
It isn't hers.

The filly freezes. The laugh rings out again and it's a chorus, something young and vibrant which emerges from multiple distant throats in a wave of joy, vibrates the leaves and makes the air dance. A current which, for scent purposes, is moving the wrong way --

-- she forces herself to stay still. Waits for the next burst, twists her ears --

-- she's okay. She heard the laughter before she saw the source. Before anyone saw her. They're not that close. Somewhere off to the west, and there's enough greenery in that direction to hide the filly, at least when taken in bulk. No one can spot her. All she has to do is turn back.

She's very aware of her heartbeat. The filly almost glances down at her chest, because any heart which is going that fast almost has to be making her breasts vibrate a little. There's enough there to do that now --

-- the laughter sounds again. Purest joy.

The filly has to stay silent. Move quietly, especially until she puts some distance between herself and the source. And step carefully, because it rained here at some point and the earth will hold a hoofprint --

-- wild horses in the forest. Everyone knows that --

-- they're laughing, they sound so happy, so free --

-- so far away...

...there's all of this greenery. She's shielded. If she just approaches very carefully, keeps her body hidden...

The filly is young. Inexperienced. She doesn't know how to deal with that first rush of the most intoxicating thing she will ever experience. And on some level, she's aware that she may be making a bad decision. Drunks often are. And then they make them anyway.

She moves.

The bushes are thick around the borders, at least along the direction she used for her final approach. But they're not that high. The greenery is too tightly clustered to see through, broad leaves thick with the strength of the season. And when it comes to height -- a meter and a half, or a bit less? The girl is already taller than that, and centaurs aren't really meant to crouch-walk. It puts her low, she can barely shift forward because her legs shouldn't be moving this way, she's sliding along in the soil and it's a little painful, but there's laughter and shouts and the odd burst of cursing, she can hear it all but she can't see...

...the bushes are too wide. She can't push enough aside to get a sight line, because her arms won't reach through: not without a lot of scratching and worse, the sound of wood breaking.

The filly hears an impact. Something going into -- rubber? (It makes her lean closer to the bush, and all that gets her is the feeling of her breasts being poked by wood. Persisting adds the sensation of long falls of hair trying to tangle up in the branches.) And then there's a cheer, a shout, and one really loud curse -- but the focus of those sounds has moved. They're all reacting to something happening in a single location. Something which took place well away from where she is.

There are times when the intoxicated are aware that they're making the wrong decision, and then make it anyway. Others when no true thought is involved at all. Simply action.

The filly stretches, from where she rests on the ground. Just enough to get her eyeline over the top of the bush.

The clearing is larger than she'd expected: one of those natural hollows which a forest offers up every so often. And 'clearing' is the proper word, one which has seen a little extra work done: small plants pulled up, rocks removed, with the approach path on the opposite side kept open. But later in life, on the rare occasions when she thinks about it at all, those scant moments before she once again finds a way to stop -- the filly will use another term.

It's not a clearing.
It's a sylvan glade.
The place where you encounter something fey. Capricious.
And it looks something like you. Enough that you start to think there could be a connection -- but they're nothing like you. Their minds don't work the same way. They don't understand. They don't care to make the effort.
Something in a sylvan glade will destroy your life on a whim.
Without regret.
While laughing.
It's a place for monsters.
The monsters she's been taught to fear across the short span of her life mostly look like colts and fillies.
...if you start at the upper waist and move towards the head, they mostly look like --
--there's only one waist...

(She shouldn't be doing this.)
(She has to leave.)
(She has to --)

How old are they? She's not sure. Within a few years of her own age, perhaps, but -- how long do humans live, compared to centaurs? The filly can't quite seem to recall that, or when they're supposed to start puberty. By her standards, the three girls among the eight humans would all be late bloomers. But right now, that's something which lets them run all the faster.

Brown hair is flying on the quickest, something worn long and without anything in the way of bindings. It should be getting in her eyes all the time, and somehow it never quite does. That girl can always keep sight of the goal, and the hardest part of that may be the choice. The approach path had to be widened enough to bring two of them in...

...football. They're playing football. Two teams of four. There's no identifying colors: they know who they are. And they run and jump and don't use their arms unless they think no one is looking, and they laugh...

She can mostly see their upper bodies, except for when they jump. One of them manages to launch himself high enough for the filly to glimpse sandals, which seems like one of the worst possible choices for the game. And that lets her see feet, which immediately turn into the worst possible choice for evolution to make about anything.

How do they even stay upright? Just two legs, and those for support...

Her hands automatically come up to cover her mouth. She presses herself more tightly against the bush, misses the sound of wood crackling.

They're playing. The things she's been taught to fear are just having fun, and...
...they're so close.
Less than ten meters to the nearest goal, and the colt -- boy? -- who stands within.
And it's fascinating. She's looking at a legend. At monsters, when they have no idea she's there, and -- they're playing.
She's read their books. Become familiar with so many of their stories. But she still doesn't feel like she understands them. The filly is watching something half-alien -- mostly the lower half -- and... is this how you come to know someone? Through watching them play?

The rules of football are familiar to her. Centaurs don't really play: older mares have trouble tracking anything right in front of their forehooves, and the stallions pledge allegiance to American football because it's another excuse to hurt each other. But old magazines are full of stories, pictures, diagrams, and a lot of calls for various people to be traded or fired. She can track a game, especially one with this few players. No one is looking in her direction. She can just watch. She's never seen a live game --

-- she's never seen a game. Understanding the principles involved isn't the same.
The filly has never had the chance to personally recognize certain truths of the sport.
An awkwardly-angled, poorly-designed foot goes into the ball, and it takes a funny bounce.

The sphere ricochets away from the point of impact. Goes off to the side, towards the filly. And she starts to pull back, but it's low, it's already rolling to a stop, it vanishes from her sight line and she only hears it come to a halt, she's safe --

-- the ball took a funny bounce. It stayed in the clearing, but for purposes of the crude field, it went out of bounds.
The filly had to raise her eyes above the top of the bush in order to see anything at all.
And wherever the ball is moving is where everyone looks.

The brown-haired girl has green eyes.

All four of the filly's hidden legs are frozen. No breath seems to reach her lower torso. Her arms can't move. Fingers clench tightly on wood. Her fingers are becoming stained, her blouse may already be marked beyond hope...

...her body won't respond. The terror is flooding through her. Nearly every signal sent through neural pathways drowns. Only three things move: her chest heaves (and she's pressed so tightly against the bush that it hurts, the blouse stains are spreading) and at the moment she realizes the brown-haired girl is looking at her, the filly's ears slam backwards and down. Covered by her hair.

No one is moving. There's more children looking at the filly now, but -- they're not moving.
The filly can't move.
The monsters have seen her.
...there aren't any screams. No shouts. They're just looking at her. She got her ears out of sight in time.
As long as they don't see her ears...
...as long as they don't come any closer...
...she has to move --

"Bonjour?"

And as the little brunette offers the uncertain word, she takes half a step forward.

The filly has to move. She has to...

"Êtes-vous nouveau ici?" the girl asks. "Je ne te connais pas..."

Yes, she's new here. None of them know her.

She has to move.
She has to move.
She has to move.

A slim arm is raised. The hand is palm-up, and then the fingers carefully curl in.

"Tu veux jouer?"

Do you want to play?

The filly's body will not obey her. Neither will her mind. A single thought rises in response to that innocent question, surges forward with speed and hope. And if not for everything which came after, feeling that thought burn through her on a level very close to instinct would have been the worst moment of the filly's life.

Yes.

...she could stand up. Slowly. Find a place where she could step away from the concealment of the bushes, let them see her, and she could just... come out...

...billions.
There are billions of humans and between all of the gaps in every part of the world, there might be thirty thousand centaurs. Add all of the liminal populations together and there would be an outside chance to reach eight million.
Billions of humans, and all extinction ever requires is for one of them to make a decision.

More timidly, as if afraid of what the answer might be, "Tu veux jouer?" And the human girl takes another step --

-- the filly shakes her head. (The bases of her ears are starting to ache.) Then she realizes that the gesture might not be visible enough, raises herself up enough to make her mouth visible, lets her lips frame Non over and over while her arms finally respond. Both hands come up over the greenery, palms out and fingers spread wide, frantically waving outwards to the sides and then inwards again. As much negation as she can express without getting hoof stomps involved.

It's supposed to make the human girl back off. Leave her alone. But there are so many eyes watching her, too many, and yet all the filly can see is green...

"C'est bon," the human tries to tell her. "Vous ne devez pas être timide..."

It is not okay. She has more of a reason to be shy than the brunette could ever imagine. And there are eight human children, eight, her pressed back ears just heard another one of them move, they're coming forward --

-- there's still a gap between the filly and the humans. With the closest, it's only a few meters across.
There has to be a gap.
It's the divide between life and death.
The brunette takes another step --

-- there are ways in which centaur double-jointing helps her. Other times when it doesn't seem to do enough. In this case, it lets her stay low as she desperately twists her upper torso, almost falling to the side as she pushes all four legs in a way which nearly creates a level backwards lunge, and then she's out of sight in that she can't see them any more, but that just means she can't see and her aching ears are trying to spring free, she has to hear them and she can hear them approaching, the filly's palms are in the dirt and it's as if the upper torso is trying to drag the lower through the full turn, they're too close and it's too much too much too much --

-- all four legs jerk. Hooves plant, push. Knees stay bent, and she lunges towards trees and thicker greenery, keeping everything below the upper waist out of sight, but she can't move like this for long, she has to straighten up before she falls and she has to hide --

-- and she's running, she's up and the forest is blocking any direct view of her and she's running, she's going to be okay, everyone is going to be okay, she didn't --

-- in the replay of dream, the only direct truth comes from the senses. If the filly didn't directly experience something, didn't live through it, then imagination fills in the gaps. She can't know what happened next. She will never truly know.

But there are things she believes.

The filly looks back.

It had rained, before she made her mistake. (The sky is clear now, but for one cloud.) The earth was wet. The soil was muddy. And her blouse is stained, her skirt is fouled with dirt, her legs are crusted --

-- she gestured at them.
She pushed off from the ground.
Four perfect impressions in the soil.
Hands or hooves.
Never both.
Both is evidence --

-- and she gallops and she listens for pursuit and now the sky has become her enemy, she's still in the forest but there's another clearing up ahead and how foolish was she, to make her path go through a clearing when airplanes exist? But she has to backtrack exactly or her next subtle blaze might be missed, but she's exposed to the sky and she has to look up and there's clear blue with one lonely, oddly-low cloud --

-- it was a clear day --
-- it was a beautiful day, the most beautiful and the worst of her life, the sky was perfectly clear and she knew that because she had to keep looking up all the way back and she never saw anything but pristine blue and every time she's looked up, there's been one cloud --

The dark mare is watching the filly run, doing so from concealment. Not that the girl would know to look for her, or have any concept of how the intruder might manifest -- but concealment nonetheless, for some are more attuned to their nightscapes than others, more readily sense intrusion --

-- it has been mere hours since griffon magic tried to force its way into the girl's mind, over and over. Something which has put every part of that wounded psyche on edge, on guard against further attempts to invade. And a near-secret of the nightscape is that for those who become aware they are dreaming, who realize somepony is there...

...it happens all at once. The filly's outline blurs, acquires mass in all directions as height surges, curves push outwards, and there's a bag slung next to the girl's left foreshoulder, a hand pushes lengthening fingers through the opening, extracts a slightly-cracked sphere, squeezes just before it loads the ball into a freshly-manifested sling --

-- and the dark mare becomes the victim of a story. One she tells herself.

She knows what the sphere is. Her own mind brings that knowledge into the nightscape, laces it into the dream. She's also read all of the Sergeant's reports, knows about the girl's accuracy -- all things she places within the setting as freshly-sprouted facts, because dream logic in a shared nightscape can consist of what the dreamers see as true.

The dark mare recognizes the drydust, and does so at the moment before the cloud is pulled into falling gel.
The dark mare is falling. There's enough time to spread her wings, to smooth it out into a glide, but the girl's other hand is going for the sword and they both know the sword is a weapon --
-- the girl leaps --

-- the alicorn made a number of inquires about the sword, on that first night. She listened to the stories, some of which were just things which ponies had already decided to tell themselves. Sorted out the facts. But when you put facts into an internal book, all you've done is bind the historical account. It's still a story: it just gets filed under non-fiction.

The dark mare has never directly been on the receiving end of the sword's strikes: a corona was disrupted, and nothing more. But she's been told what it feels like. She's imagined what might happen, if those blows were to impact somepony who carries so much more magic than the usual. It's something she brought with her into dream.

The centaur leaps. Swings. And the alicorn feels the impact against the base of her right wing, a new kind of chill spreading from the strike, something she cannot fight, the wing sags and her feathers seem to be on the verge of evaporating and the alicorn slams into the ground.

The centaur lands. The alicorn tries to roll, gets some distance between herself and the girl, starts to scramble to her hooves -- but the girl is too fast. The gap is already being closed. And the alicorn manages to ignite her horn, repeats something she knows will work: a primary bolt meant to be deflected, with a follow-up close behind. Aimed at the wrist, forcing the girl to drop the weapon --

-- the girl's arm shifts, blocks the first attack. Then it warps, joints twisting across unnatural angles, the sword jerks down to deflect the second bolt and the dark mare's last thought before the centaur fully closes the gap is that the palace always wants to find Guards who can learn...

The centaur hits her: the flat of the blade into the left side of the alicorn's head. It jerks the dark mare's body, moves her sight line, and part of her registers that the girl's form, aged up to the present, is only now beginning to further distort. The white fabric over the left shoulder falls too far inwards: a suggestion of missing tissue beneath. One eye starts to go dim. But the girl is still attacking, and the alicorn hasn't been able to separate tale from nightscape. Every time she starts to go on offense, the sword hits her again. Again. The girl is right on top of her, swinging over and over and

it's then that she sees the flicker in dimming eyes. Recognition. The girl has been attacking because there was something intruding and she wanted it gone. Striking on instinct. This is the first moment when the centaur has realized just who is present.

The girl hesitates.

In the waking world, the alicorn is still learning how to read the girl's expressions. In the nightscape, the very world twists, darkens into shame, burns with self-hatred, the sky is black and the bushes are on fire and something in the girl's face hardens as she brings the sword up and back, muscles about to commit all of that hideous strength into one more strike --

"CEREA!"

She stops. Her left hind leg goes limp. Tail hairs begin to fall out. But the sword remains raised and ready.

"How long?" The forest shakes with the scream, the flames surge. "The Mare Of Dream! That's what they called you, what you called yourself! It's just like everything else: it was right there! How long have you been in my head?"

"I --" The alicorn almost jumps forward, because the forest is on fire, the heat is surging through her hooves and tail and there's a moment when that tail feels solid. Tangible enough to burn.

Everything is crackling around her. Breaking from the heat. Smoke is rising, and the girl's eyes blaze with fury and loathing. Something which always has a target.

"-- Cerea, listen!" She has to talk quickly, needs to explain before --

-- ignore the sword, the sword is a dream, it does no harm, no damage, I can exit her nightscape at any time I might will it --

-- unless the girl tries to block her. That's possible, with the proper effort of will. It's hard to hold the alicorn for long, but -- some have been able to do it for what was almost just long enough.

The centaur is new to dream combat, and is proving to be entirely too good at it.

"Listen to what?" And now the hands are palsied -- but the shaking sword remains held. "What kind of excuse is there for -- for just --"

"-- you had just come into the world! When all we knew was Tirek! You might have been the enemy, one who would tell any lie if it would bring her that much closer to us!" The flames are forcing her forward, and she tries to summon Moon's chill, to send the heat elsewhere, but there's so much of it, the world is red and orange and fur which feels like a million tiny wicks waiting to catch.

The darkened sky howls with a furious wind. Cinders burn holes in the false night.

"But few can lie within dream," the alicorn forces out. "In defense of my nation, I needed to investigate. To scout. To recognize the soul within the form."

And the flames begin to fade, even as the tendons on the girl's clenched hands gradually sink back into the flesh. As the sword slowly comes down, with the end pointed towards the scabbard.

"To... make sure I was safe," the girl slowly says. "I can understand that. But why would you come here after that?"

Steadily, bringing the coolness which refuses to fully manifest in the nightscape to her voice, "I -- know that you see it as intrusion, Cerea. Invasion. And on this night of all nights, to find somepony within your mind, uninvited... you have every reason for anger --"

Just barely a whisper, "Why?"

"I wanted to understand you," the dark mare continues. "To learn who you truly were. Because that would make it all the easier to make others recognize that soul."

The sword is slipping back into the scabbard.

"If I could somehow make the public accept one monster, then they might accept --"

-- and the world is fire and her hooves are scorched, splitting, melting as the girl's skin blackens and cracks, blood runs out from between the fissures on a face where no feature is recognizable, arms twist in six directions at once, the centaur's hooves rot the earth and the breasts harden, soft curves transmuted into forged edge so that every breath cuts.

There is no hair. Razor wire falls from scalp and tail.

The eyes are blind coals, unable to see through their own burning heat. The ears are clogged with lava. The nose simply falls off.

Every time the centaur moves, something bleeds. There's always a target.
And the target is the girl.
The monster.

"GET OUT!"

The alicorn vanishes.

One in the barracks. One in the Lunar throne room.
Two souls on fire.
Both collapse.

Recalcitrant

The dark alicorn had learned how to mitigate the disorientation which came when she exited the nightscape too quickly. It was something which could produce an extra moment of vulnerability and as such, she had to be capable of snapping back into the waking world at a moment's notice -- or, given the ways in which a crisis tended to come calling, somewhat faster. Alert, aware, already evaluating everything around her and ready to move. There was no other way to live, at least if you wanted the experience to continue.

It meant that all of her senses immediately retuned themselves to the now: the feel of her throne's cushions (thinner than those used by her sister) under belly and barrel, hoofsteps moving in a patrol pattern somewhere on the other side of the Moonrise Gate. She focused fully upon reality, and did so just long enough to determine that no true threat existed.

And with that done, the dark-hued body twitched. Curled up on itself, examined a wounded self-image, and waited for phantom bruising to fade. Something which her mind was doing its best to emboss onto her nerves as actual pain, and she had to block it. The artist's brush of the imagination was being applied to her inner self as figment poultices and potions. It helped.

The chimerical burns, however, were going to take a little more work. They only existed in her mind, as echoes of a final fiery scream seared into the dreamself. And yet it was the residue from some form of heat.

Sun's light had never burned her. (Irritated, yes, especially after extended exposure or schedule flips -- and her sister had a similar issue with Moon.) But heat -- that was the true vulnerability. When it came to temperature, each sibling negated the other's truest strength while embodying the greatest weakness. Moon's chill cancelled out Sun's flame and after that, it was a matter of which one was willing to push. There had been times when it had felt as if they had been made to hurt each other...

She forced herself to breathe. Slowly, until she could look at her own fur without seeing false blisters rising through strands of inner char. And even that failed to negate the greatest source of pain.

The alicorn knew what her final words had been, and they seared her from within.

I have to fix this...

The girl had only heard part of the sentence, and --

-- she sees herself as something flawed. Broken. Irredeemable. Defective. In every dream which places her as her present self, something wrong. Always.
But it's more than that.
A monster.
She heard me call her a monster...

Another breath. There was time for that: there had to be. She couldn't just rush down to the barracks and start saying whatever went through her head. The dream pain imposed by phantom sword and false flame had loosened her control over words, and that was some small part of what had led to this. And the girl's movements were tracked, because they had to be: even now, having a centaur unexpectedly cross the path of a palace guest had the potential to create a lesser crisis. She would be told if Cerea tried to go anywhere beyond the basement.

Luna did everything she could to center herself, and thought.

Fix this.
How?

Simply reciting the whole of the intended sentence wouldn't do it. The only way it would make sense to the girl was if Luna gave her...

...context.

I would have to tell her.
(The dark body's curl became a little tighter.)
About the Return.
(The stars in mane and tail began to flicker. In some places, they started to go out.)
About the Nightmare.
About... everything.

With a blast of purest inner sarcasm, I'm not sure whether her lacking the background for nearly all of it is good or bad.

She could give Cerea the basics: that which occupied a deliberately-scant public record. But for the girl to understand the full reason for the completed sentence, for Luna to gain any chance at forgiveness... there might need to be more. It was something which might require truth. Not all of it, not in the sense of guiding the centaur down all the little paths of Luna's life, but... enough.

Celestia had Fancypants: a confidant, somepony who had been told a number of history's deepest secrets simply because if you were going to have one person whom you could truly speak with, you couldn't hold all that much back. The elder's seneschal. The sisters were supposed to each have at least one in every generation. But it had been more than four years since Luna had come back to the world, reclaimed herself, and... she didn't have a seneschal. It felt as if there was simply too much to tell. To... try and explain.

Luna had run through internal rehearsals a few times, trying to update an old speech for what, to her, remained relatively recent events. Private script reviews for a performance which might never reach a stage, with every line read to a costar who mostly existed in outline. She had yet to find any version which failed to make her look like an idiot. And to do it with Cerea, someone she barely knew --

-- I know her better than any.

There were ways in which that was true, at least locally. Luna had gone back to the girl's dreams on night after night, trying to understand. And it hadn't just been visits to the centaur's birthplace. Cerea wanted to go home, longed for it, and --

-- there is a house. The doors are too tall. There's too many knobs. The interior has been rebuilt over and over. Whatever substance makes up the street outside feels wrong under hooves. It holds the heat too well, fractures readily, cracks and potholes lurking to catch a hoof and trip. And she can't go outside unless she's on a morning gallop, not unless her host is present.

But at least she got to go out by herself. Legally. The others had to sneak.

The others...

She'd seen all of them. A girl with the aspect of a bird, quick and light and forever looking for the next bit of joy. The one like a snake wanted to linger near heat, to wrap and possess. A spider tried to ensnare, something like a mobile liquid imitated, the piscine looked for the tragedy in every interaction -- and off to the side, something blue-skinned and strange simply watched.

The centaur was desperately homesick. And for all the pain which a barely-glimpsed rivalry could bring...

...all of the pain.
I've been tracking the trail of memory for moons now. I knew there had to be a critical moment. Something which had created fracture.

It seemed likely that Luna had found it.

The reason she blames herself.
(The night sky strewn across neck and flanks vanished. Strands of light blue went limp.)
The reason I blame myself.

The dark mare made sure the doors were secure. That there would be at least a moment of warning before anypony tried to enter. And she remained on the cushions, tucked tightly in a curl which brought no warmth, wondering what to say. How much she could say, and... if there were truly any words which might help at all.

She paused a few times. There was paperwork which had to be dealt with. Columns to tally. The nightly work of maintaining her realm. If reports came in, things which covered the aftermath of the failed party -- she had to review those. And eventually, Moon had to be lowered. Her sister could manage the feat, but... it pained Celestia to contact Moon, just as much as dealing with Sun seared Luna from within. There had already been a thousand years of such agonies. She could not ask her sister to go through any more.

But meetings were pushed off, newspapers invited to wait in a private reading room and on the whole, Luna simply thought. Did so for long after she would have normally gone to sleep, placing her within Sun's dominion. With her Guards knowing she was still awake, if not exactly why.

When the first report about the centaur's movements came in, it went to her.

Four long legs compulsively kicked at the barracks' floor, pushed, got Cerea upright and started to launch her into the gallop before true awareness fully returned. There was a moment when all she knew was that something had been within her mind, had been present without permission, a recurring violation and she had to get away from it, she had to escape and all she could do was run --

-- but for a centaur, scent was the first sense to fully awaken. And it gave her the olfactory signature of the area's other occupant. Something where aspects had been stretched thin by potion-masked pain.

It made her stop. The full height and length of her body shivered, and the dress rippled.

She'd hurt Nightwatch. She... couldn't wake the pegasus. A mad gallop for the exit made too much noise, and...

Where would I go?

Where could she go?

Cerea shivered again. It felt as if it was too cold in the barracks. Perhaps that was a sort of residue from the intruder. And she was dirty from escape and fight, it was just finally starting to dawn upon her just how filthy she was and it felt as if the muck had worked its way beneath fur and skin.

Violated.

She...

...she wanted to gallop upstairs with the sword and find the dark mare and bring the fight into the day and scream and shout and swing until everyone, everypony realized they had no right to enter her mind, to...

...she had to clean herself.

Maybe if her body was clean, her thoughts wouldn't feel so --

-- slowly, trying to move her hooves in a way which made as little sound as possible, the girl made her way to the bathroom. Got a door open, went through, closed it behind her as softly as possible, and then trotted towards the sinks. Bent her foreknees enough to drop her hands to a level which could reach the taps, which brought her into reflection range for the mirrors and she looked into the forever-hideous face of a monster.

There were too many emotions which surged through her then. Anger clashed with rage, hatred spared some room for blame, everything rising at once to the point where they pushed each other aside and let the panic attack take over.

Her arms came up, and did so too quickly. Hands clutched at her hair, began to pull. Two sets of ribs heaved, her breasts swelled against the poor confinement of the dress and seams which had never been designed for any more exertion than would be found in a slow dance measured their combat-weakened durability against the strength of a centaur.

The jury-rigging tore. Stitches split. Fabric fell away, and anatomy spilled out into the chill-seeming air.

Cerea stopped moving, as sundered cloth collapsed next to her hooves.

For a moment, every other emotion receded, landing in the same grave as the aborted panic attack. There was a second when all which remained within her was a sort of dark bemusement, added to the inner notation that if such had happened in Japan, it would have taken place in front of at least six human witnesses and an equal number of smartphones.

Perhaps that was the true difference between the worlds. Some of what would have been her public humiliations were permitted to be private. The trade for allowing every inner secret to be --

-- she stopped again. Eventually, the taps were twisted: first for the sink and then, after the worst of it was off her face, for the bath. And then she waited.

She'd been washing herself for -- a while. Two cakes of soap had been worn down into suds and futility, and yet she kept scrubbing. There were a few brushes for her now, and anything which didn't seem as if the bristles were about to break off had the handle feeling as if it was on the verge of snapping.

It was hard to measure time via the destruction of soap. Trying to judge how long she'd been in the bath by the number of times which had seen more hot water added wasn't much of an improvement. All Cerea knew was that she was still trying to wash herself, and nothing about her felt clean at all. Not when the true filth was somewhere behind her eyes.

She knew the continued efforts were wrong. Sick. But she couldn't seem to stop.

There was something familiar about that.

When was the last time I washed myself like this?

When she'd returned to the gap. Getting rid of foreign scents. It had been at least two hours before she'd felt as if she could get within olfactory range of another centaur, and she'd had to burn her clothing --

-- stop thinking --
-- I never wanted to think about that day again. I did everything I could not to think about it, and she made me dream of it. While she watched.

Sponge shouldn't be capable of abrading skin. Perhaps her body was just that weak.

I know what happened after I left the border of the glade.
The only thing which could have happened.
Everything, everything is my --

It took a significant bend of knees and torso to get her head under the water. Nearly a minute passed before she made the temporary decision to come back up.

She tried to wash her face again. This involved the removal of the disc and as soon as she finished the third round, it went back on. Cerea was expecting to be summoned for debriefing eventually. She needed to be capable of understanding the order. It was very important to understand orders, especially when you were trying to decide which ones you were going to ignore.

Water dripped from the tips of her ears. She had an odd awareness of her ears. They kept trying to retreat under her hair.

There had been rumors in the gap. Hushed talk about those who supposedly subsisted on the energy which could be gleaned from trauma. From nightmares. They forced you to relive the worst moments of your life, and then they fed on it. Apparently a little thing like changing worlds wasn't enough to get away from that.

What was next on her menu? The yellow vests? The closest I ever came to meeting my --
-- no --
-- or coming to the house for the first time. Thinking I had a chance, being stupid enough to almost believe that, I thought of an excuse to make him touch me and I did it, I grabbed his hand and made him touch me, to feel how human I was and then I was holding his hand and pressing against him and --
-- Miia and Papi stormed in.
Miia was angry. She knew what I was after. Papi mostly wanted to know when the next meal was coming.
And I knew I had rivals. Competition. I didn't have him to myself, and that meant I'd already lost...

As meals went, it probably would have been inferior to the glade. The discovery of the other girls had been personal. The consequences of the glade might have been gl --

-- stop.
Don't give her anything else. Bitterly, No more nourishment.

She went back to scrubbing.

(She was wrong about the dark alicorn. There was something else which fed on nightmares, and she would trot into its maw.)

I have to stop.
I have to stop.
One more cake of soap --

-- the door opened.

It was the sound which got her attention, just as much as the gust of air which entered through it. Something which brought an increasingly-familiar scent towards her, as paws quietly padded in.

Cerea automatically dropped her body again, trying to get as much of her upper torso in the water as possible. The approaching canid didn't seem to notice. Or care.

She's not good with people because there's times when she's shy.

Also because she's sarcastic, something of a troll, and doesn't recognize social cues. Those were the parts nopony told me about. Plus a pack species probably doesn't care much about little things like privacy. And having a taboo regarding nudity? Well, that's where she's in perfect line with the rest of this planet. What taboo?

The canid reached the edge of the pool. The left paw slowly stretched out towards the water. Stopped.

She looks like she isn't hurt. Tired, but... nothing happened to her after I --

-- I don't want her here. "Yapper --"

The most accurate word for the reply was 'bark'. "Wait!"

"-- I'm trying to take a --"

Sharply, with most of the front fangs exposed and short white fur strands shivering in turn, "Yapper decides whether Yapper gets in water. Yapper decides! When ready!"

Cerea shut up.

"Ponies think Dogs don't wash," Yapper muttered. "Say there's a smell. Most Dogs wash. Hot springs underground. Easy to find. Alphas decide when they want to wash. Some decide that means they won't wash. But omegas get pushed..."

The left paw was pulled back to safely. Slowly, pseudohands removed the vest and skirt, exposing -- more fur.

A toe was dipped. Slowly, the canid slipped into the shallow end of the pool. Dunked her head all at once, brought it up again, and fur collapsed across a surprisingly narrow jaw.

"Well," Yapper morbidly announced, "that was fiasco."

Cerea stared at her. There wasn't that much of a head under the fur. It was something like looking at a wet poodle...

"Normally supposed to send apology letter after bad date," the canid sighed. "Can speak Equestrian, but don't write it very well. And Canis... nopony can read. So thought this was easier."

Bad date.

It was the canid's sense of humor, or what passed for it. But Cerea was briefly tempted to tell her about some really bad dates. She'd been on one which had required full armor, and that had turned into one of the less embarrassing specimens.

"Was looking for centaur," Yapper added. "Didn't take long, once Yapper reached palace. Centaur can only be so many places --" and the canid squinted.

"Angry," she observed. "Yapper sure centaur angry just then. Why?"

Because the palace is just another gap in the world. A trap. A prison...

"It's been a long night," the girl softly understated. "Yapper -- where were you? I never saw --"

"When griffons sightpush? Bathroom. Trenches. Everypony uses trenches. Yapper not pony. Don't talk to Yapper about trenches. Trying to... line up. So heard part of fight, but didn't see."

There was a soft sigh. The canid slipped a little lower in the water.

Quietly, just barely audible to water-dripping ears, "Centaur okay?"

The girl took a breath. Slowly shook her head.

"Wanted to check," Yapper continued, with every word just a little too even. "Yapper was sightpushed once. Doesn't feel good."

Under the surface of the water, the girl's hands wrung against each other.

"What does it do to you?"

"Snap," Yapper stated, and the fringed ears sagged. "One way or another. Dog snaps." And shivered within the hot water. "Wanted company after, but... was new in city. Didn't know anypony. Kept own company. Thought centaur should do better. So Yapper is company."

Neither female talked for a while. Two bodies soaked in what heat they could, and recognized none of it.

"Centaur nursing?"

With a soft groan, "My species --"

"-- no sense of humor," the canid observed, then offered up a shadowed "Happy holiday?"

"Holiday," Cerea repeated.

"After midnight. Close to Sun-raising," Yapper told her. "Homecoming now. Holiday when ponies visit family. Celebrate family. So palace on short staff. Just essentials. Princesses want staff to go home." Softly, "Doesn't mean much for Yapper."

Almost timidly, "Do you miss it?" Pain shared wasn't lessened, but at least the echoes might sound familiar.

The canid seemed to give it some real thought. Nostrils flanges flared in and out.

"Tunnels," she finally said. "Smells and sounds. Feel of it. Warmth of the dark. Tunnels, but... not Dogs. Not for omega. Centaur miss home?"

I want to go home.

"Yes."

...I'm never going home...

That was the thought which stayed with Cerea for the rest of the bath. The canid and centaur didn't talk all that much for the remainder of their time together: the former wanted to provide company while not necessarily being all that good at it, and the latter didn't want to talk about what was going through her head. She'd had someone peering at her thoughts: listening didn't feel like all that much of an improvement.

She wasn't going home. That was a belief, and she recognized it as such. The abandonment of hope seemed to be required when she considered one-half of what had offered it.

But given the probable consequences of what she determined to be her next course of action, it could also be described as the fallout of a decision.

I'm never going home.
How can I ever stay here?

Yapper had curled up on one of the many empty bunks: the canid was tired, and resting in the barracks had been easier than trying to reach her house. Cerea had dried off, then gotten dressed. She had the option to not have that many layers involved: the chill had been scheduled for the overnight portion of the schedule, and Sun had been raised on a day which was quickly heading towards the warmer end of late autumn weather. It was probably because of the holiday. But she made sure to put on a thick sweater, and added a jacket to that. She would be heading into cold.

The centaur quietly moved around the barracks for a while, being careful not to disturb pegasus or canid. She... didn't want to wake them. She didn't want to give them the chance to talk.

Several things were tightly packed into bags, and then had even more things jammed on top of them.

She put on her watch. Checked it every so often. And when she recognized that the locker room was clear, she left the barracks.

The first thing she did upon arriving within the empty space was to extract the hairpins from the safe. It took a few minutes to find an arrangement she liked: most went into her hair, a few wound up within her tail, and there was very little chance of seeing her remove any of them at night again.

She checked her garments. Examined the position of the sword, then drew and sheathed it a few times in quick succession. Practicing, and checking on the speed of the draw. She hadn't gotten all that much sleep, because she hadn't had the hairpins back. It was best to make sure that she was focused enough for the next step.

Not much sleep, but... she didn't feel very tired. It probably had something to do with her blood being at low boil.

She knew where she was going next.
She knew what was going to happen when she did it.
She did it anyway.

By the time the Gate fully opened, Luna's mane and tail were fully restored.

"I will take to my bed soon," she irritably told the first gold helmet which poked into the room. "After I speak with Princess Celestia, as there are undoubtedly things to review. Such as the recounting of the night's events in the newspapers. And I had already sent word ahead that I would seek her out --"

"-- Cerea's trying to leave."

There might have been a moment available for simply staring down at Glimmerglow. Luna immediately decided she couldn't spare it.

The doors which were most frequently used when entering the palace gardens were large, well-maintained, and lacking in ornamentation. They could be reached rather quickly from the Lunar throne room, especially when the hallways were so lacking in population. And they generally didn't have four lightly-vibrating Guards blocking them, but that was just how the day had decided to start.

"I wouldst advise thee to move," arrived in Luna's ears as something which was entirely too calm.

"We're waiting for clearance..." the alicorn heard Sunspot shakily declare.

"As am I," replied the girl. "I am waiting for you to clear the door. While retaining the option of simply clearing it myself --"

-- which was when Luna's gallop brought her around the last corner, and she saw the centaur. The warm clothing. Customized saddlebags, which had been created for the rookie Guard because everyone needed to have a decent carrying capacity, and that capacity had been reached. A hand which was hovering very close to the sword's hilt.

She wanted to speak with the girl. (She still wasn't entirely sure what to say.) But it was something which had to be done in privacy, and to have the centaur on the verge of pulling the weapon had visibly turned the tableau into a bomb.

"Explain," the dark alicorn said as she momentarily flared out her wings, letting the backwards wind blast bleed off momentum: the final stop was about two body lengths away from centaur and door. "What are you attempting to accomplish?"

The centaur calmly turned to look at her, the waist rotating too smoothly, too far, and -- Luna felt that she had learned enough about the expression of that species to recognize that there was no surprise present. Cerea had likely scented her approach, or had simply been expecting somepony to arrive. All things considered, anticipating an alicorn was rather reasonable. It might have been Celestia, it could have been Luna just because Cerea was her guard and either way, that mare would arrive in the company of Inquiries.

"I am leaving," the girl calmly stated.

"She's trying to get into the gardens," Sunspot frantically said. "We told her it's a holiday, and when the schedule has it this nice out... there's too many ponies out there --"

"-- I wish to visit Blitzschritt's statue," Cerea evenly cut in, and the fingers flexed closer to the pommel. "I hast been advised that in times of trouble, it is best to seek the counsel of a knight. Especially the knight who was assigned to me for study."

"There's families taking a Homecoming trot!" the young stallion desperately protested. "We can't just clear --"

Luna took a breath. Measured it carefully, and then double-checked her math throughout the course of the slow exhale.

"Visiting the gardens," the alicorn said, "but not necessarily that portion of them. Which is not truly visible from any location surrounding it. We simply need to block off the mountaintop, and then Cerea may consult her senior in peace."

She looked directly at the centaur, keeping all visible focus on the girl's eyes. It was best if she pretended not to be examining the sword hand too closely. Or the saddlebags.

"Wait but a few minutes," she told her rookie Guard. "We do not need to clear a path: simply to secure a single location. After that, I will teleport you myself." A little more quickly, "And once you have taken the necessary time, I wish for you to attend in my throne room. I had not expected to find us both awake at this hour, but as the coincidence allows us to --"

"-- thou," the girl calmly said, "shalt not take me anywhere."

Luna blinked.

Nightwatch said that you could tell how upset she was by the formality of her speech.
Her posture is almost relaxed. But it's relaxed by design. Something which allows springing into action immediately, without having to overcome tension first.
The movement of a predator --
-- her posture is relaxed. Her words say she's anything but.
She's carrying the sword. No armor, but -- yes, there's one of the hairpins. And she can pull the sword at any moment.
She's recovering from griffon magic. She may not be fully herself just yet.
Or she could just be this upset.
Be careful.

"It is for the sake of expediency," Luna firmly stated. "There are certain considerations --"

Without a single trace of anger or sorrow, "-- when one is moving a prisoner?"

Be very careful.

"You are not a prisoner," Luna stated.

"Canst one come and go as she wishes?" Cerea asked. "Is sight of sky permitted to me, of my own will? To simply stand at any window, without concern as to who might see? I think not. And to teleport with you..."

The girl's volume dropped. Just by a decibel or two. Enough to notice.

"...even without considering that I wouldst need to fully disarm -- I believe you had instructed me to -- place my hand upon thy back. A most disagreeable sensation, I am sure. Let me spare you of it. No."

The last word fell between them.

Luna tried to remain calm. She had to keep control of the situation. Of everything.

And yet, she took one hoofstep forward.

"You have been made aware," the alicorn tightly said, "that there are families outside."

Nothing about the girl moved. "And I am certain they will be aware of me soon 'nough."

She's bluffing.
She doesn't want to scare anypony. To hurt anypony. Based on last night, her instincts --

Sapients went against their best instincts all the time, because the most basic aspect of thought was the ability to justify overriding common sense. And Cerea was an adolescent. Potentially getting close to the end of the transition, but...

Luna told herself the next part was a test. A way to find out just how bad it was, and that definition had aspects of truth. It just wasn't the whole of it.

"You are employed as my Guard," the alicorn softly stated. "I believe you comprehend the function of a chain of command. You are hereby ordered to wait within the palace until such time as your passage can be cleared."

The Guards who were blocking the door were looking at them. From one to the other, over and over.

"Which, I wouldst think," Cerea evenly countered, "brings us to the two differences between a vassal and a prisoner."

The alicorn forced her wings to remain in the rest position. "And that is?"

"The first would be mutual obligation," the centaur observed. "I doth not believe most remember that the lady owes something to her knights." Which was when the blue eyes almost dipped. "Even the poorest excuse for such. One who hast reflected poorly upon the palace, with the ineptitude of her service. To... fail so spectacularly, in public venue and view --"

It was an opening. "Part of what I wished to discuss --"

The girl's features tightened. "-- and that a prisoner does not have the option to depart. But there are circumstance in which a vassal is permitted to withdraw service. Call me not prisoner, but Guard? Then allow me to remind thee that a Guard may qu --"

"STOP."

There had been several reasons for using marble as the palace's primary base material. Among others, it added a certain something to the echoes.

The girl stopped. Her face was placid. But her fingers remained within tail strand widths of the sword.

Luna slowly looked at the waiting Guards. Mostly Solars, given the hour.

"Leave."

The group "Princess --" was automatic.

"LEAVE."

They left.

Cerea didn't move for the door. She simply used the extra space to turn. Bodies and eyes were facing each other now, and the girl seemed to have found a way of implying insult through looking down.

The alicorn stared at the centaur, wondered just how much the stars in her mane and tail were shifting. If there was any visible wobble, as centuries of experience waged silent war against the desperation of youth.

"There is a price for finishing that sentence, even in haste." Too sharp, she's looking for an excuse, this is a bomb which may be trying to decide when and where to go off... "I would rather you did not pay it --"

"I do not have to be a Guard," the girl softly declared. "After the events of the prior eve, one wouldst believe that the palace is better off. And if I am not within thy employ -- then what hold do you have over me?"

"You are an immigrant," began the next try. "Citizens, even those in waiting, are obliged to follow certain orders of the palace --"

"-- and why do I have to remain an immigrant to this land?" was almost peaceful. "Surely there is a nation which would have me. With reluctance, but... I can offer skills. Mazein has most of the metal deposits, do they not? I am certain someone there would wish to know new ways of working the steel. And I have long been curious to meet one of their females --"

Luna was trying to remain calm, and part of that was because she remembered that part of her own life. The years when she had been looking for not just a cause, but something to turn against because that was its own kind of instinct. A need to rebel, and... there were ways in which that had led to everything.

She was still close to her youth, in the deepest part of her heart. But it had been centuries. Adulthood could be a rather reluctant acquisition, but it was also an inevitable one. And there was something about age which defaulted the base reaction to adolescent rebellion into I am getting sick of this.

"-- the process for creating that steel," Luna cut Cerea off, "has been designated as a state secret, until such time as --"

"-- so you would take something within the mind and call it yours?" The rest of the words were forced. "I believe I have some experience with that..."

It only took a fraction of a second before Luna recognized her own next hoofstep as a mistake, and it happened at the moment when the girl's hand closed on the sword's hilt.

She won't draw.
She won't. A dream is one thing, but...
...a dream where she didn't know I had the power to be there.
Within hours of the griffons. The worst time for her to discover...
She's...
...upset.
Lashing out.
But she hasn't gone for the door.
She didn't try to get the Guards out of her way, and... she probably would have won.

Which was when Luna decided she knew what was going on.

She's trying to make me kick her out. Disobey to the point where I would have to fire her. And if it's my decision, then...

Take it slowly.

"What would the Sergeant say?" Luna calmly asked.

Once again, the eyes almost dropped.

"That some failures cannot be forgiven. And that it is best to step aside and let another do the job. Especially with something so important. He would be thankful that I had made the right decision."

"And how do you think you could travel, if you left the palace?" Luna's own side of the script. Reading off what the girl had probably anticipated as her lines.

"That was already asked of me, in a way," the girl allowed. "By Puff Weevil. 'What happens on the day you leave?' The answer has to come eventually, does it not? I travel through the forests, staying close to the rivers and away from the roads. From the settled zones. I find my own food. I could ask for a map with my discharge, but sighting on Sun will suffice without it." Her free hand began to reach for the disc. "Of course, theft is not my intent. Thou shall have this back --"

"The summoners?"

Those fingers paused. The grip on the sword tightened.

"Let them come."

Rebellious and -- worse.
Why now?

But it felt as if that already had an answer.

Quickly, as if time was running out, "Cerea, your thoughts are not clear --"

The blonde tail lashed.

"-- and thou wouldst know, I suppose --"

"-- in the wake of griffon magic. Princess Celestia and I spoke to them last night. They accepted full responsibility for your actions."

"Accepting responsibility," the girl observed with no irony whatsoever, "for the failure of another? Quaint."

More urgently, "They wished to visit, when you were ready to see them! To apologize! But you still need time to recover, and we must talk. There are things I need to say --"

"-- and there is nothing," Cerea stated, "which I wish to hear."

The alicorn could have wished for words. There were any number of things she could have wished for as they looked at each other across a gap which felt larger than worlds, and her first desire was for something which could buy her time. An interruption, a delay, anything which granted her extra hours to come up with the sentences which would fix everything, because the girl couldn't leave. Not this way. Not after... everything.

There were ways in which the second oldest pony in the world made a wish and when she heard the heaviest hooffalls in the nation on the hurried approach, she realized it had come true -- half a second before she remembered that wishing was for fools.

Of course. I dismissed Solar Guards. Who naturally decided that I shouldn't be managing the situation, so they went directly for what they saw as the greater authority --

-- and Celestia, moving at a fair speed, came around the last turn.

The white horn was lit, but only with a partial corona. A tight bundle of stacked papers was floating along her right side, and the elder's expression was --

"I'm going to ask a favor," the huge mare quickly said. "From both of you. One each. Princess Luna, I need you to come with me. Immediately. And Cerea... I was just briefed. The gardens are being cleared. It's an effort, but -- it's being done." There wasn't a hint of a wince on the white features, or the ghost of a sigh. The expression was darker than that. "I'm requesting -- and it is a request, nothing more -- that you stay on the grounds for a while. Because we do need to ask you some questions. Not just about last night, but --"

She stopped. Feathers rustled along the fringe of white wings. By contrast, the half-tangible tail lashed to the right, and came within hoofwidths of slamming the wall.

"Actually," the elder corrected herself, "when it comes to the foreseeable future, last night may have to go hang. Please, Cerea. Stay on the grounds, wait to enter the gardens until the doors open from the outside, and come back to the palace in no more than three hours. Will you give me that much?"

Was it the nature of the mare asking the question, which made the girl's hand release the hilt? The tone? Or simply the fact that it hadn't been Luna?

"...I shall," the centaur said. "My word."

Celestia nodded, just once.

"Princess Luna," the elder said, "with me. Cerea, three hours. Wind your watch, please. The clockwork does run down."

Celestia turned. Luna followed suit, forced herself not to glance back at the girl. Trotted around the bend, and she was still following, all this time and still following...

"I could have managed that." If it was a lie, then -- well, neither of them had been Honesty. "Another minute --"

But her sister was accelerating. Not just noticeably: to the point where it would have stood out to any observer, including those who didn't understand that an alicorn could move that fast. They almost never used that kind of hoof pace in the palace...

Instantly, "-- which is a minute we may not have."

Luna forced her own speed to increase. Hoofbeats began to sound eight-time rhythms along the corridor.

"There is a new crisis." Because of course there was. The world had given her a disaster just to buy time, and that was why you didn't make wishes.

"Worse," the elder grimly said. "We may have a repeat." And just as Luna's stars would dim, the borders of the pastel mane were slowing in their flow, with the colors becoming less distinct. Muddy.

It's bad. "The details?"

"Read on the gallop," Celestia darkly told her, and the bubble of papers moved across the gap. "The word's going to be spreading through the city in minutes, and I'm going to have suicide prevention squads right behind it."

It's worse.

"Suicide prevention," Luna tried. "Sister, why --"

"But we've got a little warning," the elder half-growled. "Just a little. Because in our case, the Tattler decided to do something very special. First copy off the press..."

The Special Edition rested on the kitchen table between them.

Most of the newspapers had placed the party's events on their front page. (This included the Bugle, where Raque had done her best to turn a complete lack of fatalities into the focus of the whole thing, while implying the griffons had been set up.) And it was 'most' because of one paper. The Tattler had pushed things all the way back to Page Four.

It was all about priorities, at least when it came to the Special Edition. The first release of the day's paper had featured the party. But after that... well, there were times when you had to run off another printing, just as quickly as you could. After all, they had an exclusive.

"We will send somepony to their offices." It was something to do. An order Luna could give. The first thing to do while standing on the edge of a reopened precipice, waiting to see if the world fell in. "Immediately. To bring her here --"

"-- why send one pony?"

She looked up at her sister. The thin, angry smile.

"I've been dealing with her longer, Luna," the elder said. "Wishing that I didn't have to, or that there was a way to stop which didn't have somepony worse filling the vacuum. And with her... no matter what we do, you know how she'll describe it. A full unit in armor, come to virtually arrest her." The shadows clustered within the undertones. "So... why not let her set a personal record? Telling the truth not just twice, but in a row. We send a full unit. And they drag her back. Possibly in a net."

And now Luna was staring, as the smile thinned a little more. Listening to a pony she hadn't seen in a very long time.

"A postponed pleasure," Celestia stated. "Something we should try to squeeze in before the end of the world..."

The huge white rib cage shifted. Out, then in.

"But the thoughts aren't the same as the deed," the elder finished. "No matter what she might say, if she knew about it -- and she would say something. Or write it. Still, there's nothing wrong with having the thought. It's a test of sorts. Being able to reject the fantasy is how we know our souls are still intact."

Luna silently nodded, and they both looked at the newspaper again.

THE MAGIC GOES AWAY!

Ponies sickened! Devices drained!

HOW IS THE CENTAUR RESPONSIBLE?

"No full unit," the elder finished. "No net. Two Guards, with at least one escort-capable. Accompanied by one attorney, in case the Tattler decides to put up another kind of fight."

"Wordia Spinner," Luna concluded. "In the palace, standing before the two of us."

Celesta nodded. The newspaper began to smolder.

"Within three hours," the white mare spat. "Let's just think of it as our chance at an exclusive..."

Callous

There was a certain question as to whether the Solar throne room was now hosting a monster.

It had required something of an effort to bring Wordia in. Celestia had been ready for the Tattler to set up a spirited, public, loud, and completely pointless legal defense, because certain statutes had been written into Equestria's founding documents and there was clearly nothing the palace would do which was more powermongering than requesting that ponies obey the law. But when it came to interacting with those who resided within their nation, the sisters had a number of recorded rights. In this case, they could call any citizen (or citizen-in-waiting) to stand before the thrones. It was something which had been tested a few times in court before this, and the most any defense had ever managed to install as a non-weakening subclause was that the palace had to compensate the summoned party for travel expenses and any lost wages. If the opinion columnist had been summoned, she had to appear.

But it was the Tattler. Wordia's employers could be reasonably expected to put up a fight, because the only rights some ponies believed in were their own. And that non-magical summoning was probably going to be Page Two for tomorrow: after all, if you were claiming status as the eternally-persecuted majority, it helped to have a piece of evidence which was only partially falsified.

Anticipation of a legal skirmish was why Celestia had sent a palace attorney with the fetching Guards, and... that had been its own problem, because it was a holiday and most of the legal system was shut down. Equestria's courts locked their doors on Homecoming, and the palace itself was running on short staff. Guards were always about, but there had been some trouble in just finding a Solar attorney: the one they'd finally used had been called out of her kitchen, with both apologies and overtime.

It was a holiday, and... Celestia was starting to wonder if that could save lives. News required time in which to travel and for some ponies, it would have to travel rather far. Canterlot's population had, to some small degree, scattered across the nation. On Homecoming, if it was at all possible, you went home. Those who weren't native to the city tried to reach their birthplaces, and the ones who had come back to the capital's streets were often too busy greeting multiple generations to bother with newspapers. Some residents would only hear about the story on time delay, and she already had the suicide prevention squads moving down streets and air paths alike. Equipped with devices which searched for the emotional resonance of despair.

There was also a certain question as to whether the summoned party cared about any aspect of the fallout which could come from words --

-- they'd anticipated some degree of fight, just to get Wordia into the Solar throne room. And it wasn't just the pointless challenge of legality. You could only be summoned to the palace if you'd been officially notified of the request. Give a Tattler intern the chance to sneak off after seeing the Guards, and Celestia had also anticipated that the true word might be delivered on the run. (There was one obvious choice of first destination for that theoretical intern, which was why Celestia had sent a second team to Wordia's residence.) The Tattler couldn't stop the summons, but a strong chain of information relay might have delayed it for a full cycle.

Except that... it was a holiday.

The typical newspaper never truly rested. A story could break at any hour, and the first publication to reach the street would gain the advantage. The endless battle for that edge required Solar shifts leaving notes for their Lunar counterparts and when something big wasn't happening, the next set of blank pages still needed to be filled. Sports, cultural essays, special interest stories, and Luna steadfastly avoided just about all critical reviews: she had her own opinions, and didn't trust the vast majority of ponies to express their own well enough to create any degree of override.

You had to pay out a lot in salary when you were running a newspaper or, if you operated the Tattler, you found a number of excuses for shortchanging your staff: after all, just getting to labor for such a just cause should really be payment enough. And when a holiday appeared on the calendar... then it was just about the same for every paper. The Advertising and Editorial offices were just about full, because the day after Homecoming was the traditional start for Hearth's Warming sales and somepony had to make sure that purchased-in-full 10% Off banner didn't wind up with an extra zero. But holiday editions tended to be a little thinner than the average. And even in the wake of the party, even when it was the Tattler... if the calendar said you could send ponies home, you did. Especially if you got to do so without paying them for the time off and could make the remaining staff put in double the work at the standard rate.

Celestia's own Guards had encountered very little difficulty in going out through the protesters. Even in the wake of the party, there had been a one-day cutdown in the numbers. The rage could wait until tomorrow: for today, many of those who hated were content to be with their families. This was generally defined as those who agreed with them: for quite a few, it was a requirement which had cut the ties of blood.

(There had been... somewhat more difficulty with getting back in. It was the reason why the hanging tapestries kept shaking in a nonexistent wind.)

And when they'd reached the Tattler offices... lessened security, just about every staff attorney at home, and Wordia...

The unicorn had returned during the small hours. Told everypony to prepare for a fresh printing, then went directly for her typewriter. And after she had finished, she'd stumbled into a back room: a place used by the underpaid for some degree of recovery, because it might not be considered as sleeping on the job if you weren't at your desk.

She had been there still when the palace team had arrived. Poorly curled up atop a pile of the cheap saddlebags which were offered to new subscribers: something which offered all the softness and comfort of newsprint, along with sharing quite a bit of the base material. And when she twitched in her sleep, flecks of dried blood fell away from her coat.

The unicorn (or the monster) was in the Solar throne room now. There had been no time available for self-grooming: some of the fur was out of grain just from the way she'd been curled upon the pile, while the remainder was shifting as an extra display of rebellion. The whites of her eyes were tinged with red to match the irises: something which indicated a pony who hadn't found enough true rest and had chosen to fuel her body with temporarily-silent rage.

There was also a certain lingering scent. By her own written words, the unicorn had been through what she'd described as the return of a pony's greatest trauma and in the wake of that renewed pain, she'd self-medicated.

The columnist was currently about five body lengths away from the base of the ramp which led up to the Solar throne. It was giving her some difficulties in glaring at both siblings. Celestia was on the cushions, while Luna had chosen to remain at floor level, slightly off to the left. The visual projection of anger just couldn't be done with a single sight line.

Celestia looked at the three waiting Guards.

"This is a private meeting," she told them. "You can --"

"You mean without witnesses," Wordia immediately interjected.

The elder shook her head.

"There's a witness," she softly said. "Look to your right, Wordia -- "

"Once the Guards are gone," the unicorn tightly declared, "it's just the three of us in this room. I didn't see anypony else when you forced me through the doors --"

"-- and if you don't want to look," Celestia continued, "then you'll never see it. So we'll leave it at that. There is a witness. A fully neutral one. And it's your decision not to verify that." Back to the Guards. "We are both here, and --"

"-- you had no right to take my notebook!"

"-- her weapon," Celestia finished, "is being inspected for workings. It'll be returned later. And as this is a private meeting, it's also unnecessary. Please leave."

Slowly, the Guards filed out. (The longest-serving of them made sure that Celestia caught him glancing back. Three times.) And then the doors closed.

Luna took a small step forward.

"While there is a witness," and the chill in the younger's voice began to suffuse the marble, "for the purposes of your 'journalism', this meeting is considered to be -- off your newspaper's record. So now the witness has that recorded as well." And as ice sharpened the edge of the words, "Not that I would imagine such actually means anything to you..."

She's been awake too long.

There was often a certain practiced flow of deliberate mood shifts between the sisters, when they were in the same room with a hostile party. The sunny smile and the lashing tail. One would happily step forward to present what she openly hoped would come across as reasonable terms, and whoever they were dealing with would almost inevitably glance to the side and wonder whether it was really worth taking a chance on upsetting that tail.

But this was Wordia.

Celestia had been dealing with Wordia for years. And throughout so many of the encounters, a certain question had been building in the elder's mind. Something which was about to affect how they tried to deal with her.

We could threaten you. Very easily. I'm guessing there's already going to be at least one statement which will be interpreted that way, and it may come from me. Possibly several. But a monster wouldn't care about the threats, because that's the definition. It would just bask in our helplessness, and wait to see how much worse everything became.

You know what you wrote down. The city is in the process of finding out. I know that, because I have ponies out there trying to mitigate the worst of the fear reactions.

They have a reason to be afraid.

A monster doesn't care about fear, either. Not as anything except a source of amusement and pleasure.

This is where we find out if you're a monster, Wordia.

It's the sort of question which ends in a binary choice. There's two possible answers.

One of them terrifies me.

"I'd like to talk about your most recent article," Celestia began: the new words just barely cut off the forced expression of false indignation before it could completely take over Wordia's face.

"And you just had to summon me to the palace in order to do that," the mare fumed. "You practically had me dragged through the streets --"

"-- when it came to departing from the offices, you trotted," Luna cut her off. "With company, to make sure the direction remained consistent. Then you tried to make a stop at a place near the base of the building. Something you said was for food, but the nature of the business which you wished to visit would suggest something more towards --" The younger alicorn deliberately paused. "-- I suppose 'refreshment' might apply. Or perhaps you simply had a desire for overly-salted peanuts. Or salt. And then you did your best to both refuse and counter -- poorly -- a teleport."

"Which happened anyway," Wordia half-snarled. "I didn't consent to --"

"-- the palace," Celestia interrupted, "may summon any citizen. Transport is by whatever means are necessary. You would even be compensated for lost work hours, but I'm guessing the fact that we found you sleeping means you were off-shift. Time was of the essence, Wordia: something I think you know. But you did your best to push off all contact, because you also know a teleport escort generally requires being touched. You claimed any unwanted contact would be assault, loudly enough to make the Guards reluctant to try even a brief touch in public. You tried to stay ahead and to help yourself do so, you took one of the least-used approach roads. Something nopony else was trying, as the herd tends to move together. And I'm sure you were hoping to pass through the protesters on your way in. Letting yourself be recognized, waiting for it to set a new flame ablaze. But..."

The elder slowly shook her head.

"The Guards informed me that the presses in your building were constantly stamping," Celestia softly continued. "I wonder how many extra copies you've sold? It's certainly reaching beyond your usual audience. The word spreads, ponies who doubt pick up a copy to read the story for themselves, and then... some of them gave up on Homecoming entirely. Or found a new way to celebrate, through galloping here in the company of their families. It's giving your usual crowd some rather strange company. United in fear."

"And you froze, when you saw just how many there were outside the gates," Luna added. "I would not care to guess whether it was in shock or from pleasure -- yet. But it provided the chance to bring you in via teleport, and to do so before they saw you."

"And now," Celestia finished, "I'm hoping we can talk. Because a front-page story suggests something which the writer sees as important."

"You don't know what's important," the mare countered. "You haven't bothered to listen in --"

"-- is the story accurate, Wordia Spinner?" The iceberg of Luna's cold question slipped into the mare's verbal lane. "Did you recount the draining as it actually occurred?"

"And now you're accusing the Tattler of lying," emerged with a sneer.

Celestia stood up.

It was the movement which got Wordia's attention. The speed of it, along with all the ways in which the world's largest mare was no longer trying to downplay her size.

"I don't have time for this," the elder stated, and hooves began to casually slam their way down the ramp. "I'm not sure anypony has time for this. Or, for that matter, anyone. You stalled enough on your way in. You cost us time and when I say 'us', Wordia, I just might mean everyone in the world. Is the story accurate?"

The unicorn didn't move. Didn't tremble, didn't surrender a tail strand's worth of the marble floor. She simply chose to stare up.

"For what I experienced," Wordia declared, "yes. It's a very familiar sensation, Princess. Not that either of you would know, as two of the first ones out. Evacuated, while so many were trying to fight --"

"-- evacuated," Celestia softly said, "so that Sun and Moon had the chance to rise on a second day's battle. I would hope that something within you understands that."

It just doesn't necessarily care.

The unicorn took one step forward. Opened her mouth, and rage speared the marble.

"It was supposed to be over! You told us we were safe! And it's happening again, it's starting all over again and somepony had to sound the alarm, had to spread the word! I have the right to ask questions! To ask how this is all connected to the centaur --"

"Spread the word," Celestia said. And the hollow sentence echoed within white ears.

"The public knows! They're out there demanding answers, because that's their right --"

"-- you gained crucial information," Luna cut in, as every syllable crackled with frost. "And you took it to press. To inform the public. But there was another possible destination, Wordia Spinner. One which I cannot make myself believe you ever considered."

All things considered, "I don't know what you two are talking about!" emerged a little too quickly.

Two more hoofsteps down the ramp.

"You could have approached the palace," Celestia told her. "Let us know what was happening." Thoughtfully, as lead filled the hollows in her words, "I can't guarantee I would have believed you immediately, Wordia. There's too much between us for that. But given the topic, and the accuracy of your descriptions... we would have investigated. It's too important not to look into it. And if you'd come to us, you would have bought us at least a few hours: all the time that's passed since your encounter."

"But you went to press," Luna sharply followed, and the silver-clad hooves took their own step. "Told the public, and the populace feels helpless, Wordia Spinner. Not knowing what they can do to stop or fight it, not when everything failed before. Victory came at the very last, and --" her head briefly, reluctantly dipped, for her memories were both ancient and scarred --" that resource is lost to us. You spoke first to the public, and allowed the despair to return. Not the ones who could have tried to stop it. For the sake of hate."

"For the sake of fear," Celestia softly added.

The fur of the unicorn's mark seemed to be rippling.

"...for the sake of the story," Wordia half-whispered, and did so in the general direction of the floor. "For the story..."

Celestia paused. About halfway down the ramp.

"And you call yourself Equestrian," the elder said. "Taking crucial hours away from your nation, for the sake --"

"More than you," the unicorn told the floor.

Two alicorns mutually raised their eyebrows.

"Speaking as one of this nation's founders --" Luna sarcastically began.

"-- centuries ago!" The mare's snout was starting to lift. "And ever since then, you've been in here! Listening to words echo off the walls! You don't know what ponies are now, what ponies want --"

"-- and by 'ponies'," Celestia harshly stated, "you mean 'everypony who agrees with you'. And nopony else. I'm not going to have this argument right now, because an argument implies the other party might be willing to debate. Debate requires acknowledging there's a chance you could be wrong. And with you, nopony has that much time. So I need to be sure, Wordia. Once again: is your description of the momentary draining fully accurate? The effects on living and enchanted alike?"

The mare's head shot up. Furious red eyes shifted left, then not quite far enough to the right --

-- let me guess. You're looking for planter pots. If I had a zebra and a supply of seeds, I would be using them, Wordia. If this was nearly thirteen centuries ago, that would be the least of what I might consider using --

"YES."

I wish you hadn't said that.

This is where I wanted you to be playing your usual tricks. Because it would mean that we didn't have to deal with this again. That we had more of a chance.

Also, if you were lying and that crowd outside gets any more panicky before I can finish having the weather altered, then I'm pretty sure I could charge you with inducing a riot.

With purely internal darkness, I'm still trying to decide what happens if the vibrations of their voices knock any tapestries down. The creative fields are Luna's legal dominion. I'd have to check with her to see if there's a statute covering Unintentional Artslaughter. The cells are right below us, and one of them was recently cleaned...

The younger glanced at her sibling. There was a rather familiar focus on the set of Celestia's chin.

You've never been able to enter daydreams.

Not that you really need to.

They both took another step.

"Then the palace will investigate," Luna declared. "But that has its own requirement."

The unicorn's rib cage was heaving in and out. Her eyeline kept moving, from one to the other.

"You wrote about a lot in your article," Celestia noted. "In my opinion, as somepony who isn't exactly a fan -- it was some of your best work."

"And yet, certain aspects were left out," Luna observed. "An odd lack, but -- we have summoned you in hopes of seeing all details disseminated."

"Every investigation needs a starting point," the elder finished. "And you didn't give a location. Where are we going, Wordia? Where can we try to stop this?"

And they waited, as the mare's breathing slowed.

"I don't know where I was picked up," the unicorn said. "Or dropped off. I was blindfolded. The windows were covered. And I was pitched out of the carriage in a patch of wild zone, in the dark."

"Under a nearly-full Moon," Luna indicated. "I am certain that gave you some assistance in recognizing the land's features. And will help to describe them now."

Wordia glared at her.

"You are quite welcome," the younger unnecessarily added. "Describe."

"How would I find it again?" the mare challenged. "How would anypony, even from the air? It's a wild zone! So much of it probably looks alike --"

"-- an accurate description would help," the younger pointed out.

"But in the event of similar locations, we do have a distinguishing factor," Celestia noted. "And you can help us narrow it down before that, Wordia. Because you pay very close attention to detail." Purple eyes briefly narrowed. "I've noticed that over the years. You always try to know exactly what's going on. It's part of how you can decide which aspects to ignore."

"You protected yourself," Luna decided, and the first tail-held star shed its outer shell. "Armor composed of willful ignorance and imagination. Everything you felt was required to claim you could not track your passage. But... while I have not known you as long as my sister, Wordia Spinner, I do not feel you would allow yourself to become fully lost. I believe you have some idea of where you were. Enough to give us a general zone in which we may begin the search."

"And if there are near-identical locations," Celestia failed to smile, "then it's still easy. We're looking for the one with carriage tracks."

The mare froze.

"Ah," Luna said. "Not one of those enchanted to wipe out its own trail, then?"

The long white tail was beginning to fray.

"...I can't."

"Your pardon?" the younger openly lied.

"...I -- can't betray a source," the mare whispered. "I'd never get another. If I knew... if I gave any indication that I knew anything... I only got that interview because they knew I wouldn't --"

"-- I was going to reach that eventually," Celestia cut her off. "That you spent the night speaking with a criminal."

"Alleged!"

"A pony of interest, then," Luna pretended to correct. "One whom the palace has been searching for. I recognize that the events of the evening pushed that part of the story to an inner page -- but you did print it, Wordia Spinner." The chill of her tones threatened to split the marble. "Allow me to quote a portion. 'I'm innocent. It wasn't my fault. It was an accident' --"

Which just made the mare's lips twitch.

"Huh," the unicorn said. "Now there's an exclusive. First contractions."

Luna glared at her. The mare used the transferred energy to rally.

"Innocent until proven guilty," the unicorn declared. "That's how you claim the courts are supposed to work, isn't it? She got to tell her side of the story."

Such as it was.

I've been wondering how much you had to leave out. It was so thin. As if you didn't have much to work with. I'm familiar with your style, Wordia. It says a lot to me when expressions and body posture never enter the equation. And to get that little of her speech...

"I spent a night with a pony of interest," the unicorn told them, "as a neutral observer. If you find the cart tracks, then you could potentially find her. Somepony who hasn't been proven guilty. And it's giving up a source. I won't."

They both looked at her for a few seconds.

"If you're worried about being targeted for reprisal --" Celestia began.

Every muscle on the mare's body went tight at once.

"-- I'm a journalist."

Are you?
That's what your mark says.
Not the words. Not what you write.
Not until now.

"You can't solve this," the mare harshly decided. "You couldn't the first time. And everypony knows you're not going to do the sensible thing, which is taking the monster in the basement and getting rid of it --"

"You didn't give an exact time for your incident," Celestia observed. "Regardless, I'm pretty sure I can verify Cerea's whereabouts for the entire duration."

"Which reminds me," the mare sneered. "Any chance of seeing her charged with inducing a riot? Or is the palace still bending the rules to protect anything but the citizenry? And when it comes to her being responsible for what happened to the carriage -- this never happened in Equestria, never until there were centaurs --"

You're terrified and you're trying to take it out on us.
Not that you wouldn't do the same thing if you weren't scared. But you'd be more subtle about it.
And the smell would be weaker.
The Guards said there were two empty bottles in the back room, Wordia. Two.
Is that your usual amount? More? All you could find?
Are you a journalist?
Is that what you tell yourself?
Or is that the whisper which the bottles are meant to drown?
How much does it take every night, just so you can pretend?

"Would you like me to bring her here?" Celestia offered. "So you could tell her this yourself?"

The mare's eyes weren't getting any less wide. "You would --"

"You are accusing her," Luna pointed out. "Equestrian law, Ms. Spinner. She has the right to face you."

"In court," the unicorn shot back. "Not that you would ever let it get that far, not the way you control things, pretending you're just trying to find out --"

"Incidents with palace staff often find the palace investigating," Luna allowed. "We are trying to learn the truth of events."

"Tell the capital which lies you want the truth to be," entered the world completely free of speaker-acknowledged irony.

"The palace," Celestia reframed, "works with the police. And has been known to step aside for them. But when it's staff -- yes, we have been known to get involved." And then, in perfect concert with the steps which brought her to the base of the ramp, "It's how I can potentially justify dealing with you."

Watching the red eyes attempting to stop blinking didn't make the whole thing worth it. Nothing could have managed that. But somewhere within an internal ledger of pain, Celestia considered 0.0001% of the books to have been balanced.

"...what?" The mare's back hooves tried to kick out against the marble, slipped slightly to the sides: she recovered just before her buttocks would have hit the floor. "You're.. you're going to come after me because I asked questions about a monster --"

Celestia's eyebrows went up again. "You don't know? And here you've always claimed to be fully familiar with rights. Every one you personally possess -- well, not quite personally: the ones who agree with you can borrow anything you're not currently using -- and the ones you claim the palace shouldn't have. And this is one of the oldest, Wordia. The one which allows Equestria to call upon its citizens. In an emergency -- say, the sort of emergency which was implied by what you went through --"

She began to cross the distance between the ramp's base and the mare. Letting her shadow lead the way, and loomed.

"-- should their talents be required to combat the crisis -- then I can impress anypony in the nation -- or anyone, for that matter -- onto the palace staff. It's actually how the Bearers were originally treated, until the stipend came in --"

The echo of "Anyone," came from a rather unexpected source.

Celestia glanced at her sibling, and did so just in time to see the half-smile.

"Does this explain the frog?" Luna asked.

It was a crisis. It was, at what felt like the near end of the catastrophe curve, a potential apocalypse.

"Because there is a frog in the palace gardens," the younger thoughtfully continued. "One with a little patch of fen to itself, and a sign proclaiming it to be a Royal Frog. Perhaps the Royal Frog. I am certainly aware of no others. So -- impressed onto the staff during a crisis?" Her head tilted to the left under the weight of inquiry. "I presume it performed well, given the scope of its reward. And yet I could find nothing in the records. So, assuming that the details are not so classified that I somehow cannot hear them --"

And yet it still wasn't so bad that one sister couldn't take a moment to needle the other.

"-- the frog," Celestia broke in, fighting to keep her face straight in the wake of Wordia's utter confusion, "has served. With dignity. Anypony can be placed upon the staff. Anyone." And if we all live that long, at some point during the next week, Luna is going to try and make me say 'Anyfrog'. In public. It's bad enough that we have the witness...

She almost looked to the side then. At the little glint of glass embedded in the wall. As it was, all she could do was hope that the clockwork on the movie camera was clicking along, and that the wires near the tapestries weren't so high up as to lose the sound. It wasn't her first time dealing with Wordia, and she'd finally decided to make her own record of events.

Of course, she would just declare that Luna's illusion skills faked the whole thing, as those do show up on film. But for the sake of personal satisfaction...

"Anypony," Celestia repeated as she finished her approach. "Anyone."

Stopped.

"You."

Wordia stopped blinking. Breathing was close behind.

"One word," the colder voice said. "A single utterance, Ms. Spinner, and you work for us. As a direct hire. And then we can begin to give you -- orders."

"The Tattler would probably fight it," the falsely-warmer tones noted. "Assuming they feel like paying the fees. It has been contested a few times in court, with every case lost. Of course, getting this one scheduled would normally take a few moons. And given what you wrote about, I suspect we're going to be a little too busy to move anything up the docket."

"Admittedly, this might give you temporary access to classified information," Luna openly considered as she finished closing in. "But I personally have a means prepared for dealing with that. I simply need to inform you that passing such on to the public might be considered as -- treason. And that is simply for verbal recounting. Imagine what would happen if you... wrote it down..."

They both stopped. Stared down at the unicorn, whose back legs were steadfastly refusing to give out.

"You can't," Wordia whispered.

"I'm pretty sure I just established that legally," Celestia offered, "we can."

"You call us dictators," Luna observed in vocal neutrality. "Or as close as you can come through your written coding. All of which comes with layers of protective denial, so that you can claim you never meant that, and we are simply reading it that way as a means of attacking your beliefs. But that is how you wish others to see us, Wordia Spinner. Dictators and tyrants. Those who act without restraint. Who do what they wish, because they can."

"Who endlessly abuse their power," Celestia placidly added. "Who don't care what anypony thinks. Who would take out any true opposition with a hoof to the head and a horn through the skull."

"After all," Luna asked, "who would stop us?"

The mare found one breath.

"Monsters," she whispered. "Monsters --"

"-- and there's the lie," Celestia casually shrugged. "The lie you're aware of, on some level. Because it's the lie which lets you exist."

She carefully sat down: hindquarters only, so as to maintain the height advantage, and the younger did the same.

Desperately, the final burst from somepony who was trying to tell herself that any last words had to reach open air before the end, "There is no --"

"-- absolute dictators and tyrants," Luna offered, "who allow the opposition to have its own newspapers. Without influence, control, or censorship. Without laws designed to shut the Tattler's doors, assuming we bothered to invoke any law at all. Without attacking those whom you insist we see as the enemy." And with perfect calm, "If we were what you wish others to perceive us as, Wordia Spinner, you would exist as a very small pile of frost-coated ash."

"And yet," Celestia gently finished, "here you are. I don't doubt that you hate us, Wordia." It was almost a laugh. "I'm not delusional enough to take the possibility of your playing this as an act seriously. Oh, I'm sure there's a few who would write anything as long as it kept the bits coming -- but with you, it's real. You hate us. I think part of you celebrated the Return, because it meant you got to move off just hating me. The gift of an extra target. And I could ask if there was anything I could do, to make that hate stop -- but I know what the answer is."

"You could stop," the unicorn hissed. "You can't change. You're not capable of it, or listening to the true voices of Equestria. So you could step down and let real ponies --"

"-- huh," the elder said. "Still not ash."

The mare blinked.

"...heh."

Both sisters leaned in.

"Your pardon?" Luna didn't quite lie.

Silence.

"...I need a drink," the mare said. "You drag me in here, and I can't even get a drink..."

Luna's horn ignited. The field projection moved behind the throne, fetched a waiting mug and chilled it along the way. Brought it to a stop with the hoof loop facing the mare's right foreleg.

The unicorn looked down.

"Water," she muttered, voice emerging on a level just below her own awareness. "I said a drink..."

She slipped her hoof through the loop, raised the mug and swallowed the contents.

"I know you hate me," Celestia semi-repeated. "Us, these days. It's not up for debate, Wordia. There's no reason to debate a proven point. So I'm going to ask you a question. Do you hate us enough to watch the world die?"

The mare put her foreleg down again. Nothing else about her moved.

"I suppose," Luna contemplated, "there would be some satisfaction in filing the last story. The one which lets you tell everypony just how right you truly were. But who survives to read it?"

"You told us that we're not capable of change." Celestia pushed backwards with her forelegs, allowed her body to slide as the forward portion started to dip: Luna matched her. "That's how you feel. I won't debate an emotional stance, either. But you can have one in response, Wordia -- still off the record." Her own lips twitched. "If that matters. My stance is that I don't think you'll ever change your mind about us. The columns will always hit on the same themes. The distortions. You'll always have your hate. Something you won't fully explain, because we're not worthy of hearing the reasons -- and I'm guessing you've also decided we can't understand."

"We still have yet to destroy you," Luna made a point of noticing as her barrel contacted the floor. "But this is your chance to destroy us, is it not? There will simply be a certain amount of -- collateral damage."

"You claim to be a real Equestrian," Celestia softly began her final argument. "More so than we could ever be, in these days. What's your hope, Wordia? That we only solve it after the deaths mount?"

How many ponies tried to kill themselves today, out of fear?
How many were stopped?
Every attempt, every horror of a success -- all blamed on us. On Cerea. Never yourself.
Do you even care about that? I would ask you, but... it's the wrong time. And I'll always wonder. If you just want the deaths to torment us, if getting the right headline meant you were hoping for deaths...
Or do you try not to think about everything which could come from your words?
Maybe that's what the bottles are for.

"Can you tell me that all of those fatalities will come from what you see as our side?" the elder continued. "How many readers are you willing to lose to be right? How many settled zones? Nations? You claim to be a real Equestrian, and -- that means watching it fall? Discord... isn't coming, Wordia. And we've both given you an argument: that your system only works if we can't be what you want to believe."

"I personally doubt you will let yourself truly, permanently perceive that," the younger sighed. "Certainly not after you leave this room. So -- view it from this perspective, Ms. Spinner. If we can never reconcile... then can we all agree that we need a world in which there are living beings to express that hatred? As the dead tend to purchase very few newspapers..."

The mare's tongue shifted against her teeth. Pushed against the backs, as if trying to make sure they were all still there.

"Give me a trade," the unicorn finally said. "An exclusive interview with the centaur --"

The "No," emerged from both siblings at the same time, and did so with enough force to counter the vibrations from the terrified mob.

"Why?" With a smirk, "You say she's innocent. This is her chance to tell the world about it. What does she have to fear?"

"The twisting of terms," Luna replied.

And, Celestia internally added, I am not pairing somepony who's going to place blame for everything, with someone who, according to a very reluctant Nightwatch, seems to take blame for everything. "We're also a little short on time."

Besides -- there's one thing you want more.

Celestia lowered her head. Gazed up at the mare, with eyes wide and helpless. It took a very perceptible moment before Luna tried to match.

"Wordia," the elder softly said, "please..."

And the siblings waited.
For the monster.
For the mare.
For the entity between them to decide which one it was going to be.

"If there's reprisals --" the unicorn began.

"We'll protect you."

"We may," the younger declared, "consult with you on the composition of an article regarding how you had no choice but to speak." Thoughtfully, "Of course, that would make us co-authors. I would insist on editorial control."

The mare's lips quirked.

"Protection," she considered. "Assuming she somehow isn't responsible for this, then can I get the centaur? -- and that was the response I was expecting."

Another smirk, and then she fell silent. Using up time...

"Any medical information from the Doctors Quacks about the effects of ingesting toxins in centaur tail hair? I heard a rumor on my way in."

Neither sibling dignified that with a response. The mare took a breath.

"The palace is supposed to have a stock of wine in the lower levels," Wordia said. "Some of the rarest, most expensive wine in the world. I'm going to name a vintage, and one of you is going to bring it up. Her for preference, since that might let it be properly chilled. And on your way back, make sure you fetch a map."

There were two maps, in the end. The one which Wordia had used to sketch out her best deduction regarding the journey up to the point of incident, which had the area indicated as Classified. The version which the sisters had spread out in the now fully private Solar throne room was correctly labeled.

They had been staring at it for some time. Minutes which they might not strictly have to spare, but -- they had to think.

"We don't have a choice," Celestia finally said. "We knew we had to investigate. But we can't afford to leave this one on the surface. Not if it's him. But..."

"But," Luna repeated. "Second-guessing, Tia? Or looking for a different possibility?"

"It's not Cerea," Celestia firmly declared. "It can't be, not unless her very arrival disrupted something -- and if that was the case, I think we'd be seeing the results a lot closer to home. In our home. It's not even anything she dropped or touched. She's never been there. But when it comes to him -- even if he somehow regained the capacity, he never operated at this kind of range. It felt like there was an aura of sorts, but to work through that much matter..."

"Matter," Luna added, "and the darkest of the deep places. Which is after we consider that this pattern does not match his previous behavior. A moment of drain. Not the totality."

"But the effect got the devices," Celestia noted. "Every bit of charge. Maybe he can tell when he's gotten something living, and releases it?"

With perfect dryness, "Oh, good. Clearly his current setting would have had an effect upon him. Reform is possible, sister. He has become an environmentalist." The dark brow furrowed. "Or... he recognizes pony magic, and lets it go. Trying to keep from being caught. And perhaps he cannot return thaums to the inanimate."

"We don't know."

"We cannot even be fully sure that it is him," Luna pointed out. "There is simply a primary suspect. One whose current status we must ascertain." Darkly, "And should we be right, then anypony we send in to evaluate the situation will merely serve as fuel --"

"-- anypony?" Celestia said, and did so through the thinnest smile in the world.

Luna blinked.

"Tia --"

"-- we'll need somepony to get her in," the elder said. "She won't be able to enter on her own. That means --" the white features contorted across the wince "-- that I'm about to give a certain somepony exactly what she wanted. She's just not going to like the price --"

Not frantically, but with verbal hooves fast approaching the border of I Need You To Hear Me, "-- the confrontation you interrupted -- we need to discuss --"

"-- and they'll have to stay outside," Celestia decided. "Possibly well outside, if the range is this bad. But we have to risk letting them put her through the Aornum Gate. It's the only one we can count on."

"-- she and I -- an issue has arisen, and we cannot proceed until it is solved, fixed --"

"And once she's inside," the elder placed across the flow of words, "then he's going to have a few issues in draining magic from someone who doesn't have any."

She looked down at the map again. The single word branded into the center of the classified zone.

Tartarus

"Send for Cerea. We'll brief her together," Celestia told her sibling. "I'll summon the Bearers."

Uncompromising

There had been a night when the elder became the last survivor, and it had lasted for a thousand years.

A full millennium. And during that endless span, there had been those whom the elder spoke with, trusted with a little more of the truth. Seneschals. But each passed into the shadowlands in their turn, and even when the strength was once again mustered to look for yet another dear friend -- it still left her with nopony who remembered. A thousand years as the final living link to what had been, relentlessly pushing across the ocean of time in search of a shore which might never appear.

That which the younger, for lack of appropriate curses, referred to as Abeyance had wounded both siblings. A mere four and a half years hadn't been enough for the deepest scars to abate in their endless aches.

But there were other effects. For starters, the elder had spent all of that time as the nation's typical first and only resort in a crisis. Everything went to the palace, and then it went through her: the initial cut started near the heart. A single voice trying to impose order upon chaos.

"There's a chance to catch most of them together," Celestia rushed on as the sunlight of her field lanced towards the base of the throne. Energy interacted with a hidden lock, and one of the built-in compartments dropped open: two scrolls took the opportunity to tumble out. "It's Homecoming, but Applejack and Rarity are the only ones who have family in Ponyville. Twilight told me that she and Spike weren't heading west this year, and Fluttershy..." It almost triggered a smile. "...is exploring multiple possibilities. Add in Rainbow's reluctance to leave in case of emergency, and Pinkie wanting to be with a group... if this was dinner, we'd probably find the entire group at the farmhouse. As is, at least two-thirds are probably helping with early meal prep." With a wince and a sigh, "It doesn't exactly make things any better, calling them in on a holiday --"

During a crisis, a single voice.

In Luna's opinion, it could make her sister a little slow to listen.

She took a breath. Summoned several kinds of energy, and then let all of them go.

"TIA!"

Decibels rushed forward. A very large number of joules passed them going the other way.

The elder stopped, as the sunlight dancing on the white horn dimmed. Took a long, slow look at her sister, followed by a very careful regard of the newly-glittering floor. This was followed by a deep breath, which did nothing to fend off the subsequent shiver.

"...all right," Celestia finally said. "You have my attention."

Another look down.

"My very stationary attention," the elder revised. "Since I'm not sure I can take a step without slipping on this frost." And shivered again. "What is it?"

"There is an issue with Cerea," Luna stated, keeping her tones falsely even. "One which must be resolved to some degree before we begin, or her services might not be available --"

The Sunrise Gate partially opened. Three Solar helmets simultaneously poked through the gap: the dual pegasus presence allowed a stack.

"Princess --"

"-- we heard --"

"-- is everything all right? Why is there ice --"

Dark blue and purple eyes simultaneously focused on the intrusion.

"Leave."

The Sunrise Gate rather hastily closed. After a moment, they both heard the highest mare pull the last of her trapped manefall free.

"They mean well," Celestia sighed as her tones dropped away from that contributing half of the Royal Voice. "They always do. Luna, I know she was upset and trying to get outside: the Guards told me that much. I'm not exactly surprised. She had --" and the small portion of the room's humidity which didn't exist in solid form was evaporated by the sheer dryness of the elder's voice "-- a bad night. Let's leave it at that for now. And in the wake of that much griffon magic, it's reasonable for her to not be thinking normally for a while."

It almost sounded like an excuse.

Luna wondered if it had come across the same way when she'd said it.

"So I'm not going to hold trying to reach the gardens against her, especially when you kick in Stable Syndrome on top of everything else --"

There was a code, when it came to dreamwalking. A personal one: something Luna had exactingly constructed over the course of several years. A structure which dictated when she might intrude, how much she could try to do and, once she had returned to the waking world, what she was permitted to discuss. The only thing which allowed her to act with lessened guilt, and feel that she might be worthy of the burden.

She had to abide by a code: she'd seen that from the very start. But a personal code was just a way to direct one's thinking. It could never become the whole of it, because to automatically channel all sapience down a single narrow channel was to eventually discard thinking entirely.

"Evaporate the ice," Luna quietly said. "Return yourself to some level of comfort, for as long as that might still exist. And I regret the time this will consume, but... we apparently have no immediate need to evacuate and as you have indicated, we potentially need Cerea. And --"

The dark eyes closed.

"-- we may no longer have her. As a Guard. As someone we can turn to for help. As anything other than the final sight of a tail moving towards the horizon..."

She felt a waft of steam rise through her fur. Heavy hoofsteps slowly approached.

"What happened?"

Part of having a code was knowing when to break it.

She told her sister everything.

They were both on the floor again, about a standard body length apart. Some cushions had been brought down from the throne, to be pooled upon the marble. It hardly helped.

Technically, they were facing each other. Luna was mostly looking at the gold flecking in the marble. The pattern never changed.

"We all had a lot of talks about it, in the beginning," Celestia gently offered. "The ethics of dreamwalking."

"Yes," the younger bitterly reminisced. "Well, if we are returning to the very beginning, I would like to remind you that there was a time in which I lacked any choice in the matter --"

Softly, at least for volume: nothing muted the ancient pain. "-- I was there, Luna. We all were. I know it took a while before you got control. We did what we could..."

The dark mare sighed. "...yes. What you could, as best you could. I remember, Tia. All of it. Including how much it hurt everypony, to know that they could not do more."

Silence for a time. Four ears rotated, trying to pick up on evacuation sirens. Nothing but the distant furious, terrified babble of the herd.

"Old arguments," Luna finally resumed. "The consequences of which survive into the present. The reason why I generally go to those whose nightscapes cry out for aid. Ignoring the locked doors which I could so easily break."

"We had a lot of trouble getting the early citizens to accept the idea, when everything went public," Celestia quietly recalled. "Reassuring them, at the start. But generations passed, ponies grew up with the concept, and..." The white head slowly shook. "It was almost a status symbol, wasn't it? I remember hearing boasts. That somepony's nightscape had been so harsh as to attract a Princess."

"At least there was only the lone competition to see who could draw me in," Luna dryly noted. "Generations passed, with ponies who knew there might be visits in times of a more personal crisis. With other nations who -- were hardly happy with the mere concept, but at least accepted that all magic has some degree of range and I was a rather long way off. But then..."

The dark head dipped. The reflection of gold flecks took up residence in the younger's eyes.

"...abeyance. So many more generations, all of them passing with no knowledge that the feat was even possible." Almost a whisper. "One of the reasons why so many reacted badly, when it was all revealed for the second time. Nightscapes which radiate a familiar kind of fear: the dread of intrusion. And the other nations... so many fail to understand, or simply choose not to do so..."

Gently, with the warmth of the tones meant to buoy the younger up, "It could have been a lot worse, Luna. Compared to what we're getting with Cerea, the news of your dreamwalking hardly generated any protests at all --"

"-- because of the fear."

Celestia automatically scooted forward. Several cushions slid.

"Luna --"

"A simple formula, truly."

With quickly increasing desperation, "-- that's not --"

"Permit me entry into a dream," the younger quietly offered, "or face Nightmare."

And then there was nothing either could say.

Too many heartbeats passed. After a while, the rhythms synchronized.

"I could have abandoned her nightscape," Luna softly said. "At any time, after I understood that she was no threat. But I told myself that I wanted to understand her. And was that an excuse, sister? A lie which I offered to myself, as rationale for retaining the chance to gain glimpses of another world? I have seen so much strangeness through her eyes. Miracles both bright and dark, barely understood -- but nearly all of them casual. So many devices in a world which seems to have so little magic. Or machines, running on principles we have yet to understand..."

The younger shivered.

"Things," Luna quietly added, "I almost hope not to understand. Comprehension would be the first step towards recreation. Be glad that she only brings with her the lore of steel, Tia. There is so much worse. The reasons she dreaded that her home would be discovered by that world's majority." A deep, shuddering breath. "Let me simply say that, in the worst case... it would not have been much of a fight."

The elder's right foreleg stretched forward across the gap.

"Luna --"

Just barely audible, to the point where even the dark blue ears had to strain for the words, "-- she thought I called her a monster."

More scooting. Sunlight flowed down the elder's extended limb, carefully removed the shoe. A bare hoof made contact with cool fur.

The younger didn't seem to notice. The dark coat rippled, seemed to sink into itself. Dark eyes began to squeeze shut under the weight of blame.

"Someone who cannot accept herself, not as she exists. Who places endless defects upon herself in dream. I know her better than any, when I should not. I have spent endless nights hovering above her pain, when I might have descended within to offer aid. I never did. And she believes I see her as a monster."

Agony blossomed from the dark mare's spine as thin needles of ice.

"Tell me how to fix that, Tia. Tell me."

Softly, "Talk to her --"

"-- hours! Hours spent upon my throne, considering exactly that! Hours which wrought nothing! I know that we must speak!"

"-- Luna, you may not be able to resolve this before we have to send her out --"

"-- and will she go now? Risk life and sanity, for the sake of a Princess whom she has every reason to hate? For a nation which may never truly accept her? You wish for me to speak with her, sister? Then we share a desire."

Perhaps it was desperation which released the younger's next words into the world. Or it might have been a dream. A wish released into the waking world.

"Tell me what to say."

The white hoof gently rubbed at the cool fur.

Simply, "I can't."

The silence closed in again. Tiny icicles began to descend from dark feathers.

"They're your words, Luna," Celestia carefully offered. "We can talk about what we'll both say to her, once she's brought in. But what has to happen between the two of you... when the time comes -- so will the words. Don't overplan it. Just... give her a chance to listen --"

Bluntly, with every syllable directed at heedless marble, "-- I desired his death."

The elder blinked.

"I firmly recall," the younger continued to change the subject, "such as being my choice in the matter. To end him. With very little objection regarding any potential methodology. But you thought he could be made to speak. So, to restate the matter for your own record and any reels which might remain upon the witness: I was going to kill him. You did not. Therefore, should the worst come to pass... on the record, that would be your fault."

The left corner of the elder's mouth reluctantly quirked up.

"Well," Celestia wearily said, "sometimes you're right. Anything else before I send somepony to fetch her?"

"Other than planning out the mutual confrontation?" Luna asked, her head finally lifting again. "Since that seems to be the proper word. We need to have some concept of the mission's specific requirements."

The elder nodded. "This isn't just going to be magic-light: it's going to be magic-absent. She can't carry a single device. And if we have the Bearers waiting at the Gate, in case of the worst possibility coming out..." That triggered a soft groan. "It's the same problem as the last fight. They can't even bring the Elements. That's not an attack against him: it's a six-course meal."

"Simply having them accompany her to the entrance has its own issues," Luna pointed out as dark wings shook themselves out. "As a starting point, we already have questions regarding his current range -- and we are sending in an alicorn."

The groan became louder. "We don't know how much any one pony contributes to his strength -- but it's safe to assume Twilight is going to give him more than most. But she's essential, Luna. She knows how to open the Gate: there aren't many ponies who can pull that off." With sudden hope flaring through words and the brightness of the elder's corona, "And one of her last scrolls said that they'd been working on a defense against thaum drain. Just in case it ever happened again. So if they really have something --"

A little too quickly, "-- how does it function?"

Irritably, "I don't know. She didn't go into that many details --"

"Simply the most basic principle. What powers it?"

The elder's irritation was beginning to evaporate most of the newest ice. "Well, obviously it would have to be powered by magic --"

It took a while before the last echo faded.

"Tia?"

"...make it good, Luna," the elder forced out past the blocking facehoof. "Make it really good..."

"Very few ponies can try to open a Gate," Luna noted. "But that is a task which requires skill more than power. The ability and willingness to learn. Twilight Sparkle might be attacked from a distance: this is true. It may happen before Cerea gains entrance --" a little more softly "-- if she agrees to go."

One more last try in what felt like an infinite series. "Luna --"

"-- we have no other sapients without magic. We can make the request, and -- hope that she listens. For that requirement, there is no one else. But for the unlocking of the Gate, we require a backup. And a moment ago -- you said 'they'..."

Celestia blinked.

"She's going to hate this," the elder accurately predicted.

"With reason," Luna allowed. "And yet she will agree to accompany them. Because... she still feels that she has much to answer for. To balance. So -- an extra scroll?"

The elder sighed, and "An extra scroll," emerged with normal tones. "It might mean more that way." The rest was more of a mutter. "Congratulations, Trixie. You're the new Magic..."

There was a traditional position, when there was a guest standing before the full Diarchy and one sister was in the other's throne room. A notation would be made of when the meeting would take place. Whoever possessed responsibility for that part of the cycle would be on the throne itself: the other would be standing near the base.

It was day, and it was now deep enough into the near-winter's scant Sun-lit hours as to have sent Luna into the kitchens for wake-up juice. Celestia was upon her cushions, and Luna was standing near the throne's base. If they had called the girl in under Moon, then the positions in the Lunar throne room would have been reversed. That was just how it was. The siblings were equal in the Diarchy: the seating was just a reminder of whose dominion was currently in effect. Under Sun, Luna got to stand near the throne's base and given the way all four legs kept almost shifting, that just put the younger a little closer to making a break for it.

Celestia suspected too much wake-up juice. Or... it might have been the girl.

The centaur was standing very close to the Sunrise Gate: her tail was almost touching the doors. It was a position which seemed to indicate that she might be ready to leave at any time. And there was something about the way she carried herself...

Luna had described it, when she'd talked about the confrontation at the exit. That Cerea could stand perfectly still in a way which implied that any part of the body could start moving at any moment. Very quickly. And all of it was capable of going on the attack. There was something about the forced measure of the girl's breathing which implied that her bustline could potentially be used as a weapon --

-- the typical sapient's mind had a certain talent for self-distraction.

How would that even work?

The elder's imagination immediately provided.

...right.
Admittedly, there probably isn't enough tissue density for the bludgeoning to work. Or at least, enough to work quickly. But when it comes to just pushing a snout into her cleavage and keeping it there...
...note to self, if we all survive this: get copies of those two film scripts which Fancypants mentioned and make sure neither one has that written down as a kill method.
Worst 'thriller' ever.

Celestia took a breath, and wrenched her gaze back up to the girl's face. Something she was still learning to read, but... the features felt far too relaxed. Placid. And the hairpins were in place, the sword was at the ready, and one hand was very close to the hilt.

There were either no Guards in the room, or there was but one. Another question with a branching, binary answer. A state which had to be settled.

"Thank you for coming," the elder offered. "Before we started, I wanted to say --"

"-- the protesters grow loud," Cerea neutrally offered, and did so as the hanging tapestries vibrated again. "An increase in numbers, on what I am told is a holiday. And the staff hides newspapers from me, doing so when 'tis more newsprint and less staff to conceal it. The palace 'tis practically awash in ink, to the point where the marble itself seems stained." Placidly, "My actions at the party, one would suppose."

Another breath. "To some extent," Celestia admitted.

Quickly, with words as a weapon which had just spotted a hoped-for opening, "Then I shall understand if you desire my resignation from the ranks. Simply show me where to sign the forms. And, if it does not create too much trouble, somepony who can translate them for me --"

"But that's not why we needed to see you. Something's happened --"

"-- the 'visits' to my dreaming thoughts," was the girl's interruption, and it stood out just for being that. "Were you aware?"

All right. We planned for this. Things she might say, and what we would tell her if she did.
Talking about the nightscape intrusions.
About the reasons each of us has for her being here.
Just tell her.

"As Princess Luna told you," Celestia carefully began, keeping her posture steady upon the throne, "when you first arrived, we weren't sure if you were a threat. She investigated. That much is standard policy. But she only briefed me regarding what she discovered until we agreed that you weren't the aggressor. Just... the victim."

"And after?" struck without mercy.

Steady... "In all the world, the ability to enter dreams may be Princess Luna's alone," the elder evenly stated. "It falls within her dominion. I can advise her, but -- the decisions are hers, Cerea. She did tell me that she was continuing to serve as witness to your nightscape."

Tell her more. If I don't, then Luna might later on, and it'll backlash us all over again.

"And before we brought you into the Guard," Celestia continued, "there was another discussion." And watched the girl's breathing subtly accelerate, as two sets of shoulders went tight. "Because we had to understand the person we were recruiting. But there was very little said regarding details. She keeps your secrets, Cerea. She... keeps a lot of secrets."

Unless there's a crisis.
Until today.

"You knew," the girl offered another level of translation. "And you elected to do nothing."

The long body began to turn. A hand reached out for the door --

"-- I was selfish."

The grasping fingers paused. A blonde head turned, and blue eyes silently stared up.

Celestia forced herself to stay still. To keep meeting the girl's gaze.

"I didn't summon you," the elder began. "I never would have pulled you away from your home. It's... part of why summoning magic was banned, Cerea. Because -- what if a thinking being arrived? Confused and bewildered and lost, with no way to go back. I thought about that, when the theory was first explained to me. The ones who created the spells said it would never happen. I'd let you yell at them, but... marker stones don't listen any more than they did."

The girl didn't move.

"I never would have asked for you to come here," Celestia quietly continued. "I don't want to think about the level of crisis which would have prompted the mere thought. Summoning is, in a way... selfish. I didn't take you from your home." One more breath. "But I brought you to this nation. And that... was selfish."

The centaur was quiet. Thinking it over, or just waiting for the rest.

"I fail to understand," she finally said.

"Princess Luna and I talked, before you came in," Celestia told her. "About a number of things. One of them was the reasons each of us had for having you in the palace --"

"-- the entertainment to be found in strange dreams?" the centaur tightly cut in. "I imagine portions of the setting to be locally unique --"

More quickly, "-- you saw the worst of my nation, on that first night. And once I learned who you truly were, through witnesses of life and dream... I was ashamed." The white head dipped slightly. "I wanted to make up for it. To show you what ponies could be at their best." And lower still. "I -- still haven't. And it was more than that, Cerea. I wanted to send you home. I swore to do everything I could, to return you to what you loved --"

The girl's features went rigid, and that one hand began to move towards the door again.

Hurry. "-- but I didn't know if it would be enough." A little more quietly, forcing the words to emerge when every syllable carried the burden and agony which so often seemed to be the most dominant part of honesty. "I still don't. And I thought... if we weren't able to find your road, if there was a centaur again, one who might stay -- not just with all that she brought, but all that she was, someone who could set a new example, who had the chance to define what a centaur was..."

Her forelegs pushed. Half-upright, and no more.

"...if I had someone that special, Cerea -- then I wanted her to be Equestrian."

Silence. Luna hadn't said a word since the girl had entered. (Cerea had looked around the room, visibly evaluated exits, noted that the second alicorn was present, and -- that had been it.) And the centaur didn't say anything at all.

"Because so much of this nation is ponies," the elder made herself go on. "Compared to some of the other nations and their majority species? Too much. We need to integrate, so much more than we have. But integration takes work. Every day. And still, I told myself... a centaur. If it came to that, an Equestrian centaur. I told myself... that would be so special. And..."

She risked closing her eyes for a moment. And when she opened them again, the girl was still there. Watching, as the blonde tail worked through another slow, steady lash.

"...I never let myself truly consider whether you would have been happier somewhere else. In another nation. I told myself that if the events had been so distant as to have them treat you as little more than a curiosity at the start, there would always be a traveler from Equestria. Who would bring the fear with them. But... how much grounding could you have gained in a new society, before that pony appeared? How many friends?"

She sighed. Slowly shook her head, and wondered if this would be the day when her body finally recognized the centuries. Something where every movement would create physical pain to match that which rose from the heart.

"I don't know," Celestia finished. "Because I was selfish. I -- wanted to tell you that, before this went any further. I'm fallible. We both are. There are ways in which we've failed you. And in the wake of those failures -- we still find ourselves in a position where we have to ask for your help."

And before the girl could react, Luna spoke.

"As a knight."

Every muscle on the girl's body went tight at once. Even under the layers of clothing, it brought several of them into sharp relief.

"Do not call me --"

The dark alicorn took a single hoofstep forward, and the impact of the silver shoes filled the room.

"-- you say there is a mutual obligation?" And aspects of the words were harsh, because it was Luna and she'd been awake too long -- but they were also frantic. Desperate to reach backwards-tilting ears before sound was blocked out. Before the mind behind them denied all comprehension forever. "Then I owe you many things, Cerea. And one of them is to call you knight, much more than you have any to term me as lady."

They'd never heard the girl's voice reach that level of volume. Of open desperation. "-- I'm not, thou canst not, shalt not have me here when I am not --"

But Luna's words had a way of slicing through sound.

"For we need the services of a knight. Even a knight-errant, who may have no more reason or desire to see me as her liege. I will account for myself, Cerea, if you are still willing to hear me: if not in this instant, then soon enough. But --"

The dark head went down. Both eyes closed. Foreknees trembled. And the girl stared.

"-- we have asked too much of you, both of us," the younger softly offered. "We... need to ask for one thing more. Something which, in all the world, only you may be able to do. Will you hear us out, Cerea? Even if it is for the last time?"

The girl's entire body turned: something which happened so quickly as to make the sisters wonder whether a teleport had been involved. The powerful legs pushed, hooves did something much less than canter, and then she was fully facing them again.

One hand was far too close to the hilt of the sword. The other had balled into a fist. Tendons were standing out in sharp relief, and the knuckles were going white.

"Flattery!" the furious voice declared. "Flattery and falsehoods, pretending that you perceive anything of value within me, simply as an excuse for what hath taken place --"

"-- it's Tirek," the white mare said. And but for the lack of anything to beseech, she would have prayed.

The girl stopped, all at once. Several muscles went slack. At least two of them seemed to have some small influence over the jaw.

"...what?"

"The newspapers which ponies are hiding from you," Celestia continued, "at least for the most recent editions, concern the draining of magic. Something which happened last night, well away from the party. In a place you have never been. And that's just the first incident that we know of. We're going to try and discover if anypony else was affected and just didn't report it, but..." She allowed herself the full sigh. "...we may have a little trouble getting the word out right now. Or having it heard through all of the other words. Cerea... Princess Luna gave you the wrong number, and did so by accident. There are two things we have to ask of you. And the first is that you let us talk, even when you have so many reasons to wish you would never see or hear us again. To tell you what little we know, and... then ask our question."

"Will you grant us that?" Luna quietly asked. "Not from a knight's duty to the thrones, if you see yours as having ended. But as a way of saying that you have found at least one thing of value in this land. One person. For even if you have reached the point where your truest dream is for the world itself to be quit of us, and nearly all of our kind... is there not one mare whom you would wish to never see hurt?"

The younger was better at reading the centaur's expressions: another benefit of the nightscape visits, and there was no way Celestia could currently turn to the source of that expertise. For the elder's part, she simply gazed down at twisting furless features, and wondered what the girl was thinking.

We prepared for this.
What we would say.
The one appeal we could still make.
Using friendship as something very close to emotional blackmail.
Talk to me later, Cerea, if we all live through this. And I'll tell you how much I hated myself right now.
But this is about the world.

"Will you listen for Nightwatch?" Celestia asked. And waited.

The girl took a single deep, shuddering breath. The sisters held their own until all of the vibrations had stopped.

"Speak."

They finished.

The majority of Cerea's body had never moved. But the brown ears didn't seem to be capable of finding a comfortable position, the tail had a tendency to lash, and that one hand had closed into a fist before falling open. Over and over.

They'd had to name the parties involved in the incident. None of those reactions had been unexpected.

"Tartarus?" the centaur uncertainly asked.

"It's a --" Celestia began.

"-- the name," Cerea cut in. "'Tartarus'. 'tis truly what it is called?"

Luna took a breath. "It has other names," she admitted. "Different species refer to it by their own terms. 'Tartarus' is simply the most common appellation. Why?"

The hand which wasn't near the sword fell open again.

"I heard it twice before this," the girl told them. "In the letters sent by Fancypants and Diamond, when Nightwatch read them to me. I... had thought the disc was stopping on a term I might understand. Something... equivalent."

And just for a moment, she shivered.

"Your home has a similar location?" Which was when Celestia became aware that both of her eyebrows had just gone all the way up, partially from horror. Also that she was potentially going to have a lot of trouble getting them down again. "What is --"

"-- a myth," Cerea quietly said. "Regarding a -- region of the afterlife. 'tis unlikely to be important. Tell me of yours. All which has been said regarding that portion of thy land is that the area passed through was Tartarus, and that Tirek is kept there. Which seems to make no sense --"

Luna carefully shook her head.

"Tartarus," the younger said, "lies below the classified area. The land above is generally safe enough to pass through -- or at least, presents little more danger than the typical wild zone. There are gates, but -- they are guarded. We simply placed the classified status upon the land as an extra layer of discouragement, in case something should change. As we lack the forces to guard the entire border." Darkly, "Not that such prevents every last pony from going through. I am more than slightly curious as to just how many recent passages there have been."

"It's what we call a deep place," Celestia told the girl -- then, quickly, "Did that translate?"

The girl's ears twisted again.

"Deep place," Cerea eventually repeated. "The term, but not the definition. I heard 'warp' at one point --"

"Appropriate," Luna decided. "That is some part of what they are."

"The world has rules," Celestia offered, and shifted her body on thin-seeming cushions. "Of physics, thaumaturgy, chemistry and every other science. The rules which allow life to exist. But there are deep places, and... each represents a warp. You can survive there, if you recognize how they work -- but each deep place is either running on its own rules, or represents a subset which we don't understand. Tartarus is one of the largest, and... we keep it closed off."

"In order," Luna continued, "to keep the inhabitants locked in."

The girl visibly swallowed, and then looked ashamed of herself for having done so.

"Some deep places can almost be summarized in a single word," Celestia told her. "Something which gives you the core idea of how it operates. There's one near Ponyville, which had to be resealed. The heart of that one was echo. Duplication of the living or spiritual, but... imperfect. And the more you try to copy, the more the imperfections build. It's magic which no species has, Cerea. Something we can't replicate, because we don't understand how it's happening. The process may only be possible at the mirror pool, even if its creations can apparently survive indefinitely away from it."

"And... your Tartarus can be summarized thusly," Cerea didn't quite ask. "With one word."

Both alicorns nodded.

"What is that word?"

Celestia took it.

"'Torment'."

There was something about watching the centaur shudder. Part of it was the sheer size of her body, and another portion came from the configuration. So many things were moving at once.

"We cannot destroy it," Luna stated. "Sealing it off was the most we could manage. So it became a prison. The place where monsters are kept."

"Those who can't even be trusted to die properly," Celestia completed the thought. "Locked away, for the sake of the world." And, before the girl could speak, "A world which every single being within has tried to destroy. That's the criteria for being placed in Tartarus, Cerea. A direct, deliberate attempt to create global extinction. I hope you believe me when I say that we don't place anything in there casually."

And nearly thirty seconds passed with no sound at all. It nearly allowed the chants to reach them from the outside. There had to be still more protesters out there by now. The elder felt she could almost make out the words...

"There's something I've been thinking about for a while now," Celestia reluctantly admitted. "Since I saw the article. When we brought Tirek in, he refused medical attention. All of it."

"He had a split hoof, at the very least," the girl recalled -- and they both looked at her. "'twas in Diamond's missive."

Luna nodded. "The treatment was to be conducted by the Doctors Bear." With shadows dropping into each word, "As at the time, there was some argument for keeping him alive. But he pushed them off, with words alone. And our Royal Physicians operate by their own moral code, as do all good doctors. He was conscious and capable of refusal, so... their means of dealing with him became limited."

"He was inspected," Celestia added. "But most of that was visual. We were trying to keep him away from magic, as much as we could." With a sigh, "The theory was that Discord had burned him out. And most of the proof for that was... just how hard it was to keep him away from magic. It felt like no matter where we brought him in the capital, there was something to absorb. Minor devices, standing effects. And if everything else was removed -- whoever was trying to look him over could turn into a power source."

"We felt he had lost the capacity for absorption," Luna summarized, "in part, because he was no longer doing so. Should he have retained the ability, why would he not have retaliated? Resumed his rampage, with the one entity who had been able to so much as slow it --" her head dipped again "-- no longer able to act?"

"We risked some investigative magic," the elder went on. "Our own workings couldn't determine anything, and an analyzer was brought in. But the readings were confused. There was too much residue, and... they don't deal that well with anything living to begin with. At one point, the edge runes flashed on him as if it was comparing results on a device. And even that error couldn't locate a comparison to anything it had encountered before."

"Nightwatch," the centaur advanced a trembling word, "said you had attempted interrogation..."

"Oh, we did," Celestia confirmed.

"It was," Luna recalled, doing so as ions began to fill the air, "one of the only times he laughed."

Celestia's jaw tightened. She glanced at the nearest tapestry, and an effort of will managed to keep it from starting to smolder.

"But now I've been thinking about that," she said. "That he refused medical attention. At the time, I thought it was spite. Vain hopes that he would bleed out before we got our answers, and the next questions could be asked of his corpse. Not that it was going to happen from a hoof split..."

A slow head shake.

"I don't know that this is his doing," the elder stated. "Not as a certainly. But this happened in the vicinity of Tartarus. It makes him the prime suspect. And now I'm wondering what we missed. Whether it's a part of him. Something which a medical examination would have found. But no other centaur ever did that..."

Whether it's too late.
Luna wanted to kill him.
Sometimes she's right.

The largest mare in the world forced her fur back into its natural grain, and looked down at the girl.

I could trot down there.
Face her on a nearly-level plane. Just about eye to eye. There's so few sapients I can do that with.
But she has no reason to want either of us near her.

"Princess Luna told me about what you said to her at the exit," Celestia began. "About leaving." And paused, waiting to see how Cerea would respond.

The answer was with "I am not a prisoner! And with all which has happened -- with the responsibility, I shouldst not, should never have been a Guard --"

"-- I suppose," Celestia gently interrupted, "I miscounted too. Because now it feels like I'm asking for three things. Let me say something, Cerea. Because Princess Luna and I discussed this, and..."

Please.

Luna was still. As omnipresent as the night, and equally as silent.

"...I was selfish," the oldest mare in the world repeated. "Princess Luna will speak with you privately about her own reasons for wishing you to stay here. In her own time, if you'll permit it. But... we have no hold on you. No one has to remain an immigrant. If we forced you to stay within the borders, or to remain a Guard -- then we are keeping you prisoner. Under the current circumstances, we can't give you an order. And we are asking for --" she almost wished to laugh, if only at the scope of it all "-- 'a lot' is its own level of understatement. But you are the only sapient being in the world who has no magic to steal. Who can approach and assess him, with no more than the usual risks."

Graveyard humor had its own dark appeal. Something about the last words felt so ridiculous...

But she forced her tones to remain solemn, and went on.

"The usual risks," she repeated, "involved in entering Tartarus. And facing Tirek, who may have already absorbed some degree of magic. Just... not enough to break out." And, because she had to consider all of the possibilities, "Or he has that much power, and he's just waiting for the right moment. 'The usual risks' are tremendous, Cerea: I won't lie to you about that. But you're all we have. All the world has. And we can't give you an order -- but I can make an offer."

One last deep breath. Part of her memorized the feel of it: the swell of lungs, a shifting of ribs and diaphragm. Wondered how many breaths were left.

"Do this," Celestia told the girl, "and we'll speak to Ambassador Power. You can cross any border, once a path is cleared -- but it would help you tremendously to have a welcome set up on the other side. He'll carry the word back to Mazein." With a soft sigh which served as her lone indulgence, "There's potentially going to be a very long public debate in the logeions, and Rounding Moonsault is probably going to send us an extremely pointed letter about having had to serve as Referee for most of them. But minotaurs believe in freedom, Cerea. That'll be the argument in your favor: that no reasonable bull or ageláda would keep someone imprisoned without a crime. I think the population will vote you across the border, in the end. They have to, or they wouldn't be minotaurs."

The centaur didn't move.

"We'll warn Mazein about the summoners. We'll keep working on sending you home. That promise won't be broken. But if we need you for any part of that, we'll cross. And when you go... it'll be with enough bits to start a smithy. Mazein would hate the idea of owning someone's thoughts, so you take the secrets of your steel with you. And... one more thing."

Please listen.
Please take a chance on us.
...that's not what I'm really asking, is it?

"You would be dealing with yet another language," the alicorn finished. "Minotaurus is... notoriously hard on the throat, especially for the first few years. And you're just starting to get a hoof planting for Equestrian. So -- as final payment for your services -- you can keep the translator."

It's not about anything I just said.
And we all know it.
I don't know how to read all of your reactions. Not the way your eyelids are so tight at the corners and wide in the middle. Not that slight parting of your lips, or the tremble in all four shoulders and your hips. But I want to think I know a little about who you truly are at your core.

"Do we have a deal?"

Please be the person I hope you are.
Please care about your friend.
Please risk your life. If not for us, then for her.
Please...

The centaur's eyes closed. Her tail stilled, then went limp. One hand fell open. The other dropped away from the sword's hilt.

"...yes."

Antagonistic

In a story, the filly would have turned the page. Something which might have been interpreted as a major scene had just ended and unless she was starting to feel some major concerns about being caught up reading far past her bedtime, the most crucial thing to do was clearly starting on the next chapter. Besides, if it was a decent tale, then continuing to follow the adventurer on their path was clearly prioritized over mere sleep. Especially when a truly quickening plot pace could easily do the same to the filly's heart. It was rather easy to become too excited to sleep, when stories were just about all you had. And besides, her mother was a very large mare. One whose natural instinct was to move with authority. Solid, heavy-hooffalled authority. When they were both inside the house, the filly could hear her mother coming from what felt like a kilometer away: something which had allowed lights to be extinguished, books to be hidden and, if the door was opened, sleep to be faked.

Make everything which had happened from the start of the party into a story, and the filly would have just turned the page. A simple rustle of paper, and there would be a meeting with new companions. Perhaps the author would skip ahead, bringing matters back to the reader's eye once everyone was on the road. But... all it took was a simple movement. Stories progressed in a way which life did not.

Place the same events within reality, and Cerea wound up with time to kill.

The Princesses had told her that there was a full briefing being prepared. There had to be a briefing, because whatever Tirek was doing hadn't attacked a settled zone yet. It was something which appeared to give the palace some time. Of course, it was possible for things to change at any moment and should events surge to the level of immediate crisis, then royalty would act accordingly. But for now, they had to arrange the materials for a briefing. One where there would be more than just Cerea present, because the Princesses were calling in the Bearers.

(She didn't know very much about the Bearers. Based on what little had been mentioned, she'd been picturing an elite military unit: a direct Equestrian equivalent to the Commandement des Opérations Spéciales. The fact that nopony seemed to want them at any parties only served to reinforce that impression. Everyone knew about the kind of property damage which a good special forces unit could create just by going on vacation.)

But the alicorns hadn't been able to tell her exactly when that briefing would take place, and there was very little point to having her stand around the Solar throne room until everything was ready. So, with no real orders beyond not leaving the palace and being sure to come back when she was called for, they'd sent her out the Sunrise Gate. And she'd managed to exit with all four hooves moving in some kind of rhythm, closing the doors behind her.

She'd kept her bearing more or less steady until the moment she was blocked from sight. Checked the hallway for staff ponies and Guards, seen nopony at all, been briefly grateful for the holiday...

...so much of what Cerea felt herself to know about humans came from their stories. A number of the better efforts had been rather good about describing posture. When she pictured what a human would have done after receiving that kind of news... in a story, they would have found a private spot. Something with a wall. And then they were supposed to sort of sag backwards against it. This tended to manifest as a lean, where most of the contact with the supportive surface would come at the scapulae and bracing palms. The head had the option to either press the rear of the skull against the wall or have the chin tilt down: either was acceptable. But at the core, the posture was meant to represent several kinds of exhaustion, along with trying to remain standing under the burden and crushing weight of responsibility. Telling the reader that, at least for a moment (because a hero would always find a way to rally), the wall was just about the only thing holding the character up.

There were very few positions which would allow a centaur the chance to brace the back of her shoulders against a wall, nearly every last one involved a very short-term sort of verticality and, outside of the palace, most of what they would have done was allow Cerea the chance to crack her skull on the ceiling just before she crashed to the floor.

In Japan, she constantly compared herself to the humans. Everything about her body, along with the way that form moved.
She had applied for the program, and began to think about herself in terms of what humans wanted. Desired.
Shortly after coming to the household, there had been dreams --

She probably watched those from a cloud too.

Or not. Cerea was sure she would have noticed a cloud in most of those scenes. There just wasn't enough ceiling height available in the household's master bedroom.

The long body turned. The left flank leaned against marble, and the palace readily took her weight. One shoulder awkwardly turned somewhat inwards, and one breast was pushed into the other: something she could clearly see because her head had dropped, and that was most of the resulting view because her hair hadn't fallen in front of her eyes. There seemed to be very little point in trying to get an ear against the wall: anatomy still posed problems in that area and in any case, the marble was thick. She probably wouldn't be able to hear what anypony was saying.

That was how a centaur collapsed against a wall, when pressed down by the weight of a burden which might be too great to bear.

A hero would rally.
A knight.
I'm not --

It felt unnatural.

There was... a certain vibration in the marble. Something low-level, which she could only detect when this much of her form was in direct contact. It was similar to the little rumble which seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the air. Another reminder of the protests outside.

How many...?

She only held the position for a few seconds. There was a chance for somepony to come down the corridor at any moment and besides, every breath seemed to make things that much worse. And then she pushed herself away from the wall, hooves sounding on marble as she began to create some distance between herself and the throne room.

It was a rather slow walking pace. There was nowhere to run.

Time to herself. Time in which the same thoughts could just keep going around in her head over and over and --

-- I need something to do.

She couldn't go back to the gardens. It had taken enough effort just to give her a path the first time. Families had been displaced, families who were touring on a holiday because they hadn't seen a newspaper yet. She'd had to force her way out the first time and --

-- it was a bluff.

Her actions of the previous night had already reflected -- 'rather poorly' felt like it deserved its own category of understated -- on the palace. Creating a second riot prior to the next sunset --

-- Sun-lowering --
-- fire engines, maintain orbit, cross horizon --

-- had felt like a rather bad idea. But she'd needed a plan for dealing with royalty. An exit strategy, and just as with any other plan she'd ever come up with for leaving a gap, it had existed as something which could be defined by its flaws.

She'd attacked her liege and she hadn't been discharged from the ranks.
She'd disobeyed direct orders and nopony had turned her out.
It had left her in a position where she'd wound up conducting a frantic mental rundown of every offense she knew which was guaranteed to get a human fired.
Cerea didn't even know how to commit sexual harassment against a pony.
Maybe it had something to do with the buttocks. Squeezing a buttock was considered to be just about universally offensive across nearly all cultures and species, including liminal ones. It didn't happen often with centaurs because it took an exceptionally stupid stallion not to recognize that most of the positions which allowed them to squeeze were also the same positions which allowed the mare a rather swift retaliation, but it was certainly offensive.
Except that ponies didn't really possess squeezing capabilities.

...it had been a stupid thought. (She often felt like nearly all of her thoughts qualified for that status, especially when she was trying to make a plan.) It had just been one of the few she'd recognized as being such before it had broken all the way out of the gate.

Cerea had left the barracks on a quest to accomplish a single goal: to be removed from palace service. She understood what the position of Guard truly meant now: taking responsibility for the safety of the world. It wasn't just something she couldn't manage: it was a task no one of sanity should have ever assigned to her in the first place. She wasn't suitable. And she'd felt that way before learning a little more about the nature of the entity she was supposed to be guarding...

...her mind felt as if it was moving in circles. It wasn't leaving her hooves with much of a direction. The palace seemed to be flowing past her like a river, and it was hard to find any true features within the stream. Every so often, she would place a palm upon the nearest wall. A moment of bracing, or -- seeing if the vibrations had changed.

It was also possible that she was regularly checking her distance from the wall because if exhaustion and burden ended with her slumping over, at least the wall would be right there.

She'd created a goal for herself: to be discharged. And just like her plan to escape from her gap for a single day, it had arguably worked. With both goals, there was an argument to be made for a spectacular amount of unintended fallout.

Cerea had gotten exactly what she wanted. (In fact, there was a way in which she'd oversucceeded: she'd had no intention of trying to keep the disc.) Perhaps Mazein would welcome her -- or at least, not be quite as openly terrified. And all she had to do in order to take her out of a position where she seemed to be creating a new disaster every week and, just incidentally, had assumed some degree of responsibility for the entire planet -- was to go on a mission which had the potential to create endless disaster, because merely participating seemed to indicate a chance of having just assumed responsibility for the welfare of the entire planet.

But once that was wrapped up? Goal achieved.

The girl had a certain talent for self-directed dissection. This came with a lesser skill in locally-targeted sarcasm. The two often teamed up. And in the wake of that meeting, Cerea couldn't even manage to darkly congratulate herself.

Do something. Don't just trot. Find something to do. Something which isn't thinking.

But it couldn't be the gardens. Princess Celestia had given her the destination she'd never truly intended to reach, and...

...what had she been seeking, huddled in the shadow of the statue at the summit of that cold peak? She'd spoken to the stone, because it felt like something she was supposed to do. Trying to explain her reasoning, how she felt about all of it, failures and intrusion and everything which meant she had to leave, and she'd said it all to the statue instead of Nightwatch because stone ears didn't truly listen. A smiling mouth made of rock couldn't deliver a counterargument.

Don't go to the barracks.
Don't wake her.
Let the medication keep her asleep until I've left.
I've done enough damage. Her apartment. Her injuries. Her life.
Don't wake her because I did all that and if she knew what was going on, she might still try to talk me out of it.
That's what a true knight would do.
If it all works out, then I leave before she ever knows I was going at all.
Without my getting the chance to hurt her any more.
It's... better that way.

The girl hadn't been seeking counsel from the statue, not in the sense of expecting to get any words back. You could speak to the dead forever, and it would just provide the chance to reflect on how certain parties had a distinct advantage in maintaining long silences. After a while, you started to fill in the other side of the conversation on necessity, and what was better than the words which were already moving through your mind?

What had she been searching for, huddled in the snow upon the little mountain? To be told the decision to leave had been the right one, and Cerea would have been the one telling herself that. Affirmation, delivered from within. Echoes.

But echoes distorted.

There had been more than one voice to hear in the snow. They just hadn't been Cerea's.

"Do the job."

She couldn't.

"What if the world needs a centaur?"

Then the world had exceptionally poor ways of judging its needs.

"I don’t want that to be me. A Guard who... abandons somepony.”

They were better off --

What if I make the LAST mistake?

How could anyone take on the duty of a Guard, knowing that one error could mean the end of the world? Especially when it was someone who, when it came to making mistakes, seemed to do very little else.

I'm scared.

'Terror' was more appropriate.

I think that might be a good thing.

It wasn't...

But all the silent statue had done was take its eternal stand.

More hoofsteps. She found a ramp, went up without much thought, made the next turn with even less. Empty hallways. Closed doors. Heartbeats drowned out by the steadily-increasing noise, and she desperately longed for the same thing to happen with the endless thoughts.

The girl braced her right hand on the wall again. Felt increased vibrations moving through her palm, even as the rumble in the air started to hiss...

Overlapping terms. Not unfamiliar words. It's like what happened at the press conference. There's too many things to translate.

There was a curtain up ahead, less than two meters away. Something where the fabric looked both heavy and new, with oddly greyish sunlight trying to fight its way past the folds.

She didn't recognize this part of the palace. Not in daylight. But a window meant she had to be up against one of the outer walls. And if the rumble was this loud, with the translator fighting to isolate words, then the protesters --

-- the girl had longed to stop thinking and for the most immediate part of her next action, she received her wish.

The centaur stepped forward. One hand grabbed the curtain --

What's the population of Canterlot?

The girl doesn't know. It's the sort of thing she'd expect to come up in her citizenship classes, and that means it's probably in one of the textbooks. But she can barely read any part of them, hates asking her only friend to help her look ahead in the course. It means she's been waiting on the teacher and based on the way Mr. Trotter likes to illustrate facts by telling a story about a relative who had to deal with that aspect of Equestria's society, she suspects at least one percent of the total is composed of his uncles.

She doesn't know how many sapients live in Canterlot. So she can't know what percentage of that population is represented by the screaming mob outside.

However, a reasonable estimate might be 'all of them'.

...which might be understating the case. After all, the newspapers do get some distribution outside the capital. Given the amount of time that's passed since the initial printing, Ponyville's probably received a few copies. Allow those citizens to get on the first trains out...

There's no hope of making an actual count. Her window isn't at the absolute front of the palace, but off to one side, near the forward edge of the Solar wing. It leaves her viewing at an angle (and serves as the central reason why nopony spots her: they're largely staring, chanting, and screaming more or less straight ahead). So she's seeing a slice of the pie. Take an entire society, bake at the high temperatures of terror and watch it erupt through the crust of civilization.

The terror is a presumption on her part. Normally, even with some of the better-built human residences, she would be getting some impression of the scents outside. But this window isn't just closed: it's sealed. Perfectly airtight: something where pegasus magic can assume responsibility. It leaves her with nothing more than the visuals, because the audio has yet to resolve out of overlap and endless hiss. But she knows that terror can wear any number of masks. The majority of those teeming outside the gates (and some press against them, cause the metal to sway) have donned an exceptionally thin veneer of incandescent anger, and some of the rest... haven't even bothered with that much.

They're terrified. Because it happened before. Because they've just been told it can happen again. And now they want to know what their rulers are going to do about it.

The girl cannot scent what's happening outside, and there's a moment where she's grateful for that. The sheer intensity would have a chance to overwhelm her.

The portion she experienced within the walls was bad enough.

It's why she doesn't believe the alicorns were lying to her.

She did briefly consider that they were trying to lock her away in a rather more final manner than before. Make her trot into her own prison. But it would have been too complicated. Facing both of them at once -- she feels like she barely held off the intruder during a dream. Both of them at once -- they would have attacked her as a team, knocked her out and then dragged her to the true cell. But...

...she's picked up other signatures from the Princesses in the olfactory world: concern, tension, traces of amusement. And it's possible to fake a scent. There are chemicals which can do it, although you'd have to know the exact breakdown of the mood you're trying to simulate. The easier method is to determine the emotion you want to project, and then bring up a memory connected to that mood. Relive it, over and over. Work yourself into an artificial frenzy and eventually, the body will respond appropriately.

With the dark mare, she might have believed it. (Present nearly anything negative about that one in the wake of what happened in dream, and the girl just might believe it.) But the white alicorn... the girl wants to think better of the elder and, after learning that Princess Celestia knew about the invasions, is having some trouble with that. She is no longer fully certain regarding either ruler's benevolence.

They could have been lying about the offered deal: easy enough to go back on your word, when you lead a nation and nopony has the authority to override you. But for what they said about everything which had happened in the wild zone...

The words, for the most part, had been measured. Calm. Even. But in the olfactory world, the alicorns had reeked of worry. And... beyond.

The girl is staring out the window. She can't count bodies from her angle, not with the way they're all moving. But there's barely any space between them. The ground is covered by a multihued moving carpet of fur and fear.

There's a little more space available in the air, but no pegasus is in the right place to spot her. The vast majority seem to have remained on the ground. Most of what's in the atmosphere consists of those who are desperately wrangling in cloud cover, clearly intending to rain the whole thing out. The few protesters who've taken to the air are screaming at the weather team. Sometimes they do so from a few meters away. Less than one. Close enough to have feathers threatening to intermesh.

Those curses are scattered, disorganized. The ones on the ground seem to have settled into a chant and after a few seconds, something begins to resolve from the cacophony of waking nightmare.

"...centaur/centaur/centaur/centaur/centaur..."

They aren't demanding to learn what their leaders are going to do about it.

They want to know what the palace is going to do to it.

I'm not him.

They don't understand that.
They can't.
Right now, they don't want to.
She doesn't have to know the formula for gunpowder to recognize what's happening outside as a leaking powderkeg.
One spark...

It's more than that. The news of her mere existence had triggered suicide attempts. With a story spreading about magic drain...

Ponies are being hurt in every moment she exists here.
More ponies may have already died.
Tartarus is for those who actively attempt to destroy the world. She has merely shaken it to the foundations. Societies built on different principles, ideas, hopes and dreams -- but perhaps they all share the same base. Magic. Something which feels as if it can collapse.

There are times when it just makes sense to think about herself in terms of what the majority population wants. Believes. It's a means to try and find a way of fitting in. To survive.

Everypony outside believes she's a monster.

At least one pony inside thinks she's --

-- she can't fix this.
She can't explain herself.
She can't make them see her.
Nothing could.
Integration. A joke spread across two worlds.
I hurt two worlds.
It may be a record.

All she can do is... try to give the Princesses what they want. And she's terrified of failing yet again, but -- it's a scouting mission. The sort of thing you give to a squire more than a knight and at the moment, that may still be expecting too much of her because she doesn't feel like she's worthy of being a page. But there's still only so much you can get wrong on a scouting mission.

In and out. Descend into torment, and then leave again. Taking most of it with her is just incidental.

She's still wrong for the mission. For anything. But the fact that she desperately wants to get away from at least half of the leadership doesn't mean they didn't get one thing right. There is exactly one sapient being on this planet who lacks magic. The mission can go wrong in a thousand ways, and none of them include Tirek gaining any extra strength from her. There's a single thing she can't do wrong, and that makes her crucial.

The girl understands that.
She still dearly wishes it was anyone else.
It's a scouting mission, to check on the one who ended so many lives. Who responded to questions with laughter. A being who doesn't care.

There are three wishes in the girl's mind: the traditional number. She could place them all in one cupped palm, and spitting into the other would still fill it up first. But... three wishes...

She wants to go home.
She's desperate not to make another mistake.
And she really wants to get in one good swing at Tirek's skull. At a single source of her pain.

It may say something about the day that all three seem equally unlikely --

One good swing...

-- she closes the curtain.

She's been looking for something to do. If she's working, maybe she won't think. And now she has a destination or rather, she has two.

The first... that has to be a kitchen. She's been offered a chance to directly damage the world again, a world where every effect she's had upon it has been negative, and -- she's tired. She didn't get very much sleep (and there's obviously somepony to blame for that), and she's awake fairly deep into the day after so much time as a Lunar. Going into the kitchens will let her use the espresso machine -- although if the holiday's short staff means the kitchen is empty, that's assuming she can pick out where it is. And what it is. The chefs keep tinkering with their design, and discarded parts tend to stay in the kitchens in case they're used for the next iteration: something which gives her a little trouble with tracking by scent because too many things smell like coffee.

But there may be no chance to rest before the briefing, and a short nap could leave her too groggy on the exiting side. Besides, she... has reasons not to sleep right now. So into the kitchens, and look for the strongest concentration of glass tubing. But after that...

It's almost a funny question. On a holiday dedicated to family --

I want to go home.

-- where would Barding wind up? He's never mentioned having any relatives, because it's not a subject which readily intersects with metal. Perhaps he spends some time with the next generation, which probably means visiting a mine.

The forge may be occupied. But she feels it's more likely to be empty. Because Barding is effectively divorced from the news cycle --

-- she can't say goodbye to him either --

-- the main difference will be the time required to prepare the fire. And either way...

The monster in Tartarus is no part of her herd. The only links with her species are in form and name. But she still has to go see a stallion. There are certain things which mares do, when they have to deal with stallions.

It won't take very long to make a weighted baton.

The mare didn't quite manage to sneak up on her.

With the baton finished and the empty forge shut down again, Cerea's next priority had been to get out of the lower levels. It was unlikely for Nightwatch to wake up and decide to take a trot, but -- if she did, one of the first places the little knight might look for Cerea was the forge. And the centaur didn't have to pack for the mission: if anything, she was waiting to be told what she couldn't bring.

It left her without anything to do, and a mind without a task was going to start thinking again. Dreading.

The most sensible action seemed to be returning to the palace's base level. Get that much closer to any possible location for the briefing, as she really didn't think it was going to be held in the basement. But it left her wandering again. Waiting to be called.

Or 'summoned'. That felt more ironic. To the presence of the Princesses, and -- the Bearers.

At least Nightwatch won't be assigned to the mission. Not when she can't fly --

-- oh, good. There was a side benefit to having attacked her only friend...

...the girl didn't hear the hoofsteps coming towards the hallway intersection, not even with the marble in play. Most ponies made some degree of noise when they moved through the corridors, but -- this mare's most natural condition existed in a state very close to silence. It just didn't do anything about her scent.

Pegasus mare. Unfamiliar. Frightened...

But there was something strange about that fear. Cerea had become reluctantly accustomed to the reek of pony fear: it was the background scent of her existence. It was just that with this approaching, unseen mare, the scent existed as something which seemed to have been laced into the olfactory signature. A potentially permanent, low-level aspect of the mare's very being, waiting to be called forth into prominence at any moment. And there were other emotions detectable in the mix: fierce determination was very nearly dominant. It still took second place to the --

-- which was when the unfamiliar mare reached the intersection. Turned, saw Cerea, and every muscle and feather seemed to go tense at once. It created a moment where there was another statue silently passing judgment on the centaur, one where the eyes were somewhat more liquid and yet colder than stone...

The centaur almost lost that impression in the first moment of sighting. There was another sense calling for her attention.

Visually... the yellow fur had been carefully groomed. Somepony was clearly taking care of the coral-pink mane. The body was well-proportioned, although something about the posture suggested a mare who was somewhat more ready to flee than the usual: it was a certain bracing in the knees. But the wings would have been a better fit on a pony ten centimeters taller -- while the tail required its owner to be around Princess Celestia's height. Cerea had never seen a tail like that. It dominated the mare, the hallway, and probably most of the conversation. It was a tail which possessed its own gravity. An effort was required to pull her gaze away from it --

-- the girl awkwardly, subconsciously recognized some level of base irony --

-- but that just left Cerea looking at the mare's eyes.

They were a rather light sort of blue-green. They possessed most of the qualities for the shallowest parts of the ocean, and seemed to have all the impact of a crashing wave.

The pegasus had an aura. Most of it was being projected through those eyes.

They locked onto Cerea's own. Neither mare moved.

After a moment, the pegasus tilted her head slightly to the right. It made part of the mane fall in front of the opposing eye, partially obscuring the pony's features. The remaining gaze slowly wandered across Cerea. Hooves to head, then front to back, and she finally spoke.

There was also something odd about the mare's voice. This pegasus wasn't just soft-spoken: she had vocal tones which existed at the bottom of the disc's detection range. Nearly every bit of speech required a short delay before it began to emerge, as if scant decibels had been scavenged from the air -- and yet every syllable carried the force of a hammer.

"...bowel torsion," the pegasus said. And just kept looking at Cerea, with that one visible eye.

The girl blinked.

She wasn't sure there were any reasonable responses to those words. As such, a bewildered "What?" was no worse than anything else.

The scent of the mare's fear didn't increase. The determination stayed right where it was. The dominant aspect surged.

"...I have a lot of roles on missions," the pegasus softly told Cerea. "One of them is to be the emergency medic."

This is a Bearer.

It meant the briefing might be ready. The pegasus had potentially come to fetch her. But that scent...

What did I do to --

"...and I don't know your species," the pegasus went on. Thoughtfully, "I don't think anypony does, really. The Doctors Bear will probably talk to me before we go, just in case. But I was looking at you, and... I thought about how long your digestive system would have to be. Stretched out. That can create problems. And I thought... that with a centaur, the first medical issue anypony might have to look for was bowel torsion. So is that common? For your species?"

Cerea blinked a few times. It hardly helped.

"No," eventually risked making its way into the world.

She could hear hooves on the approach, moving rather quickly. Cerea decided it probably wasn't a rescue.

The shoulders shrugged. "...oh." Twice. "...it was just a guess. So in that case..."

Which was when the pegasus took a step forward.

Her volume never changed. Simply the emphasis, as the blast of fury surged through the world, combined with the aura to make Cerea's hooves skitter backwards, trying to maintain the distance as the pegasus advanced, the centaur doing her best not to fall --

"...since I would have to treat it... if somepony wanted to hurt you -- needed to make you drop -- where would they start? The knees? Yours have to carry a lot of weight. Can you support yourself on three legs? Two? What about the neck?" The head tilt increased. "Because that just about has to be the same, doesn't it? For every species. There's so many interesting things which pass through the throat, and a kick to nearly any of them can be crippling. And I don't know much about breasts, because I've never needed to. How do they compare to the rest of your body for density of nerve endings? If you hit them against something, which looks very easy to do, would you say it hurts --"

-- which was when the second mare reached the corridor.

"Fluttershy."

It was easy to look at the new mare. Just about nothing in the world would have been easier, because it meant not looking at the pegasus any more. And with this mare, there was a lot to look at. For starters, you had the height. Factor out the alicorns, and this was the tallest mare Cerea had ever seen -- something which meant even more when applied to a member of what was usually the shortest species. She hadn't known unicorns could be this tall.

But it was more than that. It was the proportions of the limbs, the liquidity of pale violet eyes and the elegant streaking of the carefully-styled mane and tall. There wasn't a strand of fur out of place, and every eyelash had its marching orders. Features which had been biologically micrometered. And the gaze was cool, calmly evaluating, like a predator who'd caught something new on her territory and was making a rather passive decision on what to do about it -- while giving up no ground whatsoever. Just in case.

I don't know what ponies find attractive in each other.
...that's it.
That is all of it.

The pegasus turned her head. Casually glanced back at the natural wonder.

"...is something wrong?"

"You got away from us," the unicorn said. "From all of us. We looked away for a second, and you were gone."

"...I just thought I'd trot around a little," the pegasus lied. "Before the briefing started."

The unicorn instantly picked up on it. In tones of warning, "Fluttershy..."

Which was when memory flared.

Fluttershy Phylia.
The one Fancypants named in his letter.
Discord's friend.
Oh no...

"...what?" the Bearer asked.

"You were looking for her," the unicorn stated. "We all know it --"

"-- and I found her," the pegasus countered. "So now we can go back. To the briefing. Together."

The unicorn took an exceptionally deep breath, something which almost seemed to ripple from head to tail --

...what?
Her mark...
...how?

Maybe... maybe there were only so many shapes in the world. Square. Circle. Triangle. Gallop far enough away from the basics and you might eventually get to -- that. An echo which had followed Cerea across the void...

Not without irony, Maybe she's just a foreigner. Even though the disc wasn't rendering an accent, the unicorn obviously had to be from Prance.

"They're going to send us out," the unicorn told the Bearer. "Soon. We came to the palace so we could see you off, and..." Another, smaller breath. "...that's it. I can walk you both back to the briefing room. And then I have to go."

"...walk us both back," the pegasus semi-repeated.

"You both need to be at the briefing," the unicorn observed, and an exceptionally thin smile momentarily manifested on her lips. "Which means you both need to get there. In one piece."

The pegasus quietly nodded. The unicorn turned, swished the elegant tail at the other two mares. After a moment, the pegasus began to follow.

Down the corridors. Past artwork. There were places where the arranged air currents brought the pegasus' scent back to Cerea, and she had to push on through the cloud of rage. And eventually, there were new doors.

The unicorn stopped. Turned, looked at the pegasus again. The foreknees bent a little.

Softly, "Come back to me."

"...I'll try. I always try..."

"It's Tartarus -- "

"...we're just getting her in, Fleur --"

The wires didn't hiss.
The disc went directly for that.
The disc has a sense of humor.
Who knew?

"-- and that's supposed to be it..."

"It still could be Tirek," the unicorn quietly insisted. "Watch out for each other. Watch out for yourself, Fluttershy. And... come back to me."

It took a second before the pegasus nodded. The unicorn leaned in...

...oh.
Okay.
If I had that kind of snout, and I made contact with a pony in exactly that way, it would be sexual harassment.
...extended sexual harassment...

Cerea began to shuffle portions of her weight from hoof to hoof. It didn't help.

Finally, the unicorn pulled back. Nodded once to the pegasus, looked up at Cerea --

"Bring them back."

The elegant tail lashed, and the unicorn trotted away.

It left the pegasus looking at the centaur.

...staring. The pegasus hadn't tried to take off once. But she was at a distance which allowed a careful neck angle to get past all obstructions, and she kept staring...

Cerea managed a breath. On the third attempt.

"Diamond told me about what happened."

Silence.

"...I..." It had been, at most, eight minutes since she'd met the pegasus, and she already had the inadvertent imitation down. "...I am sorry. I -- am aware that it does not mean all that much, as mere words. But I respect his actions, I honor his sacrifice and regret your loss. But it is nothing I did. I understand why you wish to lash out at me. I do. I am here, and -- he is not. But -- for the mission, for the sake of everything, we have to... to..."

The emptiness echoed for a while. It filled Cerea's ears, while never doing anything to mute the force of that stare.

The girl took another breath, and pushed everything which was left of her into three words.

"I'm not him."

The pegasus didn't move.

"...I don't know what you are," Fluttershy said, and finally turned towards the door. "I guess this is where we start to find out."

Misconstrued

There was a door, and nothing about her wanted to pass through it.

Cerea knew there was a certain amount of judgment awaiting her on the other side, which meant her memories were currently flooded with déjà vu. It didn't seem to be serving as an adequate counterbalance, let alone any form of shield.

The girl supposed that if you lived long enough, you could reach the point where anything you might experience would just remind you of something else. But she was still young, and the majority of her life had been spent in confinement. A place where every tree she passed mostly made her think about the number of times she'd passed that tree before, followed by an estimate for the potential number of tree passings to come before she died.

There were ways in which Menajeria was a place like no other. Aspects which should have made every experience new. But after centuries of liminal confinement within the gaps, it had been Cerea's lifetime which had seen things change

it's my fault

and that had allowed new experiences their chance to echo against the past. Bouncing off the jagged walls of solidified time, until every returning reverberation brought back a doubled chance to cut.

Pass through a door, and --

there are police officers
they're supposed to protect us
they're supposed to

-- the door in France, the one in memory which was trying to overlap the one in her vision -- in so many ways, it had simply been meant as the last step before a meeting. A chance for all parties involved to truly learn about each other for the first time.

There was a door. An entrance and an exit. The final departure from the gap, through a gateway which opened onto the world.

But the ones she was going to see had already formed their opinions about her. No action she could take had the potential to alter any of that. Words were ignored, and --

-- you passed through the door, and you found judgment. A verdict which had been set before the trial ever began, because the charge had been 'existence' and the girl's mere presence indicated guilt. Something where the sentence was apparently long overdue.

The pegasus wasn't hued in the exact same yellow as the vests: those had been more pale, with traces of fluorescence. But there were ways in which the fur was close enough.

Yapper said something about a rabbit.

The palace staff was freely allowed to take a swat at the rabbit. Cerea wondered where it was, and if it could possibly be any worse than its mistress. Somepony whose olfactory signature possessed what seemed to be a permanent aspect of fear, but -- what had been in that one movie, just before the key sequence of what was supposed to be a years-in-the-making fight scene had begun?

(She'd lacked the context for just about all of it, hadn't seen most of the prequels or sequels, and still didn't know why the stones were so important. And the one human with the facial hair was frankly a boor -- but certain aspects of his armor had style.)

Perhaps this particular member of the elite military unit had decided that if she was afraid all of the time, it would be that much easier to overcome fear at need. As with perpetually-masked radiation-channeled rage, Cerea was certain that the constant strain couldn't be good for the heart --

-- the pegasus got her teeth onto the door's lever, pushed down and started to move through the opening. Cerea automatically stepped back, averted her gaze from the increasing gap while making sure she stayed out of sight. She had every intention of going in. But following the pegasus too closely felt like a bad idea, and when it came to facing predetermined judgment... she wasn't expecting that to end any better than it had the first time. Especially when she knew that every mind had been made up, and the escort to the border wouldn't take place until after the assignment was complete.

So she hung back, until the door had fully closed. Took a last breath, felt the mare's lingering rage soak her lungs. And only then did she engage in the awkward foreknee bend which let her right hand grip the lever, just before marshaling so much of what remained for her battered soul. The massive, subtle effort required for simply sending herself into the room.

Her crime -- the offense committed by her entire species -- had been existence.
The vests had known a way to fix that.
The Bearers...

The table wasn't round. The ones around it remained knights.

There were too many auras in the room. It was a condition which could hold sway when the Princesses occupied a space alone, but -- Cerea had become used to that. Royalty had its place at the table, and those emanations of personality and power had the dubious benefit of familiarity. But they had been joined by others, she didn't know them, the group's collective focus had snapped onto her at the moment when that initial portion of centaur anatomy became visible and the girl tended to enter a space bustline-first...

She had been cantering along the edge of an emotional cliff for hours. There was no way to take in every last detail at once, and the need to start somewhere placed Cerea's attention on the table.

The scent told her it was black ironwood: the second time she'd encountered the dense, resilient substance. The upper surface had been worked to a high polish: something which gave the numerous yellowed papers scattered near the Princesses their own dark mirror. Minor imperfections and discolorations suggested places where damp mugs had rested a little too frequently.

A human table on this scale would have possessed multiple legs, or a giant center support. This one resembled nothing so much as a giant cross-section of stump, something where the sheer diameter was more appropriate to a redwood. (Cerea didn't know if the actual ironwood tree was that large, but... earth ponies.) And it was solid all the way down, because ponies had somewhat less need than humans to stretch out their limbs beneath a table.

The shape was a rough oval, with the Princesses dominating one of the longer sections. There weren't quite enough ponies to fully surround the wood. The alicorns -- the... first two alicorns -- took up more space than anypony else, and there was still room to spare. At a guess, it would take at least fifteen ponies of average size to create a full enclosure: adding Cerea didn't do much to warp those numbers.

There were multiple padded benches around the table. Several were unoccupied. The bench heights were variable, while the Princesses were resting upon floor cushions. The overall effect was to level out pony heights. Anypony --

-- anyone --

-- who was seated could make ready eye contact with any other -- including the occupant of the single boosted chair.

The room itself seemed to exist at a junction point between Solar and Lunar wings: Cerea's best guess was that they were currently behind (and possibly under) the Resplendent Ramp. Some of the marble was flecked with gold, other portions showed silver, and a few scarce stones had them at something very close to merger. It was easy to see that, with the walls almost completely bare. A number of hooks suggested where tapestries might have once been hung -- or, given the purpose of the space, maps. But there were no decorations. No artwork, and not a singular architectural flourish. It was a room which was meant to focus all of the attention on the table. On whoever was sitting around it.

She forced herself to look --

Some say first impressions last the longest. It's similar to the ways in which initial mistakes require the most corrections.

There are ways in which the girl has been told very little about the Bearers. This can partially be explained by the sheer amount of information she's been asked to acquire: cultural overwhelm, recent history needing to wait until she's mastered some of the basics, and -- her having spent nearly all of her time within the palace. Surrounded by Guards.

The Solar and Lunar staffs respect the Bearers, honor all which has been done for the realm and those who made it happen. The Lunar shift noses forward an extra portion of gratitude.

But there's still a certain base level of irritation present.

Part of that is because Guards operate within a rather narrow, extremely defined category of authority. The Bearers seem to be considerably more freeform. There are no ranks, very few regulations, and when it comes to 'Who do they answer to?' -- having that answer be 'The Princesses' should offer more comfort than it does. When it comes to Bearer-generated chaos, the Princesses mostly seem to watch. A few of the darker suspicions insert the occasional 'encourage', and most of those started after that one Gala.

Both palace staffs appreciate the Bearers, and do so while remaining rather annoyed. There's just been too many times when the Guards had to show up to take care of the aftermath. Your average Guard is a little bit tired of having to help clean up cake-covered pieces of shattered columns, not to mention galloping down to the precinct house afterwards because nopony on either staff truly believes it's an official Bearer visit until someone posts bail. And the accountants try to figure out how much of the budget needs to be shuffled before things can be fixed this time around, those told to deal with the public try to work out another excuse, and anypony charged with making the embassy rounds double-checks their pronunciation guides because when you're trying to apologize in that many languages, some syllables are going to slip. Trying to remind the various ambassadors that they were the ones who wanted the meeting in the first place is probably a bad idea.

The girl thinks they're an elite military unit. They aren't. The central commonality is the sheer amount of casual, generally-unintended destruction.

See them through her eyes. Start on the left, move in that direction and keep going no matter what...

The cyan pesasus is just barely seated. Her legs shift almost all the time, push against bench and table and air. It's nothing compared to what the wings are doing. There's a rest position for pegasus wings and one day, it's remotely possible that every last feather of the cyan's limbs will achieve it because just about anypony might potentially wind up in a coma. The raw amount of barely-repressed kinetic energy waiting to be launched -- that reminds the girl of Papi. There's also a similar, near-instant desperate hope that it may be possible to tell how much attention is being paid by whether the feathers are vibrating in the speaker's general vicinity: anything under two meters away indicates a tiny chance to have words actually going into ears without making their way out again. Unfortunately, the table is somewhat larger than that.

She wants to move. Everything about her suggests the desire to do something, perhaps to build up more of the ozone and ions which are laced into her scent. And with most pegasi... the girl saw it with Nightwatch: the ways in which those forms tend to be a little more sleek. Streamlined. The yellow is an exception: wings a little too large for the body, tail as something of a drag weight. The cyan exists at the opposite end of the curve. There isn't a single gram of mass on her body which doesn't have a purpose. Air doesn't press down on her: it waits for the opportunity to serve as one more launch surface, or a medium of perfect passage. A prismatic mane and tail may be nothing more than a color signal for everypony else to get out of the way. It's a body which was born for flight, and considers too much time on the ground to be a form of death. And there's strength there, but it's tightly-coiled, compressed into a smaller space because too much mass is going to be a detriment in the air. It also begs the question of what happens if that overwound mainspring finally snaps.

(The girl vaguely remembers that she's supposed to stop the cyan from trying to catch anything across the narrow back. The only current candidate for the action would be an extremely intact ceiling, which would seem to indicate that the world is safe from the attempt -- for now.)

Look to the cyan for one form of strength. The orange features raw power.

It's the most muscular form in the set. Well-balanced, the sort of almost casual-looking natural development which comes along simply by having somepony put in a good day's work, every day across the course of a lifetime -- but there's a lot of it. A little extra bulk on the hind legs suggests a powerful back kick, and somepony's been putting in some professional supervision on the vastus. There's a thickness there, and it echoes out to the mane and tail: wide strands, hair with some extra body to it. The rope loops may simply be a means of keeping the whole thing confined, and the hat...

There's something odd about the hat. It's not the stability, the way it only moves when the earth pony wishes. The girl will spend some time in that mare's vicinity, and it doesn't take long before she realizes that everything comes from the ears. Pressure from the sides, microadjustments provided by subtle muscles, things which happen automatically. You can read the mare's mood more readily from the set of the hat than the shifts of her features, although both pale next to what happens in the olfactory world. But it's an old hat, one where the girl can scent both the years and all of the methods being used to constantly ward them off. And trapped somewhere under all of the protective treatments are the forever-lingering final traces of what was once a stallion's scent. Something set off by the aroma of solid earth and ripe fruit.

The orange mare is more still than the cyan: everypony is. And yet there remains the impression that she wants to move. To kick whatever this is into motion so she can get to work.

Keep going around the curve, drop the gaze very slightly down because variable benches used to level out heights needed to put in some overtime...

The girl has suspected -- a very rare bloodline? Recessives which only run in certain families? There would still be a question as to whether the little alicorn is related to the Princesses -- except that the Sergeant had told her there were no heirs. Additionally, this is clearly a full-grown adult (for the very little that means for size and mass, because this is the smallest adult the girl has seen: short, almost painfully slender, three missed meals away from having every rib displayed in sharp relief) and when it comes to the second automatic question, that makes her too old. The girl has steadfastly been avoiding any and all questions about pony lifespan -- but she's managed to learn something about their growth rate just from looking at the number of years required for education. This mare is an adult, and the Princesses -- if she had to guess, royalty is currently in the pony equivalent to a human's early twenties, with the sisters about two years apart. The lavender alicorn may be a distant relative or just represents a surge of genes rising to the surface of a far-removed river, but she isn't their offspring. Not trained as an operator for Sun or Moon.

She possesses a sort of fundamental awkwardness. The wings are carried in a way which suggests they're supposed to be in some other position and the little mare hasn't quite worked out what that is. Both mane and tail styling seem to exist at the lowest possible level of maintenance, and the way she sits states that she's just realized she has four legs and she's hoping somepony is going to tell her that was actually supposed to be the proper number. And she smells like rare metals, old paper, litmus test strips, and a constant background layer of stress.

An alicorn seems to exist as a sort of subset for the general rules. The sapient next to the small one forms his very own exception.

The girl thinks this is a male. She hasn't seen the species before, doesn't know what the identifiers for gender are. With mammals, they usually wind up being pretty obvious: size, coloration, some differences to overall configuration and in a world where trick valves aren't a thing, you could risk trying to get a peek at the genitals. When it comes to mammals, determining gender for the non-avians can become rather easy -- but this is the first reptile. A rather small lizard, something where seated posture (added to the presence of an actual chair) indicates a biped. Arms and legs, which end in handling and walking claws. The tips look sharp.

She isn't used to lizards. France has a mere seven species (although rather more in the way of snakes, too many of which are poisonous: Lala claims that the ones banished from Ireland didn't flee all that far). Over the course of her life, she might have spotted three, and none of them were crested. The eyes of this one are much larger in proportion to the body, and there's intelligence present: this has been added to a basic brightness. And she doesn't know if the width of those orbs is being produced by fear, because he's the first and now she has to work out a reptilian scent. It's going to take some time, especially when she has to sort through the other natural odors which surround him. She suspects that she's the only one in the room who can detect any of it, but -- there are traces of strange chemicals, laced within hints of sulfur.

(This is something which becomes a little worse when he speaks. The voice initially keeps her from noticing that. Initially.)

Perhaps it's being produced by body polish. The scales are bright, and have traces of silica embedded within. He doesn't reflect light, and nothing about him sparkles -- but quick movements tend to produce a bit of shimmer, along with a very soft scraping sound as the edges of hard scales rub against each other.

Almost everyone in the room has an aura, and it's everyone because the reptile has single-handedly disabled 'pony' as a verbal terminator. His is one of the weaker specimens, slightly flickering and a little uncertain -- but it's present. The mare on his other side, however...

If the girl was judging by body posture alone, then this would be the leader. The light blue unicorn doesn't rest on her bench: she's taken full, temporary ownership and it's going to be temporary because the mare has already decided that she's in dire need of an upgrade. The set of the shoulders and hips, added to slow, precise movements of the tail -- everything about that posture states that not only has the mare been here before, but she's been in multiple places which were far better than this and can tell you exactly how to improve everything: the budget for doing so then becomes your problem.

That's the posture: self-assured, in control, and there's also an Ego which would like to have a word. But seek the more authoritative definitions offered by the olfactory world, and find the room's strongest source of terror.

Very little of that seems to be directed at the girl. The unicorn looks at the centaur, and most of what arises is simple curiosity. But when she focuses on the table, the fear starts to rise. Any glance at the Princesses creates an outright surge --

-- no. Looking at the white horse creates a surge. The dark alicorn... twinges of concern, and very little more. But there's at least one horrible memory associated with the Solar Princess, something which comes back every time the light blue unicorn sees her. The posture is Ego, the eventual voice occasionally indicates some nerves and genuine concerns about the situation to come, but the aroma is fear over the remnants of detonated fireworks. And the girl knows the Princess is the trigger, but -- possibly not the target.

As with the others, this mare has an aura. But it's the weakest in the group. It's an aura which seems to be trying to figure out whether it's permitted to exist. And it keeps falling in on itself.

The yellow pegasus is next. The girl can mostly skip over that one, and would like to do so in a hurry. But she recently remembered about the rabbit, and that leaves her briefly searching for lapine traces -- something where the results come up mostly blank. One extra inhalation allows her to detect a trace of lingering scent there, along with... other animals? She's almost certain there, but -- there's another factor present. A carefully-assembled collection of natural chemicals working in measured conjunction. Some kind of soap, serving as a masking agent for a number of larger molecules. It doesn't do anything to block the stench of the mare's rage, but it places a cloak on top of just about everything else.

The soap has a pleasant scent (or, to what the girl suspects would be the typical pony level of detection, a pleasant lack of it). The girl distantly wonders where she could get some, and knows the yellow pegasus is exactly the wrong mare to ask.

There's rather more scent coming off the neighboring pink mare, and all of it is familiar. Chocolate, yeast, grains of flour which may have a permanent home at the base of the fur. She smells like the interior of a well-maintained bakery, and it's something which seems to come with its own warmth.

This earth pony is a little overweight. Not by much: perhaps four kilograms, and it's distributed evenly across the body. The central effect is to give the cheeks some extra rounding, and put a little padding on top of what's actually some pretty significant muscles. Everything about the mare seems to be at least slightly amplified from the standard: she's taller than all but the orange mare, that extra bulk adds a little more to her physical presence, and some additional portion of that may come from the mane and tail. Up until now, the girl hadn't known it was possible for a pony to have curls -- at least, not natural ones. Admittedly, her sample size is rather small, and she has seen a few artificial specimens from those who put a little more work into their styling -- but this mare is carrying twin riots of twists attached to head and dock. The volume of a small cloud, the tangle of forest vines. They flounce with the smallest of movements, frequently serving as a visual amplifier to some of what's happening in the olfactory realm.

The girl is still trying to work out some aspects of pony expressions and still knows that you can tell just about everything about the way the mare wants you to believe she's feeling at a glance. The scents, however, run somewhat deeper.

Some of the pink mare's motions are extremely quick. Others are carefully controlled. She seems to exist as constructed spontaneity. And she spends so much of her time in surreptitious survey of the others. Near-constant, subtle checks of their expressions and postures. It puts the girl in mind of a shepherd trying to read the mood of the flock. Watching for those on the verge of breaking, while hoping to find some means of intercept. She has to watch, and it doesn't take very long for the girl to realize that this portion of the seating arrangement was deliberate. The pink mare has put herself next to the yellow because at the first sign of true movement, there's going to be somepony in the way.

There's something soft about the pink mare: a layer of padding which doesn't quite conceal the strength underneath. The final unicorn could be said to have a certain level of base similarity. One aspect on the surface, another beneath. But with this one...

There are pressure marks within her fur: little portions of disturbed grain which indicate that cloth had been pressing against the body. Elaborate mane and tail curls are present, and just as artificial as the eyelashes. The mare smells not only of binding glue, but the sort of chemically-overworked shampoo which is a mere two atomic bonds away from becoming gasoline. Add that to the perpetual background aroma of cotton and linen...

But there are factors other than scent. There's something soft about the white unicorn's form. She's in decent condition, but -- that's it. Her body puts the girl in mind of those humans who sculpt themselves with careful barely-exercises and the occasional touch of surgical vacuum cleaner, where true health takes a distant second to appearance: after all, health can create bulges in some rather unfashionable places. The surface level says that this mare cares about how she looks, and...

...it's the eyes. The yellow pegasus can stare like a snake. (The reptile has blinked more than the yellow mare.) The white unicorn is focused, but -- there are near-constant microadjustments. Not just looking at what is, but trying to see what's coming. And the body only appears to be at rest until the girl notices the way in which the fur reacts in concert with those eyes. The tiny ripples which are the only sign of what's happening with the muscles underneath. Because on the surface level, the mare is calm and composed. (In the olfactory world, there is fear -- but it's considerably less than what so many of the others are unknowingly showing. For white and orange, it's closer to nerves than anything else. Tension...) But underneath, she's just as ready to move as the cyan, and with somewhat more in the way of deliberate intent. It's possible to watch this mare think, adjusting any possible plan from moment to moment. Trying to decide if there needs to be a plan at all.

The white unicorn looks soft. Scabbards can be soft to the touch, and it never changes the nature of the sword.

Seven mares, and what the girl thinks is a male. (She still isn't sure. Determining gender on some lizards in her home requires either exacting inspection, a DNA test, or catching them at exactly the right moment during mating season. Birds can be worse.) And before the gaps opened, she never would have questioned that. If you were putting together something which was meant to be elite, then why would you ever include stallions? Everyone knows that stallions are stupid. In the best case, you might be able to send a few ahead. Tell them to fight something: they'd enjoy that. But you couldn't expect much in the way of tactics, they would stop following orders as soon as it wasn't entertaining any more, and the mares galloping in after the first wave would probably wind up swinging batons at their own forces just to make the stallions stop kicking.

But the girl has spent time among the humans. (She has yet to admit that she tended to treat those males as if they were a little slow. The girl is perfectly aware that humans can think, and had very few expectations of ever finding the ones who were actually good at it.) And with the ponies...

The Guards are a mixed unit: species and gender. Like just about everything in Equestria, the ratio leans somewhat to the mare side. But the girl has watched those stallions at work. Her teacher -- the one who actually thought she was getting better, and she hopes to be well across the border before he ever learns that his faith was so misplaced -- was a stallion. She'd never spent so much time around a thinking stallion.

It was a lesson, one taught without intent. Something which took permanent root. There are stallions who are truly sapient, capable, in full possession of their own intellect and proud of it. Who feel that thought has more power than a fist -- or in this case, hooves.

So why are all of the ponies in this unit mares?

Is it something historical, which says the role must be taken by females? Is there a second unit somewhere, composed entirely of pony stallions added to a female lizard?

She doesn't know. Two Princesses. Seven mares: a pair for each of the major pony species, plus an alicorn. Perhaps that's the standard mix. The last slot might always be occupied by a non-pony: perhaps a minotaur has filled the role at some point, or a buffalo. Probably not an ibex.

Where does the lizard come from? Does his species hold its own nation? Nopony's mentioned a land of reptiles. And he's so small, even smaller than the little alicorn. Given some of what she knows is out there in the wild, what kind of magic would allow that species to prosper? There are so many questions, and...

...this assignment will be the only time she'll interact with them. There's unlikely to be much in the way of conversation. Any additional studies will take place thousands of miles away, assuming her next set of citizenship classes bothers to bring up that much in the way of foreign history.

Eight sapients. Seven mares, one lizard.

These are the Bearers. And every last one is looking at her.

The alicorn is the first to avert her gaze: tired-seeming eyes dip, the head turns, and then the little mare is mostly studying her imperfect reflection in polished wood. The yellow pegasus just keeps staring, while the white unicorn eventually nods to herself. Most of the cyan's attention wanders over to the scattered papers. The girl can't read anything about the lizard, but the orange earth pony seems oddly... relaxed? But that's balanced by the tension which rises in the pink, and that happens every time the yellow mare seems to be on the verge of making a move. And the light blue... there's a visible evaluation in progress. Raw curiosity briefly rises through the fear, submerges again, bobs to the surface...

They all have auras. Everyone in the room possesses one.

Everyone except --

-- technically, she can't know. It's like trying to smell the inside of her own nose. But she's sure. It's not as if anyone ever mentioned it. Any aura -- or rather, any which isn't born from madness -- has certain requirements for the possessor. The girl is...

...she doesn't have one.

She knows it.

Eight heroes. Two Princesses. And there are benches, one chair, the final set of floor cushions is clearly intended for the centaur, the pooling which has one side of the oval just about to itself because that way, most of the ponies would have to try and reach her through coming across the table and --

-- the ponies (and the lizard), in their resting postures, are at a near-level height. The girl's body doesn't fully share those configurations. She can descend to the cushions and no matter how much she tries to bend, she's still going to be looking down.

On the Mohs scale, a centaur's hooves are very slightly harder than marble. So in theory, if she just paces the floor in a circle for a very long time...

...there's no help for it.

The girl slowly walks up to the empty set of cushions. Carefully lowers her body. Hunches her upper back, which just puts too much emphasis on certain features and straightens her again from sheer embarrassment.

Some of them are still looking at her. The yellow mare stares.

The yellow mare.
The yellow vests.
The words.
There should have been no means of knowing her name --

"-- Miss Cerea?"

The centaur blinked.

They're supposedly going to let me keep the translator.
Maybe that means getting a look at the operations manual.
I really want to know how it assigns things. What I sound like to everypony else, and whether it's giving me a Prance accent. Because this is the second time it's decided on --

"Or do y'prefer 'Cerea', t' make it a little less formal?" the orange mare almost casually inquired. A subtle shift of ears tilted the hat slightly forward. "Ah mean, not that we've been introduced an' all, but Ah've already heard a few things 'bout you. Makes it feel like the 'Miss' ain't gonna be needed."

Did every species blink? No, there were exceptions. Insects didn't have eyelids, and fish presumably didn't need to worry abut cleaning the surface when they were constantly being washed by the water around them. Miia had a snake's clear protective cap over each eye, but blinked anyway. (Any lamia who needed their vision corrected tended to go for glasses: laser surgery could be too complicated, and contacts were exceptionally awkward.)

"You heard a few things," Cerea risked. "From the papers..." Or would she have said 'read'? Because the accent...

The mare's lips moved.

"From mah sister," said the familiar tones.

...is she smiling?
Why is she --

And centaurs definitely blinked. The main problem seemed to be in stopping.

"Your sister --"

"-- from both of our sisters," a new, fully-unidentifiable accent casually broke in, and the white unicorn briefly inspected the bottom of her own right forehoof. "In my case, I am the elder sibling for Sweetie Belle." The lip movement duplicated itself on the second mare, only with somewhat more bemusement. "One of the rare times over the last few years when I have been able to say that without adding an apology..."

"An' Ah'm Apple Bloom's big sister," the tones of the American South took over. "So yeah, we've both heard a few things 'bout you, by really close proxy." The powerful shoulders tossed off a shrug. "For starters, that you're a pretty good singer." And the smile got a little wider. "Kind of a cultural thing for earth ponies, t' respect a singer. In mah experience, singin' ain't somethin' which can be managed without a decent soul."

They have some level of animation available for their films, was offered up by a few heavily-stunned neurons. I don't think it does much in the way of villain songs.

"...I..." eventually fell out of Cerea's half-open mouth, shortly followed by "Any centaur can sing, it's just our vocal --"

"Tirek couldn't," the pink one stated -- then frowned. "Or maybe he could? I mean, it's not like we ever had the chance to find out. I guess he could have done a work song? Assuming he thought what he was doing was work, because he was really treating it more like destiny. A destiny song is probably a different key." She thought it over. "And a lot slower. With more in the way of drums. Anyway, what would a Tirek work song have been? 'Hello, hello, to steal your magic I go'?" The frown twisted a little. "I kind of feel like that needs some whistling at the end. Do centaurs whistle?"

Both Princesses were smiling. Cerea had forgotten that the dark alicorn could smile. It wasn't something she currently wanted to see.

Stop blinking...

"You may," Princess Celestia rather gravely stated, "have the chance to ask Cerea a few questions during the trip into the wild zone. If she feels comfortable in answering them."

"But at this time," Princess Luna calmly added, "we find ourselves with other things to discuss. So while introductions would undoubtedly be appreciated, some portion of that process can take place across the scope of the briefing. We have a number of mission-related topics to discuss --"

Which was when the one visible blue-green eye changed focus.

"...I want an update on Discord's condition."

Two of the alicorns took a slow breath. The one who wasn't wearing regalia looked away.

"Fluttershy --" the white horse began.

As interruptions of royalty went, "...it's mission related," was far too calm. "Because if he was healthy -- well, if he was healthy, I'd know. Because he would have come to me." The wings partially flared out, slowly curled back in. "But maybe he's almost there, and it's just that nopony's told me because nopony's told me anything. So it's about the last resort, isn't it? If it all goes wrong, and he has to nearly die for us again --"

"-- there is a certain degree of blessing in hope," stated the coldest voice in the room, and dark eyes narrowed. "One which is frequently accompanied by its own level of torment. I am uncertain as to why you continue to express the desire for us to provide you with a means of increasing your pain."

"...he was -- he's my friend, you..." Forehooves planted themselves against the wood, started to push. "...you don't understand --"

"Especially," Princess Luna concluded, "when you have proven so adept at hurting yourself."

And just as the pink mare started to move, shifting to the side to form an equine blockade -- the white horse sighed.

"I've been reading your letters for moons, Fluttershy," the white horse softly said. "You're in mourning, and -- mourning for someone who may not be fully lost. And I wrote back. I'm pretty sure you didn't repeat anything I said to the others, and... I'm not sure you ever truly thought about what I told you. So I'm going to say it out loud: I understand."

"You understand," emerged with surprising speed, along with enough raw bitterness to make any Japanese melon connoisseur happy.

Purple eyes subtly narrowed.

"Mourning for someone who may not be fully lost," the white horse stated, "when you're not sure if there's any real chance of getting them back. When thoughts of both loss and hope are inextricably twinned, and every last one is a hoofblade in your own heart. If there's anypony in the world who understands that mix of emotion, Fluttershy, the way it feels like acid burning its way out -- then you are looking at her."

And from the dark mare, there arose a surge of new scents --

-- but the elder was still talking. "Hope can be torment. Hope has a chance to become torture. You're setting out for a place which drinks in both. Taking power from pain, and if hope is what could hurt you -- then hope is what might be used. You're not even going in, and you're already trying to give it strength."

She stood up.

It seemed to happen all at once. Long legs didn't unfold: they simply pushed. Huge wings partially unfolded, and the yellow mare stared up through sudden shadow.

"I also know," the elder Princess evenly said, "that you've been trying to put yourself near Cerea for moons. That you don't deal well with your anger. Still. And you have a history of going after the wrong targets. The palace is doing everything in its power to help Discord. The effort is ongoing and constant. And your mission-related update on his condition is that he is not available --"

Select portions of the huge form sagged. It mostly happened around the joints, added to a sudden stillness in the flow of the pastel light which made up mane and tail.

"-- and I wish he was here," Princess Celestia quietly finished. "I wish that." The white head slowly moved: left to right, and then back to center. "He wasn't my friend, Fluttershy. He would have laughed at the mere concept. I might have laughed, too. But it would have been in bitterness, at the absurdity of the thought."

A soft sigh had its way with the large body.

"He wasn't my friend," the Princess repeated. "We were -- something else to each other. Something darker. And right now..."

The laugh was just barely audible. It was just barely a laugh at all. A single syllable of graveyard-born mirth, and no more.

"...I miss him." The non-laugh repeated. "I miss him. Sun and Moon, if there was ever a statement to make my generation question somepony's sanity..."

A dark wing brushed against the white horse's forelegs. She looked down, met her sister's eyes, and slowly began to sink back into a resting position.

"I need you to help bring Cerea to the Aornum Gate," the oldest alicorn told the yellow mare. "Can you do that?"

Slowly, the pegasus nodded. The pink earth pony fully shifted back to her own bench.

"It's not going to be a fun trip," the flour-scented mare decided. "I don't see how it could be. Even with sing-alongs."

"We'll all try," came from the tiny alicorn -- after the sentence finished fighting its way past the gulp. "But -- I was only at the Gate, that one time. I stopped there. I've never been inside. And..." The glance at Cerea only came after multiple thin muscles had been to war against each other: the casualties were presumed to have been total. "...she doesn't know anything about it, does she? Not even what everyone tells themselves they know, when all they have are the stories..."

The dark mare nodded, just before her horn ignited. A near-absence of light rushed across the surface of the table, and something very close to a single-hue holographic contour relief image began to manifest upon the wood.

"And thus the briefing," she told them all.

The orange and white mares slowly nodded, while the light blue stared at the illusion with half-concealed terror. The little alicorn visibly forced herself to focus, the reptile braced handling claws on the wood as the cyan snorted, the pink checked on all of them before going back to watching the yellow, and royalty examined the still-forming image.

"Because before any might go in," Princess Luna stated, watching as thin winding trails between Bearers and centaur cut their way across the table, "we must maximize her chances of coming out."

And the girl looked at the map.
The final part of her ever-changing road.
The path which led to her death.

The dark alicorn looked at the centaur. Went back to the image. And a mare immune to cold fought against the urge to shiver.

"Let us discuss Tartarus."

Acrimonious

The eldest alicorn had been alive for nearly thirteen hundred years. It hadn't taken all that long before she'd started to feel like most of that time had been spent in trying to train herself out of reflexes acquired during the first twenty.

Look up at the sky. Most ponies would be watching for pegasus traffic, seeking a contemplative moment with the aid of a helpful cloud, or simply checking to see if the Weather Bureau had events proceeding on the posted schedule. (For those outside the palace, the current answer to that last was NO.) But something deep within Celestia would forever be taking note of the hue. As a general rule of her youth, if the daytime atmosphere (for whatever variable value of 'daytime' was currently in play) was approaching blue, then the direct influence of chaos was fairly distant. And it was a rule you could never quite count on, because it was a rule and at some point, he would inevitably decide to break it.

Subtle vibrations in the ground? In the modern day, that came from the nearby passage of cart wheels, citizens moving in bulk, or earth ponies practicing in secret. In the early part of Celestia's life (and more than a few times since), it usually just begged the question of just what was trying to work its way up from underneath, and did so in a hurry because wondering about it too long could cost her the precious moments required to move. Place too many ponies in a confined space, have them all moving in rhythm at once, and the world would term the results as a dance. But for the oldest survivor, the first recognition would be of the vibration. And no matter how much time might pass, there would always be a few neurons waiting for the emergence of the root angler.

So the bulk of her recognized the source of the sound which split the outside atmosphere, blasted its way through marble walls and echoed through the briefing room: after all, she'd been the one who'd ordered the conditions which allowed that false explosion to exist. She understood its nature, and it meant that she did not move. Most of the Bearers moved somewhat, the centaur's ears twisted backwards and down, and Spike's handling claws tightened on the wood -- but Celestia waited for the last of it to fade.

It was simply thunder. She knew that. And yet deep within her soul, the ghost of a filly who'd grown up in the heart of insanity insisted that the mare look up. See if wings and terror had come raiding from the sky.

The pegasus who potentially would have been some part of that ancient army simply snorted with irritation. The expression of somepony who, despite what all of the complaint letters sent to the Bureau might claim, considered herself to be a master of the occupation and didn't understand why everypony else insisted that the work hours come off exactly on time.

"Somepony's clumsy," Rainbow irritably declared. (She had been visibly irritated from the first moment of arrival, and the alicorn was just waiting for the inevitable to kick its way through.) "I saw them setting up for the rainout when we were on the way in. Giving the protesters a nice, cold wakeup call. But that's just a downpour." With another snort, "Letting that get involved..."

"There are no uses of magic," Luna calmly stated, "which are not subject to emotional resonance." The younger didn't so much as glance up at the weather coordinator when she spoke: the visible portion of her attention was still focused on watching the illusion complete itself. "We asked the Canterlot team to stay in the sky for a time, when nearly all of them had already learned of the most recent incident -- and those who had not were undoubtedly briefed by the herd. It is a situation which creates stress, Rainbow Dash. Something which leaked into the storm." The star-streaming tail slowly swayed. "With the rain in progress, the thunder should do no more than briefly frighten a few. And as for the electricity... that would be the reason why the palace has its own lightning rods."

It still wasn't so bad that one sister couldn't take a moment to needle the other...

"One of the reasons," Celestia placidly said.

The glare was automatic, and wound up being absorbed by a falsely-relaxed white body. Rainbow snorted one more time, and then settled back down -- or rather, went back to the previous pattern of restless movements. The wings kept twitching.

At least I know why you're unhappy.
It's not going to get better any time soon.

The last of the thunder faded. A new sound took its place: something which was individually small. It was also repetitive and taking place in fairly loud bulk.

"...how heavy is the rain," Fluttershy slowly asked, "that we can hear it in here?"

It was like being at the center of a stone barrel. One which was being constantly hit by thousands of small hammers.

"As much as the available moisture would allow," Celestia quietly replied. "Added to everything we told the team to pull from the garden lakes. There's probably going to be a few opinion columns about that tomorrow. Talking about how we've been abusing our control of the Weather Bureau, just so we could clear out ponies who -- had a few legitimate concerns. But at least one of those pieces may wind up with a substitute writer."

The elder had almost wound up taking custody of a dream. The questioning had left Wordia exhausted on several levels: allowing her to personally celebrate its conclusion through finishing the bottle hadn't helped. The self-titled journalist had needed a place to collapse, and there were fully-furnished cells on the lower levels --

-- which weren't all that far away from the forge. The armory. The barracks.

Wordia Spinner was currently sleeping it off in one of the palace's guest bedrooms. This had led to a pair of postings: two Solar Guards outside the door, and a freshly-written sheet regarding exactly what constituted illegal entry on the inside.

With a very soft snort, "I expect tomorrow's group to show up with back-mounted rain canopies." And without pause, "Which I'll treat as a win, because it means we have a tomorrow."

Cerea just shivered. Is Luna --
-- no. Neither of us is radiating. She's just scared. Trying to hide her reactions, and she suppressed that shiver as soon as she recognized it, but -- scared.

Celestia couldn't quite manage to see that as a bad thing. At this point, being afraid was a sign of sanity.

"Let's start working on that part," the elder told them. "Princess Luna?"

The younger nodded. Looked down at the illusion, and some of the contour lines began to glow. Several ponies arched their necks. The centaur leaned forward a little, visibly noticed how much of the table had been placed in a personal shadow and pulled back again.

"The classified area represents what we know to exist of the deep place's spread along two axes," the younger began, "plus a considerable margin of hoped-for safety around the borders. From what we have been able to determine, the overall size of Tartarus is relatively stable -- except upon the vertical."

Twilight swallowed again. "...the vertical," emerged as something which really hadn't wanted to come out.

"Providing subjects for incarceration seem to encourage some degree of extension into the earth," Luna clarified. "Working deeper." The illusion raised itself from the table's surface, and new lines began to work their way back down. "In the time since the first mapping was attempted, we have been able to verify the presence of two additional layers. This is being monitored. A fresh survey is made at regular intervals: the next was scheduled to take place in eight years, with the explorers reinforced by every thaum of magic we can provide. The deep place has not reached the core of the planet, Twilight Sparkle. Nowhere near."

Celestia looked over to the girl.

"Which does mean we have maps," she told Cerea. "And you'll be issued one. We'll illustrate the fastest way to reach Tirek. But -- you have to treat the route as a suggestion, not a guide. One of the other reasons why we have to keep making surveys is because the caverns have been known to warp."

The girl nodded. Something which, to Celestia, felt as if it had been forced.

"Approach and examine," Cerea carefully said -- and then the girl swallowed. "There is..."

Her head turned, as did the upper waist. Blue eyes reluctantly surveyed the full, rather extensive length of the strange body, and then forced themselves to look at Celestia again.

"...a potential -- issue," the very large girl reluctantly tried to finish. "Centaurs are..." and stopped.

Not designed for stealth felt like a strong guess. "We'd rather he didn't see you," Celestia admitted. "But it may be unavoidable. You'll be carrying a light source: Tartarus will decide just how visible that's going to be. The same thing may apply to your final approach angle. So if he does spot you, then -- see if he'll talk."

"Interrogation." (The alicorn wondered just how much work the disc had to do, in order to uncover the reluctance in the girl's tones. Or if there was any effort being made at all.) "When the palace had failed." And her features briefly hardened, skin going tight over cheekbones and what any pony would have considered to be an extremely minimal chin. "When intrusion into dreams had undoubtedly learned nothing, something which could have continued after he had been imprisoned --"

The Bearers were staring at the centaur again. Luna took a slow, measured breath.

"Those within Tartarus," the dark alicorn told the group, "cannot be found through dreamwalking. The deep place serves as a barrier."

Celestia still wasn't sure whether she was reading all of Cerea's expressions correctly. Something about the one which briefly flashed across bare skin still suggested a girl who had just darkly recognized the potential for a certain level of refuge.

"Before he was placed within," Luna added, "there were attempts made, for there are ways in which the dreams of all sapients are the same. I was able to enter. But he was aware of my capabilities. He made no effort to expel me: he simply used certain mental disciplinary exercises to create some degree of control over his nightscape. Determining setting and topic." With a soft snort, "Let us simply say that there were two central subjects, and that which was not excruciatingly boring --" a quick glance at Spike "-- shall not be discussed within this room. And because of those exercises, any attempt I made to twist his nightscape resulted in his immediate awakening. As we had no knowledge regarding the potions which might be able to keep a centaur --" and this time, the dark eyes briefly flickered to Cerea "-- of his type within a dream state, I was unable to gain any information prior to his incarceration."

"It's similar to the problems we've had with your medical treatment, Cerea," Celestia quickly added (because the girl didn't look any less angry). "There are a few potions designed to encourage truth, but they all have some fairly nasty side effects: ones which negate just about all of the benefits. And they're species-specific. No one had ever needed anything for a centaur."

"Spells?" Twilight rather naturally asked.

The white alicorn's lips briefly quirked. "To encourage honesty?" Followed by an automatic look towards Applejack. "That working exists. But it's like any resonance bomb: if you know the projected emotion is being inflicted from the outside, you can try to resist. He succeeded. And the Seeds don't mean anything when you have someone who won't talk."

Farmer and librarian both nodded. Celestia turned back towards Cerea.

"Attempts to sneak up on him may be impossible," she told the girl. "But if he does see you -- try to talk. Maybe you can get a little more out of him than we did."

"And what reason would Tirek possess for ever speaking with me?" Cerea softly asked.

You're scared.
You're also still angry. And you've been --
-- punishing yourself.
That's part of this, isn't it? You've been looking for pain. Because of what happened at the party. Because you hurt Nightwatch. Luna finally told me about your dreams, Cerea. There's a lot of self-blame in them, and that's an assessment which comes from two mares who can have a lot of trouble with not treating everything in the realm as their fault. Especially when so much of it is --
-- have you already realized it, and you're just trying to make me say the words aloud?
To see how much it'll hurt you?
The pain you think you deserve?

"He sees us as the enemy," Celestia quietly answered. "The world entire, as his enemy. Every species, because we all would have tried to get in the way of what he deserved. But you might be a little more..."

Everything about the girl's face was steel.

"...familiar..." the alicorn reluctantly finished.

It was strange, watching the centaur's face. It wasn't just that singular configuration of features, or the way Celestia could only recognize half of what might be taking place under the skin. With the disc in play, the movement of the minimal lips never matched the words.

And there were times when the words themselves made no sense.

"A cat," the girl decided, "may look at a king."

Everypony blinked.

"They can?" Pinkie immediately asked. Curls contracted with careful thought. "I think a cat could look at anything they liked. Including kings. Anyway, where would you even find a king --"

"-- and one monster," the girl tightly cut the baker off, "may speak to another."

Celestia winced. Twilight pulled back a little more. Trixie's tail twitched, Applejack and Rarity looked equally worried, Pinkie flashed into instant concern while Fluttershy's features were rigid, Rainbow's feathers shifted a little faster, Spike's claws made little gouges in the wood, and Luna took one breath. It was a breath which temporarily confiscated most of the oxygen in the room, along with three suddenly-crucial degrees. Celestia immediately began to compensate.

"We will discuss this," the younger quickly said. "But not during the briefing --"

-- the girl abruptly blinked, and the right arm lifted.

It was a strange thing to watch, if you weren't used to minotaurs. The fluidity of the movements, a touch of automatic angling to one side in order to avoid the side swell of her own breasts and once that obstacle was cleared, fingers curving without visible thought until the tips lightly touched the disc which had been bound against her throat.

"Talk." It was barely a whisper. "How? I am being sent within because I possess no magic. Nothing he can steal and add to his own strength. But in order to maintain that status, I can bring no magic. None at all. And without the disc... I understand so few words, communication will be impossible --"

Twilight was starting to nod. The eldest alicorn simply cleared her throat.

"You'll be able to speak with him," Celestia stated. "With perfect clarity. Comprehension will be automatic."

The girl was staring at her.

"How?" was a slightly louder whisper.

"You're entering through a Gate," Celestia told her. "It creates a translation effect. Anyone inside Tartarus can understand anyone else, for as long as they're all within."

There were more stares now. Just about everyone, with a single dark-eyed exception. And she was warming the air, compensating for Luna -- but it did nothing to affect the chill which soaked into her next breath.

"Tartarus," the eldest quietly said, "finds it advantageous for one inmate to recognize when another is screaming."

The blue eyes seemingly hadn't blinked for some time --

-- Luna stood up.

"I will understand," the dark mare softly offered, "if you do not recall the entirety of our first meeting. You were rather ill at the time, and fever has a way of stealing memory. But the topic was introduced. Five devices survive to the modern nights, only five. And part of that is due to the scant number who can cast the most advanced of translation spells, with another portion due to the scarce quantity of device-makers capable of rendering that working into something which can be expressed through the inanimate. But there is a third factor. Because when one enchants a device, it is best to work with -- suitable materials. Something which already has an affinity for the desired effect, even if using it means the best possible channel needs to be... cleansed."

The girl didn't move. Didn't speak. Frozen in place. And at some distance around the table's curve, Twilight was starting to look sick.

"Three factors to affect scarcity," Luna steadily continued. "Place them all against each other, watch their edges cut the numbers down. And then imagine how few have been willing to venture into the only place in all the world where the core of the device might be found. To stay, to search..."

Slowly, the girl's fingers shifted. Moved across the surface of the disc, until a single nail just barely touched the black opal which rested at its heart.

"We did request that you take care with it," the dark alicorn evenly finished. "Should the mission succeed, and you assume full possession -- consider that to be an ongoing recommendation. They are -- rather difficult to replace."

They won't look at her.
They don't want to look at the disc. But she's going to think of it as not wanting to look at her.

Luna sank back into a resting position, with everyone watching. Twilight swallowed, and then repeated the action until everything which had been rising was sent down again. The girl's hand simply jerked away from the disc at a speed which suggested the fingers had just been burned.

Celestia remained silent. Giving the group a chance to recover, as much as they could --

-- Applejack cleared her throat.

"Y'all said somethin' jus' then," the farmer carefully offered. "Ain't sure everyone caught it. An' it adds onto some other stuff. That the place changes, warps, an' -- wants anyone inside t' hear the screams." The hat vibrated. "Wants. So Ah've gotta put this out there."

I know what you're going to say. I've heard so many ponies say it before, and I was expecting it to come up here. But I should have realized that this time, it was going to come from you.
You can always count on Honesty to bring up an ugly truth.

"Is Tartarus alive?" Applejack asked. And the farmer waited, as the rope loops slowly vibrated their way towards the ends of bound mane and tail.

They were all looking at the sisters. Every last one of them, as the eldest alicorn thought about the girl. Someone whose dreams included scent. Because when the fear was this strong, rising this fast, even in a group which had been through too much to break... that was when Celestia could detect it. Something at the edge of her awareness, waiting for its chance to claw at her sanity.

What was it like for the centaur, to be caught in the middle of the storm? Something where the lightning could never strike her, but the flood water might still find some way to make her drown?

The rain pounded on the castle walls. Another burst of thunder shook the room.

We had a tapestry on those hooks once. It would have shaken from that.
Another map, woven in fabric.
The only image we had for the interior of the fortress, just before the final assault.
Five ponies died to get it to us.
I remember their names.
I remember all of the names.

"You're not the first pony to ask that question, Applejack." Nearly thirteen centuries. Getting this degree of control over her own voice felt as if it had required at least four decades. "Or the first sapient. Tartarus has been studied for -- a long time. And everything we've learned -- or think we have -- still doesn't let me provide a definitive answer."

Pinkie was shivering now. One of the worst signs.

"All I can give you," Celestia finished, "is this: it isn't awake. We can prove a degree of awareness for what takes place within, but -- it's limited. Most actions seem to be reflexive. If there's a mind present, it operates on a subconscious level -- and nothing anyone has ever done was capable of changing that."

The hat required five adjustments, all in quick succession. Only the last one worked.

How do you read the moods of a centaur?
Maybe it's a combination. Treat the lower torso as a pony. The upper like a minotaur.
You're clenching your hands too tightly. Your fingernails just bit into your palms. Hard.
You're going to draw your own blood --

"Which kind of says that someone tried," Applejack forced out. "Maybe a lot of someones."

"The incarcerated," Luna took over. "Trying to -- negotiate with their own prison. Offering to bring back more to feed it, if only it would let them go into the world and seek its meals. None succeeded, Applejack Malus."

"There's been escapes." Which had come from Trixie. "Twilight wrote me about something which happened last year --"

You're trying not to look at me.
I assigned your probation. You're terrified that I might revoke it.
The only pony to wear the Amulet and not kill.
Part of you wants to be recognized in this group, doesn't it? To be recognized at all. But the responsibility scares you.
And then we have where I'm asking you to go.

"-- and she would have told you the how, along with the fact that no lasting harm was done," Celestia carefully cut in. "You could call it... a prank of sorts. Or -- an attempt at intimidation. One which failed. And when it comes to the current situation, as with the possibility of a second intervention... that factor does not apply."

Fluttershy's one visible eye slowly closed.

"And Tirek?" Rarity pointedly asked. "Was he not within, before emerging to treat the world as his meal?"

The sisters reluctantly nodded.

"We thought we understood how he escaped," Celestia sighed. "The initial assumption was that it was because the Gate's guardian was briefly absent. We examined everything --"

It was Rarity. You had to watch the eyes and fast-expanding rib cage, and then you had to move ahead of the followup.

"-- and we locked that down. We made sure it wouldn't happen again. No, Rarity: we did not put him back in a prison for which he was still holding the key."

"Except," Rarity pushed on, sharp eyes quickly narrowing, "nopony was able to ascertain why the guardian left in the first place."

Luna's head shake indicated the reluctance had been doubled.

"We managed to prevent a future exit," she told them. "But -- yes, we did not find a cause." The next tones were falsely light. "If you wish to lure the guardian through the screen and render him into what I shall term as 'his lesser self,' then feel free to use the opportunity for questioning. Our own efforts in that direction encountered a number of barriers. Be warned that the lack of actual language was less than helpful -- but perhaps you can do better?"

Rarity went silent. Celestia took over before the condition had the chance to wear off.

"However," the eldest alicorn admitted, "we have to recognize the possibility that he may have gotten out. If the expedition locates an empty cave --" stopped. Sighed. "-- we're working on that part. But if he was on the loose, this would be unusually subtle for Tirek. And then there's the fact that he would have left witnesses. I don't think he would want word of his activities reaching the palace. We have a lot of questions, Rarity. Evaluating him may start to answer a few of them. But there's only one way to find those answers..."

She made a point of looking at the map. Multiple sapients followed suit.

"We're going to put Cerea in through the Aornum Gate," she reminded the Bearers. (Luna put a spot of glow on the relevant portion of the map.) "That's the one Twilight is familiar with, and it's also the most reliable of the entrances. It means dealing with the guardian -- but that's something we know how to do." A glance at Cerea, accompanied by a quick evaluation for the exact degree of whiteness which had taken over the knuckles. "When we use the Gate, with the right ritual, it tells Tartarus that the one who's going in gets to come out."

"Ritual," the girl repeated.

"Yes --"

Both hands very slightly relaxed.

"...good," Cerea breathed. "Ritual magic. That -- makes sense..."

Don't ask. Just go with it. "It doesn't mean Tartarus won't act against you," Celestia immediately cautioned. "Once you're inside, it will do whatever it can to go after you. We're hoping the sword stops some of it --" and paused. "You may need to take the hairpins out for a few seconds before you go through. And kick the sword in ahead of you."

The "Because?" was as immediate as could have been expected, and twice as harsh.

"You're going to need the translation effect," the eldest carefully explained. "I'm not sure it'll take hold if everything is in place."

Eventually, the centaur forced a nod.

"But you'll have to leave by the same Gate," Celestia told her. "The others will try to block you."

"Unless," Luna suddenly considered, "the sword can bring you past them." Two more points on the map glowed. "You will be provided with marked routes to those as well. But I would advise against attempting to negate those barriers, even temporarily. There are -- those who might sense the moment of weakness. They will do their best to follow."

"Which brings us to how we're doing this," the eldest resumed control. "The only magic we can use is to put Cerea through the Gate -- and Cerea, you don't need magic to leave again once the ritual is in place. That means the protections we would use for a survey team or a normal prisoner check won't work. Or rather, they will -- and if Tirek is active, that just gives him more to draw upon."

"However," Luna added, "the sword has displayed the ability to disable any kind of magic it encounters."

I saw your face just then, Cerea.
What was that thought?

"Any magic," the younger of the siblings emphasized. "This can, to some degree, be tested before the Gate closes. I wish to be fully certain that it can battle against Tartarus. But if it is capable -- then we proceed."

"Normally, the sword would present transportation issues," Celestia noted. "But in this case, we can't teleport in and out of Tartarus. The entire deep place represents a lockdown zone." And with a direct, deliberately-piercing look at Twilight, "Don't. No matter what happens. Don't try it, Twilight. Not even if Cerea is three body lengths away from the Gate and you're just trying to get a good line of sight on anything which might be coming up behind her. I've seen the results of attempts. This isn't the palace lockdown, where an alarm goes off and unauthorized parties just get bounced back to their starting point. It's worse. Don't."

The thunder, momentarily outclassed, waited its turn.

"...I won't," the little alicorn finally said. "I swear..."

Celestia nodded.

I don't know how many more years I have before that stops working on you.
Probably not enough.

"The plan is to use air carriages to bring you into the general area," the eldest went on. "Flying low. We're working with a fairly strong deduction of the ground carriage's trail --" Luna obligingly lit up the path "-- but we need to verify it, and we're asking you to inspect the region." With a frown, "Because once you get away from the Gates, the territory above Tartarus is supposed to be a normal wild zone. As you saw in the summoning scroll -- Cerea got this in the Solar throne room -- that's not what Wordia described. Dead trees, warped limbs, and edged ground."

She successfully fought back the groan.

"That last is the part which worries me," Celestia told them. "Trees die. Branches can look strange. But there's never been any surveys showing jagged terrain in that area. And she felt like the rock serrations were almost aiming for her frogs. Something which makes it sound as if Tartarus was leaking."

"...which is its own problem," Fluttershy whispered.

One disaster at a time.
It's a nice philosophy.
It also doesn't work.

"Yes."

Spike learned forward a little more. Scale-covered elbows went through the illusion, planted themselves on the table.

"They're all going to need shoes," the little dragon announced. "Something like the tool ones, where they're slip-on and the entire bottom of the hoof is covered by metal. Rarity has everypony's sizes."

Something very strange began happening to the centaur's face, and Celestia almost missed it. She was too busy beaming with pride.

"Thank you, Spike," she sincerely stated. "We might have missed that. Hopefully there's enough in the palace to outfit everypony -- but if there aren't, I can send somepony on a supply run."

"And yourself?" a lightly-smiling Rarity inquired.

"I should be okay," Spike insisted. "It's just some points --"

"Scales are hardly proof against the world entire." The smile was getting a little stronger. "I can improvise something for you. Especially as we already have a base design..."

Which triggered a groan. "Rarity, you swore you'd never -- not again, not with the sandals --"

The amusement was open. Most of the cruelty was illusionary, but the key word was 'most'. "Flip-flop," the white unicorn half-chanted. "Flip-flop --"

It was a rather welcome moment of levity. It made ponies begin to smile, Trixie's eyes twinkled, all of the Bearers started to relax, and it lasted less than two seconds.

"-- your pardon."

And then they were all staring at the centaur.

Pony plus minotaur. That's not the whole of it, because the face is wrong and the lower-body reactions may not match. But it's a place to start.
Clenched hands. Hard-set shoulders. The tail is lashing.
...she's angry. It can't be anything else.
Why --

The right arm came up. A furious finger jabbed into illusion, pointed at the little dragon. The furious glare, however, made a turn and went directly for the sisters.

"Why did you bring him here?"

Celestia was still learning to read the centaur's expressions. Spike was a different matter. She'd spent moons with the little dragon, understood fully when he was confused, a little bit afraid and internally flailing for words. It was the set of the shoulders, the slight wilting of the crests and the droop of the auditory spines. He didn't know what was happening, hadn't figured out what to say, and had no means of buying time.

Centaur expressions were a work in progress. Dragons had been an education. Ponies, however, were automatic.

Six tail-lashing mares took exactly the wrong kind of inhale.

"That's Spike!"
"He has always been a part of this --"
"...you can't tell us who should..."
"And who are you to ask that? I should get a cloud going and --"
"Ah think maybe you'd better jus' let us decide whether anypony gets t' be at this table."
"That's mean! You don't know him! You don't know anything about him!"

Celestia was never certain as to whether the centaur heard all of it: the disc was known to have problems when several parties were speaking at once. But she knew which one had gotten through.

"I know he's a child!"

...oh no.
I've worn the translator. I know how it works.
It always assigns tones appropriate to the speaker's place in their life cycle...

"Thou art sending a youth into danger!" the centaur declared. "Asking a mere stripling to risk his life! Hath thou no shame? He should be in school, at play, anywhere other than here --"

-- Twilight was standing, and that was just the start of it.

"You don't know him!" the little alicorn shouted as wings flared, elevation gained in an instant as her eyes began to pale towards white. "You don't know what he's accomplished, everything he's done with us! You don't know anything about my brother --"

"-- I am perfectly aware of thy guilt!" the centaur shot back, and now Cerea was on her hooves: something which, for base altitude, meant considerably more. "Thou reek of it! Say what thou wilt, but in thy heart? You are all too aware of the possible consequences --"

The girl blinked.

"-- brother? He is thy --"

"SIT DOWN."

Wings refolded. Knees crashed. Selected portions of the room jumped.

Both standing sisters briefly glanced at each other.

The chorus, however, Celestia noted, may hang on for a while longer. Which was followed by "Spike has a place in this group, Cerea. One which he has earned. Age is no part of that."

"The Protector," Luna put in, "has his own role. You shall not counter it."

Perhaps it was all of the previous offenses added to the new one, or the simple fact that there was a child involved. Either way, the girl almost rallied. "BUT --"

"-- so," Luna coolly said, "that would mean there are two minors on the mission."

Seven mares and one dragon immediately focused on Cerea. For those who might be trying to learn centaur moods, it was a rather instructive view.

"Thou --" the girl sputtered as the rising tide of red suffused her skin. "Thou..."

"As I believe you had said something about graduating from your secondary school in the spring? Of course," the dark alicorn added, "that does disallow the possibility of your having been held back by a grade. Or three. But as I choose to believe in your intellect, I now ask you to consider mine. Thought and memory alike, because I rather distinctly recall sending out additional orders to Ms. Garter -- in order to accommodate someone who is still going through puberty."

Verbally, the centaur went silent.

"When I asked you to serve in the Guard," Luna stated, "I chose to stress what I had hoped would be mental maturity over physical age. Spike's lack of calendar years is balanced by a certain wisdom: an aspect which some ponies fail to acquire across a full lifetime. I would appreciate it if you would currently make some degree of effort to match a fraction of him. Do not question the Protector's place again."

There were still no words. The blush said it all.

Both sisters returned to their places among the floor cushions. Celestia took a moment to center.

"Spike has a vital role in multiple missions," she told Cerea. "For this one... he's our communications link. And our first sign of trouble."

"Communications," eventually emerged in a rather toneless way.

...right. You've never seen it. "Spike has the capacity to send scrolls to the palace via a form of teleportation," Celestia explained. (The centaur didn't blink.) "And we can reach him in return. Tirek demonstrated the ability to drain magic from every species in Canterlot. If he's active, then it's fairly safe to assume he can take Spike's."

"And if he can't," the little dragon softly said, "then that's another piece of information. Something we need. I'm supposed to send a scroll every hour, Miss Cerea. We'll be outside the Gate, and I can move outside of the lockdown. As long as I can send a scroll, the palace will know we haven't been drained. If he gets everypony except me... I write that down, and I send the alarm. Otherwise, even a blank scroll means magic is working. I have to be there. It's the only way..."

The centaur said -- something. Wires hissed, and continued to do so for a very long time.

Eventually, Pinkie's ears strained forward.

"Tin cans," she carefully said, "with a metal string between them. Only it's gallops long, and it has little bits of lightning going up and down. Somehow. And that lets people talk to each other? But you could never keep it completely taut across that much distance! Especially not when our end would have to keep moving! And there's all sorts of trees in the way, and what if we had to cross a river? You'd lose the lightning in the water!"

The girl sighed. And her lips moved, but no sound came out.

"We cannot," Luna stated, "use a 'hand-held movie camera' to place an image onto a distant hanging screen. Spike is all we have. He knows that, and he is willing."

The centaur's mouth framed the same set of syllables for the second time, only with a whisper of breath behind them. Celestia squinted, tried to guess at the muted sounds which lay beneath the translator's soft hiss...

'fild telə fəʊn'?

The newest mare to find some sort of place at the table visibly forced herself to shift forward on her bench.

"The Great And --" The unicorn stopped. Glanced at Twilight, then brought up her own left forehoof and very lightly rapped a light blue snout. "I..."

"If there's something you need to say, Trixie," Celestia gently encouraged, "then say it."

The performer took a breath, and then recruited three more for reinforcements.

"...I don't think Spike's going to be enough." And before the rest of the table could react, "Not because he can't do it. Because there's more reasons than Tirek for him to be incapable of sending a scroll. There could be a fight where he gets knocked out for two hours, or he runs out of flame, or -- there's reasons, that's all." The long streaked tail was twitching. "I spend half my life on the road. I've met most of those reasons. We need a backup."

"I can project bursts of field into the air," Twilight quickly said. "Send a signal --"

Trixie shook her head. "No magic. We need something any of us can use." And forced herself to look at the sisters. "I want to prepare some smoke signals. It'll take about twenty minutes, with the right chemicals. You put observers at the edge of the classified zone, watching. We can set up a color code system. One hue for no status change, another for an emergency, and something for All Clear." There was a small shudder. "If we get the chance to use that. But it's a backup. Something Tirek can't touch."

The sisters nodded. So did all of the Bearers.

"Whatever you need, Ms. Lulamoon," Luna gently said. "Write out the list of ingredients. Barring emergency, the mission will not proceed until your signals are prepared."

The performer shakily nodded back. Celestia scooted forward slightly on her cushions.

"We were starting to discuss this earlier," she told the group, "and Trixie's just brought the core issue into play again. This is a no-magic run --"

Feathers rustled. Wings twitched. And then the weather coordinator finally exploded.

"-- this isn't fair!"

It had been a shout, and it had been delivered from just below the ceiling.

"I know what I'm doing out there!" Rainbow yelled. "I always do! You can't tell me that I'm grounded! What good am I gonna be, stuck on the stupid ground the whole time! And now everypony's saying the ground is trying to hurt us, we need at least a few ponies off it, there's pressure carries, I can take Spike on my back and we can all stay off the dumb ground --"

Ponies were getting up again. The centaur, whose only place in the outburst seemed to be as incidental extra target, didn't move.

"-- Rainbow," Applejack firmly shouted, "half the deaths from Tirek were pegasi: y'know that! Pegasi who got caught in the air an' couldn't manage a glide in time t' get back down! We've already got at least one case of drain, an' even a temporary one is gonna drop you!"

"I'm better with glides than just about anypony!" the pegasus raged. "And I can stay low when I need to! It's just a short drop, I go through short drops all the time --"

"-- onto a patch of ground that's like a thousand little knives?" the farmer challenged. "Y'drop a lot, but y'don't always land on your hooves, Rainbow. Even a little crash is gonna leave y'bleedin', and a big one --"

Frantic wingbeats briefly slowed, then accelerated back to the speed of denial. The earth pony simply shuddered.

"-- a big one," Applejack finished, volume dropping as the hat shifted forward to shade her eyes, "could have y'hittin' throat-first. Big one means we lose you, Rainbow. So Ah ain't askin' here." She stared at the floor. "Ah'm beggin'. Stay on the ground, much as y'can. Please."

Silence.

"Rainbow...?"

A four-tap of hooves touched down on the section of marble next to the farmer.

"Since you're scared," the weather coordinator brashly decided.

Without making eye contact. "Ah am. Could get a little tired of ponies questionin' that sort of thing..."

"Just because you're scared," Rainbow added. "No other reason."

"Rainbow?"

"Yeah."

"Y'still ain't Honesty."

Multiple feathers briefly bristled.

"Yeah," Rainbow admitted. "It's too hard."

The nuzzle was quick. Ponies returned to their benches. Celestia put another completion check into the internal list of the inevitable, then resumed.

"We have to leave every possible thaum outside the gate," she told them. "Cerea has no magic -- but under any other circumstances, she would be carrying it."

"Which brings us," Luna continued, "to the substitutions."

The aura around the dark horn became slightly more intense. Several glassy tubes were levitated away from the floor, brought into view.

"Your primary light source shall be chemical," Luna announced. "Glowsticks -- good: I see that translated. Fire can be used, but the radius of such light is often less than would be expected on the surface, and -- heat will generally be minimal." Looking directly at Cerea, "Generally. Once Tartarus determines what sort of environment might disorient you, then that is what it will try to inflict. A torch might gutter -- or flare to the point where you must drop it. The glowsticks are somewhat more resistant to that effect. However, you shall carry at least one unlit torch. In case it is needed."

Rainbow twitched again. Fluttershy was silent. Pinkie watched them all.

"You also need your own means of communicating with the outside," Celestia told the girl. "We can't offer much -- but we do have this."

Her own horn ignited, and a small metallic cylinder was levitated above the rim of the table. Something roughly the length of the girl's bare palm, with a second, slightly larger piece of spring-attached metal almost fully surrounding the top: the exception was a triple-ridged hole at one end, where the interior was laced by thin gold reeds. It floated towards the centaur.

"A canister of compressed air," Luna explained, "attached to a -- whistle, of sorts. Tartarus has ways of muffling and enhancing sound, for that too can bring torment. But there is one thing it will always allow to pass. Apply pressure to the top, and that sound will move through the caverns. It will reach the Gate. And given that, it is simply a matter of applying Ms. Lulamoon's system to the duration of each blast." She paused. "We will give you multiple canisters, in case one or several should be lost to the deep place's machinations. But you should only use it in either a time of great need, or -- if you are close to the Gate, and must let the Bearers know that you are coming out. Because this sound will always be heard. And there are things within which will be listening."

The girl slowly extended one arm --

-- most of the Bearers were still having trouble looking at her for very long. Perhaps it was only the sisters who noticed what it took to make the trembling stop.

The centaur took it.

"We had to choose the sound carefully," the dark mare told them. "Along with the frequency. We know that Tartarus allows it to pass. But we do not know if sound or frequency have any effect upon centaurs. And --" she was looking at the Bearers now, one at a time, took a moment for Trixie "-- for ponies, the sound can be traumatic. You need to be prepared. And we have to know whether there is any centaur reaction. So..." A thick wad of cotton was raised, floated towards the girl. "...it is your choice. You may leave for a moment, find an empty room and set off a muffled version. Test yourself in isolation. Or do it here, while we stand ready to help you with anything which might occur. Because we do not know how you will react, and -- it is possible that assistance might be required." Back to the mares. "And you should hear this, so you will recognize it at need -- but you must brace yourselves for the experience."

The Bearers nodded. Luna turned to the centaur.

"I would prefer to do it all at once," the younger of the Diarchy told the lost knight. "In a single location, in case of distress. But the choice is yours."

The girl briefly looked at the others in the room. Three of them flinched.

"When you are prepared," she softly offered. "Not before."

It took a minute before the final nod emerged. The centaur held the cotton tightly against the gold reeds, squeezed the cylinder --

-- Pinkie's full-body jerk nearly put her off the bench. Fluttershy's tail splayed in six directions at once. Nearly every pair of furred ears in the room slammed flat against the skull: those of the girl merely went back. Spike got out of his chair, moved to his sibling's side and gently rubbed at trembling flanks.

"...that," the centaur shakily said, "is the sound of a pony screaming."

"Yes," Celestia quietly replied. "Tartarus will always let that go through." And before anypony else could speak, "We're sending you in with food, of course. And insulated canteens. We just have to make sure the containers are scentproof. It..."

She stopped. Purple eyes shifted down. Looked through illusion, wood, floor, and centuries.

"...won't matter once you open them, naturally," the oldest mare in the world made herself go on. "And you shouldn't do that unless there's no other choice. Because there are things in there which will smell food, real food, and..."

She was barely aware of her own movement. Of the little shake of her head, the stillness of her mane, or the light contact of her sister's extended wing.

"...they'll -- react," Celestia finished. "We're mostly giving you those supplies in case you need a distraction. But don't eat anything you find in there, Cerea. Don't. We have a treatment for those who consume something in there and come out again, but -- we don't know if it works on centaurs. And when it comes to your own needs... you won't really have any."

They were all staring at her now. All but one, who had simply shifted that much closer.

"No needs," Twilight said. Because it was Twilight, and there were times when knowledge was horrifying -- and yet, knowledge was still sought.

"As long as you're in Tartarus," Celestia told them all, "you won't need to eat or drink. You can, but... you don't need it to live. Nothing there does."

"No hunger." Pinkie now, perhaps because the idea was so strange. "No thirst..."

"Oh, you'll be hungry," the oldest alicorn steadily said, inner vision burrowing through the weight of time. "Enough time in there and you'll be so thirsty that you'll feel like you're on the verge of death. You just won't die."

And finally, Fluttershy, and Celestia knew it wasn't from any kind of desire to hurt. It was the caretaker speaking, with a hope which rose from the mark itself. Begging for a single place where the most desperate cases could find a little more time, even when the price was so very high.

"...no death?"

This time, she felt her own head shake. The slight coolness of her sister's form, pressed so tightly against her own.

"You can die in Tartarus."

The rising residue of ancient agony manifested upon her features as the ghost of a grim smile.

"That is to say," Celestia clarified as her ears tilted backwards into the temporal abyss, "you can be killed. For the incarcerated, for the ones who tried to end the world... enough time, and every moment might be spent in wishing for a death which never comes. Because that would be release, you see. The final escape. And the deep place would never allow that. You can be killed in Tartarus, and there's so many ways to die there..."

There was a breath caught in her throat.

"...but nothing you can do will ever let you take your own life."

It had been meant as a final one.

"I... I know you all care about me," the oldest mare in the world eventually said, with every word brought forth from the large body by the pressing weight of external terror. "Everypony here. Spike, you're included in 'everypony': with you, it's an honorific. And -- Cerea, I want to believe that before this happened, I... had your respect. Those were the sort of words which raise questions. And if you care about me, if you ever respected me at all... you will never ask me how I know that."

It wasn't hers.

Confrontational

The doctors were out.

The briefing had gone on for some time. Maps had been examined: the designated landing site for the air carriages, multiple points of potential extraction if the group found itself exiting on the gallop. The little alicorn -- Twilight: names had emerged in their natural course, which had felt somewhat easier than having to memorize eight at once -- could take passengers with her in a teleport, but her range didn't reach anywhere near as far as that of the Princesses. Cerea also represented a potential challenge to her mass limit (which was apparently much lower for teleports), and... it was all too possible that teleportation wouldn't be available as an option. Nor would flight, or anything other than desperately fleeing. Trying to stay ahead of a living mountain, when every mocking stride of pursuit might cover a tenth of a kilometer --

-- Cerea was beginning to regret having heard Diamond's letter. It had given her imagination a foundation for future constructs. And when it came to picturing what could happen...

The Princesses had also reviewed what was currently known of the deep place's corridors, and designated what they were hoping would be Cerea's primary path: something which wound about a few times, took a few odd detours and dips. This was followed by sketching out alternate routes, because they couldn't be sure. The warps apparently tended to be gradual, but it had been enough years since the last survey for 'gradual' to have potentially created any number of changes. There was a chance that no previously recorded path could still be trusted and in that case, Cerea had two instructions. The first was to simply keep going down, because the warps had never been so severe as to change the level where a prisoner was kept: Tirek was at the bottom. And the second...

...there was another route marked on her map. It made use of unnatural staircase formations, stone ramps carved by cruelty. The path was the closest thing available to a straightline route, the single fastest trail to Tirek -- and she was only meant to use it as an exit.

Because it was Tartarus. And across the history of Menajeria, there had been more than one attempt to destroy the world.

If all maps failed, then Cerea was supposed to follow a pair of primary instructions. Keep going down, and... if at all possible, stay away from the larger caverns. From those who were imprisoned within. The deep place kept them from escaping, but -- they could still lash out. A number of the smaller ones were known to be capable of stretching a limb through the gaps between the pillars of fused minerals which extruded from ceiling and floor. With some of the largest, their writhing was enough to shake the stone: actually slamming an appendage into rock...

There was a direct route, and she was only supposed to use it if she was running for her life because the Struga would take her past too many of the monsters. Her designated entry path wound about in a way where she was only supposed to see three, they'd briefed her on those, and...

A few pictures had been available. None had been created via photography, there were markings which designated scale, and there wasn't a single image which could truly be looked at for very long.

Cerea suspected the original creators of those renderings had considered leaving the finer details out as an act of mercy. It hadn't quite worked out that way. Her imagination had a sadistic insistence on trying to fill in the gaps. And there hadn't been much discussion of what she was supposed to do in the way of battle tactics, in the event that one of them was somehow loose. It was presumed that the sword would do something to weaken their magic. It might even do the same to the party which possessed it. She had the theoretical potential to make them -- slump forward. And when her opponent was the size of a small hill, 'slumping forward' became its own problem.

She'd been given names. Details on what they were capable of. Providing the reasons for their imprisonment would have become repetitive in a hurry. And there were things which were known to temporarily ward them off, because 'temporarily' certainly included a duration of three seconds. But you could count on gaining those seconds. Generations of researchers had contributed to the tactics which guaranteed them, and had presumably done an equal amount of work on the unavailable spells.

There hadn't been very many substitutions available, and the primary one was known as 'legs', rapid movement thereof.

The fastest way out led her directly past nightmares. The presumption behind a catastrophe exit was that whatever was chasing her would be worse.

She'd forced herself to listen. After a while, she'd asked for paper so she could make notes: she couldn't read or write enough Equestrian to get by, but transcribing spoken words into French was simple enough. Cerea had repeatedly caught the little alicorn trying to sneak glances at her handwriting.

They'd worked out a code system for the compressed air whistles: a short list of possible messages, and the number of seconds which would indicate each. Cerea had briefly considered trying to teach them Morse code, but had quickly realized three things in order of increasing humiliation: spelling things out letter by letter would rapidly expend her entire canister supply, the system hadn't been designed for the Equestrian alphabet, and she didn't really know Morse code.

And there had been portions of the briefing which had been meant for the Bearers, because --

-- she didn't want to think about it. She was going to do everything she could to avoid sending that signal. But the Princesses had seen it as a possibility, it had to be included on the list, and if that message was going to find a response...

...the core idea behind sending Cerea in was that Tirek couldn't draw upon weakness. No magic. Nothing he could steal.

They can't come in after me.

The full briefing had taken about two hours, with every last moment taking place within a cloud of fear. And with the steadily-decreasing length of the late autumn days --

-- at least they aren't personally adjusting the planet's axial tilt --

-- it was getting close to sunse -- Sun-lowering.

The palace couldn't risk a morning dispatch. There was some time allotted for final preparations and after that, they would be sent out under Moon.

Final preparations. Concluding measures.

Last words...

The motley group had scattered. Cerea was fairly sure as to where the light blue -- as to where Trixie had gone, because there were ways in which the palace had to be its own city. In this case, that very much included a room with a heavily reinforced, extremely closed door: something where all of the extra weights and seals didn't quite keep the stench of fast-mixing chemicals confined. Most of the low muttering also managed to escape, and the disc steadily supplied Cerea with a constant stream of translated invective until she made it out of range.

(She was trying not to think about the disc.)

Cerea didn't know where all of the others were. The presumption was that at least a few had to be trying on protective shoes. But there were things she had to do prior to departure, it got her away from the stares (and when it came to the yellow pegasus, there was the option to capitalize) and the scents, and... she'd started with the Royal Physicians.

Or rather, she'd meant to. The office door was unlocked, but -- there was nopony there.

The girl suspected the two unicorn stallions were somewhere in the palace. They'd probably tried to go home for the holiday -- which home might have been a coin flip -- but providing medical services for the Princesses meant a life of being perpetually on-call. Her guess was that they'd arrived during the briefing, had collected all of Cerea's medical information, and were presumably providing it to Fluttershy. Just in case any of it needed to be used or, with Fluttershy involved, kicked into reverse --

-- focus.
Last chance before we leave.
Before I do something which makes everything go wrong --
-- focus...

They were being sent in with supplies. But the Princesses had also told them to take whatever they felt might be needed -- as long as none of it was enchanted in any way.

It was probably safe to assume that Fluttershy was being issued a medical kit. But most of the contents would be meant for the potential patients who could be treated.

That has to include Spike.
If there's enough of his species to form a nation, then there's medical lore. Even if he's the only one in the capital, there should be --
-- does his species have a nation?

And given what the yellow pegasus had said to her, Cerea wanted to carry a few things of her own.

The papers from the briefing were already in Ms. Garter's best approximation of a messenger bag. (Humans would have made a point of openly noting the way in which the strap cut across her breasts. Ponies were generally silent on the matter. Cerea's mind kept inserting words where the silence should have been.) They were quickly joined by two small bottles of topical disinfectant. After that... ponies knew about willow bark extract, so it was just a matter of getting enough of it. Needles, thread, and sterile wrappings -- she didn't want to be in a position where she had to stitch her own wounds and she'd never actually tried it, but she at least understood how it was supposed to be done --

-- there they are. Right out in the open. No protective wrapping --

-- it took a moment before she managed to pull her palm away from her blushing face.

-- because from what Doctor Vanilla Bear said, they've been enchanted to stay sterile until they're actually used.

Would touching the sword to the medical supplies fully dispel the enchantment? There hadn't been all that many experiments upon enscorcelled objects, likely because the palace simply didn't want to lose too many things. It was possible that the spells would only be neutralized for as long as the blade was in direct contact. And the one time Cerea had been (retroactively) sure she'd permanently cancelled a spell, the hairpin had gone into the lock. She could presumably try jamming one through the wrappings and see if she got another fountain of sparks, but the best possible result would leave her carrying freshly-contaminated cloth.

There was too much magic around her. It wasn't just part of the environment: it managed the environment. Trying to find the mundane solution in a world saturated with thaums --

-- they use magic on just about everything.

Every tail strand felt as if it had just locked in horror.

They've been trying out spells on the metal. Barding told me that.
My armor. I can't be sure there isn't anything active on it, or that the short-term spells didn't leave any lingering energy. I can't go in without --
Think.

Trinette had done everything possible to teach her, guiding Cerea through the art of working steel. The girl was still fully certain that nothing she'd created in Equestria was up to the standards of a true smith, but -- some things were basic. Because when you were making armor -- well, your creation was presumably going to wind up in a battle at some point. And even if it didn't, normal use could put strain on pins and seams. Even with centaur-created steel, it was still possible to have metal fatigue come into play. Add in the chance for dents, joints frozen by an impact at exactly the wrong spot, and you never made one full set of armor.

You made at least two.

Magical experimentation had been focused upon the pieces she wore every day (usually on the inner surface), because the casters needed to see how the results worked in practical use. But go into the smithy, and there was a spare pauldron, an extra vambrace -- enough armor to assemble a complete second set, because it was easier to swap in the new than wait for the damaged section to be repaired. And everything she hadn't been using was untouched by magic.

It also hadn't been fully field-tested.

...actually, given the way unicorns talked about their coronas, it hadn't been fully field-tested and it hadn't been fully field-tested.

No magic...

She gathered everything, assembled it as quickly as she could and donned the lot. All of the joints seemed to be moving properly. The spring-deploy across her lower back felt a little slow. She resolved to leave the helmet off for as long as possible.

Back into the empty basement corridors. (She hadn't seen or scented a single pony since she'd reached the lower levels.) She wasn't quite done.

Her brother.

Her mind kept going back to the reptile. Some of that was frustration over the way her protest had been treated. Other portions felt like perfectly natural questions.

So they either have very liberal adoption policies or the pony life cycle has a metamorphic stage.

Perfectly natural, somewhat sarcastic questions.

The next stop was the armory, and just about every glowing glass bead designated its nearby item as being in the same category: completely useless. All except for the ones which shone white, because that color had been reserved for the things with no magic at all.

She knew that, but... not what most of it did. There was just too much in the armory. That briefing was still ongoing, and her superior officer would never have the chance to complete it.

Nightwatch...

Cerea carefully worked her way past the large sphere with the red bead, examined a number of smaller ones. Picked up a sample of each from their crates, weighed them in her gauntlet-covered palms.

Maybe...

But it was a question of figuring out how to use them. And in order to have any chance...

The little knight was still asleep.

Centaurs weren't built for stealth. It was possible to muffle the sound of hooves upon the natural surface of a forest, and camouflage colors were available, but -- there was just a lot of body to hide. And with the barracks, it left Cerea moving far too slowly, all while wishing she'd gone to the smithy as her last stop. Every shift of her body, every metallic sound felt as if it had to wake the pegasus, and then the girl would need to explain...

But the potions did their work, and the little knight slept.

Into the bathroom. It took some work to get the drain covers off, and -- she was right. There was a trap. But it was just the two of them using the pool, and that meant there wasn't enough.

Back into the sleeping area. One more look at black fur, and a glance at visiting white. The rippling of dark strands across dreaming breaths.

How old is she?

Cerea had never asked.

How old is Spike?
They're sending him out there --
-- maybe lizards live to be three hundred. He's in his thirties but still hasn't hit puberty yet --
-- puberty.

Her teeth almost ground against each other.

Va te faire foutre, Luna --

-- this time, her hands semi-silently slammed over her mouth.

I didn't say it.
I didn't say it.
She's not my liege any more.
I could say it --

Her arms, unaccustomed to holding back the weight of rebellion, sank down. Cerea looked around the room.

It took a minute to find the final remnants of her original clothing. A simple selection from her airline-limited wardrobe, meant for a morning run. She hadn't worn any of it for weeks and with the steady supply of new pieces from Ms. Garter, there had been no need to attempt repairs. All she had to do was tear it a little more. Create strips, and then sterilize them with boiling water from one of the kitchens. And there was at least one other use. As long as she was already going to be obliterating what was left of the skirt...

He usually didn't mention what I was wearing.
...I had four outfits and a swimsuit. There was only so much he could have said --

-- the sketchbook was resting on one of the empty beds.

She looked at it for a few seconds. The clockwork mounted on her wrist ticked off every one.

It was... tradition of a sort, wasn't it? There were numerous terms which could be used to describe Tartarus: 'deep place' and 'prison' were the leading contenders, with 'horror' coming up on the outside. But there was also the option for 'dungeon'. And if you were descending into a dungeon...

At the very least, it was something to draw on. Add something to draw with and she could make her own map.

Sir Folliot would have understood.

Deep place. Prison. Dungeon. There was another term. For the Tartarus she knew of myth, it would have been the original one --

-- she collected the sketchbook. Almost automatically flipped it open, glanced at the first page, looked away and closed the covers as quietly as she could.

There wasn't enough in the pool.
Where?

It was her first time in the locker room showers.

There were no ponies in the area. Normally, it would have been getting close to shift change, but -- there was a crisis. Standard hours were probably becoming confused, or Guards were being briefed at the moment they came through the doors: something which prevented them from reaching the lockers. She wasn't sure what she would have done if she'd found the place occupied. Asking for donations would have been right out --

-- there were no ponies, and yet nothing about the washing area felt empty. Echoes of casual conversations seemed to radiate from the walls. Old gossip had soaked into the sponge panels, and there was a steady drip of ancient laughter running from the showerheads. Some of the more recent outbursts of mirth had probably been at her expense.

She'd... been nude in front of the other girls. Quite a few times. A number had even been voluntary...

I'm never going home.

It was easier to get the drain covers off this time, but the catch-trap was set deeper. She pressed belly and barrel flush against the floor, bent at the upper waist as much as she could, tried reorienting her body and leaning to the right...

..on her side. On a floor of a group shower. With one arm down a drainpipe. In full armor.

She'd told her last friend that she could sleep on her side. This was true. She'd also said that there was a lot of twisting involved with getting up again, and multiple fresh scrapes worked their way into the floor.

She rinsed her haul, mostly to get rid of lingering soap traces and the fact that she'd brought it up through a drainpipe. Bagged everything, and then the armor was wiped down. A few hoofsteps brought her back to the lockers and the honor shelves.

The only one there, and yet... she wasn't alone. Not when it felt like that one helmet kept staring at her.

Somepony's coming. I can hear the hoofsteps. But she couldn't scent them, and that seemed odd. She didn't spend a lot of time in the locker room, but she was fairly certain that the air currents generally washed in.

Metal on the hooves. A Guard going off-shift. Or this may be one of the Bearers. Looking for me.

She was just about done with her preparations anyway. Cerea moved to the exit, opened the door --

-- the alicorn on the other side quietly looked up. Took a breath as redirected air currents wafted every bit of scent backwards, and dim stars flickered within a nearly-still mane.

There were four words. Each had been created from ice, and the tremendous effort required to push them forth nearly froze two souls.

"I am the monster."

And Cerea didn't move.

She couldn't move. She had two paths: one went back into a locker room which had no other exits, and -- the mare in front of her was no longer her liege, but that still left royalty blocking her path...

"I had... said that I would discuss it," the alicorn softly said. "But not in front of witnesses. Not at the door to the gardens, when another could come across us at any time. Not at the briefing. I knew your approximate location, at least in that you had descended to this level. I kept all others from following you. Because it is not something I can say in front of another. Not even my sister. She told me that I had to speak with you, that the words needed to be mine alone, and -- It is... not something I say. Simply a thought, one which may never fully depart. A thought which makes a home in thousands of frightened hearts. And yet I said I would discuss it, and..."

The mare took a slow breath.

"...this -- may be the only chance. My sister... told you her reason for wishing you to remain among us. I have my own, and..."

She stopped. A thin layer of corona rippled at the base of the horn, then winked out again.

"...Princess Celestia -- wanted to think that you had respected her. Your sworn service to me is ended. I know that. But... I would like to believe that you swore to protect the life of somepony you... did not hate. Not at that time. The liege has an obligation to those under her charge, and... you are going to a place which feeds upon torment. I must try to lessen yours. Especially when so much of it is my own fault."

I heard you.
I'm going to remember that dream for the rest of my life.
I may be afraid to dream --

"Cerea," the dark alicorn forced out, and the girl could hear the effort, the strain involved just in saying a name, "if there was ever a time when you did not loathe my very existence..."

The left forehoof scraped backwards. The mare's head, ears tilted back and down, forced itself to raise.

"...will you listen? Will you grant me that much, for the minutes which remain to us?"

The girl felt her fists clench. A split-second later, she knew the mare had seen it.

Three of the stars went out.

You were in my mind.
Over and over.
If I hadn't spotted you...

In her blood, the heat was rising. In her mind, cool air coated feverish skin, as dead leaves flew up from the forest floor.

...you let me live.
You -- showed me mercy.
You were kind, when you had no reason to be.
Capture instead of kill.
I didn't do anything to earn that...

"Yes."

The mare blinked. The equine head dropped, and then the dark eyes squeezed shut.

"Not enough time," the alicorn whispered. "No matter how long any may live, there is never enough time..."

One more breath. This flicker of corona got about a sixth of the way up the horn before vanishing.

"You -- expelled me from your nightscape in the middle of a sentence," the Princess told her, with eyes still shut. Staring at something which could not be seen. "You heard only the first part. The full context changes everything. This is the whole of it, Cerea: 'If I could somehow make the public accept one monster, then they might accept a girl who had never truly been a monster at all.' I am the monster."

You're --

The Princess was blunt. Controlling. She seized the moment and if both moment and centaur weren't cooperating with the fitting, then her field seized something else.
She was direct. Often uncomfortably so. The mare went directly for the uncomfortable truths and pulled pony faces out of the warm waters of delusion into cold reality: something which happened with such force that some felt drowning represented safety.
Dreams were invaded, because she could. And when it came to those intrusions, she answered to no one in the world. Cerea had grown up among legends of those who supped upon nightmare --

-- she wanted me to be her Guard.
She didn't know what I was like. That I couldn't...
...she...
...she was in my dreams.
She saw my life.
And she still wanted me.
No one ever --

Some of the fur around the base of the eyes had darkened.

"And -- you did not know that... did you?"

The alicorn opened her eyes again. Stared up at the girl, as two more stars collapsed in on themselves.

"I could wish that you never knew," the alicorn softly said. "But then, you already represented the granting of a wish: the wish to find someone who did not -- and I did not summon you for that." Darkly, "Even had I somehow been so selfish, I am not so foolish. Not to believe it would last. That wish is one I have broken, broken for a lifetime -- but only somewhat before the natural shattering." Bitterly, "Because you would have learned of it, eventually."

There was no scent. The altered wind was carrying every bit of the scent away from Cerea and she didn't know what the mare was really feeling --

"Or rather, you would have heard a tale," the Princess bitterly declared. "Classes or gossip: I can hardly believe that you avoided the second for so long. That which ponies have told themselves is real. And would you have approached me, in hopes of learning the truth? I think not. They do not seek the telling from me, Cerea, and... I do not speak of it."

There was anger in the words now, and something flared within a nebula.

"Out of fear."

But there was no scent. And the girl couldn't tell who the anger was for.

"I don't understand --"

"We fought in the forest," the alicorn broke in. "There was very little fear in you then, but..." Just for a moment, the mare's lips twitched. "...not only did you not know who or what you were facing, but you were galloping a fever. But then, when we spoke afterwards... there was respect, for somepony who held a throne. But you were not afraid. I spoke to you, I tested you, I was --" her head dipped again "-- less than kind. I... have a number of bad habits. Forcing others to face their fears can often be chief among them. I might have -- should have been more gentle with you at the fitting, and... you still did not fear me. Because you had never heard of me. Anything about me, or -- that which so many tell themselves was me. Is me. Still. And..."

It was only a laugh on technicality.

"...they look at my Guards. My own citizens, those in every nation because the stories travel, they travel across gallops and years as they trample truth. And they wonder... what are the Guards on watch for? To protect my life? Or are they looking for the first sign of reversion?"

She looked up again. And the mare almost smiled -- but the near-expression was just like the laugh. Something with no real humor at all.

"Never enough time," the Princess softly said. "And still I canter about the edges of it, out of fear. Because my staff, my Guards -- I can say that many of them care for me. They come to know me, and the fear lessens -- but something remains. Something which has been with them since the years in which they began to recognize words. To hear stories, and how many wonder what they are truly guarding against? To protect me?" A galaxy vanished. "To protect the world from me? For I cannot tell them what truly happened. I came with the thought of telling you, that I had to speak, and..."

The horn lit up, and the corona went backwards. Twin bursts of glow surrounded crown and regalia.

"...I cannot. I am trying, I am trying, I --"

The metal flew left and right. Bounced off the walls, and the crown skidded to a stop against Cerea's motionless left forehoof.

"...I can't do this," the Princess whispered, as if there was no one there at all. "I want to. Why can't I...?"

Stopped. Blinked, until the moisture was once again absorbed by fur.

"A monster," the alicorn repeated. "Believe that about me, Cerea, if my unwelcome presence in your dreams had not been proof enough: join the herd at last. That I am a monster. It would certainly take a monster to send a child into battle, would it not? But... there was a world once, which only three remember --"

The girl hadn't moved. There was nowhere to go. Nothing she could do. No words were the right ones, no motions would ever serve, and...

...the mare had been in her dreams. The mare had said almost nothing real, and could still be lying about everything. The mare was a mon --

-- she's crying.

It felt as if she'd both always known that and just realized it. At the same time.
There were too many thoughts in her head, and none of them made any sense --

-- a monster would cry. As a lure.
I...
...you can't touch royalty.
...she was in my dreams, over and over --
-- you can't reach out --

Another non-laugh.

"Two," the Princess bitterly stated. "Two, now. A world where to be alive was to seize agency for your own survival. You fought for that, every day. We grew up too fast, if we wished to have the luxury of reaching maturity at all. And the reward? The burden of bearing the next generation. More who could suffer. But the proof of our victory? Now we have children who can be children. And yet..."

Two more tears.

-- I don't understand, I don't want to be here, I --

"...there are always those whom destiny calls upon. Inflicts, if you will. Spike is among them. He is worthy of the burden, but... it is a burden. And yet he would follow his sister no matter what we did. For the same reason I left the refuge/fortress/barricade point, to follow mine."

What? What's a barricade --
-- her eyes are so young.
Her eyes are so old.

"Out of love."

The girl didn't move. Neither did the mare.

-- you can't hug --

Finally, the alicorn sighed.

"I wished for you to stay," the Princess said, "because you were not afraid, and... perhaps that would have lingered for a time. But there was more than that. I told myself that we had something in common. I saw this aspect of myself in you: that we were fighting the same battle. Waging war against stories. But yours is the younger. Still spreading, but -- with fresher pages. It felt as if there was still a chance to change the final words. Perhaps all you needed was an opportunity, and -- somepony to provide one. You could still win..."

The dark eyes closed again. Every joint in the wings sagged at once, and the head bowed as if the horn was a foreign weight.

"...but not me. Never me. Because I am the monster. And there is a jest at the heart of it, Cerea: the darkest of jokes. Because the failure is dual. If the public tolerates me, acknowledges my role in the Diarchy... then they do so because my sister has told them that I have a place. Something they hear as an order. They have taken me in, because they feel they must. I thought that I could make them see who you truly were -- when I have yet to make them accept me. When everything came because I lost the last one who knew me, and I could no longer accept myself --"

She stopped.

The wings refolded. Her head jerked up. The horn lit, and metal shifted.

"I should have spoken to you," the mare finally said. "In the waking world. I wanted to know you, and... one would think that speaking is the easier route. I wish that we had spoken. I wish..."

Crown and insignia settled back into place.

"...but wishes do no good," the alicorn finished. "To be a part of dream is to walk among wishes, because wishes are dreams. Something with no impact upon reality. And what is at the heart of nearly all of them? The same sentiment. Let this become different. Let it not have been. A wish is a prayer which the heart whispers to itself. And like every prayer, it goes unheard."

She slowly shook her head. Dry eyes looked up for the last time.

"My final order," the Princess told the girl. "Protect yourself. Do anything required to come out again. Even when your only desire is to be quit of me, when we will never see each other again -- this ends with a centaur emerging from Tartarus. I would prefer for that to be you."

She turned, every dark limb working with perfect precision. Began to trot away --

-- glanced back.

"...I thought I would fail," the alicorn said. "Perhaps that is why..."

A fast, hard shake of the head. Ears lofted, and two constellations came back.

"There are no more orders," the Princess observed. "There... cannot be. But I was your liege, if only for a little while. And you -- wish to be a knight."

It was an automatic response. Something which rose from the girl without thought, and so it reached her voice. There was enough pain without having to think.

"I'm not --"

"-- let us define a knight," the alicorn cut her off, "as someone who does what is right, because they feel that they must. And they do it when no others will, regardless of the price. A lady owes something to her knight. To the one she pledged to save..."

There was a moment when all of the stars were gone. Mane and tail were nothing more than rapidly-collapsing strands of a soft light blue. And then it all came back.

"I release you from your vow, Cerea," the Princess told her. "But I do not release myself. A lady owes something to her knight. Grant that I see you as one. And..."

One more breath. The wings rustled, and the air currents changed. Reversed, with everything flowing towards Cerea, everything which had been held back until the very last. Until there was no time left.

"...you hate me now," the dark mare decided, and the accompanying soft laugh was finally true. Some of the best humor was birthed in graveyards. "I am fully aware of that. Perhaps you will even be afraid. But for the hatred... that will never fade. Because there is so much I could not say, and for the one thing I still can... you will loathe that I can say it. That I am the only one in the world who could. And yet... and yet I find myself capable of speaking these words, if no others. Perhaps because you might see them as the final proof of a monster."

The girl had room to move now.
She didn't.

"You look so very much like your mother," Luna stated. "And you feel that your mother is beautiful..."

The armor felt so very heavy. And there was scent wrapped around her limbs. Endless tides of shame had locked all four knees, while self-hatred unending bound the arms.

All of it was familiar.
Relatively little was hers.
The alicorn trotted away.

I'm not.
I'm not.
I'm not...

Taciturn

There was a phrase which tended to crop up in human fiction, at least for those stories which were set within the temporal window which allowed the technology to exist. It usually came into play when an elite unit was about to be dispatched, and could even see some use when a more ragtag group was going out: the latter would generally be using it because the former said the words, and wouldn't necessarily know what it meant. Cerea generally didn't go for that kind of tale, but -- her reading selection within the gap had been limited, and there had been times when she'd just taken whatever was offered while silently noting the misuse of yet another Greek letter within the title.

You were going to be dispatched onto a mission. (She was in no way qualified to be part of an elite unit, and suspected that as far as words went, including her meant the definition of 'ragtag' needed a major shift downwards.) And someone would give the order to synchronize watches.

In stories, it tended to be something of a cliche'. It also dropped an indelible timestamp onto the text, because there usually wasn't much need for anything set in the modern era to synchronize smartphones. And yet it was one of the last things she did before she headed towards the departure point.

Cerea found what Nightwatch had told her was the most reliable clock in the palace, made sure the weight of her wrist-mounted timepiece was ticking along at the largest specimen's pendulum beat. And then she'd stared from one to the other, because placing one in rhythm with the other meant they were both lying.

She lied to me.
She told me a story to get what she wanted.
...half a story.
She called me a knight...

One full Equestrian day had passed since she'd last left the palace. Only one.

A single day in which the party had collapsed because her will had been too weak to withstand the griffons' unintentional assault. Which also happened to be the day when the first possible evidence of Tirek's return had been revealed, which just so also happened to be the day when Cerea had decided to leave the Guard. Oh, and by amazing coincidence, that was the day she'd attacked her friend, the night she'd had her dreams invaded -- again -- and gone to battle against her liege, but actually leaving the Guard was being postponed because there was a chance that Tirek was coming back, so it had also turned out to be the day when she'd allowed royalty to talk her into entering Tartarus.

Not the Tartarus which Cerea knew. The deep place almost sounded worse.

And it had all happened in one day.

(It was a holiday. The time when everypony tried to be with their families...)

Her palm automatically smacked the heavy watch, which ignored the impact and steadfastly continued lying to her. (She would have done the same to the clock, but it was palace property.) And then she closed the timepiece's lid, followed by glancing back along her lower torso's length.

Both carrying capacity and arrangement of supplies were always questions for those using armor. It wasn't that hard to modify a saddlebag into a crude backpack, but there was a fundamental truth to such items: whatever you wanted to extract would inevitably shift to the bottom. Even with centaur double-jointing, fishing for something which was being carried over your own upper spine could be distinctly awkward. And with armor... Cerea could find more messenger pouches, but straps would eventually become tangled. There was a waist loop of heavy fabric, and a few of her chosen items were within hanging bags -- something which could shift against the metal with every hoofstep. Another source of sound added to those produced by the armor itself. Something which was incidentally being worn by a species which nature had not intended for long-term stealth.

Armor didn't come with pockets. This particular wearer had a certain amount of forward-mounted storage capacity available, but couldn't go fishing in her cleavage through a breastplate.

The current solution was a small section of heavy netting, draped across the forward base of her lower back. She'd carefully pushed small segments of fabric into the near-invisible gaps between armor pieces, making sure it was anchored. Anything she needed to carry was then carefully laced through the gaps until it was fully secured -- but still held in a way where one strong pull would get it loose. For that matter, she'd spent some time making sure that one very specific pull would have the entire rig come free: she didn't need to have anything using the netting as a grip point to hold her back from behind.

When it came to holding Cerea back, the local expert resided within centaur skin.

There was one place where I was safe. One. And she...

(Her head felt as if it was spinning. Certain thoughts were moving in all directions.)

A single day. One which had crossed the border into night, and she had to go through near-empty palace halls and ramps until she reached the same departure point. Because there would be an air carriage there, she would be traveling with company and too much might depend on the impression she had already made upon everypony involved.

Again.

But this time, the white horse was waiting at the final door.

There was a small bubble of sunlight next to the mare's left flank, and Cerea should have been used to that: it was hardly unusual to see either alicorn carrying something along as they moved through the palace. A sphere of magical energy being used to hold papers -- that had become the sort of thing which the girl had relegated to the background of her forced environment. A little detail of the world, like the partial corona slowly shifting around the base of the mare's horn. Maintaining the minor effect.

The white horse had been waiting for her. (The girl's first thought upon seeing Princess Celestia alone was to wonder how long she'd been holding everything up.) The equine posture displayed nothing more than composed patience, the first words were calm -- but the olfactory world gave that the lie. And the alicorn was carrying some paperwork in a bubble -- something which generally moved when the mare did. A hoofstep forward, and the minimal burden kept the pace. With both legs and wings still, the bubble would simply float. Synchronized.

Field bubbles didn't vibrate, or shift ten centimeters in random directions while the borders expanded and contracted. Not until now.

"The others are already in their air carriages," the older Princess quietly told the girl. "The group will take off as soon as you board yours. It's the dark blue one." The pastel mane slowly shifted. "You'll be riding alone."

It's a mass issue.
It's just mass...

The purple eyes silently looked into blue. Glanced down, focused on what was being carried in the crook of the girl's left arm, pressed against a burgeoning swell of metal. The visor, and the ridge which presented itself in lieu of a face.

"You're not wearing the helmet," Princess Celestia noted.

Nightwatch pulled back...

"I have no current need of it within these halls." She would put it on when she had to. Not before.

That got her a slow nod.

"I told them I had a few last words for you," the Princess informed her. "And time in which to speak, as we don't have any reports of giant limbs tearing the ground apart. So... there's food supplies in the carriage. Along with canteens and a thermos. I want you to try eating something before you go in -- and after that, use the spray in the red tube to neutralize the scent on your breath. You can't die from hunger in Tartarus, Cerea -- but the pangs can become distracting. It's the same for thirst. But when it comes to drinking --"

The pause felt oddly awkward.

"-- as discussed during the briefing: unless something happens which -- accelerates matters -- you're all going to start by looking for the site where the ground carriage was attacked," the alicorn eventually continued. "I was going over the maps again while everyone was preparing, and I have a rough idea of where it might be in relation to the Gate: Twilight and Applejack have the updated path in. Once that site is found, take a drink." A steady breath expanded the white rib cage, rustled feathers. "And before you go through the Gate, find a place to relieve yourself. Everything you can manage, because that can also become distracting -- and you don't want to bring those scents into Tartarus, either."

There would have been a few small benefits to donning the helmet before going outside. A little protection from the tapering rain. A second testing of the locking mechanism. Fully concealing any and all blushing.

"...yes." She forced herself to look away from the placid equine features, tried to ignore the scents which were anything but. "Are those papers for the mission?"

The large head quickly glanced back, looked at the little vibrating bubble as if surprised to find that it was there.

"No," Princess Celestia said. "Anything you weren't already presented with is in the carriage. This is for..." Another, slower breath. "...after you go." The alicorn slowly turned forward again.

"After," Cerea echoed. It was something to say.

Something like the ghost of a smile briefly haunted the alicorn's lips.

"Once you're all safely clear and the rain has been dispersed," the Princess told her, "there's going to be a press conference. Since the press has a number of rather natural questions. Things which echo the fears of a nation. And even when all we can really tell them is that we're trying to figure out what's going on, that an investigation is under way -- we have to tell them that much. Even if the details are --" the ghost rematerialized, faded again "-- classified. They need to know we're doing something. It may help a few. Just..."

The tide of sorrow coming off the white fur intensified, momentarily overwhelmed the dominant reek.

"...not as many as it might have in any other situation," the alicorn softly finished. "Because we did tell them it was over. And now they're wondering if we were lying. If it's something we can stop."

The large head briefly dipped. Purple eyes closed, opened again.

"That's half of the papers," the Princess went on. "Notes for the conference, which are -- quite frankly, mostly there because some ponies feel marginally better if they see somepony working from notes. It makes them feel as if things are -- more organized." The snort was barely audible. "Some. Wordia would usually claim they're a sign that my memory is failing. But I'm not sure she's going to wake up in time for the conference, and I'm not particularly inclined to do anything other than let her sleep in."

"And the other half?" If only because the question seemed to be begging itself.

"The first drafts of international letters," the white alicorn evenly told her.

"International?" Because from what little she'd seen, distance communications was arguably the gap in Menajerian magic. Teleporters had range limits, those who flew had to rest eventually, and a letter going by ground could potentially take weeks to reach a destination --

-- oh.

"It's the same magic which I use to contact Spike," the Princess verified. "But without him on the receiving end to send a reply, it's one-way. And I generally have to know the recipient, or the scrolls could wind up lost in the aether. Some nations have more turnover in their government than others, the zebra kraals/city-states don't have a central contact point..." The tail twitched. "There's problems. But I have to try. Because we've been accused --" and this time, something about the flow seemed to flicker "-- with some degree of accuracy -- of keeping our various crises under diplomatic wraps until after they've been solved." The right forehoof briefly scraped at the floor, and the bubble darted to the side. "Tirek is a problem which could affect the world."

Destroy.
You put him in Tartarus because he would have destroyed the world.

The white ears weren't rotated forward so much as they seemed to have been tipped in that direction, with both skin and thin muscles tense. Stiff. For a horse from the girl's home, it would have been a sign of fear.

"So there's two rounds of scrolls, with the sendings split between governments and the buildings on Embassy Row: those have been getting the newspapers anyway. The first is similar to what we'll say at the press conference: that we are doing something, and not to make a move until we request it. We're not telling anypony exactly where you're going -- but world-threatening events have arisen in nations other than Equestria." One more snort. "I may ask Princess Luna to go over the full statistics, to see if it only feels like we get the majority."

"So the other nations have their own prisoners there," a hollow-feeling voice managed to semi-inquire.

The alicorn nodded. "And because they usually have to bring them just about all the way in, when transferring custody at our border may mean a temporary lapse in confinement -- most of the leaders of those governments know where Tartarus is. The more intelligent ones will make an extremely accurate guess as to where we're starting, and some of our allies will want to offer immediate assistance. And we need to keep sapients out of that area, because everyone who enters is one more person for Tirek to potentially drain. So that's the first round, Cerea. That we're aware of what's going on, we need them all to stay back, and --" A slow head shake. "-- it's getting ahead of another accusation. One with too much truth to it, which says we're a little too slow to ask for help. Right now, there's nothing they can actively do and with the one-way sending... very few have anything close to an immediate means of telling us whether they've come up with a solution. But they can start thinking. Preparing. Because in the event that your survey finds him absent, or... there's another factor..."

If the Bearers are drained.
If I don't come out.
If he does.

"...the second round is an alert. It'll say that we all have to come together. We have to think of something. Because if we don't..."

Her eyes closed again. The edges of the bubble compressed, began to crumple some of the papers.

"...I know I'm putting more pressure on you," the Princess softly stated. "I wish that wasn't the case. But you asked me. And... in the tradition of governments everywhere..." One last quirk of the lips. "...I'm saving the near-lies for the press."

The girl held her ground against the waves of scent. Sorrow, regret, and fear. Too much of the last was coming off her own skin.

Assess and evaluate.
Assess and evaluate.
Assess and evaluate.

"Last words..." the mare repeated, and the purple eyes opened. There was something weary in them. Something... old. "Did Princess Luna speak with you?"

Cerea was just barely able to nod. Kept her features as passive as she could, and the waves of sorrow intensified again.

"I won't ask what she said," the elder offered. "But before I give you my own -- is there anything you wanted to know, which you don't feel was covered in the briefing? Anything which might help?"

A spiraling mind tried to anchor itself upon the mundane.

"What does the weather forecast predict for that area?" Because it was nearly winter, she was wearing metal armor, and the underlayer of padding could only offer so much insulation. Within the palace walls, the amount she was currently using could quickly become too much, and the girl really didn't want to acquaint everypony on the Lunar staff with the smell of centaur sweat -- but she was hoping there was enough thermal protection for the outside air.

It was slightly odd, watching the white-furred face. The wires had never hissed: the words had been fully understood.

"...forecast," the alicorn repeated.

But something about the slow shifting of features suggested that the mare was reaching deep into memory for a term she hadn't heard in a very long time.

"We're hoping for clear," the Princess eventually continued. "Normally, we'd ask a weather team to break up any clouds in the area, but... that's sending in more ponies. And it should be fairly cold, because it's getting close to winter. But probably not below freezing."

They only know meteorology as an exact science...

Under normal circumstances, the realization might have felt like a lesser horror. But nothing about the last day had been normal.

"Is there anything else?"

The girl shook her head.

"My last words to you," the alicorn resumed. "Try to sleep in the air carriage. It's not the shortest trip, and you've barely rested. There's only so much coffee and wake-up juice can do. Any fatigue you bring into Tartarus will only increase with time. Rest. And clear your mind, as much as you can."

A nod was manageable. Internal agreement wasn't.

Sleep.
How?

"I'm probably flying down Princess Luna's air path on this one," royalty continued. "Along with repeating part of the briefing. But it needs to be repeated. You are authorized to use the sword in any way you see as necessary. Anything which might help you come out again. " A little more softly, "And remember everything we told you about the ways in which Tartarus attacks. It may help you to hold on when the torment begins."

It's the sword. It's not the wielder. It's just the sword.

"And..."

The white horse's right forehoof lifted from the marble. The leg shifted forward --

-- halted. Came back down where it had been.

The flow of both mane and tail stopped.

"...I'm sorry," Princess Celestia continued. "I'm not even going to try and narrow that down, Cerea. There's no need to do so, because it can apply to everything. I wish you were in your home. That you'd never come here, with everything that's happened to you. Everything you've had to go through. I could wish that no part of this was your problem, that you'd never heard of us, that... we were just a dream you had once. There are..." The slowest, deepest breath, and yet one which failed to move the mare in any way. "...ponies out there who tell themselves that we can grant wishes." With a sudden burst of bitterness, "That we hear prayers. We don't, and we can't. We're just... mares whose lives went down a different path. I can wish you were home and safe, and that none of this was happening. But I can't make that happen, not by wanting it. All I can hope is that we've given you enough to let you come back."

The corona intensified, just by a lumen or so. A second projection moved forward.

"I wish we'd been better to you," the white horse said. "Better for you. Because there were two sides to that vow, and -- we didn't keep ours."

The door began to open. The girl's legs automatically began to move towards the increasing gap. Something which meant she never saw the final expression to occupy the white mare's face.

She didn't have to. The scent was enough.

"Come back, Cerea," the alicorn sadly finished, "Even when it's for just long enough to leave."

She stepped into cold and fast-clearing rain, pausing briefly in a pool of odd-seeming brightness as she looked for her designated carriage among the waiting four. (None of them seemed lit from within, but there were probably spells to stop that. Thaums trying to keep the inhabitants of a wild zone from gaining one more means of spotting something on the approach, and also one more thing Tirek could potentially steal.) The door closed behind her, the light became brighter still, Cerea automatically looked up, and a full Moon slammed through her bloodstream.

The lingering olfactory tides of the white horse's regret began to sort themselves into individual currents. Her ears registered the decreasing beat of the raindrops, along with giving her audio locations for every section of armor which wasn't quite being tested by those impacts. Colors sharpened --

-- no.

She could see the shadows of airborne pegasi as they moved around the edges of the light. Making things ready for the press conference, and exposing more of Moon with every moment.

A Moon which wasn't real.

It's... psychosomatic.
I saw a full moon during the first press conference. My body reacted because -- that's what it does. There's a full moon, and just about every liminal in the world is affected. But my body reacted because my mind told it to. Because that's what I think is supposed to happen.
That isn't real. Nothing about this is real.

She took a slow breath. Waited to drop out of sensory overdrive.

The centaur felt rain hitting the exposed skin of her face. Several droplets merged into each other, and a trickle ran down her neck before being absorbed into the padding. It was possible to track the exact angle --

-- this isn't working.
I know it's psychosomatic and it's not going away.
Corps stupide.

Of course her body wasn't listening. When had it ever? She'd tried telling it to get past an infection in the forest, and that hadn't worked. Confront the confining dimensions of the human world, and no pleas for a strictly temporary reconfiguration would ever be acknowledged. When puberty had been approaching, telling her breasts to start growing already had done nothing -- for her age group, she'd been second -- and after she'd met a much-loathed minotaur, there hadn't been any improvement in response from merely telling them to grow faster.

Moon wasn't real. But as far as her body was concerned, it was real enough.

...then again, she arguably shouldn't be complaining. She was in a position where she needed every edge she could get, and the full moon did bring certain advantages. But at the same time, it was sensory overdrive, and -- unless the group didn't reach Tartarus until morning, she would carry that moon-touched status through the Gate. Something which might make it that much easier for the deep place to assault her.

It could be argued as an edge. But it was one which could so easily be used to cut her.

I could just go back inside and ask Princess Luna to have Moon not be full any more.

...no. She didn't know if it worked that way, she didn't want to go back and in any case, that thought seemed to qualify for actual lunacy. Besides, even if it was possible, the changed false celestial state would leave the group maneuvering on glowsticks -- and, for the pegasi, the minimal heat of winter. She'd just have to deal with the effects. A full Moon was in the sky, and her body had reacted. There was no help for it.

She spotted her carriage. The team of pegasi hitched to the front seemed to shiver somewhat in the rain as the centaur began her approach.

Wait.

She hadn't practiced in what felt like weeks. (Her mother would have been disappointed at the lack of effort, but the schedule had been so crowded with Lunar shifts and citizenship classes and language studies and -- her mother would have been disappointed.) But her body insisted that Moon was both real and full. Something which made it easier. All she had to do...

The girl took a breath, felt ribs and bustline swell against the twin cages of padding and armor. Held it...

...yes. She could manage that, at least for now. Some degree of the Second Breath was accessible.

She'd never felt as if she was particularly good at it.
There were centaurs who never managed the trick. Every stallion had seemingly lost the capacity, and most mares...
...she hadn't mastered it. That was what mattered. True skill required perfection. Always. But this was the only thing she had, no one here knew it was possible --
-- did I dream about it?
...I could ask myself that about every single moment of my life --
-- and perhaps there was a chance for it to make a difference.
One more attempt at which she could fail, at the very end.

The centaur boarded the air carriage. Closed the door, centered her body within the enclosed space and sank down. There were a few seconds when she could feel the towing pegasi trying to overcome both inertia and the sheer kilograms of her body's mass: a short series of half-lurches as their hooves tried to find purchase on the slick roof.

The dark blue carriage lunged. Wheels found traction. Gravity clutched, clawed, found its grip temporarily sundered. The palace dropped away.

Three of the conveyances were already in the air, traveling together. The fourth labored to catch up.

The usual light source had been removed from the fabric ceiling. There was an active glowstick clumsily stitched into place, and most of what it did was tell Cerea where some of the local chemistry limits were. The lumens came steadily enough, but she needed more of them. In conjuction with moonlight, she would have enough to read by or, given her dismal level of semi-literacy, to make out the words she couldn't understand. But by itself... just enough to find some of the details on a map, and that required some squinting. It probably would have been better with two or more, but... how much light could she risk in Tartarus?

It would also mean doubling the amount of sickly yellow-green coating her armor and skin.

Sufficient light to identify the contents of the carriage, and -- there weren't many items packed in with her. They couldn't bring magic. The vast majority of the armory was staying behind. A number of conventional items had been abandoned. And for what little could be carried -- that had been split between carriages, with some redundancy in the supplies. Just in case one of them... went down.

Even at this distance out, the air carriages were staying as close to the ground as they could. The centaur could hear the backblast of wind from frantic wings as it shook the close-skimmed bare branches below.

They'd only been in the air for four minutes. Enough time to check the supplies, examine the light level, shift her falsely-resting body against the floor, and look at her watch. The last had already happened three times.

Sleep.

How? Sleep was where the enemy lurked. Perhaps the dark mare would want a few last last words. And Cerea had the hairpins in place, but she couldn't be entirely sure as to how much they would do --

-- she's not my enemy.

At best, the Lunar alicorn had just been somepony who had repeatedly entered Cerea's dreams without notice or permission. The difference currently seemed to be rather fine.

The centaur's ears twitched.

Less rain hitting the fabric now.
Almost none.
We're clearing the designated Weather Bureau zone around the mountain. The borders of Canterlot.

Clearing...

...she was supposed to clear her mind, as much as she could. Not so much giving Tartarus less to work with as making the deep place labor somewhat more to find it. Buying time.

She'd tried some basic meditation exercises in Japan. It hadn't gone well. She always seemed to have too many thoughts, and they mostly got in each other's way. Lighting incense had mostly taught her about just how many impurities were in the cheaper varieties. All she'd been able to afford.

She needed something to do. Something which wasn't thinking.

The girl took out the sketchbook, opened it to the first page. Brought out a quill, fished in a netting-bound pouch for the ink...

...no. The carriage is fairly steady, but -- not enough for this. One jolt and I'll ruin the whole thing.
It's already ruined.
I've been trying to make this right for months now.
It has to be right.
...it's all I have left.
...why can't I...?

She put everything away.

Clearing her mind. The girl didn't consider herself to be the least bit funny, but ponies were the masters of unintentional humor.

Think about some things now, so they won't come up later?

Probably not the definition which the white horse had intended. But it was all Cerea had.

I wish I could sleep.

It wasn't supposed to be the shortest flight. (She wasn't sure why. It was possible that they were taking the long way around. Trying to avoid certain sight lines, or the other two Gates.) Spit in her palm once for every time she had that thought, and it might be possible to fill the gauntlet.

Clear my mind...

The dream of a sword hadn't quite been able to manage the feat.

On some level, she recognized that part of the origin for her anger. She had grown up in the gap, she had believed she would die there, and... she'd had secrets. Keeping information to herself in a place where every square meter which could be reached by hoof had been trodden upon thousands of times before: bury anything in a way where the concealing earth looked even slightly disturbed and someone would notice. If there was a knothole in any tree trunk, then hers hadn't been the first hand to explore it and with typical luck, someone else would be reaching within immediately after she left. And to hide something in her bedroom, the realm which her mother could enter at will...

Ultimately, her mind had been the only safe place. And even then, thinking anything she liked required keeping tight rein over her body. Would a stray concept produce an emotional reaction? Something which would automatically be mirrored in scent? Then the filly would have needed to think of something else. Quickly, over and over again, until she'd tricked herself into emanating a different signature within the olfactory world. Think about duty and honor, but -- not secrets.

Not about wanting to live.

Not just surviving within the gaps: one more liminal trying to hang on long enough to create a next generation of the trapped. Live.

Just for one day.

And everything had gone wrong.

There had been rumors in the gap, about a rare subspecies of centaur. Something which fed upon dreams. Other liminals were known to do it, and a few of the other species hosted stranger tricks than that.

Species, but -- not the household. Just about all the feats which the girls could accomplish were strictly biological. (For Cerea, the Second Breath fell into that category, and she was almost certain that aura-sensing was hosted by a few crucial extra neurons.) Even Suu's myriad abilities existed somewhere within the realm of the sciences -- at least in theory. But they were all aware of those whose differences crossed into the mystical, and when it came to Lala...

Humans knew very little about the liminals. Legends were just about the whole of it. And the liminals, with so few gaps able to truly communicate, when travel had been almost impossible... often felt as if they knew even less about each other.

You didn't always want knowledge. Not when rumors were enough to bring terror.

Why wouldn't any sane person be afraid of having their dreams invaded? An intruder within the only safe haven anyone truly had?

Is that why they think she's a monster?
Why the press was so shaken, when she took control. Why she said there were times when children screamed.
But that would mean it wasn't a secret -- and it isn't, because it's in her title. The Mare Of Dream. They would know she was capable of coming to their dreams, and -- they would just hope it wouldn't happen to them?

There had to be limits. Distance was potentially one of them and even if that was factored out, you had time. Cerea didn't know how long ponies dreamed for, but centaurs could stay in that part of the REM cycle for up to forty-five minutes at a stretch. Unless the dark mare was capable of splitting consciousness, invading multiple minds...

...no. Don't give her that much, not without proof, or -- Or it became that much more terrifying. It's probably one mind at a time. Maybe she can let people share dreams, but it might take a special effort. And she might need to be asleep in order to do it. Matching that person's cycle...

Too far. Too many assumptions, when even one could be deadly. Something which felt very much like just about every first meeting with a new species of liminal, one whose existence had been little more than rumor. There had been more than a few of those encounters within the crossroads of Japan, and far too many of those parties had taken some interest in their host. The most logical reason was that anyone who had seven girls in any visible degree of pursuit had to have something going for him.

I can't get it right...

But when it came to the dark mare... at the very least, there was a time factor. Dreams occupied a certain amount of the clock. Even if distance didn't matter, then time meant there were only so many dreams which the alicorn could invade on any given night -- and the maximum required a life free of both duties and paperwork. Cerea had likely been the focus subject for some time. The lone victim. Protecting everypony else by taking the brunt of the blows. Offering never-before-seen shows, a singular theater where both practical and special effects had never been previously witnessed on any stage. And the dark mare had certainly seemed to have some degree of interest in both the main character and the basic plot --

-- don't.

She said... she wanted to understand me.

Why didn't she just talk to me? I was right there.

I was never going to go anywhere else.

Her hands closed into fists. She wound up wriggling the left thumb a few times in order to get it unlocked, then adjusted the gauntlet's joints as best she could.

She wanted to understand me? To know me? What about her? And it was a false Moon, but the heat surging through her blood felt all too real. How does she expect anyone to get close to her when she's just cold and hard and arrogant and her main way of interacting with anyone she supposedly wants to know better is through giving orders --

-- Cerea's spine locked.

All of it. Neck to tail. In real time, the process took about a second. Within her mind, the surge turned the rising fire into a much slower burn.

The girl knew humiliation's heat as one of her oldest companions. It never abandoned her for more than a few hours. It seemed incapable of truly fading. And this time, it had an ally.

"Heed my words! Now that I am here, there will be many changes!"

Recognition.

...oh.
...no. Please, no...

Her arms had lifted at some point, without conscious notice. Cold metal pressed against the bare skin of her face.

...it was our first meal together, as a household. Less than two hours after I'd seen Miia and Papi for the first time, after he finished explaining why they were even there and...
...I knew they were my rivals. That I was in a competition where I had to win, finishing second meant losing everything, and...
...there were two girls in the household.
Girls who didn't know me. Who didn't know anything about me. Who hadn't grown up in my prison --
-- in my gap. A place where words just kept going around and around. You couldn't get away from them. One mare said something about me, and everyone heard it within hours. And that mare was usually my mother, so -- they believed it. All of it.
The only way you met someone new in the gap was when they were born. And once they were old enough to recognize words, their ears were steeped in stories.
Two girls. They were my rivals, but they were also girls. I'd been meeting new people almost constantly since I'd left -- usually for about two minutes each. I was going to live with them, and -- it was a fresh start, a chance to be around people who didn't know me, who'd never heard any of it, about how I wasn't good enough and couldn't live up to any expectations and just wasn't...
...wasn't...
...I trotted up to the table for a meal with two girls who didn't know me, and that was the first thing I said.
Because no one who truly knew me would ever accept me.
I had to take control.
All I wanted was him --

Something wet and salty trickled through one of the seams.

-- no.
I had to win. I needed to win, just once. The lone victory which would mean everything. And I told myself that I wanted them gone, at the start. But I'd already gotten some idea of how much damage the other girls could do. And it got worse every time someone else came into the household. We were a traveling disaster. Banned from all-you-can-eat restaurants? That was the start. Banned from stores and shopping arcades and there was more than just one sporting field. Every new girl made it that much worse, and someone had to keep control...

...all I wanted was him.

Liar.

Her shoulders were heaving. The armor shook as the carriage got a little too close to one of the others, was caught in the backwash.

I remember that first meal. Everything I said.
They were my rivals. I had to establish who was in charge. Who the leader was in the race. The ultimate winner. There was only one way to act.
Cold.
Hard.
Arrogant.
...all I wanted was...
...someone who didn't know me.
Someone who might accept me.
Listen.
See me.
please love me
someone has to love me
I crossed the world because it felt like it had been a lifetime since my mother
please be my
please be my
please be my friend.

The filly cried.

Cold. Hard. Arrogant.
I didn't know what to do.
I was afraid.
So I...
...I turned into my mother.

The girl wept.

Mirrors.

Tears could polish steel, at least for the silvering which existed after Barding had put it through the wash. (There were darkening agents in the carriage, which would need to be applied before she entered.) And there wasn't enough moisture to start the rusting process. But you still never left metal wet for too long, so... she was cleaning the gauntlets, until they assumed the sheen of a mirror.

Another mirror.

She wasn't afraid of me.
I didn't know enough to be afraid of her.

The alicorn had possessed no true fear of the centaur. But there had still been another kind of terror. The fear of exposure. Open approach. Vulnerability.

Just... being yourself. Something which was so frightening that any attempt to voice it could find the speaker locked into half of a conversation. At war against the voice in their head. The one which said they would always fail.

So you didn't approach. Not where anyone could see you. At best, you found a place to watch...

Hiding behind a cloud.
Hiding behind bushes.
And when you're seen...

It was possible that the dark mare had felt the only way to have the centaur present in her life was at a distance.
The distance of royalty.
The separation of fear.
On the other side of a gap.

What had the alicorn done, for ponies to be afraid of the dark mare?

"Or -- that which so many tell themselves was me. Is me. Still."

Or rather, what did the world believe she had done? For those words suggested the dark mare had taken the blame for something which had been the fault of another. The central character in a mistold tale, and the lie had crossed the world before the truth could find a farrier willing to attach shoes.

Something which everypony knew, but didn't necessarily discuss. Like Sun and Moon --

-- no. Not quite.

"Forgive me my curiosity, but... does she ever talk about... the thing? Which happened... that one time..."

They didn't discuss it openly. Not with someone who had been a member of the Lunar staff, not unless they were certain that the other party was willing to respond. A new source of gossip, and the dark mare had been surprised that the girl had avoided all of it. Probably not thinking about just how few ponies spoke to Cerea at all. The party had been the first real chance for anypony to extract stories from her, because it wasn't a subject of discussion in the palace and the press conference had seen other priorities take hold.

But some version of events was out there. The alicorn had suggested it would have eventually come up in Cerea's citizenship classes. So it was something which had at least entered modern history --

-- and that's another assumption, isn't it?

She rubbed her right palm against the fabric wall again. Checked the reflection, automatically glanced away.

Think about the way she was talking. Barricade point. A time which only two remember, with the third lost. And from her phrasing -- wouldn't that be the Princesses?

Was the third Discord? When was he the enemy? How long ago? You can't rebuild a society all that quickly. Not even with magic.

She smells like she's -- human equivalent, probably early twenties. But I don't know how long ponies live. Nightwatch could be ninety years old. And maybe alicorns live longer than the other three species. For all I know, this all happened decades ago.

Puff Weevil said there was a time when Princess Celestia was managing Sun and Moon. Within his lifetime? So if the lifespan and maturation rates are different, then -- maybe Luna hadn't been born yet.

Or she was still in training.
In prison. For something she wants me to believe she didn't truly do.
Exile...

There was so much Cerea didn't know. All of the things which nopony talked about, because they assumed everyone already knew. But there had been stories in her gap, ones which had contained lessons. Things she'd supposedly taken to heart. The code of a knight. That which said she was supposed to protect her liege against any kind of hurt, because the world had so many to inflict.

Including emotional agony --

-- she's not my liege any more. If she ever was. And I was never truly her knight --
-- she said she sees me as --
-- it has to be a lie...

They might never speak again. Simply seeing the dark mare felt unlikely. Even if the mission was somehow a success, if the Bearers managed to compensate for every error Cerea would make -- it was likely that the centaur would enter the palace, find herself surrounded by Guards ---

Not Nightwatch.
Please.

-- collect the last of her possessions (under supervision), and then she would be escorted to the border. All of which could potentially happen in daylight. Under Sun, while the dark mare slept.

I wanted to like her. You can't be too familiar with your liege, not on a personal level. But... I felt as if there was something likeable about her. And I wanted to think she -- at least approved of me. A little. Enough that, even if she hadn't spoken at the press conference, even if they didn't have to take me on... she wouldn't have minded keeping me in the palace quite as much. I would still be a burden, but -- not a fully unwelcome one.

But she didn't really know me. No one who truly knows me would ever --

Her shoulders were beginning to tremble again, with the long flow of her tail doing its best to tuck itself inside the armor.

She knew more about me than anypony.
Anyone. Ever.
She saw my life.
Every doubt.
Every failure.
And she wanted me anyway.

The girl shook.
She cried.
And when the tears finally ran out, she fell asleep.

Outlier

Centaurs evolve.

The filly couldn't tell you how the process originally took place, and it won't be all that long before her existence, added to that of all the others, starts to drive the remaining evolutionary biologists slightly insane.

There is no fossil record -- or rather, there isn't enough to form a consistent trail. Keeping the secret of the gaps meant arranging for the destruction of any evidence, and that very much included anything unearthed from ground and sea bed. Discrediting theories was even easier, and when it came to anything more substantial, which couldn't be readily reached by those few who could pass for human -- well, that's not an ogre's half-preserved hornless corpse: that's Piltdown Man, and the age of hoaxes made it so easy to turn everything into a joke. Some of the strongest proof for liminal existence wound up hidden in plain sight, laughed at by humans who paid a few dollars to gawk on their way to see the mysterious egress. And some of the rest? Well, it turns out that the one skeleton being stored in Manhattan wasn't warped by bone disease. Who knew?

But there was always a lie.

Until there wasn't.

What happened on her world, to send intelligence careening down forty different paths? The liminals have their own theories, but -- their history is hardly perfect. And the biologists can't work it out. It could be argued that the gaps helped in some way, keeping each species safe within a controlled environment, dozens of little Madagascars -- except that all of those species had achieved intelligence before isolation began.

And then you have to consider the human aspects, because every liminal has that touch of the familiar. Does this indicate a common ancestor? If so, where are they on the family tree? At what point did all of those branches diverge? Or was this evolution in half-parallel, where the ultimate survivors just happened to wind up resembling that which they hid from? Sheer coincidence? Maybe that's easier. Because if there's a common ancestor, then you get even more questions about mutation and just how much biology can twist.

A lot of people wind up thinking about those things, and the majority do so for just long enough to invent their own worst-case scenario. Say that intelligence is most likely to turn up in an apex predator, and you get the follow-up of just what the liminals are meant to be hunting. And if you've already decided that your reaction to the new and strange is going to be fear...

There will be questions after the gaps open, and most of the intelligent ones will be drowned out by the screams of conspiracy theory. Social media posts are made in the hundreds of thousands, with each originator trying to see whose nonsense can be retweeted at the level of frenzy. The liminals are here to hunt humanity. The real people, the non-animals, those with souls have a duty to go after the monsters. The creations of the adversary, the walking nightmares, the mythological and of course all myths found outside of the holy books are pagan monstrosities designed to lure the weak away from faith.

And then someone will come up with the question of interbreeding.

That might have been the truest point of panic. The remote, nearly-impossible, purely theoretical possibility that some liminals might be capable of having children with humans. And what would those offspring be? Humanity's replacements?

There are human faiths in the girl's world which have rules about sex: pretty much all of them, and they retain the option to edit for current events. They usually say something along the lines of one man, one woman, no exceptions. (Or, because religions tend to favor those who hold power within it, one man and as many women as can conceivably be gathered. The opinion of the females regarding this arrangement is moot.) The concept of 'one man, one lamia' hit all of them at once, long before any degree of truth got out, and... it didn't go over well. It couldn't be allowed to happen, and those with souls had to strike first before --

-- there were reasons why the laws were written so quickly, and too many came from the crushing pressure of yellow vests.

But for this dream, all of that still lies in the filly's future. For the relived memory of a years-departed 'today', in the chill which lingered towards the end of winter and soaked into her hooves through half-frozen ground -- on this cold, clear day, she is standing at the border of an enclosure which is fenced and has the base sunken about four meters below ground level. There are descending layers of cut soil visible around the edges.

The border reeks from the concoctions which are carefully renewed every week. Mares can marshal enough self-discipline to approach, but -- it's not a pleasant process, and the effort required to stay in place can become almost constant.

Her mother is slightly behind her, and about two meters to the left. Watching. And behind the filly's parent is what feels like every other filly -- or rather, those who are within two years of the blonde girl's age.

Most of those youths are standing in pairs. Within arm's length of each other. Hands reach out to the side until they encounter frightened fingers, clutch tightly. And they aren't supposed to look afraid. A true mare would present the aspect that nothing about this bothered them, there's no real effort involved in being so close to stench and enclosure and shouts and profanity and, because of what's confined within, blood. If you put this many together, they will start hitting each other. Especially when they're aware that someone is watching.

There are a few mares in the pit, galloping between the confined. Too much male aggression wins a weighted baton for the trouble. The boldest (or stupidest) still attempt to clutch.

Colt-wrangling is a specialized profession, and the filly doesn't entirely understand how it works. It's one of those things where your apprenticeship can only begin when you're an adult. To send younger mares among the colts...

Some of the fillies gathered around the rim have been this close to a colt, for a number have brothers. Interactions with males of their own blood tend to take place across divides. The other side of a room. Shouting across the house, assuming you can get your voice to go through the reinforced door. Because siblings fight, and when at least one of them is a colt --

-- it's very rare for things to go further than the fighting stage between siblings.

Almost unheard of.

Almost.

A society which has segregated itself away from humans and the other liminals still has one more dividing line to inflict. And some of the fillies have been this close to a single colt while under supervision, perhaps two -- but none of them have seen this many at once.

There are nineteen of them. Every last one is muscular and for the upper torso, some of that development has taken place in ways which limit the full range of their joints. They're burly. They were freshly washed for this, probably with the contents of buckets slung at them from a considerable distance, and they still reek of musk and maleness and testosterone. Hair is slicked-back, askew, or wild. Their features start at a baseline of 'functionality' and mostly demonstrate that with enough force applied over the years, a cauliflower ear could become a cauliflower anything.

They scrape their hooves at the ground. They rear up all the time. If any one gets too close to another, there might be a punch. Kicks, and then the wranglers have to separate the brawl.

Their eyes seem dulled. Speech comes in grunts: profanities are used as substitutions for any word which can't be remembered, which puts the frequency of their verbal appearance at about one in four. And they are very, very aware of the fillies. It's why they keep rearing up. Because they're trying to show off and when a colt places his lower torso on the vertical, it's because there's something on the underside which he really wants you to be looking at.

The blonde filly has seen such displays before, because colts are wrangled and that means it's possible to pass one while someone is wrangling him home. Or an older stallion will think there's a safe moment, one where no mare is looking, and they'll just --

-- she's seen it before.
She didn't want to.
Something about the mere act of looking seemed to create internal pain.
And now her mother is watching her. Silently.
Her parent's arms aren't folded with impatience. The posture is rare for mares, because there's usually too much in the way. Instead, the filly has the option to listen for palms coming to rest against the sides of the upper waist. Or breathing. Her mother has a way of breathing which suggests the local oxygen just hasn't lived up to her expectations.

For those within two years of her own age, there are nineteen waiting colts. (More colts than fillies. The adults are worried about that.) All of them have been wrangled into the sunken space. And the filly's mother is the strongest of mares. Something which hardly ever does anything other than hurt the daughter, who's constantly pushed and no matter what she does, she can't ever seem to get a lead in a race where the finish line keeps moving.

But for today...

Behind her, the other girls clutch at each other's hands. Because there is a scant amount of time given over to the thought of love, and being at the border of the enclosure means that time is ending. There might be a few chances to sneak off, seek each other out for furtive embraces in deep shadows, but -- the adults will be watching now, and it's so hard to hide those scents.

Some of them know what their place in the order is. For one, everything ends at the moment the filly turns away from the fence. Does so with a decision.

The time for love is ending.
The time for breeding looms.
The filly's mother is the strongest.
The filly is the first daughter.
First daughter, first choice.

The filly, if asked, would say she had done nothing to earn that. But with this, as with just about everything else... no one cares what she thinks. And after she picks, only after... the others will have to follow.

She looks down into the pit. The heat of male attention steams up, soaks her nostrils, makes her olfactory bulb long to compress in on itself to the point of collapse. Three colts rear up, trying to reach her. One manages a few words. Another simply tries to reroute his blood to where he feels it's most needed.

...she doesn't want to look.
She doesn't want to --

-- centaurs evolve. The speed at which the process happens -- that's something which will eventually give the biologists some trouble: on the human scale, the shift in skin hue from Grecian olive to Caucasian pink shouldn't have been that fast. At the very least, changes quickly spread through what the gaps have determined will be a rather sheltered gene pool.

(There are actually more than nineteen eligible colts, but with the filly at the fence, three are currently being held back. The mares recognize the need to close out cousins.)

And the males are crude. Almost always trying to show off about something.

The majority are barely literate. Numeration skills often stop at the ability to count up to MINE.

They often become angry when no one's paying attention. Sometimes they're just angry. They think with their muscles -- if they can be bothered to think at all. There are times when the organ in control is both much lower and hogging all of the oxygen, and it's the reason why fillies of a certain age are kept well clear of colts entirely. Because the fillies don't go through estrus, don't have a season, and for the colts who are still being trained -- they want that season to be all the time.

They might try to make the season into NOW.
Because they can count up to MINE.
And that's evolution.

It's a foal question, at least for fillies: why are colts like this? Why are they only allowed to see stallions when there are mares close by, with every last one holding something heavy? And there's an answer, but it's provided at speed to the very young, without much in the way of detail because... the mares are ashamed. Nothing about the current situation is the fault of the generation which cannot solve it, but... they're centaurs. It feels as if there must be some way to make things right, and... all they can do now is try to keep it from getting any worse.

Take a trait. Declare that it's the most important one. Breed for it...

Centuries ago, the mares of the past decided that the most important thing about a stallion was strength.

The filly was never told how this happened, or why. But she can make guesses. Her reading material consists of human debris and when teen magazines make their way into the gap years after the actual events -- well, you can go through about a decade of fads in a single afternoon. Fashion magazines work their way past the border because it's France, and that tells her that certain body types can come into style. (Once she reaches the human world, the upper torso exception will be hers.) At some point, the herd mares made a group decision: raw power was desirable.

Perhaps there was pressure from the outside world: humans expanding their population again, fear of armored bipeds marching into the gap. Or the most popular mare pretended to half-swoon as a stallion winked and flexed, with everyone else just following suit. The exact cause doesn't matter, because she's looking at the results.

Fads have a short life expectancy. One year, possibly less. The most exceptional might reach four. A few manage to become entrenched, hang on long enough to transmute into culture.

In the gap, the decision to choose strength for the sake of strength lasted for generations. And in a small gene pool, one which is only tapping a portion of its waters...

You can't say that strength exists as something fully divorced from intellect and gentility. Look far enough into the past and you'll find stallions who were powerful and smart and polite and worthwhile. The filly peered into the mist which obscures her species' origins and found Chiron: someone who's still held up as a role model for others to follow -- except that no one has been able to take on the teacher's duty for generations, because that requires contact with the outside world.

(The filly made contact once.)
(...once.)
(She's still waiting for the fallout --)

Chiron, the legend. The scientist, physician and, when you get right down to it, the myth. The filly isn't sure if she believes Chiron was ever a real stallion, because picturing a smart one is just about impossible. It's something which can occasionally spread to her text-based perception of humans. When she looks at history and the roles which males have supposedly played in it, the whole thing can strike her as rather implausible, decidedly sexist, largely inaccurate, and mostly shows how everyone involved should have spent a lot more time in listening to women: for the Dark Ages, that's just about any time at all. Besides, even if you truly believe in Chiron, there's some mythical evidence for his having been a rotten teacher. Or Heracles was just a lousy student --

-- strength, intellect, and gentility. With a chance of decent looks. They aren't mutually exclusive traits. At some point, there must have been stallions who had it all. But the mares decided that strength was the key, generation after generation.

The filly hasn't been told the full details. But she thinks that the gap's population must have been larger then. Enough that everyone didn't have to breed. There was the possibility for some stallions to die without ever having passed on their genes. And there was a favored trait being spread through the pool, one aspect desired above all others...

Eventually, the mares woke up. (The filly asked how it happened. Her mother said nothing, and did so in the sort of tight-lipped way which made the filly wonder just when the first cells were dug.) They saw the damage, and found that they had made a tiny world where strength was the only thing which had survived. With the remaining stallions -- the ones their false evolution had selected -- all power had been transferred to the muscles outside the skull. The ones which couldn't move the world.

But the mares were still intelligent.
Proud.
Beautiful.
Untouched.

(That particular 'Why?' will come after the girl dies.)

Centaurs evolve. Every living species does, if it lasts long enough and manages to keep from sabotaging itself. Looking at the colts in the pit makes the filly wonder if the process has been kicked into reverse.

But everyone who can breed, must.
And the first daughter gets the first choice.

The results won't be immediate. Once she makes her pick, the colt will go through further training. Eventually, they'll be allowed in the same room together -- with supervision. She won't be left alone with him until everyone's sure the training took. Negative reinforcement can take a lot of time to beat in through steadily-thickening skulls, and every generation now sees a few colts who aren't capable of getting through the program. Who wind up assigned to perpetual menial labor, always under guard --

-- in theory, should things fall apart or -- go wrong -- she has the right to choose again. But she can't take a colt away from another filly. She'd be down to the leftovers, or waiting for the next group to mature a little more -- physically-- and if the process then repeated, she'd be dealing with an increasing age gap. She has to make the right choice of colt. Of stallion. Of someone to breed with.

She doesn't understand how she's supposed to --

-- the girls have been taught. But when it comes to breeding -- for the fillies of the gap, youth sex education largely doubles as the self-defense class. These are the signs of a colt who doesn't understand that it isn't time yet, and this is where you hit him. And they're taught about pregnancy, about labor and the stages of foal development and becoming a mother. The blonde filly understands all of that, but she hasn't been taught anything about sex.

Anything at all.
The others in her age group instructed each other on how to masturbate. (Certain aspects are complicated by body shape. Others require careful positioning and trying not to bring too much weight to bear. Fortunately, when it comes to a certain still-developing aspect of anatomy, the answer to the yellow pegasus' query about nerve density is YES.) The filly had to figure it out on her own.
But none of them understand how sex is supposed to work.
Not that the others talk to her about it.
Or notice when she's listening.

All she's been told is that on the night before their first time -- that's when they'll be taught everything.

(When it's too late to back out.)
(When they're finally told why there's always a night when fillies can't look out their windows.)
(Always in the spring.)

And they'll all have to live together for a few months before that. There's a special house which is only occupied by young mares of a certain age, waiting for their first time. It's something about getting their menstrual cycles to synchronize --

-- there's a colt rearing up, over and over. Trying to catch her attention. Then he sees one of his fellows attempting to replicate the feat, and punches the other in the face. The girl automatically notes the clumsiness of the attack, how the colt's swing leaves him open to reprisal, spots an angle from which to strike with the baton --

-- he's trying to get her attention.

Her attention.

She... doesn't feel anything towards him --

-- no. That's a lie. Revulsion counts. But feeling it deeply enough would produce a scent, her mother is right there, and the filly concentrates on neutrality as the thoughts go around and around in her head.

Why is he looking at her? It's certainly not because she's attractive. She isn't. The other fillies are the pretty ones, and -- what's the point in being pretty? For appearance, the filly considers herself to be the least of the group, and... the colts don't care.

The requirements for attracting a colt are a vagina and a pulse.

A few more generations and one of those may become optional.

She's not attractive. They want her because she's warm and there and if she chooses one, might not hit so hard. In the time of love, there was a reason to be pretty: it was something which could draw in another filly. But the blonde never got to be any part of that, and... there's no reason to be pretty for a colt. Even less rationale for being built like a proper centaur --

-- no. She still wants to keep growing, become considerably larger. Like her mother. One thing, one thing (or two) which her traitorous, forever-second-place body got right. And then she'll be able to nurse her filly.

...it has to be a filly.
It has to --
-- they're hitting each other.
Five of them are battling now.
Blood is flowing. There's at least one broken nose. It doesn't do anything to make that colt uglier. Practically speaking, it couldn't.

The mares within the pit rush in to break things up, and the filly gets to see how part of the training is done. She also gets to smell it, because the ozone is as distinctive as the crackle.

Getting cattle prods into the gap isn't easy, especially when the mares can't settle for low-durability models. Batteries can be harder.

Somewhere behind the filly, the strongest mare in the herd is shaking her head in disappointment. (It's not something the filly has to look for. The scent is enough.) And the first daughter, the only daughter waits to hear how this is her fault. Clearly if she'd chosen quickly, there would have been one less colt in the pit. Remove the aggressor and everything would have been fine...

...they may not be ready yet, her mother announces. We can try this again in two weeks.

Fillies clutch at each other's hands again. Grip all the more tightly, because words which should have been an announcement of reprieve only serve as a reminder that the time for love will always end.

They were judged at birth, for the crime of having been born within a gap. But the sentence is fair, isn't it? How could it be anything else, when it's the same penalty which has been assigned to every mare for centuries?

The group turns away. Her mother silently leads the filly towards their house, and there will be words to come. Words, but -- not song. It's been years since the last time her mother sang. And the other fillies gallop away in relief which can't be too open, but so many of them are holding hands and no one holds the filly's hand, no one touches her, no one will ever touch her until she chooses a colt and the first night comes for all of them.

...what if she doesn't want to be touched?
What if she told her mother that she didn't want to --
First daughter.
First choice.

No choice.

Her sentence has been pronounced. No appeals. No parole. No escape.

(She escaped for one day.)
(She's waiting...)

Live.
Breed.
Die.

The air carriage dipped.

It had probably been unintentional. There was an elaborate system of harnesses and balanced weights which helped to keep the whole thing level while in flight. And when any of that threatened to fail, there was always magic -- but it was possible that several layers of cushioning spells had been disabled for the night. The pegasi were descending, the carriage dipped, and a few hundred kilograms of armored centaur slid forward. Multiple nerves immediately went on high alert, and the girl woke up.

Her body felt somewhat refreshed, although she suspected the majority of that was a false impression produced by merely having slept at all. She'd done so in armor, and expected a number of cramps to have their say as soon as she tried any actual movement.

Physically, there was some temporary improvement. Her mind ignored most of it and continued to peer at the fading remnants of dream with narrow-eyed suspicion.

Why did I dream about that? Did Luna --

She hadn't seen the dark mare -- but she also hadn't been aware that she'd been dreaming until the moment it had started to break up. Very few of Cerea's dreams qualified for true lucidity. She'd meant to try for it before falling asleep, at least to the extent that repeating 'I need to remain aware' to herself could help -- but she'd just been so tired...

The hairpins had been in place, and that seemed to help with griffons -- but with the alicorn, Cerea didn't feel as if she could be completely sure. The possibility of another 'visit' had been looming large in her fears. She just couldn't remember anything from the dream which felt like an intrusion, or a likely hiding place. The remembered sky had been clear...

Another dip. Her body shifted again. Sliding supplies clanged off the metal which covered her buttocks, briefly pinned her tail and then went off to the side.

At any rate, why would the alicorn have wanted to see that part of her life? Pure voyeurism? Or --

-- stop.
The hairpins might have been enough.
And she... tried to apologize. Sort of. I think. As much as she could.

And there were more reasons for Cerea to dream about a given topic than the mere machinations of magic. When she thought about it, looked past the fear and thought -- the answer felt obvious. There had been more than one thing on her mind when she'd fallen asleep. And in a lifetime of memories --

-- one hand tightly gripped the sword's hilt: the other sought out the baton --

-- there were only a few which centered around waiting to meet a male.

"Centaur stallions just want -- they want. That's all it is. Want. They want, and they don't care what anyone else wants --"

"Did something happen?"

No.

But they want.

We all went back two weeks later. First daughter, first choice. We were going to keep going back until I chose.

Every generation, they get stupider.
More determined to reach their goal, for the only things they can think of at all.
Harder to train.
Stronger.

Two weeks later was when a pair of them tried to reach us.

They nearly jumped out of the pit.

They got their hands onto the border. They were trying to pull all of their body weight up with just their arms, and...

The pit was deeper now. Something which had taken time. Another delay.

Tartarus deepens as more are confined...

Another dip. It was followed by the first jolt as the wheels touched down, and Cerea made the near-mistake of trying to scramble onto her hooves before everything stopped moving. It left her attempting to maintain balance as the jolts produced by losing speed on uneven ground just kept coming, a few of the more durable supplies bounced around and off her legs, and then the cramps came in.

Eventually, it all stopped. Except for the cramps.

"Two minutes!" one of the hauling pegasi called out. "We're taking off in two minutes! Everypony out now!"

Something which had been in the briefing. Touch-and-go. Get the transport team away from the area as quickly as possible. Just in case.

Cerea sheepishly lowered her body again. Dipped her upper torso to an awkward angle (and listened for creaking metal), scooped up everything, arranged some of it on the armor's netting, separated out the supplies which were meant for the others --

-- helmet?

Not yet. She could just carry it for a while. It would be easier to gauge the weather when she could feel the results on bare skin. And it would give the Bearers something to look at which was --

-- ugly. Hideous. Repulsive. But at least all of it moved.

She left the carriage as quickly as she could.

There was a moment when she was outside on cold, hard ground, well-lit by a full Moon's radiance. Amplified senses began to pick up on just how many ponies were staring at her, none of whom she could see because she'd exited at the side of the carriage and hers had been at the rear of the formation --

-- multiple teams of pegasi began to gallop. Flapped for all they were worth. And then the carriages were gone.

The girl stared after them for a few seconds. Checked the sky, found it almost completely clear. There was some moisture in the air: without the accompanying clouds, it was nowhere near enough for rain, and she felt it wasn't quite cold enough for snow. But it would help to keep static shocks down. A mare who'd been trained for armor had become very aware of incidental electricity.

...they're staring at me.

She couldn't quite seem to turn.

They haven't seen me in armor before. Maybe that's it.
No, it's not a really fast growth spurt. Everyone always looks a little larger in armor.
...still staring.
I can feel all of it.
I think Fluttershy's is leaving dents.

The girl forced a breath. Near-winter air had its way with her lungs, and she used the opportunity to test the Second Breath again. Most of what that did was encourage the cold to spread.

A cold night, and a quiet one. She couldn't hear any birds, for the few which would have remained after any normal migration. No sounds of small scurrying mammals. There was a relatively narrow path exiting their clearing, a forest sprang up to surround it all, and yet it felt as if the group was the only thing within the chill which yet lived --

-- there was a flare of green light somewhere behind her, accompanied by a very temporary impression of distant warmth. It made her turn. And by the time she could see them all, it was gone.

She was facing the ponies and reptile now. The latter was riding the little alicorn's back, with handling claws clutched tightly to the mane: the right was just starting to establish a grip. It was the first time she'd seen anyone ride one of the ponies, and it was only possible because Spike was so small. There certainly hadn't been anything provided which would have helped him to stay on Twilight's back: not a single piece of tack was present, and when it came to balancing...

Moonlight reflected off tiny embedded particles in the scales of his face. Just about everything else had been buried under multiple layers of cloth, each of which was a little less flexible than the last. The colors coordinated beautifully with his own, the insulation was superb, and it gave him the rough appearance of a starfish which had just become sapient and wasn't entirely sure what to do about it.

His handling claws were tangled up in his sibling's mane. It was an anchor. It was also a constant tug on the little alicorn's hair, but she seemed resigned to it --

"...really?" Fluttershy softly asked, staring at Cerea all the while. (Far too softly, and yet the words filled the clearing.) "Really?"

The girl blinked.

I just got off the carriage.
I couldn't have done something wrong already.
...I think...
...her stare is... sort of low this time. Not my face. My foreshoulders, or a little below --
-- oh.

"There are only so many shapes," the centaur defensively proclaimed. "No matter where one might be, a circle remains a circle. This particular icon happens to be a popular symbol in my homeland, and it was placed upon my armor shortly before I assumed my duties."

Something which was coming to an end.

A little more quickly, "The fact that this symbol also appears upon thy partner's flank is simply a rather strange level of coincidence --"

"-- and what does it mean?" Fluttershy subtly cut her off. "To you? When a centaur carries it, without any mark at all?"

Roughly eight hundred pages of heraldry lined up behind Cerea's tongue.

It depends on who you ask, and where. Because there are only so many shapes. France is just the most common association -- but it turned up in India during an age where there couldn't have been much contact. And with independent origins, the distortions of time... everyone wound up with their own interpretations.

For some, it's faith. Wisdom. Chivalry is popular. Others associate it with purity, and there's been a few which say it symbolizes a divine right to rule.

The Egyptians called it the poisonous snake...

The centaur swallowed.

Not those last two.
Not any of them.

"A lily's flower," she quietly replied. "That's all. A lily, and... home."

Twilight was silent. Spike shivered a little. Rainbow, wings already twitching, pointedly turned towards the path. Fluttershy didn't blink. Pinkie (and the girl wasn't sure if that was just the disc being rather obvious) was snout-balancing two items, which were then flipped backwards into waiting saddlebags. Trixie was carefully sorting through several large waxy cylinders, all of which were arrayed on the ground in front of her -- and she was doing so by mouth. Rarity was using careful head movements to adjust a rather pretty scarf.

Applejack's ears pressed against the sides of the hat. Tilted it slightly forward, and then green eyes took their own very open look.

"Home," the accented voice gently announced. "Ain't a bad idea, t' carry a little with you." The hat shifted again.

"I'm not sure," the little alicorn quietly said. "Sometimes the weight can drag you down."

"Depends on what you think of as home," Applejack politely countered.

Twilight seemed to mull it over for a second before nodding. The earth pony cleared her throat.

"Sooner started," she stated, "sooner ended. Everypo -- everyone, make sure your stuff is secured, and then we'll get goin'. This is as close as they could put us without goin' in, an' it ain't the shortest trot from here. We've gotta make time."

They all packed up. Moved towards the thin path, and...

The group seemed to have a marching order in place -- or rather, a redefined one: she suspected the standard model had a darkly-muttering Rainbow in the air. (On the rather dubious bright side, she was now receiving what might be a full education in the complete range of translated Equestrian curses. Possibly beyond, as there was one term which the Sergeant hadn't even used.) Applejack and Twilight took the lead, the pegasi had a middle position, Pinkie and Rarity had the back, and Trixie served as a sort of free-roamer: moving around the periphery of the group and checking the environment on all sides.

But there was a centaur-shaped (and very much centaur-sized) obstruction in the middle of it all. And they were supposed to be accompanying her. Guiding her in, to make sure she reached the Gate.

They knew where they were taking her. They just had no idea where to put her.

At the front? There was one point where she found the entire group trailing behind her like the world's longest, most discontent tail: it didn't take long before the extra mutters told her that no one could see over her, past her, and Rainbow was considering abandoning the Stay On The Ground order again because visibility was a great excuse. The subsequent group scramble placed her at the absolute back and while that fulfilled at least one religion's Get Thee Behind Me requirement, it also encountered what Cerea had seen as the philosophy's built-in flaw: if they were behind you, then you had no idea what they were doing back there. Having her in the middle still provided part of the group that traveling view of shifting armor over buttocks while seeming to positionally imply that 'group' somehow included her. Cerea was fairly certain that nopony was happy about that.

She tried to spend the first part of the trip off to the side: close enough for the others to watch her, while still giving them some distance. But the path kept fighting against her. There were silent trees on the edges, and low bare branches frequently pushed in enough to force her into veering. She had to keep checking her position, everypony's position, was desperately trying to prevent a metal-clad hoof from going into a pony flank or worse...

Eventually, she wound up just short of the backmost position. Hunched over in her armor and moving with knees half-collapsed. It didn't help.

The mares softly talked to each other. (She tried not to listen.) To the little reptile. And outside of what was produced by shod hooves on the path, those utterances felt like the only sounds in the cold, barren world.

The girl was alone.
Alone in a herd.
Again.
Always.

And then the white unicorn trotted up to the centaur's left flank.

Disconnected

It was the concept which startled the girl almost as much as the action: the mere idea that anypony among the group might freely approach her. The white unicorn came closer, the expression (which the girl had labored to learn) suggested that the mare wished to talk, and the centaur's hooves nearly skittered towards the right edge of the rough forest path.

Nearly. She managed to repress most of it, but there was a portion of kinetic energy left over: enough to let four legs half-execute what almost felt like an aborted dance step, and a few stray pebbles bounced off the metal which covered her keratin.

She had to be more careful about her reactions: all of them. The full Moon was in the sky, and her mind was aware that the reaction was psychosomatic -- but her body continued to ignore the presence of the orbital satellite's capital letter. With centaurs, it was an amplifier: everything about you became more so. And with Cerea, whose thoughts had already been circling as a possible prelude to the full spiral, who was supposed to calm herself and center before entering Tartarus and nopony had told her how that could ever be accomplished...

The girl didn't feel like she could explain the effects of the moonlight. It would just be another difference: one more thing to make her that much more alien. Her best excuse would have been to blame it on the espresso -- except that there were no traces of coffee scent rising from any of the Bearers. Cerea was fairly sure she would wind up needing to explain espresso.

There was a single moment before she managed to regain control of herself, continued advancing along the trail in her half-slumped slow trot. But the white mare kept approaching. Found a place alongside Cerea's left flank, just about parallel with the girl's foreshoulders. The unicorn looked up...

It wasn't exactly a stare. There was a certain regard in that gaze: something which felt familiar. It was as if the little shifts of the pony's eyes were being used as a means of taking measurements, and the centaur waited to come up short --

-- the unicorn adjusted her accompanying position. Tilted her neck up, seemed to check as to whether her angle was a comfortable one. The scarf shifted again.

It was easy to make out the finer details of the mare's scent, under the moonlight. There was an aspect of fear, but the posture did its best to turn that into some level of lie --

-- it would take a little time before Cerea recognized what was happening with the mare's various postures. The vast majority of ponies treated clothing as an optional exercise. Even with the chill of the forest to contend against, most of the Bearers weren't wearing all that much: a few saddle blankets (without saddles), cloaks and throws, and jackets which had been redesigned for the horizontal. Spike was the most bundled-up of the group (and Cerea had been wondering if the little reptile was only partially endothermic), but the white unicorn was close behind: pleasant winter garments, lightly fringed at the base of neck and tail, with warmth wrapped around nearly the full length of the legs. Fabric formed an insulative layer between hooves and protective metal. The colors were well-balanced for both the unicorn and the forest: dark hues, things which stood out considerably less than the fur...

The white unicorn wore her clothing naturally, as if it was something she did all the time. And most ponies had their body language partially obscured by fabric, because they simply weren't used to it. (It did nothing to stop the scents.) This mare automatically exaggerated every shift of her body, and that pushed her projected feelings through the barrier.

It was something which gave her a light air of Drama. The verbal aspects of her fear had mostly been buried under a thick layer of Manners.

"I wish to apologize," Rarity softly began: words pitched up, aimed carefully at strangely-positioned ears and silver wire. "May I begin with that?"

Cerea blinked. Wondered just how universal blinking-as-sign-of-confusion was across all species, realized she'd been over that subject before, she was distracting herself because it was a way not to think about the words --

The centaur looked down. The pony was looking up, and the second blue gaze was the steadier.

"I fail to perceive any need for apology," Cerea quietly decided. "Thou hast done nothing which would cause offense."

The unicorn shook her head. A gesture which definitely crossed species and worlds, although it had managed to skip both Greece and Bulgaria. Cerea suspected Iran just liked being contrary.

"We were supposed to meet much earlier," Rarity stated, and there was a light touch of sadness in both tone and scent. "I was asked to meet you: the Princesses made that request. The first of us to make contact. And I refused." The mare's head dipped for a moment, looked towards where the pegasi were trotting before shifting up again. "There was... a reason for that. One I will explain. But I didn't use the first chance to meet you, and... I feel somewhat ashamed."

There was a full Moon, and Tartarus ahead. Cerea had to make a deliberate effort to keep her eyelids from demonstrating some level of Morse code.

The Princesses wanted a Bearer to...

"Why wouldst thou have been summoned?"

White ears twitched. Tilted towards Cerea, went back for a moment, centered again.

"A question," Rarity offered. "As I'm not entirely familiar with the operations of your translator. When I speak, do you hear any level of accent?"

Mid-Atlantic. It's like that one movie about the department store.
...the first half.

For once, it hadn't been a battery problem for the portable DVD player. The battered disc had simply been too scratched to go on.

"Yes."

The unicorn nodded. "And the same for the others?"

American South for Applejack. Spike and Twilight both sound like they're from Kanagawa. Fluttershy's is faded, but there's little traces left: sometimes her 'the' loses the h. Rainbow almost comes across like a first-time actress in an old Western. Trixie is... patchwork. Like someone who's traveled a lot, and brought back linguistic pieces from everywhere -- but the base is Ibaraki. And Pinkie mostly sounds like small-town America, but she slips. When that happens, she comes across like the FBI woman in that one old horror movie with the criminal who -- skinned people. Someone who grew up in coal country and doesn't want to sound like that any more.

The verbal end of that emerged as "Yes."

"Then, speaking as someone who affects an accent," the unicorn gently said, "I know that some respond to stress by having their tones sharpen." And followed that with a soft sigh. "Intensifying. In my case, the intonations have a sadly proven tendency to evaporate in the heat of stress, but -- yours are becoming thicker. And that is before we reach the formality of your terms. The disc labors, I am certain of that -- and yet, you are becoming progressively more difficult to understand." And then there was a smile -- but it came across as something tinged by sorrow. "Breathe, Cerea. Please.."

It took a second before the girl could fully restart her lungs. The Second Breath was tested again. Recently-cut hair vibrated against the barrier of the pins.

"You're going to trot into Tartarus," Rarity sadly observed, words still pitched for the centaur's ears alone. "It's not exactly a situation where I can ask you to relax. But with me -- there is no animosity. I swear to that." With a sigh, "I will confess to tinges of dread, but... that doesn't seem to be something I can entirely stop. Not just yet." The ears flicked back, surged forward. "It's an association with the base shape. Rather like having had one's first encounter with the lupine configuration as an attack from the fleshed version of a wolf, and then encountering a rather large dog. The first impression lingers. As do the scars. And so the subconscious tries to put in a word. I..."

Her head dipped again, and the large eyes reflected Moon in fresh moisture.

"...I nearly lost my sister..."

It wasn't me.
I'm not him.
I...
...you look at me and you see a giant hoof descending. The tiara going up just to cause a little pain, trying to do something before it all ends. The glints of light reflecting off metal.
Fancypants said you were all closing in.
How close were you?
How close did you come to watching her die?

The white mare swallowed. Shivered, and then looked up again.

"But the rational mind can try to hold sway," Rarity continued. "I am doing my best not to fear you. But Applejack and I both saw the film -- well, we had to, as relatives of those who attended. There are ways in which that could be considered as our first meeting. But I would rather have a more personal one, I put off what should have been the true first, and... I don't hate you. Please, Cerea. I simply wish to talk..."

Two sets of shoulders slumped within the armor.

Just above a whisper, "I don't even know what I sound like."

"For accent, with your words rendered by the disc?" the unicorn guessed. "Just now? It's something of a mix. Rather like a sweet-voiced minotaur who's spent significant time in the southern provinces of Prance, tinged with a recent stay in Neighpon." (The girl's mind had enough to worry about, and so the place names mostly streamed over the armor.) "Rather unique. And you were comprehensible. But I suspect it all becomes stronger when the stress rises." The smile took on additional weight. "And speaking as somepony who must often pretend to be calm, and has been known to fail... try to breathe. It all comes from the lungs, from the air. Simply allow yourself to feel your breath."

The smaller eyes closed, leaving the centaur moving on lingering sensory impressions, something which had become so sharp under Moon. Moved, and -- breathed. Over and over.

The first.
The Second.

Over and over...

Cerea quietly nodded. Straightened, just a little.

"Why were we supposed to meet? Do the Guards usually work with Bearers?" A means of becoming acquainted with a potential temporary partner.

Rarity shook her head. "I had been asked to make your dress. The one for the party." And with a sharp intake of air, "Sun and Moon, that was last night. Just last night. So much happening in so little time..."

...somepony in an elite tactical unit makes dresses?

She hadn't really paid any attention to icons during the briefing, and so the forest trail represented several of the scant times when Cerea tried to subtly check a pony's mark. But turning enough for a true view would have required assuming what humans considered to be unnatural angles and in any case, there was clothing in the way.

...well, anypony can have hobby skills. Given how Cerea had felt about the amount of skin and fur displayed by what she'd received from the professionals, there seemed to be a reasonable chance that Rarity couldn't have done any worse.

The group moved on. Bare branches waved in a slight breeze, and the wind chilled the centaur's skin. She didn't want to look at the trees. There was always something a little strange about trees in winter. It was like looking at a skeleton when the bones had plans to put their flesh back on in four months.

But at least the wind had made a sound. No birdsong. No little skitters from claws moving over bark. The gust hadn't conveyed a single animal scent to Cerea's senses. It was just trotting and talk.

"It was Fluttershy," Rarity stated, and there was a weariness in the words -- something which was nearly drowned under the scents of regret and sorrow. "She is not as skilled with needle and device, but... when it comes to sewing, she indulges on something more than a casual level. Some of it may come from stitching wounds. And for fabric... the creative aspects of the profession elude her, but she can manage nearly any form of basic repair. And executing the designs of another? Almost automatic. Something about the solitude of it appeals to her, I think. And with all of the demands on her time, I have always done my best not to add to them by asking for her assistance. But she learned of the request. And with that? I had an assistant. Whether I wished for one or not. Hovering about for hours, waiting to see what I would do. And where." Which was followed by a soft snort. "Part of me dearly wishes to blame Fleur for having taken over so many of the basic duties. Fluttershy never used to have this much free time."

There didn't seem to be anything Cerea could say.

"She's been trying to reach you," the unicorn tiredly continued. "For moons. And it is so much harder to turn her away, to ask that she even leave for a time, not when... she's in mourning. When we're all trying to watch her, as much as we can. To try and prevent matters from becoming any worse." Two shallow breaths, and then, "She's made it rather clear that she blames herself for what happened to Discord. And... it's what the Princess said. Fluttershy has a hard time dealing with her anger, and... she's rather more proactive in her endeavors than most would suspect." The softest of laughs. "Or so we were reminded when it turned out that she had been the aggressor in the relationship. She wanted to reach you. Because Tirek could not be reached, and... you were there. A target. Some part of her knows you're the wrong one, I'm sure of that. But... she has a pattern. One rendered in the thin hot needles of agony. She buries her anger, her sorrow, buries it deep until capacity is reached and then... it all comes out at once. And she knows it's a flaw, she tries to deal with it, express herself more normally, but..."

The elaborate tail curls slowly swayed. Stilled.

"...she faces death more than any of us," Rarity went on. "Again and again, in the course of her duties."

Maybe Fluttershy is the assassin.
She moves quietly enough.

"And we thought... that would help," the mare finished. "It did not. Because she blamed herself. It was personal." A sigh, and then a whisper, "I spoke to the others earlier, while she was with the Doctors Bear. We will all be on watch when the Gate opens. Because you are not her true target. Simply a rather convenient excuse, and -- she will recognize that in time, I think. But when the Gate opens -- it will provide a path to the real one. And even with everything which was said at the briefing... she might try to follow you in."

no
just me
it has to be just me
trotting into torment
she's been through enough

The centaur checked the trail ahead, because it was easier than looking at the white mare. The trees seemed to be thinning. Branches curved, bent back on themselves. There were places where bark had splintered --

-- the yellow pegasus was looking back at her. At them, with blue-green eyes shifting from pony to centaur --

-- it was just for a moment, and then a neighboring cyan wing flared out enough to nudge her. Fluttershy turned forward again. Trotted on.

A few seconds later, Trixie silently wandered by on Cerea's right, and then passed out of sight. Patrolling the perimeter, beating the bounds.

The white unicorn softly cleared her throat: a sort of subvocal 'ahem' which still managed to have an accent attached. Cerea looked down again.

"You were kind to my sister," Rarity decided. "That... means rather a lot, I think."

"You saw the film." (The unicorn nodded.) "I yelled at them --"

"-- for a moment," the mare broke in. "And then you were sorry. And then you sang." A slow blink, clearing away a little more moisture. "And after you sang, after she returned to our parents... the nightmares were less frequent. Children heal more readily than adults, I think. But she still needed something more than the therapy sessions, and... she sleeps more steadily, Cerea. Take from that what you will."

I just...
...I yelled...
...any centaur could sing --
-- well, any mare.

Awkwardly, because the unicorn's ear position was clearly expecting a response, "I felt like she wanted to sing along. She was... the one who seemed to be paying the most attention to the notes."

With a sigh, "She's reluctant to perform in public. Still. Nothing to do with you, Cerea. Just -- something she's been trying to work through for a long time."

The larger eyes moved over the girl's body again. Bottom to top, front to back. Measuring.

"You wear a bra, do you not?" the unicorn politely asked. "At your size, I'd imagine it would be mandatory." With another soft, seemingly subconscious snort, "Something for which the creation meant the palace did not contact me. Perhaps due to the previous fiasco..."

Everyone looks a little bigger in armor --

-- the centaur blinked.

"You've made bras?" You've met female minotaurs? You've sized them --

-- the unicorn shook her head, and the last hope prior to Tartarus crashed into the cold ground.

"A dear friend asked me to create sandals for one of her own companions," Rarity said. "The process and results were the fiasco. Because I was in no way prepared to deal with feet." There was a light shudder. "And I tried to use a rather reluctant model. Spike and I have finally reached the point where we can laugh about it."

Her head tossed for a moment. The mare looked forward.

"But walking claws are perfectly lovely!" she called out.

The little reptile giggled. One hand released his sibling's mane, and he awkwardly leaned towards one of her open saddlebags.

"And after that failed," the unicorn sighed, "Rugula still had faith in my skills. So she asked me to help another of her friends. I, being rather slow to learn from a bad experience, got as far as researching the basic design requirements before a mission rather thankfully took us out of the country, as well as beyond the temporal window for filling the order. So to date, all of my lingerie has been for ponies. At any rate, bras. You wear them?"

A very dedicated hobbyist?

It distantly occurred to Cerea that there was a chance to spend her entire life without ever seeing one of the local minotaur females or hearing about their relative level of endowment. Also that there was a slightly stronger possibility that the entire world was conspiring to make that happen.

It was something of a lesser torment.

...the unicorn was waiting.

"Yes."

"I've heard of Ms. Garter," Rarity declared. "As that was where the ultimate rerouting of the order ended. But I've never seen her creations." Thoughtfully, "Of course, her talent is rather more specialized than the usual. I doubt I would be able to render anything in the way of improvements. Still, the curiosity is there..."

There was a sort of traveling shrug, and then the unicorn gently smiled again.

"If the topic makes you uncomfortable," Rarity offered, "we can change it."

Another gust of wind, and the scent of ink filled Cerea's nostrils.

"Um..." the centaur managed.

"I mean no discomfort," the mare said. "I am simply trying to both look past your form and find some means of appreciating it -- well, other than in the decidedly easy appreciation of some rather fine legs. Although, meaning no offense again, I did happen to notice that you would benefit from a professional hoofticure. There is a spa I can recommend --"

She stopped. Winced.

"-- another time, perhaps. In any case, I have some experience with the process of seeing beyond the body. When one is the subject of a dragon's crush --"

All four of Cerea's hooves stumbled, doing so in the exact same beat. Some degree of motion maintained.

She'd recently learned that she had an accent. And it took what felt like everything she had to keep her volume down, make the next two syllables into something which only the unicorn would hear, but her entire body had gone tight at once and --

"-- dragon?"

-- she was now wondering if she also had a squeak.

Dragons.
They have dragons.
...okay, we have dragons.
..arrogant flying won't-take-no-for-an-answer connards, Miia was angry for days --
-- but theirs are probably the classic kind.
The St. George kind.
Giants. Metric tons. A lot of metric tons. Anger and greed and flame --
...the sword is plastic.
Plastic melts --

Rarity blinked.

"You didn't know?"

Multiple hairpins nearly came out.

The unicorn placidly inclined her head. Using the horn to point.

"Dragon," she said.

Cerea, who didn't seem to have the strength required to be shocked by that level of coincidence, slowly, skittishly followed the indicated line...

...Spike had a scroll pinned against Twilight's neck: one handling claw was holding both it and her mane. The other was busy with a quill.

"...that's a dragon," emerged on a current of disbelief.

"They get bigger." Which was followed by an exceptionally small smile. "With both luck and love, that happens in the normal course and at a proper speed. Spike is a dragon, Cerea. And also a birthright citizen of Equestria. We're not all ponies. I imagine you'll remind us all of that again in a few years --" followed by, much more hastily "-- although of course, the goal is to find a means of sending you home. My apologies. I did not mean to suggest a reordering of priorities."

It wasn't discussed at the briefing.
They don't know.
...that's a dragon?
He's so... small...

The rept -- dragon finished. Stoppered the ink bottle, put it and the cleaned quill away. Turned his head to the side.

"Sending," Spike quietly told the group. Several ponies nodded, the entire group stopped moving (and Cerea got her legs halted just in time), multiple bodies tensed, and he brought the scroll up in front of thin pursed lips --

-- there wasn't very much heat in the flame, and perhaps that was why the scroll didn't truly catch fire. Instead, it simply seemed to evaporate. Matter become smoke, which thinned to steam, which brightened into light --

-- gone.

A few seconds passed, and then the ponies relaxed.

"...good," Rarity breathed. "Another use of magic without -- drawing in an attack. Somehow. Not that we can be sure, but..."

Communications magic. Teleporting the scroll without going along. A form of travel which took time -- but the Princesses would have the paper within seconds. Cerea wondered what Princess Celestia's version of the casting looked like --

-- she has to know the recipient.

"Cerea?"

She said that. If she doesn't know them, the scroll can become lost...

"Dear," the unicorn rather urgently said, "you're shivering. If the cold is coming through the metal -- I'm not carrying as much as I usually would, but I'm sure I packed an extra scarf --"

"-- the ibex," fell out of a barely-open mouth, and she looked down just in time to see the unicorn frown.

"The what?" Rarity asked -- and then her eyes widened. "Was that in one of the articles? The word seems familiar. I'm almost certain that I've read it at least once --"

"-- another species," Cerea softly said. "One which... isn't in contact with Equestria any more. I -- I don't know if they can be alerted. Not the way Spike did it, or how Princess Celestia works the spell. They don't know..."

They're in the mountains. There's no embassy. No point of contact. No one anypony knows. And if there's no gatehouse, then there's no safe place for a teleport to arrive.
How could they be warned? Pegasi flying at top speed, trying to stay ahead of the drain? What if there aren't any couriers left?
When will the mountains know? When they see him coming? And that'll be easy, when he's swollen with enough power to put his eyes on a level with the terraces.
What can they do?
Shelter?
Run?
Try to join everyone else, at the very last?
What could an ibex do against Tirek?
What can anyone...

It was so easy to see it. Hear it. Hooves scrambling on sheer slopes, trying to reach safety.
The laughter.
The drain.
Magic fails. Gravity takes over.
And the ibex would fall.

She heard the unicorn swallow.

"The palace will find a way," Rarity said, and the disc helpfully rendered every inner tremble within the syllables. "I'm certain that the Princesses have already been thinking about the matter. But if it comforts you, the words can be placed into the next scroll."

Cerea just barely managed a nod. Trotting resumed.

"I feel as if I'm rather dominating the conversation," Rarity eventually took over. "Something I've been told is a frequent problem." The scarf's free end tossed again. "Is there anything you'd like to say?" Bright eyes helpfully locked onto those of the girl. "Ask?"

The centaur took a single shuddering breath.

"Yes."

"Go ahead," the unicorn offered. "Don't concern yourself with a subject potentially being too personal. I'll simply tell you. Politely. And then there may be a means of answering anyway --"

The words also had to be forced.

"It's something I have to ask all of you. It didn't come up at the briefing, and -- when I thought about the ibex, I remembered it. I... I think I need to know..."

Rarity looked at her for a few seconds. Nodded once, and raised her voice.

"Everypony?" the unicorn announced, and every equine head turned -- as did the dragon. "Cerea has a question. An important one. Something where she needs our best answers. Your attention, please? And your honesty."

The Bearers stopped, and far too many eyes focused on Cerea. From all directions, at what felt like every possible level of intensity.

I didn't look at Fluttershy's mark.
...two unblinking eyes. Calling it --
-- butterflies.

She wasn't sure how that related to assassinations. Maybe it was a cultural thing.

"Prithee, but I have..." Stopped, and took another breath. "I've... I was sent letters. Not the protest letters."

They may not know about those.
Or half the mail leaving Ponyville is those letters.
I'm probably breaking some poor mailmare's back.

"From Diamond and Fancypants." And she could scent Rarity's sudden tension, as the memories came back all over again. "I'm..."

They were all staring at her. One mare seemed to be making some attempt to capitalize the action.

The wind picked up. Branches tried to sway. Some of them were too bent back on themselves to manage the feat. The ones which had grown in twisted spirals had no chance of truly catching the current.

Just... just say it.

She had to know. The question was whether they would tell her.

"...I'm going in to assess and evaluate Tirek," Cerea heard herself say. "That's supposed to be the plan. But plans can fall apart. There's... a chance that I'll have to fight him. And in the letters... they knew you had a plan, but nopony is sure what it was. I know that if it involved magic, I can't use it. But -- just hearing anything about your tactics, what you intended to try -- if there's anything there which might be helpful --"

She hadn't expected the laugh.

It was a sound which felt smaller than the alicorn who had made it. Something more bitter than momordica charantia, and it contained no humor whatsoever.

"We were going to drop rocks on his head."

And then the stare was going the other way.

"Rocks," the girl just barely repeated. There had been no hiss associated with the word, but she still wanted to check for translator error. The other option was that Twilight had just said something about rocks.

"And fire," Spike reluctantly added.

"Would've done floods, if'fin we could've managed it," Applejack sighed. "But the first stage was gonna be rocks." The hat shifted forward, shadowed green eyes beneath the brim. "Ain't sure y'can do much with that, unless y'can bring the ceiling down on him." And for a moment, there was a small, vicious smile. "If that happens? At least we'll know it might have worked. Can't promise it'll help, Cerea -- but we'll tell you."

The earth pony stopped. Took a deep breath, and large muscles reached out for extra strength.

"We had his path," the orange mare said. "Wasn't exactly tryin' to go around obstacles. His size, anythin' he couldn't step over, he --" and all at once, "Rarity, Ah'm sorry, Ah didn't mean --"

"-- anything he couldn't step over," Rarity tightly repeated, "he stepped on. I am not offended, Applejack."

Something about the earth pony's posture didn't seem to suggest full belief, and that was accompanied by everything about the scent.

"Anyway," the largest pony visibly made herself continue, "he was comin' up to what was kind of an interestin' spot. It's one of those places where the local Diamond Dog warren gets really close t' town -- or it did, 'cause the town expanded towards that part, and the Dogs abandoned those tunnels. Stopped doin' the maintenance. Ceiling started out weak, an' Tirek... he had weight, didn't he?"

"We thought," Pinkie took over, "that he'd collapse it. Drop in up to the top of his hoof. Or part of it. You can hurt yourself that way, even in a short drop. If your weight comes down the wrong way when you're not ready for it." The brightest eyes burned with sudden ferocity. "We would have taken hurt. But even if it didn't hurt him, he would have been distracted. Maybe even trapped for a second..."

The centaur was still trying to reconcile 'rocks'.

"You were counting on the ground collapsing," Cerea said. "You couldn't be sure..."

"It was gonna break," Applejack stated. "Guaranteed."

"The Dogs set it up?" was a natural inquiry. "I've met -- I know they're good with soil, but nopony said anything about rock --"

Rarity reluctantly shook her head.

"They fled when they felt the tremors," the white unicorn stated. "There was no attempt made to assist us. We have a degree of trade, but -- not an alliance. Please trust us when we say that the ground would have broken, Cerea. We were there."

"I was going to levitate the largest rocks I could find," Twilight bitterly declared. "Get them moving, or position them so it wouldn't matter if he drained my magic. And Spike was going to try for a fire. Something we had to start at a distance, but -- Rainbow would have stayed out far enough to manage the wind. Move it all towards him, while there was still time. Because take out the magic, and the fire is still there. The wind is still blowing. Steal my field, and all that would get him was gravity. With the rocks right over his head..."

She stopped. The light blue mare sighed.

"It wasn't a bad idea," Trixie told the group. "I know I wasn't there, but -- I don't have anything better than a firework up his snout. Direct physical assault --"

"It was stupid," blasted into the world on a tide of insistence and self-hatred. "We were counting on him still being normal enough for something to hurt him. That his skull could still be cracked, and his skin would burn, and -- he had magic, Trixie, he had everypony's magic. But he didn't seem to know very much about what he could do with it. There were a few basic effects --" Paused, and laughed again. "Basic. It's like saying a single water droplet is basic when it's holding everything from a waterfall. But that was what we were counting on, Trixie. There weren't any major techniques. He could blast things, but I wasn't sure he'd figured out how to levitate something in a hurry. Field strength, everypony's field strength -- but what was his field dexterity? Could he go for multiple targets? So -- dropping rocks on his head. And fire. Because..."

The purple eyes slowly closed, and the next words lost all tone. All feeling. All hope.

"...we were trying to kill him."

And the little body shook.

"Twi --" Applejack was already moving closer to the alicorn.

"...you weren't there, Trixie." Heaving ribs pushed newborn words into an unwelcome world. "I'm glad you weren't there. Maybe you would have thought of something, with him right in front of you. But that's also when you get drained. One more victim. He had some power before he reached Canterlot, getting the Princesses out in time didn't stop him from hurting so many others, and then he started draining the Everfree. He was a walking apocalypse, he kept taking and taking and when he took everything, that was the end of the world. And... I didn't know how to get the magic out of him. We thought there was a good chance that every drain was permanent, because we didn't know. There were ponies and griffons and so many others who'd already lost their magic, Cranky said he almost didn't get clear in time, some of us would have had to get closer than the others for the attack, and --"

Shaking faster, even with the earth pony pressed against her. Fluttershy and Trixie were now on the approach, and Rainbow was already there. The little alicorn's brother simply hugged her as best he could.

Cerea could scent it all, under full Moon. The desperation of the others. How much they wanted to help her, and that was why they were all moving towards Twilight. To give her what support and comfort they could. It was the reason why fur strands pressed tightly enough to intermesh, while feathers gently drifted across a weeping face.

But the girl couldn't approach, even when everypony was now on the move. She had no right, no place. And for what those who loved the little alicorn could do (because she could scent their love)... it didn't seem to matter.

"-- that was the price. The ones who were still alive, just drained -- even if that was some of us --"

Frantically, "Twi, we talked 'bout it --"
"...I was ready, I've never had very much magic in the first place, not for techniques, I'm sure I could have --"
"-- when you think about all the ponies, about everyone, the numbers -- Twilight, I told you, I really really understood why --"
"You were all doing what you had to --"
"-- I know how much it hurt you to make that call, I have to tuck you back in when you wake up --"
"-- blaze of glory! It would have been one for every history book, for the Hall Of Legends again --"
"-- dearest, every last one of us was prepared to --"

They were all touching the crying little alicorn now. There was some jostling for position, because Twilight's size didn't give them a lot of room to work with. And none of it was noticed. None of it mattered.

"...it could be a fascinating study, don't you think?" Twilight wept. "Because a corpse can't hold magic. There's ways to make the inanimate store thaums, and platinum does it naturally --" a certain amount of lecture began to work into the sobs "-- to a given capacity. But not the dead. We convert calories into power, when we need it. And that means we usually don't just have uncommitted thaums in our bodies. So when we die... most of the time, that's it. We're dead."

They were all saying her name, over and over. She didn't seem to be listening. And with Moon shining down on pain and torment, the centaur's ears picked out every word.

"But sometimes, a pony will die when they're in the middle of doing something," the alicorn said, and the syllables were acid. "I've read articles. You can get a little fizzle. Random effects, because the thaums aren't under control any more and they just sort of -- work themselves out on whatever's around. Like being sick with Rhynorn's and trying to cast, only it's happening for the last time. So when Tirek died, with all of that magic inside him -- what happens? It's a great question, isn't it? Does it just wink out, like a corona going dark? It was too much to hope for everything to just go back to where it came from. Maybe the body would have exploded, like overloaded platinum. Taken out everything around it. Us, at the very least. And I don't know how many thaums he was carrying. Maybe it was enough to make Ponyville into a crater. It could have destroyed the mountain. I didn't know. And we were going to try and kill him anyway. Because I didn't know how to stop the drain, or block it, or reverse it, or anything, there wasn't enough time to research or study or theorize or hope, we knew we could lose thousands of ponies if we did it and killing was still all we had left."

There were too many thoughts in the girl's head: there usually were. But she watched the alicorn sink to the cold ground, saw the others follow, and found room for one more.

They're not military.
They never were.
They would feel the loss, like the Sergeant does. They would mourn. But not like this.
Not in front of me.
What are they...?

The Bearers had surrounded their friend, and Cerea could only watch.

She wanted to do something.
She couldn't.
She spoke.

"There is a saying where I came from," the girl tried to offer. "A -- cliche', really. Something from a --" and she knew the disc would hiss for a full minute "-- series of stories. About how the needs of the many outweigh --"

"-- it's a fantastic research problem, right?" Twilight asked the world. "Dispersal of stolen thaums from a corpse. Years worth of articles, just from that. What happens? There are academics who would have died to get that answer. Maybe some did, because the Gifted School lost two teachers. Maybe they were trying to get close enough to figure something out. And I was the one who decided that Tirek had to die, that so many people might die and if Tirek was gone, that meant it was right..."

She sniffed a few times. The other ponies pressed more tightly.

"We're alive," Rainbow told her. "We're here..." This was echoed.

"I couldn't even figure out why he was getting bigger!"

Energy-mass conversion? asked the girl's spiraling thoughts. She understood the basic theory, and -- that was about it. There was no way to work out the number of thaums required to produce even a gram of matter...

"Oh, that's easy," Applejack decided. "Only so much room in a body for magic, right? So once y'hit capacity, y'obviously need a bigger body." There was a thoughtful pause. "Accounts for the Princesses, come t' think of it." A strong chin rubbed against the base of the little alicorn's horn. "Can't quite figure out where you fit in there. Other than at the petite end. With room t' spare."

"...oh, shut up," the alicorn grumbled.

The earth pony smirked. "Us researchers," she announced, "kinda resent somepony talkin' over our theories." And paused. "Twi, Discord changed the plan --" and the tone shift was the audio equivalent of a facehoof "-- of course he did, it's Discord. And he got the magic back to where it came from."

"Except for the dead," Twilight softly said. "They're all still dead. And it changed before that, when we got close enough to see what was going on. That Sweetie and Diamond hadn't gotten out, and Mr. Rich was closing in, and... it was harder to think about doing it, when they were right there. When..."

"I am aware," Rarity calmly stated, and did so while her scent put its own lie on the qualifier. "Perhaps... the explosion would have been quick enough that we would have all only realized what had happened in the shadowlands. And then... I could have told her how sorry I was, Twilight. Sweetie is a filly who gives so much for her friends. For those she cares about. And Diamond is --" a small smile "-- significantly better than she once was. Mr. Rich... they all would have understood."

"You don't know --"

"I thought it was safe to go after him, once he was small again," Rainbow quickly declared. "Smaller, anyway. One good kick would have done it!" Accusingly, "And you held me back."

The wind is moving over your feathers. I can smell your intent. You're trying to distract her.

"Because it was going home, all of the magic." More sniffs. (Spike was now digging in the saddlebags, and it took a moment before a handkerchief emerged. The girl briefly wondered what it was locally called.) "I told you: I didn't know if he had any left, or what happened if he died while he still had even a little -- oh, thank you..."

She blew her snout. Thin legs kicked at the ground, and the others moved away. Just enough to let her stand up.

"And then the Guards were there," Twilight finished. "When Tirek was weak, and helpless, and... might not have been a threat any more. So we didn't finish it."

The other ponies began to stand up. All but one.

"...and we were waiting," Fluttershy whispered. "Because maybe a little more power would come out. Enough for... for Discord... to..."

Most of the motions reversed themselves. Spike transferred backs.

"...Fancypants... keeps saying it's his fault. That he made Discord see it. That everything's connected."

More salt in the air. More water being absorbed by the soil.

"...but there has to be a first connection. Something which gives you the bridge to all of the rest. If he hadn't... if I hadn't... if we hadn't been friends..."

They surrounded the pegasus. (Trixie came in last, and her posture was the most awkward.) Stayed with her, as cold sluiced through fur and souls. Gave her time, until the last sniffles stopped. For a little while.

"And now we're here," Twilight finally said. "Because we let him go. So -- let's go do what we have to. Let's get her in."

When so many lived, who wouldn't have without Discord's intervention.
When so many might still die.

The ponies stood. Cerea had been shuffling awkwardly from hoof to hoof for enough time to truly call it a dance. The only one she knew.

"Size for magic storage," Pinkie considered. "It's not a bad idea." With a smile, "And everypony knows that you need an exception to test a rule! Since Twilight's so exceptionally small --"

"I think," the alicorn decided with a faint smile, "I said something about shutting up?"

The flour-scented mare glanced at Cerea, and the words were innocent enough. The words, but -- not the images they triggered. "I bet you could hold a lot of magic."

The centaur thought of a forest, and coolness wrapping around a fevered body. Looked down at her breasts again, and then wrenched her gaze back up.

"I... don't have any."

And the girl waited for the next words to become an accusation. Something about centaurs, perhaps. That they were hollow within, and stole simply to have something which would fill the void. She felt hollowed, sometimes. Whenever she thought about how there was no one left to hold her hand.

But both tone and scent simply became curious. And there was something else present. An aspect which was almost... wistful.

"Do you miss it?"

"You... can't miss what you've never had," Cerea replied.

Liar.
You... miss what you might have had, if everything had been different. If you were different.
What you don't have any more.
To not miss something... You'd have to feel it wasn't even possible. That no one had ever had it.
If my mother had never sung to me at all.
If I didn't know that singing existed.
Maybe then I wouldn't...

"The most you can do is wish," the centaur told the ponies. "You put your wishes in one hand, you spit in the other. The spit always fills your palm first. I don't want magic, because I can't have it. Wishing for magic, for power, over and over to the point where it's the only thought you can still have..."

Her hands clenched. Parts of the gauntlet tried to jam, and she had to force them open.

I hate him.

"...that's Tirek. I'm... I'm not him..."

Please don't look at me like that.
Please don't look at me.
I'm not sure what that scent is, and now it's coming in bulk.
Please don't let that be pity...

After a few seconds, the little alicorn looked around. Blinked away the last of the tears, and then squinted.

"Applejack," she checked. "I know wild trees look a little weird without their leaves. But those branches..."

The farmer checked the sight line. Slowly nodded.

"Ain't natural," the earth pony said. "An' they ain't from one of mine tryin' t' do some creative shapin', neither. Let's keep goin', everypony. An' keep your ears rotatin'. Ah think we're close."

Seven ponies, one dragon, and a single centaur moved deeper into the night. The last wound up towards the rear of the new formation and Rarity, who was still checking on Twilight, did not drop back.

It left her alone with her thoughts.
One thought.
I'm not him...

Surreal

She kept trying to tell herself that Moon was normal. That the orb above the twisted remnants of the forest was just as it should be, when nothing else was.

The procession advanced through the night, and... that was an unsteady thing, after movements should have become easier. There was a trail to follow now, something which seldom saw use -- but one which was clearly marked on Twilight's map.

The little alicorn had a fold-out shelf mounted to a collar on her neck, with a tiny glowstick at the upper edge of the angled plane and the map pinned down upon the wood, held where she could see it with a casual glance down. There was an odd incongruity to seeing it bob along with her movements, especially when the sight was combined with the ongoing presence of the deerstalker cap.

(Pinkie kept checking on the hat. As if making sure it was still there.)

They'd had to work their way into the wild zone at the outset, because the intent had been to intercept the carriage trail at the clearing. Now that they'd learned all they could (with the centaur wondering if it was all they truly could have learned, if she'd somehow missed a detail or caused the others to do the same), they were free to move directly towards their destination. And there was a trail. Not a road, because it wasn't used that often and making the path too clear might have made unwary travelers wonder where that was going: it could potentially be worse for those capable of scouting it from overhead. But it was visible, if you knew where to look. It also wasn't all that wide. That was another passage, one which had different forms of concealment and protection. Everything within Tartarus had to be brought in somehow, and... a number of the incarcerated could be described as being on the large side.

There was a trail, and... it was getting harder to move.

They didn't seem to be making enough sound. So much of what Cerea could detect was metal shoes awkwardly advancing, and... even that felt far too intermittent. Most of what she heard came from her own breathing and even with her ears almost constantly trying to rotate downwards towards the source, that seemed far too muted.

She knew she was breathing because she could feel her anatomy shifting within a cage of metal, and... because each inhalation was a burden. A doubled one, in those moments when she practiced the Second Breath. Taking on mass --

-- the trees had gone beyond mere twistings now. Branches had nearly been sundered at their base, clung to that which had birthed them through lingering splinters of wood and bark. Some of the trunks had been vertically split, as if something had grabbed opposing sides and pulled. Gouges marked exposed roots, and there were never any marks to indicate that claws or blade could be blamed for their creation. The gouges were just there. Everything around them wept sap, another kind of blood flowing forth to stain edged soil, and...

...the trained farmer in the girl recognized that the damage was too severe. Every wounded plant should have been dead, and yet the sap was freshly flowing. And trees existed without thought, lacked the kind of nervous system which delivered often-unwanted information to those along other kingdom lines of biology...

It was only what the girl had brought into the forest: she kept telling herself that, too. That when she perceived such a thing, it was nothing more than her own interpretation of events. There were so many ways in which sapience started as the sound of one mind lying to itself. When it came to what she chose to see, her perceptions weren't real.

No tree could truly look as if it was trapped within unending agony.
As if it wished for death --

-- as self-imposed delusions went, hers might not have existed in isolation. She caught the orange mare examining the vegetation a few times, and a deep illness seemed to be taking root in strong features.

There wasn't a lot of speech taking place. When it did occur, it often began with an abrupt gasp, as if oxygen had been held to the end of endurance. Speech meant breath, and breathing...

Most of the scant talking took place between Twilight and Trixie, and that happened in low whispers. Cerea seldom caught any of the words and when she did, the disc strained to render terms she could understand. The most advanced levels of science often seemed to have their own language: something which very much included thaumaturgy. But for the rest of it... that was mostly just the Bearers checking on each other. Basic status requests. Seeing if they were all okay, and just about every one of them retained enough strength to lie. The exception was Applejack, who simply murmured something about how nothing was going to be all right until they were all out of there. And then she would drop back to check on Cerea.

(Sometimes Twilight would glance towards the girl. Those brief gazes always had an odd focus on the afterthought of a nose: it made the centaur's face itch. And the further they all went down the trail, the more Trixie trembled. Shook, as she kept searching the sides of the trail. Measuring every gap as if it would be the last possible chance for escape.)

But that was nearly all of it: status checks and what the girl felt was a last-minute review. You didn't talk unless you had to, and it made her wonder why Fluttershy approached Trixie and Twilight.

It was one of the few times when words were truly comprehensible -- at least for the terms used: the sentences themselves made no sense. Cerea overheard (and she wished she hadn't, every word she understood was a potential beacon of magic) the yellow pegasus saying something about how it wasn't necessary, all she had to do was just -- scratch a belly? And Twilight had told her that they would be on the other side of the screen, it wouldn't work, and Fluttershy had dropped back at the speed of miffed. Because that was easier than talking any more.

When you talked, you had to breathe.

The air had gone beyond still. Atmosphere existed as something which possessed its own surface tension. Every movement felt as if it required just a little extra effort, the smallest extra surge necessary to break the thinnest of barriers. Hardly any true expenditure at all. But it was needed every time. And when you breathed...

Perhaps the worst part was that they kept finding zones where the distortions stopped. Where the trees were straight and whole, with soil which simply indented beneath their weight while rocks failed to claw at their shoes. Because when you found that kind of place, where what Twilight saw as the leakage hadn't taken hold... you could start to feel hope. Perhaps this one would stretch out for a while. Maybe it would take them all the way up to the Gate. The last bad patch had truly been the last, had to be the last --

-- and then the spike-tipped solidified wraiths of half-dead bushes would reach for their skin.

At one point, Pinkie tried to sing. Softly, just under her breath, as if trying to see if she could hold a note at all. It had been something about giggling at the ghostly. And then the mare stopped.

There were four places where all of the Bearers had to stop. It was possible to watch as they steeled themselves: Cerea was used to seeing pony muscles tense, but it took a little more work to pick out where certain lines of scales had gone rigid. Each place was a location marked on Twilight's map: those which had been enchanted to radiate what the alicorn had termed as resonance. Projected emotions. Avoidance, dismissal, repulsion. Things meant to turn back any who had wandered onto the path by accident. There were devices which could be carried, things which served as countercharms to that level of defense, but -- they were enchanted. One more potential vulnerability.

It could take an endless minute before all of the Bearers were able to cross each of the four lines. The centaur never felt anything at all, and told herself that it was because the hairpins were doing their job.

Four places where they had to stop, at least when it came to getting past that type of defense. (There were others. One saw Rainbow take to the air just long enough to get over the hidden trigger rope, and none had the strength to criticize.)

She heard Twilight softly say that there should have been seven.

Naturally, the ponies had thought about the possibility of having a barrier weaken or fail. If that happened, an alarm of sorts was sounded. The associated spells were supposed to guarantee that...

Tails twitched. Kept trying to lash. Pony ears were flattened against skulls.

She wanted to stall. Not arrive until sunrise, when the moon-touched status would leave her, and -- perhaps Sun's light would somehow make everything better. But that would mean more hours in the dark, and -- they'd risked enough time.

The girl almost wished for something to attack. Crystalize the half-tangible weight of threat into that which could be fought, and -- perhaps an encounter would allow her to prove herself, if she somehow managed not to fail. But it was a selfish, foolish desire. And nothing ever came. No sounds of anything other than themselves moved through the night. Nothing at all.

She kept trying to tell herself that Moon was normal. That it wasn't forcing its tremendous mass against the atmosphere, compressing the air into something which could be felt as a burden against metal, skin, and fur. That the constant feeling of judgment which came from both inside and out hadn't partially arisen from the fact that Moon was watching. She kept telling herself that it was normal...

...but what was so normal about an artificial satellite which only maintained orbit on an alicorn's orders?

...here. Here, that was normal. It was the only thing the ponies knew. As Fancypants' comment about stars being moved suggested, it was all which so much of the species might ever wish to believe.

Perhaps Moon did watch, in some way. If it had been created by a more advanced civilization, then it was certainly possible for the construct to include cameras. But the disc had more than suggested that modern ponies didn't understand how image transmission would work. There was no concept of data transfer, and nopony had even gotten so far as discovering radio. Moon might watch... but for whatever it saw, it kept its secrets.

There were always secrets.

They moved through the endless night. And her own tail twitched, tried to lash, and she couldn't always get it under control. Their ears had gone back against their skull: hers kept trying to hide beneath her hair...

Ears concealed under hair, while moving through a place where she never should have been.

The world was silent, still, and felt as if it existed as something which was waiting for a chance to strike.

Perhaps it was simply Tartarus asking her if she wanted to play.

Savage

She wasn't sure if the entrance should have looked worse than it was, or... if everything had degraded to the point where it was no longer possible to truly judge.

The first seemed more likely. There were a few normal trees near the cliff face: the last normal trees, and... Cerea was trying to figure out why they were present at all. Perhaps the source of the drain had decided to indulge in a single aspect of discretion. Allow the usual environment to exist just outside the entrance, so that any who entered the area via flight (and didn't pay all that much attention to what they were passing over) would decide that all was well. Everything was normal. And as illusions went, it was rather inexpert. All anyone had to do was turn around.

She kept wanting to turn. To see if that last branch had made any effort to reach for her again --

-- there was a cliff face, and not a particularly large one. They were at the base of what, for any other facet of approach, would have just been an unusually abrupt hill: something which erupted from the earth like a blackhead from human skin. No slow elevation changes requiring gradually-tightening clusters of contour lines: simply that which should have been, surrounding an intrusion swollen with foulness.

But that was just what the centaur had brought with her: the way she had chosen to think of it. The hill was abrupt, rose too quickly, would have been almost unclimbable without specialized equipment --

or just being an ibex

-- but if she looked even partially around the curve of the rise, it turned into a hill. One which rose no more than forty meters: Moon was more than full enough to grant her some idea of the elevation, at least once she'd backed up a bit.

(It was an excuse for backing up.)

And for what could be seen to the sides... a few normal trees had found ways to take root, because there were species whose base requirements were soil and a lack of local competition: the results were mostly vertical. Juniper could be found on such surfaces, and a distant scent told the centaur that a bristlecone pine was thriving. But when she looked straight ahead...

There was a cliff face, one largely composed of dark basalt (and perhaps that was adding to the impression of eruption). The majority of exposed rock existed as layered vertically-resting slabs: something which suggested a cosmic hand had decided to play a shape-fitting game in three dimensions for an hour -- one where the goal was to never quite finish a level line. Monoliths atop monoliths, narrow rectangles (at least when compared to the scope of the cliff), with some projecting further than others. It would have been easy for a pony to stand atop the largest of the exposed upper ledges: the narrowest offered just enough room to accommodate a few sparrows.

(They hadn't heard any birds in hours.)

Most of the rock was fully bare, as if that same hand had carefully peeled away any concealing layers of soil in order to grant a better view of the work. You had to search high in order to find any scant deposits of earth -- but that was where the vines had rooted.

Most of them were dead. Perhaps they would have been dead regardless, with winter so close: Cerea couldn't tell if it was the sort of death which was waiting for a chance at temporarily reversing itself. But it left thick ropes of vegetable corpses hanging on the rock.

Twisted brown cellulose cascaded across the cave's mouth. Obscured the edges, making it hard to find the borders between varieties of darkness. All Cerea could tell, even under full Moon, was that the entrance was roughly twenty meters high, and nearly that wide across. But to know how deep it went, just how far the wound might extend into the earth -- that required entrance.

"Do you want to play?"

Most of the Bearers were having trouble looking directly at it: one of the last enchantments. Trixie, who'd put herself some distance away and behind what otherwise would have been the far right of the group, was focused on nearly everything else. Anything in the area which gave her another view for a few seconds, as long as it didn't look back. If it wasn't capable of noticing how much the light blue unicorn was shaking.

Some of the mares were visibly steadier than others. But every pony scent started at fear. Trixie went beyond that. And whenever she thought that somepony might be able to glance towards her, she receded a little deeper into the hill's shadow.

"...normal," Twilight exhaled. "This is -- just about what it should be." A little more softly, "I think. Nopony should rely on that. I wasn't here very long the last time, and the lighting was different." Her head dipped, and a narrow chin touched wood just before applying pressure: part of the shelf folded along a well-hidden hinge. "Things could change at any moment."

"You came by yourself," Rainbow stated, sounding as if she was vaguely annoyed about having missed out on something. "All by yourself, when you were traveling with him --"

"-- he was past the screen," Twilight quietly replied. "It was as safe as it was ever going to be. That's what Fluttershy reminded me of, when I saw what she was doing. What the screen was for." The snort was exceptionally low in volume, with all embarrassment directed inward. "Call it... magical obedience training, if you want to. It's a better term than for what I was going to do before I saw Fluttershy move. Because then I remembered what the screen would have done. I checked some of the oldest papers after I got home, and most of what I was about to do was being really stupid." With a tiny sigh, "He wasn't attacking, not really. The screen, when all of the spells are at work, when he's his lesser self... that was just about playing. But if I'd attacked..."

The little alicorn shuddered.

"I brought another ball," Pinkie gently offered. "Just in case."

(The girl had no idea what they were talking about.)

It brought out a faint, somehow wan smile. "Thank you, Pinkie -- but it won't help."

"You're sure?" Not without hope, but it was possible to listen as it progressively faded across each letter.

The narrow rib cage shifted across the duration of a small breath. "The ritual only works if he's behind the screen. Not outside it. He's part of the ritual. And..." One more inhalation. "Pinkie, all I did was send him inside. The palace had been alerted while I was still on the way, and they sent in their own investigation team. To resecure the area, and make some changes. That's why I thought nothing had gotten out: that's what the team told me. And that's most of what I was thinking about the way there. Why I was so relieved when I got back. I was already primed to think of nothing but disaster --" The little alicorn softly groaned. "-- that stupid week... and all the way there, I kept thinking -- what if something had gotten out? And... if I hadn't been so eager to get home, if I'd stayed to help..."

"We don't know when Tirek got out," Rarity quickly kicked in. "Or how, Twilight. To blame yourself --"

"-- is what I'm really good at," the alicorn finished. Finished folding the shelf, and a quick tooth nip yanked the wood away from its anchoring place on the collar: Spike dismounted, then collected it and removed the neck circlet entirely. "Trixie, we should probably have one last review before we go in -- Trixie?"

It took a few seconds before she looked back. Saw a streaked mane, one which was usually carried with self-assured confidence, on the verge of shaking itself apart.

"...Trixie?" Just a little more softly, as the little mare turned. Began to walk towards the unicorn, with every movement small and precise. The approach of somepony who knew when an equine was on the verge of breaking, right down to the gentle projection of tone. "It's okay. We're all scared. But we're all going in together. We'll be together --"

-- sharply, eyes far too wide as the first hints of froth rose up through the strands of the light blue coat, "Promise me."

The Bearers hung back. Letting Twilight have the approach, while angled shoulders showed they were ready to follow. The girl didn't move. She could see the terror, scent it, and for her to come any closer... things were bad enough already.

There was a tenderness in the next words. Caring, accompanied by a subtle undercurrent of audible fear. "Promise what?"

"Promise you'll bring me out." Heavy breathing, eyes locked forward, forehooves pawing at the ground. The sounds of metal scraping on rock. "You don't know how close I came! I never wanted to come here, but the Princesses, my probation -- she could have put me in here, Twilight, in here, all she had to do was say one word and --"

Frantically, "-- you didn't kill, Trixie -- it was the Amulet, you were the only pony who ever wore it and didn't kill --"

(The girl had no idea what they were talking about. When it came to the majority of what she'd heard since the air carriages had landed, it was an ongoing condition.)

The whites of the eyes were showing. The unicorn's neck was arched. Breaking was heartbeats away.

"-- PROMISE ME!"

"I promise," Twilight said. "I promise --"

"-- even if I die, even if you have to drag my corpse, you won't leave me in there --"

"-- Trixie, I promise..."

Four legs folded, and the unicorn collapsed.

She shivered in place, as the little mare slowly trotted up to her. Staring at the brief reflections which arose from her fallen tears, just before the soil took them away.

"...I'm... I'm holding you to that."

"I know." Closing the last of the distance.

"If you don't, then I'm going to be the most annoying ghost there ever was..."

"Also the first." One more hoofstep.

"You -- you promise?"

The nuzzle was slow. It started at the ears, and stayed there until they raised again.

"Promise."

And only then did the others approach.

Pinkie and Rarity were the slowest in doing so, and even they crossed the distance. But with Cerea...

She didn't understand what had happened.
She didn't know anything about what might have come before.
She...
...they comfort each other.
In public.
Whenever it's needed. No matter what's happening, or -- who's watching, or who might judge...
...she wasn't any part of that.

The girl slowly reoriented her body. Turned away, and began to trot towards the faint treeline. It took a moment before the alicorn noticed.

"Where are you going?" Not altogether harshly. Certainly not as harsh as the girl felt it could have been.

"We're about to go inside," Cerea heavily stated. "I... have orders."

Trinette knew ways of creating armor which allowed a mare to urinate without ever having to remove any part of it, and the specific lesson would have been given to the apprentice two weeks after the news of the gap's opening had broken. After that, there had been -- certain distractions. And Cerea had tried to figure it out while in the palace forge, but there had been too many other things to work on and besides, she was just the apprentice. Something which suggested a finishing place no higher than second.

...besides, she was almost certain that it would have required wearing a lot less padding.

The next step was to darken the armor. She'd been given a paste which Lunar Guards --

not me

-- used at times of need. It had the benefit of drying quickly. But it still took some time to spread, because she had to get it everywhere.

It wasn't something where she could have asked the Bearers for help. (Nothing was.) The girl didn't want any of the mares to put a paste-covered cloth in their mouths, and when it came to Spike... he was too small to reach very much. As it was, she had to put every encased limb to the double-jointed test in order to reach the most distant spots, and was convinced she'd utterly ruined the long-handled brush.

(It was also good for discovering just where the backup armor had required some extra work. She really wasn't sure about the left shoulder.)

Other portions could be done by hand, and... there was nothing erotic about running her hands over metal-covered curves. She just had to make sure she didn't miss anything, and ignoring the most visible targets would have been stupid.

She would have shed her worries, if she'd had any idea how. Meditated, if that had ever worked. But she didn't understand how such things were meant to function. All she could manage was the manual labor.

She had to remove all brightness from herself...

Cerea had been issued a scent-neutralizing spray, to be used after those orders had been fulfilled. It mostly taught her that ponies had a different standard for considering when a scent had been neutralized. Still, it was something which had been used by others before entering Tartarus. So in that aspect, it had been tested. Scents might not have been brought below the threshold of her Moon-touched detection, but she would be safe from the sensory range of the incarcerated.

Eventually, she felt ready --

-- I'm not
no one could be
except for a true knight --

-- and trotted back towards the Bearers.

She unintentionally passed a little too close to Twilight, and heard the little mare's quick sniff. The automatic assumption was that the alicorn was checking to see if the neutralizer had worked to satisfaction. However, the accompanying glance backwards found a purple snout trying to pick up scent from the fringe of fabric which hung below the lower edge of the armor. Sniffing at Cerea's skirt.

The centaur didn't understand. It was probably a cultural thing. That or bad aim.

"Dirt and leaves?" a watching, lightly smirking Trixie inquired for no apparent reason.

The alicorn faintly blushed. Turned to face the cave mouth, and Cerea watched as the others did the same.

"This is when we're the most vulnerable," Twilight quietly told them. "We've... been making a lot of assumptions. That Tirek's responsible --" the miniature smile was exceptionally grim "-- when he's just the first and best suspect. That whatever's doing this can detect the use or presence of magic, and drain it from a distance." With a tiny sigh, "For all we know, the cause is just close and invisible. But now that we're at the Gate -- this is when we have to use magic. There's no way we can attempt the ritual without it. And now we're assuming that if something can feel everything we do, including the ritual... that we're going to be allowed to complete it."

"The Princesses said there were two other Gates," Rainbow reminded them. "If something happens here, is there a way to get through one of those? Without magic?"

Twilight slowly began to shake her head -- then stopped. "Not the Gates, Rainbow. There's theoretically another way to get in, but..." Wincing, "Let's just say it's going to take a while. And you'd need somewhere to put all of the broken rock. It also doesn't invoke the translation, or -- promise any chance at an exit. This is how you put someone in when you want to make sure they can come out..."

She stopped. Shivered a little, in near-winter chill.

"I think we'll get to finish," Pinkie determined. "If it's Tirek, anyway. He might want us to finish."

Which focused the group's attention on her.

"He might suspect investigators, Pinkie," Rarity carefully said. "Something he would be reluctant to permit. Anyone looking into his activities -- that could stop him."

"I don't know if he thinks that way." The earth pony's tones felt oddly serious. "If he can think that way. Everything about him was 'Nothing can stop me!' To think you can be stopped... you have to think about what other people can do. You have to think about other people at all. And..."

The flour-scented mare sadly turned towards Fluttershy. Waited.

"...the one person he might have feared, even a little..." the pegasus softly filled in, "...isn't here." And she looked at Cerea -- but only for a second, and then her gaze slid away. "It's okay if you keep talking, Pinkie."

"I can't be sure how he thinks," Pinkie finished. "Just trying to imagine it is hard. It's like being a lake and wondering what a desert is up to. But... if he really really knew what we were about to do with the ritual, then he might let us finish, before he tries to attack. Because it's not sending in an investigator. It's delivering a meal."

And before anypony could react, before Cerea was even aware of words approaching her own tongue at all, the centaur heard herself say "Empty calories."

Rainbow snorted. Pinkie's features contorted a few times. There was an abrupt snicker somewhere off to the left. And by the time Cerea forced herself to fully look around and see if any more damage had been done, the Bearers were simply facing the cave again.

Moon shone down upon them. The last normal thing.

"We all know what we have to do," Twilight announced. "Let's go do it."

They moved forward. The little alicorn stayed close to Trixie. Near enough to, when the pace faltered, nudge knees straight again.

The glowsticks had strange ways of interacting with the basalt: yellow-green couldn't seem to decide whether it wanted to play across the stone or be absorbed by it. The light had a harder time dealing with the places where the basalt wasn't.

Portions of the tunnel didn't match the ground, or the lower sections of the cave walls. Cerea could see a few smoothed semicircles just barely protruding from the former: places where stalagmites had potentially been removed. But when she looked up... the stone didn't match. It failed to match in great curving blocks which associated with each other through the power of adhesives and the pressure of rumor. It was as if someone had made an effort to artificially narrow the passage, and done so in a way which allowed to be widened again in a relative hurry.

The centaur could neither hear nor scent the drip of water: something which was usually a constant in some part of a cave -- at least, for those which nature was still digging itself out. (Knights had a way of winding up in caves and as she was currently proving, so did those who were considerably more hapless.) But there was such a thing as a dry cave system --

with water, they're called live caves, without and they're dead

-- and perhaps the liquid was simply further down. They might even be heading towards it, as they'd been descending for some time.

It felt as if they should have cleared the other side of the hill...

Moon's light was well behind them now. The glowsticks were all they had: enough to see by, but... every hue was distorted. Fur had been sent for a spin around the color wheel, and every pony had seen the results land on You Lose. It was worst with Rarity, whose face was displaying both the dominant glow of the light and a traveling wince which suggested she knew it.

The sound of metal shoes and armor on stone. Breathing --

-- it felt as if the vibration had reached the girl's ears just before the sound, set the fur around the fringes into a matching tremble. And by the time she recognized that, every other part of her was beginning to resonate with the frequency of the growl.

It was more than something which filled the still air: there was a moment in which it was the air. It wasn't particularly loud (although it somehow managed to carry an implication that it could become much more so): it was merely omnipresent. It managed to simultaneously exist on both sonic and subsonic levels: the latter shook her tail before grounding itself in her teeth, while the former drowned out the input from breathing and hooves.

And it didn't stop. There was never any pause for breath, let alone one for thought. The growl was the air, the air became the world, and the world told them that they were not welcome.

"We're close." Twilight's reluctant words were audible through the constant sound, although certain syllables seemed to be falling into its harmonics.

"...that's him?" Fluttershy's whisper somehow managed to ask. "...I can go ahead, try to calm him down --"

"-- he's on the other side of the screen," Twilight urgently cut her off. "Don't."

"...but we've met." Yellow wings were beginning to unfold. "...he... he was just a big furry guy who was out of his yard, he'll remember me, he'll --"

"Don't."

The pegasus stopped. Half-unfurled limbs slowly shifted back towards her sides.

"There's a little bit of shimmer up ahead," Rainbow reported. "Anypo -- anyone else see that?"

Trixie nodded. "That'll be the screen." The mare's voice was tight. Controlled, and the scent told the girl that it was all a performance. "So at least that's active."

"For whatever that's worth," Spike muttered -- then noticed how many mares were looking at him. "Since we can't lure him through it without breaking the ritual."

"We might have to if things go bad," Twilight admitted. "To see if that calms him down. I'm just not sure if we have enough supplies for more than two attempts." She looked to the left, then tried the right, and finally had to step forward enough to get past Cerea's forelegs before an eyeline was established. "All right, everypony. This is where we need the sigils..."

Four heads turned. Teeth carefully flipped lids, and rummaging began.

Several segments of the briefing had been for the Bearers. The disc hadn't always been able to find a comprehensible equivalent for some of the terms which had been casually kicked around -- at least not before the next piece of academia came flowing down the pike. But Cerea had managed to decipher the relevant portion for this.

The sigils were one of Equestria's secrets. Not the material (electrum), or the fact that they existed: the design. Because the guardian would recognize it. A sigil would bring at least a moment of pause, long enough for the carrier to figure out what they were going to do next. And if the full configuration was ever revealed to the public...

Those who were imprisoned in Tartarus had been sent there because they had each, in their own way, tried to destroy the world. And revealing the design of a sigil would be like giving the human population free attempts at inputting nuclear launch codes through live connection. There would always be someone who was exactly that stupid.

Cerea was carrying a sigil. She was only supposed to display it if one of the other four holders dropped theirs, and she didn't even want to look at it too closely. She didn't ever want to be in a position where someone might force her to draw one from memory.

The bundles were deposited on the cave floor. Wrappings were removed and when it came to blocking odor, whatever had been done to the cotton had clear superiority over the spray. Cerea hadn't been able to get so much as the faintest whiff from her own package --

soil
soil soaked with blood

And then four ponies were carrying the things in their jaws, via the top ring. None of them looked particularly repulsed, which meant the bloodscent had to be fairly weak --

The growl changed. Intensified. There was a sound like a jet intake spinning up, and it had been tripled. Three giant scoops of air.

Trixie and Twilight still had their mouths clear. Fluttershy was the only other pony who was still able to freely speak.

"...we're ready?" the pegasus asked.

"As we're going to be," Twilight said. "Remember, we'll have some light up ahead: his side of the screen, and... the entrance. But there's also mountings on the wall for torches, or there should be. Pinkie, Applejack -- once we start the ritual, you two each light one of your torches and place them. If the mountings are gone for some reason, then... just hold them."

The orange mare carefully bent her forelegs and put the metal back onto the ground, just long enough to speak. "He ain't afraid of fire? Most --"

Grimly, "Why would he ever need to be?"

He. The guardian.

The only words which had been used to describe whatever was up ahead, and Cerea had left the briefing room before Twilight and Trixie had received their instructions. She didn't know what was making that sound. Only that it was constant, too constant for anything living because there would have been a need to stop for oxygen. Constant and...

...familiar?

There was something about the harmonics. As if some part of her knew what the sound was, but just couldn't adjust for the scale of it --

"You'll see a little bit of the chamber as we get close to the screen," Twilight told them. "And then there's a bend when you cross, and -- it'll open up all at once. Brace yourselves now, everypony. He probably won't chase us across the line if we retreat, because... he doesn't want to cross it. Not when he's like this. But too many attempts, and... he might not respect the sigils any more."

Applejack recovered hers. The group moved forward.

Cerea saw the sparkle in the air. (Even when she was Moon-touched, Rainbow's eyesight was superior to hers.) Began to pick up on the first hints of light beyond. The growling was still getting louder.

The sparkles became a slow-shifting curtain composed of miniature stars. Holiday lights built from white pinpricks. The most basic of displays and in some ways, the most beautiful. But it was vibrating in perfect attunement with the constant sound.

She was starting to glimpse part of the chamber: a rising curved basalt wall. Something which suggested the interior of a huge dome: one which had light present, illumination for which she couldn't find a source. But that was all she could see, and she couldn't scent anything within. It was possible that air didn't cross the line in this direction --

-- something moved across her vision: a momentary impression of black, something not so much fringed as notched. It made her think of a tail: one which had been poorly groomed, or bitten into a few times. Almost exactly like a tail, if that tail had somehow been --

"Step across now," Twilight instructed.

They all moved, and did so at the same instant when the guardian spun: something which happened with a jump and a landing which shook the world. The gigantic tail whipped across Cerea's sight as her head crossed the screen, and notches became serrations became waiting death --

She would think about it again, when she was deep within and wishing for something else to dwell upon. Any means of distracting herself from torment. But the first impression was formed in that endless instant, as every reflex she possessed went to war against poor discipline.

There was a need to turn, to run until she was back under Moon and could follow the trail. Doing nothing except running, until her legs finally collapsed. It was in battle against that which brought her free hand to her sword's hilt (she was still carrying the helmet, but she could drop it and go for the sling), ready to draw and do whatever she could to protect. Even if that only resulted in the monstrosity slumping forward. On top of her, which would at least buy the others a moment of distraction...

But she couldn't run. She wasn't supposed to attack. Her mind scrambled for something it could do, anything at all in a place where no training applied. And it landed on the typical sapient's talent for self-distraction.

Circular breathing.

A few liminals could manage the trick, while well-trained humans had found a way to approximate a weaker version. With the humans, it was mostly used by musicians. Those who favored wind instruments could give off the appearance of simultaneously inhaling and exhaling. Breath in through the nose while pushing cheek-stored air out through the mouth. Master it and notes could be held for a surprisingly long time.

In the case of the giant guardian, it was probably being managed via the possession of three throats.

How large was it? Perhaps five meters high at the peak of the back, and 'peak' was trying to put a level on deformity. The back was hunched, rising high above the triple heads, bulging with distorted muscles. (Some of the more curved lines suggested an internal bone structure supporting the hump, or at least trying to drive it higher.) Five meters high, and every bit as wide across the barrel because the collarbone structure had to support three necks. The rest of the rib cage just kept going from there.

There was foam coming off the jowls, thick hangings which occasionally dripped a giant dollop onto stone: anything which fell was immediately replaced. Thick and white, but tinged with a strangely deep purple along the edges of the bubbles. She didn't know why the color was making her think of a flower --

aconite

-- but the smell of it, the smell of everything about it, canine and lupine distorted and warped and grown vast like the growl, the growl which never had to end because there were three throats.

It actually didn't have much of a neck. (Necks.) From certain angles, the heads appeared to be nearly flush against the torso. What was present seemed to be just enough to hold the larynx. And it was possible that three throats led into just as many lungs, or perhaps the guardian had fully tripled up there as well. One head could inhale while the other two growled, that horrible low growl made giant and it was something she'd heard before, heard over and over because there were dogs in Japan who didn't know how to reconcile centaur scent, something which was a little equine and slightly human and mostly different. Dogs who growled because they didn't understand what was happening and the growl was supposed to hold the intruder back while they worked it out.

There was initially something about the guardian which made Cerea think of a bulldog, An underslung trio of jaws possessed teeth which didn't entirely fit in the mouths. The mad red eyes seemed to be on the verge of shedding drops of blood, while the jowls went everywhere because the endless drool had to be delivered somehow. The faces were about right for a bulldog, if you could work that much distortion into your vision. Something which would need to ignore the ways in which the bloodstained black fur had been drawn wire-fine, more bristle than brindle. Pet this and lose half the skin from your hand, just before the entire arm was bitten off. And that was presuming that the tail didn't catch you first, a blow from a weapon where the extensions coming off black bone had all the charm of a well-notched sawblade, along with bits of ragged flesh hanging from the edges.

She could think of a bulldog, because the heads had a little similarity. The legs had been bowed outwards in a fashion associated with some of the breed. But for a bulldog, the worst had already happened: they had been born as a bulldog. Everything which came after just had to be fun, and that unending optimism made them utterly endearing.

For the guardian, thick spurs of bone erupted from the foreknees: thick scabs of dried blood surrounded the base of the protrusions, and little pieces flaked off when the creature moved. What she could see of its skin was strange near the spikes, as if portions of it were warping into greater density. Some strands of bladed fur erupted from the center of full scales, splitting them in half.

It felt as if the guardian should have been in endless pain. Perhaps it simply hadn't noticed. Or it felt every last bit of agony, and was just waiting for a chance to take it out on the world.

You could see a bulldog's soul in its eyes, if you looked closely enough. Within the half-blood red of the guardian's orbs...

Was it possible to interpret its presence as duty? The fact that it could respond in certain ways as a sign of intelligence? Perhaps -- if that had been the way she'd wanted to perceive it, almost longed to do so. But no matter how much she tried to lie to herself, all she saw was rage.

Several ponies gasped, but none of those who were carrying the sigils dropped the protection. She heard Fluttershy's half-repressed sob, followed by scenting the first of the tears. And Cerea knew that no matter what happened, there was no point in asking them to name the guardian. The thoughts cascading through her meant the disc would only ever render a single word.

Pinkie was just barely comprehensible. Earth ponies became used to speaking with things in their mouths, but the mare's jaw was tight.

"Okay, everypony," she slowly offered. "Follow my lead. Inhale. Exhale..."

It was staring down at them. At the sigils. Drool fell, splashed. Some of it ran through the thin grooves which had been carved into the stone floor, at the bottom of a dome which was nearly the size of a hill.

Twilight breathed. Under the circumstances, Cerea felt it was one of the most courageous things she'd ever heard anyone do.

Hand away from the hilt.
Away from the hilt.

She still couldn't find the source of the light: something which had too many blues and quite a few reds and rather too much blood. But she understood why it existed. There was light because something wanted them to see all of it.

"Applejack," the alicorn slowly began, "Pinkie. I see the torch mounts." Her tail accordingly flicked twice, and her voice took on the cadence of a lecture. Tones which offered control, and a scent which said it was a defense mechanism. One which was trying not to collapse. "He's responding to the sigils: he knows what comes next. Move there, place and light. We'll start on the rest. And stay away from the foam. If it splashes on you, snort your nostrils clear and rinse out your mouth immediately. Then move directly towards me, and I'll give you the antidote."

The earth ponies moved as they'd been directed, limbs pushing forward under the hydraulic power of stress. Fluttershy took a trembling step forward.

"...Cerberus?" A plea, and something very much like a prayer.

I knew it.
I wish I'd been wrong.

Six red eyes refused to directly acknowledge the speaker. The growl found a way to become louder.

"...he won't listen," the pegasus whispered. "I can't talk to him any more. I could barely do it before, but there was enough canine for me to get through, just a little. To see that he was a good boy..."

"He hears you," Twilight quietly said. "He just doesn't care any more. Not on this side of the screen. Not when he's... back in his yard. Just let us work, Fluttershy. It has to be fast. Cerea --"

The centaur had just noticed the collars. There were three of them. The sharp cones rubbed against each other. She was almost entirely sure that the cones were growing out of the skin. The collars, however, seemed to be leather. Or perhaps the skin was simply thick and brown and dead.

Wildly, Heracles was the worst student ever.
This thing didn't even stay captured.
Her mind kept spinning.
...no, there's competing versions of the myth. Twelfth labor, and then it was returned to the underworld.
Or it escaped.
Or, looking at this one, it ate Heracles. And most of Tiryns. Marketplace for an appetizer, amphitheater for dessert.
I hope it chomped Eurystheus first.

"-- Cerea?"

The centaur forced herself to look at the alicorn.

"The entrance is behind him," Twilight said. "Don't try to look for it just yet. Don't move towards him, or try to get around. Wait until we're done. And don't advance until I tell you. When you do, stick to the curve of the wall. Exactly to it."

She managed the nod, and the alicorn's horn ignited.

There was no reason to hold back any more. Magic was going to be used in the ritual: magic could speed up the rate at which the ritual was conducted. If there was a beacon, then they were already in the process of lighting it. Given that, they might as well burn every lumen available.

Trixie forced herself to move. The guardian watched her with two of its eyes: the others were tracking the earth ponies, watching the new flames dance. Firelight traveled up the walls, ascending further than it ever should have reached -- but none of the colors were right, and the heat seemed to have vanished.

The guardian watched as Trixie's horn ignited, the field advancing up its length in stuttering stages. Then the center head looked at Spike.

It kept looking. One of the side heads briefly pivoted to join in.

The little dragon was moving with something of a waddle: another incongruity, just as much as the hat. It was the way the insulating layers had half-bound his legs. There was something almost comedic about it. But the guardian was staring as if it had just found the greatest threat...

Spike's nostrils flared. The guardian growled.

Both earth ponies were on the way back now. Trixie and Twilight were extracting more wrapped items from their saddlebags. Careful shifts of light exposed the contents, let the scents flow...

There were bundles of dirt. Waxy paper came away, and raw meat which smelled like no animal in the world, something which almost scented as pure, released the first drops of blood onto the ground.

The growl turned into a rumble. And when the canteens were opened, when the rich rust and iron of the freshest blood filled the dome... that was when the drool truly began to flow.

Each sigil bore the scent of blood and soil. It was the promise of more to come.

Several thick clumps of dirt were soaked in the blood. Unicorn fields worked the mix, made sure it would hold together, and then the earth ponies kicked it towards the guardian's mouth.

It snatched every clump from the air. Swallowed, and the rumble increased.

"The temp..." Trixie trembled. "The temporary, in exchange for the transient. The... the true gift is what we bring, not the one who passes. The one who shall be allowed to pass." A canteen was levitated, tipped itself over the thin channels. Blood began to flow through the carved design. "To enter of her own will, to depart of her own desire..."

"We bring," Twilight added, and the meat was twisted, rendered. "We offer. We exchange."

Two steps forward. Her forehooves touched a pair of tiny divots in the stone, and the flowing blood began to glow.

The guardian's eyes narrowed, all six at once. And from more than twice Cerea's height, the heads lunged. Came forward like a mountain collapsing, trying for the meat, for what was behind it and who, almost nopony would be able to move in time, Fluttershy was calling out in six non-languages at once, Rainbow's wings were already at full span but it wasn't going to be enough, her hand was going for the sword and --

"THERE IS A BARGAIN!"

Half of the punctuation had come from the shout. The rest came from Trixie's metal-clad forehooves crashing back onto stone.

The guardian stopped. A furious gaze tried to meet all six eyes at once: the unicorn decided to help her own cause by rearing up again.

"A bargain, by blood and soil!" It was, all things considered, a rather theatrical declaration. "As we are bound, so are you! Do you remember what happens when the bargain is broken?"

Two giant pieces of scab fell. One from each bone spur.

The guardian stopped moving. Rainbow's wings took considerably more time to refold, and the scent of building ions never fully went away.

"By blood and soil," Twilight exhaled. "We offer. You obey..."

It was eating.

The amount of red-dripping mass which had been liberated from the palace's meat station was far too small to ever satisfy the guardian. They'd barely been carrying enough for a Great Dane. But a five-meter monster was rolling every tiny piece around a mouth. Making sure it touched every part of the giant tongue. Then it passed the meat to another mouth.

"Real food," Twilight shakily said. "He... doesn't need it. And if he goes through the screen, he doesn't really look for it. But in here... it has power."

Rainbow, near the center of the reassembled pony line, was watching the process.

"Poison," the sleek mare said. "He didn't have that drool when he was in Ponyville --"

"The screen again," the alicorn lectured. "And... it's why he's a threat to everything in there. We have an antidote." She took a slow breath. "It took centuries, but... we have one. They don't. He's a lot smaller than so much of what's down there -- but nopony's ever found anything he can't get his fangs into. Any creature which isn't vulnerable to that poison. The poison is what lets him stop them. But it doesn't keep for more than a minute, if you take it away from here. We can't ever use it. So it's him. It's always been him..."

The third head swallowed. Carefully nipped down, and teeth four times the size of what it was consuming gathered in the next piece.

It stood. Bowed legs straightened, as much as they ever could. The back end raised up from the stone.

There was... a crack in the wall behind the guardian. Something jagged, uneven, several meters across. Two thinner gaps, just barely perceptible as a split from the central wound, ran up the wall.

It was easier to see where the main break was. Several lines of the dark stains which were running down the stone had that as their origin point. A few had pieces of long-dried sundered tissue clinging to the crack.

"He's accepted it," Twilight told them. "Cerea..." This time, it was the alicorn who swallowed. "Whenever you're ready. It'll open when you approach. And the threshold is the true entrance, so... everything will take effect as soon as you cross. Just remember -- you have to test the sword before you fully commit. We have to be sure. And if it doesn't work..."

The girl had her orders.

Remove a gauntlet. Reach a bare hand towards the side of the passage. Don't touch it...

It meant she needed both hands.

"We're gonna be in the access cave," Applejack assured her. "Close enough t' hear, if'fin y'set the whistle off. An' close enough t' hear when y'come out." Nodded to herself, and then moved back slightly. Shifting to the left.

"You will come out." There was something solid at the core of Rarity's tones. Silk wrapped around steel. "Tell yourself that, in every moment when thought can be spared. That you will come out."

"I'm sorry," was Pinkie's contribution, and the right forehoof rubbed at the floor. "I don't even know why. Maybe just that anyone has to go in there, when they don't deserve to. But I'm sorry..."

"Bring back a story." There was something lurking at the back of Trixie's voice, and it was almost like a laugh. "This could make for a decent story."

"Which I write down!" Rainbow huffed. "...yeah. Just..." Wings unfurled, refolded. "...don't take too long. Because once you're out, I can probably take off. And we can all stop worrying about whatever. And stuff."

Spike stared up at her.

"Is there anything you need?" the young voice tremulously asked. "Or want? Something you just thought of? While there's still a chance?"

I want to go home.

The girl shook her head. Her right hand began to move towards her face --

"...Applejack."

A little too casually, "'Shy?"

"...I know you're moving behind me."

"An'?"

"...I know you're getting in position to clamp my tail," the pegasus said. "Because you think I'm going to try for the entrance, as soon as it's open. To follow her in."

Almost innocently, "Is that what y'think?"

Fluttershy's eyes slowly closed.

"...I'm not going to do that." Which was followed by the softest sigh Cerea had ever just barely heard. "I don't have very much magic. Not... the usual kind. But I have enough. And I'm not immune. Only... only she is. I can't pretend that he won't drain me, if he's capable. Not because I'm angry or trying to move too fast or because I'm doing it for someone else. He can. He will."

Wings loosened, and feathers sagged onto stone.

The guardian chewed. It was surprisingly loud, for such small morsels.

"...all I can do," Fluttershy finished, "is make things worse. So I'm not going to follow her. You can stay there if you want, if you don't believe me. But... all I can do now is the same thing I've done for moons. I can wait..."

The old hat barely shifted across the full nod. (Ear pressure was good for that.) And then they were all looking at Cerea.

Looking at the girl, with ears rotated forward. Waiting for words, in the last moments when she would be understood.

But there was nothing she could have ever said. Nothing which she wanted to hear.

I want to go home.

Her hand came up, grasped and carefully pulled. Silver wires parted from her face. One ear flexed a few times, as if trying to shed residual stiffness, and then she bent just enough to hold out the disc on a level where the ponies could reach it. Pinkie's lips carefully took custody.

The girl's arm was raised again. Hairpins came out, one after the other, went into a little bag on her upper waist. A long blonde fall went across her eyes, and she quickly brushed it back.

The helmet...

She had been carrying it for hours. Kilometers. Refusing to put it on. But she would need both hands for the test.

Behind her, there was a rumble. A growl. Bitter poison splashed to the floor as the guardian lapped at the blood.

Nightwatch had pulled back...

I'll never see her again.

And if she didn't come out, the last way the Bearers would ever remember the girl was through bringing back the face of a monster.

Slowly, she raised the helmet. Held it over her head with one hand, gathered and tucked her hair with the other. The metal came down, clicked and locked into place.

She didn't let herself look at them, as her features (hideous to ponies, hideous to all) were blocked. Her eyes briefly closed as the visor began to approach their level, and she turned away without ever taking a final glance. Began to trot along the perimeter of the dome. And as she approached, the crack in the stone widened. Pieces of dried, dead skin and muscle fell away as the passage yawned open like a basalt mouth.

Perhaps the streaks and stains had come from a prisoner who'd tried to escape. They might have gotten just far enough to see the dome, because hope could be torment. And then the mouth would have bitten down.

The gap was large enough to let her pass now, and it became wider still as she crossed the last few meters. Moved through the shadow of the guardian's tail, and heard hairs like steel scrape against the helmet's crest.

There was light in the tunnel, of a sort. Some of it had reflected in from the dome, and the rest felt like a lie. Claiming that if she came in, light would be present for her...

She carefully removed the sword from its scabbard. Set it upon the ground, followed that with the bag of hairpins, and kicked them both across the threshold. The sword skittered somewhat as it slid across the stone.

The girl followed. And at the instant she began to cross, there was a brief sensation of intense chill, deep within her skull. As if fingers sending up the false steam of evaporating liquid nitrogen had just lightly stroked the surface of her brain.

It might have stopped her. But she had to catch up to the sword, and that meant she needed to hurry. Bend her foreknees, dip, scoop --

-- she could, if she tried, pick up hints of the natural sounds which lurked beneath the translations of the disc. It generally wasn't enough to let her learn individual voices, not without a lot of exposure: Nightwatch was likely the only pony whom she could readily distinguish in a crowd.

But she'd spent several hours with the Bearers. (She didn't understand exactly what they were, because 'an elite military unit' obviously wasn't it.) Long enough to tell her that the desperate whinny of alarm, something which found a way to fully carry across the chamber on a mere suggestion of volume, piercing the other sound to do so -- that could have belonged to only one mare.

Cerea grabbed the bag in one hand, the sword in the other, gripped, straightened, stood, and swung the blade towards where the other sound had come from. Straight up.

The ceiling halted its descent, and did so all at once. The grinding stopped.

"It'll start testing you at the moment you enter," the memory of a royal voice reminded her. "To find out how it can hurt you."

The descending stone wouldn't have crushed her: she was sure of that.

(Almost sure.)

But she had been lowering her body in order to recover the plastic. A lowered ceiling would prevent her from rising again. And she felt that the deep place very much wanted to know what it would feel like to make a centaur crawl.

It had tried its first test. She had managed hers. The sword could fight back -- to some extent.

The sword could do that. The wielder...

She turned, just enough for the briefest glimpse of the one who had called out. A featureless ridge of metal nodded towards Fluttershy, and then the centaur began to make her way down the passage.

The ceiling remained where it was, for the throat wished to swallow her. Behind her tail, the mouth started to close.

She was aware of that, could hear the lesser grinding, watch the light dim as the source was blocked. And she was trying to focus on nothing more than what lay ahead.

But a sapient's mind had a certain talent for self-distraction.

The girl's reading material had been varied. But she'd loved tales of adventure most of all, there were supposedly factors which united so many of them, older books had multiple chances to find their way into the gap -- and so she'd come to learn about The Hero's Journey. In Cerea's opinion, Mr. Campbell had been stretching for a few of his points, along with potentially having put a deliberate limit on his search for source material. It was a typical human thing: those who wanted to prove a point would only seek out that which agreed with them. The bane of scholarly works, politics, and social media.

But it could be argued that he'd found something. Survey the milieu of legend, and there had been times when she was able to perceive some of the same notes coming off different instruments.

A heroine was forced to leave their home.
Supernatural aid might be offered.
There could be a meeting with a goddess.
You withdrew from the community. Isolation.
Trials easily followed.
And after that...

They descend into the underworld.

That was what heroines did.

But she wasn't a true knight.

At most, she was someone who had taken on a job. (Another job, as she'd proven herself woefully, inevitably unsuitable for the first.) One where she was the only candidate to possess the crucial qualification, and that still wasn't enough to promise actual capabilities.

She had agreed to do a job. She'd just gone on shift.

She was within the deep place's translation effect now. Anyone below would be able to understand her. But the cry of alarm had arrived as a whinny, because the Bearers were without. Nothing she said to them would arrive as words.

And still... there was something you were supposed to say, when you were going on shift. Without insult, without rancor. In a way, she would be saying it simply so that there were words at all, before the last of the light was shut away.

It didn't even feel as if it would be vulgar, when you said it for the right reason. It was just... traditional.

So she said it.

"Okay, assholes," Cerea told the world entire as she descended into the dark. "I'll take it from here."

Eldritch

There are scents associated with death.

Several are based in decay and for the olfactory world, that's an entirely predictable symphony of foulness: you already know how every last sour note is going to go, but the environment might affect the speed at which they're played. Others are rooted in absence, because breath itself has a scent and when lungs cease to function, first and Second forever stilled... then it doesn't take long before that scent begins to go stale. Then it vanishes. It's something which can make the air feel a little heavier than usual, when the most basic rhythm of life no longer contributes its scant breeze.

Urine and feces. Those are common, and serve as a lack-of-grace note. Numerous species will have all of their sphincters relax at the moment of death: in particular, humans are subject to this, and just about every piece of media tries to ignore it because a spectacular demise inflicted upon one's opponent probably doesn't need to go into detail on every resulting stain. The spontaneous fouling and resulting stink could be argued as a warning signal to other humans: don't approach this place, because death was here. Or it's just one last piece of petty revenge, offered up by a species which knows how to inflict so many. Go ahead and eat me, monster -- but at the very least, you're going to have to clean the corpse first.

And then there's the molecular signature of centaur blood, writ strange as the flow slows and dries. When it's cold enough, you might even get a sort of gel. The girl only smelled that once, because there was a stallion who...

...it... happens sometimes. There was a mistake, and the mares bred for strength. Over and over, until strength was all which remained. The only thing which the stallions could understand as being important. And centaur lifespan --

-- the girl hasn't quite reconciled that, and it's partially because she hadn't had any real reason to think about it. She was at a given stage in her life, the human male she longed for roughly matched that place in the cycle -- wasn't that the important part? But to compare her potential years to his -- no. She would win him, because she had to win. And after that, they would just -- be together...

...not every liminal lifespan matches that of a human. Some have shorter seasons, others can treat their first century as reaching late middle age, and a few are technically dead to begin with. Different developmental rates, separate points at which the internal clock shifts into the gradually slowing beat of long-term failure. And no matter what is done, eventually, reflexes slow. It takes more effort to gain the same results. Natural aging, clearing the way for the next generation.

A centaur can remain strong for a very long time. But it isn't forever. And when the stallions begin to weaken -- there are different reactions. Some spend nearly all of their time in exercise and combat, trying to fight against the inexorable tide. Others drop into denial and never come out. And for a few, when there are those who feel that the only important thing about them is strength and they start to lose it...

There was a stallion who didn't want to become weak. And there was no way of telling what his final thoughts had been, but... the girl suspected he'd decided it was a choice which came from strength.

It had been winter: cooling scents carried by a chill wind, easy to track. They'd found him outdoors, and... the herd had cleaned up.

There were scents connected to death, and the girl knew about them because centaurs died. And when that happened, the herd took care of its own. Moved the shell to where so many others were kept, and waited for the land to run out of room.

Scents for the dead.
Scents for the dying.

So many diseases came with signature odors, things which the bodies of the ill would emanate without respite. Some of them can even be detected by humans. The girl can spot diabetes on the breeze: it's decomposing apples, fruit as rot just barely contained within failing skin. Diphtheria has a horrible sweetness about it, and typhoid -- somehow, typhoid is baked bread.

The girl knows about the scents of the dying, because her mother is the strongest mare and -- at least for the mares, there are ways in which centaur culture can vaguely echo that of the griffons. What good is strength if it can't be used to raise up the weak? Those at the top of the chain take responsibility for the ones on lower links. Those in the herd who need help.

There are healers in the girl's herd. Physicians, and when the time of integration comes, medical knowledge will be frantically exchanged in all directions. It takes a special set of skills to heal. But just about anyone can take care of the sick. The youngest can press the dampness of a cool cloth against searing skin. And when your mother is the strongest...

The girl trotted with her on a few of those rounds, always within her mother's shadow. (Mostly in the early parts of her youth. She seldom came along after puberty had begun, because Trinette claimed the hours of an apprentice, and -- the girl suspects she had simply become too much of an embarrassment.) Checking in on the ill. Taking care of the dying. And there were scents of unnatural sweetness and decay and rot and, somehow most horribly of all, baked bread: something which kept the girl from eating the real thing for a month.

She knows about the scents which come from the dying because there is a gap, every aspect of existence is confined within it, and death has nowhere to go. No more than a filly trying to offer small comforts to a sick mare can leave the final bedroom until her mother does.

After the girl dies, after her body collapses across what should have been tiny hooks of sharpened stone... after that happens, there will be questions as to just how much of it was real. The answer is immediate and obvious: all of it. Every detail from every last moment, including all those which might have felt impossible. And for a centaur, especially one who has been moon-touched, the primary sense can be scent.

How much was real? All of it. It could be said, with full accuracy, that she received personalized attention. Perhaps some of the scents were created for her alone -- but that doesn't make them any less real.

The gate fully closes behind her, cuts off the flow of outside air. What remains is enough to keep her alive, because you can only be killed here. But there are scents. Sweetness and rot and rust. Something she tries to keep at the back of her awareness, because to reflect on it too long is to feel her stomach heave again and again.

Never unnatural odors. Always something she knows, and never anything which can be escaped. But none of them are associated with death itself. Not until the very end.

The deep place smells like a thousand things are simultaneously dying.

Dying and can't finish.

The passage closed, and the last echoes of pony sounds vanished. The final scents from the mares and dragon, carried on a twisting current of temporary pressure differential -- none of that faded. They were suffocated, buried under layers of encroaching stench until there was nothing left but what Tartarus wished to pass off as natural air. And the stink --

-- that, too, was buried -- or at least, the attempt was made. She had learned how to live in the human world, and figuring out odor discrimination had been no small part of that. For a centaur to live within a haze of petrochemicals and ozone and what human females thought was perfume required the ability to relegate a degree of sensory input towards the back of the brain.

She buried the complexities of that layered background scent as best she could, while trying not to think about why it all seemed so familiar. But that simply gave it a few neurons to occupy, and it used its perch as the smallest of thrones. Trying to send out orders to shiver and tremble --

-- her head felt odd. Her brain didn't feel right, and she'd never been so aware of the kilogram-plus of living electricity sitting within her skull. A biological computer which felt as if it still had that chill mist traveling across its surface, probing and poking and searching, almost like a spider with legs of ice was trying to weave a web from her thoughts --

Rachnera
she would have laughed at this place
she would have laughed at me

-- Cerea briefly forced her attention away from that horrible sensation, made every sense take the fastest possible survey of the environment. Checking for immediate threats. And finding none other than the fact that she was in a deep place whose existence centered around torment, risked sheathing the sword so she could get the helmet off.

The soft bag was clenched in her left hand, and she was trying not to exert too much force upon it. Breaking the hairpins would be so easy...

...a soft bag, but... she could see the points of the pins pushing against the fabric from the inside. As if they were trying to work their way out, like feathers escaping from a down pillow. Or a jacket. No one had ever found a way of turning feather down into a weapon, and that seemed like something of a pity because the pointed fragments of former flight seemed to be capable of working their way through anything. Their host had possessed a down jacket, but it had been an old one and the integrity of the shell had been failing. If he sat down too quickly while wearing it, he could raise a cloud of feathers faster than Papi in full molt...

It felt as if the chill was working deeper. Pushing towards the cerebellum, shoving the corpus callosum aside in order to get at the good stuff --

-- she balanced the helmet against the juncture of her backs, letting it rest in the hollow where horizontal switched into vertical. Began to quickly place the hairpins, one by one, getting the strands under control, and every little piece of plastic seemed to jar the frozen fingers, force them closer to the surface. Making them rise up and out, but the chill was still spreading on the upper layers of her mind because she wasn't clear yet, not yet and her fingers worked faster, she was trying not to fumble, ears straining to pick up on the grinding of moving rock --

-- the strange cold evaporated from her thoughts, leaving her with nothing more than the weight of air, metal, and duty --

-- there was a surge in the air. Not a gust of wind, or the sudden twisting of a dust devil. A wave of foul overpressure rippled over her from head to tail, pushing at every seam in the armor, searching for a way in, roiling as if in sudden confusion or desperate frustration --

-- it stopped.

There was a moment when she did nothing more than hold very still. Refusing to shift so much as a tail hair. Waiting to see if it happened again.

(It would, at what could be called a predictably irregular interval. Always at some point after enough time had passed that she might start to believe there would be no others.)

The process had taken more pins than she'd hoped. There were only seven left in the soft bag --

-- maybe it needs more pins than that.
Maybe Tartarus is... waiting...

She held her breath, first and Second. (Holding the Second let her know it was still possible, but doing so with the deep place's air was -- unpleasant.) But that particular chill didn't return.

Seven pins and after some thought, there were none. She was able to whip her tail forward enough to lace five of them within the flow, secured the remaining pair so that she could reach them quickly. One for each hand, if they were needed. And then, with a little more time in which to do so, she looked around --

-- she tried to look around.

There had been some question of how to manage the glowsticks. Several solutions had been offered, and the alicorns had decided to go with all of them. The glassy sealed tubes ended in small metal loops: enough to secure fabric or thin cords. By varying how much she was using, Cerea could tie the smallest glowsticks to her wrists or forearms, shedding light wherever she pointed. Or they could be attached to her forelegs, trying to illuminate the lowest portions of the path ahead. During part of the journey towards Tartarus, she'd tried hanging one around her neck, used too much cord, and wound up with light mostly reflecting within a chasm of metal cleavage.

(Rarity had offered her a drapecloth, allowing her to banish lumens at need. It was some kind of dark velvet, and the improvised drape was oddly precise.)

She'd chosen a forearm arrangement for going into the tunnel, with the option to fasten another at the front of her helmet or forehead: a miner's light. And the glowsticks were working, the degree of radiance seemed to be roughly what had been present in the forest -- but there was something strange about the color.

About the light.

The chemical radiance had started as a mix of yellows and greens, similar to a few of the specimens she'd seen at festivals, and that was still the same. The intensity had changed. The hues were saturating the air, discoloring atmosphere as light tilted towards matter. Not beams, but wafts of light, swirling and churning within the caves. It was like trying to see through chlorine...

She'd carried her Moon-touched state through the gate, didn't know when it would wear off (or worse, if) -- but it didn't seem to be doing much for squinting.

There was darkening paste on her armor. It had removed all of the shine, and now seemed to be turning liquid under the pressure of the light.

They said this was resistant, made its way through a slow-to-warm mind. What does it look like when there's no resistance at all?

Cerea checked on the ceiling, nearly glared at it in a futile attempt to make it stay in place for a few seconds. Wondered whether it was worth donning the helmet. She needed the protection, but -- it would cut off a portion of her senses. Even Moon-touched, it would be harder to hear. The range of her vision would be restricted, and odor discrimination would still leave her constantly factoring out the confining scent of steel.

It could be donned in a hurry. For the moment, she needed to take in her environment.

Another survey of the area. Looking. Listening.

(There was something about the scent...)

It could be called a living cave system, if she wanted to assign it anything approaching that much dignity. In speleology, that status was mostly granted based on whether there was water present. The girl could hear dripping, somewhere up ahead. The beats were irregular, to the point where no tiny splash ever occurred when she was anticipating one. But there was fluid condensing, falling, raining down onto stone. It simply didn't smell like water.

(She didn't want to think about what it smelled like...)

The ceiling had found a way of being both too high and too low. Much of the peak for the unnatural arch was out of range for what the gusts of light could reach, putting much of the roof into uncertain shadow: suggestions of presence.

But this mouth had teeth all the way down its throat.

Stalactites hung lower than she would have wished: some of the jagged points came within centimeters of her head. Stalagmites rose in patterns, ridges and hooks spreading out from the wide bases in ways which left just barely enough room to get past without injury -- if she was careful. If there were no mistakes, and if the rock didn't notice that you were there, didn't shift a few vital millimeters to the side.

(She would soon notice that the degree of stalactite descent was a flexing variable. If she put her helmet on, there was always a chance to scrape the metal, send a screech of steel's agony through the caves. Remove it, and do everything possible to keep a bloody trench from being scraped into the skin.)

Try to look past the distortions of chlorine, and there were hues trapped within the rock. Most of them had collapsed in on themselves. The results were mostly deep browns and greys, with more than a few hints of puce. Some of that shimmered in that light. Small portions writhed.

Some colors ran across the sharpest places in thin rivulets, with portions of the torn-away paintbrush at the top. She could describe fragments of long-dried dead skin as a paintbrush, especially when they came with so many fine hairs.

The passage was wide, but the trails were narrow. There were little pits in the floor: the majority were smaller than the diameter of her hooves, with just enough leg-catching exceptions to keep any traveler on constant guard.

As with the approach path, the air felt oddly heavy. Menajeria's atmospheric pressure seemed to be consistent with that of her own world: about six and two-thirds kilograms at sea level. (She was presuming she'd been close to sea level upon arrival.) The corridor seemed to have compressed that by about one additional kilo. Enough that she could feel the metal testing the padding. Constantly. Searching for weak spots...

A vulnerability was located, and cold soaked through the fur of her legs, ignored skin and took up residence deep in bone.

What could she hear? One sound suggested dense keratin being dragged across stone. Over and over. There was a little yipping sound at each end, and then it started again. And there were little swirls in the air, eddies of vibration left behind by partial syllables in search of a language.

If she listened...

'gi... ld... yr...'

It was as if tiny fragments of whisper had been trapped, were wandering the caves trying to find a way out, and the only means of escape would be to unite within listening ears. One letter at a time, until the words were assembled. And if she listened long enough, she would understand: wasn't that the enchantment? She could understand anything said within the caves. Just...

...take a hoofstep forward, the sound is a little stronger ahead...

She strained her ears, to the point where she could feel the fur along their fringes starting to vibrate --

-- her body tilted forward, left, down as her forehoof began to slide into the little pit --

-- she jerked back. Instinct screamed, and her head tilted forward just in time to avoid the stalactite.

The air continued to whisper. Rumors swirled through the caves, then briefly paused so the first of the screams could come through. Something oddly liquid, which came up through the cave floor and coated the lowest portion of her armor in rock dust and agony.

The temperature seemed to be on the rise. Was on the rise. There was a moment when she was comfortable: just long enough to recognize, to wish that it would maintain, that one thing could be right. And then sweat started to bead on her skin, soaked into the padding. Thin trails of salt began to work their way through her fur.

After about a minute, the trend reversed itself. It contained another pause, a single instant of thermal normalcy. And that was followed by the sensation of water beginning to chill. The promise of ice, padding crackling every time she moved. Splitting, perhaps. Frostbite...

The test.

It would mean removing a gauntlet. Becoming that much more exposed. Having the helmet off was a constant risk, but it was also a tradeoff. Right now, she needed

don't want

the input from her senses. To add the risk of injury to a hand, when she didn't know how quickly Tartarus might respond...

I don't need it any more. I know Tartarus is -- reacting. That the sword can fight back, at least a little.

But there were other reasons to perform the original test, even after the entrance passage had tried to make her crawl.

Carefully, trying to make sure the metal joints were all flexing properly, she removed the left gauntlet. Trotted towards the nearest wall -- no: forced herself forward, making every leg work in turn. Trying to keep the helmet balanced in the hollow.

Four legs.

It was really far too many to think about.

"Did you ever realize that you have four legs?"
Yes.
There were times when it was almost constant.
But it only started after I saw someone who had two.

Take out the distortions of the chlorine light, and this part of the wall was almost normal. Gypsum, perhaps: one of the more frequent types of cave stone. You had to be careful around gypsum, especially if it was powdered. It was a skin irritant, did harsh things to lungs and throat.

Cerea wasn't sure where she'd read that: one of Sir Folliot's observations, perhaps. France had more than a few caves: in fact, when it came to the earliest known parts of human history, the nation contained some of the most important in the world. But centaurs weren't exactly known for spelunking. Her herd had placed its gap on the surface of the world, because confinement within the earth would have quickly destroyed them. Centaurs needed nature. It was other liminals who had taken shelter underground, forever listening for the sound of approaching bulldozers and picks...

She slowly advanced her bare palm towards the wall, even as the armored hand went back toward a supply bag. Centimeter by centimeter, until she was almost making contact --

-- jerked it back, and did so at the same moment when her other hand darted forward, pressed flimsy weight against the fresh protrusions and yanked down.

And then there was a strip of torn black fabric hooked onto the sharp hooks of the cave wall.

She didn't know where she was, and she was trying to figure out who to blame for it.

When it came to what had happened to the road, the changing surface and being chased down by what might have just been an illusion of void -- there had to be a liminal responsible for it. One of those few whose abilities truly reached into the realms of the supernatural.

Her first suspect was a satyr. Not that she knew very much about them, at least outside of the legends which had followed the girl's herd into the gap. But they were closer to what humans thought of as fae than most of the liminals. They were certainly capricious enough. And when it came to their historical dealings with centaurs -- well, both species had arisen in Greece. The centaurs had left, while the satyrs had taken a hiding place within the homeland. There was a certain assumption that at least one involved party had been making a major effort to get away from the other.

She'd been warned about satyrs, before she'd left the gap. (There had been rather more warnings about humans, and some of the more insular mares had still been trying to find some way of getting her to reconsider departure without offending her mother.) That they would steal everything away from you, everything, followed by laughing and saying it was all in good fun -- then dashing away before you could get any of it back. Those on the farm had at least made some degree of attempt towards stealing their host.

The girl hated that farm. The satyrs were a natural target for her hate, but -- there was also a minotaur. The one who made her feel inferior just through taking an overalls-straining breath, and that was when the girl knew she wasn't done growing and the minotaur was --

-- every liminal species had needed to find ways of defending their gaps. Satyrs, as with some of the others who came close to fae, were said to rely on disorientation. The sylvan glade: a human stepped into one location, and emerged from another -- if they were lucky. Otherwise, there might be a stop in between.

So it could be a satyr. Or something more rare, exotic. One of Japan's native liminals, perhaps. The girl didn't know. What counted was that the horrible laws still allowed her to defend herself against anything which wasn't human. Even with a plastic sword, she could do some damage just by putting her strength behind the flat of the blade.

Not a real sword.
Not a real knight --

-- the important thing to do was finding the party responsible. Quickly, before she was missed. Anyone capable of bringing her here (wherever this was) would also be able to send her home. And as human detective stories suggested, she could start by -- sniffing around. Try to pick up on liminal scent, and hope she would be capable of tracking it to the culprit.

But she didn't know where she was.

(The temperature was wrong.)
(She'd already checked her phone. There were no transmission bars. Rearing up to get the rectangle somewhat aloft hadn't found a smidgen of signal strength. Neither had the desperate vertical leap, and one of the surest signs of insanity for a centaur was making any attempt to climb a tree.)
(No litter decorated the forest floor.)
(The air was strange. Too crisp, too clean.)
(How far had she gone?)

She would be wandering through the unknown. Without any frame of reference...

...her skirt had become torn.

There was no one around. And besides, even if a human did show up (which would just let her ask where she was, presuming they didn't run), that exposed portion of her body would never be seen as vulgar. As abomination, sickness, something which had to be contained or exterminated -- but in the strictly sexual sense, not vulgar.

She bent, twisted at the joints in ways which the humans would have found unnatural. Tore a strip of fabric from her damaged clothing, and tied it to a low branch on a nearby tree.

There. Mark her path every so often, and she would at least know where she'd been. She could put tiny extra rips into subsequent strips as a means of numbering them.

Not that she might need any further markers, not if she picked up the scent quickly and managed to be -- persuasive.

If she was especially lucky, she might even be home in time for breakfast.

Selenite gypsum: for petrologists, it was known for transparent and bladed crystals. Tartarus had made that literal.

She'd marked her arrival point at the beginning.

She was marking it at the end --

-- don't think that way.
It's what Rarity said. Believe I'll come out.
A knight would come out.
...or die in glory. Their body trapped forever in the caves, by choice. Because there was something they had done which was more important than escape --

But she wasn't a knight.

It had been months since she'd been stolen away from the household. Moons, if she wanted to think about it that way. And today was a holiday. The day on which ponies went to their families. Went home.

And she was here. In a place which imprisoned monsters. Those whose existence threatened to destroy the world.

Out of bounds for reality.

Cerea put the gauntlet back on. Decided to leave the helmet off for a little longer, and so got to hear the next reverberating cry of agony without having any note distorted by metal.

Her tail twisted. The dock felt as if it was trying to retreat backwards into the armor's shell.

Check the watch.

She flipped up the twin domes: an act made clumsier by a metal-clad finger. (There had been very little point to wearing it on the inside of the vambrace and in any case, the minotaur-made timepiece was so large that it would have given her some spacing trouble.) Clockwork ticked off one second, and then another. The pace was consistent with her internal count.

After a moment of thought, she attached the flexible metal cord and secured the other end near her elbow.

Check the map.

Three monsters. She was supposed to pass three, and she had been briefed on all of them. She wouldn't see anything she hadn't been warned about. Not unless she became lost -- and that was why she'd been given a map in the first place.

It took a little work to extract it. The palace had wanted her to have something more durable than paper, especially when no reinforcement spells could be used to protect her guide. The hasty solution had been to redraw the whole thing on fabric. It meant working the roll past a few of her other supplies, and she nearly snagged it on something within the messenger bag, was briefly afraid of having the whole thing rip --

-- the air was moving again. She didn't know how. There was no natural, open exit to the outside world to create a current. No pegasus magic to arrange circulation.

It had almost sounded like someone clearing their throat. An observer offering a near-subsonic verdict, and it was 'near' because ultimately, the goal was for everyone to hear it. The evaluation of failure. Disapproval.

(It had almost sounded familiar...)

Perhaps Tartarus was breathing.

(The temperature went up. Came down. There was always that pause in the comfort zone. The perfect thermal range for an armored centaur. And it never lasted for longer than it took her to recognize its presence. To hope.)

She was... supposed to trot forward -- well, of course she was: the entrance had closed and 'forward' was the only option available -- until she found a side passage: something which would branch off the main corridor at a forty-degree angle. Cerea would have the option to remain in the central cave, and that would quickly lead her to Tirek -- but it also put her into the deep place's core. Trotting down the center of the Struga, where so many of the incarcerated would be able to see her. Possibly scent her. Try to reach.

The branch point would be easy to spot. Numerous magic-reinforced explorers had reported a slight glow in the air at its mouth. Something which made it easier to see the horror ahead.

It wasn't supposed to be a particularly long trot. A couple of minutes before she reached the first turn. Maybe a little longer if she was especially cautious about the cave floor.

The girl trotted forward, and metal-shod hoofsteps echoed on the stone. She had to be careful about that. Darkening her armor, covering her light sources -- there were ways in which those measures felt pointless, because she was the one using them.

Centaurs weren't built for stealth. No matter what anyone did, you always wound up having to conceal a lot of centaur. Her hooves had to be armored: Tartarus was known to stab at vulnerable frogs. But metal on stone made noise. Sliding her hooves would transition the noise from impacts to long scrapes. She wasn't sure which would carry further.

Maybe if I just step very lightly...

...her body mass, which she refused to have measured by scale in front of witnesses, was in the vicinity of three hundred kilograms. After rounding down. Way down. And that was without including the weight of her armor. Given that, 'Stepping lightly' was a rather subjective thing.

She moved.

It was hard to scout the cave floor. The twisting chlorine light didn't always want to move in that direction and by the time anything she'd planned for fell into the shadow of her breasts, things could change. She kept waiting for a hoof to drop into a hole which was just the right size and depth to fracture a pastern. And no matter what she did, her hoofsteps echoed --

-- are those my hoofsteps?

She stopped moving. The echoes eventually died. Perhaps the first thing in Tartarus which had ever died.

The girl tried a few more steps --

-- it's just echoes. Even a normal cave would distort sound.

Two more.

...distort them in ways which make it feel like someone is behind me.

She looked back. A stalagmite gleamed oddly under the glowstick's light. It was a strangely bright color, one she didn't expect from stone. Almost the yellow of sulfur, except -- brighter. Almost fluorescent. Something meant to stand out, be seen. Especially in bulk.

Close the doors, we have to close the

And there was something else within that yellow. A tiny glint of something bright, like there was a bit of metal embedded close to the center. There was something almost familiar about the reflection --

-- she tried to focus on it, and the glint was gone.

She... didn't want to look at the yellow. Not in that shade.

The girl turned forward. Five more steps.

...like they're behind me and moving like a centaur --
-- they're just echoes, I'm a centaur --
(There was a moment of doubt.)
-- so that's what it's going to sound like, a centaur moving, only --
Larger.
Heavier.
No armor.
No shoes.

The girl stopped. The echoes died. Moved again. A sonic phantom followed.

There was a glow at the place where the side passage diverged. It seemed to come from the air itself, went to war with her glowsticks and left the corpses of colors strewn across the battlefield. That was what she had been told to expect.

She'd also been told to expect a forty-degree angle. This was closer to sixty.

Tartarus warps. That's why they have to keep sending in survey teams. To make sure the maps are up to date.
...is it supposed to warp this quickly?

She was almost sure she had the right corridor: her trot had been of roughly the specified distance. But there had been warnings. The map was, at best, a rough guide. She couldn't fully trust it. And if the deep place had sealed off her passage, opened a new one which led past more than three monsters...

(She kept shivering. Sweating. She told herself it was the changing temperature, and some of that was true.)

Well, that was why she'd brought the sketchbook. Even if the correct passage had simply been tilted somewhat at the mouth, it rendered her map partially invalid -- and that meant she needed to make her own.

She took out the sketchbook, tried to balance the spine on one hand: using her armored breasts as a shelf would just have it sliding forward, and bracing it against the wall was an invitation to destruction. Opened the cover, automatically glanced down at the first page, the page with the sketch which she'd started and stopped and erased and resumed time and time again, desperately trying to get it right when it wouldn't fully come together, when even her poor skills should have been able to render the most important detail in a minute and it had been months --

-- she had meant to flip past it. Move beyond the sketches of house and household. Of the other girls, and everything she was convinced she would never see again. Find the first blank page, and draw out the road into torment.

It was the movement which stopped her.
At first.

It is the face of a human male. Japanese. The black hair is a little too long to be fashionable, unruly, leaves near-bangs hanging well down the forehead and that's mostly because its owner can seldom be bothered to brush it in the morning. Styling is a lost cause. It's a good season when they can get him in for a trim, and a more standard one when some of the hair gets burnt off.

The features aren't classically handsome. The nose tilts up near the end, while cheekbones are unusually sharp and the chin comes to something of a point. Add that to the way the ears stick out somewhat (just enough to serve as handles for a grab-and-drag: the centaur is hardly the only one to take advantage there, but she gets the best leverage), and... well, the girl wasn't the only one in the household to eventually wonder if their host has some liminal blood. If it wasn't for a height of a hundred and seventy-five centimeters and surprising physical strength (along with inexplicable durability), the word 'elfin' could be used as a descriptor with cutting intent. And there's usually a little wryness somewhere in the expression, along with a considerable amount of exhaustion. Even so, it's the sort of face you look twice at, mostly to make sure there's enough memorized to pick it out of a crowd on the third attempt.

The pencil lines thoughtfully raise their chin. Carefully-placed highlights indicate a shift of those cheekbones, and the profile turns. Rotates on paper, in dimension.

It is not staring at her.

It cannot.

She has been trying to complete the sketch for months. To capture the most vital detail, the essence of him. But she failed, because she always fails.

The living face has turned towards her. But it cannot stare, look, or gaze.

Kimihito Kurusu has no eyes.

Rejetée

Her first instinct was to fling the sketchbook away, listen to the impact as the eyeless face was dashed against stone. That frantic desire surged through her, pushed at muscles and joints, tried to operate her body with the hydraulic pressure of revulsion. But she fought it, clawing back against a flood of instinct with desperate rationality. The sketchbook was most of what she had for placing any necessary drawings. If Tartarus could force her to begin shedding her supplies, then it would eventually try for the hairpins, for the sword, and without those --

-- there were no eyes: a consistency. The exact means by which they had been excised varied by the second. She was looking at the pencil lines which indicated hollows set deep into the skull: something which began as cold and dry, followed by dripping graphite and ink. The tangled remnants of the optic nerve could be found plastered against the side of a fresh black wound, but only for a moment before it was all just skin, a bare expense of blank skin stretching across a skull which had never seen any need for eye sockets at all.

Nothing about that absence could show emotion. Only agony, so much of that was hers and it left the girl looking at the shifting curves which delineated the mouth. Curves which were moving.

There were whispers in the caves and in time, some of what they carried would be understood. But in that moment, as she just barely held onto the sketchbook, muscles almost spasming as she clutched at the repository of grotesquerie, the only local sounds were produced by her frantic breaths and near-skittering hooves, with the irregular splashes and strange air currents relegated to the background. And within that instant, she knew that to keep looking at the void would override thought. She would toss away the sketchbook, with sanity following close behind.

But she hadn't seen his face in months. It was his face, and she'd once told herself that it was the features of the one she loved. There was something in her which didn't want to look away, couldn't stand to see the void, the void which was her fault because the girl had believed she'd loved him and within the bounds of a sketch, the least possible rendition of everything he'd meant to her, she couldn't even bring back his eyes.

It left her trying to read the grey lips, something at which she'd never had any true skill. The girl had needed to become at least roughly familiar with multiple languages, and it was hard enough to keep everything sorted out in her ears. Picking out words in a foreign tongue on sight alone...

But some terms were more common than others.

`never'
'never wanted'
'deformed'
'ugly'

It was easy to find those words on a human's lips, in multiple varieties of Babel's outflow. And when it came to the face which was almost all the way off the page now, mouth framing the same syllables over and over as the teeth prepared to snap -- there was one set of motions which she'd spent months waiting to see.

That which would come when he truly knew her.
When he saw past every illusion she'd desperately brought to bear.

There were no eyes: something which limited the face's expressions. All that could be read within their absence was pain and agony and hate.

The mouth did its best to clarify.

'Monsutā'
'Monsutā`
'Monsutā'

There had always been so much in his eyes, always. Weariness and frequent frustration. A desperate need to understand had often been followed by acceptance. And where there was acceptance, when he had been holding her hand, the hand upon which she was balancing abomination...

...he had accepted her, in some ways. She had --

-- she'd pushed herself onto him, in the first minutes after making her decision. Because she hadn't thought much of him at the start -- well, why should she have? He didn't even have the sense to get out of the way when he heard hooves closing in, and when it came to the chase of the purse-snatcher, with him on her back (without full invitation!) and yes, he'd never ridden anything before, he didn't know how to keep his balance, he was going to grab at something for support and all things considered, it probably should have been her shoulders...

She hadn't thought much of him. Fast-rising surges of outright loathing didn't require much in the way of thought. The plan had been to catch the thief, do -- something -- the laws forbid her from striking out against any human, even one who was trying to hurt her, but she had been certain that a knight would have improvised -- and then trot away from the male she'd run across (and into) on the street. After finding a covering for her newly-bare upper torso, because she had also been embarrassed, humiliated, and she didn't want to ever have that happen again.

And then he'd taken an impact for her. Something he'd had no reason to believe wouldn't have been fatal. A split-second decision, made with no thought at all. He'd thrown himself in the way on instinct...

...and in return, she'd thrown herself at him.

Had her behavior been somewhat forward? Only if that description of her actions was buried under a massive cloak of hotly-blushing understatement. She'd practically offered him access to -- everything, everything about her during those first moments in his home, because he had shown the potential for nobility. Self-sacrifice had been proven, and pointing a phone at her to get a video for later upload just hadn't happened at all. It had felt as if he'd accepted something about her, and --

-- she couldn't remember what that felt like.
To have someone accept anything about her.
(She'd failed in that confrontation against the thief, as she always failed. And he seemed to have accepted her anyway.)
To hope she would stay.

And she'd felt as if she had to work quickly, before he changed his mind. Before he had the chance to find out just how poor her skills and abilities and everything about her truly was, for a girl who always came in second. So... he'd been grasping at her breasts, during that wild chase. Maybe he liked doing that: some of Japan's lesser forms of media suggested it was a popular pursuit, although such perverted groping mostly seemed to take place on trains, was more often directed at buttocks and in both cases, her anatomy was several size categories above what the local culture deemed acceptable --

-- it had still meant he'd touched some part of her. Maybe if she pushed herself at him -- no, might as well just grab his wrist and invite him to feel her heartbeat through bustline and distant rumor -- allowed him to start by exploring what was most familiar, he might reach... everything else.

And perhaps he wouldn't have been repelled.
Wouldn't have turned her out.
Turned away.
There had been an initial moment of something very much like acceptance.
She'd told herself it was love.
Because she couldn't truly remember what receiving either one was like.
And she would have done anything, anything not to lose that feeling again --

-- and the head was beginning to fully separate from the paper, she didn't know what would happen once it did and she had to do something, she had to get rid of the book but it was part of her supplies and it was Papi and Lala, it was the house and Miia's long tail weaving through just about all of it, she'd drawn Suu and Mero and she hadn't been able to think of any way to show Nightwatch what Rachnera looked like without startling the pegasus, it was all of her life in Japan within thin lines and slight shadows and it was the only thing she truly had of her home --

-- one hand was just barely clutching the sketchbook. The other bent back at the wrist, traveled along angles which she'd never allowed those lost eyes to see, desperately clutched at the secured place for thin plastic, almost broke it under frantic pressure --

'Monsutā'

-- stabbed outwards, towards where the eyes should have been.

She looked away, just before the moment of impact, and she knew that she shouldn't have done so. You didn't take your gaze off the enemy.

(Somewhere behind her, a cave cleared its throat.)

But she didn't want to see.

There was a soft fizzling sound, followed by a sudden roiling of the air around her hand. And when she forced herself to look, a three-quarters profile image was still upon the page. Motionless and silent.

The glowstick's half-liquid light was more natural around her fingertips. Still yellow-green and somewhat sickly, but -- it was light. Not something which existed in a state where it nearly had mass, splashing across a page. Instead, it shone on the memory of a human face and, in those places where the paper had been worn thin by multiple erasures, nearly shone through.

Cerea slowly, carefully closed the book. And then her head turned to the side, with one arm moving to follow: trying to illuminate what she was searching for. The spot where a desperately-flung book would have been likely to hit.

It was easy to find. The field of thin blades which sprouted from that section of wall existed in their own hollow. Frozen ripples of outwards-curving stone showed where the cave had peeled back to expose them, and -- possibly where the wave would have crashed in again, as soon as she was no longer trying to desperately wrench half-shredded remnants away. Impaled, and then entombed.

That was when she considered screaming.

Most of that was simply a delayed reaction: there had been no time for such a base, shameful response, and now there was. A little of the rest was morbid curiosity blended into a darkly scientific bent, for she was sure that Tartarus would relish in the sound of a centaur's scream. Not just permit it to pass through every cavern, but helpfully boost it along while negating every hint of distorting echo, until it found its way through the thinnest crack of the sealed exit. Reached those waiting beyond, and made ponies shiver.

Instead, the girl softly said "...merde," and immediately decided that the mere word had given the deep place too much.

The back of her armored hand wiped at her forehead. Sweat fell away. It was too hot just then, and remained so until it became too chill. But there was always a moment in between those states, lasting until she noticed it. Until she began to long for --

She... still had to make a map...

It was hard to use the hairpin for leverage: the sketchbook was not a thin one, and there was a chance that any excess pressure would see the plastic break. (The fragments might retain some ability to battle against magic -- might. It wasn't as if anypony had tested that.) Instead, she tried to keep it between two tightly-pressed fingers, so that the tip just barely touched the paper. And then she flipped the book open in a single motion, aiming for the middle --

-- the glowstick half-dripped radiance upon plain paper. Another kind of void, one which could be just as frightening as that which had chased her across the road between worlds. The threat and fear of uncommitted potential.

She temporarily fastened the hairpin to the book's edge. Brought out something she could sketch with. Measured the departure angle of the branch passage with darting gaze and sharp breaths.

Carefully, feeling as if every movement was both far too slow and exactly the wrong one, the girl began to sketch.

There was a sound off in the distance, coming from somewhere along the path she'd taken, and she... couldn't quite pin down how far back the source was. Just that it sounded strangely like hooves. Ones which belonged to someone who was larger. Stronger.

She looked for the source, when the sound became too loud or quick. At one point, she risked backtracking by a few hoofsteps, and saw nothing. But the sound was still there. Hooves, but... not really trotting forward, or walking, or doing anything more than... tapping. A rhythm which steadily accelerated into the beat of impatience for as long as she sketched.

After a while, she stopped. Closed the sketchbook, put her supplies away, and took the branch passage. The echo kept the pace.

Behind her, the caves breathed.

She'd been given a route to follow, one which passed three monsters. Told to stay out of sight as much as possible, keep herself within shadows. But centaurs had a hard time with stealth, and the light had launched its own battle against her. The glowsticks flared at odd moments, intensified their output and made her wonder if the half-resistant chemical reaction was being accelerated. This was followed by the question of what would happen when that illumination went out --

-- or perhaps it wouldn't.

She couldn't even tell herself that it represented a wish. In some ways, it was more of an extrapolation. To have a glowstick go out completely would potentially be to describe it as having died. Tartarus might not allow that to happen. Leave just enough of a glow to find the outlines of the glass, try to see by that, shaking the contents over and over as if the movement could wring one more lumen out of the mix, and the briefest of flares would make her long for more --

-- the glowsticks flared at odd moments. The light of the branch, which almost seemed to come from the fetid air -- that was somewhat more active. It crawled across the armor, tested the paste and searched for spots which hadn't been dulled enough. When that failed, it settled for surrounding her: something which wasn't so much a halo as calling card. Something approaches: all incarcerated parties should pay attention. Decide what you're going to do about it.

That strange radiance surrounded her -- but she quickly noticed that it wasn't really able to touch the sword. If she thought of the deep place as a twisting whirlpool sinking into reality's ocean, then the sword represented a mobile patch of stilled currents. Something which traveled along the fatal spirals, where the roiling of the air never quite reached it, where any glow which came within centimeters of the blade either died away or, for that which came from the glowsticks, simply became light again. And the radiance had equal trouble in surrounding her head and tail.

(The girl briefly wondered just how deeply her features were shadowed.)

There was no issue in drawing the blade and waving it about. A blade without an edge was good for little more than slicing through glow and vapor: on Menajeria, this was almost good enough. The unnatural light fell away from the air, and the atmosphere perceptibly lost pressure -- for that portion which touched her hand. Wherever the sword was, things were normal -- in a very small radius. And when she moved it somewhere else, Tartarus closed in again.

The light traveled with her. The echo of heavier hoofsteps followed, and she kept trying to tell herself that it was just an echo. She had to twist her upper torso to get safely past a precisely-placed group of serrated stalactites --

-- more sounds of keratin on stone. She'd been telling herself that was an echo.

Chitin scuttled across the shadows of the stone ceiling.

It was a familiar sound. So was the sheer scale of it: a scrape and a scamper, and both were followed by a soft, dark giggle. Something which told the centaur that she'd only heard it because the arachne wanted her to, the trap was already set and every movement she could make would be the wrong one --

-- her hand was already close to the sword's hilt. She gripped, began to pull, saw that the light was glistening in long thin lines, as if caught by the moisture of freshly-extruded strands --

-- they broke, as the sword touched them. Fell apart in ways which webbing never could.

Eight legs skittered away. And the air whispered.

'mi... al mi...'

Another, more distant giggle. Somewhere up ahead, there was the sound of something wet dropping onto stone.

Then it repeated. Twice.

And then the low moan of a leviathan's near-endless agony shook the cavern. Came up through the armor, created vibrations within the metal which ignored the padding and drove themselves into the girl's bones.

It was pain as resonance cascade. You couldn't be alive and not shiver in time with the frequency. Not if you understood what pain was at all.

(She was wrong. You had to understand pain, to shake with another's torment. But it was also about how you thought of it...)

The noise filled the world, and parts of the stone joyously danced to the beat. It became impossible to hear almost anything else.

Almost anything. For when she moved towards what she had been told would be the next of her landmarks, the echoes of hooves followed.

Three monsters. If Tartarus had not twisted so much as to completely change her course, then she was only supposed to encounter three. This was the first, and the second was close by -- but then, it felt as if much of the world would be close by. When the cell was this large, most of the planet potentially had proximity.

It had a cavern to itself: a domed hollow which, like that which it contained, never should have existed. She knew that she had not descended so deeply within the earth, that the amount of space required for this prison should have created more than the basalt mound in the saner world above.

Even under the twisting light of glowsticks and air, the incarcerated monster was mostly black. The exceptions were generally puce and where neither of those applied, that was where the concept of color tried to suicide.

It had its back to her -- or at least, that was how it felt. She couldn't find anything which resembled the front of a head: it took her some time before she could force her gaze to any point which projected enough from the presumed torso to be a head at all. Locating the limbs was almost a lost cause, right up until the point where her mind reluctantly allowed the possibility of grossly thickened tentacles to qualify.

She almost hadn't spotted them as being tentacles at all. Such appendages were typically designed by nature to be as flexible as possible. The girl was almost certain that these specimens didn't have bones, but 'almost' was as far as she could get because tentacles also didn't have armor plating.

It almost looked like bark, except for all the ways in which it didn't. If she allowed for bark, then it was a tree which had seen massive fungal infections. The plating was cracked in ways which allowed the tentacles to move, mostly by grinding against each other along the edges. It also permitted the rot to drip out. Sometimes a maggot would emerge with the putrescence, and the wriggling wetness would fall onto stone. It would have a moment to exist there, still supping at its meal. And then the stone hooks would catch it.

The monster was surrounded by hundreds of maggots. All blindly writhing, unable to pick a direction between escape and feast. Very few of them had died. The exceptions had come from the ones who landed close enough to eat each other.

That which carried them, birthed them and so much worse... she didn't think it was facing her. At least, it didn't react. The handling clusters of tentacles twisted, the columns which served for legs almost could have kicked, and a creature nearly a hundred and eighty meters long keened in half-conscious agony, within a cavern like a hollowed mountain.

There was a glow in the air, because the deep place wanted her to see it. To see all of it, and become lost within its shadow.

Another maggot fell. The columns of twisted minerals which closed off the cell didn't vibrate. Such a small impact could never disturb such gigantic extrusions of stone, especially when the new arrival was only half the size of the girl.

It came down within a meter of another maggot. Writhed. Twisted, as fluids flowed from freshly-torn flesh. A thin cone stretched out from the narrowest end, just before two stiff projections darted forward and sunk into its neighbor. The feast of agony began anew.

She pulled back as she felt her stomach twist, everything she'd consumed trying to come back at once. Not merely nausea, but trying to create a shield: a closer stench of foulness and acids to block out that which the roiling air had just carried to her, circulating around her head in a fast-closing circle, it was like the scent bomb all over again and she was going to break --

-- she missed the disc. Missed its scent, the constant presence of familiar metals and stranger things. It would have been something to focus on. To breathe in. If she put on the helmet, if she shielded herself within another kind of cage --

-- the foulness came too close to her head, to the hairpins, and the current fell apart.

The scent was still there, for Tartarus had not produced it. But it was no longer coming at her with deliberate intent. It was possible to retreat. And the girl had trained herself to run backwards, but... she wasn't going to give Tartarus that clean a shot at opening a hole under a hoof. She forced herself to turn, started to trot away, made each leg to work in turn and that was taking so much concentration because four was just too many --

-- another sound of impact, and it made her look back. But she never saw anything hit, for the columns were wider than her body, with the gaps a mere meter or so across. She was parallel to a column, and all she saw was the stone. There were hooks growing there, and something very much like unliving thorns.

There were also symbols carved into the chert, each a meter high. Something about them felt blurry, and the girl had to squint before she could read them.

Gardul'ak

So she was on track, because the alicorns had told her the name of the first monster --

-- blue eyes blinked. Squinted again. The word eventually resolved in her vision, and she read it for the second time.

The deep place created its own translation effect, because it always wanted those within to know when someone was screaming. And, as a special side bonus, for travelers to see the names of those who were imprisoned. To think about what they had done to be kept here, and what might happen should they escape.

To see the names. To read the names.

She could read.

The word was somewhat blurry, and perhaps that was because of the hairpins. Some of the ones at the back of her head might have been interfering with any magic affecting her visual cortex.

She'd taken so many notes in French, was carrying all of them with her. There had apparently been an option to just bring a book --

-- the temperature was climbing again. It moved past chill, paused at comfort, and she longed -- but then it climbed again. She began to sweat, and rot rained down from Gardul'ak's vastness all the faster. The keening of the leviathan's pain grew louder, louder, her ears twisted and tried to retreat under her hair, she was trying not to back away, but it felt like every cell in her body was dancing to agony's music and her body was just trying to move.

There was moisture gathering on the tips of the stone thorns. It could have been condensing water. Perhaps every thorn was a barnacle. She couldn't touch it. And the keening began to reach new heights, paused as all of the monster swelled outwards, the leviathan seemingly trying to fill its cage as it fought for the air required to scream --

"-- it'll stop soon," said the new voice. "Just... wait."

She didn't move. There was very little point. The words had come from a distance, and from behind stone bars. Technically, there was nothing to flee from, and --

-- she'd been seen.

The second cell. About forty meters deeper in. On the other side of the cave corridor.

In some ways, it was already too late.

"Wait," the other prisoner gently told her, and it was a sweet sort of voice. There was a natural gentleness to it, something which hadn't changed from the volume it had needed to achieve in order to reach her. But there was also a certain amount of internal strain trying to erupt through each letter, and that was a sound the girl knew by heart. Her mother had taken her to visit the sick...

It was the voice of someone who existed close to the edge of death, trying to pretend everything was normal. Braving their way through the pain.

The living hill's keening arched further towards scream. The voice waited for the next break before speaking again.

"I do see you, centaur." There was a little amusement in it, and that quality only increased as it traveled across the next words. "And I could be offended, that you haven't answered me. Or tried to look at me, or any other form of acknowledgement." Thoughtfully, "But that's just the result of a wish, isn't it? A wish to be safe. I can't do much about that one, not when it comes to the totality of the situation. Not when I'm in here. But I can at least grant within the limits of my abilities. That I offer you no threat."

Keratin shifted. Most of that was ahead of her, and there was a little double-tap inherent to the sound. Split hooves.

"A centaur," the voice mused. "Another centaur. How quickly things change, these days." And then there was something very much like a chuckle. "Is it day? Would you know?"

She started to turn. To answer. It brought her eyes across another patch of too-bright yellow in the opposite wall --

-- there was a new sound in the corridor, and she just barely registered it. A repeated slapping: something solid onto something wet. Like bricks being placed into fresh mortar.

The voice was almost a little hurt now: something which nearly let all of the other pain go through. "Oh, centaur..." it sighed -- and then the bemusement took over. "Does it cost so much to be polite? Is it day, out there in the world? Are we under Sun?"

It was a voice. Not half-heard whispers or giggles or the screams of a monster --

-- she had to wait for that to pause --

-- but a voice. A real, living voice.

Perhaps that was why she answered.

"Moon was up when I entered," she carefully projected through the glowing air of the corridor, and the words were allowed to pass. "I'm... not sure what time it is now."

She had the watch. She could open the twin lids, look at the face --

"Moon," the voice wistfully said. "The scars are gone now, aren't they? That's what the last survey team was talking about, when they came through. No more scars."

Scars?

"I do wonder what that looks like," the voice added. "Things change, up above. They change down here, too. Faster than they have before. Perhaps faster than they should. Are you going to see Tirek, centaur? It's a fair guess, as you're here without a survey team. Only one for so long, one kept below, and now another comes. Seeking, as the one outside the bars."

It paused again.

"Not that we nearly all haven't been outside the bars, now and again," he told her. (She'd just realized the tones were male.) "For a little while. Not the deep place, never the deep place for me, but... the bars, yes. Because that's part of it. Come closer, centaur. You have to, yes? If only to pass by, if you're going off to see him. I --" and she felt as if she'd heard the wince and swallow, pain being pushed back "-- would like to see what you look like, from a little closer. Tartarus will allow that. I know."

"How do you know?" Which was said without looking at him. Not that the other major option for viewing served as an improvement.

They briefed me about you.

"Experience," the male sadly told her. "Long experience. Because there could be mist as you pass by, or darkness, and it'll prevent me from seeing you. And I'll always wonder. But how much worse to see, and have that memory to look back on? A moment of normal conversation, and the knowledge that it will never come again?"

He paused. The leviathan shook. Somewhere up ahead, the faint slapping sounds accelerated.

"The knowledge," the voice said. "I have that. More than enough to share. And yet, knowing never fully stops the worst of it -- at least for me. Your first time in the deep place, centaur? You wish to know about how it can hurt you. And I see armor, for what I can see of you at all. But the true protection is knowledge. Would the alicorn have briefed you on the truest essentials? I presume she still exists, out there in the world." With the lightest of laughs, "Since there is a world. And you did just mention Moon."

...he said he's been outside the bars.
If that's true, he could come through at any moment.
But I either have to pass him or backtrack through the Struga.

Her hand gripped the sword's hilt.

"If she told you about me," the male almost casually continued, "then there would have been a name. I haven't had the change to introduce myself by it in -- some time. May I have a pair of wishes, centaur? Just two little ones? When the first is a wish to see someone new? And in exchange for both -- knowledge? That which may protect you, as you seek the other in these dreary halls?"

It had almost been casual. There had been a plea embedded in the words. Desire and desperate hope.

The hooked maggots writhed. Scraps of wet flesh splashed onto stone.

The girl slowly turned. Checked her path in swirling light, moved down the corridor as she angled her body towards the opposing wall. Stopping every so often, as the leviathan's scream swelled, shook the world --

-- the wail peaked. Stopped. A pause, and then there was another scream. Something just about a decibel softer.

"Oh," the other prisoner breathed. "You're coming to see me, aren't you? You really are..." Wistfully, but with tones changed, slowed. As if he was speaking to someone very small. "And this is why we wish, little calves. Because the greatest love the world can grant... we only feel that when they come true..."

Tartarus is for monsters.
Monsters.
They told me about you. That you'll always want to talk. But I saw Gardul'ak, and it distracted me.
This is a monster --

The monster standing just behind much narrower bars had ears like cupped leaves rendered as jet intake scoops. Grey-brown fur ringed the fringes of comically-oversized hollows. The attachments were about as wide as stems.

There were two horns. They emerged from the peak of the forehead's slope, one well above each eye. Each came up for a few centimeters, twisted to the horizontal, cleared the ears, twisted again as if a child had wrapped gum around a finger, and went vertical. It was like looking at a diagram of airflow in a newborn dust devil drawn in brown keratin, with little pointed tips of white.

The hooves were naturally split at the front. Warm brown eyes were slightly recessed under the shadow of thick, protective lids. Features roughly like that of an antelope's found a pained, brave smile putting wrinkles into a grey coat, just above the triangular fall of the little beard.

But it wasn't an antelope.

Kudu.

She stopped, directly facing his cavern from two meters away.

The kudu's cell was about the size of a large living room, and -- that was nearly all she could see of it. Most of the light had clustered near the front, allowing her to view him and very little else. Just getting a full look at his form required shifting around somewhat: the gap between his bars was barely large enough for the kudu's snout to be pushed through. All she could really make out beyond him was what seemed to be a tangle of branches towards the back. Some kind of thicket, made from half-broken thorns.

The warm brown eyes widened.

"A lady," the kudu breathed. "Or so I presume, based on anatomy." A quick look at metal-covered curves, and then he tilted his head back, seeking her face. "You've been told what to call me, I think. But it's so much better to make introductions. I am Strepho, dear lady -- and you should feel no pressure to provide your own name."

He stopped. Muscles contorted, spasmed under his skin, and she watched him push the pain back down. On the other side of the corridor, the leviathan's twisting slowed.

"Especially as the alicorn probably told you to be careful about that," he eventually continued. "So I'll content myself with 'centaur' for now. One wish granted, my lady." The head tilted with bemusement, and she almost expected the heavy horns to bring him into the ground. "You're good at this! But can you prove yourself expert? I wish for one thing more, if you'll grant it. And I promise, the knowledge is worth the exchange."

Her mouth felt oddly dry.

"I can't let you out --" she immediately began.

"-- and I wouldn't ask," the kudu gently said. "It wouldn't be allowed, in any case. Not now, and never all the way." Sadly, "I wish to leave, I admit that. I always wish, even when I know it grants my prison strength. But I also know when they won't come true." He took a shallow breath. "The thing I want now... that will be permitted. Because it makes things worse, you see. So much worse. And I ask, even while knowing that. Especially because I know. And so Tartarus shall let it pass." A noble-seeming head tilted to the other side. "Haven't you noticed that there's only so much an alicorn will ever say? After a while, it starts to beg the question of what she's not telling you. Paths, warnings, general guidelines -- but not secrets, lady. Never secrets. I know the secret of how the deep place truly works, of the only way it ever could. How you can shield yourself from it, if you have the strength. And I'll tell you, and I would love to tell you freely -- but I must take a chance first. To ask for a dream."

"Which is?" Every letter was dust on her tongue.

His words, however, had almost turned liquid.

"You carry food. They all do, in case they have to bargain. Trust a kudu to know when food is about. " He arched his head forward, and the snout came close to a little glint of bright metal within the stone bars. "Food, real food, something which won't turn into blades and acid on the tongue. Give some of it over, freely and of your own will. Enough for a taste. Enough to remember --"

She'd been told that her food was mostly meant to be used as a distraction. That there were things in the deep place which would react to its presence --

"-- for that," the kudu softly finished, "is the torment. And the first part of your lesson on how to survive this place, my lady. Given freely, in the hope that you will do the same. You will, won't you? I wish for that..."

-- she didn't know kudu scents: this was the first one she'd seen. There was no way to connect the wisps of molecules coming off his fur to mood or honesty.

But the warm brown eyes were gentle. Pained. Desperate. And everything in her said that the kudu was telling the truth.

She didn't understand.

I don't understand much of anything.
I've been here for months. I'm trying to learn. But it feels like nopony told me anything real.
No one ever tells me anything real.
My mother...
...if it goes wrong, I draw the sword.
I can move faster than a kudu.
I have to.

The leviathan's moans were losing volume. It made the slapping sound easier to hear. Brick by brick, somewhere down the corridor. Just out of sight.

"A little," Cerea softly told him. "Enough for a taste."

The kudu simply nodded.

It took a little while to extract one of the packets. She carefully unwrapped the scentproof layers --

"Oh," the kudu just barely breathed. "Dried watermelon! A glorious night, if night is still present. A little water to moisten it, lady? Please?"

She tipped a few drops from the canteen. Placed the results on the floor, knelt just a little, and drew the sword.

The kudu, eyes fixed on every movement, watched her push the mass with the tip. Sliding something very much like congealed flesh through the bars.

His head quickly went down. Snagged the dried fruit just before the freshest of mineral spines hooked the beard, slowly chewed. The brown eyes closed, and every muscle trembled with unnoticed pain.

"Lady," was the first word after he'd swallowed. "The lady wish-granter." The forelegs briefly bent into a low bow. "That's how I'll remember you, and it will hurt me in ways which Tartarus can barely dream of. Two wishes granted, and now a promise kept. Gardul'ak -- its voice is softer now, is it not? The destroyer is about to become your teacher. Or -- an object lesson. Listen, lady. Just listen..."

He fell silent then. Left her straining for sound, and the effort provided her with half-heard whispers and the sounds of maggot flesh coming apart and a leviathan's agony, as the temperature peaked, sweat soaking into padding just before the plummet began again --

-- the cries of a monster's pain lessened.
Dimmed.
It was a rumble of discontent now.
And then, just for a second, the living hill... sighed.

She turned as much as she dared, and it just barely let her watch the kudu and the huge mass in the other cell at the same time. Something which would have been so much easier for a pony, but -- predator's eyes. They kept telling her --

-- the leviathan's armor plates seemed to be sinking. Receding, coming closer to hidden skin. Gaps closed. A tentacle began to go limp --

-- no: it wanted to do so. It nearly managed the feat twice, almost became a boneless crusted mass across what seemed to be oddly smooth stone. But it tensed each time, started to lift again --

-- stopped. The entire length collapsed, all at once. There was a moment of silence, and then the next tentacle began to descend --

-- she saw the first of the new gypsum spikes spear through the half-closed gap between plates, just before she scented the putrescence of fountaining blood.

Gardul'ak screamed. The hill shook within the mountain of its prison, and the kudu silently waited in perfect stillness until the maggots had ceased to rain.

"And there it is," he gently told her. "The secret."

The temperature fell. (The kudu didn't notice, because that was for her alone.) Paused, because it had paused every time. And then the plummet brought flesh to shivering as metal concealed a display of what could never be arousal, as horror mixed into confusion and drove the whole thing closer to the border of sanity.

"But it's a poor teacher who doesn't explain an answer," the kudu offered -- which was followed by the first touch of spite. "Or an alicorn. So I'll explain -- but perhaps a question will help you see it. Dear lady, granter of wishes -- what is the difference between torture and torment?"

"I..." It felt as if her words had died. Decayed into a clogging mass in her throat. Something else which could die in the deep place. "I -- I don't..."

"In torture," he gently said, "there is no thought of escape. No thought at all, really. There's a kudu saying about torture: the reason we won't use it. The only thing you can learn through torture -- is to discover what the tortured person thinks you want to hear. They'll say anything, to make it stop. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. They'll babble everything they've ever imagined. But the pain doesn't end, because none of it will ever be the right answer. Not when the goal is torture for its own sake. It can't stop, because --" thoughtfully, "--where's the fun in that? The agony just keeps building, and... there's only so much pain a mind can hold before it breaks."

The cold was the reason for her shivering. It was the cold...

Somewhere in the distance, the slapping paused. Thin liquid ran across a vertical surface, and the trickling worked its way into new whispers.

'ms r'
'mn se'

"And when the mind is gone," the kudu passively observed, "the most the body will do is twitch. Sometimes not even that, if there isn't enough left to understand pain. Torture for its own sake contains the seed of its own demise, because a tortured mind will always shatter. After that, the body gives out. Always. But torment... dear lady, you saw it for yourself. Torment pauses. Because in permitting pain to stop, for a second, for an hour -- that is where the true agony lies."

She barely felt her head move. She just knew that she was looking at the kudu, and only him. She couldn't stop...

"Have you ever seen someone in chronic pain?" he quietly asked her. "One for whom potions still work, but... only for a little while? Have you watched their face, as the effects begin? Because there's a moment when they feel almost normal again, as if nothing might be wrong, another second and all will be well, their life can go on because it won't wear off this time, it won't --"

His head dipped. The first tears welled up in brown eyes.

"-- but that wish doesn't come true, does it?" he sadly told her. "That's why I dedicated myself to the other wish, the better. Because in every cycle for the afflicted, there is a moment when you dream that the pain will end. When there's enough of you to dream. A pause, to collect your thoughts. To remember how thinking works. Of everything coming so close to normal, so close, and perhaps the moment will stretch out for longer this time. Maybe it won't end. And then it does. The time before agony returns -- it's a variable, lady: it has to be. But it's always enough time to dream, to wish. And that is where the truest pain comes from, that we can think, can wish, and are left in a state where it can happen again. Because the prerequisite of torment is hope."

She was barely aware of her hand having dropped to the sword's hilt, chill fingers numbly trying to find a grip. The kudu didn't seem to notice.

"Maybe things will be better," he told her. "Different. A pause to recover, to consider, to dream. To stretch towards the most precious fruit of hope. The poison, dear lady. To accept the pain, to merge with it, to recognize that every respite is nothing more than the grandest trick -- if you could simply abandon all hope when you entered here, then you would be proofed against Tartarus. Anyone would be."

He slowly shook his head. Twisted horns brushed against the stone bars.

'm sr'
'mn sre'

"But sapience creates fools," the kudu declared, and did so as Gardul'ak writhed again, with a flung maggot splattering against thickened columns. "I know the trick. All of the tricks. Sometimes there's a door. Or a gap between the columns, and the spikes don't spear you as you slip through. There have been doors, and some of them let you almost get to the exit. I know that's all it is, lady. And yet... you have to try, don't you? Every time. Every door."

The trickling stopped. She heard a metallic sort of click.

So did the kudu.

(She couldn't imagine that the cupped ears missed much.)
(She... wanted her imagination to stop.)

He turned, peacefully looked down the corridor.

"In fact," he passively observed, "there's one now."

And she looked.

There was a cave. A (un)natural corridor of stone within the earth. Rock and water and screams and pain. And about fifteen meters away, there was a wall.

It was white. The paint looked to be a fairly cheap coating, not so much covering plaster as trying to make it look better by comparison. The sort of thing you got in

a government building

and in the center of that corridor-spanning wall, there was a door.

Two doors, really. A hinge on each side of the frame, a gap in the middle. It was the push-bar style: you pressed on the long, wide center bar (set for human height), it disengaged the lock, and you went through to find --

judgment
we went through the door and
he shouldn't have known
he couldn't have

-- the whispers didn't become any louder, not just then. They simply drafted extra syllables from the leviathan's screams.

"That's your door," the kudu observed. "It has to be, don't you think? It was made for you. So you should go through it."

The wall was blocking the corridor. She could try to kick a hole into the barrier, but --

-- maybe it's just illusion, maybe if I hit it with the sword, it'll --

That felt possible.
It also felt like hope --

-- I could turn back. Try the Struga.
But where there's one wall, there could be another.
There could be dozens.
It wants to play.

-- she wasn't sure when she'd stepped away from the cell bars. For the most part, she was aware of the door getting closer. Or her body getting closer to the door. The exact difference seemed rather fine.

She could almost make out the whispers now. The chanting. It was easy, because so much of it just required her to fill in the gaps. Something she could do from memory.

Somewhere behind her, the kudu sighed.

"The memory of a meeting," he said. "The granting of a lesser wish, and... knowing we will never meet again. New sources of torment. I fail, dear lady. I know the trick, every trick -- and yet I fail. Because I understand wishes. True wishes." Which was followed by a sudden groan of pain -- one which was cut off by a rueful laugh. "Lesser wishes and hope. The strongest of poisons, aren't they? And that was why I set out from my homeland. To grant the greatest of wishes, for everyone in the world. In the name of making the pain stop. And I made a wonderful start of it!" With open regret, "I... just didn't get to finish."

It looked like a human door.
It smelled like plaster.
And on the other side, the no-longer-whisper of a lost world's anger pounded at the agony of memory.

'monstre'
'monstre'
'monstre'

But there were more words than that which she heard in French. There was the last thing she ever heard the incarcerated kudu say, just as her free hand reached out for the cold which radiated from the metal push-bar.

"Did you know," the kudu conversationally asked Cerea, as gentle brown eyes watched her through a mist of ancient sorrow, "that at some inevitable point within the torment which is existence... every last sapient being will truly wish to die?"

Abandoned

Humans know everything, own the world entire, and are always right. They wrote the laws which say so.

Perhaps that accounts for some small portion of why the tsunami of rage arose, when the liminals were revealed. Many humans claim that their deity crafted them in its own image. But it's usually the reverse. Humanity likes to build a god as a reflection of the supposed worshiper: if the girl ever had a moment of doubt regarding that, then she just considered the scope of the coincidence required for all those people to find a deity who hated everything they did.

Stretch that process out along the curve of creation, and the species goes for omniscient overseers because humanity likes to believe it knows everything. (This is especially true of the least educated among them, who enjoy kicking in the concept that anything they don't understand is obviously a lie: that declaration is frequently followed by trying to kick in the face of whoever tried to tell it.) And the emergence of liminals created living evidence that the entire species had not only missed a rather significant detail, but had been doing so for a very long time.

Also, as a number of religions quickly pointed out, if their god (and theirs alone) had created humanity as a reflection, then exactly what had been responsible for putting together all of that?

Humanity had been told it didn't know everything, that portions of the world weren't theirs, and they'd gotten something wrong. There were a number of instinctive reactions, and the angriest ones were quickly rendered into pending legislation.

The majority of gaps were within human nations. (There were a few exceptions: isolated islands, unnoticed and previously unclaimed by human explorers.) Quite a few of them predated any iteration of the local human government. So how did you solve that? Well, for starters, you could create a law which allowed the open seizing of liminal lands. Because there might be more intelligent species in the world than anyone had ever dreamed of, but they weren't human.

That made things easy. Or rather, easier. Humanity was already accustomed to declaring portions of its own species didn't qualify: as a great writer once observed, just about every sin starts with treating a person as a thing. If someone who has a different skin color or eye shape isn't human, can be spat upon and dismissed, exploited and enslaved -- if multiple nations and religions have already decided that the ability to bear children makes someone inferior and you're a person who can quote 'all men are created equal' because it lets you slash away pronouns before starting on skin...

The liminals had revealed themselves to the species whose arguably greatest skill was in labeling portions of itself as mere animals, followed by treating those segments accordingly. The fact that the new arrivals possessed wings and hooves and horns was just making everything easier, especially when the horned ones are so easy for the preachers to accuse.

And now there were bills approaching multiple legislatures, designed to render liminals into something less than permanent second-class citizens because actual citizenship was never going to get involved. Some nations were discussing the possibility of internment camps in something less than whispers and when it came to public vocabulary, 'internment' was being used as a substitute. It's for the public health, of course. Who knew what kind of diseases the soulless animals might carry?

How do you write a bill to steal the land of those who were there long before the current government arrived? America offered multiple successful models. The theft of territory and loss of recognition as a sapient equal was a bargain written in blood and soil, where those who wrote the laws always seemed to have stakes in real estate holding companies. Those which, rather coincidentally, were interested in purchasing newly-available large parcels of virgin land.

For the United States, the rapidly-advancing legislation represented little more than Round Two. But in France, there was enough pressure boiling within the Sénat and Assemblée Nationale to create a looming vote, recognition and rights potentially evaporating in the rising steam of fear. And after that... well, since when has terror not used a chance to acid-etch a path into power?

That's what the loudest among the governments desire. But it's not every human. There are those who want to bring the liminals in -- somehow. The ones who read ancient tales as youths and never fully let go of the hopes that they might secretly be true, added to a few who can look at any kind of shape and decide to see the person within. Some of those hold power in France. But they're being overwhelmed by the rising voices of fear, the ones who chant about animals, abominations, and -- worse.

The ones who want to make it work feel that the first, best chance at having the fear fade is giving the world a chance to meet liminals -- under controlled conditions. The opportunity to see them as people.

And that's why this is happening.

Why the girl is in human territory, for what her mother believes to be the first time in the daughter's life.

There's a government building in Paris, with a huge courtyard just outside it. The courtyard is... 'occupied' would be an understatement. There are humans waiting outside, thousands of them, and they chant and they mostly breathe on unintentional rhythm because any truly large group has a chance to do that, and there are times when they scream. Those flinging verbal obscenity are supposed to be kept at the back.

The building itself is hosting centaurs within the walls: smuggled in during the night within well-draped military vehicles. They've been there for about seven hours: the announcement of the press conference was made about a third of the way into that. But there had been rumors before the meeting took place. People were waiting for it to happen somewhere, there are versions happening all over the world and for France -- that much warning, in a city so large, on a cool spring day (and why did it have to be a weekend?) was more than enough for everyone to direct their forces. It means the mob has layers, carefully segregated by the police. Thin lines of division which aren't going to be enough.

Those who comprise the mob have a number of reasons for being present. But they all share one. They're waiting for the centaurs to come out.

Just mares, of course: twelve altogether. There hasn't been much human presence within the gaps just yet, and even those who try are just at the beginning of learning about their formerly-invisible neighbors -- but some things were discovered quickly. Those who arranged this public debut know that bringing in stallions for the current stage is a bad idea.

Mares, and... fillies. Because youths might be somewhat less threatening. Besides, everyone knows a cat is a predator, but a kitten learning to hunt is just cute. And if you truly want to learn about the new, it... might be best to start with the children.

If only there were children outside in the crowd.
(It's a short-term wish. The girl gives up on it before the riot starts.)
Less adults inside might have also helped.
But politicians, no matter what side they're on, frequently want the world to know they were involved. And those who claim to speak for the common people generally wind up only speaking to those in the power structure -- preferably, someone close to their level. And with the centaurs... that meant the humans wanted to deal with the strongest.

The leader of the France herd is waiting within the building, just behind the last wall. The final doors.

(Interior walls of plaster, and the push-bar is at the wrong height for an adult mare.)

Flanked by the city's police, whose forces have been boosted through a few military loaners and government security. Those who, several thousand kilometers to the west, would have a much shorter title.

(It won't be enough.)

And because children were requested... she is accompanied by her only daughter.

In this phase of the great experiment, the girl still hasn't seen humans all that often. This is her first time in a city. There have been rapidly-accruing lessons: meetings take too long, the language of bureaucracy might actually be made worse by formality, and the building isn't airtight. Nothing is. The trip to Paris was a long one, and it only took eight kilometers of asphalt roads and fumes before the convoy had to pull over and find a place to purchase vomit buckets. The roads reek, the city is solidified chemicals emanating a haze which the humans somehow manage to ignore even while it's slowly killing them, and the crowd outside has too much of it breathing in rhythm while reeking in perpetuity because 'deodorant' is a joke. It's a stench which breaches the gaps between doors and frame and in that, it just about serves as a preview.

Her mother shows no signs of having noticed the sensory assault. She stands tall and proud and stoic, waiting for the doors to open. There's a hastily-built platform just beyond, shielded by clear plexiglass. Something bulletproof, because the French government isn't completely stupid. And there are microphones, the press are closest to the front of the great courtyard, there's going to be a mutual speech and a Q & A session and after that wraps up, everyone will head off to the meet-and-greet. The party.

The girl's mother is almost fully still, and it's 'almost' because hooves occasionally tap with impatience. They were supposed to go outside ten minutes ago.

Her mother is ready. (The elder was fitted with something very much like human clothing for the occasion: the first time any mare has ever donned some approximation of a business suit. The designer didn't quite manage to account for the scope of the bustline.) The daughter has swallowed back the rise of bile and vomit three times. It isn't a scent which can be concealed, and every flow of nausea finds her parent staring down at her in judgment. Something which is only going to be silent until they reach privacy again.

The stench gets in through the finest of gaps. So does the noise. Those who chant are supposed to be at the back of the crowd, are meant to stay there. But somehow, their words are the only ones the girl can hear.

...word. Singular.

One of the police officers swallows. The hat, rimmed in silver-white, takes an awkward dip as the man visibly fights to keep his hand away from the gun's grip.

Her mother is talking to one of the humans now. A male with a receding hairline and a title. The girl can tell that her mother is talking down to the president, and that's not just from height. How do you deal with a supposedly-intelligent male? How long can they maintain intelligence before hormones and muscles take over? He doesn't even have an aura...

It isn't the right time. (Not so much questioning as issuing an order.)
There is no right time.
They can clear the courtyard --
-- and then the public will just say that they're being kept away for a reason. The exact ones will be invented, quickly distort. The liminals already exist as something very much like a living conspiracy theory. People are already questioning just what it took to keep it all a secret, and how much the government was involved. We have protection. This has to be done eventually. Inevitably. Everything about this is -- inevitable.

And to that, her mother pauses. Nods.

Inevitable. Yes. In that case...

The herd leader moves towards the doors. Some of the humans have to scramble so they can follow in her wake, and the girl wonders how they can move into the miasma at all without forcing every step. Maybe it's easier when you only have to command two legs.

(The girl thinks she knows more about how humans move than anyone. A few extra minutes of experience.)
(She's wrong.)

The doors open. The scents surge, come close to freezing the girl in place, and she wants to retreat, gallop away and find a bucket because everyone else used one at least once during the trip.

(It's going to be a bucket because she has now seen a human public restroom, and... there are problems. Stall size was just the start of the issues.)

Everyone except the girl, because her mother was watching. But there are thousands of humans outside, added to the stink of Paris itself and human civilization is acrid and hot gusts of methane and anyone would need a moment to focus, to vomit, to get it over with --

-- her mother glances back.

The girl swallows again. Parental eyes narrow. Legs are forced into action.

...it's like trotting into sewage.
It's like living in sewage. (Once the program starts, the worst days will have her mentally editing that to 'living among'.)
But it's a cool spring day. And on the other side of the door is open sky.
...mostly.

There are multiple helicopters high overhead: government-sent, or operated by the police. The girl has to force herself not to look at them, because -- it was hard enough to create a no-fly zone above the gap, even with the help of those who can pass for human. It never prevented the possibility of a lost pilot. The sound of engines and blades in the air is something to be feared, and hearing so many... it's another reason to gallop.

Also, there's a lot of cameras. Some of them are broadcasting live. When a culture teaches its members to flee anything with an active lens, it becomes slightly hard to stay in one place.

But on the other side of the plexiglass and about three meters down...

...humans.

She knows that magnitudes more exist than are gathered here: she's just having trouble imagining it. There's more humans in this teeming mass than centaurs in the herd. Perhaps in every herd, all over the world. And there's so many varieties of skin color, of hair and height and what's starting to look like a near-universal case of underendowment, and they are pushing against each other in a way which makes it look as if bodies are trying to phase. Too many people, too many packed so tightly that any form might be best off inside another, and... the police are pushing, pushing, there's barriers of thin wood, some metal here and there, a little more plexiglass, the scents are overwhelming and if she focuses on her primary sense for one more second, she's going to break --

-- her mind, desperately struggling for a new source of input, anything she can focus on which will save her, discards most of the auditory. The lead human male, one president among a global many, is speaking. Introduces the adult mares, and then her mother says a few words. The girl was there for when it was all rehearsed, and too much repetition made history a little boring: she's not really listening. Vision --

-- there are so many humans --
-- and at the back of the mass, the part which is pushing the hardest, she finds the yellow vests.

Afterwards... long after they're finally evacuated, when the gap gets its first truly reliable Internet connection and the first discussions of who might enter the program are under way-- that's when she gets to do the research. The mouvement des gilets jaunes started as protest assemblies against economic inequality: the fluorescent yellow is simply a means of making sure that members can be seen. Demands for higher wages and, after a time, shouts for police reform because quite a few members were badly hurt during assembly dispersal.

It could be argued that they started as something with good intentions. The movement spanned multiple political strata, because who doesn't want to make more money? But when you bring in members from everything, you start to hear a few reasons about why salaries are so low. Such as, just for example, immigrants. What need is there to pay the citizens a decent wage when an immigrant will work for just about free? Which is amazing, really, because immigrants are also lazy. Except for when they work harder than you do and close you out of the promotion which should have been yours just for being a citizen, but promoting them was clearly just being done for demographics and social media and...

At first, it's only a few who speak that way. They're initially put up with because the movement needs the numbers. But some members drift away because they don't want to be around that, those who remain keep bringing in friends and after that happens a few times, the nationalists have become the numbers. And they protest against income inequality because foreigners have the money, the police because the globalists control those...

The yellow vests make them so easy to spot, especially when they start traveling together outside of the protests. You can't always cross the street in time. It reaches the point where they start to attack freely, in plain sight, with the reassurance of numbers.

Because they're French.
Because they can only be French if no one else is.
Because they know they're going to a heaven which was created by a god who hates all of the same people they do.
Heaven is for perfection. Those with souls.
And they will be the only ones there.

Those in the vests have a word for the centaurs. For the liminals. And it is that which is being chanted, louder than anything else, than microphones and speakers. Louder than the dreamers who were deliberately placed just behind the press.

Some of those seem to be trying to call out to the mares and fillies. Greetings, and a number of those are joyous. But their voices are being drowned.

There's a concentric expanding ring structure in the courtyard: that's something the girl can try to focus on, to keep the vomit down. To fight against the rising panic attack, something which has never happened in front of her mother. She's spent years keeping that from happening, burying urges and scents until she reached safety.

(Her mother smells like control. Rigid discipline. Not caring about anything except the next spoken word.)
(Not caring.)

Sensory overload still feels imminent, and looking at any of the other centaurs will just remind the girl that she's inferior because they're surely handling it better than she.

(The sounds from all of those fast-shifting hooves are obviously just mares trying to stay awake. It's been hours, after all.)

Look at the rings. Expanding lines of barricades. Some of them shift under the pressure of so many bodies. The police are caught in the living tide. Rocking back and forth.

Those who wear the vests are chanting.
It's one word. Over and over.
That word is becoming the only thing the girl can hear.
Monstre.
Monstre.
MONSTRE --

The chant is almost musical.

And yet, as human and mare speak upon the stage, alternating and staying on their own rhythm, the girl starts to feel hope.
Hope that the world can truly change.
And then the last ring surges forward.
Spring sunlight reflects from too-bright yellow, almost blinds her.
The backmost barrier collapses.
Officers, security, protection, and lives sink under the rising tide.
On the platform, the planned speech stops.

The president tries to plead for calm. But he only gets two breaths in which to do so, because that's how long it takes for his security to reach him. They start moving him back towards the building, frantically gesture for the centaurs to follow --

-- the others of the girl's herd scramble. But there's a moment when her mother isn't moving. When the harsh lines of the beautiful face are simply staring out at the crowd, the mass which is now teeming in on itself. Exerting pressure. See the mob as a single body, and outer cells are starting to crush inner organs. People are going to be trampled.

(Some of them will eventually try to sue the herd.)

And if her mother isn't moving, then the girl can't move. She'll have to take a stand here, and the watchers are being overwhelmed, the dreamers will be next, the press at the core of it all are trying to find safety and the first hands claw at the plexiglass. Trying to climb up.

That just lets the vests see that the plexiglass could potentially be climbed.

It's slick. But that's not a problem. You just bury enough bodies at the base to form a slope. And then you climb over that.

Her mother is just -- standing there. As if she's looking for something.

If they stay here, they're both going to die --

-- the parent turns. Walks towards the doors. Not trotting: walking. As if the mob is beneath her notice.

That's when the scent of human blood reaches the girl. Something which is moving closer. The police are fighting, so many people are fighting, and skin splits while bones crack. It... seems to take very little, to break a human bone. Perhaps that's why so many are shattering.

The microphones have been abandoned. And a knight whose art was words... they would take the chance, command the podium. Make the speech that brings it all to a stop.

The girl looks at the podium, just for a second. But skill with words was never hers. She can barely sketch. And... she isn't a knight.

-- if she stays out here much longer, she's going to be the last one in. The final target, because the rest of the herd has vanished into the building. Her mother is almost at the doors, and has just now glanced back to see what's holding up the latest failure.

There are fingernails clawing against the plexiglass, breaking. The vests are surging closer. And she could vault the barrier, get into the crowd, try to clear a path for those in danger, but there's no safe space to land. Anywhere she could come crashing down would only see her hurt more people.

A arm vanishes under the roiling tide of life. A second later, more blood saturates the miasma.

They would overwhelm her --
-- a knight dies for something --
-- one sharp note. Her mother has given an order. Get inside. They can't barricade the entrance until all of the centaurs are inside.

The girl has to turn.
Turns her back and tail on pain and rage and blood, because that was the order and she can do nothing else.
Starts to trot --

-- fighting to focus on limited sources of sensory input. To not lose herself in the potential overwhelm. But there are some things which will always get through. That which she's spent a lifetime training herself to hear.

The first screamed word from the human male... that's what makes her glance back. It's reflexive. And she manages to find him, some fifteen meters back from the podium. A thatch of honey-brown hair which has the minimal styling quickly coming apart. The face is middle-aged, but the features remain fine. Not just pleasant, but -- handsome, in their way. Long fingers claw at the air, desperately waving for attention.

He has called out a name. But the one he called to merely keeps walking to the doors. And the girl knows that it's just reaching safety, there are too many people out there for the centaurs to try saving any of them, but the girl turned upon hearing the familiar and the mare -- did not.

There was an introduction. All of the adult mares, and so the name was out there. But why would he call out to --

One more word.
Frantic.
Desperate.
The only chance.
And she hears him.

She turns, for that too is reflex. Sees the grey eyes, the panic and terror and something else, one thing more, she starts to move towards the barrier, she has to move, find some way to get into the crowd because --

-- the hooves come up behind her. A powerful grip becomes a vise on her left arm. Flesh bruises. The other hand twists an ear, and the base will be discolored under the fur for days.

Her mother drags her away, doing so in front of mob and cameras and helicopters and fast-flying blood. Gets the wayward daughter into the building, just before some of the helicopters start to drop tear gas onto the crowd. It doesn't help. The plexiglass barrier is breached by climbing forms, and too many of them reach the doors. The centaurs unite with the humans, try to hold the line.

Hold the doors closed.
But the vests keep trying to get through.
And they won't stop.

There are ways in which the yellow vests get what they want.

The Paris riot isn't the only one. But it's the largest, with the most people hurt, and that allows it to display the bloody visuals across three whole news cycles. To many, it makes the protestors look like the animals. Those who support the internments find just enough of their voters turning away (at least in public) to make them suffer a politician's greatest (or, for many, sole) concern: whether they're going to retain that position of power. But no one wants to offend their base by openly giving in, so -- the solution is to pretend that the decision was outright seized by greater authority, then pointlessly protest that.

The United Nations is granted (or passed) the power to write the liminal laws, and those statutes will have global domain. Part of that has them quickly decide on what comes to be called the Little Rock Solution: forced integration, starting with the schools. And so the student exchange program begins.

But it's all done too quickly.

The hastily written laws are among the worst-composed in human history. And it's not just loopholes. The statutes themselves pretend to be absolute, and what's been created is an absolute disaster.

It isn't a total failure, and... perhaps that's the worst part. The laws were, like the constitutions of so many nations, composed in a single huge effort, passed and ratified as a desperate unit. A total failure could be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. A partial one requires amendments, and those... aren't coming along all that quickly, especially when those who initially stood aside and hoped for failure are now resisting. You can measure the delay in police reports and emergency room visits. For the latter, the doctors usually don't know how to treat the patients. Some of them refuse to do so: because their faith says not to (and there's that human religious fortune again), or out of fear that they'll get it wrong.

The laws are more than merely imperfect. Portions wind up as their very own travesty. But tearing down and starting from scratch would potentially mean losing the best of it, and there is a huge success within the new body of law: the protection of the gaps. That's where the United States winds up effectively leading the way -- by accident and anti-example, because so many of the bills which had been speeding towards legislative bodies around the world had been based on the tricks used to seize territory from the natives. Now those old laws are both a demonstration of what not to do and a demonstration of what others might try to get away with.

The liminals effectively wind up with a seat at the table, or at least in Assembly Hall. Several seats: if Monaco and the Holy See can each claim a place, then eight million newly-revealed residents of the planet can be divided in ways which allow them multiple representatives. The gaps themselves gain the status of micro-nations: able to retain their own laws and government -- at least, for those who don't want to outright merge with their host country, and a very few will make that choice.

But for the vast majority, citizenship effectively becomes dual: with the exception of the mergers and those who lived on uncharted islands, just about every liminal will hold papers for their gap and the country which surrounds it. So to that degree, the girl can consider herself to be a citizen of France, and... she wants to honor her nation's culture. To represent it and her herd in near-equal measure. She just has a lot of trouble thinking of herself that way, because... she knows how many humans disagree with her.

There are successes within the laws. Many of them. Each gap retains full control over its resources. Borders become sovereign, and any human crossing into liminal lands had better be prepared to follow local statutes. For those who can't manage the feat, or who mistakenly believe that human law crossed over with them and they don't have to do anything which the animals demand -- well, skilled lawyers who specialize in liminal regions are understandably hard to come by. The ones who lie about it tend to invest in tourist agencies on the side.

Other triumphs are partial. In just about all cases, a liminal's personal abilities aren't subject to regulations. It's like passing a law against someone being left-handed --

-- actually, across the course of their history, some of the humans came close to trying that. The prospect of potentially finding out what happens when an ogre gets slapped with a ruler may have served as a barrier.

Still, the harpies don't have to file a flight plan every time they take off, which means a lot for a species which generally can't remember where the paperwork is supposed to go and usually winds up using the ink for skin decoration. But at the same time, there are some tricks out there which are genuinely dangerous, and the only way of stopping most of them is if their use comes into conflict with the other laws.

Territory. Sovereign nations. Protection of resources. The right to soar freely, to gallop -- if you mostly stay in the bicycle lanes while obeying all traffic laws and yes, one early draft would have had the girl making her morning runs with blinkers attached to her buttocks.

And then you have the statutes which govern interaction.
Written in broad strokes, where the sweeping ink stains obscure any chance at justice.
They come down to this.
If a liminal is within the territory of a human government, then no human can attack them.
But at the same time... a liminal cannot strike against a human.
For any reason.
Any at all.
Including self-defense.
And for every iteration of their hateful existence, all over the world, no matter how they label themselves or the deity-sanctioned excuses they offer for their rage, one truth is consistent among those who would don the yellow vests.
They travel in packs.
And the smartest ones take the vests off.

It's so easy to lie, when it's planned in advance and the group supports you. To claim that the liminal did something first. Well, liminals have all sorts of strange abilities: who knows what would have happened if that one kept looking at them? And some of them stay on the outskirts of the pack, carry cameras and if the liminal tries to fight back, that's the moment when the video starts recording.

Such tactics are hardly universal. There are humans who are just too stupid to make it work, and they're usually the ones who decide they can take on the strongest liminals with no help at all. (They already have an advantage in simply knowing everything.)

And... it isn't every human.

Perhaps that's the harshest part. That there are those whom the liminals can truly trust. Care about and for. Host families open their doors. Entire communities offer a place. Friendships bloom. Bonds of mutual devotion stretch across a fast-closing gap of species. It can even feel very much like love.

But other humans will fake it for a time, getting into position for the strike. And they look just like everyone else.

Then it gets worse.

Because humans have their faults, enough to fill a thousand books (while detailing the methods of denying them all would run the shelves out to a million) -- but liminals are hardly perfect. There are those who come out of the gaps because they interpreted the laws in their own way. They are allowed to be loud, arrogant, rude, perhaps even indulge in something very close to criminal acts or even cross the line entirely -- and what can humans do? Because striking out against such a liminal would be against the law.

Those are the ones who quickly force the creation of agencies like M.O.N. Liminals are recruited to police their own, and the household eventually meets Zombina, Doppel, Manako, and Tionishia. (As the household constitutes a semi-mobile disaster area, they usually wind up meeting them about once a week. More often if the squad collectively decides to freeload dinner. Again.) But it gives those politicians who hated the liminals something to point at. An example for why the gaps need to be closed again. And those who were convinced they could never be touched in the first place are incapable of caring about what might happen to everyone, because that still doesn't mean it'll ever happen to them.

Liminals in human lands often wind up pushed together. They travel in numbers for mutual protection -- but there's always more humans. Always. Trying to live in small neighborhoods just creates mini-gaps. Ghettos. And no matter what happens, if it can be proven that the liminal stuck first -- for that value of 'proven' which relies on the rehearsed human lie -- then the liminal is in the wrong. As excuses go, the best 'self-defense' can do is to potentially get you sent back across the border with custody of a rather rare apology.

And yet... the world is out there. All of it. Liminals start to leave the gaps. A few of those are adults. Others continue to huddle within, hoping for safety in numbers in a place where the law gives them control. But some of those who venture into human nations manage to succeed. They become singers and small business owners and team mascots. Anything where they can be perceived as safe. Where, like so many immigrants before them, they can start to build a new identity and a life.

And sometimes, they go back to the gaps. Limping.

The exchange students eventually find themselves at constant risk of deportation: everyone else risks prison. Human bodyguards find themselves in great demand, just so there will be someone who can fight. The hire rates quickly become exorbitant.

Many of those students wind up returning home.
Limping.
If they're lucky.
And that's with physical assault.
There's worse.
Every student fears the moment when 'worse' tries to make a move.
There are so many reasons for blouses to be torn.

The girl never sees the thatch-haired human male again.

She doesn't know if anyone saw him again.

There had been two words.

One had recently been offered to the crowd.

The other, the more frantic, the desperate... hadn't.

"CENTOREA!"

There should have been no means of knowing her name...

Sui Generis

It was, perhaps, another commonality in the tales: not just the stories of knightly glory, but yet another thread lacing together the myths of old. (She couldn't remember if Mr. Campbell had covered it.) At some point, there would be a door. And when you passed through, you would find judgment.

The door within the caves had been placed as one kind of echo, with at least two more directly behind it: the sound of the chant, hints of the scents which had arisen from the crowd. But that was the word for it: echo. Like the hoofsteps which still seemed to be following her, one forehoof apparently tapping with impatience as the sonic illusion waited for her to make a decision. To turn back, or -- pass through, and face the judgment which awaited her on the other side.

The girl had already passed through that door, a lifetime ago and a world away. She had found judgment and in that, she had matched the dominant theme of her life. She had failed.

But you had to consider the nature of the court.

Whether the jury had assembled itself through the magnetic call of bias. If the one who watched from a different kind of bench had abandoned neutrality, relishing the chance to use the long fall of the official scarf as a weapon. The opportunity to strangle justice in its crib.

She had passed through the true door, and had only come to understand the nature of the assembled court in the aftermath. That those in the vests had planned the surge all along, acted with design and intent. They had just expected the world to ultimately agree with them. And when it came to the actual results, it was rather easy for those who always believed themselves omniscient to simply claim that no one else knew anything.

Cerea had already gone through that door, in the hope of finding a better world.
Hope was torment.
Experience came when you learned from the results.

Her free hand stopped less than a centimeter from the metal bar, caught within the radiating cold.

The other hand pulled the sword.

She wasn't entirely certain as to what would happen when the plastic made contact. It felt as if Foglio's Hammer was in play: if everything had merely been assembled by magic, natural bricks and mortar coated by plastic and paint by an agency which knew nothing of human hands... then to strike at the construct would find no magic to disrupt. The power of the enchantment would have departed, and the door would remain. But if it was illusion, something which required the ongoing presence of thaums -- then the sword would have to dispel it. The only way to find out was through --

-- there was a new sound from behind her, seeming to originate somewhere within the tapping. As if the caves had breathed again, simply so they could produce the short, sharp sniff of disdain. A near-subconscious signal which tried to override her muscles, because she'd gotten it wrong, she always got it wrong and the world entire had simply invested a certain amount of morbid interest into seeing the how of it.

The wielder always got it wrong.
But this was the sword.

She drew the blade, brought her free hand up and over her armored breasts, added a second grip to the hilt

or if the materials are real and it's being held together by magic, then it might just crumble

and swung all the harder.

Part of the girl's mind had been expecting, if not a clang (because plastic wouldn't do that), then at least a dull thud. The sharp shock of solidity sending some of the energy back through her body, rattling her within the metal cage. Instead, there was a brief sensation of resistance, and nothing about that suggested Tartarus was starting to fight back against the blade. It was closer to having just discovered the surface tension which had been holding together the world's largest soap bubble.

The deep place had constructed her door. It had also put together the sounds of assembly: that which suggested the whole thing was a little more real. Cerea didn't doubt that if she'd actually made contact with the pushbar, there would have been enough present to touch. Given the cold of the simulated metal, perhaps enough to conduct chill through the gauntlet, with frostbite as a potential side goal.

It might take more time to achieve true results, when the deep place wasn't merely manipulating the material of its own walls. But for this, there was a brief sensation of resistance. And then the bubble popped.

A ripple of disrupted white passed across armor and skin: light bound into the construct, now free to move however it liked. And just beyond the reach of her blade, there was a twisting tide of fluorescent yellow laced into the atmosphere. Something which surged towards her with a scream of 'MONSTRE'!', did its best to surround and confine within bonds of sickness -- and in doing so, came into contact with the sword.

That light turned the armor sickly as it was disrupted, coated the cavern's walls in the residue of another world's hate.

But there was more than that coming apart. Recently-thickened air roiled outwards in all directions, simulated plastic and metal phasing back into vapor. It was a outbound explosion of fumes made visible within the liquid chlorine of her light, and the foulness of it tried to blast into her nostrils, did its best to simulate the scent bomb while adding in new factors. Things this world knew nothing of, born from her memories of human rage and sweat. The massed odor of their blood.

All of it tried to saturate her, rob her of reason and send her mindlessly galloping forward into the traps which surely lay beyond. But she had been through the Sergeant's exercises, she knew the deep place could create scents, and she'd been braced.

She didn't break.
She kept swinging the sword. Dispersing whatever she could, which didn't seem to do much for the stink. The eternal background saturation of a thousand things dying.
But she felt her hooves cantering in place, reacting to the strain of it --
-- the girl almost lost the more subtle sound, and that was because of the kudu's laughter. True mirth had erupted behind her, added to the stomp of forehooves and a non-clang from twisted horns being repeatedly knocked into stone columns. The total of the cacophony almost seemed to add up to some form of applause.

But she heard it, because she had spent so much of her life hearing it.
The sharp inhale of judgment.
Her hooves had cantered, and so the verdict was failure.

The kudu was still laughing, and it wasn't enough to block out the grating noise produced by Gardul'ak stirring. Reacting to an unnatural sound within the deep place --

-- the girl tried to see through twisting chlorine tides. And with sword drawn, with no way out other than down, Cerea plunged deeper into Tartarus.

She now had reason to fear a different kind of encounter within the corridors.

The kudu had told her that Tartarus could let prisoners out of their cells, and Cerea believed him. There was no escape from the deep place, but -- there were offers of hope, because that was the foundation of torment. So it was possible that she might find another one of the incarcerated: not alongside her trail, but within it. There was no telling how they might react to her. Conversation seemed unlikely. All the largest needed to was slump forward.

And perhaps Tartarus would let the kudu out for a time, in the name of that hope. The offer of companionship. He might suggest that he could serve as her guide. (There was some sort of supposedly-epic human poem about that, but it had been in Italian and the meter of terza rima had lost just about everything during the translation.)

But he would be at her side. Able to reach her. To... grant a wish.

A girl who had failed over and over again, trapped within a gap with no way out, rushing towards an inevitable future filled with nothing more than the echoes of what had come before...

On the worst days, she had retreated into herself. Stared into the shadows which seemed to make up the whole of her life. And there might be a wish, because it felt like the only way for everything to stop.
But then she'd come out.
Because of hope.
And the torment had gone on.

The echoes followed.

It was possible to look at a coracle floating next to an aircraft carrier and say, with some accuracy, that they were both boats. In a similar manner, Cerea was able to describe the third monster as a sort of snail, especially as the relative upscaling in size between examples was about the same.

It was rendered from ooze and rot, with a shell that spiraled into too many dimensions. Acid dripped from every bit of exposed flesh: sickly green produced from pulsing translucent pores. The results had no effect on the stone. But it made the air boil in strange ways, as if the atmosphere was trying to find some way of evaporating. The results weren't quite steam, thinned as she watched them, and... there were times when she seemed to catch glimpses of something just beyond the fumes. Green blades warping towards brown death, or pinpricks of corrupted starlight. It was if if the acid was trying to burn a hole through reality.

Three of the eyestalks stretched out to watch her, silently tracked her progress through the corridor with stare and sizzle. It waited until she reached the next bend, and then spoke.

The three words might have been voiced in an attempt to hurt her.
They might have represented nothing more than identification as a centaur. Especially given what had been already offered as an example.
Or it could have been recognition.

YOU BELONG HERE.

Acknowledging her as something which could destroy worlds.

The echoes followed.
The distortions made them heavier. And they kept the pace, but -- she kept getting the impression that it could move so much faster than this.
There was frustration within the echoes, all directed at her because she was holding everything back.
Disappointment.
It was so familiar.
As if she'd heard it all before.
Over and over.
As if a single moment of thought would give her the source.
She didn't want to think.

She was... losing track of time.

It was something like having a fever during the dead of night. Swearing that she'd been trying to find some form of comfort for an hour, attempting to calm a body which wouldn't listen, pressing cool cloths against her forehead, writhing within her own skin for what had to be an hour before risking a peek at the ancient clock in her bedroom and it would have been a minute, only a minute and so much more of the darkness to come...

She kept looking at the watch, if only to find out just how much the clockwork was lying to her.

The girl was also checking the map. This seemed to be happening too often. Slopes were no longer what had been indicated, and... not all of them had harshened. One gradient, marked by the last survey team as a treacherous gradient meant to send hooves skidding out of control, had developed something very much like miniature terraces. There was still a downslope which she needed to descend, but... it was possible to step down, if rather carefully: the results were extremely crude, seemed to have been molded from clay which had dried too quickly. It also appeared to have mostly been worked by hooves: all divots and rough spots and there was probably an ibex somewhere who felt offended and didn't know why --

-- it was possible for her. Ponies would have a harder time contending with a series of half-meter drops.

Some of the walls seemed to have receded into themselves. There were fresh hollows, as if someone had been planning a place for placing decorations. At one point, she found an entirely new side passage: vaulted so that the ceiling was only two meters over her head, and the walls were oddly smooth. It was clear, tried to project the non-magical illusion of relative safety, and terminated in a rock wall eight meters in.

At one point, the chlorine light dripped from bright flashes of green and blue, embedded at upper waist height within one of the more distorted walls: something where it looked as if stone had recently fallen away -- but there was no debris by her hooves.

She peered more closely, and a full spectrum of captured fire did its best to express every hue. A rainbow of frozen radiance, where every shade was just a little bit off.

She stopped just long enough to look at the exposed gem, then considered that she had no way of harvesting the black opal and didn't know what carrying a non-purified specimen would do. And it was also possible that Tartarus was just trying to make her stop.

(It made her think of the disc. She missed its scent. Something which had been a near-constant, present in just about every waking moment since the Lunar Princess had found her. It was the olfactory equivalent of background noise: a near-subsonic murmur, never truly noticed until it stopped.)

The temperature went up. Then it came down again, and there was always that pause at the level of comfort. Something which held until she longed for it to continue, and then broke. At one point, she found herself thinking about whether she should take off the armor, that the thermal aspects had to be easier to deal with if she didn't have metal and padding joining in the battle on the enemy side...

The hairpins were in place. Which meant it was her own thought, and that made it all the worse.

She retained the armor. She put her helmet on, if the stalactites were thick enough. But it stayed off most of the time. Some part of her didn't want the input from her senses, not when every scent was trying to uproot her and each noise had been designed to send her galloping towards the surface at the speed of fear-blinded panic. Never thinking about anything but the road ahead and the void behind, never noticing the hole until it caught a hoof and momentum shattered a foreleg. But the metal obscured scent, blocked vision and distorted sound. She needed to know what was coming.

To hear every approach.
To listen to the whispers.
But the Sergeant couldn't tell Tartarus not to go for her head.
To stop targeting her fears.

There were times when the girl heard things moving in the distance. One of them sounded like scales skittering across stone, exactly like scales, and something deep in her calculated speed and mass and that happened just before she heard the little laugh, scented a rather familiar foulness soaked into the clothing because the lamia had told herself that she could learn to cook. She also looked at recipes as rough suggestions, substituted for missing ingredients with anything of the same color, and every flavor test conduced by a species which could digest half-rotten meat (and accordingly, possessed almost no taste buds) reported that everything was fine. When it came to the inevitable results... those with more refined senses tended to experience the kind of wish which the kudu would have been happy to grant, and did so in the vicinity of the nearest toilet.

She almost moved towards that sound, because it had come with a little laugh. But then she recognized the subsection of it, that which was almost hidden within the whispers. There was a slight swirling within the skitters. A constrictor moving while part of the body was coiled. Trapping something.

Then she heard a human's labored, compressed breathing.

The laugh got a little louder.

That was when the whispers began to make sense.

The echoes followed.

The helmet was off, because she had to listen.

All she could do was listen.

There were wingbeats, somewhere up ahead. A huge span making its way through the dark. Laughter, brighter and faster, because everything about that one was a little quicker. And there was a screech, but that was a human thing. The cry of pain which came when razor talons cut into shoulders.

Chitin scurried across the shadowed ceiling. Webs muffled the cries of the one who was being carried. Entombed.

There were two other kinds of suffocation within the tunnels. One came with accompanying splashes, fins breaching the unseen water's surface just before dragging someone under. And then there were little pops of air bubbles coming to the surface. Those stopped before the centaur reached the meters-deep pit, just in time to see the last of the water draining from the well-tunneled bottom.

The second was thicker and came with a symphonic accompaniment of choking, as if the dying human was trying to breathe a dense gel.

She always heard the moment when life stopped. And then there would be something else. A near-silent presence standing at the site of each distant death. Watching. Doing nothing more than watching, certainly nothing to stop any of it.

There was also a whisper.

One word from five voices.

She could understand it now. And had she needed the translation effect so badly, as to step into the deep place during a moment when she'd had no protection at all? Wouldn't it have been easier if everything had been nothing more than meaningless babble? Without understanding, there would have been no effect.

But she understood. The lone syllable, and every implication which lay within.

The Princesses had told her to go through without protection.

Perhaps they had wanted her to hurt.

"...mine..."

Another thought which was hers alone.

The echoes followed.
They were getting closer.

Limestone drippings ran down this wall. That was supposedly normal.

She couldn't say the same thing about the way the wall was moving.

It was the only time she saw a large-scale change happen, and... that felt wrong. Tartarus liked to work in the shadows, behind both of her backs, force her to turn and see what it had been doing because the anticipation made it all so much worse. But this wall...

It was trying to extend into the corridor, and it didn't seem to be quite sure about how to accomplish that. It moved in fits and starts: a few centimeters, a third of a meter, and then it went backwards. The stone made strange grinding sounds as a number of the drips fractured. Fell away in trails of the world's frozen tears.

She approached slowly, and the chlorine coated three small glints within the stone.

Her assigned path meant that she had to come this way. Backtracking to the alternate route would take -- time. She wasn't sure how much. And she also wasn't sure what Tartarus was trying to do, or why it was so... clumsy. The stone hadn't moved quickly enough to have a chance at crushing her: the four-meter-high patch of half-mobile rock wasn't even large enough for that, not at only a meter across --

-- she couldn't make that assumption. It might be able to lunge quickly enough to catch her, and -- the deep place likely wouldn't kill her, because then the torment would stop. But pinning her in place -- there was enough mass for that. Dent the metal, make her protection into an extra layer of the prison. Writhing against stone, like a butterfly pinned in a display case. Unable to die.

She could hit the wall with the sword as soon as it started to move: making contact in the entrance passage had caused the entire ceiling to stop. But just as she tested Tartarus, it tested her. Set up expectations, in the name of waiting for a moment of assumed safety before subverting them. She would not have been surprised to see the wall pushing forward around a sword-shaped hole.

They tested each other.

(She had been placing more fabric strips along the walls: an action which had become numb and repetitious. They were always present if she glanced back, but -- she didn't know what happened to them after she moved fully out of sight. Perhaps they were simply too mundane for Tartarus to touch.)
(Or perhaps that was hope.)

After some thought, she took up the sword in her left hand and extended her right arm, got ready to pull it back, allowed herself the crucial hoofstep which put a metal palm almost within limestone's reach --

The cave wall tried to shift forward, and it was a shift: not a leap or surge. It just happened to be a shift where only the lower half had moved at all, and done so without giving the upper any notice of intention.

A different kind of cleavage occurred.

The girl, who'd stepped back with time to spare, waited for the rumble of rockfall to stop. Backed up a little more, looked down at the sloping extension of debris, forced herself to breathe in the miasma of the dying, and checked to see just how stable it all was.

The crumble of stone looked like a snowpile which someone had driven across: the same kind of crush and spread. She couldn't find any hints of metal in the rubble, but... perhaps the glints had been from bow-buried mica, or something similar. There had just been an impression of something more solid. Metallic.

Something... familiar...

She carefully advanced. Stepped over, one leg at a time, still gripping the sword. Watching the wall, and it meant she initially missed the smaller effect of her passage.

It was harmless: one of the few errors which could have produced that kind of result. She had mass, her movement created vibrations, and the rockslide wasn't fully stable. The planting of one hoof conducted enough energy to displace a piece of rubble, and she got to feel the stone bounce off the armor which coated the trailing hoof's keratin.

She still winced. She had to be more careful --

-- the caves breathed.
A sniff of frustration. Disdain for a substandard effort.
It was a familiar sound, and no less so for being found within the middle of approaching echoes. The movement of someone larger, heavier, more powerful --
-- and she knew.

Don't feel
don't feel anything
don't produce any scent
she knows everything, she's coming towards the door, she's going to come in because she can come in any time she wants and
she knows
I failed and she knows
I always fail and she
and she
and...

The girl stopped. Almost everything about her stopped, with the only exceptions as heartbeat and thought. The echoes froze.

After a moment, she took a breath.

It took a moment before she was fully clear of the debris. And then she turned, as she passed the sword from the left hand to the right. The freed arm was raised high, and near-liquid light trickled down the path she'd taken. Outlined the shadow.

The other presence existed in three dimensions, and the girl knew the measurements were off. Greater in height and mass than the true, as if the observer had shrunken, lost size and years in equal measure. But when it came to the details of features -- the shape was right. It was possible to pick out the arch of an eyebrow, the curve of an afterthought nose. And it was all present on a shadow swollen from having to contain an endless fount of disappointment, where every change of expression arrived as nothing more than a shifting within the layers of darkness.

There were new scents in the caves, and every one came with a lifetime of familiarity. The odor of forced neutrality. The olfactory rigidity of total control. Nearly every emotion trapped within perpetual lockdown. But the disdain, the disappointment, judgment and letdown... that got through every day.

Every day for what felt so much like a lifetime.

The girl took another breath. The first. The Second. Two hollows at the front of the dark face subtly narrowed, as the Second clearly wasn't smooth enough.

It's not real.
(There was a moment of doubt.)
(Another moment.)
(But this time -- for the first time -- she recognized it.)
Nothing about this is real.
It wants me to remember.
To question myself.
To never be quite sure of anything I'm doing.
Hesitate. Second-guess.
Torment myself.
And this is what it feels is the best way to bring all of that out...

Nothing about the shadow was real.

Every syllable fighting for the chance to be the first out... was.

She choose four.

"Salut, Maman."

The hollows in the upper part of the dark face widened.

"I know," Cerea softly said. "Shockingly informal, wasn't it? But there's no fault present in the greeting, mother. Because I'm acting under orders. Something my liege told me, before she truly became my liege at all. For a little while. She told me to -- speak less formally. To reacquaint myself with the concept of contractions. I... didn't pick up on the irony. Not until I knew her a little better. But it was an order, Mom. I'm still trying to follow it, even now. And... maybe formality is best reserved for the ones who deserve it."

The shadow of the herd leader took half a step forward. It was enough for Cerea to spot the laden scabbard on its right side.

"And I know this isn't you," Cerea continued, looking into those hollows. Looking up. "I know you're not real. If you were --"

She wanted to laugh.
She almost did.

"-- you never would have let me talk for this long. Not without interruption."

She watched the shadow of her mother's breasts swell across a harsh breath. Then they continued to swell. Just by a few extra centimeters, to give Cerea something else she couldn't match. Swelling within the half-solid memory of fabric, and that was why it was visible at all.

It had taken a breath. It released the foul air as whispered words. That which she could so readily believe her mother would have said.

"...impudence, Centorea... inferiority expressing, rebelling as pointless, impotent impudence..."

"-- let's talk about that," Cerea cut the shadow off. "Because we're overdue for that talk. You galloped away from any chance of having it happen the last time around, remember? I know you do, because I do. You're not my mother. You're how I feel about her, and how she makes me feel." She just barely noticed her own snort. "For whatever Tartarus pulled out of my head, before the hairpins went in. A weapon which got held back for a while. Trying out smaller sources of torment first. But I remember what she did, and that means you might. She told me. And after she did that? She ran."

The first breath. The Second. Neither had ever felt so deep.

"Like a coward."

The shadow gripped the hilt of a phantom sword, one larger and heavier than Cerea's. One which, as it started to clear the scabbard, showed an edge.

Cerea's hand tightened on her own hilt. The shadow stopped.

"You're not my mother," she told it. "I could never talk to her this way. I'm sure of that. The full words would never come. Any syllable from me would get beaten back by a wall of sound. But you're here, and she's not. I wished for her to come during my first nights here, did you take that from my mind? I wanted to see her again. Because if that happened, I was back. I was home. But I had that wrong."

The shadow almost seemed to blink.

"...you don't want to come home... not where you can be supervised, disciplined, where you would have to be proper... rather be lost forever than be a real --"

The girl had barely acknowledged her own snort.
The next sound initially escaped her notice, and continued to do so for four vital heartbeats.
And then both mares found themselves trapped within the echoes of laughter.

They were staring at each other. Cerea kept having to look up --

"-- centaur?" she just barely managed to choke out. "That was going to be it, right?" This laugh was shorter. "Predictable as sunrise! And around here, just as scheduled as the weather! Act like a real centaur! Or I'll have to show up and remind you what that's supposed to be like! And you did just that! Exactly that, because I was out of reach, away from your control, and that meant I had to be doing something wrong -- no, wait..."

She had to stop for a moment. Waiting for the remnants of her own mad laughter to fade enough for speech.

"...doing everything wrong. I spoke to Ms. Smith after you left, did you know that? She told me that you kept calling her office. Email, over and over. Demanding progress reports. And of course Kuroko never sent any! She tried to tell me it was from protecting my privacy, but I can smell a lie on her. It's easy, even when I barely have any truths for contrast. She didn't contact you because that would have been work, and she's too lazy to bother. So you crossed half the world, because you couldn't stand the thought of my doing something without your being there to disapprove of it. Did they stick you in the cargo hold, Mom? Did the herd's leader get the deluxe blankets?"

The shadow appeared to be struggling for words --

All you have is my memories of her.
You can do anything she's done before.
Mastery of echoes.
But I've never spoken to her like this.

"Half the world." (She'd just taken a hoofstep forward.) "To assess and evaluate. Maybe that's irony, or it would be if you hadn't made your decision before you left. Failure." Another snort. "Maybe that's another reason why I thought of you when I was in the first castle. I didn't have to find you, because the mere idea of my being this out of reach? Out of control? You might just spontaneously appear to pull me out of it. You crossed half a world to make sure I stayed in line. Why not two? And at the moment you came up the walkway at the house, just about the instant you saw me..."

Her voice dropped. Her hands tightened.

"...you tried to take over. Issuing orders, by name. Always by name. 'Centorea!' Because that's how you remind me of my place, isn't it? But it was more than that."

"...a failure in the herd," whispered the shadow. "...what difference does it make, where you are? Still a failure, one which reaches across worlds... and no matter where you go..."

The girl, almost curious, watching the dark hand on the phantom sword, waited for the rest of it.

"...you will always arrive in the same place... a place where none will ever love you..."

"CENTOREA!" It had come perilously close to a bark. "That wasn't a name! It was a reminder! But it was more than that, wasn't it?" Her left forehoof rotated. Armor ground against the stone. "It was your initial defense, declared in front of the entire herd, every time you gave me an order. And it was the first layer of deceit. There is nothing here except a centaur. Nothing. Merely a centaur, not even a daughter. Sometimes I thought you were treating me like a stallion -- no, wait..."

It wasn't a laugh this time. More of a gasp: air in, and right back out again. Expressing that level of dark mirth properly might have taken a full hour.

"...you would have given a stallion credit for strength. With me, it was always weakness. Demanding that I prove I wasn't weak. Lift a hundred and fifty kilos? Then we'll make it an even two. If I jumped that hurdle, then the next one would be higher. I couldn't be strong enough. Ever, because you set the goals and you never stopped moving them. But you could treat me like a stallion in other ways. Like I was stupid, and had to be trained well enough to pass for civilized. And you wonder why I left."

The shadow had a response waiting for that.

"...for the second time... everything which happened, all of the laws, the pain, it started with --"

"Ferme ta gueule."

Half-solid hooves stumbled. Went off balance.

"Arrête de parler," Cerea gently semi-repeated, and kicked in "salope," as a near-afterthought. "Just shut up. I already talked to a few people tonight. One of them was a mass murderer who'd been working toward global extinction, and I feel like he still granted me more dignity than you ever did. Was I ever really free, Mom?" The last word had been spat. "I think you decided to see it as having me on the end of a very long rein. You could just pull me back whenever you liked, and I would have had to come, wouldn't I? Because I'm not an adult yet. You could have withdrawn me from the program. It's not just without my consent: you never would have thought about getting my consent at all. Caring what I thought. Because I went out to find my liege --"

She almost could have laughed again. Almost, if not for the tragedy of it all.

"-- and that's the wrong word. So is 'master'. I was calling him master because 'lord' just didn't feel right and I still wanted him to feel like he was in charge. That he could make a move. I went out to find a partner. To get away from --"

"-- I only let you go,"the shadow cut her off, "so that you would have a chance no mare had known. To find and choose your own te --"

"-- the amazing part," Cerea softly broke in, "is that you told them that immediately. Used the term, anyway. Smith had to fill in some of the details. Every filly in the herd -- with us, it was a secret. We weren't going to be told until it was too late. Until we'd been in the special house long enough for all of our menstrual cycles to synchronize. With the healers doing tests, trying to make sure it could all happen in one night. The same night every spring, when all the windows have to be covered and no filly can look outside. Because they can't know. Not until it's too late. I found out two weeks before I applied for the program, because the herd wasn't sure about what was going to happen, everyone was stressed, and... someone just slipped up, Mom. Talked in a place where I could hear them. I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but... mares talk in front of me, sometimes. Especially when you had them trained to act like I wasn't even there. A secret kept from every filly. But with the gaps opened... well, I guess your mouth was just the next thing to go."

She hadn't been aware that a shadow could look that shocked.

"I spoke to a murderer tonight," the girl pushed on (and there was another hoofstep). "He told me something about hope, something true. How much it can hurt. Hope is what put me into the program, even when I knew how bad the laws were. Because being in a world where I could be attacked at any moment, couldn't do anything to stop it -- how is that any different from living with you?" She almost spread her arms, made herself keep one hand on the hilt. "The form of assault, that's all. Belittled and dismissed, against groped and kicked and -- and everything I knew they could do, Mom, everything, and I still chose that over you. Because maybe things would be different. Hope sent me out of the gap. The hope that someone would accept me."

Her voice dropped, and did so as her eyes tried to close. The effort required to keep them open made her shoulders shake.
It didn't seem to leave anything for blocking the words.
The thing she never could have said to her mother.
That which could barely be voiced to a shadow.
But the words came. Were seized by the air, and carried to where a wraith of memories and self-loathing could hear them.
Because that was torment.

"That someone would love me."

"...impudent..."

"...I don't know how to be loved," the girl whispered. "I don't know how to show love. I threw myself at him, and I thought that if he just touched me, if he was willing to touch me when no one else would, if he just..."

Her fingers were trembling.
She had to keep her grip.

"...held my hand..."

The shadow took its own hoofstep forward.

"...why do you even deserve love? What about you is worth loving at all? Nothing. You know that. Nothing... no reason for anyone to care about you, none, not for a mons --"

Her grip tightened.

"Nightwatch cares about me."

The light from the glowsticks twisted. Dimmed.

"...paid... special order from the palace..."

"You had that thought," and her voice felt oddly calm, "because I've had it. Until I wondered what they paid her to get rid of the fear scent."

"...wrappings, you just found those, treatments applied to the fur..."

It made the girl slowly shake her head.

The temperature climbed again. Peaked, began to sink.

"I am so good at this." There was a little wonder in it. "You're every thought I've had about that, aren't you? Every doubt, about everything. And no one's quite as good at tearing me apart as I am. But there was still hope. Hope for something to change, if I just tried. That sent me out of the gap. And hope led to pain, pain to torment, and torment to --"

It was a familiar thought. Repetition had made it so. On the bad days (and that was so many of them), it could turn up once an hour. It was a thought which had worn a well-grooved road of pain into her heart.

I want to go home.

It was just the first time she'd looked at where it led.

"-- what you took from me. What no one in the herd really has."

Her forehooves were almost up to the debris now, and the shadow was so much larger than she was. The chlorine flowed over it, and... nothing was illuminated. The darkness remained just that.

The shadow wasn't casting one.

It didn't matter. She'd been lost within that darkness for most of her life.

"I told you that I was seeking my partner. But you called it something else when you came. Was that the only way you could see it? And after you said that, right in front of them..."

This laugh was bitter.

"I was going home anyway. All you had to do was tell Smith that you were withdrawing me. I couldn't stop that. I would have been deported. Sent back to your custody. But you were out of the gap, Mom. You had to follow their laws, and your blade was just like mine. Plastic. There was nothing left to lose, because I was going to lose everything. So..."

this much taller, you go for the knees

"...I knew I'd already lost. Failed, because I always fail. But I was angry. I didn't lock it down. What was the point? I'd been doing that less and less in the household, because they couldn't scent it anyway. I was angry, because hope is torment -- but the real pain was having it snatched away. By you. Again and always. So..."

The laugh was bitter. It was also sincere.

"...I drew my sword. And I went after you, because the laws let us hurt each other. Were you sick from the flight? Is that why we never got any further than parrying? Our first real fight, over a male. And it put us in the arena, because that was what formality and honor demanded. When you knew you would win. We charged at each other with lances, in front of an audience. Because if you put videos of galloping braless centaurs online, it sells. I know. And..."

I had a clear shot.
He was on my lower back. Stabilizing my aim. You were alone.
you're always alone
And neither of us had armor, because when it's this serious, the strikes are meant to hurt.
I had a clear shot at you. I saw the opening.
And I went for your sleeve. I caught the fabric.
...I took your blouse off.
That part wasn't on purpose.
And you hit my blouse. A loose section near the waist.
...I don't know what you were trying to --
-- Polt told me they would have tripled the ratings if the censors hadn't covered the nudity during the broadcast delay.

"...you hugged me." It was just barely a whisper. "After the fight was over. You hugged me. And do you know something? That was the worst part. I could barely remember the last time you'd hugged me. The last time you'd sung. But it almost felt normal. And what's worse? Hope? The pursuit of it? Or that moment when you think you've gotten what you wanted, and... maybe it won't end. Half my life, Mom, more than half my life without you hugging me, and I had to charge you with a lance to make it happen."

The shadow had no answer for that, not immediately. There were too many doubts to allow a fast sorting.

"You had to justify not winning, I think." So much of her wanted to laugh again, even as the chill soaked into her bones. "That's why you said all of those words. In front of cameras, witnesses. You called me hale and strong. Said I'd grown. That made you look better for the broadcast, because it had all happened between a pair of true centaurs. But as soon as we were back at the house... were you tired? You were warm when you hugged me, and we barely touch each other. The only way we get to touch is if I hit you."

(She had charged down her mother.)
(For him?)
(For herself?)

"I never got to hug a filly during the time for love. Maybe you were too warm. Sick. Feverish. How sick did you have to be to say it in front of them?"

Which gave the wraith of doubts a near-perfect choice.

"...failure... defective..."

"YOU'RE THE ONE WHO FAILED!"

The scream shifted several pebbles from the pile. They bounced off Cerea's hooves, and every last one served as the final straw to break her backs.

"You gave in! Gave in when no one else ever had! You said what had happened, and then you ran! You left me in the household to think about it, night after night of thinking about it and when I tried to reach out to you, to ask, there was never an answer! You said it once, and then you were ashamed! You fled Japan rather than speak to me, to talk about what had to come next! To explain everything which had come in between!"

The temperature had reached its nadir. She barely noticed.

"I thought about it, because that was all I could do! Over and over, and I realized what had to have happened! There was one way for him to know my name, Mom, just one."

That was what happened when blood started to boil, and anger reached the point where even a shadow started to pull back.

"You stayed in contact. Smuggling letters out? Maybe you went to burner phones after a while. But the two of you kept talking. And it didn't matter in the end, did it? I was dragged off the podium, because you can't ever let me make my own decisions. But you made yours. The Princesses lied to me, mother, because maybe an alicorn really doesn't ever tell you everything. Three on my path. Only three."

Her tail was lashing. Too fast, too hard, the long hairs were coming close to the wall, they could be snagged...

"Or maybe they just lost count."

The shadow had an answer for that.

"...and what are you, to all of them? Failure. Embarrassment.Diluted..."

"YOUR FAILURE!", and the words felt too large to be contained by weak flesh. "Were you happy when I vanished? Because it got rid of the evidence, the living evidence of how weak you'd been! Of your sin! I had to think about it over and over, night after night when you wouldn't make contact at all! You pushed me every day, until I felt like my backs would break. Like my legs would fall off. And you were what, mother? Waiting for that to happen? For the hind ones to fall away? And all I had was hope, that I could do something right, that you would touch me and love me and sing again. But you touched me in front of the audience, you hugged me and it didn't feel real. Didn't feel right. Because it wasn't acceptance."

She didn't know if the next thought was a realization, or a lie she was telling herself. She simply recognized that it was a concept which had arisen for the first time, and that meant the shadow knew nothing of it.

"It was forgiveness."

"...what... what are you...?"

"It was forgiveness," Cerea harshly repeated. "Because you made a mistake. And you didn't expect anything to come of it, did you?" That was worth another laugh. "There's always a few mares who don't breed on that day, because you can't synchronize perfectly. Nothing's ever guaranteed. You would have just waited until the next spring. But you knew what had happened. You were the only one who did. You didn't expect consequences. Why would you? Except that..."

She could laugh for a very long time, if she wanted to. Laugh until the echoes filled the caves, reached the waiting ponies outside. Laugh until her mind broke.

But perhaps that had already happened.

"And then you just had to wait while those consequences were developing in your lower belly, waiting to see what would come out. And the shape was right, at least. But you didn't know what kind of damage had been done. Your blood had been diluted, your precious blood and you were the one who'd diluted it. So you pushed, over and over. Trying to find out where the damage was. And I could never meet your goals, not when you kept moving them. Because you didn't have a daughter. You had a side effect. And when I finally challenged you, when you had to find a reason for not having won... then calling me your equal in front of a public audience was easier than admitting to any mistake. Saving face: Japan understands that. Centaurs can live by it. And I wanted that hug to be right. To feel normal..."

The scent of the dying surrounded them. One did not react, and the other could not.

"But once we were away from the cameras? You dropped your little bomb almost like it was an afterthought, belittled me one last time. Through truth, the truth at last. And then you just left. You didn't care about how I would take it. What I was feeling. You don't care. You weren't accepting me, at the end of the fight. You were forgiving yourself. Because 'diluted' is what you really think of me, isn't it? Every day, always and forever. The embrace was false, it couldn't be anything else. I heard what you called Kimihito, mother: everyone did. Is that all you thought of yours, all the way to the end? Is that why you abandoned him? Me? You forgave yourself. Why should I?"

The shadow didn't know what to do. How to respond. Its hands kept opening and closing, the tail was moving in ways which no true tail ever had and the fallout of the breathing pattern told Cerea that no female minotaur had ever been imprisoned in the deep place. The shadow couldn't keep those movements straight.

She wasn't sure when she'd gotten that close. She had to back up just to see the hollows in the face again.

"You acted like there was nothing to forgive," the girl almost casually noted. "You've always been so good at keeping yourself under control. Your scents hidden. So I don't know what it's like, when you lie to yourself. Are you looking for my forgiveness, mother? Do I have something you want? Does the sin have to forgive the sinner? Do the humans have a religion for that?"

...she was... tired.
She'd been tired for months. Something which had started long before a world had stolen her away.
Tired and -- worse.
And her mother hadn't cared.

"I know you're not real," Cerea told the shadow, and there was no moment of doubt. "Maybe that's why I can talk at all. You would never let an inferior speak for so long. Let alone someone who was defective. And there's no one incarcerated within the cloak of your shadow, dreading what might happen next. I'm in your shadow, and I hate it. I know it's not you, Mom. And..."

She almost wanted to sigh.

"...I went for your sleeve, at the end," the girl quietly told the silent, looming, swelling form. "I couldn't strike to truly wound. And even now... I don't think I could strike to kill. Not when it was you."

Her right arm went back.
The sword came up.

"But this isn't you."

She went for the knees.

She had, perhaps, given it too much time to collect itself. It was somewhat more solid than the wall. The cave vibrated slightly when it went down.

Cerea kept swinging.

After a time, the air roiled again.

He was at the bottom.

She'd wound up practically redrawing the last part of the map from scratch. Altered slopes, tilted passageways. And there was supposed to be a sharp bend just before she reached him: the sort of thing where she had the chance to peek around the corner and, if she was lucky, make her observations without being seen.

The bend had been altered: she could see that well before reaching it. There was more of a curve there now, and it would counter just about any attempt she might make at stealth. Her best hope was to catch him looking the other way, or sleeping. Which assumed that anything in Tartarus truly slept.

It also assumed that he was capable of sleeping through this much light.

There was more illumination ahead than she'd seen in the deep place, reflecting into her strangely-smooth corridor. For overall lumens produced, it was just about normal -- but it felt far too harsh. The brightness was nearly correct, and the intensity wasn't. She didn't know how that worked.

(She'd taken off the helmet again. A little less metal helped when trying to move silently, the reflections had been bouncing around the interior, and she didn't want to try making her initial observations through a visor.)

Perhaps it was a hint regarding his sensory capacities. She'd seen pictures of him, taken during the assault. Like Lala, his sclerae were black. Maybe that said something about what he could manage in light wavelengths -- especially when combined with the tiny yellow pinpricks of his irises, where there was barely any pupil visible at all. (Lala was almost normal there, if you factored out the gold.) He might be more comfortable in a different range and given Tartarus, the current one almost assuredly wasn't it.

She strained her ears, rotated them, trying to hear any movement ahead. The deep place used that moment to set up a breeze, and fragments of whispers tried to play with her psyche. She assigned them a loss, then made sure she had a firm grip on the sword.

Assess and evaluate.
See if he'll talk.
(One to another.)
I have to do this.

Four hooves moved forward, as silently as she could make them shift at all. Almost sliding them. But she was expecting to fail at stealth, and Tartarus did not disappoint her.

Something about the stone changed. Metal scraped the altered minerals, squealed...

That was when she was permitted to hear movement, as her ears untucked themselves from the fall of her hair. Four hooves, and the beat was quick.

Get it over with.

She matched the expected pace, gripped the sword's hilt and went directly for the bend.

Nothing about the environment was quite as she'd been told to expect it, and that was the first bad sign.

There was supposed to be a small, perfectly unnatural antechamber in front of his confinement. Littered with small spikes extruding from the cave floor: even with armored shoes to protect her frogs, enough had been reported that it would be hard to find a level place to stand. But the stone was smooth, perfectly smooth, and the ceiling was too high.

He was in the cell. Behind bars of stone, ones which seemed as if they were thinner than they should have been.

Or perhaps they simply appeared that way by comparison.

She had seen his eyes in the pictures. She'd also seen his proportions. Overmuscled to the point of parody when swollen with magic. Without it, he was thin and weak. His base form seemed old, but -- it was hard to truly tell from the pictures. Something about the still images had suggested a long illness. The sort of thing which aged you long before the years could.

He was in the cell, awake and on his hooves. He had rather naturally turned towards the sound of her approach.

She emerged from the cave's corridor.
He stared.
They saw each other.

And what she saw was that the shade of his fur had climbed through several shades of brightness, moving from dulled henna into something which was closer to burgundy. (He had fur on his torso. It felt unnatural.) The beard was thicker, and she could see the first hints of white mane starting to regrow. Somepony had removed the nose ring.

His arms came up as he stared at her, and they were the arms of an athlete. Someone who worked out for the sake of staying in shape, and had yet to develop the obsession for finding out just how many muscles could interfere with each other. The legs were equally strengthened, and both torsos almost shone with new health.

She couldn't see much of the cell itself, because her initial focus was on him. But she was measuring him against the interior, which meant glancing up to another stone ceiling which was higher than it should have been. Smoother. She almost thought she saw tiny waterstains.

He was slightly taller than she was, at least if she cared to stop measuring at the top of the skull: the horns added to that. In good condition. And there was intelligence in his eyes, thought, she was looking at a stallion who could think and --

-- there was no attraction: she was thankful for that. (She wanted to believe that she would have felt nothing even if he hadn't looked so much like a baboon.) Nothing approaching a hormone tried to surge within her body.

But he was looking at her.

She didn't look away. You didn't take your gaze off the enemy. And she saw that he was far healthier than he should have been, stronger, and there was only one possible cause. She didn't think anything truly recovered in Tartarus. Not for longer than it might take to hope it would last.

He looked at her. And she knew nothing of his scents, what any of them meant. At the moment, he mostly smelled like loam, with hints of ozone and faint traces of rust. And there was something else lurking in the background of that, something which made her think of the disc --

-- his arms had come up. Hands tightly gripped the bars.

(Three fingers and a thumb. The digits were thicker than she'd seen on the stallions of her herd. She wondered about his dexterity.)

Tightly enough that the fur itself went tense, let her see hints of dark flesh underneath. There were thin scars laced down the back of each hand, multiple trailing lines which terminated at the fingertips and stretched back towards the shoulders.

She saw all of that, in what was just about a single instant. And she saw him look at her, with those tiny yellow pupils roaming across her form. She could read nothing of his scents -- but his features, while simian, gave her something of a baseline to work with.

She was looking directly at him when his disgust tried to surge.

He had found nothing attractive about her face or form, nothing at all. Perhaps the rare females of his species were just that different, or he simply had taste.

But in many ways, that was the least of his reactions. He didn't desire her. But he looked at another centaur, what might be the only other centaur in all the world...

They were both in Tartarus. There was a prerequisite for torment, and it rose in his eyes. Spread out from there and for a moment, another kind of radiance almost took away the ugliness. The little gasp came close to stealing away monstrosity.

And then he spoke.

There were hints of gravel in the voice, and the tones seemed to be trying to push themselves away from the default of an embedded sneer. It was the kind of voice which could become grating rather easily, and had never seen a need to moderate itself for the sake of any others. But for those first two sentences, it was a voice which was filled with a different sort of desire. The voice of waking dream.

She heard his hope.

"You came," Tirek softly declared, and every syllable shone with dark wonder. "I called you, and you came..."

Unrepentant

It could be said that she understood, in that moment when she first heard him speak. Recognized exactly what had happened to her, because the party involved had just confessed to what he could never see as guilt. It could also be said that electric words fell into her ears and skimmed the surface of her brain, looking for a place upon which they could truly alight. Some part of her knew, but -- not the whole. Not just yet, because there was simply too much to reconcile. To see and hear and scent, especially scent. The scents which carried her across the remaining span of her life.

She had been moon-touched at the moment she'd entered Tartarus: something which had placed her senses into overdrive and left them there. Her choices were to either continually sort out a near-flood of data or drown. And when the myriad factors brought by emotion churned the waters, as the torment of Tartarus did its best to play...

She had heard him, and some part of her understood. But those neurons held back the full message, because there was too much information coming in and sorting had to take place. Her survival might depend on it.

He was... grasping the bars of his cell, as he stared at her during that brief moment of wonder and hope. Two columns of merged stalactites and stalagmites, one in each hand, and the stone seemed thinner than it should have been.

Grasping. Something about that was trying to call for her attention, but in the midst of everything else...

She was still looking at him. Deliberately trying to put sight foremost, because this was her first encounter with what Equestria thought of as a centaur, and she didn't know what all of the scents meant. And in Tartarus, where the olfactory miasma saturated all, gave her too much to sort through while deliberately trying to drown the most vital details...

At first, she thought that multiple hooves had been damaged during the final battle: a fraction of an instant was required before she recognized their cloven state as natural. The one which had been split by Diamond's tiara displayed some degree of healing, but... it was rough. The new keratin appeared uneven, and the shade didn't quite match what surrounded it. The hooves were a silvery sort of grey, but -- dulled. There was nothing reflective about the color, not a single true hint of metal --

I keep thinking of the disc.
About metal...

-- and if she didn't have the evidence of the rough-grained poor healing before her, she might have thought he'd painted them. A minor act of vanity -- but the color was natural.

When it came to her own stallions, she was certainly used to the lower torso possessing a different shade than the upper. Their upper torsos didn't have fur. His did. The burgundy was mostly present on the arms and face: from the upper waist down, the dominant hue was a sort of dulled black. There was also a darker growth of fur along his cheeks: sideburns of sorts, just above the white beard. And the tail -- less pale than the facial hair, and the fall was more lush than the herd stallions ever displayed, but... there was something about the color which suggested a permanent stain.

They roughly shared the same ear placement. But in his case, the location represented their maximum height without being moved to the top of the skull, and she knew their range of motion would be more limited than her own. The horns would get in the way.

He was wearing a rough-cut vest: something where the arm holes had ragged fabric around the edges, with no trims or attempts at hemming at all. And --

-- there was fur covering his lower torso.
Just fur.
She was desperately hoping he had a trick valve.

Sounds: he breathed, and... the rhythm was off. For mares, the Second Breath was something which had to be learned and she wasn't always sure as to just which capacity her herd's stallions had lost: the internal, or that which allowed such refined levels of education to occur. But if you watched them, knew where to look -- then it was possible to see how they weren't managing it. He breathed, and the upper ribs shifted. That was all.

She could hear water dripping somewhere in the caves. Water, or a fluid which shouldn't be confused for it. Soft trickling noises. Off in the distance, a living hill keened its agony to an uncaring world.

And for scent --

metal, something about

-- in the olfactory world... everything was strange.

She knew he was a stallion. (Nothing could have made her try to get a look at the underside of his lower torso, and she really didn't want to see him rear up.) But when compared to those of her herd, a crucial odor had been muted. Testosterone had its own scent, and he possessed very little of it. Age, perhaps, or Tartarus not allowing such things to be produced at a normal level.

He looked healthy. But the roots of his fur had gone rigid, it had raised the strands, uncovered what would have normally been hidden under a surprisingly thick coat and exposed it to the too-intense light. And...

...she had already seen the thin scars on his hands. And even when moon-touched, she could just barely begin to track the rest. Winding cicatrix rivers fed by endless keloid tributaries, winding across so much of his body, so much --

-- there was a pattern. They roughly followed the skeleton, stopped at the jaw (and the hinges felt wrong) and had their heaviest lines along the full length of the spine. But every such scar indicated an injury which had healed long ago, and yet --

-- her senses were frantic for relief, had been seeking it for hours, and there was an instant where they almost found it.

There was fresh air. Fresh, something which Tartarus needed an extra moment to taint, and she only detected it because it had come directly to her. Not so much washed across her features as flicked, because there wasn't enough for a true current. It seemed to start somewhere in the cell's ceiling, and it briefly cut through the miasma, the constant stench, that which Tartarus had been inflicting upon her without bothering to have that fade towards normalcy at any point --

-- he looked healthy. There was a moment when he almost shone with hope.

But there was a dominant scent in the stone antechamber with the too-smooth floor, and it was very much like that which had been in the deep place from the very beginning. It just happened to be coming from the stallion.

metal, some kind of metal overlaid with rust

He smelled like something which was dying.
Dying and couldn't finish.

She looked at him. He stared at her.
And he smiled.

It went too far up his face, only parting the lips at the far corners of the mouth. She felt as if his jaw could open much more than her own. A gaping maw.

His head tilted to the right, came back to center. There was something a little odd about the movement of the neck.

"Is she friend," he softly asked the caves, with no more than a light cascade of falling pebbles within the gravelly voice. "Or is she foe?" And then, as the cold smile spread a little more, "Neither. Something much more rare, precious and true."

Another little gasp, a sound born from wonder, and his grip tightened upon the stone.

"I didn't think..." he began anew, and that was briefly cut off by a tiny gulp of saliva and air. "When you didn't appear, right then and there, I thought..."

One slow head shake, and then the gift of hope fulfilled brought new light to yellow irises. Something where there was barely any hint of pupil. She wondered how much he could truly see.

"Neither friend nor foe," Tirek stated. "Ally. Step forward. And then we can both leave this place behind."

She gave him one hoofstep. Just one. Keeping her gaze upon him, as he continued to look at her.

He didn't want her: she knew that. Not sexually. There was no attraction, no drive to possess. But he had desire. Everything about the simian face was emanating raw want. He longed for her, for everything she represented. To have her at his side...

A myriad of sensory information had been sorted out. Recently-acquired facts seemed to be next in the queue.

"You called me," Cerea quietly replied. The question mark was mostly implied, because the question had been answered.

No summoners.
No cult.
No grand plot.
Just you.
If it wasn't for you...

She could feel her muscles going tense, her hands trying to close. Forced everything down into neutrality, just as if her mother was watching.

His head tilted, to the left this time. Recentered again.

"Is that why it took so long?" he asked, and the gravel grew a little rougher. Discontent, frustrated and not entirely sure where the blame was supposed to lie. "You were called, and you didn't know who had called you?" The snort was a strangely natural sound. "Or did you arrive well away from my vicinity, and had to find your way here --"

He paused. Eyelids scrunched across the dark expenses of his sclerae. Something which looked very much like suspicion.

"-- how did you even get in?" Not so much question as demand. "I knew there was someone in the halls, and that it wasn't a pony. Or a griffon, or a yak, or anything else. Something working its way down. But it usually takes a pony to open the Gate." Another snort. "I'm not even sure the other species even remember their own versions of the ritual. Not when they just let the alicorn manage everything. But the rituals are species-specific, and -- there is no centaur ritual."

And for a single instant, his eyes closed with pain.

"Because it could be said that there is no centaur species," the stallion finished, and the yellow pinpricks regarded her again. "Did someone open the Gate for you? If so, where are they? Do they know why you descended? And are they willing to watch you come out again?"

One hand partially drew the sword: just enough to show about twelve centimeters of blade. Cerea roughly nodded sideways to the weapon, then slid it back into the scabbard.

Tirek -- squinted.

"Strange," he said. "I can see it. And yet..." Another head shake, faster this time. "...strange. The sword brought you in?"

She pictured the moment when the blade had stopped the ceiling's descent, paired it with memories of truths told long ago. Tried to make her body react with the subtle scent of honesty --

-- he's not reacting.
Not to that. Because he's not the kind of centaur I know. He doesn't have an olfactory bulb to match.
He's watching my body.

(He didn't want her. Not that way.)

I think he's looking for shifts in posture. Something like the way his shoulders just went tight.
There was no one like you in all the world. They had trouble with your body language. And your features are so different than mine -- but some of the ways they contort are similar. That little wrinkling at the top of the nose, tension in the shoulders...
You're suspicious.
You still have hope. But you're not sure.
And... there's something else.
You just sneered a little. Were you aware of that? Did you even try to hold it back, when no one knows what a centaur sneer looks like?
What do you suspect?
What do you know?

All of that went through her mind. But for his answer, all she did was nod again.

"Interesting," Tirek decided. "Still --"

His grip tightened on the bars, to the point where she could see knuckles going pink under the fur --

-- the floor in here is too smooth. They told me I would barely be able to find any place to stand which wasn't full of spikes and hooks. There aren't any.
I just looked at your cell. There isn't much in there. A few thin blankets in one corner. But the walls are almost regular, curved and -- smooth. If you tried to sleep, you would be sleeping on stone, but -- it's just stone.
Why am I scenting traces of fresh air?
Why aren't those bars extruding something to tear your hands apart?
Something is wrong.

"-- I have to ask," the stallion continued. "What did you get from the casting? A sense of my location, driving you onward? How did you find me at all?"

He's talking because he's suspicious. Because if he can make me talk, it'll help him to figure out what's wrong.
But two can play that game.
...I don't know if I can play that game...
(Something was wrong. The bars weren't reacting to his grip, and it had gone on far too long for the deep place's favorite source of torment: the illusion of normalcy. She had to remember that something was wrong.)
But it still means he's talking...

The suspicion was probably most of the reason for his speech. But perhaps there was something more to it: that there was simply someone present to speak with. Not his kind, but -- as close as he might have come in years. Decades, or even centuries: she didn't know exactly when he had first been incarcerated. Just that he hadn't died. He only smelled like he was dying...

Someone he could speak with. One to another.

"Your location is rather well known," she offered.

A small nod. He was willing to acknowledge that.

"But my arrival didn't allow me to seek it out immediately," Cerea calmly went on. "I arrived several hundred kilometers from the site of your battle." And briefly wondered how the unit of measure had arrived in his ears. The wires would have hissed --

wires, why am I thinking about the wires

He sharply inhaled, and a surge of frustration bared his teeth.

"That far." The anger was fully in the open, but -- it still didn't have a direction. A target.

"And," she added, "there were more problems than that. It would take too much time to recount them all --"

His eyes narrowed again.

"What do you know of me?" It had been a demand.

Careful. "I have your name in my mind," she told him. "'Tirek' --"

"-- Lord Tirek," came with a sneer.

"-- but it didn't come with an image," she quickly added. "So I knew I was called by someone with that name, and little more. It complicated the quest. And even now, after I managed to learn enough to find you -- I have to question the veracity of my sources. You might imagine that the ponies in particular were unwilling to speak well of the one who had nearly won." (Which got her a rather curt, extremely frustrated nod.) "Additionally --" and she felt free to let some of her own feelings rise through her skin "-- arriving after you did meant it was rather hard to get anypony to speak with a centaur at all. They had certain -- associations. The perception of commonalities..."

The right hand came off the bars. Three fingers extended towards her, then curled back in.

"We have one thing in common," Tirek quietly said. And there was a weariness in his voice, the thinnest coat of an ancient veneer over half-buried hatred.

"Our form," Cerea granted. With some variations. A lot of variations. Evolution in rough parallel...

He shook his head. The horns briefly grazed the bars.

"No magic," he told her, and the heavy words had their way with his features, briefly dragging them down with the pull of regret. "You have no magic. No more than I did."

And she nodded.

He took a slow breath. Only one set of ribs swelled.

"I thought..." The right hand came off the bars again, lifted to his face and briefly covered his eyes before dropping back down. "I couldn't be sure, with everything that was going on. In the midst of chaos and pain. Even now, all of these moons later, I'm still trying to sort some of it out. But the spell was seeking, trying to find someone, and -- it was like watching pages of a book. Each with a painting on it, flipping by too fast. Not a sense of movement, but... a blur. Overlapping images blending into nothing, as the colors distorted towards mud. But I've had time to reflect, and... I retained some memories. Glimpses."

Looking directly at her again, and there was no disgust. Simply... want.

"I thought I saw your home," Tirek just barely voiced as his eyes closed again, with the words carried by the briefest waft of clean air. "A herd. You have a herd?"

He couldn't see her, not in that instant. And perhaps he'd never had any need to conceal his expressions at all, not when he lived in a world which had to learn how to read every one.

It was, perhaps, the single worst instant of her time within the caverns. When she looked at his face and remembered collapsing in her own cell, buried away from the sight of ponies. Thinking about a lifetime of solitude, trapped in a world which feared her. With no others of her kind, none who would ever love her...

She looked into the reflection of endless loneliness. And in that lone horrible moment, there was no monstrosity left.

"...yes."

It could have been a nod. Or the weight of eternal solitude had briefly pressed against his horns.

"How many?" the hollow voice asked. It had to be hollowed, for all of the gravel had dropped out. "How many centaurs in your home?"

She didn't owe him anything.
He was the reason for every death. For all of the pain.
And yet, she answered.

"Across the world? Thirty thousand."

His eyes opened. The yellow was almost damp.

"Thirty thousand," he slowly repeated. "And none with magic."

She nodded to that.

"A herd," the stallion said, as longing tones reached towards the impossible. "There was just a glimpse. A dream. The sort of thing which Tartarus would craft, found outside the caves. A source of endless torment. The thought that somewhere, there was a herd. In a place I couldn't reach..."

And then he smiled.

It was just for an instant: something true and dark. Then it was gone.

"I had parents," Tirek quietly told her, as the fit shoulders sagged. "There are those who wouldn't believe that, if you told them. Even with portraits, some would say we just appear. But whatever exists in the blood, to produce a centaur... it's fickle. It doesn't like consistency. I had parents -- of a sort. But my brother --"

You had a --

Every muscle tensed. It was easy to see, when he was in such good condition. Especially for someone whose scent --

"-- brother," and the word had been spat. "Does that even apply, when someone isn't the least bit like you in form? Not even the same species. But we were told that we were siblings. And at the very least, we shared both thought and goal -- at the start. Because neither of us had magic. I researched, as best I could, before it all started. I couldn't find proof that any centaur had ever possessed magic, but -- there was so little recorded. Perhaps a few had, and --" the rage surged "-- I was the exception. I just knew that I could feel the void, in every moment when I watched another living within the joy of their magic. Donkeys, ponies, ibex, yaks, buffalo, zebras... name a species and find its power. Our parents -- if there was anything they might have possessed, they wouldn't speak of it. Said nothing through all the days of their lives. There wasn't even a single word just before their deaths. Or they didn't care that they lived with a void inside. And my supposed brother? He had no more magic than I did -- but at least the twisting of blood had gifted him with wings. Flight. All I could do was gallop. And people stared, wherever we went..."

She could see the anger rising. The heat of it, evaporating everything which had made him briefly seem like someone worthy of pity. But it was in the name of that lost moment that she spoke.

"I know what it feels like."

Bitterly, "Do you? A herd. Always a place you could return in safety, to be with others of your kind."

Not any more.
Her hand tensed on the hilt.
Because of you.

"We needed magic," Tirek stated. "There was no other way to exist, as the only ones who lacked it. So we searched, we explored, and... it was something of a riddle. How did you gain magic, without using it in the first place? But there was an answer. It..."

His eyes had brightened. But the rest of his form had gone tight.

"...took more research," he continued. "After we had the theory, and found it would be the only way. Each of us had to... help the other. I'll always credit Scorpan for that, even now. That he was willing. And as the elder, the one who had been without for the longer time, I was first."

The white tail, its fall seeming forever stained, went limp.

"Over and over," distant words told her, as if the speaker was barely aware of them. "He had to be so careful. To cut deep enough, and to do so without killing me. Every time. And I did the same for him. Because at the time... I thought that was love --"

He stopped. Looked directly at her, and almost snickered.

Don't look shocked.
Repelled.
Even when he just told me that his brother cut him --
-- can he read my features?
Cutting.
Over and over.
What did they do?

"I was wrong, of course," he bitterly announced. "How can someone be your kin, when they don't share your form? That's easy. They have to want everything you do, and give it to you without fail. He had. Until that day. After we'd both healed, when we came to settled lands and..."

Stopped again. Perhaps he'd decided that he was saying too much, especially when the suspicion had just dropped back into his features. Asking a question now might cut off the flow entirely. And she'd always been so bad with words...

But she had no other way.

"Devices under the skin?" she guessed. "Made to respond with a thought?"

His eyes widened. And then he snorted again: not with derision or contempt, but as an expression of something very close to true laughter.

"We considered it! He and I spent moons asking about configurations! But it was too limited. It wouldn't really be our magic. We could only do what the devices offered, and there's only so much room within a body. Space to use. It had to be small. Small and fine..."

She risked another hoofstep. The helmet shifted slightly, knocked against some of the other things she'd secured to the webbing. Two spheres bounced off each other within their soft bag. A canister rattled --

-- he was looking at her. Yellow pinpricks roamed up and down her body. Examining all of the things she was carrying, as the right hand pointed its fingertips at her again.

But then the palm centered on stone. Fingers closed around the same bar.

"I went first," Tirek said. "When we found someone alone. I went first. And I wondered, after that. Did he suspect what would happen? That it wouldn't be a partial tap with a sapient, a tiny moment of weakness for a few thaums which nopony would miss? That it had to be everything, every time?"

Decibels were beginning to climb. Tones sharpened. Muscles bulged.

"Did he let me go first, because he felt that he'd worked out the whole of it and wanted to see if he was right before he made the attempt? To find out if the stomach would change, where eating and drinking was ashes and waste in the mouth! That we couldn't create thaums --"

His breath blasted into her nostrils, nearly drove her back as the shout came close to shaking the stone.

"-- and it was never 'we' at all, was it? Because after he saw what had happened to me, he refused to use the power which I had labored to gift him! He flew to the ponies, asked for what he saw as help! But I felt that coming from him, knew the betrayal was inevitable! And I couldn't let him tell them exactly what we'd done. I followed him when he flew, stayed close and hidden enough to know he hadn't given them details yet. That was waiting for morning, for when their best thaumatologists would arrive. What if he told them how to reverse all of the physical aspects, and the changes were still there? With no way to feed, endlessly shrinking in on myself, eating myself --"

And she knew.
Because he'd said too much.
Because she hadn't learned enough to reject what never should have been possible.

Twilight said it. Ponies, anything with magic... calories into thaums, and thaums to power.
But he can't do that.
He can't metabolize food. He can absorb thaums, and that keeps him alive. He just doesn't have any way to create them. And he was draining the whole, every time. So he would have to keep finding new sources.
How many hours of life does one pony grant him?
One city?
And he'd have to keep doing it.
Over.
And over.
And over...

He'd stopped. His chest was heaving. Muscles rippled. And then his body relaxed into a sort of detached serenity.

"I don't regret it," Tirek evenly said. "Not even what I had to do with the corpse, to get rid of the evidence. That's how I know he was never truly my brother. And I kept his necklace for a time. As a reminder to never trust so deeply again."

She wanted to vomit.
She needed to hit him.
She spoke.

"I struck out against my mother." The words felt as if they were coming from kilometers away. "I didn't care. That's how I knew she wasn't really my mother."

He blinked.

"Not emotionally," Cerea added with a quick, desperate-feeling snort. "But my father! My father actually wasn't my father! Not by blood, and never by love...!"

She'd almost been expecting the laugh.

"Love," he openly dismissed. "Just as pointless as friendship, in the end. Another version of the same lie, hiding under a different name. You could almost pity the ones who believe in it. But it's so much easier to educate..."

Think about the 87th precinct.
This is an interrogation. Even if I'm the last person who should be doing it, I'm the only one here.
Direct the topic.
The scars. They did something physical. Something to their bodies...

"How did you stay alive, once they put you in here?"

Which just proved how bad she was with words, because she remembered the answer at the moment she'd finished asking the question.

His expression suggested that he'd just decided she was an idiot. She felt it was justified.

"I know Tartarus won't permit someone to die," she quickly added. "Only to be killed. But --" and the thought blazed through her "-- you're surrounded by magic right now. The deep place may not be fully aware, but it's alive, and there's magic here. Nothing about Tartarus works without magic! You could have --"

The stallion's face had just twisted with the memory of pain.

"-- I did," Tirek told her. "I..." Every strand of fur vibrated across the duration of the shudder. "...was nearly dead, when they put me in here. Nearly. But of course Tartarus wouldn't allow that process to complete. So I was just weak and in pain which would never end. And I had the same thought, girl. Take what had been so generously offered to me. And I could. But -- consider the nature of the meal. I took in the power of torment, just the smallest portions -- and it was so much less kind than that of chaos. In the end, chaos merely changed me. Torment... did what it always does. I drunk it in, and... Tartarus wouldn't let that last spark of its own magic die. There was always a little left. Agony from within, to join the tortures pounding outside the skin. Building up after every attempt. Slowly. But I kept trying, because I hoped that I would find a way to make it work. And I had time to practice, because that's the darkest gift of this place. Time. And I learned."

A single chuckle became the darkest sound of her life.

"Learned that the act of draining creates a channel," the stallion evenly declared. "Thaums flow one way. But I could try to send orders back. Touching a dreaming mind. And it nearly killed me. If Tartarus had been truly awake, capable of real thought -- then it would have struck back. But it won't let any source of pain go, not unless we kill each other. And with enough time..."

He doesn't tell her all of it: he doesn't think of himself as being anywhere near that foolish. But he doesn't really consider anything he's saying to be important. He certainly doesn't believe she can work it out for herself. He has changed, and those outside have not. There is a centaur here, merely a centaur, the one he called -- but she has no magic. Apparently the sword does something (and he can see it, yet cannot see it -- why?), but not the female.

No magic.

How can she possibly matter?

The sword, however...

It can take centuries to refine a proper plan, and the dark gift of the deep place is that centuries will be available. You learn the tricks, if you pay attention. That there are periods when the incarcerated will be permitted to wander the corridors. Getting almost all the way to the exit, in the name of thwarted hope.

During a moons-removed moment of 'now', the centaur is in the corridors. For the second time in what he believes to have been no more than a few days.

The plan has been refined. However, actual experimentation is -- limited. Every time he opens the channel, the amount of permanent residue trapped within his form builds. It has reached the point where he's barely mobile at that point of near-death, where it takes just about every effort he can muster simply to walk, and doing more than that threatens to make the frail shell collapse. Tapping brings back a degree of strength, yes -- for a short time. But he can't take the whole of the deep place in. That seems to be something limited to the truly living, or -- his body simply shuts down the channel before it does what Tartarus would never permit.

Taking too much of the deep place at once, knowing what it does in the aftermath, would count as suicide.

And even so, he'd thought about trying to drain more from Tartarus. To weaken it to the point where it wouldn't be able to fight him at all. But while his ability to steal might not have an ultimate limit, his capacity for withstanding pain does. And there's also a crisis scenario. The one where he takes so much that the agony sends him unconscious, and -- the magic he took turns out to be that which keeps the other cells closed.

The soon-to-be-former occupants would know where to find him. And if they didn't, Tartarus might just give them a path.

He has learned, over the course of endless time. There is a mind within the caves, and it is not fully awake. It may be dreaming. And if you whisper into the ear of a dreamer, there is a chance to direct the dream.

It's a risk. Everything he does is a risk. Tell an endless dream of pain the wrong thing, something which doesn't entirely fit the rest of the eternal chimerical dance, and it might wake. But the dream knows that sometimes, prisoners go into the corridors. Because it hurts more that way. And you can, if you're careful, get almost all the way to the exit.

He can't open it. Nothing he does will force that, because no part of the dream includes letting a prisoner go.

But when you stand so close to the Gate, so close to freedom -- you can hear the guardian, because the deep place wants those within to hear it. The splashes of poisonous foam, and teeth grinding as they long for a chance at time-prolonged flesh.

You can hear the guardian, when you're just about at the Gate.
That means it can hear what's happening within.
Tartarus makes sounds. It whispers. Moans are common. It speaks in the voices of the dead, and gave up on mimicking his brother a long time ago. There is no torment there.
If you know that it produces sounds... if you understand that the guardian possesses, for all the horrors of its form, some aspect of the canine...

The experiments almost killed him. (Almost. Always almost.) And when he tried this in his cell a few -- days? -- ago, there was a new source of pain. His hearing is not quite like that of the other species. A minor difference, in his opinion. Almost pointless. And perhaps if he'd thought a little more, chased that down across all the possibilities, he might have found something very much like magic.

He chose another route.

But knowing when certain frequencies are present... that is what allowed the first stage to go through.

Tartarus produces sound.
So if you can force it, just for a few minutes, to create ultrasound...

He can hear the guardian's pain. The thrashing, as it tries to fight a foe it cannot see or reach. That pleases him. But it cannot strike. There is nothing which can be touched, and but one means of escape.

He hears claws on stone. Howling becomes barking, and then... silence. The beast has plunged through the barrier, and it won't return immediately. The guardian would be wary of the sound returning, but -- this is the lesser self. It has not known Sun and warmth for some time. So it will run, until it is found.

Because the lesser self is something those outside can hope to control.
Control and... bring back.

The centaur couldn't open the gate. He didn't have to. He went back to his cell, steadily shrinking along the way, barely able to cross the last few body lengths. And he did all of it in something very much like joy, because after the guardian is inevitably found...

There are always survey teams. But their examinations are exacting. In the wake of the guardian's return, the palace will -- take a prisoner count. Make sure nothing got out. And that's it.

The ponies come. (He's lucky enough to be tapping the channel when they arrive. He has nearly been killing himself in checking. Nearly.) He can feel the ritual. It's possible to count the sigils. There are seven --

Eight.

It almost feels as if the deep place pulls back from itself. Trying to find a perspective from which it can examine the thought.

Eight.

Tartarus twists. That which is not quite waking thought seems to surge towards consciousness. If it wakes --

-- he doesn't care.

Eight.

The ponies came.

They reached his cell. He stared at them until they left. Intimidation doesn't come naturally when he's been reduced to bones, skin, and just enough muscle fiber to make the whole arrangement twitch. But the twitching usually gets them to depart.

And then he tapped Tartarus, for what he told himself was the last time. Donned the traveling cloak which he'd been wearing during the capture, and... told the deep place to dream about a prisoner in the corridors.

Then he'd hurried, as best he could.

It is a new now. Seven are leaving. They gallop towards Sun and warmth and air which doesn't burn their lungs. The Gate begins to close --

EIGHT!

It had not been the proper bargain. But he had given the deep place (and through it, the guardian) a lie to revisit. The echo of a recent dream.

There's just enough of an opening left to pass through, once he's lost nearly all of the stolen strength.

To crawl, as only a centaur can. Poorly.

They made him crawl.

He stays next to the wall. Following the exact curve. The guardian watches him leave. The bargain of blood and soil.

One pony. Once he's out of the exit tunnel, he can find one of the roads. Try to reach the nearest settlement before he dies, now that he's in a place where he can die again. If he's especially lucky, he might find a monster along the way. He never tried that before they locked him in for the crime of trying to survive. It's not tasty, but -- it'll sustain him. He knows he can steal from monsters now.

He had time to try a lot of things.

But when he stole from the monsters in the deep place -- their essence has been corrupted by Tartarus: it's part of why you're not supposed to eat and drink what it offers. Taking from them was...

...he couldn't get more than a fraction.
He wanted to die...

But he's heading for the surface. Once he's under Sun and Moon, a single monster will keep him alive for a time. After that, he just needs one pony.

Then another.
And another.
And another...

...he could take it slowly. Stay in the shadows. But he hasn't truly dined in a very long time, and the alicorn will figure out what's been happening rather quickly. (There was a world left which he could escape to, so the alicorn still exists.) He tends to leave evidence behind, and most of it is still moving because disposing of a body properly takes too long. The last lesson gifted by his false brother.

So he'll have to build up his strength as quickly as possible. Reach the point where they can't match him. Beat him. Take him prisoner again.

Of course, there's only so many ponies. But there used to be other nations. Still are, as some of them send in a prisoner now and again. A few of them could exist under the old names.

He wonders what they taste like.

"Snowball effect," Cerea heard herself say.

His ears twisted for a moment. She wondered if he'd heard any hissing.

"Yes," Tirek eventually replied. "It gets easier, after the first few. Faster."

And your range starts to go up.
I asked how they'd caught you the first time. And it was actually simple.
Total evacuation.
You hadn't figured out the limits on what you could do yet. Hadn't experimented enough. You knew you could drain from a living sapient being, and that was as far as you'd gone. So they cleared out several square kilometers, pushed animals and monsters ahead of them as a just-in-case, and waited. Because the population density was apparently lower, and all they had to do was get a fairly small number away from you. Stay ahead.
Then they waited.
Eventually, you collapsed.
They found where you'd fallen. Kept you asleep as much as possible, and stayed out of range. But they were afraid to examine you. To get too close, when you could still drain them. You can't metabolize calories and when you drained someone, they lost the ability to produce thaums. No one you hurt in the first attacks ever recovered. Just trying to analyze you might have woken you up, because it would have meant using magic. Given you a power source. And if it all started again, with you able to reach more people, get to the point where you could sustain for a while...
You had to be locked away as quickly as possible.
For the sake of the world.
Before you destroyed it.

"But you weren't expecting Discord."

His face wrinkled with amusement.

"Oh, I was," he declared. "Just not in that fashion. I managed to send him a message, early on. An offer, you might say. And he was thinking it over. Cooperate, or... well, I imagine he understands the alternative now. Since he went through it."

He let go of the bars. Stepped back, then turned the long body. Paced to one wall, turned, came back the other way...

"Something of a surprise," Tirek admitted. "But --"

Stop smiling.
Or at least don't smile until I can reach your teeth.
...assess and evaluate. I know he's active. He's clearly been draining magic from the surface, or he wouldn't look like this. But we don't know how yet. That's what has to be shut down. Because we have to be a few hundred meters underground and he didn't have that kind of range when he was a walking hill.

So I get all of the answers I can -- practicality reared up -- I hope there's actually some real answers in this, or that somepony can sort them out from the lies -- and I get out of here. Give the information to the Princesses, and see what they do with it.

Hope there's anything they can do with it.
Anything at all.

"-- all things considered," the stallion continued, "I'm grateful."

"Grateful," she just barely managed to repeat.

"Things change," he casually remarked. "And without him, I'm not sure I'd have you."

The smile became that much warmer.

"I don't think you've provided a name," Tirek added. "Allies should introduce themselves, don't you think?"

She had two to offer. He had no right to one, and she wasn't sure she ever wanted to hear the other again.

He can't scent when I'm lying.
He can't.
...please let this work...

"I have some concerns about this alliance."

He paused in his pacing, casually glanced towards her. "Oh?"

"An ally summoned by magic," she made herself say, pushing each word through the miasma, "could be removed in the same manner. If anypony reverses your spell --"

He seemed to find that amusing.

"They can't. They're missing a crucial ingredient." He lightly tapped his sternum. "Forever."

He has taken in the power of chaos, because that was merely another kind of power and so it had to be his. If power exists, then it will ultimately be his. Because he has the ability to take it.

What right do others have, to do what he cannot? What kind of creator would deprive so? It should be his. All of it. A long time ago, and forever after. The ability equals the right, and he has simply been exercising his right to catch up. And he has swollen vast with stolen power, and it will last this time, it will last because he's surely taken a sufficient amount to let some portion linger.

But it's best to play it safe. If some is good, then 'all' is better. And 'all' means the rest of Equestria, followed by crossing the first border. Eventually, he'll find where the alicorn went. And with her power...

He'd been debating that part of the plan. Is it best to leave the alicorn intact?

Shortly after he took his first true meal, he tried to use the magic. To cast. And he can do that, but -- it's hard. (He feels that his lack of skill is easily justified: exactly how was he meant to practice?) Basic effects seem to take three times the effort which he feels they should, and -- casting burns thaums.

He's had to fight a few times since his victory began. The initial round (and that reminds him: he has to find a calendar and discover what year it is) allowed him to discover a means of creating kinetic blasts. But he has to work for it. The blasts grow more powerful if he puts more strength into them, but -- it took a lot for him to get that strength. There's only one way to replace lost thaums.

Fortunately, recharge sources are all over the place. Even if some of them are trying to run away.

They're trying to evacuate again: he knows that. But he's become strong enough to let his ever-increasing range chase a few. And now that he's had a little more time to experiment -- he's been able to tap the magic of monsters and plants and the wild zone: all things he hadn't tried before. They can't isolate him from everything. And the alicorn can't hide forever.

So when he finds her, if he's strong enough that she won't matter -- maybe he should let her keep that magic. After all, there's only so much one can practice raising Sun and if he gets it wrong too many times in a row, he's going to have a new problem.

Or maybe alicorn thaums come with a side dose of skill. Solves everything.

At the time he'd reached Canterlot, he'd still been trying to decide if he should find out. But then they'd evacuated the Princess, he heard some shouting ponies suggest a plural, and it made sense to get more power before he took on multiple alicorns.

Ponies had been expanding their civilization over the years. That town to the west was new. It looked delicious.

He'd gone for it, taking on new mass along the way. At his current size, it was becoming easier to ignore the screams. The sensation that his hooves were occasionally squishing on (and in) something was irrelevant. Smaller things had the option to move. Nothing which happened if they didn't was his fault.

And then chaos appeared.
Chaos offered itself to him.
...well, that was fine. He'd always intended that deal to be a lie anyway.
And in this 'now' of memory, chaos is ripping him apart.

It's not fair. His blood (the blood of betrayal, that which a just universe would have empowered at the start) becomes water, becomes acid, becomes some kind of syrup and that's the first thing he's truly tasted on his tongue in a very long time. The power is being stolen from him, that which he deserves, has the right to, and it's happening because chaos thinks a world where he's the only one with magic was going to be boring.

The ponies allied themselves with chaos. He could easily believe they were that delusional. But the other way around?

-- there's a sensation associated with having one's bones turn into marshmallow fluff. It isn't a pleasant one.

He's screaming. Magic is flowing out of him in all directions. He can feel the mind moving around inside him, taking this apart and dismantling that, becoming part of the base structure in order to wrench more free. But he can also feel it weakening. Every time it touches the construct, some part of it is truly taken. But it has to do so, that's happening willingly, chaos is losing itself and --

-- why?

Perhaps it fell into the trap, as another once did. But the centaur has learned. He knows any emotional bond constitutes imprisonment of the self. You can't change who you are for another, because freedom cannot be anything other than an absolute: something which is never moderated, much less locked away.

Chaos is no longer as free as it once was, and so it is dying.

It just isn't happening fast enough.

Spines erupt from his back. More power leaves him. And it's unfair. The ponies have their ally, someone who is in the middle of dying for having made that choice and that's the fate which chaos deserves. But who is willing to stand with the centaur? Who understands the fundamental injustice of the universe, of being made to live in a world where everyone else has what you lack?

...he had a brother once.
Then there was a betrayal.
And he'd realized that he'd never had a brother at all. Not a gargoyle. How could that one truly understand, when the gift of flight was his every day? And now he was out of Tartarus, in the world and of the world and draining from the world, he'd stolen from ponies and zebras, donkeys and yaks and griffons and minotaurs to take back his denied birthright. And from the vast heights he'd assumed, what was supposed to be a mere preview of what he would inevitably reach --

-- he hadn't seen a single centaur.

He was alone. Chaos was tearing him apart (and it felt as if the structure within was shifting, a sensation almost lost in the middle of losing everything), and it was happening because he was alone.

There was no one to stand with him.
(He'd never really had a brother.)
No one who understood.
No centaurs.
And the thaums were going away, he was shrinking, he was going to be frail and weak and in Tartarus again, frail and weak and an hour away from dying forever, chaos couldn't give it all back if he burned a portion and he was alone

and it is now.

There is a single instant which sees him wish.

A wish for someone who could fight against magic and chaos to save him.

A centaur --

-- his head goes back, as if he's just been kicked in the chin. And the burst of power which comes from him is every color and no color. Perhaps it's all of the colors, mixed and blended until nothing can be seen but a muddy brown. There's a single mind forcing all of that magic to work together, and now it has the power of chaos to add into the mix. Something which reaches out, searches through possibilities and choices --

-- to living eyes, the burst of magic vanishes. But all it's done is determine that the local set of possibilities doesn't contain an answer to that singular demand. So it has to look elsewhere.

Possibilities and choices.

Put enough of those together, and they make up worlds.

He may be hallucinating: the pain is certainly that severe. But the visions are both too brief and too coherent. He sees metal which thinks for itself, he sees flight without wings followed by ground of fused glass which radiates something worse than heat, then stars are confined inside spheres and this and this and this and --

-- he sees a herd.

They don't look like him, not in features or hue. But the shape is right.
Centaurs. Somewhere, there are centaurs. But he needs a warrior --
-- possibilities divide. Swarm the world, focus on a target, and all of the wild numbers produced by chaos, the imaginary and the fractal, all that measures everything there could ever be --
-- equal one.

It is not, in any way, a fully controlled casting.

The stallion will admit that it took chaos to create such a path between worlds, especially when no living summoner has ever reached so far. But it's chaos which has been forced to temporarily unite with unicorn magic, pegasus techniques, earth pony tools and zebra harmonics, minotaur strength and donkey endurance to go with griffon domination and darker things besides, still lingering within his form. (The darker aspects get a vote.) It's just about everything. The little alicorn flying towards him while trailing boulders in her field's wake would give her wings to put together a true unified theory of magic and at the moment of the summons, the stallion is very close to existing as exactly that.

It's not a controlled casting. The base is a summoning, one performed through raw power and desire. Knowledge, finesse, skill -- none of that has any part in this. A wish is being granted and like so many genies who decide to trick their tormentor by taking the terms as literally as possible, the magic is going to work with the first answer it found. A warrior possessing youth and strength and the willingness to chase a faint hope across the whole of a planet.

The girl is chosen. And magic starts to build a road --

-- but it's magic barely controlled, with no true understanding of how the effect is being created. Something where the massive effort required to make it happen at all cost too much, and the caster is already collapsing. The conscious mind behind the wish isn't going to be conscious much longer.

The spell never would have held for long. The road has been created, and it has to lead back through the original trail of rejected possibilities. But now it's starting to fall apart. The collapse starts at the back, surges forward, makes the girl gallop all the faster. And the spell weakens, burns thaums of every flavor in an attempt to stay intact just long enough as worlds blur under the girl's hooves, but there is chaos in the mix and some things are becoming randomized.

One of them is the aim.
Another is the exact, fragile nature of the link between two places with their own definition of 'now'.

The girl runs through space, across dimensions. She doesn't know she's crossing time. Her own 'now' remains where it was, will move in linked pace starting with the instant she reaches the forest -- but when it comes to the anchor point of the connection's sending end...

And the spell found a warrior, one carrying a weapon, but all she has is skill and senses and a few biological tricks. The wish was for one who could fight against magic and chaos --

-- it all finds the blade, as the girl gallops. A mixture of energies which will never exist again saturate the plastic: material resonance and a quick flicker from the law of similarity carry the effect to anything of a similar composition. Magic turns to chaos for assistance, and they create something which can stand against everything.

Within the falling, shrinking form, the living, thinking remnants of that chaos does what it must, because that form of love demands no less. For those who still live, strength is returned. Not always all of it, because the stallion burned through so much -- but enough to allow healing. Natural regeneration, with the changes caused by the drain reversed.

And then chaos tries to separate from the stallion.

It fails.

It gave too much of itself. And even then, there might have been enough left to recover, but... the structure has shifted.

The stallion, weak and frail and changed, collapses.
The chaos storm, brought below the threshold, is carefully brought to safety.
The world buries the dead. Mourns. Waits in fear, for it might all happen again.
A lost girl gallops across time and space and possibility. In the measure of the calendar, it will be moons before she arrives.
But for mere distance, there is a forest ahead. Oblivion close behind.
She is running towards her death.

"So it's simple," Tirek told her, smiling from behind the bars. "You accompany me. We go back to Canterlot, or wherever they're storing what's left of Discord -- and I know there's something, because I felt him try to break free. But that's the key. We find where his remnants are, with my draining whatever we can find along the way. And once I have enough strength again, added to some of the final dregs of chaos..."

The smile became wider.

"...I'll send you home."

The metal of the gauntlets creaked as the girl's fingers went limp. The miasma of the dying washed through her. Saturated, until it felt as if it filled lungs and body and soul. There were no traces of fresh air just then, or memories of feathers and metal and training grounds and cells. Simply loneliness, endless loneliness as the only one of her kind to exist here, condemned to live within an endless fog of hate.

That was the sentence which had been pronounced by this world.

There was another.

The right hand fell away from the sword.

Sociopathic

She wanted to go home.

Perhaps that was why the images manifested within her, as she stood before him in the lowest level of the caves. Separated from the only other centaur in the world by thin columns of stone, and now kept away from everything she had ever loved by nothing more than the strength of a waiting promise. There was a moment when both factors felt like nothing more than barriers which were waiting for the right moment to drop.

If it was possible at all... if he managed to rebuild the road...

There were certain factors which never fully entered the waking dream. A few vital neurons recognized that the stallion's initial aim on the ingress had been horrible, and there was no reason to believe it would be any better for her return. In the most absolute sense, she probably had at least a seventy percent chance of coming in over water and centaur endurance wasn't quite sufficient for swimming half of the Pacific. It was possible for her to appear upon a treacherous slope, followed immediately by the fall: 'midair' might just give her more time to think on the way down. In the middle of an airport runway or train tracks: the major uniting factor would be having the area in use. And would matter move aside to make space for her, if she came in a little too low? If it didn't, she would effectively find her hooves merged with the receiving surface: the amount of time she would require for bleeding to death was likely just enough to let her fail at amputation. And if she did shunt solid masses out of the way, and arrived well below ground level... an instant tomb, precisely sized to fit.

Practical considerations. But in the vision... it was the walkway leading up to the house. And she would step carefully, precisely onto the last part of the path.

It would be a sunny day.

Perhaps someone would be close to the door. Not outside, not where they could see her, but -- they had all learned to recognize the sounds of each other's movements: a scratching of talons across the floor, chitin scurrying along the ceiling and scales sliding over tile. It would be easy to determine that there were hooves on the approach. And perhaps a head would briefly bow, because centaurs were hardly the only liminal species to possess structured keratin. It was probably just a government visit. Or someone lost, who knew that this house was designed as a homestay site and could reasonably hope to get directions. Or join the fight for a single heart, whichever came first.

There wouldn't be enough time or distance to fully recognize that this particular beat was familiar. Not before the knock sounded, and someone went to see who it was.

Papi.
It would be Papi. Quickest to the door, just about every time, even when she's slower on the ground and there isn't enough space in most of the house for her wingspan. Because she always wants to meet someone new.
The builders modified the latches. Made one of them into something she could open. There's usually a little hesitation before she remembers which is hers.
She would open the door...

...and it would be a high-pitched cry, warm feathers pressed against her, tears soaking through the blouse and the others would be close behind -- well, relatively: Rachnera might hang back (as would Lala, silently watching for a few seconds, letting the others have their turns), and Mero needed to maneuver the wheelchair through the crush. But it would be mere seconds before Miia's arms wrapped her (and it might be hard to keep the body from following suit), Suu would have that little head tilt of puzzlement which she'd picked up from the harpy, and there would be one more coming up behind all of them

He would reach out for her hand.

There would be no questions, not in the first minutes. Simply contact and tears and hugs: she knew that so many of them would hug her. Touch her. More physical contact in an hour than in the last several months.

(The Bearers had touched. Pressed against each other, provided that constant reminder of presence...)

The words of the stallion's offer seemed to take up the whole of her inner hearing. Perhaps that was why it was so hard to determine exactly what the other girls were saying. But she could still see it, the playlet surging across the stage of her soul. And in scent...

...even for humans, scent was the surest key to memory. But there was nothing in the deep place which gave her the signatures of feathers and scales and chitin and that strange, slightly acidic odor which always came off Suu's membrane. She simply remembered strongly enough to bring all of it back, to almost bring them back.

But it had to cut through the miasma. Work around a background presence of rust and buried metal. Get past that which the vision had made her body produce. And there was something else: the tiniest hint of fresh air, that little waft coming from the cell's ceiling. Just enough to register, and to carry along the faintest traces of the forest beyond.

The outer sickness, as Tartarus spread into the wild zone. Brought its torment to everything it touched. Made it all start to die, and never allowed the process to finish --

-- but in the vision, dream, self-inflicted torment... there was none of that.

They would greet her as one returned from the dead and in that, they would be wrong.

"I'm fairly sure I need the last of him in order to make it work," the stallion rather casually said. "Something a little more... active."

"Active," the girl carefully repeated.

His right hand lifted, patted the battered vest just below the sternum.

"It's odd," the stallion decided. "Maybe it's a side effect of everything which happened while he was inside me. But his thaums... even after he'd thrown back the rest of what I'd earned, tried to separate... something lingered. It didn't drain as quickly as anything I've ever sampled from the other species, but it was draining --"

He tapped the healthy upper torso again. Smiled, and the corners were too far up his face.

"-- and then they put me in here. Back in the place where nothing can finish dying on its own. And I do feel as if there's something of him still left in me." With open irritation, "It's just not enough to use. I've tried, and it almost feels as if it's trying to shift away from me. The last bit which didn't drain away, acting like it was originally his survival instinct." And that triggered a soft snort. "Not capable of thought, but -- some degree of evasion, at least for now." Casually, "And there's times when it's as if I can feel it struggling. But I know I can use his power, girl, because I already have. I just need to acquire more of it, to the point where it can be used. That's why it's the most crucial part of sending you home."

"Because you had that power when you brought me here," the girl stated.

He granted her a nod. "And it's best to replicate the conditions as exactly as possible." Another snort. "Not that I was keeping count on the other factors involved. But there's an easy way to fix that. I just have to duplicate the path, as precisely as we can. Start out in whatever that town was, then work towards the capital. That's the one favor Discord granted us." The smile widened. "Something else he didn't intend to do through restoring their magic, not when it comes to how it helps here. But it still applies. I'll be dealing with the same population. I can get the same mix."

"And how are you measuring it?" The forced neutrality of outside observation. A scientist watching a disease course through a bloodstream, waiting to see when the organism would fail.

"Height and mass," he promptly told her. "We can measure by my size. I have a very good idea of how large I was when I called you. It'll be easy."

Easy.

She never took his offer seriously. There wasn't a single moment where she believed that any part of it was real. But she still imagined the results, because she wanted to go home.

To go home.

She didn't believe him. But the inner vision responded. So did her body, and that was what truly told her that he possessed no capacity for perceiving the olfactory world, not on her level. Even without any associations to grant the new scent, the sheer strength of it would have drawn a response.

They would greet her as one returned from the dead and in that, they would be wrong.

She would have been returned by the dead.

By the death of a world.

She didn't believe him. But she had wanted. And she kept her upper torso straight, prevented her tail from lashing and made sure no hoof tapped or cantered...

But the caves were saturated by the reek of her shame.

Her hands tightened. One joint on the left gauntlet creaked.

"Are you strong enough to leave?" Assess and evaluate.

He nodded.

"Now," Tirek casually decided. "Not at first. I... didn't recognize exactly what had taken place. Not until I was back here, and tried to tap Tartarus again."

He said chaos changed him. That's part of how Discord fought him, but...
He's been draining magic from the outside world. He didn't have that kind of range before. Not even when he was just about a living mountain.
He said... that during the first test, he was going for a partial tap. A moment of weakness, and a few thaums nopony would miss. But it didn't work that way. He had to take the whole of it, every time. And Wordia said she felt herself starting to lose something, but -- then the effect released.
So...
(She didn't know enough to dismiss what seemed possible.)
...what if there was a permanent change, produced by the chaos magic? Something unintentional, but... that's why he's been able to act. Why he's healthy and --
-- ready to leave.
I'm not a good liar.
(She could hardly believe she'd gotten this far.)
I need an excuse for leaving him behind...

"And after that," Cerea guessed, "you decided you needed to test yourself."

Another nod. "Testing, and rebuilding my strength." The next words were spat. "I needed to have some small amount of strength before I left this time. I'd rather not have to crawl again, to feel so weak and frail. Tartarus took enough pleasure from that portion of my torment. But as my ally has arrived, the time seems rather --" This smile gave her a glimpse of his teeth. There were no canines. "-- opportune."

Just lie.
He can't scent when I'm lying.

"I should scout ahead," the girl told him. "The path I took to reach you had a few problems. If there's any way we could use the Struga --"

"-- I can smooth the path," he cut her off.

The bars are too thin: just enough to grasp, maybe thin enough to be broken with the right strike. Even surfaces on the walls and floor. No spikes or hooks.

Both of the stallion's arms warmly gestured outwards, with the left nearly grazing the stone bars. It was like watching someone extend their reach before moving in to grasp. To hug. "Allies need to help each other, don't you think? Besides, the sword brought you in. That means it can bring both of us out."

His arms dropped. The stallion stepped back from the bars, paced a little as Cerea desperately tried to think. To come up with another falsehood --

Tirek stopped trotting. Facing the left wall of the cell, as his right arm came up. Fingertips brushed against stone.

"Or it would," the stallion casually remarked, "if you hadn't lied to me."

The scent reached her a split-second after the words: something which wasn't new in the cave, simply intensified. Rust and metal, with the latter briefly making her think of the disc --

-- the grinding sound came from behind her. It was faster than most of the sounds Tartarus had produced when the mass of the caves tried to shift, it made her think of the partial rockfall in that one corridor and by the time she turned neck and torso just enough to see, the new bars were already in place.

There was something about the new blockade which felt clumsy. It was if a bored child had been asked to construct columns from modeling clay: the material had been roughly rolled and abandoned to dry. And there weren't very many of the thickened extrusions stretching from floor to ceiling, but numbers weren't really required. There just had to be enough to narrow down the spaces between them. Making passage impossible --

"I told you, girl," Tirek's voice evenly sounded from behind her, and where words did not echo, tone did. For an instant, the trapped girl found herself wondering if he'd needed to make any degree of effort to get that exact familiar note of condescending disappointment into his voice. "I told you that I knew there was something in the halls, working its way down. I also know that there are at least six ponies in the entrance chamber." Thoughtfully, "It could be seven. Or it could be twelve. There's a single source of magic in that group which possesses a certain amount of... overlap. Is that an alicorn? Because it isn't an earth pony carrying an assortment of devices and wonders. I would know."

She slowly turned back. His smile had cracked at the corners, just enough to give her a hint at how his jaw was hinged. Something which looked as if the mandibles weren't fully fused. Connected by ligaments, like the mouth of a snake.

"Let's say seven ponies," the stallion casually continued as the girl's body went rigid within metal. "Because I'd like to believe I've earned an alicorn. And there's something else, too. Something I've never tasted before. It's coming across as being somewhat spicy."

Things changing faster than they should.
The terraces on the way down. Too tall for a pony, but -- they're just right to serve as a staircase for my height. For his.
He's been altering Tartarus. Some of it was probably experimenting, but --

Smoothing the path.

"Seven ponies," Tirek repeated, and the leftwards head tilt came across as something obnoxious: this was only reinforced by the smirk. "Including one alicorn. Probably a relatively new specimen, because I did hear something about a plural when I was last out and about. One currently unidentified. I've known about them for hours, girl. And I thought that you might have done something. Forcing them to put you through the Gate."

He squinted a little. It took Cerea a moment to realize he was looking at the sword. Or trying to do so. It was as if the yellow pinpricks couldn't quite manage to focus.

...there's trickles on that wall. Running down from where his fingers are touching the stone. Not quite wet. Like someone rubbed the surface with thick mud.
They smell like rust.
Like congealed blood.

"But you said it was the sword," the stallion evenly continued. "I felt the sigils. I felt the ritual: the one which ponies use to enter. They put you through."

The girl took a hoofstep towards his cell. Towards the thinned bars, because she wasn't going to be getting out past the thickened ones. There were gaps, but the spaces weren't sufficient for her use. She'd already taken visual measurements: she could remove her armor, use every bit of double-jointing which a centaur body offered --

my body

-- squeeze her breasts inwards, and none of them would do anything for her lower rib cage's width. The stone was crude, but it was also thick. She couldn't break it with sheer strength, and repeatedly hitting it with the sword after the magic-triggered change had completed... that just stood a chance to break the plastic. A centaur couldn't get out.

"I did consider that you might have threatened them into it," Tirek added, and the deep place's translation gave him the perfect note of dejected hope. "The sword might have been good for that. But if that was the cause, even if you'd convinced them through a few strategic blows -- then why would they stay in the area after you left? Why are they waiting for you to come out? Because that was the ritual, girl: one enters, and then one leaves. Brutality as control... call it a guess on my part, but I don't think you managed to completely break them. Finding outside magic, something which would effectively control their minds... I suppose there might have been innovations, but in my day, you would have at least needed to be carrying a device. Something emanating the right resonance. And you have nothing, girl. No magic at all."

"I tricked them!" The words had been too frantic, and Tartarus would also carry every bit of that to his ears. "They think I went down to evaluate --"

"-- I suppose that's possible," the intelligent stallion offered: something which failed to come across as polite. "But then you still would have lied to me, in saying it was the sword. Why would you ever lie to your ally? Still..." The free hand came up, thoughtfully stroked at the beard. "...there is a way for you to prove yourself. And fortunately for both of us, it just happens to be the next part of the plan."

She was trying to make herself look as if all of her attention was focused on him. It was giving her some difficulty in preventing her tail from lashing.

"The next part," she repeated. It took no effort to make the words come across as angry, because nothing about that was a lie.

The bars across the exit are too thick.
The ones blocking his cell...

"Eight sapients at the entrance," Tirek casually observed. "And the guardian, of course. But the ponies, plus the unknown -- those are the current problems. When it comes to my departure from this place, leaving it for the last time..."

His right hand pulled away from the wall. Three tiny portions of the fingertips briefly glinted in the harsh light.

"...there's been certain practical considerations," the stallion continued. "Like being able to fit through the corridors." With another snort. "Draining the entire wild zone would produce an interesting question: whether I could break through the caves before the compression of the stone broke me. So as much as I despise having to operate at this rather minimal level of power, I had to hold off on a true meal until I got outside. And I also had to make sure that it was just the wild zone. I felt as if ponies had come into my grip a few times. I'm almost certain that I got a zebra once. But I had to let go, as quickly as possible. Because if they were truly and fully drained, while I was in the cell... well, I was the first and best suspect, wasn't I? It wasn't as if I could stop them from dragging their way to an alicorn. And I knew I'd released in time, that I hadn't taken the whole of them..." He sighed. "Pleasures denied. Another price of this place. But I suppose there was enough suspicion in the end, that I might be up to something. That's why I've been waiting for someone to investigate."

The pinpricks tried to focus on the sword again. Failed, moved to her face, and she saw his disgust rise.

"Which may be you," Tirek decided. "But -- let's say it's not. I've had some time to practice the use of Discord's unintended gifts. Practice after I couldn't try anything during my last few hours outside, because I was too weak. I felt that something had changed, but... I was afraid to try absorbing, just in case that didn't work any more. " Much more softly, "And that meant I needed Tartarus, and quickly. Before I lost the last of it, before..."

He stopped. It took a moment before he managed to dismiss the final portion of shiver.

"There are ponies at the Gate, which means they're suspicious of something," the stallion stated. "That tells me it's time to leave. And if I drain them now, where they currently stand -- they will drag themselves back to the wild zone. They'll crawl."

The thought almost made him smile.

"To sound the alarm," the stallion continued, as the gravel in his voice deepened. "And it'll take time for us to exit: time during which they can scatter in all directions. We might not be able to find and stop them all. One of them might manage to alert the palace. So we're going to go with the easy solution."

He turned his entire body, and she watched the process. The ways his legs moved in order to execute the partial rotation, allowing him to fully face her again. Every means by which his upper waist hadn't.

"We're going to wait," Tirek announced. "Because if you tricked them into sending you down... then there's a time limit, isn't there? A point after which they'll just have to check on you." And the simian face contorted into a sneer. "Especially if you played the grandest trick on them."

"I told you!" (Her words were too fast, too sharp, anyone could hear it and in here, everyone could...) "I did trick --"

"-- if they decided they were your friends," the stallion spat, and the glob landed on the stone floor.

She had to force herself not to stare at it. The expectoration had landed as a half-congealed gel.

"Would they do anything for you?" Tirek snapped, and she saw his fists clench, scars standing out on the backs of his hands in sharp relief. "Because that is the trap, and you would have done well to set it. I nearly fell into it with Scorpan. Too much time in Tartarus, and they'll wonder if you're coming out. They'll descend. And when they reach us... that's when I drain them. Completely." With a snicker, "Even with an alicorn potentially involved, I'm almost certain that eight won't leave me needing to remodel the deep place too severely. If all else fails, I'll just burn some of the thaums off as they're being taken. And we leave them here, head for the surface and close the Gate behind us..."

There were gaps between the nearest bars, and they were only too narrow for a centaur to get through.

...he was looking at her. Waiting.

"They won't come in after me," Cerea softly said. "They won't."

This time, the stallion's head tilted to the right.

"Really?" There was a certain childishness about the word.

"They don't have any reason to," the girl stated. "If they think something went wrong, they're more likely to move for Canterlot. Sound the alarm immediately. We're..."

She had been about to say better off going to them. Proposing that he drain them as soon as the Gate was open again. It would put them both in the corridors, working their way out. Give her time to try something. To think of... anything.

But she always thought of the wrong things.

What if we do reach the exit?
If I can't get away from him. If he twists Tartarus to the point where I don't have an escape.
If he... drains them.
Discord's gone.
It doesn't matter if he does it down here, or just outside the Gate. It would be permanent.
They were ready to face that. Every one of them was willing to give up their magic to stop him.
To die, if it meant stopping him. That was the price.
(They weren't an elite military unit.)
(They were something else.)
(She almost had it...)
But not like this...

"...we're not friends," Cerea told the stallion, and the word were soft -- at the start. Every subsequent syllable picked up an extra unnoticed decibel, harshened enough to scrape at stone. "We never were. I couldn't make friends, out there. It was impossible. Everypony had one thought when they saw a centaur, and that thought --"

His ears were going back. It wasn't from fear. She was just that close to shouting.

"-- was you!" Her tail was lashing, with the right forehoof repeatedly stomping at the floor. "Making friends? How is that supposed to be possible, when everypony was convinced the world would be better off if I was in here forever? There was no way to do it, no point in trying! Not when they looked at me and saw corpses, the deaths of their friends, the death of magic itself and the death of a world --!"

Nightwatch.
Barding.
Yapper.

She stopped, all at once. Brought the forehoof down to the stone and kept it there, forced her tail to still, and felt her breasts heaving inside twin shells of padding and metal. Heaving hard enough to hurt.

There was something new in the stallion's dark eyes. She was desperately hoping it wasn't respect.

"You're better off," Tirek intoned, and the sincerity of it tried to burn her skin. "How much would a centaur have to change, in order to befriend those who were so different?" And he slowly, almost thoughtfully shook his head. "You would only betray yourself through trying to become what you thought they desired you to be."

Ice closed around the girl's mind.

the magazines
the websites
everything I saw and read
everything

"They won't come down?" the stallion asked her, as something in his tones almost begged for belief. She wasn't sure whose. "Are you certain?"

Her right hand, acting on something very close to instinct, moved towards the hilt. "They --"

The realization hit with enough force to nearly drive her back.

They might not follow me.

If I don't come out, that's enough of a sign that something's gone wrong. They might not assume it was because of Tirek: I might have gotten lost, or come too close to another one of the incarcerated. But I was the only one they could send without giving you more strength. Retreat to Canterlot, search for a new plan. That's practical.

They might not follow me.

But they have to chase the sword.

They can't leave it in here. It might just lie fallow, negating magic wherever it fell.

But what if something else in Tartarus were to take it up?

It would probably sicken them, disable their magic while they carried it, because that's what it did to everypony who tried.

But Tirek doesn't have any magic of his own.

It might weaken him. Prevent any draining while he held it.

Or it might give him the choice between offense and defense. He can steal magic, or he can block it. One more way of disabling any attempts at stopping him.

They can't leave the sword in here.
Not in the deep place. Not in any part of the world.
It's too dangerous.
It shouldn't exist.
I shouldn't --

She recognized the thought.

-- him.
I wouldn't exist here if it wasn't for him...

It took a moment before she realized that some part of that had reached her face. And perhaps he'd never had to read centaur features, not even in a mirror -- but they both had something of the simian in their ancestry.

"Ah," Tirek breathed. "They do have to come in, don't they?"

...merde seemed inadequate.

He looked disappointed again. It came with a side order of condescension.

"Allies really shouldn't lie to each other," he told her. "But that's not you, is it? Maybe when you first arrived, but... too much time among the lessers. Too much change. Because friendship is weakness. And freedom can never be anything other than absolute."

He had the complete lack of grace to follow that up with a sigh.

"It's a pity," Tirek solemnly declared. "I would have liked to work with another centaur. Someone who understood. I waited my entire life for that. I thought you were a wish granted. And all I ever had was someone who'd lied about being my brother, because he wasn't a centaur and he wouldn't support me to the last. Followed by you."

...he keeps rejecting his brother on form.
Twilight and Spike.
And there was something beyond that...
...he won't believe me now. He's been suspicious since I implied I'd come in on my own, because he knew the Bearers were out there. But I don't have the lies which can convince him. I'm no good at lying.
I was the wrong person to send.
If he manages to get the sword, figure out what it does -- it might make everything worse.
A knight would think of something...

She didn't have a plan. She just knew there was no point in pretense any more.

"You don't have to do this."

It won her another head tilt.

"This is amusing," Tirek decided. "I don't have to do what?"

"You don't have to drain everything," Cerea desperately pushed out, even as she took another hoofstep towards his cell. "You didn't get a choice at the start. But that changed." Which left her in what was just about an entirely new position: trying to compliment a male. "If you saw my herd, then you saw my stallions! Wouldn't you say they're healthy? And you're much better proportioned than they are! -- as you are, right now. Just look at that upper torso! And your legs...!"

He looks confused.
One of my stallions would have tried to squeeze something by now.
Maybe he's proudest of his horns.
...horns which get bigger after he steals magic.
Don't bring up the horns.
...I'm so bad at this...

More softly, "Whatever Discord did to you, whatever changes chaos made -- it left you with what you wanted at the start. A moment of weakness, and a few thaums which won't be missed." Her arms were coming up, going forward with metal-covered palms turned up. "If we told the alicorn what had happened, if you demonstrated that you had control... then maybe you wouldn't have to stay in here --"

He killed.
He killed his brother and he didn't care.
Then he kept going.

And yet, she watched his face. Hoping to see that single moment of recognition, and the acknowledgement of a new path.

"The thaums," Tirek stated, "always drain away."

But hope was torment.

"There could be volunteers." Trying to keep her tones level, even as every bit of her posture begged. "A few every day. Once they know that it's just a little --"

"-- they'd come to me, of their own free will?" There was no humor in the laugh. "To me, if they can look at you and see their dead? No. It doesn't work that way. And I may look healthy enough to you, but I know how I feel. Like my body isn't right. I haven't felt right since the first moment I saw someone use magic. Others doing what I couldn't. All things which should have been mine by right. And I took that right, after the blood had stolen it from me."

"I don't want magic, because I can't have it. Wishing for magic, for power, over and over to the point where it's the only thought you can still have..."

"I have my own solution," the stallion placidly finished.

"Which is?"

She saw his face.

"If I take enough magic," Tirek calmly stated, "then eventually, some of it will have to stay with me. It'll stop draining. I won't lose strength from the act of taking a breath. The one thaum I didn't take could be the last one I needed to stabilize. What's better, girl? To always be in search of nourishment, knowing the hunger will return? Or to reach a state where you never have to eat again? And all I need to do is keep taking magic, until I find out where that point is."

'Have you ever seen someone in chronic pain?" the kudu had quietly asked her. "One for whom potions still work, but... only for a little while? Have you watched their face, as the effects begin? Because there's a moment when they feel almost normal again, as if nothing might be wrong, another second and all will be well, their life can go on because it won't wear off this time, it won't --'

Hope was torment.
'Insanity' could also qualify.

"And then it'll all be mine," the stallion evenly finished. "Just as it should have been from the start. Forever."

He didn't really have an aura. (She wondered if it was something his body had absorbed.) It was the weight of monstrosity which made it so hard for her to speak.

"And what if you're wrong?"

"Then there's always more magic," Tirek placidly told her. "Always. Mine, by right of being able to take it."

"Not if you take all of it every time," and she was pushing, she knew he wasn't going to listen but she was the only one there, the one who would fail... "What happens when there's no magic left? When the entire planet's been drained, and you're still losing strength?"

and the monster shrinks back down to fit the corpse of the world as it slowly starves, blaming others for having been so weak as to die

It was easy to read this expression. Pure annoyance.

"I've had this argument," he shot at her. "It didn't go particularly well for Scorpan, either. There's always going to be magic somewhere. And if there somehow wasn't..."

The next thing to reach his features bore certain similarities to an earlier specimen. It was slightly wistful, with hints of loneliness around the edges. It was also saturated with hope.

"...I recently learned," the monster informed her, "that there are other worlds." And the smile grew wider. "I would love to see a herd..."

...no

There were ways in which her world had very little magic. Very little -- but the dullahan existed, as did those who were even closer to fae. Add that to all of the little rituals, and there was enough to take.

Of course, it might not be possible for him to reach her world.
On the first attempt.
But he'd made a decision. One which said that he was the only one who mattered. Who was real.
Everything else was just something to break.

That was when she knew.
It could be said that it wasn't a choice.
She didn't see it as a choice at all.

She'd... noticed that the temperature was more stable in this part of the deep place: something else Tirek had done, to make himself comfortable.

I've never...

So all of the new chill was coming from within.

She was going to fail.
A knight lives for something.
She always failed.
My liege wanted this from the start.
They were all ready for this.
To pay the price.
She was never going home.
A knight fights for something.

The girl had made her decision: something born in the heart of the deep place. A non-choice willingly made, an offer freely given. Because as it turned out, the world did need a centaur -- at least, for another minute or two. It just didn't need the one in front of her.

She had made her decision. But she was scared. Her body was motionless within the armor, her features felt oddly placid, there wasn't a single hoof tapping against the stone, her tail seemed to have gone completely limp -- and yet, she was scared.

Perhaps that was a good thing.

I can't get the helmet on without looking suspicious. It'll take time, block my sight, and it might draw an attack. Guard my head.

She risked one more step forward. Measured the gap between the cell's bars, trying to figure out how to deal with the stone. It looked thin enough...

He has horns. They're nowhere near as long as they were when he was at his previous top size, but they could still do some damage. Watch for a charge.

He was looking at her again.

He was sneering.

"It's been -- novel, speaking with what's almost another centaur. But I had this argument once," Tirek semi-repeated, and his head tilted slightly forward. "I don't need to have it again."

It was all the warning she received: that he had decided to endure any degree of wait in silence.

It was enough.

She saw the field spark into existence just above his head, warped reds and corrupted oranges, something which started as a single flare of light and built into a sphere during a single heartbeat, gaining in power and size and --

-- there was just enough time to see it. To witness as his arms thinned, the horns receded, luster dimmed within the fur --

-- the kinetic blast had been aimed, meant to pass between a gap in the bars, and the stallion almost succeeded there. Part of it hit the stone, knocked a surprisingly large piece free. The rest went directly for her head.

But she had already drawn the sword.

The blade slashed up, blocked, energy dissipated in front of her in a flash and twinkle, she had to move the sword away from her eyes because she needed to see where he was aiming next and she was expecting a feint --

-- but it just let her spot the moment when dark pools of malice flooded with denial.

"WHAT?" It had been a scream. "YOU CAN'T! YOU DON'T HAVE ANY --"

She didn't. It had never been the wielder. It had always been the sword.

Cerea began to back up. Running backwards, if only for a few meters. And there was still a danger of having that end with a broken leg, but the stone was smooth beneath her hooves --

-- because he has control here, not Tartarus
but if he thinks of it --

There was rage on the baboon features: something which was almost lost in the outpouring which said none of this was supposed to be happening. And he didn't use the moment to fracture a pastern. He just summoned more energy, his legs thinned and two ribs stood out along the lower torso, he chipped a piece out of another bar and she smoothly deflected the blast to the right, still while moving backwards...

She would know she'd gone too far if she jammed her tail.

Her free hand was going back. Reaching for one of the bags which she'd carefully secured within the webbing, shoving the drawstring aside, going into its mouth. Reaching for a sphere, and the tightly-compressed load she'd attached to it.

Don't squeeze --

"NO!"

He shouted a lot. It told her something about his potential as a singer. She didn't think he had any.

A third blast, equally useless: its central purpose was to visibly cut down on the length of the horns. And he was starting to sweat, something which smelled horrible and half-congealed, but she'd been through far worse, it was nowhere near a scent bomb and a hot Tokyo day was magnitudes beyond what his body could offer.

How do you fight?
He's never been taught how to fight another centaur. He may not know how to be fought. And he has magic, but he's not really thinking about what he could do with it. No attempts to twist my ears or go for a hoof. No finesse and one tactic, something which is just making him weaker --

If nothing else, the stallion recognized that the effort was costing him energy. Because the thaums always drained, always, and now he was burning them, three blasts and he hadn't hurt her yet, but he was visibly losing body mass and --

-- she saw it.

She smelled it, at nearly the same moment. A scent which reminded her of the disc.

His left hand thrust towards the nearest cell wall, didn't reach it. The platinum wires came out of his fingertips, twisting, spinning, the fine tips blurring as they penetrated the stone --

The girl is moon-touched (or Moon-touched): psychosomatic or not, it's something she carried through the Gate. Her senses are in overdrive: something which includes the capacity for processing the extra information at a higher speed, in order to prevent overwhelm. Without that, a centaur of her herd would risk a faint by trotting through a meadow on a warm spring night.

It means she has to think a little faster. And at the moment she sees and scents the metal, she understands.

She couldn't tell you exactly what he did, not when it comes to the full thaumaturgy of the process. Perhaps the fine details mean stabbing into marrow in order to make this work, or replacing the interior of a few key bones entirely. But she's worked out the core.

Platinum absorbs magic. Constantly, from everything, unless you can tell it not to. Small pieces leak when they reach capacity: large ones explode. And platinum can be pulled into an incredibly fine wire. A pound of the stuff, drawn with care, could stretch across a kilometer with ease. Barely visible from some angles, not quite monofilament while still posing a danger to anyone who contacted the length at speed -- but it could be done.

The exact process, the necessary treatments -- one living being knows how to do all of it, and he's not particularly prone to sharing. But she has the core of it. Cut the body open, following the lines of the skeleton: one or two major wounds per month is probably the top speed. Take platinum wire, guide it through bleeding flesh and wrap it around bone. And then let it do what platinum always does on this world, only under the direction of the one who took it in.

She didn't identify the metal at first: the miasma of Tartarus blocked some of that, added to the fact that the wire itself smells corrupted. A mineral echo of sickness and forever-dying flesh. But she has the heart of it now.

Platinum can only hold so much. You don't want it to leak (and it may be doing so anyway). You definitely don't want it to explode. And it's the same thought she had in the forest. The absorption is the platinum, but the storage medium? Energy-mass conversion. When he drains more thaums than the metal can hold, the energy is converted into extra kilograms of centaur. Eventually, kilotons. Burn it off -- or just exist -- and he starts to shrink again. Lose everything and the body starts to feed on itself.

And after chaos had saturated him, made changes without intent or thought? Now the wires are under his direct control. They can erupt through the skin, and platinum can be pulled so fine. Penetrate stone. Stretch out to wherever he's trying to drain, and Tartarus leaks through new channels while the smallest of puddles drain in the other direction. And when he reaches a location, when he drains or, with the deep place, tries to make it act in accordance with his wishes -- little glints of metal glisten with the rock.

He can release raw blasts of power, and he hasn't thought of anything else yet. But each one is costing him: strength, health, mass. He needs a recharge.

It won't come from Tartarus, not unless he goes beyond normal desperation.

Not when he knows where to find seven ponies and a dragon.

How long will it take for the wires to reach them? To drain everything they have, to steal away magic forever? It has to be at least a few seconds. The girl would pray for that time to act, if she could think of anything worth praying to at all. That any price be hers alone. But the wires are heading for the stone, her left hand has found the correct sphere, fingers work the compressed bundle away from the light beige wood, this is going to be two throws in quick succession, throws because the sling will take too long to get spinning and she has to be exactly on target --

-- the bundle goes first. It's just barely bound together with fine, light strings, and she had to do so in a way where any impact would make the whole thing come apart. She also had to weight it with a small rock. Finding a small loose rock in the palace had been the hardest part --

-- it passes through a gap. Hits the stallion's diminished upper torso, and effectively explodes.

The fairly minimal force of the impact makes him look down. It's reflexive, and it happens just in time for him to get the first pinion fragment up his nose. The rest work into his vest, portions of fur, spread out in a cloud and coat his arms.

"WHAT?" Which is followed by a sneeze. "WHAT IS --"

The sphere rockets through the gap, shatters against his upper ribs, and the thin purple liquid splatters across the scavenged debris of lost feathers.

Then it turns into glue crossed with springs.

The force of the change pulls thinned arms inward, clamp them against his sides with enough force to draw out a cry of pain. And he's lost strength, he's straining to move the limbs and failing, but the wires only forfeited about a meter of distance. They're still trying for the wall. Temporarily freezing his arms didn't do anything to stop them, he's going to get mass from somewhere, she may have just pushed him across that desperation line and once he's strong enough --

-- the girl is thinking as quickly as she can: something which leaves her with no time for second-guessing herself.

Now she has to force her body to match.

She stops backing up.

Takes the first breath.

The Second --

There are always secrets. And in a world where they can be attacked at any time, knowing that even self-defense is a ticket to deportation... the centaurs have kept a few. Just in case.

The girl didn't tell anyone about this, no more than her herd informed a single human doctor about how it's done. Not even when the first piece of evidence was right there on the charts. Because some organs are duplicated, and a centaur has four lungs. And under normal circumstances, they'll run on the upper two. After all, there's only one airway, and the tissue in the lower pair is -- slightly different.

But they function. It takes some mental discipline to make it happen on purpose: there's a specialized flap blocking the lower extension of the trachea, and the exercises which allow a mare to move it at will aren't easy to master. However, if that can be done... if the mare can find true control over what every other species considers to be a fully automatic system...

There are two typical uses for this technique.

First: a centaur who receives some warning regarding necessity can hold their breath for a surprisingly long time.

And then there's the Second Breath.

Imagine that you could truly hold your breath. Not just inhale and refuse to release it until internal suffocation threatened to close in. Take in the air, and not use it. Keep it on hold, because the tissue in your lungs won't process anything until you tell them to do so.

Now imagine there are four lungs. Two work at all times, with the others on standby: an organic backup system. The upper lungs are more than enough to manage oxygenation on their own.

What happens when the lower pair joins in?

What if you could make them work only when you wanted them to, processing the extra oxygen precisely on rhythm, flooding the bloodstream in the same moment when the adrenal glands kick into overdrive...

The Second Breath is biology's nitrous oxide. A mare who can use it will, for a few precious minutes, have her reaction time accelerate. She moves faster. Pain resistance goes up. There's extra energy available for every system. She's essentially burning all available fuel while ignoring design specifications, and she can't keep it up for long because the centaur body isn't supposed to be doing this. From the moment the Second Breath starts, the mare is running a countdown until it has to stop. Any engine which runs entirely on boosters is going to burn out, oxygen overload has its own set of problems, and a centaur who doesn't stop it in time...

It's short-term: it can't be anything else. It's also the reason why a liminal species which lacks any truly supernatural tricks managed to carve out a place in the world. Because a centaur who understands how to use their size and mass is a formidable opponent, but one who's also running on the Second Breath is a terror.

But there's always a point when they have to stop. And if they kept it up for too long, they'll be winded, worn out, exhausted, shaking from excess adrenaline, finding themselves having to force six heavy limbs into doing anything at all. Easy targets.

If they went beyond that...

Mares have died from the Second Breath.
Second and last.

She stopped running backwards, and did so at the exact moment when the world slowed.

Air currents resolved into individual puffs. Every scent untangled from every other, and she discarded the ones she didn't need. The struggling stallion on the other side of thinned stone bars either lost half of his frames or discarded any unnecessary animations: which depended on Papi's level of distraction when she was asked for the definition.

Heat suffused her muscles. Blood surged under the pressure of an accelerated heartbeat. Overloaded capillaries gave her skin a slightly different tinge of red.

Moon-touched added to the Second Breath. It was all she had. The most she could do, for the short time she had in which she would be capable of doing anything. And if it wasn't enough...

A knight fights for something --

-- she focused on her target.

Then she charged.

(For Menajeria, the fastest sapient being on level ground over a short distance had always been a minotaur.)
(That status ended.)

The untested armor, put through new and unexpected strains, rattled. Her bra was given its effective final exam: the padding and shells provided reinforcements. Hooves pounded, she rushed across the scant meters, she ran because she would run until she never moved again, and she jumped.

But she wasn't going for height. Just force.
The left pair of hooves pushed off first.
The girl's body twisted in midair, and a few hundred kilograms of centaur and metal slammed sideways into thinned stone.

Normally, she would have felt the impact through the armor. Even with the padding in play, she might have spent two days in feeling very little else. But the Second Breath was at work, and most of what she felt was the moment when the bars shattered.

Stone fragments rained down into the cell, a hailstorm like nothing a pegasus had ever created, and some of them impacted Tirek with enough force to break the skin. Something gel-like began to seep through the fresh wounds on his right arm, the same was rising from a cut cheek, and the wires were still stretching out --

-- she landed, skidded somewhat, easily regained her balance and pushed off the stone. The left hand was going back again, reaching for a different bag. The right had the sword, and she swung directly for the wires.

The force of the impact partially wrapped them around the blade: the fineness of the drawn metal scored the plastic. And she thought that he must have reacted instinctively. Something had just attacked him, he had no finesse, not much in the way of tactics, up to one solution for everything and he used it.

She would never be entirely certain of what he'd done. But based on the way he began to scream, followed by the moment when she saw his left arm collapse in itself so sharply as to let her see the gap between ulna and radius, she was almost sure he'd tried to drain the sword.

There was no point in stopping the charge. She wrenched the sword down, kept going forward --

-- she wondered what his mother had looked like, somewhere in the sparking, flashing depths of a mind being forced to work at maximum speed. If a long-dead mare had ever cradled a lost foal against her, in the years before monstrosity had produced a second birth from the womb of jealousy.

She wondered how he felt about being rammed by an armored bustline.

Judging by the newest scream, he didn't seem to like it.

She used the impact, kept wrenching down, and she was the larger of them now, he'd lost too much mass to the attacks, she was trying to tip him over, put him on the ground, but four legs were more stable than two, he still had enough to resist and the wires were unwrapping themselves from the sword, whipping around and she got ready to parry, aware of just how quickly the metal could whip through her exposed flesh --

-- but he had one tactic. The points were now heading for the floor.

She'd made him that desperate. Fearful enough to take in the magic of the deep place, no matter what it cost him. And it was close and plentiful, she gave up on the second sphere because ramming drydust down his throat was going to take too long, her left hand changed targets --

-- he desperately grabbed for that arm: something which did the wires no favors in their quest. The smallest use of flexible joints twisted the limb away from his clutch, and then her arm came forward again.

The weighted baton cracked his skull.

All of the wires briefly went limp. He staggered, reeled. And she brought the sword back, hit him again, the staggering increased, but he was going to wind up pressed against the wall and if she did drop him to the floor, that was so much less distance for the platinum to cross...

She was right on top of him. There was so much he could have tried, even with shortened horns. So much which she was ready to counter. But he'd never had a Sergeant, didn't know how to fight or be fought. Strength was optional, size transient, and skill absent.

But he kept trying, with his one tactic. The wires stiffened, started to move again. So she hit him again. And again. Upper ribs, and the flesh caved in over bone. Jaw: the skin twisted, puckered and tightened as it shrank.

And yet, the wires writhed. Because she hadn't stopped him. That was her job. She hadn't put him in enough pain that he had to stop, and she could blame Tartarus for that. After all, unconsciousness was a form of temporary escape.

She decided to distract him.
Shouting at him counted.
No matter how it all ended, there was only a little time left. There were things she'd been longing to say.

"I never wanted to come here! I never wanted to be part of this! All I wanted was what you gave up, what you threw away and murdered!"

The next impact broke two ribs.

Did you ever realize you have a compound fracture?

The thought seemed to be oddly separate from her spoken words. The words just kept coming, as something with no thought behind them. Perhaps that was the only reason they emerged at all.

"I wanted someone to love me! And they did! I crossed half the world and I found the ones who weren't shaped like me and didn't think like me and cared about me anyway! The Bearers aren't a military unit! They're what I lost! Because the shapes don't matter, not when they love you! I had a family, I finally had a family, I had sisters and you stole me away from all of it! I HATE YOU, I HATE --"

It was, on several levels, something which had been waiting to come out for a very long time.

It also nearly kept her from spotting the moment when he finally had a new thought, and the wires from his right hand went directly for her face.

She dropped the baton, heard it clatter on stone debris as she moved that arm up and across. Grabbed, twisted, yanked, and she was pulling on metal and she was pulling on his bones, but she'd also pulled him closer still, almost an embrace, he was too close for the sword to be effectively swung, she heard his hooves scrape on the stone, trying to find a push or stability without slipping on rubble and --

-- she got the sword away from the wires. Shoved it back into the scabbard, just for a moment, because it freed up that hand to do something else.

"I have a Tartarus, where I come from," she panted. "It's a place for the dead." She grabbed what she needed, and her hand came forward. Pressed the canister against his left ear. "The dead have something they wish to tell you."

She squeezed.

It was the sheer volume of it, the sound which Tartarus would always allow to pass, perhaps even amplified, and pony screams shattered the air, moved through stone and down the passageway as they headed up towards a saner world, he howled in agony and twisted away from her, the depleted canister was dropped and she went for the sword again, took up a two-handed grip and the untested pauldron over her left shoulder stuck --

-- it gave him a second, as she tried to wrench it free. Enough time for wires to enter the closest wall.

The collapsed forearm began to swell. Horns started to lengthen, and it happened in the same moment when every newly-bulging muscle writhed against itself. She was losing time, he was gaining mass and power, he might actually think of something to do with it this time and --

Do the job.
Understanding the price.
In an instant, without thought.

She strained. Two internal ligaments did their best to tear --

-- the metal came free, both hands were on the sword again, he was swelling and getting taller and right now, all that did was give her a bigger target.

In the end, all she had was a practice blade. It let humans say the laws had been followed. A scaled-up toy, which existed without an edge. Suitable for cutting nothing more solid than vapor and light.

It didn't have an edge.

It did have a rough approximation of a point.

And even with a blunt object, as long as there was a single surface upon which all strength could be concentrated, focused -- all she needed was force.

She didn't swing. She thrust, and the plastic penetrated his skin.

Sparks erupted from the new wound, sparks of all colors and no colors and she felt resistance as she pushed and he screamed, his limbs were swelling as his torso started to collapse around the blade, sparks fountained and she pushed harder, using all four legs for the strength which came from pushing off stone, trying to get through the muscles and the ribs --

-- there was a fresh source of resistance within his body, as if she had tried to push an apple through a wire fence. She pushed harder.

Sparks fountained. Some of them skidded off her skin: others attempted to sink in. She could barely see the half-congealed mass which kept dripping from the wound. (She wondered how long it had been since he'd had true blood. Diamond had written about seeing a split hoof bleed, and that could have been the last of it.) Most of her attention was focused on the flow of escaping magic, and there was something left over for seeing how the finger wires had gone limp again.

She used the sword for leverage. Moved it, and him. Getting him into the center of the broken cell, dragging him by the pectoralis major as he shrunk, he was shrinking again, down to her height, she pushed and pushed --

-- it was, perhaps, only then that he realized what she was trying to do. A feat which, in terms of time required, indicated a rather impressive deliberate ignorance of all previous evidence.

His eyes widened for the last time.

"YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IF I DIE!" the stallion screamed. "YOU CAN'T --"

You're right.
Twilight didn't know. She said it was a fascinating academic question.
I don't know how much magic you've taken in, or what happens when you aren't controlling any part of it. An explosion is possible. But the world won't miss the monsters. If it's more than that... then all I can do is hope that Tartarus contains it. And if it doesn't, then everyone up there was willing to pay the price.
But you're not that big yet.
So it might just be me.

But that wasn't what she told him.

"I know what happens if you live."

Her entire body felt hot: a price of the Second Breath. But on the deepest levels, at the core of a wounded soul, all she felt was the chill of acceptance.

There had been a vow.

My life for your life.

She pushed harder. The space between two weakening ribs shrunk down around the blade: a twist broke bone.

"I'm..." The gravel was starting to fill his throat. "I'm your only way home..."

"You were never going to do it." Not when he'd had no real idea of what he'd been doing in the first place. Not when it would have been for someone whom he didn't see as real. At most, a passage for himself alone, to the first world he could reach. The next meal in the quest to end a hunger which could never be sated.

My life for all lives...

Blitzschritt had sworn that.
Had lived it.
That was what made her a knight.

He shrank again. It was a sign of progress. It was also making it harder to push. She had to stare down at him now, the angles for leverage were changing, she was forcing him towards the floor and she had to worry about the wires again --

"Who..." The yellow pinpricks were dimming. Fighting to focus on her face. The last fight he would ever win. "Who are you...?"

There had been a time when he'd had a family. A brother. There had been people who had loved him and if it had been possible to mourn, then it would have been mourning for a lost foal.

But that particular body had been cold for a very long time.

Those were his last words. The next six were hers.

"A centaur," Cerea told him. "That's all you get."

She shoved.
The blade went in.
A corpse couldn't hold magic.
Everything else came out.

and it was sparks and wind and petrichor, joined by something very much like adrenaline existing as concept alone, a low hum in the air and a feeling of weakness and strength and renewal and destruction and something else, something intangible, invisible, which contained all of it because it had to contain everything and it all erupted from the wound, the blade was growing hot in her armored hand, there was something trickling across her gauntlet and everything she had went into pushing, pushing all the way to the end, making sure it was done but it was all coming out of him and the invisible tide was carrying it into her and through her and it was in her and there wasn't enough room left for her and

-- she barely understood that he was still shrinking, as her own knees collapsed. She told herself that she was just trying to follow him down.

She lost the scent of his death, as his sphincters began to let go.

Lost the sight of his darkening eyes, the final echoes of the traveling screams and the feel of cold stone against her folded legs and a tail which could no longer be moved.

Lost the sensation of her own heartbeat.

Lost almost all thought, but for one.

A knight dies for something...

The Second Breath stopped.

The first...

Undead

...scent was the first sense to awaken, and it told her that the air was -- pure.

It wasn't Menajeria's atmosphere, something which defaulted to a greater state of cleanliness than that of her home. There were no artificial hydrocarbons there, nothing of exhaust fumes and laboratory creations and every bit of chemical falsehood which humans had forced themselves to breathe -- but the ponies still had a degree of industrial process. Steel melted in the forge, potions had to be mixed, and the girl suspected somepony had worked out the basics for concrete. And yet, with none of the more advanced travesties in effect, the air was cleaner, but -- this went beyond that. It was as if the air existed as nothing except air alone, had never known any intrusion. It was air as quintessence, and it was...

...thin.

The pressure against her skin and fur was right. There were no signs of being at high altitude, and she certainly wasn't gasping for oxygen.

(She didn't feel as if she really needed to be breathing.)

But it was air as quintessence, air as the concept of itself alone, and... it didn't seem to be quite present. Or perhaps she wasn't entirely touching it. She felt as if all awareness was being processed through a faint barrier.

The next thing she became aware of was that she'd had a sense of the air against skin and fur. But when it came to weight against her body, that was very nearly it. Some very light pressure from cloth, basic cottons and linens because the human-made artificial fibers took some getting used to and for a centaur, polyester never really stopped stinking --

-- she wasn't in her armor. And her body was very nearly in a sleeping position, with legs partially under her lower torso, arms folded beneath the soft weight of her breasts, while the pure breeze swept through the long blonde falls which came from head and tail. It carried the recognition of a new scent, something familiar and yet not quite there --

-- the breeze shifted, and a half-tangible leaf brushed through her hair. A ripple of grass lightly teased against her skirt, at least in those moments when it didn't seem to be on the verge of phasing towards her fur.

It was then that she recognized the lack of pain.

The Second Breath had stopped.

(All breath had stopped.)

But while it had been active, she had used her body as a ramming instrument. Forcing stone to break, and done so within a deep place which probably delighted in magnifying negative sensation. Add that to the weight of armor worn for too long, to the point where padding compressed and flesh felt as if it had to be next, leaving behind little aches long after the steel had been removed. And there were the small wounds which came from the act of living, tiny strains forever accumulating because to live was to hurt and... there was no pain.

None at all.

She had no awareness of her own heartbeat, possibly because she didn't seem to have one.

And now she was resting on soft soil (which had a little too much give to it), in a field of grass, within pure air...

There seemed to be a simple conclusion available, and the thought which summarized it was a peaceful one.

I'm dead.

Perhaps it should have brought horror. But one of the humans' greatest writers had said it: that any shock at finding yourself dead was mitigated by the ongoing presence of 'I'. There was something left of the girl, enough to recognize the condition and so much more.

She wondered if she was capable of opening her eyes, and did so just in time to see the weeping willow's lightest branches gently sway in front of her face.

Feathery, half-present leaves brushed against her ears. She almost giggled.

Flexible branches hung down all around her, like a cross between a cocoon and shroud. She rested beneath the drooping canopy, not quite ready to get up yet, and tried to peer through what felt like endless green.

What little she could see of the sky was clear. Sun was high and bright. Moon, very nearly full, trailed by a short distance --

-- for her home, it would have been natural: something which meant she needed an extra second before she understood the significance. Both, when the planet's artificial cycle never had them in the sky at the same time. It was always one or the other. And now it was both.

She thought she understood. These were the originals, and therefore they were also dead.

Moon was especially beautiful.

Standing seemed to be the next thing. Her skirt shifted as she rose, and the red cross between an ascot and tie moved in familiar ways. Warm sunlight touched her bare arms, while the buttons of her blouse strained to contain her. Some of the few pieces which had survived the trip to Japan, hadn't gotten through a full week on Menajeria, and poor choices all. She should have packed more in the way of pullovers...

The girl made her way out from under the willow, ducking here and there, pushing the soft falls of green out of the way while feeling as if too much effort would leave her hands going through --

-- it was a pasture. There were other trees, but they were fairly spread out. And beneath them, moving within the tall grass, occasionally a few meters above it... there were ponies.

Ponies and... others.

None of them were particularly old. Some had their fur pressed down in predictable places, as if they'd recently removed a metal weight. Several seemed familiar, at least once the girl had started to translate features away from the stone. And they milled about and above the perfect pasture and grass which scented as ideal. Talking (and she couldn't make out the words just yet), laughing, pressing up against each other in ways meant to show comfort.

Nuzzles were frequent. Some of those loving movements had to adjust for the fact that the recipient didn't have the same kind of snout.

She saw a knot of four. All were laughing. One nuzzled another, and something very much like a mountain goat gently rubbed her companion's fur, then licked a few strands --

-- looked up. Over, with horizontally-slit pupils placidly gazing across the sea of grass.

That one was the first to spot the girl. Others turned to see what she was looking at.

Some of them began to move towards her: hooves shifting across the pasture, including the cloven ones. And the air remained pure, for there was no fear.

The girl wondered what she should say. Perhaps the words would be the right ones --

-- and then she heard it, as her ears twisted backwards to gain more of the sound. Feet pounding against the soil, running faster and faster, sandals slapping dirt and skin in equal measure. Frantic panting breaths because that one wasn't used to running for long...

...there was a particular music within the words: a factor which distorted when the speaker tried to work with Japanese, but never truly faded. Multiple expressions of 'i' as a vowel would pick up an extraneous 'o': 'night' became 'noight', which took something away from any dread attempt to stalk it. By contrast, 'ou' collapsed into itself, while most terminal 'g' sounds evaporated. And it was all part of the lilt from too-quick speech, the rise and fall of the brogue.

There was also a certain pressure to the half-gasped syllables, along with a suggestion of physical weaving. A human typically shifted both arms as they ran, which helped to maintain balance because they didn't so much walk as perpetually fall forward. This female only had one limb available for that, and it meant she tilted to the side a lot. The other arm would be raised and bowed outwards, with the palm down against the top of the head.

"Lass! I found you, I found you, I found you, I finally --"

The girl turned: head and waist rotating first, proceeding across a natural range. And she saw a high-collared sundress cut to mid-thigh on shapely legs, gentle yellow being used to set off skin of blue, one hand tangled up in white hair and pressing down because the runner was trying to keep her head in place, saw tears falling from golden irises and before she managed to finish turning her lower torso, the newcomer went directly into the upper.

The left arm wrapped around her first: the right hand needed a second to untangle itself from long strands. A height difference of nearly fifty centimeters meant the new arrival was weeping into her bosom, and the girl felt her arms come up. Knew her own tears were flowing, running down her face and being taken by the white strands.

They hugged for a time. Something which almost seemed endless, because a proper hug went on for as long as was needed.

"-- I found you," Lala wept. "Saint Anthony and Anubis be praised, I found you..."

One of the girl's arms raised a little higher. Gently stroked the dullahan's hair, careful not to put too much pressure on any direction. You could touch a dullahan's head, if you knew them well enough. That degree of familiarity simply came with an obligation to keep it on the neck.

"I was waiting to see you," Cerea whispered. "I kept hoping... that if it happened, that I would..."

"I promised..."

They kept hugging, as what had been approaching hooves and wings continued to hold their distance. Giving them time.

Finally, Lala looked up from the soft swells. Wanly smiled, and then pulled back just enough to allow turning. Facing the others.

"I need her for a wee bit," the dullahan told them all. "Not quite time for the rest of you to take your turn, right? So if I can just have...?"

The herd, ponies and non, nodded as one.

"Tank you." (The lilt also had a tendency to shave out an 'h' here and there. Or, on a really bad day, 'ere and dere.) Lala reached out, took Cerea's right hand in hers: something which, as the second smallest of the exchange students, required reaching up. "Come on, lass. Saw a good spot on the run in, right? C'mere. We've got to talk, while there's time..."

Cerea nodded. Allowed herself to be led, and the two girls moved away from the group.

(One continued to follow. At a respectful distance, where deer-like ears would hear nothing. But she followed, and the dusting brush of a tail swayed.)

It left them going up a small incline: the sort of exceptionally gentle slope which mostly existed to tell the climber where their knees were. But it still gave them some elevation, and Cerea found herself looking at more of the perfect pasture, the sway of half-solid grass, some of the other creatures spread out across the field, like the ring of dozens visible to the left --

-- there was a six-limbed form crumpled among the blades, and fingers of bone, sinew, and darkened henna were just starting to claw at the soil.

It was oddly small: no larger than a colt of five years. The horns were barely nubs, while the body was an anatomical chart of starvation. It was gasping, as if it couldn't manage to breathe. Cerea didn't understand. She was doing perfectly well without breathing.

It writhed somewhat. Forced its head up, and saw some of what was surrounding it.

A number of them silently stepped closer. Pegasi and griffons flapped, and no sound came from that. Simply a shrinking of distance, as the ring continued to close.

The withered form tried to get up.

All four of the skeletal legs folded. Collapsed.

It looked up again. Yellow pinpricks just barely spotted the girls atop the little rise. A strangely-hinged mouth opened, and perhaps the frantic hiss of escaping air had been meant as a scream --

-- a slightly-cool hand squeezed her own.

"No, lass," Lala softly said. "You don't need to see this."

Cerea nodded. Looked away and allowed herself to be led, because the dead had something they wished to tell the other new arrival. Something they wished to do.

Behind them, the circle closed.

Lala had insisted on having Cerea give her side of the events first. It had taken a while, but... time seemed to be available, and dullahans could be endlessly patient.

Both girls were resting in the grass. For Cerea, that meant having her legs folded, placing her in the soil, but -- she didn't seem to be getting dirty. And she'd tried to pluck a few blades: she didn't feel hungry, but the grass smelled delicious. It was just... hard to touch. She couldn't quite seem to get a grip...

Lala had sat down next to her right flank. And then she'd leaned back, using the centaur's lower body for support. You could occasionally do that with a mare, if you asked first and the mare was in an exceptionally good mood.

There had been no need to ask Cerea. Not when it was family. And in the whole of the pasture, the dullahan was the only truly solid presence. Cerea could feel every breath through skirt and flank. Could tell that Lala was still breathing.

She'd just finished the story. (Words had been there. Most had felt suitable.) Leaned forward a little, tried to get a few blades again. It seemed as if concentration helped, as if she was forcing herself against that strange barrier, getting closer to the pasture in ways which the lack of distance didn't accommodate --

"-- careful, lass," Lala softly offered. "Please."

Cerea glanced over. "It'll hurt me?"

The dullahan shook her head. (There was a certain degree of connection when head and neck were together, which allowed such shifts to take place. It was also slightly tenuous, and that made some movements slow.) "No. Nothin' will hurt you. Not here. But... don't want it too much. Not right now."

She paused. The blue skin of her cheeks began to phase towards violet.

"I can explain," Lala offered. "Here and now, I can. But there's other things to cover first." Another slow shift. "Ponies..."

Almost automatically, "I swear it all happened --"

"I believe you," Lala gently cut her off. "Would've had more trouble if I hadn't seen them. And I wouldn't have found this place within the realm without you as an anchor, lass. Without the pact. Even so..." and there was a little wonder in her words "...it's all real..."

"Even the last part." Words which marked the first time she'd felt tired.

"Even Tartarus' illusions?"

"Especially the illusions." Her shoulders sagged. "I killed him, Lala. I'd never killed anyone. I just made a decision, and I --"

"-- if you're thinkin' it was murder," the dullahan immediately said, "it wasn't."

A little challenging, "How do you know?"

Wryly, "'Because we're talkin'."

"...oh."

The dullahan leaned back a little more. There was something about the slight coolness of the contact which reminded Cerea...

...coolness and hue. Two things which invoked Luna.

"I need a minute or so," Lala said, staring at the clear sky. "To put it all together in my head, what happened at home. There's a lot of it, and I can't ever say it all."

Cerea calmly nodded, and the other girl watched the movement.

"You killed someone with a practice blade," the psychopomp noted with bemusement.

It was almost a snicker. "Don't tell the humans."

"Not going to happen," Lala stated. "They wouldn't believe me anyway. That was part of the trouble, right there..."

Silent thought, as Cerea looked down at her.

It should have been strange, seeing the dullahan this way. Separated from dramatic cloak, partial armor which didn't do anything, and the false scythe. It was just the sundress, and... that felt more natural. As if it reflected more of who Lala truly was.

The warmth of the sundress, and the slight coolness of the other girl's body. And still, there was that half-cowlick which came off the front of her scalp. A blade of white hair. Something which almost looked as if it might be able to cut.

"We didn't start to worry until well after breakfast," Lala finally began. "You've stayed out for a while on long gallops, and we all know how you get when you find a new street. But when you didn't come in..."

Blue eyes closed, and the blonde head bowed.

"It wasn't you," the other girl quickly said. "You know that, lass."

"I thought about what had to be happening," Cerea sadly reflected. "That you would all believe I was dead --"

"-- not all."

It had emerged as something calm, and the shock of it got Cerea's eyes open again.

"Not --"

"-- we got the search going pretty quickly," Lala announced. "You don't really need the details there, except that our personal M.O.N. squad came in after a few hours. Which nearly got Smith fired, because the cultural exchange people think it should have been a lot sooner than that. But the neighborhood was being searched. Knocking on every door. Your personal film crew confessed to having caught you on a few streets, and that gave us part of the trail. But then it just -- stopped..."

She sighed. Stared down at the grass.

"I tried to tell them," the dullahan stated. "Right from the start, that you weren't dead. I would have known. The other girls believed me. So did he, after a bit. But no one else did. Not when the press came around, not after the story went international --"

Cerea blinked.

"-- international."

"Right, it did!" The thin blue arms spread out to the sides, waved a little. (Cerea wasn't sure if that was Lala or the dullahan's body. The body occasionally seemed to express opinions of its own.) "Went around the world! We had vans parked in front of the house, reporters from what felt like half the nations --"

"-- why?" It felt like a legitimate question. "I can't have been the first student to vanish! Even if there weren't any kidnappings before this --" which she was having trouble believing "-- someone would have tried to jump their passport, stay in the country after deportation --"

There was a very thin smile on the dullahan's face. It was almost always a thin smile, if she allowed herself to be caught smiling at all. But there hadn't been a single moment of internally scripted, near-chūnibyō drama...

"Lass," Lala evenly observed, "you're the daughter of a herd leader. Adds some interest to the story. There was a political factor. And on top of that, you're white -- and there we go." It took a few seconds for the giggle to die away. "Expected you to look exactly that offended --"

"-- white," Cerea just barely repeated. "White?"

"And blonde," Lala impishly added. "Doesn't hurt. Of course, they had the rest of it to deal with. One network didn't cover anything until the last and once they had to, they digitally altered your ears. Bumped up the size, to remind their viewers that they weren't supposed to actually care. Another group wanted that audience to feel worse for you, and they brought them down. Didn't end well for anyone." Innocently, "But then, pretty much all of them just showed you from the shoulders up..."

The blonde (but not 'white'!) girl fumed for a while, until the dullahan finally sighed.

"I told them you were alive," Lala continued. "That I would know, because the pact was there. The house believed me. The press didn't. But even for us, it didn't help. Alive and missing meant there were so many things which could be happening to you. Things we didn't want to think about, or talk about. Even with each other. And..."

She trailed off for a moment. Lowered her right arm, and slim fingers ran through the grass.

...it hit the house hard," she eventually went on. "Everyone had their own way of dealing with it. Rachnera --"

"-- celebrated." The words were bitter. "Where no one else could see. And said a few words about how I was the only one too weak to escape, where everyone could hear --"

The cool palm pressed against her skirt. Cerea stopped.

"There were a couple of weeks where no one could move without getting snagged," Lala said. "Then there was a house meetin'. Everyone yelled at her. Miia slapped her. There hasn't been a tripwire since. Rachnera's dealing with it by not dealing with it. Skulkin' about, never admittin' to anythin'. And Miia, she nearly got deported --"

Cerea's upper spine went straight, almost locked in place. "What happened?"

"That documentary idiot came back." Lala spat. "The one who tried to get Papi's egg. I didn't recognize him, because he was before my time. He tried to sneak in with the press. Miia spotted him. Then she wrapped him. It got worse from there." A little more softly, "But the program cut her a break, because... because they knew how bad it was." Paused. "And they were already losin' a lot of students."

I nearly got Miia sent back.
I thought the program might fall apart.

"Because their parents were afraid," Cerea made herself say, "that it would happen to their own children. Whatever was happening to me."

And all the dullahan could do was nod.

"A lot of parents pulled their kids home," Lala quietly said. "For two months, we didn't have Mero -- she came back last week, Cerea: she won't talk about how she got loose."

Decibels were beginning to die. The other girl's head tilted forward, swayed dangerously on the neck as the scythe of white hair cut the perfect air.

"Papi cries sometimes." Almost a whisper. "Whatever she's doing, she'll just stop, and... cry. We keep finding her in your room. Nothing's changed there. We kept it waiting for you. A couple of other girls tried to get it, new girls, but -- we all linked arms and wings, blocked them every time. Rachnera was part of that. And so was he -- I felt that, lass."

Cerea knew. She'd been equally aware of her entire body going stiff.

"Because he blamed himself." Dark eyes closed, reopened. "He thought he should have known, done somethin' -- all the things which were impossible, he decided he was responsible for."

"He was home," Cerea immediately argued. "There wasn't anything he could have -- he would have just been trapped with me --"

"-- you know how many times he stepped in. Threw a punch, when we couldn't."

The blonde girl silently nodded.

"He thought he should have done somethin', even when he couldn't." The sigh was just barely audible. "Dat's where you two are alike. He didn't try to shove us out, but -- he talked to everyone. About goin' home, because he didn't think he could protect us any more. It didn't drive us off. Mero's ma pulled her out for her own reasons, and Mero couldn't stop it because she isn't an adult yet. But he didn't let anyone new in. And... it's quiet, Cerea. The house is quieter without you. Even Suu just goes puddle sometimes and doesn't come out of it for a while. Because..."

The words had a certain lilt.

"...we kind of got used to having a few hundred kilograms of blonde stomping her hooves around the place and pretendin' she was in charge." A cool hand gently pressed against the skirt again. "And they believed me, when I said you were alive. Papi kept askin'. But 'alive' could still mean enslaved, or worse, and... we miss you, lass. All of us, every day..."

They both waited until all of the tears had stopped.

"I'm sorry."

Gently "It wasn't your fault."

"I missed you. All of you --"

"-- even the spider?" Teasing.

Cerea took a breath, and found that she could. She just didn't need it.

"I kept thinking the same thing, over and over," the girl told the dullahan. "'I want to go home.' But it was never about France, or the herd. I wanted the house. To be with all of you. To..."

It took one more breath.

"...go back to my family. To see my sisters..."

Almost a whisper. "Is that what we are?"

Which made the girl's words turn frantic. "Prithee, but this one did not mean to offend --"

"-- just wonderin'," Lala quietly interrupted. "Wonderin' exactly when you'd finally figured that out."

She turned her body in the grass. Pressed a cool check against a warm form, and stayed there until the trembling stopped. When a little more of the pain began to fade.

The topics became a little scattershot after that.

"I'd like to meet Nightwatch."

Somewhat too quickly, "I hope you don't. I mean, not for a good long time. Not here --"

With a soft snort, "I don't know if I could find this place again without you, lass: we're a long way off from the fields I know. And I can't make a pact with someone I've never met."

"Somepony."

"...really?"

Solidly, "They're two separate words."

Which triggered another snort. "Anyway, no pact, no bloodline with someone who swore. You'd have to enter together." And a soft sigh. "I'd still love to see her, though. In her world, even if it was just for a minute. Or your Luna. I -- kind of think we'd get along. Least, I'd like to think that."

Shadows which comfort. The cool sanctuary within darkness.

"I think so too."

Silence. One girl breathed. The other couldn't seem to get a rhythm back.

Without judgment, "You haven't asked about your ma."

Which made Cerea snort. "I told you about that part of Tartarus. I don't want to think about her too much, Lala. I had those thoughts. They were just about the last ones, and maybe that's enough --"

"She's still your blood."

Immediately, "Half of it."

"Lass --"

Her volume was starting to rise. "-- the part which isn't diluted, and that's the reason for my stupid name, Lala. I made up a nickname which no one ever called me, and that was how I thought of myself. Because I couldn't stand the sound of my own name. She didn't give me a name, she tried to label me with a wish --"

"-- can I talk?"

Somehow, it was enough to stop her.

"About my mother."

(Just not for long.)

Lala nodded.

"...fine," Cerea muttered. "Get it over with..."

But the silence stretched out.

"You're a lot less formal," the dullahan finally said. "A lot. And before some of this came up, there were a few times when you were almost relaxed. None of us ever saw that in the house. Not for long."

"I'm under orders," Cerea firmly stated -- then paused, and almost smirked. "Also, I'm dead."

The psychopomp was briefly silent.

"We need to talk about that --"

"-- being dead means I literally," Cerea declared, "cannot screw anything else up --"

"-- we all saw it, after a while," Lala scythed in. "Especially Rachnera. Who does miss you, in her own way. She spotted it first, and -- worked those hard fingertips into what she saw as a weak spot. But it was worst after your ma visited. The pressure... lass, you were cleanin' the house bottom to top, and you kept trying to wipe out your own fingerprints and hoofmarks. Just about circlin', trying to get rid of every trace."

Defensively, "We make a mess. All of us. It's not our house --"

"-- we are a mess."

Cerea stopped. Lala's lips quirked.

"All of us," the smaller girl added. "All of the time. Damaged goods. Because every species had a gap. Lass, this is how we all saw you after a while. Let's say that you decided to find a thousand yen. One loose coin at a time. And one day, you looked at your total and you were three short. Three short, and that made you a failure. You couldn't stand that. So you'd go out, and you'd find four. And when you did? You'd look at the new total, and you'd decide you were nine hundred and ninety-nine short."

Cerea's mouth fell open.

"Tell me I'm wrong."

Nothing came out.

"Any time," Lala helpfully offered. "We've got a while yet."

The silence maintained.

"Right, that's it, isn't it?" the dullahan lilted. "But that's from your ma. And now you've seen it, and you're angry. You're allowed to be. But she's part of this."

The smaller girl raised her hands to her head. Lifted it away from the neck, and tilted everything until the golden irises were staring into Cerea's face.

"And she's part of you."

I don't want...

It was very easy for the dullahan to patiently stare. Especially the 'patience' part. The staring wasn't quite up to Fluttershy.

The head wobbled.

"My arms are gettin' kind of tired."

"Fine," Cerea finally said. "My mother. What happened?"

The neck received its burden. The dullahan rubbed at her own biceps for a few seconds.

"She didn't get the word for an extra day," Lala told her. "Another reason Smith nearly got sacked, and why she's still on probation. But then your ma came storming in. Tried to take over everything, and she did that when she didn't know how any of it worked. It's not like most gaps have people go missin'. So it was mostly blunderin' around, shoving her weight into people and barkin' the kind of orders which would have just made things worse. Only took a few hours before Zombina snapped. Told her that she understood, but none of it was helpin' and your ma had to step back." A brief pause. "You can probably guess what happened next."

Morbidly, "How many limbs did she knock off?" It was Zombina. They could all be sewn back on, but the process was annoying.

"How many? None," Lala firmly said. "Tionishia grabbed the blade. Tried to reason with your ma. When that didn't work, she tried to go wall, block everythin'. And after that failed..." The sigh was soft. "Ogre versus centaur. They both got the worst of it. Even when for 'Shia, the worst was just havin' to hurt anyone. But we got her out. She galloped away, once she was out the door. Didn't come back for hours. And then she was sorry, and quieter, and --"

"-- waiting for a chance to start over," Cerea decided.

More silence.

"She loves you."

Two toneless words. "Does she?" And then the bitterness came back. "She sure didn't love my father. He called out to her, and she ignored him. She wouldn't save him, when there were no laws yet and we could have attacked. I was about to go in, and then she dragged me off! Anything could have happened to him, anything, and it would have been my fault --"

"-- yours," Lala broke in, "when she dragged you off."

"I should have pulled free --"

"-- how is a centaur like a narcissistic hermaphrodite?"

Cerea blinked.

"...what?"

There were ways in which the girl could think of herself as French. In the same sense, Lala was Irish. The brogue, some regional biases, football club allegiance, part of what could sometimes be a slightly morbid worldview --

"Constantly hard on themselves."

-- and the somewhat crude sense of humor.

The joke, rather appropriately, died.

"No credit for comin' up with that on the spot?" Lala innocently asked.

A rather embarrassed breeze got out of the area.

"Centaurs," the dullahan muttered. "An entire species with no sense of humor." Which was followed by "I know you looked it up, when you could. Were there any deaths in your riot?"

Cerea shook her head.

"So he came out of it."

"She didn't know that," Cerea argued. "And a few of the humans were hurt badly. Hospital time. He might have been one of them. It's not as if I had his name. I still don't --"

"-- you could have asked her."

"When she refused to speak with me?" The tail was starting to lash. "After she ran, Lala? Did everything she could to avoid me? I thought she would have been happy to have me gone, because the sin had vanished!" Faster now, with the hairs skimming through the grass. "Or at least the evidence --"

She had told the dullahan all of it, because she hadn't felt there was any reason for holding back. There was time, and... she'd said it earlier. When it came to the living, there was no more damage she could do. Even if she wanted to get in one more good swing at a very familiar target.

"-- of her weakness," the girl pushed out. "The only one who ever gave in! Who ever --"

"...lass," Lala gently said, "I need to ask a favor."

"What?"

"Imagine it," was even softer. "Imagine your ma, on that night." The snicker didn't quite fit with the rest of it. "I understand that you'll want to stop just short of the act. Isn't hardly anyone who wants to picture their parents having sex. But -- put yourself there. Try to see it, just for a minute." The cool hand lifted higher. Rubbed the skirt, stroked unreachable fur. "Please..."

In time, the girl will learn that the core of the idea came from the humans. This seems to make it even stupider.

She has no interest in the colts. She thinks about being with them, and the most she can feel is disgust. What the filly doesn't know is that she isn't the only one. The generations of cumulative error have seen stallions warp into something which has no gentility left. Power and testosterone which reeks in their sweat and no thought which wants anything more than the act itself. Their own satisfaction. The conquest. Nothing else.

You attract a stallion with a vagina and a pulse: another century, and one of those qualifications may become optional.

You can't ask them to caress.
To kiss.
To love.

When mares look at snorting, reeking, uncaring brutes... disgust can be the least of it.

And centaurs have this much in common with equines: if the mare isn't in the mood to have sex, then sex isn't going to happen. Mating effectively becomes impossible. There are ways in which the body closes itself off and if the stallion tries to persist beyond that, the kicking begins.

The species has rendered itself into something where half of the population doesn't want to breed. The mere thought can make extinction look like the soft option.

But the species must continue.

And the humans, who breed horses... who, in pushing for some of them to become faster, stronger, better able to work and race and who did it all while not caring about the fact that the results were snorting masses of hormones which just happened to also be neurotic messes that no equine mare would willingly touch --

-- came up with the concept of 'teaser'.

This is how it works.

For equines, you find the mare who'll carry the foal. Then you have to find out if she's in estrus, because horses do have that. And if the time is right -- you have to make sure she's receptive, because the wrong stallion is going to be kicked. Bitten. Worse.

So you start with the teaser.

A teaser stallion has to be in good condition. A strong libido is a necessity, as they have to want the breeding. But what's just as important is a good temperament. They have to shine on personality. Skill at nickering, slow approaches, and gentle contact. They're the sort of stallions who, during a few carefully-supervised hours, can get the mare in the mood.

The humans observe.
Watch for that moment when the mare agrees to the act.
And in the instant they see she's receptive, that it's going to happen -- they get the teaser out of the stall. Swap in a snorting mess of hormones and neuroses, who will already be aroused because there's a receptive mare in front of them and they don't care about the fine details.

That is how you breed racehorses.

Now. Apply all of it to something which can think.

Even without estrus, the centaur mares need to be receptive to breeding. If the emotional state isn't present, then sex is rather unlikely. The fad (or fetish) for raw power wore off a long time ago. Just about no one in the current generation can be aroused by any living stallion. And you still need to get the mares in the mood, because the other option is extinction.

So what's left?

You get just about all of the mares of breeding age together in a single residence. Wait for their menstrual cycles to synchronize: something which can happen with multiple species when their females are living in close proximity.

And then, when there's no way out -- you tell the youngest what's going to happen.

The stallions are no longer suitable: the older mares recognize that. But you do whatever's needed for survival.

It's the only way.

You can't bring in horses. They're large, difficult to corral, make too much noise, and they aren't the least bit arousing. A horse can't tell a centaur mare that it loves her.

It can't hold her hand.

There is a night in every spring when no filly can look out of a window...

When the girl was first seriously considering the possibility (or rather, the dream) of having sex with their host, she tried to do some research. Attempting to discover whether it was possible and, if the answer worked out to 'true', exactly how she was supposed to manage the act without killing him. (The first rule of such Internet scouting turned out to be avoiding anything with a .de address. Forever.) But after her mother confessed...

Knowing it was possible was no longer a comfort. Existing as the living evidence turned into something opposite. But there was a new question in play: how were they found?

Use the right websites, and you can search through time.

There are liminals who can pass for human, at least for a little while. The mares pay them to go out into the world. In one generation, they place classified ads. Eventually, special-interest magazines get involved, and a little block of text at the very back invites the curious to connect with others who share the same fantasy. Approach the present, and a website can call out to dreamers directly. And in every year, the trap is set.

Do you dream of something different?
Are your tastes tilted towards that which never existed?
Imagine. Imagine six limbs and a warm embrace...

(Someone has to write the erotica for those smaller mailings. Eventually, for the websites. The girl never finds out who was hired for that. Perhaps some of the gap's mares were working from the inspiration of memory.)

Eventually, you get a number of them together, still under the direction of those few who can pass. There's a meeting, a hookup, a convention. An annual event which just happens to take place within a day's travel of a gap.

The wheat is sorted from the chaff. You're certainly looking for pleasant features, but it's more important to find a personality which offers warmth and comfort. A tender touch goes a long way. Everyone involved had better both know what a bath is for and have made a recent personal acquaintance.

Then you gather the wheat together in privacy. The seeds. That which sows a future.
You lock the doors.
And you tell them everything.

Some probably laugh. Quite a few might have tried to leave. Offended, angry that someone tried to take it this far.

Then you show them the evidence.

The girl presumes the liminal host might reveal themselves right there. The final argument, the one which can't be countered. It... won't matter in a day anyway.

And once they believe...
...you offer them a dream.

One night in every spring.

It starts early. After all, the parties involved need to be introduced.

The humans are brought into the gap. (There are multiple smuggling routes used for this alone. The girl's one-day exit chose something new.) They meet the mares, and an hour normally has to be allowed just for the shock to wear off on both sides.

Pairs sort themselves out. There's a walk around the area. Quiet conversations, as each side truly learns about the other. Flowers may be offered. Bouquets are waiting at strategic points, just to make that happen. And there's conversation and hand-holding and perhaps a few might even attempt to dance.

The young mares tell themselves that they're only doing what they must. But the illusion quickly closes in, begins to solidify. They've never had a male speak to them like this before, with respect and adoration and... as someone who exists in the presence of a dream.

Hands are held. If permission is given, skin can be gently stroked.

The mares usually have to wind up leaning in for the first kiss. In and down.

They come to know each other, as much as one night will permit. And when the illusion is complete, when the mare's body is starting to respond -- the new couples go to the special stables. Blouses are removed. The soft caress moves to those areas where nerve density is highest.

It almost always reaches the point where the mare is willing.
The stallion, waiting in a nearby, soundproofed room with only alcohol for company, is always willing.
And when the moment is right --
-- the older mares swap out the teaser.

That's how centaurs breed.

The girl, who went out into the world before the special house called for her, learned that just a little too late.

The details also happen to double as the world's most effective emetic.

It has to be done quickly. There are many ways in which the secret of liminal existence was kept, and one of them is a special brew. Something which makes humans suggestible, distorts memory into what the drinker is told. But it only affects a limited span of recent time. Take too long...

One of the base components is alcohol. (Satyrs can do a lot of things with alcohol.) For those at the gathering who don't agree to the trip, there are free drinks. Everyone else gets their glass at the end. A few even raise them willingly, with a toast to the power of a fulfilled dream: they might not have gotten to complete the act, but -- they touched a centaur. For a number, that's enough.

A dream which, by morning, will be less than dissipating mist.

They won't remember.
None of them ever remember.
A number stay in the special interest community. Anyone who's been proven as an excellent teaser may wind up being invited back.
You're supposed to rotate couples. Even so, there are a few for whom not just anyone will do. Some of the mares wind up meeting the same human for the third time, and the tears have to be held back until they leave.

So what happened with her mother on that night?

The teaser had done his job. Her mother was... ready. And the girl can almost understand that, because stallions just try to get into positions where they can squeeze. They don't fondle or massage or caress, and kisses are right out.

The girl managed to get their host to touch her a few times of her will, and it was... soft.

It was so easy for the girl's breath to grow hot...

...her mother had been with the teaser for hours. They'd talked. Touched. Then they'd gone to the stable, her mother would have undressed, and the teaser naturally followed suit.

(Mares were instructed to avoid comments about underendowment.)

Kisses and touching and... her mother was ready.

As the girl understands it, the teaser should have been swapped out. There are older mares who do that. So what happened? Was there a new mare in the role, one who was easily distracted? Who found something else calling her away, the wrong sound coming from another part of the stables, a summons for multiple mares to intervene, told the human to rejoin the others on his own, and just completely lost track of affairs?

Did the teaser almost reach the gathering?
When did the human hear her mother cry out in pain?
The stallion -- the one whom the girl thought was her father -- had been drinking. For hours.
The approach was rough.
The start was worse.
There's a weighted baton secured in each breeding stable, one which is even larger and heavier than the standard because an aroused stallion can be harder to dissuade. The mares aren't supposed to use it unless they have no other choice. And her mother, who had just cried out in pain at a moment when the supervisors were out of hearing, trying to reach the last resort, being dragged away from it because the stallion doesn't care --

-- the door would have opened.
The human racing in: something the stallion doesn't notice. The intruder sees, in a single instant, what the mare is trying to do.
The baton is seized.
There is a centaur stallion whom the girl believed to be her father. He is strong, extremely stupid, really needs to be kept away from alcohol, and exists as a trotting pileup of genetic errors.
As it turns out, one of those is a certain vulnerability to being hit squarely at the back of the skull.

The stallion drops, and stays down for hours. (The mare will tell everyone that he was so drunk as to pass out after the act, and they all believe it -- including him.) It leaves mare and human effectively alone in the same stable, with the mare looking at her rescuer. The one who showed her that some touches didn't have to be harsh. Who, at least for a single year, saved her.

There are many distractions on this night. No supervisor ever gets back to that stable and even if they had, the mare has used the baton to jam the door.

They reach for each other...

The two females sat in the grass for a while. After a time, the breeze returned. Cerea still couldn't seem to make the air work for her. Not that she needed it, but -- it was frustrating. As if everything about the place was almost present...

"We did some of the smugglin'," Lala quietly offered. "Dullahans, I mean. Never me personally. It was for the adults. I only got as far as bein' taught how to put on the makeup, before the gaps opened. And the contacts." There was a soft groan. "As far as I'm concerned, a girl in heavy pancake makeup looks like only one thing in God's world, and dat's a girl in heavy pancake makeup. But some people don't look too closely." She paused. Sighed a little, and stared up at the sky. "The contacts make my eyes hurt."

"I never met any of the smugglers," Cerea wearily replied. "That was for grown mares. Did... they tell you what it was like? Going out into the world?"

"Stress," was the answer. "Stressed, all the time. Wonderin' if they would be the one who made the last mistake."

"No," the girl miserably said. "That was me."

It had been the whole story. The dream fight with Luna required the proper context.

The dullahan sighed.

"Best to deal with that first, I think," she decided. "And then back to your ma." She leaned back against Cerea's flank. "Lass -- I'm going to ask you somethin' serious."

The girl waited.

And, almost all at once, the too-fast pace of Irish speech accelerating throughout, "How much longer did we have, to stay hidden? Hard enough in the medieval days, when travel was so hard and there were just a few humans who might risk going off the roads. But then you got the explorers. After a while, technology put cameras in the sky. The ones who could pass... we were bein' run ragged. Everywhere at once, just trying to spot the potential leaks and fix them before the flood washed us away. One mistake. One moment of bad contact, a collar that fails just as someone bumps me. Always, always one moment --"

"-- which might have been mine --"

"It couldn't have held much longer," Lala quickly argued. "Can't reprogram every satellite, hack systems which never get tied into anythin'. Can't be everywhere. The elders knew that, Cerea: the elders for all of the gaps. It's why they talked to each other through the burners, because -- it was almost over. No matter what we did, it was almost over. When you think about it, we barely got as far as we did. And it was going to be easier to come out, announce ourselves and try to account for the gaps, than to let them find us. Coming out... we could try to control a little of it. We would be there when the reaction hit."

"Their hands might have been forced," Cerea countered. "Building rumors. Hoofprints in the mud --"

"-- and you think you're the only one who ever tried to get out for a day? Who nearly got caught? Centuries, lass: centuries in the gaps. That's a long time to go with just one rebellion."

The girl fell silent.

"It was almost over, no matter what happened," Lala told her. "Maybe you did leave evidence. For kids, who might not have told their folks. And no one said the parents would believe them. Even in the worst view of it, you were -- coincidence."

They both mulled that over for a while.

"So we're exposed," Cerea said. "Forever." Because going back into a closet was effectively impossible, and she couldn't even use a typical Japanese walk-in.

Dryly, "At least now they have to kill us in the open."

"Fatalistic," Cerea observed.

"Dullahan," Lala countered. And gently, "Lass, don't you blame yourself for enough already?"

"I've been trying to blame my mother," Cerea dryly responded. "It hasn't been much of an improvement --"

"-- she's scared."

The blonde head turned. Blue eyes slowly sought contact with gold, which stared right back.

"She's been scared for a lifetime," Lala quietly decided. "Yours. You had it, down there in the caves. She probably tore apart every book your people ever wrote, trying to find out if there were any other times. To see what happened if a centaur bred with a human. There's species who need that, worse off than yours --"

The lamia. Where every birth was female, and humans were an essential part of the reproductive cycle.

"-- but I doubt she came up with anything, or the fear wouldn't have been there. She said it in front of us, that horrible word, and I know why you hate it. Diluted." The anger briefly twisted blue skin. "It's like saying one drop of Protestant blood means you can never be Catholic, and the Americans had their own version for their colors. But with your ma -- I do believe she was afraid to see what you'd look like, when you came out. And she got the right limb count, so..."

The scythe of a cowlick had its way with the pure air.

"She pushed you, because she was afraid," the dullahan continued. "Afraid of the price for what she'd done, and that you'd be the one who paid it. So she was looking for where the damage might be, like you said. She pushed to see what broke. Because she's been afraid since the moment you were born, and she was afraid for you. A birth like no one had ever seen before. And she tried to love you, but..."

She trailed off for a moment, and the girl took over.

"Afraid." Bitter, saturated with disbelief. "And you think she loved me."

"When I meet people," Lala neutrally offered, "they're usually not in the best place in their lives. Some of them are at the end of their lives. They're scared, and they have a lot of ways to deal with that. Some of them involve lying. Ask a dullahan about fear."

Cerea's fists clenched.

"Or ask me," she countered. "After months spent having just about everypony --"

"-- then you should know. She pushed you, lass. Because she was afraid. Pushed you so hard to be a centaur, until you probably wanted to be just about anything else because 'centaur' was never good enough."

They were so pretty.
All of the ones in the magazines. On the websites.
...small and fine and I knew some people liked breasts that size...
...just about no size --
-- but people were willing to be with them.
To touch.
To love.
And I wanted...

She had gazed at the captured opinions of others until they had become more important than her own.

"I think she loves you, in her way," Lala offered (and the girl almost wished she could believe it). "But she doesn't know how to show it. All she remembers is the fear."

"And she still left him for the mob." There was no point in understating it. "After they'd stayed in contact for years. The gaps were open. She could have saved him --" stopped. "No. Taken him back, right then and there. A mixed-species couple --"

"-- one of the first," the dullahan observed. "The first targets. And she would have had to admit to everything, on the spot."

"She abandoned --"

"-- people are complicated." Somewhat more softly, "I said your ma loved you. I never said she was the best mare, or that she made the right decision. She might have forgotten how on both. You could say the best of her was almost left in that stable, after the fear set in. Except that the best of her is right here. And she was too close to see it..."

The small girl looked up at her. Gold eyes roamed across Cerea's features.

"Did she ever really look at you?" Lala asked. "Did anyone? When all she was telling them to see was a centaur?" And waited.

Eventually, the girl's ears and tail all twitched.

"I don't understand." Words she'd brought with her from two worlds.

"Lass," Lala said, "centaurs... evolve. Fast. When the gaps opened, when some species saw yours for the first time in centuries, they couldn't believe how much you'd all changed. Skin and fur, height and build. And your males got twisted. Changed to the point where no mare wanted to be with one, something else which happened right quick. A whole species on the verge of not being able to breed any more, with no way to reverse what happened to your stallions because all the damage might have been on the chromosome the mares don't have. Can't replace. What's the solution, when evolution comes callin'? The one which means there's no dilution at all? Never was, and never could be?"

What are you --

The question never had the chance to be born. The answer effectively killed it.

"Cerea, lass, love -- you look just like your mother..."

She barely had any grounding in science fiction. But there were movies in the household, mostly bad ones. Biology textbooks had been smuggled into the gap.

It was enough. And for the second time, the girl's jaw dropped.

"Let's say interbreeding is possible," the dullahan continued (and, in Cerea's opinion, did so just a little too evenly). "Are centaur genes that dominant, to let nothin' of your da go through? Or are centaurs reaching the point where the mares are a little like the lamia, and the sperm cell is mostly a trigger? Maybe the egg cell just doubles the chromosomes and calls it solved." Staring at the girl's face, "I know your lot didn't do much with photography, no more than mine. Not when we're just about all taught that cameras are something to fear. So there's no record of what your ma looked like at your age, and memories can lose detail. Especially for a species which thinks about how things smell a little more than how they look. But for what she looked like, when she was young -- I'm bettin' the answer is right next to me. Because she was evolvin' to work without males, or to make sure the stallion's damage can't be passed on."

The smaller girl pressed more tightly against the larger's trembling flank. Because it was usually hard to detect Lala's presence in a room. She possessed something approaching an anti-aura: one which made her easy to dismiss or overlook. (Overlooking the fake scythe could take some effort.)

You didn't always know she was there. Until she wanted you to.

"Cerea, when we all saw you next to her for the first time, adjusted for age and everything else, the things your body hasn't finished with yet -- you're just about her clone."

And there were no words. Simply the feeling of her own hands lifting to cover her eyes, and the renewed discovery that the dead could still shed tears.

She felt the dullahan stand. The cool hand gently stroking her spine, upper to lower.

"Maybe it's not entirely that," Lala offered. "We've all got a human aspect, don't we now? Some more than others. Maybe we all need a little human blood every so often, to stay healthy. But that would still make you the most complete centaur to come along in hundreds of years. The first --"

"Second," the girl choked out. "I'm never any better than second at anything --"

"-- she kept pushing you." Both hands were at work now. "Win one category, get pushed into the next weight class. Never giving you a real chance, not when the goal was being moved back on the field after every kick. And even if you're just second -- you're always second. Racing and strength and jousts and aim and everything I could ever name. Saint Sebastian's arrows, Cerea: how talented does someone have to be if they're second-best at everything? There's no dilution, love: there never was. You're just -- you..."

She stopped. Moved around to the front, gently pulled Cerea's hands away from her face.

One was standing. The other was still in the grass. The centaur had to look up at the dullahan.

It also changed their relative positions for the next hug.

Even through the dress, under the heat of a lost Sun, Lala's bosom was slightly cool.

And then the dullahan sang.

The topics changed a few more times.

"The self-defense amendments are coming. Some people are trying to stall them, but the momentum's there."

"How long?"

"Next month, soonest. A year at the worst. Retributive force, equal to what we're being attacked with. Most of the cultural exchanges are looking the other way until that happens." Lala paused. "Some people gave the changes a name."

"Oh?"

With absolute dead-toned neutrality, "Cerea's Laws."

"My --"

"There was a lot of publicity," the smaller girl offhandedly said. "Maybe more than a lot. That sort of thing tends to get named after whoever set it off. And there was this story going around. The one which said you were so honorable about obeyin', you'd obviously let yourself be taken without a fight." Lala grinned. "I didn't have the heart to tell them..."

"I was hoping you'd win."

Slightly impressed, "Really, now?"

"You or Miia," Cerea admitted. "You'd be good for him. And you've got a couple of edges. You're not going to kill him with breakfast. And as far as he's concerned, you've got the best legs."

"Says Miss Busty," Lala giggled -- then took a closer look. "Bustier?"

"I picked up a cup size," Cerea admitted.

Teasing, "Just the one?"

"Maybe. I... can't actually read the label."

"...wait," Lala said. "I think I missed somethin' in the first telling. Since when do you let anyone put you in a bra?"

"I've been thinkin' about his summoning spell," Lala began, pulling her knees up to her chest. (She was sitting against Cerea's flank again, and had been for some time.) "What you said for the things he told you, and what you guessed."

"That he couldn't have reversed it anyway." The girl sighed. "Even with a guarantee, the price --"

"-- not that, lass." One hand went out, gestured dramatically. "He might have still had some of the dark magic in him. From the deep place, from Tartarus. And he'd been in there for a long time, hadn't he? Stealin' that power, over and over. Maybe it's dreaming, but... a dreamer can know a little about what's going on in the wakin' world. Make enough noise, and that becomes part of the dream. And I can't believe that Tartarus liked having its power stolen."

"So?"

The smaller female went silent. Hugged her own legs, then let go.

"I almost think he had magic, of some kind," Lala said. "Everyone else there does -- and yes, lass, everypony: don't start. Just -- not what he considered to be it. Whatever he had wasn't flashy enough. Subtle. And he wanted what he couldn't have, because that's what just about everyone wants. He had a brother, he killed the only one who still loved him, and then he wanted someone who would save him. When he's got all of that magic, of all sorts, and some of it used to be dreamin'. Not awake, not completely aware, but dreamin' he would stop. And that power had to have been tangled up in the casting."

There were times when the dead seemed to think very quickly. It might have been from getting the actual neurons out of the way.

"Twisting the spell," Cerea said. "To find someone who would stop him."

"You told him there was a herd," Lala conceded. "And then he died knowing he'd never reach it, at the hand of the one he'd called." The smile was exceptionally thin. "I'd call that torment..."

And finally, Lala stood up.

"It's about that time," she said. "I gave you as much as I could, lass. But even a dullahan can't stay in the realm forever. Not this far from home."

Cerea sighed. Pushed her hooves against the soil, and felt vaguely irritated as the keratin threatened to pass through earth. It took an extra second before she found the leverage to regain her full height, followed by backing up so she could look at the smaller girl properly.

"I can go back to the ponies I saw," she announced. And the other. It seemed important for her to reach the other, and the air told her that one was relatively close by, perhaps even watching -- but these moments were for Lala. "Talk to them about what happens next --"

The head tilt was honest enough. Curious and, with Lala, a little precarious. "-- why?"

With a borrowed morbidity, "I'm dead. I think that's the next step."

"And who said you're dead?"

Cerea stared at her. The dullahan smiled.

"I know what happened. All of that discharged energy went through me. My body was shutting down --"

Lala's right arm came up. The cool palm touched Cerea's lower sternum.

"We can touch," the psychopomp said. "I made sure of that. But lass -- did you notice how much trouble you're havin', when you try to touch somethin' else? You're only about halfway here. On the border. Right up against the last barrier, if you want to think of it that way."

The stare didn't seem to be getting any less intense. Lala ignored it.

"Because there's a few problems with that death," was the dullahan's next casual announcement. "You said that place doesn't allow suicide. And you killed him -- knowin' that his death might take you out. Does self-sacrifice count for suicide? It might have given you a little bit of an extra chance. And, lass..."

The pressure from the cool palm lightly intensified.

"...trust a dullahan to know. No doctor, me. I can't work out the specifics. But it feels like your body's in deep shock, right up against that edge. Everythin' else got put out of the way for a while, so there would be less to worry about. It's trying to heal, back there in the world. But..."

The smaller girl stepped back. Looked up, and smiled.

"There's those who say centaurs have nothing supernatural about them, no magic," she declared. "Wrong, all of them. Because every last one of you is supernaturally stubborn. The real fight between you and the 'taurs isn't just about the curves: it's to see who can be the more bull-headed. And you'd think they wouldn't be losin' so badly, not with the head start. If you decide you want to be here, lass, truly wish to stay in this realm, reached towards it with everythin' you had -- you would, I think. But if you try to go back..."

She stopped. Looked at the centaur: hooves to head, front to back. The golden gaze seemed to pause partway along the left flank.

"There's those," the dullahan softly repeated, "who say centaurs..." And stopped.

"Lala?"

White hair vibrated. The head shook so quickly as to make the body lunge for it when the tumble inevitably kicked in. Fortunately, the body had become good at blind grabs.

"I'm not sure," Lala tried again as she put her head back on. "Not a doctor, and I think this is more than that. So I can't guess." Refocused. "But this is about you, lass. What you want. Finally, it's about what you want. So -- what do you want?"

The girl thought about it.

"I may never get home," she made herself admit. "No matter what I do."

Gently, "I know."

She looked at her sibling, then tried to inhale truly pure air under a clean sky as she gazed at the perfect pasture. Thinking about a world where the truest, most constant background scent was fear. Terror forever pounding at her brain, when this place offered some level of stability --

-- there was an ibex watching them.

The new female was some distance away. Too far for eavesdropping: a distance-granted offer of privacy. Simply... watching.

And then the ibex nodded.

Backwards-curling horns gave the movement some extra emphasis. So did the smile.

Stability.
The gaps offered stability.
Forever.

She thought about it, as she looked at the ibex. And then Cerea nodded back.

There was enough time for goodbyes, and a little more.

"There's rules," the psychopomp told her, as they walked together at the last. "I'm not sure how much you'll remember. You'll know you saw me, at the very least. But some things might slip. And when it comes to me... all I can carry from you are words. Just a few."

"To them."

Lala nodded.

"What do you want me to say to the girls?"

Cerea closed her eyes.

"That I love them. That I'll keep trying to come back."

"The spider, too?"

It made her smile. "If you must."

"To your ma?"

"That..." One more breath. She seemed to have lungs, of some sort: it was the air which didn't fully cooperate. "...I haven't forgotten her. That I think I did something right --"

"I may," Lala solemnly cut in, "have to take out the 'think' --"

"-- and if she wants to doubt me, she can choke on it."

The dullahan blinked.

"Those must have been some orders," Lala half-whistled. "Anything else?"

"I don't know the squad that well --"

"-- to him, lass," Lala quietly clarified. "To him. You've barely mentioned him this whole time, and -- this is it."

She opened her eyes again. Thought, as hard as she could.

"To look after all of you, because the rest of the group is still trouble. That I hope he's happy, in the end. And... that maybe it's better, if everyone wins."

For the first time, the dullahan frowned.

"That's it, lass?"

I wanted to love him.
I wanted what I thought I couldn't have.
So I told myself that whatever I was feeling had to be love.

"And -- it wasn't his fault. I think it's what he might need to hear."

Lala nodded, and did so as something about the air between them seemed to blur.

"I miss you," Cerea choked out as her limbs grew heavy, a distant thunder starting to pound in her ears. "I miss all of you every day, and I might never come home. I miss you..."

The cool arms wrapped around her for the last time. A strong, desperate grip was offered back.

Everything started to become indistinct. Insubstantial. Everything but the form held so tightly in the girl's arms.

"We'll see each other again," Lala whispered from the center of the final hug, while the land deepened into shadow. "At least once more, love. I promised...."

Crippled

Scent was not the first sense to awaken, because that would have meant her body was granting some degree of internal mercy. It wasn’t, and so the tactile array began to report in.

It was then that she recognized the presence of pain.

The secondary presence.

She vaguely recalled having recently used her body as a improvised ramming instrument. Sideways. And there were ways in which the Second Breath could be thought of as an ultimate adrenal rush, which included every means through which it hid the finer details regarding rapidly-accruing consequences.

The Second Breath was over. (The girl felt as if she was having difficulty with the first. Something about her body’s position seemed to be off.) And she’d sent herself into rock, with the armor taking the brunt of the impact — but kinetic energy rather infamously moved. A portion had conducted through steel, drilled into padding, reached her skin, and then just kept on going. There seemed to be quite a bit of bruising along her left flank, which was perhaps why she was lying on her right side —

— she was on her side. Getting up again was going to present a few issues.

Read enough tales of knightly glory, and you wound up picking up a few extra details about the time period along the way. Things like the era’s often-dubious attempts to delve into medical research. Blood-soaked wood with carved-out shallow depressions, made to fit the human body. Grooves designed to carry leaking fluids away after the first cuts had been made. Investigation through dissection.

It was a rather random memory to be drifting through her slow-waking brain. She didn’t feel as if she had any true cuts: the last battle hadn’t seen her skin broken, and nopony had tried to treat any of her wounds through surgery: something the Doctors Bear were understandably reluctant to do. But pain served as one of the body’s means for self-evaluation. And when it came to summarizing exactly how those injuries felt, the girl had latched onto an excellent mental shorthand.

She felt as if someone had hit her with a fourteenth century anatomical table.

Her brain also insisted that the table had been hickory. She wasn’t entirely sure why. Maybe it had something to do with the wood’s superior density. Still, in Equestria, black ironwood felt as if it would have been more suitable…

So that was why she was on her right side: keeping pressure away from the injuries. (The party who’d done the positioning might not have been considering her normal sleeping posture: upright and locked — but placing her in that pose from the outside was difficult.) She would have to get up eventually, pushing against her body’s mass and the oddly-heavy weight of blankets —

— the armor had been removed: she’d just realized that. Her limbs reported warm, soft fabric. Both torsos were also covered, but there was an additional layer in play there. Something which felt oddly flimsy —

— eventually, she would have to get up. The pain was going to have a say in the process, and… that voice was not as loud as she felt it should have been. Her first guess was that there had already been some degree of healing, and that seemed to indicate an extended period of unconsciousness.

Or perhaps she was simply losing the pain within the other sensation. The dominant one, that which seemed to suffuse every cubic centimeter of her form, constantly shifting without actually going anywhere…

Initially, she couldn’t quite work out what the feeling was. Her first impression was that it resembled the desire to vomit: a sensation for which the ill-self-advised gyūdon bowl had granted her an extended period of intimacy. The girl needed an unmeasured extra period of time before she realized that her stomach wasn’t at fault. Or rather, it was no worse than anything else, because…

It was very much as if her body had taken something in for the first time and was trying to decide if it was digestible. Whether she was capable of processing it, or needed to do whatever was necessary to expel the substance before it did her harm. But it was a sensation which had spread out to the whole of her form.

Her pasterns wanted to heave bile.
Portions of her brain were actively trying to throw up.
Individual cells were on the verge of spewing mitochondria.

It was a sensation which suffused her body. Saturated. And it wasn’t stopping.

That strange, horrible, newly-universal sensation had just about taken over. It never faded or intensified, which at least told her that Tartarus wasn’t responsible. But it was giving her some trouble in sensing anything else. She had to force her olfactory bulb to report in: something which at least proved that the moon-touched status had left her some time ago. And when the first messages arrived…

Sterilizing agents. Topical things for skin and fur. A room which gets cleaned just a little more regularly than everywhere else, because they understand how infection can start. And there’s a hint of potions in the air, because it’s a lot harder to scrub that. Instruments, metal and wood. There’s silver somewhere nearby. A little platinum.

(She didn’t want to think about platinum.)

Repair materials on a wall. Covering up the damage. I don’t think they got all of the embedded scale fragments out.

There have been ponies going in and out of this room for a while. The Doctors Bear leave behind olfactory phantoms. The alicorns came through within the last day: that’s fainter. A canid hung around for a while. An old stallion took some time. But there’s just two ponies here now..

The stallion’s burned some of his fur. Again.
The mare…
…worried. Tense. Fear twisted up with concern.
She’s been here long enough to have it all soak into the bench.

The balance of evidence suggested the girl was alive. She was starting to become aware of her own heartbeat. She was also sure that death would have hurt less —

— there had been a pasture..

Lala.
I saw you.
We touched. Hugged.
I miss you…

She wanted to cry. Because she had seen her friend, greeted a sibling through the power of a promise kept. But she also wanted to weep because she was alive, and the mare was right there.

The mare had slept through just about all of the events which had occurred in the palace: briefing, preparation, departure. The girl had done everything she could not to wake the mare, because she didn’t want to tell her friend about what was going to take place. If everything had somehow been successful, then her subsequent wish had been to sneak in and out, with no further encounters. And had she executed the final failure, then a corpse didn’t have to explain itself —

— was the mare moving? A shift of air against the girl’s exposed face suggested that the wings had just flared out, and that was followed by hoofsteps. On the approach.

Am I crying?

She wasn’t sure. Not only did the tears seem somewhat insubstantial, but there were too many reasons for that tiny flowing weight to be present.

The girl was almost certain that she could move, and was completely sure that she really, really didn’t want to. Any rapid shift of her body felt as if it had the chance to target a jet of vomit at the nearest wall. However, this assumed there was nothing between her and the wall, and the mare was approaching.

If she could move, then she could probably open her eyes. If she was lucky, she would find herself staring into hickory. Wood and smoke…

Where did that come from?

She had to look. There was very little choice, because the mare was getting closer and they’d lived together for too long. Faked sleep could probably be spotted, especially once the mare saw how the rhythm of breathing had changed: something which became extremely visible through the dubious benefit of overlying amplification. On a good day, the girl would be proud of her endowments, looked forward to gaining additional mass and cup sizes, and yet never ceased to be amazed by just how many means they had of betraying her.

The mare was almost right up to her. She had to look…

Cerea opened her eyes.

The pegasus was less than a meter away. It left Cerea gazing into moist silver and the wet tracks which had worn their way through black fur: something where the grain and lie had been roughened through spending too many hours awake. There was no armor blocking the view for any of it, and yet the scent of metal in the palace’s medical offices persisted. With Barding half-curled up in sleep on the second bench (with the snout oddly close to the little scrap of tail), it couldn’t do anything else.

The little knight stopped moving. Stared at Cerea, an act which took place on a near-level plane, and there was a sound like a nicker and a neigh tangled together: something which made an odd kind of sense. Each had been a noise which the girl associated with a given equine mood, and the pegasus smelled the same way. Joy and a deep sadness, inextricable from each other.

A softer nicker was followed by one more hoofstep. Another salty drop ran across saturated fur, and then the sleek head bent down.

The contact was made with the upper plane of the snout: something which allowed the mare’s tears to fall onto the girl’s bare skin. Fur rubbed against the afterthought of a nose, kept doing so, and the girl wondered how long it had taken for the little knight to figure out the nuzzle.

There were two nearly inaudible whinnies: words which the girl hadn’t been taught. The pegasus backed away just enough to let Cerea see the smile.

The dark head went left, angled forward for something just out of the girl’s sight. She heard teeth gently apply pressure to metal.

A light blue spark drifted down from the girl’s forehead, passed in front of her face and headed for an open door. She didn’t understand why.

And then Nightwatch offered her the disc.

The pegasus waited until the silver wires had finished moving across the centaur’s skin. (It was a familiar feeling, and it had just picked up an extra layer of discomfort. The girl didn’t want to think about animated wires.) Watched until the last one had settled against the tip of a furry, oddly-sore ear, then took a very deep breath —

“— you didn’t tell me! You just went out there, you went into Tartarus and you didn’t TELL me, you were going to just leave Equestria AND YOU DIDN’T TELL ME — !”

It was, Cerea felt, a rather credible impression of the Sergeant, and all the more so for being completely inadvertent. The crying didn’t seem to be subtracting much.

“…I…” The act of trying to speak made her intestines twist: for a centaur, that was a feeling which could travel a very long way. But there was no other choice. “…I didn’t want you to … if you knew, you might have —“

“— been upset? Tried to talk you out of it?”

The girl didn’t understand how Barding was sleeping through all of it. The smith had to be exhausted. Or perhaps that was one of the smaller gifts granted by his mark: the ability to rest when there was a lot of noise around. Metalworking wasn’t exactly a quiet process —

“We both made a promise!” The tail instantly reached full lash: both wings flared out, and wind began to whip about the room.

Desperate now, with no words which could help and only a name to offer in the frantic hope of interruption, “Nightwatch —“

“ We said we could speak to each other about anything! WE’RE FRIENDS!”

The wings almost slammed back into the rest position: a movement which didn’t happen evenly, and still took place at the exact moment when the pegasus lunged forward.

The girl heard several wind-carried papers drop. It was something she had to hear, because the mare didn’t move out of the sight-blocking teary nuzzle for a very long time.

Eventually, there was a silent agreement made to change the topic. The little knight’s posture and scent more than suggested that any immediate revisiting of the initial one had a good chance to set things off all over again, only louder. Barding needed rest.

“He’s been sleeping in here most of the time,” the pegasus quietly offered from her renewed position on the visitor’s bench, inclining head and ears towards the charred form. “The doctors finally stopped trying to get him out, because at least it meant he was sleeping. It’s been the forge or here, ever since they brought you in. He’s been doing a lot of work. And he always had an excuse for coming back —“ Nightwatch trailed off for a second, took a shallow breath. “Well, it’s Barding. He always has a burn somewhere. He just decided to stop ignoring them.”

A slow head shake: something else Cerea got to see on a near-level plane. The Doctors Bear had shoved at least two beds together in order to create something which offered a centaur support — but it had to exist at the height which permitted them easy access. It had left Cerea rather low to the ground, even after she accounted for the height granted by piled-on blankets.

Blankets, and… something else. The armor had been removed. Somepony had gotten her out of the padding. But the centaur was almost entirely sure she was dressed, in… something. Tactile information was still coming in, and whatever she was wearing didn’t seem to be providing much to report.

If Cerea concentrated, she could speak without nausea. It just took some effort, and the roiling sensation within her cells did nothing more than wait for the chance to surge back.

“How long?”

Another spark worked its way past her nose. Both mares watched it go.

“Two days,” Nightwatch finally said. “You didn’t wake up for nearly two days. I…” Stopped again. Took a deeper breath, and feathers rustled. “The Bearers heard the signal.”

…signal?

It was only then that she recognized what she’d almost done, and a slow-moving suffusion of horror began to search her body for any remaining space.

“You emptied a cylinder in one go,” the pegasus unnecessarily explained.

Which was supposed to be the distress call.
I forgot.
It was just a weapon I could use against him, and I forgot…

There was a sound which Tartarus would always allow to pass. Especially if it granted the deep place a fresh supply of those who could suffer.

The surge in volume was joined by the blast which rose from her skin and fur: concern and terror, produced at a level which actually made the edges of Nightwatch’s nostrils twitch.

“Are they all okay?” Cerea frantically questioned. “Please, please tell me —“

“— they’re fine,” was just a little quieter. “Now.”

“Now —“

More quickly, with an added note of apology, “Some of them were still pretty shaken when they got back to the palace. Miss Lulamoon just about kept herself together until the rest of the staff was out of the area, and then she asked for a mild sedative. The doctors didn’t argue. Not after what she had to try and pull off in the Struga.”

Trixie went in?

“Not that the distraction would have worked without Pinkie —“ The little knight stopped, visibly recentered. “From the starting gate, Cerea: they heard the signal, and they had enough supplies to perform the ritual again. That got them in. After that, they were trying to find exactly where you were. They had maps, but — they couldn’t really use them. Um. Not for long.” A little more softly, “There’s going to be a fresh survey, next moon. There has to be, with all of the changes which were reported. Everything they came back with, and —“ She nodded towards a mobile set of stacked drawers. It was the sort of rolling multi-compartment supply station which could be found in any hospital: the main Equestrian difference was the folding hitch. “— everything you drew.”

The sketchbook was resting on top of the array. Cerea looked at the closed covers for a few seconds. Nightwatch’s gaze flickered away from the drawers.

“They were mostly following the cloth scraps,” the pegasus resumed. “That gave them the trail. And of course —“ her face creased with disgust “— that kudu told them you’d been by. That saved some time. So when they got to the bottom…”

Another pause, and silver eyes squeezed shut under the pressure of pain.

“..they found you,” the little knight visibly made herself finish. “Both of you.”

“There was stone blocking the entrance,” Cerea softly recalled.

Gaps which were too small for a centaur to get through. Large enough for ponies.
If he hadn’t been dead…. if they’d reached us while he could still drain them…

She’d made a mistake, and the consequences would have been permanent. The fact that Tirek was dead didn’t seem to excuse it.

He’s dead.

She was sure of that much.

I saw…
…I killed…
…why do I keep thinking of hickory?

Her tongue felt strange.

“There wasn’t enough room to get me out,” the larger mare quietly noted. “And they couldn’t teleport —“

Nightwatch’s lips briefly quirked.

“There was stone,” the pegasus agreed. “They have a Twilight. Who doesn’t really exert her field strength very often —“ the disc helpfully added the minor undertone of confusion “— but when she does, some minor obstacles stop being a problem. Like Ursa Minors. And stone columns.”

“…oh.” Cerea resolved to ask somepony what an Ursa Minor was, as the disc hadn’t hissed and she didn’t think constellations had been causing problems —

— I’m leaving.

“They found you,” Nightwatch repeated. “They — saw what you’d done… Cerea, please look at me…”

It took a few seconds before the girl could force her gaze back onto silver. Seconds during which the reek of guilt and shame filled the world.

“Once he was dead,” the pegasus went on, “they could use magic again. Twilight was carrying you in her field, and she —“ the wince wasn’t suppressed in time “— also took the corpse. It’s part of why they had to improvise on the way through the Struga. They were trying to bring you out as quickly as they could, and she didn’t want to risk putting you down. Applejack still said that she felt like it was a smoother exit than she’d been expecting.” Paused. “I’ve been trying to figure out if Honesty means she’s still allowed to be sarcastic.”

Cerea internally tabled another question for the 32nd of Never.

I feel sick.
I was unconscious for two days. That’s why the bruising is partially healed. But the rest of it…

She was in the medical offices. The Doctors Bear had gathered every piece of data she could offer, and it still hadn’t kept them from sending up fumes of concern whenever they discussed the possibility of having to treat her. Her body felt like a foreign instrument: one where all of the notes were off and the spit valve hadn’t been cleaned out in ten years. She had been hit by so much of the magic which had erupted from Tirek’s corpse, and she felt sick…

Which probably didn’t explain the rather odd residue on her tongue.
Or why it felt so… pleasant.
Is the rolling cabinet hickory?
She inhaled.
Birch.

“They sent the signal as soon as they were in the wild zone,” Nightwatch resumed. “Scrolls and fireworks. The air carriages evacuated everyone, and…”

Wings and tail both twitched. The next breath was forced.

“…I’d been awake for a while,” she said. “I knew something was going on, almost from the start. The palace has a certain background beat during a crisis. Too many hooves and wings, moving too fast. And you weren’t there. I found somepony I could ask. Then I found Princess Luna.” A little too stoic, “After a while, the carriages landed. I met them on the roof. And I saw Twilight carry you out.”

…no…

“I’m sorry —“

“I know,” was a gentle statement of fact. “I know.”

There was silence for a time. Another spark floated out. Barding shifted a little in his sleep.

“You were taken directly here,” Nightwatch resumed. “Well — almost. There was a field transfer. Princess Luna brought you the rest of the way.”

Which, to Cerea, seemed to be omitting a rather crucial detail. “Did they manage to bring out the sword?” This time, her liver twisted. There seemed to be some chance for a knot. Not quite bowel torsion. “I know somepony might have to go back for it —“ or she could, once she felt better—
— if —
— but it had to be done. “— and it would have slowed at least one pony down, because I don’t think anypony brought a net. So I understand if they needed to wait. But it’s too dangerous to leave in Tartarus.”

Silver eyes flickered towards the rolling drawers. Quickly moved back to Cerea.

Almost toneless, “It’s out.”

I don’t know that scent. What pony emotion was left for the girl to encounter?

Probably a narrow subsection of disgust. A sympathetic reaction for anypony having had to carry the plastic.

“Tirek?” Cerea asked. Postponing the true question. The moment when she would need to ask why every organ felt as if it was in open revolt. The odd tongue sensation could be a side effect. Picking up on hickory all the time might be its own symptom.

“The corpse is about forty body lengths down the hall,” Nightwatch quietly said. “Um. We had to turn an empty room into a morgue. It was mostly having Princess Luna set the temperature. Preventing decay. It’s… not a very large room, because it’s a very small corpse. The Doctors Bear are going to do a full autopsy at some point. And the Princesses told the press that Tirek was dead, but that’s all they’ve said. They didn’t tell anypony that you were involved, because they were hoping they would get to — um…”

They thought I was going to die.

It felt like an oddly calm thought. The alicorns had possessed every right to believe that Cerea might die. She’d spoken to Lala. A few seconds of heart stoppage seemed to be indicated.

“They wanted to debrief you first,” the little knight awkwardly tried. “And Princess Celestia knew that just telling everypony about one centaur having killed another was going to need some work. And rephrasing. So they just said Tirek was dead. That calmed things down, at least to where the protesters outside the palace had their numbers drop a little. But there’s a few ponies who don’t believe them, because almost nopony’s seen the corpse.”

“And they want proof,” Cerea reasonably guessed — followed by a bitter “While Wordia is probably writing about how the mission failed —“

“— um. No. She’s still in the palace.”

Cerea blinked.

It was Nightwatch’s turn to look nauseated. “She says she has reasons to be worried about going home. And she hasn’t accepted any security measures. So she’s just — here. With Guards at her flanks any time she leaves the assigned bedroom.” The mare’s lips pulled back from her teeth. “And she keeps complaining about that, but she’s the one who won’t leave! And she’s still tried to get up here at least twice! Any excuse to poke her snout where it doesn’t belong…!”

Cerea waited until the mare’s hackles dropped somewhat, and used the time to talk her kidneys into settling down. They didn’t listen.

“So the Princesses were waiting until you woke up,” the pegasus not-so-smoothly switched. “And debriefed you, before they said anything more. But we can’t give out pictures, or bring anypony in yet. With cameras, you can sort of… um. You can see… um.” The opposing collection of nausea was visibly increasing. “...unless you keep the shot really close on his face, too close to put a newspaper next to his head or something else which shows place and time… you can sort of see inside him. Um. A little. Or at least the parts which are sticking out. The… broken wires…”

Nightwatch stopped. Wings unfolded, shook out all of the joints, went back to the rest position. The process came across as being somewhat stiff. Healing from the strike, but not entirely healed. Temporarily incapable of flight. Something else which was Cerea’s fault.

“The doctors barely left the office,” she finally continued. “Barely left you. They couldn’t ask for help from the outside. It’s not because of classified information, Cerea: a good doctor would take the secrecy oath in a second. It’s because they were the only ones who knew anything about treating you, and they were guessing. They didn’t know how to wake you up. If it was even a good idea to try. And from what they said about how fast you usually heal… it was too slow. Nothing was getting better. Not fast enough to matter.”

Then what did they…?

The mare’s next breath was a little too deep.

“Not until they brought in Sizzler.”

All thoughts considered, the subsequent Who? didn’t last long enough.

The cook.
The meat station…

The girl’s hands didn’t quite fly up to cover her mouth: she was on her side, and the right arm initially tried to shove its way under the soft weight of her breasts before resorting to a quicker path. It took an extra second to block off her breath, and it wasn’t doing anything for the aromas, the scent of hickory and smoke and what was actually some rather savory spicing. Minimal spicing, because the kitchens had been watching her take food for moons and were aware that three grains of salt sufficed — but expert.

She finally identified the odd sensation on her tongue. It was called ‘aftertaste’, and it was magnificent.

Nightwatch was staring at her. Blue eyes returned the favor, only with considerably more horror.

“Cerea?”

Only if it was medically necessary…

“I didn’t want you to know!” the girl gasped through her palms. “I… I’m sorry, I’m —“

The pegasus’ mouth twisted: something which only lasted for a moment. And then the next sound emerged, something powerful, impossible to stop.

Even with the disc, it took a few seconds before Cerea could make out any words through the laughter.

“Moon’s craters, Cerea!” the pegasus gasped. “I didn’t fly away because you were a centaur! Or because my apartment was set on fire! You think I’m going to leave because you’re an omnivore? The only one who was upset was Sizzler, and that’s mostly because he always wants someone else he can cook for! He was proud to be part of your treatment: he just wished you’d said something after you got here! You had your third steak a little while ago, and the doctors said they can almost watch the bruises fade!”

“How —“ worked its way out from between betraying fingers.

“Cut the pieces extra-small, massage your throat until you swallow,” Nightwatch dismissed. ‘Since the doctors didn’t have a liquid mix for meat. But that was when you really started to recover. And the doctors were getting tired. They hadn’t slept enough and once you were starting to stabilize, they kind of shoved each other out the door. Vanilla set up a monitoring spell. Those are the sparks: each one tells him about your condition. He’s sleeping, two rooms down. Or he was, because the sparks alert him if something big changes. Waking up probably counts. But he knows Barding and I are in here. So he’s probably just… letting us talk.”

Cerea slowly forced her hands to drop. Nightwatch sighed.

“The doctors are in charge right now,” the little knight said. “They won’t let the Princesses debrief you until they think you’re ready. But they wanted you to see somepony was there when you woke up. To see a friend. And if they think I’m stressing you too much, if your condition changes a lot just because we’re talking — they’ll tell me to leave, and I’ll have to do it. When it comes to medical things, they can give anypony orders. Override the Princesses, and Princess Luna just sort of stalks out of their offices. Sometimes you can hear the lightning hit when that happens. Usually in the part of the gardens for one settled zone. Where their medical school was. But…”

The pegasus slowly got up again, approached with each hoof picking out a careful path. The girl, still possessed by several kinds of terror, could only watch.

“We need to talk,” Nightwatch said. “About… a lot. And I’ll stop if you’re tired, or too stressed, or sick. You… still look sick. And the Princesses will be the ones who formally debrief you. Cerea, I know you might not want to do this yet, but…”

Silver eyes closed, and it was ten long heartbeats before they opened again.

“…I thought we were going to lose you,” the pegasus whispered. “And even when we didn’t, you were leaving. So if you think you can, even a little… I want to talk…”

The girl still felt sick. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, and she was afraid to find out. But having the Doctors Bear not rush into the room seemed to indicate some possibility of full recovery.

Or they’re afraid to tell me.
That I’m dying.

…no. She felt sick, and that sensation had filled every organ — but it wasn’t at that level.
There was also another factor.
I saw Lala.
We hugged.
She knew it, and so death had lost a certain amount of terror.

There had been a promise.

No. There had been two. And the other was for Nightwatch. To… talk.

“I don’t know where to start…”

The mare glanced at the rolling drawers, and then looked away.

“You killed Tirek,” she softly said. “Start with that.”

It was a new source of fear for the girl. Lala understood death. Nightwatch might still see her as a murderer.

It didn’t happen.

“You tried to talk him out of it,” the pegasus quietly said. “Now that he could only take a little, here and there…”

“It didn’t matter to him.” The words were bitter. “He wouldn’t think about changing, any more than he let his brother find help. Somepony who could try to reverse it all. Remove the wires: maybe it was just that simple.”

“But you gave him the chance,” was oddly calm. “That’s what counts.”

“I still killed him.” The words were somewhat hollow. All the more space for the full-body nausea to fill. “I never killed before…”

“He tried to kill you,” the Guard pointed out. A little ear flick added emphasis to the words.

“I decided to kill him before he tried to blast me.” Necessary information.

“So did Princess Luna.” Soft, controlled, without a trace of fear or revulsion. “She just didn’t get what she wanted for a while. You were her Guard. It’s the vow, Cerea. One life for all lives. Yours, because you didn’t know what would happen. And his.” With just a little more volume, leaning forward on the bench, “You saved the world. You’re a hero —“

Automatically, “— I’m not.”

The pegasus was staring at her.

“Really?”

Cerea’s hooves wanted to vomit, and there was actually some practicality in play there. An infected hoof could release pus. Maybe her hooves just needed more practice.

“Somepony would have stopped him,” the girl insisted. “You can tell Twilight that the rocks would have worked.”

“After how many drainings?” Nightwatch asked. “Because with you, it was none.”

“It was a job,” started off the next salvo of protest. “The Princesses offered me money and the disc —“

That’s another new scent.
Find the context. Posture. Expression.
…she’s insulted.

“Guards,” Nightwatch said, “receive salaries.”

“This was different!”

“How?”

Cerea tried to find the right words. Some way of making the pegasus see that the centaur’s act had been strictly mercenary, meant nothing —

— the girl froze.

The two liminals rested within the perfect pasture.

“So just a job,” Lala said. “Almost want to congratulate you, lass. You just insulted every soldier there ever was. Along with police officers. Some spies. For that matter, I think your old knights got armor repair for free.”

“It’s different!”

“How?”

“I took a job for pay.”

“And they don’t?” The dullahan leaned back. “Low pay, most of the time. Heroing doesn’t turn much profit.” A little more quickly, “Would you have done it for nothin’ at all? Because it sounds like the Princesses made the offer first. You never asked.”

“I was the only one who could go in without giving him more strength.” The girl knew she was arguing: she just wasn’t entirely sure as to what. “I had to go.”

Casually, “So yes.”

The “Um,” was borrowed.

“Helps to pay a hero,” Lala observed. “Keeps people in the profession. And stops heroes from starvin’ to death. Don’t insult the professionals, lass. Or yourself. Modesty’s fine for a hero. Denial is just annoying.”

“…I already had this argument,” Cerea slowly said. “I…” and stopped. Looked directly at Nightwatch. “I’m sorry. I know I insulted the Guards, and a lot of other people. I…” It was oddly hard to dip her head, when she was on her side. “…have trouble seeing it in myself. A lot.”

The nuzzle was gaining skill with practice. Cerea still wasn’t entirely sure what to do in return.

“You could have gone home,” Nightwatch told her.

“The price was too high.” She had to force back the sigh: it felt as if the steak might come up with it. “Even if he’d agreed to use volunteer donors, just a little from each… Discord is still gone.”

“Um,” Nightwatch said. “He could still recover. I hope. Fancypants is trying…”

“And he didn’t have any real control,” Cerea finished. “Plus he was lying. He did it by accident, Nightwatch. For making it happen on purpose, it’s wouldn’t and couldn’t. All he did was… wish.”

Wish in one hand.
Bleed into the other.
See if you die first.

“And you turned feathers into a weapon.” There was a small smile attached to the words. “Feathers.”

“Fragments.” Not quite denial: more towards correction. “It would be easy to add it into the arsenal.”

The smile strengthened — then vanished.

“You were a great Guard,” Nightwatch whispered. “One of the best.”

Most of the words skimmed through her, lent speed by the still-present current of denial. The use of past tense stuck.

“I can’t stay.” And this is where the fight starts.. “Not after what happened at the party. There’s probably going to be lawsuits, Nightwatch. Because of me.” More quickly, ‘I can’t leave the palace without something happening. But maybe I can cross a border. All I can do as a Guard from now on is make things worse —“

The pegasus didn’t interrupt, not with words. There were no gestures, and both wingtips failed to painfully arc towards Cerea’s lips. It was the tears which silenced the centaur. The fresh flow into what had been drying fur, coming so quickly as to keep the strands from absorbing it all.

Something was wrong. Scent said everything was wrong, and the girl, fallen silent on her makeshift bed, finally identified the olfactory signature of regret.

“I was waiting for you to come back,” the little knight softly said. “So I could yell at you, in the way Princess Luna does. To make you yell at yourself, until you understood my getting hurt wasn’t your fault. But that was only part of it. Because you’d gone into Tartarus, without telling me. To confront Tirek, and… you might not come out. I needed you to come back so you would be back. And…. I thought we would talk. Fight, probably. And then you would be a Guard again.”

I can’t…

“Spike sent the scroll which said you were alive.” Decibels continued to fall away. “Alive but — hurt. Sick. So I made sure to be on the roof when they brought you in. Twilight carried you out of the carriage…”

She stopped. Shook her head, far too quickly, and tears flew everywhere.

“Then Applejack came out,” Nightwatch finished, “I saw Applejack. And I knew.”

The girl had initially learned a single phrase for the pony language. She had asked for those words, because she saw them as the most essential.

“I don’t understand.” Applejack hadn’t been hurt, or Nightwatch would have said something before this —

— the little knight turned. Slowly moved towards the motionless stack of rolling drawers, and bit down on a grip which had been designed for exactly that. A simple step backwards pulled a rather small section open.

The girl couldn’t see what was inside, not with the pony in the way. But there was a new scent: hints of candle wax, false traces of long-departed mercury which carried an odd sweetness within. It was almost familiar…

“Barding found out almost immediately,” Nightwatch quietly said. “I’m not sure how, and he hasn’t said. Maybe somepony galloped for him first, and he listened because… it was about you. And then he kept coming in here, over and over. Because he wants you to stay. He wanted to tell you, when you woke up. That… you still had a place…”

Her head went forward. Teeth closed, and steady legs turned.

The weeping pegasus had an even trot. Not powerful, but — steady. There were no signs of weakness. She was simply doing what had to be done.

The little burden was dropped onto the makeshift bed. Placed where Cerea could see it.

And then the girl understood.

The object resting on the soft surface had warped in several places. Several sections had blackened. A few had dripped.

It was possible to find multiple impressions curving across the semi-cylinder. Trenches placed by desperate pressure.

There was just enough of the hilt left to identify, and a little section of crossguard.

It had never been the wielder. It had always been the sword.

The sword was gone.

Lost

”What can a centaur do when attacked by magic?”

Princess Luna had asked the question at the press conference, then answered it. Words which had granted Cerea some degree of chance, in a form of a path she could try to follow. A trail cutting across the fear-soaked surface of a new world, in the hopes that it somehow led to a destination called acceptance.

And now…

…what had it looked like, when the Bearers had found her? It was the first time the girl had truly tried to picture it.

Had it even been sight at all, at least for the first signs? The pony olfactory sense was far weaker than her own, but… there were situations which created exceptions. It could be argued that ponies were a prey species, and such seldom had any difficulty in picking up on a certain miasma. Not that which came from the skin and fur of the dying, because that was just part of the background in Tartarus. It would have been a deeper combination of odors, something more definitive and… terminal.

Would the deep place have brought those scents to the ponies from a distance, as a means of torment? So that they would only know that there was death ahead, but not how much or whose? Make them dread. Or it could have hidden everything, at least when it came to that sense. The distress signal had been sent: there was no helping that. But concealing every hint of what might be ahead, forcing the group to fill the space within their minds with self-generated horrors — that could be effective. Imagination had a way of conjuring that which was worse than reality, and it was usually followed by declaring that reality had somehow won anyway.

She didn’t know what they had suspected, as they’d followed what had been seen as her distress call. At the very least, they had probably believed there was some level of disaster ahead: an expectation which crossed worlds. Call in to Japan’s cultural exchange office, tell them it was that household again, and a disaster would be the least of what was expected. Cross to Menajeria and the girl had more than proven herself capable of creating a disaster on her own.

Perhaps they had scented death at a distance, as they followed the trail of scrapcloth. (A trail which Tartarus had somehow allowed to stand.) Or they could have been left to wonder, because dreams could so easily be the worst of it.

But eventually, they would have found the final approach. There might have been a moment to wonder about the change in the angle, followed by sighting the shadows from the new bars ahead. And then…

…what had it looked like, from the outside?

The corpse would have been small, and the girl didn’t know how small. Her memories of the final collapse were somewhat indistinct, and she suspected that unconsciousness had closed in prior to Tirek’s final forfeiture of mass. Perhaps it had appeared very much as if she’d impaled a child. An act which would have only been performed by a monster.

How small had Tirek been? If somepony had seen the sword before, would it have been reasonable to expect some portion of the length to have extruded past his spine?

Two collapsed forms. Broken platinum wires projecting from the final wound, and perhaps the shrinkage of their container had forced more metal into the light. A corpse on cold stone, and a barely-breathing body which was still pushing the blade forward through the overwhelming power of superior mass.

…cold stone.
Cold, smooth stone.
I dropped. All the way down. My legs, the underside of my lower belly and barrel… the armor doesn’t cover everything.
There aren’t any wounds in those areas.
Why aren’t there…?

Had they stared at the scene before them, of what might have been taken as murder? The slow cooling of a death which had finally finished, and the too-solid drip of half-congealed blood?

They would have know he was dead. That she had killed him. And after that… there would have been a need to get out.

Trying to reach the surface, while carrying a burden.

Princess Luna had been wrong. It had ended with two centaurs emerging from Tartarus. One of them just happened to be dead.

(Twilight had broken the stone bars, and that had been followed by carrying an armored centaur all the way out. When it came to the little alicorn’s field strength, Cerea wasn’t sure which had been the more impressive feat.)

They would have tried to separate the bodies. Each carried in its own field bubble, if only to prevent jostling. Plus they had to get the centaurs apart, because one was carrying a sword that negated magic and the other was impaled upon it. Separation, get the sword out of Cerea’s death grip, and then levitation would be possible. Somepony else would need to carry the blade, and Applejack had apparently volunteered for that portion of ongoing illness.

…how had they gotten the bodies apart, without using magic? Jaw grips on tails? (Multiple, for that of the mare.) With somepony having to bite down on Tirek’s short fall, after his sphincters had already —

— the girl didn’t want to know.

That was probably when they’d seen it, down there in the caves. There was a chance for Tirek’s corpse to have fallen away from the girl, or shrunk so much as to separate on its own. But she was picturing them as still having been close together. As close as family. And the hilt having become distorted, part of the crossguard missing — both were observations which could be made at the start.

Separate them, expecting to see the edgeless blade emerge. Another factor which had to be dealt with. And then…

The girl wondered what their feelings had been. Relief, because something which existed as anathema to their existence was gone?

Except that I was still there —
— they brought me out…

Fear? Confusion?
…concern?

She could picture all of it. But she didn’t know. In the end, the only piece of information she truly had was still half-inferred. Twilight had come out of the air carriage, carrying the last living centaur. And then Applejack had emerged.

The earth pony would have borne the ruined hilt. An act which was visible to Nightwatch, so… probably at the front of the jaw. Enough sticking out to identify. And the Bearer would have been carrying the plastic without discomfort, weakness, or any illness beyond that produced by having to taste half-melted plastic.

Nightwatch had witnessed it. And at the moment the little knight truly recognized every aspect —

”What can a centaur do when attacked by magic?”

— she would have known Cerea’s dubious career as a Guard had ended.

Earth ponies had raw strength, endurance, and resilience. Unicorns used their fields, while pegasi went with techniques and the gift of flight. An ibex had once offered those powers granted by the many definitions of ‘stability’ to the thrones. There had been griffon Guards in the deep past. At least one donkey had made it, and Cerea knew that yaks had applied for the post.

The Guards had been comprised solely of ponies for a very long time. But there had been those from the other species who had taken on the duty. It might happen again one day.

And every one of those species had their own magic.

It had never been the wielder. The only thing which had allowed Cerea any degree of chance at gaining a place was the sword. A sword which could at least try to battle against all of it, when the girl could do nothing. The only sapient on the planet with no magic of her own, no hope of matching power against power and coming out intact on the other end.

It was worse than the laws. The human laws said she couldn’t fight. Equestria had permitted the girl to defend herself. It just wouldn’t mean anything. And even if she crossed a border, went to a new nation — it just put her in a location where the dominant form of magic was something different. The result of any attempt to stand against it, however, would be identical.

Two centaurs had been brought out of the air carriages. One was already dead. The other, hated and feared by a world which longed to strike against her, was just… slightly delayed.

Without the sword, she was defenseless.
A trotting vulnerability.
Helpless.

What could a centaur do when attacked by magic?

Fall.

Maybe it’s not that bad.

It felt like a rather uncommon degree of optimism, especially given that it had emerged from Cerea’s own thoughts. But there were times when denial wore its own masks.

“…the blade?” she made herself softly ask, still staring at the ruined hilt as she lay on her side, with the little knight so close. Maybe — maybe the blade had just broken off…

Would its power return if all the pieces were put back together?
How do you reforge plastic?

She didn’t know if it was possible. Barding’s mark might not be able to work out the process: metal wasn’t any part of it, and she wasn’t about to wake him just to ask for what would probably be the wrong answer. Regardless, heating would certainly be involved, and the forge might wind up filled with toxic fumes.

She was hoping Applejack wasn’t feeling ill.

The girl felt ill. Sick and covered in blankets and — something else. There was fabric against her skin and fur, strangely flimsy…

“Gone,” Nightwatch quietly answered. “There’s…” and the girl watched her friend swallow back sickness. “…some residue visible. Um. Inside Tirek. But it isn’t enough to make up the rest of the sword. Not even close.”

Almost desperate, and it was ‘almost’ because she’d pushed so much of it down. “The hairpins?” Which hadn’t been used for a direct assault. Maybe her mind was still safe —

— it was a hope. There were ways in which that made it torment, and nearly all of them crested at the moment when she saw the pegasus slowly turn back towards the rolling cabinet.

It took more effort this time, and some strictly unintentional comedy got involved. Ponies had invented tweezers. They had also created them to work with rather wide jaw grip surfaces. It made the whole arrangement come across as if Nightwatch was trying to use mouth-operated spring bellows, which just happened to end in a pair of very fine points.

The last vestiges of hope held up until the pegasus began to turn, because Nightwatch was trying not to make contact with the plastic. But then Cerea saw the little object held between the tweezer’s tips, and understood.

The blackened hairpin was carefully deposited onto the makeshift bed, and the minimal impact against a soft surface made the edges threaten to crumble.

They wanted everypony to believe I was harmless.

Poorly-crafted illusion had just warped into truth.

Could she fake a sword? She could certainly forge a proper one — well, nearly so: her replacement lie wouldn’t have an edge. The weight would be off, but it wasn’t as if most ponies had ever touched the original. If she could find some way of matching the color, making light react identically with the new surface…

…a perpetual bluff. Eventually, someone would have enough confidence to test it, believing they could get their power past her reflexes. They would be half-right. Her reflexes might be up to the challenge. It just wouldn’t matter.

…why did the hairpins…?

The effect which had made the sword capable of standing against magic had touched the hairpins at the same time. Perhaps they had been linked, to the very last. Ultimately, it didn’t matter.

She had already resigned from the Guard. Cerea hadn’t given any real thought to changing her mind on that issue, because… she was a trotting disaster. She couldn’t leave the palace without triggering something, and that meant she had to leave the nation.

Nightwatch had been prepared to argue that decision. And at the moment the pegasus had seen the ruin of the sword, understood what it meant…. the past tense had fully closed in.

The girl wasn’t a knight.
She would never be a knight. Not without a weapon which meant something.

“I’m sorry,” the one true knight in the room whispered. “Cerea, I’m so sorry…” And nuzzled her again, jaw and chin arching over the ruined plastic.

Try to look strong.
For her.

The centaur made herself take a breath. (There was no attempt made to invoke any degree of access to the Second, not when she felt so sick.) Tried to reevaluate.

My life for all lives…

When looked at that way, a sword was a rather small price to pay. Any true knight would have made that trade in an instant. If she’d known, at the moment she’d entered the deep place, that killing Tirek meant the loss of the blade…

I would have done it anyway.

The thought gave her some comfort.
The results still left her helpless.

What am I supposed to do now?
What could I ever…?

She felt sick. Every part of her felt sick. Her tail hair had found some way of reporting illness. Trimming the fall would be a form of revenge. And there were sensations beyond that, familiar and pressing…

“I have to get up.”

Immediately, “Cerea, you’re not supposed to —“

“— I need a restroom.” They’d been feeding her. Centaur digestion was highly efficient at extracting calories: it had to be, because the other option was a sapient who more or less needed to eat continually. But it still took a lot to fuel her body, and there were consequences for that.

She briefly wondered how much benefit she’d taken from the meat: calories and recovery. The Doctors Bear had been told that she was supposed to have some when healing a wound…

I want another steak.

Part of that thought had been directed by a dream of full recovery. The rest was for the taste. Some degree of horror was still applied to the whole.

I don’t know how I like my steak.
Maybe Sizzler could figure that out.
…where did they say the carnivores and omnivores got their meat? Nothing sapient, ever. It’s mostly monsters. The griffons have ranches for monsters. I had a monster steak. And there’s no growth hormones, no drugs, all the food is pure and the meat winds up the same way.
What does neurocypher taste like?

Eating something which had been trying to kill you seemed like a rather human form of revenge.

“There’s a bedpan. And… um… something else. You’re sick. You shouldn’t be trying to get up!”

Which quickly begged the question of just how the doctors had rigged elimination collection for a centaur, and even more hastily discarded it because Cerea didn’t want to know. “It isn’t dignified! To just… do that, lying down! And I have to get up, just to find out if I can get up.” Without vomiting. She still wanted to vomit, and it wasn’t from the meat. Not when that horrible sensation took up the whole of her. “And I’m on my side! It’s not a good position for me, not for two days!”

And if she got up, she could temporarily trot away from the corpses of sword and hairpins.
From the grave of hope.

“You shouldn’t! I —“

There was a certain set to the little knight’s jaw, just for an instant. An aspect which reminded Cerea of the Sergeant, and that let her know what Nightwatch had almost considered. But she wasn’t in the Guard any more. Orders didn’t apply.

The centaur twisted. Heaved against her own weight, while silently praying that her digestive system wouldn’t do the same. Pushed…

…the outermost layer of blankets flew away. The lower ones fell…

Imagine a society of ponies. Give them art, culture, and for this exercise, we’ll need to make sure they have medicine. The healing arts, and so many of the little inconveniences which come with them. Climb to the proper level on the mountain of medical advancement, and a needle jab might be just as painful wherever you go.

But you’re also dealing with a species which, with the exception of those strange ‘clothists’, exists without a nudity taboo.

Given that, what’s the point of staying covered up in a medical facility? You bandage wounds. Protect recently-stitched areas. Blankets provide warmth. There really isn’t a need for much else. Physicians already have to observe through fur all the time: a close medical inspection often starts with a razor. But with the vast majority of the treated, that’s it. Maybe you keep a few things around for the body-sensitive — but otherwise, patients are nude.

Now let’s say that two medical representatives from that pony society are trying to treat someone from an unfamiliar species. A patient who not only has a taboo regarding public nudity, but also got a little sick of discovering just how many means the human world had of removing her blouse. And just for the fun of it, we’re not going to let any skill in stitching wounds translate to fabric. At all.

They are about to invent the centaur hospital gown.

So how is this going to work? Well, the patient doesn’t have a trick valve and wants to keep her genitals covered. We can certainly accommodate her there. But at the same time, the current bruising is along the left flank, and that has to be kept visible. So let’s take a long drape of cloth and run it along the lower back — but it’s only going to fall to one side. The healthier one, which means it mostly winds up bunching up under the patient. And naturally, this has to be anchored somewhere, so we’re going to cut out a hole for the tail, followed by pulling most of it through. And the fabric can cover the buttocks, because that’s what the patient seems to desire. It just has a tendency to slope. Towards the same side.

Of course, we’ve still got the upper torso to deal with. And we need more anchor points, so how about — sleeves? Sure: we can utterly ruin the cut on some short ones. Also, because some horrible concepts are more or less universal, this thing is going to fasten with fabric ties. Which are going to be made with wide, thin strips, because it’s possible that a unicorn won’t be in the area and tying a knot by mouth is one of those skills which benefits from having a lot to work with. And also means working very, very close to whatever you’re covering. Bumping is going to happen. Repeatedly.

So the ties hang long. And loose. Very, very loose. And they’re anchored around the sort of buttons which make it look like somepony found a donation supply of cartoon waistcoats. While the knots? Mostly aren’t. They come apart easily. ‘Spontaneously’ is also an option. And once the fastening is complete, there’s still a very large gap between the sides. After all, it’s very possible that you’ll need to look at whatever’s underneath in a hurry, not to mention applying instruments to check heartbeat and lung function (for the upper pair) and —

— wait. Did you really think they were going to close this at the back?

…the outermost layer of blankets flew away. The lower ones fell. The hospital gown went through its first test against Centaur, Moving, and followed that up by discovering that the girl’s braless bustline possessed a considerable amount of free-swinging weight.

The knots fell apart. Certain aspects of centaur more or less fell out. A random monitor spark floated by. Barding snored.

Nightwatch stared.

“Um,” the little knight said.

The girl, for whom mortification took place via instinct, began to bring her hands up —

“— you’re a little bruised there. And that was with all the padding.” With open concern, “What did you do? Was that from the ramming attack? Does it hurt? And did you have enough room in there? Do you need to make the next set bigger? Because we did just order the bras…”

Cerea blinked. Her arms dropped to her sides.

And then she began to laugh.

The only consistency for the rest of the day was Cerea’s sickness. She kept wanting to vomit. Every cell in her body wanted to throw up. To expel something which might be hurting her. But nothing happened. At one point, she went back into the restroom, slowly lowered her body until she could lean over the sink without jamming her lightly-bruised breasts too badly, tried, and… nothing happened.

Nightwatch was in and out. The pegasus was still excused from Guard duty until her wings fully healed, so there was no need to go on shift. (Cerea wasn’t even sure what time it was. There was no clock in the treatment room, and Nightwatch’s breath carried the residue for some sort of potion mix: a schedule might have been flipped.) But food had to be fetched, the little knight responded to the sounds of traffic in the approach hallways by seeing who it was and every so often, she just went out to find another argument.

They kept arguing. Because Cerea couldn’t be a Guard any more, and the pegasus sadly acknowledged that. Not when there were no defenses left. But…

“You can still be a smith. Barding wants that. The palace would expand the forge. Make sure you both had room. He’s been too busy for the last few days, but there’s still a long way to go before —”

“A smith who can’t leave the palace,” Cerea countered.

Helpless.
Even in another nation, all it takes is one frightened pony. Passing through or native.
A terrified local of any species.
The Sergeant talked about yaks. How their magic centers around the concept of destruction.
What would a yak do to me?
How could I stop it?
I couldn’t.

The pegasus hesitated.

“You could just stay inside until the refit is finished. That’s moons. Things could be calmer by then. The way it happened for Yapper. And once the Princesses talk to the press —“

Inertia.
Normalcy.
With me, ‘terror’ is normal.

“— it won’t help —“

“— you didn’t try —“

Shortly into their third go-round on that, Barding woke up. His primary role was to add a limited chorus. He wanted to keep the steel in Equestria. He insisted. He was incredibly angry about the prospect of seeing the steel leave, and said so. Over and over, until the rage reached a temperature which his forge could never achieve, and the furious blacksmith stomped his way out of the room.

He wanted to keep the steel in Equestria. He’d said so, over and over. It was just that on the list of things he’d wanted to stay, the steel had been named second.

Sizzler dropped by. The intent had been to see what the doctors had wanted for the next treatment — but he found the patient awake: something which made his eyes briefly shine from the internal glow of assigned credit.

It was Cerea’s first chance to speak with the cook. He had a blood-red coat, one for which the fur possessed an oddly-liquid quality. He struck her as being a little on the dim side, and his personal aroma kept trying to slap her across the face. The unicorn smelled like meat. He smelled like a lot of meat, none of which were varieties she knew because most of those held either nations or tenant rights. And he was offended that the centaur hadn’t seen fit to tell him about her proper diet. Deeply, vastly, almost mortally, and he held it for all of twenty seconds.

That was followed by the happy, anticipatory offering of a menu. (Nightwatch’s skin began to flush a faint green beneath the fur.) Cerea asked for explanations and expansions on most of the monster names, receiving an inadvertent bestiary in the process. After some extensive advising, Sizzler eventually agreed to start on some zirolak chops, along with telling her that neurocypher meat was treated as a delicacy — but given the hazards in acquiring any, the palace didn’t keep it in stock. Plus if he was so lucky as to acquire a fresh supply, he would appreciate some help with cracking the shell.

He left to begin preparing it all, and the argument resumed. After a while, it transmuted. You could only argue about the same things for so long, and there were other things to discuss.

“Did you see her?” Nightwatch asked. “Your friend?”

My sister.

She’d been trying not to bring it up, if only because of the implications. But since the little knight had raised the topic…

“Yes,” Cerea softly said. “We… talked. I remember a little of it.”

(She remembered being hugged.)

“She said… she can tell everyone she saw me. And that I miss them. She tried to tell them I was alive, but most people didn’t believe her…” Which felt insulting, but that was humans for you. They’d told themselves that they already knew everything, and it turned new facts into lies.

Black feathers rustled. The tail twitched a little, curled against itself.

“So you were in the shadowlands,” the pegasus forced out. “And you remember it.”

Which was the pony name for their afterlife. “I don’t know.” She was trying to bring back details, but — everything felt delicate, as if too much effort would see the entire lacework of memory shredded. She knew they had talked about —

— my mother.
My conception.

She wasn’t sure how to tell Nightwatch about that. What did ‘I may be partially human’ mean to somepony whose only acquaintance with humanity came from Cerea’s stories? The girl didn’t even know if the little knight would understand the concept of mixed blood, because there seemed to be something strange about pony genetics.

Cerea had seen a picture of a mixed family in one of her textbooks: unicorn dam, earth pony sire, and pegasus foal. She’d asked about adoption. And it had turned out that ponies could freely breed with each other: species wasn’t a factor. Not only that: if there was so much as a single ancestor from outside the pony’s race, even a dozen generations back, then those genes might potentially express themselves in any future birth. (For those who cared and hated in equal measure, bloodline purity was a major factor — and just about impossible to truly verify.) But when there was such a birth, the foal would always be fully of the surprise species…

How did you explain ‘half-human’ when ‘half-pegasus’ didn’t exist?

And she might not even be that.

Clone.
She remembered that much.
She… had too many thoughts about that. Feelings. It wasn’t the sort of thing she was going to reconcile in one day. But she needed to find some level of positive in the idea. Something she could hang onto, when the mere concept threatened to become its own level of illness.
…so at least I would be guaranteed to reach her size.
She reconsidered.
I might be able to do better with some changes in diet.

She didn’t think the disc could explain cloning, much less parthenogenesis. It hadn’t even been able to get genetics across: anything beyond Mendel’s most basic concepts had been rendered as ‘in the blood’. She was, however, completely sure that she would eventually be able to explain the ideas behind ‘teaser’. Cerea would know she’d succeeded when she saw the pegasus frantically dash towards a much more accessible sink.

They had agreed to talk about anything. But Cerea was leaving, and… it felt as if she shouldn’t be jumping an unasked question.

My mother stayed in contact.
She told him my name. That there was a daughter.
Why?

She might never know.

…the little knight was staring at her.

“Nopony brings anything back from the shadowlands,” the pegasus breathed. “Nopony…”

“There’s resuscitation techniques,” Cerea immediately argued. “The doctors have a poster of one on the wall over there.” She gestured towards the diagrams: a CPR technique, applied to equines. Based on the next-to-last image, applying pressure with hooves produced a lot of rib fractures.

“That’s just medicine,” Nightwatch countered. “And I said anything, not anypony. We get ponies to breathe again sometimes, when they’ve only been dead for a couple of minutes. And some ponies believe in reincarnation: that some souls get to try again. Maybe they’re right. But nopony remembers what they saw. Heard. Anything. Cerea, if you remember anything of what you saw…”

There had been something deep in those words. An aspect which, matched to the mare’s scent, had been very close to hunger. Craving. A desire for —

— belief?
They still hadn’t talked about religion. Minotaurs seemed to go for ancestor worship, and the majority of zebras had been casually named by a textbook as spiritualists. But ponies…
…do they have any religions?
Any at all?
She didn’t know.
And she really didn’t want to start one.

“Maybe it was the centaur afterlife,” Cerea tried. Which was based heavily in Greek myth, rendering it into a place best avoided. “I don’t remember any shadows. Or ponies.”

A perfect pasture.
An…
…ibex?

“…oh,” emerged with open disappointment. “You still look sick.”

“I feel sick.” It was a change of subject.

“I’m going to get the doctor.”

Which put Nightwatch out of the room, because some rules remained consistent between worlds.

She told Vanilla Bear what had happened. How she felt. He took notes, because his partner was still resting and would need to review later. And she tried not to think about the scent of his fear.

“We checked you for magic,” he finally said. “It was one of the first things anypony tried. Multiple devices were involved. And the readings were confused. You registered as someone who had recently been in the presence of multiple spells, but… there was more present than the signature scanner could deal with.”

The girl just barely forced a nod, and wrapped the blankets a little more tightly around her body. She’d had to get back onto the makeshift bed before the physician had arrived, and it had left her reeling.

A true centaur wouldn’t feel like this.
A true centaur would recover.
‘Diluted’…
…I’ve had this argument.

“Abjura examined you,” the doctor added. “She tried some basic dispelling. Countermagic. And after that, she was just the one who tried first. There were some — further attempts. But nothing shifted, and the readings were still confused. The…”

He hesitated, and she waited for his head to tilt up and left. Entering a daydream, as a means of sorting out whatever was going through his head. Chocolate Bear had warned the staff to move around him if it happened in the corridors.

But he kept looking at her, and the fear scent increased. Something which had slowly faded from the doctors as they’d studied her. Returned, redoubled, and saturated with so much else.

“…current theory,” he made himself continue, “is that we’re dealing with a mix of magic, where some of it comes from outside the pony range.” Sighed. “It’s not a bad theory, not when the source was Tirek. And we don’t have any means of countering those effects. Bringing in extra consultants may not do much, because everything is tangled together. Abjura couldn’t shift the unicorn portion. The Princesses —“ paused, winced, and the product-soaked mane almost moved “— well, we needed somepony who could try to negate multiple forms of magic at once. They tried. And that didn’t work.” Another breath. “So…”

You’re so scared.
Scared for me.

“…we’re hoping it fades normally,” Vanilla Bear said. “Giving it time, but watching for symptoms. We’ll check you with the devices every so often. See if the overall level has dropped.”

“Has it dropped at all?” Cerea softly asked. “Since I was brought in?”

She watched him gather strength. And then he shook his head.

“We may wind up calling in Twilight Sparkle,” he told her. “One more voice in the room. Maybe she’ll have an idea. Another researcher’s perspective, and a fresh eye on the data.” A little more softly, “We’re trying, Cerea. We’ll do everything we can for you.”

The girl nodded.

“You just feel ill,” he tried to confirm. “The full-body nausea, plus some disorientation.”

“Yes.”

He measured her blood pressure and body temperature: the latter was slightly elevated. Checked her breathing.

“But appetite is still normal.”

She echoed herself. A blood sample was collected. He checked the bedpan and… other arrangement, gained nothing more than a blushing explanation, then asked her to take them into the restroom.

“No reaction to the meat.”

There’s this thing called ‘honey barbecue’. I’ve been wondering where to get some.

“No.”

He took a few more notes.

“We’re trying, Cerea,” he repeated. “We’ll do whatever we can to find an answer. But I’m not ready to let the Princesses debrief you —“ he raised his left forehoof, and did so at the same moment when his corona flashed light blue: a dual interruption “— because I remember when I left to rest, and I think you talked to Nightwatch for most of that time. I know you’ve been out of bed. You look like talking wore you out. I have a few more questions, and I’m going to let Nightwatch come back in after that— but just for five minutes. After that, you eat. And rest. Because the Princesses would need to question you for a few hours, and you are not up to it. Do you understand?”

She wasn’t part of the palace staff any more. On that level, he couldn’t give her orders. But he was still a doctor. And when it came to galloping away from medical authority, Cerea gave herself seven hoofsteps before she reeled into a wall.

The girl nodded again. The unicorn was silent for a few seconds.

“We’re going to start the autopsy soon,” he told her. “Another day or two. The platinum is…” The hesitation eventually broke. “…dead. We risked cutting off a piece. It won’t take thaums. But that tells us the corpse is probably safe to work on.”

“But you’re still using protections,” Cerea guessed.

It got her a nod. “Everything we can think of, or find: the extra time lets us keep searching. And when it comes to the results… I know the palace is going to classify whatever we discover.”

“It’s best that way,” the girl softly said. (The nausea shoved, and her hands clenched.) “No one should ever duplicate what he did.”

“I’m not sure they can,” Vanilla Bear decided. “We have the aftermath. Not the procedure. We don’t know what they did to the platinum to prepare it, or to themselves. And…” He sighed. “They weren’t the first ones to play with platinum. A lot of sapients have looked at it as a way to boost their own power.” The blue head dipped. “And that’s why they also weren’t the first ones to die.”

When you want what you can’t have…
…when it’s the only thought left…

There were many reasons to feel sick.

“We can’t stop all of it, Cerea,” the doctor sadly told her. “But we can hide the entrance to this road.”

She nodded. He went silent for a time.

“I was thinking about the delay,” he finally told her. “I looked up the date for when the investigation team checked on the incarcerated, after Cerberus was brought back. Then I found the first day for a reported magic drain. There’s a lot of time in between. My guess is that he was moving around the wild zone. Experimenting. Draining whatever he found, to see if he could. Monsters. Animals. Plants. Learning about his true limits.”

Another nod. Making sure the evacuation trick wouldn’t work twice.

The stallion took a shallow breath.

“Or maybe,” he softly said, “he also had more time to deal with anyone he encountered, and I need to start looking at Missing Persons reports.” Turned, and started to trot away. “I’ll send Nightwatch back in. Five minutes. After that, you eat and rest.”

And then he glanced back, because the time spent looking away from her had let him find strength. Strength, and what scent told her was a lie.

“Because you’re not leaving here until you’re healthy, Cerea,” he smiled. “But we all know centaurs heal quickly. So get better.”

The words were hope, and carried their own torment.
But the smile was the lie.
The fear was reality.
Afraid for her…

There was only enough time for a little more arguing.

“I’ve been trying to arrange a surprise,” Nightwatch finally said. “Something which shows how much you’ve brought to Equestria. What you could mean to the whole world.”

Fear and destruction. “Since I was brought in —“

“No. Um.” Wing joints visibly tightened, and the pegasus winced from the pain. “For a while now. Something… special. But you won’t hear — um. See. You won’t see it unless you’re still here. Not as the first. So you have to stay.”

“I don’t understand,” was still the go-to. “What could I have brought —“

“No hints,” the little knight said. “Um. Or no more hints.” She glanced at the door. “He’s about to kick me out. Stay, Cerea. Please.”

“I can’t —“

“— then we’ll argue tomorrow.” She started for the exit — then paused, and glanced back. “But you’ll be here tomorrow.”

Unless I die. But she just felt sick. “Yes.” Something which might be permanent.

“There might be another surprise tomorrow,” the little knight declared. “Or a little later. But I can probably tell you about that one soon. It’s something you helped with.”

“I don’t —“

There was a fierce, almost vicious intensity in the silver eyes, and the flaring aura matched all of it. But the words…

“I’m waiting,” the too-even tone said, “to see when it gets delivered.”

She left.

The girl, ill and afraid, feeling more helpless than she’d ever been, could do nothing more than wait. Looked around at the charts and instruments and everything meant to keep her alive.

She would leave the room.

One way or another.

Lala.

She had spoken to her sister.

I just feel sick.

There had been a promise of a second meeting.

They don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Perhaps that was only a few days away.

The girl will dream of one circle, with the dead approaching to have a few words. There is another. And while she sleeps, with only exhaustion allowing an ill form to seek temporary refuge…

Reinforcements were called in. The tactic didn’t help all that much when the party shattered, but — it isn’t easy to surround an entire settled zone. Every possible exit had to be watched. Form the circle at the outskirts of civilization, and then begin moving in. Slowly, because they don’t want to miss anything. Or anypony.

There are clues to follow. A ground carriage would have come through at night. Well, there’s more ponies on the Lunar shift now. Did anyone see it? Ground carriages are becoming increasingly scarce: one taking passage under Moon might have stood out. Oh, and two of the stallions would possess cerulean fur. Probably a rather bright shade, because that’s the way the dye usually comes out for the first few days.

They have a sketch showing the impression produced by damaged wheels. This gives them another avenue to track. Those going through the settled zone quickly learn to long for dirt paths, cursing cobblestone when nopony’s looking. But on the Canterlot end, where the Solar Princess is relaying all discoveries… which carriage houses are still offering personal hires? If, for some unknown, lawyer-choked reason, they won’t allow the examination of their books without a warrant… well, it’s rather hard to keep the turned-away officers from casually glancing at the carriages on their way through, and white cedar is just so distinctive.

Another team goes deeper into the settled zone, moving ahead and then reporting back. They’re the ones who speak to the realtors as prospective new arrivals, and the recent habit of placing rental property pictures on the office walls is proving rather helpful.

But for the most part, the circle moves inwards. It’s a slow process, because there’s a lot of doors to knock on. The nation isn’t quite due for its next census — but the date is close, and it only takes a minor temporal distortion to provide an extra excuse. Hello! Who lives here? For how long? Can you verify that? Oh, thank you. Your neighbor didn’t answer: do you know if they’re at work — oh, it’s a vacation. For how long? Because we’ll need to drop by again, of course…

Others track down the Lunars. Any ground carriage. Any at all. Two stallions, cerulean. One stallion of a different hue. They know he would have been a unicorn. (Those in the circle have not been told that to a centaur, unicorns smell slightly different.) And one more.

House by house. If there’s a property known to be occupied, with no verifiable reason for it to be empty — then that residence is watched from afar. The circle moves inwards. And they knock. Over and over.

They are looking for the house with no answer, because that will be the solution.

It takes more than two days. All traffic going out of the settled zone is examined. The train station is watched. Those who comprise the circle have very little trouble seeing past fur dye, and a surprise decision from the Weather Bureau to grant that settled zone a warm spell gives the residents a taste of spring. Removing any excuse for layering is just a side bonus.

They find a witness, one who found the hour of travel unusual. It’s easy to remember where the vehicle turned.

That leads to the place where the ground carriage deposited its passenger, pulling onto the rental’s unkempt lawn to do so. The resulting wheel ruts are examined.

It doesn’t take long to get the warrant. And while they wait, the house is watched. The observers see heavy curtains shift a few times, but… there’s nowhere to go.

The circle of knocks closes in.

There are pegasi and earth ponies among the arresting officers, plus one griffon. They thought it would be more insulting that way.

The arsonist doesn’t put up a fight. There’s too many officers for that. But there is an audience of sorts, and she uses the opportunity to proclaim her innocence. Over and over. She has the right to remain silent and after the first four repetitions, everyone starts to wish she would use it.

They… have to stay near her. Watch her, even with the horn-covering metal restraint cone in place, as she’s taken to the settled zone’s gatehouse. But it’s strangely hard to do. There’s something about her eyes. The way she looks at them or, with anyone who isn’t a unicorn, looks through.

Sometimes she pauses in the declaration of innocence, just for a few seconds. Those periods are spent in what comes across as a merry singsong, and her voice drops too low to make out the words.

Most of the settled zone learns about what’s happened within minutes. Undercover officers are fine, but secret arrests are one step away from secret trials. This part has to be public, and that includes allowing the mare to ask for an attorney. The Princesses know it’s all going to reach the press. They’re expecting a reaction. Possibly several.

But there’s still supposed to be a secret in play, and that’s the destination. The mare is being teleported to the palace, where she will be kept within a cell on the lowest level. Any requested lawyer can be present for the interrogation, but that first round is going to be performed by two alicorns. They have a few questions.

The destination is supposed to be a secret.

It isn’t.

Entitled

The pegasus has several reasons for going into the lower levels of the palace. One of them is rather basic: she lives there. She’s been residing in the barracks for some time now, and has been trying to figure out a new approach in what’s officially become an ongoing argument with her roommate. Desperately searching for the words which will make the centaur stay.

…the centaur is sick.
Cerea will get better. The doctors are taking care of her. They’ll work something out.
They have to…

…there are multiple reasons available for the pegasus to descend. Residency. Patrol routes. And if she encounters anypony else in this rather specific area, she can just say something about checking on the prisoner, because that’s only partially a lie. She wants to see the pony who came to her apartment. Who set the fire. Who ran, and managed to keep running for far too long.

She wants to…

…no. The pegasus has recognized the need to set certain boundaries, and they start with the cell door. She will not, cannot go inside unless the prisoner is in distress and needs real assistance. Words can cross the little barred window. (It’s set at the proper height to watch a pony within, and there’s a minor enchantment which detects any restraint approaching the gaps so it can shove back.) She’s free to speak with the prisoner. The victim of a crime has the right to confront the one who committed it and as long as she’s very careful about her actions, such meetings don’t need to be confined to a courtroom.

The pegasus has been wondering about the trial. The prisoner hasn’t asked for an attorney. Perhaps she’s planning to represent herself. After all, she does believe she’s innocent…

…there are two ponies patrolling this area. Both of them know the pegasus, understand completely, and that comprehension still doesn’t make either of them particularly happy about this. It takes a few minutes before they agree to allow her through, and there are certain conditions attached to that permission. They are going to remain in the rough area, with ears rotated forward. And in the event that they hear anything which hints at matters having gone to the physical, they are going to close in.

The Lunar pair trusts the pegasus. Implicitly. But they wouldn’t be Guards if they hadn’t offered a reminder. Because Guards protect their Princess. And in order to make sure that most vital duty continues to cross the centuries, they watch out for each other.

The pegasus, verified, tracked, and keeping tight rein over herself, moves towards the cells.

She isn’t sure whether most of those who work in the palace are aware of the cells beneath. They’re hardly ever used, at least for the intended purpose. The majority of staff members who learn about them tend to treat the area as a place where anypony who’s too tired to get home can just sleep for a few hours. Additionally, a few dating couples have interpreted the entire section as a Designed Tryst Zone, because there are beds and it can take a few trips before anypony realizes that the doors only lock from the outside.

(The pegasus has been waiting for the restored barracks to experience that kind of invasion, and suspects the only thing which has kept her roommate from trotting in on an amateur-hosted class in pony sexuality is — the existence of her roommate. Hormone floods can wash away sufficient reason for putting a couple into a cell bed, but chancing a centaur witness might require more of a tsunami. There’s a very real risk in having Cerea see any of it, and the central one is that any blush that hot might actually set the centaur on fire.)

But the cells do see some use. Recently, there had been a young pegasus mare who had contracted a unique condition, and she had to be isolated. Ultimately, it was nothing contagious, and a cure was found — but while the effects had persisted, the true danger had been from having her in public. (Nearly all of that risk would have been to the mare.) And then Cerea had appeared…

…there’s a rather odd sound coming from up ahead, something which the pegasus needs a moment to identify as she closes in. It’s metal scratching against wood. Over and over. And it isn’t coming from the door, because that approach would be repelled. The reasonable guess is that the unicorn is having a go at the furnishings and, judging by the audio track, appears to be making some headway. Given the most likely source and location of the metal, this is presumed to be literal.

The pegasus crosses the last few body lengths. There are no real attempts being made to move silently. She’s in armor. Even if she could fly (and the doctors told her to wait a few more days before the first attempt, the pegasus can see how much Cerea blames herself and can’t make the centaur stop), there would still be some sound produced by metal shifting on her body, not to mention the flight itself. Also, there’s usually very little point in sneaking up on a cell.

Moving underground, towards the one who tried to create some level of torment.

(The foal’s treatment is taking longer than expected. Nopony knows when the hospital release might come. Some are starting to wonder whether it can happen at all.)

It’s nothing compared to what Cerea went through. The pegasus keeps telling herself that. Nothing at all…

…she’s in front of the cell. Facing the little barred window.

She looks inside.

It’s the first time she’s seen the unicorn. Of course, the same can’t be said going the other way. The unicorn saw the pegasus in a newspaper photo. Picking out a target —

— the restrained horn, coated in metal which displays carefully-chosen embedded jewels, is currently incapable of projecting a corona. The restraint can’t be removed by any force which hooves might bring to bear, and mere impact against anything in the cell won’t take it off. To that rather limited extent, the prisoner is helpless. (You don’t get to be a Guard unless you recognize just where all of those limits run out.)

But the covered protrusion is still a horn, and the metal is dense. So the prisoner is having a go at the cell’s lone shelving unit.

There’s no charge involved: no attempt to add a limited amount of mass and speed into the equation. Instead, the unicorn has her head down, and she’s just — scrapping the restraint’s tip against the wood. Over and over, working the gouges deeper into a trail of splayed splinters. And when the pegasus is this close….

…there’s a little bit of hum, here and there. Moments of singsong, where the pegasus can’t make out the words. And the motions repeat. Over and over. There’s a definite pattern. The pegasus, who’s watched her roommate sketch and can’t quite see the part of the shelving which is being progressively damaged, almost feels as if the prisoner is trying to draw something —

— the unicorn looks up from her work. Glances towards the cell door, and sees the pegasus on the other side.

They’re looking at each other. Silent. Motionless. Connected by a mutual gaze and a pair of decisions.

The other mare’s eyes are — odd. It’s as if they possess just a little too much pupil. Something which could almost be pulling in every last lumen. Consuming —

— the pegasus is a Guard. She’s seen worse things than those eyes.
She tells herself that for a second time.
A third —

“— I’m sorry.”

There’s something thin about the unicorn’s high-pitched voice. A stretched-out coating trying to hide a deep pit. The uppermost layer of quicksand has just offered an apology, and the pegasus isn’t ready to believe it.

“Sorry,” she repeats. It’s something to say.

The unicorn nods. “I’m so sorry you set your own apartment on fire.”

The pegasus, who went through the entirety of Wordia Spinner’s so-called article with only a few breaks for nausea, says nothing.

Nausea.
Cerea is sick…

The unicorn waits for a response with open puzzlement. Not getting one triggers a little head tilt to the right, one where the weight of the restraint might be sending the movement slightly astray.

The prisoner’s next words are almost calm. They also have a certain rhythm.

“I think about what it must be like, to lose yourself to that degree. To the point where you can’t think about anything properly any more. Where you don’t care. Not about what’s important. And you hurt yourself, you hurt everyone around you, you hurt a foal —“

“— that was you,” the pegasus softly states. Some things need to be on the record.

“I’m innocent.”

The words somehow manage to come across as sincere.

“There’s a warrant on the way,” the pegasus tells her. “We’ll have your field signature soon. And there’s already an occlugraph. All we need to do is compare the results.”

The unicorn almost smiles.

“I have Rhynorn’s,” the prisoner claims. “You can’t make me cast when I’m sick.”

“Then we’ll do a blood test to prove it.”

“You mean the palace doctors will do it,” the unicorn calmly replies. “Conflict of interest.”

The pupils seem to be getting larger.

“I don’t think you understand how medical oaths work.” The pegasus forces the words to remain steady. “I don’t think you understand a lot of things —“

“— all my signature might prove,” the unicorn half-sings, “is that I lifted something. Assuming that anypony trusts a palace-corrupted test. One where somepony will have to take the restraint off. And the test won’t say anything about whether I set a fire. Especially since that was you —“

The pegasus is trying to keep herself under control. Most of that attempt is currently focused on her magic, because she’s not going into that cell and she can’t send wind in her stead. She can control her magic, she has to — but it still leaves her with a moment when she’s not fully paying attention to her body.

Black wings flare out into the challenge position.

She’s not sure the unicorn knows what the shift means. She is fully aware of just how much the movement hurt, and only manages to keep the pain away from her features while the joints refold.

The unicorn did notice the initial surge of pain.

“You’re not well,” the prisoner notes. “Is it because the centaur has been draining your magic? What little you have? Imagine being its victim, over and over, and still not understanding —“

The pegasus smiles. Moves her wings again, just a little. The tips of the flight feathers almost seem to curl in and out. Her tail sways.

“— you have a funny way of flirting.”

The unicorn freezes. Pupils contract.

“…what?” emerges as a word straining to reach the level of a whisper.

The pegasus continues to strike her pose. “I mean, you did come to my apartment,” she lightly beams. “Most ponies would be questioning the motivation. But you dropped by twice. That makes it a little more obvious. First there was the love note —“

“— I didn’t,” the unicorn hisses. “I didn’t, you’re the sick one, sick just for thinking about it, sick —“

“— and personally?” She makes the smile a little wider. “You may be in denial, but I know a feather-duster when I see one.”

The unicorn’s recoil is a full-body event: something which starts at the enraged eyes, flows through the body and sends the desperate overpressure of rage into the hooves. The resulting push sends the entire body backwards, and the prisoner stumbles upon landing.

“Don’t call me —”

The pegasus casually presses on. “But you were making certain assumptions,” she smiles. “What if I wasn’t a bone-poker?”

“— I’M NOT A PERVERT!””

The pegasus waits for the scream’s echoes to die away. It’s not the sort of vocalization which is going to bring in another Guard — but there doesn’t seem to be any point in talking for a few seconds. Not until the unicorn stops panting, and the flattened ears lift away from the skull.

“Every Guard knows the words,” the pegasus neutrally offers, with all physical pretense towards flirting vanishing in an instant. “Feather-duster: sexual attraction to pegasi. Bone-poker: wanting a unicorn. When there’s a training group, we’re encouraged to use every term. Anything somepony might see as derogatory, no matter how stupid it is. Casually. Until the words don’t mean anything any more, because we’re all. Just. Guards. Some of us start kicking around the phrases as greetings. You know you’ve been accepted into the ranks when somepony has a go at you, right to your snout, because they know you won’t care —“

— nopony had spoken to Cerea that way. Not within the centaur’s hearing, and… there weren’t all that many ponies who were still on speaking terms with the pegasus.

There had likely been no casual insult. Not towards a girl (and the pegasus knows her roommate is young) who usually treats her own existence as a mortal offense. And the pegasus hasn’t tried it, because she knows how sensitive Cerea is. How… fragile.

No acceptance.

Has the integration process ever truly come close to working, for a training group of one?

…perhaps it doesn’t matter. Not for the Lunars. Not when the centaur can no longer serve as a Guard.

“We know all of the words,” the pegasus makes herself finish. “We don’t have to use them. You think they’re important. I don’t. And as soon as somepony stops caring — the terms don’t matter. There are words which are more important.”

“And what are those?” rides into the world on the wave of a sneer.

“Squadmates,” the pegasus quietly says. “Partners.” And then, because she knows nothing will wound more deeply than the truth, “Friends.”

The unicorn’s eyes…

The prisoner dismissively sniffs.

“You’re a fanatic,” she decides. “All Guards are. That’s why they can’t think properly. Why they don’t care about the herd. Why they don’t care at all.”

There’s a certain amount of morbid curiosity involved in continuing to listen, along with a rather significant quantity of internal notation. Some of this may have to be repeated during testimony, and the pegasus isn’t looking forward to that. They’re the sort of words which foul tongue and brain.

“Monsters…” The unicorn stops. Takes a hoofstep forward. “You’re protecting a monster.” And then she smiles. “Or is it two?”

Somehow, the pegasus keeps her wings exactly where they are.

“I would never hurt anypony,” the prisoner tells her. “But somepony who protects a monster — that’s a pony who can’t care properly. Just associating is bad enough. Not striking to remove it? What kind of Guard wouldn’t clear an obvious threat out of the palace? But to say what you just did…”

There’s horror in the unicorn’s features, and none of it reaches the eyes.

“Definitions,” the unicorn decides. “This is about definitions. And that’s why I tried to warn you.”

“Warn.” There was acid in the prisoner’s words. Repetition doesn’t seem to be doing anything to dilute it.

The smile arrives too quickly on the other mare’s face, and does so as a unit. No transitional movements of facial features seem to have been involved.

“It’s the sufficiency clause,” is all too close to a chant. “A sufficient warning. Two. Two more than you deserved.”

“A notice on my door,” the pegasus states. “One doused in a chemical which would make me sick.”

“It’s not my fault you don’t have proper magic,” the prisoner decides. “Being stuck taking down everything by mouth for your whole life. And it’s also not my fault that you can’t think properly. That you can’t even spot —“ the brow briefly furrows as the brain behind it searches for vocabulary ”— what the griffons are… oh, right!” The smile gets wider. “An invasive species.”

“There’s only one of her,” feels like a reasonable point to make.

The slim forehooves stomp. “It could breed.” And before an even more reasonable ‘How?’ can be offered, continues. “I had a duty to warn you!”

The pegasus believes herself to understand something about duty.

Cerea had…

…she’s been trying not to think about it. But she believes the centaur. That Cerea saw her friend. And there are positive aspects to that: for starters, the residents of that strange household now know Cerea is alive. Her friends, her rivals and, after the news reaches the herd, her parents. That the girl is lost, but — alive. And somepony is trying to look after her.

…she’s sick…

That’s the best way to look at it. The more practical one states that if the centaur spoke to the psychopomp, then the centaur had died.

It might have only been for a few seconds.
(It might happen again.)
(She’s sick.)
But she had died. Traded her one life for all lives, like a true Guard.
What has the arsonist ever done for duty?

“But you didn’t listen,” the prisoner continues, and those strange eyes skim across tight wings and self-paralyzed feathers. “And it would be a pity, except there’s nopony worth pitying.” And licks her lips. “No pony. Not any more, not that you were ever much of a real pony in the first place, or ever could be —“

“— you hurt a foal.” Just to see the lack of reaction.

“The fire did that,” the prisoner says. “Which you started. How am I supposed to be responsible for the movements of a fire?” Thoughtfully, “Really, isn’t it the centaur’s fault? All of it? The magic drains: I’m sure you know about those, since it’s done that to you over and over. All of the anger, all of the fear. All the centaur’s fault, just for existing. And it could stop doing that at any time.”

The smile thins. The pupils widen.

“With,” the unicorn adds, “a little help.”

Which is when the pegasus decides she’s had enough.

Her ears feel as if they’ve been clogged with sewage. The memories of the unicorn’s words aren’t exactly an improvement. And she’ll have to repeat those words to herself over and over as she leaves the cell area, fixing them in her mind for testimony. Carrying what feels like fresh vomit —

— Cerea is sick…

The pegasus turns. Begins to trot away. It only takes a single step before the sound of metal scraping into wood resumes, and the pegasus wonders whether the prisoner has decided that damaging palace property doesn’t have any possible charges attached.

One long scrape — and then the unicorn stops.

“This isn’t a very good cell,” the prisoner petulantly declares. “Why isn’t it any better?”

The pegasus knows the cell is basic. A place to sleep, a few things to read (with almost none from unicorn authors, just because). There’s a restroom trench and a sink. Furnishings are minimal. And that’s because this is a cell meant for a criminal. Cerea’s cell was more towards ‘honored enemy’ —

— she instantly regrets at least half of that designation —

(Cerea has to stay.)
(Has to.)
(But she’s sick…)

— but for the unicorn, the arsonist, there are no special touches. Nopony is going to offer bedsheets of rich purple velvet. Most of the cell is a dull grey. The most colorful thing within is the prisoner, and that just barely.

“I tried to warn you,” that one sadly offers. “But there was no reason to. Not when it was too late, and you were already corrupted. Because you can’t care properly, can you? Not about ponies, real ponies. Just monsters. I would never hurt anypony. But you associate with monsters. Call them your friends. And what does that make you?”

Her wings are under control. The left hind leg, recognizing a recent plural, nearly succeeds in kicking backwards.

“You should have been separated from it at the start,” the unicorn declares —

— the voice changes. Lifts in pitch, takes on hints of song.

“Separated,” the prisoner repeats. “Separated from each other, like bad fillies…”

The pegasus doesn’t understand.
She doesn’t want to understand.
She wanted to see the arsonist. Face the mare who had done so much. Now she just wants to get out of the area.
She’s seen the mare.
Seen her eyes.
Something about the eyes is wrong.

The pegasus trots a little faster.
The words follow.

“Reinforce, and drag,” the arsonist merrily sings. “Reinforce, and drag…”

There were certain sacrifices which had to be made when controlling your lessers and as far as Mrs. Panderaghast had previously been concerned, she’d already made just about all of them. Simply being in the same room felt as it had been the worst which could ever happen to her.

Except that she’d been wrong.

She couldn’t really say that the true worst had taken place. She was simply in a position, one which was in no way her fault, where it had the potential to happen. And it was utterly unfair, undoubtedly unjust, she was being made to suffer and she had done absolutely nothing wrong.

No matter what happened in this small, dark, criminally-unadorned stone underground room (because the earth pony was hosting, and that mare was stupid), she was going to wind up paying a price. She saw no realistic means by which anything about her comfortable, well-supported, perfect life failed to go through some level of near-total upheaval. She didn’t deserve that.

Not when she’d only made one mistake.

And now they were having a meeting. Another meeting and, as with the cellar, Mrs. Panderaghast wasn’t officially there. She hadn’t officially been in a lot of rooms over the last few weeks, she was frankly sick of talking to those whom she wasn’t provably associating with, and if the upcoming upheaval of her life had any level of dubious benefit, it was that she was very likely to be not officially meeting with them for the last time.

“So she’s being kept in the palace,” said the head of the pegasus supremacy organization, and did so in a tone which suggested he wasn’t all that distressed about it. That he didn’t understand: something which CUNET’s head had very little trouble believing. Anypony so delusional as to believe pegasi were important was obviously going to miss out on any number of additional basics.

The earth pony mare was worse.

“Yes,” Mrs. Panderaghast tightly stated. “That’s what my source has told me.”

It’s not fair.
Why was the universe punishing her? Simply for having been right?

But she’d received the word directly, and…. she didn’t like dealing with the source. With any of the parties in the room. Not when they were delusional and stupid and her obvious inferiors, and they never admitted to that last part. They thought they were better than she and if anypony had challenged them on it, they would be ready with a full parade of Facts.

Mrs. Panderaghast had no idea where they’d found the nerve to even try that. She was the one with the Facts. Everything else was obviously a lie.

The alliance existed within a definition so loose as to be on the verge of plummeting from the dictionary. In the wake of the pressure exerted by the weight of a centaur, the three in the room had agreed that Equestria was for ponies. They would just settle on which ponies later. And that was equally stupid, because it was obvious to Mrs. Panderaghast that the other two weren’t really ponies at all. They were her lessers. They had been born that way, and so their status would never change.

They were also exceptionally delusional, and that didn’t seem to have any chance of changing on its own. Not until somepony educated them.

“So they’re going to question her themselves,” the earth pony recognized. (And how obvious was that Fact, if an earth pony could see it?) “Interrogated by the Princesses.”

Mrs. Panderaghast nodded. The mare smirked. There were probably dozens of appropriate responses to that news, and smirking comprised none of them.

It was unfair. She’d had a life. More than that: she’d had a lifestyle.

What did CUNET do, as an organization? It found the unicorns who understood that they were special. Nopony could ever take away the gift of a horn, for it was theirs by right of blood. CUNET said the horn was the most important thing about them, got them in a room with others who felt the same way, reinforced just how special they all were and in exchange for the heady, perfect, unending intoxication of superiority, all the organization asked for was money. As far as Mrs. Panderaghast was concerned, it was a perfectly fair trade.

The real trick was in finding ways to ask for that money at least three times per moon.
Skill came from spending as little of it as possible.
…well, the organization had minimal internal spending. Mrs. Panderaghast had dresses to purchase and for some unfair reason, the designers always charged more for what they claimed as ‘extra fabric costs’. Which was proof of magical incompetence, because a truly superior unicorn would create something which was enchanted to fit.

CUNET told its members that they were superior. Also that they should be unhappy about not having that recognized by everypony around them, because the eternally-persecuted majority (relatively few of whom belonged to CUNET, but far too many unicorns had simply become corrupted) should have been in charge based on blood alone. And it collected dues, it had fundraising drives, and it reliably stepped onto the battlefield to wage its eternal war against those numerous lessers. A battle which was never truly won. Because if that ever happened, then how was Mrs. Panderaghast supposed to pay for the next dress?

…a dress which was probably going to have a foreign label.

The mere thought made her sick.

She’d always intended for CUNET to triumph one day. Somehow. She had the Facts. Get enough Facts together and they would lead to the Idea. The one which put her — which put CUNET in charge, while still guaranteeing a steady flow of bits. It probably would have had something to do with a newly-acquired tax base. But until then…

The current profit margin of hatred barely required any actual work. She’d reached the point where she could get other ponies to write the articles for her just by saying she was busy: they never minded when she signed. Besides, it was her organization. That meant the credit was hers to take.

She had been doing perfectly well for herself, largely by doing just about nothing at all.

And now that was over.

“She’s in the palace,” Mrs. Panderaghast repeated. “We have to do something about that.”

The pegasus shifted on his bench. The unnatural wings extended somewhat, folded back in.

CUNET’s head watched him think. Waited for the question, which was going to be ‘How?’ She was ready for that. As primary queries went, ‘How?’ actually had some legitimacy —

“Why?”

And now he was smirking,

She was going to make him pay for that.

“She knows things,” Mrs. Panderaghast told them. “Things which can’t come out under questioning.” Which was the truth.

Mrs. Panderaghast had spent years operating within the shielding fog of a legal gray area. Other ponies could write the articles, but art and perfect protection were found in the editing. She always avoided direct orders, and tamed down any text which felt too authoritative. Pointed suggestions had to be sanded.

Bluntly: how could she ever be responsible for others acting on what they felt she’d implied? That was their interpretation. As long as she could take rather temporary custody of the court’s witness bench and declare that she’d never directly said any such thing, then the Facts suggested she would be immune.

She wrote the kind of articles which served as a waiting schoolhouse slate, and allowed her members to fill in the blanks from an invisibly-attached list of the obvious. She did as little as possible and the organization’s members, acting under her direction, never really accomplished much at all.

(Also, the pegasus and earth pony at the underground table had clearly copied her. This was unfair. She’d copied an earlier organization first.)

And then the young mare had acted on her own.

In terms of the membership as a whole, it hadn’t been the first time. Work a group of ponies into a frenzy, load them up at the starting line for a race which would never be won, and it wasn’t exactly surprising to see one prematurely jump the gate. But she’d always stepped back from those ponies, and justifiably so. They’d had their own interpretations of her words: how could that possibly be her fault? A remorseful few agreed that she needed to deny their actions, because the organization as a whole needed to carry on. The truly devout even signed over control of their estates to her before entering prison, and she honored them through nearly bothering to remember their names.

But none had ever gone so far as the young mare.
Not to the point where it involved a foal.
A wounded infant was something which very few ponies could stand to see. A cry of pain, produced by one too young to understand what hurt even was — that served as a rallying point.
With a foal involved, investigators might chase a little longer.
Laws might be ignored. Or worse, enforced.
For a foal, a jury could wind up making the wrong decision. The one which said Mrs. Panderaghast was somehow responsible.
And then it would all come crashing down.

So she’d made a mistake.

(Was the palace tracking her already? Surely nopony there was that intelligent. It was a Fact.)
(It had to be.)

And it was unfair. She’d been protecting herself by getting the mare out of the capital, but — when you looked at her actions from the more nauseating perspective, hadn’t she shown some degree of kindness? She was being punished for kindness.

The so-called pony virtues. Nothing more than alicorn lies.

…it could be said that the young mare knew very little, and Mrs. Panderaghast would have readily agreed. When it came to CUNET’s membership, the pony in the palace cell existed as a trotting echo (and it was trotting because the lesser species kept sabotaging field strength and self-levitation alike). She’d wanted to be special. The organization had told her that she already was.

Mrs. Panderaghast knew the young mare was weak-willed and suggestible. This had been proven, because she’d mindlessly agreed with whatever CUNET said.

(Why didn’t more ponies align with her through thinking for themselves and coming to the only sane conclusion? After all, she was right…)

The young mare knew very little. The last few things she’d been told, perhaps — and in the absence of that, she probably knew whatever she’d been telling herself. But for all her lack of knowledge, the pony in the palace cell was still in possession of a rather unfortunate Fact.

She knew the cellar meeting had taken place.
(So did the pony who had told Mrs. Panderaghast that a member was in trouble, but — one problem at a time.)
She knew the head of CUNET had been there.
Had gotten the young mare out of the city.
A witness. A way to verify events.
A Fact in the possession of somepony who was weak-willed, didn’t think for herself (or didn’t do it very well) — and, after weeks of isolation…

Would spells be required at all? She might just listen to the first pony who showed sympathy. Who told her she was special, but… in a different way. Claimed the young mare was strong. And the best way to prove that strength was through the simple act of confession.

She’s the sort who might slip.

And she can be connected to me.

Something had to be done. That was obvious. There had never been a more self-evidentiary Fact, and it had led to her plan. Something born out of desperation, marinated at the temperatures of injustice and reluctantly served up as what would have to be her final effort — but it was still perfect, because it was hers.

However, this was the part of the plan where Mrs. Panderaghast was stuck dealing with inferior morons.

“She knows things about you,” the earth pony mare smirkingly observed. “Why should we care?”

The pegasus nodded. Then he looked disgusted with himself for just having agreed with an earth pony, along with having been part of a ‘we’. Mrs. Panderaghast almost understood.

She took a breath. A soft sound of straining seams informed her that the current dress had failed to magically adjust itself.

This is the dangerous part.

“Because,” she told them, “I’ve been keeping notes about our alliance. Writing up papers about all the little secrets which the spells discover, when we’re all so close together. I’ve put those notes aside, where they can’t be found. And if anything happens to me, such as my going to prison — the papers go to the palace. It’s all been arranged.”

She briefly wondered if such spells actually existed.

Perhaps she needed to get some papers. Full, blank reams in sealed envelopes. That should let ponies believe whatever they liked…

They were looking at her.
Their lips had pulled back from their teeth. Wings had flared. Muscles were bulging.
She knew she could win. She was utterly confident that a unicorn could defeat a pegasus and earth pony in a fight.
She just wasn’t sure whether these two idiots were prepared to agree with her.

Maybe they’ve been writing up papers.
They might be getting ready to…

No. They couldn’t be that smart. They would cooperate with her. They had no other choice —

— the pegasus shifted forward on his bench. Spoke through the snarl, as sparks began to cluster around the edges of his feathers. Electric-blue anger lit the room, and ozone saturated the unicorn’s lungs.

“So we,” he spat, “have to do something about this.”

Mrs. Panderaghast nodded, and considered it to be the bravest thing she’d ever done.

The earth pony still looked furious — but there was something thoughtful laced into that.

“The goal is to keep her from talking,” that mare matter-of-factly considered. “And you have someone inside the palace…”

Another nod. The bravery doubled.

Why is that mare smiling?

She found out.

“Then it’s easy,” the earth pony decided, and the satisfied expression was stone. “Have your source kill her.”

Something deep in Mrs. Panderaghast was measuring the casualness of the tone. It was the same aspect which had busied itself with monitoring how closely the mare was watching her, at least when it wasn’t concerning itself with figuring out time and distance to the door.

The words had made the pegasus pull back a little. She felt that made him look weak. Or for a pegasus, weaker.

“It’s not that easy,” the unicorn pointed out. “There’s Guards in the area, patrolling. My source doesn’t have easy access to that section. They can’t open the cell on their own. And even if they can reach the interior, the odds are too good that ponies will know they were down there. The first, best suspect. They won’t do it.”

Which, now that Mrs. Panderaghast thought about it, was somewhat irritating. She was sure she had at least a few CUNET members who might be willing to kill for her, and the unjust universe had left her reliant on somepony who wasn’t in the organization at all. (Multiple someponies, and every last one stretched the terminal syllables to the breaking point.) The most she had been able to rely on her source for was listening. Collecting information, passing it along, and that was about the limit. Even after the pony had approached her freely, hoping to help.

All you could ask the source for was information, and even that was limited.

(Some of what she’d been recently told was precious indeed.)
(She almost longed to tell her inferiors.)
(Just to watch their faces.)

Mrs. Panderaghast’s plan meant asking for one thing more.

The earth pony was smirking again. It made the unicorn wonder if the proposal had been a test —

— it didn’t matter. She had a plan, and neither of them was capable of seeing it.

The pegasus was thinking. It made him look stupid. Thankfully, it was also making the sparks slow down.

“We’re sure your mare is in the palace?” (The unicorn told herself that there had been poorly-cloaked desperation in the tone. A new Fact.) “Can we verify? What about Spinner?”

Mrs. Panderaghast promptly decided the snort was justified. “In the palace,” she said. “And not coming out.” It had been betrayal, and she didn’t understand why. What cause ever would have been sufficient for the reporter to justify cooperation with the alicorns?

She’d never seen Wordia as being that weak, and it had created another problem. Fortunately, both issues just happened to have the same solution.

“The half-gallop marker,” she told them, “is that we’ve all had our members blocked from palace service. It’s the security clearance screening.” (All three nodded in frustration, followed by feeling equally disgusted for having chorused.) “We can only look for those who approach after being hired. But when it comes to getting reliable ponies to do what we need, within the palace… there’s an easy answer.”

“And that is?” asked the very stupid pegasus. She had no idea how he’d even reached the point of being in charge. Best of a particularly bad lot?

Mrs. Panderaghast smiled.

“We’ve had forces outside the palace for weeks,” she reminded them.

“So?” inquired the world’s lowest non-measured intelligence, and did so as the earth pony began to go pale beneath her fur.

“So now,” Mrs. Panderaghast told him, “they’re going in.”

Wings flared. Flapped. Sent their owner into a wall, where the electricity discharged. The earth pony simply thrust herself to her hooves, and did so with enough force to crack the bench.

“ARE YOU INSANE? WE CAN’T —”

“— papers,” the unicorn reminded them.

“It’s the palace!” the pegasus gasped as he picked himself up from the dirty floor. “The palace…”

“If I go down,” she softly said, “you all go with me. Or maybe you should go first? Try listening.” And because she had been there far too long, stuck with her lessers in room after room when she never should have been there at all, not when the gift of blood had made her superior, ”To your better, like proper guanos and clods —“

She never saw the earth pony move.

On the rare non-fashion occasions when Mrs. Panderaghast thought about her body type, she usually saw herself as being highly attractive: it was just that very few ponies had the intellect to appreciate a mare who was carrying an extra bale-weight or so. (She liked to round down.)

The impact which drove her off the bench at the terminal point of the earth pony’s jump, sending her into the floor and leaving the mare standing atop her — if nothing else, it gave her something else to appreciate: namely, just how thoroughly she’d (subconsciously) planned ahead. Extra weight had turned out to be outstanding at redistributing force, because nothing was broken. Yet.

Her horn was weakly sparking in all directions. That was good. She would soon have a working to cast. It might even be a new one. Unicorns in stressful situations had been known to spontaneously create spells, and the clod on top of her probably didn’t even know what backlash was —

“— I don’t care how it might all come out,” the earth pony snarled, and leaned in to let hot breath blast against the rotted pearl snout from a mere hoofwidth away. “Or where I wind up, for doing what should be done. You say that to me again, and your part ends here, Majorica. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

And the pegasus, forever useless, did nothing more than watch and smile.

They thought they were her betters.
It was amazing how inferior ponies could be that delusional.

“…yes,” Mrs. Panderaghast said. It was easy to fake the tremble in her voice. It was what an intelligent pony would have done, especially when the plan’s success required living to see the next part.

The clod got off her. It took a few seconds before the unicorn could stand. More until speech returned, and she told herself it was more dramatic that way. More stately.

Then she told them the plan.

They cooperated. They had no other choice.

There were questions, of course. They wanted to know how everypony was getting in. She told them, and they were satisfied.

After that, there was some discussion of the Princesses, but — that didn’t last very long. She hadn’t expected it to. The trio agreed on very little, but one of the few commonalities of belief centered on the alicorns. Namely, that they were weak. The siblings who had originally defeated Discord (somehow), made a new world, founded their own nation and held it for nearly thirteen centuries, were just so obviously weak. And the proof of that? Was all three of their organizations, and the continued existence thereof. None of them truly understood that full freedom of expression meant allowing that which was hated: they just would have never have allowed ponies to disagree. And as it was, they all knew that the palace tried to tell ponies what to think: the recent one-sheet (which none had read, because it was obviously propaganda) proved that. The palace should never tell ponies what to think. That was their job.

Perhaps they existed at the palace’s sufferance. But that was the alicorns’ mistake, and so it was finally time to make them suffer.

(All of them also saw the alicorns as freaks. Something nearly singular, in no way one of their own. Impure. Inherently corrupt. And when it came to the power, all had become skilled in hiding their envy.)

It was quickly agreed that the Princesses were too weak to get involved. The Guards existed to keep them from getting involved. As with the most recent attack, they would merely be evacuated: something else which kept them from learning what real Equestrians wanted. And when it came to the rest of the palace forces — why would any of them ever strike against real Equestrians? Once they saw the herd charging, they would simply… give way. Perhaps a few might even join in, because all three recognized war as a condition where the other side never fought back.

(All of them said the palace staff would give way, and Mrs. Panderaghast briefly considered that none of them might truly believe it. But they were all at the head of their respective organizations. Perhaps the other two had somehow come far enough to realize that when it came to hatred, the actual vessels were — fungible.)

After that, it went to the issues involved in getting the young mare out. Along with what needed to be done if that, for some unknowable reason, proved impossible. The unicorn agreed to all of it, because she had to make it look as if she was giving a little.

(Perhaps the other two had their own plans.)
(They couldn’t be that intelligent.)
(They…)

And there were other topics.

“What about the centaur?” asked the pegasus.

“The centaur,” Mrs. Panderaghast stated, “is a distraction from the centaur.”

They were both staring at her. She refused to rephrase. If they had possessed any intelligence, they would have known what she’d meant —

“— which centaur,” the earth pony slowly said, “are we all talking about?”

— right. Intelligence, lack thereof.

“Tirek?” the pegasus checked. “The palace claims he’s dead —“

“They’ve obviously been using Tirek as a distraction,” Mrs. Panderaghast offered up, because it was a newly-minted Fact and they were the only ones she could share it with. “Maybe they brought him out of Tartarus and had him create a few small drains, just to make it look as if there was a threat outside the palace.” Which just showed how badly the alicorns needed to be kicked off the thrones, because what kind of mind would think of that? “Or they found some way to weakly simulate the effect, since the draining wasn’t complete or permanent. But we know this was a distraction, because my source saw what they’ll be trying to pass off as the corpse. It’s too small.”

They all thought about that.

“This is insane,” the earth pony finally muttered. “Insane…”

And that was wrong. To Mrs. Panderaghast, it was simply the next logical step.

She had founded her organization. She had collected funds, and put a fair amount of those well-earned bits aside. But she had also protected a young mare who, quite frankly, hadn’t deserved it. And now she was doing this because she’d already done so much, and there was no way she was going to stop. Stopping was for fools, and a fool who stopped for something as idiotic as self-reflection was distracted, motionless, and particularly easy to catch.

Majorica Panderaghast had established a place in the world through directing her forces into battles which were never truly won. This was simply advancing the basic philosophy. Ultimately, she didn’t care about how it all came out, not for the participants.

There would be a battle. And the thing about having a battle within the palace…

…if she was particularly lucky, there would be more real Equestrians who would see it as their chance, join in on the side of the alliance. But she didn’t really care. It was enough of a Fact to know that lesser ponies (including far too many unicorns) were timid creatures, and would simply stay out of it.

But a fight at the palace would command the full attention of the Guard. Every police officer would be called in. And with the entirety of those forces concentrated in a single location, nopony would be watching the trains. A unicorn mare whose fur had been soaked in dye, carrying letters of credit made out to whoever possessed them, regrettably cut down on total luggage capacity — that mare would enter the Grand Gymkhana, pass beneath the ceiling-embedded constellations and, watched by nothing more than false stars, depart from Canterlot.

It was a regrettable sacrifice. For starters, she would have to abandon so many possessions, and they would be hard to replace. Additionally, traveling alone meant moving without the reassurance of a protective opinion bubble. But there was no other choice. The young mare would talk: Mrs. Panderaghast was sure of that. And if it somehow wasn’t her, then somepony would: the stakes had grown too great. And this was the alternative.

She’d already decided to hide in Prance. (Perhaps she should have sent the young mare there, but… it would have been too expensive.) It was a nation of ponies. It was also one whose citizens generally felt they were better than Equestrians. How hard could it be to exploit that? All she needed was a primer in the so-called culture, a little time to practice the accent, and she could start all over again.

She didn’t care about what happened to the young mare, or CUNET: she would no longer be any part of that. Nothing in her was capable of caring about anypony else involved. It was her plan. Her distraction: the greatest in Equestria’s history. And with that had come the realization that a proper unicorn was best off caring about nopony but herself.

They would do it. They had to. They had no choice. And she would be safe.

The earth pony briefly marshaled herself.

“And the… other centaur?” she asked.

The unicorn noted the little tremble in the earth pony’s voice. Reveled in it, and almost wished she could keep the sound there forever.

But the upcoming assault was a chance to solve multiple problems. Her source had provided precious information indeed. And when you had a Fact this good… you had to tell somepony.

Mrs. Panderaghast smiled.

“The centaur,” she announced, “is no longer a problem.”

Insurgent

To say that war is chaos would grant it too much dignity.

Chaos contains everything. This allows it to incorporate what might be seen as a contradiction: a touch of inherent order. Something which is necessary for chaos to function at all. But when it comes to a war...

Too many sapients believe it's possible to impose structure upon conflict. The blame for that particular delusion needs to be split up, because there's too much for placing at the base of any single source. Stories are partially at fault here: one blood-soaked word follows another and when you get enough of those together, you just turn the page. Any number of leaders have tried to dictate events through whatever they're willing to term as strategy or, with more than a few, what their terrified staff is unable to tell them was actually a horrible mistake. Look at the girl's own world, and the game's coding will not allow a hit from that distance unless a scope has been attached to a digital weapon: impossible accuracy then becomes the default. And strategy games tend to rely on a given set of rules.

War doesn't have rules. It doesn't take turns. War follows the most basic definition of a monster: it considers what you might wish to do, and then it fails to care.

No plan survives contact with the enemy? A truly good scheme might hold up for as much as five stages before breath stops, and that number lies at a near-unreachable end of the probability curve. Battles turn into a contest of Brownian motion between matter and antimatter particles -- except that a direct collision still may not produce the expected effect. It could be argued that nothing on a battlefield has full control of anything, including itself.

There's going to be a lot happening. Too much at once. War distorts everything, and one of the first casualties is time. The Sergeant understands that: the crucial moments can take place between ticks of the clock, while single moments of agony stretch out towards infinity.

Chaos, by definition, must contain that thread of order and war... does not.

But the sapient mind still needs some way of organizing it all. This generally requires a series of useful lies. And the girl has brought new games of strategy with her: the product of a species which was born for war.

So try to view it that way. There are at least two factions in this game, along with a number of subdivisions: some of those wouldn't mind a chance to strike against each other. (One side is blissfully ignorant of the fact that as far as the battle's initiator is concerned, they're actually playing misère.)

Rewind a little, to just before the attacking group made that first move. Scout the defenders. Locate some of the most crucial pieces on the board...

The oldest of the alicorns was never Honesty and on some of the worst days, that can make her feel as if she's entitled to lie -- especially when so many of those falsehoods are directed inwards. She's... just not particularly good at lying to herself.

The current lie is agonizingly familiar. It's also a worn, threadbare cloak tossed over hard-edged reality while failing to conceal a single aspect, and yet she's trying it out again because there's nothing else.

The white mare is trying to tell herself that she's not helpless.

She's in one of the palace's many mini-libraries: the one which hosts the scant supply of (hopefully) relevant texts is about halfway between her bedroom and the Solar throne. Sunlight pulls books off the shelves, flips pages in front of a violet gaze at a speed which doesn't allow for true reading. It doesn't have to, because she's only looking for a few key words. 'Magic absorption' would be a welcome discovery. 'Nausea' has made her stop far too many times, and none have provided any real assistance. There's one term which might be argued as more crucial than any other and so far, 'centaur' has been a lost cause.

It takes a lot to make the Doctors Bear speak freely about a patient. Requesting that an alicorn search both texts and centuries of memory for anything which might help the girl requires a lot of fear.

The white mare is trying. But this has never happened before. (She's aware that when she says it, the fear tends to spike.) She's been thinking, sorting through endless recollections for anything which might even come close, and the nearest approximation she could come up with was chaos pearls. The land inflicted (and in some ways, infected) by a power which hurts it, building up a protective shell around the remains.

(If it had just been an infection again. She could have done something about that.)
(She can't do anything --)

The girl's body seems to have been overloaded with magic: too many forms of it for any single party to deal with, all in a huge tangle which won't come apart by pulling on a single immovable piece. Those thaums currently aren't showing any signs of fading over time. And how does a centaur's form react to such intrusion? With unending nausea, for starters. But... what else? What could happen?

The doctors understand something about how the girl's body works. But there was no way to anticipate this, no reason.

It's probably too much to hope that the centaur is going to cough up a gem.

...the current book goes back on the shelf. Another comes down. She flips through pages. One engraved image of a poorly-stitched wound gains her attention, and too many memories replay.

She should be better at this. She's had so much time to improve herself. Too much time. And yet...

The elder has some medical knowledge. The foundation was gained in her youth, because the Discordian Era had endless ways to kill and in the event that one of them didn't entirely succeed, the survivors needed to know how to deal with the resulting wounds. Some of her efforts to help injured friends --

-- she stops. Waits for the shiver to pass, then goes to the next page.

She's stood outside so many triage tents. Forced her way into a few more. The old mare also keeps up with articles, glances at a number of journals, loves to speak with innovators and always tries to gallop in pace with the times.

But there are skills she's never mastered. She managed to learn musical notation, if only because her memory of the Singing Shores survived the Discordian Era and she wanted to record some of what they'd had to say -- but with actual instruments, she can kick a drumskin on rhythm and has at least some chance of not going down in defeat against pluckstrings.

She doesn't consider herself to be the least bit artistic. Her hooves shove pebbles into what she feels are interesting patterns, and then somepony who loves her will announce that she's screwed up the color balance. Innate base levels of artistic talent combine with personality to become major factors in illusion magic, which is why a millennium-plus of very occasional, extremely depressing practice has left her just about able to manifest hazy visual washes of up to three hues.

But when it comes to directly serving as a physician? Something where having the proper mark still helps, but sufficient study would at least allow an intelligent pony some degree of mastery? She could probably manage an amputation, especially since she has a ready means of cauterizing the stump. And that's when she's been alive for centuries, watched as medical knowledge advanced, had any number of theoretical chances to put herself into formal classes and she should be better than this --

-- but placing a Princess upon a school bench will give the nation a reason to come calling for her. Every time.

I should be better than this.
Maybe I can find something.
Remember anything...

But this has never happened before.

I'm not helpless.

She's in one of her own little libraries, and suspects a Royal Physician may have gone to the big one. (Only one of them: they wouldn't chance having both out of the palace when the girl is sick.) And the medical building lore of the Canterlot Archives contains more written material than a hundred doctors could ever fully memorize, much less personally utilize, and she still suspects just about none of it is going to contain the word 'centaur'...

...still searching.

...well, at least it puts off the interrogation for a few more minutes.

(The attackers told themselves the interrogation couldn't have happened yet. They make up their own Facts and this time, they were right.)

Not that she intended to start until Luna was ready, but the younger hasn't come in yet. The sisters are going to be conducting the first stage of what's meant as a two-pronged attack: the second part won't begin until late afternoon. The elder isn't quite stalling, but she isn't exactly looking forward to their segment. The best hope is that they ultimately get something which allows them to --

-- just once. Is it so much to hope that just once, they get to make a second arrest?

And there's a morning edition of a certain newspaper on a table behind her, delivered while she was searching and the white mare looked at the articles just long enough to verify what she'd been expecting to happen. Some portion of the press is now aware that the arsonist was arrested (because the arrest was public, and a witness wanted to see his own name in print) , but -- not of where the unicorn is being held --

-- the thin, cheap pages are vibrating in place. The protestors are just that loud today. She almost wonders if they've somehow found a new complaint. Wordia has at least three every day. Count the protesters as a single unit and that's two unwelcome guests.

...the old mare may wind up having to thank the supposed journalist. That's going to hurt.

However, any such moment of self-inflicted nausea has to wait until after the debriefing. And the eldest is fully aware that she could have broken 'orders' and debriefed Cerea at any time, but -- the girl is sick. Additionally, she's found that when you find somepony with a strong sense of ethics, it's usually a good idea to follow their lead. Defer, because the mare was born in an time when too many ethics worked out to 'survive' and often expressed that conclusion in the singular.

It's been nearly thirteen hundred years and when it comes to the skills she's mastered, a truly bad day will make 'ethics' feel like a work in progress.

...of course, if the doctors had a little less in the way of ethics... such as, just by way of example, lacking the portion which had allowed Tirek to refuse treatment, then the girl wouldn't be --

-- no. That's not a wish she can allow herself to have. She understands why the Doctors Bear allowed the killer to send them away. Because you have to set a line. It's easy to say that you'll only break it once. One of the only things more simple is to claim you'll stop after twice.

...she should have suspected platinum. In that, it's arguably her fault as much as anypony else's. Not that she ever had the chance to watch any other centaur play with the stuff, but she's at least seen most of the sites where the other experiments took place. On a few occasions, she even helped to clean up the debris.

The white mare has seen Tirek's body, and intends to both attend and document the autopsy. Assess and evaluate the corpse.

-- and now the books are faintly shaking on the shelves.

It would be nice if she could file a noise complaint with the police without triggering at least three articles about abuse of power.

...well, two.

She keeps scanning through the books. And while she searches (and knows it won't work, but she's not helpless), she thinks about that eventual debriefing. The press conference, which she's been planning out before the details arrive. She wants to have the girl there. The alicorns will probably have to do most of the talking: the first gathering proved the centaur isn't much of a public speaker. Public vituperator, maybe --

-- the white mare almost smiles --

-- having the girl there...

...how many times has she done this? Stood in a library. A lost laboratory. Some distant ruin. There's been at least two caves. And the common factor between all of those locations is that for every one of them, she was desperately searching for anything which might save someone she lov --

-- it's the wrong term. She cares about the girl, but 'love' is still a little too strong. The white mare thinks of the centaur as being... awkwardly endearing. It's like watching an apologetic kitten struggling to master clawing its way up drapery. If that kitten had six limbs and was capable of demolishing a monster in less than two minutes.

And she's still searching. Because the white mare has lost Guards before. She's also had a number fall ill. And there are ways in which death is at least simpler than sickness, because death is finality. With death, she's had centuries of practice in learning how to move on, and... none of that makes the process any easier. But with the eternal uncertainty of illness...

...maybe the girl can recover on her own. Or the doctors might think of a solution: it wouldn't be the first time for that. But this is magic. (Do they need to call in Twilight?) What does the girl's body know about dealing with magic?

Cerea may have saved them --
-- ultimately, the labels of Solar and Lunar don't matter. Her staff. Their nation. But with Guards or staff, they're all hers.
She has to do something --
-- the sound peaks.
A dozen books jump on their shelves. Three fall.
The gates crash.

There is a broken storm in the tallest tower, cradled within the artificial stillness of the air. Something which barely lets any sound pass through, because vibration must be stilled before damage is done.

It does not know.

It cannot act.

The smith has been hoof-hammering at the metal for hours.

It's about half of what he's been doing over the last few days. When he's not near the centaur, he works the steel. There was a huge job in front of him, something which would be so much easier if there was another set of hooves at work.

Hooves and hands --

-- about half of his time passed in her sickroom. Most of the rest was spent in the forge. (He's not dead, so he presumes eating took place at some point. Actual details of the meals seem to be escaping him.) The job is necessary, and it's not just because he doesn't feel there's anypony else who can do it properly. He knows nopony else could manage it, and he's a little too aware of how he's ending those indefinite pronouns.

...when he works, his thoughts are in tune with the metal. He thinks about metal, of metal, and possibly in metal. That's how it's supposed to be. And he's been heating the steel, shaping it, and getting well ahead of schedule. Some of the results have already been sent out. At just about any moment when he isn't with her, he's down here because this is supposed to be where the mark takes over.

If the mark takes over, then thinking about anything other than metal stops. That's how it should work.

But he keeps thinking about her.

He's put the big job aside for a little while. Right now, she's the reason for his being at the forge.

...he heard about the assignment, the mission, the mistake by accident, and he's been calling it a mistake because the results obviously have a few issues. Yes, Tirek is dead: he'll take that as a positive. (From what he's heard, someone wasted perfectly good platinum.) But she didn't tell him. So he worked until she was brought back, then he worked some more while he was waiting for her to wake up and it reached the point where he had to sleep, plus all that work had produced the usual number of little burns and if he had to sleep, then it might be a little more comfortable to do so after he had the burns looked at...

He fixed her second set of armor. (They should have tested that shoulder joint more thoroughly.) Polished up the first. And then there was more to do.

And she still didn't wake up.

The blacksmith is sweating. He doesn't do that as much as other ponies. But it's been happening more often --

-- she has to stay.
He's been trying to figure out how to make that happen.
(He should have proposed when he had the chance. A spouse has to get some degree of say in whether their partner leaves the country.)
And that's why he's at the forge.
He's going to make her a gift.

It makes perfect sense. You give people gifts, and then they have to stay. But the steel is heated, it's ready to be worked, and... he doesn't know what to make.

Shoes? No, she could create those herself. It should be something she can't do on her own. Can't or won't.

Maybe he can make a bra for her. She's clearly carrying a lot of weight there, and metal is obviously more supportive than mere fabric. That's a practical gift. How hard could it be? All he has to do is reverse-engineer the measurements from the breastplate and he's practically good to go on the spot --

-- she has to stay.

The steel can't go to Mazein. Not yet.

Fine: with their smiths, the steel wouldn't exactly be in the worst place. But the girl has to stay. How can he make that happen? Because it's too crowded in the forge, the girl is just too big and there's barely anywhere to stand and that's the perfect excuse to make the palace expand the place and...

...she's sick, she's sick and no part of his mark is about fixing the weaknesses of flesh --

-- he can talk to her about metal. About what almost feels like a whole other world of metal. There's no one else like that. So she can't leave.

...what if he made her a mug? Something where the loop was sized for fingers?
She needs a properly-sized bench. He can at least assemble the base.
He could...
...could...
...benches...
...places with a lot of metal benches...
...what about taking her to a hoofball game?

The blacksmith has somehow acquired the impression that the girl is rather athletic. So... why not show her what Equestria has to offer? He's vaguely aware that there's supposed to be some sort of problem with bringing her outside the palace, but this is hoofball. If the spectators can get used to the insanity of the sport, then a centaur shouldn't be an issue.

...what if she likes hoofball too much? Enough that she decides to participate --

-- nah. It took centuries to work out the rules for three pony species. It'll take a while before anypony updates the book for a centaur. Besides, she'd have to stay until that happened. At least that long. So it's probably safe. And once he gets tickets --

-- how's the team doing this season?
Who are the current players?
He used to love hoofball. (He loves it, so she'll love it. True smiths think alike.) But he hasn't been to a game in...
...in...
...he should go find out what the schedule is. Also whether there's tickets available -- wait. Doesn't the palace get tickets? He could ask the alicorns for permission to use the stadium's Princess Box. See the Canterlot Express in style.

...too much sweat. He usually doesn't...

...he can talk to her. About metal...

The blacksmith is sweating. He doesn't do that as much as other ponies, especially given the heat coming off the fires. Resistance to high temperatures is one of the little gifts granted by his mark. And yet there's water running down his features, in quantities too great to be absorbed by charred fur.

...he can hardly talk to anyone about metal...

Some of the sweat is trying to take a trail across his eyes. That's just annoying.

...maybe... maybe if they talked about things which aren't metal...

...it's coming from his eyes...

...she has to stay...

There's a dark orange pegasus stallion who keeps getting shuttled between shifts, because the Sergeant won't take him off probation. He's currently guarding an empty Lunar throne room, mostly from itself.

He hates the centaur.

But Tirek is dead.

He still gets to use the locker room when he's on probation. Even if some ponies talk around him more than to him, he still hears them talk. And that's one of the dominant stories making its way through the palace. It would be almost impossible not to hear it and for those who somehow miss out on every word, there's always newspapers.

Tirek is dead.

The stallion managed to get a glimpse of the body. It's so small. So much smaller than it is in his dreams, especially at that point where he's just barely managed to get into a glide, but it feels like the loss of his magic and core and self has stolen maneuverability and the shadow of the giant hoof is descending --

-- he didn't have that dream last night.

He hates the centaur. The one who's still alive. The last living centaur. He hates her so much that two different Guards have independently inquired as to just when he's going to ask her for the date.

He tried to electrocute her during a training exercise because the dream came into the waking world and all he could see was a monster which he hadn't been able to beat. Something that nearly killed him. That's why he's on probation, along with having been put into therapy. But he had to keep going through training exercises with her. And the sword is gone, and the centaur is sick, and --

-- Tirek is dead.

Tirek is dead and there's only one centaur left to hate.

The reporter hates being in the palace.

If asked for her feelings on the subject -- not that anypony cares to do so, or really talks to her at all -- well, she's prepared what she feels is a rather effective simile. She feels like a seapony out of water, because it's not so much that she's been removed from her natural environment as being trapped in one which is eventually going to kill her. And seaponies don't even exist.

The mare is trapped in the palace. It's something which makes her somewhat unsure as to whether she truly exists. And it's still better than stepping outside, because that's when existence might get a chance to stop.

(The mare's occupation means investigating a lot of conspiracy theories, if only to see if she can get a decent column's worth of implied accusations out of them. But she's never been able to do anything with the Seapony Truther Society. What do they believe? That there are four elements, and a pony race to represent each. The pegasi clearly stand in for air. 'Earth' is a rather easy guess. Fire? Most of them claim that's the crystals, because their buildings create internal hotspots and you can't leave any paperwork sitting in the middle of one. A minority say there's legends of something called 'kirin': nopony can produce a picture, but the artists' concepts are nicely deranged. And water? Seaponies. Which are extinct. Because the Princesses wiped them all out. Why? And where's any evidence that they ever existed? Um... and the 'um...' is where the mare got off the train of illogic before it crashed. Blaming the alicorns for the loss of a full pony species might be good for moons of headlines, but she at least needs something which faintly resembles a waterlogged artifact for that first carefully-blurred photo. Also, four elements? Does the Society even know what mercury is? And she's not bringing it up because she's personally offended, but... how did they manage to completely leave the unicorns out?)

She can't leave her assigned bedroom without having Guards follow her everywhere. At least one of them will be a mare, and that means the restrooms have developed a distinct lack of ditch points. She wasn't even able to make a full break for where Tirek's corpse is most likely to be kept --

-- Tirek is dead. She does believe that, although she's really hoping to get a few more details. Ponies... try not to talk around her. Anywhere near her. She's tried to take her meals in one of the kitchens and the Guards allow that, but... nopony approaches. She gets a table to herself, and that table acquires a radius of empty tables.

She's in the middle of the palace. (Well, not the exact middle. Her assigned bedroom is in the Solar wing: one of those given over to the international guests who lack hotel and/or embassy. It has a decent-if-angled view of the front, and she's been trying not to look outside because one of the protesters might look up. She suspects the reasons for it being both Solar and the smallest one available are the same: namely, the white alicorn holds the senior grudge.) It should be easier to get information than this...

But she still hears things, usually at a significant distance. Tirek is dead. (Nopony has thanked the mare for the part she so obviously played in that. Nopony. The ongoing lack of notice has moved well beyond mere irritation.) And the centaur killed him.

Why?

Hard to say, especially when she's not hearing any details on the actual fight. Maybe there's so few centaurs in existence because any two who meet will automatically try to kill each other --

-- the centaur is sick, and the sword is gone.

She's almost sure the alicorns don't know she managed to overhear that.

The drains were probably Tirek. At least, the palace blamed him. But they're not giving out any details just yet.

It was probably...

She's had exactly one chance at truly writing anything down. The mare has left the office to chase a story before, but she has to tell her employers that she's doing so: the other option is to be marked absent, unpaid and, after a few days, unemployed. So she asked if she could send something to the Tattler, just to let them know she was still working. The alicorns agreed, the unicorn spent a few hours constructing her message --

-- and then she met her new editor.

The unicorn said a few things. Some of them concerned freedom of speech. Of expression. There were a number of accusations regarding censorship and abuse of power.

The dark alicorn still confiscated the paper, looked it over with red ink at the ready, and crossed out every part of the mare's cypher in less than five minutes.

There... wasn't much left after that.

So much for the subtle art of steganography. (In retrospect, the unicorn should have used a considerably more modern technique.) She's been wondering how long it'll take before she's fired. This may have already happened: she is somewhat... fungible, and somepony else can be found to operate the boiler. But...

...she can't leave.

...well, strictly speaking, she can. The mare can trot out at any time, although she can just about guarantee that the Guards would search her first. But she's been waiting for somepony to target her. Because she talked. She provided more details than the article had initially contained, she had to --

-- it was common sense. There are multiple side effects associated with seeing the world end, and she's pretty sure that one of them is having newspaper sales drop. But there are ponies who aren't going to see it that way, because there's only a single way in which they can see things at all and it's usually through a red mist of self-imposed rage. The mare understands how fanatics think, because she has to be aware of her audience. And with that potentially turned against her...

She's a target. She knows it, and the alicorns obviously agree: otherwise, why would they let her stay? This is the one place where she can be guarded (or Guarded: some of them are visibly irritated about that) at all times. Put her back into the world, and she will be vulnerable.

(The unicorn is vaguely aware that in many ways, she's just about in the same position as the centaur. The main difference is that any attack against the larger presence is going to come with slightly fewer screams of "TRAITOR!")

She's safe here. But she doesn't know how long she can stay. She has no idea of what it might take for convincing anypony who hates her to back away: telling them that the world sort of needs to exist and she may be the only reason anypony can attack her outside the shadowlands doesn't feel like it's going to work. And nopony here really talks to her, she takes her meals at the center of a vacuum and there's never enough drinks served with any of them. Especially breakfast. There's all those bottles in the basement and they've mostly stayed there.

The mare doesn't think the same way without the bottles.
She doesn't like some of the thoughts she's been having.
(There's been headaches. Some tremors. Light bouts of nausea, followed by surges of anxiety. There is no way she's going to tell the Doctors Quack about any of it.)
The bottles are the only way to stop thinking and if she doesn't get some soon...

...but she's still waiting for the consequences of her actions.
So she listens to the chanting outside.
She waits for it to start including her name.
For reprisal.
And when she hears the gates crash down, something within her darkly fails to be disappointed.

Technically, the black-furred pegasus is still off-duty. (She keeps testing her wings, and the grade continues to be 'No.') But she's decided to see it as taking on a new assignment: one which, for a Lunar, is all too familiar.

She's been trying to rest in the barracks. (The pegasus is on top of a stack which consists of one mattress, two blankets, and several pillows. She's trying to find a position for sore wings which works.) It's something which means she gets very little of the sounds coming in from the outside, and that should make it easier to fall asleep -- but the last few days have seen her schedule detonated by high explosive. She's been greeting Sun and Moon in turn during partial skip-shifts, sent back to the waking world by stress and the occasional touch of potion. Plus she's been staying up too long, trying to be alert and in the room with Cerea at just about all times...

'A little groggy' is the least of it. But she can't rest. The current assignment is too important.

Cerea has to get better. (The mare is deliberately refusing to imagine the other options.) And once that happens, she needs to stay in Equestria. (In the forge. The pegasus mare has mourned the loss of the sword, but... it's more important to have Cerea alive than to have her in the Guard.) And in the parlance of the Lunars, that means the mare has to figure out how to prevent that charge from ditching her.

(Her wings start to shift. The aches come in slightly before the breeze, and she forces both magic and limbs back down.)

What would be so great about any of the other nations? How are things supposed to improve for the centaur, just from the act of crossing a border? Equestria is where things have already started to get better. Where she's been making connections. Slowly, only a few, but they're connections all the same and --

-- yes, the party turned into a fiasco, but that wasn't the girl's fault! And once the debriefing is complete, the Princesses can tell the world that Cerea saved them! Things have to surge towards the positive after that! Ponies will think differently about a hero! They...

...they have to.

(She's aware that her tail is starting to lash. At least that kicked-up breeze is fully natural.)
(She keeps looking at the empty nest of blankets on the floor.)

The project is almost ready. She can tell Cerea about the arsonist having been brought in: that's scheduled to happen shortly after she reaches the medical offices again. But the mare has to keep the project secret for a little while longer.

Cerea can't leave. She'd have to start all over again. And who would look after her? The Princesses would be on the other side of the border. The pegasus wouldn't be able to guard --

-- how does somepony yell effectively, in that way which makes you yell at yourself? She might have to ask Princess Luna. Of course, her Princess would want to know why, but she's pretty sure that royalty wouldn't have any issues with the cause...

...the pegasus gets up. Paces around the perimeter of the barracks. It doesn't help.

Cerea wants to go home. Dreams of it. The pegasus knows that. And... she wants to see it happen. To witness her roommate trot onto the road which leads to family. There are ways in which the best thing she could ever wish for her friend is a single perfect goodbye.

But until that day comes, the girl has to stay in Equestria.
This is where her friends are --
-- the palace alarm goes off.

It's a high-pitched ringing, broken up by a tolling of bells, and the pattern repeats no more than three times: after that, the noise just gets in the way. Every Guard knows that sound by heart, and never wants to hear it.

There's a moment when her entire body tenses. A quick breath finds her pushing sore wings back into the rest position, and that happens on the move because a Guard who can't fly is going to react to that alarm by breaking into a gallop. She doesn't know what's going on or where the problem is, but that alarm has gone off, somepony is going to know why and that means --

-- the pegasus is injured. Temporarily off-duty, medically unfit to serve.
It doesn't matter.
She's still a Guard. She's already prioritized. Her actions and, if necessary, her life.
That's the way it has to be.

The dark alicorn is under Sun.

She went out to the gardens: the Eastern Saddlezania section, as she was in the mood to look at a not-so-natural hot spring. (Two Guards are politely lurking out of direct sight, doing a moderately poor job of pretending they're not there.) And she's been awake a little too long: something which would normally render her somewhat irritable, while an excess of Sun exposure can make that worse -- but standing on the left bank is allowing the steam to do wonders for her sinuses.

The Sun exposure doesn't matter. 'Excess' means more than an hour or two: she gets that much in the course of her normal waking cycle. In this case, she's hardly going to be within the warm steam and chill light long enough to have that time matter. And even if she was... there's going to be an interrogation soon. Given the increasing noise level being produced by the idiots outside -- well, mostly idiots: she understands the ones who are present because they don't feel that the Tirek question has been given a full answer, and longs for the chance to dispel their terrors -- it may have to be conducted via shouting. And when she thinks about who they're going to be questioning, along with the exact reason why...

There's a pattern which the sisters have been known to use for extracting information: the sunny smile and the lashing tail. Sun-induced irritability doesn't hurt her tail. With this questioning, the dark alicorn suspects that when it comes to her sibling, most of the elder's efforts will be used to keep the star-free tail still.

They might be able to acquire some desired answers. But both are anticipating that their own efforts will fail, especially since neither can actually touch the arsonist. (The dark mare has taken some pains to remind herself of that minor detail.) And, given that expectation, have arranged their upcoming failure as the first stage --

-- how does she make this right?

Not just the arsonist. Not only the foal. (She knows Tia has been looking for anything which might be done for the foal, and is largely aware of that because when the younger sibling tried to reach that part of the Archives, she found it already occupied.) The girl. Because the girl is sick, and...

...both siblings are struggling with that. (It's another reason for the younger to loathe all which abeyance stole from her: at least Tia has less books to review for the first time.) But for the dark mare...

...why does this upset her so? She uses fear, here and there. There can be a little thrill to a successful intimidation: to her, it's little more than one more weapon in the arsenal, and she's the one who normally has to use it because the sunny smile has an image to maintain. But she never wants to invoke terror unintentionally, and...

...more than four years since the Return, and ponies still...

She had talked about it with Tia, when they were both failing to come up with solutions. At one point, they had both indulged in a mutually-shadowed discussion of the last resort. To simply take the long road. Something which was near-literal graveyard humor, because 'the long road' meant outliving every generation which could ever know that fear. Every generation for just about every species, just to make sure no elders started circulating matters again.

Tales would fade. The Return itself would be shoved into the sidebars of history books. There would be a world which had never known anything of Nightmare and in the dark mare's estimation, the best case meant all she had to do in order to reach it was advance forward at a rate of one second, per second, every second, across a minimum of...

...three hundred years.

She hadn't laughed at the proposal, because... Tia had crossed a thousand. Alone upon the sea of ages, drifting towards an impossible shore as the only one who remembered anything at all. However, as quality graveyard humor went, it had still been supremely unfunny.

But in the current age, she had been offered the presence of a single sapient. One who had never been afraid of her. Not because of the Nightmare. It had also been someone who had been battling against a story. Someone else who was waging the same war. Who might have won, when the dark mare could not. And now...

She hates feeling helpless. Weak, inadequate, and small.

...she had been small once. A long time ago. Something which memory put less than a single instant away. And in dream, without that effort...

At least the elder could hope for an infection to burn out. The best which the dark mare can manage under normal circumstances is slowing blood flow. It's possible to go further, but... doing so is a last resort, and not every species responds in the same way to that level of cold. With a centaur...

The dark alicorn wants to do something.
She wants to lash out, because she can't.
(There had been several reasons for visiting the hot spring, and one of them was because she had to make sure the steam kept rising. It let her know that she was maintaining some level of control.)
And the idiots are far too loud.
...they were still getting louder.
There's a moment when she wishes for somepony she can take it all out on --

-- and the world provides.

Some of the pieces are about to leave their starting positions.
Watch.
Wait to see if any fall.

Disjointed

Two Guards are posted outside the only occupied cell, and neither truly wants to be there.

Guards generally don't have many reasons to spend time in the palace's lowest level -- at least, not long-term. Trips to the armory are infrequent, you don't want to be near the forge for any longer than it takes to sneak a note onto Barding's message board, and with the barracks... they went unused, and now they're rather decidedly occupied.

During more normal times, the majority of ponies using these hallways will be doing so as a shortcut. The visible portions of the palace exist as a pair of angled lines which branch from a central point, and the basement does not. There are passages hidden beneath the Courtyards, and anypony who needs to get from Lunar to Solar without going outside or using the Syzygy all the time can just go down first --

-- assuming they can learn how to navigate across the lowest level.

The basement doesn't conform to the visible shape of the palace. It lies under both wings and the space between them. The cells aren't anywhere near the device repair shop, which isn't all that close to the barracks, and the trot from there to wine storage might encourage an increase in thirst. There's a lot of acreage, and new hires have found ways of becoming lost within most of it.

There isn't that much hoof traffic. Some staff rookies give up on ever figuring out how to get around down there and these days, more than a few veterans take the long way around. It's for the same reason you generally don't cross a moat through swimming: you just never know when the resident monster is going to come by.

The Guards don't exactly have a reason to expect company. They can't hear anypony approaching through the corridors, and when it comes to what they can pick up on from the outside world -- if the two Solars are getting even that faintest hint of vibration, then the protesters must have reached a new level of volume. And they were told, barring emergency, that they were to maintain their posts until such time as both stages of the interrogation were complete.

The prisoner is trapped inside the cell.
Her words keep escaping.

The prisoner... talks. A lot. The best parts of it are inaudible, and those still take place in the sort of half-mutters where a listener can almost guess at what's being said: any true blank tends to be filled in with the most toxic material available.

Sometimes she sings, with most of the notes seeming to stay just under her breath. None of the lyrics are audible, but the tone and meter can both be made out. They're childish, singsong beats, repeating over and over and --

She has somehow mastered the trick of complaining about her food while eating it. Some of those protests will be about having to use her mouth for more than chewing and swallowing. Both Guards are convinced she's forgotten how to use it for Shutting Up.

All details about her suffering are conveyed directly to those outside the cell -- well, to one of them. Necessity requires a unicorn to be present, just in case something happens to the restraint. (Just about impossible, but -- Guards plan for the worst.) That's the mare whom the prisoner will usually address. When it comes to the tally of terms used for any attempt at contact, Misguided is currently holding a rather distant second place, and the Solars aren't sure anything is going to catch a hard-galloping Traitor-- but over the last hour, Brainwashed has been coming up on the outside.

She tells them she's innocent. Repeatedly. There's an entire presentation available as to why Nightwatch is the true guilty party. This is something which emerges when pressed, and the prisoner is fully capable of pressing herself. The Solars have heard a hundred reasons for why the pegasus is to blame, although the prisoner is certainly willing to allow for the possibility of centaur corruption. She knows the signs of that. According to her, the Guards are displaying most of them just from standing outside the cell and if they're both very unlucky, she'll probably say what they are.

And when there's no speech, there's singing. Muted lyrics, and the scraping of metal going into wood.

The Guards keep having to look into the cell. Checking on what she's doing, seeing how close she is to the door. And the moments of wood-scraping become the best ones, because that's when her head is lowered. When they can't see her eyes.

Neither questioned their orders. Both are utterly loyal to the thrones. Each pony would give up their lives in an instant for the sake of the world, and they're still mutually planning on checking the law books to see if there's any clauses which would label their current assignment as Cruel And Unusual Employment. Because they have to stay down here until both stages of the interrogation are over, and they want that process to officially begin so they can start getting this trotting knackered out of their lives.

...there's another term: one both Solars have been quietly examining in the cool of the basement. (As with the rest of the palace, the climate in the lowest levels is regulated. The actual temperature is fine. It's just that something about being near the prisoner is making them feel cold.) Hackamore. It's not a word anypony uses much, and nopony ever wants to hear it said about them.

The original definition has it as a sort of facial adornment, which the Saddle Arabians use as part of artistic displays. It's a lot like a bridle. It's just... missing a bit...

...and that's when the alarm goes off.

They recognize the exact pattern. (There are two dozen signals, the palace staff is required to learn what they mean, and nopony gets into the Guard without having every last one memorized. The centaur had to sit in an isolated room with a dedicated phonograph for several hours.) Breach. Something just got into the palace --

-- they're both Solars. Instinct sees tails stiffen and fur twist against the natural grain. Duty provides a single overwhelming urge: reach their Princess --

-- they can't.

They have their orders. There will be other Guards in Princess Celestia's vicinity, and they'll take care of her. If reinforcements are required, somepony will set off that alarm. Until then, they have to stay where they are, especially since this particular signal wasn't followed by another.

...maybe somepony just got into the wrong section of the palace. The Spinner mare might have tried for a restricted door. If so, the All Clear will be sounding at any second.

...any second...

They have to stay.
They listen.
They worry. Fret. Do their best not to start pacing. Hope for word from above.
And within the cell, the prisoner begins to merrily hum.

"Breach," the Sergeant half-snarled, and Cerea watched the roots of his fur go rigid. "How did they --"

He stopped. Brown eyes darted left and right beneath the shadow of the hat's brim, even as patterned ears twisted backwards towards the sound of fast-approaching hooves.

The old stallion jumped. Twisted in the air because that was faster than doing it on the ground, and his knees bent a little too far upon landing --

-- the protesters.
It must have been --
-- we heard them, and then --

The girl was already ill. But that had just been a physical thing. The newest surge expressed itself as sickening thought, riding a wave of bile and blame.

-- me. They're coming in because of me --

-- she was trying to move. To get all four legs off the bed. But doing so meant she had to check on everything around her, because nausea had been producing disorientation and she could potentially reel in any direction. It let her truly see the Sergeant, and the exact pose his body had assumed. For a pony, he could almost be regarded as half-crouched, and he was facing the open door. Getting ready to spring forward and charge at the source of those hoofsteps.

Her nostrils flared --

"-- it's Doctor Bear!"

All four of the Sergeant's legs straightened slightly. Just enough to take him out of the charge position, while ready to bring him back into it.

The brown-furred unicorn raced through the doorway, pulled up about three meters away.

"I'm here!" It didn't emerge as a gasp after the short gallop: Chocolate Bear was unusually fit for a unicorn, far more solid and muscular than his thin, almost waifish partner. (It felt odd to use the term for a stallion, but you had to see the diagnostician. Cerea was still trying to figure out how Vanilla's neck was capable of supporting the weight of his mane.) "I heard! Do you know what's going on?"

A single spark drifted down in front of the girl's eyes, crossed the gap and touched his horn. The surgeon barely noticed.

"No word yet," the Sergeant tensely stated. "Best guess is that some of the idiots outside just became the idiots inside. Don't know how..."

His tail lashed, exactly twice, and that was all he would allow himself. Cerea, still getting up, watched the old stallion think.

"Generals know," he muttered. "They'll start working on their own plan, and they've got Guards around them. Don't need to reach the Generals right now. Trust the recruits, trust all of them. Most important thing is..."

And he glanced back at Cerea, whose forehooves had just reached the floor.

"We have to secure this area," he decided. A fast-intensifying gaze focused on the surgeon. "Didn't have these offices before I started traveling. Generals would have to be protected if they were injured. Surgery turns into the most critical part of the palace. You've got something --"

But the unicorn was already moving.

"Shield device," he told them as his horn ignited, and a bright green corona lanced towards one of the anatomy posters. "Built into the wall. It's the strongest version known. It'll put the dome over the entrance door, and I can block off more rooms on command."

"Can you turn it off again? It doesn't need one of the Princesses to shut it down for an all-clear?"

The poster was pulled off the wall, exposing an embedded crest of gold and silver. "Yes," Chocolate Bear said. "They understood that they might both be unconscious for a while. I've got full control."

"And is there another way out? One Cerea can fit through, since the Generals might have to use it?"

The surgeon nodded.

"Good," the Sergeant declared with open satisfaction. "Close us off for now. Buy some time. Where's your partner?"

"Archives. Medical building. Looking for anything we could use." The exhale went on a little too long. "So at least he's not in this. Activating."

The green corona flowed across the face of the device --

-- it wasn't a new scent. The unicorn almost managed to keep his expression calm, was able to prevent his body from doing more than having every muscle go tight in a single surge -- but he couldn't do anything about his scent.

"Something's wrong," Chocolate quickly announced, and the corona's brightness intensified. "I can't..."

"What is it?" the Sergeant checked. "Talk."

This is me...
They were coming for her.
They had to be.
They would come for her and when they found anypony in their way, they would go through.
All she did was make things worse.
Just existing --
-- she could have died in the fight against Tirek, she had died and if she'd stayed that way, then none of this --

"It's not working."

It wasn't a new scent. It was the one Cerea knew by heart, as the first she'd encountered. The stink of pony fear.

The unicorn's head was starting to toss, and the next sign of equine panic somehow seemed all the worse when it came from a pony with a shaved-away mane. There was no hair flying, nothing to obscure any part of the reaction, and it let her see the sweat beginning to soak into his scalp. "It gets checked twice every moon, and the last one was right after Cerea was brought back! I'm not a mechanic: I don't know what's wrong, and I can't repair it! And it can't be the charge, because it taps directly into the palace grid! There was no other way to make the shields last long enough --"

"-- breathe."

It was an order, because that was what Sergeants did. But the word didn't emerge as a shout, yell, or scream. It was just an unusually solid utterance, and the weight of it pressed Chocolate's body into momentary stillness.

"I believe in coincidences," the earth pony said. "They turn up all the time in fights. But not this one. We're both going to the front door. We'll block it. Tip things over, make sure it won't open without us hearing. Buy some time."

"Traps," the surgeon quickly said. "Is there anything we can activate in the hallway? Something which might --"

"-- did they brief you on any traps, Doc?" It wasn't a snarl. A snarl would have been so much more gentle. "When you were hired?"

"Nopony told me about anything, but a Guard might know --"

"There's a few," the Sergeant stated. "Only a few. But this is a place where everypony on the staff can go." He was already moving for the door. "You don't just treat the Generals: anypony in the palace gets sick, they see you. And you get kids, right? When somepony goes bracken in the middle of a tour, they get sent here?"

The "Yes --" barely had time to emerge, and wound up having to establish the utter confusion all by itself.

"-- kids, Doc." The wiry legs were accelerating. "Because there's public parts of the palace, and kids wander off. They get everywhere, they touch everything, and they'll find a way to set off something which was a hundred percent secure because they didn't know it was supposed to be impossible. Discord was from kids. Anything in the public sections has to be harmless and even then, the kids get creative. There's other stuff we can use, but the palace has to be a lot emptier first. You're with me, Doc. MOVE."

No school tours today.
Please.
Please don't let me be responsible for hurt children.
Injured ponies.
More hurt foals.
I don't know where Nightwatch is...

The surgeon scrambled to follow.

The centaur tried to move again, because only the forelegs were planted. She could move if she concentrated. While she was concentrating, for just as long as she was concentrating...

She heard something heavy being shoved across the floor. Some of what had been on top of the desk dropped, and shattering glass allowed her to scent exposed photo prints.

The Sergeant raised his voice again: projecting past noise and distance. "Cerea, do you know where the other exit is?"

"...yes," was the best she could do. It was as he'd said: the surgery was one of the most critical areas of the palace. It had to have more than one way out, and a (former) Guard needed to know exactly where that newest of secret passages was.

"Good," emerged as something stark. "Grab a weapon."

"Sergeant --" was simply desperate. Her back legs reached the floor: the left one stumbled slightly.

So many ponies could get hurt.
Killed.
Because of me.

"We may not come back," the old stallion told her. "You hear us drop, you run. You're in a doctor's office. Something in here can be fatal. FIND IT."

She was no longer under his command. But he was still her Sergeant, and she moved.

It didn't stop the thoughts.

If they're coming for me, if they take me, then they might leave everypony else alone --
-- my life for all lives --

She wondered if any of them were wearing yellow vests.

I have to find Tia.

Luna was willing to entertain the possibility of a false alarm.

A staffer somehow got into the wrong room. Wordia Spinner decided to make us issue her an invitation to the world. Faulty spells, somepony setting off the wrong signal by mistake...

Legitimate possibilities all, and she wasn't willing to trust a single one of them. When it came to security, a little light theorizing meant nothing when compared to the weight of verification. And given what she'd been hearing from the protesters --

-- she had to start moving.
I have to find Tia.

Her two Guards had failed to smoothly slip out of their half-concealment, and were coming towards her at their personal top speeds.

"Princess!" Moonstone gasped. "We're moving you to Security Point Paddock until we find out --"

"-- no," the dark mare stated. "You will not."

They were both staring at her. She recognized that the disbelief in their expressions came from both concern and a sort of love. Luna appreciated it, and also knew that understanding the source made their reaction no less annoying.

"We have to get you to safety!" Imbrium insisted. "If we don't protect you --"

"-- and we currently have no knowledge of what I am to be protected from," Luna rather reasonably told the mare, insofar as that could be done while her wings were flaring out to their full span. "Our first, best suspect is the protesters --" and if I need to be saved from that rabble, you might as well give my regalia to the Royal Frog and see how it gets along with Moon "-- and they represent something less than a severe threat to me. We need to find out exactly what has taken place, and then we must protect those who are truly vulnerable. The staff --"

"-- but we have to --"

Her wings flapped, and then she was aloft. Imbrium, caught staring up, needed an extra second to get airborne. Luna decided to both allow for species and save some time, then enclosed Moonstone in a corona bubble and hoisted the earth pony along.

"You need to protect me," the younger stated. "I understand that. So you are both coming with me. Your job is to prevent my death? Apply it to yourselves as well."

She started to gain altitude. An aerial survey might be possible, especially if she cloaked both herself and her charges in illusion. Go to where the most likely suspects had been, see what was going on, and do so while knowing that her sibling would be attempting the same.

Her horn ignited. Patches of winter sky coated three forms, and the dark mare was briefly grateful for the Weather Bureau's scheduling decision. Keeping up an appearance of moving background clouds across a trio of the camouflaged in realtime would have brought on a headache within minutes. There was only one cloud visible, it was ahead of them, and --

-- what is that shape?
Where would her sibling have gone first?
Find Tia.

Hard-won experience had taught Celestia that there was no true first thing to do during a potential crisis. Not in the sense of having a single reliable action which was guaranteed to work every time, especially when she didn't know exactly what the crisis was.

No true knowledge -- but she felt as if she was in possession of a fairly workable guess. It was something which had been amplified by the noises which were starting to reach her, shouts and screams of triumph reverberating within the building's acoustics and that was why they'd chosen marble in the first place, because that material would make it so much easier to hear any invaders in the halls --

-- there had been a Guard outside the library, but Glimmerglow hadn't known anything. It wasn't the mare's fault: there hadn't been enough time for the word to spread that far. They'd wound up moving together, the next two Guards found didn't have any real information, but the sounds were moving through the palace ahead of the ponies and it was ponies, so many hooves echoing on marble, along with a rather distinctive note of wild laughter --

-- more screaming now, all echoing up from the entrance level. Startled ponies, doors slamming shut, glass had just broken somewhere and the next terrified scream was that much louder --

-- and now she had three Guards trailing her.

She cut it down to two. Because there was something in the old mare which wanted to go galloping directly into the middle of it all, and an alicorn body offered the option of doing so with her head lowered -- but she needed more information. Acting without knowing what she was acting on was its own path to disaster and

find Luna
she was going out to the gardens, she should be safe for now
find Luna

she could hear hooves pounding and wings beating too fast, there were more than two alicorns at risk...

"Sunspot!"

The speckled Guard moved that much closer. She gave him orders, and he galloped away.

All right. I think I know what this is. I can't afford to be wrong.

(She didn't want to be right.)

"We're teleporting," she told the remaining Guards. "Move into contact with me. Now. And get ready for recoil. I don't know if the arrival space is clear." Aiming for the final approach portion of that hallway improved her odds, but there were ponies moving through the palace at their best speed. Some of them would be doing so in a rush of panic, and if she teleported to where a living being was already present...

In one sense, the penalty for doing so wasn't too severe. Merging matter on the molecular level was severe. A teleporter coming in to where a relatively dense solid already existed would simply find their body shunted aside in a random non-down direction, until they found enough space to appear. That such movement steadily accelerated as it searched for a safe point... that was something of an issue. As were any walls which might be in the vicinity of that safe point. Or ceilings.

She was hoping not to fall on anypony.

There's probably at least one witness trying to reach me. Tell me everything they know. But we might never find each other. This is faster.

"The Potrero should be empty --" Glimmerglow frantically tried.

Celestia spread her wings. Feathers brushed against both Guards' backs --

-- she was lucky: the space was clear. They arrived on their hooves, and Celestia's wings refolded as she galloped across the last section of marble --

-- both Guards tried to protest, because they knew what she was trying now and it was going to be exposure, risk --

-- and they were right.

Her horn ignited again, and the leading edge of the expanding shield bubble pushed open the door to Apex Tower.

The elder had nearly thirteen centuries of memories to draw upon and as she stared down from the balcony, one of the most frustrating rose to the surface.

"What did you say to him, just before they locked us in? I didn't hear --"
"That it would have been nice to be wrong about something I wished I was wrong about."

Followed by, with just a touch of internal shadow:
This is what I wanted.
There's no protesters left outside the palace.
I probably should have added something about not having them all inside.

There were still some ponies visible, all at street level. Fallen forms. Some were trying to get up. Others weren't. And the wind brought the first of the bloodscent through the air-permeable shield.

"Get some of our ponies down there," she told her Guards. "Start clearing out the wounded. Get them to the hospital."

Glimmerglow glanced at Steadfast, who nodded. The pegasus mare moved to the edge of the shield, Celestia made a temporary gap for her, and the Guard swooped out.

I could --
-- there were so many things she could do. Most of them had the chance to produce more wounded.

She had the option to serve as a teleport escort for every one of the injured. Back and forth, over and over. And doing so meant she was leaving the palace. Abandoning that many more of her own.

There was the possibility of having a second wave on the way. She might be able to stop that. All she had to do was put up another shield. One which would essentially need to cover the entire palace. And she had raw power, could put more thaums behind a single effort than just about anyone alive -- but she wasn't Shining Armor. Celestia didn't have a talent for shields. It would take too much of her inner resources to protect the building for even a few minutes, the results would require the sort of constant maintenance which left her doing very little else...

I could teleport to the Empire and find the Captain, then come back.

International transports were potentially exhausting, the plan came with the rather nasty built-in assumption that she found him immediately, and she wouldn't be here. Additionally, any shield use meant trapping the current attackers within the palace. And there was another problem...

There was so much she could do. But there was only one of her. And any choice she made would neglect every other.

It had been an early lesson in leadership. Casualties could be potentially minimized, but seldom eliminated. To look in one direction was to turn her tail towards another. And no matter what she did, the bodies would fall.

What happened to the gate? What did they use to bring it down? She wouldn't be able to truly feel any spells utilized in the attack without getting a lot closer --

-- her horn twinged: magic use nearby, approaching fast, moving through the air, and Celestia's corona flared at the moment her head jerked up --

"-- I will not ask for calm, sister," a patch of lightly-rippling sky quickly said. "Simply focus. And, if at all possible, a plan." The illusion dropped, and Luna maintained the hover: the pegasus Guard remained close by, and the enclosed earth pony blinked a lot while trying not to look down. "What had you done prior to my arrival?"

The old mare had nothing she could pray to. It made the Thank you somewhat directionless, while remaining fully sincere.

"Started an evacuation of the wounded," Celestia quickly said. "Sunspot's moving down, checking on the staff. He's also shedding his armor along the way." Remove the metal and there was no protection -- except from that which arose when ponies saw a stallion who clearly wasn't a Guard. "He'll recruit anypony he finds, and they'll evaluate. I gave him discretion on setting off the next alarm. Yourself?"

"Locating you," Luna rapidly replied. "And now we may have to do the same for another."

She thinks she knows something. "Who --"
-- no. If it was the protesters...
...they've never tried to --

"That cloud." A silver-clad forehoof jabbed up. "It was poorly molded: the shape is already beginning to disperse, and I can only make a guess at the original intent. But if you examine what remains --"

The elder looked.
Because she had to verify.
She had to know.

There were no scalpels, and Cerea didn't understand that. There was a surgical room among the medical grouping. She felt cutting tools would have been a reasonable expectation. Then again, she didn't even understand how a pony scalpel would work. A slip-on metal shoe with an exceptionally thin, sharp front edge...

...she couldn't find any of those either.

Her watch was available, and it didn't take long to locate the flexible metal cord. She attached it.

Needles?

They weren't particularly effective as cutting instruments. Stabbing wasn't much of an improvement: they were too thin. Her best option in a fight would be going for an eye, that would probably mean throwing the things, and they weren't exactly balanced for it. Plus any unicorn field grab would disable her efforts, and the most minor pegasus wind gust...

Of course, she could always try for what that one show had displayed as a near-guaranteed fatality. Load the chamber with air. Inject it. Let the embolism do the rest.

Cerea loved stories. She also understood that television ignored science in favor of drama, and had looked up the actual results later. The overall mortality rate was roughly twenty percent, and the fastest possible death required ten minutes. The far end of the temporal range ran out at two days.

Her ears kept twisting. She could hear furniture being moved against the outermost door. And, somewhere off in the distance...

The disc could only work with what she heard, and nothing was close enough to resolve into words yet. But she felt as if she was picking up on the undertones. The rage had been expected. She hadn't been prepared for the glee.

Three needles?
Anything I carry as a weapon can be telekinetically grabbed and turned against me --
What couldn't be used against her?
Maybe --
She didn't quite try to actively start the Second Breath. It was more of a warm-up exercise. Trying to move the trachea's lower branch flap --

It took about twenty seconds before she managed to get all four legs straightened again. Another ten were required to make the room stop spinning.

Okay. Can't do that --

-- there were familiar hoofsteps coming back.

"Find anything?" the Sergeant asked her, quickly trotting into view.

She held up a small bag, then displayed the watch.

He nodded, glanced back at the middle-aged unicorn. "Doc, is she good to move?"

It had been months since she'd witnessed a pair of males carefully evaluating her body...

The blush rose almost immediately: an instinctive reaction, and one she didn't know how to stop. But they kept examining her. Something which was a little easier to do because when it came to the equine portion of her form, she'd never had this much on display.

She had the sweater, and there was a bra beneath that. But when it came to her lower torso, it was the hospital gown. Something which had been designed to drape her right flank, fully exposing the bruises on the left. As far as Cerea was concerned, she was displaying acres of plain, brown, inadequately-groomed fur. It felt vaguely obscene. And the only thing anchoring any of it was the hole at the base of her tail.

If she moved too quickly, there were going to be buttocks. At a minimum.

"For injuries," Chocolate Bear announced, "yes." He looked up at Cerea. "There's probably going to be some pain."

If I can even find it in the nausea. She nodded, and felt several loops of intestine contract.

"But there's the other condition," the surgeon added. "We don't know what that might do --"

"-- have to risk it," the earth pony decided. "Can't leave her here. You're coming with us?"

Chocolate Bear nodded.

With the smallest, thinnest smile Cerea had ever seen on a pony face, "Can you fight?"

The unicorn then matched it.

"Non-combatant," he told them. "But no one else ever seems to know that." The lush black tail twitched. "I've got a trick which works in a fight. I just have trouble wounding with it."

"A doctor," the Sergeant began, open frustration suffusing every syllable, "who doesn't want to draw blood --"

"-- I have trouble wounding," the surgeon steadily clarified, even as his eyes slowly shut. "It's too easy to kill. What's the plan?"

Emery Board blinked.

"Too easy to --" and dropped it. "Tell me once we're out of these rooms." And looked up at Cerea. "We're getting you into the secret passages. If we're lucky, they won't be able to reach you there." His ears pressed firmly against the hat. "But I'm not counting on being lucky. Core of it is that we've got to find a safe place, and this isn't it. Doc says you can move. Is he right?"

She was planning to lean against walls a lot.

"Yes."

They're coming for me.
They wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't here.

The noises were getting closer, and the disc began to resolve words.

Just about one word.

"Centaur!"
"...oh, centaur...?"
"CENTAUR!"

"All right. Let's --" and stopped. "No. We need a few more seconds."

"We don't have time --" Chocolate Bear began --

"-- we've got enough for this," the old stallion decided. "Where's your thermal paper?"

...his what?

The surgeon abruptly grinned, and his horn ignited. One of the lowest drawers on the rolling cabinet lit with green, followed by opening itself.

"Coming to you," he offered, and an oddly glossy sheet floated towards the earth pony. Something almost reflective, as if the material had been coated in thin, flexible glass. "Did you want hot ink or cold?"

"Give me both: I'll write fast."

Two bottles crossed the gap, followed by a pair of quills. The paper itself landed on a visitor's bench --

-- the outside hooves had reached the door.

There was a shove. This was followed by a kick. More kicks. Multiple flares of light illuminated the hallway, leaking around the edges of the barricade point --

Cerea stood in place. Her tail trembled. She gripped the watch's cord, watched for that first directed burst of field. A freshly-woven cloud being pushed into the room, crackling with electricity. Hooves aimed at bare flesh --

"-- done!" The Sergeant moved the paper by mouth, picking a display spot while the unicorn slammed the bottles back into the drawer. "Where's our exit?"

It was at the back of the surgery, next to the supply cabinet.

The hidden door opened. Concealed lighting devices flickered into a too-low level of glow, and the trio slipped into shadow.

The elder wasn't particularly artistic. There were times when she felt as if appreciating art required effort, especially with some of the more esoteric forms of it. But she had been among the first to see the symbol. Something burned into a door had singed its way into her memory. And when she stared up at the cloud, saw just where the molding had been unweaving itself...

Too many thoughts arrived at once.

How?
They wouldn't have made this move unless they knew.
...they've never tried anything like this. They have to realize...
Fanatics were capable of realizing any number of things, as long as it was something they'd told themselves.
Leak?
They probably wouldn't act on a rumor.
Overheard somepony at a bar, we tried to crack down on that after the last article...

But the evidence of intent felt indisputable.

(The evidence was partially falsified.)

They know.

"I'm going," Celestia told the group. "Now. I'll come back here when I'm done. We have to get her out of the palace --"

A somewhat frantic "Sister," came from just overhead. "I shall go to her --"

"-- I'm taking her to Ponyville," Celestia cut the younger off. "I have more arrival points than you do --"

"-- she was my --"

"The sword is gone, Luna! She's helpless! We don't have time to argue! I'm --"

Helpless.
There was someone in the palace who could do even less to help himself.

Purple eyes went wide.

"Get some ponies up to Summit! Protect Discord!"

The echo lasted exactly long enough for the memory of a very young mare to stare across time at the reality of a very old one.

...I just said that.
Things change...

Celestia's horn flared, and the Solar alicorn vanished.

Hotheaded

When it comes to potential emergency situations, the palace has a number of standing policies. A few of the more recent additions to the list are closer to suggestions. For example, if any quantity of Bearers are going to be dropping by, it's usually a good idea to prepare a few papers for Maintenance in advance. Should the visit be intended to launch a mission (or worse, a diplomatic meet-and-greet), that's joined by disaster relief forms and in either case, you're probably going to need about three bale-weights' worth.

It's been a long time since the last true war, and a few decades have to be added onto that number before reaching what used to be the most recent siege: something where all of the attackers were kept outside until just about the very end, and probably should have known better than to believe that the palace was experiencing a true moment of weakness. But you never stop briefing staff on the various alarms. Telling them what to do in the event that any of the sequences go off, and there's nothing wrong with running a seasonal drill to make sure everypony's making the right moves. Because Harmony is an ideal and as with most concepts of perfection, the best you can do is keep trying to reach it.

So there are policies in place for the initial stages of a breach. The majority of non-Guard staff are meant to shelter in place. There's exceptions, but nearly everyone has the same orders: lock themselves in, try to arrange a few barriers, prepare for self-defense. They are not meant to go into the corridors. Actively risking their lives isn't the best idea. The breach has to be evaluated for threat level: where it started, how far it's spread, and you really need to identify the place it's desperately trying to reach. Breaches normally have targets, and the sisters don't want those untrained for combat placing themselves between the invaders and what they want most. Inanimate targets can sometimes be repaired or replaced. Those ponies who aren't natural combatants, in the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to interpose themselves during a moment of bad luck -- ponies have to be buried.

That's what supposed to take place. Get to what's seen as a safe point. Make sure it stays that way. Don't try to evacuate unless you're just about right on top of a fast exit and even then, it's not necessarily a good idea. You have to be careful about opening anything which leads to the outside because there's a breach in progress, and the invaders may be looking for one extra means of ingress.

The sisters can't promise that ponies won't get hurt if they stay out of the way. They've just found it tends to improve the odds.

But this time, the invaders are ponies. Citizens who, over long years of talking to themselves, have convinced themselves that nopony else qualifies. They've chorused themselves into hating the palace, with songs which come from inside and out. And some of them were told to serve as distractions.

Of course, that's not how they feel about what they're doing. They're giving the palace what it deserves.

Some of them are going for artwork and in doing so, are discovering that a number of protective shield devices are still working: anything which operates on a purely internal charge remains functional. But not everything is guarded. If it's in an alcove, it's probably untouchable -- for now. The tapestries, however...

Eventually, they may reach the Hall Of Legends. Rock crystal woven into exacting patterns, held together by a near-invisible framework. The framework might be easier to target.

Others are trying to find what they feel are the places where the real records would be kept. (This wasn't a stated part of the plan, but there's an Opportunity.) Anything which shows how the palace has kept their species down, because of course the alicorns are going to write about that and place all evidence in an accessible location. There's three species caught up in this particular delusion, so there's a lot of looking. Some of the participants are already using the mobile scrums as an excuse to get some shoves in.

But a number are trying to get into those sealed offices. The places where members of the Solar staff might try to shelter. Because why would anypony close a door unless there was something interesting on the other side? And if there's a pony behind it -- well, that's actually a 'pony', because they work for the alicorns. And if they don't cooperate, they deserve whatever happens next.

There are three organizations involved, and their members all have a few things in common. For starters, they've all been told that the palace is responsible for everything wrong in their lives. The reason for their never having been publicly been acknowledged as superior. Some of them have been thinking about that for the majority of their lives.

Fanaticism, simmered over a constant burn of hatred over the course of several years, has finally reached its boiling point.

The majority of the staff is supposed to shelter in place, in the hopes that it'll keep them from turning into targets. Hostages. Worse.

They have standing orders to defend themselves, and no more.

Those are their orders.
It's just not what's happening.

The usual sign of an incoming teleport arrival was the flash of light: something which generations of thaumatologists had tried to eliminate, with none even partially succeeding. A stealth teleport, something which didn't announce itself -- it would have been endlessly useful, and there seemed to be no way of forcing it to exist. The light was an inherent part of any entrance or exit with the between. If you teleported, you got a flash. Period. And that was the best case.

Celestia, who had just enough time during recoil's abrupt rightwards push to realize that somepony had moved the rolling cabinet, wound up including the extra option.

There was a flash. This was followed by an alicorn body being jolted into the nearest wall: something which had (occupied) shelves attached at various points -- and the kinetic energy transfer produced by that amount of mass coming to a very sudden stop added the crash.

It had been a short recoil: she managed to stay on her hooves, took the brunt of the impact on her outward-leaned shoulder and prevented the wing from being injured. But that was followed by having to immediately refocus as fast-twisting ears registered delicate instruments which had been set to jittering or worse, moving towards the edge of the shelving --

-- she flung herself back towards the center of the room, just in time to avoid having anything come down on her back. She also wound up hip-checking the rolling cabinet into the opposing wall, but it frankly deserved that.

A flash. A crash. If you were standing in the right place, neither of them could be missed. And as she wildly surveyed a room which wasn't hosting a centaur, those still-twisting ears picked up the reaction from the hallway. Something which briefly cut into the other bursts of light: the ones which had been pushing against the outer door, along with making the echoes of hard kicks pause just long enough to register possibility.

"There's something still in the offices!" a pony voice called out. "Something big! That's got be the centaur!"

Somepony snickered. "They must have left it behind. Not like it's any good to them any more..." And the little touch of mirth swelled, expanded from the internal pressure of ego until it became a full mockery of laughter. "Did you lose your sword, centaur? Is that the only reason anypony kept you around, to give the alicorn another weapon against us? No sword, no centaur, no value, no use, no breath..."

(It was the sound made by a natural bully: something the girl would have recognized in an instant. A fundamental internal weakness trying to mask itself, because inflicting enough pain had to mean nopony would ever get a good chance to look.)

The old mare had already been angry. The recoil had served as an extra irritant. Not finding the girl had added something else to the mix: the bed was empty, and no one had emerged from any of the other medical rooms to see what the noise had been about. And now there were voices, intruders in her halls, threatening her staff in her home --

-- it had been a brief pause in their efforts to break in. Long enough to gather strength and redouble efforts, because now they knew there was still a target to reach. The corona light leaking around the edges of the door took on an aspect of white: something which indicated double coronas from the unicorns in the group. The kicks kept coming, and the mare heard stacked furniture starting to shift --

-- it all started to move backwards. Then the upper portions shifted before the lower, another crash got added to the mix, and earth pony bodies shoved themselves against the resulting gap, again and again until there was just enough room for a pony form to get through, kick everything out of the way --

The old mare felt oddly as if there was something shifting within her body, getting closer to the surface. Not so much a rise as a flare.

...my staff, my people, my home...

"You never should have decided to come here!" the bully shouted as multiple sets of hooves pounded down the entrance corridor, because things like evidence and personal testimony were just lies to fool the weak. Light flowed ahead of the group, light with too much white in it because there was a centaur ahead and there was no point in dropping a double corona now. "You shouldn't EXIST! EVERYTHING WHICH WE'RE GOING TO DO IS YOUR FAULT --"

Six ponies (with a pair from each Equestrian race, because none wanted to give any other a numerical advantage) tried to barrel into what had been meant as a recovery room, and didn't quite make it. The lead bully rushed in, made it across two additional body lengths, and that was when he saw what was waiting for them.

He slammed to a four-legged halt without dumping momentum into a slide, vibrated somewhat atop his hooves. But there had been a silent group agreement to let him take the initial risk (even when that was clearly no risk at all), and it was something which had the other five intruders fanning out behind him. Going no further than he had, as they all stared.

More legs locked. Only two of their owners managed to convince themselves it was from strategy.

They had all seen her. Never at this lack of distance, but... she was a constant background presence in pony lives. They'd seen her, and they'd all decided that they knew her.

They knew she was weak.

She had to be weak. That weakness was part of why the Guards existed in the first place. What happened when trouble came calling? A Princess was bundled off in the opposite direction. She'd responded to Tirek by leaving: how did that represent any form of strength?

(They had all been trying to flee. They'd all been told that their species was the most important thing about them. That clearly also meant the magic inherent to their species. And if they lost that magic...)

The alicorns didn't fight and if they didn't, it was because they couldn't.

-- well, the Solar one couldn't. (There were different theories associated with the Lunar, and one of the more disturbing claimed that the Guards were trying to protect the world from her.) No one living had ever seen it. They saw her greeting ponies, being friendly with those who weren't even ponies at all, and she was kind and gracious and smiled a lot and she was the good mare. Nopony among them could reconcile the idea of having the good mare fight, because everything she did was so obviously intended to avoid it. The Guards existed to keep her away from conflict. As far as two of the intruders were concerned, Discord had originally tripped at the edge of a volcano and staggered out just before the lava dried.

She was weak. A freak with access to three categories of magic, but when did she ever use it? Without the Guards, she was an easy target. Anypony could beat her: that was what all of their organizations said. It was just that nopony had ever gotten that close.

They were all that close.

And they stopped. If only for a moment, they all stopped. For a mixed group of supremacists, it was the most united they'd ever been.

Part of that hesitation came from what had just been recognized as an issue with the prior, more distant sightings. She... looked a lot smaller when she was far away. She was right in front of them, she was more than a third again as tall as the largest of them, and an ethereal mane wasn't doing anything to distract from what was suddenly being registered as a very solid body. A giant form which had tension radiating from every powerful muscle.

A little more of that pause arose from a simple fact: she was part of the world's background. She had, in fact, been part of it for a very long time. The mare had birthed a nation, and even if that nation wasn't all it could have been, should have been if those in charge weren't so weak -- they all counted themselves as citizens of the realm. The only real citizens -- but without the mare, there wouldn't be any kind of nation at all.

They hated her. (They told themselves that. Then they had told others, and some had listened.) Loathing applied. But a constant background presence, combined with a very real size factor... it felt like being an adolescent who was rebelling against a parent. You had to fight back, because being an adolescent meant knowing everything and you had to take control before the adults could shut you down. But there was currently a certain question as to whether it was possible to line up the kick.

And there was another factor. You could hate the alicorns. As far as they were concerned, doing so was proof of sanity. Loathing alicorns was among the surest signs of a real pony (if you could get blood and form to match) -- but you still sort of needed Sun. Just about every remotely plausible dream of deposing the sisters had to include some means of making sure they would continue to perform their duties: the other option was a rather half-baked victory -- or, if Sun had stopped in just the wrong place, fully roasted.

Yes, there were supposed to be other avenues for making it all work: the idiocy of the four-unicorn theory had been around for a while. But when it came to the loss of magic, Tirek had provided just about all of Canterlot with some rather intimate knowledge regarding exactly what that felt like. To find two quartets of the horned who would be willing (or could be forced) to make that sacrifice, every day... it was something else which made them hesitate.

They'd all seen her, as part of the constant background of their lives. Pictures, educational films (and she was frankly a horrible actress: to watch her reciting lines was to detect exactly where the cue cards had been hidden). Newspaper articles. The center of parades. And she smiled and she was polite and gracious and she was the good mare.

The good mare was standing in the center of fallen debris: broken instruments and shattered syringe glass. Her lips had pulled back from her teeth. Both ears were now tilted back towards the neck and flat against the skull. The hind right leg was partially raised away from the floor, while the half-tangible flow of the tail lashed. And the room itself was... hot. Far too hot, and the air rippled with haze as it rose from her fur.

It all made them hesitate. Just long enough to recognize all of it. Recognize, but... not understand. Because the lead bully had been at the center of his echo chamber for far too long, listening to words of agreement. That was his idea of Harmony: everypony acknowledging perfection. And so he spoke to her. Knowing that this was the good mare, and the good mare always had to back down.

"Come on, Princess," he half-sneered. (Using the title wasn't offering the mare any respect. In many ways, he simply couldn't conceive of her having a name.) "You don't want to do this --"

She spoke.

She spoke, and yet it was as if somepony else had spoken. Because it was a voice they didn't recognize, one where the harmonics had been distorted, deepened, and there was an accent, something none of them had ever heard before, ancient tones twisting the words from within.

She spoke as familiar purple eyes were suffused with a foreign hue, and her voice was just barely her own.

"I looked down and there were bodies in front of the gates."

And perhaps if she had not dropped him with a thought, the rest would have had a chance to run.

She looked at him. It was all she did. And sweat broke out across the whole of his body, threatening to saturate fur within a few fast-accelerating heartbeats, just before it all converted to froth. His breathing became panting, turned shallow, was hardly anything at all as unseeing eyes receded partially into the skull, every limb seized at once as joints collapsed and then the stallion fell.

The alicorn gave his heatstroke-convulsing form no more notice than was required to vault over it as she charged.

The other unicorn, who was not-thinking at the speed of panic, hadn't dropped her corona. A flicker of field fetched one of the denser pieces of debris, brought on a body-dropping backlash with a slam as the alicorn lowered her head, used the white horn to hook a pegasus between humerus and scapula, levering him with his own joints before a single jerk of her neck sent him into a wall. It was something which the remaining pegasus and earth pony mare mostly missed, because the follow-up sound of the huge right forehoof breaking six of the earth pony stallion's ribs gained the majority of their attention, as did the resulting scream. The left forehoof, moving faster than anything that large should have ever been able to move, made sure they didn't have to hear it for long.

The huge head lifted out of impact range. The horn ignited, and the last pegasus was pinned against vertically-hung parchment. Feathers spread out across an anatomical chart, just about matching the available outline. The skull was simply slammed into the backing stone.

The final intruder tried to turn. To run.

Wings spread. Not for flight, because the room wasn't large enough. Just to offer a little more control on the jump.

The oldest mare in the world landed on the earth pony's back, and the square-cube law took care of the rest.

She carefully stepped down from the last of the fallen forms. Allowed Sun's heat to dissipate from the first, then sent a portion of her field to twist nearby taps and fetch containers. The worst of it could be mitigated if she got cool water against his neck and groin. Other projections gathered bandages and elastic wraps, then began to entangle limbs in practiced ways. Earth pony strength wasn't going to mean anything without the proper leverage, and when moving one leg just pulled on another...

"...you can't," whispered the last to drop.

The elder of the only two ponies to survive the Discordian Era paused, and Celestia Invictus looked down at the mare.

Can't what? felt like a rather natural question. Or she could have made a familiar statement: 'You'd be amazed by what I'm capable of.' And she might have chosen to reflect on the double-edged nature of earth pony endurance, because an immediate blackout would have provided a degree of relief. The mare's eyes were dimming, but... not fast enough.

She could have done any or all of it. But instead, she allowed her ears to loft again, and listened.

"...you're not allowed to do this... you have no right..."

The old mare didn't feel a reply was needed. Instead, she finished carefully evaluating all six with well-practiced battlefield expertise, judged that all would live while none would actually enjoy it, internally chided herself for not having anypony to question, and bound the now-unconscious mare's mouth.

There were other things which could be done in the aftermath of a battle, and Celestia had to decide which ones were worth the use of quickly-passing seconds. However, slowing her breathing was just about an absolute requirement, as was making sure the temperature in the room was dropping back to normal. She had to calm herself, while doing everything possible to avoid so much as a single moment of personal satisfaction. Wanting to do it again was right out.

The pony form had some anatomical issues, and most of them passed over to the alicorn variant. For starters, if there was an urgent need to apply hoof to buttock, then Celestia had no direct personal means of kicking herself.

I should know better than to have made that kind of wish.
There's going to be a second arrest. We may reach triple digits. I just don't know if any of them are going to be crucial. The arrest which matters...

She surveyed the office. Looking for signs of what had happened before she'd arrived, because the girl hadn't been there -- but the attackers had known where to look. And the only disturbance she'd found on arrival had been her own. She hadn't missed the first fight...

They know the sword is gone. That she's vulnerable. He couldn't have done a better job of confirming that. (Her field tipped a mug, got a trickle of water into the unicorn stallion's mouth and made him swallow.) They were after her --

-- but is that the whole of it?

Celestia was already starting to question the motivation. The girl was both the source and target of fear. Hated, loathed. The old mare didn't doubt there were those in the city who would have struck against Cerea in a vulnerable moment -- outside the palace. To put together this kind of operation, even in the name of striking down the centaur -- to risk this much...

Whose risk is it?

Could the leaders of the organizations legally separate themselves from the attack? Were they really willing to kick away years of control and profit over one centaur?

It felt unlikely.

...but not impossible.
They could be that far gone.
Their memberships might have been in revolt. Do this or they leave. Or turn against their leaders. Get the right mindset in place and herd mentality can mean creating monsters in bulk.
They might not have had a choice.

It was a bitter thought, and the internal image which showed the maestros of hate seeing it used against them failed to bring any satisfaction at all.

If we get an arrest which matters...

"When somepony shows you who they are, consider believing them the first time. But when the enemy directly tells you what they're trying to do, consider having a little doubt."

All right, Zephyra. I hear you. Cerea's a target, but there's a chance she's not the only one. I have to start looking at things from that angle. What else might they be trying to accomplish with this?
...Wordia?
It still doesn't feel like that's enough to justify all of this. Not even in conjunction.
There's Guards with her. She made sure of that, just by trying to get away from them all the time. Wordia can be moved, and I know where she's starting from. But I still have to find Cerea.

There was shouting, somewhere in the distance. Something fell over. Glass broke. And she had to let all of it happen, because there was no guarantee that she would be able to come back here. Even if she was able to return later, more intruders might find the medical offices. Seeking the same target, and potentially obscuring any remaining hints as to the girl's location. She had to find the clues now.

For that matter, we're down at least one Bear. (Another surge of concern tried to take over her psyche: she pushed it back.) One might leave to research, but not both. Not when Cerea's this sick. So if she tried to leave, he would have gone with her. That means two missing, possibly three. And that's without figuring for visitors.

(The girl had been getting visitors. It was a sign of how far she'd come...)

She kept surveying the room. Fallen stethoscope. Broken glass, with the smallest pieces vibrating from the echoes of distant fights. The girl's sick bed or rather, the one Celestia was supposed to use if the need ever arose. It had been the only thing large enough --

-- the edge of something glossy, thin, and almost reflective was sticking out from under the pillow.

The elder sibling didn't smile. She merely projected her field, fetching the sheet of thermal paper as she trotted towards the nearest sink, stepping over two fallen attackers on the way. A metal sink, and a single flare of heat turned all of the residual moisture within into steam.

Good. You thought I might come in.
Let's see what you wanted to tell me.

She looked at the paper, and the prior flash and crash picked up one more rhyme.

Thermal paper could be found in most of the palace. Typically, there would only be a few sheets in any given room, hidden away until they were needed -- and it was a few sheets because they were almost impossible to make. The thin material had to pass through a fifteen-step process before manufacture was complete, and the only one which didn't risk destroying it was taking the dead branch off the original tree. Thermal paper creation was majestically unforgiving, and had left behind a centuries-long trail of aching creators who swore they knew what they'd done wrong.

The intended results were oddly hard to tear. In fact, there were only two things more difficult: writing on them -- the paper would only absorb two precisely-blended mixes of ink -- and, when it came to the usual methods for disposing of paper, destroying the results. You couldn't get rid of thermal paper by throwing it into an active fireplace. The flames wouldn't be hot enough.

Celestia didn't have that problem.

She placed the paper in the sink. Looked at it, and nearly all of the sheet collapsed into ash. Everything except the gold-glowing trail placed by a very special ink.

The mouthwriting was tight and small. It was the product of a pony who was never sure of when the next resupply was coming in.

Cerea and surgeon with me. Moving her to safety. Trying passages first. May go for Paddock, but expecting difficulties. Backup is leaving palace for outside terrain.

Emery.

The writing dimmed, and the final ashes scattered.

It told her so much about what had happened, and it didn't tell her enough. Emery had been visiting the girl, because a Sergeant was always going to check on his own. He'd decided to evacuate her himself, and Chocolate Bear had naturally come along. In the best case, Celestia had probably teleported in less than five minutes after they'd all trotted out.

And he probably used a few seconds for writing it with both inks. If Luna had found the sheet, then the paper would have fractured in the cold, leaving behind a brief trail of luminescent blue.

But she didn't know the exact route he planned to take, especially when there were so many ways to reach the saferoom designated as Paddock. Without the doctors, she couldn't know how severe Cerea's current condition was, and whether there had been a risk in simply moving the girl at all. And she didn't have the time required to plunge into the secret passages and search the entire network. She had to get back out into the palace.

It wasn't ideal. 'Ideal' would have been getting Cerea into Ponyville, secured at tree or farm or possibly even cottage now that Fluttershy was trying to serve as a medical consultant, away from all of it and safe. But Emery was far from the worst option. When it came to looking after someone, Emery was like having six Guards in a very compact package. And if there was any need for backup... she'd seen Chocolate Bear fight before --

-- no. I've seen him run a bluff, so he didn't have to fight.
...it might have been a bluff.
It probably wasn't --

-- she had to trust the Sergeant. Generations of Guards had trusted in Emery's teachings, and the ones who'd both remembered them and been a little lucky were mostly still --

-- wrap up here. See what else has to be done. Get back to Luna, then put together the next move.

The old mare cared about the girl. But Cerea was a single person: one who had already acquired two guardians. And there was shouting and screaming and echoes of hooves pounding through her halls, posing a threat to the whole of her staff.

She had to get back out there.

The old mare wasn't able to teleport back immediately. There was one thing which had be taken care of first. An aspect for which she had no other choice, and naturally that was Tirek.

The makeshift morgue was nearby. The location was something which just about the whole of the palace seemed to be aware of, because what felt like a rough majority had been trying to get a look at the corpse. Celestia fully understood the emotions which drove ponies to make sure Tirek was dead -- but the parade of peeks had been threatening to interfere with the autopsy, and she really didn't need anypony coming to a few 'maybe it'll work this time' conclusions about the blackened, corroded, semi-identifiable platinum. She'd wound up sealing the room off herself, and it was worth a few seconds to make sure it stayed that way.

She made sure the corpse was undisturbed. Examined the resealed door, then reinforced the spells. Three intruders who'd been late for the centaur-kicking party came across her, and then there were three more unconscious bodies in the medical offices. Celestia carefully failed to place any of them upon the bed.

Mixed groups.
They're cooperating. For now.
Maybe there's a way to ruin that.
It's almost enough to make me wish windigos weren't some overrated playwright's idea of allegory.
...mostly some overrated playwright's idea.
Mixed groups...

It was the sort of thought which led to others.

No school tours were in the palace. Nopony started this early. But there were some set to arrive later. The police should keep them out of the area.

...the Canterlot police had at least a few officers watching the protesters at all times. Just in case. Not enough to stop anything like a full-scale assault, because nopony was expecting that, and it would have taken just about everypony they had. It wouldn't leave anything for the rest of the capital.

There may be injured officers down there. Probably close to the gates, where I couldn't see them. Glimmerglow will --

-- or they could have gotten out of the way, then tried to follow the assault. Get into the palace, help from within. But if anypony was conscious, then at least one would have gone for a precinct house. Alerted them about what's going on. We could be getting reinforcements in a few minutes. It was another reason not to raise a shield. And if nopony got away to send the word, I can send a Guard.

More strays in search of a centaur. Eight seconds wasted. She briefly entertained the thought of putting a sign on the door, then darkly recognized that none of the intruders would ever believe her.

Considerably less than the population of Canterlot, at least. It was still possible that some had come from outside the city...

They're in our home. Threatening our staff.
Her entire body went tight.
Not for long.

The old mare took a breath. Ignited her horn, and aimed for Apex Tower.

Put away the Princesses.
Bring out the Generals.

Terrorizing

War is an industry and as such, it creates a number of products in bulk. Injuries are popular. Corpses can be viewed as an assembly line goal, and they're self-recycling. But as much as anything else, war excels at the creation of irony. Some of the best weapons are assembled by those meant as the targets. Others are put together by the attackers. In the majority of cases, those injuries come from within.

There are three leaders for the invading factions. (None of them are actually participating in the first wave of the assault. They're not going to be anywhere near the second, either. One of them is just entering the Grand Gymkhana, and a newly-red tail calmly sways as a number of police officers rush past her towards the exit doors: the mare responds by placidly checking the departure board for her train.) All of them rely on getting their followers to think, believe and, if necessary, act as one. Something which would seem to fall under a particular aspect of pony psychology.

They tell themselves that they're masters of it. The ones best suited to take advantage. But when it comes to herd mentality, they don't really understand it.

Part of that lack can be placed on an inability to use anything other than subsets, along with a certain difficulty in grasping the true scope of the plural. How can you understand how ponies think and react when you're only willing to treat a tiny percentage of the population as being real ponies at all? They have a degree of jaw grip on how their followers will react in any given situation, and even that's imperfect. Because there was a first wave, some ponies didn't bother showing up for it and with the ones who were in attendance, not everypony rushed the gates at the same time. A number held back, watching from the shadows as they waited to see if everything was going to work out first. Because if it failed, then they could get away clean and should it succeed -- wait a few minutes, make sure no members were coming back out rather faster than they went in, and then move. The intervening period is useful for internally composing stories about how they were on the front line all along.

(Some of those finally started to move, and all of them stayed conscious exactly long enough to regret certain recent life choices. The younger alicorn is still waiting for her sister's return, and Wave 1.5 is mostly giving Luna, who's working from above, something extra to do.)

The leaders of the three supremacist factions have said that only those ponies who agree with them are strong and powerful and real. They mostly say it to their followers, and find the real benefit is in having their intended audience being exactly that gullible. But to some degree, they've also talked themselves into believing more than a little of it. And they see the 'ponies' who exist in what the majority consider to be the world as being something weak. Timid control freaks. The typical response to conflict is to not be there when it happens, and you can induce fainting spells in a too-high percentage of the population simply by reminding them that the world outside the settled zones is fully uncontrolled. Some won't eat any grass which hasn't been grown by the Cornucopia Effect. Others live in dread of wild weather and if you want to induce fainting spells, try directing something shocking down a public street. Like a stampede. Of bunnies.

There are ways and degrees for which all of this is true. The faction leaders just insist on seeing it as the whole.

They don't understand herd mentality.
They've never thought about why it exists.

Consider the Discordian Era. A world of chaos, one which the two survivors still internally name as Eris within every pain-saturated memory. Every sapient species trying to survive the madness and no matter what they did, too many fell. Some plummeted into insanity. Others were pushed. A number simply surrendered.

Herd mentality fights back.

Gather as one. Minds assembled in bulk can sometimes stave off chaos, at least when it comes to the incidental side effects: there's almost no hope of withstanding the draconequus when he decides to pay direct attention. But for the smaller storms, the randomized breaking of rules... get enough sapients in a small space and they can collectively hope to decide that down is below their hooves, ground is solid, air is breathable, and the world has only the standard chance of killing them.

Assemble. Collect at the barricade points. Choose a leader, and when that leader decides to make a move -- then you move as one. Unite as one. Think as one. And that's how you might survive.

There are weaknesses. It doesn't exactly encourage innovation. There's a tendency to just let things keep going as they are, because creativity and the willingness to try something different may lie a little too close to madness. But on the whole, herd mentality is a form of survival instinct. Like all such tactics, it works until it doesn't -- but it wouldn't have lasted for so long if it wasn't viable.

And it also encourages a certain degree of... territoriality.

The buffalo get it worst. Buffalo tend to treat borders as sacred, which means any sapient crossing one is about to get a rather painful lesson about the price of blasphemy. But ponies aren't all that far behind. And the most timid mare is going to treat bunny stampedes down public streets as a reason to test the mattress quality of cobblestone --

-- but if you run a volley of slingtails through that mare's house...

So much depends on what they choose to see as theirs. You can back a pony into a corner. Make it the corner of their living room and you're potentially about to have a few rather short-term problems. The majority will resolve themselves when unconsciousness closes in -- temporarily.

The invaders have entered the palace. The core of a nation and, in some ways, the place which hosts its heart. A location which the staff, on the subconscious level, treats as theirs.

The orders are to shelter in place. To only act in self-defense.

But the invaders are in their home.

There are several groups going for the rooms which hold paperwork, all bound by the collective delusion which says that the palace has not only committed endless crimes, but taken the trouble to write down every master plan and filed them away: for preference, this would be in a cabinet clearly labeled as Master Plans. And of course, they're somewhat more reasonably expecting to encounter file clerks along the way. Weaklings.

So now we're going to take a bunch of staff ponies and put them in a room with a lot of paper.

Pegasi work in the records rooms. They have an easier time getting to the highest shelves. There are also unicorns present, and even the weakest can manage paper. To wit, when you put both of those factions together, they can manage to get it going at a speed of several gallops per hour in what amounts to a papercut tornado. Enjoy being in the center of that. Yes, the intruders can fight back, because it's species magic -- but they're not exactly coordinating their efforts, and they weren't even expecting resistance in the first place.

Oh, and there's earth ponies present. Because once the filing cabinets are empty, they can be kicked at the intruders. Or maybe there's no real need to empty them all the way...

Some of the invaders are trying to destroy whatever they can reach. They're treating it as a game: What's Secured? And if a unicorn field slides off, then a pegasus can try to soak the offending object down, an earth pony could kick it, and just about anypony can chew an offending tapestry to death. In all cases, they have a pair of excuses: the primary is expressed I Want To and, if they actually find themselves in need of extra justification, I Paid For This. The latter is regarded as a function of their taxes while completely disregarding how few bits they've actually kicked over and, as an incidental extra, ignoring the fact that they haven't been alive for the last seven centuries.

They find the yak sculpture. It's too large for anypony to tackle in one go. There are easier targets --

-- multiple unicorn fields, all being utilized by those who had to restore the piece after it emerged from the barracks, pull on designated support pins.

The carefully-shaped rounded boulders, each two full body lengths across, shake. Shiver. Roll.

And then there's the wooden bit.

Some of the invaders never really stop seeing the wooden bit.

It's probably best to skim over what's happening in the kitchens. The palace has an armory (and nopony's made a serious try for it just yet). The backup is a well-stocked utensil drawer. Cooks get all the weapons. Anything coming out of a kitchen has a good chance to stab, fillet, flame-broil or, worst of all, juice. You really don't want to know what's being done with the juicer. The girl would have a hard time watching that -- assuming she didn't wind up in a state of perma-wince from spotting how the espresso machine is being used as an assault weapon.

It's been redesigned a few times now. It passed through what the centaur would have probably failed to describe as an Escher phase, mostly because she's barely familiar with the artist. But it's past that now. The shape is a little more... recognizable. Because the chefs didn't even realize they were all working with the same inspiration, and... well, you need a chamber to collect the liquid on the upper level, so why not have two? And mounting them forward just makes --

-- the girl is going to have a really hard time with the espresso machine. Let's leave it at that.

Horrible things happen to those who get too close to the kitchens. Some of the invaders who fall need to be locked away, just in case they get up again. And in one of those kitchens...

There's going to be a lot of trials after this all wraps up. The ponies who faced an angry blood-red unicorn with surprising field strength and wound up being sealed in with hook-hung slabs of ribs, muscle, and half-rendered fat, will try to claim that they've already served their time.

Some will even demand that the palace compensate them for their trauma.

None of them appreciate honey barbecue.

Forces were dispatched to Summit Tower. This is becoming its own problem.

The first line of defense is at the base of the ramp. Anypony who gets close is attacked. But not all of them are dropped on the spot. Some manage to get away. When they encounter one of their own, the news is passed along. Something which very directly says that the Diarchy has placed forces at the tower's entrance, and that has to mean there's something up there which the alicorns don't want anypony reaching. Any deliberate protection has to be breached.

Which sends more invaders towards Summit...

It's the battle equivalent of rubbernecking. Go see why everypony else is being trampled. A significant percentage of the invader forces are heading in that direction. The Guards are doing everything they can to hold the line, but there's more showing up every minute, some are trying for the air and encountering the next line...

And the broken, helpless storm knows nothing.

Three pegasi are on the move.

The dark orange one is the slowest. He managed to keep his wings from being hit, but... the standard Guard armor doesn't fully cover the legs. It's the same issue: mobility. And more than a few intruders went for the Lunar throne room. One of them was tooth-holding a camera. Squall thinks they were going to put some of their own on the elevated cushions and take pictures. Souvenirs. That Time I Committed Treason Against My Nation: The Photo Album.

It was a hard fight, and some of them managed to hit his legs. But a Guard who's on probation remains a Guard, and he got to be the one who's limping away.

...which still needed some extra help.

Some of the attacks hit his legs. He had to make sure the hardest strikes went into armor. There are multiple ponies down in the Lunar throne room, and two of them have split hooves.

He's not entirely sure he managed to secure them. There aren't a lot of things in the throne room which can be used for that, he had to find fabric somewhere, and mouth-tying knots was never his strength. He's fully expecting that he'll have to pay for those torn-up cushions --

-- he has to find out what's going on. He has to locate his Princess. He's on probation and being shuttled between shifts because it feels like nopony wants to keep him on theirs for very long, but he's still a Guard --

-- where's the centaur?

The thought briefly freezes him in place. Multiple bruises use the opportunity to express their opinion, and then get all the louder when he starts moving again.

The palace is in chaos. Verify his Princess first. But after that... go for the centaur.

The black-furred one managed to reach the main level, and a Lunar Guard always has a first priority. She needs information. The fact that she's already had to drop one intruder along the way is just an incidental benefit --

(She has to be careful. Magic comes from movement, and her wings are still injured. There's only so much she can do at all. But this is duty.)

-- and finally another Guard. Does he know --

-- yes. The exchange is quick. The Princesses are together, and there are Guards with them. Good enough for now. If she hears certain sequences of alarms, she'll try to reach Princess Luna again. But she currently has the information she most needed, because a Guard always has to prioritize.

Always.
She can hate herself for that tomorrow.
If she lives that long --

-- she knows where her Princess is, and that the alicorn is with those who can get her to safety at need. (Assuming the Princess cooperates. Nightwatch isn't about to indulge in too many delusions there.) That means she gets to change course.

Find Cerea.

Glimmerglow, still outside the palace, considers herself to have fulfilled her orders. She was told to check on the wounded and start getting them to the hospitals. The first part was --

-- there were ponies caught in the surge, who tried to get away and found themselves pressed against the gates, and the pressure --

-- bones, broken with enough force, can send up splinters through the skin --

-- done. The first part was done. As for the second -- pressure carries limit her to one injured pony at a time, and some of the wounded shouldn't be moved that way. Additionally, there was a minor attempt at a second wave, and Princess Luna responded to that by creating more wounded.

So the most effective thing Glimmerglow could do was heading directly for the nearest hospital and telling them what was going on.

She spoke too quickly.
She had to repeat herself before anypony understood her.
And then it was one more try before they believed.

The hospital staff is... angry. Enraged. But they're on the move. Medical carts are being dispatched. Police officers are going to accompany them, because there's a chance of having a third wave on the way and if that happens --

-- her orders have been fulfilled.

The pegasus gains altitude. Looks down for a moment, notes the flow and direction of hoof traffic. Checks the air currents, along with those using them. Focuses on Summit Tower, until she can make out the airborne forces which are trying to get in.

She can hear some of the thunder. It tends to drown out some of the screams of confusion and fear which arise from street level. Not all.

Summit Tower. Discord's haven, under assault. And at the absolute peak of the roof, a flagpole and the colors of her nation. Something blackened, because thunder is preceded by lightning and one intruder had very little concept of aim.

She looks at that flag.

Then she orients on every other.

The palace has a background beat during a crisis. In this case, it comes with extra percussion. The sound produced by angry hooves slamming into whatever they can reach. Because contrary to so many wishes, war remains a state in which the other side fights back.

The staff is fighting. Some of them are winning.

Some.

Others have been hurt.

The faction leaders expected them to give way. Step or flap aside, and passed that belief on to their followers. They don't understand herd mentality.

They don't understand ponies.

And had they been present for the whole of it, they would have gained the chance to fail at learning the lesson again.

At the very end.

"Success?" a hovering Luna rather quickly inquired, and did so at the moment Celestia had safely cleared the teleport. It had taken too long for the elder to return: something which already implied trouble on the other end --

"Mixed," the white mare said. "Cerea's with Emery and Chocolate. They're trying to get her to Paddock, and they moved her out before I got there."

And there was no time to give chase. On both intellectual and strategic levels, the younger understood that, and it did nothing to dilute the surge of pain.

Give them time. Neither of us can afford to search the passages right now. Trust the Sergeant, trust in the doctor...

"One of us can check Paddock in a few minutes and try to move her from there," the younger concluded. "But you were still delayed. What took place?"

"Multiple intruders going directly for the medical offices, trying for Cerea," the elder stated. Almost a hiss, every word forced out as Guards watched, looked for possible attacks and waited for orders, "They know the sword's gone, Luna: one of them said it directly."

"So this is about her." The younger's voice, however, had taken on aspects of growl --

"-- I'm not sure."

Luna blinked.

"Your reasoning?"

"There aren't enough of them heading up there. If she's the primary target, then why not direct the majority of their forces towards her?"

"Because she has lost her weapon," Luna reasoned. "They might have concluded that only a few ponies would be required."

"Possible," the elder readily allowed. "But this is instinct, Luna. They want to take her down -- but I don't think that's the whole of it. There's something else."

"Then we need to identify it," the younger declared.

Celestia nodded. Her lips briefly twisted.

"Ready to go General?"

"Always."

Luna landed on the balcony, got ready to move back inside. Celestia glanced down towards the street.

"I see a few new ones," she noted. "You've been fighting?"

The younger snorted. "If you can still call it that when my attempts to dissuade them came from so far away. Yourself?"

"That's most of what held me up."

Luna made a quick mental estimate of the time her sibling had been absent, then deliberately tripled it.

Slowing down in your old age...

It wasn't the right time to say it. Later, when there were no Guards present. Once they'd won, and... long after they'd found out just how much that victory might have cost.

They both went back into Apex. Started to make their way down the ramp as Guards flanked, led, and watched for rear assaults.

"One of them told me I had no right to attack her," the elder casually mentioned.

Both of Luna's eyebrows went all the way up.

"Truly?"

"Yes."

"Hmmm..." the younger rather horribly mused. And, until the exact moment they found the next fight, left it at that.

The wall of the hidden passage was cool against Cerea's exposed left flank. It didn't particularly help with the nausea, and mostly served as a reminder that she kept finding herself leaning against the wall.

She could walk normally, if she focused. But it was like tensing a muscle: she couldn't keep it up forever. And every loss of control let the sickness come flowing back.

A real centaur would --

-- no other centaur had ever found their body saturated with magic and given that, when it came to what any centaur could do in dealing with it, Cerea was effectively leading the way. She just wished she was doing so at a faster pace. The trio hadn't made all that much progress towards the designated saferoom, and too much of that was because of her.

But there were other factors. Some of those came from the Sergeant: he stopped frequently, rotated his ears and listened. Other occasions found him pressing one against a wall, and the pony body was a lot better at that than the centaur one. (Cerea credited the upper skull placement, along with a different arrangement of muscles.)

If she paused for too long, the doctor closed in on her. Checked her breathing and pulse rate. Stress-generated reflex directed him to try for the latter along her jaw, and she had to repeatedly present her wrist.

There were lighting problems. The passages were usually brighter than this. The emergency devices, which ran on their own charge, were fully functional. A number of those which the Sergeant noted as taking their thaums from the palace flickered, or glowed too dimly. Some didn't work at all. Others displayed exactly the wrong hues.

She was trying not to see yellow in every reflection, or to acknowledge the screams which echoed in her ears. Because she could only get a sense of what was happening on the other side of the walls when something particularly loud happened (and there was too much of that, some of which sounded like bodies impacting marble), but... there were other shouts of rage. Words which had originated on another world.

Monstre'
this is my fault
my fault

The Sergeant stopped. Listened. Nodded to surgeon and centaur, and then they all moved again. A spark floated away from Cerea's forehead, touched Chocolate Bear's horn --

"-- we've got to watch that," the Sergeant softly said. "Might need to turn it off if we get separated."

"It's monitoring her," the surgeon said. "I need the extra information --"

"-- I know what it is," cut him off. "Been in enough hospitals. Triage tents." His voice was steady, while his scent said there had been too many of them. "It's a common spell, and that means I'm not the only pony who could recognize what it's for. How it travels. That can be tracked, Doc, and stealth is hard enough right now as is." (The girl failed to fight off the blush.) "So if we get separated, you shut that down."

A moment of hesitation, and then the physician nodded. More hoofsteps. Cerea tried not to reel.

Check the supplies. Cerea had wound up looping her bundle to her waist with gauze. She was waiting for something to fall off. At least Chocolate Bear had proper saddlebags...

"That trick of yours," the Sergeant abruptly said. "How much have you used it outside of a surgery?"

"You mean combat," the unicorn checked, and the earth pony nodded. "I had to threaten with it once. And there was a mugging, and..." He took a slow, oddly deep breath. "Let's just say they wound up being really glad I was a doctor."

He'd explained his personal spell shortly after they'd entered the passage. Cerea thought she understood the basic theory behind it: she'd dealt with shields in training. Some unicorns could learn to make their fields more solid -- but those results defaulted to a dome or sphere: anything else was too hard to hold for long.

But this was something tied to a mark and with ponies, that could make a difference. Focusing that solidity along a narrow surface...

"Take care of that mane with it?" There was no laugh within the words. The Sergeant seldom laughed. Scant moments of humor were mostly implied.

The head-shaved unicorn almost snickered anyway. "What mane? I'm a surgeon. Maybe projecting a corona through any hair near my horn only costs me the tiniest possible fraction of field dexterity, but I need that --"

"That's what I'm asking," the Sergeant clarified. "Is that how you get rid of it? Or is it one of those tricks which doesn't work on the caster?"

And this was a snicker. "It does, and I'm not suicidal. No."

A few more hoofsteps --

"-- might find somepony coming down this way if they're trying to reach their little hidey-hole --"

The trio froze, and the centaur tried not to reel.

"Horse apples," the Sergeant whispered. (The tone suggested he was choosing his words carefully, both for volume and to keep any of the stone around the passage from being blasphemied apart.) "At least we don't have to wonder if they're staff..." His ears focused forward. "At least three. Twenty body lengths, closing in. Gonna reach that next turn and come into sight soon. Don't think they've heard us yet. Three can be a lot in a narrow space, and they're coming this way. Nearest exit to the corridors is behind us, and we shouldn't go out there if we don't have to." The taut features had found a way to further tighten. "So this is gonna be a fight. Ready, Doc?"

It took a moment before the surgeon nodded. Time in which the other hoofsteps got closer.

"Cerea, try to stay out of it," was the next hiss. "Could use a distraction. Something to shake them up. Could usually just tell you to get in sight, but they know the sword's gone, and we need to keep you from fighting right now. No sword takes away a lot of the centaur fear --"

The girl had a thought.

"-- I have a distraction."

He looked back at her. It took a moment before he adjusted his neck into the right angle.

"One which isn't you fighting."

She nodded.

"Then let's hear it."

The girl took a breath. Fought back the nausea, reached into her memory, and sent every recollection of the exact tones into her throat. Felt it fill with gravel.

She was almost sure the tones were going to be right. She just didn't know what to say.

Um.
I have the power?
...um...
...I'll take your power?
Oh no...

Imagination faded out. Memory desperately took over and, courtesy of Papi's retro gaming habits, it wasn't quite the right one.

"BEWARE!" Tirek's voice roared into the passage. "I LIVE! I HUNGER! RUN, COWARDS!"

The Sergeant, who hadn't been in Equestria during the attack, didn't really react. Chocolate Bear's tail went stiff, all of the brown fur twisted out of grain, eyes widened as sweat began to form in his coat --

-- and when it came to open reactions, that was the least of it.

"He's still alive!" somepony ahead of them screamed. "We have to get out of here --"

The Sergeant moved.

He was an old pony. (Cerea still hadn't been able to ask anypony about the species lifespan, and wasn't sure which kind of answer she potentially needed to dread more.) It was possible that the advancing years had cost him something of his strength and speed. But those had also been the decades during which he'd expanded his knowledge of tactics. And you didn't get to be an old Guard without mastering a few vital skills. Like the one about not dying.

He moved, and did so far more quickly than Cerea had expected. It took two heartbeats before Chocolate managed to follow. And before the unicorn could catch up, Cerea heard the first body go into a wall.

All three had been caught in the act of desperately turning around, looking for any way out. It meant their orientation was slightly wrong for striking back, while being just about perfect for getting slammed in the ribs.

The sounds kept coming for a few seconds. The surgeon turned the corner, got out of sight and added his own set of noises. Cerea tried to follow, her right hand went back towards the scabbard --

-- no scabbard.
No sword.
Coronas and lightning and kicks which break rocks.

She tried to push herself forward anyway. The wall renewed its acquaintance.

It's so much worse when I know what they can do. And that I can't stop it...

The sounds momentarily stopped.

"All clear," the Sergeant called back. Then, with a much harsher note, "For now." He trotted back into view, came towards her as his ears adjusted the hat. "Shoved them off to the side for you. Ignore the groans. We can go through in about a minute. Doc's using some bandages to tie them up. Just step on anypony who tries to take a snap at you from the floor."

She forced a nod, counted her own heartbeats until Chocolate Bear came back. Brown eyes stared at her.

"You sounded just like him," the surgeon shakily said.

The girl wasn't quite sure of what to say.

"Very expert," the subtly vibrating unicorn decided. "Extremely intimidating. Please give me some warning if you're ever going to do that again. Sergeant, if they're in this section and talking about a saferoom --"

"-- then the passages are compromised," the old stallion snarled. "Minimum. Brings up a lot of questions, doesn't it?" He looked up at Cerea again. "Which means we can't trust or risk Paddock. Secondary plan just broke out of the gate. We're getting you outside."

The reporter was only initially convinced this was about her.

On a rather dark internal level, the mare wasn't exactly disappointed when she heard the gates fall. But she was surprised. The palace is supposed to be a safer place than this and yes, of course she's been writing about how the place is an eyesore for years, that it's falling apart (yet doesn't deserve any bits for rectifying that, because renovations and updates are clearly a waste of the national budget), but there's Guards. Devices. Wonders. It doesn't seem to be so much to ask for select portions of the ceiling to be capable of slamming into the floor. And the gates still fell, and she knew it was about her, that they were coming for her and the Guards had to get her out...

...but she's still in her assigned rooms. The doors have remained closed, and the ponies posted outside had initially told her that it was for her own protection. They could guard her best if she was in a place where intruders had to go through them in order to reach her --

-- which was when everypony involved recognized that those quarters have windows.

The mare is incapable of teleportation, has never figured out how to project her field backwards and lacks the field strength to levitate herself anyway. It doesn't prevent somepony else from possessing that fatal-to-her combination of skills, and that placed one of the Guards within those assigned rooms.

Curtains were pulled shut because as recurring horrible I Can Make It Work! ideas go, blind teleports are among the unicorn species' longest-running self-kicks. Differentiation prevents the fabric from being field-moved through a barrier of glass, and somepony who just tries to put themselves into the room is going to be dealing with a lot of freshly tipped-over furniture. (There was some damage done this way, and the reporter isn't paying for any of it.) Recoil tends to be its own distraction.

The Guard was initially placed in her room as extra security, just in case a unicorn tried it.

And then they found out it wasn't just unicorns.

The mare feels it was a natural assumption to make. She's known Mrs. Panderaghast for a long time, and that acquaintance suggested that if anypony was going to be exactly this stupid...

But the reporter initially felt she had to be the target. (Why weren't more Guards coming to her assigned rooms? Why wasn't the sole priority for the entire palace staff rendered into Get Wordia Spinner To Safety?) And there was an alliance between the three groups (tenuous, fragile on a level which would turn snowflakes into bastions of stability and that was with everything constantly threatening to melt from internal heat), and that meant to have been falsely seen as betraying one was clearly to create the inwardly-reinforcing lie that she'd betrayed them all --

-- an assault from CUNET alone felt like a fair deduction. And nopony's tried to get in through the windows, because it's well-known that glass is vulnerable and that's why it's reinforced by so many spells. So there weren't any wingbeats sounding outside, no hooves hammering in a desperate attempt to get through.

After the gates fell, everything came from the inside. And once the first group found her door, that included the blasts of wind which rattled it within the frame. The building scent of ozone.

She can't get out. The staff knows her, and that's why the door has locks on both sides. All she knows about what's happening in the palace is what she can hear. And at that, she's hearing both too little and too much.

At least two groups reached her door before this. She could listen to the shouts as much as she liked. The sounds of hooves striking against flesh, attacks attempting to work their way through armor. And now she's listening to a third fight, there's an odd little sizzle which she thinks might be somepony's trick, screams and yells and somepony is in pain, it might be one of the Guards and if they fall, it's just her and the one mare left when nopony has tried to get her out...

The mare usually doesn't pretend towards neutrality. (Usually. The false stance is good for annoying any number of ponies who strictly deserve it.) It's more typical for her to claim that she simply sees not just what is, but what should be: the fact that the latter conditions don't exist yet then become the palace's fault.

But even in a crisis, even when her thoughts have been saturated with terror for endless minutes -- she retains some capacity for mentally distancing herself from the herd.

This is too much.
It's too much for it to be solely about her.

She knows what the leaders of those three organizations are risking through this. (She's also been able to verify that it's the full trio of memberships, because listening to what's going on outside has let her hear some of the slogans.) What they're almost guaranteed to lose. Breaking into the palace, just to get rid of a single reporter? The only price she pays is her life. They're trading that for their own status, income and, if the palace catches up, their freedom.

And she isn't worth it.

Is she a target? Absolutely. But she's not this important. Waiting until she couldn't take any more, had to leave before she went mad and simply lurking near those places where she would inevitably need to return -- that was the more sensible approach for removing her from the world. To invade the palace...

Prior to this, she had heard battlecries, slogans, shouts and accusations. She caught her name exactly once. For all she knows, the second group mostly tried to get through her door because there were Guards outside it and whatever was on the other side had to be worth reaching.

Most of what she's hearing right now is Round Three.

Kicks. Teeth snapping. High-pitched squeals pierce her eardrums and go directly into the bone. And she doesn't know what's truly going on out there. Tracking this level of violence on audio alone would presumably be a job for somepony who works in the Sports section. She's still not even sure why the Tattler has one -- and yet, those skills are suddenly vital. They seem to contain the information she needs.

Who's winning.
Who's losing.
Where the goal line is.
What the coaches were actually trying to do --

-- the sounds stop, and the nearby Guard goes tense.
The sounds are gone. But the mare can smell blood.
More blood.

"Status check!" the armored presence calls out. "Report in --"

"-- still standing," The stallion's breaths are coming too quickly, and his voice is pained. Both things which have increased since the second fight.

The reporter immediately does her best to spin on a single hoof, doesn't quite make it and has to stumble for balance at the end of the turn. The Guard simply watches the smaller unicorn round on her, and doesn't move.

"You have to get me out of here," the mare nearly hisses. (Her body wants to tremble. To shiver. She has never wanted a bottle so badly in her life, and knows that nopony is going to let her have one.) "Right now. They're just going to keep coming --"

"-- you're safest in here," the Guard steadily lies.

"SAFE?" The laugh is fully unintentional. (She wouldn't have laughed if there had been a bottle.) "They're in the palace! Get another unicorn! Somepony who can escort, teleport me out --"

"-- there's only so many ponies on staff who can manage it," the Guard cuts in. "Some are Lunar. I'm presuming that the unicorns who can pull it off have other problems right now, especially since you're not the only pony who needs to be guarded." Dark blue fur tightens. "In fact, if I was going to put those priorities in order, you'd have a hard time reaching third place --"

"You have to protect me!"

Far too calmly, which is to say that the words can emerge with any calm at all. "I am."

Desperate now, she hates sounding desperate in front of the Guard and that's because there's no bottle, the bottle would solve everything and maybe it could even make the other mare listen, "This is the palace! It's supposed to be safe! The only reason I tried to stay here --"

An armored forehoof slams into the floor, and fragile syllables die under the impact.

"-- there are three ponies guarding you," the larger unicorn states. "We could be somewhere else. Watching out for ponies who not only need us, but care about what might happen to everypony here. But we're with you, by order. And when you look at it that way, we don't have a lot of choice about who -- or what -- we associate with. But you, Wordia..."

A grim smile twists the other mare's face.

"...you're the one who usually claims to know everything, right? All of the time, in every column. You know best, you know what really happened and you'll tell enough lies to make your readers believe it. A mark which supposedly grants something between precognition, clairvoyance, and editing the world. So I'm surprised you didn't know this was coming, especially since you always claim the palace is so weak. And if you did know about all of it... then why didn't you just choose not to be in a place where ponies could get hurt?"

...the... the mare...
...she needs words. But her throat has gone dry, and if she could just pour liquid sentences down her throat...

...she has an audience within the palace. Not exactly fans, but she's fully aware that a good part of the staff -- Princesses included -- read her work every day. Tracking the one who's seen as the enemy. The mare understands this completely: she's been doing the same thing with Raque Marshdew's sickeningly sweet ramblings for years. It mostly means she makes sure some of her phrases are designed to infuriate a very select portion of the readership. And because she knows that the palace follows her work, hearing any part of her compositions virtually quoted back to her shouldn't come as a surprise.

It shouldn't feel like a kick --

-- she distantly wonders if anypony is sheltering in the barracks.
The mare is a target. She's fully aware of that, along with the fact that she can't be the only one. To her, there's a very clear possibility for the primary goal. And as it turns out, there was a nation which objected to the centaur.
The rebellion from within --

-- and that's when the alarm goes off again.

It's a new pattern: six notes total. They repeat three times, then stop. The Guard is moving for the door before the initial repetition begins.

"You're getting your wish," the larger unicorn tightly declares.

"I'm..." is all the reporter can find within the dry desert of her mind.

"That was the signal," the Guard says. "Stay close."

Her horn ignites, and orange fire begins to turn the locks.

The Solar Princess trusted one of her Guards. Sent him deep into the palace, because she had faith that he would make it. Shed armor along the way: a risk, but also an act which might keep him from being treated as a priority target. Recruit whoever you can along the way, while protecting everypony possible. But as much as you can -- try to see. Find out what's happening, and then decide whether to take the next step.

Sunspot's seen enough.

There are staff ponies fighting back. Everywhere. And some of them are winning -- but they aren't natural combatants. More than a few are getting hurt.

This battle can be won. But doing so is the responsibility of those who were trained for it. The palace would have never asked the staff to do this and the longer it all goes on...

They are risking fatalities, and the cumulative odds are growing with every passing minute.

He makes the call. Finds the right place, and uses it to set off the next alarm. A sequence which every member of the staff has memorized. Something they'll have to treat as an order.

He feels it's the only thing which can be done.

The alarm sounds. Everything begins to shift again. And hidden within one of the no-longer-secret passages, lurking in wait for exactly this moment, one group finally starts to move.

Mrs. Panderaghast didn't count on this happening. She didn't care if it happened. Ultimately, she doesn't see any of what actually takes place within marble walls as being her concern. Blood, broken bones and bodies -- they're nothing more than the distraction which allows her to board the train. She's already won.

She didn't count on it.
She didn't care about it.
And she got it anyway.
The most vital aspect of the plan has begun.

The palace is evacuating.

Desperate

Every member of the palace staff is required to memorize the two dozen messages which can be delivered through the alarm system -- and prior to the Return, the count was at twenty-three. The most recent addition to the list has picked up the nickname of Bucket Brigade, and it has absolutely nothing to do with fire. The newest alert is meant to inform the staff that changelings may be in the palace and if that's a possibility, everypony has to get a bucket of water and sling the contents at their neighbor's legs. Changeling magic fools the senses, but it doesn't do anything to trick the environment. You get a very distinctive splash pattern on the floor when you toss water at a changeling's legs. It's produced by having so much liquid going through the holes.

That's a universal alert, and the entire staff is expected to participate. (Avoiding the Brigade might be seen as somewhat suspicious.) But when it comes to the evacuation alarm, and how the staff is meant to respond... there, you find a few gradients. It's all in the exact sounding of the last few notes.

Tirek's attack triggered the signal for a full evacuation: everyone on the staff, no excuses, no stragglers. And the Princesses were part of that, because they knew they had to be, and -- they hated it. Both understand the necessity of retreat, knew they had no defense against the theft...

To have their magic stolen would mean that Sun still shone down on Canterlot. Every day. And every night, until the continent began to burn.

They knew they had to leave, and they hated it. Hated abandoning their home, their citizens and nation, while some of the bravest, most selfless ponies volunteered to buy time. Remove sources of magic from the palace. Serve as distractions, and all of them made that offer while knowing that Tirek would see their continuing presence as appetizers. Because when it comes to protecting the leaders, a herd can produce heroes in quantity.

Or, with the current invaders, monsters in bulk.

There's a signal for a full evacuation, and that isn't the one Sunspot sounded. This version splits the staff. You're either a combatant, support, or somepony who has just been instructed to get out. Combatants stay behind and try to repel the invaders. Support assists in the evacuation, doing whatever they can to help the vulnerable reach safety: after that, they have the option to turn back. The rest have effectively been told to leave and in this case, that means getting off the palace grounds. Everyone in that category has to get out, because the sisters don't want to see anyone hurt and this at least cuts the odds. They're trying to protect the helpless.

(It's 'everyone'. There are non-pony members of the staff. Something which the invaders usually see as a sign of the palace's corruption, because ponies (well, one kind of pony: they disagree on which) is all anypony should ever need. Currently, a few of them are getting a look at that corruption close up. It's a reminder of just how superior their own magic is. Absolutely superior in every way. In fact, it's so superior that any second now, that magic is going to come up with a countertactic for what the non-ponies are doing, and it's going to do so on its own because the ponies who are carrying that magic can't seem to think of anything.)

This kind of evacuation is tricky, especially during what's effectively become a siege. There are designated routes, and the palace runs seasonal drills to make sure everypony remembers which way they're meant to go: primary, and a few backup options. But there's a shared aspect to all of those routes: namely, the departing staff members have to go somewhere.

Some will be heading towards the tunnels which run under the palace: the trail which evaded Tirek. Those whose primary route exits at the front of the palace are going to need some other way out: nopony's sure as to whether another wave is coming in.

(There is.)

A number are going onto the grounds -- but that can become its own problem. There are passages which have their terminus outside the walls and out of necessity, those have the strongest protections -- but nopony's entirely sure of just how much is working right now. Every door out can become an invader's way in, especially if somepony sees them leave. Of course, they're supposed to have some issues on the other end...

For the pegasi, any opened window which is large enough for a pony to pass through is an evacuation route. This is still an issue, because a window has to have its protections neutralized for a few seconds before it can open, they don't reactivate immediately (if they're working at all) -- and some of the invaders are in the air. The majority of those are still going after Summit -- but if they see a new way in...

And some Solars don't want to go anywhere.

The designated support staff, upon hearing the evacuation alarm, tries to get ponies on the move. But a number aren't cooperating. They don't want to abandon the fight. They're not going to let the invaders win. The fact that they have absolutely no combat training and have been trying to wreak havoc with what's effectively a stapler seems to escape them.

Part of what worries the support contingent is that some of those ponies had been doing rather well.

...it's harder to shift some of them than it should have been. Quite a few wind up temporarily changing roles: the support group gets them moving by asking if they would be willing to look for others, or come along for a while and protect those who are leaving. But they're able to get a number onto their designated routes, and a few get out. Some of those will turn into couriers of words.

Others simply discover how badly a few areas have been compromised.

So now there's more fighting.
There are times when the staff winds up on the gallop. Others which see invaders being chased.
And with every passing minute, more are wounded.
It may only be possible to keep it at wounds for so long.

Combatants. Support. Evacuees. Designated roles.

Much to the Guards' annoyance and thinly-veiled fear, the Princesses tend to designate themselves.

There was a door in front of the sisters and as doors went, it was doing its job. The door was large, solid, and rather decidedly closed. A number of invaders had decided that a door which was this insistent on staying shut had to have something interesting on the other side and, after failing to defeat its protections, were taking out their frustrations on the artwork which occupied so much of the area. Oh, and there was a room nearby, one which they had been able to access -- but the only thing they'd found in there was paper. Not alicorn-written records which proved how the palace had been acting against them for centuries: shelves holding endless stockpiles of blank paper. What good was that supposed to do?

A number were in that room, doing whatever they could to bring those shelves down. It was the punishment for not having been properly incriminating.

But there was a door they hadn't been able to get through, and they weren't exactly wrong about it leading to something interesting. Under normal circumstances, the hallway on the other side was a path to some of the more secure areas of the palace. Sections which, while still containing no proof of a conspiracy that didn't actually exist, would have been a lot more fun to destroy.

And in this instance, there were also two alicorns on the other side.

White and dark blue ears heard something else crash. Both sets twitched.

"So they're between us and the scroll supply," Celestia softly announced.

"Likely coincidence," Luna decided, keeping her volume low. "They would have very little reason to see them as important."

The elder nodded. Relatively few ponies were aware of the one-way communication, and the majority of those who did know about it lived in Ponyville: the usual method of discovery was through just happening to be in the area when something came in. Spike had a standing speech prepared as an explanation for the skittish, and still hoped to eventually deliver it while fully standing: most of his attempts had been delivered from a posture which was bent in on itself, as the little dragon panted from the effort of the long trackdown. (He no longer gave immediate chase. The chases didn't exactly help.)

Most ponies didn't know what Celestia could do with the scrolls. (A number of sapients among the other species had found out about it the hard way. Most of them occupied political positions, and just about every one now responded to any unexpected flash of light with an internal surge of dread and a rising question of What Does She Want?) So it was unlikely that the room had been targeted or deliberately blocked. It was just something else to break.

Three more things crashed. Two of them sounded generically expensive. Celestia readily identified the third by noting the exact sound produced by so many tiny crystal spindles scattering across a marble floor.

"The scrolls are just important to us," the elder muttered. "And we have intruders in the way."

"A short-term condition," the younger determined --

A very focused "-- Princesses," came from behind them. It was, in some ways, the sound of Authority. It was also the noise produced by a lot of Worry concentrated into a very small area.

There were two alicorns on this side of the door, and what were now six very nervous Guards.

"We need the scrolls, Seyfert," Celestia told him. "We don't have any other choice. I have to start sending messages to ponies within the palace. Get the information flowing, as much as we can. We've been out of contact too long already."

She could have wished for another option, but... there had been gaps in pony magic from the start, and the centuries hadn't been enough to close all of them. One of the largest was communications. You could carry news on the wing, a chain of teleporting unicorns could relay-race information across the continent -- but when it came to sending words without also sending a pony...

Ancient pegasi had swapped out smoke signals for more stable constructs of vapor, then put their codes into the wind and given them a push. Things hadn't advanced much since. Celestia's spoofing of the dragon magic which allowed a few to move their hoards to safety in an instant (with a lot of advance preparation, quite a few recently-consumed white opals, and only after getting past the perpetual dread which came from the dragon knowing that they couldn't move themselves and someone could be lurking at the designated receiving end) was one of the very few discoveries, and Spike was the only other person who could use it.

The palace didn't even have speaking tubes. The walls were already honeycombed, and there were just too many potential destinations for any sound to go.

They needed more communications magic. They had needed it for a very long time, and that ongoing need had done absolutely nothing for advancement. But right now, they needed the scrolls. For communication, and planting the seeds of sabotage.

"There has to be another way," the densely-built Guard protested. "Some other route --"

"-- you," Luna softly decided as something else crashed down, "are fully familiar with the passages. This means you are aware that there is a path we could use. One which still terminates outside the storage room -- after taking several winding minutes to reach. We would still chance facing the same situation: simply after a longer delay. Teleportation into a place so crowded virtually guarantees recoil and a moment of vulnerability. You are stalling. Hoping that something happens to clear the area, or that we will change our minds. We will not."

"They might move out," Moonstone suggested. "If we just --"

-- the earth pony stopped. Looked at both sisters, from tension-tight necks to too-stable tails and back again. She took a slow breath.

"-- no," the Lunar Guard reluctantly said. "We need the scrolls. But you need to let us go through first --"

"-- there's six of you," Celestia softly cut her off. "I'm hearing at least twenty of them. Six Guards against twenty ponies are, at a minimum, going to get hurt."

Imbrium took a step forward. Her wings rustled.

"Give them a chance to surrender," the pegasus requested, and there was just a little touch of tremble in her voice. Fear for what could happen to her Princess. "Maybe we don't have to do this. Maybe once they see you, they'll come to their senses. They'll stop --"

Every Guard was ready to take a fatal impact for their Princess in every moment of their lives. Was prepared to step into the last moment of their lives, if doing so meant saving the world. It was an occupation which produced heroes, along with an understandable tendency towards expecting the worst.

They watched out for their Princess at all times.

"-- they shall," Luna considered, "receive one chance."

"One --" the pegasus tried.

"-- at the moment the door opens," the younger softly stated, "they will have the option to stop. And if they do, they shall not be hurt. An opportunity to -- change their minds. But I do not expect this to happen. They have made their choice, Imbrium. And still -- one chance, and only one."

"Princess --" Looking to Celestia this time because for the staff, certain aspects of the Return had turned into the Reassignment. Imbrium had been a Solar once. She loved her recovered Princess, and did so as much as she'd ever cared for the elder. But this was the constant presence, the senior, the good mare --

They watched out for their Princess at all times.
But these were the Generals.

"-- one chance," the elder repeated, and felt her ears go back. "No more. Because she's right."

"A single moment, in which sanity might reassert," stated the younger. "But after that? They have chosen to turn against their nation. And there is a price for that. One chance, Imbrium. But any attempt to attack negates it. And after that --"

The temperature on this side of the door was stable: both sisters were making sure it remained so. But six tail-bound stars simultaneously went nova.

"-- they already chose to break the gates. Invade our home. And there is a price for that. Let them come."

Every mark talent came with a particular set of gifts. However, two ponies with the same talent wouldn't necessarily be in possession of the same set. Wordia was fully aware that both she and Raque had marks which came from the known group of journalism icons, which begged a few questions as to how the other mare managed to live with what had to be defective magic.

Still, there was always room for individuality in any given mark family -- but some aspects were more common than others: with reporters, good hearing was almost universal. But quite a few gifts could wind up extracting their subtle price. Wordia's personal grouping included a sharpened memory: the ability to replay events within her mind, making sure she knew exactly what the original wording had been before deciding on how to best interpret it. To that degree, her notebook mostly served as a known tool of her trade, while occasionally doubling as her best weapon of intimidation.

She could review events as much as she liked. There were times when she did so to excess, searching for that single crucial moment which would make the story work. Others found her focusing so intently on something which never should have been seen once as to require some assistance in stopping. Bottles were good for that.

The mare had an eye for detail. She watched the trio of Guards who were trying to evacuate her, and did so a little more closely than they might have expected. It was easy to notice how they were keeping her in the center of a mobile triangle, with insufficient space between reporter and staff for giving her any chance to bolt. Treating her as if she was something to be protected --

-- no. As a prisoner.

She'd never been able to figure out if it was a gift of the mark, or a subtle drawback. The tendency to narrate her own story, going over her memories and life in an attempt to give it all the proper... spin. It was so easy to get lost that way. And part of her wanted to retreat into recent memory, because the present held sounds of fighting which weren't as distant as she wanted them to be, she could hear the violence and smell the blood and she was tired of smelling blood, she'd always been good at dealing with the bloodscent but there was so much of it...

The tiny spikes of rock at Tirek's drain site hadn't targeted her with intent. But more of the intruders could be searching for her. She wasn't the primary target: Wordia was sure of that much. More of an attack of opportunity. It wouldn't stop her from being attacked. And all she had was three Guards, when everypony knew Guards were incompetent. How stupid did you have to be, in order to think you were capable of protecting an alicorn? Oh, and the alicorns were also incompetent, because they needed to be protected --

-- who is the primary target?

There it was. She was in the middle of a personal crisis and her mark was trying to figure out the story. Not that the alicorns would let her reach a typewriter. Censorship abounded.

The Princesses?

Not unless somepony had come up with a reliable way to move Sun and Moon. Or were exactly that stupid.

...it was the supremacy group trio. Some of the members were going to be that stupid. But the leadership never would have...

The centaur?

That still felt like a possibility. But even when she considered secondary targets (including, because the universe was unjust, herself), the attackers seemed to be too spread out. And if the centaur had been brought down, then wouldn't most of the group have left?

With the centaur.
Dragging the corpse behind them, as proof of their victory.
Possibly in a net.

The sweater stained with road dirt. Blood flowing across cobblestone. Mounds deforming with the passage, but no longer shifting from breath. Blonde hairs torn out by pony teeth, every strand treated as a trophy...

I need a drink.

The Guard trio moved. She had to move with them, and it didn't feel they were moving fast enough.

What's so important that they would break in for it? What do the group leaders see as being worth that?
...are they even acting of their own accord?
Important enough to bring down the gates. To attempt a teleport into the palace --

The reporter blinked.

"Teleport," Wordia said, and was suddenly aware of just how dry her mouth was. She needed a drink. She had to get a drink. If she didn't --

"-- we can't," the unicorn Guard irritably declared. "I already told you. Several times --"

But that wasn't it.

"-- they can't."

The door opened.

The invaders turned. Saw what was on the other side. The oldest, largest mare in the world, whose expression suggested that there was no patience left. Next to her, the one regarded as the most dangerous, the monster whom the Lunar Guards might exist simply to contain -- somehow.

They stared. They couldn't help it. And every tenth-bit of mercy in Luna's heart forged itself into a single chorused word.

"Surrender," the alicorns said as one.

Some did hesitate. One horn had its corona wink out. Four others had the light display the spikes of rage. Wings flared. Hooves stomped. Two of the stupidest began their charge.

The sisters moved.

Wordia's group stopped moving, and she nearly went into the triangle's apex pony. She hated that. Apparently Guards truly weren't capable of thinking and trotting at the same time.

"They can't," repeated the unicorn on her left. Echo without comprehension.

If you use my words, you could at least think about them! "The palace is under a permanent lockdown spell! You can teleport within most of the palace, but the only way to have it work going in and out is if you've been granted an exception! Otherwise, you just reappear at your departure point, and an alarm goes off here --"

"I know what a lockdown spell is," the unicorn mare tightly said. "And that we have one."

Really? Because Wordia frequently had to remind her audience about things they already should have known --

-- I forgot, I forgot about the lockdown, I thought anything I heard outside was a pony trying to get into position --

If she could just get a drink, if she could just think, she'd been thinking with the bottles for so long because they helped her stop having the wrong kind of thoughts for a while, but then they always wore off and you clearly needed more bottles or better contents because the mind needed lubrication and in Wordia's case, that somehow helped to keep her from slipping down the wrong holes.

"You knew," Wordia accused.

(The other two Guards were refusing to look at her. They weren't speaking at all. It wasn't going to save them. She was going to write an article, and she was going to take great pleasure in quoting their body language.)

The "Yes," was decidedly irritated. Guards also needed to be a lot better at dealing with a stressed-out public.

I shouldn't be this stressed. Not even with everything going on, with intruders in the palace and I heard my name at least once --
-- I shouldn't be like this --
-- I need --

"I forgot!" slipped out, and she immediately blamed the lack of bottles. "I forgot about the lockdown! That it's there, that it works!" According to the Tattler's records, a few prospective interns had tried to impress the paper by going directly for the inside story. Filing a pony interest piece regarding what it was like to be inside a detention area hadn't helped their cause. "But you should have known --"

"-- I do --" the angry mare shot back.

And there it was. You got them talking. There were times when her mark provided helpful whispers on what might keep them talking. And if they kept talking, if they went on for long enough, if you got them worked up -- they slipped.

"Then why did you even come in?"

In the strictest sense, there were more than two dozen witnesses for what happened next. Or at least, that was the starting number. The majority of them didn't remain conscious for long.

The Guards got into position, or tried to do so. It was an effort just to keep up. The eldest of them had been with the Solars for more than two decades, and he'd never known his Princess was capable of moving at this kind of speed: that anything so large could move that fast...

It was an effort just to keep up. Most of them didn't manage it.

And the sisters advanced through a space which, in terms of ponies, was becoming no less occupied, but decidedly more prone.

Afterwards, it would be the Solars who had the most trouble reconciling what they had seen. The sisters moved perfectly. There was some separation between them, expanding and contracting as combat maneuvers required. But each served as a constant watch for the other's flank. Any threat unseen by one saw the other moving to intercept. Coronas ignited (and always went dark before any backlash could hit), wings flapped here and there, and hooves kicked out in all directions -- but none of that detracted from the constant level of awareness for what the other was doing.

They guarded each other.

They moved perfectly and in doing so, they often seemed to move in exactly the same ways.

Their movements matched. Their voices did not, for Celestia had gone quiet. A single word at the start, and then...

She moved with efficiency. Virtually everything she did dropped a combatant. But she displayed all the emotional intensity of an abacus which had decided to subtract unruly beads, and her expression was grim. A combination which only one living pony had truly remembered.

And Luna...

Her Guards were fully aware that the younger could treat intimidation as just one more weapon in the arsenal. Some had even realized that the lashing tail was required, for it gave the Diarchy another aspect of balance. And most Lunars, if queried on the subject in a setting where they had to give an answer, might have reluctantly offered the consideration that their Princess would probably enjoy fighting -- and do so just a little too much.

They would have been wrong. The younger hardly minded hurting those who deserved it and when it came to the option list for interaction with those causing trouble, would offer up 'violence' well ahead of her sibling. But she knew not to take too much pleasure in it. She'd seen those who did, and knew exactly where that road tended to lead. It wasn't a path she could follow.

But somepony had recently informed her sister about a certain perceived lack of rights.

Pleasure in violence for its own sake was dangerous.

"EQ 14:3:6, Home Invasion!" the younger called out as she hip-checked a frost-covered earth pony into an alcove. "1:9:1, Self-Defense!" A flare of corona sent a pegasus into the ceiling, then the floor, and finally into a unicorn because a stunned pony could be put towards a new purpose. "0:0:4: Treason!"

Education of the stupid, however, was a perpetual delight.

The unicorn Guard was staring at her. Wordia didn't like that. Also, they hadn't started moving again. More incompetence.

"I couldn't trust the spell," the mare tried. "I didn't know if it was still up."

"It's never failed," Wordia stated. Unfortunately. Although this really wasn't a good time for that to change.

"The gates haven't gone down either," the Guard rather viciously reminded her. "I couldn't be sure --"

"-- the lockdown is the most reliable effect in the palace defenses," Wordia volleyed. "It always has been. It's kept independent of other spells and charge sources, so nopony can try to counter it by approaching it through a different working. The gates can go down, the palace could burn and the lockdown would probably go last --"

"-- you know quite a bit about our defenses --" was a stronger observation than the journalist wanted to hear.

"-- but you came in anyway! I forgot --" why did I say that again? "-- but you would have remembered, and you still came in --"

"-- you were panicking! When you panic, you don't think! I could hear you through the door, and what I heard was that you needed somepony! SO I WENT IN!"

It hadn't been anything close to a shout: force, but without much in the way of attached volume. Wordia was still convinced that the idiot Guard was about to summon every attacker in a hundred-body-length radius...

...she...
"...what?"

The Guard wasn't glaring at her. A glare would have been so much easier.

"My squadmates held the line, and I took the reserve role," the other unicorn said, and her voice had become calm. Too much so, and far too quickly. "Going in. Doing that meant you weren't as scared. More rational. You stopped spooking and got closer to just being your usual bitch self. Because we're your Guards. That means protecting you."

...I...
...I need...
...are those hoofsteps getting closer?

The stupidest madmare ever to have been foaled took an extra, fully unnecessary breath.

"Even from yourself."

And then the attackers found them.

And then they were in the scroll storage area. Coronas shifted groaning bodies out to make room.

Children, the oldest mare in the world irritably considered as she surveyed the damage. They're acting like children. The foals who, once they hear they can't have something, kick out a tantrum and destroy whatever they can reach.

But most foals grow out of it. They look at the wreckage and realize that they were only breaking things to prove that they had control over their own lives. Something they felt was needed, after the indignity of a 'no'. But so much of what they destroyed was theirs. They shattered their own possessions, just to prove a point which doesn't even exist.

Foals come down from a tantrum with their parents snuggled next to them. Warm and loved.

These ponies are going to wake up in cells.

They're breaking their own lives.

They had also gone to some trouble in breaking most of the ink bottles.

"Typical," the elder decided. She couldn't even gather up the ink with her field: liquids tended to get tangled in the borders, flowed around the edges in dark tributaries of lost words. "But we should have enough to work with." Her field lanced forward, split into multiple projections and fetched six scrolls. "I'm starting with support staff and senior Guards, Luna." The spell targeted ponies: as long as she knew her target, having an unknown location wasn't a problem. "The first group has to avoid the front exits. Guards are going to start gathering up the combatants. We'll use some of the kitchens for assembly points. Along with picking up weaponry."

"The armory?" asked the younger, watching the Guards set up a perimeter at the door. (She had been trying to learn the scroll-sending spell for some time, and her results had been -- mixed. Having Celestia tell her that the first seven years of the elder's own investigations had been on pace for the same number of explosions wasn't encouraging.) "Who goes there?"

"I want a better picture of what's happening in the basement before I try for it," Celestia grimly decided. "Or we might wind up going ourselves at some point. Because until we figure out where everypony is within the palace, asking somepony to open the armory might just give somepony else the chance to follow them in."

"Weapons they do not know how to use," the younger noted -- then, a little more darkly, "Which could rapidly make the situation worse. Especially as the sphere still exists."

Celestia nodded. Her field located an intact bottle, grabbed a quill, braced the opened scroll against a wall and began to write. "So," and experience meant her next words were never meant as anything other than the darkest of jests, "let's get this war organized."

It was rather easy to hear where Luna's snicker wasn't. "Commence," the younger said. "Moonstone, search for more ink --"

They both heard a noise in the hallway. A body shifting against marble. Given the post-combat context, Celestia felt it sounded suspiciously like a semi-conscious bound pony trying to stand up by using a wall for leverage.

Luna's horn ignited. A burst of dark blue shot through the door frame.

"-- 4:12:10, Resisting Arrest..." she stated over the thump. "Place a scroll for the Sergeant among your initial grouping. Let him know that you received his message, and we shall remove Cerea from Paddock ourselves."

Celestia nodded. "When we can," the elder said. "She'll be safe there until we can reach her."

More scribbling. The speed was doing horrible things to Celestia's fieldwriting. She wanted to put the quill in her mouth --

"They know about the sword's destruction," Luna observed. "How?"

The old mare could confront the question and write at the same time. "We need to answer that," she readily admitted. "We both warned our staffs about bar gossip after that one article. It was just about all Guards who saw Cerea being brought off the air carriage. Then Applejack came out, with what was left of the sword."

She frowned.

Exactly who was there?
Guards. Tutors. Some of the ponies she trained with. Crossing came in later...

She had to put the list together. Quickly. But there had been so many ponies milling about...

"I know somepony went directly to Barding," Celestia added. Desperate times... "Broken weapon, so the first thought was to try and get it reforged."

She tried to picture Barding leaving the palace. Seeking the advice of an outside expert.
...looking for help in working with a material which didn't exist anywhere else in the world...
...and she'd gotten stuck on just trying to picture Barding leaving the palace...
...she had been seeing him outside the forge more often lately. To an unusual degree. Any degree at all --
-- it hadn't been Barding.

"When the theory was still that the blade had broken off within Tirek's torso," Luna casually considered. (The elder absently listened to the sound of one Guard swallowing back what would have been some rather impressive retching.) "But there was insufficient material for any attempt at restoration, and its properties were gone." More thought: several meteors streaked through her mane accordingly. "Wordia Spinner would normally be a suspect, especially as she has a minor talent for placing herself in the vicinity of free-flowing words -- but she has had no communication with the outside."

I want it to be Wordia.
She wanted to kick down that prison sentence herself.
What's her personal spell? Is it possible that she has something for communication?
-- she would have used it already.
Over and over.

"We need to know how the word got out." Her corona flared, and the first scroll vanished. "Gossip overheard by somepony who repeated it in the wrong place: even after that speech we gave our staffs, that's still possible."

Moonstone reluctantly cleared her throat. Both sisters glanced in that direction.

"Some ponies went out to celebrate when they heard Tirek was dead," the earth pony told them, carefully nosing an intact bottle out from under fallen scrolls. "A few of them probably went to bars."

"We may," Luna darkly contemplated, "have to install a staff-accessible liquor room. With its own barkeep, just to keep such occasions in-house. I almost look forward to seeing how Raque Marshdew excuses it --"

The last sound had been a body shifting against marble.

This one was marble moving against itself.

...and there were more attackers than Guards, they were trying to keep her in the center of the triangle but there was a pegasus in the group, that one kept trying to go up and over while hooves cantered around the reporter and her mark was for listening and thinking and she could fight, she'd always had some skill there because she'd grown up in the Tangle (a place which the alicorns didn't understand) and managed to have the process reach adulthood, but there were too many and one of them had just recognized her, the Guards were fighting and she heard hooves impacting armor, she thought she heard a hoof crack and it almost drowned out the scream of "TRAITOR!" as a pony's kick went directly for a vulnerable leg --

-- the field projection went between combatants, zig-zagged to its target, surrounded and yanked.

A pony who was kicking would have, at a maximum, three legs which could be dedicated to other purposes. The sudden pull brought that number to two. Bipeds could work with two. Ponies who'd just lost the support from a pair of limbs on the same side of their bodies tended to have a little more trouble.

The attacker, whose expression came across as both surprised and stupid, fell over. The next Guard kick went into their head, and did so as another burst of corona targeted vital flight feathers, pushed there and there on the structure of an active left wing. The subsequent flap did the rest of the work and after that, it was just a matter of waiting for the pegasus to slide down the wall.

Shortly after that, the fight was over. And as soon as it ended, the Guards once again proved they were idiots.

"Do the three of you have anything better to do than stare at me?" Wordia furiously demanded. And because her audience always seemed to need reminders of things they already knew, she followed that with "Oh, wait: you do! You're supposed to be getting me out of here! And if you're going to be guarding me, don't you think you have to stay conscious? And what kind of Guard wouldn't think to protect their legs? So if I have to --"

They were still staring at her. She clearly needed a stronger insult.
She found one.

"Is the centaur any better at this?"

The sisters could find their thoughts galloping down the same path, and so they shared a twinned reaction upon hearing the secret passage open. The first part was relief: somepony had found their way to the temporary command center and was about to provide information. Even in the absence of anything tactically useful, simply knowing that a familiar face had reached relative safety was more than enough.

The other aspect said they had to be sure. And neither had anything close to the girl's olfactory range, not even mark-boosted ponies came close to that -- but too-fresh fur dye had a reek all its own.

Two coronas projected into the hall. A robe-shrouded form, four legs split between sun and shadow, was pulled back.

The pony struggled. They'd left just enough slack for struggling to take place, mostly as a side effect of eventually needing to get the robe off.

"Explain!" the younger demanded. "How did you enter the passage? How did you get out again?"

The stallion's reply initially emerged as an assortment of choking sounds. The elder suspected it was an early attempt to set up an accusation of brutality: neither of them had their field anywhere near this throat. "...I... I don't have to tell you anything..."

"Then we won't waste time asking," Celestia told him. "Because I have six Guards here who are waiting for us to finish, and none of them are particularly interested in letting you rejoin your faction."

"...I won't tell them --"

"I do not believe," Luna coldly stated, "we had brought up the possibility of having them conduct an interrogation. They are going to secure you. Followed by a formal arrest --"

He looked at the Guards. Six sets of hard-edged stares looked back.

"-- you can't --"

"Guards on palace grounds," Celestia informed the invader, "can arrest. Especially given the charges involved. Which means that anything you do to stop them counts as resisting arrest. So I'd advise you to just let it happen. And as it turns out --" and she very carefully didn't smile "-- I was considering whether to grant lesser charges for the first pony who talks. Pity that wasn't you." And paused. "I may add a charge of Not Talking."

A rather desperate "...what? That... that law doesn't exist..."

"The palace is under siege," Luna calmly told him. "Which happens to serve as one of the conditions under which martial law may potentially be declared. The law does not, in fact, exist. Would you like it to?"

She smiled. The stallion did his best to faint, and didn't quite make it.

The sisters transferred corona custody to the unicorns among their Guards, and the new prisoner was bundled out of sight.

They won't hurt him. Celestia knew her ponies. They're just going to tie him up.
Some of the knots may be a little tight.

They wouldn't interrogate him, either. It was a waste of time. Especially when there was a good chance that the siblings already had the answer.

Celestia knew Luna had reached the same conclusion, because each was somewhat like the other. Something which was true in more and stronger ways than anypony ever suspected. And in this case, all the elder had to do was look at the expression of rising rage twisting the younger's features, and she knew.

Just about everypony was aware that the palace had passages hidden within the walls, because some secrets were harder to keep than others and Guards ran time trials. It wasn't uncommon for a staffer to see an armored form slipping out of the dark, it had been happening for generations, and sometimes it happened in front of a tour group...

Centuries spent in the same structure. Having ponies know the passages existed was inevitable. There were children who could point to some of the entrances on a map, and a pony who had never been part of the staff, watching closely enough from a hidden vantage point, might figure out how to get in.

They just wouldn't know how to get out.

The passage doors always closed behind anypony using them, and the exit requirements were completely different. You couldn't readily guess at what you needed to do in order to get out. A failed attempt had a good chance to set off an alarm, and so many of those had gone off across the centuries. Tour strays who thought they had the opportunity to go exploring, most of whom looked utterly sheepish upon rescue...

The passages weren't secret. The means of leaving them was. And they were part of the evacuation plan, something which already assumed that things were going wrong and detours off the original path might be necessary. Any member of the staff would need to have a few exits memorized, along with the routes which led to some of the hidden saferooms.

Any member of the staff.

Purple eyes stared into dark blue. And they both knew.

Paddock wasn't safe. There might not be a single safe spot left.

"We've been compromised," Celestia coldly stated.

"Zero-zero-four," the heat of Luna's anger announced. "Treason."

Mythomaniacal

A castle under siege, with defenders trying to fight off the onslaught. Careful advancement through shadow, trying to bring the reason for the crisis to some level of safety.

It's all my fault.

Cerea felt as if she was living a story and somehow, no part of the current plot had the world trying to find yet another means of removing her clothing.

They'd been in the passages for some time. It was easy enough for the Sergeant to declare that they were giving up on Paddock and trying to get Cerea outside: the actual attempt was somewhat more involved. Some of the trails which wound within the palace walls were fairly isolated from each other. A now-lost saferoom had multiple ways in -- but those paths didn't necessarily intercept. Typically, the fastest way to get from one hidden road to another was through going back into the marble corridors for a few seconds, and that was something the Sergeant was refusing to risk. The trio had passed several possible hallway crossover points, and...

It was easy to hear the fighting outside. And even with the nausea saturating her, a distraction which was trying to fill and then overflow every cell... Cerea could always scent the blood.

It's all my fault...

Typically, they would only hear the battle when they neared an inner exit. (The Sergeant had also rather directly said that his current priority was getting Cerea to safety, and any attempt to assist in an unseen skirmish would risk compromising that. The girl's nostrils were being flooded with the olfactory signature of duty.) And because they had to make the trip without ever stepping onto marble, were effectively taking the long way around ... they got to hear a lot of them.

But there were some noises which had been designed to not only permeate the palace, but to sound within the passages as well. Cerea had sat in a room with a phonograph until she'd had them all memorized: something which had involved quite a bit of cranking. (The crank wasn't really designed to be gripped by hand.) It meant the group heard the evacuation alarm go off.

"We need to be more careful now," the Sergeant had told centaur and surgeon. "This could be somepony's route, and they might be running scared. We might only have a second to tell the difference between an attacker and a staffer who's just running until they can't run any more."

Where are they evacuating to?
A former rookie Guard remembered the standard destinations. But she didn't know who was supposed to go where.
The tunnels?
Some of them were supposed to try for the gardens.
They can't use the front of the palace. Not if the protesters came in that way, because there could be more on the way.
I...

But there had been no further encounters. (Sometimes, when they were within the widest of the walls or nearing a corner, they would hear hooves desperately pounding across stone.) And they'd continued to make their way through shadow, past lighting devices which weren't always fully working or glowing in the right shades or responding to their presence at all, while the girl tried not to lean against the wall too often. Because the nausea surged at any moment when she lost focus, and

This is my fault.

there were so many reasons for that to happen. Or rather, one reason, which kept repeating itself over and over and over --

-- there wasn't enough light in the stone passage.

And then there was too much.

Cerea's first instinct in the presence of what had to be a magical effect was to reach for the sword: something which found her hand closing on air, immediately followed by having her exposed flank contacting cool stone again. But the wisps of light continued to materialize from raw atmosphere, doing so directly in front of the Sergeant's snout, and it was light to vapor to something more solid and it wasn't a pony teleporting in because that was more of a flash: something which happened all at once --

-- I saw this before.

She'd just seen what it looked like from the sending end.

The scroll coalesced, and fell to the floor in front of the Sergeant's unmoving hooves. He calmly nodded to himself, and knelt forward to nose it open.

"Could use some extra reading light, Doc," the old stallion requested, and bright green projected towards that part of the passage. "That'll do. So..." The downwards-facing gaze quickly shifted, moving left to right and back again. "'Passages are compromised. Traitor among staff.'" Something about the brown eyes hardened. "'Abandon Paddock. Take Cerea to Adamant's cave.'" His teeth nipped one corner of the scroll before he straightened, and a small sweep of his head told the centaur to come forward.

She forced herself away from the wall, trotted forward until she was close enough for him to push the paper towards her right hand. The girl took it.

"Shred that," the Sergeant told her. "Smallest pieces you can manage."

It was something she could do -- in theory. She certainly had enough strength to tear paper, but her fingers seemed to be fumbling...

"Cave?" Chocolate Bear uncertainly asked. "Where is there a --"

"Out in the gardens," the old stallion cut in. "Guess you haven't taken the full tour." He started moving forward again. "It's got some problems. Not enough ways out, for starters. But for most ponies, there's only one way in. And it's not part of the standard shelter list, so a traitor wouldn't know to check it. We're probably looking at having one of the Generals intercept at some point, once they can get free."

Traitor had just registered in the girl's mind.

Somepony turned against the palace.
Maybe a lot of ponies.
Because of me.
All because of --

"A traitor," the surgeon shakily said. "Who --"

"-- if they knew, they would have told us," the Sergeant immediately shot back. "And they just found out the passages were compromised." Nostrils flared into the full snort. "No fault on the timing. The worst thing to be if you want battle information is a General. Too far away from the action. Anypony running a battle is usually the last to know about a fight." The snort repeated. "And I figured we had a problem after we hit that first miniherd. Just not one which ran that deep." Several stone-weakening curses were visibly bitten back. "Treason."

"But who --" the doctor tried.

Anypony who hates me.
A qualification which provided an impressively large list of suspects...
...she had turned somepony against their own nation.

It could be argued that the revelation of liminal existence had turned a number of people against their own humanity -- but as far as the girl was concerned, when it came to the definition of humanity, striking out against anything different was just about the core of it.

"Don't know." It was almost a bark, and the sound was still less harsh than the glare which the old stallion directed at the unicorn. "Or they'd be asking for your help right now. If they could still talk. But here's the crucial part, Doc. It's not me. It isn't you, because a doctor's got a thousand chances to drop anyone they don't like. Everyone here, right now, can be trusted. We'll just have to be careful with any staffers we run into. Got me?"

Centaur and surgeon nodded: it would have been hard to say whose movement had been the more shaken.

The trio advanced through shadows and self-blame.

There was a final ramp leading down. One short passage. A barely-visible door on the right: the Sergeant carefully pressed his right forehoof in a pattern against several innocuous stones near the frame. There was a soft sizzle as a number of still-functioning protections temporarily winked out.

He pushed on the stone, let it move just enough to create the smallest of cracks. Fresh, cold air surged into the passage.

The girl inhaled.

Nearly winter. The air temperature matches what was set on the weather schedule, which means we're not near a temperature-regulated part of the gardens. I'm not sure which part we are near. (A rookie Guard was also required to memorize the passage network, but that had been a work in progress: additionally, the Sergeant had led them through a lot of turns.) And --

"Cerea?"

She blinked. Looked down, and found the Sergeant glancing back and up.

"What are you scenting?" the earth pony softly asked. "Airflow was wrong in the passage for you to get that one group before we heard them. But the wind is blowing towards this side of the palace. The breeze is coming in. Give me some idea of what's out there before we move you."

She attempted to narrow her focus. The nausea fought back.

"I... can't be sure of anything right now," she told him. "It's hard to concentrate --"

"-- you picked up on the Doc," the Sergeant reminded her. "Just sort it out."

He thought she could do it.
He'd also believed she was still capable of being a Guard --
-- no. She didn't need the sword for this.

I have to do what I can to help.
But I can't protect them.
I can't even protect myself --

The nausea abruptly surged, and the girl's hands clenched as she desperately fought back against the roiling tide.

Don't double over.
...as much as I can.
(A number of human females, all under the delusion that they were being original, had announced that not only was Cerea clearly incapable of looking straight down and seeing her own forehooves, but it was impossible for her to bend in a way which touched them. Which was absolutely true, because centaur double-jointing only went so far. Also, what was so special about being able to look at one's forehooves on the vertical anyway?)
I need to do this.
I'm not a Guard any more. But they're trying to protect me. They could get hurt.
I have a duty towards them --

The flood waters temporarily receded, and she pushed.

"No ponies," she told him (and considered herself to have taken far too long in doing so). "Not close. There's... a lot of rage in the air, but it's diffuse. Probably a drift pattern." It wasn't a particularly pleasant change from the usual background fear. "And there's a little smoke, but not enough for a nearby fire. Not when the wind is blowing towards us."

"Thought I heard thunder at one point," the Sergeant casually mentioned. "Somepony had rotten aim. Anything else?"

She shivered. Something about the illness seemed to be having its way with her temperature tolerance. It was nearly winter, the wind was cold, and too much of her left flank was exposed.

Don't get this wrong...

"Some ozone traces." And immediately felt stupid, because he already knew there had been lightning. "And a lot of plants." ...stupider. "That's it."

"Schedule was for clear and cold," he reminded them. "That's what we're feeling now. But the gardens have their own little weather systems. Some of them count for moisture pockets. Pegasi combatants can get clouds together in a hurry there." The earth pony frowned. "Also means we're going to be dealing with shifting wind conditions every time we cross a weather border, and there's going to be a bunch of those because the cave isn't that close. Plus there's more directions to watch. We'll move as fast as we can."

Vanilla Bear had been wrong. She'd left the palace before she was better.

They weren't quite in the gardens proper: there was a buffer zone around the palace walls, where Canterlot's standard vegetation (and weather) held sway. But there wasn't all that much distance to cross in order to reach the border.

"May have to stay off the garden paths," the Sergeant decided as the group advanced forward. "Rather go through the plants on either side, in the parts which have enough of them. The paths are too visible."

Like right now.

"Like right now," the old stallion finished.

You didn't have to be a Sergeant to think like one. Not when the problem was this obvious.

Reach the gardens and some portions would have an overhead canopy available. Others offered plants which were tall enough to allow an attempt at getting low and trying to hide among the stalks. But the trio wasn't there yet. There was a border space, and it had them out in the open under a clear sky.

Cerea looked up, and did so too quickly: nausea tried to transmute into dizziness, seemingly picking up some new strength along the way.

Pegasi fighting near that tower. Those clouds were probably just woven. They're too small and dark for anything natural in the sky.

If any of them look down...

The airborne combatants seemed to be focused on two things: staying in the sky and knocking somepony else out of it. But all it would take was a single moment of diverted attention --

"-- keep moving," the Sergeant steadily told her, and she knew he'd looked up too. "We can't do anything about what's happening up there right now. But if one of theirs breaks off, one of ours will wonder why. And once we're into the green, we'll have a few more options."

Hovering hooves slammed into a cloud. Thunder exploded. The surgeon winced, visibly forced his legs to stay in rhythm.

They moved forward. Cleared the first line, such as it was: some low, narrow border bushes, probably less than a year old. The tallest didn't even come up to Chocolate's sternum, and Cerea's nausea didn't prevent her from simply stepping over them.

"Just need to get a few more body lengths without being spotted," the earth pony reminded them. "Keep trotting --"

Three sets of ears twisted backwards in the same instant. Heads turned. For the centaur, the upper torso quickly followed, and she tried not to reel again --

-- another portion of the outer wall had just quickly swung outwards: they'd all heard it open. And then ponies rushed out.

...tried to rush out.

They were staffers: Cerea recognized a scant few, understood that the entire group had to be composed of palace employees. Eight in total: six unicorns, two pegasi. Those who had not only been told to evacuate, but had needed to.

Some were limping. Others couldn't reach a full trot with a wounded body leaning against one flank. And all were pushing themselves, moving faster than their wounded bodies ever should have permitted, nopony among them had seen the trio yet because they were all focusing on gaining one more body length of ground and then one more and one more after that and the moment when the scent of their blood reached Cerea was also the instant when she heard the hooves pounding up the passage behind them --

-- to some degree, this has always been about distraction. Go look over there. We're going to make a sound, and we're going to make a light. If that doesn't have your full attention, then we're going to kick in some blood.

The evacuation is under way. That means the intruders have one place where they really don't want the palace to look. And some of those ponies have gotten away from the plan, because this isn't exactly a disciplined fighting force. Discipline is what they want to inflict on the world, for that definition which is most typically known as I Want Everything My Way. There is anarchy within the walls, a breakdown of intentions added to a need to seek and destroy and just run rampant for a while. Rebellion against the ultimate parental figure, just as long as she doesn't actually turn up. And none of that matters, because the ones who could stick to the plan are on the move and the stupider specimens are just creating more of a distraction.

Spot a group of wounded staffers trying to get out? Well, the only way they could have gotten hurt was if they were fighting. So really, anything the intruders do to them is just going to be simple revenge.

(The girl has already decided that every last injury is her fault. Behold the trotting apocalypse. A thought of Tirek might be enough to tilt some ponies towards suicide, but only she can get them to attack each other.)

(Ponies are being hurt in every moment she exists here...)

They gave chase, because there was wounded prey. (Any comparison to a predator species would, of course, deeply offend them.) There was no need to worry about opening the door to the outside. The invaders don't have every unlock sequence -- but in this case, the staff is doing the job for them. And once the six of them are outside, it's eight wounded staff ponies. No numerical advantage, and they would have preferred that -- but they'll be okay. Because their prey is weak and vulnerable and easy pickings who, quite frankly, deserve it.

They are ponies who can count up to MINE, while having lost all capability for identifying what's actually theirs.

The intruders come racing out of the new gap in the wall. Head directly for the injured.

And then one of them sees the centaur.

She shouts. Calls out the alert to the rest, changes the direction of her trot, and several follow --

"GET BACK!" It was the sort of Sergeant shout which the training grounds had spent weeks in attempting to wire directly into Cerea's legs. "GET INTO THE TREES!"

-- and there were horns igniting and wings flaring out, hooves pounding their way towards the trio and they were outnumbered, the wounded staff members could only do so much and if anything, Cerea's presence had pulled most of the attackers away from them because a centaur had instant priority. A centaur who didn't have a sword, was helpless and, for one horrible second, couldn't move because there were too many of them, there were always too many and she couldn't do anything and she couldn't just leave --

-- the surgeon's horn ignited. Bright green projected forward, flattened into an exceptionally narrow slice of sparkling field, about the length of the girl's index finger. Something which could be seen perfectly from Cerea's height, and was mostly visible as radiant glow if spotted from a more level head-on angle. A construct which was almost two-dimensional.

One of the attackers briefly glanced in that direction, and gave it no more regard than that. The green field was too small to lift more than dust, too thin to surround anything more than a portion of air. Stopping to laugh at the pitiful effort was more attention than it strictly deserved. So it was ignored, and the pegasus kept coming.

The thin slice of field -- sliced.

Fifteen vital flight feathers became just as many still-attached calamus points, and an equal number of scattering rachis.

The pegasus tilted to the side in midflap: something Chocolate Bear ignored, paying no attention to the crash in favor of twisting the field towards another attacker.

Create a field projection. Solidify it, somewhat like a shield -- but keep it thin. Flat. Almost two-dimensional, with the truest focus of that solidity along a very, very narrow edge. Something which probably couldn't be achieved without the help of a mark talent. But for the pony who could manage it...

There were no scalpels in the offices of the Royal Physicians. The resident surgeon had never needed one. And he was going after the pegasi among the attackers because just about every member of that species possessed a phobia regarding having the sky stripped away from them, and the majority of feathers didn't bleed.

Admittedly, pegasi did possess a number of blood feathers -- but a skilled surgeon knew which ones they were and could try to avoid them. The same was true for any pony's vital arteries and veins. But with a field which substituted for so much of a surgical kit, a trick which cut...

It was a simple matter for Chocolate to wound. Surgery was, in part, about necessary wounds: doing some damage now in order to allow healing later. But that was with a motionless, fully-sedated body. Put that kind of trick into play against moving ponies, whose movements might push them against the virtual blade, and it was far too easy to kill.

One attacker had begun by disregarding the projection. The remainder were now taking it very seriously. Something which sent a number of them towards the Sergeant, because an old stallion had to be an easy takedown --

-- and that was the next mistake.

But they were also coming at Cerea. And the group was out in the open, with so many more ways in which to move. The two stallions couldn't intercept everypony, and a loop of tan field went for her, caught her left foreleg, tried to yank --

-- she instinctively cantered backwards, trying to get away, and several hundred kilograms of centaur were tested against the field's raw strength.

The unicorn, who wasn't quite Twilight Sparkle, had her overwhelmed field wink out. And the staffers were joining in now, doing what they could, but they weren't moving all that fast, they were already weakened and wounded and a pegasus went for Cerea, the wind blast disoriented her and then the currents began to swirl around her head, it was getting harder to breathe because it felt as if the air was going too fast for her to catch much of it, she pushed her way out of that just before the surgeon's next cut took that flyer down, but there was too much happening for her to keep track of, the illness was rising and she was weak and helpless and she couldn't fight magic with nothing more than raw mass --

-- this is my fault.
Everything happening is fault.
I shouldn't be here.
I --

-- and there were attackers dropping, but at least two of the staff ponies were unconscious now, Chocolate Bear had tried a dissuading swipe to miss and wound up going at least a centimeter deep into muscle, the intruders had lost their earth ponies but one unicorn had tried an end run approach, vaulting the bushes to get at her and he landed about twenty meters away, skidded into a new position, focused on her and started the charge, he had speed and a spear attached to his skull and she barely had control over her own body, there was too much happening and nowhere to dodge and the unicorn's right foreleg went into a sinkhole.

Cerea, so much taller than any of the others, had found herself in possession of the lone angle which allowed anyone to see it happen. (If it had taken place directly in front of and below her, she would have missed it: the mocking humans had a biology-based point.) There had been a charging unicorn. One leg had rather unexpectedly dropped, going in well past the hock. Something which could hurt a pony who was moving at a normal pace, if their weight came down in just the wrong way when they weren't ready for it. In this case, one leg had dropped, and the rest of the unicorn had tried to keep on charging without it.

She heard the bone break. Something very much like a poorly-muffled gunshot, wrapped in a silencer of blood.

And sinkholes happened. Too much water in the earth, or too little. Excess freeze and thaw, sometimes in rapid succession. Any number of things could weaken the ground, leave it waiting for a collapse-triggering impact. Pure bad luck on the unicorn's part. He could reflect on fortune's cruelty in the hospital, and write the full thesis in prison.

Except that they were in the palace gardens. A place where the weather was fully regulated, and those who maintained the grounds presumably had ways of telling the local water table to shut up and sit down. And she was almost certain that she'd been on that patch of ground before he'd reached it, her weight was magnitudes above his and if the soil hadn't collapsed for her --

-- the Sergeant was looking at her.

He was still fighting. But he always kept watch over her, whenever he could.

He looked at her. Recognized that she'd spotted it. And, just for a second, the right corner of his lips curled up. A movement which, for the seeming effort involved, might have taken ten years off his life.

Outliers.

A pony who could change the terrain was, in fact, all sorts of trouble.

She would speak with him later, if any true degree of 'later' turned out to exist. In privacy. And she didn't understand the source for the emotion, but... you kept secrets because you were afraid.

She would keep his --

-- there were still ponies trying to reach them, there were too many directions to effectively dodge and three more had just come out of the still-open passage, Cerea had at least closed their own door behind her and there was a howl as they spotted the centaur, but this group was mostly running in a straight line towards what looked like Destination Anywhere and she was more or less going to be in the way --

-- one more pony came out.

Black wings unfolded. Flapped five times, with the wincing mare staying on the ground.

The newest gust blasted into the newest intruders. Sent two tumbling, with the third recovering his balance through coming to a stop against a solid object. To wit, a brown unicorn.

(The gust never touched Cerea, allied stallions, or staffers. When it came to wind, the mare was just that good.)

There was more movement. More magic, and the girl just barely managed to dodge one final attempt to pull at her ears. And then all of the attackers were down, but they weren't all fully unconscious and two of the staffers were bleeding more than ever --

The green field winked out. Chocolate Bear took a single breath, and Cerea watched as a surge of self-loathing was pushed out of sight. Locked away beyond vision, but not past scent.

"They need me. And I've got to stitch the one I cut --"

The Sergeant nodded. "We've got a whole group of wounded," the old stallion agreed. "Too hurt to take another attack without serious help. Do what you can." He raised his voice somewhat. "If anypony over there is healthy, start tying this group up. We've got a few things you can use."

Two of the staffers forced themselves forward. The surgeon moved. His corona reignited, began to sort through the contents of his saddlebags as he rushed towards the injured group.

Cerea was still staring at the final arrival (who, to be fair, was doing a lot of staring back). Trying to think of anything she could say.

"You're naked!"

That felt like an exceptionally bad choice.

The black pegasus awkwardly glanced back at her own fully-exposed fur.

"Um," Nightwatch said. "I'm off-duty. Um... I was off-duty. Well, obviously not any more. But I didn't try for the locker room. I had to find out what was going on, and getting into armor would have taken too long." The silver eyes took a rather deliberate (and still awkward) look at Cerea's left flank. "You're not exactly dressed for the cold --"

"-- you're not dressed at all!"

The Sergeant, displaying the most natural instinct of a male subjected to what was effectively a discussion of fashion, ended it.

"What brought you out here?"

"I verified Princess Luna," the little knight told them. (Chocolate lowered his body, put himself in proximity to an injured staffer and began to look at the wounds.) "After that, I could look for Cerea. It didn't take long to figure out the passages were compromised. And I remembered that you were going to visit her today, so I thought that if she hadn't been teleported out, then she had to be with you. So once I knew the saferooms were lost, I thought you'd take her outside. Towards the gardens, because that offered the most concealment spots. I looked for a passage going outside, and I found those three slipping into it. Then I was chasing them. And now..." A tiny shrug, followed by another, deeper wince of pain: the injured wings had been asked to do too much. "...I -- found you?"

Anyone looking at the Sergeant's expression might have had trouble gauging whether he was angry at having been second-guessed that thoroughly, or proud that a Guard had been able to manage the feat. Cerea, however, was going by scent.

"I'll take a Guard right now," the old stallion stated. "We can move out --"

"-- we can't," the surgeon called out, and the unicorn's voice was just barely able to contain the anger.

They all looked towards him. It took a little more effort for the staffers, because it meant paying attention to a source of the bloodscent.

"Two of these ponies can't be moved very far," Chocolate Bear told them. "One more shouldn't be moving at all. Not until I can get them stabilized, and that's going to take several minutes. Without including the one I cut, because I still need to get some stitches into him. I have to start treatment now, Sergeant, or some of this could get a lot worse." The pause was far too brief. "And this is my dominion."

My fault.
this is all my

"You're saying you'll override me," came out as something which was far too calm.

"If I have to." Green-glowing bandages were wrapping themselves around an injured flank. "But I'm saying you should leave me." With a thin smile, "I'm a non-combatant, remember? If anypony else comes by and sees a doctor at work --"

"-- this isn't war," the Sergeant told him. "It's worse. They're not going to honor anything. You need somepony watching you."

The old stallion looked at the wounded, shaking staffers. Brown eyes turned to Cerea, examined her from forehooves to the top of the blonde head.

He made a decision. Outwardly, it was all that happened. The stallion had decided what to do next. The situation had been evaluated: number of those at risk, how much danger each was in, and what could be chanced. Working the harsh math for the algebra of necessity. Decisions had to be made and in the absence of a general, sergeants usually wound up making them.

That was outwardly. But Cerea intended to keep his secrets. The sinkhole, and the newest source of self-loathing.

"Nightwatch," he said.

The pegasus took a hoofstep forward.

More softly, to keep any of the fallen attackers from overhearing, "Princess Celestia got a scroll off to us. We've got a few staffers who are strong enough to try fighting again, but the Doc can't handle all of this by himself. Especially not if more of the idiots come out, and we already got lucky, not having some of the sky group notice this. Can't try to peel any of ours off from up there. So I need to stay here and watch this lot. And you have to get Cerea to where the General wants her. Adamant's cave. Can you do that?"

The little knight nodded.

"Can you do that," the Sergeant forcefully repeated, "when you can't get off the ground? When you're the only one with her, and I don't know when I can catch up? Especially when you're looking after someone who didn't get past the treeline when I told her to?"

if they'd taken me down
maybe this would be over
he's putting her with me when she's already hurt, she's going to get --

There was just enough of a hesitation to notice, and then Nightwatch nodded again.

"Sun watch you," the old stallion gruffly said. "If we get to the point where Moon has to guard you, then we're already in deep trouble. And you know we've got a traitor to watch for. The same way I know it wasn't you. Go."

The little knight nodded to the centaur, began to trot towards the gardens. The girl, for lack of other options, followed.

The old stallion watched them go.

It wasn't quite déjà vu. The last trot they'd taken through the gardens had been at night, and... it could be said that the conditions had been different.

This is my fault.
They were hurt and bleeding and it's all my fault.
Every minute I exist here...

Most of the sounds of combat weren't reaching them.
Most of the scents had been lost.
They could almost be alone.
Almost.

They were off the path: they had to be. It was hard enough to conceal a centaur without giving the attackers an open trail to stare down. (The sparks had stopped coming off her when they were about two minutes out. The girl didn't want to picture the surgeon's reaction when he'd turned and seen they were gone.) It was giving Cerea some trouble in proceeding, because any attempt to hide her (and she was convinced that the sheer bulk of her body had already brought defeat) meant they had to go through the thickest vegetation. Something which left the girl trampling plants from all over the continent, just before she pushed aside branches in a desperate attempt to squeeze her way through vaguely-widened gaps. Her sweater was becoming stained (but not torn), and she suspected that her exposed flank was becoming discolored. Add that to any dirt she'd picked up from the passages, and a filthy appearance really didn't reflect well on her hosts.

...which, compared to bringing a siege down on the palace, felt like a much lesser thing.

They had to go through the plants: there was very little choice, and they had to hope that there was enough of a leaf canopy left along the full trail to obscure any view from the sky. But any need to make time would put them on the paths.

Nightwatch was keeping the pace. Something which frequently required flight --

-- I'm the reason she can't fly --

-- but Cerea wasn't moving at her normal speed. There was no need to hold back for the pegasus. And the little knight was engaging in some fairly extreme mobility. She kept circling the centaur's body (and the smaller form had much less trouble getting past a continent's worth of vegetation), checking every possible approach route as ears rotated in all directions and silver eyes made sure not to neglect the skies...

"I'll stay with you as long as I can," the little knight told her. "But if I hear the wrong signal, I'll have to go back in. For the Princess."

The air was suffused with life. There was also a distant taint of rage, and a rather local upsurge of guilt.

"I understand," the girl told her friend.
I do.
Your life for her life.

The pegasus sighed. Pushed on, and greenery pressed against black fur.

"If I have to leave you --"

"-- I understand --" felt a little too frantic.

"-- before we get there," the mare continued, "you'll have to reach the cave on your own. Do you remember the path?"

The girl immediately searched her memory, because there had only been the one trip. Her short time as a rookie Guard had focused on memorizing the interior of the palace. And she'd gone to the miniature peak several times, but -- that was her Guard. Adamant belonged to Nightwatch. Or perhaps there was some interpretation which would have had that the other way around.

How did it go? Cross a little patch of forest. A small section of the plains. A brief sojourn through wetlands...

"Yes." The nausea surged, and she briefly pressed her left palm against a nearby tree trunk. Let the rough bark offer what support it could.

The little knight nodded, and a fresh current of worry took over the air. "So you can get there if I have to go back."

Cerea nodded. Portions of the blonde tail tried to twist.

If you go back in to reach the Princess.

It was possible to track the path towards the cave in terms of environments crossed. But there was another way to look at it. You went to the honor statue, turned left, followed that path until you found an honor statue, and then sighted on the next honor statue --

-- if you go back in to --

"How did Adamant die?"

The smaller hooves momentarily stopped. The sleek body reoriented, and then silver eyes stared up into blue.

"Um," Nightwatch said. "I was going to read that to you." And the little knight almost smiled. "Which means you have to stay. So I can get the book. And there was something you were supposed to tell me first, remember? The other way you and Blitzschritt were alike. Not just being the only one from your species to be sworn into the Guard --"

"-- the mountains," the girl quietly answered, "were stability. And so was my gap. Nothing would ever change. You were born, you lived, you died and before that happened, you produced a foal who was going to do the same thing. The same nothing, Nightwatch. We both came from places which couldn't change. And we grew up with people who thought that was the only way to exist."

The pegasus blinked. Then she checked the sky and the world around them again, because she was a Guard.

"Um," the little knight said, and every feather rustled. "Um. I didn't think you were actually going to... not that fast -- well, I don't have the book with me, so you'll have to --"

"He sacrificed himself," the centaur almost placidly cut in. "Every statue in the gardens is somepony's sacrifice."

You'll go back in if you hear the right alarm. Even hurt, you'll go in.
A year from now, the Princesses will carry a sculpture out.
You know that.
You'll go in anyway.
And that's what makes you a knight.

"...yes," the mare eventually answered. "But the details are still important. It was his life, Cerea. And then it was everyone's life. So wait for the book." A little more softly, "Please."

The girl was silent.

You can't promise me that you'll live to read it.

They kept going for a while. The cave was getting close. But now there were pines ahead. Flourishing, which meant there were needles. The girl was going to get scratched and stained. Of course, back in the palace, ponies were being bruised and broken, so in an absolute sense, the girl really had very little to complain about.

You could be dead in an hour and it would be my fault.
Everything that's happening...

There was a burst of thunder, somewhere behind them. The echos rolled over the variegated landscape.

"This is because of me," Cerea whispered. "None of this would be happening --"

...in every minute I exist here, ponies are being hurt...

Desperately, "-- you didn't make them rush the gates, you didn't tell them to be stupid --"

This could be the last talk we ever have.
You were my friend. You lost your home for that. You could die for that.
Anything which happens to you is my fault...

"You're barely moving," the little knight frantically said. "We have to move. Um. Is your... um... what's the word -- bicep? Is your left bicep hurting? Because you're gripping it really hard. With your right hand. Reaching over your -- um. Are they hurting? Is it your legs? Cerea, talk to me, please..."

The silent girl forced herself to take a step. Then another. The back hooves kept trying to stumble.

"Um," the Guard tried again. "Um..."

The palace alarm went off again.

Both females glanced back. The little knight failed to make a break for the marble walls.

"They're just repeating the evacuation alert," Nightwatch said. "In case somepony missed it the first time. Um. But you knew that." And with a surge not so much of volume as intensity, because the little knight had to be careful about anypony being in hearing range, "Cerea, good things happen because of you! Tirek is gone! The whole world will sleep better, once they finally know how it happened!"

"They'll just say one monster killed another," floated atop a sea of emotional illness. "One monster summoned the other --"

"-- and then there's the arsonist finally being captured! If it wasn't for the information which you and the Bearers sent back --"

The centaur blinked.

"...what?"

Which just made the little knight smile. (It was still a rather mobile smile, and the girl had to watch it cross a hundred and twenty degrees of arc.)

"It took a couple of days to find her," Nightwatch stated. "Narrowing the search. But the investigation team was able to track the ground carriage. They found where it dropped her off, and then they brought her in. She's in the palace, Cerea, in the cells, and everypony knows it!" Paused. "Um. Well, they know she was captured. But not that she's in the cells. That's a secret. Or that the Princesses are going to question her themselves! Um. Well, that's the first part --"

The girl had stopped moving again.

"-- she's in the cells?"

"...yes," the little knight tried. "I said that. It makes it easier to question her privately. And keep an eye on her. I checked her cell myself. But she's got other Guards with her, making sure she stays in place. Um. Except not right now. Is the disc --"

"-- you saw her?"

except not right now

"It's allowed," emerged from the verbal sparring tunnel on defense. "I talked to her, Cerea --" and there was a moment when the injured wings shuddered "-- for a few minutes. Directly to the arsonist." Which was followed by a snort. "I'm probably supposed to say 'alleged arsonist', but we talked. I know, Cerea. I think anypony who listens to her would know. There's something wrong --"

no

"-- what happens to a prisoner during an evacuation?"

The little knight's eyes were going wide, and it was all concern now, the centaur couldn't scent anything else past the cloud of worry...

"The palace is under siege, and she's in a horn restraint! She's helpless, Cerea! If somepony's helpless, you have to get them to safety! Even a prisoner! Maybe especially a prisoner! We would have evacuated you!" There was a single sharp breath. "Um. If you'd still been in the cells, and something had happened, and everything else was different --"

It wasn't deduction. The girl didn't consider herself to be fantastically intelligent. (She knew she was smarter than the average human, but also didn't feel that was much of an accomplishment.) Nothing about the girl's current thoughts was based in logic. It couldn't be.

Not when you were dealing with somepony else's fantasy.

What was fanaticism? You told yourself a tale, and you kept providing the same recital to a single receptive member of the audience until every last word was believed. Until the tale was the whole of your life.

The girl wasn't a genius. But she knew how to think in stories.

The arsonist had to belong to one of the supremacist groups -- the unicorn one: the girl had just remembered that there had been a field involved in placing the ignition chemicals. The Princesses were going to interrogate her, and the girl had to believe that the dark mare would be rather good at that --

-- the prisoner's location was supposed to be a secret. But there was a traitor in the palace. The arsonist had remained hidden for a long time: something which the police procedurals suggested as somepony having hidden her. And if the arsonist talked...

The attackers, acting as the heroes of their own stories...

Were they rescuing a friend? Giving everything they had to get back one of their own? It felt like a possibility. So did the act of recovering her before she could talk.

Except that the arsonist was in the palace cells. A place which was fortified by layers of magic, and the counterspells were only keyed to a few. Any traitor who was trying to directly break her out would either need to be part of that group, find some way of sabotaging the workings...

...or set everything up.

The girl knew how to think in stories -- but that could be its own hazard. Madness was someone deciding that their personal tale had replaced the whole of reality: everyone else just had the details wrong.

Cerea knew she was telling herself a story, and there was a moment when she questioned the reason for that. Because this was the tale which absolved her. Which meant she was nothing more than an excuse, and it was always her fault, always --

-- I've had this argument --

"-- what if this is about her?"

The sleek body stopped moving. A silver gaze locked in shock, and a low branch poked unnoticed pine needles into one straining black ear.

"...what?"

"She's going to be questioned!" The girl's arms waved outwards: the nausea tried to pick a direction for overbalance and found itself overwhelmed by an excess of options. "What if somepony helped hide her, kept her from being caught for this long? What if she names them?"

"Then there would be an investigation," the confused pegasus said. "More arrests, if we were lucky. Maybe even going all the way up. But -- Cerea, we know it's the protesters who came in, the herd leaders for their organizations are already going to have a hard time distancing themselves from this! Even if they aren't here right now." Which triggered the briefest of frowns. "Or maybe they are. It's not like I saw everypony -- well, two of them might be." With open disgust, "I don't think anypony is ever going to see Mrs. Panderaghast in a fight. I guess she could just fall on somepony --"

The girl could think in stories. Second-guessing was somewhat easier.

Maybe it doesn't make sense.
They're risking too much.
They could lose just about everything. Nightwatch is right. It'll be hard for the leaders to keep themselves out of court. And even if they do, a lot of their membership might wind up in prison. The ponies in charge might stay free -- somehow -- but how much of their power base is lost when half of their herd is gone?
There's going to be a price no matter what happens. The only way to avoid some of the consequences would be --

-- no. She had to focus. She needed to keep talking --

"-- Nightwatch, I know I'm guessing!" It counted for speech, but it probably wasn't helping her cause. Arm gestures didn't do much either, and she didn't think the pegasus could interpret finger movements. "But a third of the attackers are probably from her group! They could be going for her!"

"They can't get to her!" the pegasus protested. "She's in the cells --"

The mare abruptly stopped. Stared at the centaur, as every muscle went tight.

"She isn't," the centaur urgently said. "Because the easiest way to break out of prison is by getting someone to open the door. She's being evacuated, Nightwatch. Nopony has to get her out of the cell: they just have to get her away from the Guards --"

"Sun and Moon," the little knight breathed. "Cerea, I don't know if you're right. It could be a lot more than this. But somepony has to check --"

The silver gaze moved left, towards the cave. Went back to Cerea, shifted towards the palace, and feathers seemed to twist against themselves.

"I have to guard you," Nightwatch almost whispered. "It's the two of us here, it has to be. I can't leave you unless one of the alarms goes off. But the Princesses wanted you at the cave. They'll come for you eventually, and we can tell them --"

"-- they may not get the chance!" Arm gestures definitely didn't seem to be enough for getting the point across. The little knight still wasn't used to arm gestures. Maybe hoof stomping needed to get involved. Or a tail lash -- oh, good: that was already under way. "The palace is under siege! There's too many ponies at risk: they may not come out here until it's too late! You're the only one who can go --"

"-- I can't! You're helpless! You could die! You already died, and it can't happen again --"

-- the girl mostly knew that she'd lowered her body to the ground in front of the pegasus when she felt dirt and grass against her belly and barrel. There was also a surge of nausea to mark the end of the abrupt shift: something which made Cerea briefly turn her head away from the little knight, just in case this was finally the moment when her digestive system tried to do something --

"...Cerea?"

The desperation was still present in every syllable, and none of the intensity had been muted. It was simply a change in volume, added to a fresh surge of fear.

Afraid for me...

Her arms went forward. Palms placed gentle pressure just above the pony's shoulders, and fingers moved through the short black fur.

She looked at her friend, and did so for what felt like the last time.

"I'll get to the cave," Cerea told Nightwatch. "I'll hide at the back. They won't find me. Go towards the palace. Find somepony. Tell them that they have to check the cells."

And then she realized the pegasus was weeping.

"You're helpless," the little knight said. "If I'm not there --"

"-- my life for all lives."

She'd thought it would be the final argument. It didn't work.

"It's not the Princess," Nightwatch furiously shot back. "It's just an arsonist --"

"-- your arsonist --"

The pony's muscles were shaking beneath the girl's palms. "-- you're more important, we could catch her again, get her back, I have to watch you --"

"It's my life," Cerea softly offered.

If they find me.
If they catch me...
...then it all happens at once.
Then I don't have to be afraid any more.

"Cerea --"

"-- I..." The girl swallowed. "...I -- went through a lot, trying to have my own life. And every Guard has to be ready to make the sacrifice, in any second of their lives. To decide what's worth sacrificing themselves for. When... it really isn't a decision at all."

The tears were soaking into the mare's fur. Darkening what had already been so black.

"-- please --"

What season was it, in this part of the gardens? The girl didn't know.

"I'll hide. I'll be okay for a minute. You know that. We haven't heard anypony come out this far. If you go now --"

"-- I can't..."

Just that it was too cold and, for what rose from inside, warm.

"You're the only one who can," Cerea whispered. "And we're losing time. Go."

There was a second when the girl thought the shaking had stopped. And then she realized the pegasus had backed away from her hands.

The little knight blinked up at her. Moisture fell.

"Get into the cave."

"I will."

"Don't die."

Then the mare turned. Faced towards the palace, and began to gallop.

Cerea pivoted just enough to watch her go. Tried to stand, pushing all four hooves against the soil, and felt the nausea surging again --

-- gallop.
She can't fly.
Because of me.
She told me about pegasus magic. So did the Sergeant. Movement is part of it. She can't fly and her wing movements are limited.
The Sergeant probably trusted her to get me out here because he didn't think anypony was going that far into the gardens. But she's going back. If she can't find somepony quickly...
but i can't do anything
it was the sword
not the wielder, just the sword
and the sword is gone

Her legs wouldn't fully straighten. She seemed to be swaying. Her right hand sought the support of a treetrunk, found a sapling, and wood seemed to groan under her weight.

just the sword
helpless
i'm
it doesn't matter what happens to me
i can't live here
survive here
defenseless
all it takes is one pony and
then no one will get hurt any more
my life
my life for...
...helpless...

The nausea swirled. Expanded. Headed for the back of her eyes, the tip of every hair strand.
She couldn't seem to move. The world was beginning to blur. Time already had.
The panic attack wasn't coming. Panic required energy, and she didn't have any strength left.

i've always been helpless.
against my mother
the herd
the humans
the world
it was just the sword, the sword is gone and i'm here and i shouldn't be, i never would have come here if it wasn't for him, all of those ponies wounded and bleeding and he's dead and i'm still here
i just want to go home

helpless
always
i want to see my sister

Her hand slipped down the bark. She almost picked up a splinter.

my life for
for her life
she could get hurt
killed
but i'm helpless, i've always been
why am i here?
why did i leave the gap?

Hope.
The torment of hope --

wait
why did i...
Why did I leave?
I... I said it. In Tartarus.
"Because being in a world where I could be attacked at any moment, couldn't do anything to stop it -- how is that any different from living with you?"
The form of assault. Physical instead of emotional. That's it.
...and when it's emotions, I don't even need someone to hit me. No one's as good at tearing me apart as I am...

Her legs were beginning to straighten.

I was helpless. In the gap, because it was my mother and I couldn't do anything. So I traded the helplessness: one form for another. I went into a world where I knew I could be attacked at any time. Where I couldn't strike back without being sent to her again. Forever.

And I still went.

On the worst days, she had retreated into herself. A girl who had failed over and over again, trapped within a gap with no way out, rushing towards an inevitable future filled with nothing more than the echoes of what had come before. Stared into the shadows which seemed to make up the whole of her life. And there might be a wish, because it felt like the only way for everything to stop.

But then she'd come out.

(Knowing she would fail.)

Because of hope.

(Because she wanted to be loved.)

And the torment had gone on.

(But she hadn't failed.)

Helpless against the purse snatcher, just before I met Kimihito. What was I supposed to do, with a practice blade? One I couldn't touch him with? Was I going to intimidate him by galloping after his scooter? Make him crash because a centaur was coming up from behind?

But I chased him anyway.

Helpless against my mother in the arena. The herd leader. The strongest. Unbeatable. I was going to lose, and she would take me back to the gap. I knew it.

I picked up a lance.

And there were a few precious months when I had the sword. I was lost and afraid and I might never be able to go home, but at least I could fight. I could finally do something. And I told myself it was just the sword, because Princess Luna took me out with a feint, and -- I was helpless again. Pressed down against dead leaves in the forest. Captured, and she could have killed me at any time, just because the sword was out of my hand.

And then she was kind.
I didn't deserve that.

But I...

Almost all the way up now.

I put that together in my head, didn't I? That it was just the sword. No sword, and I was helpless all over again. I finally had a chance and I didn't want to give that up. It was the sword, not the wielder. The wielder wasn't anything without the sword.

I lost to an alicorn.

...basic feint: have to watch for those...

I was in a fight which was beyond what I could manage and I lost.

That's every day of my life.

I didn't have the sword and I went into the competitions against the older fillies. I had a practice blade which I couldn't touch anyone with, and I went to Japan. I had no power and nothing special about me which wasn't what every other centaur could do, except that every other centaur didn't keep losing all the time. And I didn't stop one insect in a swarm or beat out six other girls in a contest for one heart, and I was in a place where I was vulnerable and weak and lost and helpless
and I got up every morning
and I kept trying anyway
because I wanted to be loved

So I lived with the fear.
The fear of being vulnerable, every day.
You're always vulnerable when you look for love.
I was helpless, and I still went out there.
And what if I could have struck back, with a plastic blade? With a real one? It wouldn't have protected me against a mob, or a bullet. And I still went out there --

-- WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?

Her fingers closed. Bark crumbled within her grip.

My whole life is about going into battles I couldn't win! And still going! And there were a few months when I thought I had a chance, and now I'm just going to stop?

All of the statues here, honor statues of the ones who did what had to be done. For duty, and the world.

How can I just stand here in these gardens while somepony I --

The nausea was still there. She knew that. The illness wasn't fading, and it might be with her for a lifetime. She just couldn't seem to currently find it under the surge of hot tears.

...if I won a competition, then my mother would love me.
If I went into the world, then someone would love me.
someone had to love me
...and they did.
Papi loves me.
Miia loves me.

(She almost smiled.)

Mero and I sort of put up with each other. Because I like some stories to have happy endings. We argued about literature a lot.
Rachnera's a really annoying older sister who thinks bullying makes for good lessons.
Suu is still learning. I don't know if she understands what love is. But she cares about us.
Lala... loves me.

And I loved them.
Even the spider, Lala. Even the spider. In a way.
They were my sisters.
The shapes didn't matter.
They still don't.
Because Nightwatch loves me.

(She almost laughed.)

...not that way.
If either of us starts looking at the other that way, we're both in trouble.
But...
...I went into the world to find a partner. Someone who would fight beside me.
It... just turned out to be the wrong world.
She's my partner.
My sister.
Somepony I love.
I'm not a knight.
Maybe I'll never be one.
I don't have a weapon.
But the weapon should never matter more than the wielder.
And what kind of sister lets her sibling fight alone?

The nausea didn't fade. It simply took a small step back, as if it had decided to watch for a while. And then she was standing.

Her vision snapped back into focus. Time resumed a normal flow, and she realized that it had been less than two minutes since the little knight had left. Given the distance to the palace, for a pegasus who couldn't fly and didn't have the kind of ground speed which allowed the mare to compensate...

Breathing steadied, as much as it could. Her breasts heaved a few times, possibly as a warm-up exercise. She had every intention of heaving something before the day ended. Possibly somepony.

Then she twisted at the upper waist, let double-jointed arms reach down to the left, and powerful hands tore some fabric away from the hospital gown's more exposed side. That area was just about completely out in the open anyway: one lost strip wouldn't make much of a difference.

It also wouldn't be much of a sling. But it was better than nothing. And as far as gathering ammunition might go -- she was already outside...

The pegasus automatically glanced back, because her first assumption upon hearing something that large and heavy racing up behind her was that Princess Celestia wanted to have a word --

"Cerea?"

"You're not going in there by yourself!" the centaur declared as strands of blonde hair moved in all directions: the trim was recent, but the hairpins were still gone. "We have to --"

"YOU SAID YOU'D GO TO THE CAVE!" Something which emerged while running forward and looking backwards. In the gardens. The girl was worried about having the pegasus trip on a root.

"I changed my mind!"

"You're helpless!" The tones and scent of deepest concern were surging again, interlaced with terror. "You can't --"

"I know I'm helpless!" the centaur half-yelped. "It's an ongoing condition! But you can't fly! So we'll be helpless together!"

The silver eyes went wide.

"You're galloping! Do you feel better --"

She was still sick. But it felt as if she was having an easier time with focusing past it: something which had started at the moment she'd made her decision. Her best theory was that she was in shock again. Her own body couldn't believe how stupid she was being.

But this was her partner. And when it came to one life for another... you didn't have to be a true knight to make that trade.

"-- this isn't a full gallop! We have to stay with each other! And when you're on the ground --"

The centaur didn't really think about it. She just accelerated a little more, caught up to the pegasus and matched her pace on the right.

"What are you --" Nightwatch just barely got out.

"-- jump!"

A fully justified "What?" was jolted free.

"Jump! Straight up! And keep your wings folded!"

The pegasus stared at her partner. Four knees flexed, sprang --

-- the centaur leaned forward, reached out at the same time --

"HEY!"

-- you really don't weigh much.
You sort of fit under one arm.
...if I press you in against my upper torso and use that for support --
(The blush began to rise.)
-- right. Put them together and my breasts are wider than my upper torso. They stick out to the sides.
...her head is -- sort of...
And now she's pushing both of them to the one side.
...get her snout a little more forward...
Okay.
I'm probably the only person in the world who knows this is embarrassing.
Let's keep it that way for at least six hours.
Accelerate.

Venomous

War can be regarded as chaos which exists in an incomplete form. Something lacking that necessary thread of order, while obliterating all dignity in the first strike. There can be plans, diagrams, designed movements and counters -- but in the end, it's going to come down to a desperate struggle for survival.

There are many ways to interpret war, for the mind to try forcing it into making some level of false sense. (Ignore 'adventure', for that designation exists for those whose memories have never included the scent of blood or the feel of flesh as it gives way. Anyone going for 'romance' has entered a realm well beyond a normal level of hopelessness, and should possibly be left there.) But when it comes to the participants, the way those caught within it both react and interact... try to think of them as alchemy.

The vast majority of ponies don't understand alchemy. There are a few who possess some concept of how it works, and a scant number have marks for it -- but for the most part, they see it as something best left to the zebras and in that, they've partially given it the wrong definition. Because with zebras, it's about harmonics. It's not so much looking at how things react to each other: it's trying to find the ways in which they want to work together.

(That's not what's happening here, not in war. Mostly.)

And yet alchemy is a natural part of existence. Personalities are forged in a crucible. Take all the events of a life, along with every last reaction. There's the heat of embarrassment: something which tends to linger on the fringes of the mix, for it never truly fades. Stress and demand... those create the pressure cooker. Affection is a gentle simmer. Both friendship and love share the same risk: taking a chance on letting another's mix enter and alter yours. Blend it all together. Stir across the course of a lifetime. And all the while, let the slowly-resolving results tell themselves a story.

But ponies don't understand alchemy, even when every last adult could be said to have gone through it.

The manifestation of the mark could be thought of as alchemy.

The moment when a life catalyzes.

There was a group of invaders hidden in the passages, lurking in wait for the evacuation alarm, and every last one of them was carefully chosen. Personally selected. The leaders of their factions were looking for certain qualities. A level of loyalty which went well beyond that of the normal membership. The willingness to do what had be done. And... rage.

The girl, who doesn't think much of the Americans' comics, feels that 'rage is red' works out to something very trite. To her, the produced scent is something which suggests smoke billowing up from a boiling toxin, added to a hint of scorched flesh. It's something constantly on the verge of burning itself out -- or up. And the faction leaders understand that last part, because there's a crucial level of heat which must be maintained in order to keep their memberships intact -- but there's also a safe maximum. When things boil over... that's when they get what they'll always claim are those who acted fully of their own accord, with no approval from the leaders whatsoever and a complete misreading of the true message. And of course, you need something to blame. The organization's teachings clearly aren't it, because look at all of the ponies who didn't lose it. So what did the wayward do before they snapped? Didn't somepony see her with a copy of the Bugle? Then the solution is clear: ban the Bugle. Blame the last thing the pony read, the last meal eaten, any odd colors on a dress they might have seen in a store window -- blame almost everything in the world for being responsible and perhaps no one will notice that the only exclusion on the list was yourself.

There were multiple criteria applied when assembling this group. Possession of a near-constant anger level that bubbles along at the rate which normally exists just before the first kick is launched was not the least of the considerations. The willingness to utterly hurt ponies was a major factor. So was believing that anypony who wasn't one of their own deserved it.

They got into the palace together. (They hated one word in that sentence more than any other, but -- they had their orders.) They went directly for one particular passage. All of them had to wait in that passage, and needed to do so while indulging in nothing else. No breaking into offices. No targeting staff. No searching for proof.

They waited for the evacuation alarm, because that was going to be the key moment in their story. (It wound up going off just as a train's boiler built up the final bit of steam pressure, and a fur-dyed mare in a private compartment felt the jolt as the most vital wheels in her plan began to turn.) And they had to do so without hurting each other -- although when it came to both entrance and exit, every last one reached the independent conclusion that it would be rather easy to cover up a little purely 'accidental' shoving.

And they had been provided with a carefully-drawn map. (The unicorns had custody of that, and refused to share.)

The chosen ingredients were picked for volatility.
They want to explode.

Wordia Spinner's group is well on the way to their exit, and the mare is starting to feel worn out. She's a rather effective fighter, especially given her core belief that protests against unfair tactics are the first resort of the loser -- but she doesn't have a lot of endurance, she doesn't keep herself in good shape, there were a few more encounters along the way, and... she wants a bottle. Part of her needs a bottle, and she's almost starting to wonder as to why that inner voice is so strong. But she's nearly reached what's supposed to be some degree of safety. It just isn't necessarily going to work out that way.

You could look at her position as co-fighter as a particularly odd brew. The result of forcing an unexpected mix together under extremely high pressure, and watching to see how long it holds. Her temporary companions, however, regard the situation as Wordia having impressed herself onto the staff.

That one unicorn Guard mare is waiting for exactly the right moment to tell her.

Take the most common, ordinary, unnoticed base element which could possibly exist. Then shove poison down its ears until every bit of ingested foulness begins to reemerge from the throat. Tell it that everything taken in makes it special, with special care to imply that there's no other value present. And then, after the mix erupts in exactly the wrong place... leave it to stew in what are now internally-produced toxins.

The arsonist knows she's special. She also knows that she did nothing more than what had to be done, and that everything she did was both the only decision possible and somepony else's fault. She can keep all of those self-imposed facts in mind at the same time, and do so while applying an internal label of Fact at an intensity which could make Mrs. Panderaghast blanch.

The mare is capable of believing any number of things, and there was a time in her once-dull life when the main qualifier for putting faith in another's words would have been somepony feeling she was actually important to speak with. But she's been talking to herself for a very long time now. And as it turned out, she had the real answers all along.

So it didn't surprise her when the Guards (the traitor and the inferior) opened her cell. The palace was being evacuated? Then she had to be moved. In fact, it seemed quite possible that whatever was going on might have been centered around her in the first place. She's just that important.

The mare made up a new lyric about being important and tried it out at low volume, because the Guards are hardly worthy of hearing her sing. She always knew she was important. It just took a while to find out how.

Then she receives proof.

The Guards hear the proof approaching: even barely-ponies like the two armored dolts would have a hard time missing it. And at first, they probably think it's reinforcements coming, because she can see their stupid faces and they briefly look happy to hear hooves on the approach.

But then the words reach them.

The words weren't any part of the plan. But these are among the purest of fanatics and when you get too many of those together, the slogans are going to come out. They replace thought, substitute for battlecries, and put off the faction fighting for a few more seconds. The words give the Guards something they can react to and at the moment they realize there's an attack galloping towards them, they act.

They had enough warning time. If they had used it to go off on their own, they would have escaped.

But they're Guards. And their priority is her.

They change course, because the evacuation route would have gone directly into the attackers. They try to reach another way out. But the intruders see them, and then there's a chase and they're trying to move her, they push against her and shove her but of course she's not going to cooperate, she saw unicorns back there and a third of the slogans were hers. (The rest? She already has an explanation for that, and she's just waiting for the right moment to express it.) She knows they're coming for her, and it means she does absolutely nothing to help.

The traitor Guard has to levitate her, carry her along. And that pony has enough field strength to do it -- but now she isn't doing much of anything else.

There's a chase. The Guards manage to stay ahead for a while, and they turn here and there, use the confusing layout of the lower level to some advantage, but they're carrying a burden and they can't get enough of a lead to drop completely out of sight. There are no rooms close enough to the cells which can truly serve as defensible positions, and trying to convert one wouldn't be getting her to safety. They are, as per their training, trying to get her out. And she just watches the attackers coming up behind them, and sometimes she hums and if her field bubble gets a little too close to the unicorn generating it, she tries to kick through the border because that horn has to stay lit.

The intruders catch up.
The fight begins.

In her opinion, it takes longer than it should. The obvious problem was the bring-alongs, because the Guards prioritized and... there are ways in which that can be a mistake. Standardized tactics can turn into errors etched in stone and when ponies face a mixed group of their own, the first priority is frequently to drop the unicorns. Because earth ponies have strength and there's a full list of pegasus techniques somewhere, but a unicorn is a perpetual wild card. Unless you've personally seen every trick which a given corona can offer, you can never be entirely sure what any given unicorn can do.

She understands that completely. She's been working on a new trick of her own.
As far as the mare is concerned, going for the CUNET members first is a compliment.
...having them actually go down is a sign that somepony may need to do some minor culling of the membership.

There's a fight, and it's two Guards against that selected group. Two Guards can do a lot. But they're doing all of it while trying to protect her and she... doesn't care. But putting her behind them... well, her horn is covered in metal. That added something to the impacts.

She doesn't think they're dead. (Not that it matters.) They both look like they're breathing, especially because there's blood on that one snout and it's not going to bubble unless there's air passing through it. But they're both down. Incapable of fighting, much less sounding any degree of extra alarm. But there was a point when they were calling out for reinforcements, probably just hoping that any of the other traitors were close enough to hear and now the victorious group is more than a little nervous. Every distant hoofstep could be trying to get that much closer, even when those sounds seem to be coming from above.

One of them starts to move towards the wounded CUNET members -- but then there's what feels like a full outburst of hoof-produced overhead noise, and the conscious ponies shift priorities. They have to move, they start to surround her, and the fallen are left where they dropped. Prioritizing.

They tell the mare that they've come for her. To get her out.

She's proud. Of course she'll go with them! Because she heard her own slogans, and that means she knows who's really in charge of this.
She'll have to be in charge now, because the others were too weak.
She's especially proud to tell them that they finally know their place. As those who've chosen to serve their superior.
(There is a reaction when she says that. She can't be bothered to see it.)
She deserves this.
She's important.

There are three factions of invaders trying to fight their way through the upper levels of the palace. They have been forced to work together and in the most absolute sense, they have a lot in common. The foundation of that emotional cloning starts with a steadfast belief in their own superiority, added to the necessary cart which carries 'Everypony else has it wrong' in constant echo range. And 'everypony else' very much includes the ones they've been told to fight alongside. They've been forced to work with those they hate, and the tendency of disparate elements to use the foxhole of combat as the kiln which forms lifelong connections just isn't applying here. Not when every little victory is seen as having successfully given orders, which your inferiors clearly should have been following all along. And if you must protect somepony, then maybe you can move in after the second kick.

Still, they have a lot in common. So do radioactives, and you don't want to get too many of those in close proximity either.

Reactants with too many similarities. You can't force them to bond for long. Because in the alchemy of hate, the mixed groups of ponies trying to fight their way through the upper levels of the palace represent supersaturation.

It's an artificial state. Something which can be achieved, but... it's unnatural. There's only so many of the mixed toxins which can be held in rough suspension, and that's been maintaining for all of those weeks protesting together outside the gates. Keep them in proximity for too much time, compress everything into a small space, apply the heat of attack and you might get something very close to critical mass. And their leaders have been trying to keep them from reacting with each other.

Supersaturation is a delicate condition. Any new factor...

There's a group closing in on one of the reading rooms. They've done some damage, but -- they know the palace is fighting back. Something which wasn't supposed to happen -- but they can still win, because they're superior. In fact, every last pony in the group is one-third superior and two-thirds inferior: it depends on who's thinking about them.

They're all keeping an eye on the doors, the intersections, and each other. Looking for anything suspicious.

It means the scroll gets noticed.

There's a small group of benches in one of the deeper alcoves: a sort of secondary reading area outside the main one, for when a Princess needs to use the central space and everypony else just spontaneously decides to take their books outside. Those benches have plenty of cushions, and... a portion of the scroll is sticking out from beneath a plush purple edge. You wouldn't see it unless you were looking for something odd. (Or looking for something at all.) It was obviously hidden in a hurry, and not particularly well.

A poorly-hidden scroll is worthy of notice.

One of the unicorns slows down. Her horn ignites, collects the missive and because it's the palace, she tries all the counterspells she knows: the instant result is a shower of sparks as she effortlessly breaks through every layer of protection which isn't actually there. She tells herself that it's safe to open the thing, and she's absolutely right. The quickly-unrolling paper is tilted away from the rest of the group, allowing the first reading to be for her eyes alone --

-- it's rather more of a scrawl than usual: something which suggests the old mare was both in a hurry and had been trying to hide her style. But the clumsy attempt at deception has utterly failed, because the unicorn still recognizes the fieldwriting. You can't grow up in this nation and not know it, not when it's been at the bottom of every signed law to make a history book for the last thousand years.

R3

Trigger Event Zantor is go. Wait until you reach Location Prektic, then move against others. Palace MUST support your faction after lessers are removed: will be easier if you win.

Make sure you're the one who recovers this. The weaklings can't know.

TO THE PAIN.
TO THE FLAG.
TO THE END OF OUR ENEMIES.

C.

The unicorn's corona instantly goes double.

Because the old mare knows how conspiracy theorists think. A trail of documentation created over the course of years is a carefully-planted forged false lead, but a single stray scroll sent to a staffer who was going to be evacuating along this general route, with instructions to hide it as poorly as possible? Something which somewhat echoes what their faction has been telling them all along, as the Solar Princess is finally caught out supporting their inferiors through making deliberate plans to sabotage their lives?

"WHICH OF YOU IS R3?"

For the pony who discovers it, that's evidence.

Of course, there's some ponies who suspect it's a deliberate deception. They say so. That's the first sign of their working for the palace. And after that -- well, it's a little harder to get the protests out in the middle of the fight and after that, two-thirds of them have been hoping for a chance to attack the unicorn anyway, so as long as she attacked first...

Not everypony falls for it. There are scrolls being planted in various, widely-separated places and at best, a third of the discovered ones disrupt the supersaturation. But when it does work, it makes the emotional state collapse back towards a more normal base -- which in this case means taking out those long-suspended energies on everything in the immediate vicinity. Especially if it has a horn. Or wings. Or neither.

It's a cruel trick. But... the old mare is kind. She spent much of a lifetime in learning how to be so.

It's war. Forgive her for backsliding.

The girl, galloping towards the palace walls with a slightly-stunned pegasus carried under one arm, represents alchemy in progress. There's a certain distillation of purpose under way.

She is not alkahest: the solvent which dissolves all the bonds of pony society into a primordial boiling soup. (Even after potentially realizing what truly might be taking place, it's what she fears. She just doesn't have time to express it. Certain other concerns are currently in play.) But she is a catalyst. Something which makes previously-disassociated factors come together in new ways...

Call her the potter's clay, still being shaped. The terra figulina of another Terra.

Recently, there were a number of foreign elements introduced into a new system. She's trying to ignore them, or at least focus past what they've been doing to her. (The illness is still very much present, but she's managed to push it down to background awareness. It seems to ease off somewhat when she's concentrating on what they have to accomplish.) But alchemy is the reactions created by a life in progress, and there are so many of those foreign elements. A thaumatologist might describe them as all the elements of existence -- followed by watching closely, because alchemy isn't the sort of thing you're supposed to do as creative cooking. You don't just pour everything into a living cauldron and wait to see what happens -- but as long as someone else already did it, you might as well observe. From a great distance.

Elements...

Nopony told her about Sun and Moon, because none could have imagined it as something she needed to learn. Similarly, there has been no discussion of the pony virtues, and that's placed a lot of potential questions on hold: at the very least, she would want to know how that particular sextet arose. Every culture is different, and the six honored by ponies wouldn't be fully echoed within the girl's herd. Valor, determination, steadfastness... centaur females look to what's almost a completely different set of standards, while the stallions feel that clean-and-jerking the largest amount of weight is all the virtue anyone needs.

She would wish for the choices to be explained. And inevitably, she would measure herself against them.

The girl wishes to be kind, but... it's hard. Kindness represents a softening of the self and in both herd and household alike, that could feel so very much like showing weakness. Making herself vulnerable, when the war for a single heart means there was always someone waiting to strike. And when it comes to receipt -- what has she done to earn it? What can she do it to earn it every day? Is she even worthy of something so simple? Love felt as if it would be impossible to find, and its gentler cousin...

She wants to be more honest with herself, possibly even in a way which brings down the number of internal attacks. Loyalty? Oh, she recognizes that: it's the virtue where ponies and centaurs overlap -- but she left her herd. And laughter? It's elusive. The one who so often feels like the subject of so many cosmic jests can find it impossible to laugh along, or just to laugh at all.

One virtue might run a little too deep: something universal among the Guard. Her former liege bore an Element once, and that's why the dark mare understands. The girl would readily give up her life for that of another, and the final gift of Generosity is sacrifice.

Magic...

...she would have a lot of questions. And it might take a Princess to explain it, because the librarian has yet to go that far in her studies. These are words which have yet to reach a scroll: what is magic, when expressed as a virtue? It's deep change. Inner transformation. Personal growth. The willingness to admit you aren't perfect, that you could be more than you are, and the drive to be better. Something the girl has carried with her from the start.

(If somepony tried to explain all of it at this exact instant, she would cut them off with a sincere wish to be carrying a little less magic. 'Prithee' would probably get involved.)

She's... trying. She's not perfect, but she's trying. It's usually all you can ask for.

Right now, she's mostly trying to ignore the screaming.

There was still a battle raging in the air around the tallest tower -- but no part of that had spared a glance down for the two mares. And when it came to those whom Cerea knew were at ground level, there had been a deliberate choice. Her chosen path towards the castle avoided the Sergeant entirely, because he had to watch over physician and wounded. He couldn't abandon them, and he didn't need the distraction.

(On a more practical level, Cerea really didn't want to hear his reaction when he saw her heading back inside. There was probably a level of profanity which would collapse the ground under her hooves and if he truly didn't like her decision, he just might do it without the actual cursing.)

They weren't seeing a lot of ponies. (Cerea didn't have all of the evacuation routes memorized, and so was unaware that she was avoiding most of the paths which staffers would have taken. It didn't matter. They needed a Guard.) Most of the ones she did race past seemed to be invaders who'd managed to become severely lost, and her best option was to keep racing because she was faster than anypony on the ground and one of her arms was just a little bit occupied.

Cerea needed to avoid fighting, for as long as possible. She and Nightwatch had to pass the theory to somepony who could act on it. And they were seeing ponies whom the girl was certain had never been any part of the staff, because their first reaction to seeing a hard-galloping centaur was to scream.

But they didn't try to fight her. They just screamed. The same scream.

Nightwatch had said it to her: that when most ponies looked at Guards, they saw the armor. The arsonist had taken special care to research beyond that -- but for the majority of viewers, removing the metal would render its former wearer anonymous. The little knight wasn't recognizable out of armor.

...which was currently the problem.

"THE CENTAUR IS FOALNAPPING THAT PEGASUS!"

It was a belief which begged certain questions, all of which were at least temporarily answered through standing stock-still and reviewing all possible options: as those on the ground consisted of earth ponies and unicorns from the supremacy factions, none of those included rescue. And as long as they weren't moving...

A knight could work with that. Cerea just did her best not to break stride.

Eventually, they approached a shadowed portion of the wall. There were no ponies anywhere within sight. 'Scent' was a little more uncertain, but Cerea was fairly sure that nopony was close enough to react.

"This is one of the outside entrances, right?" the girl asked. "I remembered that from the drills. But nopony showed me how to open this one yet. So you'll have to let us in."

Silence.

"Did I miss it?"

No response.

...I've been carrying her at full gallop while pressing her firmly against the side of my left breast and it had to be firmly because even with the bra, I couldn't take a chance on having her getting hit in the snout over and over and --
-- I made sure her snout was clear, I can feel her breathing but she's not talking, she's not --

The centaur hastily adjusted her grip, knelt as best she could while her right arm went under her bustline and did its best to help. Some rather careful movements managed to get the pegasus down to the well-shaded grass.

Cerea straightened, reluctantly backed up to get a better viewing angle. Dazed silver eyes stared at her. And there were still no words.

Frantically, "Are you okay? I didn't hurt you? I was trying not to put too much pressure on your wing! Tell me I didn't --"

Four dark legs staggered in place. Wing joints loosened.

"...soft..."

Cerea blinked.

"Nightwatch?"

"...I think they nuzzle back..."

Several hundred stories marched through the girl's mind in rapid review. None of their recorded dialogue offered anything helpful to say.

"Let's just get inside," Cerea tried. "Before we're seen."

Feathers rustled. The pegasus abruptly shook her head, and the black wings refolded. The silver gaze turned to regard cold stone.

"Right. Watch closely. You'll need this later --"

"-- I can't stay with the Guard --"

The nausea surged, and all four of the centaur's knees tried to buckle. The pegasus, who had just fully focused her attention on the wall, failed to notice.

"-- if you don't want to set off the trap, you start by pressing here --"

Immediately, "Trap?"

"It's a ramp going in. Miss the first stone and it's a frictionless ramp. Of course, that doesn't stop the pegasi." With what felt like surprising grimness, "The pegasi get the foam. So after you press that first one, move to --"

And then they were inside.

It took somewhat more effort than Cerea had been expecting. The entrance they'd used ended in one of the halls which had multiple art alcoves, was partially concealed by one of those alcoves, and...

She'd had to shove at the door, force her mass against it in order to move the unexpected weight on the other side. The result had been (eventual) movement -- along with a rather loud grinding noise as something scraped against the marble, and she was waiting for somepony to investigate what the fuss was about.

Scent had flooded the corridor at the moment the seal was broken. Fear and rage, commingled to the point where they were essentially inextricable. The air was saturated with them. Cerea wasn't sure she would be able to find any older traces within the mix. The palace was going to need thorough ventilation before anything could come close to being normal again.

"I'm through!" Nightwatch softly called out from the other side of the new gap. "Give it another push!"

It took three before Cerea could force herself through the opening. (Her lower rib cage still refused to compress.) She automatically peered out of the alcove, checked left and right, felt stupid because of course Nightwatch had already done that and finally looked down to see what the problem had been in the first place, not to mention what was making the new noise --

"-- Cerea?"

Slowly, the centaur stepped away from the remnants of the fallen griffon statute. Fragments of broken stone feathers clattered against her hooves.

It started with a falling statue...

Or rather, a portion had begun that way. That which had made Princess Luna feel she deserved a chance.

But I knocked it over to start with. It was my...

While she'd been on her sickbed, her hips had been studying vocabulary. This had meant trying to learn the full definition of 'upchuck'. They now felt like they were perilously close to mastering it as an action.

...I didn't have to take the impact. I could have run.
...I had to take the impact.
A knight would have --

She took a breath. The illness stepped back again.

"Just thinking," the girl quietly said. "Let me see what I can find..."

Maybe I can get past the saturation.

She took a deep breath. The nausea remained in the background. It meant having her head spin was entirely her own fault.

With open concern, "Cerea?"

I can't get past the saturation.

She was trying to use odor discrimination. Identify, isolate, ignore, then move on to the next. But there was so much...

Try to find metal. Guard armor.
...Guards go through here all the time.
Still not a bloodhound.

"I can't pick out anypony specific. Not when so much was happening. We'll have to find somepony the hard way. Can you hear anything?"

Black ears rotated: the brown ones did their best to twist.

"Fighting," Nightwatch reported. "Off to the left somewhere."

"We should go that way," Cerea immediately proposed.

"Fighting," the pegasus stated, "means ponies to fight. You still don't have the sword."

"Fighting," the centaur countered, "means ponies who are fighting. That could mean Guards. So we should go that way."

The silver eyes glared at her.

"And," Cerea unnecessarily added, "you still can't fly."

Black forehooves made a sullen point of not stomping. "I can still use wind." Paused. "In some ways."

"I can still kick."

"...Cerea..."

"I'm also pretty sure I can punch somepony," the girl said. "But that's probably going to be a pegasus. Punching that far down is hard." Her lips twisted. "Or I could just headbutt."

The pegasus had a doctorate in not stomping. Not sighing was the thesis. "We go towards the fight." She started to move out of the alcove, with the centaur making sure to stay close behind. "We just have to find a Guard who can get into the basement and check the cells. And then I'm getting you out of here."

It wasn't a good time to argue. (That could happen after they spread the word.) The mares advanced through the hallway. Past fallen art, torn tapestries, and freshly-chipped ceilings --

"-- they went after the ceiling," Cerea softly observed.

"They went after everything."

The girl stared up at damaged frescos. Thought about fine powders and stained paws.

And then they were alone for a time.

"Where is everypony?" the girl whispered. "I thought..."

"We're not near any offices or workspaces," Nightwatch replied. "This section's been evacuated. And the invaders... did their damage. Then they moved on."

They wandered through debris, stepping carefully to avoid producing extra sound or... doing more damage.

Cerea kept checking the air. Searching for any traces she recognized, or... for more signs of contempt. She almost expected that they were going to wind up stepping around another obstacle eventually. Something which might come in puddle form. If they were lucky.

They didn't care.
They don't care about anything.

The mares stopped at an intersection. Listened left, then right.

"Left?"

"There's definitely hooves running to the left."

They began to make the turn.

Both paused.

"They're coming this way," Cerea said. "It's getting louder --"

"-- they're coming fast," Nightwatch frantically cut in. "There's at least two of them! And that's just the ones who are galloping! I hear wingbeats --"

-- there was a moment of shared confusion, with both uncertain as to whether they should pull back in order to line up a potential ambush, or keep watching in order to get more information. It left them visible, and it also let them see the exact moment when the unicorn and earth pony stallions raced into view.

They were running hard. The unicorn's fur was already shedding excess sweat, and the earth pony wasn't particularly worried about whether the weaker specimen could keep up. Both were showing signs of injury: impacted fur, discoloration to the skin beneath. They were fleeing, they were both breathing fast and the unicorn was having trouble with that too, they weren't particularly thinking about anything other than the path ahead and that now contained a centaur.

The earth pony, who had been told that the centaur was helpless, still had some difficulty in reconciling the level of reality which now included And Right In Front Of Me.

The forelegs decided to accelerate into a charge. The hind, based on visual evidence, decided to dump momentum. The resulting skid-veer went right, and that was when the wingbeats caught up.

Dark orange blurred through the upper levels of the hallway, pulled up with a backblast of wind, got over the unicorn, and the stallion dropped.

As far as Cerea was concerned, pegasi were rather light. But gravity added something, and so did the armor.

All four close-pressed hooves went into the unicorn's spine, and the smallest of the stallions screamed. It made the earth pony look back, hooves scrambled to recover because the centaur was in front of him and that mare was helpless, utterly helpless and somewhat in the way and that helplessness possessed several times his body mass --

-- the male pegasus had to be easier --

-- keratin skittered, planted solidly, the earth pony oriented as the pegasus stallion jumped down from the fallen unicorn, wings were spreading but there wasn't enough time to take off again, the earth pony was going to kick --

-- the pegasus didn't have time to take off. He simply twisted his body, and the earth pony's forehoof went into armor.

Kinetic energy transferred, and enough carried over to send the pegasus staggering into a wall. The majority, however, rebounded.

"AAAUUOGH!"

...oh, Cerea distantly thought as she watched the earth pony fail to find a good planting on the newly-split hoof. Barding's been working on the refit.

The pegasus reoriented. Moved. It didn't take long after that.

He looked up from the second dropped form --

"-- what the buck are you two doing in here?"

He's a Guard.
...technically...
...he's still a Guard --

Nightwatch was the first to complete the turn, and the mare raced into the hallway. "We had to find somepony! Cerea --"

He barely took a moment to stare at the girl. The exposed left flank and then, for no reason she could think of, he went to her face.

"-- is probably supposed to be outside!" Squall yelped. "Anypony with any priorities would have gotten her out of here, away from this! That's supposed to be you, Nightwatch! And you don't even have armor! You're going to get hurt --"

"-- I followed her in!" Cerea technically failed to lie. (Honesty was a work in progress.) "There's something you have to --"

"-- I have to make sure you two leave!" the Guard shouted. "One without a weapon, and the other doesn't have working wings! There is nothing you can do in here which is as important as getting her out! I don't know what that one is thinking --" this with a furious glance at Cerea "-- but you --" and then Nightwatch "-- need to be more responsible!"

"We have a reason for being here!" Nightwatch tried to insist, with wings painfully flaring to suit. "It's important --"

"Keeping her alive is important! Evacuate her! Now! Before every one of these idiots smells a fresh target!"

It could be said that the mares shared a thought. On some level, they both understood that Squall was distracted. Stressed. He had too much to think about, was probably not dismissing them offhoof, and yet both responded to his shout through giving up on males forever. Or for the next ten minutes, whichever came first.

"Keeping me alive," Cerea disbelievingly proposed to the pony who had nearly electrocuted her. "Squall, we have to --"

Eyes wide, desperate, begging. "He's dead! He's dead and you killed him! I don't hate you that much!" And before any of it could truly sink in, "Nightwatch, I don't have time for this! There's more problems brewing where I just came from! I have to go back! Get her out of here!"

His wings flared to their full span. Flapped, and he turned in the air, started to speed away --

"-- it's the prisoner --" the girl desperately tried.

But he never heard her. Not over the sound of his own pleading voice.

"LET US SAVE YOU!"

And then he was gone.

The mares were briefly silent. Two fallen invaders used the moment to groan.

"We don't know how much time we have to find somepony else," Cerea observed. "We can't just gallop around here and hope to get lucky."

"Because so many of the Guards would have taken the staff out," Nightwatch carefully took over. "We could try to chase an evacuation route, but that may mean the tunnels. And the further out we go, when it might already be too late..."

Blue eyes met silver.

"I -- we have to go down there," the centaur said.

"We have to check," the pegasus reluctantly agreed.

Because that was duty.

It didn't matter what kind of factors were brought into the brew. Duty never changed.

The intruders in the basement are now searching for three things: excuse, escape, and opportunity.

The first is easy to come by. What's their excuse for still being down here? It's the fault of the unicorns: the ones who were so weak as to be the first to drop in a fight against a mere pair of Guards. Forget about the injuries which the remaining ponies in the recovery team are sporting, because the unicorns are the ones who actually went down and --

-- the unicorns had the map. There was too much of this place to memorize, the unicorns had the map and they can't go back for it.

...well, they could. All it takes is working their way to where the bodies fell.

Wherever that was.

The group has become disoriented. They lost the trail in during the initial part of the chase, when the Tartarus-chained Guards were trying to get the target away from them. After that, there was a period when they were on the run, trying to get some distance between themselves and any somehow-arriving reinforcements, they made a few brilliant turns because who was going to track them when they were moving randomly and...

Nothing they've done has managed to locate any part of their entrance route. And there has to be another path leading to the upper levels, a secret passage, a public ramp, but... so many of those would have been on the map. They've been stumbling around, trying to align themselves with Solar or Lunar wing. But there's just too many corridors down here, running through spaces where the surface levels of the palace never ventured. They are somewhere within what feels like the near-infinite space between angled marble and they are lost.

...there's a certain suspicion that this has to be where the best evidence is kept, and a few would like to explore -- if they had a guaranteed exit at the end of it. If they could just do what they were supposed to do.

(They were chosen for this.)
(Because they were the ones who would do what had to be done.)

They are listening for the sounds of hooves on ramps. Doors opening. Stone grinding as it pushes against a hidden frame within the walls. And sometimes they feel as if they're hearing hints of that, but they can't track it down here. Any noise they can register is so often connected with fighting, their own numbers are lessened, and...

...blame the unicorns. The unicorns went down. There's probably a working which copies paper and the selfish idiots didn't use it. And there's got to be spells down here, things they might have to deal with in order to get out.

It's why they took the prisoner's restraint off.

That took some work. The Guards probably had some kind of master key, or knew a spell which could unlock the entire thing at once. The recovery team had to get through the straps, and those were reinforced. Fortunately, there's a lot of stuff down in the basement and if you stumble past the right section, it's easy to borrow a few tools for the job. So now they've got an active horn to work with. If there's spells to deal with, then she can deal with them. Or take the brunt of any failure. As long as it's not them.

She was almost silent, when they were taking the restraint off. It was practically the only time...

...she keeps talking, and sometimes she sings to herself in ways where they can't make out the words, hackles have been raised since they entered the palace and her song makes every nerve hum along in a way which can't quite counter the octaves, she sings and she talks to herself and she tries to give them orders as her clear inferiors, she told them that coming for her was the first sign that they knew their place and she's just kept going from there and she becomes petulant and childish when they don't do what she says immediately, her field keeps pulling on manes and tails like a foal trying to get attention and sometimes the corona light goes under the jaw and she almost never shuts up...

...there's something wrong with her eyes...

...unicorns are useless. The pegasi and earth ponies can agree on that. You just wait until the horn lights up, and then you hit them. It works every time. And her horn is lit more than it should be, the light shimmers on the walls, they're convinced it's going to reflect into searching eyes and then --

-- they were chosen with intent.

Each species group thinks they were the only ones given the full plan -- but ultimately, they were all told the same thing. Even the lost unicorns agreed to it, because Mrs. Panderaghast has some awareness of which members might eventually become a problem -- along with the ones who potentially already have been, and simply weren't caught. Those ponies were approached first.

As far as those involved know, the central purpose of the assault is to make sure the arsonist is never questioned. There are two ways to achieve this, and the first is through removing the mare from the palace.

The second...
...if it seems like getting her out will be too difficult, but they can still escape once the burden is released and the opportunity just happens to arise...
There's a backup plan. Something they're starting to hope for, because what good is a bonehead who sings to herself and draws attention and just insults them all the time?
...it's just like getting rid of the centaur.
They were hoping to encounter the centaur. To hurt the one who's to blame for all of it.
It's the centaur's fault.
But both problems have the same solution. Something which happens to qualify as alchemy.
You just remove the impurity.

Recreant

There were ways in which the cave was never truly empty.

The dark mare had memorized every alcove and grotto of the formation long ago, and... a thousand years spent in abeyance still hadn't been enough for a cave to truly change. It meant the teleport had failed to produce any recoil. And when she used her chosen vantage point to examine the area...

No natural luminescence shone upon the rock, for that was waiting for the first touch of Moon. But she could see perfectly in the dark: something which made it decidedly easy to tally the local population. Mushrooms. Lichen. Moss. An increasingly distressing lack of centaur --

-- and a single statue, facing outwards.

She didn't have time to stay, for the battle was still surging within the palace. If she had heard hoofsteps coming up the path, she would have gone to see what was producing them -- but trying to fly over the gardens, constantly looking down, hoping to catch a glimpse -- no. Doing so would potentially allow the invader to claim vital seconds, along with simply leaving the elder alone for that much longer.

The dark mare had to go back. There was no time for searching the grounds, let alone becoming lost in her own thoughts. But there was a statue at the entrance, one so old that some felt the cave might have simply emerged around it.

A Guard. Part of the original squad.
A Lunar. One of her own.

It wasn't just tourists and trainee Guards who took slow trots through the gardens. And she had tried to tell herself that if nothing had happened at all, then he still would have been dead for centuries. There wouldn't be a body: she wouldn't have been able to identify any remaining particles as having once been part of something living. He would have been gone and dust and dead.

They all died.

There were those who said that nopony was truly dead as long as their name was still spoken and for thousands, the sisters served as the final anchor of whispers.

He had traded his life for her own.
The first to do so.
Nothing close to the last.

There was no time for mourning, or reflection, or much of anything else beyond igniting her corona again, getting ready for the teleport back. But as she did so, she looked at the statue, and there was a single moment when all of the memories came back. Of staring down in horror into proud eyes, as the light which had been behind them flowed out in tandem with the blood.

I'm sorry.

And then. because her greatest wish for the statues was never to have another, she vanished.

"-- and this is our exit!" the unicorn Guard declared.

The mare looked. In the reporter's opinion, the exit they'd been fighting to reach looked like most of the palace walls. There were visible doors. Artwork was hosted in little alcoves and because they'd reached this section first, all of it was still intact. And the corkboards next to the doors held the real treasures -- if you were so foolish as to believe that the palace would be willing to give up its greatest secrets via pinned memo.

(Wordia was fully aware that the palace received most of its art pieces through donation. It left her with a regrettable lack of ability to go after the alicorns based on a wasted purchase budget. She'd had to settle for openly noting maintenance and restoration costs, followed by questioning just how much of the collection belonged in a museum. Of course, when the sisters basically existed under glass...)

"We went up," a semi-distrustful journalist said.

"We went up to go down," the Guard told her, and began to move towards that vital wall section: the other two assumed watch positions, checking the hallway. "This passage has a few advantages. Some of which operate on independent charges."

Because anything tied into the main palace system was having problems. The idiot priorities which had money being spent on fresco restoration instead of security: that was a future article in the making if Wordia had ever thought of one. But it would have to focus on the art itself, because her readers had generally grown bored with the canid --

-- a passage with a few advantages, and none of them were going to be a built-in bottle cabinet --

-- she had to focus. They were almost out, she still had Guards with her, all they needed to do was clear the passage and get outside --

(The mare could think. The hard part was stopping. The bottles let her stop, for a little while. Prevented her thoughts from racing down the wrong paths, as long-buried questions tried to erupt from dream.)

-- she didn't need to be thinking about articles and the canid and a readership always looking for the next cause, attention drawn away by the new because keeping them interested in something old was hard enough, which obviously applied to the Princesses --

-- she didn't have a bottle and she'd been fighting, there was too much adrenaline in her system, none of it had anything to do right now and the thoughts were going around and around and they might currently be clear of the attackers, but more could arrive at any moment and she couldn't afford to let herself get --

-- to let myself get --
-- to...

And she knew.

"Get me to them."

The unicorn glanced back. "What? I didn't hear --"

"Wherever the alicorns are! Which was probably on that paper which appeared out of nowhere, the one you wouldn't let me see! Get me to them! I know what's going on --" and it would be some time before she realized that she'd actually edited herself in midstream "-- not what they're after, but what they're trying! I have to tell them!"

The unicorn's teeth were rather visibly set. It was easy to see, when the lips had just pulled back.

"You," the Guard tensely stated, "just figured something out. Something which helps the palace. Fighting to save yourself through protecting us is one thing --"

"-- they already think I'm a traitor!" She reared up, felt recently-impacted muscles scream in protest and went ahead with the foreleg gestures anyway. "I might never be able to change that! It doesn't cost me anything to tell them which I didn't already lose --"

"-- and now you're just on our side?" the Guard demanded. "You expect me to believe --"

"-- maybe," the reporter furiously shot back, "I just want to see if I got there before they did."

As counter-arguments go, "My job is to get you out --" was anticipated, and had booked its irritation in advance.

"-- then get me out," Wordia stated. "I'll tell you. And you go back in and tell them. But if you have to get me out first, it wastes time --"

And now the Guard's tail was threatening to lash. "You would tell me --"

-- stopped. All at once, as the tail fell still and folded ears lofted.

The unicorn Guard looked at the other two armored ponies.

"New plan. I'm taking her to the Princesses. I know I'm breaking orders and if you're not comfortable with that, you don't have to come. If you want to go provide reinforcements --"

"Why?" the stallion immediately broke in, and did so as the mare waited for a miracle. Something she didn't believe in, especially not when it came to the palace. The impossibility of getting somepony to think --

"Because," the Guard stated, "she would tell me." Bright green eyes did their best to drill through the mare. "But if it's a lie, something you thought you could get past me -- then you get to tell them."

Celestia automatically looked up from the makeshift battle map as the dark light flashed.

"No," the dark mare immediately reported, and the elder fought off the urge to sigh.

That's the third check. She'd asked Luna to go this time: the younger didn't have as many arrival points available in Ponyville, but the situation had long ago reached the point where Celestia just wanted the centaur to be Anywhere Which Isn't Here.

Emery may have needed extra time. Taken her by what he saw as the safest path, even if it was the longest one.
Or he had to change the plan, and he can't contact me.
...or they were overwhelmed.
If enough of them reached her...

Emery possessed the combat effectiveness which arose from decades of Not Dying. But he could be brought down. Once that line of defense had dropped, it would be down to Chocolate Bear, and...

The surgeon had technically killed, because every doctor who lasted in the profession would find a patient they couldn't save, or -- make a mistake. And they all kept count. Before the sisters had asked the Doctors Bear to mutually occupy the revived position of Royal Physician, his had been at nine. In Chocolate's view, he had killed... but she still wasn't sure he could attempt a fatal strike.

And then it would be the girl.
Helpless.

The old mare, almost flush against the floor in what felt like a sea of scrolls, pushed the thoughts away, and then shoved at the self-loathing which arose from the resulting acidic trench. There was potentially far more than one life at stake. Just for starters, she hadn't seen Glimmerglow since sending her own Guard down to evacuate the wounded.

There were a lot of wounded. More after Luna took care of a few stragglers.

Guards were also semi-autonomous. In the absence of continuing orders and knowing that Celestia was with others, the pegasus might have tried to deal with something else.

She didn't have time to hope. She might barely get a chance to mourn.

Several of the waiting scrolls shook. The top one vibrated off the pile.

"It's getting louder outside," the elder noticed. The worst case seemed to be another wave coming in. "I should go to Apex --"

"-- you," Luna firmly stated, "need to stay here -- at least for a short time. We are waiting for reports, and that was one of the regions which was already being examined. And when it comes to 'getting this war organized'..."

The most irritating part of the younger's statement was left unvoiced: something which simply allowed the words to directly grind against Celestia's mind, with no delay from having to pass through the ears.

Do not argue with her in front of the Guards.
Don't.

But there were times when Honesty was the most annoying Element, because few things were more irritating than the truth -- and the most fundamental truth of Celestia's scroll sending spell was that she was the only pony who could cast it.

They needed to communicate with the palace while using a level of discretion which the alarms couldn't achieve. (Any traitor would know about the alarms.) So Celestia had been sending scrolls, and coded messages had let ponies know where the temporary command center was. Of course, it was possible that they'd informed the source of treason as to their location, but...

...let them come almost seemed to have something going for it...

They were trying to get more information, and the process had effectively anchored them to the scroll room.

There was only so long they could stay, because remaining in one location for too long was its own risk. The (hopefully) loyal were seeking them out, providing that vital data, but... there was still some trouble in reaching them and eventually, some of the invaders might notice the unusual flow of traffic. Eventually, they would have no choice but to get back out there -- but at the moment, they were more or less stuck.

Putting together any degree of the full picture counted as Doing Something. Assembling the puzzle had the potential to save lives. To that extent, the sisters were fully active. And knowing that did nothing to silence the inner desire for going into the halls and kicking somepony --

-- hoofsteps. A heavily-bruised Solar unicorn made it up to the door, was quickly cleared by the Guards, and offered up her piece to the siblings. They added it to the map.

"So another encounter here," Celestia said, and a glowing quill made the notation on the map. "Five of them, which means they lost at least one pony along the way. " The tendency of assault groups to start off as species-balanced had already been recorded. "And..."

Their ears perked at the sound of another approach. It took a few vital minutes to put the newest story together, and then the information received set Luna's tail to flicking.

"An unpleasant reminder," the younger angrily declared (and Celestia automatically began radiating warmth, trying to counter the rapid drop), "that my bath is not quite as secured as my bedroom." Her own quill, surrounded in fine spikes and flaring stars, slashed at the paper. "Very well. So once we add this..."

The siblings looked at the results.

"...what are they attempting to accomplish?" Luna eventually finished. "The central pattern is one of scatter. They roam into every part of the palace they can reach. If there is no staff to attack, they settle for assaulting the inanimate. I see no central target, nothing they must achieve."

It had turned into the question of the assault. Celestia had started to suspect an ulterior motive early on. Luna hadn't been far behind, and might have even come in a little ahead. What was so important that the faction leaders were willing to risk... everything? They didn't know.

But when it came to the external expression of that growing frustration, the elder simply nodded. "I've seen more purpose in chaos from Discord." We need a report from Summit. "These are... angry foals. Lashing out at everything."

More hoofsteps: four sets, getting closer. The echoes suggested a quartet of ponies moving through the main secret passage. The sibling had left the door open on that one: for those who were coming in to report, it saved time and with any intruders, the Guards got an immediate clear line of sight for the attack.

"Even rebellious children possess a goal in their tantrums," the younger observed. "Frequently, to make the adults change their opinion regarding a denied wish, if only so the display might stop." She looked down at the map again. "Can we attempt to estimate the percentage tracked? Identify a cluster through their absence?"

"We don't have all the numbers," Celestia softly observed. "Not when nopony took a head count of the crowd outside, and we might have another wave coming in. So we can't be sure how many we're missing."

The newest approaches had almost cleared the passage.

"We are missing," Luna firmly stated, "the intent --"

They both knew the voice. They hated that voice. Every one of the mare's natural colors was slightly off, and there were times when they mutually swore the same thing had to eventually wind up applying to the reporter's tones. If she ever sang (and there might not be enough Tyrconnell in the world), it would have to be off-key. It was a voice which lived to say the things they loathed, and so they had decided the voice itself was ugly.

"-- the tantrum is the intent!"

It made them turn their heads. Each saw the mare's injuries, and mutually displaced any concern into a light dread of the inevitable opinion column about how the Guards couldn't keep anypony safe --

-- their own Guards, acting rationally, ignored the three of their fellows coming up behind the mare and blocked Wordia from getting in.

"Miss Spinner," Luna tightly said, "I am fully certain that you are supposed to be outside. As the evacuation alarm was given, and we cannot qualify you as any level of combatant. At least, not when it comes to what you might term as 'our' side --"

The furious mare reared up. The blocking Guards duplicated the motion, leaving them looking at the top of a bouncing off-white mane. The movement was disrupting the normal styling, and portions of the strands were starting to fall onto the other side.

"-- I heard you on the way up!" Wordia shouted. "You almost had it! Maybe you would have gotten there in another minute --"

"-- unusually charitable," Celestia noted, and began to stand. "But --"

"-- but that's a minute you may not have! It's a tantrum! And what's the one thing somepony kicking out a tantrum really wants, the one thing they all have in common no matter what the reason for the tantrum is?"

"Miss Spinner --"

One last bound, and they caught a glimpse of frantic eyes.

"They want you to look at it!"

They both stared at her, at least until gravity took over and she dropped behind the living wall again. And then purple eyes sought out a dark gaze, for there was once again somepony to consult.

Both siblings nodded.

"Let her in," Celestia softly ordered.

'Immediately," Luna added. "For we may have very little time."

"I don't know what they're after," the reporter admitted as she examined the map: both siblings briefly marveled at the sound of what seemed to be some level of truth. "I just feel like I know how they're trying to do it. Make a lot of noise, do as much damage as possible. It's not just about what they can reach, it's where they can be seen."

"Scatter the Guards," Celestia nodded. "Make us try to look everywhere at once, because there has to be a goal. A target."

"And it's not the centaur," Wordia rushed on. "Not as the main thing they're trying to do. She's like me --"

"-- I will," Luna found the time to dryly comment, "inform her of your opinion --"

"-- in that they would have taken out either of us if they had the chance," the reporter pushed. "A side benefit, but it's not the goal. Because they're being loud and public and everywhere." She jabbed her right forehoof towards the map. "Everywhere you've got multiple reports on, wherever there's one miniherd after another, if they keep going back, so the Guards stay scattered -- that isn't the target. It's the distraction from the target."

They stared down at her: the familiar enemy brought within the scroll supply, standing among the debris of unwritten words.

"I could be wrong," was the next fully unexpected statement: something where the mare had to raise her voice, because the indistinct sounds from outside the palace were still getting louder. "But this feels right. It's something they would do in the Tangle, not that you would know. Go look at the distraction."

They had been Princesses for a long time. In the most absolute sense, Luna was closer to the last gallop as a General than Celestia was. And when you were no longer fully accustomed to rapidly swapping one mask for another...

We were almost there. At the most, another few minutes would have done it. I would have remembered something similar, or Luna could have retrieved the memory first. Recognized the situation, because it's been centuries and fully original tactics are hard to come by.

But I underestimated the protesters. I didn't really think they were capable of a basic feint.

...I'm going to hear Zephyra yelling at me starting from the moment I fall asleep. Possibly for the next moon.

"We are now potentially looking," Celestia announced, "for an absence of reports."

"Some areas were still believed to be secured," Luna added. "Anything running on a fully independent charge seemed to have remained intact. They may have drawn our attention to the public areas so that they could try to defeat the most complex defenses without attention."

"Somepony has to check those," Celestia agreed. "But we haven't seen a lot of complicated spellwork or techniques from any of them. It's their normal membership. We could be missing some talents, or they might have hired outside help --"

"-- offering possibilities which can be applied to everything under Sun and Moon," Luna pointed out. "Begin with the basics. Where does the map feel they have not been?"

And then the volume peaked.

Scrolls shook. Half of a shelf crashed. and Celestia's field yanked the journalist back just in time.

"They're outside!" the elder yelled as the unicorn mare stumbled, staring at anything which wasn't the siblings. "We know that!"

It was a distraction. But it was also something they couldn't ignore.

Insane

The empty forge had yet to fully cool. There were things which had to be done in order to properly bank the flames: bringing the temperature down at too great a speed could do its own damage. But the girl, carefully peering around the edge of the doorway, could see where the process had been started, left at a point where it could go the rest of the way without supervision.

There was still some heat left to the fire. Enough to create its own reddish glow, something which reminded Cerea of the armory's protective spells -- and it was the only constant color in the little world. The lighting devices mounted in the ceiling were having issues. They flickered, changed intensity, and a girl who'd rapidly become fed up with fluorescents kept waiting for a buzzing sound which never came.

The important thing is that Barding got out.

He seemed to have left just before starting work on an ingot: still held fast at the workstation, just about cool enough to touch. And...

...that's odd.

"This shouldn't be open," Nightwatch whispered. They were trying to produce as little sound as possible: a goal which Cerea felt was invalidated by the mere fact of centaur existence.

"It's usually open," Cerea softly countered. Which was actually somewhat odd all by itself, because temperature control was a huge priority in a smithy. Pegasus magic might offer aid here and there, but a closed door was an assist which didn't have to worry about running down the charge. "Just about every time I go by --"

"That's you," the pegasus stated.

"...sorry?"

"You didn't know him... before." The black mare paused. "Well, you sort of did. For a few hours. He didn't like to be interrupted. Or disturbed. Or reminded that other ponies existed. You had to sneak requests onto the corkboard and hope he didn't hear you. And now he leaves the door open a little more when he's working, so you can see him working and -- come in."

There didn't seem to be anything the centaur could say, and having her hands go behind her upper back to awkwardly clench at each other wasn't an effective substitute for words.

"But he locks up when he leaves," Nightwatch continued. "Because it's still his smithy."

"He gave me a key," the girl quietly observed.

The silver eyes looked at her, and the clenching transitioned into wringing.

"He would have locked up," the pegasus semi-repeated. "Especially if he was evacuating, because he'd want to protect everything inside."

Cerea took another glance inside.

"I didn't know about the door." And here it comes... "But... he usually would have put those tools back. If something isn't being used, he gets it out of the way. Because he's always saying the smithy is too small and he can't have anything taking up space when..."

She still felt as if nausea was permeating every cell of her body: pushing it down to background awareness wasn't the same as being rid of it, and Cerea suspected it was just waiting for its chance.

It was everywhere within her. It could at least do her the courtesy of blocking off the blush.

"...I already take up so much," she reluctantly finished, and looked at the splayed tools again. "What would he have been trying to make? I've never seen him use those metal shears."

"Or somepony broke in after he left," Nightwatch considered. "It's not like the armory: you could get in here, if you tried for a while. And if they were looking for a way to cut something."

They both examined the lock.

"I can't tell," Cerea reluctantly admitted. "There's already so much scuffing." Barding kicked the door closed a lot.

At least he got out.
...please tell me he got out first.
That somepony didn't come by, and made him cut something, and then they...
...if I'm wrong, if this was me, if they knew we worked together and they went after him because of --

The nausea surged. Her right hand untangled from the left, getting free just in time to brace against the door. The frame softly groaned as it took her weight, and the centaur frantically pushed herself away from the new source of sound.

"Sorry!" she hissed. If anypony heard...

...if anypony heard, it might be the ones who were supposed to be down here. But if the Guards were still present, then the prisoner hadn't been evacuated...

She tried a deep breath, pushed the nausea down again as her ears frantically twisted in every direction. Nightwatch, already on high alert, could only match the results from the second action.

"What are you getting?" the pegasus whispered, as they both listened.

The girl tried to sort. Isolate and identify. The saturation wasn't as bad on the lowest level. There was a degree present, because scents traveled. They'd brought some of it with them just by using the passage, but... there was less to go through.

It was still hard, with the illness so close to the surface. Just having to make a deliberate effort...

Even at her best, there would have been issues. The forge normally operated at high temperatures: something which created its own disruptions within the olfactory world. Determining when Barding had departed was effectively impossible. But when it came to other presences...

The forge door opened for her. Just about nopony else ever went inside.

"I don't hear anypony coming. Do --" and paused, as the little knight shook her head. "Good."

"And -- smell?" Nightwatch asked.

"I can't pick up an approach right now." The air currents of the basement meant that range detection for scent wasn't fully reliable.. "But there were ponies here. A mixed group." Reluctantly, "I think at least one of them is hurt."

Please don't let that be Barding.

"Blood?" Nightwatch whispered.

Cerea slowly nodded -- then quickly added "Not much. It's mixed in with fur. Not enough to drip." (She checked the floor for bloodstains anyway.)

"When you say mixed...?"

"Three species." She didn't think there was any need to specify 'no alicorns'. "I think... at least five of them? But it could be more." Another breath. "And..."

...what is that?
A mare. Angry --
-- no. It's more than anger. It's related...
...isn't it?

She didn't have a context for it. No pony she'd ever encountered had been emanating that exact mix of acrid toxins and putrid fumes --

-- nopony I've seen.
I scented this before, didn't I? Traces...

"Five," Nightwatch hesitantly whispered.

"It could be more." She was having that much trouble.

"The prisoner was assigned two Guards. Maybe reinforcements came down, but... Is one of the ponies a unicorn mare?"

Cerea had to force the nod.

"It doesn't tell us much," the little knight reluctantly concluded. "One of her Guards would be a unicorn. I don't know if any mares had this exact shift, or if somepony got called away and a mare had to swap in. And I can't ask you to tell me if they were wearing armor. Not in here. So we still need to reach the cells."

Assess and evaluate.

Again.

"Do you want me to try tracking the ones who were here?" Quickly, "I'm not sure I can. But I could try --"

"-- do you know which way they went?"

The girl tried to focus again.

"It's hard," she finally admitted.

I can't...

"-- your back knees are buckling a little," Nightwatch instantly said. "Maybe you should --"

"...I think they doubled back on their trail." Her right hand shakily came up, pointed. "It's all in this direction."

"And that goes towards the cells," the pegasus reminded her. "So..."

Cerea started to take a step forward. The dark tail hit her front cannons.

She stopped.

"Neither of us is up to a big fight right now," the little knight observed, and fur rippled against its natural grain. "Maybe we can each manage a few kicks. But this is close quarters, and... you said at least five. Our job is to get a look at the cells. And if we find those Guards, and they're with her -- we can help. If somepony is just breaking her out now, we could try to do something. But the bigger the group, the more trouble we're in. You can punch a pegasus. You can't punch lightning." Her feathers rustled. "Not that there's a lot of moisture down here right now. But you get the idea. We have to be careful, Cerea. And sometimes... that means retreat. She's not worth your life."

The girl was silent.

"Cerea?"

No answer.

"You're a civilian now," the Guard said. "Or that's what you keep saying. I can brief you on traps which aren't working because you should still be part of the staff. But we're on palace grounds. And in this situation, I can still give you orders. So if I tell you to run, we run."

Coming from most people, it would have sounded practical. Fair.

But Cerea was dealing with a Guard.

"Cerea? I need you to tell me --"

"...yes."

And they moved.

Part of the girl still wished they weren't the ones performing the check, but... there was no one else. There had only been so much time they could have spent on a search for anypony to go in their stead, all they'd found was Squall --

-- he was looking at my face.
No. My mouth.
I think he was waiting for me to say something about his wings again.

-- and after that, they'd had to go themselves.

The castle was riddled with secret passages. But when it came to accessing the basement, the most ready route they'd had available just happened to come out near the smithy: something which put it a considerable distance from the cells -- but it was still faster than galloping around the upper levels until they found a more direct route, because that would have meant switching palace wings.

And what would they learn, when they reached the cells? Guards present, a prisoner within... had the alarm been ignored, with the Guards deciding their most defensible position was right here?

Or they might have doubled back. A scroll from the Princess would have told them about the traitor, and they could have decided not to risk going up. Make a stand on familiar ground.

Maybe more Guards came down to help.

Maybe the traitor came down to help.

Cerea didn't know who it was. If it was just a matter of finding somepony who hated her --

-- concentrate, focus on my hooves, I just have to get there...
...four legs and two arms...
...I'd almost feel sorry for Rachnera if it wasn't for everything else...

...there were a lot of candidates, and anypony they might have found on the upper levels could have been exactly the wrong pony to tell. She just didn't feel it was Squall, because... he'd had his chance, in the corridor. A clear shot. And he'd just tried to order them out.

Or he was getting us out of the way so he'd look good later --

-- she was almost certain it hadn't been Squall. Perhaps he simply didn't hate her that much.

The lights flickered. Colors distorted, here and there. And she couldn't say it was too quiet, because there was still so much going on overhead. There were times when they heard distant shouts, screams, and some of those came from pain. And there was a slow-building rumble in the air, a sound which reminded the girl of the worst protest days and the times when the anger had grown loud enough to reach the basement. Just a little more, and the world would begin to vibrate.

There might be more of them coming.

A siege. She was living a story again and somehow, no part of it concerned having the world find another way to remove her clothing. The girl had done some of that herself, with that one flank just about fully exposed to the world.

She didn't even know if the sling would work. It wasn't the best kind of fabric for improvising the weapon. Snapping the stone out at high speed... that usually took something a little more solid.

If I get it wrong...

It could be argued that they were both helpless. Helpless together, guarding each other's flanks. But Nightwatch could still access some of her magic, where the girl had none. (Or too much, none of which could actually be used.) And if Cerea didn't move in time --

-- if something happens where she needs to fly and I can't --

She forced her knees to straighten, and the effort got them out from under the palace wing. Into the space which lay below the Courtyards, and so much else.

They were trying to hurry. But there was only so quickly they could move while trying to stay silent, and... one of them was currently grounded, while the other's biology not only made that permanent, but had potentially elected to ignore all possible influence from human blood and go strictly with centaur. A few hundred kilograms of mass were going into battle with the concept of 'move silently' and if they won, it would be because stealth had died laughing. Her hooffalls were too heavy. She was too heavy. Sliding her keratin didn't produce much of an improvement, and the nearest circles of adhesive felt were a world away.

They were also pausing every so often to listen. Check for scents. It was all slowing them down.

We're probably too late already.
If anything happened at all.
Maybe they just evacuated her and somepony came down here because... the attack meant they needed shears. For some reason.
Or she's still here.
Or I was right, and the invaders got her out ten minutes before I ever thought of anything.

It wasn't a story. The heroines didn't have to arrive in the nick of time. Reality seemed to prefer the graveyard humor associated with failure.

...an empty cell. Two corpses in front of it, where the Guards fell.
Two more statues --

-- they were coming up on an intersection. There was a choice of three branch trails.

Right is mostly storage and one of the hidden passage entrances. After a while. There's a lot of bends. And then there's a public ramp.
Left for the armory. That's almost a straight shot, once you get past that one angle. Eventually, the cells.
Forward is the barracks --

Nightwatch's ears twisted. The overhead light bent towards yellow, rushed through red and slowly dimmed its way towards pink.

"I think I hear hoofsteps," the little knight whispered. "To the right. And... maybe voices? It can be hard to tell down here, but we wouldn't be getting much of anything from the upper levels. Not when we're between them." Paused. "Um. Well, there's that rumble. That's getting louder. But it's not voices." She advanced half a step, listened again. "Maybe... multiple voices? And..." The black fur creased across the confused frown. "...a little echo. Like somepony is almost... singing?"

-- had the invaders gone into the barracks? They had tried to destroy whatever they could reach, and the barracks were where people lived. Cerea couldn't picture them as having any reluctance to enter. More towards... pleasure.

"Cerea? What do you hear?"

But the girl wasn't really listening. Not to anything which came from the outside. Her ears were filled with the cacophony of joyful destruction.

...she lost her apartment.
Almost everything she owned.
I saw what she brought in. There was so little left.

Her semicircular canals were beginning to roar. Both left-side hooves stumbled.

They targeted her once. They would have done it again in a heartbeat.
She might have lost the last of it.
Because of me.
...I told myself they're after the arsonist, but this could still be me
she's supposed to be my friend and the only thing I've done is hurt her

She was just barely aware of her body's increasing tilt.

all I do is hurt the people I care about
everyone and everypony
I shouldn't be here --

The nausea surged. Balance was lost.

It felt as if it took everything she had simply to direct the near-fall, because Nightwatch was too close and having a centaur's weight collapsing on top of a pegasus was a nightmare all its own. But it was that dread which let her push, gain some degree of control over the direction and in the end, she didn't fall. She just went sideways, and the wall took her weight.

The stone supported her, while the coolness of the contest suffused her flank. Both sensations were nearly lost in the jolt.

She massed a few hundred kilograms. (She tended to round down.) And when that much weight collapsed against stone, all at once -- it hurt.

The girl cried out in pain, and even that was nearly lost in the thud of her body being taken up by the stone.

Nearly.

There was a period of time when no reaction came, because sound required time in which to travel and when it arrived, minds still had to react. Nearly three whole seconds.

"SOMETHING'S DOWN HERE!" burst towards them from the right-side path. "SOMETHING BIG!"

And then there were hoofsteps. Racing, accelerating, and the movement pushed the air ahead of them, rage and fury and those traces of blood and something else, a factor which she couldn't identify and there was no time to think about it, not when the pegasus had just jumped, spinning in the air with a painful flare of wings to land staring up at Cerea, eyes wide and fearful and desperate --

"RUN!" Nightwatch shouted. "CEREA, RUN!"

When it came to what happened next, the girl blamed her mother. Because the parent had spent a lifetime in wiring direct controls, making sure The Voice Of Authority went directly to the hooves while completely skipping over the brain. And Cerea pushed herself off the wall, got some space between herself and the pegasus before making the turn (and she'd gone left, still trying to complete a self-assigned mission), did her best to gallop while the nausea just kept surging, she wasn't racing down the hall so much as constantly falling forward while never quite finishing, four legs was too many to control and she couldn't push the nausea back, it just kept coming, it was going to overflow and consume her, she was being chased by the void and when it caught up, she would be nothing --

-- and then the lie caught up, because nothing else did.

From most people, it would have sounded reasonable. You were told to run, and then you ran.

But she was the only one running.

Guards got in the way. And Nightwatch hadn't left the intersection. She'd stayed behind, trying to buy time.

Her life for --

-- it was what almost brought the centaur down. She went into a different wall, and the near-rebound threatened to make the impacts go uneven again. The shame saturated her at a level which began to work with the illness, she was just barely able to clutch at her hair and the panic attack was coming, it was coming, she was alone and useless and she'd left her friend, her sister to die and the illness just kept rising and there was no sword and no courage and no chance and it was all her fault all her fault all her fault

she had to turn back
she had to
her head was reeling, her body was collapsing, but she had to go back
they were to the right, they didn't sound all that close, they'll need time to navigate
the lights were flickering and changing hue, they were brownish now and her skin had been dappled in a shade to match her fur, she couldn't focus and everything ahead of her was red

red
glowing red
it runs on its own charge, one of the strongest charges in the palace, because it has to keep working if everything else shuts down

She was mere meters away from the armory.

Her arms dropped. The girl's head snapped up. Hair flew back, and the nausea dropped into her hooves.

Move!

She managed to stop the renewed gallop just short of the door.

Nightwatch had shown her how to open the armory, because that was one of the secrets. There were multiple huge locks on the door, and they were mostly present because anypony trying to get in without authorization was going to waste a lot of time in looking for multiple huge keys. And in the absence of a ring which didn't exist, they could potentially spend happy hours in pressing on tumblers and waiting for the right click. The click was virtually guaranteed. Some cell doors clicked.

But the locks had a purpose. Because spells which had no way to truly think could still be taught to recognize authorized personnel.

Nightwatch had shown her how to open the armory: namely, if the spells had been attuned for the person approaching, then they pushed the locks aside, and then touched there and there. There was a pattern, a rhythm, a beat, a nasty result for anypony who missed it, and all Nighwatch had done was show her the procedure. Abjura had dropped by on the following night and performed the attunement.

Just about every weapon Equestria had ever produced, found, rediscovered, or confiscated was on the other side of that door. There was going to be something which could take out the attackers and if she found it quickly enough, galloped back before Nightwatch was hurt --

-- she shoved at the locks, touched the right locations, and the red glow winked out. The door started to open, she got her fingers on the edge and pulled to make it open faster, all she needed was the right weapon --

-- the right magic.

She'd left the Guard before being briefed on everything kept within. Actual testing, finding out which items a centaur could activate -- there had been no chance. Cerea possessed only the vaguest idea for what most of it did, and hardly knew if anything would work for her.

The door had opened, and glowing beads lit the path into confusion.

Anything I could take is a weapon against us. They recognize that I'm using something, the unicorn collects it, and then --

Her frantic gaze darted from one hue to another. Violet. Gold. Red. Untested blue.

...I can't just stand here and I have to close this if I hear anypony coming, if the invaders get into the armory --

-- she was looking at what might be the most potent collection of weaponized magic in the world, and it was all useless --

-- her ears twisted. There was shouting, back the way she'd come. And she couldn't make out the words, but the furious tone suggested somepony had just been spotted.

-- I don't have time --

A singular color gained her attention. She grabbed it, made sure to collect the bead, backed out as quickly as she could, resealed the door and galloped towards shouts and rage and rushing wind, something which almost seemed to be pulling her forward because some of the channeled air was being taken from her current corridor.

The area was trying to equalize. That meant air was also blasting in behind her. The hospital gown's skirt, just barely anchored at the dock of her tail, fluttered dangerously.

Leave me something to breathe, Nightwatch
please be breathing

and she was trying to gallop faster, the nausea hadn't been shaken loose but it seemed to be having a hard time keeping up, she needed speed but she also needed to be capable of stopping in time before she trampled the wrong ponies, she cleared the corridor's angle and Nightwatch was right there, still on her hooves, still fighting, keeping the attackers from advancing with wind speed alone, but one wing wasn't moving properly, the gusts were faltering and there were two pegasi on the other side of the intersection, hovering as their legs wove under their bodies, taking some portion of the little knight's magic apart, and she saw an earth pony wearing oddly-thick metal shoes pushing forward against the atmospheric tide and black-furred legs starting to buckle and that was when everypony in and around the intersection finally registered the tremendous racket produced by a centaur galloping indoors.

The attackers looked up. (She didn't have time to count them.) And what they saw was something larger than any of them, where the forward-set predatory eyes were alight with malice and silver wires crawled up one side of its face and there was no sword, but the giant was moving fast and its hand was glowing, it wasn't supposed to have any magic and its right hand had light leaking out from between the fingers --

"-- shall we watch thee deal with this?" was, in Cerea's opinion, a thoroughly inadequate battlecry.

Her arm went back.
Her arm came forward.
The throw landed dead-center in the intersection. Twice.
And the attackers -- stared.

Some physically braced themselves, while others attempted to dodge. But for the most part, their focus remained on the point of impact. Rooted to the spot, frozen with dread of what the magic might do.

The little piece of keratin stayed exactly where it had hit. Something which wasn't a hoof: merely a section of lost horn which had been carved to resemble one, with small symbols engraved around the edges. After a moment, the little glowing tan bead clattered to a stop next to it.

And nothing happened.

They had simply stared, while nothing happened.

Cerea considered her first battlecry of the confrontation to have been something of a loss. The second, while arguably obscure and considerably lower in volume, seemed to make up for it.

"Blitzschritt," the centaur quietly informed them, "offers greetings."

And then she was among them.

The Sergeant's lessons held: it was easy for her to become surrounded, to be swarmed -- if the attackers had the numbers. But she kept her legs moving, the intersection gave her a choice of directions in which to dodge and leap, and -- Nightwatch was there.

She didn't have magic. She had size, strength, and got in several free kicks because the attackers had been waiting for thaums which had never flowed. A pegasus risked coming in high, and so got to discover that the girl also had hands, a decent range of reach, and the headbutt had remained on standby. And whenever somepony tried to go in over her lower back, attack her from a place they assumed she couldn't readily reach or simply went for a knee... the little knight would already be in front of them, and a Guard without armor was still a Guard.

Guards knew how to be fought.

There were robed pegasi. Earth ponies, equally covered, and it was one pair of each. There were also kicks, Cerea managed a punch on somepony whose jump went a little too high, and the pegasi were the first to drop: Nightwatch kicked one into a stupor, and the specimen whom Cerea had headbutted wound up losing all interest in the waking world. The centaur kicked twice, reared up and crashed down once, and the first earth pony was out --

-- the remaining combatants just barely heard the hoofsteps approaching from the right-side corridor, and yet all of them looked. Because hoofsteps could mean reinforcements. It was just a matter of whose --

-- to some degree, Cerea was still trying to work out what ponies found attractive in each other. But she'd seen Fleur, and understood what place Fluttershy's partner occupied on the bell curve: all of it.

The new unicorn mare, now visible at about fifteen meters away, almost ambling towards them with her head down, softly humming to herself as half-hidden eyes regarded the general direction of the floor, seemingly possessing no interest in the battle or anything which wasn't her own hooves... possessed none.

She wasn't ugly. But physically, she was almost utterly unmemorable. Her coat hue could be tracked along a system of paint chips until the moment the observer reached the shade of brown designated as 448-C, at which point they would probably be asking themselves why they'd bothered. The mane and tail were arguably trying to put a little variety into the mix, but that particular shade of burnt orange didn't exactly help. It didn't complement, and it didn't highlight. It was just... there. And nothing about the mare seemed to have been groomed for some time.

Her build was strictly average, narrowing down to noticeably slim hooves. She wasn't remarkably tall, or thin, or short, or anything. It might be possible to forget the mare five minutes after passing her on the street, or in five seconds, or at the moment anything actually caught your notice. And she wasn't paying attention to the fight, or the ponies, or the centaur. She casually trotted as if there was no hurry at all, she hummed to herself and the last earth pony standing saw her, looked around, saw that he was the last, and he turned away from Nightwatch, oriented towards the unicorn's corridor and charged.

The shod stallion's forehooves slammed into each other on the second step. Blades snapped out of the metal's forward edge.

And Cerea didn't understand. She had scented his rage, didn't need to guess at the intent -- but he hadn't used the shoes before this (although there might not have been an opportunity, given how he'd had to activate them), the knives were out and the mare hadn't even noticed, he would reach her within seconds and the force of the charge would drive metal deep into flesh, she didn't have time to wonder or think or do anything but chase while she grabbed at the place near her upper waist where stretched-out gauze had attached the makeshift sling, she got it spinning, loaded a stone, launched it with a silent prayer --

-- it hit just behind and between the ears, at the base of the poll.

The stallion stumbled. But he was an earth pony and even with centaur strength behind it, the inadequate sling meant the impact hadn't been enough. He stumbled, the pain made him slow down, he almost went off-course before recovering --

-- but he'd slowed down.

Relatively speaking, there were very few ponies in the world who knew what it felt like to have someone grab them by the shoulders. Most of those lived in Mazein, and so reasonably wouldn't expect the experience to be followed by being flung over a mare's back and into the ceiling.

Gravity noticed.

The earth pony, having gotten to experience 'up', decided to stay down,

Cerea stopped galloping, ending the charge some five meters from the unicorn.

She didn't know who this was. But the attackers had been trying to conceal their identities beneath robes and layers of winter clothing, and... this mare was nude. It seemed to indicate some chance of having her be a member of the staff. And with the strange way she was moving, not really paying attention to anything at all -- she might be hurt. Concussed, under a spell...

Or it could be a trick. The girl had to approach with caution. She didn't see an injury. (Scenting one was out of the question: the last of Nightwatch's wind was coming from behind her, and all of the air was blowing towards the mare.) There was still a horn --

-- several things happened in rapid succession, and Nightwatch's scream came first.

"CEREA! DON'T!!"

The unicorn's ears twitched as they received the name. And then she casually looked up, and saw the centaur. Glanced at the bare flank, where the sword would have been.

"...oh...!" That was all she said, at least to start. A single small peal of delight.

And now that she was looking up... she did have a distinctive feature: her eyes.

Under normal circumstances, they would have been a rather bright amethyst. But they didn't reflect. Nothing shone from them. They didn't pull in light: they crushed it --

-- the unicorn looked at the centaur.

The other aura ignited.

And then it was the world.

and the world burned
the toxic fumes which rose from a soul which had turned into magma, heat surging as the shell of normalcy fell away, the aura was everywhere and everything and the girl had never been in the presence of anything like this, didn't know how to block or moderate a sense she'd never needed to filter, the aura reached into her and tried to sear away anything which didn't fit and that was everything, she was staggering, helpless, she couldn't focus and it felt as if she could barely scent or see anything but that horrible aura, the illness rose to greet its best ally and

the girl knew the madness was in the palace
just before it wrapped itself around her throat.

The mare's horn ignited.

And the corona was also amethyst -- to start. But something happened as it flowed forward, seemed to split just before it reached Cerea: the second portion angled off behind her, out of sight. The initial burst seemed to be collapsing in on itself, much like those horrible pupils. Gaining density at the edges, as the natural sparkle became muted within something which looked so very much like a mottled bruise --

-- the field projection wrapped itself around Cerea's throat, just below the translator's disc.
It was solid.
It squeezed.

The centaur, lost within the burning aura, could barely think. Her hooves, tapping into the core of desperate instinct, scrambled backwards.

There had been field loops at Palimyno: some of the unicorns had attacked with them and after she'd been beaten, a number had tried using the tactic to divide up her weight before finally resorting to the net, with earth ponies doing the dragging. But the Sergeant had taught her to defeat a loop with mass, test her body weight against the corona's strength and watch the projection break --

-- she tried to pull her way out of it, and the unicorn had been ready for that. The corona blazed a little brighter, with the projection simply stretching as the loop pressed ever-inwards. It was... better than that one police officer had done. The one from the first castle. Had she ever learned his name...?

The girl distantly registered a very loud thump. It took a moment before she realized it had been the sound of her own body dropping to the ground. The secondary, softer version which came from behind her seemed to be something of a mystery.

Her hands came up. Fingers clawed at the projection, tried to tear it to pieces. It didn't work. And all the while, the loop kept contracting. Because Fluttershy had been right. The neck was just about the same for every species, and so many interesting things passed through it.

The girl had four lungs -- and one airway.

I...

The mare was... smiling. Something almost purely joyous, exultant, and -- peaceful.

...why wouldn't she be happy?
She's bringing the monster down.
She thinks she's saving the world...

Her vision was beginning to go grey at the edges. The smile was going to be the last thing she ever saw. It was... actually a rather lovely smile...

But her ears were still working, at least for a few more seconds. And the mare...

"We separate the bad fillies," the unicorn softly, almost gently sang. "Reinforce and drag..."

She didn't want to hear that. Not as the last sounds to ever reach her. The girl's ears tilted backwards --

-- another sound. Half a gasp, cut off around the edges. Somewhere behind her.

Cerea, eyesight still narrowing in as grey began to fuse with black, found the loop hadn't fully encased her neck's joints. Head and waist both turned, and she saw where the branching projection had gone.

Nightwatch was down.
Choking, as the second loop squeezed her throat.
Her wings came to a stop, splayed across the floor instead of refolding. The last of the wind died, and the unicorn's scent finally reached Cerea. Something acrid and constant and burning, almost on the same level as the aura. The scent from the clearing, only elevated beyond mere traces and given the proper context. The stench of insanity.
The wind had died, and the pegasus would be next.

no
this is my fault
i can't do anything
i'm the reason she's down here

(the illness surged, almost blocked the aura)

she's going to
me
because of

The silver eyes were starting to bulge. To dim.

The girl forced herself to turn forward, even as the loop contacted a little more.

She could barely breathe. But the disc covered her larynx, and for what little air she could reach at all... she could still speak.

"Just me... you can have me, please, I surrender, you can kill me... just let her go..."

The unicorn, who seemed to be looking down at her now, simply tilted the brown head slightly to the left.

The girl's arms dropped. Illness filled every finger, and she was starting to lose that sensation too. It was almost a mercy. She was helpless and lost and she had killed her friend

this mare is killing my friend

and death would at least make the illness go away.

She was... going to see her sister. And she would do so in the company of another sibling, because they would enter together.

I shouldn't have gone in.
Shouldn't have brought her.
My fault.
...she's killing us

There would be another statue in the gardens. Just one. The centaur had quit.

"Not her... please..."

The head tilt went the other way.

"My... my life for her..."

But the mare smiled, and sang a little more. Cerea's failing ears lost the lyrics, but... she didn't need them. She understood.

There was no such thing as enough surrender. And the little knight's life was just one more thing to take.

...my life for her...
my life
her choice
to come with me
to try and protect me
to sacrifice

Lights flickered overhead. Yellow, grey, teal.

Her arms were coming up again. A final desperate clawing at a collapsing bond was also instinct. History had taught her that. France had given the world the mass-production executions of the guillotine -- but before that, there had been a lot of hangings.

my life for
I swore

One last push of the legs. Maybe the unicorn wouldn't be ready for that.

I swore

Her knees were trying to straighten. The loop moved with her. But the unicorn didn't seem to be taller any more.

maybe I can just fall on you
I swore
my partner
my sister
somepony I love

She had to try something. To try anything, the last thing, the only --

you can have me

Her tail trembled. One hand clenched. The other went back. The unicorn, peacefully aware that the girl was seconds away from death, simply watched.
But she was almost up.
She just needed one hoofstep.
One moment.
One thought.

but I swore
my life for all lives
my life for HER life
and maybe you'll kill me

BUT I WON'T LET YOU HAVE HER

And the closing field of black went to grey, thinned before evaporating under the onslaught from twinned brilliant flashes of purest white which bloomed from somewhere behind her upper torso, and every trace of the illness vanished as her head cleared and she knew exactly what she had to do and her sword was in her hand.

She didn't question its presence, any more than she thought about the odd, brief sensation which arose from within, as if something almost fully spent had just drifted out of her skin. She felt it briefly brush against the nape of her neck as it left.

There was no need to question the blade's presence. It was her sword. She knew what she was supposed to do with it.

Her right hand moved, and the edgeless excuse for a weapon did the only thing it was capable of. It cut through light.

The split projections fell apart. Oxygen rushed into Cerea's lungs, a second gasp sounded from the pegasus, and the staggering unicorn just barely managed to get her head up --

-- she wasn't really staring at the centaur. Cerea felt as if the unicorn was focusing on a point somewhere around where the torn-away hospital gown would have been. That seemed rather rude.

She swung the blade, and the unicorn cantered backwards. Just barely getting out of the way.

"No!" the mare whispered, and to hear the syllable within the aura was to witness a concept collapsing in upon itself. "Nonononononono...!"

The aura didn't wink out. It twisted, flared, turned against the unicorn in a new form of backlash, madness pressing from without and within. And then she turned. She ran.

Cerea had other priorities. For starters, there was breathing. That seemed to be very important, especially when the breaths weren't her own.

She risked six quick inhalations: her lungs gratefully accepted the gift, while her bra dutifully held. And then she rushed across the short distance to the pegasus, and dropped down to be at the little knight's side.

"Are you all right? How's your breathing?"

Silver eyes flickered to Cerea's face. Moved to the exposed left flank. Repeated the actions --

"Nightwatch! TALK!"

The little knight took a breath.

"Um," she said. "Um. Um. Um..."

Close enough. "Can you get up? I don't think you should fight."

"UM..."

"I'm going to put you in the armory," Cerea decided, and placed the sword into its scabbard. (She had the sword, so she had a scabbard. That was only sensible.) "It's the safest place. And then I'm going after her."

"...I..." The silver gaze flickered again. "I can get in there myself. You'll lose too much time... Cerea -- Cerea, you have to --"

"You're sure?" That with a quick check of the fallen combatants. Two of them were still semiconscious, both were staring at her, and neither was making any attempt to move --

-- the robed mare noticed the attention, and promptly passed out.

Cerea resolved to kick the stallion during the exit, followed by calling the situation solved. Attacking herself didn't really seem to be helping anything. Attacking the intruders, however, was much more practical.

"-- that was the arsonist..."

The centaur felt her lips pull back from her teeth.

"...Cerea, she's a hackamore..."

She was roughly familiar with the term, which was probably why the wires hadn't hissed. She just had no concept of the local context. "She's a --"

"Her mind is missing a bit. This is crazy -- you just... you just --"

"-- into the armory. You promise?"

"I promise. Um. Cerea --"

She reached forward with both hands, got the little knight up on her hooves and gently kissed the black fur of the forehead.

"Good. I'm going to go hurt her now."

And then Cerea straightened to her full height, turned her body until she was facing the proper hallway, got the kick in...

She didn't question the sword, the scabbard, the sudden cure, or any other part of it. There was no need. She'd read a lot of stories, and some of them had even been American. She understood how this worked. When it came to how the brain might attempt to find comfort during strangulation, this particular result was a rather literal classic.

Mr. Bierce's writing suggested she could make her dying dream last long enough to do some real damage. She had a Cause.

She took the first breath.
The Second.
Then she moved.

And she was galloping through the twisting lights of the hallways with her ears scooped forward for sound and her olfactory bulb going for every possible trace, the mare had a lead and it was possible for her to take strange turns, but all Cerea had to do was find the scent or hear hoofsteps and neither one happened first. It only took twenty seconds of running before the first signs reached her, and they consisted of a continual litany of "Nonononono" with no music left in it at all.

It almost reminded her of somepony.

She kept moving. And then she saw burnt orange hairs whip around a corner.

It was more of a chase than she'd expected, than she'd ever wanted. Cerea was stronger, could move faster over an extended distance than a minotaur across a short one, and the unicorn had no hope of matching that. But the pony was smaller and in the hallways of the lower level, that gave her more freedom to maneuver. She was zig-zagging, taking every turn she could find -- and Cerea had to slow before moving around corners, trying not to slam any part of her body into the sides. The arsonist could manage everything at what would have otherwise been a negligible top speed, and that corona kept igniting, over and over --

-- she stopped aiming at Cerea after the second deflection, because the resulting moment of weakness was letting the centaur catch up. Instead, she started aiming her field through open doorways, pulling out random objects and flinging them backwards: the high ones had to be blocked or dodged, while the lower pieces had to be jumped. The first piece of tipped art suggested they were moving into the more public areas, shifting the second demonstrated some decent field strength as Cerea realized they were probably on the verge of a public exit, she had to vault the fallen statue --

-- it was pure luck. There were hidden paths into the lower level -- but there were also public ones, because just about anypony on staff might need to visit the device repair shop. You couldn't stay lost forever, and the unicorn had spotted the most common way up and out.

Slim hooves hit the incline, and Cerea could hear the mare's breathing beginning to labor: the unicorn wasn't used to this level of exertion. The centaur took the slope, braced her own hooves in the designated dents, took a left turn at the top as newly-fractured jewels in the wall turned every reflection into an endless collection of distortions, and then they were both coming out from behind the Resplendent Ramp.

They were in the Syzygy. The connecting point of Solar and Lunar wings and when they were on the main level, that meant they were at the entrance. The exit. And three of the doors were open, two were off the hinges, there was a tremendous amount of noise outside, the arsonist was racing through the empty Grand Hall towards the outside and bad things happened when the girl went out of bounds --

-- it slowed her, just for a second. The unicorn gained some distance, galloped through the smallest exit.

Then the centaur remembered that it was her dream. She could do whatever she liked.

She went for the largest door.
She left the palace, racing forth into winter.
She entered the final phase of the war.

And the first thing she heard was the rumble of hooves and rush of wings closing in on the palace, because the second full wave had been set to provide an additional level of distraction. It had arrived exactly on schedule, it was coming directly at her, and it was moving somewhat faster than it probably should have.

It didn't have to worry about getting through the gates, because that had already been done.

The attackers were a little more concerned with what was coming up behind them.

The faction leaders don't understand herd mentality. They can't, not when they've told themselves to be something separate. They forgot the reason it exists in the first place, and then they overlooked some of the ways it might function. Things they told themselves would never happen, and the dedicated repetition of a fervent belief has yet to create actual Fact.

They don't understand that ponies in public can be skittish, wild weather can produce anxiety, and a few are considering whether bunny stampedes can be weaponized -- but the herd will always protect its home.

Its leaders.

And it's more than just the herd.

As with the initial attack against the gates, there are ponies here who didn't intend to be. A few have been carried along by rushing bodies and would really rather be elsewhere. And with just about all of the city's police either inside or somewhere on the grounds... there's been nopony to direct traffic. Some ponies were scheduled to be at the palace around this hour, didn't know what was going on, got pushed in by the jostles of grouped movement and streets which now seem to only lead one way, couldn't get out, and now they're taking what shelter they can. Cowering within doorways and arches and against nearby walls. Trembling, shivering, and trying to stay out of it.

They're about to become very important.

But when the assault began -- and as it continued -- ponies were leaving the palace. The police were alerted early. Those who were evacuated to the streets had to go somewhere. The whole thing has been kicking up a lot of noise, because that's the nature of the distraction: the sheer volume is going to produce some degree of investigation. And Glimmerglow looked at the flag of her nation, and then oriented on every other -- because Equestria acts on its own too often, and a nation forgets it has friends.

She went to Embassy Row. All of it. And now there are cloven hooves, twinned horns, clacking beaks coming in through the air, and they're joined by pegasus feathers and earth pony voices and there's a unicorn Guard who was supposed to have the day off at the very front of it all. He got the word just in time.

It's not just the herd, although that's the majority of it. There is a new army charging in behind the second wave, because Canterlot has arrived.

There's been a few battlecries on this day. (Some of them took the form of legal statutes.) The unicorn, with hundreds charging in behind him, adds one more.

"Okay, assholes! We'll take it from here!"

The second wave raced forward, no longer so much in an attempt to enter the palace as from knowing what was coming up behind them and trying to find any way out of it. Very few of them truly noticed the rather ordinary mare galloping towards them, because there were other priorities.

But then they saw the centaur.
And the centaur had the sword.
The sword was supposed to be gone. It was part of what had made the assault possible. In theory, anypony could take on a Princess if they were quick and clever and ready to defeat two ponies who were so obviously weak, but nopony had any concept of how to deal with the sword.

(And for the attentive in the second wave, there was more to stare at. There was that which they could barely allow themselves to see, and refused to believe.)

The second wave was racing forward. But 'forward' was where the centaur was, she was coming towards them, one of the unicorns desperately tested for a faked blade with a corona projection and when she cut through it, that was when the terror began to take over.

Call it... centaur panic.

They didn't want to go forward. They couldn't go back. The conflict broke the wave, turned it into eddies and puddles of robed ponies who weren't entirely sure what to do next.

The answer, at the moment Canterlot caught up to the drastically outnumbered ponies, became 'fight'.

Or, more precisely, 'lose'.

The arsonist was galloping, and now she had bodies to block for her: ones which didn't even have to be tipped over. All she had to do was steer around the little battles without getting involved herself, squeezing through the small spaces which the centaur couldn't use. But she was tiring. Her breathing was becoming ragged, because she'd barely exercised for moons and hadn't even done much in the way of casual trots before her exile had begun. She didn't have much time.

All she could do was use the battlefield as an obstacle course. And there was just so much to avoid.

There were five ponies who'd lined up against a female yak, because the dri with the long braids was wearing a badge designating her as part of the Solar staff and if there was anything the faction members wanted to do more than than establishing themselves above other ponies, it was getting rid of everyone who wasn't a pony at all. There were five of them and they all had magic, so it didn't matter how big she was. And a member of the species whose portfolio was for destruction casually glanced at their line, charged forward, and hit the group's collective weak point.

Smashing, done properly, was something of an art.

There were zebras everywhere, and whiffwings was free for the asking.

Several griffons were at work. Stares lanced this way and that. Two ponies dropped to the ground, rolled over to display bellies and helpless throats, and that was enough to make four more break. One of them left the cobblestoned streets, detoured across the nearest patch of soil, and a white-furred paw stained with the residue of fine powders shot up out of the earth, grabbed an ankle, and began to drag the screaming pony down.

The arsonist had to get past all of it. So did the centaur. And none of them were paying any attention to her, not just yet -- but no matter what she did, the centaur was still close behind...

...they scatter before her, clearing the path, and the target senses something is wrong. Ponies are a prey species, and the fact that centaurs are mostly herbivorous doesn't change the rest of the facts: forward-set eyes, ears meant for directional focus of sound, added to speed and strength and power.

There are many ways to create a monster, and the one the girl knows best is rather basic: you tell someone they're a monster over and over again, then wait to see how long it takes before they agree with you. But even with something which is just starting to enjoy meat, you still might get a predator.

Prey knows when it's being hunted, and so the unicorn glances back. Sees what's charging it, and the horn ignites, because it's all she has, it's what makes her better and something has to get through -- but there is a sword, and every desperate attempt at projecting the corona is deflected, parried, rendered into the sort of fading light which might be seen in dying eyes. The centaur charges, it's faster than any unicorn in the world, and it can't be stopped. Nopony in the city will try, because there are invisible walls bordering that charge path and they are being maintained by fear.

The unicorn mare is small, because they're all so very small. The centaur could pick her up with one hand if she gets the leverage, slam her into a wall and then just because the sound produced by the impact is so pleasant, she could do it again and again and again. The unicorn has magic -- but that's the only thing she has. Take away that power and what is she?

Something which could be hurt.
Something which could be dominated.
Something a living nightmare could be in charge of --

-- there were too many kinds of assault under way, and some of them were sensory. She'd never been outside in a crowd like this: when it came to Menajeria, she'd barely been outside at all. Cerea was getting what felt like every species scent at once: the flurry of emotions in the air was trying to produce the same level of disorientation as a Tokyo intersection. And there was too much noise in the battle. Her ears kept trying to retreat under her hair.

But it was her dream, and she kept going.

It was actually turning into what she felt was a rather nice dream. Having familiar faces turn up was a good touch. She spotted Vanilla Bear, who was absolutely no good whatsoever at actual fighting -- but the enthusiastic leg flailing seemed to be putting in some work. Crossing Guard turned up several meters beyond that, working in conjunction with the cattle from her citizenship class.

Abjura was countering workings in all directions. Acrolith had settled for trying to find a vegetarian equivalent to mincemeat, and was making it out of vegetarians.

There was a demon of scorch and singe making wreckage out of several attackers, and that almost seemed to be bad. Then the furious avatar of hard-galloping pain resolved into Barding, and that was worse. Because an earth pony who had spent most of his life in a forge was going to see that considerable natural strength magnified by Quite A Lot. He didn't like anything which was happening, he wanted to know if anypony had seen the girl and he was going to keep kicking ponies until one of the attackers said where she was. Plus he had somehow come under the screaming impression that somepony had to have been touching his tools and, for no reason Cerea could think of, he stopped next to one groaning body and asked if it knew the hoofball schedule.

There were also four minotaurs up ahead, as part of a solid, thick line of defenders. She could see the horns. Having four meant increased odds of getting a female. Of course, spotting a familiar salt-and-pepper mane had just cut it down to three chances --

-- it was a thick line. But there were gaps to work with -- if you were the size of an average unicorn mare, and the arsonist slipped through one of them. Cerea kept up the chase, the ambassador heard pounding hooves and turned just in time to see her, the girl tapped every last bit of strength which the Second Breath could offer and started to line up for the jump --

-- which was when the breadth of that line truly registered.

I can't.

Not on her best day. Not during her best dream, not without sprouting wings. No centaur could jump that far, true or not. She could just barely make out what might be a landing spot through the shifting bodies and it was more than six times the length of her own body away, she had to pull up and find a way to go around--

-- but the ambassador had already seen her.

Muscles began to shift under his shirt, and there seemed to be a pattern to it. A sort of dance, conducted without any true movement. Pectorals tightened, released. Biceps tensed, hooves scraped at the ground, he looked at her, and the Second Breath was abruptly and utterly outclassed.

Strength flooded through her, supercharged every muscle as her potential soared beyond maximum capacity, adding power without mass and fusing it to everything she could already do -- something which happened as Torque dropped to one knee, braced a big hand against the street in search of support.

She understood. It was a loan. He was going to need it back, and quickly.

Cerea grinned. Accelerated further, picked a launch point --

-- there were screams. There were a lot of screams, and she belatedly realized that some of them had been going on for a while. But several recent examples had been produced by the fact that quite a few people now had a centaur going over their heads.

She really hoped none of them looked up. She had half of a hospital gown for a skirt. It wasn't really intended to do anything for preventing spectating from underneath.

The landing had her scrambling to recover balance. The increased strength seemed to help her with the impact, but it hadn't done anything for her body's durability: a hind hoof had just chipped. And immediately after most of the local world heard her come down, the extra strength went back to its source.

She didn't object. Torque was part of the fight, and wrestling certainly required a certain degree of power. But there was still a period of transition where she was trying to adjust, reorient, pick up on the arsonist again, and it was also the moment when the enemy pegasus went for the sword.

It probably hadn't been the worst idea for a move. Swoop in, get her teeth around the blade, and count on having momentum provide the power required for yanking it out of the girl's grip. In fact, as far as disarming Cerea went, it worked to perfection: the girl felt the hilt being pulled away from her palm, and then she got to see the pegasus rolling across the cobblestones because at the instant the pony had taken up the sword, all capacity for flight had gone away.

The sword fell out of the mare's mouth. Several random hooves kicked at it, and none without penalty because even a brief moment of contact produced revulsion and the desire to stop -- but it was skittering across the street, moving out of the girl's sight --

-- that wasn't fair. This was her last dream. She wanted it back.

And then the hilt was in her hand again.

It was a very accommodating sort of dream.

Quite a few of the combatants saw that. A number of the robed ones started up a new scream. Some of Canterlot's defenders apparently felt the need to sit down, and indulged on the spot. Cerea galloped.

She spotted the arsonist, who was approaching the edge of the battle. Behind her, the noise seemed to be lessening, with the sounds of combat fading away. There was an odd, familiar sensation of being watched, although she took some comfort in the fact that no one was recording anything for upload.

The unicorn mare was galloping. But there had been sweat sliding from the dull brown coat for some time, and it had taken on a new aspect: the white bubbles of froth. The arsonist had very little left. Running out of strength, space, and those she could hide behind. They were almost out of the central fight and once they left the main battlefield, there would be nothing but --

-- and that was when she saw the children.

After it ended... that was when somepony explained their presence. There were always those in a war who'd simply been trapped. A class had been scheduled to tour the palace at a given hour, the teacher had brought her charges in from an unusual approach angle, traffic had pushed them along, just about everypony who could have directed the flow away had rushed inside -- not the Hillsborough Crush, not when none of the youths had been hurt, but a distant kin. Nopony had realized what was happening until it was too late.

They'd only been there for a few minutes. There were colts and fillies cowering near a wall, because they were having so much trouble in simply getting away. They were all too young to have magic, and the teacher was trying to watch over them -- along with several police officers, a number of city ponies, and two griffons. The adults were trying to move the children to safety, protecting them from something worse than chaos. And they were almost out, but they were young and fearful, using the wall for shelter and bracing both, staying as close to each other as they could in order to share a different kind of strength.

The arsonist saw the children.

She saw the unicorn trying to help the pegasus along.

Her horn ignited. Mottled bruises wrapped around two young necks.

"Reinforce and drag," offered the first bars of the song, as the choking began and the unicorns among the adults instinctively, desperately aimed their own fields at a working they'd never seen before, tried to counter and failed as everyone else turned towards the lit horn, trying to line up a shot for the backlash. "Reinforce --"

-- and the centaur caught up.

The blade slashed through the projection. All four of the mare's knees bent, and the light fell apart.

"YOU'RE MAKING ME DO THIS!" the arsonist shouted. "IT'S YOUR FAULT! IT ALWAYS WAS! NONE OF THIS WOULD EVER HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU DIDN'T EXIST! YOU'RE A MONSTER -- "

The centaur's left hand went down as the upper torso bent forward in concert with folding foreknees, and then the girl's fingers were under the mare's right shoulder.

She lifted, almost casually. Released the Second Breath as she straightened, because it felt like she'd had it going for too long already and she didn't need it for this.

Then she took four hoofsteps forward and slammed the mare's back against the bracing wall.

The pony's weight was being supported by one hand, pressing the unicorn against stone. The other arm, pulled well back in order to get the proper alignment, was holding the sword. A blade without an edge, which had a rough approximation of a point.

The point was against the mare's throat.

No one moved. No one spoke. Behind her, the last of the fights fell apart. That was how it had to be, in story and dream.

The world watched. Waited.

"I saved your life," Cerea softly began. "Twice. Once in the underlayer of the palace, because the ones who did all this to break you out of the cells... they must have decided they couldn't get you out any more. That's why that last one tried to kill you. It's the same reason they invaded in the first place: so you wouldn't talk. He tried to cut you with a hoofblade, and I. saved. your. life."

The arsonist's horn was dark. She didn't speak. Not with the sword against her larynx, and the centaur so ready to push.

"And then you strangled me, just as you tried to strangle them," the girl went on. "You tried to choke a Guard. My partner. The same pony whose home you burned, when you nearly killed a foal --"

Which was when she started to hear the crowd again.

Cerea didn't know how public the arrest had been, or if there had been any photographs. It was quite possible that very few of the group had found the time to look at a newspaper that morning and in any case, she didn't know if her dreams came with news coverage. But the story of the foal had been in the press for moons now. A city waiting for recovery, or... the word that it would never come.

Perhaps none of them had seen an article and if they had, the mare was the sort of pony whose face was forgotten within minutes. But Cerea had just told the entire capital who the unicorn was.

The sound was growing, and it was something much less than happy.

"-- because you don't care. Because you'll blame anyone except yourself. And I saved your life twice: once in the corridors --"

Her own voice felt so calm. Almost... otherworldly. The dream had to be drawing close to its end.

"-- and once in Tartarus. When I had to kill Tirek, for the sake of the world --"

It triggered another sound: one which she swore had to have shaken the palace. She let it pass.

"-- and for all of you."

I'm crying.
I can feel the tears. Running down my face, where everyone can see.
Knights don't cry --

-- sometimes they did. There were circumstances under which it was permitted, and one of them was watching an ancestral home burn.

"Because it was all going to happen again," she didn't quite whisper. "I destroyed my only road home, because the one who built it is dead." (She missed the next ripple of sound.) "He thought I would have to save him. Save myself. But I chose all of you. Because that's never a choice at all, is it? I gave myself up for you, I died for you, for the world and your lives and for magic --"

The unicorn's eyes had gone blank. Words were still going into the ears. But it felt as if comprehension had been dismissed.

The supporting hand shoved.

The mare gasped. The sword's point...

"-- and what do you use it for? What's the only thing you've ever used it for? To hurt somepony else! To attack Guards, to strangle children! Without thought, without reason, without caring." Just a little more softly, "And you call me a monster? WHAT ARE YOU?"

Which was when she realized that the point was starting to indent the throat.

"...please..." the mare whispered.

But the query was only in the voice. It didn't feel as if any of it had reached the eyes.

Or perhaps she simply couldn't see it, through her own flowing tears.

Killing is easy.
I've already done it once.

"You have earned no kindness," the centaur harshly declared. (And still, no one moved. Held back by the sword, the dream, the moment.) "What are you, without your magic? Is there anything left? Should there be, if you think a horn is all which could make someone worthy of life?"

She leaned in, realigned the sword to keep the point where it was. Came face-to-snout with the shaking mare, and felt her breasts pressing against the heaving ribs. Another source of pinning weight and with the unicorn, the mere contact would be torment.

"You have no magic," the girl whispered. "Not unless I allow it. You have no breath unless I allow it. I'm guessing you find the concept familiar..."

She felt the heartbeat of another, thudding against her chest. Counting off the last moments there would ever be.

I promised to hurt you...

And she would have asked herself what a knight would do, when a defeated foe possessed neither honor nor a hope for change. But she didn't feel like a knight.

There was the question of how a Guard might finish it. No possible answers applied to her.

There was a certain query as to the method Centorea Shianus preferred. The girl just wasn't sure Centorea Shianus existed. That filly had been an artificial construct, forced to hold together by the weight of eternal pressure and the heat of her mother's endless fear.

Perhaps, at the end of all dreams, she simply needed to decide what Cerea wanted.

The girl was at the conclusion of her life, watched by her conjured figments of crowd and children, and she still wasn't entirely sure who 'Cerea' was.

But she knew who she wanted that mare to be.

"I want you to think about that," she told the unicorn, looking directly into those horrible eyes. "In every moment, for every breath you have left to take. I want you to think about being helpless, like a choking child. I want you to think about everything I could do to you, everything you deserve --"

The supporting hand let go.

The arsonist slid down the wall, and the edgeless blade almost followed the full path. It simply shifted as the mare dropped, and all four of the centaur's knees bent and her legs folded, with the plastic putting a shallow trench in the fur while the sword's point moved from throat to horn.

The girl, in the closest approximation she could ever find for a crouch, leaned in as much as her upper waist would allow.

"-- if I wasn't. so. nice."

Her free hand touched the mare's warm face. Closed the listless eyes.

And there was only silence.

No one in the huge crowd moved. It felt as if the world had barely breathed. The tableau was frozen, and only the unicorn's heaving ribs provided any sign that life went on.

A false life, at the end of dream.

It was over.

Cerea closed her eyes, and waited to open them again in Lala's presence. To... see Nightwatch, one more time. There would be a long talk. Apologies. Tears. And then, perhaps, her sisters might forgive her.

After that... perhaps there would be a chance to make a new friend...

...a new sound entered the world, something half-familiar. Soft pads moving across stone, with little clicks added in as claws contacted the rocks. She just had to scale up for canid and biped...

"Centaur?" Yapper whispered.

...typical. She couldn't even get the perfect ending.

Just barely moving her lips and trusting the disc to work regardless, "What?"

"Centaur should probably carry her in. Or give her to the other Guards. Or police. Find a restraint. Sword can't stay there forever."

"I can't."

"Centaur hurt? See some bruising around throat." There was a brief pause. "Also see --"

"I'm dreaming," Cerea unnecessarily explained. "I have to let it end..."

This pause was longer.

"Dreaming."

Four claws rudely poked into Cerea's left shoulder.

"OW!"

"Not dreaming," Yapper firmly established. "Centaur weird --"

...wait.
What?
But --

-- which was when they heard the wings. Multiple pairs, moving in from the palace -- but two of those sets were huge and powerful, swooping towards them, descending --

Cerea opened her eyes, looked up just in time to see the white horse and dark mare coming down, flanked by multiple pegasus Guards. Multiple sapients scrambled back, trying to provide touchdown room.

The day landed on her right, with the night on her left. And the first thing the white horse did was to examine the bruising on the girl's throat, followed by a glare at the arsonist. Given another moment, there would have been an order given: the first of many. To bring out a restraint, and secure the prisoner again.

But it all had to wait, because the dark mare had landed on the girl's left.

She, too, immediately began a basic examination. Looking for injuries.

The alicorn stopped.

Stared.

And a mare who knew about the power of stories pushed aside every reaction which could be offered to the impossible until there was time to deal with it, made room for the necessary and seized the only moment they might ever have.

Her horn ignited. The corona projected into the sky, expanded as it twisted in shape and color, until an intangible centaur some fifteen times the size of the real floated above them all.

"SHE IS ONE OF US! OUR SAVIOR, TIREK'S SLAYER! ONE OF OURS, ONE OF MINE! ARE THERE ANY WHO DARE TO DISAGREE?"

A city stared up into cold winter air. Saw the projected image, an exact replication of the girl who was low against cold stone. Looked at the exposed left hip, with its icon of a sword superimposed over Moon.

And no one could say anything at all.

Impossible

If any had been present within Summit Tower, had witnessed the tiny intangible speck of near-light as it drifted up through the floor... they might have perceived a certain amount of petulance in the movements which followed. There was a degree of irritation associated with having to deal with an environment that had been forcibly prevented from changing, and the barest hint of ripple created by the speck's passage through still air could easily be interpreted as an act of defiance.

It moved over the salt-stained fainting couch, reached the battered storm and hesitated near that section which could be said to resemble a bit of antler. And then it sank in.

The storm collapsed.

It collapsed in on itself. It collapsed into a twisted torso and mismatched limbs, all of which were a little wavery around the edges. It collapsed into antler and horn, paw and talon, hoof and claws and ears and eyes. And at the moment when the couch's cushions finally indented under the light pressure of too-minimal weight, the eyes opened.

They blinked a few times.

"Ah," Discord softly said. "We won, then."

He tried to sit up, and found portions of his form willing to cooperate. The legs seemed to be reporting in on something of a delay, but it was just sitting and he didn't really need them for anything yet. Looking around, however... well, that was just disappointing. Utterly boring decor -- outside of the couch, of course: he immediately recognized it, understood the only possible way it could have been present, and took a moment to appreciate the gift. But when it came to the room itself? Well, the only way for an environment to be this stuffy (and literally!) was to place it in the palace. The home of the boring and staid and grim, where hardly anything interesting ever --

-- a certain basic sense, which had needed a little extra time to awaken, coalesced at last --

-- there... seemed to have been a lot of rather recent chaos in the area. He could hear pegasi flapping just outside the tower, and they sounded exhausted. It appeared as if he might have missed something important...

...how long had he been -- unaware? Unconscious? What had happened to him? His memory was normally sharp: arguably too much so, as to fully dive into the insult of a fully-frozen past would have him internally recreating the experience at a level just below living through it all again. But he remembered Tirek, and... after that, there was just a haze --

-- hurtling endlessly through a maze with no true room to move and no way out, moving constantly because there has to be something and with every attempt, the narrowing walls close in to scrape away that much more of self --

-- there... there would be time to think about that later.

(How much time...)

The past was frozen, locked beyond change: a near-ultimate insult. The future was where anything might happen, and that was why he loved it most. But he had to deal with the present and in this particular slice of time, there had recently been a lot of chaos in the area. There seemed to be some small chance that it might have helped.

There were still some traces in the motionless air. Indications of something big. A change...

The recent surge of chaos might have helped. But there was a rather distinct possibility that it had only helped him. He had to get outside, learn exactly what was going on. And after that, presuming the situation didn't directly involve her (because she had a lovely tendency for being somewhere near the heart of the storm), the next jaunt would be to the cottage: she must have been worrying herself sick, and he had to put an end to it. And after that, there was another stop which he absolutely had to make...

He brought up an arm. Noticed that the outlines of the scutes around the wrist were blurring into each other, and rather irritably told them to stop doing that. (He didn't bother waiting for them to respond, which was nicely matched by their not listening.) Moved his talons, touched them together with a click and a snap --

-- he was something unique in the world. Singular. An entity not quite like any other and if any sapient had seemed to be getting close, he might have just changed himself out of sheer spite. But there were still things he had in common with the other inhabitants of the planet, and one of them decided to apply.

Discord, as someone who had been critically close to death, woke up on the first true day of his recovery -- and promptly overdid it.

It felt as if most of a city was staring up at the giant illusion of the centaur. Given the sheer size added to Luna's placement, the majority of Canterlot had a pretty good viewing angle.

But it wasn't everyone. The girl was now staring at the sword in her hand. Yapper had glanced up, shrugged a little, and then looked down again: for a Diamond Dog, comfort was found much closer to ground. And Celestia, who often wished to have just a little more advance warning for some of her sister's plans (and, on too many occasions, any warning at all), had looked up about half a second later than everyone else.

The elder stared. Yanked her gaze back down, looked directly at the girl's right hip, and found a hospital gown blocking the view.

Sunlight flickered around her horn. The fabric lifted slightly. Cerea, whose breaths were coming at the rather low speed of catastrophic stun, didn't seem to notice.

And there was also a test which could be done: a very basic spell, something which determined whether an icon was true, the product of cutie pox or, when it came to the young and desperate, the result of what was generally some rather poorly-applied paint. It was a working which the old mare knew, it took less than a second to cast, and --

-- most of the crowd missed seeing the results. The majority were looking up, others didn't have the right angle, very few would have recognized what the spell did and for any who might have understood, there was a very large alicorn in the way.

The fabric dropped back down.

It could be hard to work out some of the girl's expressions: as learning experiences went, recognizing all the signifiers which a singular configuration of features could produce was an ongoing one. But to Celestia, the breathing alone suggested deep bewilderment. The utter confusion of someone who'd not only just found themselves with new limbs, but now had to figure out how they actually worked.

Celestia --

-- it's real
it can't be
how is it --

-- had a certain amount of empathy there...

The arsonist, still being lightly touched by the swordpoint, shivered with revulsion. Tried to wriggle away, and the girl automatically moved the blade to track.

They were among the public. Within the direct view and potential attention of what felt like a sixth of the city and just about all of the embassy personnel -- barring a few who were still wrapping up the last fights, which hearing told her was mostly taking place around the edges. Everything the sisters did would be witnessed.

But you didn't stay in power for well over a millennium without learning a few short-range tricks for pitching your voice.

She kept her horn dark throughout the casting, knowing the distortions produced by hiding the magic would bring the working's duration to something under a minute, and then just barely moved her lips.

"I thought she just found a sword somewhere."

A rather dry, slightly unsteady "...somewhere," arose from the dark mare on the girl's left.

Defensively, "There are two swords in the armory. Somewhere."

"Not used by ponies, of course."

"No. Confiscated. So when I saw her holding one while we were flying down..."

"Understood," Luna replied. "For my part, I felt Barding had made her a replacement. In case it became necessary to attempt a bluff. And now that we have completed this topic, would you like to face the real question --"

-- which was when the light manifested behind them.

It was, as bursts of illumination went, something two very young mares had learned to recognize in an instant. React to, because the appearance of that light meant dread and destruction and a chance of death. Centuries-old instincts had them turning before their conscious minds realized what was taking place, getting ready to defend --

-- the white light, when used for transportation, was readily distinguishable from that of a unicorn's teleport: more of a bloom than a flash. It drew the attention of the entire crowd (but for the girl, who was still staring down), and made the very last of the fighting stop. It was something which the sisters had believed they might never see again.

It was also much more shaky than usual, and casually violated multiple laws of physics through taking several seconds to fully fill the required space.

"Now, really," declared what, but for a lack of full strength, would have been the world's most expert put-upon tones. "A fuss is being kicked up on this scale, and none of you thought to inform me? One could begin to feel somewhat neglected. I really could --"

-- his body dipped to the left.

The sisters stared. So did most of the crowd. The draconequus, abruptly finding himself both physically and mentally off-center, simply looked down.

"...oh," he softly stated, and watched a half-tangible hoof sink a little deeper into cobblestone. "So there would appear to be a few... limits. This may have been a mistake..."

Nopony moved.

His eyebrows knit together. The clawed foot seemed to take on extra solidity. A portion of his antler blurred. The sunken hoof failed to go anywhere.

Red eyes glared at the alicorns and, most unusually, did so while fully within their sockets.

"Try not to enjoy this too much," their old enemy wearily requested, and the mismatched shoulders slumped. "I don't suppose --"

Which was when he finally saw Cerea.

The talons fell open, and did so in precise concert with his jaw. The paw, however, simply came up.

The crowd had fallen silent. (Sapients often went quiet in the presence of the draconequus, generally in the hopes that it would somehow prevent them from gaining his attention.) It meant the sound produced by the facepalm traveled for quite a distance, and the noise made the girl begin to turn. Her lower body remained almost flush against the stone, with the right arm keeping the sword exactly where it was -- but the complicated jointing of neck and upper waist allowed her to rotate just enough to see where everyone else was staring.

She blinked a few times. The sisters decided the reaction was suitable.

"Oh, for..." Discord muttered as his paw dropped, and followed that up with a petulant declaration of "I just did this! Look, I know it's almost traditional that there be no rest for the hero, but I got the last one! Would somepony else --"

He stopped, and red eyes stared deep into blue.

"-- I know you," he whispered. "How do I...?"

The claw planted, pushed. It let him take a single staggering step, as the sunken hoof was dragged through the ground.

"I know you," Discord just barely repeated, and tried to move again. "You... carried me home..."

Both knees gave out.

The sisters moved. They did the only thing they could and when they stopped, the frozen world could do nothing more than watch.

Discord blinked again. Looked to the left, and then the right. Saw where his windmilling arms had come to be propped up across a pair of alicorn backs.

"...what," the suspended (and now rather tilted) draconequus eventually got out, "are you two trying to --"

"We're getting you inside," Celestia firmly said. "Now."

"You require examination," Luna added. "Do not exert yourself any further."

His expression suggested he was treating 'examination' on the same level as 'studied', if only because both were equally grievous insults. "I'd rather not be poked and prodded, if it's all the same to you two. One would think that mares who've spent so much of their lives in dodging medical charts would have a certain degree of sympathy --"

"-- and what are you going to do," Celestia softly asked, "if we decide to press the issue?"

His head turned just enough to let him reluctantly note the section of leg which was still partially inside the street.

"...apparently very little."

He braced himself against their backs. Pushed, and the hoof came free. It still took several careful wing nudges to help him turn around.

"Cerea," the elder called out, "we have restraints inside. But I don't want to leave you here with her until somepony can bring one out. Can you carry her in?"

"...yes," eventually drifted back to her on a slow current of something approaching inner concussion.

"While keeping the sword in contact," Luna added. "And hold her in such a way that she cannot try to kick."

The affirmation echo eventually turned up.

"Good," Celestia firmly declared. "You're with us." She looked around. "Bulkhead, you too: I know it's your day off, but you've clearly decided to put in some overtime and you look like you're the freshest. And --" so this is where he wound up "-- you too, Sunspot. And Glimmerglow." Because the returned pegasus had froth dripping off the edges of her feathers, and really needed to get inside.

"Every other Guard currently on the grounds," Luna ordered, "is to coordinate with the police. Begin making arrests. Sort out the ponies who need medical attention and see that they get it."

A number of helmeted heads fiercely nodded.

And we have to order a search of the interior. Find everypony who's hurt there, see if there's any intruders who are trying to hide...

...find out just how bad it really is...

The centaur picked up the prisoner, holding the limp unicorn out in front of her with the legs presented to the air --

-- mostly out in front of her. Even with the girl's strength, a straight-arm carry would be a wearying position to hold for long, and so a portion of the unicorn's back was braced against the girl's breasts.

The prisoner shuddered again. Shook within Cerea's grasp, and the girl did not let go.

She hates that.
Good.

"All other members of staff," Luna called out, "if you remain capable -- render what help you can. Return to the palace, or wait on the grounds until we can send further orders. But we need everypony." The younger's head turned, and a dark gaze moved across several griffons, sole canid, a rather proud yak, the lone donkey, and an extremely shaken centaur. "And everyone."

The sisters oriented on the Syzygy, and slowly began to walk forward. The braced arms almost immediately began to slip.

"You set the pace," Celestia told the draconequus. "We move when you do."

"You could teleport," he petulantly pointed out.

"We are not taking you into the between in your current state," Luna immediately established.

He grumbled. Tried a step. Then, after a few seconds, he tried another.

"...the height discrepancy between you," Discord noted, "is not helping." Another step. "You could level it out. All Our Lady Of Perpetual Brooding has to do is take off a little."

"Regularly striking you with an active wing would normally have some degree of appeal," Luna agreed.

They all went forward.

The staff was beginning to sort itself out. A number of ponies were attending to the wounded. Some were securing prisoners. Others headed inside, Yapper stayed close, and one stallion fell into step next to Cerea.

"I never got --" The siblings heard the abrupt cutoff in the middle-aged voice, and each assumed it represented the moment when he'd gotten a very close look at the girl's exposed hip. "...I... I never got an answer from you."

"Mr. Guard?" asked an utterly confused centaur, who probably didn't need anything else to deal with just then.

"The invitations," Crossing said. "I host a Homecoming gathering at my home every year. For the new immigrants who... don't have any family they can reach. I sent you an invitation to it. The palace was going to bring you over. If you said yes. And after you missed Homecoming, because of... everything... I sent you one for the make-up session."

"...oh," the girl said. (Celestia considered her to be doing rather well.)

"I went to a lot of trouble to spell your name right."

"...oh." She took a rather audible breath: the prisoner's weight shifted. "I'm... a little behind on my mail."

"There's a few days left," the head of Immigration gruffly said. "Just let me know."

The entrance was getting closer. Celestia tried not to look too closely at the fallen doors.

Discord inhaled. Neither sibling knew whether to treat the accompanying expansion of his rib cage as a good sign.

"You could also," he stated, "simply pick me up. Carry me along in a field bubble."

"But you hate being confined," Celestia reminded him.

Thoughtfully, "...true..." And then, as a weakened body leaned against warmth and coolness for support, "My dear Grimcess -- are you starting to like me?"

The "No," was immediate.

"...oh," sunk to the street.

"But..." Celestia quietly told her old enemy, "I don't hate you as much as I used to."

He thought about that.

"It's still a change," Discord decided as he limped along. "I'll take it."

All around them, ponies were starting to talk again. One exchange drifted into alicorn ears.

"...that can't be a real mark."

In near-matching tones of inner concussion, because that was making the rounds, "It's right there..."

"A mark would be on both sides --"

Luna's field projected backwards. A tiny flare of stars briefly lifted the proper section of centaur skirt.

The resulting hard thud was assumed to represent acknowledgement. Or a faint. Possibly both.

"...oh, Sun..." somepony else said.

"What?" asked a mare.

"She's got legs all the way to Sun." There was a pause. "Pity about the... other torso..."

They passed a recently-retired demon of scorch and singe, who had finally found somepony capable of groaning out the Home and Away schedules and was now gradually resolving back into a pony. He looked up at the girl whom he'd tried so hard to find, began to fall into step with the group as Luna released the overhead illusion at last --

-- and a stallion who tended to concentrate on events at ground level (because you didn't get metal from air) finally saw his friend's exposed hip.

He didn't really consider the reasons why the icon might have appeared. (In some ways, he still couldn't. Not just yet.) No part of him fully acknowledged the strangeness of it. Instead, he simply blinked. And then he immediately, completely, joyously, and comprehensively got it wrong.

"YES!" Barding shouted, rearing up for a moment as his body was buoyed by the near-impossible joy of celebration.

"...what?" Cerea just barely managed to ask. "Barding, what...?"

"LUNAR SHIFT BLACKSMITH!"

A few more steps. Negotiating the ramps was going to be the tricky part.

Discord abruptly snickered.

"This must look so stupid," he considered. "The two of you, trying to carry me along. Total incongruity..."

He began to laugh. And they carried him home.

The girl would have understood. When it was a story, the main thing to do in the wake of a victory was turning the page. In reality, there was a lot of confusion, some general milling about, and ponies staring at her everywhere she went -- which turned out to be the path to the Royal Physician's offices, because there was more than one person who needed to be examined.

The number was also somewhat higher than two.

Time was required to locate and reunite the Doctors Bear and by that point, the crowding had reached a density which didn't allow them to get into their own offices. Most of the overflow wound up in the hallway.

The listed purpose of the Royal Physician posting was taking care of alicorn medical needs, which meant the stallions dearly hoped to operate with a perpetual maximum patient load of zero. But the staff understood that if anything happened to them on the palace grounds, or if they simply didn't have time to seek their own doctor -- they could turn to the Bears. And there had been staffers fighting, Guards in combat, a few ponies had tried to charge for the first time in their lives and discovered that when their opponent got out of the path in a hallway, there was inevitably going to be a wall somewhere...

Glimmerglow had alerted a hospital early on, and a number of personnel had followed the herd to the palace. Those ponies stayed. But the Doctors Bear were overwhelmed. They didn't have the space, the staff, or the ability to take care of several dozen injuries at once -- and that was before factoring in the wounded among the invaders.

And then somepony had to look for the ones who couldn't reach the offices on their own.

Too many ponies had to be carried in. A few wound up having doctors stay with them, waiting for enough help to allow those patients to be moved at all.

Messengers were sent out to hospitals and private offices: come if you can. Scrolls requested bed space and, for those who were under arrest, the hoofcuffs required to keep them there. That second category didn't get too much of a say in that part of the matter, although a few used the opportunity to accuse some of the doctors of trying to hurt the innocent. It didn't take too many of those before the cameras came out. Clockwork was wound, and film steadily recorded an official record of abuse. Using m'changa as a painkiller was abuse. It didn't work quickly enough.

Patients were distributed. Some just required bandages, while a few simply needed a hot drink and somepony to tell them it was over. But half of the palace offices were turning into medical bays. It took nearly an hour to locate everypony (and a little less than that to take out the invasion's final stragglers), and the worst of it came when they found the Guards who had been trying to evacuate the arsonist.

Those ponies went to the hospital. The Doctors Bear expected them to stay there for at least a week. And even after the bones healed, there would be extensive rehabilitation time. They wouldn't be returning to duty for a while, and the last words of each before being teleported out was to insist that they were coming back.

The sisters made sure that evacuation happened well out of the girl's possible hearing. Because Nightwatch's frantic post-exit search had made it up to the medical offices and... she'd had a story to tell. Something which she delivered to the siblings in private, in tones which generally indicated what was just about a near-universal concussion and an effectively record-breaking number of 'Um's. And then she tried to reach her partner. Again.

But Cerea was being isolated for a little while. And the alicorns knew that if the girl had seen or heard any part of that, when hers had been the idea which had placed centaur and pegasus in the basement -- she would have blamed herself. For not having thought of it sooner.

Something happened.

The alicorns didn't understand what had taken place.

Mark manifestation was an everyday miracle. Something which happened every day arguably didn't quite get the amount of study it strictly deserved -- and that was with ponies. There was a certain amount of interest in zebra marks and when it came to living pony scholars, that quantity topped out at three. To work out what had happened within the body of a centaur...

They isolated her for a few hours: something which took quite a bit of work, because there had been a giant illusion and now disbelieving ponies kept trying to see. Part of that time was used for routine medical examination, and the Doctors Bear reported a badly-bruised neck, one chipped hoof, some new bruises in other places, and a bad impact to the left foreleg which the girl apparently hadn't even noticed at the time -- added to everything from Tartarus which hadn't finished healing yet. The prescription was rest and steak. Possibly several steaks.

But the illness was gone.

The illness was gone and a mark was present. Something impossible. And so she was being isolated.

Nightwatch wasn't exactly happy about that. But she had her orders. And, after the doctors got a look at her neck, a private bed.

That was three offices down from Cerea. The one reached via adjoining door was for Discord, and the summoned thaumatologists didn't have any more idea of what to do than they'd possessed after the confrontation with Tirek. Cerea at least offered any doctor the benefit of familiar organs united into working systems. The draconequus treated his own biology as an optional extra, currently lacked the strength to opt in, and a number of frustrated pony screams suggested the direct questioning wasn't going well.

The entire Canterlot prosecution department was moved into the palace, and they had to call in Lunar reinforcements just to process the sheer number of charges. (A number were added to the arsonist's list. A public attack against children meant multiple griffons were already lining up to testify.) There was a pause in the proceedings because an entire city had just run out of arrest forms.

There wasn't enough paperwork. There weren't enough cells. The Canterlot police ran out of room in a hurry. The prison which lurked about a fifth of the way around the mountain, completely out of sight from the main city -- there was more space to work with there, right up until there wasn't. Ponyville, which shared its prosecutor's office with the capital, could offer up all of twelve cells. A palace team went into the basement and pressed every last one of those designated spaces into use, which mostly meant the rather vicious removal of several undeserved furnishings. And it still wasn't enough.

(At one point, Luna sarcastically proposed calling eminent domain on the homes of Tattler district representatives. Celestia came within three seconds of drafting the actual bill.)

When it came to those who wouldn't spend some of their pretrial time in a hospital bed, they used anything which could be barricaded. But quite a bit of that was in the palace itself, and it turned the basement into a repository of screaming, more claims of ill treatment, and the occasional portion of stunned silence in a dark corner as a few ponies finally began to reconcile what they'd just done to their lives.

(A few of those volunteered to turn Nation's Evidence. The alicorns offered to think it over.)

The ones in the basement had to be fed, and the most egotistical decided that imprisonment in the palace meant they were entitled to the palace menu. Celestia responded by contacting the kitchens, announcing that the daily special was going to be Griffon Cuisine (Modified), instructed everypony to begin soaking vegetables in meat juices immediately, and then unleashed Sizzler upon the basement with a full menu.

They still had to figure out why things had failed. Until everything was fixed --

-- so much was fallen, torn, broken --

-- the majority of their lives had been spent within marble, and every hoofstep they took moved through the fragments of memory --

-- there were going to be extra ponies on watch. The line between Solar and Lunar staffs was becoming blurred. Wakeup juice was made freely available and, for the desperate, espresso. Much to Celestia's coffee-loathing horror, the espresso seemed to be catching on.

And there was a traitor to deal with.

The investigation started immediately. The only personnel who would be allowed to access the arsonist (and Cerea, and quite a bit else) were going to be the trusted ones, and the sisters were the sole arbitrators of 'trusted' -- but Emery was put in charge of assembling the nominees. In part, this was because the old stallion's judgment was sound: the rest was to give him some ponies he could yell at.

But Cerea had been isolated, because they were waiting for somepony they trusted. And in time, devices were recovered from the armory. The chosen items were given to a unicorn mare, and Abjura went into the converted office with its pushed-together beds and every paper the Doctors Bear had written about the occupant's biology.

She would be the first to try and work out what had happened to the centaur. Because the sisters needed to know.

They needed to hear that it wasn't going to kill her.

"...and here you go," Celestia said as the sunlight-held quill finished signing the last of the forms, followed by floating them over to the police officer. "Official Royal Summons for Majorica Panderaghast, Geodene Fracture, and Aerial Supremacy. Because we didn't see any of the three at any time, and I'd really like to find out where they are. You can pick up the home entry warrants on your way out."

"What if their attorneys try to block the summons?" the officer asked.

"Bring them along as well," Luna offered.

The officer swallowed. "Bring --"

"-- tell them to consider it as a chance to present the arguments personally," the dark mare finished. "However, I do not expect it to be too much of an issue. Especially as all three may be on the gallop -- well, two on the gallop and the last flying, as that -- what is the modern term? -- ah, yes. That 'stone foal' refuses to touch ground any more than absolutely necessary. And attorneys who make too many excuses regarding sudden needs for vacations might also potentially be known as 'accessories'." A silver-clad left forehoof casually gestured towards the door. "Fair fortune to you, officer. Begin the hunt."

He left, closing the door of the makeshift office behind him.

It was going to be the office for a while. The Solar and Lunar throne rooms had been... disrupted, and the sisters had silently set up shop in the first available space which could host two desks, several rapidly-filling file cabinets, and a boiling need for getting to the bottom of it.

"They may be running," Celestia quietly said. "We both agreed on that. The real question may be how long they've been running for."

"We can find them," Luna firmly replied. "We will."

They sorted out more paperwork. A number of bulk-printed letters from the basement stash had been brought up, with sending addresses being compared to the names of those in the cells -- for the ones who would give their names at all. Both sibling suspected a few of them were going to bring the denials down to birth certificate level. And they had to make sure they were detaining the right ponies, because a number of independent protesters had been caught up in the initial crush against the gates.

Most of those were in the hospital. Some of the smarter prisoners were already claiming to have simply been pushed inside. Taking forty minutes to get back out again was blamed on disorientation.

"It's almost time to raise Moon --"

"-- I am aware."

The elder sighed.

"You've been up all day."

"It is nearly winter," the younger noted. "Which makes that into something less of a feat."

"Still --"

"-- I am aware of the potential for irritation," Luna said. "And when it comes to any such, I also believe there are sufficient channels."

They both wrote for a while.

"I saw the frescos," Celestia eventually said.

"As did I," Luna sighed. "Yapper may have work for a lifetime."

"It's too much just for her. She'll need a team."

"Working under her direction," the younger considered. "She might enjoy that --"

-- a forehoof knocked in a prearranged pattern, and the sisters glanced at each other.

"Enter, Abjura," Luna called out, and the door was carefully pushed open. The light green unicorn mare slowly entered, glanced from one desk-bound alicorn to the other as several field-carried devices had their wavering bubbles gently bounce against her flanks.

She's shaken, Celestia immediately realized. Her control's normally so much better than that, and she's barely keeping her horn lit...

Luna had already stood, and was starting to trot out from behind the desk.

"Transfer custody to me," the dark mare said, and several helpful projections offered themselves: the borders of the unsteady bubbles unevenly receded, allowing darker energies to take over. "And then sit."

Abjura shakily nodded. Watched as thaum compass, signature scanner, and analyzer were all given places on nearby shelves. Slowly folded her back legs, allowed her tail to splay, and went back to looking at the sisters again. Elder to younger, over and over.

"There's..." and she faltered. The splayed tail flicked, and her chin dipped. "There's..."

"We're ready," Celestia gently told her. "Whatever you have to say, even if it's the worst -- we're ready for it."

Luna silently nodded, took back her bench, and six mane constellations dimmed.

Abjura took a slow breath.

"There's one sword."

The sisters blinked.

"...I believe," Luna eventually said, "some additional details will be required."

"Her body is... stable," the palace's researcher told them. "But not in the same way it was before. When she was first brought in..." Another, deeper breath. "You usually can't pick up on active thaums in a pony body. Not unless magic is being used. But she always registered as null, until whatever Tirek did got into her. And all of that is gone. If she's not doing anything, then she shows as null again. But now..."

The tail (a very light yellow, midrange trim, frequently wrapped to prevent chemical mixes from staining the fall) slowly swished across the floor.

"...there's one sword. It... comes when she wants it. So does the scabbard, and she can put it inside normally. The scabbard is just a scabbard. But the sword..."

She swallowed. Forced herself to look up.

"We didn't really get to test for the limits of her range. Not when she had to stay in the same room, and I could only drag it so far. But she can put it down, somepony can take it away from her -- and as soon as she wants it back, it vanishes. Then it's back in her hand. And... I tried something which I never would have risked before, Princesses. I found a chisel and -- chipped a very small piece off the..." They both watched her delve for vocabulary. "...hilt. Then I moved the sword and the chip to different rooms. When she called for the sword, they both vanished. And the sword was whole. Like nothing had ever happened to it at all."

The siblings simultaneously became aware that neither of them had taken a breath for some time.

"The material?" Luna asked.

"As far as I can tell," Abjura uncertainly told them, "the same as before. There's... still some problems with analyzing it by the usual methods."

"So the remnants which were removed from Tirek --"

"-- are still there. I checked. Still melted, still inert." The unicorn worked her jaw a few times. "I don't know if she's summoning it from somewhere, and the call repairs any damage -- or if she's just creating it over and over. But there's one sword. And after she did -- it... a few times... she was hungry. The same way any sapient who's been using a lot of magic needs to eat. And I watched her through the signature scanner when she did it, I only had a tiny window because the sword disrupts everything at the moment it appears, but... she's generating thaums."

She paused.

"It... took a while before we noticed the hairpins." Much more quickly, "It's not as if her hair restyles itself! They just -- show up. In her hair. Scattered between head and tail. And I broke one in half, and then that was gone when she needed it again..."

Celestia tried to think.

...

She didn't feel as if she'd succeeded.

"How?" Abjura softly, desperately asked. "How does magic... create antimagic? How?"

Eventually, the stars in Luna's mane found some degree of rough alignment.

"Perhaps it is more towards -- countering," the younger tried. "The original font of the thaums which saturated her was Tirek, and he... had claimed a certain degree of -- variety. We may be looking at a subclause of the Last Question, Abjura. Occlugraph himself believed there could be a formula which would express that all magic was one. And if that was true, then -- perhaps all countermagic..."

It was rare, to hear Luna trail off that way. Slightly more scarce were the occasions when Celestia found her sister's gaze openly seeking some level of backup.

I know, Luna. 'Say something.'
...I am very open to ideas on what.

"Is she stable?" the elder asked, and did so while both alicorns knew the answer. A negative would have been the first thing Abjura told them.

"...yes. A..." Three gulps of air. "...normal mark. Normal thaum generation. I want to give her a few more hours to see if any late reaction appears, but... she can have visitors, and we can take her out of isolation by morning. Princesses, what this could mean --"

"-- sleep on it, Abjura," Celestia told her, maintaining an even level of false calm throughout every syllable. "You were in that fight too, and you're tired. Just... go sleep."

The unicorn got up on the third attempt, and left.

The sisters gave themselves a full minute for doing nothing more than sitting still. They had both been alive for a very long time and when something completely new came along, they needed to take a moment.

"A mark," was Luna's eventual contribution. "I knew it on first sight, and... I did not have time to disbelieve. Only to react -- and do not start, Tia: it was the only way. But a mark..."

"You realize," Celestia carefully asked, "that a good part of the city may feel as if you just directly threatened them. That they either accept her, or they'll have to deal with you."

"Yes," was far too calm. "As intended."

"It could create a setback for you," the elder quietly pointed out. "Make it that much harder to be truly welcomed again."

"Yes," the former Bearer of Generosity said. "There may be a price. I will freely pay it."

The white horse stood up. Trotted over to the silent dark mare, leaned in, and nuzzled her sister.

It took a minute before they returned to their starting positions. They'd both been alive for a very long time, and so mutually understood that moments had to be taken for nuzzling.

"Some of those thaums must have been taken from ponies," the elder softly noted. "Discord sent back magic to all of the survivors, but... what happened to anything which remained from the lost? And now it almost sounds like a piece of him was in there..."

"Ponies, Discord, so many others..." Luna tried to imagine. "Perhaps... the thaums were trying to resolve themselves in the only way they could? Taking on a stable configuration, in a moment of great need..."

"Manifest," Celestia quietly finished. "In a centaur. Creating antimagic with magic --"

-- stopped, and not for long enough.

"...oh no..." the elder just barely breathed.

"Sister?"

"We need to find out," the white mare distantly said, "if we have any Guards left unassigned. Or coming on shift. Or on vacation. We have to bring them all in, right now."

Bringing ponies in.
I have to find Fancypants. Use the escort network to bring him home.
The police will check the network to see if Panderaghast hired somepony to teleport her out. Aerial would never do it and Geodene isn't going to deal with the disorientation --

"Your reasoning?" Luna carefully asked as she watched the elder's face.

"Because I'm going to temporarily repeal all freedom of the press laws and somepony has to go shut down the actual newspapers. Help me draft the emergency Decree. 'We, as the Diarchy --'"

The younger blinked.

"...what?"

The elder frantically reared up. Massive forehooves gestured in all directions. "Twilight has her own periodicals section! What do you think is going to happen when this reaches her? Antimagic from magic! She'll do whatever she has to in order to reach Cerea! This is the only way!"

"...Tia," the dark mare carefully began, "Moon is going to be raised soon. This also happens to mean that, with the current temporal proximity to winter, the bulk of Ponyville commuters will be taking the train home --"

"-- lock down the city," Celestia immediately said, in the split-second before she crashed down again and Luna's field had to frantically lance out in an effort to keep the analyzer on the shelf. "Got it!"

"-- and some of them would have done so before this. We cannot prevent her from learning --"

"She wasn't your student! You don't know what she's like! Anything she has to do, anything! She'll forge a marriage certificate and claim that we can't legally keep her from visiting a spouse!"

"Tia --"

Purple eyes were wide. Frantic. Fearful.

"-- I've been trying to keep my personal library safe for years and now she's going to move in!"

Luna snickered.

"Tia."

Celestia grinned.

"Took you long enough."

"Yes. Well, your supposed sense of humor still requires some time to access through layers of absurdity. So you are not using every uncommitted Guard to block her."

"No. I'll be lucky if I can manage two. But once she knows --"

The elder stopped. Her expression turned thoughtful and, after a moment, took on a tinge of shame.

"I do need a messenger." Which was followed by a heavy wince. "And this isn't related to that, but I just realized. We have to rework the entire one-sheet. Again --"

"-- I will call for dispatch," Luna quickly said as she stood up. "Where are they going?"

"The veterinary school, to start. We're hiring three senior students and one teacher, plus an air carriage. Make sure they know they'll be compensated, and they have to be prepared to stay overnight. And then the carriage will bring her back. Possibly 'them'. Although I'm guessing one is going to wind up waiting in the hall." With a small smile, "Because the articles and commuters are heading towards Ponyville, Luna." Her horn ignited, and sunlight went for a scroll. "And... I want her to hear this from me."

The girl, exhausted and confused and unsure of what might come, had been trying to fall asleep. Sleep meant the chance to not think for a while. About marks and magic and the sword which she'd tried to place on a table -- followed by realizing that she probably shouldn't be leaving it out for the night, and having it vanish accordingly.

She couldn't sleep. Because the pushed-together beds weren't comfortable, they were also too low, she didn't sleep on beds in the first place, she was under orders not to sleep sitting up because the doctors wanted her heart to do a little less work for a few hours -- they'd noticed a number of recent system stresses, which had led her to make the mistake of explaining the Second Breath -- and there were just too many thoughts in her head.

But it was also because there was an adjoining room. Discord's improvised medical suite was connected to hers by a door in the wall, and somepony had just gone in to see him.

It wasn't a medical test, because she'd been able to hear most of those. (He had a way of protesting any attempt to quantify him which suggested that the investigators had been trying to take samples through removing limbs.) But she couldn't sleep, it felt as if all of her senses were on high alert, and she could hear somepony going up to him.

Just barely hear. Whoever it was had a certain talent for moving very quietly.

She didn't want to eavesdrop. But there was nowhere to go, and so she listened to soft weeping. The draconequus whispered something back, and it sounded like he was saying that he would be all right in time, she didn't have to worry so much, and then there was more weeping and he was merely sorry, he was sorry and...

It went on for some time, because it had to. Then the hooves began to move again.

She closed her eyes. Tried to sleep --

-- the adjoining door opened.

The mare quietly closed it behind her, and the girl heard her trotting. (Still just barely, although the mild scent of that rather pleasant soap was now serving as advance notice.) Coming up to the too-low bed...

...soft fur gently pressed against her forehead, and the first tears fell onto the girl's skin.

She didn't move. The mare needed the release.

"...I don't know where to nuzzle you," Fluttershy whispered. "...I..."

"We're... still trying to work that out."

After a while, Cerea risked placing a hand against the base of a yellow ear. There was no objection.

Unspeakable

There are very few places in the filly's gap which offer the illusion of privacy, and the arena generally isn't one of them.

It bears some resemblance to an ancient sporting oval, because there are ways in which the herd took aspects of that ancient Grecian homeland with them. The competition zone is somewhat more sunken than would be found in the original, and there's clearly no need to make seats out of mud -- or make seats at all. But the general style would be familiar enough to a historian, and... the existence of a spectator area means there are those who watch. Even with an extra practice session, an hour wrenched free from the clock -- that would normally be the filly's mother.

The majority of liminals (and, for that matter, every human) live at the bottom of an atmospheric ocean. Nearly seven kilograms of vaporous mass presses down on every square centimeter of the girl's flanks, in every moment of her life, and the constant weight...

...it will take years before she understands the joke which was unearthed from an ancient book. Something about a human whose mother was an exceptionally poor cook, to the point where her child spent the earliest part of his life in a constant state of acid reflux. But then there had been a war, the son had joined the military, and it had put him away from that horrible cuisine for the first time...

...she doesn't notice the weight of the air. No one does, unless they find themselves in a situation where it's somehow replaced or removed, and it's hard to prevent that from becoming fatal. But she always knows when her mother is in the viewing area, because the pressure created by parental observation never ends.

The eternal weight of failure.

In the now of dream, the filly is alone. And the pressure is still there.

She's set up the course. Arranged the hurdles to a height which her mother would approve of, which means they're too high for the filly to readily clear: when she doesn't knock the wooden pole off the adjustable supports with her forelegs, she's snagging it with the hind. The filly takes a lot of tumbles, and always tries not to cry out in pain. It's something which could draw attention. Worse: a sign of weakness.

Her speed is measured. Not good enough. She knows there's someone who's faster than that.

Another jump. One arm slams in front of her chest, tries to stabilize anatomy which is both going through a growth spurt and doesn't have any concept of what it's supposed to do during landings. The tumbles make it worse. There's that much more which can become bruised.

Weights are lifted. They aren't heavy enough. She attaches herself to a drag mass with reins and hauls. It doesn't go far enough. She keeps track of what the other fillies are doing when she can, because they're numbers she has to surpass and...

...combat.

There's no one to spar against. She can still run a drill. Imagine the opponent, move in attempts to block imaginary swings and phantom thrusts. (She normally winds up imagining someone she can't beat.) All that's required is a clear space. Maybe she'll work with a quarterstaff today --

-- there's no staves on the weapon rack. Just... swords. Wooden practice blades, which goes nicely with the wood dummies in the center

why are there

of the arena, and she shrugs to herself, takes a model which looks right for her arm length, decides to charge into the field of wooden centaurs, she can aim at joints and only tell herself that the opponents parried --

-- she gallops. And the sun shines down upon her, a filly fighting beneath the only part of an endless sky which she will ever know, taking on an opponent which cannot be beaten, and she's swinging at cellulose limbs and bark-covered torsos, none of it is working and she doesn't notice when each dummy has its torso count cut in half, she can't even bring the inanimate ponies down, glowing coronas deflect her strikes, wind forces her arms out of alignment, sheer wooden endurance ignores her best hits and even when she's alone, she fai --

-- this isn't her sword.
She wants her sword.

And the plastic hilt is in her hand.

She swings. She strikes. Spells fall apart. Air splits around the blade. Wood fractures. And her legs are cantering, she whips her lower body about and moves in a way which keeps her from being surrounded --

-- the filly leaps in order to gain force on the descent, pulls years and height and several cup sizes out of the air. The girl fights, and the army starts to move against her, which means they're moving and bark splits at once-frozen joints to allow it. Then she swings again, and it splits all the more.

It was always the sword. Never the wielder. But now the sword is the wielder, and so the wielder is the sword.

Poplar wings crack. Oak horns fall away. Walnut docks are fractured --

-- it's over.

She automatically looks across the debris field of chunks and splinters, towards the spectator area. Because this is something other than failure, and her mother...

...years before she understands why the joke was funny. Because there had been a human who'd lived with heartburn all his life, he'd been put into a situation where his diet had to change, and he'd run into the medical tent, screaming for help as he faced the fear of his impending death.

He had to be dying. The fire had gone out.

...her mother isn't there...

"I ask for a portion of your time," the dark mare's voice carefully requests from somewhere overhead, as the cool shadow moves across the girl's lower back. "If you will permit it. If not... I shall depart."

She looks up. The alicorn is hovering about thirty meters above her. There is no concealing cloud, and the regalia is gone.

"It is not the debriefing," the mare carefully adds. "I simply wish to... speak again. But your day was..." Dark fur shifts across the deep breath. "...rather involved. I will fully understand if you wish to simply rest --"

"-- we can talk."

The girl isn't entirely sure why she said that.

Has she watched me here before?
Watched me... lose.
Over and over.
And she still wanted --

The alicorn nods. Wings stretch out, lock, and the dark mare carefully glides in. Touching down about three meters away from the girl, directly facing her. The constellations of the tail are a little too close to the tallest hurdle.

"I have been considering," the alicorn begins, "what I might do to prove atonement. What I might..." The dark eyes briefly close, open again, and the mare's gaze nearly tilts away from the girl's face. "...offer. But..."

It's a dream. Neither of them strictly needs to breathe, and the alicorn is still putting every rib through an internal pressure test.

"...there is a certain... issue," the mare finally continues. "I had thought that I might grant you a gift. But my knowledge of what you might desire -- it arises from dream. Something which means you will undoubtedly feel it is knowledge I should not possess."

You saw my life...

"But it is all I have." The tail is starting to go limp. "And earlier, you had said... that you did not hate me. So I ask for a boon. For all that I can grant within the nightscape requires me to draw upon that knowledge, and if I do so --" Another breath: one strong enough to rustle feathers. "-- then I ask not to be hated for a little while longer."

I don't understand. Words which follow her into dream.

The dark mare looks around. The arena. The sky. The empty spectator section. Anything which isn't the centaur.

"If I am to demonstrate," the alicorn tells her, "I must alter all of this. Every aspect. Do I have your permission?"

She doesn't understand. But there's only one way to fix that.

"You'll stop if I ask."

"On your order," the mare corrects.

"...do it."

The mare looks up again, and does so just as the first airplane passes through a clear Asaka sky. The direction suggests it's heading for Narita International --

-- there's more of a shadow falling across the centaur now, because the house has a shingled slope coming off the first-floor roof. It's just enough to give the front door some protection when it rains, and it can't quite protect the house's larger occupants. The girl can face the door directly and have her tail exposed to sunlight and street. The street usually gets a good view, because there's a gap in the cemented stone fence which marks the border of the property: something which had to be widened for Rachnera, and the same can be said for the door --

-- she can smell the metal of the street gate. It's a metal grating which slides into a hollow within the border wall, extendable on the horizontal. Barding might be interested in the jointing...

...Saitama prefecture.
Brown walls. Red shingles.
The transformer is humming along at the top of the pole. It took me a week before I stopped hearing it, and now...
I can see the window to Papi's room.
Talon scratches on the ledge, because she's been going in and out that way. Usually when she shouldn't, but just try telling her --

"My first offer," the dark alicorn quietly says as pony hooves shift against the little walkway, "is to twin your lives. To wake in my world, but to dream in yours. Consistency of environment and tale. Pause the story as one dream ends, resuming when the nightscape renews. With no awareness that any dream exists at all. You will script your own life, and... I would hope for the story to be a happy one."

She's home.
She could open the door and --

"-- are they inside?" Just above a whisper. "Is everyone --"

"...the way you remember them," the alicorn quietly answers. "The way you believe them to be. But I would not wish to bring them out at this time. Not when you know they are naught but figments."

The girl doesn't need to breathe in a dream. That's good, because she's barely managing the feat --

"And there can be more to that dreaming life," says the dark mare. "If you desire it."

Earlier, she had been suffused with nausea. The current level of shock isn't much of an improvement. "More than this."

It isn't real.
But I wouldn't know.

"You..." The alicorn gaze dips again, regards the girl's forehooves. "...exist in two worlds which view you as a stranger. Something foreign, unexpected. For a number, perceived as an intruder. In my own, there is only so much I can do in attempting to solve that. But for this place, while in dream..."

She's expecting the dark mare to say that the nature of the story can be set. The girl will trot down streets which welcome centaurs, where the liminals are accepted and love is possible and she might even win --

-- she had granted permission to alter the dream.
Every aspect.
And the dreamer is an aspect of the dream.
The girl's lower body twists --

-- she stumbles. She can't help it. But it only takes a moment to stabilize on her feet.

on my feet

She reels again. Her right hand comes up, searches under her hair until it cups the pink shell of a furless ear.

She...
She just...

The girl quickly extends her right leg out to the side, obliquely stares at the portion of bare skin which peeks out from under the long skirt, and then gets to figure out how to balance on one leg just long enough to nearly get it wrong.

She wriggles her toes.

And...

This time, her hands go backwards. Drop, cup again --

"What," the alicorn carefully inquires, "are you doing?"

The accurate answer would be Squeezing my own buttocks.
...I don't understand the appeal.

But she doesn't reply. There's at least one more mystery of the human form which she's been curious about. The waist jointing. They don't rotate as far, but when it comes to bending forward and down --

-- okay.
I can't touch my toes.
...I probably could if I pushed for it.
Except that bras aren't meant to prevent this kind of movement. So everything sort of swings forward...
...I already know this view by heart. It's just a different angle.

The human girl straightens.

Her tail automatically tries to swish, which encounters a minor handicap of not currently existing. Human buttocks don't swish. They're doing something in response to the command, but she's not entirely sure how to describe it. And there's been some changes made to her vertical proportions, because the upper torso is now connected to a pelvis. But those changes are what was necessary in order to make her look right, and she realizes the dark mare has seen enough of the species to recognize what is right.

However, her overall height is the same: two hundred and one centimeters. She would tower over just about everyone in Japan, and wouldn't find many women to match her anywhere in the world. The girl already proved that her bustline hasn't changed, and recognizes that the alicorn had to improvise on the hips. The hips seem fine. She doesn't have a good view of the back. The grip didn't really tell her much.

I could ask her to make me shorter.
To change the proportions.
To...

...make the girl into what others wish her to be.

"No."

She barely recognizes her own voice. It sounded so much older...

The dark mare tilts her head slightly to the left. And stares up, at the same time.

"No," the alicorn repeats.

"Not this," the girl quietly continues. "Not like this..."

A single slow nod, and then all four of the girl's hooves are planted on the little approach path again.

"And to dream of a life with your friends?" the dark mare carefully asks.

The girl's eyes briefly close.

"It would be how I remember them. How I perceive them. It's... not who they are. No."

The alicorn's features twist with something very close to pain.

She's trying.
She wants to try.
But this --

"Not your home. And not your form." Several mane stars dim. "That was much of what I had considered. Placing you within your herd, when I... saw enough to recognize that you were never happy there... no. And as for centaur companionship away from it --"

"-- what?" In lieu of 'I don't understand,' because that's been getting a workout.

The mare's forehead creases with concentration --

-- it takes a second for the girl to realize where the error arose. The alicorn has been within her dreams, seen memories replay inside what the mare terms as the nightscape. There's been enough secondhand observations of humans to work out how their legs are put together, and the evidence of touch suggests at least one really good look at an ear.

The alicorn has seen humans, in their limited palette of hues. But she's also gotten at least one glimpse of Lala, and so decided that dark blue is a perfectly appropriate shade for a newly-formed centaur's skin.

The horn has mostly vanished: there's a tiny stub in the center of the forehead. Any vestige of wings is hidden, because the former alicorn did roughly master the concept of 'skirt' and nothing appears to be attached to the upper back. But the eyes are a little larger than the girl would have expected, the tail is exactly the same, and there seem to be a few issues involved with anchoring the hair to the whole of the scalp.

The other centaur tries to take a step forward. The arms, limply hanging in place, effectively come along for the ride.

She sniffs. Then, clearly dissatisfied with the results, she tries it again. The dark eyes, trying to find some way of focusing on the nose, effectively cross.

"How does anyone breathe through this thing?"

The girl is still staring. The alicorn, who's just looked at her own bustline, hasn't noticed.

"I was uncertain as to a proper size for these." It takes two tries for her hands to go under her breasts, plus one more to heft them up within the silver blouse. "I have seen enough of your herd to recognize some degree of variety, and to recognize that a significant amount of mass is desirable. But one should not always immediately strive to mimic the ideal. Slightly smaller than your own proportions seemed like a good starting point. Unless you feel I should adjust outwards --"

The "-- no" is partially born from jealousy which doesn't want a chance to form, and is also about five seconds away from just asking to see a minotaur photo album. It mostly makes the dark blue centaur blink a few times.

...she's... more attractive than I would have expected.
I never found anyone during the time for love.
I was always alone...
...that's not what she meant by companionship.
I think...
It isn't.
A different kind of dream. One where someone trotted with me. That's all.
I wish...

...she wished into that hand often, as a filly. Her tears filled the cupped palm first.

"...no," the girl finally says.

The other centaur sighs, and collapses back into the alicorn. This is immediately followed by having the left forehoof come up to rub at the snout.

"You are," the dark mare observes with some exasperation, with the foreleg dropping again, "a rather difficult sapient to endow." (It takes the girl a moment to recover 'gift' as a synonym, plus several more for pushing back the blush.) And, much more softly, "The last cycle has provided me with very little time to consider additional options. Cerea... what would you ask of me? What must I do?"

And there was only one answer.

"I just want to talk."

The mare blinks a few times.

"...what?"

The girl is already second-guessing herself. You can't become too familiar with your liege. Too close. You can't.

But the alicorn isn't her liege any more.

"You..." The girl swallows. "You know me better than anyone. And... I feel like I barely know you. Maybe -- if we just talked..."

And Luna... sighs.

The mare's eyes are scrunched slightly at the corners. Both forehooves are lightly scraping at the pavement. But the tones are wry.

"I could wish for you to have chosen a simpler option," she says. "But... knowledge is its own form of power. And when it comes to that aspect -- yes, there is an imbalance." The scraping accelerates. "But it is not easy to correct, Cerea. I can never tell you everything. Even with a seneschal --"

A what? It has to be a word she knows: she just can't seem to recover the definition --

"-- the time required to tell a full tale barely exists. And I... have not spoken in such a manner for..."

Every star goes out. Mane and tail collapse into strands of light blue.

"...some time." Just above a whisper, "I have, to a significant degree, trained myself not to speak. You... saw a portion of my failure. When one struggles against oneself, and loses --"

"-- is every day of my life," Cerea evenly tells her. "And you know it."

The alicorn's lips quirk.

"Not every day," Luna decides. "I feel there have been certain recent exceptions." And sighs again. "We are both weary, Cerea. We both need true rest. But... I shall arrange for us to spend waking time with each other tomorrow. Somehow. And if the world chooses to interrupt, then that meeting will be rescheduled. Again and again, until we have spoken. Will you accept my promise?"

"Yes."

The alicorn nods. Wings flare out, and she looks up into the sky of another world.

"We will likely be interrupted," the dark mare declares. "Events tend to conspire in that direction. But I will ask that any such disruptions be limited to the truly important. And perhaps fortune will allow it to be news which we all need to hear."

She takes off. Gets about two stories of height under her wings, as the centaur watches an alicorn prepare for a flight above the prefecture's streets. And then she looks down.

"It might interest you to know that the changes to your form were not simple to make," the alicorn tells the girl. "I imagine that the mark has yet to be incorporated, but... your self-image is somewhat more stable than it used to be. Good night to you."

The unicorn mare knows she's special. In some ways, it feels as if she always should have known that, but... the truth needed to emerge. And then the spiteful, deluded cruelty of the world didn't bother to acknowledge any of it.

However, the world has been making up for lost time.

For starters, there's her cell. The confinement section of the palace basement (and of course the alicorns have a secret place for trapping the important!) is, put mildly, somewhat overcrowded. The other cells are stuffed to the brim with ponies. (Two-thirds of those were caught due to natural inferiority, while the other unicorns were clearly imprisoned because... well, she'd already been wondering about just how much culling of the ranks had to be done.) Based on what little she's been able to make out through the sound-muffling spell --

-- they gave her cell a sound-muffling spell: something which lets her own words go out, and allows those within a certain radius to hear her -- but prevents the cacophony being raised by her lessers from creating any personal level of disturbance. It's a sign --

-- at any rate, it sounds as if one pony needing to use the restroom trench has to shove six others aside and then clear another two away from the top of it. But she has a cell all to herself. The only pony who's been given that much room to breathe, and also doesn't have to inhale the tainted scents produced by inferiors.

Because she's special. Important, in a way which even the palace has been forced to recognize.
...the palace, but not the freaks who run herd over it --
-- she's so proud of herself, because the mare just did what she doesn't believe anypony else would have been capable of.
The malformed were in her presence, and she --

-- the sound-muffling spell? Privacy? Her very own Guards? (She probably won't be lucky enough to have the new quartet share the fate of the last two, but she can always hope.) The alicorns are too stupid to understand anything the mare came so close to accomplishing, but there must be somepony on the staff who's been acting under their snouts. Providing the unicorn with such obvious signs of respect.

It's the least they can do for the mare who nearly saved the world.

Perhaps she has an ally in the palace. (She must have made an impression with her display of heroism. Simply not outright breaking in the presence of the monster... how could that not have drawn attention?) But it's hardly everypony. Just for starters, the cell's original bookcase? That was confiscated. It's been replaced with a cheaper version, and the one she'd had was pretty cheap to begin with. And that pony swapped out the case, but not the books. She doesn't even want to look at the books. They're all about ponies of different races working and living and loving together, and the mare is far too intelligent to be tricked by mere propaganda.

The original bookcase was taken because somepony wanted her artwork. The little sketches she'd gouged into the side, showing the best way to counter what that propaganda has done.

They'll probably keep it. You can't sell something priceless.

And she's had visitors.

One of them... well, she was hardly going to speak with an earth pony, at least not in any way which he wanted to hear. And the second drop-in (who had rather more sensibly decided to have been born with a horn) also claimed to be a psychiatrist, that mare had stayed in the cell with the restrained unicorn for about two hours, and...

...the mare hadn't liked most of the questions. The tone of them, which made it so clear that the other female thought there was something wrong with her. But of course, when somepony was special, there was always going to be a portion of the herd which wanted to drag her back down to their level. She'd said that directly. Then she'd said a number of other things and ultimately, the blood-traitor had left. Slowly, wearily shaking her head, as the corona she didn't deserve carried several newly-full notepads along.

How does somepony get that mark, anyway? Intelligence clearly isn't any part of it. The mare knows how to tell when somepony is smart. They agree with her.

The degree-carrying idiots had left. Shortly after that, the freaks had dropped by.

Both of them. The mare is just that important.

And then she'd demonstrated it.

They had questions? Well, everypony did! Who wouldn't want to know all about somepony so special? But when it was freaks doing the asking, and one of them was speaking in those low, cold tones while the one who had put on a mask of tolerance for centuries finally let it drop and showed just how little she was willing to tolerate somepony who was better...

And no, she didn't want an attorney! That one stallion had given her words to recite, and she'd eventually realized that he'd been trying to speak for her. She could speak for herself -- yes, anything she said to absolutely anypony within the palace (or, for that matter, sang) could potentially be used against her, but that was just because most ponies were too stupid to understand what the truth was --

-- they'd tried to question her. And she'd withstood all of it! From both alicorns, both trying to interrogate her at the same time, and she'd given them little more than open observations of their freak status!

...well, there had also been some suggestions regarding ways to reorganize the government. And she'd listed numerous laws which needed to be repealed, because they never should have been passed. Certain opportunities had to be used, even when the ones you were talking down to weren't capable of understanding in the first place.

Two alicorns united against her. How could she have done anything but win? Even when the barely-concealed monster was cold and the white freak was so strangely... grim...

...she would have expected the elder to have smiled more. The one who never should have had the crown to begin with was known for smiling, and there hadn't been a single --

-- they were both so rude. They treated her as if she was nothing more than...
...like she wasn't --

-- the point was that she'd won, and name a single unicorn mare other than herself who'd done that! Stood against two alicorns in a single day! Along with...

...she'd nearly saved the world.
She nearly...
...it's not her fault.
It's the centaur.

She's been thinking about it. Reviewing the impossibility and blasphemy of what she saw. But going over her direct observations didn't give her a lot to work with. She had to add a number of deductions, and those were easy. All she needed to do was tell herself things until the final conclusion made perfect sense.

Just for starters? The centaur didn't save her life. That's impossible. She didn't see it happen, now did she? And even if she had? Centaurs can probably make you see things. Because they steal magic from others, from their betters and once they steal enough of it? It turns into a false mark.

The centaur now has a mark. The centaur is living, still-breathing blasphemy, and that's not the mare's fault. She nearly won. She almost saved the world, and it would have happened if she hadn't brought the truest monster to the point where the beast had to reveal itself.

It's just that... she's the only one who understands what it all means.

If there's any problem with being special, that's it. Dumbing the most crucial Facts down enough for lessers, traitors, and freaks to recognize their nature takes a lot of work.

How many ponies has the centaur drained, to gain that travesty of a mark? What else can it do? And it killed Tirek -- oh, she believes that. One monster killed another. Taking out the lesser threat. And now the centaur is entrenched in the palace, in Equestria, and how many ponies will realize what it's planning?

Conquest, probably. (She's still trying to work that part out.)

But she almost killed it. She nearly saved the world. And maybe there's still a chance. She just has to tell the right ponies about what's really going on. Assemble a group. Something better than CUNET, something pure. How hard could it be? She just needs those who are smart enough to see sense. To recognize a monster for what it truly is.

It didn't save her life. It made her attack. She never would have done anything if the monster hadn't existed, and therefore the monster is responsible for all of it. The monster needs to be in a cell. In Tartarus.

It needs to be dead.
She knows that.
...why doesn't anypony else know...
...she just needs to find the right ponies --

-- it takes a moment before she recognizes the sounds made by approaching hooves: the muffling spell distorts everything until the new pony crosses its border, and then she hears the mare say "Food delivery."

One Guard does something to the door. The mare hums to herself as she watches it start to open. She's been working on a new song. It's about monsters, and what has to be done in (and to) their presence. The rhythm is already perfect.

And then the shadow slips into her private room.

It takes several blinks before the mare manages to resolve the true details. (The monster touched her eyelids. It means she's been thinking very carefully about what she sees. Just in case.) Just for starters, the shadow has a horn --

-- it's a unicorn. But the fur is...

...she's never seen fur like that. The new mare possesses a singular coat: one where individual strands can be dark blues, subtle deep greens, hints of grey to go with stranger shades. It's all duplicated within mane and tail, with the totality almost seeming to absorb light. A single blink renders the deliverymare into a moving blotch.

The easiest way to track her is through the field. The horn is lit, and a green-grey corona carries multiple plates and bowls into the cell --

-- the lighting's a little better near the cheap table. (The mare considers the table to be its very own insult.) It lets her make out a slightly squarish jaw, see just how short-cut the tail is and recognize that the mare is on the young side. But the bottles of seasonings are made from crystal, the plates themselves are rather fine, and the contents --

-- the mare is staring, and it means she misses the little bit of extra projection from the only unrestrained horn in the cell. The one which closes the door.

"You should eat," the living shadow gently suggests. "It..." The smile is quick, arriving quickly and vanishing before anypony other than the mare can spot the expression. "...was a long day. And then some."

The mare is still staring at the contents of the largest bowl.

"Those are hop shoots," she half-whispers. One of the most expensive vegetables in the world --

"-- what else would you serve with root angler lure?" the shadow politely notes.

The mare looks at that for a while.

She's never had lure. Even in the capital, the seat of a nation's wealth and power, hardly anypony ever has lure...

"...how...?" takes a moment to work its way out.

"When you're in the palace," the shadow quietly informs her, "you eat what the palace eats."

"The palace," the mare quickly says, "wants me to eat this." Maybe it's drugged --

The shadow abruptly snickers.

"What the Princesses don't know," she snidely announces, "can't hurt them." Which is followed by a laugh: deliberately muffled, because there's Guards somewhere --

-- the mare can't seem to hear the Guards, and that's not the muffling spell: the sounds produced by armor tend to get through. Maybe they're changing shifts --

"Aren't they lucky?" the shadow continues. "What they don't know can't hurt them. Complete immunity to pain."

It takes the mare a second to work it out: they don't know anything. Like all of the best insults, it just happens to be true, and she almost starts to laugh --

-- she looks at the shadow. Stares deep into green-grey eyes, and the other unicorn doesn't flinch. Just about everypony else has been flinching.

"I wouldn't expect a member of the staff to say that," the mare carefully notes.

The shadow's next words somehow come across as living Honesty. A necklace made of sound.

"I'm not part of the staff." The corona winks out. "They had to call some temporaries in, with... everything that happened." A few decibels fall away. "Everything which almost happened."

The darkness sighs.

"You came so close," it says. "A few more seconds, and we all would have been..." A tiny, regretful shrug. "Eat. Please. You need strength. And this meal is... special." With another small, quick smile, "Of course, you probably have this all the time..."

She's never had anything this expensive in her life.

After a moment, the time it takes to approach the too-cheap table with its fabulous burden and not have it all go away... the mare lowers her head. The restraint means she can't even eat it properly, but... it smells...
...not drugged. Not treated with potions. It's all just...
...special.

She starts with the lure. The shadow silently adds a few subtle seasonings, and the mare takes her time about chewing. Makes sure every part of her tongue gets its chance, and then carefully swallows.

The mare can just barely muster the whisper. "I'm... not supposed to be having this, am I? I'm really --"

"-- you nearly won," the shadow softly confirms. "Half of Canterlot just watched, and you nearly..." The sigh is brief. "But there's no point in thinking about it too much. Not today. Tomorrow is more important. Because things can always change tomorrow. And maybe the next time will be different."

No one's talked to the mare this way for... a long time. Not since CUNET first approached. It had felt so good, just to be -- noticed. And she'd had the company of ponies who understood.

But then Mrs. Panderaghast had stuck her in that horrible house, the first of two horrible houses, and the carriage had been cheap, she hadn't been allowed to talk freely during her first chance for public exposure and the drain...

The mare eats. The shadow watches.

"I almost won," the mare finally whispers, after several of the hop shoots are given a proper home. "I know it. We were almost safe, everypony who counts, and even the ones who are too stupid to care. But the centaur cheated..."

The shadow sadly nods, and that simple movement is enough. Words aren't necessarily. The set of the ears, added to the slump in shoulders and hips... it says more than words ever could.

"...are you hungry?" The last test. If they're eating the same thing --

"A little. May I?"

The mare nods. The shadow tries a sample.

They eat together for a while, and gossip is dissected. The reporter didn't have enough of it.

A field-held napkin considerately wipes the mare's mouth.

"...what's your name?" the mare finally asks.

"Miranda." With a little wince, before the mare can say anything, "I know it's unusual. I always think about having it changed. My parents... well, it's part of why I don't talk to them very much any more." Which is followed by a little sigh, "Associating with the kind of -- 'people' -- who think that's a good name is some of the rest. And I'd ask yours, but... all of Canterlot knows, don't they?" The smile appears, vanishes again. "The entire capital. In a few more days, it'll be the world..."

The mare isn't thinking about where the Guards are any more. She's told herself it isn't important.

"You brought all of this in for me." It's a statement. The mare doesn't question Facts.

"Somepony had to. It's... been horrible for you. I can barely imagine... I'm not sure I can imagine. Just how bad it's been, with everything it made you do. And that's before you bring in what all of the idiots believe. But when you think about it... when you let yourself think at all..."

The shadow's eyes close, and the mare almost timidly waits.

"I just thought," Ponyville's police chief shyly offers, "you... might need a friend."

Chaotic

With the girl, the olfactory sense was generally the one which woke up first -- unless there was an immediate supply of new information calling for her attention and in this case, the source was quite literally pressing. But scent raced the temporary contender to the finish line, placed an incredibly close second (because something about Cerea was always going to finish in second), and told the centaur that there was no cause for concern.

...well, maybe a little.

She couldn't really call the sensation indescribable, mostly because a little eyes-closed thought told her exactly how to describe it. There was light, gentle pressure, shifting back and forth across a given area. Warmth was mandatory, and also came with intermittent bursts of slightly higher temperatures because the source was breathing. And the sensation went left, then right and even with blanket and sweater covering the region, occasionally slipped in deeper at the middle and had to pause for partial extrication.

It was very much the sort of stimulus which could awaken a sleeping centaur, mostly from raw shock. And she knew exactly why it was happening. Because the little knight didn't know what was taboo, had been trying to work out a proper greeting for moons, and had finally decided that the best place was the location which had recently been announced as capable of nuzzling back.

Having a pegasus snout rubbing against her covered breasts felt warm, friendly, not quite erotic, and very much like something which had to be shut down as soon as possible because otherwise, it would wind up happening in public and then the entire capital might copy the idea.

They had to discuss that.

...sometime.

Cerea opened her eyes. Nightwatch, who was in exactly the right position to pick up on a shift in breathing patterns, pulled back and looked directly into the girl's face. Something which was easy to do, because the centaur was still stuck sleeping on her side.

"Good morning," the little knight smiled. "Are you hungry?"

Cerea did her best to look around the room. The mild scent of Fluttershy's soap still lingered, but the yellow pegasus had departed some time ago. There were no doctors in evidence, and any food existed as distant olfactory rumor.

She was hungry. But there were other priorities.

"Your neck," the girl quickly asked, and did her best to evaluate the injuries. "How does it --"

"Better," Nightwatch quietly answered. "Your throat looks rougher than mine. Um. Because there's no fur in the way, and I think she was squeezing you harder. But if you want to cover the bruises, then we can just use one of the scarves Ms. Garter sent."

"Your wings --"

A little too quickly, "-- two more days. Cerea, how are you feeling?"

Sleep could cloak pain within concealing fog. Morning sun burned it off. (Presuming it was morning, because the office was fully enclosed and enough had taken place to completely upend the girl's sleep schedule again. She could check her watch. After she recovered it.) Cerea evaluated.

"Sore," the centaur understated. "Mainly my neck and left foreleg." And also that one ear, because she'd slept with the disc on and having the wires on one side of her face the whole time hadn't exactly helped. But her breasts had finished healing, and the nuzzle had brought no pain. "But the nausea is still gone. I mostly feel..."

She took a breath. And then she winced.

"Cerea?" emerged on an instant gust of concern.

The fight.
The struggle.
The fact that what no one tells you about the Second Breath before you start training is that your body is trying to maintain roughly the right temperature under stressful conditions and when your lungs go into overdrive, the sweat glands might be right behind them.

The doctors had cleaned her wounds. But that had been just about it. And to pony senses, she probably came across as... well, to their snouts, it might be just somewhat more intense than usual. But as far as Cerea's own nose was concerned, she reeked. Any casual trot down a hallway might leave centaur olfactory afterimages drifting along the currents.

"...dirty," the girl groaned. "I need to get out of these clothes. And then I have to wash everything." She was meeting a Princess later, and there was no way she could be in the dark mare's presence like this. "I'm sorry for asking, but -- if somepony could bring fresh pieces up from the barracks --"

If anything in the barracks survived.

The last of what Nightwatch owned in the world. The final fragments.

"We can probably go down," the little knight told her. "And then it won't be washing up using sponge panels in the walls. Um. Because we'd usually have to find a room with those panels. And the barracks have them. But I think you'd prefer to soak in the pool."

Cerea blinked. "We can go down --"

"-- the doctors are on the way. I saw them before I came in, and talked a little. There's only so much they'll say to me, because they're doctors. And they've got a lot of patients to get through. But they wanted to check on you early. And then I think they're going to release you." A quick breath, and feathers rustled. "Um. Sort of. They'll let you leave the room, if they don't see anything new that's wrong medically. But they want you to stay in the palace for a while. And carry an alert canister. Something you can squeeze for an alarm, if you start to feel strange. Just in case. And there's going to be at least one thaumatologist checking on you later, because they don't want 'medical' and 'magical' to get too mixed up." The little knight visibly reconsidered. "Maybe two thaumatologists. Together. But that won't be today. Rest and recover, until Princess Luna sends for you. Um. She mentioned that. But if you're feeling well enough to leave the room, you should. Because... Abjura says you're stable, completely stable, and... there's a lot of patients."

The mare took a breath.

"They had to make sure you were stable," Nightwatch softly said. "Completely sure. I... asked Abjura. I had to. There's been ponies who tried to claim griffon magic, or -- zebras that thought they could grow horns. Buffalo wanting to be stronger. Cross-species magic acquisition. That's why they isolated you. Because with the others, she said... when it all went wrong, it happened within a few hours. In the best cases. Most of them were instant. They..." Stopped.

Cerea waited. Nothing else came.

"Nightwatch?"

"You're stable," the little knight stated. "You're okay. Nothing's happened. So it won't. They tested. It's -- natural. A normal mark. Because it's your magic. So they... need the bed."

Limited space. Hordes of the injured or, when it came to those who had been the invaders, a herd. All Cerea had was some bruising and a strange (but stable) case of unexplained personal magic. Others had fared far worse.

Magic...

She thought about calling for her sword, just to see if anything had changed during the night. But she really didn't want to do it lying down.

All the more reason to get up, then.

What do you do when you wake up with magic?
When you're... not supposed to have it?
When no centaur has ever --

It was too much to deal with. The illness was gone and in its place, she was simply overflowing with thoughts.

She wanted to take a bath. It could be easier to think in a bath. If she was very lucky, it might even be easier to stop.

"When will the doctors come in?"

"Probably a few minutes."

It hadn't quite been a lie, Cerea decided as they finally began the trot towards the lower level. Trying to estimate medical time was something like attempting to hit a dartboard after having been blindfolded and told to move in the tightest possible circle for several dozen rotations -- if both hands had been bound behind her back and she was trying to fling the dart with an aggressive flick of one ear. And even with extra help from the local hospitals still roaming through the makeshift medical bays, the Doctors Bear had a lot of patients.

But as Nightwatch had predicted, the physicians had been willing to release her -- as long as she stayed within the canister's signal range of another pony at all times. (She had been assured that the new model didn't scream.) It was just that they'd come across as... confused --

-- no. Stunned. They recognized what had happened and because the most drastic change had no discernible medical impact, they had to let her go. Recognized, but... they hadn't quite reconciled.

Try being the one it happened to.

The mares were encountering some difficulty in navigation. Portions of the palace had been blocked off, and some of that was due to multiple aspects of investigation: basic forensics, pictures being taken of the damage to the point where being fifteen meters away wasn't sufficient protection from the camera flashes. And a number of previously-secret passages weren't available: the previous reasons added to a sudden need for reconfiguring the exit sequences. It left them weaving around, trying to find any way down which a full mixed team of Guards and police didn't need access to first, and...

...ponies were staring at Cerea.

...they always stared. Even after several months in the palace, there were staffers who just froze and stared as she went by. Some of those gazes had focused on her face, just before flinching away. Paying horrified attention to her breasts had been popular, and the girl still wasn't sure why there was any particular regard for her arms. (One was currently free: the other had the sketchbook and multiple school supplies tucked under it. She was... trying to get used to holding the sketchbook again.) But now they were looking at --

-- the remnants of the hospital gown had reached the point where just about her entire left flank was exposed, virtual acres of dirty and (to the centaur) stinking brown fur, and they just kept looking at her hip...

She was trying not to look. Not yet. It was... too much to deal with. The nausea was gone, she felt better and -- but for the lingering and new injuries, she would have felt normal. (Something deep within darkly noted that for the girl, 'normal' did in fact generally include hurting somewhere.)

Cerea almost felt normal.

'Normal' wasn't supposed to include casually glancing at your empty hand and having a moment of desire place a plastic sword in it.

She used a moment of relative privacy in an empty corridor to do it. Then she did it again. And again. It felt -- good...

...the little knight, whose black fur was sending up subtle wafts of bemusement, was shaking her head.

"The first full day with a mark," Nightwatch said as silver eyes quickly shifted their gaze to the exposed hip. "And she's already got flank-brain."

"Flank --"

The mare's tones dropped.

"-- it feels good, doesn't it?" she softly asked. "To tap into your magic? To look into the reflection of your soul?"

When it came to the third sentence, 'I don't understand' felt inadequate. Cerea went with the two she could comprehend.

"...yes."

"Flank-brain," Nightwatch firmly said. "It happens to just about everypony after they get their mark. They practice their talent. Explore their magic. Because it feels good. And they don't think about very much else, and they forget to eat, they fly into walls, and they're absolutely stupid until it wears off. And it has to wear off, Cerea. You just got a mark --"

The little knight stopped. Blinked a few times, and her feathers rustled again.

"-- you just got a mark," the little knight quietly repeated. "You manifested, and I saw it happen. 'How' is for the thaumatologists to figure out. I just know that it's real. A real mark. You earned it. And when the mark is real, when it's like ours... then a lot of what you're going through should be just like what we do. And flank-brain is normal -- but it can only go on for so long. You just got a mark, Cerea." And, just above a whisper, "I don't want to see you fall into it."

"What's --"

The pegasus explained.

"...what happens when somepony falls?"

With open sadness, "Barding. Barding happens -- Cerea, you didn't have to make the sword vanish just because I said that. I'm just trying to look out for you. You don't know what it's like to have a mark. Somepony has to teach you. And Barding is... getting better."

An older sister... If just by a few years. (It probably still wasn't the right time to ask about pony lifespan.)

"Ponies can fall into their marks," Nightwatch told her. "Friends pull them out. Maybe if we tried to go right..."

They navigated through rubble.

The mares went past ruined artwork. Torn paintings. Fallen statues. Frescoes which would need more than one canid to repair.

One detour took them by the Syzygy. There were more investigators at work there, and several deliveries were coming in. Nightwatch took notice of one, then asked if Cerea could carry a few more things.

Eventually, they reached the basement, and things... moderated. There had only been a few intruders here -- at the start. The current phase of the aftermath had pushed many more into the lower level and even with the sound muffling spells in play, there were still places where they could hear the rumbles of anger and denial coming from the overfilled cells. Both sounds were starting to become somewhat worn out.

There were no investigators in front of the closed barracks doors. No leaks of light from camera flashes streamed past the edges. From what they could see and hear, their mutual home was empty. Examined and abandoned.

Cerea took a breath. Bra and sweater readily dealt with the strain. Her heart seemed to be having a few more issues.

Please.
Please.
Please don't let her have lost any more than she already has...

She opened the doors.

And nothing had been touched.

Too many open beds. One which showed signs of use. Some scant possessions. And a nest of blankets on the floor.

It... made sense, really. Part of the goal would have needed to be keeping attention away from the lower level. Get in, find the arsonist and, while distractions were going off in every other part of the palace, get out. So the invaders hadn't been able to risk raising too much of a ruckus in the area. The barracks weren't close to the cells: a factor which limited attacks of opportunity. They'd just never had the chance to go in.

...to...

The girl's shoulders slumped, and did so just before the first tears began to flow --

-- she heard trotting. And then a gentle hoof rubbed at her right foreleg, well away from any bruises.

"It's guilt, isn't it?" the little mare asked.

For all the effort it took to get out, the "...I..." might have been fighting past another field loop.

"You're happy for me," Nightwatch decided as the rubbing carefully intensified. "That it's all still here. But you feel bad because your things are okay. When there was so much damage on the upper levels. The Princesses... their home was invaded. Wounded. They lost a lot. And you don't know what right you have to be happy for yourself, having anything for yourself, when anypony else lost anything at all."

...how does she...
...she can't pick up my scents, not like that, I know it...

But they loved each other.
They were sisters.

"Some things can be fixed," the little knight gently told her. "Replaced. Other losses will hurt, and we won't know how much until somepony figures out just what was lost. But we came through. I can feel bad for the Princesses. But I can still be happy for myself. For you, when you have so little. Cerea... please, this time... let yourself be lucky..."

And in time, the tears stopped.

Even for the mares, it was an exceptionally long bath. Neither was supposed to be anywhere just yet, and the centaur wasn't the only one who had been feeling filthy. Additionally, Nightwatch's wing joints were aching from all of the previous activity, and -- well, hands had their uses. Cerea just had to be very careful about where and how she massaged, and refused to move any finger so much as an extra millimeter without the little knight's personal direction.

They washed.
They talked.
There was a lot to talk about.

Even with centaur double-jointing, it took a certain degree of care for the girl to casually regard her own hips. Fortunately, the bathroom had plenty of mirrors and when it came to mark examination, they were actually at the proper height.

My sword, superimposed on Moon.
Their Moon. The craters are different.

Each hip bore an identical icon. There was a lot of detail available. It was possible to make out individual marias.

She could look at the symbols. Touching them was going to require a long-handled brush.

"So my coat just... grows in this pattern now," the centaur tried.

"Yes."

"What happens if it's shaved?"

With open confusion, "It grows back. Faster than anything else would. Your magic wouldn't be affected." With a wet little shrug, "Even the faction leaders might not have gone that far in trying to hide. If there's anything more suspicious on a pony than pants, it's shaved hips."

"...how do I clean it?"

"Normally," Nightwatch said. "On the surface, it's fur. Don't be fooled by any Mark Care products. That's just ponies trying to get your money. But no blending powders. No dyes or makeup. They'll just evaporate."

"...they'll..." the girl eventually got out.

"The mark doesn't let itself be hidden. Clothing's okay, but that's it. Armor counts as clothing. But we should really put your mark on the armor, because a lot of ponies are going to be trying to get a look. You saw that in the hallways." The pegasus, floating about two meters away from the girl, seemed to be executing a sort of waterlogged fawning. "And you need to show off! We'll have to modify some of your skirts, Cerea! A few strategic cuts, to make windows --"

In open horror, "Those are my hips! I don't go out with bare hips!"

"Ponies need to see!" Nightwatch countered. "You're the first centaur with a mark! The faster they get a look --"

"-- even my swimsuit covered my hips!" Mostly. Well, that portion -- actually, it had been a horrible design with a really poor fit, but it had been all she'd had --

"...swimsuit?"

"You don't just show off your hips in public! That's why skirts exist! Too much hip and foreshoulder exposure is obscene!"

"...obscene," Nightwatch finally mustered.

The girl's arms were beginning to weave through the air again. It was coming across as a desperate attempt to beat the concept into submission. "It gives stallions ideas! One idea! The only one they can still have!"

"My stallions?"

The centaur froze.

"Um," Cerea said. "Um." Which was quickly followed by "It's still not right. And it's winter, it's cold, I can't just go around cutting holes in my clothing when Ms. Garter worked so hard to --"

"-- Cerea," Nightwatch firmly interrupted, "ponies will want to see your mark. A lot of them probably got a look yesterday, especially with the way the doctors' skirt was resting. And the illusion. I heard about Princess Luna's illusion. But there's going to be a lot of them trying to get a look. And if they don't have a window, then some of them might look under your skirt. When you're so tall -- you're blushing. I know it's intrusive, but it's not sexual. They just want to see -- you're really blushing. I don't think I've ever seen you blush that pink before. Um. Red? Cerea, what's --"

But the girl's hands had already moved up to cover her face.

"...the hospital gown," made its way out from between her fingers.

"What's wrong --"

"My whole left flank," the girl half-whimpered. "All of it. Out in the open. The whole time. I just realized that. I went through a crowd with my left flank exposed and the only anchor was my dock, I was galloping..."

"It's..." the pegasus desperately tried, and then paused to search for reinforcements. "...a very nice flank..."

Decibels were beginning to drown in a sea of humiliation.

"I was flashing my buttocks."

"...they're -- very nice butto --"

"And that was the best case. Because I still don't have a trick valve."

"Cerea --"

"I jumped over a crowd. I jumped."

"Um..."

"Some of them probably looked up."

"Um."

"A torn blouse is easier," the girl moaned. "Nopony here understands torn blouses."

"Cerea, nopony's been saying anything about it, they don't care --"

"-- the illusion. The one Princess Luna put in the sky. Which is probably on the front page of all the newspapers we picked up before coming down. That was me. Just as I was right then? Exactly?"

Silence.

"Nightwatch --"

"-- somepony said it was about fifteen times your size -- Cerea. I've seen you bend at the waist. Um. Upper waist. You're not going to get your head under the water for very long. I know you can't get that low unless you just fold your legs and lie down in the -- Cerea!"

Eventually, the girl was convinced to breathe. It was something which took a lot of newspapers.

The pegasus had gotten out of the pool, fetched the stack, and brought it back to the barracks. The pile was at the edge closest to the sinks, and the material was losing a certain amount of cohesion from having a wet snout do all of the browsing.

"There really aren't many pictures," Nightwatch reported.

"Many," echoed the centaur who was currently cringing against the opposite side of the pool.

"The illusion was big enough to see from a long way off -- no, stay on this side of the surface -- but it wasn't up there very long. The articles say a lot of ponies saw it, but not all of them were carrying cameras and -- the ones who were focused on your mark. Even Mr. Charger made that the center of his shot."

"Charger." The name sounded familiar.

"Garoun Charger. He was at your press conference. One of the oldest reporters, and one of the best. He was just about the only one to reach the palace while it was all still happening. Because he had to." Another page was sogged into turning. "He's got the most accurate article, but he's still missing a lot. Most of the others interviewed witnesses, and that just means they're getting everypony's confusion. But nopony's talking about your -- showing anything, Cerea. There's a mark. A centaur mark. And everything else which happened. It all sort of takes priority."

The girl's tone suggested open manifestation of relief at this stage would be somewhat more unlikely than the mark. "Did the Princesses --"

"They aren't quite ready to talk yet. They sent out a statement, but that's as far as it's gone. But it has to be soon. The capital's... really shaken right now," Nightwatch reluctantly told her. "And that'll spread as the news does. So they'll probably talk to the press tomorrow. I think they're waiting for something."

The centaur forced a nod.

"How about the opinion columns?"

"It's mostly Raque so far," Nightwatch eventually reported. "She's sort of stuck on 'I told you so.' Even though she never did. And she wants an interview. A lot of them probably do. And she's saying that ponies have to accept you, because you can't be a pony if you reject a mark."

How can you have a mark if you aren't a pony?

Cerea braced herself against the edge of the pool. (Her tail came within centimeters of jamming itself.) Waited for the worst.

"What did the Tattler say?" The last news she'd heard had Wordia Spinner as still being in the palace. It didn't do anything to stop the rest of that newspaper.

A black snout nosed around for a while. Dripping ensued.

"There's two editions," Nightwatch finally reported. "They're..." Stopped.

"Nightwatch, please. I can't read --"

"-- one of them," the pegasus said, "is quantum."

Cerea blinked.

"...what?" The wires hadn't hissed...

"Um. It's a theory. A really new one. Twilight Sparkle talks about it sometimes. I don't really understand it. Princess Celestia doesn't either, and Princess Luna says it gives her a kitten headache."

"A --"

"-- it only goes away if there's a lot of purring kittens around. But it's supposed to be about -- possibilities splitting? The way something might happen, or it might not. And the world changes either way. So the Tattler went quantum. There's two editions. And in the first one, nothing interesting happened yesterday. The front page story is sports. Editorial is about that one hoofball player who supposedly cast a spell from the banned list during the last game. There's no mention of anything from the palace, Cerea. None. They probably tried a few drafts where it wasn't going to be the fault of ponies who are mostly Tattler readers. And they couldn't make it work, because it was too big. So they just decided to live in a world where it never happened."

The blinking wasn't helping anything.

"...what does the other edition say?"

More nosing.

"I think this is a smaller print run," Nightwatch decided. "It's the edition before they deliberately ignored everything. So they scrapped that after it reached the street and started over. Not that they probably sold many. And a lot of their subscribers won't be picking up home copies for a while --"

"-- Nightwatch --"

"They went after the palace."

The dark voice of near-experience went with "For supposedly inciting the attack with spells, or planting agents inside the factions --"

A little too carefully, "For you."

"So I started it --"

"-- um. Ponies usually manifest their marks during early adolescence. There's some range on either side, but it usually starts a little before secondary school. A really late mark would still show up before graduation. And the Doctors Bear told everypony you were an adult. So they said the Princesses were lying about that, because..." The mare was starting to giggle. "...they couldn't quite make themselves say why they'd just figured it out, but it was so obvious that the palace hired a filly..."

They talked. Several topics came up. One didn't, and Cerea could hear the echoes created by its absence.

There was discussion of the inevitable trials. The hunt for the faction leaders. They both wondered whether the interrogation had uncovered anything, and what that might lead to. But they never talked about the girl's future, and Cerea wondered if that was because the happy pegasus had already decided what it was going to be.

I don't --

But even with the best baths, you still had to get out eventually. And once they were both dry, Nightwatch needed to leave the barracks for a while. The pegasus was still being debriefed: another session had been scheduled, and she needed to reach it. (Cerea suspected her own pseudo-interrogation was getting close.) And Nightwatch wanted Cerea to be where ponies could see her. Because the centaur was stable, but -- she was stable after going through something which had never happened before, and there was still an alarm canister on standby.

Cerea, who'd never had a sister (followed by having six), still understood the concern and agreed to be more or less in public for a time. They'd both eaten before leaving medical care, but the centaur was under orders to go for steak. It wouldn't take all that long to reach the necessary kitchen.

They both ascended. Stayed with each other, split up only when they had to. And then it was just the girl moving through rubble-strewn corridors, having to make detours here and there...

She'd somehow never checked the time, thought she'd left the watch near the last bed, was nowhere near a window, and there were no members of the staff in her current section: she couldn't get a peek at a badge. Not that it mattered, because the shifts had apparently become completely tangled up with each other. Still, all she had to do was find a clock --

-- she moved across marble, cracked and split and gouged. It was a material more fragile than the average hoof, and it did strange things to acoustics.

The air currents weren't quite right for her to scent an approach. But sound told her there were two males approaching, and they were doing so on a total of six limbs.

...well, six limbs and two artificial aids. The braces tended to thump.

She knew both voices. One had only been recently heard for the first time, and the second was weary from long moons of travel with a very fast conclusion.

"It was my fault."

The stallion's tones had also been weighed down by a considerable amount of guilt.

"It was my choice," the unseen companion calmly countered, and thumped across another step. "You -- just helped me see that there wasn't one. Not really."

"You always have a choice --"

The tinge of reluctance came across as something other than childish. Early adolescence, perhaps. The first step into maturity. "Because... you were right. You can't care about just one thing." The little sigh felt odd. "You can't care about everything, either. Not all the time. It's exhausting, when you're doing it one by one. But to care about the whole... I remember what happened, Fancypants. I remember all of it. Every moment. I know how it could have ended. And the past doesn't change." There was a snort. "You have no idea how annoying that is. No do-overs, claims the universe. You'd think it could at least step in to stop certain tactics."

With the lightest hint of humor, "For breaking the rules?"

The thumping stopped. Cerea, who had no choice but to keep going on the same route, couldn't prevent herself from hearing --

"Not the worst of jokes." the other entity decided. "Far from the best. But I'll respect that it was on me."

The stallion trotted. After a moment, the companion thumped along. The sounds of movement, and nothing more.

For a few seconds.

"We should have those adjusted --"

"I wouldn't have made it without you."

The tones were measured. Even. The marble did everything it could, and they were also barely audible.

"Discord?" Fancypants asked, and she could hear the shock lurking just under the layers of civilization.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

"There's... a base level of sorts," the draconequus finally said. "As with ponies, and so many others. Think of it as blood. You can only lose so much and still recover. Every chaos pearl represented one drop returned. It still needed that last spark, of course. It needed me. But to come home... I needed a place to return. You found enough pearls, Fancypants. About... six over the minimum, I would say. And without them..."

Silence.

"It was my duty --"

"-- thank you."

The movement stopped again.

"I did nothing more than any proper stallion --"

"-- I can think of three others who would have considered that chase, had they understood it," Discord interrupted. "Possibly four, although the last would mainly be doing it for the sake of the first. But they can't leave their home for that long. She would have, and... that's part of why the palace didn't tell her what you were trying, I think. Because she would have destroyed herself in the attempt."

"Four," Fancypants carefully checked.

"You've met her partner, I believe."

The "...yes," was slightly tense.

"The middle pair... can't quite go anywhere on their own just yet. Or do much of anything else. You did what no others could. So -- thank you."

"...you're quite welcome."

Trot. Thump.

There has to be a passage I can just duck into...

"Fancypants?"

"Yes, Discord?"

"Are we friends?"

Dead stop, and the weight of anticipation hanging in the air.

"...I think it's too early to say," the stallion finally admitted. "In many ways, we've barely spoken. The possibility exists, however. I -- wouldn't mind trying."

Thoughtfully, "I can think of some ways to find out."

"Really?"

They sound like they're right around that corner. Almost on top of me.
Why is there never an open door when I need --

"I could," the draconequus considered, "attend a few of your parties."

The air was beginning to shift.

"There are certain -- rules for attending parties," Fancypants said.

His voice was calm. The freshly-arrived scent provided Cerea with the first hints of panic.

"There are?"

"Yes."

"Excellent!" Discord happily declared. "I'm glad you let me know so far in advance! So that's the first thing we'll have to change --"

-- they came around the corner. Cerea, who had just been considering the value of a full retreat, froze.

Fancypants looked tired, and she understood that. The stallion had likely been recovered in something of a hurry, and she wasn't sure what being relay-teleported across a good part of the planet did for jet lag. The draconequus, however...

He was somewhat hunched, even more than what the pictures had suggested came from his usual posture. It was mostly to give him better bracing over the crutches.

The wooden supports were slightly uneven in length. It helped in matching the entity who was using them. He moved the crutches ahead of each step, he waited for the thumps to plant themselves, and then his body caught up. Some effort seemed to be going into keeping his tail off the floor.

She barely knew anything about him. But she had been told that he was potentially the most powerful entity to exist outside Tartarus. And the crutches were just about all which was keeping him more or less upright.

The red eyes stared at her. She had to look up at him, something which hardly ever happened in this world, and he was just staring...

"Ah," he softly said. "Fancypants? I believe I'll meet you at the air carriage. She and I need to have a short talk."

After a moment, the stallion nodded.

"Lady Cerea," he respectfully offered. "I hope to speak with you soon, especially regarding the party and -- things which were in no way your fault." A glance at Discord. "Now that I'll be -- home. Later this week, perhaps?"

She barely managed a nod, realized too late that she'd just committed, and then could only watch him go past her.

The centaur and draconequus were facing each other. Caught within silver-flecked marble and the debris of what had once been the illusion of peace.

"I spoke to Fluttershy." The long neck curved, let him look down at her, and -- she noticed that the edges were somewhat blurry. As if the grey-brown fur wasn't quite there. "And the siblings did their level best to bore me, of course." Another snort. "The amazing part was their not quite managing to succeed. With the Grimcess, it's almost automatic! But they've been gathering together what little they know, mostly so they can show it off. I suspect your friend had to pass a few non-personal details along. As she must, for her own duty. And of course, one could say I possess a portion of the inside story..."

She barely knew anything of him.
She still expected him to laugh.
But he shivered.
The short-cut thin black mane vibrated. Talons flexed in and out. The paw convulsed. Red eyes closed, and then opened again. The crutches were adjusted.

He took a breath. It made him look like someone who was truly practicing an instrument for the first time. Pushing air through a flute, with no idea where the notes were supposed to go.

He spoke, and everything ended.

"I can't send you home."

...she... was oddly aware of her tail. It had just drooped. She wondered if the hairpins would help make that look better. Centaur magic: a lifetime supply of hairpins whenever she wanted them, although Abjura was convinced they were all the same ones...

...her tail had drooped. A loss of control. Forfeiture of dignity. But perhaps she was entitled, at the end of all hope. For his power had been essential in building the road, and he --

-- no hope. So if there was no hope, there could be no torment. What came after torment?

Acceptance.

"I -- understand," the girl just barely heard herself say, and her legs began to shift. "I'll just -- leave you alone --"

The paw awkwardly raised itself away from the crutch, gestured at her: stop.

She stopped.

"I was part of that summoning," Discord said. "You may feel free to interpret that as literally as you like. But it wasn't just me. It was... nearly everything. Fragments of power from so many. And I..."

He glanced down at the crutches.

"...will be recovering," the draconequus quietly told her, "for quite some time. Fancypants was taking me to an air carriage, because... I have business in Ponyville, you might say. There are those I need to catch up with. And the Sisters Oddly Vengeless fear -- fear! -- I might lose cohesion in the between. So it's going to be an air carriage, until -- it isn't. And there's going to be a lot of air carriages. I have to make up for lost time."

Working out his scents would have required him to possess them. But his expression, exaggerated across unique features, was easy to read. For the most part, he was frustrated -- and somewhere at the core of that was a glimmering shard of hope.

"How long?" she heard herself ask. "To recover?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "I... never came that close before. Fancypants will undoubtedly ask whether further pearls will speed my recovery, but -- well, you heard some of that, I suppose. One drop of blood each. It helps, as much as a single drop can. But seeking out too many might mean some of that blood winds up being his. I..." The red eyes closed again. "...already have one friend who regularly risks her life, and we have talked about that. But even should her life become peaceful -- she sees herself as part of the cycle and -- she accepts that her part will end. After a time, she gained a promise from me. To... let her section of the wheel turn."

Another breath. Not enough of the ribs shifted. She wasn't sure all of his ribs were there.

"He's done enough," Discord decided. "Let time take over. I should recover, when enough of it passes. But even then... it wasn't my power acting alone. And in the absence of another coordinating abomination with exceptionally poor breath -- did you notice his breath? Rotting from within! And that was his best trait! -- it would take a group effort. Just about all of the species, working together." This particular snort turned into a chuckle halfway through. "With me! Well, that's going to take a major feat of diplomacy, isn't it? Although I understand a few minotaurs and griffons are already on board. But to replicate all of it, even after I have my strength back..."

And now the put-upon tones were back. The petulance.

"Testing!" Both arms tried to wave, and the crutches nearly fell: he snatched at them just in time. "Quantification! The scientific method! The insults I'm expected to endure --"

He stopped. Looked down at her again, and the warped lips curved.

"-- look at you," he quietly said. "You gave up on the spot, didn't you? But my phrasing could have been better, I admit that -- even when the rules for language can be their own irritant. You can look towards the future, if you so wish. But I advise you to take care with that. I... have some experience with living for the hope of 'one day, it'll happen'. I had my day. It... simply turned out to be a day other than the one I'd expected."

The talons came away from the crutch, moved towards her chin --

-- went back.

"The future is glory, because that's how sapients wish to see it," Discord told her. "But they're usually wrong. And living for nothing more than the hope of tomorrow isn't the best idea. Use the present. I gave the sisters a promise, and I give it to you. When I recover, I will do what I can. But I can't send you home. Not without a complete understanding of what took place, and not by myself. As the Grimcess put it, this is going to be a process. And I can't say it'll be a short one."

One day.
One day I'll leave the gap.
One day I'll find someone who loves me.
One day...
...and then you add them up, one by one, and the total works out to every day.
All spent waiting.

"When I can," he said. "If I can. As much as I can. After all... you carried me home."

"I didn't mean to," was automatic. "I -- you were part of the magic? Everything that went into me?"

Discord nodded.

"I have a very vague sense of you," the draconequus said. "Some weak degree of familiarity. It mostly seems to center around a desire to punch my mother in the face." Both eyebrows went up. "Since I'm lacking the basic qualification there, I'm rather hoping that you let me know when you get yours --"

"-- I didn't mean to carry you," she repeated, adding extra insistence to force the point. "I didn't even know you were there --"

"-- so?" he casually interrupted. "I've been told that intent counts. So lack of intent clearly also counts. Just as much, only from the opposite direction. And at any rate, you intended to save the world. I happen to be some part of that, so..."

He shifted the crutches forward: the visible expression of the intent to move on. Her hooves began to shift out of the way --

-- the girl stopped.

"May I ask you something?"

"I suppose you can ask me several things," the draconequus grumbled. "Lacking what others tend to define as omniscience -- which they oddly insist must include knowing about the boring parts -- I may not be able to provide an answer you'll like. But as I have both an air carriage to catch and a possible friend waiting for me to catch up, let's keep the questions at -- three."

She quickly sorted the internal flood --

"Tirek said he sent you an offer. What was it?"

-- and immediately decided she'd pulled the wrong candidate out of raging waters.

He just about told me --

"It was exceptionally clumsy spellwork," Discord irritably said. "The message barely got through at all, and I had to put half of it back together. But he'd learned I was free, and I suppose he had concerns." One last snort. "Justifiable, I'd say. After the fact. So the offer was basically that I had to stay out of it. Don't interfere, and I wouldn't be a target."

"Or," Cerea failed to stop herself in time, "he was trying to stall you until he had enough strength to take you on."

The little nod shocked her.

"Quite possible," the draconequus said. "Looked at from this end of time. But I also had the option to leave. I would have been safe enough if I had. And..."

He stopped. The half-phantom fur rippled oddly across his torso.

"...I had been trying to figure out how I could protect my own," Discord finally continued. "Fluttershy... I thought I could pull her back, if I was quick. And there is..." The distorted features went through a few extra contortions, and finally found a configuration which allowed them to release syllables -- with great reluctance. "...another factor. A -- family, you could say. But they were on vacation, well away from capital and settled zone. I didn't have to worry about them for a while. Fluttershy was more immediate. With her, I could watch. Wait for the right moment to step in. But Fancypants..."

He sighed.

"One choice," the entity said. "No choice. I think you understand that."

She nodded.

"Two more."

Her right arm bent back across angles which, in all the world, only he might have considered as natural. Pointed to a certain region of skirt.

"Was that you?"

His eyebrows went up again. She watched as one briefly tried to get away from his face.

"The mark?"

Cerea nodded.

And Discord laughed.

He'd already been partially bent: his natural posture, added to looking down at her and the contortions required to hold the crutches. But now he was just about doubled over, body twisting with helpless mirth and tail lashing with merriment as peals of wild hysteria echoed across marble, looking as if he might tumble forward at any moment and Cerea surged forward to catch him --

"-- oh, dear!" he gasped. "Oh, my dear girl... a mark! Me? You've caught me out! On your first try, no less! The Conglomerate Sisters required actual experience to get there, but you? A single leap -- !"

She didn't understand. All the centaur could do was get into position, make sure her hands were braced to receive whatever weight might exist --

"-- I can't!" Discord laughed. "Nopony told you? Of course they didn't! Because alicorns keep secrets, right up until they don't. And no others could have ever dreamed that you would need to ask!"

He nearly went down. She got her hands against his torso --

-- no true bones.
Matter without structure --

-- and pushed him semi-upright again.

He gasped a few more times. Got his breath back, for whatever that might mean. And then he favored her with the worst smile in the world.

"I can't affect marks," the most powerful entity known informed her. "Not in any ways other than the usual."

"...what?" turned out to be the best she could manage.

"And I won't even count that as your third question!" he decided. "I could encourage a pony towards certain lines of thought. Make career suggestions. Perhaps if my timing was especially good, I might catch one who was about to manifest and inspire them. But I can't create a mark. I can't change one which already exists. A gap in my powers, because it means altering an expression of pure order. No. That was not me --"

-- and paused.

"...I think," he added, as every tone suddenly turned thoughtful. "It could be like the summoning, correct? Something I couldn't manage on my own. But with all of the other magic present... it trapped me within you, I think. As I was trapped inside him, only with the matrix of thaums substituting for the platinum. But when you manifested, it was a change. Something which released me..."

And then he shrugged. Armpits rubbed against the crutches.

"Not with intent or purpose," he huffily declared. "At most, I was a catalyst. And I'd need to see some proof on that. Your third question? I do have an air carriage to meet."

She only had one.

"Are you going to be okay?"

He was staring at her again.

"Seriously?"

She nodded.

"And you're not just asking that for how it might affect your own situation, are you?" he asked. "You want to know."

Again. Cerea was starting to wonder if a few hairpins would help to control the resulting fallout.

"...yes," Discord said. "I think so. In time. Hopefully not too much of it."

He began to advance again. She stepped aside, and he thumped his way through the damaged palace --

-- stopped. Glanced back at her.

"Are you sure you want to go back?"

And then she was staring at him, as unspoken words piled up within her throat.

"To let them know you're all right, yes," he decided. "Because I've recently learned about the issues which arise from being out of contact, so I feel you should absolutely do that. To visit, if the passage can be stabilized. And I suppose you might want to fetch a few things in both directions. Provide souvenirs. But if it's a road -- one you could take at need, even if that was just once a year or so -- then I would hope you'd consider staying. Because they had to tell me a few things about you. They rather enjoyed that. Alicorns love to lecture. And in my opinion, Cerea..."

The smile was horrible. Hideous. It was also fully sincere.

"...the world would be a little less boring with you in it."

He limped away. And she could say nothing at all.

Moon-Touched

The centaur was making her way towards what she expected would be an exceptionally awkward conversation, and that was when her life usually managed to render 'awkward' into the default state.

Casual chats with her housemates seldom had the chance to remain so: every liminal species had its own culture, while each gap had found a way to sound individual notes on the orchestra of isolation-created issues. Even the most casual topic could potentially lead into a clash -- especially when they could all feel their host's not-so-distant presence haunting the edges of every dialogue.

Exchanges with Kimihito tended to head down subconscious-blazed paths into thickets of blush-triggering vocabulary, in the hopes that it would make him reach for her hand.

...she could admit that now.
She could have done so many things differently. But she hadn't known how. Cerea hadn't understood anything about relationships and how they began. Not as anything more than words in stories.
Perhaps if she'd just started through trying to be his friend...

But among the very few humans she'd known, he'd still been the easiest to speak with. Ms. Smith saw long speeches as a good chance to catch up on naps. And when it came to those who saw a centaur on the streets, and felt there were things they just had to say -- 'awkward' would have typically represented a rather welcome step up. A human confronted with something different seemed to feel the need to verify it and with Cerea, this frequently started with a finger pointing at her breasts and a fully-direct inquiry of "Are those real?" The exceptionally stupid would add a rather expansive gesture which covered everything from foreshoulders to tail, then repeat the question.

There wasn't all that much of an improvement among ponies, although which torso and limbs were currently being regarded as impossible tended to move up. In particular, any talk with Nightwatch had the chance to delve into levels of skin radiance which biology barely allowed to exist -- but part of the key to caring about each other was for both parties to force themselves into keeping the discussion going anyway. They had to understand each other, and the only way for that to happen was if they -- talked it out.

The girl was carefully making her way through the palace. Making her way towards a promised discussion. 'Awkward' felt as if it might represent the best possible result.

The summons had been delivered in the kitchens, and Cerea had received it with both sufficient lead time to prepare (in a few ways, none of which felt as if they truly mattered) and a note that due to -- well, everything -- the exact moment of their appointment was subject to change. The girl was fully aware that there was, to forge a drastic understatement, rather a lot going on. Multiple investigations were under way and with the exception of anything she might offer up during debriefing, her place was in staying out of them. When it came to mysteries, the only puzzle the household had ever collectively, repeatedly solved was 'Who caused that disaster?' The solution was always close at hand, and hiding the evidence generally meant hiding themselves. Quickly.

She'd dropped by her most recent medical bay to recover her watch, then gone back to the barracks and found Nightwatch was still absent. It had given her the time and isolation required for Too Much Grooming, and she was convinced that none of it had done any good. Not when she was meeting royalty. And...

...Cerea had checked the results in one of the mirrors.
She couldn't really picture her mother as ever having been young. Features unmarked by the etched lines of permanent disapproval.
Perhaps the silver-backed image had been it. Only reversed.
My mother is beautiful...

She'd groomed herself, possibly to excess. (It didn't matter if it was humans or ponies: she would always be at least somewhat unnatural to any spectator. But she could at least be clean.) Long-handled brushes had been deployed. It had taken some time to settle on a hairstyle, and she'd finally just undone the fifth attempt and let everything fall more or less along the center of her upper back. And brushing the mark had been strange, because it hadn't been. The intrusion of bristles had briefly split craters, twisted the hilt, and then it had all come back together again. Normal fur.

Then she'd searched the bathroom, looking for long-abandoned contents in storage cubbies. Eventually, she'd found some ancient caked remnants of what she felt to be fur-blending powder, managed to coax some of it into being a little less solid, applied the mix to the brush, and streaked the brown mix across the mark.

There had been no true sensation at the moment she'd seen the makeup evaporate into curls of vapor: no electric shock from within, or an interior poke telling her not to do that again. It had just... happened.

Sometimes, things just... happened.

She'd picked out clothing: a soft sweater and, despite what Nightwatch would have probably insisted upon, the most covering skirt she could find. Made sure she had plenty of lead time remaining, and set out towards her destination. Cerea was anticipating having to detour a lot, because there was still so much rubble in the hallways. The maintenance department was trying, but... there was so much to do.

The girl had given herself plenty of time to reach the appointment, and barely managed to reach the main floor before a portion was claimed.

The blending of Solar and Lunar staffs meant she'd been spotting a lot of new ponies. Cerea was sure she would have remembered the svelte unicorn who was slowly trotting towards her, picking an uncertain path through the damaged hallway. Because as with Sizzler, the mare's coat seemed to have something of a liquid aspect to it. And technology in the gaps tended to be somewhat behind that in the human world, because power sources were hard to arrange and things which had just become obsolete were easier to acquire.

But even the cheapest pieces could come with their own unexpected price. And when it came to that singular shade of purple, a single glimpse of the hue associated with mimeograph ink found Cerea instinctively trying to hold her breath.

The mare both smelled and looked exhausted, brought to a point where the weight of her own horn was almost too much to bear. Moving slowly, with her head down. It wasn't a good way to avoid every obstacle, and Cerea carefully began to get out of the way.

It wasn't quick enough. The unicorn glimpsed the scant portion of exposed leg, along with a hoof. Glanced up, followed by going much, much further up.

"...oh," the mare softly exhaled, and the girl braced herself for the surge of fear --

-- the unicorn backed up a little. Tried to look at the girl's face, encountered obstacles, and backed up somewhat more.

"I'm..." The unicorn took another breath. "I'm Motife. I -- work in Public Relations."

"Oh," seemed to represent the best of Cerea's efforts and as such, didn't make the upcoming meeting feel any more promising.

"I worked on the one-sheet," the unicorn further clarified. "For a couple of moons."

The girl, who'd just recognized a new aspect of a rewritten reality, winced.

"I'm sorry," was automatically offered, because of course now the whole thing had to be revised all over again --

"I did a lot of the layouts," the unicorn carefully told her. "It meant looking at the same paragraphs. Over and over again. So I've been spending moons reading about you. Every day. And -- all I did was read about you, and..."

The mare looked into Cerea's eyes, just for a moment. Then the gaze started to wander backwards and down. Towards the left hip --

-- the pony took another breath, and her regard was yanked back to the girl's face.

"I read about you every day," the mare quietly said. "And I still don't feel like I know you. The kitchens are still open --" and then there was a light laugh "-- I'm not usually here during Lunar hours. I keep forgetting that the kitchens are always open. Do you want to --"

Both forehooves lightly scraped at the floor. Pebbles of debris skittered away.

"-- go into one?" Motife finished. "Because there's going to be another one-sheet. There has to be. And I thought... maybe we could get a snack together. Talk about your home. I -- feel like I should know more about your home. About you..."

One last breath.

"Please?" the pony asked. And waited.

Cerea, caught in the center of an unexpected olfactory vacuum, tried to chip words out of the ice surrounding her brain.

"I... have a meeting," the centaur finally answered. "I'm on my way there now. I can't. Not tonight."

Motife nodded.

"So another time," the unicorn said. "Since I'll be going Solar and Lunar for a while. I'll drop by the barracks and set something up. Good night, Cerea."

And before the girl could say anything else, the tired willowy form slipped past her, heading towards Syzygy, doors, and so many of the nights to come.

The Princess hadn't been able to promise Cerea that their meeting would pass without interruption: the girl had understood that. But there were ways to make ponies feel any intrusive knock had better be important, and one of them was through choosing exactly the right location.

It still felt like an oddly simple door. The Moonrise and Moonset gates had intricate patterns worked into their surfaces, with weaves of silver forming an ornate frame. This was just a door. Plain, silver-tinged white -- with a very familiar icon set dead-center in the stone. And a alicorn somewhere beyond.

Her bedroom.

It could have just been the Lunar throne room --
-- no. One of the many potentially impossible goals of their talk was to close the imbalance between them. And anything done from a throne was elevated.

The two Guards assigned to watch that door looked at Cerea as she approached. Took her in with steadfast regard, and then mutually stepped aside.

"She's expecting you," a rather weary-seeming Moonstone stated. "Just go in."

"I should knock," Cerea automatically said. "It's polite --"

-- my mother never knocked.
I had to reach Japan before I found out what polite knocking sounded like.
...that was mostly Kimihito. Suu didn't understand knocking, Miia just wanted to reach my body heat, Rachnera thought it defeated the purpose, Lala usually turned up out of nowhere, I could hear Mero's wheelchair approaching before she ever got near the door and you couldn't ever ask Papi to knock...

"-- we're the ones who have to knock," Imbrium countered. "You go in."

The Lunar throne room was a place which ponies could approach, but -- it could take a small, rather visible effort before some of them actually went inside. Under normal circumstances, it had marble, hanging tapestries, artwork and little statues in alcoves. There were lightly-bejeweled decorations about, and silver was everywhere. Put it all together and it created a center of power. Something which spoke to the strength of the mare who held it, while making a few wonder if they dared to step within.

The bedroom, the sanctum of privacy, the heart, was -- plain.

There were multiple bookcases. Two were made of wood, while another four were rather ordinary stone. In the olfactory world, the literary contents announced themselves as ranging in age from Just Published Last Week all the way through There Have To Be Preservative Spells Keeping This From Turning To Dust On The Spot. Cerea could only make out a few scant words along the myriad titles: enough to tell her that the majority was probably fiction. The overloaded shelf directly over the heavily-scratched teak desk was devoted to history.

One corner of that paperwork-strewn desk held an isolated, wood-framed sketch. It was the only piece of artwork in the room, and the soft glow directly told her that multiple protective workings were in effect. The radiance also hampered Cerea's ability to tell just what it was a sketch of: she could just barely distinguish outlines. It took her a moment before she decided that there were six ponies, along with what had to be a single minotaur standing with them. One of the three stallions seemed to be wearing a hat, and the filly at the forward edge of the group was surprisingly small.

The walls were plain. The lone mirror looked as if it hadn't been polished in a while. One lamp felt as if it might have once been the lamp, with every other customer having to wait for the next version to be invented. And the bed was huge, virtual acres of mattress covered by an ocean of rumpled sheets because this was a bed which only got made when the blankets were changed, followed by having the owner unmake it again at top speed -- but almost none of it was being used. A sort of twisting indentation at the left edge told an observer where the lone occupant slept.

The Princess wasn't in that quasi-hollow. She was on the mattress edge closest to the door, belly and barrel flat against those rumpled sheets. Constellations fell in seeming disarray across dark fabrics. Her wings were in the rest position, and the silver-shod forehooves protruded slightly over the edge.

The left one gestured outwards as Cerea entered.

"Close the door," the Princess instructed. The girl did so, and the alicorn nodded.

"I --" Cerea tried, because it was the sort of opening word which almost had to lead into a second syllable, and she was very much hoping to find out what that was.

"I am about to cast a working," the dark mare interrupted. "It is something which affects sound, and ensures the words I speak within this room will not travel beyond it -- at least, not through conduction. It temporarily pauses should I open the door, or address somepony on the outside by name. And I am telling you this so that we both understand that there is privacy here."

"I understand." Which, for the girl, represented a rather rare sentence.

The alicorn's corona ignited. Dark glow projected past Cerea, covered the walls and coated the doors before fading. The Princess nodded to herself, and then looked at the centaur.

"Sit."

The girl automatically reexamined the room.

There was one bench. It went with the desk and while it was alicorn-sized, it was meant for the smaller of the two. Nothing was present for a visitor, which left the floor or the --

-- no.

Cerea carefully approached, tried to use the intensity of royal regard as a guide for just where her hooves were supposed to stop. It left her just in front of that mattress edge: something which would have her in arm's reach of the Princess if she somehow lost all common sense and did something so stupid as move.

She carefully folded her legs, sank down to the thinly-carpeted floor. The combined height of mattress and resting alicorn put them just about on eye level.

The Princess nodded again. Dark eyes briefly roamed across the girl's features, and the alicorn took a slow breath.

"There has been very little time to prepare for this," royalty quietly said. "The scant moments which offered the delusion of making myself ready -- in those seconds, I attempted silent rehearsal. Constructing playlets upon an inner stage, sending myself before a singular phantom audience, and -- watching to see what I might say."

It was... fairly warm, this close to the alicorn. And as the tail-bound stars trembled, Cerea wondered just how much effort was going into making sure it continued to be so.

"For the most part," the dark mare slowly told her, "I witnessed myself fail. Over and over, to the point where I almost wished for something to distract me. So it would stop. A wish which was fulfilled, again and again..."

The alicorn rather visibly looked past Cerea, checking the door. Nothing happened.

"...naturally, until just now," she finished, and the olfactory world told the girl where the sigh hadn't been. "When it comes to belief in what some might term as deities, both Princess Celestia and myself have a certain degree of difficulty. But I do recognize when the world has decided to make a gallop on irony."

It wasn't a full lash of the tail. More of a simple sweep: left to right, then back to center. The movement still allowed Cerea to spot the sheer number of stars which were beginning to dim.

"I told you that I could have wished for a simpler option," the mare said, and her forelegs bent inwards. "I still do. Cerea... it is hard for me to trust." The dark head dipped, looked away. "The last time I put my belief, my hope in another... there was a price."

Every constellation in the mane twisted, dimmed to the point where they were barely visible at all. And Cerea couldn't move.

"One which I... spent quite some time in paying," the alicorn whispered. "And now... to believe that any will keep my secrets, when I have so many... it is hard. Something in me longs for proof. That any I might confide in would have been shown capable of holding her tongue, never to repeat anything I might say in any time other than one of catastrophic need. That she already holds secrets, knows that she must retain them, and..." A tinge of irony worked its way into dropping tones. "...the secret of -- is the proper word 'liminal'? Did the disc -- good. The secret of liminal existence does not count, as something already broken --"

It would take some time before the girl came close to understanding why her own words emerged.

"-- I figured out Sun and Moon."

The alicorn blinked. Cerea, resting against the floor in what was still a rather warm room, froze.

I don't think they kill anyone who realizes what's going on, tried several increasingly-desperate neurons. I'm almost sure they wouldn't --

The mare's left foreleg unfolded. Stretched slightly towards the girl, then went back in. A dark head shook itself twice as eyes blinked away sudden daze.

"I..." the mare whispered. "Moon's craters, I --"

"-- it was just a little while ago," Cerea quickly, frantically interjected. "I haven't told --"

Almost a gasp as all attention focused upon the centaur, words being pushed out on a blast of emotion before any barrier had a chance to block the way, "-- I am sorry! I never thought about it! That you would have to learn about the cycle of our raising and lowering them on your own, for who would ever believe they would need to teach you? Never a part of any citizenship class, because the knowledge is only found among foal questions! Queries answered at the youngest age, and never asked again!" Another surge of breath, and then the alicorn had to forcibly refold her wings. "How little must you truly know? Something which creates even more of an issue in finding a place to start! Do you even know what year it --"

"-- I know they're artificial satellites," the girl cut in. And waited.

She didn't have to wait very long for a response. Fractions of a second and during that scant time, she wasn't entirely sure if she was waiting to die. Or how concerned she was about that possible result. Death lost a certain degree of terror when you had someone waiting to greet you.

There was no thermometer in the room. The sole initial visual indicator in having the bottom drop out of the Celsius scale was in the way Cerea's right arm automatically came up in an attempt to cover the near-instant results.

"...what?" Luna whispered as every star went out. "You... I... what?"

"I'm just from a different place!" Cerea desperately offered, as her fingers became the next things to stiffen and the shiver worked its way to her tongue. "I t-t-t-thought about how it had to w-w-w-work if you were moving them, the only way it c-c-c-could --"

A tiny flare of field touched her lower jaw, pushed it shut.

Slowly, the mare stood up, hooves indenting the mattress. Briefly closed her eyes, and an effort of will reignited every stellar core. Jumped down to the floor, and slowly trotted past Cerea's rapidly-chilling form on her way to the exit.

The corona touched the door. It opened. Two Guards turned, awaiting an order from their Princess.

They got one.

"Alcohol," Luna said.

"Princess?" Moonstone checked. "I'm sorry. Did you say --"

"Alcohol."

"...all right," Imbrium tried to take over. "Did you want any particular vintage --"

"I have but two requirements," the alicorn told them.

"Okay," Moonstone tried as the fast-spreading frost began to coat her armor. "What are they?"

"PLENTIFUL. AND NOW."

Heat-shifting was a pegasus technique and, in the time they waited for the delivery, Luna did very little else. She warmed the air around Cerea first, then she did something which made both sweater and skirt radiate their own heat, and it was only after the centaur had finally stopped shivering (with all exposed skin carefully alicorn-examined for frostbite) that the mare turned her attention to the rest of the room.

She removed frost. She kicked at patches of ice. And every time Cerea tried to speak, another flicker of energy told her to wait.

Eventually, there was a knock. A wheeled cart delivered six bottles and two mugs.

Luna selected the second bottle from the left. A single glance put it at the proper temperature, another opened it, and then her field carefully poured the results.

She looked at Cerea. Then she looked at the other mug.

"Drink."

"I usually don't --" represented the first words the girl had been allowed to say.

"An issue with your biology?"

"No."

"Cultural taboo? That mares do not consume, while your stallions choose to make up for your deficit?"

"No."

"Religious? Personal? Something about being suspended upside-down in a barrel filled with all of the alcohol you have ever spilled, when simply finding such a barrel would take some work and you would need to upend several vineyards before any concerns set in?"

"No --"

"-- drink."

Cerea took three sips. (It mostly tasted like the inside of a well-maintained cask, with hints of cherry.) The alicorn was satisfied.

"Princess --" the centaur carefully tried.

"-- eight minutes," Luna cut her off.

"...Princess?"

"Alcohol," the alicorn firmly stated as she resumed her place upon the mattress, "has an onset time, and I am quite literally not drunk enough for this. Eight minutes."

In the girl's opinion, the mare hadn't actually taken all that much. She had a better idea of pony body mass now and unless Luna was considerably lighter than she looked, the amount which had been swallowed at high speed was just about what was required to take the edge off. Possibly several edges.

Regardless, Cerea shut up.

Eight precisely-measured minutes passed. Luna kept looking at the door, in part because recasting the privacy spell five times required identifying the target. No knocks came, and the empty mugs were finally set on the desk.

"How?" the alicorn finally said. "How did you figure it out?"

Cerea explained. (The wires didn't hiss anywhere near as much as she'd been expecting them to.) And when she finished, nothing about the mare was moving. Not mane or tail, or a single star held within. No tiny shifts of limbs or feathers. No blinking and, for five endless seconds, no breath.

Finally, "You have told no others."

In terms of word choice alone, it sounded like the sort of thing you heard in a bad movie, just before the secret villain struck. It just didn't come across that way.

"Not that they aren't natural," Cerea quietly told the mare. "At the party, before I realized what might be happening... I tried explaining orbital mechanics. For why it couldn't work, with my own sun and moon. But no one understood what I was trying to say. And Fancypants just knows that I realized the two of you were raising and lowering them for the first time on that night, because I had to give him a reason for why I'd been so upset. With everything else that happened, I... guess he just didn't think to tell you. And I didn't tell anyone else, because..."

She had to be honest.

"...part of it is because of everything which happened after that. There wasn't a chance. But the majority was... they all saw it as natural. I thought telling them about my theory would terrify them." Not without irony, "I do enough of that just by existing. And... before I did anything -- I wanted to speak with you first. So I kept quiet."

Slowly, oh so slowly, Luna nodded. The dark eyes closed, and the mare's chin dipped towards the mattress.

"Good," the alicorn breathed. "Good..."

Cerea waited.

"Is that part of why you wished to quit? Having realized what was truly at stake for the first time, and believing you could not execute the duty?"

Her heart hurt.

"...yes."

Luna silently nodded. And in time, her head came up again.

"You have questions," the mare quietly observed. "I... have not rehearsed the answers. I may not possess the answers. And yet, after so much time... I am curious as to what the questions would actually be."

The girl squared two sets of shoulders, and kept her voice soft.

"What happened?"

"There are several possible phase states contained within your query," the mare dryly said. "I am barely dealing with this night: I do not need to bring in quantum. Let us collapse the possibilities into an initial question. What happened that they exist at all?"

Cerea nodded. Luna's eyes closed again.

"We do not know," the alicorn sadly offered. "And they cannot tell us."

There were many things the girl could have said. So much which she might have feared. But everything within her, added to the assistance of three sips, told her to simply listen.

"We have... attempted to work out what we could, from the scant evidence which was available to us," Luna quietly began. "But most of that was the evidence of their existence. They are from the Pre-Discordian era, and -- we presume there was a need for them. But two words help to explain why we know so little, Cerea: Pre-Discordian. A time from which all true history has become lost, and researchers do little more than squabble over their favorite theories. Their best guesswork. Discord took control of the world, and... part of that came when he seized control of them. Our measurements for time became breath and heartbeat. Day and night? They were variables. Sun might appear six times before sleep, or Moon could remain in the sky for four waking cycles. At times, they appeared together. We had eclipses, and... hated ourselves for seeing any beauty within them. He controlled them, and -- they are creations of order. Discord was unable to tap into any natural means of directing them. So it was brute force. It damaged them. Something which became worse over time, and... we do not know how much time passed. We barely know anything of what the world was like before he came and as you might imagine..." The sigh rustled her feathers. "...nor does he. And while he remembers the whole of his life, when it comes to a great deal of what took place while he had control... he was simply not paying attention."

Damaged...

But Sun had yet to go out.

"It was insanity, to try and win back control of our world," Luna whispered. "Insanity. The surest sign that we had fallen to his madness. But... there was nothing else. We went into chaos, and... something happened."

"Something," was the first contribution which the girl had felt capable of making.

'We.'
She's talking about it as if she was there.

The alicorn's lips quirked.

"There is a long tale," she said, "and there is a short one. In the short one -- 'something'. We found our marks. For our era, the first marks. And with myself, and my sibling... we became the living links to Sun and Moon. They were damaged, Cerea -- but it did not reach their most basic functions. They retain the ability to keep the world alive. But they have difficulty in measuring the passage of time. They do not remember what came before. And they both became somewhat possessive -- well, Sun more than Moon. But..."

AIs.
Tales of knightly glory weren't a good place to learn about artificial intelligence. The girl was much more familiar with human stupidity.

"...with the links forged," Luna quietly continued, "we had control. Something Discord was unable to override, while we stood guard. It was the first true victory within the war. And with his influence removed... they began to heal. Slowly. But they could no longer operate themselves. They required partners, and we agreed to be those partners. For as long as was required, until they were whole. Until they once again moved themselves through the sky. And then our duties would end."

...how...
...how long...

"In this era..." The alicorn's tail briefly twisted. "After his escape, Discord seized control anew -- for a short time. We spent most of his escape trying to gain it back, while the Bearers did what was needed to renew his bonds. Our links had not weakened: our monitoring had. He found a temporary way in. But the chaos was brief. From what we were able to determine, any setback was minor. The healing continues. Slowly."

"And the world doesn't know," was a substitute for the real question.

"That they are devices?" Luna said. "Cerea... portions of the world existed in some degree of peace because, over the course of time, they had learned not to think about how -- fragile this is. For there are always those whose contemplations go deeper, and thus delve into fear. That it all relies on us. That, for far too long, it was Princess Celestia and no other. And that if we are lost..."

"There's no one else," had to be said, and no amount of magic would have given the girl warmth.

No heirs.
No names passed down from one generation to the next.
What happened?
...how long...

"None. Cadance -- we have not taught you about Cadance -- the third alicorn, the third of but four -- has tried. She can touch them. She followed my sister's channel to do so, during a time when my sister was all there was. But the mere contact placed her in agony. Princess Celestia had to exclude her from the link before she collapsed. We have not asked Twilight Sparkle to make the attempt, from fear of losing her. Cerea --"

Was there moisture on the mare's eyes?
No. It was already being absorbed by the fur.

"-- we have tried to make a world where they simply accept, without question, that Sun and Moon exist, and we move them. Where the majority give the matter no more thought than that, because the current system holds at its core a seed of unstoppable terror. On the night of the Return, when Sun did not appear for too many hours -- or, on the other side of the world, lingered -- the planet nearly went mad. Some of them are still weighing the consequences of that night. Wondering about that ultimate fragility, because that question now lingers far too close to the surface. And that is why I understand your fear. That terror is part of why we have had so much global turmoil since my Return --"

-- and Luna stopped.

"Another subject of which you have no knowledge," the mare sadly stated. "The one where, for the reasons why it all started -- why my Return had to happen at all -- I could have wished for you never to have learned of the matter. But a distorted version has reached the textbooks. We have yet to figure out how the tale might be corrected for the true. Or... if it should."

Too many answers.
Too many questions
(Too much fear.)
Where do I even start...?

This was what she'd wanted. To know more about Luna.
There might have been some irony in that. To wish into an empty hand, and find herself burdened by sudden weight.

...how long...

It was as good a place to start as any.

"How long?"

The alicorn's tones had gone dry. "A qualifier, perhaps?"

"How long," Cerea softly asked, "have the two of you been doing this?"

And it could be said that the calm, perfectly level answer was nothing more than a number.

"In the most typical measurement? Twelve hundred and seventy-five years."

It could be said. Lies were often spoken aloud.

"Or rather," Luna added as everything within the girl reeled, "somewhat longer than that. We generally count from the end of the war, as that was when time found several more means of reliable quantification. But there was a rather noticeable delay between the manifestation of marks and the final victory. Additionally..." and her eyes closed again. "...the true number only applies to my sibling. I had... abeyance..."

Cerea, floundering within the tempest of inner turmoil, searching for anything to keep her afloat as the storm endlessly surged, seized the only words available.

"What happened?"

The mare's horn ignited. Two more drinks were poured. Both were consumed. And then she spoke.

She did not say everything she could have. There were topics which needed to wait for another night and with others, there might never have been enough time to say it all. But for what she did say, she did not lie. And she said enough.

The motionless girl listened to it all, in shock and horror and fear. And when it finally ended, she did the only thing she ever could have. Without thought, on instinct alone.

"Oh, Luna...!"

The centaur moved.

It took a full ten seconds before she became aware that she'd moved.

"I am trying to decide," considered an oddly calm, half-muffled voice, "if this is comfortable. Or merely disturbing."

And then she was aware of very little else.

You couldn't reach out. You couldn't touch. You certainly couldn't hug a Princess. Cerea, within arm's reach of the mare, had just done all of it. Her arms had gone forward, encircled the mare, and gathered the pony close.

In the more specific definition, Cerea had just pulled Luna into her own bustline.

There had been an automatic tilting added to the action, because there was a horn present and that added a requirement to be really careful about where it wound up. So the mare's head was somewhat sideways. Basic safety. Also, you had to keep the snout clear, because breathing was important. Luna was certainly breathing. So was Cerea, which was why the living pillows kept shifting. Or rather, Cerea was breathing for now, while part of her desperately longed for that condition to end. Immediately and forever, hopefully taking all of the humiliation with it.

You couldn't hug a Princess, and Cerea had just done that. The followup impossibility now concerned exactly how she was supposed to stop.

Her arms weren't cooperating. Maybe that was why ponies stared at them. They knew how stupid arms were.

"I'msorryI'msorryI'm --" and the sheer force of it seemed to jar the left bicep outwards "-- sorrysorrysorry --"

"-- I did not," the mare calmly announced, "say to stop."

Cerea blinked.

"...Princess?"

"One should generally not," royalty stated, "form an opinion without going through the full experience. This is true of many aspects of life. Plays. Dining. Golf. This."

Oddly, the part which Cerea most wanted to disregard was golf. "Princess..."

"I am," the half-muffled voice said, "thinking this over. Comfortable. Or disturbing. Maintain your position, please."

Neither female moved.

"I have reached a decision," Luna announced.

A six-limbed bundle of dread, fully unable to stop thinking about what two of them were still doing, waited.

"It is disturbingly comfortable."

The mare closed her eyes. Softly sighed, and rested a little more weight against unexpected support. The girl simply hugged her.

And Cerea was not afraid.

They'd separated. Hugs were a little like baths that way. Even the best ones had to end sometime.

Luna was off the mattress again, and her field was active. She faced the desk as she resealed the bottle, along with shuffling some papers across the teak. Cerea, still on the floor, was waiting to be dismissed. They'd already had much more time in privacy than the girl had expected, than Luna had likely been expecting, and... she had to go figure out what she'd just done. The consequences of her actions, and everything she now knew.

But that was when the mare turned around.

"A question for you," Luna calmly offered. "If you will answer it."

Cerea, who'd just had more answers than anyone was probably supposed to strictly possess, mostly nodded from a need to balance things out again.

The alicorn stepped forward. Brought her horn within contact range, and looked at the girl.

"A familiar position for us," she noted. "We lack only the forest, and must each deal with the arrival of understanding. But the first time, I was trying to assess what had appeared in my nation. Who you were. And now, knowing what has been gained..."

Her foreknees bent, and the horntip lightly touched Cerea's left shoulder.

"Will you be my knight?" the Princess asked. And did not move.

There was no answer. At least, not on the verbal level.

"The Doctors Bear," Luna finally said, "have yet to fully brief me on centaur biology. However, I am presuming that some portion of your bloodstream needs to be flowing within the deeper parts of your body. Having that much of it going through the skin cannot be healthy. Additionally, as you are new to the possession of a mark -- something where my sister and I are still trying to work out how it appeared at all, but agree that it was earned -- you should be informed that it cannot blush." She straightened. "Something of a pity. A blood Moon is a rare thing, and much more appealing than the name might suggest. And yes, I could have said 'Guard'. That is how it would appear on the majority of the paperwork. But the other term is equally suitable. I believe I was promised an answer?"

The mare's gaze was calm. Patient. Old...

"...I quit," the girl said, shivering in the midst of perfect warmth. "I..."

"-- with all of the recent commotion," the Princess announced, "I did not find an opportunity to file the paperwork for your resignation. In fact, I am entirely certain that you are still being paid. Also that the terms negotiated prior to your seeking out Tirek can be interpreted as a bonus for services rendered. But I am not holding you here, Cerea. If you still wish to leave, you may."

"...I'm not worthy," served as negation's next desperate strike. "I had to accept at the press conference, because it was the only way to keep it all going. As an immigrant. But I didn't know what it meant. What the responsibility was --"

"-- in terms of worthiness," Luna told her, "I have reached my own conclusions. Something which is easier for me than for you, because being outside your skin provides perspective. Respect does not have to be earned every day. Nor does kindness. Some maintenance is required not to lose them, but much of that is basic courtesy. You have had my respect for some time. I am asking for your kindness. To grant me the honor of having you as my knight."

"...I..." was, in some ways, just about all denial had left.

"The duty? You have already performed it: saving the world. Although I would rather the occasion not offer itself a second time, I believe this proves your capacity for doing it again. And..." The smile was there, and then it wasn't. "...should the question be rising in your mind: I am not attempting to keep you in the palace simply because you now hold some of my secrets. You are trusted with them. However..." The mare took a breath. "...Nightwatch is convinced you are staying. That you must stay, as her partner and friend -- "

She stopped, and the dark eyes briefly closed with shame.

"-- no," Luna resumed. "We used that bond against you once before, my sibling and I -- and I think you realize that. Doing so for the sake of the world. But now I will speak for myself. There is a mark, Cerea. What ponies see as a reflection of the soul, and not inaccurately. I realize it will take you some time to think of it that way. But... if you do not wish to see the mark as a symbol of who you truly are in the needs of a moment, when fear and doubt have no time or say -- then... I hope that you might perceive it as a guide to the mare you wish to become. And for Moon to be present, as part of that mark..."

It was easy to perceive it, in the olfactory world. The place where the tears weren't.

"...I would also hope that it shows you wish to remain in my service. That you have... forgiven me."

The girl's hands came up. Covered her face, and muffled the single sob. Went down again.

"I... have magic now," she finally said. "What if there's another Tirek?"

"I have spoken to the Bearers," Luna solemnly stated. "In the event that you are unable to counter a drain, we shall ask Barding to forge you something with an edge. Alternatively, should the new threat have gone beyond a height you can reach, we find a very large rock. Cerea -- will you be my Guard? My knight?"

The girl stood up.

Both foreknees bent. Her upper torso leaned forward. The mare, who didn't move, simply accepted the results.

It wasn't the proper thing to do. Not when viewed from the perspective of old stories. But the characters had to act the same way every time. Eventually, the reader had to make her own path.

Even the best hugs had to end sometime. But you could always start again later.

"Yes."

Vengeful

One of the more common ways to learn about another person was through listening to them talk about the things they loved. Favorite subjects could be a starting topic, along with prized possessions -- but in Japan, the girls had typically encountered certain difficulties with both. For starters, when it came to the household, the favorite subject was Kimihito and if any of the exchange students stayed on that topic for too long, it could easily lead to a fight.

And when it came to possessions... they certainly had their favorite pieces: Miia's hair clips approached the level of religious artifact, which meant the lamia treated any attempt to make her swap them out as the act of a heretic. But six of the girls didn't own much of anything and for the lone exception, the vast bulk of it stayed within the waters. Additionally, if anyone found Suu lovingly cradling something new in simulated hands, it was generally best to investigate immediately because the slime didn't understand very much about human society and there probably wasn't a receipt.

The alicorn and centaur were still within the royal bedroom, because an interrupting knock had yet to sound and neither of them wanted to wrap things up just yet. And when it came to prized possessions, books were most of it. When it came to Cerea, Luna couldn't really do much with books. Pointing to titles as future recommendations for when the girl finally learned how to read could become depressing in a hurry, and the mare probably wasn't about to start reading anything aloud. Doing voices was right out.

It was just about all books. But...

"What was his name?" Cerea quietly asked, and her right index finger carefully pointed towards the portion of the sketch which hosted the male pegasus.

Luna quietly regarded that section, met the frozen eyes of the dove-grey stallion. She'd faded out the glow, allowing the girl a better look at those who were hosted within. The glow itself had turned out to be another security measure, so that none might peer too closely. Look, and -- wonder who those portrayed had been.

No one was truly allowed to look. None but the alicorn, and... those who were trusted.

Her knight.

How would one of her favorite characters have dealt with the situation? Cerea was sure that several of them would have felt the situation violated boundaries, created impropriety and, in the hands of certain authors, guaranteed tragedy because of course something horrible was going to happen to knight, liege, or both. So many stories existed as lessons of punishment for breaking morality, at least for what the author had decided was going to be moral.

But this was about what Cerea thought was right.

They'd spoken about confidentiality. That nothing could be repeated to any other unless a crisis left no other option, and the girl had understood. She had existed as a living secret, and...

Her liege didn't trust easily. But it had to start somewhere.

Luna was talking. And in a newly-welcomed knight's opinion, the best thing which could be done for her liege was to listen.

(For somepony who might be a little bit more.)

They were both standing near the desk, and the sketch had been the focus of their mutual attention for some time.

"In terms of what he wished to be called?" Luna softly began. "Because there was an appellation which was given to him at birth. I may have used it all of seven times, generally when angry. But his name... that was what he wanted to be known by. The way he would have asked us to remember him."

"Like Render?" Cerea managed a small nod towards the minotaur. "Zephyra named this one, too?"

A small smile had its way with the corners of the alicorn's mouth. "You have yet to take possession of the timeline," she told the girl. "He came before Zephyra or Render. He..."

The dark eyes closed and when they opened, the mare was no longer looking at anything in the room. The deep gaze pierced the past, and the air was filled with the scent of mourning.

"...could easily be argued as... the cause. The reason it all happened. And his initial contribution was to provide us with his new name, as the very first thing he said after crashing in front of my sister. 'Surprise!' Trying to make himself look less threatening, I suppose. Turning it into a joke. But much like you, Cerea, one could say that his timing was off. Attempting to be both peaceful and personable, seeking sanctuary directly after a raid -- the rest of the barricade point decidedly failed to see the humor in it. Or what ultimately turned out to be the sincerity..."

Inhale. Exhale. Check the room's temperature. Repeat.

"...a long story," Luna quietly decided, as pain twisted mane and tail. "Too long, and... there are many ways in which it is not a happy one. I cannot entertain the delusion of currently providing any significant fraction, not when we have already had so much more time than I anticipated. But on this night, I can at least offer identities. We called him Surprise, almost from the first day. To the last. And our Laughter thought it was funny."

Do I keep talking?
Do I stop?
She's hurting. I can smell it.
But she would ask me to stop if it was too much.

"His wing," Cerea risked, and pointed again. "The right one --" The limb didn't seem to quite be in a normal rest position.

"-- yes," the alicorn intercepted. "The artist rendered the true. It was injured, and never healed properly. Something which affected both his flight and magic. He could fly -- but it was generally ill-advised for him to remain airborne for very long. And he was never the strongest in his techniques. When it came to his jests, he typically concerned himself about the subtlety of magic. Small effects designed to create maximum havoc." This smile was exceptionally quick. "I think you can imagine that simply holding a pocket of scent against a snout for a time can have a number of effects. When it came to raw strength, there was generally a semi-informal contest between Zephyra, Star, and myself. And during any given cycle, none to all of us would win --"

She stopped. Her eyes closed again, and dark fur became darker still as it absorbed the first drops of moisture.

"I can stop," the girl said, immediately deciding she'd pushed too far. "We can stop --"

"-- it... hurts to speak of them," Luna steadily forced out, and a mare immune to cold shivered. "It always will, Cerea. But part of that agony exists because I have not spoken of them with anyone other than my sister, for... a very long time. There is a base level of pain: something which has never truly faded." Decibels fell away. "I no longer believe that it ever will. But for the current extent of the wound... this allows the bleeding to slow."

The dark mare breathed, and did very little else. Her head dipped, her ribs shifted, and her eyes stared into time --

"Your hand is on my back."

Automatically, "I'm sorry --"

"-- once again," Luna offered, still focused on the ancient sketch, "I did not say to stop --"

A hoof knocked on the door, and the alicorn's head turned. Looking first at Cerea, and then the artwork's frame.

"-- although it would seem the world has decided that we must do so, at least for now," Luna announced: a glance at the frame restored the glow to its original intensity. "My orders were to hold all interruptions unless the matter was truly important. Let us assume that my staff has judged correctly."

Cerea nodded, pulled her right arm back. Luna trotted towards the door, and a flare of field opened it.

"Your news?" she asked the pony on the other side.

Cerea didn't see who it was, any more than she listened to the low-pitched words. She was still thinking about everything she'd been told. Knowing she had but a fraction, and that the rest had to wait for future nights.

There would be other nights --

"-- good," the alicorn decided, and the syllable was saturated with the shadows of satisfaction. "Then let us -- hmm." A thoughtful sound, one which almost vibrated from dark anticipation. "Cerea, this requires a test. The sword is rather obviously not present. Do you currently have any hairpins manifested?"

The centaur, already feeling confused, shook her head. Blonde strands shifted accordingly.

"Then we test," Luna announced. "Place your hand on my back."

The staffer at the doorway looked at Cerea. Then she looked at her Princess and in that, she had company.

"You want me to --" the girl started, because privacy had been broken --

"-- one of your earliest formal lessons in our magic," Luna cut her off. "Although sufficient time has passed to potentially mandate a reminder. I am about to attempt short-range teleportation. The distance covered will be a single body length, and I will be doing my best to bring you with me. This remains easier when all parties are touching. You do not have the sword manifested and the hairpins are absent. Therefore, this is the time when we need to determine whether your body resists such effects without them. If you will?"

The centaur moved towards the alicorn, carefully touched cool fur and solid spine. (The contact was made more quickly now.) The horn ignited. Light flashed --

"Good," Luna repeated upon the dual emergence from the between. "There is no longer any issue in transporting you with your weapon, because the weapon does not need to exist until the transport is complete. So the next thing we need to do is -- check the timetables. And allow a considerable margin of error, because there are multiple variables in play." She glanced backwards and up, looked at Cerea's bruised neck. "However, at the very least, I hope to have sufficient for you to fetch a scarf. And if we happen to find ourselves with significant lead time..."

The smile, directed at no one in particular, was thin. Vicious. Cold.

"...perhaps," the Princess concluded, "we should visit a seamstress."

The overweight mare (and that was as far as she was willing to go with her self-description in the face of all physical and dress material cost evidence: merely slightly overweight, and always fashionably so) was still on the train, staring out the window of her private compartment in utter boredom. She'd always known that the world outside Canterlot was nothing worth looking at and as scenic vistas and fabulous terrain passed by under Moon's light, she congratulated the planet on being sensible enough to prove her right.

It was a long ride to Prance and if the only other significant pony nation had its way, the trip would either be longer still or utterly impossible. They had connected themselves to the rail network with great reluctance -- but the citizenry's collective habit of sniffing loudly at anypony seen getting off a train had developed almost instantly. Prance was generally perceived as preferring to deal with the rest of the planet from a distance, because the stereotypes said that population collectively believed itself superior and the best way to maintain that illusion was through never actually meeting anyone who could shatter it -- for that value of 'meeting' which indicated true social interactions. Tourists were seen as a necessary evil, along with a slow-trickle supply of those who could be looked down on at no personal social cost.

It was a long ride, and it could have been a longer one. In Prance, the extremists usually argued for isolation, typically in the name of keeping their culture from being corrupted. Ideally, this would have taken the form of cutting the rail lines, stopping all trade, expelling every embassy and, in the best-case scenario, teleporting the entire country to Moon.

The mare, who was currently dyed red and black because it struck her as an effective combination for a future display of power, felt she was going to fit right in.

She'd already been working on her accent, and recognized that was going to take a while to perfect. But when it came to the distant nation's supposed signature sneer, she'd been a natural.

It was a long ride, and that was partially because the train kept stopping. The railroads offered private compartments for those who wanted a little more space for themselves, and it was possible to get all meals delivered from the dining car as a courtesy service. (Courtesy, in the mare's mind, meant she was under no obligation to tip. She was becoming rather irritated about always being the last to be served, and didn't understand what she'd done to deserve it.) But you couldn't get the whole train to yourself. There was no way to keep the line from stopping at multiple stations. It kept picking up passengers whom the mare really didn't want to look at, because it hadn't taken her long to discover that the railroad had absolutely no standards. It would let anypony ride, in any car, and she'd closed the heavy curtains over the aisle-facing windows accordingly.

And now the train was slowing down yet again, as a small, rather ordinary-looking settled zone began to come into view. A place which obviously hosted nopony of any class whatsoever, and therefore probably had a population of those who were just waiting to hear how special they were. But the mare couldn't exactly afford to get off. The train occasionally stopped long enough for passengers to stretch their legs (and, sadly, wings -- very few pegasi were true endurance fliers, and so quite a few rode the rails), look around a little, and find a different source of snacks. In this case, the mare preferred to remain isolated until she reached her destination.

It wasn't just an unwillingness to move among lessers. It took time to set things up, and those efforts were best reserved for Prance. Any promising opportunity in Equestria had to be --

-- she didn't initially recognize the grinding sound as having been produced by her own teeth, and then it took far too long to make it stop --

-- abandoned.

A private compartment, with nicely-padded benches, a foldout bed which wasn't completely horrible, and a sliding door that she kept locked. (One which, unfortunately, did not come with an equally-private bathroom. She was still trying to figure out the best possible timing for making sure she never had to share. And she kept hearing noises from the other compartments, and the aisle, and the doors as they opened and closed. The walls were far too thin.) Remain within. Practice her accent. Every so often, count the letters of credit she was carrying, which was occasionally followed by vague internal questions about how exchange rates worked. Wait for the boredom to end.

Waiting for her true future to begin.

The train came to a full stop. It left her looking at the side of the station which didn't have anypony boarding, and she distantly regarded the very few ponies who might be waiting for a trip to Canterlot. Possibly to tour the palace or in the ideal, what was left of it.

She'd left during the first stage of the assault. News typically traveled at the speed of ponies, and a mare on the rails who didn't care to leave her compartment could get ahead of the details. But when it came to how things had shaken out... a certain amount of destruction would have been welcome. Appropriate payback for her suffering.

But in the end, not even that mattered. The plan had but one true goal, and that had been accomplished.

She was out of the capital.

...the walls were too thin. Her ears reported every passage down the center aisle, and thus told her that there were quite a few ponies getting on. She distantly wondered what the next stop was. Perhaps the majority of new passengers were just going to the next settled zone up the line. There couldn't be this many ponies heading for Prance, especially not on a train boarding at this hour of the night. The little portion of settled zone she could see beyond the platform looked too stupid to know where it was.

There were a lot of hooves going by. The heavy curtains vibrated in sympathy, which indicated the only way that word was going to be used within the private compartment.

The mare irritably wondered how cheap their luggage was. Half of it sounded like moving metal.

She heard multiple sliding doors open. Then she heard more doors, and... it sounded like the number of ponies on the move had more than doubled. Compartments emptying out, with hooves moving towards -- the dining car? Perhaps there was a special dish being made for dinner. She'd have to ask the server, presuming that idiot ever showed up.

Hooves on the march. What almost felt like a low-level mutter of confusion, echoed from too many throats. And then it all went silent, just before the train's steamstack vented and the whole thing began to move again.

...good. One stop closer to Prance. One more nag-riddled excuse for a settled zone which she'd never have to see again.

The train picked up speed quickly. (She imagined it would be able to move faster still if the supposed inventor hadn't so clearly kept unicorns out of the design process, but that was what you got with earth ponies. Sabotage.) The boring scenery began to whip by again, and mostly served to hit her in the face.

If she blocked out the sound of the wheels -- something which, in theory, might eventually be possible -- then it was rather pleasantly quiet now. The advantage of mealtimes. She didn't have to put up with half-heard mutters, or hints of conversations that nopony of sanity would have ever cared about. It was almost as if she was the only pony in the entire passenger car --

-- typical. All she'd had to do was have the thought, and the world punished her with the sound of hooves working their way down the center aisle.

Very heavy hooves.

The mare considered her build to be -- pleasantly padded, and she couldn't get that kind of impact on a normal hoofstep. It was a sound which took the extremes of typical pony mass and added a multiplier. Whoever was coming down the aisle had to be the heaviest --

-- the largest exterior window of the compartment could be forced open: a necessary emergency evacuation measure, because narrow strips of wild zone had been cleared to make room for the tracks and there was always a chance of having the protections break. But it was something which presumed the train had stopped. And if you weren't a pegasus or, in the case of the recently red-and-black mare, happened to be a unicorn whose inadequate teachers had blocked her from mastering teleportation theories, using that exit on a train which had reached near-full speed was suicide.

The mare recognized the possible danger at the exact moment she heard something grip the door's outside lever.

It rattled a little.

She heard the unseen party push. The lever, secured by what was actually a rather good lock, held.

Then the intruder pushed a little harder.

The lock was perfectly fine metal. It meant the housing parted from the wood as a single unit, trailing along behind as the entire door slammed sideways into the hollow between thin walls. The mare heard the now-interior edges splinter, and the lever itself just came off in the monster's hand.

There was a perfectly reasonable reaction to seeing this happen, and the mare instinctively used it. But the monster had two hands, the other one moved, and the edgeless blade cut through the shower of sparks.

It produced a moment of weakness: something which had the mare sinking into the well-padded bench as the momentary disruption of unfocused magic created a sickening sensation. Her stomach seemed to flip, all of her joints loosened, the black jaw fell open, and sheer rage pushed the words out.

It was a lie.
It's supposed to be gone. It was all a lie.
I should have known I could never trust --

"...she lied," the unicorn hissed. "She --"

The monster's response was to duck under the door frame, because an excess of size was just one more way it proved just how unnatural it was. And then it entered the compartment.

It was a process which took a second to enact, and never really finished. There was a lot of monster and, once you left the pony scale behind, not all that much compartment. The abomination just barely managed to get its hips inside the violated sanctuary, and most of the overlong blonde tail remained in the aisle.

"'She'," it rather passively said -- or rather, the disc and wires did. "That's interesting."

The mare immediately tried to rally.

This was beyond merely bad. Her current situation had a good chance to be the single worst thing anypony had ever experienced, and those who argued otherwise simply weren't in possession of the facts.

The monster had the sword. She couldn't fight the sword.

A physical blow might be possible, as the monster wasn't wearing armor. It had a sweater, a well-bundled scarf, and a vertically-pleated skirt, with the last being somewhat overdone: there was far too much fabric along the excessive length, and the covering over the hips was a festival of folds. For that matter, the sweater itself was obviously of low quality: each sleeve had a short length of thick thread hanging out near the fully-unnatural wrists. And that meant the mare could strike with nature's perfect weapon, but -- she didn't have the space required to get up speed for a horn strike, and the monster was just too big.

Magic was out. A charge had very little chance to work. But the monster was stupid. Monsters always were.

...it had those mounds on the front. They kept moving. Shifting, every time the monster breathed. The mare wondered if the mounds could attack.

Looking at the mounds was better than looking at the sword. But not by much.

It's stupid.
Just talk...

"I'm sorry," was the mare's first lie. "You startled me." Which was one of the few times she'd felt Honesty working for her. Who wouldn't have been startled --

"-- you can get up on your own," the monster evenly told her. "Or, if thou chooses to resist, I hast --" stopped, just for a moment, and the left hand dropped the broken lever to the floor. "I have the option of carrying you out, Mrs. Panderaghast. It's up to you."

The former leader of CUNET, in the face of terror and monstrosity, continued to execute her brilliant strategy.

"Who?"

The monster's small blue eyes narrowed. There was a small jolt as the train accelerated a little more, and Moon-lit crags of rock sped by all the faster.

"I have papers," the unicorn said, and that was true. Acquiring a properly-forged set had been a necessity in the plan. "I think you've mistaken me for somepony --"

"-- you're actually rather distinctive," the monster stated, with the artificial voice maintaining a fully unnatural calm. "Once ponies start looking past your normal fur and mane colors, at least. Because the Princesses did realize that you might have tried to leave the city. It didn't take long to get your bank to turn over the records. Not a full withdrawal, because that might have looked too suspicious. Closing everything out can draw attention. But then you turned it all into letters of credit. Bearer bonds, if you prefer that term. And then you went to another bank, and turned them into different bearer bonds. Which was followed by a mare displaying different hues turning up at a third bank, converting them again..."

There was a small head shake. Blonde hairs, unconstrained by the natural dignity of a mane's center line, bounced. The mounds echoed some part of that, and the unicorn fought back nausea.

"You still smell like fur dye," the monster said.

She couldn't. The smell faded after a few hours...

"Cosmetics are legal," the unicorn announced, and hated hearing the defensiveness in her own voice. But she was entitled. Who wouldn't be defensive, when challenged by a monster? "Anypony can wear them. And you don't have any proof --"

"-- you're distinctive," the monster cut her off, and it was a deliberately cruel substitution for 'beautiful'. "I'm guessing you didn't think about that. But a --" and a hiss entered the artificial voice, something which sounded as if it was coming off the wires "-- binding/corset/girdle might have helped. Once the Princesses realized that you'd gone on the run, it was just a question of how you'd leave. You didn't risk the escort network, because they keep records of their passengers. Just in case somepony does try to use them for an escape. Ground carriages are what you hire for other ponies. Going by air... no. Not you. And you'd never risk a long trip on hoof. Princess Celestia thinks your top range is about sixty blocks. So that left the train. And all they had to do was check with the Grand Gymkhana's ticket sellers until they found the one who remembered you."

The strange head shook again.

"You were easy to remember," the monster observed. "The palace had your chosen colors from the last banks along the line. Then they just asked if anypony had seen a mare with those hues, a lot of luggage, and... let's call it 'a memorable build'."

The predatory eyes briefly glanced down at the mounds.

"I'm not in much of a position to go after you there," the monster wryly noted. "So we'll keep it at 'memorable'. You're under arrest, Mrs. Panderaghast. Because Guards can arrest, when the crime involves the palace. I feel like you've overqualified yourself there. Are you coming quietly?"

A Guard.
They made this thing a Guard.

As unpleasant reminders went, it felt worse than the sword's disruption. Besides, why did Princesses need Guards anyway? If they truly believed in the supposed virtues of 'Harmony', wouldn't they go without?

"You can't prove I'm this Panderaghast mare," said Mrs. Panderaghast. "Whoever she is."

"Once you're in the palace," the monster stated, "the dye can be removed. Not that it's very hard to see underneath it. I can spot you. I can scent you."

"You... you can what?" What kind of monster was --

"Other ponies will verify your identify, because they have police lineups here too. If necessary, the Princesses will take a sample of your field. There's already a warrant for that." The higher set of shoulders shrugged. "I would have brought the device with me, but somepony checked it out of the armory --"

"-- I'm not going anywhere with a monster!"

The scream echoed through the rail car, bent the wrongly-placed brown ears back. Mrs. Panderaghast liked that. It knew how wrong it was. It just needed to be reminded --

-- I need other ponies.

"THERE'S A MONSTER!" the unicorn screamed. "IT'S TRYING TO HURT ME! EVERYPONY, PLEASE, THE MONSTER IS --"

"-- the Guards emptied out this part of the train before I got on," the monster said. "There's nopony to hear you. And as far as monsters go --"

-- no, they can't all be gone, they can't --
-- I could have talked to some of them, found the vulnerable, had them take me to dinner --

The sword was pointed forward now, leaving that annoying loose thread hanging down from the wrist. The blade's tip was all too close to Mrs. Panderaghast's horn.

The mare, dreading the touch, with nowhere to go, fell silent.

"-- I was in the palace," the beast softly continued. "But you know that. You knew I was helpless, because you're the one who seems to have told everypony else. But I was just a target of opportunity. And the Princesses are starting to wonder whether they could say the same thing about the entire palace. Because they also saw what you did to your own home, and... it made me wonder, Mrs. Panderaghast. The Princesses were talking about all of it, and that made me think about children. The ones who respond to not getting what they want by throwing a tantrum. You could have gotten out of the city with just about the same lead if you'd left normally, I think. But you were angry. You were going to lose your organization, your income, and your home. So if you couldn't have anything... then you were going to throw a tantrum. You just wanted to see people hurt. Why should anyone else be happy, if you weren't? Why not just use the chance to make us all suffer?"

It kept breathing. The attack should have made that stop...

"You made sure your possessions could never be used again," the monster said. "That your followers couldn't be used again, because you took ponies who trusted you and destroyed their lives. And the one thing you left intact was the membership list. Because it's another distraction. Columns of ponies to be tracked down and questioned, instead of you. A tantrum. Do damage for the sake of the pain alone. You could have tried to leave without all of this, and you. just. didn't. care. You only care about yourself. And I've been told that's the definition of a monster."

The huge hooves shuffled the giant body a little closer.

"Definition," the monster repeated. "And in your case, actions. There's proof. You don't care. The law does. The lawsuits, for that matter." And added a little sigh, followed by another one of those warped shrugs. "But we have plenty of ponies who can identify you, no matter how much you lie or claim conspiracy. One of them is still in the cells, still alive after everything you tried to do. And maybe her testimony can't be trusted -- but paperwork can be followed." The corners of the too-thin lips twisted. "You shouldn't have had her sign over her assets."

Mrs. Panderaghast briefly resisted the urge to offer a well-prepared protest, because she'd had it ready to trot out in court for years and there was every chance that a monster would fall for it. She stood ready to claim that she was a world-class financial advisor. It was always the same advice: give me control of your money. And every time somepony followed it, assets increased. That was a proven Fact, and that all of the increased assets were her own didn't make it any less Factual.

But that would mean admitting her identity. And when it came to caring about what happened to anypony, she was focusing her attentions on the only worthy subject.

There had to be words which would drive the monster off. She'd already made it flinch, or so she was fully prepared to see it. If it was a matter of triggering retreat...

...if only the train wasn't moving so quickly, if self-levitation hadn't been sabotaged to make it so hard to learn...

"No matter who I might be," she made herself declare with well-practiced authority, "I'm a pony. And you're a monster. One whose form is nothing more than a distortion of mine, a warping. A pony might be able to falsely claim authority over me, but not a monster. A beast with nothing in common, a foulness which possesses no magic of its own --"

She could have gone on from there and, given the chance to do so, might have automatically slipped into how all of the other magics were lesser anyway. But that was when the monster raised a hand, and the body horror of bending fingers sliced through her words.

"Princess Luna thought you might say something like that," the beast announced. "So she asked a seamstress for a quick alteration."

The left hand bent in on itself at the wrist, grabbed the dangling thread and yanked. A hastily-sewn internal structure went taut, and the curtain hidden among the hip-pleats pulled open.

The unicorn automatically looked.
Stared.
And something within shattered.

She tried to sink into the padding. To lunge for the window. To go everywhere, all at once, and it turned her into a shivering mass of fear and denial.

All she had was words. One word. The most fundamental Fact.

"No! Nonononononono...!"

But no matter how much she said it, nothing changed.

"You're the second pony to react that way," the monster said. "I wonder what you two might have in common?"

"Fur dye!" Mrs. Panderaghast screamed. "You're accusing me of what you did, because that's how monsters work! A false mark, with no magic behind it! Nothing which connects to the core of a soul, because you don't have one!"

It opened the right hand. The sword vanished. Closed the fingers well before the unicorn could hope to react, and the hilt was being held fast again.

"-- NO --"

"I suppose," the beast calmly stated, "there are some who would say I should thank you for this. One mare did. Princess Luna suggested that I give you the credit, since you set so much of what led to my manifest into motion. And then -- watch how you dealt with it. But given how many ponies were hurt, that wouldn't feel right. So I won't give you thanks or credit. Instead, I think you should always remember that you were responsible. Or at fault. But I'm sure you'd rather just be in denial. And even so... CUNET existed at the palace's sufferance."

It smiled.

"I was asked to tell you," the abomination announced, "that it's finally time to watch you suffer. Get up. Or I'll carry you out. It's one or the other."

The unicorn couldn't deal with the lies. Nopony of sanity could.
So she ignored them.

"They'll never convict me," Mrs. Panderaghast decided -- then, somewhat belatedly, edited. "Her. No neutral jury would. Attacking a monster is common sense. Anypony who disagrees is corrupted. The verdict would be invalid."

The monster's head tilted slightly to the right.

"Of all the ponies I've seen," it said, "you're the most human."

The unicorn blinked at the nonsense word. Something which had only sounded in her ears because the monster was corrupting the disc.

"What's a --"

"You've told yourself that you know everything," said an artificial voice backed up by an unwavering nightmare of a sword. "So anything you don't know is a lie. But the jury will weigh the evidence. Or... the facts."

Which didn't make any sense. Nothing made sense any more, because there was a monster with a mark, a false mark and there had to be a hidden pony somewhere, illusion magic, there had to --

-- but she still had one last resort. The final defense. That which would save her.

And as a special bonus, it was something she'd been planning to do anyway.

"You're a Guard," Mrs. Panderaghast allowed solely for purposes of strategy.

The monster nodded.

"Then you're a government official," the unicorn declared with satisfaction. "And I hereby declare, in the presence of a government official, that I'm surrendering my citizenship. Equestria no longer has any direct authority over me. You'll have to contact my new nation for extradition. And they won't be so ready to give me up."

The predatory eyes blinked.

"...really?"

"Once I decide on that nation," Mrs. Panderaghast reasoned. "Until then, the best you'll be able to do is deport me --"

She would have said more. There was a full speech coming, and some part of it concerned getting the palace to pay for first-class transportation. But that was when the hands reached out, seized fur and skin, then lifted.

"I've been wondering," the monster said as she began the complicated process of turning in the small compartment, along with doing so while both keeping the sword's blade against the horn and fully ignoring every justified scream. "As someone who's been taking classes. Is it a side effect of birth citizenship, deciding to learn nothing about your own government and just make up civics as you go along?"

There was an interlude after the teleport back to the palace. It was time in which the Princesses could question the former head of CUNET personally, and it also let Cerea go back to the barracks, where she found Nightwatch and -- got to tell her that she was staying.

Some of the ensuing celebration took place above floor level, because Discord wasn't the only recovering party who had to be kept from overdoing it. Fawning also occurred. And nuzzling. There was rather a lot of nuzzling, and Cerea still didn't know what to say about it.

Or... whether she should say anything at all.

Nightwatch simply wanted to nuzzle her as a friend. As a sister. As the little knight would have nuzzled any pony that she loved. She didn't understand any other implications. And given that... perhaps any such action was only taboo if Cerea thought it was.

Maybe if she just asked the pegasus to only do it when they had privacy...

They did wind up having a short argument, and it concerned what had taken place just before Cerea had gone into the armory. The girl told the pegasus that she was aware Nightwatch had been trying to buy time for the centaur to escape, thanked her, and then asked that she not do it again. The little knight had answered with a deflection: Cerea would do it for her.

For or to? Because if anyone or anypony died in the attempt --

-- maybe it was for and to, Nightwatch argued. But mostly for. You had to care about someone if it was 'for'. And that was called being a Guard...

They'd tried to keep the fight on the minor side, and Cerea had finally ended it. The ceasefire had been called because neither wanted to argue for long, not on the night when the centaur was staying. There were other things to talk about. And once that was done, writing had to get involved because there was an invitation which needed answering. Nightwatch was the only one who could take Cerea's dictation for the reply.

The two Guards were only halfway through that when the next summons arrived. And then they both went off to meet a traitor.

It didn't take long. Most of what was necessary was simply going into the proper office, where the Princesses were already waiting. And then they all watched the clock for the arrival of the final invited guest, because that pony had followed treason by continuing to show up for work.

She trotted in, the grey-white forelegs crossing the threshold exactly on time. Being late counted as Rude.

The mare looked at the waiting quartet, and her regard was perfectly normal. Or at least, as normal as it ever was.

"Princesses," the mare rather properly greeted, with each Guard receiving a precisely lesser nod. "Is there a question of Etiquette which I need to resolve?"

"One," Luna gravely began, "of -- shall we say, proper approach. Something only you can answer."

The mare primly nodded. Celestia took a single hoofstep forward.

"Why Majorica?" Celestia softly asked. "Why did you sell out the palace to the unicorn supremacist, Ms. Manners? Geodene's headquarters has a public address. Anypony can find it, even if it takes a lack of horn and wings to actually get through the door without being kicked. Why didn't you go to her?"

The earth pony was silent. No hooves stomped, the tail did not lash, and neither ear changed its loft.

"The chain of loathing," Luna stated, "collapses one link at a time. But it does so at speed. She -- what is the term? -- sold you out, Ms. Manners. We barely had to ask her for the traitor's identity. She did not attempt to bargain for a lesser sentence: something she never would have gained to begin with. She is simply trying to drag the maximum number under the waves with her, rather than drown alone. And she could certainly think of no reason --" the slight nod was visibly aimed at the old mare's forehead "-- to defend you."

"Fortunately," Celestia gently sighed, "she's not intelligent enough to start blaming the innocent. Or... doesn't know enough names to make an attempt. But she hates you. She hates anypony like you. And CUNET has a few earth pony members -- but that takes a lot of self-loathing. And I always thought the one pony you respected was yourself. So why her?"

Both pupils contracted.

"Geodene Fracture," the earth pony mare tightly said, with every syllable visibly weighed before release, "wishes to do things which nopony of refinement should ever do. Actions which would ignore the Weight Of History and the Burden Of Need. She is an upstart. A child in an adult's body, in eternal rebellion against true Authority. Majorica Panderaghast, for all her Views, is a mature mare from a good family. I knew she would understand."

The centaur's entire body went rigid. The pegasus moved into an intercept position, watching for the earth pony to break into a gallop -- but Ms. Manners did not move.

"Why?" Celestia quietly asked, as the borders of her mane and tail went still. "Why, Demea?"

"We ask for the sake of the knowledge alone," Luna coldly added. "Consider it as our final order of your employment."

The earth pony's tail lashed, and the contracted pupils lanced collapsed rage at Cerea.

"She slapped me!"

The girl, suddenly aware that she was also the focus of alicorn and knightly attention, forced her hooves to cease their canter.

"I told them about that!" Cerea frantically offered, because it had just become her fault again and she didn't know any way to make it stop. "I couldn't hold a Greeting Stance, not in the way you wanted me to do it! I don't bend that way! And my -- they were going forward, and --" in full desperation "-- I was bracing myself on the edge of a table, and you ordered me to move my hand! I pitched forward! I didn't mean to slap you! I told them about that, I told you, and I apologized --"

"SO?!?"

The old mare had reared up on her hind legs, and the fore kicked out. Meters away from hurting anyone, which meant words had to strike across the gap.

"Apologies represent failure! Proper Behavior exists so that situations which might require apology can never occur! There are Rules, and you break all of them simply through existing!" She was starting to weave now, fighting to maintain balance as froth began to bubble up within her coat. "Six limbs, six, and two of them failed to present the basic Courtesy required for becoming wings! A pair of torsos! A girl who comes from nowhere, knows nothing, and expects that we will change everything simply to suit her existence! That which is Proper does not change, can never change, and to believe that exceptions and change must be invoked simply because there is something new -- !"

She crashed down. Both foreknees bent too far upon landing, and white foam dripped onto the chipped marble floor.

The quartet stared at her.

"Thank you, Demea," Celestia sadly stated. "There are times when I need a reminder --"

"-- both of you, lost," the earth pony panted. "One who no longer understands what is Proper when she should have been the one who defined all of it, and the other creating change --"

"-- of why Discord," the white mare finished, "is preferable to you. Because when a pony falls into their mark... they need help. Ponies to bring them out. But somepony like you would never allow that to happen, because they feel they've become perfect. So... I kept you here, because I thought that was protection. Placed where you were safe. But Discord is chaos, and chaos is change. You're order. The worst kind. Stasis. And perfect order, perfect chaos... they have one thing in common."

The oldest pony in the world sadly shook her head.

"They're both destructive," Celestia told them all. "Order just feels it's for your own good." And raised her voice, just enough for those waiting outside to hear. "Take her to the cells."

Four Guards entered. Heavy chains were deployed, cuffed onto the earth pony's legs in precise ratcheting fits. The mare didn't notice. The mad eyes could only look at Cerea.

"You are Shockingly Informal," Demea Manners told the girl. "Did you ever realize that?"

The centaur's ears went back. The dark mare took a step forward.

"You feel," Luna began, "in what is clearly your first public attempt to establish a basis for the insanity plea, that Cerea --"

But that was when the Guards took up the mouth grips on the chains, and began to drag the mare away.

Her legs went backwards, and did so at a perfectly even rate: something which kept her upright, as the cuffs had included smooth-bottomed platforms for the hooves. It meant her final attack was delivered on a Proper Angle.

"Your parents," she screamed at Cerea, "clearly used no Discipline!"

And then she was gone.

There was a sound.

It was a rather odd sort of noise. When it came to the dark mare, the recipe consisted of half a swallow and about a quarter of a laugh, added to one hoof which had just desperately slammed itself in front of a snout. The result, chilled to the proper temperature and forced into decibel-leaking cold storage, arrived in the world as 'SNRK!'

It couldn't really be seen as a typical sort of expression, if only because the average SNRK! generally didn't emerge from two mouths at once and when it came to the centaur, had encountered a little more trouble in getting past pinning fingers.

Centaur and alicorn glanced at each other. And then, in spite of everything, bound and united by shared secrets, they both did their best not to laugh.

The journalist stepped into the still-disarrayed Solar throne room for what she was dearly hoping would be the last summoned time. Noted the damaged fabric hangings, and immediately planned an article on tax bits being used for restoration costs.

"The Guards said you two wanted to see me," she half-snapped at both alicorns. (Making sure to direct each half of the snap in a different direction was an art, especially when she had to aim part of the barrage high to reach the giant on the throne.) "About my leaving."

And she wanted to leave. She wanted to go home, because the crisis had passed -- on the national level. Wordia was certain of that. In terms of going after palace, arsonist, or centaur, there weren't enough of the organizations left to try again -- as groups. But there were still individuals out there, and a single pony didn't need a herd as an excuse to go insane.

She was still at risk. But she was sick of being trapped within marble, when she didn't control her own movements or have freedom to publish words. They were cutting her off from freedoms.

...and bottles. She hadn't touched a bottle in...
...she needed...

"This is about arranging your return," the smaller alicorn nodded. "A somewhat less complicated process than arranging mine."

"I'm a little curious as to how you intend to haul out that miracle," a lack of bottles half-spat.

"In a few seconds," the larger freak said. "But before we do that... off the record, not that it usually matters to you..."

The giant stood, and looked down at Wordia from the apex of the throne. A momentary twisting of features suggested a sudden flood of acid within the mouth.

"Thank you," Celestia said, if in a tone which was just shy of fluoroantimonic. It was the sort of vocalization which made cushions melt.

Wordia stared at her.

"...what?"

"You'll probably never hear it again," the Solar princess told her, slowly sinking back down. "Barring a drastic change in circumstances. If you think about it, you might even come into agreement with me on a single issue: namely, that once was enough. But you played your part, Wordia. And did so when so many others wouldn't have. So there it is. From both of us." Purple eyes flicked to the left, glanced at the younger in a way which implied both frustration and the recent loss of a bet. "So now we're going to talk about how we're getting you back onto the Tattler staff."

It was a statement which made the journalist balk, and she didn't know why.

And then she did.

"I won't be your agent there," she immediately announced. "I'm not going to work for the palace --"

"-- we are not asking," the younger imperiously stated -- then paused. "However, I would advise you to begin considering future career opportunities."

"Not necessarily here," the elder quickly added, getting the words in just ahead of Wordia's sharp inhale. "Princess Luna and I were talking it over, and the thought of having you in the Public Relations department is several unique and contradictory kinds of concerning. But if you'll take any advice from us at all -- yes, I did resist the urge to laugh there, Wordia -- it's this: keep an eye on your paper's circulation numbers. A fully independent one, because your publisher will probably lie about it to the last. And be ready to unhitch from the draft team before the cart goes over the cliff."

"I don't --" Wordia began, because it would give her time to think of exactly what she didn't understand. Or to fully realize what she had subconsciously understood, and then come up with the best way to distort it --

"You are the enemy," Princess Luna calmly observed. "Our enemy. That is how you regard yourself. With pride."

"And you're not going to change," Princess Celestia decided. "Neither of us believes that. You'll be a stone in a hoof crack for years to come, always trying to work deeper and start an infection. But Wordia -- we've had enemies. More than a few. And on the whole, if we're going to have one -- we'd rather it be somepony who, in a crisis, agrees that the world needs to exist. And that we can sort out the details about how it should operate later."

"We have gone against sufficient foes," the younger dryly said, "to recognize that level of sanity as a rather rare quality. As such, we have agreed that we would both prefer to avoid having the Tattler replace you with somepony who does not possess it. So we have constructed a scheme which should allow you to return."

Wordia Spinner spent several seconds trying to figure out if she'd just been complimented or insulted. (Leaving the palace would eventually turn it into several weeks.)

"...what?" she finally tried, and considered it sufficient. "What's the grand scheme?"

"We're sending you back with a story," the Solar alicorn said. "Something where the Tattler will have to accept that you needed to work your way in for a while, just to have any chance of getting the facts. They won't be able to turn you away, because it'll mean losing the exclusive to another paper. And any lingering anger towards you from everypony else will be dispelled when they see what it is."

"Although," the Lunar specimen added, "we do plan to have you watched for a time -- do not, Wordia Spinner. From a distance, and solely for your own safety. There are volunteers."

The journalist thought about it.

"Not an exclusive interview with the centaur," she guessed.

"No," Princess Luna defined, and did so firmly enough to frost the air. "I fail to see how that would regain your readership's trust."

"Can I get one anyway?"

"No," the giant echoed. "She's a lot of things, Wordia. But she's not good with speeches."

"I heard some things about how it all ended," the unicorn naturally contradicted. "It sounded like she put something together in a hurry. A few things. Including a mark. And when it comes to that story --"

"-- no interviews at this time," the dark mare stopped her.

"We'll have a press conference soon," the white one offered. "And a new one-sheet. Somewhat less soon. But you'll have some degree of chance when we gather everypony. And if it helps, Raque isn't getting an exclusive interview either."

It did, and Wordia was never going to admit it.

"You heard about the conclusion," Princess Luna not-quite-asked.

Wordia snidely nodded. She hadn't even needed to make any real effort at eavesdropping. It was all anypony had been talking about.

"All things considered," Celestia smiled, "it's a good thing that Cerea was still allowed to attack..."

The unicorn blinked. Several times.

Bitches went through her mind. Twice, while making an effort to stay ahead of the world's most temporary surge of hateful admiration.

"So a story," she said. "One I can bring back. What is it?"

The Solar Princess took a slow, reluctant breath.

"Something embarrassing," she said.

"Humiliating, really," the dark mare softly groaned. "As the other emotion which never seems to truly fade..."

"It's from deep in the past," Princess Celestia admitted. "Something we managed to bury. Inexpertly. A dedicated... journalist could have uncovered it." The white horn ignited, and sunlight delved under the throne's cushions: eventually, a rather reluctant field bubble carried a familiar notebook back to the unicorn. "It's not going to make us look good."

"Quite the opposite," Princess Luna sighed.

"And then some."

"But," the dark mare firmly said, "it does not involve elephants."

"We talked about this," the giant told her. "If the primary story wasn't going to be good enough to get her back in --"

Wordia was looking from one to the other, stunned gaze shifting like a hoofball caught in a scrum.

"No elephants," Princess Luna declared, and put a cold hoof down.

They all waited until the echoes died away.

"...no elephants," the Solar alicorn agreed, then began to evaporate the fast-spreading frost. "Here's some quills, Wordia. And ink. A lot of ink." With a sigh, "I'll give you the documents you'll need for proof after you finish taking notes. And please listen carefully. Because we're not going to repeat any of this. No matter how much you wind up laughing."

Sapient

Those who had invaded the palace had believed it was a day which would change everything and in the case of the centaur, they had been right.

It was the day which had seen her gain a mark.
The day that found her leaving the palace, without going out of bounds.
Going outside.
In a way, even with the gardens and schoolroom, it had been a first time.
It wasn't the last.

In comparison to multiple Bureau-scheduled portions of the continent, Canterlot winters tended to be mild. This was supposedly due to Princess Celestia's personal preferences. The city's altitude already threatened to create problems on a near-daily basis, and when it came to the cold which could be found in the heart of the season... the Solar alicorn liked to stick with the crisp.

There was a little snow about, because the Bureau felt that a little snow sufficed -- most of the time. (There would always be at least one heavy storm on the schedule, because there were plants on the mountain which benefited from a snowpack: residents grumbled accordingly and tried to find out when the city plows were going to reach their section, followed by working out the bribe for getting the hauling ponies to trot down their home's approach path. Hot drinks frequently sufficed.) But the powder and flakes mostly clustered in the hollows between cobblestones, outlined where each rose and fell.

It all made for patterns of white overlaid on shimmer-grey. Something to observe at street level, as the pegasus and centaur moved through the Sun-lit city.

"And which way do we turn next?" Nightwatch asked Cerea. "Since we're going through the Heart -- no, don't look for stores! Um. And don't sniff the air. You can probably smell some of them, now that we're this close to the main shopping district. Use the street signs."

The girl looked. Found the nearest written indicator, adjusted her sightline because this was only her fourth patrol and she was still searching on the human level...

...It was a different kind of magic: one with no thaums involved at all. She beheld symbols, and felt them resolve into words.

"We turn left," Cerea confidently said.

"You're sure?" the little knight openly teased.

Cerea glanced at the hovering presence on her right.

She was still trying to figure out how hovering worked. Cerea knew flight was at least partially powered by magic: no pegasus had a wingspan suitable for their size or mass. But when it came to hovering... the wing flap rate was far too slow, fully inadequate, and still kicked up the kind of breeze which had the centaur feeling thankful that the air wasn't any colder. Cerea was already trotting around the city in full armor (which at least hid two very clear signs of how her body felt about the chill). It didn't need to be any worse.

"I'm sure."

Nightwatch nodded. "Left." The pegasus tilted her head in that direction, and Sun glinted from the helmet. There had been an insistence on one of them wearing a helmet and until Cerea completed the redesign and ponies got used to looking at centaur features, it was going to be the pegasus. "Let's go."

They started moving again. Multiple ponies watched them pass, and some did so while huddled in doorways. Others gazed out through whatever safety could be granted by window glass. But some were on the street, others were over it, and two trotted up to the patrolling Guards.

Well... one of them.

"You're the centaur," said the younger mare.

Cerea internally noted that the tendency of sapients to openly state the obvious had gone multi-species a long time ago and never looked back.

"My father... he..." began the somewhat older. And then she shivered, with her fur vibrating from something other than cold. "...we got him out. After the draining. But he heard that it might be happening again, and..."

That mare backed up a little. Looked up as best she could, directly into blue eyes.

"We saw the signs being posted a few days ago," the patina-bronze said. "We knew you'd be here. And... thank you." Hooves scraped at stone. "I just wanted to say thank you."

The girl held up a hand -- then wondered if the signal had been understood. But ponies sometimes raised a foreleg for the same purpose, and the two mares seemed to have understood the basic request: wait.

She reached up to her own throat. Gripped the disc, and nearly held her breath until the last of the wires had come away.

It was a rising sort of whinny: one which came with a pause in the middle, accompanied by an ear flick and the tiniest of snorts. It was also a somewhat timid "...you're welcome."

Nightwatch beamed. The two young mares made roughly six dozen noises of pony excitement between them and Cerea, who managed to catch about four of them, was forced to put the disc back on.

That public reaction was one of the things which tended to happen, when the centaur was in the city.

She was still fighting stories. But there were new tales in the world. And some of them were on her side.

It was a city day. There were also city nights, and those were somewhat more frequent. The girl was a Lunar, and nopony knew of a potion which allowed her to more-or-less casually flip the schedule. Reaching Sun took a deliberate effort. But the Princesses wanted the Guards to be working both shifts, so that each temporal side of the capital would come to know them.

All of the Guards.

There had been a bill introduced into the Night Court: one which wound up making the rounds in the company of the dark alicorn, because its true parent wanted nothing to do with it. But Luna had insisted on giving him all the credit, making sure to mention his name no less than seven times as she made her speech before the legislative body. And after the new laws had thunderously passed (with one notable abstention), the Princess had readily signed it.

It was a simple law, in its way. Something which really wasn't all that much to ask for. The original version had required that new Guards spend a few moons working with the city's police, trotting their patrols and moving among the residents. Letting the capital come to know them. And there had been just a touch of backdating for 'new hires' on that draft -- but Luna had decided to let it encompass the whole of the Guard, because she felt Canterlot needed to meet those who stood ready to save the world.

(The law, abandoned and disavowed by its creator, had still been named after Puff Weevil. It was one of two measures currently being enacted so that ponies might remember him, and Cerea wondered if he would ever consider it as an honor. At the very least, it meant his name had already entered the history books and given how his district was currently trying to recall him, he wasn't going to get the chance to do much else.)

So the whole of the Guard was going on patrol. They just weren't doing it all at once, because someone had to stay at the palace. The majority of shifts were shuffled around, occasionally traded, and frequently used as the stakes in wagers. And when it came to Cerea... it had been assumed that something was probably going to go wrong.

Accordingly, the palace had requested a consultant. Dejected Overcast had turned up within the hour, listened to every proposal, nodded twice, and then the jack had pointedly described exactly how they could expect most of it to turn on them. This was followed by providing measures to mitigate everything, because donkeys always planned for the worst. Stopping nearly everything was good for letting them find out what they'd overlooked.

Cerea didn't just casually go out into the city. Her shifts were set in something stronger than stone, and couldn't be changed without direct alicorn orders. The streets had to be prepared. Signs were posted several days before her arrival, announcing an upcoming Centaur Patrol Zone. Hours were declared, with boundaries set. The latest revision of the one-sheet was offered to everypony who lived and worked in the area. There were traveling discussion groups. Counseling tents. Anypony who didn't want to be there on Patrol Day received sufficient warning and had the chance to make other plans.

Of course, there were always a few whose true talent was for staying at least two weeks behind current events at all times, and so managed the rather impressive feat of coming across a fully unexpected centaur. For those sapients, there was a backup measure: pegasi with miniature storm clouds at the cold-splash ready. And drying wonders, because it was winter and the palace didn't want anypony to get sick.

There were still ponies being soaked, here and there. Because some would never read signs, or listen if they thought somepony was telling them what they should believe, or... change. But the girl went out on patrol at least once a week, and each occasion found more ponies willing to share the streets.

She had to keep going out there. Integration took work. Every day. To make them see her.

It was a crisp day in mid-winter, and she was with Nightwatch. Out and about in the city, about to pass through the Heart for the first time. A chance to see the shopping district: they'd both brought money accordingly. And there would be other things to look at, but that was just a matter of finding the right windows.

She was outside with her partner, in the capital, under Sun. But they weren't actually on patrol. That was just the excuse, and the palace knew it.

There were two very special destinations ahead and, somewhat annoyingly, Nightwatch had only told Cerea about the first one. But that initial true destination was something they'd been hoping to see for a very long time.

The current day was for the city. But there had been others.

Days and nights, as Sun and Moon were raised and lowered, and the cycle went on.

Some nights found her in the forge, because the mass armor refit was still underway and even if it hadn't been, she still would have made time to visit a friend.

The actual explanation of the girl's icon had left Barding somewhat disappointed.

"A centaur gets a mark," he grumbled at the moment his mouth was free again. (He'd been making and hanging replacement tools, because anything the invaders had used was now permanently suspect. There had also been several muttered notations regarding how he should have responded to the offense through breaking their bones, if only because the steel needed the dust.) "And you didn't even wind up with the right one."

The girl, who was tending to the fire, smiled.

"It's not as if I'm a real blacksmith," she told him.

The grumbling got louder.

"You're a blacksmith," eventually resolved itself in a wire-touched ear. "Your mark should have known it. Not even for forging a sword..."

Cerea, who was capable of recognizing an inadvertent, fully-sincere compliment and still had trouble actually dealing with them, operated the bellows with a little more force. (It was a hoof-driven matter, and she had to be careful not to stomp too hard.)

"Decided what you're wearing to the game?" Barding asked.

"Not yet." She was still trying to work out hoofball, especially since the disc had initially rendered it as 'rugby' and, after what had seemed to be a pause for thought, kicked in 'riot'. And she'd asked Nightwatch for a copy of the rulebook, hoping for some useful diagrams -- only to have the little knight lead her into the Canterlot Archives, where Cerea had been confronted with a hardcover which was larger than a pony, might have outmassed half a team, needed to have its pages turned by committee, and was non-helpfully labeled as Cart-Portable Edition.

All she really knew was three things: Barding loved the sport, they would be watching it from the stadium's private Princess Box, and it was absolutely not a date. The stallion just wanted to introduce the centaur to the thing he loved second-most in all the world. And she'd decided to go with him, because he'd come far enough to remember that second place could exist.

"The Box should be warm enough," Barding decided. "But you'll want to match the colors for the Express. Use a scarf for that. Minimum. I'll bring one in tomorrow and show it to you."

She nodded.

"We can weight the ends with some metal," the not-quite-recovered smith added. "Just to make sure it hangs properly."

They worked on peytrals for a while.

"Has your mark whispered yet?"

It had been a rather... soft sort of question. Something which carried within it no traces of metal at all.

"I..." was all the girl could initially manage.

"It's just the way most ponies think of it," Barding quietly said. "Like a whisper, only softer. But it's closer to a feeling, most of the time. When your soul knows there's something going on which involves your talent, and... tries to give you guidance. Has it?"

There had been a manifest, only... she hadn't realized that at the time. She'd thought it was a dream. And there had been a moment within the dream when she'd known exactly what she had to do...

"I don't know."

She turned, and did so just in time to watch the singed head complete a serene nod.

"It will," said one of the first to accept her. "It's a true mark. Time and circumstance, Cerea. It'll happen. And when it does... you'll know."

"So it was just the sign?" Nightwatch checked.

"Yes," entered the world on a current of minor insult. "I can read. A little. More every moon." Cerea sighed. "It was harder in Japan. There's so many more symbols involved."

"How did you manage?" the pegasus inquired, casually flapping along.

"A lot of the signs had translations posted," the girl admitted. "But those were usually in English --" the wires hissed "-- another language. So some of it was just memorizing paths. Reading was hard. I had to run most of my schoolwork through -- something like the disc, only with words displayed on glass. I was barely up to trying light novels."

"Light --"

"Most of them weren't worth the trouble."

"Oh."

"And," the France native declared with no trace of perceived irony whatsoever, "the titles were too long."

The pegasus visibly tabled the questions for later.

"You read the signs," she said. "What did you scent?"

"Um," the girl tried. "Um..."

"Cerea..."

"There's a chocolate shop somewhere up ahead. And what has to be a butcher --"

"-- Gristle's," Nightwatch quickly broke in, "has multiple effects in place to keep the odors confined --"

"-- and that doesn't keep everyone from carrying their purchases home."

The pegasus winced. "What else?"

"Glass," Cerea eventually announced, and the afterthought nose wrinkled. "Not the windows. It's glass with dyes mixed in. The kind you shape into fake jewels. And there's some really cheap fabrics --"

"-- that's probably Barneigh's," Nightwatch decided. "We don't need those windows. Just about nopony does." With a little sigh, "They don't even have a good Hearth's Warming display."

"A good --" the girl started.

"-- enchantments. Usually on moving figures. Some of the big stores go with clockwork." She smiled. "Next year, we get you out here in time to see the holiday decorations. Anywhere else?"

"There's an herb shop," Cerea definitively announced. "I'd like to stop there. And I can smell a camera store."

The pegasus nodded. "It's the best one in the city. It has to be. When it's being run by relatives of the inventors..." She glanced up, found the nearest clock tower. "We should have time."

Reactions come in multiple scales. Local. Global. There's the personal, and sometimes it turns into the seismic. Because there is a world beyond Canterlot, and it's still trying to sort some of this out.

Of course, events in the capital have an effect. For starters, when it comes to the lawsuits which were being brought against the griffons who had been startled into using their magic during Fancypants' party? Dropped, mostly out of embarrassment. It isn't a good time to move against those who are seen as being on the side of the centaur.

Equestria sent thanks to every nation whose embassy came to the aid of their friends, and... that was most of the planet. (Not all. There are countries which have yet to place their flag on the Row. Some simply refused to come, while others are waiting to be discovered.) Gifts were offered. There was also a party to honor every participant, once they were all healthy enough to attend. And after that finally wrapped up about two hours before Moon-lowering, multiple species tried to trade hangover cures, to poor effect.

But when you look beyond the borders...

Tirek is dead. No one's willing to publicly say that's a bad thing, and the sisters suspect that some of the quietest nations may be trying to figure out exactly how the magical drain worked. Spies are being dispatched accordingly, mostly to save the experimenters from themselves.

The true monster is dead. But there's still a centaur. One with magic, and a mark. And if there has to be a centaur...

It's Equestrian. Then... shouldn't it be? It seems to be doing some good there, because we're all going to agree (in public) that being rid of Tirek is a good thing. The alicorns can keep an eye on it. Besides, there's only the one...

National reactions. For the most part, they're favorable. Mazein has the benefit of a firsthand report, and Protocera is always going to have a soft spot for anyone who protects children. Prance, however, grumbles, mutters insults to itself, lifts its collective snout in the most snide manner possible, and fails to see that if there ever was a non-magical way to get them off the planet, multiple countries would volunteer to help push.

But when you focus more finely...

The journalist is alone in the Tattler offices, deep under Moon. There's an argument to be made that the needs of her profession and mark had put the mare among the dark alicorn's charges, and nopony has ever been stupid enough to bring that debate directly to her snout. Still, she's perfectly aware that freedom of expression laws fall into the Lunar dominions. She just doesn't think about that very much.

She wishes she knew more ways to not think about things. Sometimes it feels as if the bottles just aren't doing the job any more.

As if she's mostly drinking just to --

-- she's working on a story. Every aspect of her typewriter was personally checked over, because she's a professional. And she'll stay at her desk until the composition is complete, then deliver the results to the presses herself.

But she's having trouble finding the words or rather, she can't identify the proper distortions. Because her editor wants a retrospective. The centaur panic, as with the Diamond Dog before, is... fading. And perhaps a reminder of what ponies are supposed to be afraid of will stir the pot.

But her mind keeps wandering, and it feels as if the bottles would only send her thoughts further adrift. As it is, she's slipping down the timeline. Delving into the past.

Oh, she's back at the Tattler: the alicorns managed to accomplish that much. There were questions when she proudly trotted back in -- eventually, and she finally told her editor that she was under no obligation to answer any of them because he'd already fired her six times in four minutes. That observation had bought her enough time to tease what she'd really been working on, and...

...she doesn't quite understand fishing, except as a perversion practiced by griffons or worse, some of the ponies who own cats. But any good journalist knows how to set a hook.

It got her back onto the staff, just in time to attend the next Diarchy press conference. The one where the alicorns tried to sell their version of Tirek's fate (and the mare knows some things were left out) to the world. It also put her within questioning distance of the centaur, but... she hadn't really used the opportunity. They had very little to say to each other and besides, there was just about no point in asking anything. Not when the journalist had been there for so much of it, and...

...it wouldn't have been published.

In her opinion, the paper's management completely knackered their treatment of the assault on the palace. But when it came to the press conference, they'd had a plan. The headline, the front page, the entire lead section -- all of that had been the story she'd brought in. The rest of the city had gone with conference and centaur, but the journalist had been the only one to tap her sources in Maremmano and do the hoofwork which led to the palace-humiliating reveal of The Vermicelli Incident.

(She briefly considered looking into what the younger alicorn had said. The part about the elephants. And then she realized that any hint which had been dropped in the open to that degree was designed as a setup. They were obviously trying to make the mare follow a fake trail: something which probably led into realms of falsely-Classified material and a chance of prison time. They're not getting her that easily.)
(As excuses go, it's a convenient one. The bottles haven't been touching it.)
(Besides, elephants are supposed to smell really bad. And there's no way the paper is paying for a trip to Pundamilia Makazi anyway. The mare is usually lucky to get a refund on a train ticket into Ponyville.)

...it had been a boring press conference anyway. Uninformative, not that she ever expected the alicorns to say anything real. Most of the entertainment had come from watching them both canter around the very concept of the girl having a herd somewhere. And as for how she'd wound up with a mark? The elder had, with expression fully controlled, simply proposed that a centaur was just that much like a pony. Besides, ponies weren't the only species with marks. Zebras possessed them. And now, so did centaurs. There was a known magical test for a true mark, and they were happy to conduct it in front of witnesses. So if the assembled reporters would simply accept that it had been an exceptionally late manifest...

A boring press conference, made all the worse for knowing how she would have dealt with the story.

So the centaur had killed Tirek? The palace should have executed him in the first place! As far as the mare is concerned, the majority of what supposedly passes for heroism these days is mostly the alicorns getting someone to clean up their old messes. So if the centaur was at any risk, that's the palace's fault --

-- she's heard that the dark alicorn wanted Tirek killed at the start. The mare trusts her sources there. She could --

-- of course, if the palace had executed him, the mare would have had a story at the ready. The central theme would have been hypocrisy. The palace claims to believe in reform and here they go, killing someone. Well, where would the world be if they'd done the same to Discord? She could have gotten multiple articles and columns out of that one, all of which would have freely contradicted what she'd written once the planet had learned that the draconequus had effectively been paroled. Something which hadn't really gone over well with anyone, to the point where even Raque had hinted at misgivings...

...the mare can contradict herself from one column to the next. It doesn't matter. When it comes to doing the math, her readership only cares about seeing the sum total work out to The Palace Is WRONG. She can make anything the alicorns do into the exact opposite of what they should have done. It's her...

...her -- job.

And she has to remind her readers that letting the centaur out is wrong.

Except that... the fear is fading. For so many, it's already faded, and there are a number who can barely remember why they were supposed to be frightened in the first place. You can only keep the boiler running on a single source of fuel for so long, and then... it all starts to become normal. And even if it wasn't... Tirek is dead. Everypony knows who killed him. They can place a name and a face and a now-unique body configuration on that feat. How do you put pressure on an entire city when the centaur is now seen as a safety valve?

(What had happened in the past, when she'd turned the boiler up too high?)
(She can't think about that.)
(She wants to think about a bottle.)
(She wants to...)
(...how is she supposed to ever...)

The Tattler can't. Not for the capital as a whole, and the mare certainly never could. It was just her readership. And when it comes to that audience...

The mare does a lot of things to get her stories. Some of them require skills gained from growing up in the Tangle, and can't be managed in the presence of witnesses. Breaking into the accounting offices of her own newspaper was easy. And it put her in possession of the truth. As far as she's concerned, that's a rare custody -- although being completely unable to print it feels all too common.

She's seen the numbers. The real ones.
The Tattler is dying.

It's guilt by association, because so much about the paper is associated with the guilty.

(The Tattler hasn't been covering the trials. But the mare is hearing things. A popular defense for the now-jailed was to claim that agents of the palace had made them do everything. The bolder directly accused other members of being those agents and because the alicorns have something resembling a sense of humor, that seems to have had a direct effect on cellmate assignments. Blame anypony, unless it's the one residing in their own skin.)

Here we have a Tattler district. The neighbors agree with each other on certain topics, isolate themselves into a bubble of pleasant echoes and vote accordingly. Deliveryponies go into those neighborhoods in order to drop off the subscription copies. Well, now there are homes which have papers piling up in front of the door, because nothing's getting forwarded to the prison. And Canterlot knows that so many of the invaders were Tattler readers, they associate the paper with the attack, the deliveryponies keep quitting because they're tired of being glared at on the way in and out of what was meant to be a safe haven, and the mare knows her publisher isn't going to start sending the editions in plain brown envelopes. Fake one-sheet covers displaying a new paper's masthead are right out. And in part, it's because the owners are cheap. The mare's known that for a long time, and gets a reminder every time she puts in for a raise.

She knows the owners are too cheap to consider camouflage measures. But for the first time, the numbers say they can't afford them.

Some subscribers are in jail. Ponies don't want to be seen picking the latest edition up at newsstands. That has an effect, and those changes in the sales figures pale in comparison to what's happening with the advertising. Because it's guilt by association, and who in the capital wants to have their ad space associated with the Tattler? Barnyard Bargains pulled out moons ago, and after the attack...

...there's only so many conspiracy magazines in the world. A maximum number of con artists selling suspect seeds. (No Earth Ponies Required! No Soil! Just Place In Sunlight And Wait!) Those who will still purchase ad space aren't enough to let the paper turn a profit, not without effectively quintupling the sales figures and...

...the office is empty. Part of that is because she's deep under Moon. Some of the rest comes from having already seen several staffers carry their recently-searched possessions out the door.

The Tattler is dying. Centaur-based sensationalism won't save it. And eventually, the owners will decide that's the mare's fault. They'll find somepony else to operate the boiler, then blame the steam for not rising. And -- when that happens, what will the mare do?

Who would even hire her? Because this is all guilt by association, even when she helped, and...
...she couldn't tell anypony that. Not if she hoped to return to her job. Her life.
But she's going to lose her job. Soon.
And everypony associates Wordia Spinner with the Tattler.

Is she supposed to start her own paper? Using what for money, exactly? Besides, she's not cut out for management, much less Editorial. It's too far from the action.

...the palace...
...it was a joke. Public Relations department. Ha. Ha.
...she just typed that. On instinct.
Laughter always looks so stupid when it's written down.

...ultimate insider. The chance to investigate...

...she's not that desperate.

The mare knows she's going to need a new job. Soon. But there's some time left. She'll come up with a plan. Right now, she has a typewriter, a blank page, and it's so late at night that nopony is going to check her work. So what is she going to write, in the name of a cause which was already lost?

She looks at the bottle.

It takes a while to get a first draft out. The mare isn't exactly happy with it. She's being asked to run a boiler which is leaking from every surface, and the quality suffers accordingly. The heat isn't there. There's no way to polish this manure, let alone use it as fuel --

-- another look at the bottle.

She inspects the story again.

Two changes. A notation that Princess Luna did want to have Tirek executed (which can be proven), and... using the centaur's actual name.

It's all she has, with deadline approaching. Space needs to be filled, especially when the advertisers aren't doing it. So she takes the article down to the lowest levels, personally sets the type because it saves a little time, and goes home. There's a better bottle at home.

The journalist tries to drink herself to sleep. It doesn't work.

...the drinking part doesn't fully work.

She falls asleep, in time. But she changed two little things, and drinks just that much less.

The high-end stores in the Heart were mostly annoyed. Traffic did tend to drop when the centaur was in the area, but... what could they say? It was hard to take a chance on irritating the palace, and when it came to openly turning away someone who'd arguably saved the world -- well, yes, more than half of them did have the Bearers on the ban list, but that was justified. Those mares had a known chaos and destruction level of Discord On Holiday. The centaur was trying to move carefully and, after a single peek through the doors, had demonstrated the common sense not to risk the cordial shop. And at least she was spending --

"Nightwatch."

"...what?" asked a rather distracted pegasus, who was still staring at the front cover of the magazine rack's most prominent issue. Something which featured a mare of roughly the same size. One whose wings were noticeably smaller, with carefully-trimmed feathers and a remnant of tail that mostly existed to show where the dock went --

-- a hand came down in front of the mare's snout, and covered just about all of the fashion title's picture.

"Hey!"

"That's not healthy," Cerea firmly said. "I would know."

The centaur was spending. But only when she wasn't keeping her partner from doing the same.

They tried moving to another section of the bookstore. A stallion briefly stopped them. It took some time to find something Cerea could sign. Drawing a hand superimposed over a hoof was right out.

He also asked to see her mark. But the armor was present, she hadn't put the icon into that portion yet, and...

...she didn't like the little curtains which had been sewn into nearly all of her skirts. But she understood why they were necessary. Ultimately, the little horses just wanted to find a sign which said that she was a little like them. And... that was it. Their proof.

She couldn't show him, not while covered in metal. But she did sketch it, and then the mares moved on.

"And there they are," Nightwatch finally said. "Um. What's left of them. And we've only got the three titles so far."

Cerea quietly examined the remaining thick album boxes.

Audiobooks.

Her partner -- her business partner, who had set up the entire enterprise without telling her, while making sure Cerea was set to collect all due credit and the bulk of the profits -- had been rather busy.

It had taken a lot of effort. Finding authors who were willing to try putting their stories into a new medium -- that had been the easy part. But then the little knight had ventured out to Saratoga Way. Over and over again, delving into the capital's theater district for those who would be willing to perform. And then she'd needed directors, editors, there had been an absolute requirement for sound equipment...

Every part of that called for money. And in a sense, Nightwatch had been able to fulfill the need. The little knight had a bag of ancient coins: an old gift from Princess Celestia, as something to be passed to future generations. The pegasus had simply taken out a bank loan against their value. It was almost paid off.

"We can do more when we fold in some of the profits from the first few," Nightwatch said. "Um. Eventually. I took part of that out already. You'll see why later." She went up to the first box. "The owner says they're selling nicely. But not perfectly. I was hoping they'd go faster. Especially when the production came out so well."

Cerea had listened to a portion. The performers had committed, with the director quickly realizing the limitations of an audio-only medium and hiring a narrator accordingly. But...

"They're not portable," the centaur observed. Which, in her opinion, was part of what held back sales. Ponies could only truly listen at home.

"Well, no," Nightwatch agreed. "You can't really carry a gramophone around all the time. Unless you're a centaur. And then it would be strapped to your lower back. Which doesn't sound comfortable --"

"-- my audiobooks are smaller."

"How small?"

Fingers formed a phone-sized rectangle.

"That's one book?"

The centaur was suddenly very aware of how many ponies hadn't left the store.

"...no."

"No," Nightwatch repeated.

"It can be over a thousand -- I can't tell you right now or the wires are going to hiss down the charge. Where do you want to go next?"

"You wanted the herb shop," the stunned pegasus managed. "Or we could go into the games place. And yell at them. For publishing all of the things you talked about at the party."

Cerea shook her head. It might be possible to recover some portion of the rights, but... they both intended to stay in the Guard. Nightwatch had mostly gone for the audiobooks to fund Cerea's entrance into Equestrian society, and -- something else. Neither wanted to go into business full-time.

But if it ever was ever truly necessary, the girl (who had multiple witnesses to her status as originator) had the option to simply contact a publisher and do the whole thing all over again, only adding a precisely-translated rulebook for each and the word 'original'. (She suspected the company would insist on including 'centaur' somewhere.) But she wasn't sure it mattered. It felt as if games belonged to the world. And by giving them up, she'd found yet another way to prove she wasn't a monster. She'd let herself be exploited, and even done so in a way which kept her blouse intact.

They went back out. The herb shop was next, and Cerea made multiple carefully-considered purchases. After that, they were just about on top of the camera store.

The girl had been sketching more than ever. She'd finally started to draw ponies. (Nightwatch had been first, and it had taken nearly an hour before the pegasus had stopped wriggling. The palace had been recorded. Both Princesses.) It was all things she could take back. But there was nothing wrong with getting a camera. Taking a few pictures. She'd set aside part of her salary as the budget, and then Nightwatch had told her to add more because there was a universal constant for cameras: you never had enough money.

They approached the store, and Cerea carefully examined the stock which was displayed in the front window. Some of it actually seemed familiar. Not just the styles which the reporters had been carrying, but items old enough to have made their way into the gap. And quite a bit of it had been designed for operation by hand --

-- she looked at the window.

Then she looked through it.

"...that," the girl whispered, "is an ageláda."

The little knight tried to follow her gaze.

"Um," her partner considered. "Yes. Minotaurs invented cameras. This shop is run by the inventor's relatives. Um. Descendants, by now. That's why it's so good. They have a direct line to the best imports --"

"-- is that normal?" Cerea just barely voiced. "Her size?"

"Height?" The pegasus visibly searched her memory. "I was only in Mazein for a few weeks, when the Princesses went there. Um. It's a long story. I'd have to check and see how much of it you're cleared for. But I think she's a little taller than average --"

"-- her size!" the girl hissed. "Is that average?"

Nightwatch looked up at her roommate, and then checked the exact viewing angle.

"...I think so," she finally said. "Maybe she's a little bigger than most of them. But it was only a few weeks -- Cerea!"

With audible distraction, "...what?"

"Are you smirking?"

Far too innocently, "I am?"

"That's a smirk! You're smirking just because you're larger than she is! That's -- that's... um. Is that petty? I don't know if that's petty. Or cultural. But I'm not going to nuzzle her. Not in public. Minotaurs don't do that sort of thing. -- you're still smirking --"

"-- if you're going to be a girl," the relaxed centaur said, "then there's nothing wrong with being a big one."

"And you're clutching at that bag from the herb shop."

"I am?" was a rather poor falsehood.

"I thought you were getting seasonings," Nightwatch said. "But you barely use salt. Just a few grains. Goat's rue. Fennel. Red clover and watercress. And that's just what I saw. What's all of it for?"

They have a lot of uses was fair. But they all had one thing in common. And the centaur body was designed to support a considerable amount of mass.

I might be able to do better with some changes in diet...

"...nothing," Cerea lied. "Do we have time to get lunch?"

In the present, the centaur is making her way through the city, with her somewhat-suspicious partner staying close.

Two weeks prior, Cerea had seen the draconequus try something new.

Watching Discord repeatedly offering thanks was like witnessing someone working out a muscle for the first time. The first signifier of internal location usually came from feeling the increasing strain, and most of the followup was spent in waiting for a ligament to tear. Something about his expression suggested that overuse of gratitude put significant stress on his lips, along with silently stating that he really should have tried a few warmup reps first.

But he'd insisted on meeting all of the pegasi who had defended Summit Tower. Limped his way along the line, speaking to them one by one. And he tried... but by the time they all trotted out, it had become clear that he just wasn't very good at thanking ponies.

Then the Princesses had let the surprise enter the room, and it had turned out he wasn't all that much better at being thanked.

Diamond and Sweetie kept rearing up on their hind legs, trying to reach him. At one point, it almost felt as if they were attempting to climb him. And he awkwardly twisted atop his crutches, fought for words as the Rich and Belle families watched from the other side of the room, finally said that he would have saved anypony who was about to be stepped on and the fillies, in that worst and best way of all children, still found a way to make it mostly about them.

He was no good at thanking others, and he wasn't much better at being thanked. In both cases, it was probably due to lack of experience and when it came to having happy children nuzzling at his legs, he was a complete loss.

He had been the enemy, once. The foe to the world entire. But he had changed. He had saved the world. And there were more thanks to come.

It was a private party.

The head of Immigration hosted at least one every year. It was usually based around Homecoming, for those of his charges who had no family they could reach. And his wife was a perfectly lovely mare who was used to having lots of different species around, the children were numerous and polite and everywhere, and the backyard was marked with the prints from hooves and feet and stranger things because every single arrival served as someone who could get involved in a game.

Cerea had attended with Yapper, who hadn't gone before. (The canid had grumbled about 'Not make this habit'. And then she'd come along anyway.) The centaur had tried to help Tarter cook: Crossing Guard's spouse had carefully corrected her lack of seasoning. And then they'd all wound up in the cold backyard, where Cerea had tried to come up with something that everyone could play. The terminal syllable very much applied, because the majority of her citizenship class had shown up.

After some thought, she'd chosen football. And then she'd failed.

...it was the anatomy! What good was restricting hand use to goalies when just about no one had hands to start with? You couldn't forbid the use of forelegs! (She'd briefly tried. Some of the kicks had become exceptionally awkward.) And what about wing strikes? Because the griffons had figured out wing strikes in a hurry. Plus there was a natural problem associated with getting a unicorn to header the ball, but it only occurred once.

But at least she'd made them all laugh. It was a decent trick, especially for a girl who didn't consider herself to be the least bit funny.

She'd been much better at helping to clean up than to cook, even if it took a lot of work to move around the kitchen without breaking anything. And afterwards, she'd gone outside into the chill air under a waning Moon, to find her lone cattle classmate staring out into the night. Just... staring, while the forehooves lifted and dropped. Over and over.

It had been natural, to ask what was wrong.

"I want to go back," he'd told the night, because it seemed as if he was barely aware of her. "I'm only myself as long as if I stay away from the herd. It's hard to think. To be the only one thinking. I try to stay around everyone else, but it's not the same. It's not enough. I... want someone else to think. I want to stop..."

She didn't understand cattle.
(She barely understood ponies.)
But she knew about striking out on her own.
About moving away from orders.
About... telling yourself everything you had to do. And instantly becoming convinced that every decision had been wrong.
Wondering if you should go back, if only to switch sources of pressure. Internal for external.
She didn't understand cattle. But she understood him.

They talked.

After a while, he agreed to stay.

But there would be another relapse. There always was. It was a battle, to stay independent and healthy and -- yourself.

His herd was out there. So was hers.

His still called to him.

She didn't care what her mother thought any more.

The girl had left the draconequus to his admirers after that. (Ignoring the faked pleas for rescue felt like standard policy.) She had to properly go on shift, and that meant meeting her Princess.

She'd been thinking about a lot of things, and some of them needed to be discussed with Luna. Cerea just wasn't sure she was ready to voice the main subject yet. The thoughts themselves felt too big, and... it was going to be a lot to ask. She knew it.

She'd been thinking about the world...

But as it turned out, she would have had ample opportunity to bring up the topic -- if she'd just been willing to talk. And the problem was a rather frequent one for the girl: stories. Because the dark alicorn had wrapped up her paperwork early, had no special duties waiting, was in possession of some rather unexpected free time, and had decided to -- read.

There wasn't much Cerea could do in that situation, because she never wanted to interrupt somepony while there was reading to be done. It left her watching as the Princess selected a book, then trotted through the palace until a suitable room was located. Something with a view of the structure's front, and all the ponies occupying the space beyond.

The protesters were gone. These ponies were on the repair crews. Some of them were outside the walls, the majority were inside, and they usually made a lot of noise.

Days of inspection had allowed the alicorns to identify exactly where and how the sabotage had taken place, and now the palace defenses were being changed to prevent that from ever happening again. The gates themselves were simple enough to repair, but... the palace had a certain degree of inertia. It was hard to make changes to any building which had stood for so much time -- unless something had gone drastically wrong. And given a disaster for a non-excuse, the Princesses had seized the opportunity and announced a redesign.

The gates were being replaced. The artwork was being repaired. Princess Celestia had reportedly spent four hours surrounded by ancient papers, only issuing the reluctant order for the restoration of the yak sculpture at the very last. Yapper had been temporarily granted her own crew, and the best way to describe any orders given was 'barked'.

It all made a lot of noise, and the Princess didn't seem to be very interested in casting any sound-muffling spell. She simply took up a position on a well-padded bench, nosed open the book, and began to read. All Cerea could do was watch.

Watch, and think.

It's a lot to ask for.
They probably won't do it.
It won't work...

Pages turned. Chapters went by. The girl did her best not to pace. Fought to keep her ears from retreating under her hair, as the cacophony of the rebuild sounded around them. And her Princess simply read on.

Where would it even start?
What would I say?
Should I say anything?
They won't --

For what happened next, there was no extra sound. The alicorn had been very careful about that. There was no additional noise, and nothing of note to be found within sight. But neither was the girl's primary sense, and her nostrils flared.

She looked at where her Princess was peacefully reading on the bench. Watched another page turn. And then the centaur took five abrupt steps forward, and dropped her right hand onto the center of the alicorn's perfectly-camouflaged back.

Chill immediately shot up her arm. And then it stopped, because it was a choice between that or frostbite, and the Princess wasn't quite ready to go that far.

"Very well," announced a frustrated voice from a patch of what was now lightly-rippling air. "How?"

Cerea didn't say anything.

"The illusion is perfect," the disgruntled mare announced. "Unlike this one, because I see no need to continue going through the exhausting effort of perfectly matching my surroundings when you clearly know where I am. But that is simply myself, upon the bench. I even glanced ahead by several pages and made sure to reproduce the text. You should not have noticed anything for several minutes. At a minimum."

The quiet maintained.

"I am perfectly capable," the alicorn stated, "of taking care of myself. If I make the decision to spend a night in the capital..."

There was a perfectly good bench available. The silence got comfortable.

"Let go," Luna ordered.

"No."

"I believe," came a not-quite-tight voice as the alicorn's normal hues reappeared under Cerea's palm, "that as your Princess, I can give you an order --"

"-- which I can disobey," Cerea calmly cut in, "if that order is meant to let you ditch your Guard."

The alicorn grumbled to herself for a few seconds.

"You are very annoying. Nopony is this annoying."

"I'm not a pony," the girl peacefully said.

"I am aware of my verbal choices," the alicorn shot back. "It is an honorific."

The girl had no response for that.

...you have at least a hundred ways to get out of this.
I'm probably underestimating by a lot.
You could get away at any time...

"How long," the dark mare abruptly asked, "do centaurs live?"

Cerea blinked.

"I have asked a question," her Princess observed. "I do not expect you to predict your exact lifespan. A species average will suffice. But an answer is required."

"...for mares?" (The alicorn nodded.) "About a hundred and forty years."

She was large for a liminal, and that tended to shorten lifespan -- but centaurs had redundant organs. Backup systems. And still, the number was much shorter for stallions, and the girl wasn't sure why. It might have been all of the testosterone.

She... hadn't really thought about what it meant, to compare her own potential span with Kimihito's. It had just felt like something they could have dealt with, if she'd just found a way to win.

"Why?" the girl asked.

"I am attempting to discover approximately how long I am expected to put up with this."

It was a test. The girl was almost sure of that. She'd been spending a lot of time with the alicorn, and...

Being a Guard involved a lot of duties, and they could be different for each sapient who donned the armor. Cerea did everything she could to keep her Princess alive: that was universal.

It was probably somewhat more rare for a Guard to be asked if she would just listen for a while. Because alicorns kept secrets, right up until they didn't. But they needed someone who would share them. And they never told you everything, because there just wasn't enough time -- but there would be another night.

The dark mare was prone to depressive cycles, especially when fear had arisen uninvoked. It was best that she have someone nearby during those times. Personal experience meant Cerea was more than equipped to recognize a spiral, and could do so well before it reached the center.

Sometimes the duties included holding her Princess. Cradling the cool head against her breasts, until the mare fell asleep. (It was another reason to look for herbs.)

In a way, it had all ended when the dark alicorn had first welcomed her. Asking Cerea to stay.

You had to save each other.

The alicorn was quiet.

"I think I may resent those taller than I," she eventually said. "Which once meant resenting just about everyone in the world. It was something of a full-time occupation. Which I grew out of. Literally. And you are bringing it all back."

Cerea didn't say a word.

"Very well," Luna finally sighed. "Then come with me. Is there any particular film which you have interest in seeing? This feels like a good night for the cinema."

"We can look at a newspaper." The girl paused. "You'll have to read it to me. And... after the show... I need to ask you something."

"Oh?"

By the time they returned -- or, more realistically, snuck back in -- the white horse was already up.

Cerea hadn't meant to bring Luna into full view of the older sibling. She'd simply been taking her own Princess back to the bedroom, and the Solar alicorn had just happened to be near those doors. And when it came to explaining exactly where they'd been, what had happened along the way, and why the Princess Box Maximum Capacity sign was now being nailed up... that struck her as being Luna's problem. Cerea was just the Guard. Her Princess had gone somewhere. She had come along and Guarded.

The girl was also sleepy and, in the presence of royalty, turned the junior over to the custody of the senior. Then she yawned, blinked a few times, eventually remembered how to reach the barracks, and then trotted off to call it a day.

The sisters watched her go.

"Do I get an explanation?" Celestia asked. She'd been careful to hold the query back until the girl was out of sight, hearing, and what the elder was hoping was effective scent range.

"Eventually," Luna decided. "After I work out exactly what it should be. Do you wish to share a meal?"

"Please."

They began to trot together. Matching the pace.

"I'm glad you have a seneschal again," the elder offered. "She's good for you."

"Yes," the younger quietly decided. "She is."

They passed a few doors, and did so in solitude. The shifts were changing and even with the repair crews at work, the palace was its most peaceful.

"Although we are using 'knight' for now," the dark mare added. "It may be more suitable."

The white horse nodded.

"'Good for me'," Luna semi-repeated. "Yes. The first since Diviner." Her eyes briefly closed. "And yet... one day, I will still have to say goodbye."

A little too quickly, "Luna --"

"But... perhaps it will be for a good reason," the younger added. "Because with Cerea, there may come a time when I simply watch her go home." Which was followed by a soft sigh. "Have you found a chance to survey the headlines this morning?"

"Yes."

"Is the Vermicelli story beginning to fade?"

"Barely." It was the elder's turn to sigh. "It's something I try not to think about. That I can look back at nearly thirteen centuries of rulership -- and count them as the total number of mistakes and humiliations. I still haven't told you about eighty percent of the things I fell into without you."

"...truly?"

It was a fully innocent inquiry, and it mostly served to prove that the younger hadn't been Honesty either. Because now Luna was going to start looking...

The elder pushed back the horror, and forced herself to trot on.

"At least a third of them wouldn't have happened if you'd been there to save me."

"Truly," was heavily dripping with satisfaction.

"The rest would have been much worse."

Luna thought about that.

"Does my theoretical presence render the revised events sufficiently humiliating as to give Wordia Spinner another story?"

"Worse," Celestia firmly declared. "I'm just hoping your little stunt put her off the elephants. Forever."

"Yes. Well. There was another option."

"There was?"

"It could have been the alpacas."

Both siblings groaned. Each checked their path as they approached the intersection. A brief argument about where to dine ended with their turning left.

"I love you, Luna."

"And I you, Tia."

They trotted for a time.

"I got an update from the Tartarus team," Celestia told her sibling as they entered a known privacy zone. "The earth ponies managed to seal the breaches. But the plants... it's too early to know if they'll recover. Nopony can tell if the corruption will fade, much less if there's a cure. And everything else has to be directly reverted or destroyed."

"So we may have to guard the Classified zone with somewhat more force," Luna considered. "Always another problem..."

"At least it keeps us moving forward," the elder darkly considered. "Another issue to chase."

Two more turns. There was a quick attempt to make Celestia say 'anyfrog'.

"Cerea has made a request," the younger eventually said. "A rather interesting one. I wish to discuss it after the meal. I believe you will be amenable."

"I'll listen," the elder promised. "What's it been like?" And, quickly clarifying, "Just talking to her."

"Intriguing," Luna allowed. "She is rather more intelligent than I would have originally suspected."

The younger paused. Looked up and down the corridor. Listened, just before a hidden corona negated all chance of eavesdropping. The elder, knowing the magic represented no danger, didn't pay any real attention to it. The flow of thaums, or the glint of mischief in her sibling's eyes.

"In fact," Luna announced, "she recently shared something with me. A fact she had worked out of her own accord. You might call it an... astronomical observation."

"Oh?" asked the distracted elder.

Luna told her.

The spell prevented eavesdropping. It also nicely muffled the sound of Celestia's stunned form rebounding off two separate walls.

It begins as a day much like any other. That's how the ibex prefer it.

Weather control isn't a direct part of their dominion. The pegasi claimed that in the time before tales, and they arguably disrupt more than manipulate. And the ibex view innovation with suspicion, discourage experimentation as an act which so clearly borders on the mad. Tolle Hörner has yet to ask his people whether a massed direction of their energies into the sky could force a weather system to stay just as it is, or calm that which threatens to harm. Stabilize. Perhaps he never will.

It is a day much like any other, because winter in the mountains has a predictable and welcome sameness to it. There is cold, there is snow, and it's going to last for a while. Those who live within the Höhenburg's perfect defenses can look out over their people and see the same thing they see every day. The same ibex, going to work along the same sloping paths. And they pass the patch of level surface which represents the mostly-unused front courtyard, because that's what they always do. The castle's courtyard is just... there. The Höhenburg has one and if it's ever necessary to press it into service, their leaders will.

The morning is chill and grey. The ibex walk, climb without effort, talk about the same things they always speak of. Changes in topic tend to switch into something which has been discussed before, because reviewing will make sure it comes out properly.

And then they hear the wings.

They look up a little too quickly. They're not used to hearing wingbeats, at least when it comes to anything that large. Mallards, condors, certain species of vulture... all will ascend to this height, although few will stay for long. But these sounds are being produced by something larger, the different is to be dreaded, feared, stopped (especially if it rises from within), and it makes them think of monsters. The ibex look up, and...

...ponies.

Multiple pegasi. And two air carriages, moving through the grey sky.

There's something ornate about the covered conveyances. An aspect none among the viewers can identify at this distance, because their history is oral and when it comes to descriptions, tends to leave the best parts out.

Ponies. Just ponies. Equestrians are allowed to pass through the mountains, and the ibex can only hope that the changewinds do so quickly. They have to be passing through, because it's all any living ibex can remember them doing and therefore, it's effectively all they've ever done --

-- the carriages are -- approaching the courtyard.

They don't do that.

They're not supposed to --

-- every ibex freezes. Citizens, servants, and the royals who watch from their perfect castle as the carriages touch down.

The two vehicles sit there, still and silent. Several towing pegasi do nothing more than try to catch their breath in the thin mountain air. A few strategic wing flaps concentrate a portion of it, and then the doors open.

The opening doors give several observers a very good look at the embedded crest, and the most educated among the ibex make their guesses.

This isn't supposed to happen. They didn't request an appointment. (Why would it have been granted?) They only pass through...

...one alicorn steps out of her carriage. The smaller emerges from the other. They each step forward into full view of the royal family and so many others, caught within a perfect silence.

And then the monster comes out.

It's in nearly-full armor. The head is exposed, but -- that doesn't exactly help. The metal-covered shape of the lower body suggests contours approaching that of an oversized pony, but the upper torso emerges from where the neck should be, and then there's a portion which curves out and limbs which tilt sideways and the eyes are too far forward and it takes a few seconds to identify what's substituting for the snout.

It follows the alicorns, who move in front of the towing pegasi. Then it's standing between them -- no, just a little ahead. They're flanking it. Showing that they came with it, and stand ready to defend.

The centaur has come to the mountains.

It looks up towards the primary balcony of the Höhenburg. At queen, lead consort, and three children. And none can move.

It takes a breath.

"We miss you."

Perhaps one of the alicorns has cast a spell, to make the words carry so. They travel to every pair of twitching ears within range, sink into each. And yet, none can speak. This has never happened before, and so words do not exist.

"I come from a place which isolated itself," the centaur tells them all. "We locked ourselves away from the world, because we'd told ourselves that was the only way to survive. But... that's all it was. The world went on without us, while we survived. The world was a lesser place for it, because all we did was survive. We didn't live. We couldn't. Because we'd locked ourselves away in a gap. Built a prison, and said it was the only possible home."

The small blue eyes briefly close, and the monster gently sighs.

"You locked yourselves away," it says. "Completely. Before that, you'd been isolated. You mostly kept to yourselves. But now you were just gone. And do you know what that represents? A change. One for the worse, because... we miss you."

It slowly shakes the blonde head.

"The world needs the ibex," it tells them. "But it needs you to be in the world. A full part of it. And you've locked yourselves in a prison. It will hurt you. I would know."

The monster looks to the alicorns. The dark one nods, and that horn ignites. Energies flow through the open door of that carriage, and something emerges --

-- a plinth. Marble, flecked with gold and silver. And at the top of it... a helmet. Something which has been cut for two backwards-curving horns.

It floats to a stop in front of the monster. Touches down in the unused courtyard, and almost seems to root itself to the spot.

"A gift," the creature says. "Something given from gratitude, as a reminder of your own gifts. The things you all have to give the world. Because... we miss you. We're better off with you." The right hand gently touches the helmet, caresses a curve. "We need you. And... we'll wait for you."

The centaur starts to turn away --

-- stops. Glances back.

"Please come down," it asks.

And then it gets back into the carriage.

Those are the last words. It does not speak of what the dark alicorn had brought up during the ascent: that they are attempting to build a road, and there was a chance that ibex magic could stabilize the path. The centaur never thought of that. It simply wanted to come into the mountains. To make a request.

The alicorns board. The pegasi spread their wings, and the carriages take off. Only the plinth remains. The helmet.

And they could have removed it. Two moons later, after discovering that the first departed doe had gone past it on her way down the slopes for the last time, they longed to be rid of it.

But it was something new in the world, and none could stand to touch it.

Relationships with males. Cerea wasn't good at those, and didn't feel like she was getting any better. Barding didn't seem to mind (or notice), but he was still recovering. And when it came to the other stallions in her life...

There were only a few. And there was a night when she went into the locker room to get changed for her shift, approached her storage area, began to shift the privacy curtain, and then realized that she was sick of it. Tired of hiding, tired of concealing herself among those for whom nudity was the default state because she was afraid that they would find her too different and be repelled, when her own exposure was only taboo if she said it was...

She was a centaur. She was also a Guard. She fully intended to maintain the latter status for all of her time in this world, and that meant everypony around her had better get used to the former.

Cerea grabbed the curtain. Then she pulled.

Multiple rings came apart. Most of the fabric cascaded to the floor: the rest hung from her hands. And she dropped that, followed by reaching for her blouse. She had to get changed.

...changed in front of multiple witnesses.

...well, it wasn't as if she had to take the bra off. Just... the skirt...

...oh no...

...she couldn't even retreat into the showers. She'd committed. She had to keep going with her mistake --

-- and she felt the male's gaze.

Cerea looked down. It took a few seconds before she focused on the source.

"Look, everypony," the orange stallion voiced in a tone of perfect boredom. "We've got a tank beetle."

Several Guards stared at them. There was a soft snicker from the general direction of the active showers, but that could have been coincidence.

"A what?" Cerea finally asked.

"A tank beetle," Squall firmly said. "Heavily armored. Six limbs. Too big to be real."

Two ponies coughed.

The centaur thought about it.

"That's fair," she decided, and started to work the skirt off.

He was still staring at her.

"...what about me?" he finally asked.

"What about you?"

"Don't you have anything to say to me?" the stallion checked.

"An insult?" the girl asked. "What could I say? What could I ever do which the world hasn't already done? Isn't just having to be Squall insulting enough?"

It was easy to pretend she didn't hear his sputtering. Ignoring the sudden bursts of laughter took a little more work.

By the following evening, the story had reached Emery.

"Recruit," he roughly greeted her after the training exercise. "Or is it 'tank beetle'?"

She could stop all but one insect in a swarm. Preventing a blush from conquering her skin was effectively impossible.

"...that was fast," was the best she could do.

The wiry body executed a taut shrug. "Guards gossip," the Sergeant said. "And insult each other. A lot. You wanted to see me?"

It had been a training exercise. It just hadn't been for her. Because there was a new Guard class on the way. Something which was a direct result of the invasion, because multiple young ponies had looked at the palace and realized that Princesses really did need Guarding. They would have a job, a salary, a purpose in life, and it was rumored that at the end of the training, they would get a party. Fancypants was already trying to figure out just how much could go wrong at the party.

But in order to get any of it, they had to go through Emery. Who taught them how to fight, how to be fought, and liked to bring out little surprises. Such as, just by way of example...

"THIS IS A CENTAUR! TELL ME HOW YOU WOULD FIGHT HER!"

"...we don't?"

"...we'd -- really rather not?"

"...I ask Moon to get me out of this?"

"...go for the legs?"

"WHAT WAS THAT LAST ONE?"

It had been mostly downhill from there. The class was currently limping off towards the showers, accompanied by failed tactics and fresh bruises. Cerea, who'd barely taken so much as a glancing hit, personally felt the leg targeter had some potential.

"I wanted to see you," she told the old stallion. "Privately."

He slowly nodded.

"About...?" Emery Board carefully asked, and she watched his entire body go tight. Tension in form and scent.

She looked around. Listened, checked the air, and made sure nopony was in range.

"I know you were trying to protect me," the girl quietly said. "When we were going over theories. About earth ponies who could potentially change the terrain, and everything else. You wanted me to know it was possible, and be ready for any of it. Outliers, Sergeant. Like minotaurs who can transfer their strength. You knew earth pony outliers existed, because you're one of them."

He didn't say a word. He simply watched her eyes, and did so without fear.

"I understand secrets," Cerea told him. "I've kept yours." And sighed. "I feel like I'm keeping a lot of secrets." Including that of one other earth pony, because she was now convinced that there was no way for Applejack to have seen the tiny holes created by platinum wire -- but sensing a disruption to the earth? Somehow, that was the answer which made perfect sense, especially when she added in the fact that the Bearers had just known the abandoned warren's ceiling would break.

At least one other earth pony. And then there was Pinkie. The girl had no idea what Pinkie was about.

"I'm not going to tell anypony," she informed her instructor. "I won't. I... just know you used it to save me, during that fight. I wanted to thank you. And say that -- it'll stay a secret. If you want it to."

She didn't know why it was a secret. There were a lot of reasons for secrets to exist. But her first guess would always be fear.

"I do," the stallion solidly told her.

Cerea nodded.

"Is there anything else?"

She shook her head.

"Then let's spar."

The girl stared at him.

"Sergeant --"

"You and me," he told her. "We've never had a proper go. Not when we can both use everything we have. I trust you not to ram the sword through my ribs, and you trust me not to break your legs. Divots only, so you'll know when I'm trying to take you off-balance." He took five hoofsteps back, bent his foreknees and lowered his head. "Ready when you are."

She was still looking at the old stallion.

"Now?"

"No better time."

"...why?"

He took a shallow breath. Twisting ears checked the direction of the wind.

"Because you have to be ready, Cerea," he told her. "There may be a lot of outliers."

One night had seen the girl pulled off Guard duties for a while, because her existence now represented a pair of magical mysteries and when there was something this strange to investigate, nopony could keep Twilight Sparkle out of the palace forever.

Cerea had been asked to wait in the designated room: a location which was isolated, protected by multiple layers of magical defenses as a just-in-case, and was also surprisingly spacious. (Part of that last was because it had to accommodate a centaur, but the bulk came from having recently seen every last ignitable surface removed.) And after a while, the little alicorn had entered.

Her scent had wafted into the room ahead of her, and announced that the thaumatologist was somewhat disgruntled about the whole affair. Multiple field bubbles entered behind her, towing a myriad of devices, several notebooks, one chalkboard, and a distinctly annoyed light blue unicorn mare who apparently just hadn't been moving fast enough.

"Two hours," Twilight irritably announced as the last box of chalk cleared the threshold. "Princess Celestia said she's only giving us two hours tonight." Feathers awkwardly rustled in a way which suggested that they'd naturally started the process on their own, had their owner notice, and then found themselves unable to complete the act while under supervision. "And that I can't have you for a full day. Or a week. Or ask you to drop by the library until at least spring." She sighed. "Because we'll have to tell Ponyville that you're coming. And I'll probably have to rearrange a few shelving units to make sure you can get past the books --"

She stopped, slim features twisting. Glanced backwards, and finally spotted where her companion had begun to kick at the bubble's interior. A light blush momentarily underlit fur, and the unicorn was released.

"It's still two hours," Trixie observed. "So let's use them. Cerea, are you ready?"

The Lunar Guard, acting under orders, managed to force the nod.

"Good." Something very much like goggles was floated towards the unicorn's head: the edges of the pinkish bubble receded, and magenta hues took custody. "On my cue, make the sword appear."

"And then on mine," Twilight firmly said, examining a dial of sorts, "make it go away."

It went like that for a while. Devices were deployed. Things were written down, and Cerea experienced the dubious lack of comfort which came from knowing that no amount of casual language mastery would have let her decipher the mares' notes. They consulted with each other, asked her questions, came up with new questions based on her answers, spent some time trotting around the sword, and then Twilight made the decision to try putting one of the hairpins into her own mane.

Normally, a portion of the allotted time would have been lost in waiting for the alicorn to recover from the near-swoon, but it gave the trio a chance to just talk. Cerea had lowered herself to the floor, just in case it helped at all.

"I was looking at the occlugraph we had from the summoning," Twilight told the centaur: the small body was currently half-tucked against what had been determined as the most supportive wall, while the unicorn fetched her some water. "I remembered that when we went out to your arrival site..."

She sighed. Both wings twitched, and the horn dipped.

"...I don't know if anypony showed it to you," the little alicorn continued. "They probably didn't think there was any reason, because you can't really read one unless you've had training. And nopony could read yours. The scratch line was all over the place, and there were too many colors. But I remembered seeing a speck of mint green, and thinking that... it looked familiar. And when I finally looked at the glass again... I started seeing more colors. Familiar ones."

"Then we showed it to Spike," Trixie briefly took over. "Because dragons see colors exactly. They have to, in order to identify gems."

"Except that he didn't see colors," Twilight resumed. "He saw ponies. Unicorn field hues. Some of them were matched to Ponyville residents who didn't evacuate before Tirek got into range. Others had to have been from Canterlot unicorns. And the scratch line going everywhere... maybe that's part of Discord's signature." With a soft snort, "It's not as if he's ever let himself be tested. But that's why the occlugraph was so strange. Because we were looking at everypony, everyone, and -- just about everything."

"And that's what Tirek's casting looks like," Trixie quietly concluded as she moved towards the nearest sink. "It's the only record, and... it's incomplete, because it was rendered through a device which was only meant to create visual interpretations of unicorn signatures. It couldn't keep up."

Cerea silently nodded.

"We've made extra copies," Twilight told the girl. "You can do that, if you're careful. We might need them, to send you home -- oh, thank you..." She slipped her left forehoof through the offered mug's loop, raised it and took a sip. "But now we know more about what was involved. So... maybe...?"

She managed a smile. Cerea seemed to be stuck on nodding.

"The thing we can't test," Trixie softly groaned, "is what happens when you take your magic with you. Your mark."

"Very little," Cerea quietly proposed. There was magic in her world: there just wasn't very much of it. She supposed that in the best case, she might become somewhat more capable of fighting back against those who were close to fae, but -- for the most part, she would likely find herself in possession of a party trick.

Behold the centaur who can make a plastic sword appear.
They probably wouldn't revise the laws for that.
...the humans might decide the hairpins were the real threat and order me to have them licensed.

"But we don't know," Twilight countered.

"We don't even know why you're still alive," Trixie added with the usual amount of tact. "The usual result when someone tries to incorporate new magic within their bodies is --"

The unicorn stopped. Her head went down, and both forehooves scraped at the floor as the invisible scent of regret flooded the room.

"-- I..." the mare forced herself to go on. "...looked into that. For a while. I was trying to..."

"It doesn't matter," Twilight softly told her. "It wasn't you --"

"-- I was the one who decided to look."

Cerea, caught on the fringes of a story she'd never read, could only listen.

The alicorn had no verbal answer for that: simply a pleading look, added to a surge of sorrow within the olfactory world. Trixie sighed.

"The finish line on that course," the unicorn too-evenly finished, "is that, outside of some very rare circumstances --" her gaze briefly flickered towards the alicorn "-- it always has to be kept outside the body. You can't take it in, because it clashes with whatever you already have. And then it all starts going wrong." Much more quickly, "We don't think you're going to die from this. Nopony does. You're stable. We just don't understand why --"

"-- because there was nothing it could clash with," the centaur offered. "I didn't have any magic of my own, Trixie. It's... sort of like what Pinkie said. There was room."

Inner space. Magic. And then a mark.

(In another sense, she'd effectively gotten a pair of tattoos. Cerea was fully aware that her mother would hate that, and had decided not to care.)

But all of the others died...

There was an argument to be made for a second exception, with both parties having something in common --

-- but the Doctors Bear had performed the autopsy.

Tirek's corpse had been exactly that: a corpse. It just happened to be a corpse which wasn't entirely sure about just how long it had been dead. Because Equestrian science had advanced far enough to understand something about decay, and the stallions felt there had been too much of it.

The brain had been exactly as intact as it should have been. But the lungs no longer possessed alveoli: smooth structures which lacked those final branch paths, acting as bellows alone. Marrow had gone putrid within the bones. The heart had apparently kept working, but exactly what it had been pumping was still something of a question. Nothing about the digestive system appeared to have functioned for some time, and both physicians had belatedly realized that their temporary prisoner had never requested access to a toilet trench.

Lala had said it, during their meeting: that Tirek might have had magic all along. Just... not what he considered to be it. And if that was the case, then perhaps that first intake of thaums had effectively killed him. But it had done so while keeping the body animated, with whatever passed for a soul trapped within a cage of platinum wires.

Rotting from within. Forever dying, while unable to finish.

(After the autopsy, the corrupted platinum had been extracted, and then the body had been cremated. Princess Celestia had done that personally, bringing the remnants down to a level below ash. The deadened metal had simply been melted, cast into a ball, and then isolated. Forever. And there had been no funeral, because there were none who would have cared to mourn.)

The girl had thought about that, done so long into the day while her roommate slept and the centaur tried not to shiver. And then, trapped within the half-logic which arose when sleep refused to come and terror had the wheel, she'd finally realized where her own magic had come from.

Discord had sent back everything he could. But there had been thaums within Tirek which no longer had a natural home, and it was that which had remained within him to the last, kept from final fading by Tartarus and a dream of torment. The draconequus had prioritized for the living, and that meant Cerea was carrying the dead.

It hadn't been the gift of sacrifice. The thaums had come from casualties. Those who hadn't meant to die, who had been struggling to flee, to...

...she couldn't live for all of them, to imagine what they would have wished her to do and send her actions down those paths. She had spent most of her childhood trying to live for the expectations of one mare, and it... hadn't been healthy. But she'd asked the palace for a list of the dead, in the name of honor and duty.

The girl had more freedom to travel now, and had mostly been using it to visit graves.

(She also visited Blitzschritt at least twice per moon, but that was just keeping the ibex current.)

"Maybe," Trixie considered. "I..." and Cerea watched the unicorn force her head up. "...just wouldn't want to try it twice."

Eventually, Twilight got up again, asked permission for the next test, timidly tried casting a few spells at Cerea, and all were stopped. There was some early difficulty being encountered in measuring the strength of antimagic.

More notes were made. Plans were deployed onto paper, most of which concerned what things to bring the next time. And as the mares were packing up, Cerea finally asked exactly what had been done in evacuating centaur and corpse from the Struga. It turned out to be appropriately spectacular.

"What I still don't understand," Twilight said as she sorted out the notebooks, "is why we were able to follow your trail."

"You knew where you were going," Cerea quickly pointed out. "Even with all the changes Tirek made, you just had to keep heading down --"

"-- why there was a trail," the little alicorn qualified. "We found the pieces of fabric you marked the path with. All of them. And most of the trouble we had in getting you out was because we did use the Struga." With a soft sigh, "Even that's changed. A little. The surveyors will draw up the details. They're going in soon."

Cerea knew. She'd asked the Princesses for the exact date of the upcoming mapping. And then she'd requested that one member of the team bring in a picture of a scarless Moon.

"From what we were told about the things Tartarus can do to the corridors," Twilight continued, "it wouldn't have had any problems in wiping the patches --" frowned "-- swatches? Rarity would say 'swatches' -- off the walls. But they were still there, and the trip out was smoother than it probably should have been. I don't know why."

"And you're complaining," Trixie grumbled, "because we only nearly got clobbered. Twilight..."

"And I can't believe that Tartarus liked having its power stolen."

Had the dullahan worked it out? That Tirek had created enough disturbance for the draining to reach some level of awareness, and the deep place had responded by...

A smooth floor, in his cell. Endless minutes when she would have had no way to respond, her unconscious (or, briefly, dead) form collapsed against stone, and nothing had torn at her flesh.

She had killed Tirek. Stopped the draining. And there had been a trail.

Could a sleeping incarnation of pain dream of gratitude?

She didn't know. But she carried the dead, and... perhaps there was a tiny spark of the deep place within her inner matrix of thaums. After all, for so many among the various species, simply knowing that their magic could be negated served as a form of torment.

The girl had her theories. But she didn't know and so, at least for this meeting, she said nothing.

"Fine," the alicorn grumbled. "Questions for another day. Because there's always questions." She looked up at Cerea. "We'll schedule the next session. Maybe that'll even be in Ponyville."

And then the little mare turned to face Trixie.

"Will you be there?"

In sight and sound, body posture and tone, the question had been innocent enough. Scent stated something else.

"Twilight," the unicorn slowly began, "I've been off the road for moons --"

"-- the palace is still paying you. I checked with the Princesses: if you wanted to, you could keep collecting vouchers until Cerea goes home. They'll just treat you as part of the research staff. You're helping --"

"-- they could call me in if they needed --"

"-- you'd lose continuity," the alicorn argued. "And we'd lose you. There's still a problem to solve. There might even be more problems now, and they're all interesting --"

Twilight stopped. Looked up at Cerea, and the blush was nearly lost in the light from the horn's abrupt ignition. The left saddlebag lid helpfully raised itself, and light delved within. After a few seconds, a scroll, quill, and stoppered ink bottle emerged.

"'Don't imply that the person at the center of the problem is the problem'," Twilight muttered to herself as the quill got to work. "That's one for later." The scroll rolled itself, dipped into the open saddlebag, and the little mare focused on the unicorn. "Trixie... we need you."

"I'm not a Bearer." It came across as a statement.

"You're my friend," Twilight said. "That's more important."

The unicorn was silent. The streaked tail tried to swish, moved into flicking, attempted a lash, and failed at all three.

"...for a little while longer," Trixie offered. "Just to work on the problem."

"Okay," Twilight exhaled, and checked the non-flammable clock on the wall. "And that's all the time we were given for Cerea. So we should leave now." Another glance at the centaur. "Until next time?"

The girl nodded. Multiple pinkish field bubbles arranged one last sorting, and two mares began to head for the door.

"So the train back now?" Trixie asked. "Or an air carriage?"

Thoughtfully, "I don't think we should go home just yet."

"...why?"

"Because we're already here," Twilight logicked. "And this is a team effort!"

"I already said I was staying --"

"-- but you're not the only part of the team! We need everyone who was involved! You haven't met some of them! And you know... he's sort of safe right now... almost harmless..." A brief waft of scent suggested multiple fantasies of revenge had just billowed through the alicorn's mind, followed almost immediately through being put on (temporary) hold. "Come on! I'll introduce you to Discord!"

The little alicorn happily exited the room. And the light blue unicorn glanced back at Cerea, as the pony's posture went halfway to collapse and every part of her expression begged for HELP.

The girl understood. But no HELP was possible.

There was an artist. The artist: a unicorn, far too thin, multihued. A living palette which had just seen the paints start to mix. He was about to work in rock crystal for the first time, he'd just finished evaluating his model and when it came to the feature subject of the newest portrait, he wasn't all that happy about it.

"And how is this meant to be accomplished?"

"You're the one doing it, Blank Canvas," Princess Celestia said from a distant corner of the Hall Of Legends, where she was casting spells on a plaque. One which already had multiple names on it, all too distant for the girl to read, and the alicorn was sending thaums at it as if she was trying to render the whole thing indestructible. "We wouldn't have sent for you if we didn't know you were up to the challenge."

The stallion still had some doubts.

"How am I expected to make a centaur look heroic?"

The alicorn's horn dimmed. She straightened up, trotted to Cerea, and stood next to her. Gazed down at the artist, and smiled.

"Just make her look like herself," she told him. "The rest will come."

And what of the supremacists?

A number were in prison. But not everypony had participated in the attack. Those who hadn't been among the invaders couldn't be arrested, and the palace only had one membership list.

There was a lead on Aerial Supremacy. But Geodene Fracture had effectively vanished, and an earth pony with power who decides to go into a wild zone may not have to come out for a very long time. And when it came to their respective rank-and-files...

Known membership in such an organization... it was something which seldom made a pony welcome. They found comfort among their peers, because they had claimed discrimination and, at the moment they publicly decided they were superior, found the world willing to prove the 'discrimination' part right. At best, it was a rather intense quirk, and most ponies tried not to speak with anypony who possessed it. Not for very long.

But now membership formed its own mark: one of shame. Belong to such a group and even if you hadn't participated, you'd probably wanted the attack to succeed. It left the survivors with very few ponies they could deal with at all. None but each other.

A number fell deeper in, and did so quietly. They couldn't speak out, because they were seen as an embarrassment to the rest of their species. Smile, nod and, at the best of times, lurk.

You couldn't save everypony. Not for those who had already decided that they were better, for to truly look at what the belief had cost would mean having to admit they were wrong. A price which, even when compared to near-total ostracization from the herd, was still too much to bear. A few would wake up, patch themselves together through regret, remorse, and pushing forward through the borders of the bubble, but... only a few.

There would always be those who hated. When compared to self-examination and truly figuring out all the reasons why a given life wasn't any better, hatred was the easier option.

But what of the vulnerable? The ones who need something to believe?

You couldn't be everywhere. You couldn't save everypony. You just looked for the isolated. The friendless. Because there were many ways to describe such ponies. One possible choice for a descriptor was 'Twilight Sparkle', and she was lucky. She found those who were willing to whisper love into her ears, until she became capable of saying it back.

There's a pony out on the streets today. It could be a mare or a stallion, belonging to any of the species. All you truly need to know about them is that they're alone. They don't feel loved. Special. Nothing has gone right in their lives for a very long time. And they're trotting by themselves because they're always by themselves, all they want is somepony who'll talk to them and there's a bar up ahead. They can stop in. And once they do, maybe all they need is one pamphlet, one poster, one gentle word to send them careening down the endless fall into perpetual rage.

Instead, they see a sign.

There's a cultural festival up ahead. Rare, in the winter -- but this is sponsored by the palace. Somepony's brought in a Cumulus mattress: vapor so saturated with magic that anyone can rest on it. Special machines let you move things like a unicorn, as long as you're within a third of a body length and you don't mind a weight limit of a tenth-bale. Plus there's a greenhouse. Special treats grown by earth ponies, so a touch of summer can spread through the cold. And the pony reads the sign, hears laughter up ahead, and it seems like there's a good time to be had. Maybe it'll cheer them up.

Maybe they'll make a friend.

The sisters think about Twilight. And they keep trying.

"He's beautiful," Nightwatch whispered as she looked down into the crib and Cerea desperately tried to find some way of cutting back on the sheer amount of pastel nursery she was occupying. "Beautiful..."

The parents, trying to reconcile the presence of two recently-dearmored Guards (including one centaur) in their home, still managed a smile. But they knew the pegasus. They've been her neighbors, and... they didn't blame her. They didn't blame Cerea, either. Neither Guard had set the fire.

The foal had been home from the hospital for about a week, and his parents were hoping he would stay away for years. There would be routine checkups, because even a foal who was so clearly on the mend needed to be monitored -- but when it came to being trapped in a bed as sparks floated out to waiting doctors, there had been enough for a lifetime.

He was home. The city would be told on the following day, because the parents had wished for a little peace. But the Guards had been told, because Nightwatch had been a neighbor. And then the two mares had arranged a trip to see him.

"He is beautiful," Cerea awkwardly offered. "He really is."

She was dearly hoping it was true. Most of what she could judge was health, complimenting males of any age was hard, and... the foal was small, fuchsia, wriggling, and currently proving that the pony life cycle didn't have a metamorphic stage.

The mother looked at her child. Glanced up at the centaur, and swallowed twice.

"Would..." The count went to three. "...would you like to -- hold him?"

Cerea's gulp count quickly reached five: after that, she ran out of saliva. She knelt as best she could, carefully reached down...

He's so small.
Warm.
He barely weighs anything.
He just yawned...

Instinct kicked in. She cuddled him. And the foal, far too young to have decided what 'normal' was, responded to the foreign, near-monstrous sensations of being held by hands and cradled against a bosom through falling asleep.

His father smiled. (She wasn't used to fathers who could do that.) The mother watched.

"I remember reading a little bit of the first press conference," that dam carefully began. "You've really never had a child?"

Cerea shook her head.

"Because you have..." The parent stopped. "But so do minotaurs, I suppose. You're very good with holding him."

The centaur gently stroked a finger against the foal's ears. He wriggled, and slept a little more soundly.

A foal.

Sometimes she thought about the shadowlands, and Lala. The dullahan's theory. Perhaps centaurs had reached the point where spontaneous parthenogenesis had become an option, with no religious requirements involved. It might be possible for Cerea to have her own foal, and... if so, it would be a filly.

But if that was true -- then what was the trigger? What did it take to start the process?

She didn't know. And in many ways, it didn't matter, because she wasn't ready yet. For now, she simply wanted to believe that the option remained open. Magic might be able to help there. And no matter what, any such filly would be her foal.

Someone to raise. Cherish. Help along, without pushing too hard. Giving that child the freedom to become who she needed to be.

Any such filly would be loved.

There is a very special unicorn mare.

There's nothing particularly unique about her fur or mane. Her tail never drew much notice. She always thought her natural hues were drab. The mare has been told that she has nice eyes and a lovely smile, but felt that was the sort of thing ponies said about your appearance when there was nothing else to talk about.

She used to feel drab. Boring. Ordinary. Unloved. Unnoticed. But then she found those who told her just how special she truly was. They took her in, they talked to her until she felt special and once she started to believe it, they followed that up by explaining why certain other ponies weren't special at all.

She's special. She always has been. It just took a while before anypony noticed. And now the world knows.

The world knows, and it treats her accordingly.

She lives in a place with other unicorns. Just about nothing except unicorns -- well, there's a few exceptions, but they aren't really ponies at all and whenever she's around, they get treated like servants.

(This always happens to any inferior she looks at, for as long as she's looking at them.)

Those with horns are clearly in charge, and that's how it should be.

The mare has her very own rooms!

The furnishings are lovely. They're obviously expensive. Something which reflects just how special she is. And when she first arrived... well, at the time, she felt they were somewhat ordinary. But one of the other residents told her where they'd come from, name-dropped a few stores and crafters who exist on such a high level as to force her into pretending she'd heard of them before. But once she was told about some of the other places those sources have furnished... well, she's more than learned to appreciate her new possessions. In fact, the longer she looks at them, the more special they become.

When she's in her rooms, she can use her horn freely. But nopony can come in unless she puts a special metal cone over it. That's also the requirement for letting her go into the rest of the building --

-- it's not a restraint! It's a new kind of analyzer!

(They had to explain what that was.)

Because when she taught herself that very special trick, she made some changes to her field. Things nopony had ever done before. And with that level of raw innovation in magic -- well, they just have to study her. She understands completely, especially because she's certain that the alterations will in fact take years to work out.

So ponies can't be exposed to her very special field. Protection is required. That makes perfect sense. And not having access to her horn when she's outside her lovely rooms? Why, that's no trouble at all! Ponies lift things for her, they open doors and arrange for entertainment -- there's this wonderful innovation called an audiobook and she loves those, even if nopony will explain where they came from -- and make sure she would barely need to ignite her field at all!

Ponies talk to her all the time now. (Unicorns, of course. Always unicorns.) They tell her how special she is

(or at least that's what she usually hears)

and the food is perfect, the bed is soft, all the colors are what she's been told are calming hues and maybe she can't leave the building until the research is complete

(until she's better, somepony said)
(until she understands)
(servants say stupid things)

but they give her lots of soft woods to take into her rooms. Because she makes art. She has a theme. It's almost enough to make her wonder why she never manifested as an artist, especially since the ponies who collect her work for what they say is the gallery like to study it for hours.

(they analyze...)

Lovely rooms with a perfect view, which means there hasn't been a single glimpse of the palace. And they bring her newspapers

(sometimes it almost feels like entire sections are missing)

and they make sure she always has snacks and cosmetics and somepony she can talk to. Any time she wants to talk, there's always a pony available. And she's almost sure those ponies agree with her all the time, except when they ask questions and when they ask too many, she tells them to go away. They do. And the next time, she gets another pony. Or the same pony again, only they're very sorry about having questioned somepony so special and won't do it again.

(the wording keeps changing)

The meals are wonderful. There's companionship. Sometimes they bring her into a room with other unicorns, and some of them are so silly! One of them said they were a Princess! And not only is that pony voluntarily lying about being a freak, but he doesn't even have the wings!

She decided he was telling a joke. That made the most sense.

The mare is special. They all tell her so.

(It's what she hears.)

And she lives in a perfect place, with servants and inferiors who know it, where there isn't a single pony who doesn't know her name. She can make art and talk about things which everypony should know, and they smile and nod and she tries to ignore where the questions are going because she doesn't want to think about it and besides, there's no children here. She hasn't seen a foal for...

...for...

...separate and...

Her rooms are lovely.
Her companionship, should she desire it, can be constant.
She is treated as if she's the most special mare in the world.

(They have separated her from the world.)
(Some of them wonder if she can ever return.)
(And when they originally tried to bring her into the asylum, she fought them.)
(The mare had to be dragged.)

She's happy.

On the night before they went to see the foal, Luna entered the barracks.

Or rather, they heard hooves moving through the barracks. And then everyone who had been using the pool got to watch the alicorn trot in.

Nightwatch and Cerea had frozen in place. Yapper's response had been to duck under the water -- but the canid had forgotten to take a breath, and quickly had to come up again. Motife, who understood group baths as a social occasion, immediately decided that she'd picked an exceptionally bad time for her first and tried to scramble for the edge --

"-- as some of you know," the Princess immediately stated, with the majority of the walls doing their best to add echo, "my own bath is damaged. I understand that this one is considered to be suitable, to a degree where I have overheard multiple ponies discussing whether to sneak in while the Lunars are on shift. And until such time as repairs are complete..."

Several flares of field removed the regalia, and the dark form carefully slipped into the water. Calm eyes regarded the canid, both ponies, and finally moved to the naked centaur.

"I have seen it before," Luna stated. "Involuntarily. During the measuring session. I moved at the wrong moment." She shrugged. "You clearly require a new fitting. I shall send for Corsetiere Garter tomorrow. So. What are we all talking about?"

"...hoofball," Nightwatch finally managed. "Barding is taking Cerea to a game soon."

"Hoofball," the Princess repeated.

"Um. Yes."

"Good. So perhaps one of you can explain it. In your opinion, how is that supposed sport still legal?"

Which got them through the first hour.

The centaur dreams of being a pony.

The change does not occur because her Princess has twisted the nightscape. The girl does not become a quadruped. Instead, it seems as if she has always been a pony. A mare who was born in this world, knows of no others, and trots down the streets of Canterlot because that's where she belongs. And over the course of a perfectly ordinary day, she goes into shops, she pores over books, she visits friends, and she exists among ponies as one of their own.

A pony. One with brown fur and a blonde mane. Who's somewhat taller than the average, because the girl really can't conceive of being short any more. And the tail is exceptionally full, because something has to be.

But those are the central consistencies of her form. She has not rendered herself into an alicorn, but... there are times when her horn ignites, her wings flare, or her hooves hit the cobblestones with extra force. The girl shifts between the three species for which she has personal experience, because she has yet to meet a crystal and everypony says seaponies don't exist. The dream can't quite make up its mind there, and...

...does it really matter? She's a pony. There's no other way to exist. And the other equines smile at her, they greet her, they know her and they nuzzle and...

...it's the wrong kind of nuzzle.
Or rather, it's in the wrong place. Because she's a pony, and that part of her anatomy would only exist if she was either close to giving birth or had just done so. Add in a drastic relocation...

...she's aware of the dream now. (This seems to happen with increasing frequency, and she wonders if it's a lingering effect from her Princess.) And she knows it isn't real.

It can never be real.
It isn't right.

The brown-furred mare steps into an alley. And once she's out of sight, the girl's hands cover her face and even in the dream, she has to force herself to breathe.

She...
...how many times did she dream of being human, once she reached Japan?
Of going among them, as one of them, so that no one ever looked or stared or questioned or...
Of simply running her toes along her host's legs, to make him laugh?

The girl stands in a phantom alleyway. The passage between larger spaces. The gap.

And after a time, her hands drop. She adjusts her blouse, checks to see that the scabbard is resting properly, and stares out into what little she can see of the dreamworld. Because it's still an alleyway, and the only way to get real details is to venture out.

Some of the figments may run. Others won't.

She isn't human. She never was. And she'll never be a pony.
She's a liminal. A word which means she exists as something forever caught betwixt and between.
She's a centaur. There will always be those who render that translation as 'monster'.

She's Cerea.
Perhaps that's enough.

They stopped at the post office. A letter was sent to the police chief of Palimyno, containing carefully-transcribed thanks.

They passed a young pegasus with a courier's mark, who was hoping to get into the palace. To see a Princess, because she'd been thinking about something which had happened to her, and... she thought she might have been one of the first drains. She should have told somepony. If she had, then...

...so much was her fault...

They both told her it wasn't. Some things weren't anypony's fault.

There was more trotting. They were getting near the edge of the sign-designated zone, and Cerea checked her watch. Then she checked Sun, just to make sure her watch didn't need to be adjusted.

Moved by alicorns.
The other option is a perpetual gravitic slingshot plummet around a flaming ball of fusion death.

Which, when she thought about it, was probably just about as terrifying.

"Okay," she finally asked. "Where are we going? Because it can't be much further."

The little knight smiled. Landed, and flared out a wing.

"There."

It took Cerea a few seconds to recognize what she was indicating. There was a small house: dark and cozy, surrounded by a lot of loose soil. And next to that...

"...it's an empty lot," the girl observed.

"It's ours."

The girl blinked. Then she adjusted her position, and had to do so three times before she could properly stare down.

"...it's what?" she tried.

"Um. That's where I put the profits. From the audiobooks. Because we can't live in the barracks forever. Um. And I don't think you should live by yourself. Not for a while. Not when you had so many housemates, and -- you're still getting used to everything. And it would take a special house, for a centaur to live in it. Something nopony's built before. So I commissioned a minotaur. He's working on the designs. A place for a pegasus and a centaur to both live..."

Both black wings flared, and the little knight put herself at Cerea's normal eye level.

"You're shocked." she observed. "I'm sure that's shock. Um. Cerea, you don't have to do this if you don't want to. I'll understand if you want to stay in the barracks for a while, or don't want to stay with me. I didn't say yes for you. I -- just wanted you to have a place to go. With somepony you trusted --"

"-- is that Yapper's house?"

The pegasus blinked. Nodded.

"I thought it would be easier if we were neighbors," she said. "We could watch out for each other. And she already offered to add some pit traps. Um. She even said she might tell me where they were afterwards. Not that there was much point, because I just had to remember to fly over them. Cerea -- what do you want to --"

"-- I'm going to need some salt," the centaur distantly considered.

"...salt," Nightwatch tried.

"There's a ritual of protection. To keep a new home safe from spirits." She frowned. "I hope I can remember the details. It doesn't get performed very often. The gap didn't exactly see a lot of new homes."

"Ritual," formed the next attempt.

"Do not," the girl solemnly said, "question centaur magic."

She looked at the empty lot again.

Living with a coworker. With an adult, and her partner. There were those who would probably say it wasn't proper. But she was the only centaur. When viewed as a category contest, for anything she might do, she automatically finished in first. And when it came to being proper -- that was her definition to create.

(She'd said as much when she'd testified during the first trial. Ms. Manners had screamed to suit.)

Her life was a story: one which was still being told. And if hope was the prerequisite of torment, then the fundamental requirement for existence was drive. The desire to go forward. To run until you never moved again. And then you waited to greet your friends.

Perhaps there would be a road back to Japan one day. She might return to the house, tell her sisters about everything she'd seen -- after simply holding them for a time. (Even the spider.) It was possible that she would find herself briefly visiting the France herd -- and nothing more, because Cerea could no longer truly imagine living there.

But she couldn't live for 'perhaps'. She had to use the present. The gift of time.

And for now, she chose to gallop.

"Do you want to get a closer look?" Nightwatch asked. "See where it's all going to be? Um. Because I'm pretty sure Yapper was joking about putting the traps down early. But we can poke the soil."

The young knight smiled. Looked ahead, and nodded once.

"Let's go home."

Abomination

They had brought the monster down and in doing so, believed themselves to have saved the world.

Some among the townsfolk were still trying to reconcile that they had been the ones to do it. The settlement wasn't particularly noteworthy: it was fairly old, rather isolated, and tended to treat news as something which took place at a great distance. It was the sort of place where the announcement of a disaster would bring a sad, empathetic statement of 'Well, these things happen,' and such would include the implication that none of those things would ever happen here. But the monster had come to their town, appearing during the evening transition between celestial bodies. It was currently being dragged down their moonlit main street in a net -- well, several nets: it had taken a bulk of ropes to get the entire thing wrapped -- behind them. Destiny had chosen them for the test, and they had won.

It was something which a number couldn't quite believe. Many of those with horns were repeatedly, almost compulsively projecting light towards minor bits of detritus in the road: surrounding, lifting, and dropping again. The ones with wings, currently pushing their hooves against the cobbled streets as their part in helping to drag the burden, kept taking off: the limit of each flight was the length of their mouth-gripped tow rope. And the ones who lacked both... they froze every so often, strained their ears in all directions. In all cases, the behavior was exactly like that of a being who had nearly lost a limb and kept shaking it to make sure it was still there.

None of them could understand the monster, and that had surprised a few: the stories said that the last one (just a few moons ago, far too fresh in memory) had spoken their language. This one didn't. Oh, it had vocalized, and done so several times during those moments when it wasn't crying out from the pain of their attacks. There had almost seemed to be multiple languages involved: some of the sounds had possessed a near-liquid tonal quality, while others had been harsher. But the town was isolated, and didn't really host anything worth coming to see. It seldom had visitors from the rest of the nation, let alone what lay beyond -- and so none who lived there knew how to perform the complicated working which would lead to temporary translation.

Not that it mattered. It was a monster. They didn't care what it had to say, because they knew what it had come to do. Something they had stopped.

They had saved the world.

They were still trying to figure out what newborn heroes were supposed to do in the aftermath. For starters, they hadn't actually killed the thing. It had been a matter of some debate, especially since they knew what it did -- but a few were aware that the last one had been captured, it had seemed that they should take the same route, and... they didn't know how to kill, not when it came to making themselves complete the act. They'd had it down, hooves had been held over its head, and --

-- it had looked at them.

It was hideous. Monstrous. A nightmare escaped into reality, and that very much included its eyes. Eyes which were too small and set at the front of the skull: the marks of a predator. But the color...

It had blue eyes, half-closed from pain. And they couldn't understand the monster, not for anything it might have been trying to say -- but somehow, the one whose hoof had been braced over the bridge of the snout (nose, a tiny afterthought of one) had seen the resignation. The moisture coating the little orbs.

The first tear.

Monsters cried as a means of deceit. Monsters faked pain as a lure. This was a monster. But it was beaten, and a police department whose only true expertise was in resolving domestic squabbles by addressing all involved with their full names... their chief hadn't been able to do it.

There was an excuse, of course. Part of that came from the last one, merely captured. The rest was that the monster, having been beaten, was no longer their problem.

So they had bound it, and that had taken some work. Chains were available, as were cuffs: sometimes domestic squabbles needed a visual reminder that another stage was available. But the monster was huge. It had towered over all of them. One of the few who had been to the capital eventually declared it was just about the same size as the elder of their rulers, and those who had paid the most attention to the stories had shuddered. It was huge, it was far too large -- but they'd stopped the monster before it had become any bigger. A monster which was the size of the elder had been dealt with: the last one hadn't stopped there.

Still, it had required some adjustments. Chains had been attached to each other: it was the only way to stretch things out enough to get all four legs bound. And then there was the... other part. That had been less distance to cover, but they hadn't initially thought to bring a chain for something which none of them had personally seen.

Some of the town's residents, those who hadn't heard the sound of battle from inside their homes, who were only reacting to the sporadic cheering which broke out as the monster was dragged along, or looked out a window when they heard the shaky laughter which came from reactions to jokes that were only funny because they'd lived... they were staring at the monster now. The ones who had battled had already had their chance, and even they would find themselves looking.

For some, looking brought shame, because so much of the body could be seen as beautiful. Get the tattered black draping fabric out of the way, clean up the fur, get some of the mud off, ignore the clotted blood from various wounds and the tiny new ones which were opening up from being dragged along the road while trapped in nets... get past all that and there was still the sheer size of the thing, but to say you found no appeal in a body so large was to insult their leaders, and so it was something few would vocalize.

But the fur, properly groomed, would be a rich brown. The hooves were in excellent condition, and the legs were powerful. (Some of them had felt that power directly, because the monster had attacked them. It was a monster: attacking was what it did. The fact that they had initially gone after it on sight didn't factor into their personal equation.) The tail... even with mud and worse coating so much of it, they could tell it was a rich shade of blonde. And the torso was healthy, the rib cage wide and proud, strong muscles offering the attraction which came from raw physical power.

More than a few looked at that, and so many felt the shame that came from finding any degree of appeal. But it was something which always shattered quickly. There was beauty in that large body, a certain level of wounded ideal along the torso --

-- right up until it bent, distorted, hideously warped into the other torso.

There was no fur anywhere on that portion, and the bare pink skin which emerged from the sleeves and neck of the dirty white cloth garment was mottled from dirt and fast-emerging bruises. Shortly below the shoulder blades, the flesh further distorted forward, twin mounds which repeatedly deformed from pressure as the monster was pulled across the stones. The residents who had studied the greater world were reminded of a distant nation to the east and the twin-horned beings who lived there, realized that physical quality might mark this monster as a female, and the most intelligent considered that it might even explain something of what had happened. The last monster had been a male, and it had drained. This one had...

There was a sword.

None of them had ever seen swords before, not directly. Swords were something which existed in books, a weapon which the twin-horned could wield -- but very few of them chose to go that route. They had no true experience of swords, and so did not know that in some ways, to call it a sword was to grant it the favor of a surprisingly relaxed definition. It was a sword in the same way that a scaled-up toy boat could be called a ship.

It was proportionate to the creature's hideous second torso, the length of those extra limbs. It was properly balanced. But it wasn't metal, and it had no edge. The places where the slicing surfaces should have been honed to fatal perfection had been rounded and smoothed. There were still ways in which the sword could do some damage: it had weight to it, and a curious density. The monster, swinging the weapon with all of that hideous strength, had the potential to break something if it hit just the right weak spot, and a number of the combatants were sporting their own bruises. But realistically, the only things the sword could hope to cut were vapor and light, and the residents were dragging it along in a secondary net some twenty body lengths behind them, with all refusing to touch it because until the moment they'd brought the monster down, that was exactly what it had been doing.

(Perhaps that was the difference between males and females of the monstrous breed. Males drained. Females cut. None were sure which was worse.)

They didn't know what to do with the sword. They had already decided on the monster's fate: namely, that determining such would be the problem of another. And it was too large for the dusty jail cells, things where the walls suddenly didn't look solid enough -- but the settlement was an old one, and so the first family in had maintained their castle across the generations. A castle which had a rather extensive sort of wine cellar, and it wouldn't take all that much to convert it back into a prison. One resident had galloped ahead, alerted the owner, and so bottles were being hastily shifted. The monster would have a place to both begin the first stage of its well-earned rot and await the rest.

The procession dragged it through the streets. They laughed, because they were alive and they had saved the world. Occasionally, a resident would steel herself enough to emerge with a camera, and the procession would pause for pictures because this level of heroism had to be recorded. They began to plan a celebration which would last through the night. They ignored the little cries of pain which the female could not choke back, because they were merely the sounds of a monster. They could not understand it, and believed it could not understand them.

They were wrong.

It could not render their speech into comprehensible sentences: to it, the sounds were neighs and whinnies, nickers and desperate snorts. But it recognized that there was a language there, and even if the words could not be deciphered -- some of the emotions could. So many of its own kind made those sounds when they were very young, before true speech came. It had also grown up among those who resembled the captors in form: larger and with more limited colors, having subtracted wings and horns and the capacity for true thought. These were tiny and mostly bright, with some pastels and a very few shades which it might have considered normal, they were talking -- but in so many ways, their body language was the same. It could see some of what they were saying, or at least the intent behind the words.

And there was more than that. The monster, even with that afterthought nose, possessed a singularly excellent sense of smell: magnitudes sharper than that of her captors. Spend enough time among a species, come to know them, and it would become possible to detect certain emotions through scent. The female had never encountered this triad of creatures before -- but there were ways in which they resembled what it had known. Others where they even resembled the monster. And so the odors were largely unfamiliar, but there were so many of the creatures and when the bundle of ropes and chains was being dragged along in their wake, with nothing to do other than think about failure and despair and the fast-approaching inevitability of a final fate... it was time in which to recognize commonalities.

The monster couldn't understand their words. But the blue eyes saw their postures: the sensitive nose took in their massed scent. And so it knew that no matter how much bravado was being displayed, the stallions rearing up to make themselves look larger, the mares slamming hooves down in the little stomps of domination -- they were afraid. Every last one of them was afraid.

The procession moved down the settlement's main street. It periodically stopped for celebration and pictures, compulsive lights and short bursts of flight, and all of it happened within an invisible cloud of unrelenting terror.

But they had saved the world. (That was how they perceived the events. There was no other way they could perceive it.) And to them, that meant their part was almost over. They just needed to confine the thing for a while, and then --

-- well, actually, 'and then' felt like a variable. The town lacked many things, and the total absence of those who could vanish from one location and appear in another suddenly felt like a major flaw. It would have been the fastest way to set up the relay race of information, for they were a long way from the capital. But instead, the first stage would need to take place through flight. That would slow things somewhat, but the residents were fairly sure their leaders would know about the situation by morning. The problem, and final fate of the monster, would be transferred to those with authority. They would manage everything, the town's residents would undoubtedly collect their honors, and none would ever have to resist the urge to glance back at a monster again.

So many had looked at the familiar portion of that body. But always, their gazes moved to the warped. To unfamiliar limbs which subdivided at the ends, to those predatory eyes. The hideous features. Perfectly proper ears which had been disturbingly shifted to the sides of the head. The tight gathering of blonde hair (with no proper streak down neck and back) at the top, and the long strands which had broken free.

(Some of those with horns had tried to grab the distorted head with their light. It had made them feel as strange as they had when they'd tried to coat her weapon, and they'd quickly stopped. Every one of those residents had stopped thinking about it, and so none could have predicted the events which would occur before their sun returned.)

Its legs were chained, and the locks were holding. The -- other limbs -- had been bound. It hadn't escaped, and so it wouldn't escape.

They had won.

Eventually, under the lights of moon, glowing devices, and camera flashes, they reached the castle.

The current owner (a mare, and far too young to be holding her title) had been waiting for them, had been told what was coming, and still wound up pressed against a corner in fear. Several residents moved to reassure her as the main procession split: one group dragging the monster towards the ramp into the cellars, while a second tried to find a place they could store its weapon. Storage which would, ideally, involve none of them being near the thing or touching it in any way.

Finally, they had it in front of the proper door: the one with all the evacuated bottles lined up along both sides of the hallway. Some rather awkward maneuvering was required to get the oversized body through the gap, and one impact gave them the chance to ignore the single cry which could not be choked back. And then they checked the locks, made sure everything was functioning properly, and headed back towards the light. One of their number would be set to guard, and that assignment would shift throughout the night. But all would have the chance to join in the townwide party. A celebration for the heroes they hadn't known they could be.

They had saved the world.

And within her stinking cell, a girl who had once wished to be a knight, lost in a strange land, beaten and half-broken and awaiting what she was sure would be her death, with none left to watch her, finally allowed her emotions to fully flow forth.

Centorea Shianus closed her eyes, and the young centaur wept.

Otherworldly

There were times when the sisters needed to speak in privacy, and that occasionally provided a challenge. Some Guards could be overprotective: those who were often reluctant to let their charges get too far out of sight didn't particularly appreciate any order to back off and would generally interpret the command as something which had merely instructed them to find a place where they wouldn't be spotted. The shortest-tenured staff members occasionally decided that if anything was so crucial as to require a lack of untrustworthy eavesdroppers, then somepony trustworthy had better be listening: those ponies either grew out of it in a hurry or discovered that their tenure wasn't going to become any longer. And in the first year following the younger's Return, those of the Solar staff had been a little too careful about staying close during any interaction, just in case It Happened Again -- even when none of them were entirely sure as to just what had happened in the first place.

(However, that portion had slowly faded, and now the only times when true fear manifested was when the sisters were unsupervised during times of diplomacy. The younger could often be viewed as diplomacy's alternative option. In the eyes of the other nations, she was what you got instead of diplomacy, and very few palace ponies truly understood the effectiveness of having a bright smile being backed up by a lashing tail.)

But the staff merely worked in the palace, while the siblings had supervised its construction. There were secret passages whose floors had only been touched by eight hooves, marble panels that swung open at the touch of a corona which had been selected from a list of two. Both sisters had times when they had to slip away, and so multiple methods and pathways existed to allow exactly that. The sisters had a way of vanishing when they most needed to do so, and any Guard incapable of being temporarily reassured by the signature-radiating notes they would mutually leave behind on their respective thrones was a Guard who needed some more experience.

(They could generally get away with two hours. After that, a truly good Guard was going to come looking anyway.)

The siblings had several places available for such conferences. A few took place in the secret passages themselves, quite a number had been hosted by a forever-otherwise-closed tower, and one of the most recent was currently a little too close to a space that wasn't generally occupied: neither was about to risk having the subject of their discussion overhear any of it. In this case, the younger had waited until about two hours before Sun-raising was due, then woken the elder and brought her into the palace gardens.

The exactingly-landscaped portions which held no statues were themed. Each section represented part of their nation, hosted plants which grew most naturally in that territory: it was possible to trot across the whole of a miniature continent in about an hour. For this conference, they had gone to the newest section: that which held blooms that could wait years for the lightest touch of water, using a single brief shower as the chance to spring forth. Life lurking under the surface of the sand, not so much dormant as endlessly patient.

It had taken quite a bit of pegasus magic to set up the proper conditions, reliably keep the humidity present in so much of the gardens away from the little dunes. But the replication had been exacting, and so those who visited the new addition learned a basic fact of the desert: that no matter how much Sun beat down on near-bleached grains during the day, Moon still ruled the night. Under Moon, the desert was cold. It meant that every so often, the elder would adjust her body's radiance, fighting back the external chill: for the younger, just noticing low temperatures was generally a deliberate act.

But they were both cold on that night under the cloudless sky, if only within. The implications had come with their own ice.

The younger finished her review of the previous day's events. Looked to the elder, and waited.

"I don't even know where to start," the elder sighed. A little more dryly, "Just the fact that somepony's come up with a way to let that many unicorns truly combine their efforts... that's a weapons-grade working, Luna. The old limit was three, and you thought this casting involved...?"

"An exact number cannot be determined," the younger replied. "It is the nature of the mudslide itself: one might notice a slightly lighter hue in the flow, but watching it too closely provides time for the observer to be buried. And my instincts say there was a single caster directing from the center of it: somepony forcing the disparate signatures into something less than harmony. Not having them work together so much as refusing to allow the smaller channels any chance at escape. A single director..." A thoughtful pause was followed by "But for contributors? I would estimate a minimum of several dozen, and the upper limit may be well beyond that."

"The least aspect of this is something we need to reverse-thaumgineer as quickly as possible," the elder half-groaned. "Because we are going to need a counter to it, and fast. That many unicorns truly working together could take out anypony -- us included. We have to be capable of negating the central caster."

"Assuming it allows cooperation on any working," the younger observed. "It may have been designed for this casting alone."

"I'm not willing to make that assumption just yet," the elder darkly decided, and a huge white forehoof compulsively shoved sand away. "It's too dangerous." (The younger nodded.) "And then we get into the fact that this massed magical effort, something where we can't figure out the true number of casters and thaums involved, was used for a summoning. Nopony's attempted a summoning in..."

Purple eyes closed. The pastel hues of the half-tangible tail fell still.

The younger knew better than to wait. "Sister?"

"...me," the elder softly said. "As far as I know, the last true summoning attempt was me." Her eyes opened, and the tired gaze sought out sky-lofted craters. "I can safely say it failed."

The younger sighed. "Tia..."

"Me," the elder sadly repeated. "But it was nothing like what you described, Luna. Nothing at all. I remember... a sense of reaching out. It was almost physical, like I was being stretched. As if I was standing at the bottom of Apnea's Pit and trying to touch Moon. It... started to hurt after a while. After it failed, I felt like I'd been in a taffy pull for weeks... "

Each instinctively moved a little closer to the other, still facing each other across the sands. Both gave the past some time to pretend it could fade.

Eventually, "Did you ever formally ban summoning spells? During my abeyance?"

The elder snorted. "It's one of those things where forbidding it doesn't exactly matter to anypony who was intending to cast it in the first place. And to slap a saddle on that, it's also like banning unicorns from balancing their entire bodies on hornpoint: you know it's virtually impossible and it's going to fail anyway, so you just picture thousands of crashes and don't think about the one pony who could actually pull it off. It's not so much forbidden as ignored, Luna: when there's an entire category of magic which just about nopony can work, a lot of unicorns just decide they're going to fail too, and the scant remainder finds out the hard way. Plus there isn't much need for summoning. I failed, and I knew what I was reaching towards. Most casters are just -- biting into the dark. Pushing their snouts into the abyss and clamping down onto the first thing they touch. You can't even be sure that what you're pulling back is worth it. I always felt as if Discord had a talon in the casting, because so many of the results seemed to be random."

"But not all," the younger quietly said. "We know some are deliberate. Controlled, even if that which came was not. We were there."

"Clover's Pass."

"Yes."

Tails curled in, covered their marks.

"I could have wished to never remember that again," the elder sighed. "I probably did a few times, especially after you weren't there to take the nightmares away..."

A plain statement of "I will be there tonight."

"But if this brings it back for you -- Luna, you've never been able to control your own --"

"-- it does not matter," the younger lied. "Let us focus on the present again. A group of unicorns, united by a working we have never seen before, trying to summon something. The calling spell itself may be an old working, or it may be new: neither of us had ever heard the journey described by the one who was summoned. But the analyzer has recorded what it could, and those results shall be studied by our best researchers." A pause. "We will have to tell the Bearers, sister, once their current mission is complete. And the performer shall need to stay in Ponyville for a time."

"Trixie with a new kind of magic to study and steadily-building wanderlust, researching in direct tandem with Twilight -- when this generation's Magic is up against something she's never tried before." The elder almost smiled. "We may have to reconfigure the disaster relief budget again."

And then she frowned.

"You have thought of something," the younger quickly said. "Speak."

"They missed," the larger mare slowly stated. "Badly."

"It is still possible that they were trying to summon her," the younger hastily interjected. "We should not dismiss the chance of her being a fully innocent victim, but as we have no concept of what the casters were attempting to bring, she may have been the true target --"

"-- not what I meant, Luna." Both forehooves were now dragging little trenches into the cold sand. "Why summon anything into the wild zone? What's there which she was meant to interact with? If they somehow knew about her, if they had a spell which could see into where she came from and knew what that thing could do -- I can picture summoning her to fight against magic. But you were there, and the most magic in the area came from the residue."

"There was the neurocypher, and she seemed to be immune," the younger considered. "But there are other means to combat that monster. And, put mildly, much simpler ones." Visibly thinking harder, forehead creasing near the horn, "The only hoofprints in the area were hers -- and then ours. I saw no physical signs of prior pony presence..." Slowly nodding, "A summoning would generally attempt to bring that which was called into the presence of the casters, the better to try and assert some form of control immediately. You are correct, sister: whatever they meant to summon, whether that was her or another entity -- it was most likely not meant to arrive in the wild zone. They gave her a road, and it fell short of the destination."

"We'll dispatch teams to study the area," the elder decided. "See if there's anything we're missing, just in case there is some major magic out there. One of the deep places, chaos terrain -- anything. But for now, let's work from the idea that they missed. At the very least, she arrived out of their detection range, or too far away for them to reach her in time."

"And this is where the press rather typically works against us," the younger irritably declared. "If they did not mean to summon her, then it is possible that they have no idea of what occurred. But if her arrival was their intent... then there have been headlines. Photographs. For those who pay attention to what is, on this occasion, accurately labeled as 'news,' the nation is aware that a centaur has appeared in Equestria -- and the remainder of the herd would have been told by friends and family, for it is best to be on alert." Darkly, "On watch for the monster. We may have a group attempting to summon centaurs, doing so with unknown magic for a purpose we can barely begin to guess at -- and if a single one of them happens to be either capable of reading or less than allergic to outside air, they know they succeeded."

"Kick this in," the elder glumly added. "They also know that we were involved in the search. And since nopony's seen her since, the very natural suspicion -- currently being distorted into full-fledged conspiracy by a few of the finer 'editorial' columns -- is that we have her. Which in this case, we actually do." A little more dryly, "I'm not sure if it's coincidence or irony that we actually had the 'weapon of mass destruction' argument, only we were talking about the sword. But in this case, the pro-Diarchy papers largely think we took her down quietly and put her in Tartarus: whatever reasons we have for delaying the formal announcement are --" she winced "-- they say 'classified,' and I swear I can see Raque's fieldwriting placing a superimposed 'ineffable'. Those who are a little more against us..."

"Remember Tirek," the younger finished. "All too clearly. And in that half-spoken, 'you cannot prove we meant to imply that' way which they have all mastered, suggest we have some undefined reason to use his powers for our own ends."

The sisters looked at each other. There were times when such was necessary, and more when they simply needed the reminder that the act was once again possible.

"All of this," the younger quietly said, "over a single terrified child."

The elder blinked. "...child?"

The dark head dipped. "I misspoke. Based on what the doctors were able to determine, added to what little I have been able to glean about her life through her nightscape... most likely late adolescence. Standing within the threshold of adulthood."

The white mare managed a smile. "Young enough to dream," the tones of memory declared, "and old enough to start acting on them. We were that age once..."

"I would like to believe," the younger softly replied, "that we still are."

Silence for a while, as the sky began to lighten and the endless call of duty approached.

"Afraid of so much," the younger finally said. "Of what brought her here. Of never being able to go home. But in combat, she postpones her fear, and does so when so many others might not." Almost a whisper, "And with me... with me..."

Carefully, with the left foreleg now carefully reaching across the gap, "Luna?"

The younger didn't reach back. "Nothing, Tia. Nothing worth discussing, not on this night. Simply a matter which has been on my mind for -- some time, and one I will speak with you about once I have resolved it. I vow that this will not go unspoken -- but I am, in a way, attempting to analyze another kind of signature. Grant me that time."

The elder slowly nodded. "As long as we talk."

"We shall." And both knew it was a promise.

The same feeling for both now, a sort of pressure against their hips. As if the fur of their marks was slowly gaining mass.

"You're still visiting her dreams?"

The younger simply nodded.

Oh so very carefully, as if the words themselves might collapse the sand beneath them, "What are they like?"

Silence.

"Luna --"

Sharply, "-- it is my code, sister." The surge of anger was familiar, and colder than the mist rising from dark fur. "I never asked for the ability to dreamwalk, to visit the nightscapes of others. To hear the calls which emerge from the midst of nightmare. I am aware that so much of the time, I could be viewed as an intruder, at least during those occasions when others do not simply call me a voyeur. When there was a chance that she was an invader, I went into her dreams and told you something of what I had learned, because to not do so would threaten our nation. The same as I did in every war where the act was possible at all. Now... I am simply trying to understand the place she came from. To understand her. And unless a crisis appears, or the knowledge I gain becomes necessary to protect or save, it stays with me. I cannot grant her privacy, not when we still do not understand what happened or why. But what few of her secrets I might glean -- they remain in my custody, so that I might be worthy of my burden."

It was one of their oldest fights, something which had reached the point where every possible feint and counter had been memorized. Each knew exactly which words came next and that was why the elder drew on a thousand years of isolation before looking away, all the better not to say them.

Finally, a cautious "...Tia?" broke the silence, accompanied by an outstretched dark foreleg.

"It's funny," the elder softly stated, with her tone openly declaring that it was anything but. "I missed the arguments. Even the ones we should have settled a long time ago. I missed the bad times because at least they were times we had together..."

The white head slowly turned back. Hooves gently touched, and the sky lightened a little more.

"We've talked," the elder quietly said. "We both know what the situation is. We've consulted with each other. But what you're seeing as the solution --"

"-- the necessary," the younger carefully cut in. "As Zepyhra would have said, the needful. I wished to do what I feel she needs. But I also needed to speak with you about the risks. They are --" this time, the dark features turned away for a moment "-- considerable."

"If you go through with this, making the offer -- then it's in your dominion," the elder reminded her. "I can advise. But it's your decision, Luna. What are you going to do?"

The younger looked at the elder again, shifted a little closer while maintaining contact.

"We cannot imprison her indefinitely," she said. "Even if the summoning was for her. To charge an innocent with 'having been chosen by another' -- it is a poor choice of crime. And should it truly have been a miscasting, then we would be locking her away for having been in the wrong place when uncontrolled magic struck." Dryly, "I am certain that Sombra would have told us that our mutual leadership style was finally improving."

The elder wryly nodded. "And I have no illusions about the truth not getting out. There was a time when some of the staff members were using the cells to meet for -- private moments." Which was followed by a weary shrug. "Arguably my fault for putting in the beds. And while they're sworn to protect palace interests, some of the dates they give limited tours to aren't. They don't even have to reach her cell. They just need to see that there's Guards watching an occupied cell, and the story will spread from there."

"Not in the cells," the younger said. "Never in Tartarus. We could certainly grant her land somewhere nopony ever goes, away from all of the settled zones and air paths, a gallop to herself, and..." Stopped, took a slow breath. "I protect her privacy, Tia, as far as I can. But I must say this: it would be far too close to what she had before. She is..."

The elder waited, as the sky brightened and stars faded. Waited until she realized there was no reason to wait any longer.

"It's a risk," the white mare finally said. "She's going to be at risk for every day she's here. And it's more than the public reactions, the things we can't stop. When that cult --" winced -- "'group' -- we may still go with 'cult' after we learn a little more -- when they find out what's going on... Luna, what do we tell her?"

"As much as we can," the younger replied. With faint sarcasm, "Recently, it has felt as if not providing details has a way of working against us." And back to normal tones. "Additionally, all I can do is make the offer. She must accept it. And she should not make that decision without being aware of those risks."

"Agreed --" and then purple eyes widened from the shock of fast-arriving memory. "What about the Princess Haylee gambit?"

The younger started at her sibling. Laughed.

"You recall that?"

"I remember needing three days to get the streets cleaned up afterwards. And that was with six deliberate downpours."

"Yes. Well. Elephants," the younger observed as red began to underlight the dark fur. "Admittedly, other than that initial aftermath, it was successful. For a time. But in this case, Tia, I do not feel it is in anypony's best interests for us to imply the existence of a centaur nation. We are having enough trouble with a very real single sapient without dealing with citizen terrors regarding a visit from imaginary thousands. And you know that. So why would you ever propose such a tactic?"

Wickedly, "It has been a while since the last parade. And since I personally haven't seen elephants in decades --"

The blush wasn't exactly fading. "-- and since I was the one attempting to assemble most of the downpours, I can safely state that if you desire to send elephants marching through Canterlot's streets, you may take responsibility for the cleanup. We have cobblestone now, Tia, and I wish you fortune in finding a means of effectively washing out the hollows." A dark gaze tilted towards the sky. "Which brings us to our time. Together?"

The elder smiled. "Please."

They focused. Concentrated. Sent thoughts and dreams of tomorrow up invisible, unbreakable threads.

There were ways in which it was an everyday sort of miracle. It was the miracle required for every day to exist and in performing it together, the sisters felt blessed.

"You never did tell me where you got the elephants."

"True."

"...you're still not telling me where you got the elephants."

"Correct."

"Because?"

"Because I am fairly certain you would still be angry. Additionally, our relationship with the majority of zebra kraals is currently stable, I can think of at least one subsection of Pundamilia Makazi where the statute of limitations will never run out, it has been eleven hundred and four years since the last time I was sentenced to death, and I would like to maintain that streak. Are you hungry?"

Another hour, so that both could share a meal. (There was no longer an argument among the kitchen staffs about whether that meal was called brinner or dinfast, mostly because the sisters' ears were both attuned to the words and had the reaction directly wired to their hooves.) And then they went down to the cell.

The centaur (the girl, the elder forced, trying it on for size and finding it to be an awkward fit), demonstrating the typical timing of the late adolescent/early adult, had been in the restroom. They'd waited for her, which gave the younger some time to finally discover exactly where that one missing book had wound up. And then they were facing a sapient who was wearing an ill-fitting shirt which had been left behind by a visiting minotaur ambassador three generations ago, plus a repurposed and recently-reattached tablecloth.

They talked. She listened, and her hooves shuffled awkwardly. There were times when her arms went behind her upper back: bringing them forward again showed the hands pressure-marked with red.

Every so often, the blue eyes would close. Unreadable features twisted under silver wire, scrunched before the first tear welled from between tightly-pressed lids. And the younger stepped closer.

"We will continue our efforts towards sending you home," she stated. "But we do not know how much time may be required. And --" she took a deep, unseen breath "-- it may not be possible to perform that magic without the assistance of those who worked the original casting. We may need the one who directed that effort: any notes they have recorded regarding the spell, at the very least."

"And we can't keep you in the cells," the elder gently added, "because you don't deserve it. But at the same time..."

"Tirek," the younger finished. "Nopony can see you without thinking of him."

"Who..." The girl swallowed, brought up her right arm and wiped her eyes on the folded-back sleeve. "...who's Tirek? I know it's a name..."

They told her.
What he had done.
What he was.

"...no," the girl whispered. "I -- I'm not --"

The younger stepped a little closer still. The girl stayed where she was, and the only movements from the centaur were produced by trembling.

"It is all they know," the dark mare quietly, too-steadily told her. "No living citizen had seen a centaur before Tirek came. There were never enough of them to create a nation, for they did not so much breed as appear. He was their first encounter, and everypony who came within his range found the core of themselves pulled away. It was violation on a level few could have imagined. One could argue that we are still attempting to heal a nation in which much of the population was effectively raped. And they are healing, because their magic was returned and the time they spent without it is being glossed over in so many waking hours -- but when they sleep, the nightmares remind them of what took place. What they still fear, for he is alive, and their dreams care nothing for the fact that he is imprisoned, with his power broken. All the dreams know is the terror."

"He stole our magic," the elder softly added. "All magic. He would have destroyed the world, and even the nations he didn't reach know that. You bring it all back simply by existing, because trauma cares little for logic -- and that is why the ponies of Palimyno attacked you on sight."

"And then ponies saw what that thing did when you were holding it," the younger said. (A little closer still. The girl still hadn't moved.) "You wounded magic. It gave them an additional association, and that story has spread. Worse: it has warped. Ponies tell themselves what they believe happened, and then they tell those who write it down. I do not doubt that some minds have already created a menace worse than Tirek, and it has blonde hair and brown fur. They will look at you, and they will see nothing more than a monster. That is what we face, centaur. We are battling an enemy formed from imagination. We are fighting stories. And so many will have already decided which tales to tell themselves." The next words were spat. "The things which, in spite of anything new they might see or experience, they will choose to believe."

The girl was shaking faster now. Hair was being vibrated free from the pins, and the mounds had their own way of trembling.

"But --" the younger carefully went on, and unfurled her left wing.

The elder watched, kicked the surprise to its proper place in the queue, for the time since her sister's Return had seen a near-total absence of casual touching with anypony other than her. But the wing arched forward, the tip made contact with the girl's right foreleg, and the centaur did not move.

"-- being the subject of a story is not a crime," the dark mare told the girl. "Nor is being the focus of false belief, or possessing any degree of resemblance to what came before. We are judging you by your actions -- and with those actions, you have saved pony lives."

"I... I hit the statue in the first place," the girl weakly protested. "I was saving ponies from my own mistake, and I didn't tell you about the neurocypher --"

"-- and I did not ask," the younger interrupted. "Listen to me, centaur. We cannot keep you in the cells, not when you do not deserve them. You could stay voluntarily, as our guest -- but given enough time, those outside the palace would learn of your presence: it is inevitable. And the longer we keep you as a poorly mouth-gripped secret, the worse the citizenry's reaction shall be."

"We could give you an island to yourself," the older added. "Send in supplies, bring you back when it's time to send you home. But --" the white head dipped "-- that could be a long time in isolation. And that's just another kind of prison."

"Or," the younger offered, "we welcome you. We bring you out in front of the citizenry, flanking you. Show them that we are not afraid, and hope that given our example and enough time, some of their fear will fade. But..."

The wingtip shifted slightly against the foreleg. The girl didn't seem to notice.

"...it will not be all," the dark mare finished. "It will never be all, for you have enemies whom you have yet to meet. Those who have a vested interest in hating you --"

"-- I'm used to it."

The centaur's gaze had dropped, a split-second before the stark words emerged. Her arms were at her sides, and both hands were balled into fists.

They looked at her for a few seconds.

"Not on this scale," the younger quietly observed. "For until we find your path home, there is no retreat point. No place of safety, no people waiting to greet you. You have been hated with purposeful intent, centaur: I do not doubt that. But this will be something beyond what you have experienced. Something no one should ever go through -- and yet at the moment we place you under Moon's light, another kind of sentence begins."

"And it's more than that," the elder added, making the words gentle in the futile hopes of lessening their impact. "We told you that somepony brought you here: possibly by accident, potentially with intent. If it's the latter -- then as soon as we say you're here, once we bring you into the public eye, you become a target. They may try to retrieve you." Carefully, "And that could give us our best chance to send you home, because it potentially lets us find out who they are -- but at the same time, they might succeed. They might manage to snatch you away, before we can do anything. And since we have no way of knowing what they'd planned for you..."

The girl breathed and for a full half-minute, that was almost all she did. The blonde tail hung limp, shoulders trembled, and fingernails bit deep into palms.

"We will do our best to protect you," the younger told her. "But honesty requires us to tell you the whole of it: that there is a chance we will not succeed. You could return to your home tomorrow, centaur. But it might require moons of time to open your road, or more. And until then..."

"Protective custody, on a voluntary basis, while knowing that we can't keep it up forever," the elder said. "Your own territory, but -- yours alone. Or we do everything we can to make you part of our nation for as long as you're here, with the understanding that we can never totally succeed, and simply trying may risk your life."

The dark wing folded, and the centaur reacted no more to the loss of contact than its establishment. Not visibly.

"You have the day to make the choice," the younger concluded. "But ultimately, that choice is yours alone."

No response. They hadn't expected one.

"Is there anything you want to ask us?" the elder offered. "Anything at all?"

"Any options you have thought of," the younger added, "where we have not?"

The strange head moved in negation. (It was odd, how that was the same.) But the blue eyes were still downcast. There had been no attempt to look at the siblings. She wasn't looking at much of anything.

"We will see you shortly after Sun is lowered," the younger told her.

They turned. Began to leave --

"-- a hour after sunset," the centaur softly asked, barely choking back the sob. "Please, if you can. I need one extra hour. There's... someone I need to talk to."

Vicious

Place a centaur in Canterlot, within a world which has learned to fear the male of what they had so hoped would have been the singular example of the species, and you've kicked a boulder into waters which seldom have the chance to become completely still. The idea that her presence was ongoing, with the chance to be permanent... it meant the ripples hadn't stopped. Some of them would join with each other, accumulate force and given enough time, there would be the chance of a tidal wave.

The sisters were watching, trying to anticipate the merger of angry waters before there was any true opportunity for a flood. But they knew how hard it would be spot everything and in any case, there was more than that to look for. The girl had been summoned. The words delivered at the press conference had been chosen to ensure that the only ponies outside of carefully-selected palace staff and Bearers to know that would be the casters. Whoever had pulled Cerea into their world had to know where the centaur was now: given the probable size of the group involved, somepony within it almost had to have read a newspaper, or at least have been within hearing range of frightened gossip. There was an ongoing question as to who those ponies were, and now that they had been given information which could be potentially be acted upon, some sort of action almost had to occur.

But all the palace could do was watch and listen. Their own spies couldn't be truly dispatched without some rough idea of where to go, and any attempted infiltration of what might be a cult always had a chance to backfire. There was always something in a pony which favored the voice of the herd, and when you introduced a new recruit to a group which had been taught to truly think as one...

There were many requirements for being among Equestria's spies, and there had been a few times when not even that steel-strong will and sense of personal identity had been enough.

The palace was waiting for somepony to make a move. The girl herself could be watched, because matters almost had to center on her eventually. But take the focus away from her, even for a second, and they didn't know where to look.

At one point, Luna would irritably declare that it was rather like trying to solve serial murders. (There had been a few of those in the world's history: almost none in Equestria, and even one had been far too many.) That in the absence of clues, you reached the point where the near-best hope was for the killer to be somewhat more clumsy during their next strike -- which essentially meant that in the name of trying to prevent the death count from adding twenty more, some part of the investigator was almost ready to wonder about the benefits to be gained from one. And a volunteer could set up what you saw as an ideal target, create a deliberate decoy to lure the murderer in and hope to stop them before the act could be completed, but...

Would the summoners try to recover the girl? Or would they simply decide that the palace created too much of a shield and bring in something else? Another centaur? Had they even been trying for a centaur in the first place and if not, what had they been after? What was their true goal, and how was summoning supposed to accomplish that at all?

There was an answer. But it would not come quickly, and until the day it arrived from a rather unexpected source, all the palace could do was watch and listen.

And all the while, the ripples would continue to spread.

There were certain problems with being nocturnal, and it took very little time on the Lunar shift before those palace hires began to empathize with their own Princess.

In the case of Nightwatch...

The little mare had her residence within an apartment building (the uppermost floor, with extra-large windows), and there were several reasons for that. Cloud homes were hard to come by in Canterlot: there was always somepony who would complain about a blocked view, and not dealing with endless petty complaints from even pettier nobles could make it easier for those who truly desired vapor to simply commute in from Ponyville. Which seldom happened: the palace encouraged their staffs to live in the city itself, because the capital was its own living entity. One soul manifested from thousands of moving parts, and anypony who was going to work in Canterlot had better learn how that soul breathed. Additionally, homes were just more expensive in the capital, so it was easier to rent and that could still be too high...

Nightwatch was carefully saving to purchase a house, although she had very little idea of when the move might take place. She knew what the fiscal goal was, and faithfully put something aside towards that total every moon. In terms of the total amount necessary -- she could track that, although making adjustments occasionally required somepony to tell her about what had been happening in the real estate market.

The time needed to reach the goal was simple math. But she wasn't going to move until she had somepony to move in with. She wasn't trying to buy her own home: she wanted to own theirs, and -- she hadn't found that very special somepony.

She was single. Very, extremely, sometimes painfully single. And part of that came from being nocturnal.

There just weren't as many ponies working the Lunar shift, leaving a smaller population to work with during her normal off hours. Some capital businesses recognized the need for catering to Lunar social lives: bars could apply for special morning licenses, and most cinemas were open around the clock -- but again, there just weren't as many. (Lunars on their off-days had no trouble sharing 'normal' night hours with partying Solars. It was just that eventually, somepony would notice that you weren't getting tired.) She hadn't found anypony within the palace itself. And when it came to those who lived in Solar hours...

Potions existed to flip the sleep schedule, and Lunars who were about to take their vacations were offered free doses. Nightwatch hated them. She was willing to drench herself with the vials, knew she wouldn't get the full benefit of her time off without them, and still wound up spending a day on each end suffering from something it would take long discussions and the efforts of two worlds to conjoin into the proper term: temporal jet lag. (The hardest part for Cerea would be explaining the jet.) But the potions let her relax under Sun, meet ponies she would never otherwise see, there had been some who'd been interested, she'd felt herself to be on the verge of a relationship and then --

-- she always had to tell them eventually. That she was a Guard, and that could be hard enough. Nightwatch was fully aware that for many ponies, dating a Guard was like dating a police officer, except that diplomatic missions meant you could wind up waiting to see if your loved one came home safely from a hundred gallops away. But also that she was a Lunar, one who was fully committed to the welfare of her Princess, and...

...being with her would mean one of two things: that they would choose to spend the majority of their own lives under Moon, or they would only see her for a little time in each cycle. A romance conducted through brief snuggles and the passing of notes.

Nopony had been willing to follow her. Nopony wanted to wait. And so she understood her Princess that much more, especially on those mornings when the little mare forced herself to slip beneath the cold sheets of an empty bed.

She slept through most of the day, and there were certain tricks for that. Blackout curtains were just about a necessity. Custom-fitted earplugs were often more trouble than they were worth: it took some contorting just to bring them into position, and then there was getting your hooves out of the loops without pulling them loose again. She didn't like earplugs anyway, any more than she liked potions which put you to sleep and, far too often, kept you there. There were ways in which Guards never truly went off-duty, and even sleeping ones needed to be on alert for certain sounds. But the pony outside her apartment door was quiet, and never made the mistake of trying to get in.

The little mare awoke before Sun-lowering, nosed the curtains aside because everypony needed a certain amount of daylight in order to stay healthy: a full three minutes were spent soaking in the light of the orb. Toiletries came next, which included a new kind of mane cream because a mare who spent so much time with part of hers compressed beneath a helmet needed something which would help when it came off and one day, Nightwatch might even find out what it was. Breakfast, a quick cleaning of the kitchen so there would be that much less to do for maintenance during her next night off, and then --

She smelled it before she saw it, the bitterness just barely leaking around the door's frame. And because she was a Guard, she used those pegasus-intended windows for the other approach, leaving her apartment by air, then coming up the ramps from the ground floor to reach her own level, carefully trotting down the hallway until she was looking at --

How many pictures had been taken, during the press conference? The largest group had come when the girl had been taking that strange oath, but they hadn't been the only ones. There had been flashbulbs going off before that: just less of them. Scattered shots had been taken after. And during every one of them, Nightwatch had been at her assigned post: close to the centaur.

Easy enough, for somepony to get a picture of that. And once you had the image, plus a few more from other moments for comparison... after a while, you might start to see something within it. That there was a pegasus who was hovering close to the centaur. And, during those moments when the girl was so horribly stressed (something increasingly visible to Nightwatch, although she wasn't sure who else could reliably pick up on it), hovering a little closer.

The cut-out picture had been attached to the paper, and the paper had been taped to the door. There were a few words written underneath the image: heavy, near-blockish lines which went poorly with the normal curves of the Equestrian alphabet. It was the print of a pony trying to disguise their writing by forcing away anything unique about it, and it had to work around carefully-chosen fragments of pasted newsprint. Something which had been added for emphasis.

She read those words. Then she read them again, because something in her wanted to see if she could do so while forcing her feathers to rest evenly against her sides. After that, she went back into the apartment for a mouth guard, because she knew what the paper had been drenched in and was momentarily grateful to the near-intruder for having used too much of it: smaller amounts were harder to scent, and it was possible that the nausea from removal wouldn't have kicked her until she was halfway to the palace.

She flew towards the towers and without the armor, she was just another Lunar mare on the way in for her shift.
Unless somepony cared to look a little deeper.
Until they checked the Guard roster for her name.
And then they could find out where she lived...

"Now when you're fighting unicorns," the old stallion instructed while Cerea briefly rested beneath the shade of the cottonwood tree, because those moments when her body was allowed temporary respite were still times when her mind was expected to be working, "the usual problem is range. The majority of 'corns with attack spells want to use them at a distance, see? Because backlash comes when somepony hits their horn. Sharp, hard contact with something fairly dense, while it's channeling their magic. Disrupts the spell, sends that power back at them. And that contact is usually made with a hoof."

He paused, looked at her low-resting body while his right forehoof scraped a small trench into the dirt. They'd been over a portion of this on the previous day, and the girl knew when she was about to be tested.

"How do you judge the potential effects?" he asked, and waited.

"The layering of light -- corona -- around the horn," Cerea answered, forcing the words to move around the stitch in her upper right side. "Partial is just... mostly annoying to them, and some of them can work through it. But most of what they could do at that level is just moving small objects."

"And sometimes," the sergeant darkly reminded her, "those small objects are sewing needles moving towards your eyes. Give me the rest."

"Full single layer is the majority of normal spells. Hitting the horn breaks that up, and it'll hurt them physically," she recited. "Not the horn, because that's unbreakable --"

"-- there's exceptions," he instructed. "But you can't do it. You never want to meet something which can."

Cerea nodded, continued. "-- but bruising along their bodies, maybe some minor sprains and bleeding. A double corona would be a heavy attack spell or a lot of power being channeled into something more basic. Disrupt that and it's usually the end of the fight, because the backlash can cause bone fractures or knock them out on the spot. Triple is the biggest castings, or just using everything they have. And if you hit the horn then --"

She'd spent most of her dinner wondering how it happened. What it looked like. And then she'd spent the majority of a night dreaming of the worst.

The girl didn't want to picture it any more, didn't even want to say the words. And for that, the sergeant didn't push her, because somepony else could say them.

"-- they die," he steadily finished. "You'll almost never see anything over a single in daily life, recruit, not unless they know they're safe or they're stupid enough to just show off. A lot of unicorns back up a little before their horn ignites. Clearing some space. A lot of them have that reach reflex, even when they shouldn't. It's a tell, and it gives you a little extra warning."

She let that information join the mass which seemed to be churning within her skull.

"But this is about range." The old stallion snorted, and the far edge of his left upper lip briefly threatened to curl. "There are those who say a unicorn's worst nightmare is an angry earth pony less than a body length away. And there's some truth in there. It's a good comparison for you. A centaur's not like anything else, and that gives you an advantage -- but they need a way to think of you in a fight and when it comes to strength, that's earth pony. You get close, and they get scared. They can't get their corona going without risking a hit, not for more than short bursts, and some just can't cast that fast. The Generals -- they could work with enough speed to fling you away at partial, and there's a few others close to that power level. For the majority, though -- you only see the strongest spells when they think they've got some distance on you. You can watch the corona drop as you move in, assuming you get the chance. And for the typical 'corn..."

He looked her over again: tail to lower sternum, forehooves to head, passing over a lot of sweat along the way.

"The average unicorn can't lift a full-grown pony," he told her. "Or move more than six things at once, and they'd better be the same kind of things: bunch of plates on the way to a table. Grabbing something out of the air, that's moving at high speed towards them -- force can add to effective mass. Something small and dense, going fast -- if the unicorn isn't shield-capable, that can punch through a field. Tell me how this applies to you."

It didn't exactly leave her dealing with one of her favorite subjects, and that topic felt like a partial answer.

"I'm..." I don't want to say it, don't make me say it... But this time, delay would only make him repeat the question. Much more loudly and, if she stalled enough, he would also repeat her answer at a decibel level which would reach the protesters, the capital, and had some chance to send the faintest of lingering echoes towards home.

I want to go home.

"I'm... heavy." It felt as if the words had a mass greater than her own, and also like it was a truly painful comparison.

"You're big," he decided to reinterpret it. "There aren't many who can lift you, or even slow you down. The smartest ones will pull on a single hoof, twist your ears -- but that takes brains. Either way, if you see the field coming, even when you're dealing with somepony way up in the Gifted School ranks, the sword gives you a chance to deflect. That's half of it. What's the rest?"

Think, think... There was an answer: the sergeant never asked the sort of questions which didn't have one. (However, the only reward for getting it right was having to face another question.) Fighting a unicorn, closing in on them because they can't risk as much magic at short range...

...range.

Why did she even have to close in?

Softly, "Distance attacks. From my side."

And he nodded.

"Because a unicorn at close range is usually afraid to cast," Emery Board told her. "But they're still a unicorn. Weakest of the races, physically. There's exceptions: Bulkhead's got some power. But an earth pony with his build, same combat training -- that'll trounce him just about every time. Unless he uses his horn. Not his field. Just the horn. You'll see a lot of different horn types: long, short, stubby, wide. But any 'corn can poke. Some can cut. Unicorn, desperate, at close range -- they'll use their head the hard way. So let's avoid that. Stand up."

She carefully raised her body from the grass, stretched until she was fully upright. (It still left her head well short of the lowest branches: the ponies were small, but the trees were normal.) Waited for him to speak, because Cerea was still learning pony expressions -- but becoming an exchange student meant she had also spent a significant part of the last year in language studies. The momentary contortions of his features suggested someone on an internal quest for vocabulary which had never been meant for frequent use.

"Bow," he eventually recovered. "Can you --"

The blush rose almost instantly, and she told herself that shaking her head so quickly was just a means of trying to redistribute the blood flow. Cerea didn't know how that myth had become associated with centaurs in the first place: her best guess was that it came from the most distant part of the roughly-recorded past, long before the retreat into the gaps. As it was, for the modern age, stallions simply didn't have the discipline to learn archery, or anything which wasn't on the level of drunken bar-brawling: the actual drinking was optional. And with mares... they could take up the study in the earliest part of youth, and there was absolutely no point to doing so. A bowstring was drawn close to the torso, and so puberty brought about a progressive loss of leverage. It was somewhat possible to manage a short-range shot with a more horizontal hold (and she'd done it a few times, possibly by accident), but it was just so undignified.

Guns --

No. She hadn't seen any local firearms, and wasn't even sure how they would work: what Cerea thought of as a standard proportion for a trigger wasn't going to function for a hoof. Besides, when it came to introducing that kind of weapon, she knew the rough ingredients for gunpowder, but not the ratio. Additionally, gunsmithing was an art all its own, and even if she managed to get everything right -- something where she would probably get one attempt before the test firing had the whole thing come apart in and through her hands -- it left her with the same issue as any other projectile.

"Then we'll try a sling," the sergeant decided. "It's easy to rig one in a hurry and the ammunition's everywhere."

Which still left her with the same problem. "Sergeant?" He looked up at her, and somehow managed to do while also looking down. "A horn is a very narrow target. Just hitting it from any kind of distance..."

She was expecting a shout. She got a nod.

"Hitting the horn is a bonus," he told her. "Making them think you could is the real prize. Make them afraid to cast, recruit. Keep the stones coming, and they'll be thinking that any of them could trigger a backlash. If they're afraid..."

Of the sisters, Luna was the more likely to be found with her snout stuck in a book. (There were very few benefits to be found in a thousand years of abeyance, but the younger had darkly observed that if nothing else, she had been offered a wealth of unread tomes. Also that the entire palace was effectively on perpetual Spoiler Alert and telling her about that one supposed event from Book 6 before she reached it would be considered as treason.) With Celestia, you took odds on having the elder trot through the hallways with a field-held newspaper keeping pace in front of her eyes and if the odds-maker was sharing the specific hallway while moving in the opposite direction, you got ready to dodge.

In this case, the white mare's attention had been caught by the picture of a unicorn mare stumbling out of a nearby Town Hall. The photographer had managed to partially capture the little alicorn coming up behind her, if only as a slim outstretched foreleg. This was because most of the focus had been centered on the mare's freshly-torn cape.

The picture was in black and white. This gave Celestia some difficulty in identifying the exact origin of the newest fur stains, but she assured herself that tomatoes were the most traditional source.

There were hoofsteps coming up behind her on the left. The most familiar of hoofsteps, and all the more welcome for the near-eternity in which she had only heard them in the best and worst of dreams.

"And what has your attention at this hour?" Luna inquired as she matched pace, with both of them now heading towards a dining hall: the last meal for the elder, the first for the younger.

The field bubble shifted left. Hues transferred custody, and Luna read.

"Ah," the younger observed. "Much more peacefully than expected."

Celestia nodded. "Pinkie tried to talk them into going with a dunking booth, but they'd already brought the produce to the meeting. I'm just hoping it's mostly out of the town's system now."

"They should still make an effort to keep her from going too far from the tree while alone," Luna observed as they began to pass a series of large art-hosting alcoves. "In case it is not. Shopping should be done in the company of Twilight Sparkle, as it places them both outside. Or perhaps the Lady Rarity now and again, if only to see if there is some chance to have them truly talk --"

One set of hoofsteps stopped.

There was a certain bemusement to the younger's tones and by the time Celestia recognized that, it was too late to do anything about the anticipation. "Sister?"

"What?"

Wryly, with just a hint of snide: "I approve of your redecorating."

The elder made a mistake. She turned, and all it did was leave them looking at the same thing.

"Admittedly, I am somewhat surprised to find it still exists," Luna admitted. "At least in a viewable location. I do recall that part of the treaty was that we had to host it in the palace, and to do so for the remainder of our lives. Of course, their Prince of the time failed to specify a location..."

The elder was silent.

"It is not easy, becoming accustomed to yak art," the younger added. "One generally requires an extended period of inspection to perceive the true intent of a piece. At first, one only sees -- now what was the most typical description? Oh, yes." With entirely too much not-really-repressed-at-all glee, "'The thing.' Or in this case, the stone thing. The two stone things. With the wooden bit in it. Placed at the center."

Completely. Silent.

"I looked for this," Luna casually added. "During the second moon of my Return. After finding that it was not anywhere in sight, and knowing that you would still be abiding by the treaty. Where was it?"

White teeth briefly ground against each other.

"I think," a tight voice barely said, "the last place I had it was the barracks."

"Ah," Luna decided. "And Cerea, in cleaning the area, moved this out to that hallway. Where somepony saw it, perhaps did some rather quick and comprehensive research, then carefully returned it to its proper location. In the name of the treaty."

The pastel mane was no longer flowing.

"The Prince was rather taken with you," Luna smirked.

"Yes," Celestia forced out. "I remember every whisper of his own retinue discussing the perversion that required."

"And so he had art commissioned as a gift to you," the younger mercilessly added. "For the treaty."

The nod suggested several tendons had just snapped.

"Сюжет принцеси," Luna expertly pronounced.

Silence.

"Or, in Equestrian... The Plot Of The Princess."

They both looked at the pair of carefully shaped, rounded boulders, each of which was two full body lengths across. And the wooden bit. Once you recognized what it truly was, you never really stopped seeing the wooden bit.

Luna took a deep breath. Assessed exactly how far away her sibling was, along with the exact amount of near-fire radiating from the white fur. And then, because there were things which a younger sister had to do, said it anyway.

"Rendered in the actual proportions."

And then there was only the chase.

He had deigned to eat lunch with her in the center of the track's oval, or rather, to stand about five meters in front of her while she ate. She had yet to catch him indulging in something so natural as food, and was starting to wonder if earth ponies had the magical option to absorb nutrients directly from the soil.

The sergeant understood that she had to stop and eat, and none of his shouts had been about the sheer quantity consumed. His only words regarding her size were about how it could be used in combat, both against Cerea and to her benefit. She could eat when she needed to, because a brain deprived of calories was also a mind which was going to be short on reason. But he refused to let any moment go to waste, not when there was a recruiting class of but one and none to speak with during what would have otherwise been a break.

Training sessions were for combat. Meals brought different lessons.

"You've seen Guards," the old stallion told her. "You saw police, on that first night in Palimyno. Guessing nopony's told you the difference yet. And that Nightwatch hasn't read that far in the book for you."

"No, sergeant." Fur vibrated at the tips of her ears.

He took a slow breath.

"She'll give you the small print," he said. "But there's something I want you to think about, before she gets to it. A few recruits know it going in, and others had to learn the hard way. What Guards are, and what we aren't."

Her ears were trying to strain forward now, and they really hadn't been made for that. She didn't know what the creator of centaur ears had been thinking: she only suspected it had been thought of towards the absolute end of the shift.

"We're not cops," the sergeant stated. "There's a little overlap, here and there. We can usually detain somepony, and there's a few circumstances where we can arrest. That's mostly on palace grounds. But we don't investigate crimes. If something happens in the palace itself -- and there's been a few of those over the years -- the police take the lead in figuring everything out. You can get some jurisdictional friction there, but it's primarily their job to sort and solve." He softly snorted. "There's a few of mine who still can't remember that when they need to."

Cerea nodded. Listened.

"If you see a crime in town," he went on, with hat and tail as still as something resting upon a statue, "you can try to do something about it. Have to be careful about what is a crime, especially in the little neighborhoods. Zebras have shoplifters, but they also have food baskets out for anyone who drops by. But you'll get the basics there. If you're sure that you need to move in, you can."

Zebras... How many animals from her world had equivalents here, and how many of those were sapient? (There had been mentions of bipeds, but she suspected they were a very small minority.) What was the full population like? Did each major species hold a nation?

But that wasn't the current lesson.

"It's just not a Guard's real job," the sergeant told her. "The first duty -- the real duty -- is to your Princess."

She nodded again. It would take a long time before she truly recognized what his choice of pronoun might have meant.

Groupe de sécurité de la présidence de la République. (No part of her acknowledged that in just about any other language, the term would have been considerably shorter.)

The next words, for a stallion who mostly communicated in shouts, felt oddly soft. But they were also harsh. They grated against the mind, rasped through layers of meaning until their core was carved into the inner surface of the skull.

"We protect," the sergeant recited. "We protect her. If it's protection, any time you have to make a choice, she wins. Save one other pony or save the Princess, you save the Princess." With steadily, strangely decreasing volume, "Four foals die if you move left, but the Princess lives: you move left."

Four foals...

She could picture it. She couldn't stop.

And then he made it worse.

"A collapsing building and she can't fly or teleport, you get her out." And before the crashes could stop sounding within her mind, "If the entire city is going to die screaming and there's a single chance to get her to safety... she's the only choice, recruit. Every time. You save the Princess, you save the nation. You might even wind up saving the world."

Her body rested low in the grass of the oval and in her mind, a city burned.

"There is no number," Emery Board simply stated, "which is not outweighed by one. She's it. Every time."

It was becoming impossible to meet his eyes, staring through phantom smoke and false screams.

"That's what really happened with Blitzschritt, at the end," the sergeant told the girl. "Why the ibex left. I saw them, when I was traveling. Not many ponies do. They remember. Still. Always. Because for an ibex, the first duty is supposed to be the mountains. Nothing's as important. There was one moment when Blitzschritt had a choice. She chose to be a Guard."

His eyes closed, opened again. It was all he would allow himself, outside the realm of scent.

"She died for that choice," the old stallion said, and it was the only moment when he was truly old, when she scented the number of dead he carried with him. "But the Princess lived. And the ibex, they understood what the Princess living meant for everyone. They just thought it was a pony choice. To have an ibex making it -- that meant there was something in Blitzschritt which had been changed. Too much change: that was what they didn't understand. So they left. That way, it wouldn't happen to any more of them. We can go through their mountains, because we honored her. But they don't come down any more, not for long. They think it'll mean losing who they are."

Her head bowed.

"Look up."

It was an order. She did.

"You weren't there," he said. "Neither was I. Before my time. Nothing either of us could have done. But you'll meet her. You're going into the gardens tomorrow morning, and you'll see her statue. I want you to learn about her. Because in the end, she could be an ibex, or she could be a Guard. She made her choice. And now she's a statue -- but she's also a corpse. Dead decades before she should have died, recruit. Just like so many others, since the Guard began. You have to live for your Princess. You have to fight for her. You have to be the one who tells her when she's wrong. But you also have to be ready, at any moment, to die for her. And if you can't make that choice -- that if it's any other number or her, that if it's you or her, that it always has to be her --"

He took one step forward, and the tail finally lashed.

"-- then get up. Don't say a word. Get up, go to the edge of the shield. Wait for somepony to take you back. And you'll never set a hoof onto this ground again."

A knight fights for their liege.
A knight fights for their kingdom.
There can be other lieges. There's two of them to start with.
If the kingdom falls...

"Are there any --"

Two more hoofsteps, taken so quickly that she needed a moment to realize there had been a physical crossing of that space. "-- heirs, was that your next word? No, and the only reason you get away with that once is because you don't know any better. No heirs, recruit. And it wouldn't matter. It's her. That's the only choice. ARE YOU LEAVING?"

Her tail trembled, and the warmth of the sun seemed to lose something as the rays came through the shield. Her hind hooves twitched. But she stayed where she was.

He watched her for a moment, coming no closer. Simply watching, in the moment when the lone fear was her own. The eternal fear of failure.

"That's the only answer," he said. "You took a vow, and you just might take another. Don't forget them. It's her. It's always her. It has to be. Finish your lunch and we'll get back to it."

The stallion turned away, began to walk towards the track. But he said one more thing before he reached it, and she knew the words had been meant for her to hear.

"You can be a centaur," he told the world, "or you can be a Guard."

The Tattler went through a lot of interns.

There was usually an ad somewhere in the classified section, actively seeking new applicants and in part, this was because the publication viewed the majority of interns as single-use. They required a fair amount of training before you could put them to work and if you were lucky, you would get one decent charge out of them. The best were occasionally promoted to the central staff (and Wordia herself had started that way), but the rest were released into the world to make their own way.

They were typically viewed as being single-use, and so that was exactly how they got treated. They were used, and the ones who realized that tended to drop off the subscription list.

What were the requirements for a Tattler intern? It helped to have some interest in journalism, if only so they would know what not to do. But it was much more important for an intern to be attractive. Memorization skills were required, because an intern was going to be shown pictures of the most recent palace hires and therefore they had better be capable of remembering what those ponies looked like, along with where they liked to drink. A smile helped -- Wordia had nearly failed there -- especially if it was the kind of smile which told a pony that the intern was paying attention to them alone. Those who were truly gifted might be issued an expense account, which was good for exactly one admission fee for the club of their target's choice. The ones whom management expected to let go afterwards paid their own way and worked out the lie about being reimbursed later at the same moment their hooves hit the street outside the newspaper's offices for the last time.

This intern was young, was skilled at faking charm, and had successfully used her field to swap one set of drinks. It helped to have the target be consuming for two.

"I know, right!" she falsely laughed, pitching her volume to get over the stomping which echoed from the dance floor. "Just to work for them... I bet those first few moons in the palace feel like nothing else in the world. And of course, you get all the best gossip!"

"...there's..." The target, young, of middling appearance, and who'd skipped past the suddenly-relevant portion of the New Hires briefing book, hiccuped. He wasn't used to having a mare being this interested in him, and the combinations of Dream and Alcohol had moved most of scant surviving Thought to somewhere near his poorly-groomed tail. "...there's a rule about... talking... about what we see them do..."

Her smile became that much wider.

"I don't want you to break any rules!" the intern declared. (Not that she'd told him she was an intern, or anything else which was real. He didn't even have her name, and he wouldn't get all that far into the post-encounter palace questioning before desperately wishing he could forget her face.) "It's just that -- you work for them. With everything that's going on right now. With everything that's living there..."

She leaned forward slightly, as if she was moving into position for a nuzzle. Her tongue briefly caressed her lips (and would never come close to his).

His brain stopped working, and the part which took over wasn't really meant for thinking.

"I was just wondering," she prettily smiled. "Speaking as somepony who gets to work in the palace... what's your honest opinion about the centaur?"

Shadowed

The centaur and pegasus looked up at the silvery light reflected from craters as they stood in the heart of the palace gardens, and there was a moment in which neither of them risked breath.

“Do you feel any better?” Nightwatch finally asked. “Um. For being out here?”

Cerea’s right hand instinctively, awkwardly pushed back on the sleeve which draped over her left wrist. Moved the fabric just enough to let cool autumn air touch a little more of her skin.

More than cool now, even in the carefully-regulated gardens. Enough to make her wonder when winter would arrive.

“It helps a little to be outside,” the girl quietly said, with that hand now rubbing at the exposed arm. “We don’t do well with long-term confinement. ...centaurs, I mean. There’s this part of me which almost always wants to gallop...”

“That’s everypony,” the pegasus softly qualified as they moved down the trail which wove around the evergreens. “Everypony in the whole world. Even pegasi. I want to fly, but -- running is different. You can't say it's better in front of a pegasus without starting a fight. Um. Most pegasi. Definitely at least one. But I think it can be almost as good in a different way.”

“I’m not a pony,” felt like a statement which had to be made.

“But you still want to gallop,” was offered as a gentle counter. “Maybe that’s close enough.”

They were both quiet for a while, and then the pair began to move again. The centaur was trying to keep herself as close as possible to the left side of the path, because the pegasus was on hoof and they were trotting with each other. It created a need to make room as a form of apology for her size, even when sufficient space for a full secondary school class tour already existed. The central effect was to create multiple pauses in the journey, during which the girl would try to untangle her hair from low branches. It was a little easier for her fingers to brush the green needles out.

“Were there prisons?” Nightwatch asked. “In your gap. Um. Because you had to have just about everything in that one place, so if anyone broke the law, there had to be some kind of punishment. And if you all have trouble with being confined, then the cells might be enough. But a prison might have taken up space which your herd needed for something else. Only you couldn’t exile anyone as a punishment, not when no one knew you were there. And... um... the other option would probably be... um...”

Cerea sighed. The rubbing got a little faster.

“It was a... tiered system. Two of them. For mares and stallions. But they ended the same way.”

The pegasus waited, because there were times when it was best to let the questions pile up at the back of her teeth. A quick check was made of the Moon-lit trail, just to make sure they were still heading in the right direction.

“With the mares, it started with public discipline,” Cerea eventually continued. “Which mostly meant getting yelled at, in public." Her mother had believed in that one in the same way grass believed in sunlight: near-constant use of the resource, comprehension fully optional. "The idea was that if you were humiliated enough about breaking a small rule, you wouldn’t want to do it again. There were some punishment details: extra labor, the jobs no one wanted to do. But the usual step after that was shunning. No one would talk to you unless they caught you doing something wrong, or you were trying to use their not talking back as a way to say some things. You could take food, keep the gap running, go to bed and do it all again tomorrow — but if you didn’t create a stir, everyone just acted like you weren’t there.”

She’d never really seen that level as an effective deterrent, at least as it applied to herself. When it came to Cerea’s position in the herd, shunning had felt all too close to default.

“With the smaller offenses, most of it was really just about trying to get everyone back in line,” the girl went on. “Because you really couldn’t go anywhere else. There were gaps which were fairly close to each other, enough to risk travel and maybe ask someone else to see if your problem fit in better with their herd. Ours wasn’t one of them. So making someone behave... that was the first priority.”

“And if it was something big?”

Silence, which at least gave Nightwatch the chance to peer ahead. Still some distance to go.

Carefully, “Cerea... It’s the things we have to ask each other. You... sort of implied that some of your stallions might try to — there’s a reason you carried that baton —“

“— prisons are...” The girl swallowed, and the accelerated rubbing began to redden skin. “...a constant drain on resources. If you lock someone away, they aren’t contributing anything to the herd. They’re just taking from it, because they still need everything which keeps them alive. And part of it was — what you said. There’s only so much space to use. So there were only a few cells, because that was all the herd could support. No mare went into them unless every other option was gone. It would be indentured servitude before it went to the cells, and I never saw any mare reach either stage. But there was one in the cells, when I was born. No one ever said what she did, and she died when I was seven years old. You... didn’t go too close to that patch of ground, because sometimes you could hear her screaming. And then the screaming just — stopped.”

Brown fur rippled in the breeze. The centaur stopped moving, and a slow breath shifted the sweater. The sleeve was pulled back down.

“Underground cells,” Nightwatch softly said. “I should have expected that. Did... the herd take fillies to where the prison was? So they could hear what would happen if they were bad?”

Cerea silently shook her head. After a moment, a simple “No,” was added to that, because even overlapping body language needed a little help when the other party was looking up from an awkward angle.

“So there’s that,” the Guard quietly observed. “I... um. I think you know what the next question is —“

“— never in my lifetime.” The girl’s voice was almost calm. “There were other things for mares, and ways around a few of them. You could even get trial by combat under certain conditions, but...” And stopped.

Open, immediate concern. “Cerea?”

“Let’s call that,” the tones of detachment said, “a means of settling civil and family disputes. But with stallions, after a certain point, the punishments had to be physical. They needed something they could be afraid of, because social consequences... for the most part, they just didn’t care. Some of them were too dumb to worry about pain. And if they were big enough, strong enough, stupid enough, and someone really got hurt...”

Blue eyes sought silvery moonlight, and found no answers waiting for her in reflected light.

“...there were different cells,” Cerea finished. “With heavier chains. And I know that twenty years before I was born, there was an execution. Because you couldn’t send them anywhere, so if the cells weren’t enough, if they were so strong that there was always going to be some chance of escape — then there was just one option left.”

Every part of the girl shook. The pegasus waited until the forward regions settled down.

"We don't have that," the little knight carefully offered -- then hesitated, as feathers briefly rustled. "Um. I'm not the best with history. But Princess Luna told me some things, and... it's more accurate to say that we don't have that right now. There's prisons, but... the ones for ponies mostly try to promote reform. Finding some way of making their lives better when their sentences are over. But there's always the ones you can't fix, or crimes so bad that the ponies have to be kept there for life. And... there used to be a death penalty, but it either phased out over centuries or it reached the point where it could only be used for things which never happened. If anypony gets close to going that far, there's..."

This was a shudder.

"...another prison." Two breaths, and then black fur was once again resting in its natural grain. "It's one of the things the Princesses argue about, because Princess Luna feels execution should be an option more often than it is. Only for a very few things, but..." A slow breath. "She says it isn't a deterrent against someone doing the worst, because anyone who would go that far probably isn't going to be thinking about consequences at all. So it doesn't keep anyone from doing something. But she said she's completely sure it stops them from ever doing it again."

They both moved a little more. The pegasus examined moonlight as it played off moss, then picked up her pace.

"They had a fight," Nightwatch added. "After Tirek. Um. Most ponies don't know about that, and you shouldn't repeat it to anypony outside the palace. But the Guards know. The Princesses have to find ways of agreeing on things, and... they couldn't. So they just argued, and -- we don't know how they settled it. They left the palace for a little while, and when they came back, Princess Celestia had the last word. Princess Luna doesn't talk about it, because she thinks it was the wrong decision and she doesn't want to start the fight again. Ponies... get scared when they fight."

It didn't even qualify as a guess. A guess meant there was a chance you weren't certain. "She wanted Tirek killed."

"...yes."

"And Princess Celestia -- thinks he can be reformed?"

Ponies died.
How many ponies died...?

The words had become as dark as the fur. "He's not in that kind of prison. I don't know what the whole argument was, Cerea. I only heard a little of it, and they were fighting for a few days. Which means a lot of the argument took place during parts of the Solar shift. But from what we all pieced together... at least part of it was because Princess Celestia wanted Tirek to explain himself. Not his motive, because that was easy. How it was done. She wanted to figure out exactly how the draining worked, because that was the only way to create a counter. In case someone else came along who could do the same thing. And it's a lot harder to interrogate a corpse. But maybe he decided that he would only survive as long as he didn't talk, or..."

The pegasus stopped. Wings flared, and needles were caught in the sudden blast of wind.

"...he might have just thought it was funnier to make them wonder. I don't know if anypony's tried to question him again, because there may not be words which don't make him laugh. He's a monster, Cerea. He's something which can't care. And he's still alive, when so many ponies aren't..."

The girl waited until feathers had stopped shaking, and tried to be discreet about straightening out her hair. It didn't work.

"I can find something to cut it with, if you don't wear it that long," the little knight offered. "If you want to do it yourself. Or we could ask somepony to get those stylists back."

As changes of subject went, this one felt like a life preserver tossed into a stormy sea: the centaur wrapped her arms around buoyancy and hoped for the waters to settle. "I'll probably trim it myself. They tried to make my hair look like a mane. I don't have a mane."

Not without humor, "Is there anything else you really need right now? Something you're willing to ask for? Maybe not even an object or item, but a wish --"

Immediately, "A shoulder massage. Someone who can just rub them. Work their fingers against the muscles. I --" hopefully "-- I don't suppose you know how to -- I know it's a lot to ask, with all the -- touching, but if you're willing to try, even for a few seconds --"

Nightwatch stopped trotting. Giggled once, and her wings flared again. Just enough to allow a hover in front of Cerea's gaze, so she could helplessly, mirthfully display her forehooves.

"...oh."

"The palace has a masseuse on retainer," the pegasus added. "Just not on staff. She has her own place in the capital. And she can work with her hooves. Most spa ponies know how. But she mostly comes in for the Princesses, when things get really bad. And she'd still need to learn your anatomy, so she'd know what not to do. And --" which was where words ran out.

"And find a way not to be afraid of me," Cerea morosely finished.

"It's not impossible."

The girl went with the obvious counter. "It's not likely, either."

They looked at each other for a few seconds, blue on silver, with shadows from nearby statues of the dead falling across both bodies. And then they moved again, with the pegasus staying in the air. (Cerea was sure that sustained flight at such a low speed and rate of wing flaps was impossible. Magic seemed to be involved in just about everything.)

"You sort of look like you're thinking about something," the pegasus observed.

"Holidays," the girl admitted. "It was -- sort of a random thought. I don't know how deep into autumn this is --"

"-- about halfway --"

"-- and that made me think that I don't know what your autumn holidays are. Or if you have any."

"Um. Nightmare Night was a little while ago. It's... probably a good thing that you didn't get to see any of that. It's partially about disguising yourself as something which isn't a pony, other ponies use the chance to try and prank or scare, and... a couple of people in the capital came up with the same idea. Adolescents. Old enough to think they were smart and young enough to be stupid on purpose. They thought it would be funny if somepony got mad at them, because they were safe when they can't be identified and the anger couldn't reach them where they lived or went to school, there were some pictures to work with and --"

The pegasus was still trying to work out the girl's body language. There was an extra torso to deal with, plus two additional limbs: it complicated everything. But eyes tended to widen with horror in exactly the same way, and that was all it took for the little knight to realize that the centaur had just figured it out.

"-- um... it... wasn't exactly in good taste. They got yelled at. A lot, because ponies were offended. But they didn't get to be anonymous after the disguises got torn off. Or kicked off --"

The larger hooves were beginning to canter in place.

Frantically, "-- but the next big holiday on the calendar is Homecoming! That's more of a celebration! And it's just a few weeks away. You're supposed to --" and the implications were only capable of putting brakes on the suddenly horrible words, while being completely helpless to stop them "-- get together... with your... family..."

The females simultaneously looked away from each other.

Technically, the blush faded first from the centaur: it was just harder to pick out the last remnants on the pegasus.

"...sorry."

"It's okay."

(It wasn't. But as lies went, the words made up a familiar one.)

More trotting, with eight legs now moving forward from the pressure of sheer embarrassment.

"I'm just glad we were able to get you outside," Nightwatch eventually resumed. "It's easier at night. The gardens didn't have to be cleared. And..." Hesitated. "Um. I didn't think you were going to -- react like that. To hearing about what happened with Blitzschritt. So strongly. So it felt like you really needed some fresh air. And I wanted to show you something anyway, after you heard her story. Um. I was planning on doing this before the books arrived. Or trying to plan. So it's good that we can go out immediately."

It was easy to make an emotional connection, when somepony was reading her a true story. For most of the girl's life, stories had been just about the only such connections available. "The Sergeant said... everyone has to learn about a Guard?"

A little more softly, "Yes. Every recruit. It's usually a different Guard for everypony in the group. Why do you think he assigned Blitzschritt to you?"

It was the sort of question which felt like a test. It was also something which Cerea had been asking herself for a while, which meant some level of probably-wrong answer was readily available. "Because she was the only one. The first and last ibex to serve. Someone... singular. And if I pass... that's what I am." Not that the centaur had made it through yet. Or might make it through at all.

"I think that's part of it," the little knight replied. "But there's something which I heard during my training. That if we thought of ourselves as pegasi and unicorns and earth ponies while we're in the armor, it should only be in terms of what we could each contribute to the squad. But in every other way, we had to think of ourselves as -- Guards. And that was the first way to see it. Blitzschritt was a Guard with the magic of an ibex --"

The tone was insistent. "-- she was a knight."

It was becoming easier to recognize the smile. "You keep saying things like that."

"She was. Just like you are. Knights have a cause," Cerea recited. "You both do. You find your cause, and then you dedicate everything to it. She lived for something, she fought for something, she died for --"

"-- she didn't mean to die."

This time, the centaur stopped.

"Um," Nightwatch continued as the hover became increasingly shaky. "Um. She... sort of did, at the end. Um. I mean, I think she knew she was going to die when she made her stand. And she knew that if it worked, her death would mean the Princess lived. I guess..." Forelegs made awkward motions. "Um. I'm not always great with words either. I think I wanted to say that she didn't go into the Guard looking for a way to die. She probably wanted to live. Maybe she wanted to find someone to fall in love with and have kids. Her dream might have been to have her retirement ceremony with three generations watching. A Guard has to be ready to die for their Princess. It shouldn't mean you're always hoping that's what happens. Anyone who signs up because they want to find their death shouldn't be there. You should live for your Princess more than you ever think about dying for her. And when somepony plans on having that as their death... they're gone."

"A knight's death should have meaning," insisted a thousand stories.

"Some Guards live a long time, and die in their bed at home. They made ponies happy, and we smile when we remember them," the pegasus gently countered. "I think that means something."

No response, but for the girl's hands slowly falling open at her sides.

They began to move again, because there were times when awkwardness served as a whip against the base of the tail.

"There's more light up ahead," Cerea observed: a silvery shine was just visible to the left of an upcoming sharp turn in the path. "Is that somepony's corona? I -- don't want to startle --"

"-- no sparkles," Nightwatch answered. "And I know where we're going. It's supposed to be like that. You'll see in a few seconds. This is where I wanted to take you."

She flew ahead, vanished around the curve. The centaur quickly hurried to follow --

-- there were multiple environments in the gardens. Miniature ecosystems, carefully maintained by at least two kinds of magic. And when the girl thought about such environments, she typically pictured that which existed under open sky. She was capable of swimming, but -- it was an effort, the centaur body wasn't really meant for snorkeling, diving was worse, and exposure to Meroune's mother had turned any potential charm involved in visiting a coral reef into just being that much closer to the realm of madness.

She usually thought of ecosystems in terms of what existed in the open. A species which associated confinement with the underground wasn't going to imagine a cave.

There were no spikes of rock hanging from the ceiling at the border of the gap in the rock, nor did spires immediately rise from the floor. It was possible to see some specimens of each somewhat further back in the hollow, because there was enough light in which to do so. Moss grew in the cave, and the proof of its life streamed from its surface as silver light. Chips of mica picked up on that glow, scattered it before reflecting portions back to waiting stone eyes.

There were other colors. Mushrooms shone red: some sort of lichen added a touch of blue. But the statue itself was grey: the sort of grey which takes over when age drains all other hues away. It had been visibly restored several times, with that work being done across uncounted generations by sculptors using different methods: the seams showed upon close observation, but any visible difference in the materials themselves had faded over the centuries. It was a statue so old that for all Cerea knew, the cave had simply emerged around it.

A grey statue of a sturdy earth pony whose expression was patchwork resolute, set under a style of helmet the girl had never seen before. Resting in the mouth of a cave within the embrace of the night's rainbow, as a black-furred pegasus hovered nearby.

"This is Adamant," Nightwatch reverently stated. "He was one of the first Guards. A Lunar. And... he was mine. It was hard to learn about him. It took nearly two moons before I thought I had enough to understand him, even a little. I had to spend some time in Ancient History, when I'm not good with that, and just getting the right books and documents..." with a little smile, "...well, the librarian eventually got better. But I learned as much as I could about him. And... I just thought it was a good night for you to meet him. Because we all get a Guard. And we have to figure out how those Guards relate to us."

The girl was staring. Watching the colors play off stone.

The little knight noticed. "...are you okay?"

"I've..." She swallowed. "...I've never seen anything like this before. The plants..."

Nightwatch smiled. "It's not quite the same during the day. Some things do better at night. There's less competition. And... it's not just plants which can look different under Moon. It's the world. It's.. more beautiful this way, here and there. But most ponies won't believe that."

She flew back, touched down next to the girl, and settled her body down onto the path. Resting, as she quietly watched stone eyes.

After a while, the centaur sank down to join her.

"Is there more written down?" the girl asked. "About Blitzschritt?"

"Um. I don't know. She's one of the Guards we all learn about, as one of the greats. But most of that is how she died. There might be old files from when she was going through training, but it would be mostly notes about how she was doing. Her application could still be around. If she kept a diary, it would probably be in Ibexian, and there aren't many ponies who know how to read it. I could try to help you with an Archives search, but I'm not the best with that either."

"What about the ibex? Wouldn't they have their own books?"

Silver eyes closed.

"I don't know. We can pass through the mountains, but -- it's a lot harder for most ponies to stop there. We all learn about her, at least a little, and... I sort of... stopped reading to you a little early."

The girl awkwardly looked down at the pegasus and found closed lids staring forward into a private darkness, as partial prisms painted the fur.

"There was something written down about the way most of them reacted, at the start," Nightwatch reluctantly admitted. "I didn't want you to hear it just then. Um. It's easy to censor things, when you know someone can't check on their own yet. I should stop doing that."

Carefully, "What did it say?"

"They... blamed her." Hastily, while the girl's vocal chords were still lining up for the shout of protest, "They said none of it would have happened without her. Because if she hadn't gone down, then the Princess wouldn't have come up. And that made it her fault."

"But --"

"-- I know how it sounds!" Forehooves angrily pushed against the dirt of the path. "But there's all sorts of sapients who think like that! They just -- go further and further back, looking for something they can blame. Tracing back every decision until they find the one that's wrong. And it's pointless most of the time, because it already happened. You can't take it back, and when it comes to blaming anyone, when you're just looking for that one moment... the griffons have a saying about that. About why it's pointless."

She knew it was a cue, and also recognized that she had no choice but to take it. "What's the saying?"

Armor shifted across the movement of the breath.

"It's about where that sort of trail always winds up, if you take it far enough. 'And...' Um. 'And no one would have suffered had they not been born.'"

The girl's eyes closed.

Yes.

"Princess Luna quotes it sometimes, when she's frustrated," Nightwatch added. "She says it's the sort of saying which most ponies don't want to think about. Because it makes too much sense. Some of them will do anything not to think about it..."

Birth is where suffering begins.

Or in Cerea's case, somewhat earlier --

"-- you're quiet."

"I am simply thinking. Your words have given me much to think about --"

Carefully, "-- and now you're formal again. Which probably means you're upset."

Both females opened their eyes at just about the same time. Looked at each other, and then mutually found it easier to regard the statue.

"There's just been a lot tonight," Cerea finally said. "The humans have a saying... 'too much to unpack'. That's been every night here..." She'd never understood it until she'd had to face down her luggage in Japan. After the airport had finally found it again. "I -- know it's a lot to ask. But I want to learn more about Blitzschritt. If it doesn't create more problems for you, would you please --"

"-- yes."

Moon, close to full now, continued on its journey. Two tails slowly shifted across the dirt of the path.

"There's at least one more way that you're like her," the little knight stated. "At least to me. I can't say it, because -- you're supposed to figure it out for yourself. And I could be wrong, because it's just the way I'm seeing it. But I'm almost sure there's one more."

Black and blonde strands briefly touched, with the longer doing most of the work. Separated.

"I'll read you Adamant's story," Nightwatch offered. "After you tell me what you think that extra link with Blitzschritt is."

"I'll try."

Touched again.

"I like to come out here when I'm having trouble thinking about something," the pegasus said. "It's usually pretty lonely in the gardens at night. I think he likes the company."

Wayward

Fear wears many masks. The existence of the centaur has inspired a number of such disguises, and her presence makes every last one drop away.

The emotion often tries to operate from concealment, because so many of those experiencing it don't want to deal with what truly lurks at the core. There are ways in which this is similar to the sapient response to pain, and this may be because fear is supposed to be an avoidant measure. But fear, like pain, can be seen as a flawed system. Pain is meant as an alert signal: there is something wrong with this part of your form, and now you must think about how to fix that. And that's how it works -- at the lower levels. When the degree of wounding has mere aches left far behind, with lightning searing across nerves and cells twisting against themselves... that's when pain drowns out thought. You can't work out a plan for how to respond. You can't focus or direct. Existence becomes something spent thrashing useless limbs in a flailing attempt to kick away inner fire, and any partial thoughts which surface on the sea of lava will be nothing more than a desperate wish for the final end.

Fear is, in many ways, the mind's way of trying to prevent pain: physical, emotional, psychological. You stay away from the things which can hurt you. But the system is flawed, because fear can be an emotion of shame. Even for a herd species, so often reacting as a collective entity, there's a need to account for yourself -- at least once the concept of 'self' returns. And admitting to fear? For some, that feels like a confession of weakness. What kind of sapient are they, unable to master such a base reaction?

So fear disguises itself. The adjustment of lips into a sneer, the stomping of a hoof: anything which makes it look like some other reaction is taking place. That's how the sapient justifies their actions, because they're not afraid at all: it's clearly something else. Something which would be more acceptable -- if only to themselves.

But in the presence of the girl...

Fear tries to hide, making itself invisible to the one going through it. A different exterior appearance can be adopted -- but the scent remains the same. It doesn't matter how the disguise tries to come across: it's all terror at the core, and that distinctive odor will cut through any visible shielding layers a sapient might construct.

Imagine what it's like, trying to conceal fear in the girl's presence. Recognize that no matter what you might try in terms of bluster and steadfast stance, it just doesn't work. That she'll know. She'll always know.

Now imagine what it was like for the girl within her herd. To live in a society where everyone always knows.

The gap had need of formality, because words were another way to attempt placing shielding layers over scent. There was also a demand for certain herbal concoctions: things which, applied to skin and fur, could neutralize the body's natural scents for a time. However, those were seen by the mares as a double-edged sword: if improperly brewed, they would have a scent of their own, the only thing anyone could detect from you for hours -- and how weak were you, so unable to master your emotions as to require that level of concealment? And yet the concoctions were brewed. Any meeting between herd leaders (so infrequent during the centuries of hiding, with travel almost impossible across the great distances) would likely see them used on all sides, because negotiations of pacts and trade didn't benefit from having the other side recognize how you were really feeling about the latest subclause.

But for the girl... for the filly...

Imagine it. That you're afraid of coming in second yet again, of disappointing your parent in the best way you know how and can't ever seem to prevent. You're at the starting line for the race, or waiting to begin the fight from your corner of the arena, taking a place in the line which shuffles towards the newest of contests -- and you're afraid.

Straighten your spine. Lock the shoulders. All tail movement is stilled. None of that matters. You're afraid, and everyone around you knows it. Do they decide you're already beaten? Is there a moment of sympathy which none will dare to voice? Or are they simply seeing you as being weak, nothing worth associating with...

And when you lose again (because you almost always do and when you win, you're immediately shunted into fighting against those you can't hope to match), when you face your parent... she knows how you feel. The air is saturated with your failure, and that's the way it will be for every last moment of your life. All of the time spent within the herd.

The filly was afraid, and so there were those who always saw her as weak. Because they could scent the fear -- but not the reason for it. And when emotions are so readily apparent, there are those who dismiss anything so petty as cause.

And still... ultimately, fear is all about how you use it. Or for those wearing the disguises, how it uses them.

Pain prevents thought. Fear distorts it.

When the terror is thinking for you...

The sisters are watching the protests again.

It's becoming a routine: something which disturbs elder and younger in equal measure. They try to share as much time as possible, during the period of waking overlap. First and last meals together. Consultations. Every so often, pursuits through marble hallways because each not only knows exactly how to irritate the other, but recognizes the sibling need to occasionally knock somepony down by a few hoofheights. A reminder that no matter what others might believe, they are simply ponies.

Things they do together, and some of those activities are enjoyed. Even bureaucratic drudgery becomes easier when it's being confronted by a pair. But for the last few days (and twice in each cycle), they each find themselves making their way to the balcony. The meeting generally takes place somewhere along the hidden passageways. There will be a pause for the younger to cover them in illusion, and then... they witness what their kindness has wrought.

The younger is fully immune to all but her own magical cold: the elder forever serves as a source of heat. And yet there have been times when both have shivered, because winter will be brought into their nation soon. The coldness of the protesters' hearts serves as an early frost for the soul.

Each has whispered dark jests, watching from the tower: the most recent was about how the increasing chill may be about to finally prove the existence of windigos. But there's no real humor in it. The words fail to serve as distraction for the mind while the eyes search for the spread of symbols. Ears pick up on the latest version of the chants. And the scent... in this kind of population, it's easy to pick up on the emotion behind all of it. The real one, even as those who march and shout refuse to recognize the true source of everything.

More members of the general population show up every day. Those with real jobs just put in a few hours when they can spare the time. Some parents have been bringing their children.

CUNET is still there, of course. But in terms of both proximity and what almost looks like actual communication, the sisters are starting to perceive the beginnings of a very strange alliance.

Mrs. Panderaghast is at the head of a unicorn superiority group. The siblings know it, and each has enjoyed a mirthless laugh when that mare screams that anypony openly saying so is demonstrating the only real bigotry. But all of the pony species host those who feel themselves to be superior. There are pegasi who will do anything they can to avoid descent, believing that the possession of wings has truly put them above it all. Some earth ponies decide that coronas and techniques mean nothing compared to one solid kick in the snout, followed by spending the rest of their lives seeking opportunities to demonstrate.

When looking at those groups who believe themselves to be better, CUNET is simply the loudest, among the largest and, at least when it comes to fundraising, the most organized. And they have a few earth pony and pegasus members, all suffering from a near-fatal combination of low self-esteem and horn envy. But when it comes to the other clusters which float atop the sea of ponies in a manner similar to pond scum... you wouldn't normally expect them to associate. There's a certain fundamental disagreement in core philosophy which nopony among them can get past without casualties.

The sisters are familiar with all of the major groups: trying to maintain harmony means keeping an eye on those who wish to break it. Each can spot the leaders from a fortieth-gallop away. And that's why they know that some of those ponies are now in direct proximity. Talking.

The next dark jest comes from the younger, and concerns the remote chance for a permanent improvement in relations.

But they both understand what's happening. The pegasus representative exists in a self-imposed state where he's better than any earth pony or unicorn. The earth pony knows him to be wrong, and the unicorn has Proof that they're both idiots. Everypony in that triad hates everypony (and usually everyone) else -- but each has told the others that they loathe the centaur.

They have agreed that Equestria is for ponies. They'll just work out which ponies later.

The sisters have studied such groups, and done so across the course of centuries. They used to be more prevalent, especially during the Unification. The vast majority of settlements which emerged from the Discordian Era were single-race, saw the others as competition, raiders, and thieves -- something which wasn't always false -- and so had some natural objections to being Unified. But in modern times...

There was a question as to how such groups brought in new members. They investigated, and found certain commonalities in the majority of fresh recruits.

They were ponies who didn't have friends.

They were ponies who didn't have much of anything at all.

Quite a few of them were poor. They generally wouldn't have outstanding looks: those who did usually lacked personalities to match or had been especially unlucky in love. Their marks were among the most common icons, which meant their talents weren't anything which wasn't duplicated over and over again throughout the rest of the population. They were ponies leading the sort of lives which faded into the background: still the main character in their own play, but it was one which nopony else cared to watch.

They were discontent with their lot. Few of them would understand why anypony's life should be better than theirs. Some refused to put in the effort required to improve themselves: others had simply failed too often to try again. They were often dreamers, and the younger knew that what they dreamed about was respect. Finding some way of making others recognize their greatness, when the world itself had not.

They wanted to be special.

And then somepony would see them, because they were so easy to spot -- at least for anypony who knew to look. And that pony, their friend, the first friend they'd had in so very long... would tell them they didn't have to do anything to be special. Because they already were.

They were an earth pony (or a unicorn, or a pegasus).
That was what made them special.
More than that: it made them better.

They were so often ponies who had nothing: friends, resources, rare skills, or intellect. And here was somepony who told them they'd had the only thing worth possessing all along. Wings (or a horn, or raw strength). Look at all of those ponies (and others) who don't have that! The new recruit was better than all of them! They were born better, and it was something which took no effort to maintain...

It was all they had wanted. To be special. And now they could exist in that state, knowing that roughly two-thirds of a nation had just become their lessers.

It was also something like believing that you were superior due to the birth hue of your fur, only with a lot less public laughter and a total lack of ponies dousing you with dye.

The sisters did whatever they could to remind each other that in the end, they were but ponies -- and part of that came from the fact that in form, they were two out of what was currently an all-time high for the alicorn population: four. They had access to every category of magic but that of the crystals (and both were wondering what would happen when the inevitable emigration from the Empire truly began). Power which no other ponies possessed, along with living without aging and a responsibility which felt as if it might never end. Something which could so easily set them apart. Which had the potential to make them think in a different way. Believing themselves superior.

All of the groups were a reminder of what would happen if their minds began to gallop down such channels. It was usually enough.

Still... they had wondered what it had to feel like, believing such things. They were each thinking about it again, staring down with worried eyes at that strange alliance. To exist under the faith that the most important thing about yourself was your race. It didn't matter if others were smarter, stronger, faster, wealthier, because all of those things were either transient, falsehoods, or conspiracies. You didn't have to be educated because you were a pegasus. You didn't need to be skilled because you were a unicorn. Mere social niceties were useless compared to the status bestowed by the body of an earth pony. Perhaps it was the only notable thing about you, and that made it all the more important. And for all of them, it was something they'd always had. There was nothing in the world which could take that self-imposed superiority away --

-- except for the touch of a blade.

Strength would vanish. Wings drooped. Coronas winked out.

That was what had brought the groups together.

There were so many times when fear passed itself off as hatred.

The centaur understands that the old stallion isn't afraid. Not of her, at least. She's fairly sure that he's capable of experiencing fear, but also feels that he mostly does so in regards to what might happen with others. His recruits, after all, and there's a certain degree of possessiveness to that.

She recognizes that what he's doing on her first day back at the training grounds wasn't born from fear. It still doesn't make the experience any less excruciating.

He hasn't asked her about Blitzschritt, possibly because she was expecting him to do so and he seldom works with what she perceives as natural timing. Instead, the day began with a rather thorough, expert chewing-out and with the flat teeth of a pure herbivore involved, that left her ears feeling as if the remnants had been flattened against her skull. The Sergeant wanted to know why she'd kept her olfactory capabilities hidden. This was followed by not letting her get in any degree of excuse for it, which was also the point where 'expert' began to nervously step aside so 'epic' could have the floor. And once the mountain stopped bouncing back the echoes...

The Sergeant doesn't smile. It's almost impossible for the girl to picture him as ever having been young, and Nightwatch went further than that. In the little knight's opinion, the old stallion was never born: he simply rasped his way into the world. But once the yelling stopped and the newest round of exercises had mentally wearied her to a new level of perception, she started to see an aspect of youth in him. As far as the centaur is concerned, the Sergeant is (in his own way) acting exactly like a colt with a new toy: eager to find out what it can do through pushing it to the breaking point. It's just that in this case, he's on the verge of breaking her nose.

There was a brief discussion about the pony sense of smell, because he wanted her to understand where the baseline was -- along with where the edge cases had to stop. The majority of ponies could, under normal circumstances, pick up on the scent of emotion -- if those feelings were present in bulk. Somepony approaching a herd which was under the sway of a single mood could probably figure out what that mood was, in the last second before they potentially fell to it. Some monsters had their own reek which was detectable by anypony with functional nostrils, and a number of marks provided a magical enhancement to the sense: trackers could manifest that kind of capability, but it was more often seen in cooks.

She's beyond all of that. (Any centaur qualifies there and in her own herd, she would have been no better than second.) And as far as he's concerned, it's a weapon.

The training grounds have been set up differently today. The wind changes every few meters, because he wants to know what her range is. How well she can detect from downwind, if there's any trace odors which get through against an upwind current. Various sources of scent have been placed in the area. Some of them are subtle, and he needs to find out what the least she can detect might be. Others are foul, because he saw how the scent bomb disabled her and so he wants her to fight against that: get as close as she can while still maintaining control, then hold her ground while he adds something worse to the mix...

The Sergeant believed her when she told him about odor discrimination and how she'd trained herself to fight against the stink of the human world. (It was the first time she'd ever really told him anything about humans.) He just claimed not to understand why she'd ever relaxed.

The most recent order has her approaching, one forced hoofstep at a time, something dark and bubbling. She can't quite find a way to tell him that he's just about replicated the stench of freshly-coated blacktop, mostly because she'd probably have to explain blacktop. And as she approaches, he asks questions. What the most subtle scent she's ever detected is. Whether there's anything where registering presence would set off an instinctive gallop. How much she's identified when it comes to the emotional reactions of ponies, which means he also needs to know which gaps have to be filled in.

She feels she understands why he's demanding to know all of it, along with the reason he's postponed the first team exercise for a day. But it'll be a long time before the girl recognizes why he's truly so angry about her not having said anything, and won't take anything like 'It's natural for me...' as an excuse.

There can be another side to such questions. This was demonstrated by the creator of a false documentary, who had endless queries regarding how she slept, why she had adopted a traditional Japanese style for her room instead of bringing in a rustic French look, and... how her anatomy worked. He kept telling her that the best way to make humans relate to her was to show them what was most human about her form. All of it, because he also wanted her to take off the blouse.

Others wanted to know how fast she could gallop. Could she outrun a motorcycle? A car? What would they need to use in order to catch her? How strong was she, and how much would be required to overwhelm her?

Humans would ask liminals all sorts of questions. Some of those inquiries came in public, no matter who was around them or how loud the objections were. A number decided to simply acquire the information through physical contact. The centaur had been groped. One had wanted to know how firmly Papi's feathers were attached, and made the determination through yanking. (The harpy had been cradled against her for a while after that, until the sobbing stopped.) And all of it had happened while the humans involved knew the liminals weren't allowed to anything which could be interpreted as fighting back.

It was easy to hear the words which lurked beneath the questions.

How different are you?
What's the best way to stop you?
Is there any means of destroying --

Ultimately, that was why she didn't tell him about the Second Breath: not just the need to keep something to herself, but because she was listening to the echoes which still resounded in her ears from Japan and France alike. But there are many possible reasons for questions. And in the time to come, the girl will recognize why the Sergeant acted as he did.

He needs to understand what she's capable of because he's trying to keep her alive.

Some of the humans were trying to figure out the best way to kill her.

Fear can masquerade as curiosity.

It's quiet in the classroom. It's... been quiet for a while, and the teacher still isn't used to it. There should be failed attempts at subtle whispers, notes being poorly passed between students. She knows her class, because she teaches in one of the school systems which felt that children might have an easier time learning without a constantly-changing babble of voices in their ears. It means that as they advanced, she moved with them. It's been several years with the same group now and considering just who that group contains, most of her trips to professional conferences eventually wind up listening as a number of her peers try to apologize.

She can't claim to love the chaos any more than she can say, with any degree of a straight face, that she's capable of fully controlling it. There are those on the school board who felt that meant the ongoing disasters of the Crusade were her fault, and the blame eventually turned into a prod: out of Ponyville East, reassigned to the North schoolhouse because they weren't completely sure about their ability to fire her either. The transfer lasted for all of ten days, and it mostly got that far because after a trio of substitutes quit during the first nine, the lead board member personally stepped in on the last because keeping reign (and reins) on her old class couldn't be that hard.

The teacher got a raise out of that one, although she mostly asked for it because it was the only way to make the stallion temporarily stop begging.

In truth, it's become easier over the last sixteen moons or so. The Crusade ended, because... because it had to end: like so many futile enterprises, it contained the seeds of its own destruction from the very first day. That did a lot to lessen the number of disasters, although the count hasn't exactly dropped to zero. Some of her students will be connected to the Bearers through bonds of blood and love for life, and with the rest -- it's still Ponyville.

Even so, things change. It's the nature of both time and simply growing up. She can look around the too-quiet classroom from behind what so often feels not so much like a desk and more like a barely-anchored raft, looking at those changes whenever she likes. Wider wingspans here, an increase in height there. Somepony's trying to style her mane again and doing no better than the first few times.

Truffle's lost weight. It started as something she was glad to see: the colt (and so much closer to stallion now) had been approaching the point where the extra mass could be unhealthy. But the tenth-bales continued to drop away, and now... she's been watching him during the lunch break. Seen how he just barely picks at his food.

There are times when Silver's body jerks upon her bench. Others when it's more of a start. Glasses and wood jump in concert, and one crashes down after the other.

Sweetie and Diamond now sit at adjacent desks.

That happened on the first day of the new session. She lets them choose their own desks, because it's her first chance to see how the social strata is settling: she can always separate troublemakers later. But even after the Crusade ended and Diamond began to find some degree of truce with the world, there was a distance between the fillies. Something which felt as if it might never be bridged.

School began again, and did so even after everything which had happened during the summer. They all trotted in, and then... Sweetie and Diamond sat next to each other. Without a glance, without a word. Those are held back until recess. They talk now, although the tones are low and tend to stop whenever anypony else gets too close. Rest close together in browning grass, within beams of sunlight which never seem to warm their fur.

The teacher knows what young love looks like. Crushes, the times of first experimentation. This isn't any of it. They aren't attracted to each other, and they aren't quite friends. They shared an experience, and it pushed them together. United under the crushing weight of guilt.

She can't claim to love the chaos, and the same could be said of the fillies...

...before.

That's where some of the guilt comes from.

She's spoken to Mr. Rich a few times. The Belle family, Truffle's parents. All of them. She knows exactly how many of her students are currently seeing therapists, along with the number who should be. Her class is too quiet because the youthful joy which creates the typical level of wondrous disturbance (it would be wondrous now, if only it would start again) has yet to fully recover. They need help: something she recognizes on the level of her mark. A way to heal. But the one who stepped in may never do so, the source of their pain is locked away, and...

The letter from the Princess is currently in her desk. She spoke about it with her class, because there are some orders which the teacher cannot give. (In the end, it was a request.) As it is, she won't be bringing all of them. Some came to her after that session, waited for privacy and then said they couldn't face it. Two more were willing, but -- if there's ever a situation which required parent-signed permission slips, it's this one: the same drawer also hosts a pair of furious NOs, along with one demand for her immediate resignation just for having asked.

But the rest will be coming. They're just waiting on arrangements, and the setting of a final date.

There are other classes of students who could have been the first, all over the continent. It might be possible to find another group which was just about equally wounded, especially in the capital. But these are her students, and they need to heal. Her desperate hope is that this is what allows bleeding souls to finally stop the flow.

That's her motive for going.
She should have spent more time asking about theirs.
Fear can disguise itself as confrontation.

It's not that news doesn't reach the mountains. Current events are just typically regarded as being unimportant. The ibex exist in a history which slips across the slopes of time, and that means they really don't have much regard for minor pebbles captured as ink. There are boulders which don't necessarily get much of a reaction.

When Sun was hours late in rising? There's a level of gratitude for the existence of the Princess because the majority of sapients both appreciating waking up in the morning and having a morning they can wake up to -- but they don't think much of her as a person. The Princess has always made an effort to gallop with the times, fearing that retaining all the beliefs of her youth would lock her into a statue made of outdated perspectives: still flesh on the outside, but with stone having paralyzed the brain. To the ibex, this makes her dangerously changeable. Unreliable, and they continue to hold that view even after nearly thirteen hundred years of relative orbital stability.

(Relative. The annual Return Day eclipses, created through a unique effort of sibling teamwork, are seen as a bad sign.)

More time spent in the dark would have led to the panic which gripped nearly all of the world on that too-long night. But for the duration they experienced -- they felt they understood what the cause was, which made them choose to simply wait it out. The Princess was unreliable, and so all the absence of Sun indicated was somepony who didn't understand why she wasn't allowed to sleep in.

(The reaction to finding out the real reason wasn't much better. A thousand years with one ruler, and now there were two? Some nations just didn't know how to maintain stability.)

By contrast, the signs of Discord's escape didn't quite reach the mountains -- or rather, would not have gotten that far without personal attention. The barricade points of the Discordian Era were, in part, created by the presence of sapient populations: the sisters believe that the gathering of thinking minds in relatively large numbers created some collective ability to resist weaker, purely passive changes. It's different for the ibex, because their magic is rooted in stability. The draconequus could have taken the mountains, at any time he desired to do so. It's just that... he would have had to work for it. Just a little (in his opinion), which made it into the sort of thing which he'd decided to wait for. Having fun elsewhere, easy mirth erupting from the ground itself just before soil converted to sea... there was so much more of the planet where that could be accomplished with relative lack of effort. The ibex were simply being saved for later, because there's nothing quite like the humor found in watching the faces of those who thought they were safe.

So during the escape, there was blue sky over the peaks -- and, off in the distance, surrounding purple. The ibex recalled their history, checked the records as a form of backup, reconciled to the long haul for something which didn't really affect them, began the preliminary process of eventually considering the possibility of debates on what to do with any potential refugees -- and by the time the first potential subclause had almost been checked off, everything had been restored.

They never noticed the changelings, because no member of any hive has ever tried to infiltrate ibex society. A species with the call for a personal twisting built into their very being recognized a certain difficulty in pretending to be the opposite. Besides, the appearance of altered hooves doesn't work on the slopes.

And with the most recent event...

As a rule, ibex don't really keep up with current events, because they don't see pebbles as distorting the flow of time. Some of the boulders can even be worn away. But there still has to be some tracking for what's going on in the rest of the world, just so a few of them can explain the things which are in no way important. It means that every so often, a designated reader will go down the slopes until they reach the level where the rest of the species begin to consider crude attempts at mountaineering equipment. It'll take a few minutes to empty yellowed missives from the waterproof box, and then some level of review will occur. If there's anything regarded as being vaguely interesting, it'll be mentioned to the herd queen.

Tirek never reached the mountains, and part of the reason was the entity in the palace's tallest tower, forced into what he would regard as insulting stability through the forced stillness of air. But the ibex learned about that centaur. They came to understand what Tirek had done, and decided that it wasn't important. He had been defeated: that alone meant he couldn't have been that much of a threat in the first place. Besides, if he had reached them, they would have stood against him. They had maintained in the face of Discord. What could Tirek be, compared to that? One who had not been able to face their collective power, against one who would have simply --

-- taken it.

...no. They could have withstood him. They maintain.

It's been a few moons. Winter is coming, and while ibex have no trouble moving in the snow (which sometimes refuses to crunch under their hooves), truly heavy quantities of missives, newspapers, and the very rare package ordered by someone who decides there's a need for outside goods... it can become damp while being dragged. So it's time to bring the next load up, just to have that much less for the next time.

There's news. There always is. No portion truly affects the mountains, and that means none of it is important.

But there's also another centaur.

The designated reader mulls that over for a while, and then switches into a sort of mental rumination. After a while, the cud of consideration decides it's something the herd queen should probably know about. So the articles are packed away, the bundle is hauled to a proper elevation, and after those few who received boxes drag them away in shame, the reader heads off to the briefing.

The new centaur is discussed. It takes very little time to decide she is in no way important. She didn't reach the mountains, and being in the custody of the foolish palace means she will likely never come anywhere near the ibex. She has no reason to approach. And if she did... they would stand against her, steadfast and unyielding. As they have stood against everything across the centuries of sliding time, as they would have stood against that which drained magic and now, if necessary, the one who --

-- negates it...

...she isn't important. The rest of the world is trying to deal with something new: their eternal mistake. A change. But the mountains remain.

It could be said that the ibex are afraid of change, and there are times when fear disguises itself as dismissal. And ultimately, that effort will fail.

The centaur will come to the mountains.

The little knight is becoming fed up with her bed.

She misses her old mattress. She'd never realized just how thoroughly the springs in the lost apartment had become molded to her form. There were probably faint divots off to the sides, because she's been known to flare a wing during an especially-active dream. And as for the blankets... it's sort of a galloping joke among the Guard that no matter how spartan the government service life is supposed to be, every last pony among them permits themselves some form of luxury. (Nopony has ever been able to figure out what the Sergeant's is. The best guess is that he occasionally allows himself to sleep while prone.) Acrolith spends a good portion of her salary on exotic spices. Squall collects graphic novels, and has never quite been able to explain the why. And in retrospect, the pegasus liked to snuggle under the deepest, thickest softness available.

(She'd even been considering saving up for a Cumulus: a miniature cloud squared off for bedding and saturated with techniques to the point where anyone could sleep on it. And as for the company's pillows -- pegasus heat-shifting, enchanted into that part of her bedding, would mean never again having to flip anything over to the cool side.)

But now she's living in the palace basement. It's made her realize that there's something to be said for support thicker than a single hoofwidth. When it comes to the blankets available in the barracks, she's starting to suspect the last resupply of anything bedding-related was performed while the palace was in the middle of an ancient budget crunch. The current projected thread count of any local sheets has a high end of 'one.'

It's something which encourages thoughts of moving.

The Princesses have offered her advances on her pay: the implied interest rate for any such grant tops out at zero. Anything she might need to help her find a new place in the capital. But she doesn't feel like it's safe. No Guard has much of a problem with risking her own life, but the little knight feels as if she's currently a danger to everypony around her. It's not impossible to have the same faction strike twice, and the last time...

She asks for updates on the foal's condition, as much as she can get away with. The answers never change.

Moving has to wait until the world is a calmer place, and she doesn't know how long that might take. So for now, she's reconciled herself to the barracks. At least the bathing area is good, and...

...if she could find a place -- she doesn't feel as if she should. Not just yet. Because she sort of has a roommate, at least as far as that term can apply for two sapients whose schedules don't share all that much waking overlap. And the girl...

She's wondered what it was like, in that strange household. If the centaur was more confident there, or... if the presence of five live-in rivals made everything worse. A game which never declared time-out, where one opponent was something very much like a sister, another was at least cared for, and only a single female could ever win. Dining, laughing, living with those you were forever at war with, in the battle for a single heart.

The pegasus isn't even sure if any of them could have won. Interspecies marriages, outside of the three main pony races... there are a few in Equestria. Crossing Guard once mentioned there were four extant griffon-pony unions (something much more common in Protocera), along with the fact that he was sick of the non-jokes about how the omnivore of the pair had just decided to stock a live-in snack. It's somewhat easier for ponies and zebras, at least in avoiding the need for an adoption agency: those unions are cross-fertile. And anypony who works in the palace long enough will see the Bearers pass through, along with getting the chance to witness how the little dragon stays so close to the white unicorn mare.

There are times when the interest is there, and a few where those desperate hopes find themselves fulfilled -- but only a few. And the hardest requirement is finding that other who's not just interested in exploring the social and sexual possibilities offered by another species, but who loves you. An experience for a night can be located more readily than the union for a lifetime. And the human... was he simply intrigued by the possibilities created through having so many females pursuing him? Were his tastes so wide-ranging as to find potential contentment in any one of them? Or would he have... tried them for a while? A touch of fur, the brush of feathers, and... whatever the other three could offer, followed by a return to his own kind.

Perhaps he had been better than that. It was possible that he had loved the girl in all ways but the physical. The pegasus doesn't know, and when it comes to the centaur...

...the little knight can't leave the barracks. Not yet. The girl needs somepony who listens to her. Somepony who doesn't run, who can tell her that... she's better than she believes herself to be.

When there's an attack, a crisis, something which threatens to hurt or worse -- Guards get in the way. And the pegasus believes that right now, it has to apply to a girl who's forever on the verge of attacking herself.

The fear has departed. The pegasus will not.

For the filly, it is as if every square centimeter of the gap has turned into a watching eye.

She understands about cameras. They are one of the things she's been taught to fear, at least when wielded within the hands of a human. (Years later, it will become another reason for her to distrust the one who falsely claims to be making a documentary, along with yet one more source of loathing towards those who record her morning gallops from smartphone lenses which peek out around the edges of curtains.) There are a number in her gap, but... they're hobby items, and expensive ones. The difficulty of smuggling anything in becomes compounded when supply drops, and just about every bit of electricity her herd can reliably tap is provided by batteries. Additionally, chemical compounds aren't just difficult to transport: they stink. It means that for those few mares who take an interest in photography, the best recourse is instant film. No reeking darkroom isolated from the rest of the herd, no desperate hoping to somehow acquire one of the few digital models which are powered by flashlight-suitable batteries alone: just point, shoot, hold your nose while the internal chemical load does its work, and they're done. But technology marches on and as digital photography continues its conquest, the availability of such things drops. By the time the filly's plan truly begins to work towards its conclusion, liminal gaps around the world make up nearly a seventh of all such orders, and when the supply finally runs out...

The filly has been taught about cameras, which includes why the herd doesn't have access to most of them. She knows a little about micro-lenses from articles in magazines years past their prime, and while she seldom leaves the literary realm of knightly glory for the even more distant dreams of other genres, she does recognize the existence of monitor walls. Screens relaying information from dozens of rotating units to a single observer. She also understands that electricity is a short-term luxury in the gap, and so such setups are locally impossible --

-- but she's planning to commit a crime. And for a filly seeking to break the oldest of rules, every part of the gap feels as if it's watching.

There are cells buried within the soil. There was a time when standing in the right place would let her hear the confined, because the prison has to be ventilated and so sounds travel through passages designed for air. The centaur voice was made to sing: an endless concert of pain has very little trouble rending its way through the octaves, and a mind which can no longer think about anything but the walls cannot care about what those sounds do to a quavering filly's heart.

To be caught... her family is one of the oldest, her mother among the strongest, and that is why the filly believes that being caught will make her into the next occupant of that echoing cell. Because her mother will surely decide that as with everything else in the filly's life, the other way to prove that the parent is fair would be through treating the daughter more harshly than anyone else.

It terrifies her. There are times when she has to isolate herself until the scent of her own fear can fade, others when those terrors make her retreat to the bathroom for relative privacy and the protection created by billowing steam. The herd does have hot water, the filly is an adolescent now... long bathing sessions are easier to explain.

The bathroom also gives her an extra place to plan.

It's harder than she ever thought it would be. She has to memorize every last patrol route, and memorization is the only option. Any privacy created by the implications of a personal bedroom only exist until her mother decides they don't any more: the filly's room can be searched at any time, generally under the pretense of cleaning. (Or rather, checking the results after the filly has cleaned, because personal examination is the best way to determine how inadequate those results were. The white glove test exists and with the mother's unfailing vision in play, is mostly redundant.) She can't sketch maps, because there's no safe place to hide them. Her home is out of the question, and when she moves the quest for a safe spot outside... every part of the gap has been explored. There isn't a single knothole in a tree which isn't excruciatingly familiar to someone. It feels as if any difference she creates, the smallest disruption to the earth where a stockpile has been buried -- it would have to be noticed. And once those supplies were found, there would be a chance of backtracking everything to her...

(The easiest solution would be asking a friend to hold things for her. She... can't fulfill the central requirement.)

She's familiar with the means of eliminating scent from objects: the best ways to cleanse those smuggled items which arrive while still radiating the stink of the human world. The filly has been using whatever she can get away with -- but even those stockpiles are limited, and if her mother notices that she's taking too much...

It feels as if there are too many moving parts to the plan. The majority of those are created by patrolling mares, and all it will take to destroy her is a single adult wandering slightly off-course. It's unlikely, because the routes are so well-established as to have hooves moving on a level between instinct and autopilot -- but it could happen. The filly has been wondering about the best ways to watch for such deviant routes. The construction of a homemade periscope had initially felt like a possibility, but it's one more thing to carry and the tube itself would likely be noticed, especially if light flashed off the upper mirror. It might be more practical to just find a way of -- watching for a longer time. Eventually, she will have to turn and gallop: there's no helping that. But perhaps if she could find a way to gallop backwards...

It's hard to find a way for the plan to work, and becoming more so with every passing week. There are endless opportunities for everything to go wrong, and too many arise from her own skin. When it comes to the day of enaction, she has something to try -- but there's too much time before that, and every last minute in her own household could see panic drift away from her fur as something very close to fog. Her mother cannot be given the chance to scent the trepidation. Nervousness. Anything. The filly has to master herself, because anything else might have her own body betray her.

Sorrow is shameful. Angst is shameful. She cannot allow herself to feel, not in a way which others can detect. She has to appear normal, for as long as she can. It's the only chance she has.

(Nothing about her existence is normal. The filly has no knowledge of her own state, and the young mare has yet to even partially reconcile anything. It is recognition buried on a level below dream.)
(It is rising.)

She can't draw maps: one more thing which could be found -- but accompanying patrols has allowed her to also memorize that much more of the terrain: that was part of the point. Storing supplies remains a problem, but she won't be carrying all that much to begin with. She simply has to account for every factor she can because that way, when she fails, she can at least tell herself that she tried. It's something she'll have to tell herself, because no one else will care to hear it. Especially as a poorly-chosen defense.

Perhaps that will be what she screams from the heart of the chains, the last echo to bubble up from the soil which surrounds her cell. That she tried.

She's afraid of the prison, of being confined forever. That fear has to be hidden, masked, made to look like nothing more than devotion to the herd. But the filly does not fear that she will die in the gap. She knows that to be the totality of her future, just as it's been for every one of the herd in all the generations which were lost.

That's why she's leaving.

Tactless

There were, perhaps, two kinds of deadline. Those the girl was aware of, and the ones which only presented themselves to her in the final instant before time ran out.

The majority of her life had been occupied by the former. The next loss in a race against older fillies would start in fifteen minutes, and there was nothing she could do to stall which would not be seen by her mother as exactly that. The first plane is supposed to take off at this hour, so up the ramp into the cramped cargo hold and gain the initial lesson in a new education: namely, that humans often regard deadlines as something which only happens to other people, and so a flight which is supposed to launch from Nice Cote d'Azur at three in the afternoon is actually going to be sitting on the tarmac for two more hours while no one is allowed to leave it. Enjoy your first chance at claustrophobia.

The filly has a plan.

Enacting the plan requires setting a date.

And at the instant she does so, disaster stakes its place on the calendar. Waiting for her to catch up.

But there were also occasions when you didn't hear the ticking of the clock. Her first trot to the household had been one of those: hoping, hoping with her entire being that she had it right and there was a chance for her to find a human partner, someone who would fight alongside her, guard her upper back while riding atop the lower, perhaps someone in Japan was indeed worthy and the months of an exchange student's homestay suddenly offered endless chances to prove it...

Her hooves had unknowingly sounded out the beat of those final seconds before the deadline arrived, tapping their way up the street to his door. And then there had been two other girls, they'd gotten there before her, and she was in the fight of her life. Something where there was but a single prize, and the only way to be victorious was to come in first.

She had existed in a near-constant state of low-level war. She had shared a household with those who were, on the most basic level, battling against her. Technically, she had been sleeping with the enemy: Miia's early morning tendency to sleepily head for the highest body temperature in the house had occasionally made that literal.

It was war, and they were the enemy. That would have been the easiest way. The one where you never felt regret or pain for anything which happened to any of the others, because any defeat they suffered was simply one more rival dropping out of the fight. It... just hadn't worked out that way.

Cerea had been the knight upon that battlefield, or had at least tried to be. She was also the housemother, the schedule-setter, the rule enforcer, and she was all of those things because someone had to do it and it clearly wasn't going to be any of the others. Deadlines existed for things like sending homework in, updating papers, corralling girls out of whatever part of the house was about to be reconfigured next, and who else was going to make sure they were honored? Time passed: there was no way of stopping it -- but every girl had her own way of perceiving that flow. Lala could be too patient: if one deadline passed by, then another would surely come around again. Miia was distractable, Rachnera hated to operate by whatever standards someone else had set down, Suu was still trying to get a grip on the concept of 'clock', and Mero's movements were synchronized to the backbeat of internal drama: surely finishing (or, given the mermaid, tragically failing) in the actual last possible moment would make for a better story!

Papi was the worst there: the most trouble accessing any degree of memory and, too often, barely caring about it. The harpy often existed in something close to an eternal now, which meant she also expected that to be the time at which food, joy, and playtime were delivered. But there were exceptions to that state, and... they had been among the worst moments, because there was a human saying -- a curse, really -- for which Cerea had never been to track an origin, and Papi was its living embodiment. That the truest source of pain was to be just smart enough to know how stupid you were, and on the harshest days, when all Papi could remember was that she was supposed to have done something crucial, talons almost tearing at her hair as she desperately fought to recall just what it had been, shivering and crying as the slim body twisted against itself from the pressures of self-hatred...

They almost all hugged Papi, when it got that bad. The harpy existed in the now, and so perhaps comfort too could be something which felt eternal.

Each girl had their own way of seeing the world: their own personal distortion of time. But that was just perception of the flow: seven minds finding unique ways of tricking themselves. Time seemed to stretch, slow, compress and speed up -- but it always passed.

There were distortions in the last days leading up to the meeting. Lurking in the future was the moment when thought and breath would stop, placing cold hooves onto the final path.

It was the morning of the meeting with the children.
That much more of her time had run out.

It was something like getting ready for a date, and that very much included the last-second desperate attempts to once again solve (second-guess, change, clothing had been flying in all directions but one and multiple discarded blouses were draped across empty bunks, she had barely managed to keep her current bra on and that had already been changed three times) the problem of what she was going to wear.

In Japan, her wardrobe had been limited: the airline had managed to lose most of her luggage, which was an especially impressive feat when she considered just how much of it had been traveling in the cargo hold with her. But some pieces had made it through because they'd been shipped not as luggage, but under heavy freight. Her training armor had reached the new country, and... one date had seen her spend just about all of their limited time together clad in steel.

It had been something of a detriment to hand-holding. (Any true attempt at a hug would have likely broken ribs.)

Now she was trying to decide what she could wear in front of colts and fillies. If there was anything in Ms. Garter's creations which allowed the slightest chance to assuage terror. And sweaters had been put on, taken off, flung hither and yon because that was the sort of phrase which appeared in so many stories and if you were going to be flinging sweaters, hither and yon was as good a choice of directions as any.

A shorter skirt? She would essentially be lying on the floor, trying to bring herself that much closer to their level. Perhaps it was best to have just about the full length of her legs exposed, letting them see more of the familiar -- except that in a standard resting position, her legs would be folded. Any length of skirt sufficient to create decency would still drape them. Unless she hemmed the front alone, which would require her to figure out skirt hemming in --

-- she checked the watch, and immediately wished she hadn't.

Nonononono...

Not the pink blouse: she was half-convinced that it had soaked up too much ill fortune from the press conference to ever be worn at a meeting again.

Definitely not the yellow.

There was no circumstance under which she was going to show cleavage. She had certain doubts about whether she should display her arms. Being double-jointed would allow her to hold them behind her upper back for an extended period without major discomfort. So if the name of the game was to eliminate the unfamiliar, once those were out of the way, the next thing to do was clearly --

-- there were limits to what binding could accomplish, trying for even minimal results would likely bruise her to the point where breath became agony and in any case, there probably wasn't enough elastic in the world.

Hair. She had to do something about her hair. There was something she could use now: Nightwatch had brought in some mane-styling equipment, and one tool had enough of an edge to cut. Because the stylists who had worked on Cerea before the press conference weren't there, possibly weren't coming and even considering how little their efforts had actually accomplished, probably would have at least been able to provide a second opinion. Or, better yet, an order. The centaur was going to wear this, because that was what the Princesses had dictated. It would mean that for whatever happened, at least when it came to appearance, none of it would be Cerea's fault. Other than on the level of form and birth, and no one would have suffered had they not been born...

She desperately went for the trimming scissor-blade's jaw grip, awkwardly took it up in the fingers of her right hand and lashed her tail until she caught the end of that fast-swinging length in the left. How much tail fall did pony mares permit themselves? She should have been paying more attention. And just randomly hacking at blonde hairs would create something unsuitable for going out among humans, but the ponies wouldn't know that. She opened the blades --

-- they squeaked, and that high-pitched burst was almost matched by the frantic sound which emerged from her own throat.

Both noises stopped. The girl desperately turned towards the one occupied bunk --

-- black wings shifted under the blanket, and fabric rustled against the natural movements of life maintaining itself. The pegasus continued to sleep.

The meeting was taking place at mid-morning, because the students needed to get up at a normal hour, have breakfast, gain transport to the capital (she had been told they were coming in from Ponyville, she wished she knew a few facts about their town other than the rough capacity of its cinema), and get home long before sunset. It wasn't taking place any later because Princess Luna would be one of the chaperones and asking the dark mare to remain awake too far into the day... there was already enough tension built into the meeting without adding that.

The meeting wasn't taking place too early, or too late, or at any time other than too soon. But it was happening during Nightwatch's normal hours of rest, and that meant Cerea would be alone.

(The little knight had offered to stay awake. To take whatever potion flipped her sleep schedule, to let her be there during the day. But Cerea already asked so much of the pegasus, publicly staying close had cost the Guard a home, and to request that the mare accompany her before the children...)

The centaur existed on the exposed edge of a potential panic attack, a single heartbeat away from having breath turn into hyperventilation as hooves desperately pounded towards anything which might serve as a hiding place for a body too large to readily conceal itself, in a palace where the best shadows had long been marked on a Guard-accessible map. And the only thing keeping her from getting worse was having her only friend asleep on a bunk, because that meant all the fear had to flow forth in silence.

This blouse. That sweater. Not that skirt and she could hear hooves approaching, there were hooves on the way and she needed something, anything, this was a soft sort of dove-grey and that didn't go badly with her fur (although she wasn't sure it really worked with her skin), the skirt could be blue and she was vaguely aware that there was some part of her own world's history which now had her upper and lower torsos at war with each other --

-- the door opened.

"Ready?" Acrolith half-whispered.

No.

The girl forced a nod.

"Do you want a stylist?" (Cerea immediately decided that any exasperation perceived in the next sentence had been imagined.) "When I left, the Princesses were still talking about whether it was best to use one again or just let you arrive in a more casual state. But there's enough time to do something with your hair --"

No more braids. Her ears were already seeking concealment and if all else failed, she could flip her hair in front of her face.

"No," she just barely whispered as her hands compulsively tugged at the fabric near her waist: blouse down, skirt up. "I... don't think it's going to get any better than this."

"We could --"

Her hands moved to her waist, turned palms-up, slowly raised until they were at the top of her head.

She could change her clothing. Twist her hair into endless configurations and styles. But she couldn't give herself a snout any more than she could force two torsos to become one, or take away a tail and everything, everything behind her forelegs while somehow being granted wriggling toes. That was something for dream. In the waking nightmare of her reality, she would always be a centaur.

"-- oh," Acrolith softly said. "Did..." The earth pony took a careful breath. "Did you eat?"

She had consumed food and given the speed of the metabolic process, there was a chance that the amount which had come back up was less than what had gone down. Also, breath mints obviously counted. Cerea nodded again.

"I'm just taking you up," the Guard told her. "I won't be in the room. The Princesses are already there. The children come in after you do. But it's a new part of the palace for you, and this way, you don't get lost."

I also don't get the chance to make a break for it. Not that Acrolith could keep up --

"-- I understand." She swallowed, which just about doubled her nutritional intake for the day. "I... don't think anypony told me what they picked for the location. Where are we going?"

They moved through a long, wide hallway which felt like a cross between a church and an art gallery, with multiple portraits and captured moments worked into the walls using a myriad of methods. The majority had been rendered in rock crystal, gleaming faintly from outer and inner light as centaur and earth pony passed -- but there were also a few relief sculptures, a pair of ancient oil works, and Cerea's attempts to look at anything other than the path ahead discovered --

-- at first, she decided that it was just a similarity of appearance. But then she scented lime, and recognized that the ponies had independently found the technique. Not every exposed surface in the palace was marble, and a true fresco could only be painted directly onto plaster. The ones in the long hallway were kept near the ceiling. (Humans liked to work on ceilings, but asking the pony body to lie on its back and arc the neck towards the roof was just begging for multiple injuries. Even unicorns would have been working with awkward neck cricks.) The colors were bright -- but some portions had extra clarity to their hues, and one fresco only seemed to possess what might have been its original palette along the edges. Hints of wall brackets for the mounting of scaffolding suggested there was some restoration work in progress.

Back to the rock crystal portraits. Some were of individuals, others had groups, and... there were monsters. Ponies battling against monsters. A rainbow theme figured prominently into several of the newer-seeming pieces, some of which seemed to feature the same ponies. Two areas where spacing suggested portraits had to be were covered with heavy cloths: works in progress, repairs, or revisions being made.

They kept moving. The scent of lime became sharper, turned into something fresh. She looked up --

-- the scaffolding hadn't been taken down yet. But another cloth was awkwardly tacked to that section of the upper wall, with both droop and the strength of the lime stating that the coverage had been done in a hurry. Any ramp used to gain access to the heights had been removed -- but that presumed it hadn't been a pegasus at work. She could smell lime and fresh paint, some of the natural chemicals which went into the brightest colors, xanthic acids were present and --

-- she almost stopped, then and there. As it was, her hooves faltered, and small nostrils flared as they desperately sought the information which would clarify the near-impossible.

That's not an equine scent.
It's almost lost in the paint, and that would distort things. In this case, it mixed it all up enough to weaken the base. But I know that isn't a pony. It's all wrong. It was there an hour ago at most, it came down and departed in the same direction we're going...

But the Guard had picked up on the hesitation.

"Something wrong?"

"No," she lied, which gave her the chance for another breath.

They had to keep moving, and it allowed Cerea to track the scent, at least until it went into a narrow corridor on the left: a passage they weren't following. But it was sharper at floor level, away from the paint. Easier to identify, for the aspect she could determine at all.

It's... canid?

She hadn't really seen any pets in the palace. They existed, at least in the sense that keeping animal companions was part of pony culture: Nightwatch had told her that the Solar Princess kept a gossip-free phoenix (and that just about everypony on both staffs cordially loathed the thing), while the dark mare had yet to look towards that kind of company. That, along with the duplication of species across worlds, suggested it was certainly possible for somepony to have a dog.

A dog which had been on a high scaffolding, attending to the newest of frescoes.

Two percent of Equestria's citizens were something other than ponies. Japan had seen Cerea meet her first kobold, although the sports club entrepreneur had been much closer to lupine. It wasn't hard to believe that a fully-sapient canine species could exist here, and one was working in the palace. She just hadn't scented any traces of that party's presence until now.

Under other circumstances, it might have reassured her. If she somehow got through her training, became part of the Guard (and nothing in her could truly picture it just then, hooves helplessly shuffling towards what she knew would be disaster), she wouldn't be the only non-pony among the palace staff. Perhaps there were others whom she had yet to find. Still the only centaur, but...

But she looked at rock crystal windows, paintings and sculptures. Failed to recognize most of the monsters, didn't know who any of the mares or stallions were, couldn't tell if the dragons were metaphorical or real, and had no idea what that one yak was doing there. And as she moved, she thought about the scent, because it put off thinking about what was coming for just a little longer.

Canid...

Imagine a society of ponies. Let them think, feel, and love. Give them language, art, and song: the songs can be especially important. Allow them to express themselves in any way they can imagine -- but every time they do so, adjust for the fact that these are ponies. Even with magic and a third of the population possessing wings, nearly everything they do must account for the equine form. Paintbrushes are held in the mouth: musical instruments need to be operated by hooves. It creates differences, and will do so throughout every aspect of their civilization.

They think, feel, and love. But they aren't human. There is no visible aspect of the biped about them, and yet it could still be said that there is something about them which mimics what one of the greatest of writers to ever walk the girl's world said about the heart of that strange species. That which appears at the point of contact when the descending angel reaches out to meet the rising ape.

They aren't human. They never were. But perhaps there are ways in which all souls are the same.

Imagine a society of ponies.

Now let those souls express themselves through dance. (For one lavender example, this can be done poorly.) What's required?

Well, for starters, you're dealing with hooves. Hard-set keratin can do a lot of damage to multiple types of flooring. (The girl is fully familiar with this issue, and continues to cordially despise poorly-fit circles of adhesive felt.) This means being very careful about what those hooves are dancing upon. Marble is right out: the echoes would drown out any music within the first few steps, and any stone porous enough to absorb sound isn't going to do well with repeated impacts. Without access to artificially-created materials...

We're probably going into the realm of the softer woods. Something which can stand up to all of those hooves without showing damage, especially when magic can enhance durability. But that allows some muffling of the stomping -- at least in selected areas, because it's a society of ponies and that means three species which are effectively wearing tap shoes at all times. So subsections of the central floor can be made of harder materials, meant to be used for those songs where the dancers become another instrument within the orchestra.

Expand the area. Ponies aren't as tall as humans, but they take up more room on the horizontal and they generally aren't going to be quite that close together. There are slow dances, but that doesn't mean that we're looking at compositions in which partners are constantly in physical contact. Even flank-to-flank becomes awkward in a hurry. For that matter, without benefit of arms, picking up your partner and swinging them around is going to be limited to fairly powerful unicorns and very strong earth ponies who decided to improvise while not realizing that when the base of their partner's tail hurts that much, sex is off the table. And the bed. Pretty much the entire house, but the chance to explore The Wonderful World Of Breakups has only just begun.

The area needs to be lit. Magic allows for the placement of glowing strips in carefully-recessed areas, but it won't hurt to have at least one grand crystal chandelier: ancient, imported, and if it happens to come down (again), it's guaranteed not to break. (The same can't be said for anypony caught underneath.) The marble does beautiful things to the highlights.

Dance often requires music and the height of readily-available sound replay technology is the gramophone, so we'll need an area for a live band. This is a stage, although careful examination of the little gap between floor and base suggests it can be recessed into a pit at need, either as a whole or in sections. Currently, it's occupied by a wooden box. This comes with a small door on the side, is tall and wide enough to accommodate about a pony and a half, has a clear window at the front, and is resting on a hastily-installed dolly track. The box occasionally shifts from side to side, because the camera operator within is a little nervous about having to be here and isn't quite sure where the best shot is going to be. Her opposite, somewhat-lower number in the box on the other side of the room is having similar difficulties. Neither is certain that their tracks are going to be enough, especially when the thin silver wires which stream from and through the box keep slowing things down.

There's going to be a refreshment area, of course. Mugs with hoof loops are still present, but all bottles have been removed and the common trough has been filled with water for the duration. There's still a few small tables and benches: a partial ring which starts three meters away from the perimeter of the dance floor, but they're small: the children's section has turned into the whole of the thing.

The silver wires stretch up to the walls and ceiling. Each terminates at the edge of a metal disc, slightly concave, ranging from three centimeters across to forty. This is something the girl was told about in advance. Film itself works as it does on her world: chemically. But the simultaneous recording of a soundtrack requires magic, and so the bronze discs have been set up around the room. This requires the wires to criss-cross sections of the air on a level which prevents any flight higher than three meters over the floor and would clothesline any pegasus who tried. The area gives off the impression of having been decorated with streamers for a strangulation party.

(They're making a documentary of sorts. The girl has more than a few bad memories about those who claim to be making documentaries.)

There's a feeling of age to the huge ballroom. Where hooves will not echo, time does. To listen closely is to move within a thousand lingering beats, being careful not to step through the ghosts as you go.

A few windows exist, but they're very high up and mostly serve as places to put extra discs. The scant portion of sunlight which reaches the room is currently hitting the front of the stage. One ray is cut by the horn of the white horse. She's standing near the base, and her weary eyes are using the light to read a rather florid newspaper article. (The girl just barely gets close enough for her limited vocabulary to make out a single word before the Solar Princess puts it away: opinion.)

The room has good air circulation: pegasus magic guarantees that much. It only feels as if every bit of atmosphere is pressing down with enough force to collapse withers.

One grand entrance exists: heavy, huge closed double-doors at the far end of the room, well away from where the girl came in. They aren't airtight, and that makes it possible to pick up on the scents which await on the other side. (Age has an olfactory signature all its own, and so does youth -- but there are ways in which all fear is the same.) There are multiple exits: the girl's nose tells her that one goes to a seldom-used kitchen, while others lead into restroom areas. All of those doors are open, because the guests who will soon arrive need the reassurance which might come from a choice of ways out.

The girl has no such luxury. Acrolith closed the passage behind her.

A ballroom for ponies. There's a pair of camera operators present, but their job is to stay out of the way and as far as they're concerned, being in the boxes gives them a measure of safety. (This is a cross-species, cross-world delusion: that to take a picture of something happening means the event is obligated not to touch you, because clearly that would ruin the shot.) For nearly all purposes, they can be dismissed. The true current population is two alicorns and, forcing herself to cross the distance which will bring her close to them, one centaur. Her hooves are taking their time about the task, the last possible stall -- but something else has reached the Princesses first, traveling well ahead of the source, and neither shows any reaction to that presence at all.

The girl had believed the alicorns were incapable of scenting her fear. Now she knows it. Because if they could, the meeting would have been cancelled on the spot.

"I won't do you the indignity of asking if you're ready," the Solar Princess quietly offered. "It's not something anyone could really be ready for. I just need to know if you're still willing to try."

The girl silently nodded, and the alicorns mutually evaluated the tightness of the movement.

"Then let us review," the dark mare stated as several small constellations in the slowly swaying tail began to rearrange themselves. "There are ten who made this trip, accompanied by their teacher. We will bring them in slowly. Should all manage to come inside, the occupants of this room will total sixteen. And that is the maximum. The presence of Guards might not offer reassurance, and should any express their fear through attack -- that is where Princess Celestia and myself will step in. Physical efforts will be stopped: magical ones negated. We consider ourselves to be capable of dealing with the task. For the same reason, your sword remains secured at the training area. Attacks are something you will not have to deal with, and --" the dark eyes smoothly met smaller, near-frantic blue ones "-- being without it makes you into less of a visible threat."

Helpless...

"What if..." Cerea swallowed, felt the little gulp pass under the disc. "What if some of them -- break? And set off..."

"As the reporters did at the conference?" the dark mare asked. "Once the children enter, their passage through the enchantment/threads/weave will briefly encase each in a private current of air. It will only last for a short time -- but in those moments of first sighting, their fear will be theirs alone."

"It's the best way we have to fight herd instinct right now," the white horse softly added. "We told them -- and their teacher -- that if any of them feel like they need to leave, they can. There's nothing keeping them here. They can wait in any other public section of the palace, or go to the gardens. But they have to stay on the grounds, because -- we'll need to get them past the protestors when the meeting ends. We don't need any of the children winding up in that group."

"There will be no Guards in this room," Princess Luna decreed. "But they will follow any children who leave it, at a distance. Ready to keep potential problems from compounding."

"No soakings unless it's necessary," the Solar Princess added. "It's not that warm outside, and puddles on marble..." The pastel borders of the flowing mane twisted. "In the worst case, Princess Luna and I will teleport them directly back to Ponyville."

The dark gaze of the younger shifted down.

"Is that what you are wearing?"

It didn't really reach Cerea's twitching ears as criticism so much as it offered a very temporarily postponement of execution. "I can go change --"

"-- an interesting choice," Princess Luna decided. "Soft hues. Fairly neutral. Nothing which clashes with skin, hair, or fur. I would call it suitable."

There were several ways to respond after witnessing a lifeline being cruelly snatched away, and the girl chose to take a deep breath. Then another, even deeper, fighting to reach the limits of lung capacity and rib cage --

-- Ms. Garter's somewhat-tight creation held, and so there was no need to send her back to the barracks for a new bra either.

"...merde."

The hiss of wires lasted less than a second. Both alicorns glanced at each other.

"In the interests of not creating a second incident in the Bulkhead style," the dark mare decided, "I choose not to tell you exactly what that translates to until well after the meeting ends. Shall I presume that hearing you curse of your own knowing accord for the first time is due to nerves?"

The centaur instantly blushed.

"I'm sorry --"

"-- take a moment," Princess Celestia gently offered. "Breathe, let it all sink back down. You have every right to be tense, and if the worst that happens today is our learning that your native tongue contains profanity, I'll consider the day a win."

The blue eyes closed for a few seconds. Breathing slowed, and clenched hands were eventually forced open.

"Better?"

"Yes," the girl lied.

Her eyes opened again, which let her catch the alicorns looking at each other for the second time.

"One last thing, for you alone," the white horse said. "Before we do the rest of the review with the children present. Somepony may try to touch you. We'll stop a kick, but -- if they just want to touch, and you're okay with the point of contact -- try to let it happen."

"Should you not wish such interaction, voice your concern and we will halt it immediately," the dark mare added. "But children learn through interaction, and this can include the physical. Touch might allow them to perceive you in a new way. As something --" the pause felt a little too long "-- more real. But should that attempt tread on any personal taboos, or if they try to touch you in a place which you consider private, signal us. A curling of your smallest finger will suffice." Her head tilted slightly to the left. "Or do you wish to forbid any and all such contact in advance?"

They won't touch me.
No one will ever touch me.

"No." It would be like forbidding herself to fly through flapping her arms. There was no reason to deliberately eliminate what was already impossible.

"Then let's start," Princess Celestia gently offered. "I'd appreciate it if you rested at this edge of the dance floor. Keep yourself directly in front of us." Or as much as Cerea could be, with some five meters between them. "Belly and barrel against the wood. And then I'll open the door."

It was temperate in the ballroom. But there were many distortions to be found in fear, and one of them began to alter her perception of the thermal as she carefully lowered herself onto soft wood. It was a rather grainy sort of brown, speckled with black spots. She didn't recognize the scent or sight of it. Possibly something which only existed here --

-- it had absorbed the sound of her hoofsteps. But her skirt served as a drape, falling down over her flanks rather than closing into a tube under her barrel. It meant her fur was directly against the wood, and she didn't know if it could absorb her sweat.

Watch the door. Don't move. Don't move at all...

Her tail twitched, and that alone nearly served as the whip to lash her out of the room.

Sunlight flared, surrounded the left door. Boxes shifted on dolly tracks as it swung open, and the filming began.

The teacher entered first: an earth pony mare, and Cerea couldn't identify the hue of her coat: close to magenta, but with too much purple in it for that. Pale green eyes surveyed the ballroom, moved to the centaur, almost jerked left in an attempt to escape -- but then slowly, carefully forced themselves back, just before they locked onto the target. The mare watched Cerea during just about every second of their time in the ballroom, and it was the careful gaze of a guardian who was constantly evaluating a threat.

A colt came in after that, and the girl began to recognize the problem with the private air bubbles: they kept the initial bursts of scent away from her. A tremble in grey, too-thin legs told her about the fear, and the unruly brown mane tossed from side to side as the colt visibly forced himself to keep moving -- but all she had to go on was his body language, and that was the way it would be until the personal currents ran out. If there was anything subtle lurking in the olfactory world, it would have to wait.

Some entered as individuals: an exceptionally white pegasus pushed herself forward with wings as much as legs. Then two entered together, and the color of the one on the left made Cerea start -- but the yellow coat was too soft, too pale, and she forced the image of surging vests to recede for a little while.

She noticed the bow in the mane, and wondered how the little earth pony had gotten it on. But that meant an extra moment of attention, and the filly shrank into herself under the weight of what had been meant as simple curiosity, while the orange pegasus who'd accompanied her managed to force out a countering glare.

Cerea looked away. And by the time she managed to glance back, there was a rather scruffy-seeming unicorn colt coming in, corona surrounding and compulsively folding a sheet of paper. Another earth pony, and this one nearly pivoted on his back hooves, came close to spinning himself into the floor --

-- the next earth pony was right behind him, and the white-streaked mane (something with a small indentation at the top, as if a near-constant source of pressure had recently gone missing) made the colt's twisting blue ear vanish within its flow. She seemed to be whispering something to him: Cerea could just barely make out that words were being said, but had no idea what they were --

-- it was enough. He steadied, began to shift forward again. The pink filly glanced to her right, at the little white unicorn who was so close by her side. More of a two-toned mane and tail for that child, all of it trembling as she moved, every hoof just so, shifting position only when the pink earth pony did --

-- but the pink earth pony didn't move in the same way. Every limb changed position in a way which felt familiar to Cerea. She wasn't sure why, because nothing about the way a pony moved should have reminded her of Japan and the household, but each step brought her mind to the familiar hallways and --

-- no. The ceiling.

The pink filly moved as if each of her legs was being pushed forward by surges of fully-internal pressure. A being of flesh and fur operating limbs coated in imaginary chitin --

-- which was when she realized the filly had an aura.

It was uncertain. It flickered in and out. But it was there at least some of the time, and it suggested a pony who was just starting to come into her own power.

It flickered and as the filly truly looked at Cerea for the first time, it flickered into solidity.

She didn't pull back. She was in the presence of the Princesses: the filly was nowhere close to that. But there was a force of personality there, something which was trying to focus itself upon a purpose --

-- the aura had solidified when the filly had looked at Cerea.

Her eyes were blue, with a hint of grey. Large and liquid, like everypony's eyes -- but there was no softness there. None at all.

The white unicorn trembled. The pink earth pony shifted a little closer, and they came the rest of the way together. Stopping with the other students, at the far end of the dance floor.

The girl had never truly danced. She had taken no part in the time for love, stallions saw dancing as a fight with a disappointing lack of injuries, the one human she'd told herself she cared for had been so much shorter than she, plus her lower body took up an embarrassing amount of any dance floor and she couldn't look straight down to see where her forehooves were in relation to his feet...

...none of the children had fled. No filly or colt had broken. They simply stood, watching her as a trembling, vibrating line, roughly twenty meters away.

Somewhere behind her, Princess Celestia smiled. She knew the alicorn would begin with a smile, just as surely as she knew it wouldn't help.

"Thank you for coming," the Solar Princess gently said. "Just through entering the ballroom, through staying... you've done more than some mares and stallions could have managed. I hope you feel proud of that."

The white unicorn's trembling accelerated. The pink filly pressed tightly against shaking fur.

"The time allotted," Princess Luna took over, "is very nearly whatever is required. To a degree, the meeting ends when you wish it to. Should all parties be capable of asking and answering questions, then it may go on for some time. However, there is an obligation to send everypony home in time for their dinners. And if it ends quickly -- then it ends. But I hope for it to end when all parties have no more to say."

"No matter when it wraps up, we'll get you home safely," the white horse promised. "And when it comes to what you can say --"

The base of the teacher's tail went rigid.

"I'm not happy about this," declared the voice of an angry guardian. "I wrote you about this --"

Nothing in Cerea was surprised at tone or defiance. She'd seen what was in the mare's eyes. A parent could become an unstoppable force in defense of their child, and a teacher took the role for all in her charge.

Some parents --

"-- I know," Princess Celestia quietly said. "And my position remains the same. There are those who say that freedom of speech doesn't apply to children, Ms. Slate. That any rights are only gained with adulthood, just in time to find out how many means exist for others to try and take them away. None of that is going to happen here and now. The only way this works is if your class can speak freely -- and in this case, that means without censorship. Questions can't be stopped, or there won't be questions at all."

"You may ask whatever you wish," Princess Luna told the children. "Keeping your queries within the realm of decorum would be recommended -- but you shall not be halted for words alone. No matter what is said here, your teacher cannot reprimand you for it, nor may your parents levy punishments. True freedom of speech lies upon this room --" and Cerea wondered if the dark eyes had just narrowed "-- but even without other forms of punishment, that freedom still includes another: one of the most basic. The freedom to accept consequences."

"And the fact that you can ask Cerea anything," the Solar alicorn calmly continued, "doesn't mean she has to answer. There are answers she doesn't have. When it comes to anything she might consider rude, she's perfectly free to tell you so, and then leave it at that."

"Ideally, queries shall flow in both directions," the dark mare stated. "You have been asked to meet her -- but ultimately, it would be best if all involved met each other."

The girl was expecting nods: the most basic sign of obedience to what wasn't (but could have been) an order. But the children didn't move.

"Whenever you're ready," Princess Celestia gently encouraged. "Anypony can speak. As many questions as you need, or as few. If you don't have anything to say, you can remain silent. But after agreeing to come and meet her -- a chance to speak with her, when so many others wouldn't -- I'd hope you have something to say."

The air felt heavy and too still, with none of the scents reaching her --

-- the yellow earth pony cleared her throat, and took the smallest possible hoofstep forward. Keratin grazed the absolute edge of the dance floor.

"...yeah," that filly said. "Um... yeah. We've been..." Which was followed by a tiny cough. "...readin' a bit, here an' there. The newspapers an' stuff like that. Ah can say we've all been tryin' t' get ready for a while now."

Cerea blinked.

The centaur was still frightened. Bracing herself for the worst of it, when the worst was the only thing which could happen at all. And in the crowded, churning midst of her own terror, there was still enough room to wonder about the intonations. Admittedly, there were hints of regional differences in some of what reached her ears within the palace, but time living in the capital might have worn away some of the larger variations. Even so, she had no idea why the disc was steadily, without hiss, rendering the sounds of the American South --

"An' we all talked 'bout it." (The pink filly briefly glanced at the yellow.) "'bout how it felt like there were things which got -- left out. Questions adults don't ask an' when somethin' ain't been asked, ain't no answer gettin' into a paper." Shakily, "But that's why there's foal questions, right? 'cause sometimes, we ask the stuff which the grownups don't think about no more."

Right down to double negatives, offered the briefest distraction. How?

"For starters, the papers made it kinda feel like y'came outta nowhere," the filly observed. "An' Ah guess y'did, for Equestria -- but not for your home, right? 'cause there usually ain't one of somethin'."

Cerea's ears briefly twitched backwards, towards another source of sound. She wasn't sure where the little quarter-skitter of hooves had originated, but suspected it represented the sound of somepony in charge deciding that total freedom of speech might have been a mistake.

"So mah first question," the little yellow earth pony told her, "is kinda basic. Do y'have parents?"

This was all a mistake...

"Yes."

Head and mane bow dipped a little.

"Both alive?"

Her arms shifted inwards without her full awareness, locked under her breasts in a position similar to what she adopted when going to sleep. She just usually didn't put anywhere near that much grip pressure on her skin.

"Yes." And now every part of the watching world would begin to suspect a full herd. That much more to fear. "They were when I -- left."

"What do they do? For a livin', Ah mean."

"My mother is..." She had to force the breath. "...sort of -- in charge."

Under different circumstances, the question could have been funny. "So you're the daughter of a Princess?"

But the girl couldn't seem to find a smile, and was glad for that. It might have shown teeth. "No. Being in charge isn't hereditary. It isn't an elected position, either. It's about showing you can do the most for the group. That you're the best suited to lead. Being her daughter doesn't come with any special privileges. It just means..." Her shoulders slumped. "...I have to work harder."

The yellow filly's initial takeaway seemed to be "So there ain't no Princesses."

"No, there are. I knew one. But it usually didn't matter very much to her. And she wasn't in charge either. Her mother was the Queen."

Several of the children shuddered. So did the teacher.

"Queens ain't got a good reputation 'round here," the filly said. "Little too -- buggy." And before Cerea could even begin to work out why that word had been on the far end of the translation, "How 'bout your dad?"

She distantly wondered why her arms were starting to hurt.

"He..."

There was no way to have known her name.

"...does manual labor. Sometimes." Which was just about all you could rely on stallions to do, and it had to be suggested as a contest of strength. "It's mostly plowing."

Openly curious now. "Any siblings?"

"No." She had been a lone foal, and that was a true rarity in the herd. The population had to be maintained. To have but one child, especially from someone who was among the strongest...

The yellow filly nodded. Stepped back, even as the unicorn colt's corona put the folded piece of paper down.

"Sounds like there's a lot of centaurs out there," he decided. "How far away?"

"There's no way to reach it." Was she speaking too quickly? "It's a distance which can't be crossed --"

"-- but you got here," the colt with the scissor icon cut her off.

"That was magic," emerged as frantic protest. "Not mine, not anyone's. My herd doesn't have magic --"

"-- so there's a herd."

Another little skitter from behind her. It seemed louder this time.

They're winning...

"They can't get here." Her tail was starting to shift, tucking itself against her body, trying to hide. "No one can."

Orange wings flared.

"Things usually don't happen once," the pegasus shot out, just before she came down again. "If you could get here, then whatever happened to bring you could bring in more centaurs."

They haven't found the summoners. Not a hint, not a clue. They don't know how I got here, or how to --

"I don't want it to happen again!" No, don't raise my voice, both of the white ones just pulled back... "That's... someone else who's trapped."

unless it brought him, him and him alone, we'd be stranded together and
he has a family, I saw the pictures, it's his family

"But if you didn't do it, then you don't know how it happens, or how to stop it!" the fierce pegasus declared. "Or maybe you've been lying, maybe you came here on purpose --"

The Princesses weren't moving. Weren't stopping any of it, and the teacher was just watching Cerea. Freedom of speech --

"-- I'm not," and her breasts were heaving, she was clutching at her own arms to keep them from coming up to her head, she was breathing too fast, too hard, "I wouldn't have ever come if I'd had the choice, I wouldn't have come to a place where everypony hates me, not where there's nothing except fear --"

The pink filly's right foreleg came up. Went down.

It was a little sound, in its way, and yet there was still a moment when it felt like the only one in the ballroom.

All of the words stopped. All of them, as that aura flared again.

"I have a question," the filly said. "Lots, really. And what you just said kind of goes into one of them. So I'd like to talk now."

She glanced at the trembling white unicorn. The two-tone mane shifted with a bare nod, and the pink filly stepped forward. One full step, putting her forehooves on wood.

"You arrived in Equestria, somewhere outside Palimyno --" stopped. "Oh. I'm Diamond. I wanted you to know that, because you really should know our names. Everypony has one. Even the ones who aren't ponies, or who aren't anything any more. Anything real."

The words had been steady. But the aura had shivered, and it was the relentless inner pressure which made the filly take another step. Something which was beginning to disperse the private air bubble.

Cerea didn't have the filly's true scent yet: not enough of it had drifted forward. But she could feel it coming, just as surely as she could hear the cameras tracking every forced step.

"Names," Diamond repeated. "Apple Bloom talked to you at the start. Then Snips, and that was Scootaloo after. The white pegasus who spends most of her nights crying is Cotton. Truffle was the first through the door. We all have names. It's important to know what names are because when someone's gone, when you keep asking about them over and over and nopony ever talks to you, a name is all that's left --"

"Diamond." From the teacher, starting to move even as the Princesses still wouldn't, taking the first step towards her student --

-- the filly simply glanced in that direction.

"No."

The teacher stopped.

"That's Miss Cheerilee," Diamond informed the girl, continuing to move forward as she spoke. "She can punish us for saying the wrong things. Except today. Today is when I get to say no, and a lot of other things besides." Which was immediately followed by "You showed up somewhere near Palimyno. A couple of gallops away, I guess, since it took you a while to get there. And the papers said you vaulted the bushes because you were scared and hurt and looking for help, so buildings meant people and someone, somepony, maybe even a centaur who could help you. But they were scared. You know they were scared. But you were in Equestria, and you got out of the cell, so Equestria had to come and get you. The Princesses. And you said it, didn't you? That you would never come to a place where everyone's scared, where they hate you..."

She was halfway across the dance floor now, and her hooves had never made a sound.

"I said I had questions," Diamond said. "This one is from two ponies. Sweetie Belle and me. Sweetie's the one I came in with. Sweetie is the pony I almost died with. Everypony in Equestria is afraid of you, and you know it. There's a whole world out there, a great big planet with lots of countries and a whole other hemisphere."

One more step. One more aura flare, and then the centaur was within scent and power. Burned by fear and rage which existed as something other than disguise. The righteous fury of a leader who had seen those under her charge hurt, with nothing she could do to stop it.

The filly was small only to sight. For every other sense, she became the world.

"Why are you still here? Why can't you just go away?"

No one moved. No one spoke. It felt as if there was nothing she could have said, that there was no point to words existing at all. The disc could only translate sounds. There was no magic to convey an inner scream which had been building day by day since the first moment she'd realized that there might be no means of returning home, that she was trapped among those who would never touch or accept or love, the scream was in her ears and her tail was lashing against her own right flank and her hooves were scrabbling against wood, she was barely keeping herself from getting up, staring down at the presence which kept coming closer and the scream was getting louder --

-- but she spoke.

She spoke because she knew that words would only fail, and she couldn't fail if she didn't try.

"I... this is -- there's ponies trying to figure out how I came here, how to send me home. They might need me for some of that. And the Princesses --" she had to keep a grip on herself, and the segment of that which expressed itself through her hands was beginning to bruise. "-- they were kind to me, when nopony else was. Kind enough to give me a chance. It's hospitality, it's a debt which has to be repaid. I have to be worthy of kindness, to earn it --"

The tiny gasp had come from behind her. She wasn't sure whose it was.

"-- you could go anywhere!" And the filly was still closing in. "There's escorts and air carriages! Just tell the palace where you're going and they could always bring you back, maybe in seconds! He didn't reach all of the other nations! He did it here! So maybe the other countries won't be afraid of you, right? Because they weren't there, they didn't feel it! But I did! I feel it all the time when I go to sleep, I feel it over and over and so does Sweetie, because we were the last!"

The hoofsteps never echoed. The words did, even as the filly came to a stop two meters away. Staring up at Cerea from the heart of aura and fury.

"I don't --" Her words were stumbling over themselves, fighting for space in her throat and the panic attack was coming, it was coming "-- I don't know what you mean, I --"

These words were much softer.

"We were the last," Diamond quietly said. "He was coming. Everypony was trying to evacuate, except the Bearers. They were trying to figure out what they could do, so they were going to stay. It's what they have to do. But he was getting closer. It's funny, watching something move when it's that big. It's like seeing a mountain trying to creep up on you, except that he didn't care if we knew he was coming because he knew we couldn't do anything. His laughter got to us before he did. And he just kept coming, taking his time because there was magic in the Everfree which he could steal. He'd already finished with Canterlot, and that's where my daddy was. He didn't mean to be, he didn't want to be. He just couldn't get out of the city, not when just about every pegasus was grounded and the escorts couldn't teleport any more. Some of them got their magic back, and some of them were just... dead, they were dead because they dropped out of the sky from too high up and couldn't get into a glide in time. But he was trying to do anything to reach me, even without magic, because that's what a daddy does. Trains aren't magic. They're steam. He got one running. But he didn't really know how it worked, so he nearly made the boiler blow up, trying to reach Ponyville. To reach me."

Freedom of speech.
The prison of hearing.
The girl couldn't move. She only shook and trembled and waited for spreading inner cracks to finally reach her skin.

"And I was just galloping all over Ponyville, because we had to make sure everypony except the Bearers was out and that had to be done properly. I was looking for the ones who were hiding, because you couldn't hide, not from a mountain," said the too-calm voice. "I found Sweetie. Because her daddy wasn't there. He's a hoofball coach, and the team was in Baltimare. It's hard, when things are scary and your daddy is gone."

Just for a second, the filly glanced back. At the one named as Sweetie, and then the yellow filly.

"I found Sweetie, and somepony had to make sure she got out. But by the time I found her, the mountain was there. And when mountains move, they don't notice anything. They don't care. It was a hoof like a cliff coming down on us, a leg like a landslide, and we both felt the pulling, I was trying to get Sweetie moving and she was trying to push me, but we both just stopped because it was like our souls were being pulled backwards and taking us with them. His hoof was coming down, and..."

Looking at Cerea again, through those unblinking solid eyes.

"...my daddy was there. Trying to reach us. His fur was all soggy, and his forelegs were burned from the boiler. He had to rub in cream three times a day for two moons, just so he could walk. But he was galloping for us, and I didn't want him to be there because the hoof was coming down and it was so big, his soul was being pulled too and he was stumbling, the Bearers weren't close enough yet and... we were going to die. All of us, when the hoof came down. Sweetie and I were going to die together, I couldn't leave her and I was screaming at my daddy to go away because he was just on the edge, he could have gone back but he just kept trying to reach us and --"

The centaur would never be sure if she had actually heard the words which seemed to emerge behind her, or if they had simply drifted up from the depths of her own shattering heart.

"...no, Diamond, don't..."

"-- then Discord was there."

There was nothing left in the girl which could think anything beyond a simple, unanswerable query of Who?, and that happened in the last instant before those solid eyes became liquid again, all at once.

The wood took in the tears, and did so just as readily as it absorbed the froth from the centaur's fur.

"And Mister Fancypants talked to us, he said it was his fault! Because he talked to Discord, and then Discord made a choice -- but we're the choice he made! He chose us instead of himself! He was there, and now he isn't anything! We keep asking how he is, if he's getting better, but no matter how we ask or who asks, even Miss Fluttershy can't get an answer and she was his friend, she was the only real friend he had and no one cares enough to tell her! He wasn't our friend, he never knew me and maybe he never even knew my name, but he made a choice! If we hadn't been there, if I'd found Sweetie faster or my daddy hadn't been looking for me, or any of it, anything, if we just hadn't been there, then maybe Discord would be okay and the Bearers would have done something and..."

She stopped, head and aura down. Salt and moisture darkened the floor.

The bronze discs visibly bowed outwards. Sought for the soft sounds, drank it in, and failed to keep any of it away from the girl's mislocated ears.

"...it's you. He took magic. You hurt it. And maybe you're not him, or maybe you're something like him. Maybe you're with him somehow, waiting for a chance. You're soft where he was stone, because that tricks ponies, makes them think you're safe. And if you weren't like him, anything like him -- then you'd leave. You'd know we were scared, you'd feel bad for doing it, and you'd just go away. But you're still here. Like a mountain, because a mountain doesn't care. It just crushes you. It doesn't even notice when it happens. It doesn't care. You don't care about us, because if you did, you'd leave. You're just like Tirek, just like him --"

"-- I've never even seen him!"

And she was on her hooves.

(She would hate herself later, back in the barracks. For having moved, for putting the filly in her shadow. For being so large, when others weren't.)

They were staring at her. All of them, staring up as foreign limbs stopped clutching at each other, leaving strange gestures beating at the air.

"There were pictures!" Diamond's voice was getting louder again, and the aura was intensifying. She could feel both of those things, and in neither case did the shattered girl actually care. "All you could see in any picture was him! Pictures and stories everywhere --"

"-- and I came in after that! I don't know who Discord is, or what happened at the end, or what Tirek looks like! I'm afraid to ask for a picture! Because all I know is my own stallions, my own stupid stallions and --"

She'd known there were pictures: that there had to be. But she hadn't asked, any more than she'd asked about what Tirek looked like. It had gone unvoiced from the moment she'd learned of what he'd done, and --

-- I know he was smart.
I've never met a smart stallion.
I was afraid that I would see him and want.
Want the one who killed.
How could anyone live with that --

"-- I don't want to look at him! To ever see him, because I'll look at his face and know that's what all of you see when you look at me! He destroyed every chance I ever might have had here without coming anywhere near me, he's a mountain which I can't reach or fight and I HATE HIM, I hate him because he pulled hope and love away from me and there's nothing I can ever do to get them back --"

But the filly wasn't done. A filly who had waited for her own death while providing company, and the little unicorn was shaking and crying --

"-- he killed ponies! Don't you understand that? Ponies lost their mommies and daddies, parents lost their kids, they think about that whenever they look at you and you're just here, you're big and strong and you hurt magic and you didn't lose anything --"

"I LOST MY WHOLE FAMILY!"

And in the silence which followed, six of the discs crashed to the floor.

The centaur's arms fell to her sides. The long legs slowly folded, and the mountain collapsed against cold wood.

Her eyes were closed. She wanted them to stay closed forever. The Princesses had trusted her, and...
...she had known she would fail.
She always failed.
She destroyed things.
Anything she touched.
All I wanted was one day...

...the hoof touched her.

It was a little hoof. Small enough for any sound of approach to have been absorbed by the floor. The angle was awkward, the pressure light, and it touched her near the center of her lower sternum. Just... touched.

She didn't look.

"You said they were alive," the filly reminded her. There was just a little bit of quaver in that voice: enough to be identified and, should it become necessary, enough to be denied.

"It's been months now," the girl whispered. "Months. I've been counting. I know how long the days are here, how long they are at home. All they'll know is that I went for a gallop and I never came home. There's no evidence, no forensics. They... they have to believe I'm dead: it's the only thing they could ever think. The whole program might be falling apart. Parents pulling the students back because they might be next. If one of us was kidnapped or murdered, then any of us could be. The whole household thinks I'm dead, if there's even a household left. And I can't go home, I might never go home, and... I lost them. I lost all of them, forever..."

She shook, against the simple constant pressure of that touch. She trembled, as sweat and froth fell away from her skin.

I'm dead.
I've been dead from the moment the road began to change.
I'm dead to them and they'll never know.

Maybe it was easier, being dead. Death wouldn't hurt as much.

Oh so softly, "You're crying."

Knights didn't cry like this. Another failure.

"Daddy talks about how things get changed in the press," Diamond said. "To make better stories. And sometimes monsters cry, to make you think they aren't. But they never mean it. So we weren't sure if you'd really cried."

She didn't answer.

"Do you miss your mommy?" The hoof moved a little higher. "I miss mine sometimes."

There were two things which forced her eyes open at that moment: the realization that she was in the presence of a child who had lost a parent to Tirek, and --

-- something colder.

She had said she missed her family, and that had been the barest truth. The loneliness and longing formed knives stabbing at her flanks.
She missed her family...

"I'm... I'm sorry," she whispered. "I know it doesn't mean anything, but I'm sorry. For what he did to your mother. I'm --"

"-- he didn't," Diamond quietly cut in. "She's... been gone for a long time. Do you miss yours?"

Her heart was shattered, and so truth drifted up from the wounds.

"I miss how she sang to me, when I was sad. But... that was a long time ago. Years..."

She looked down at the filly, and mostly saw a section of strong back and streaked tail.

"How old are you?"

"I..." A few tears were blinked away, if not the shame behind them. "....would have graduated from high school in the spring. I don't know how our lifespans compare --"

"Your mommy sang. Do you?"

She forced a nod.

The hoof dropped away. After a moment, the filly backed up enough to clear the shadow, giving Cerea a view of soft blue eyes.

"Singing is something which comes from the soul," the earth pony decided. "I don't know if monsters can sing. Maybe they can. But they wouldn't feel it." She solemnly nodded to herself: the movement of somepony who'd just made up her mind based on the lack of evidence found at the landing point of a very large leap. "There would just be sound. Will you sing?"

"I'm not good." Automatic. "Even in my own herd, I'm no better than --"

"It's still singing."

She had reached the point where she wasn't quite sure what she was protesting: only that a protest had to be made or singing would happen. "The lyrics won't translate. The words will, but a rhyme in my language probably isn't one in yours. And the meter won't match --"

"-- so don't sing words."

They aren't humans. They never were, nor are they centaurs. They are ponies, and there are times when that is enough.

But they think, feel, and love. They dance, and build places to accommodate that means of expression -- but dancing requires music. Even when it takes place in apparent silence, a song is always being conducted by the soul.

Build a room to host the dance, as they would require it to exist. But it also needs to be capable of conducting music: keeping the notes true as they move across the walls, allowing the echoes to maintain a touch of their source.

There is a centaur singing now, and she is not human. She never was. She has dreamed of it, and those dreams were some of the best and worst of her life. The best because even when the only thing which changed was her lower body, it left her as someone who could believe she belonged and in the heart of dream, knew that it would always be so. The worst came when she woke up.

She is not human. She will never be a pony, not in the waking world (and that dream is not so far away). She is a centaur and at this moment, she creates a song like nothing this world has ever known.

Her voice rises and falls through the notes. It changes octaves on a whim, and the transitions always flow. She's afraid to try lyrics, so she remembers classical compositions, soundtracks, tries to mix and blend tones and styles. The ponies know not of imaginary ships flying between the stars, or desperate races towards a heart waiting to be won. They only hear the sound, and imagine whatever they wish. Those dreams are the gift of the Vox Centaurai, although that description might send the disc into what would feel like an endless blast of venting steam.

It is quiet now, rebuilding its charge. There is never any need to translate music, for music simply is.

She sings like nothing else in the world. She is like nothing else in the world, and the little pink filly eventually lies down on the floor. Listening, because she got there first and so she gets the best spot: that's only fair. Those in the camera boxes try to figure out if it's possible to separate sound from film again, because they already suspect this reel is going to have a very limited release. They were sworn to secrecy if the need arose. They know the results will be shown to a few, but -- it feels like too much was said. The palace will not edit or censor -- but when it comes to the reel, they won't exactly distribute and... this can't be lost. They won't let that happen.

The centaur sings. Slowly, the little white unicorn approaches, rests next to her final shelter. The yellow and orange fillies are close behind. The too-thin colt never quite makes it to the group, stopping three body lengths away, and the teacher simply watches.

The Princesses...

No camera is pointing in that direction. Nopony is even looking at them. They have privacy in the midst of a crowd, something which hardly ever happens, and so there is no need to break it. Suffice it to say that they listen. There is always something new in the world for those who still care to look, and time can be gifted over for simply listening.

The centaur sings, and eventually the song ends. But then the questions come. They are about worlds and differences and loneliness, and some of them are questions which only children could ask. Some can be answered, while others cannot. The centaur wishes she could answer a few, and with others... she tries to remember that they're children. A newborn is a monster of desire constantly demanding satisfaction, and childhood creates the slow process of becoming something other. Some adults never fully succeed, or even truly try. But there are ways in which all children are monsters, until they learn not to be. Something which takes a society, and the occasional friend.

She has her own questions, and some are answered. But for the biggest one... it's too complicated, and requires a voice which isn't present just then. A promise is made: that words will arrive soon, once the final piece of the story is asked to add his part. She will learn what happened at the end of the battle, and that knowledge will arrive in three days. Three days before she learns something of the entity in the tallest tower, and the sacrifice made from choice.

The centaur will need to have those words read to her and when they end, she will find herself in front of the mirror again. Staring at the reflection of a monster, because she never allows herself to succeed for very long. Knowing, finally knowing what some see when they look at her, and hating that image all the more.

Towards the end of the meeting, a member of the palace staff risks a tiny knock on a passage door, because there is a message which the sisters have been waiting for. The younger grumbles a bit, the elder thinks about the dubious wisdom of an order to find them at any time, and the sealed envelope is passed through.

It's something they have to open and read together. But they need to wait until the meeting is over. The children leave, the teacher is trying to figure out if she can escape from having to show the finished reel to any parents, and the centaur is led out by a Guard towards a much-needed meal.

There are ten children. For three, the nightmares will have ended before Moon can be raised again. Two more have them slowly fade over the course of several weeks. One begins to compose a letter: something she would normally get one of her father's clerks to do on her behalf, but these have to be her words. Those are clearly the best ones.

The sisters are the last ponies out. The younger goes to her bed, but only after extracting a promise from the elder that they will read the contents of the envelope together. They owe the centaur that much, and...

...both are worried.
There are ways in which the meeting could have been so much worse. (The elder is planning on a silent self-kicking session regarding her own choice of class.) Some where the result could have been argued as the best possible outcome. But words were said, and one grouping...
The girl thinks kindness is something she has to earn.

The sisters need to talk. And before that can happen, the letter must be read.
Together.

Final Evaluation

They skimmed past most of the training-related details. The unique fighting style, the capacity to pick up combat skills at a rate which the Sergeant had never expected to see without an associated mark, speed and strength and thinking in ways no pony would because a pony's mind wasn't involved... they had been expecting all of it. Physically, the girl was a marvel.

The important part was at the end.

Requires validation, but won't ACCEPT it. Believes herself to be inadequate in all ways. Suspect parental interference from an early age. Did not require breaking down during training because breaking took place years ago. Constant outside social support system with multiple points of bracing may be able to prop up for some time, but rebuilding may be impossible.

Will always be questing for success, but perceives anything she accomplishes as temporary, inadequate compared to what others might manage, or as a setup for future failures. Forever fighting to gain a goal which she will never allow herself to reach. Is capable of taking on the duty, but one true breach may destroy her.

Guard suitability: BORDERLINE
Hiring decision left to Generals.

And when they both reached the last word, their eyes closed.

"You spoke the words, Tia," the younger finally said. "On the first night she stood before us. In a way, even then, you knew."

The elder silently nodded, and said them once again. Both repeating the sentence and pronouncing it.

"'She reminds me of Twilight'..."

Uncontrollable

There were those whose natural reaction to coming up with such an idea would have been pride. They would have allowed a moment for simply being impressed with themselves and regardless of what the girl sometimes believed about humans, that number included quite a few among her own herd: if nothing else, centaur double-jointing made it that much easier to actually pat yourself on selected portions of the back. A pause for celebrating their own intelligence, as ego got a chance to expand that much further outwards.

The girl, already stunned, reeling on levels both mental and emotional, utterly disoriented to the point where four legs no longer felt like enough for support, feeling uprooted on a level which threatened to reach the soul (and it would have been so easy to blame all of that, after the screaming had stopped), descended towards what was almost an instinctive reaction.

An audibly concerned "Lady --" came from the other side of the door.

"A few more minutes! Please, I just need --"

The hooves withdrew again.

A female in a restroom, with a worried male unable to make himself go inside. Even with trick valves involved, it still seemed to be a line which wasn't casually crossed. Something which might even serve as a universal constant, especially when some of the things which were more fundamental no longer seemed to apply.

Cerea took a shuddering breath, and began to second-guess herself.

Is there any other way it could work?
Any at all?

Maybe the local laws of physics were just that different. Except that if they were, the altered rulebook seemed to be presenting a surprising number of loopholes. Like the ones which allowed someone from outside the system to continue existing within it, while constantly engaging in the little things. Like breathing. Any changes strong enough to allow something which massed no more than a few metric tons to provide heat for an entire world felt as if they would casually obliterate oxygen processing on the way down.

From everything she'd seen, gravity remained exactly that. Pegasi could create lightning, but Nightwatch had told her part of the process involved adding ion charges to the clouds, or setting off what was already there: the results were normal electricity. You could start a fire with magic: a unicorn field spinning an object fast enough to create the necessary friction, or a talented pegasus concentrating a lot of heat into a very small spot. The Sergeant had told her that. And he'd also made it clear that once the magic ended, what you were dealing with was flame.

Everything she'd seen about the world indicated that all the rules she knew were working normally. And magic could be seen as an exception to that, but... it had its own rulebook, something which didn't seem to be so much set fully apart as resting in rough parallel, just a little bit to the side. The magic she'd seen didn't change the system so much as it found new ways of working within it. And it was easily possible for her to have missed the great acts of sorcery, things which only alicorns could hope to control -- but would it be that different?

Permutations...

Sun as a -- moveable white hole? Something just as superdense as a black hole, but emitting energy instead of collapsing it within? Except that... this was getting past the astronomy which Cerea was comfortable with, but she was almost sure that the white hole theory had it emanating just about every kind of energy. Which very much included hard radiation in vast quantities, plus a white hole was supposed to spit out matter. A daily forecast featuring mostly sunny weather, a increased amount of gamma, and a strong chance of non-meteors raining from the sky. And Sun looked like... a sun.

Maybe they aren't moving Sun and Moon.
Maybe they're just turning the planet.

Judging by the way she was fighting to keep all four knees from giving out, it wasn't much of an improvement. It was certainly possible for an orbiting body to become tidally locked: her own moon qualified. Have that happen to a world within the zone where life was possible, and it wouldn't be possible for long. Boiled on one side, frozen on the other. So you could have a situation where a planet had to be turned, and now all Cerea had to do was figure out how managing that much mass was supposed to be possible.

They're stronger than they've let anyone see, for anything other than this. So powerful that they can move objects on that scale. Casually.

Except that she was now getting into a territory which a very bad science fiction novel (and, as she'd eventually learned to her horror, an even worse movie) had summarized with 'What does God need with a starship?' Or, for a rather more local point --

-- she felt the surge rising, realigned her upper torso just in time, rinsed out the long sink and awkwardly cupped her hands to catch enough of the clean water for washing out her mouth --

-- why did two entities who possessed what would effectively be the power of living deities need Guards? Unless they were just letting their protectors die over and over as a means of concealing how powerful they truly were, and that didn't make any sense when everyone (except herself) simply knew they were moving the things, casually accepting it as fact...

Picture a star. Cosmology's demonstration of fusion principles, and that meant there was a lot of energy being generated. One of the requirements for life to evolve on a planet -- at least, for life as the girl knew it -- was that the world had to be far enough away to receive just enough heat: too close or too far out were simply different kinds of death.

But that was with a star. Her own world's sun was more than three hundred thousand times the mass of the safety zone which hosted its orbiting observers, and that meant the planet had to be fairly far out. Eight light-minutes. Distance as protective barrier.

Imagine that you could build an orbital fusion plant. (She was trying to avoid the 'how'. She already felt as if she was going to vomit again.) One designed to create heat and light for a single planet. You could scale it down by a lot: you'd pretty much need to. Figure out the safe distance: well clear of atmosphere, but... it might still have to be pretty close. Even if you had nearly all of the energies radiating in the intended direction, you'd have to calculate for how much would be lost to the chill of space. In fact, you'd pretty much need to be capable of controlling which way the energy went, because a cool side was vital. When you went up to run maintenance, you'd need to land somewhere --

-- teleportation, might not be necessary --

-- and if it was in the right place, at the right size -- then when you looked up, you'd see what appeared to be a normal sun. Not that anyone could really look at a sun for long...

How big would it have to --

-- she didn't know. Cerea had a high school student's knowledge of physics, went somewhat beyond that for astronomy. It wasn't enough to reconcile this.

Why?

Science fiction hadn't been her primary reading material, especially with bad adaptations like the God And Starship book to not lead the way. Her literary tastes usually went back in time. She knew about satellites because you had to work around them for certain aspects of astronomy, and because -- the herd had been scared.

There had always been a few liminals who were capable of passing for human, at least for a little while. They were the ones who'd done most of the smuggling into the gaps. Who'd made -- arrangements. But as technology had advanced, they'd been encouraged to go into the sciences. Computer programming. Everything which went into orbit needed to have a little extra code slipped into the operating system: do not record any images from here. And even then, it had felt like a matter of time before the whole thing fell apart. Just one slip --

-- there had been just about nothing in her body to bring up the first time: this internal violation consisted of nothing but dry heaves --

"-- Lady --"

"Please!"

And he withdrew.

Not much science fiction in her mostly-ancient library. She felt like she lacked the necessary grounding.

(She felt like the floor beneath her hooves was trying to heave her away.)

But if she had to speculate... then it felt like there were two primary reasons for making an artificial sun.

You were on the verge of losing your natural one.
Or there was a planet being created, and you just needed a sun to go with it.

(She reeled. Her hands clutched at the sink. Knuckles cracked from internal pressure.)

But... nothing she'd seen even remotely suggested that any species on the planet had access to that level of creation potential, nothing --

-- and then the carved-out hollows within her slowly began to fill with horror.

Computers. Smartphones. Airplanes and rockets and televisions and everything else humans put into the world.
Things made by another. Perhaps that which was left behind, ancient beyond measure, found and studied and operated -- but not understood.
On an individual level, the capacity for control did not imply the ability to create.
Or... repair...

...she just barely managed to slow her descent, sinking to the floor instead of crashing. The girl was certain that Fancypants would have come in for a crash. And then she huddled, arms wrapped tightly under her breasts, tail trembling.

She stayed like that for about a minute.
Shaking.
Reeling.
Wondering if Sun would go out.

...no.
Stop.

They weren't necessarily inherited from -- a long time ago. I don't know. I'm assuming the worst. Sun came up yesterday. It should come up tomorrow.

Unless something happened to the Princesses.
Unless it took a certain, rather extensive degree of training, or for some reason, an alicorn was needed to make it work. She'd already been told there were no heirs. If nopony was ready to take over --

"She's the only choice, recruit. Every time. You save the Princess, you save the nation. You might even wind up saving the world."

And that was when it hit her.
The reason Blitzschritt had taken the last stance.
Why every Guard had to be ready to give up their own life in an instant, without true decision or thought.
Keep the Princesses alive, keep a planet alive.
She had taken on that responsibility. Something she wasn't capable of.
If she failed...
...when she failed...
They die, and...

She didn't even have bile left to bring up and no matter what the internal wrenching felt like, it didn't seem to be strong enough for blood.

Cerea was never certain as to exactly how long she was in the restroom. Enough time for a few more knocks. Nothing ever brought back what she'd said to turn them away.

It took a while before she could present the illusion of having pulled herself together, and she was fully aware that illusion was the whole of it. Some of the humans had a saying: something about holding an item together with bailing wire and spit. When it came to both materials, she would have readily exchanged her desperate attempts to prevent total collapse for reinforcement with something that solid.

She washed her face again. Rinsed out her mouth until the stink was gone, at least for pony nostrils. Adjusted the dress, checked for water stains.

They need Sun. A planet can't sustain life without one.
So what's Moon? What function does it serve?

She wasn't sure. Perhaps there had been a lost planet with its own star and natural satellite, and... when you made a new one, you wanted it to feel like home. You couldn't hold hands under moonlight unless you actually had --

-- no one will ever --

It was almost a welcome thought. A different form of agony could serve as a distraction.

So Moon could be present for the sake of appearances. Or -- did the oceans strictly need tides? How dense was Moon, to appear in roughly the same scale as it did in her home, and still exert that much gravity?

Or it could be simpler than that. Sun generated energy, and that was under some degree of control. Enough power for life to exist, and no more. But to regulate an output which was produced by fusion that precisely --

(She was desperately hoping it was fusion.)

-- might be difficult. And it didn't hurt to have something which could serve as an extra control...

Perhaps Moon was the heat sink, soaking in anything extra in order to keep the planet safe, then harmlessly dispersing it into the void. Or -- a backup Sun, in which case, Moon was what Sun looked like when it was turned off. It was possible that it served one function while waiting to fulfill the other. After all, if you could make one Sun, why not have another on standby? Just in case, especially since it was possible that the whole system only existed because you'd already lost your original model --

"Lady Cerea, I... don't mean to rush you." She heard him swallow. "And it's not as if I have any experience with the amount of time your species requires to -- complete their business."

Ignorance was seldom bliss. (She felt as if her fresh compilation of guesses had just violated one of the exceptions.) But there were times it was protective (and same). For all Fancypants knew, this was a normal amount of trench time.

"But you've been in there for --"

"I'm coming out," she told him. "I just need to use the dryer."

That was quick enough: the boxy item mounted too low on the wall could have the directions of its vents adjusted, and then it was mostly a matter of finding a position where she wasn't baking her own bustline. And then she headed for the door. To rejoin a party whose initial pretense was a falsehood. In future years, it would be true enough, but... the graduating class of one now potentially understood exactly what she had been asked to take responsibility for.

I swore --

She had to do her best to get through the rest of the night: it would reflect poorly on the palace if she didn't, and upon her host. And she wasn't going to talk about any of her theories within the gathering, because there was a chance she was wrong, and... you didn't go up to those with true faith and casually suggest how the extra loaves and fishes might have been stored under a dune-shaded cloth. But after that... if it was real, if all of it was real...

There was a forge. The world would be that much safer with her in it.

She now knew enough about pony expressions to recognize that Fancypants was somewhere beyond the more casual levels of worry.

"You're not moving well," the noble observed as they headed back towards what felt like a more uncertain babble of voices.

Cerea forcibly got her hind legs in line.

"We can end this at any time," he told her. "Excuses can always be made for Guards: the difficult part is coming up with one which doesn't panic the populace. If you want to go back --"

"I'll stay." She could do that much, in her last hours representing the palace.

A flicker of corona adjusted the monocle.

"Some of the guests," the unicorn carefully attempted, "said you were talking about -- the translator had difficulty in finding terms for the majority, but it was something about orbital bodies. And you --" she could now scent his sweat, mixing with the blood "-- seemed confused."

She had to fight the nausea back down, and was surprised to find it landing on top of what, if allowed to escape, would have been the laugh. Well, in the presence of that level of understatement...

(Reeling. Disoriented. Internally, fragmented. Holding herself upright with sheer willpower.)

"About the Princesses," Fancypants went on. "About --" he swallowed "-- Sun and Moon..."

"It was Jet Set." Cerea took a little comfort in the fact that it was barely a lie at all. "Some of the things he was saying were just -- ridiculous."

"...such as?" took far too much time to emerge.

"Asking the Princesses to change the seasonal length of day and night for Equestria, and then adjust back to normal for the rest of the world," she told him. "That's just ego. As if Sun and Moon exist for his sake alone. When it's what that one yak said. They're for the planet."

She didn't consider herself to be all that good of a liar. But he couldn't scent when she was working with falsehoods. Nopony could, and... it helped, to have the base rest upon the impossible foundation of truth.

It made him smile. "Our Princesses merely control, yes," he said. "And my apologies for Jet Set. He's one of those who will always support whatever is determined to be in fashion. I was rather hoping to convince him that was you." But then he hesitated. "I was told that you were asking about -- whether the Princesses were the ones who exerted that control. And there was something about... mass?"

She was silent for a moment. Searching among inner debris for an answer.

"In your first letter, you said that Princess Celestia is your friend."

He nodded.

"I don't quite know what to tell you," Cerea softly offered. "I know what's been classified, and... I can only guess what she might tell a friend, who can be trusted with a little more. But you know that magic brought me here. Everyone does."

"And that it has to send you home," he confirmed. "With no other way to reach it. Implying a place which is very far away indeed."

She nodded. "So where I come from... we didn't know that the Princesses controlled Sun and Moon. That's all, sir. And since there's no contact with Equestria... I just heard about it now, for the first time. It was just a little bit of a shock. And to think about my being a Guard for Princess Luna, when Moon is hers..."

When you thought about it, there hadn't been a single lie in any part. As long as he didn't think about the possibility of another planet, the existence of more solar systems...

He paused in his trot. She matched.

Slowly, a little too softly, "I am trying to imagine that. What it would feel like to learn it for the first time, at your age. And I am failing. It's the magnitude of it, I think. It's like trying to imagine having been blind since birth, and getting the first chance to see. I can muster the words for the concept, but when it comes to what the reality might be -- I can't find a tooth grip."

She nodded. There was enough of her left for that.

"And nopony would have told you," he quietly concluded, "because they could not have imagined that someone would not know."

Again.

He looked up at her, and the distance crossed seemed a little greater.

"You more than needed the time to think about all of it," Fancypants decided. "I will tell any who inquire that you ate something which rested poorly, before leaving the palace."

And he smiled. Something which scent told her was a little forced, but... it was still a smile.

"Not to be repeated, of course," he said in a much lower tone, "and I suspect you know that already, but... I did need to speak with the Princesses about you, simply to plan the party. Some things weren't directly said, but I've known Princess Celestia long enough to occasionally hear where the words aren't. And my reading tastes are rather varied. So while we have a last moment of privacy, let me ask you -- and I will understand if you don't answer."

The smile was somewhat forced. The hope now sparkling within his eyes was all too real.

"Another planet?" Fancypants asked. And waited for her answer, shifting his weight from hoof to hoof like a foal awaiting the greatest of gifts.

She took a breath, one so deep as to almost pull the scarf loose.

"Yes."

And then everything about the smile was true.

"I know how much it complicates things, Lady Cerea," he softly told her. "Any effort made to return you home, when no controlled magic has ever reached so far. But... please do not think less of me for this, of a colt who finds himself in a stallion's body, gazing up at a dream. I have empathy for your pain, for the loss which comes from being so very far away from everything you knew. And at the same time, without dismissing anything you have experienced... I hope you will understand that the colt had longed for this chance. To see it happen within his lifetime."

Really, all she had to do was keep nodding.

"Because those of us who truly thought about it," Fancypants evenly continued, "knew this night was inevitable. It was simply a question of when..."

"Inevitable?" Cerea asked.

The smile became that much stronger.

"We look at the night sky," he gently, reverently said. "A place filled with suns. And we know that the universe is just as filled with life, seeking a way to cross the distance and greet us as new friends. Millions of suns, and -- someone is moving them..."

He began to trot again. Cerea followed.

Just before the threshold where they would have been overheard, "I hope that you can tell me something about your world. In time."

Just keep nodding...

"But for now, for your home," Fancypants reasonably concluded, "Sun and Moon are not moved by Princesses."

"No," managed to emerge without too much of an echo.

Curiously, "Did you ever meet the parties who did?"

"...no."

Shaken. Disoriented. Reeling. Fragmented.

She felt as if she was moving through a world of solidified spirits. It took careful stepping to avoid jostling any unsuspecting dreams. And the scent of fear was stronger now, there were tiny pockets which had that level dropping down again and they manifested where Fancypants stopped to offer explanation -- but so many were staring at her. Seeing her as something wrong, which didn't even understand the most fundamental things about how the world worked. Something which would continue until the story had fully spread --

-- something which might go on for the rest of her life...

"Whose courtyard this is." With the reminder overhead. At the press conference. It's always been right there.

And, much deeper down, almost lost within twisting layers of greater confusion and broken reality:

...I had a reaction to an artificial moon?

"Centaur?"

She glanced down. Brown eyes stared up at her. The tail wasn't rotating.

"Centaur not moving well," Yapper decided, voice pitched as close to a whisper as the canid could probably come. (Not that it mattered. No one was coming close now.) "Centaur smells sick. Maybe centaur should go home --"

I don't have a home.
I might never go home.

"I am fine."

The canid huffed. Planted pseudohands on minimal hips.

"Centaur not funny," she repeated. "Also not a great liar --"

"-- I," the girl announced, "am fine. I am simply going to join the gaming area." Presuming she didn't empty it out. "There appears to be something of a squabble developing. Most likely a misinterpretation of the rules." Also her fault. "Explanation might assist. If thou woulds't grant pardon --"

And with that, she moved away. The crowd parted before her, and she could see the sketched-out gameboards. Poorly sketched. Another example of just how minimal her skills truly were.

She moved past sapients. Around them. And, nearly lost at the edge of her peripheral vision, a speckled white overweight body in an ill-fitted garment began to move.

Cerea didn't see much of the approach. She scented it, but... he was just one more current of fear within the miasma. In a way, she only truly spotted him when he finished the journey, and that was because he made certain to put himself in a place where she could see his chosen mask.

He was short: not just when compared to her, but for an earth pony. Having extra mass bulging out to the sides really didn't seem to compensate. So he decided to go with the simplest solution, and jumped to the top of a low table.

She heard the crash of his hooves upon the wood, instinctively looked in that direction, rotated just a little. She always had to be careful about rotating in a crowd. Her lower torso readily acquired momentum, and... she'd launched her beloved once. A side impact. He was so small, weighed so little, and... it was so easy to hurt him...

The stallion stared at her: something which wasn't quite level, as even the table didn't give him enough height for that. Just -- close enough, from about half a meter away. Staring through a mask of indifference. Something he'd chosen, had spent extensive time in rehearsing, but... she could scent the truth. The terror lurking under all of it.

But it was about how you used it...

"I'd been hoping for a chance," Puff Weevil announced to the room. "I almost felt like you were avoiding me."

You were staying away from me, offered up a fragment. All night, until you were ready --

This was a politician: she remembered that much from the briefing book. Even after tonight, she would still be a palace employee: simply in a different capacity. She represented the Diarchy. She couldn't cause offense.

"Time and tide," Cerea said. "The second pusheth me from one part of the gathering to the next, and occupies the first. We meet now, sirrah. Speak thy piece: I shall listen."

The speckled ears twisted a little. Focused forward, as a portion of the crowd began to slowly approach. Putting themselves in a position where they too could hear. She smelled some of that, picked up other portions with different senses. A glimpse of flaring wings and, mostly hidden under the indistinct translation of mutters produced by the disc, the sound of clacking beaks.

"I wasn't expecting you to bring a date," the Night Court representative admitted. "I'm sure you understand that. Nopony did. Not that I see this as a romantic connection, of course."

She would have expected a politician's smile to be more precise. Less of a fully open lie.

"'tis not," she quickly said. "I had simply --"

"You just came with another predator."

She heard the intake of breaths all around her. Cerea wasn't sure where Yapper was in the crowd, couldn't know if the canid had heard --

Something dark was in the politician's eyes. Dark, solid, and -- determined.

There were times when fear disguised itself as control...

"You can take all the fruits and vegetables out of the Lunar Kitchen that you like," Puff stated. "In fact, I hear that you take more for yourself than any two other ponies. Something of a drain on the budget, I imagine. You can move bale-tons of plant matter -- but you can't move your eyes." The squint forward was openly faked. "It's amazing how many won't let themselves see that. When a simple look tells the world what you are. Especially when you're the one looking. Searching for the next catch from the hunt."

The beaks were clacking faster. Getting closer.

Griffons, he's offending the griffons and he doesn't care, they might as well not even be here...

"I hast no passion for the hunt!" she protested. "Never have I taken down anything that breathes for meal or sport! Simply in defense --"

"-- but putting you at the party lets everypony see that," he cut her off, and added a theatrical tail swish to the words. "Everypony who's willing to see. And do you know something? I'm glad for the party. The base concept of it, anyway." The snort gave it an extra level of lie. "I've been thinking about that, and I'm willing to offer some of the credit to you. Ponies should meet Guards. Ponies don't understand Guards. Because Guards don't think like the herd, do they? The herd cares about the safety of the herd." His volume was increasing, and progressively deeper breaths put visible strain on the seams of the ill-fitting suit. "While a Guard would let any herd die, because they're only capable of caring about one --"

Would it have been any easier, if she hadn't overheard Jet Set? She would wonder about that, long after reason had returned, and -- she didn't know. There was only so much she could have said to the politician in any case, and... perhaps it would have been easier, if she could have pretended to be somewhat more intact. At least to the level towards which she pretended every day. But she was disoriented. Reeling. Bailing wire wasn't an option and spit represented more of a binding agent than she had available.

Her hooves were trying to caper. She was having trouble keeping her tail still. Her lungs felt like they were sending air to the wrong place, and a mind which couldn't manage the Second Breath also felt like it was fighting for oxygen. But she had recently acquired information, taken custody of the casually impossible. And even if so much of her didn't want to know any of it -- the fresh knowledge still gave her an answer to give. She just didn't understand why somepony who'd grown up being told everything from the start wasn't seeing it.

"To save that one," Cerea stated, "is, after the disaster hath passed, to save all who yet breathe. My duty is to guard Princess Luna, sir. How would the world manage without Moon?"

And he snorted.

"Princess Celestia can deal with Sun and Moon," Puff Weevil stated. "Everypony knows that, because it's the way things used to be. And besides, even if they were both lost -- not that anypony wants to see that happen, of course -- some of us remember the old legends."

Apparently it wasn't everyone, because "What old legends?" came from a donkey on the far right. And the olfactory tide was shifting, a fast-rising swell of offense...

Another snort. "Any four unicorns can work together and raise Sun or Moon. Once." And he made the mistake of adding a small snicker. "It's supposed to permanently drain all of their magic, but that's not even a sacrifice, is it? Not when you trade it for a sunrise. And it's not as if we're likely to run out of unicorns any time soon --"

Cerea would be told more about him in the aftermath, things which hadn't been in the briefing book. About Tattler districts and echo chambers, things which could lead somepony to speak so freely because they almost always existed in a place where every listener agreed with them. Puff Weevil hardly ever needed to read the room: in many ways, he was something which his standard audience had written.

To the ears of multiple listeners, he'd just suggested that having what might be thousands of unicorns lose their magic wasn't really a sacrifice. Most of them weren't happy. And a new current suggested that Fancypants had turned a little too quickly, partially reopened a small section of the wound. That faint wash of blood was trying to approach, and it wouldn't reach them in time.

"Four," repeated part of the lessons which the girl had taken from the training grounds.

"Just four --"

"The most unicorns who can combine their strength on any effect," Cerea stated, "is three. Making your legend into what so many of them ultimately represent, sirrah. Somepony's wish. A falsehood. One more dream to stave off the dark."

He stared at her, and a blast of olfactory anger surged through the terror.

"And you know our magic so much better than we do," the earth pony decided. "Behold the wisdom of the centaurs. Those who understand magic best --"

Frantically, "-- 'twas part of training --"

I'm breathing too fast, this is

"-- because they need to know about what they take." His hooves shifted on the table, and she recognized that he'd almost tried to pace. There just wasn't enough room. "But I thought about it, having the city meet Guards. I think that's a good idea. It's why I'm putting a bill into the Night Court."

He took a breath. Left the crowd waiting for the rest of it, as he basked in open satisfaction.

"It's not much to ask for, and that's why I'm sure it'll pass," he declared. "Having every new Guard work with the city's police for a few moons. Not sequestered in the palace, but out on the streets. Among the people. Hearing their voices. And I only have to make the starting date slightly retroactive --"

She was still working through her citizenship classes. And they'd reached that part of the course, there was a spinning fragment of the girl which did understand that Princess Luna would need to sign the bill -- but she couldn't picture any other result. It wasn't much to ask for. Not for anypony among the Guard.

But she wasn't a pony.
She was something they saw as a monster.

"'tis too soon!" And the protest was open, desperate, her arms were starting to gesture and they weren't used to that kind of expression, her hands were twisting and her breathing was too fast... "The palace is trying, but -- sirrah, the one-sheet was but this eve! The populace -- the timing is not --"

It's coming, the panic attack is coming

He couldn't pace. The table still gave him just enough room to advance.

"And what is the plan?" he demanded, head thrusting forward, jaw arcing over her breasts as hot breath blasted against her nostrils. "Princess Luna doesn't stay in the palace all of the time, no matter how much some ponies might long for it! The ones who are waiting for it all to happen again --"

She didn't know what he was talking about. But some did, because there was another shockwave in the olfactory world. Anger, outrage -- but they were barely detectable, not when the fear was surging...

She couldn't think. It felt as if it was taking everything she had to keep from running, and there was so little left.

"-- but she just keeps going out, so they get to wait, don't they? To see if it happens in front of them, when nopony's ever really been told about what happened the first time! And even without that, even if miracles hold --"

She was trying not to pull back, there were too many sapients watching, listening, letting it happen while Fancypants tried to get closer and there was another, more distant snort at the politician's words, heavier hooves shifting forward and a near-bovine scent on the approach --

"-- what kind of Guard would you be, who can't even step outside without making it all worse! How do you Guard her, when a trip to the Heart sets off a riot? If there's a diplomatic mission, and you have to be explained to another nation? About how you're a predator, one who brings games which are all about control and conquest of territory? The product of a species born for war! Everything you do, say, create, EVERYTHING proves what you are! You can't live in the palace forever, centaur! What happens on the day you leave?"

...they're human games...

She couldn't offend him. The last piece of her, the one which was trying to resist -- it didn't offer anything to say. To offer insult was to grant him a victory, and she didn't have one anyway. To turn away in silence was open surrender. But he was just about on top of her, opening his mouth any wider would put him into her and she didn't want that, didn't want him to touch her, refused to let that happen, he was leaning further forward and she stepped back.

Her right hind hoof kicked something. There was a cry of pain.

It was instinct. Everything which happened next was instinct. Someone was in pain. She'd caused it. She had to see how bad it was, to apologize, to fail at making it right when all she ever did was make things worse.

Cerea turned, and did so at a speed which only a centaur could have managed. And her hindquarters didn't slam against a single being, because none had wanted to get that close to her. She'd been standing within an open circle of rage and challenge, bordered on all sides by the terror of life. There was enough room to turn.

But her tail moved with her. It slapped the politician's face.

He yelped. Teeth parted, clamped down just as she completed the half-rotation. Yanked.

It made her cry out. She hadn't been expecting the pain, and there was nothing left in her to block its open expression. And the next instinct was to rear up, her forelegs pushing off the floor in a surge of strength, carrying her to a height which no one else in the room knew, she was above them all for a second and saw where the ambassador was, how close Yapper had come, that Fancypants was but three meters out and that was all she saw before all of her weight crashed back down as the prelude to bringing up her hind legs --

-- her forehooves landed. Her upper torso automatically bent. Forward and down.

It put her among the flock, or the pride. The sound of frantically clacking beaks coming from multiple startled, unnerved, scared griffons.

Instinct. All of it, including theirs. The one which made their eyes open wider, meet her own --

-- no...

It would be her last true thought for some time.

Is it cumulative? She can't seem to remember that. She can't seem to think.

There are eyes. There's a moment when those strange eyes are the only things which exist, and then a question goes into her soul. It asks who she is, how strong she is, whether she's predator or prey, and a centaur has aspects of both. But the eyes don't lie, and neither do the teeth. She could hunt, if she wished. If there was any meat pure enough to be consumed, then... she's wondered. Her first days in Japan were a time of experimentation, and just because a supposedly-organic bowl wasn't pure enough doesn't mean there might not be a time when she tried again --

-- there is a predator in her, deep down. Another connection to the humans. But it's something she denies, because she pushes back so much about herself. Pushes, or has felt others push.

The question is in her. It has plenty of room in which to move, because her soul feels like a broken jigsaw, something where the image was assembled from pieces which never truly fit together. Held fast by broken bailing wire and evaporated spit and willpower which has just run out. The question gets louder, it demands, and it's being asked over and over again. Every time she tries to answer, it comes at her from a different direction, it has her surrounded and

is the force of griffon magic cumulative? Or is she simply fighting off attempt after attempt?

She can't remember. And it doesn't matter.

She tried to tell her friend, the one she shouldn't have, doesn't deserve. She tried to tell the Sergeant. Anything less than perfection is failure.

Perhaps she blocked almost every attack.
All but one.
Or... she stopped them all, even without the hairpins. She doesn't know.
But even when you resist, there's always an effect. Always.

Something breaks.

fight
she can fight
she has the sword and they have her surrounded, the reek of terror is a prelude to attack, it's just like it was at the town when there's so many of them but she's the largest and her weapon stops their magic, stops magic of every kind when the only way so many of them know how to fight is with that magic and
imagine what she could do to them
if she wasn't so nice

a reek of terror, a miasma, fog, submerged in an ocean of dread
but some of the wisps are
familiar
a pony, a canid, something like a bull with foreign aspects mixed in
she can't hurt them
she can't fight
can't
deepest instincts are all she is now, she has no experience of this, it's worse than a full moon and somewhere deep within, a single neuron fires off a bitter comment about how when brought to the point of deepest instinct, she wasn't given an overwhelming need to apologize

she can't fight
so she runs

and she can run faster than anything in the room, perhaps faster than anything in the world, but she can't hurt anyone she can't and perhaps she screams, a scream heard by all in their own native tongues, something which tells them to get out of the way
or they might have just moved
there's a centaur starting to accelerate, but she's terrified of hurting someone and it means that within three seconds of losing herself, there's a jump which vaults multiple sapients as screams come up from below her
there's a clear space to land, she's getting some momentum now

the minotaur is in front of her
she can't go over him, there's no space to go around and
they like to wrestle
horns offer the gift of leverage points
reach out, twist, throw to one side
no more minotaur, and no more music, and there's screaming all around her, she's moving faster and the shield spells were set up to detect motion, to channel a runner, they're going off at her flanks and the resulting corridor is too narrow, so instinct sends her hand to the sword's hilt, she gets it clear and everywhere the sword goes, the shields are gone

more screaming
because of the sword
because of her
because she exists
but she can run now, she has to get out and a memorized map flashes into her mind on a level below thought, she knows which way 'out' requires, she's been confined for months and moons and years and a lifetime and she needs space, open space in which to run and they scatter out of her way, all of them but some aren't fast enough and
she doesn't hurt any
she goes around, over, but never through
that too is instinct
the doors are in front of her
the patio
there are heating wonders warming the air, ponies and donkeys scattering, and then she's past all of it into the open and cold and out of confinement except that there's something looming in front of her, one last barrier made of light and shouting bodies beyond it, ones which have just noticed her but that's the way out
the sword slashes
the shield starts to fail
she plunges through
and the centaur is among the protestors

most of what she ultimately remembers are the screams
they are running, nearly all of them are running because they weren't expecting this and for the ones which fight, the sword moves, slashes until vapor dissipates, light falls apart, the flat of the blade pushes on a suddenly-weak back and forces legs to splay across cobblestone

she can't count them, because that's not instinct
the numbers are too many
the count for those who get their attacks through is zero
they weren't ready for this, for any of it
(but they'll be better prepared the next time)
and she doesn't register faces because those aren't important
a face she can see is something in the way
she vaults and dodges and swings and the world opens up before her, there's a road and
she knows about roads
gallop down this one fast enough, far enough, let it change
let it take her home
she's clear, the protestors (or what's left of their scattered numbers) are behind her, now she can truly run, she's going faster and faster, she just needs to reach her top speed and stone will become dirt will become
there are wings above her, powerful ones, closing fast
she has to protect every angle
she looks up
and there's a monster diving towards her

black fur for the entire body, with an extra tuft at the tips of pointed ears, a thick layer of black skin stretched between the splayed bones of a hand forced to stretch, bend, distort into a wing, the silver eyes have pupils which are vertically slit and the monster's mouth is open, trying to say something, it's screaming syllables in fear and desperation and that just lets her see the fangs

it's wearing armor, the monster is armored and she doesn't know what it might be able to do, it's diving straight at her, trying to get in front of her, it's calling out what might be a name and that's just a distraction, this could be new magic from a new monster and she knows how to deal with magic, so the sword comes up and

the scent reaches her
the armor can't do anything about the scent
the scent she knows
the one she welcomes
the one where all the fear just came back and nothing in the girl understands that the sapient is afraid for her
the sword is moving

Muscles wrenched against each other, almost injured the centaur from within: the strain of redirecting so much force in so little time, with nowhere to put it but deep into the bone. She did everything she could to stop it, in the first moment when thought returned. And it wasn't enough.

She was aware of the screams behind her. The terror. But only in a distant way, and for something less than a second.

The sword had been slowed. Twisted in the middle of the swing. It hadn't been stopped, and the flat of the blade slammed into the armor.

The enchantment broke. An illusion crafted to precisely match every movement of the wearer dissipated in an instant.

The stretched skin, so much like a bat's wing, was gone. There were black feathers now. An open mouth lost its fangs, and the vertical pupils flashed into dark pools of horror within silver lakes.

Cerea saw all of it at the moment of impact. In the split-second before the force drove the pegasus out of the sky.

Armor clattered against stone, continued to do so as the little knight rolled. Wings were pressed between mineral and metal, over and over.

"...no!"

And the centaur was down on the stone now, belly and barrel pulling in cold, reaching out for the fallen body -- but outstretched fingers stopped, just short of the fur. She couldn't touch the pegasus. She'd hurt her only friend, again. She had no right...

The pony was breathing. The silver eyes were open. Staring at Cerea. And behind them, other Guards were swooping in, with many of them doing so on illusion-coated wings. Multiple ground-assigned Guards and police officers were close behind. Some were trying to keep shouting protestors back. Small shields were being raised, and it felt like that wasn't happening fast enough. A shadow in the rough shape of a unicorn mare focused its attention from place to place and wherever the mobile darkness looked, green-grey flashed into existence around another two of those who were trying to get too close, just before the colors split into their components and sent that pair of hue-surrounded ponies tumbling in opposite directions.

And Cerea didn't care.

"Nightwatch...!"

"I'm..." All four splayed legs kicked a little. Wings tried to refold, flared back to full span in a surge of pain. "I'm okay. I'll be okay. After I get my wings looked at." The little knight got her hooves under her, forced herself to stand up and looked at frantic, weeping blue eyes. "Cerea, we have to get you out of here...!"

But that didn't matter either. Because Nightwatch would lie if she thought it would make the girl feel better, might have lied before, and behind them were screaming ponies and more fallen forms and a party which had, all ways, broken up.

She'd gone out of bounds.

Obfuscating

The girl's personal library had been built from the castoffs of a thousand shelves, where the only choice was in what she took from the boxes and sometimes, there wasn't even that. (One shipment had stood out: a hundred copies of the same remaindered book. The cover had claimed there were more shades of grey than the human eye could ever hope to distinguish. None of the fillies had been allowed to glance at the interior pages, but the fuel for the next month's fires suggested that there was still one central means of creating boredom.) But there were small chances to decide what she didn't want to pursue, and so she'd never been much for horror. There didn't seem to be much need to explore those whose lives became waking nightmare.

She would die in the gap -- long after she was made to breed with a stallion who was incapable of loving her.

She had been brought into the world out of pure biological necessity. A living gear, so that a civilization could continue to turn in place.

Place that against things like psychic children or eldritch abominations from beyond space and time, and the girl's usual reaction was to close the book. Any writer who truly wanted to understand horror from the inside was welcome to take her place for a decade or two. Horror was the familiar, accompanied by the knowledge that no part of it would ever change.

Cerea had never been much for the genre as a whole. (Rachnera indulged rather frequently, and often seemed to treat the books as a How To guide.) But she still felt that she had a few of the basic rules down, at least to the point where the household could watch a movie together and she wouldn't be the last to recognize when the protagonists were inevitably about to turn into idiots. If the source of the scare had been nothing more than a cat, then there was either something major coming up behind it or the cat was about to go through a few changes. A bare branch set to rapping on a closed window, pushed by nothing more than the wind -- well, that glass wasn't long for this world, or the sound would cover up whatever was coming in through another part of the house...

It had reached the point where Papi had started to call off plot 'twists' in advance, and that was coming from a girl who could take three steps towards the kitchen and potentially forget which movie they'd been watching.

They... had watched the movies together. Sometimes they did so after their host had already gone to bed. It was -- something they could all do --

-- the centaur usually thought of horror as the familiar: the same trails, the same faces, and that house in the gap which was only occupied by mares of breeding age. Living together for a few months, in order to -- synchronize. But she'd skimmed the genre, and felt she understood a few of the deeper concepts. And one of those was grotesquerie. The idea that you could see something which came across as a perfectly ordinary part of the world -- until you got a little closer. Looked deeper. Touched supple skin and felt your finger descend into rot, as the corpse continued to smile.

And if it hadn't been for centaur senses, that would have been the clearing.

To sight... it started out as nothing more than a partial gap in the forest: one of those little breaks you could get in even the thickest of natural greenery. There were only a few trees, with branches both sparse and bare. The ground was oddly uneven: little hills of rock half-thrust out of oddly dry soil, with a few of the dividing valleys deep enough to potentially trap an unwary hoof. About twenty meters across at the widest point, perhaps eight at the far end, just before it truly started to pinch back into the thin road --

-- no: 'road' was overstating it. There was a trail: one which didn't see enough use to keep it fully clear. Use Moon's light to stare into the encroaching darkness on the other side, and make out trees with somewhat thicker trunks. Roots bulged from the earth, set up tripping hazards for those on hoof while testing the shock absorbers for any wheeled conveyance at least three times per rotation. (When it came to carts, Cerea wasn't sure the ponies had gotten very far with the concept of 'shocks'.) Branches thrust themselves into that false corridor, pointed wood tips looking to snag or scrape anything they could reach.

And to some degree, that was normal. It was a forest in a world which was approaching winter. Chill air was a reasonable expectation. Level ground became a luxury. Without evergreens, living vegetation was too much to expect. Any horror found within that environment was generally located in the mind of the observer.

Except...

...Moon shone down, kept the girl's senses in overdrive. It allowed her to recognize that she shouldn't have been seeing so much of the ground. Leaves fell in autumn, were carried by the wind's currents. The valleys so suitable for catching limbs were also perfect for sheltering a quantity of long-term mulch. But there were no leaves. No tufts of brown grass, waiting for spring to renew all. Bare ground, pebbles, rocks...

The pebbles had points. Some of them looked sharp. Portions of the exposed rock seemed to be approaching serration. Keratin might be scraped on contact, possibly notched, and... every hoof had its vulnerable frog lurking near the center. And for those half-seen boulders... rain and wind tended to smooth minerals over time, created gentle curves. This was angles and protrusions and edge.

Bare branches often looked somewhat twisted. These seemed to have an invisible hand pulling on the wood. There was an unnatural curve, something where the bark had broken rather than follow suit. And if you glanced away, and then looked back...

The warping of the wood wasn't a constant. Sometimes it increased. She never managed to catch it in the process of moving.

There was something strange about the atmosphere, and -- even when moon-touched, that was all Cerea knew. It was certainly possible for the air to be this still in a natural environment, but that state wasn't a common one. And there was another factor, something she couldn't quite pin down...

Her ears twisted. No breeze ruffled their fur. The only sounds she could register were those made by the ponies: they'd entered ahead of her, and metal-clad hooves were awkwardly making their way across the landscape. (The majority were visibly unaccustomed to moving in shoes.) She couldn't hear any ani --

-- the yellow pegasus stopped. Glanced back at the others, from her position near the right side of the clearing.

"...I want to try something," Fluttershy softly said. "But I'm not sure if I should."

"Fluttershy," the little alicorn began, "if you've had an idea --"

"...talents," the quiet voice precisely broke in, "are magic. Subtle magic, usually, but... there's power there, Twilight: that's what you've always said, what you write about sometimes for the journals. And I've been listening, ever since we came into the wild zone. I didn't hear very many animals when we landed, but -- there were a few. Moving away, because they were startled by all of the carriages coming down. And they were just about all behind us."

Several of the ponies nodded. Cerea, who just wanted something other than the ongoing reports from her olfactory bulb to focus upon and wasn't exactly unhappy to have the possible killer moving away from her, simply listened.

"...and since we started getting closer to Tartarus..." Fluttershy quietly went on, "...I've been hearing less and less. Even with winter so close, even with hibernation to slow them down and migrations to take others away for a while. I thought... if we found someone who'd seen anything, who'd been a witness... I might be able to question them. That could help us. Just having the extra information."

The girl was looking at the triad of butterflies again.

She talks to animals? Or -- insects? Both?

Cerea understood that some marks were more symbolic than others. And when she thought about it, communication with the animal world was a perfectly suitable talent for an assassin. Just get the family cat to tell you which buttons were usually pressed, and then you could disable the alarm. And why did you need to enter a bedroom in order to poison the target, when you could just send in a mouse with chemically-painted claws?

"...but right now," the pegasus finished, "right here... I don't hear anything. And I could try to call out, see if anyone answered, or if I could call them in... but I don't know if anyone was here to see it in the first place. And just trying to learn..."

Her head dipped. One blue-green eye half-closed.

"Would be active use of magic," Twilight thoughtfully considered. "In the place where we already know there was an attack, because it matches the description Wordia --" the disc didn't render the name as spat or snarled, but helpfully indicated where it had been bitten "-- provided. And even listening might have counted for passive, since you would have been trying to translate..."

The little alicorn visibly weighed the options. Feathers twitched a few times, and didn't seem to do so in a proper order.

"It's a risk," Twilight concluded. "But it might not be a major one, because mark magic is subtle. We need information." Darkly, "And if we get attacked because we do this, that counts."

She took a visual survey of the group, one pony after the other. Checking positions, postures and expressions under Moon's light. There was a moment for regarding the little dragon (who had returned to his sister's back) -- followed by a very awkward one when the alicorn visibly realized she'd looked at everyone except Cerea, probably had to spare a glance in that direction just so as to pretend towards inclusion...

The gaze didn't exactly lance out. Purple eyes forced their line of sight to move in half-leaps, which resulted in a number of virtual faceplants within rocky chasms along the way. Reached the armored hooves, told themselves to work up from there, recognized that things were moving too far up, barely found the strength required to cross the upper waist, entered the shadow cast by a metal-encased bosom, and stopped on the spot.

Twilight swallowed.

"Everyp -- everyone," she said, "I want to give Fluttershy one chance at this. But it's like Spike sending a scroll. It's going to be quick, and we're all on guard."

Multiple ponies nodded. Cerea, for whom being on guard meant one more thing, dropped a hand to the hilt of the sword. The alicorn swallowed again, and then turned towards the pegasus with enough speed to distort the hanging bangs of her mane.

"Count of eight, Fluttershy," Twilight said. "That's it."

The pegasus nodded. Tilted her head back slightly, opened her mouth --

-- the disc didn't hiss, and there was a moment when that almost felt like the strangest aspect. But the girl had barely seen any animals -- or rather, she had hardly seen any which didn't think. There had been a few, nearly all encountered during her first trip through a wild zone. Before she'd found the ponies. Squirrels and glimpses of birds and one deer who'd done just what deer always did: stared at her until she'd moved, and then bounded away. There had been a few birds in the palace gardens, but being kept within the palace hadn't allowed her to see the much-dreaded phoenix. And when it came to being dragged through town in a net -- that didn't really offer much of an opportunity to check for pets.

And still, she expected the disc to hiss, because it always tried to translate. A sapient being spoke words, and the magic did its best. But the languages spoken had always been ones created by those who thought...

What happened when a sapient being spoke in the tongues of those who were not?

A count of eight. And in that time, the pegasus warbled hints of birdsong, which moved into a projecting sort of chitter, added hints of hiss and a brief burst of bark. There were subtle aspects of trill, touches of chuff, and it all came with rapid adjustments to posture, position of wings and legs. Body language warped. A single instant of mewing saw the incredible tail trying to sway like that of a cat. And throughout all of it, the disc remained silent.

The ponies tensed. (It was the most visible with Trixie, whose ears had responded to the aural display through going almost straight back.) Huge eyes surveyed the edges of the clearing. The sky (and Rainbow's wings were flaring again, because getting a better view from overhead was still a great excuse). The ground. Waiting for any form of answer, including the one they feared.

Nothing came. No sounds arose from the forest, and the still air consumed the stillborn corpse of an echo.

They waited. One minute. Two. Six...

Fluttershy finally shook her head. Took a little gulp of air, and immediately released a waft of apology.

"...sorry."

"Ah know why y'wanted t' try," Applejack reassured her, and did so on the move: the earth pony was checking the left side of the clearing. Orange ears kept rotating, as if searching for sound from all sides. "An' Ah ain't gonna argue the why of it. Could've used a witness or ten. But since we ain't got 'em -- let's do what the Princesses asked."

Twilight nodded. "You all remember the briefing. This is Wordia's clearing, and that means we know the carriage came through here. Let's see what else we can learn."

The group scattered somewhat. Spike carefully made his way to ground level: the insulation around his knees gave him some dismount trouble. Multiple glowsticks were ignited, and yellow-green did what it could to add onto Moon's light. It wasn't much.

Cerea, for her part, followed orders. She was good at remembering what her orders were: the process of trying to execute them usually drew a few looks from her mother, especially when the order had been 'Win'. Some of those visual once-overs would feel disdainful, while others had the potential to wither. And on a few occasions, when the parent might not have known that the filly was looking...

Reach site.

She unstoppered the canteen. Tried to breathe in the subtler scents of what both humans and ponies considered to be pure water. It didn't help.

Take drink.

It wasn't much of a drinking game. (The household had only made that collective mistake once.) And once the canteen was closed, the girl inhaled again. Checking to make sure it was fully sealed.

The water's scent was blocked. But when it came to everything else...

Ignore it.
...ignore it...
...I am a centaur.

(There was a moment of doubt.)

Moonlight amplifies. But I can choose how I sort the flow. Scent discrimination. I can survive crossing a street in Tokyo after a hundred thousand humans have crossed that street in the previous day. Hour. I can deal with a thousand models of cars belching and farting and spewing their fumes in that same intersection. All the food which the people were carrying, the chemical stinks of their shampoos and soap and makeup, when none of them know how much some of those skin powders reek. Plastics and the acids from batteries.

Some of them still think tobacco is a good idea.

I crossed that street and I didn't die.

I wanted to vomit --

-- sort the flow.
...ignore it...
...ignore that the whole clearing smells like something dying...
...dying and can't finish...
I know that chemical, don't I? Relatively fresh. When the air is this still...
...they used a lot of it. And...
...blood.
Pony blood. Dried.
Somewhere over in that direction, where Trixie is checking. Wordia said she fell out of the carriage. Any blood that fresh is probably hers. So that would be where the drain took place --

-- she was about to gallop directly for the unicorn, because there was a living source of magic about to trot across the location where the drain had taken place. But then she realized what a centaur galloping towards a pony would look like, the only thing it could look like, began to rechannel her effort into a warning shout --

-- the translator is a risk.

It froze her, just for an instant. There was a chance that the disc's magic somehow counted for being subtle, but the effect was still invoked any time there was speech. They were trying to avoid magic and in any moment when she spoke, when anypony spoke, magic was used.

The fear was that Tirek might somehow detect any magic use: center, approach, and drain. Cerea had no magic of her own -- and as long as the disc was active, she was a beacon --

-- the thought froze her, stilled her voice. And in the moment that happened, the light blue unicorn squinted towards the ground.

She frowned a little, or at least tried to do so: the glowstick in her mouth was presenting something of an obstacle. Squinted harder, then carefully lowered the luminescent tube onto hostile soil.

"I found part of their trail."

Cerea almost didn't register the words, and nopony noticed her next action. The Bearers had all turned to face the speaker: something which meant nopony spotted the moment when the girl's hands flew up, began to clutch at silver wire, trying to pull it away from her skin --

-- no.
Stop.

Trembling fingertips rested lightly against cold metal.

I don't understand enough of their language. They would be constantly trying to get things across to me. With expressions she couldn't always read -- Spike was a lost cause there -- and gestures which, for all but the little dragon, would be made without hands.

Keep the disc on and she was a constant risk. Take it off and she was a perpetual liability.

She... needed comprehension. There was no other choice.

I should have focused more on language studies.
Anything which happens is my fault...

The girl forced herself to slowly approach. She needed the moon-touched enhancement now. Even a split-second of warning...

"How can y'tell?" Applejack called out. "All Ah've spotted is their entrance point." The thick tail helpfully lashed towards a well-shadowed gap in the trees, almost invisible under Moon's current angle. "An' we can kind of project across t' where they would've gone out, but y'ain't standin' on that line --"

"They didn't move in a straight line," Trixie solidly stated. "You pull carts, Applejack. Carts which go down a defined road, which gets used just about every day. You've been smoothing out that surface for a couple of generations." With a soft snort, "I have a caravan. And it goes down paths and trails and byways and if anything gets disrupted, flooded out, or blocked, it goes into places where three ponies across two hundred years thought there was maybe enough space to get through. You don't move in straight lines, especially not when the terrain's this uneven. You look for slopes you can manage. Go around things."

Slowly, the earth pony nodded. "Still begs the question," the large mare said. "How can y'tell?"

The unicorn's grin started as a faint one. Glowstick light made it somewhat sickly.

"Because," Trixie told them all, "their wheels suck."

Multiple glowsticks didn't seem to be doing much to aid the cause. Having everyone standing around the same spot also meant a lot of repositioning: shadows had to be kept out of the area, and Cerea was trying to find a place to stand which didn't have hers placing everything in darkness again. It helped to hang back somewhat from the main group.

(It was another excuse for staying back.)

They were all trying to look at the same place. A rising ridge of rock, one which seemed to be doing its best to discover the art of flinting through rendering its own surface into an endless series of tiny knives --

-- no, that wasn't quite right. Hooks. Catch and tear. And they'd managed to snag something. Tiny fragments of palest tan tinged with faint pinks, as if the wood had been kissed by the lightest of bloodstains.

"White cedar," Trixie announced -- and then kicked in a derisive snort. "Whoever rented this carriage was cheap. You can get white cedar wheels for just about nothing, because most ponies are only going to buy it once."

"Y'sure --" started to emerge from the left.

Another snort. "Ask me about wheels, Applejack. About overpriced circles which break down any time you stop thinking about them for an hour. Putting on all of your spares, and then having them ruined a quarter-gallop later because you only managed to steer half the caravan clear of the sinkhole. I had to learn wheelwright skills on top of everything else, because it can take a day before anypony passes by and if you're really unlucky, it's going to be a wheel merchant."

"Really unlucky?" Rarity carefully tried. "How would that be --"

"-- road prices are just a little bit higher," the unicorn spat. "Stupid wheels. And this is one of the worst materials anypony can use. It may look nice, but it doesn't hold up to the pounding any carriage is going to take when it's this far off the main roads. White cedar is soft, everypony -- and it gets worse than that." And now it was a snarl. "The wood oils are toxic."

"How bad?" Twilight quickly asked. "Deadly?"

I smelled cedar. But I thought it was just one of the trees.

"It would have to be a huge quantity," Trixie told them. "Distilled. For this much wood... it's mostly an irritant. You just don't touch exposed portions if you can help it, in case there's any oils left. And you never want to have it on your fur for too long, in case it works down to the skin." With one last snort, "White cedar wheels are what you get when somepony's just dumping stock. They'll make a wheel out of it because it takes too long to detoxify and they can't make anything else. And the pony who pays for them to be put on isn't really worried about how the ride's going to go."

Rainbow was leaning in now. "I see the curve on the bottom of that bigger piece," the pegasus reported. "So yeah. Wheel."

She stopped. Looked up. Spread her wings (and Fluttershy moved right just in time), rustled feathers.

"Does anypony else feel like the air's a little weird?"

The entire group looked at her.

"Weird how?" Spike asked.

"I'm..." Frustration briefly had its way with sleek features, and a surge of reluctance flooded Cerea's nostrils. "I'm not sure. It's..." This time, the feathers shook. "...it's like the air is -- heavy."

Nopony spoke. A few shifted their tails, Applejack tested her ears against the atmosphere, and Fluttershy simply shook her head. Finally, Rainbow refolded her wings and stared down at the trapped splinters again.

"One more reason why air carriages are always better," she announced. "Even a zeppelin wouldn't leave this kind of mess."

"This time," Twilight told them, "we need the mess. It's a clue -- oh, right, thank you --" The alicorn arched her neck, clamped on the far edge of the item which was clutched between Pinkie's teeth. Custody was transferred, and an expert flip centered the landing on top of the purple mane. "-- and that means it's something we may be able to use --"

There were forms of communication other than verbal, senses outside the standard five (and when you included proprioception and thermal, it was seven). And even humans seemed to have some capacity for knowing --

Twilight's head lifted. Tilted back, and then kept moving up until this time, the little alicorn made it all the way to shocked blue eyes.

"-- why are you staring at me?"

Cerea didn't want to look. Some part of her dearly longed to be paying attention to anything else. Most of the rest was wondering about that first encounter with a quadruped in the forest. Seeing an animal which had displayed no signs of sapience, in a world where most of the ungulates seemed to have their own governments. It begged the question of whether the name had crossed worlds -- and it didn't matter, because with the term foremost in her mind, the disc probably wasn't going to render the term as anything else.

Every word was a potential risk. And yet, it felt as if some of them needed to be said.

"Where did that hat come from?"

Also, a rather confused extra thought chimed in, if I decide to say 'deerstalker', what do you hear?

Twilight blinked. But the words got Pinkie's attention. Blue eyes found Cerea's face, and then they stayed there.

"Most ponies don't ask that question," the flour-scented mare said. "Hardly anypony, really."

"I'm not --" the girl forced out.

"I know," Pinkie rather forcefully cut in. "Hats usually come from haberdashers."

There had been no extraction from a saddlebag: Cerea was sure of that. No flash of corona light, or sparks from a field.

"This one doesn't," the earth pony finished in a tone which suggested that she'd just solved everything. "And that's all --"

The slightly-rounded jaw abruptly closed. Every muscle around it flashed taut, and then they all released at once. Pinkie's mouth fell open.

"-- no!"

She wasn't looking at Cerea any more. The blue gaze was desperately switching from pony to pony, and scent told the girl about fear and a sudden surge of self-hatred added to a desperate need to apologize --

"-- it's subconscious!" Pinkie half-yelped. "I didn't mean to! I wasn't thinking about it at all! It just happens, it just -- there's a clue, and if there's a clue, there has to be a hat -- I didn't mean to do it, I have to be more careful, I Pinkie-promise I'll be careful --"

The centaur didn't understand. The ponies and dragon took slow breaths, and then everypony checked the area again.

"I think we're okay, Pinkie," Twilight finally said. Moved forward a little, just enough for the nuzzle to reach shivering pink fur. "And -- nothing happened. We're okay..."

All right, suggested the same part of the girl's mind which had been wondering about the hat. Just keep an eye on Pinkie. For... some reason...

There had been no hat, and now there was...

"White cedar wheels," Twilight refocused. "Everyone, spread out a little. We're looking for more small splinters."

"And check the dirt," Spike added. "They had to go over dirt eventually. Start at the exit, where the soil takes over again."

"...why?" Fluttershy asked.

"Because the wheels were damaged," the little dragon said. "Wheels leave ruts. Damaged wheels leave impressions..."

They all looked at him, with the girl initially doing so in confusion. But the little alicorn slowly began to smile.

The discoveries were just about simultaneous.

Centaurs weren't bloodhounds. But Moon was full, and her body had responded. The air was still, and -- seemed to remain so, no matter how many ponies were moving through it.

The carriage had been here about a day ago, as the only traffic which the clearing might have seen in quite some time. And now there were more ponies in the area -- but Cerea had entered with those scents. She could sort them out, put them aside in her mind, try to focus on whatever remained.

She knew what she was tracking now. White cedar, the chemical, and --

"I've got wheel ruts!" Rainbow enthusiastically called out, and ponies began to turn

Cerea had just turned. Backed up slightly in order to look down, because trying to clear her view through compressing metal with her arms was effectively impossible.

"I found blood," the centaur quietly stated.

Multiple heads swiveled. Several were having trouble picking a direction.

"...blood," Fluttershy repeated.

The girl forced a nod.

"It's dried. I'm sure it's Wordia's. She said she fell out of the carriage --"

"-- how do you know what our blood looks like?" the yellow pegasus softly asked.

Armored hooves awkwardly shuffled. One arm angled itself over the girl's bustline, and the gauntlet squeezed the opposing metal bicep as the girl looked away.

"...smells like," the centaur softly said. "I know what it smells like."

"...I'm pretty sure it's the same question." the pegasus countered.

"When I... jumped over the bushes, and -- everypony attacked me..." The girl swallowed. "It was the flat of the blade." Always the flat of the blade, when you were carrying something which didn't have an edge. "But when you hit a snout... sometimes, that's enough. Where I come from..."

She stopped. Cerea had never really discussed the existence of horses and -- different ponies -- in her world. She didn't know how to explain that. Beginning with the fact that equines could experience spectacular nosebleeds felt like the wrong place to start.

"It's Wordia's blood," Cerea made herself say, and every word was an effort. "It has to be."

They were all looking at her again --

-- Rarity nodded.

"Which gives us the exact place where the magic was stolen, does it not?" the white unicorn asked the group. "So we now have two things to examine. And I feel we should try to avoid dividing our forces. It may take all of us to work out the finer details."

Twilight nodded -- then winced.

"Which leaves us trying to analyze the site of a magic drain," the little alicorn reluctantly observed, "without magic." With a soft groan, "Let's do that one first."

"Hey!" Rainbow protested. "I found mine before she --"

"-- I can think about looking at yours," Twilight firmly said, "without getting a headache. We'll start with the blood."

Eventually, everypony nodded. (Rainbow's came across as a rather frustrated specimen.) Those who'd spoken took up glowsticks between their teeth again. Slowly approached, as the girl felt the chill soaking through the armor. Something which offered no protection from the cold, or the reek of their fear.

Applejack was the first to close in. Moving carefully, staring down at ridges and points and serrations --

-- the large mare stopped. Carefully set the glowstick down.

"Ground's been disrupted," she stated.

Cerea tried to look at the place where the green eyes had focused.

I don't see...

"How?" Twilight asked. The slim legs steadied as they diverted towards Applejack.

"Think Ah've gotta show y'all on this one," the earth pony considered. "Ain't sure it's gonna be visible t' anypony else."

I still don't see...

The earth pony was looking directly at her.

"Cerea? Saw you take a drink earlier." Green eyes searched until they found the container. "Gotta ask a favor."

I thought they were carrying food and water in scentproof wrappings. They have to wait for me at the Gate: they must have brought something.

They were completely different species. 'Centaur germs' weren't going to be a problem. Wiping the canteen's mouth would just be courtesy.

"If'fin you can spare it," Applejack requested, "tip a few drops right 'bout here." The right forehoof carefully tapped. "Slow an' careful, jus' enough so the dirt can't drink it all. Tiniest puddle y'can manage." With what felt like a rather rueful shrug, "Ah'd usually ask Rarity, 'cause it's gonna take fine control. But... can't right now, an' Ah don't want t' risk bein' mouth-clumsy on this one. Fair? And once it's poured, nopony move."

The girl cautiously stepped forward, fetching the canteen as she moved: ponies parted to give her room. Bent her foreknees and leaned, careful to keep her partially-folded legs away from the ground. Portions of the forward surface were armored, but she hadn't covered every square centimeter. It was the tradeoff between metal and movement: even for a centaur, too much weight would slow her down. And when it came to the threat of losing flexibility and speed, when you potentially had to run for your life...

She peered as closely as she could, staring into a little hollow between rocks. Let Moon offer whatever aid was available.

I still don't see anything.

Cerea rather dubiously poured. The world's smallest lake formed, reflected Moon from its surface as the watching giants waited --

-- air bubbles rose through the water. Four streams of silvery spheres, just barely large enough to see. Three had emerged from soil, and one from rock.

"There," Applejack breathed. "Right there. Y'all see it?"

Cerea saw it. She just didn't understand how the earth pony had seen it.

Slowly, oh so slowly, the little lake was draining.

"Quarry eels an' rock pythons don't come that small," Applejack stated.

Twilight was staring down.

"That's tiny," the little alicorn said. "Pinpricks. Just large enough to remove integrity from the borders."

But not large enough to see.
...maybe it's her talent.
Mark check...
...apples.
I thought sharp eyesight was supposed to come from carrots.

"Ain't sure it relates," Applejack reluctantly admitted. "Ah guess there could be another cause. But Ah can't think of an insect that does the trick, not when it's stone."

"...Snails might know," Fluttershy softly proposed. "But I don't. I'm sorry..."

The large mare sighed. "Anyway, didn't want t' hold nothin' back on this one. All Ah found, so -- all Ah can say. Anypony else?"

They all checked the area. But all Cerea found were more of the scents.

Blood.
Terror.
It's not the Bearers. Wordia, I think. And there were stallions, and...
...somepony else.
A mare. Angry --
-- no. It's... more than anger. I think it's related, but...

She hadn't encountered that scent before. There was nopony there to provide expression, posture, anything which helped to made a connection. And for the strongest odor -- she was sure that the others had at least registered that one chemical stink.

The scents were all the girl had. And for the Bearers -- when trying to figure out how magic had been drained, without using magic to analyze anything... nopony could work out anything at all.

Which brought them to Rainbow's discovery. Twin grooves, not fully even. It was just barely possible to spot tiny hills of impression-patterned earth, in a place where the soil granules were somewhat more normal. A few were even rounded.

"Yes," Twilight breathed, and Cerea finally understood. Because her reading taste had galloped towards tales of adventure, really didn't have much to do with horror, science fiction was mostly a wash and she herself existed as living fantasy -- but if you were really desperate for fresh stories, then there was always the 87th Precinct.

It hadn't been all that bad, even after Cerea had emerged from the gap and found that all of the cited technology was decades out of date. A good officer was a little like a knight. And police procedurals had their own lessons to teach.

It's as close as they can get to matching tire treads.

"Sketch it out," the little alicorn requested. "We'll send that in the next scroll. White cedar wheels, and now we've got the damage pattern..."

"The driver may have replaced them already," Rarity pointed out. "Burned the evidence."

It got her a nod. "It's possible. We just have to hope they haven't thought of it -- Rarity?"

"Yes, Twilight?"

"Why aren't you sketching?"

"...er," the white unicorn said. "Twilight..."

"I know it's not a dress design, but you're the only one who can really draw!" With the faint blush just barely visible under Moon's light. "Most of what I can manage is spell notation diagrams. If Spike tries to make a rubbing on that, it's going to tear the paper. While it ruins the dirt. And the paper. Dirty paper. We'll lose all of the detail --"

The unicorn lowered her head, and an unlit protrusion built from something other than bone gently tapped Twilight's lips.

"-- oh," the alicorn finished.

"I thought I saw a camera among our supplies," the white unicorn said. "Would not a picture be simpler? Film is chemical in operation. And since the most sophisticated flashes are not present, no magic would be used."

"We can take one," Twilight admitted. "But we can't send it. Spike's trick doesn't work on film. It would just burn. Rarity, are you sure --"

"My mandible dexterity," Rarity sighed, "is not quite up to the task. Anypony?"

"I pay local artists to design my posters," Trixie stated. "And that's more detail than I use for working out stunts."

"...sometimes I mark injury locations on an outline," Fluttershy timidly offered. "That isn't enough..."

"I take dictation," Spike told them. "I don't think I can make the picture that fine."

"I didn't bring glitter," Pinkie firmly said. "I wasn't going to invite Tirek to anything. And we're not going to get glitter now, because the hat was bad enough."

Rainbow merely snorted. "It took more than a year before Twilight cleared me to do my own paragraphs. Without her staring the whole time. I'm not ready to try for the cover --"

The pegasus, who seemed naturally attuned to movement, abruptly looked up.

"-- why did you bring a book?" Magenta eyes regarded the centaur with open suspicion. "Because if you're thinking about writing all this down and publishing it somewhere, I write it down. The story version. Everypony takes turns on writing the other stuff. And it can't be published --"

Cerea looked at the group. Took a breath, and focused on the little dragon.

"Does it work on any kind of paper?" she asked. "If it's just the scrolls, do you have to be the one who writes them?"

In response, the little dragon backed up.

No --

-- and kept backing up until his neck was no longer fighting against jacket, plush hood, and the limits of his own joints. It was hard to find a good viewing angle, when you were so small.

"It's easier with the scrolls," he finally said. "I can try with any kind of paper, but the scrolls have been prepared. It's the same with the ink. But anyone can write them. Why?"

She slowly lowered herself again, trying to get as close to his level as she could. Cradled the sketchbook against metal with one arm, and gently extended the other.

He stared at her hand. Five digits, all covered in metal, with the palm represented as a steel hollow.

He could breathe fire at any time.
Even if it's not hot enough to melt the steel, he could heat it before I could get the gauntlet off. Third-degree burns. I could lose my hand...

She didn't have any connections for his scents. She didn't know if he was afraid.

I won't be afraid of you if you're not afraid of me.
Please don't be frightened.
Please...

"One sheet," Cerea softly requested. "If you can spare it. Please."

It wound up requiring three. (Cerea hated working in ink: every mistake was effectively permanent. As it was, she was just hoping she'd come close enough to give somepony an effective point of comparison.) The little dragon took custody of the results.

"It'll go out with the next update," he promised. "Is there anything else I should add?"

"I think I know where they were going," Trixie decided -- and then shook her head. "If they were trying for the first available settled zone. But the Princesses were already going to start there." Carefully, as if reviewing an internal checklist, "White cedar wheels, damaged..."

"The carriage itself may not be much better," Rarity considered. "Fallalery decorated with dross."

"A mare got off," Rainbow added -- then shrugged. "It's not much, but it cuts things by about half if somepony saw it."

"They would have been avoiding witnesses," Pinkie kicked in. "But you never know..." And frowned. "But if they were thinking about being seen, then they might have done as much as they could to hide. Big hats to shadow their faces..."

"Layers of clothing to change their builds," Rarity added -- then softly groaned. "Yes, I am aware that I just further complicated things, thank you."

"...cosmetics," Fluttershy reluctantly told them. "Fleur can do a lot with cosmetics. With an expert, you're just about a different pony..."

With open frustration, "An' that's before we start t' think 'bout fur dye --"

"-- cerulean."

As it turned out, the force of eight simultaneous stares was more than enough to make a centaur canter in place. It didn't exactly help to have one of them be coming from Fluttershy.

"I..." the girl tried to get out through stares and Moonlight. "...I... Nightwatch always said fur dye stinks. I -- I thought..."

Rarity took a slow step forward. The centaur backed up.

"For a few hours following application," the white unicorn carefully said. "And then it fades. Those who wish to change their natural hues for a time often lock themselves within their homes accordingly. With windows closed and the vents shut, which only protects everypony else. They came through last night, Cerea. And you can smell their fur dye?"

Hesitantly, as if every centimeter of movement cost a day from her life, the girl nodded.

"They didn't all use it. Just --"

"You can scent the color?"

"One of the palace employees tried it," Cerea reluctantly said. "I asked Nightwatch about it, and she said it was probably for a party."

"You told me," Twilight slowly began, "that I reeked of guilt..."

The girl's hands, currently (and awkwardly) clenched under her breasts, were doing their best to wring against each other: the metal made noises accordingly. "It was on... Nightmare Night? But it's the same dye. The only real difference is that it's being used by two stallions --"

It wasn't Rarity who made the words stop: the unicorn, wide-eyed and staring, was frozen in place. Spike had just stepped forward.

There was something about seeing a dragon approach which brought a temporary halt to speech. On Menajeria, it was mostly the newness of it. In the girl's home, with one of her own dragons, the paused speaker would usually be searching for an appropriately withering counter-insult.

"Say all of that again," Spike carefully requested. "Slowly. I need to write this down."

Treasonous

There are always secrets, and those who work in the palace long enough tend to learn a few.

Nothing about the Discordian Era or the origins of alicorns: not even the sisters know very much about what might have existed prior to their births, and when it comes to the true events of their early lives -- the vast majority of that has been hidden. For safety, and not just that of the Princesses. Because the transformation of the current Magic has told modern ponies that becoming an alicorn is possible, and now the sisters are watching the populace. Waiting for somepony to try again, and dreading the moment when it all goes wrong.

Perhaps only the seneschals, those carefully chosen once-a-generation confidants, know the truth about the Princesses -- and even then, they only gain a portion of it. The pony currently moving through Solar and Lunar wings suspects nothing of those origins (and, were they to somehow learn, would take the news rather poorly). But that individual has been serving as CUNET's source for weeks now. Information has leaked out from the palace -- no, was voluntarily carried, because the source interpreted doing so as necessary.

The centaur is inherently corruptive. Its mere presence is ruining everything. This has been proven again and again. But the Princesses won't see it. There are times when the source doesn't think much of the sisters and, while involved in the current activity...

There was some hesitation at first. Legs initially refused to work at a normal walking pace -- or rather, the one which tells any observer that the pony has every business in being here: anypony who questions them is clearly in the wrong. (Ponies tend to avoid talking to the source for very long, which means most of the information has been gained through careful listening and the occasional bit of luck.) Peeking around corners before advancing was going to look too suspicious and at the start, it was happening anyway.

But then the pony thought about the truest reasons for their actions. The justifications formed a clear path, one leading to a single conclusion: what will happen today is deserved. The nation will see, once and for all, that no centaur can ever be allowed to exist within Equestria's borders. Everything else is just a side effect. And it's not as if anypony's going to get hurt.

...well, nopony who doesn't deserve it.

(The source has heard rumors. Tales which claim the centaur is leaving. This changes nothing. There are fools within the palace staff, those stupid enough to favor abomination, and they'll undoubtedly try to talk the monster out of it. And in what's a rather fine reason for taking action, the two biggest idiots turned out to be in charge.)

That pony is moving more steadily now. Normally. Glances are still being risked, but the pony has to make sure they're not being observed too closely. Because when it comes to secrets, most of what the long-term staff could learn concerns the palace itself.

All the ways it works.
Some of the ones where it almost doesn't.

It's an old building. It's been an old building for a very long time. Attempts to update it for the modern era tend to produce problems: a recent change in the plumbing wound up putting a few holes in the walls, along with flooding the younger's private bath and begging a few unanswered questions regarding the properties of crystal pipes. And there's a lot of magic laced into the structure. All sorts of effects, some of which have to be prevented from interacting with each other...

Old buildings, along with those which experience frequent revisions, tend to develop certain -- quirks.

The source has a rather low opinion of the centaur, has deliberately avoided anything which would allow that pony to learn more about the monster, and so is unaware that the girl would be quick to understand. The centaur hasn't been in the palace long enough to learn these secrets, wouldn't understand what the pony is doing -- but if the purpose behind those simple actions was explained...

There was a household which had been asked to host seven liminal girls, when the number of original intent was 'one'. Thanks to the needs of its residents, some of the construction was under near-constant revision. The same applied to the power requirements, along with a few concepts which would have made translation wires hiss with the sound of indignity for a very long time. And when a building is being altered...

The centaur would understand. You can't flush that one toilet while someone is rinsing off under the showerhead. Too many simultaneous pulls on the wifi, in too many different directions... not only does streaming become impossible, but let Papi try to download a live service game update and even email may grind to a near-halt. Mero needs to have her own water supply: something which possesses a much higher saline content, and the pipes aren't supposed to mix -- but if three critical taps are all being used at the same time...

There have been assaults against the palace before this, because the structure was planned in an era when it had to be its own city. The founding of Equestria was more tumultuous than most of the history books suggest, and when it comes to relationships with the other nations -- there have been wars, and a number managed to reach the gates. But in just about all such cases, there was warning. A chance to prepare, with nearly every attack originating outside.

But with the source...

(Not even the changelings became this deeply entrenched, because getting onto the palace staff means passing a background check: even the best forged paperwork might only hold up for so long. The real snags start to appear when interviews are scheduled with references who don't exist.)

The intensity of a given standing defensive measure will match the criticality of the area. This particular pony can't go everywhere in the palace: some portions are simply blocked. And when it comes to magical tampering -- for spellwork, everything is secured: magic used in a way which makes those effects resistant to any further castings. It doesn't matter much for the source, who couldn't do anything about two-thirds of it anyway.

The critical sections are blocked.
Others are not.

There's a minor distortion in the left wall for one staff-only section of the palace, near the budget offices: something you have to know to look for. The marble in that section has become damaged -- but the portion which was initially knocked loose wound up being placed back within the faint outline of its own crater: a stopgap measure. And if you remove it, peer into the shadows... that's when a small length of exposed silver wire becomes visible. A tiny portion of what's required to channel thaums into the palace's defenses.

Maintenance has that on the schedule. They've had it on the schedule for a few Bearer-intensive years, and it keeps getting shuttled to the bottom of the list. Cleaning up broken columns comes first. And until then, the marble plug suffices. After all, it's not as if anypony's going to touch the wire.

This particular corner looks perfectly ordinary. It is perfectly ordinary, except for the fact that you can't leave any copper resting in that one spot. But how often is that going to come up?

Here's a door. Always close it fully because these days, the latch needs to slot into place before the workings will kick in.

It's also possible to figure out where some of the secret passages are, especially if you see the Guards exiting them during drills -- something which can also hint as to how a few routes are opened. Give any member of the staff enough time, and they could probably draw a partial map. In this case, Mrs. Panderaghast asked for the exact location of the cells, some suggested routes down, and a guide for just which parts of the wall need to be rapped.

You learn the quirks of an old building, if you're paying attention. All its little idiosyncrasies. And the pony isn't even entirely sure as to what all of the changes might add up to: none of this has any relationship to their mark.

But they listen.

(Some might consider that kind of eavesdropping to be rude. The source disagrees. They know what true rudeness is. It lives in the barracks, and this will make it leave.)

Everything the source is doing would be counted as minor --
-- individually.

There are things you're not supposed to do, and they're all being done.

Doing the needful, because the cause is sufficient.

The centaur breaks every rule, simply through existing. The foolish alicorns have forgotten what the rules are supposed to be. This is... simply a reminder.

If anypony of sanity knew about the sabotage making its way through the halls, truly thought about it -- then they would clearly understand that the pony was acting out of duty.

Duty, and what the pony believes to pass for love.

The girl is asleep.

She's been sleeping at odd hours, and doesn't seem to be capable of true rest. Part of that comes from the disruption imposed by two days of unconsciousness, and the remainder can be laid at the hooves of the ongoing illness. If she concentrates, she can move normally -- for a little while. Speak. But she does so while holding everything back with an effort of will. Something which is always going to give out, and when it does...

She can't focus to that degree while she's sleeping. Some part of a saturated body reports its inability to heal from whatever happened, whatever's still happening, and... she wakes.

The girl has awoken to find new items near her bed. For starters, somepony has been bringing in her mail -- or at least, that scant portion which the palace cleared to be read to her. She's already heard the one from Fancypants: it was filled with apologies, multiple excuses for how nothing which had happened could possibly be her fault, and ended with his regrets for having to leave the city. There is still a fragile storm hosted in the tallest tower, and the next chaos pearl could be the most crucial. Or the one after that.

There was also a second letter. The envelope features a near-endless trail of consonants trying to wrap around the paper. The girl has neither opened that one nor requested that anypony do so for her, because she's still convinced it got in by mistake and besides, the writing has somehow gotten worse.

Sometimes she finds a pony in the room. Both of the Royal Physicians have been in and out, and the scent of their fear never truly fades. Acrolith dropped by for a few minutes, and... the girl isn't sure that particular Guard knows the centaur is leaving. That news definitely hasn't spread to the whole of the palace staff, because somepony else brought in her unreadable textbooks and some illegible notes regarding the lessons she'd missed. She feels vaguely guilty for having lost her perfect attendance record so easily. Even within the chaos of Japan, she usually managed to log into her classes on time. A true centaur would pride themselves on promptness.

A true centaur is also capable of getting sick, which means perfect attendance requires either incredible luck or being too stupid and/or stubborn to allow themselves any time for recovery. To gain any blushing details on that, all she has to do is think of the forge.

...Barding came in again. He didn't argue about her upcoming departure this time: instead, the smith brought a length of chain and asked her to examine it. Test the metal for strength. The girl feels the true implication is that he was trying to figure out how to attach her to the anvil.

Yapper peeked into the room, but was visibly uncomfortable: the scents from the medical equipment weren't sitting well, and the canid couldn't stay for long. Sizzler drops off food and teaches her about why well-done is its very own sin. Barely-heard, too-soft words from the outer hallway almost suggest that Fluttershy may have tried to get in. Apparently she had some treatment ideas.

Perhaps the doctors tried them. They've been desperate enough (and the girl can scent that too) to attempt a few tactics. The stomach tonic was one of the first failures.

The illness shows no signs of fading. It generally isn't intensifying: in just about any given moment, the girl feels exactly as sick as she did in the instant before. And she feels so stupid, just for being sick. It would have been a better story if she'd died in battle. This is too slow...

...she isn't dying.
The doctors have started telling her that. She isn't dying.
(They can't know.)
When nothing works or makes her feel any better.
Without treatment, without medicine, when she can't currently hope for even a single moment of normalcy, even knowing that it would always be followed by torment...
What if it isn't fatal? What if it's just... permanent?
Is it possible to live like this? Where she has to concentrate just to reach a restroom, focus in order to get herself positioned over the trench, and she always wants to vomit from every cell and it never gets any better?
What kind of life...

Too many reasons for why she can't stay asleep. Thoughts which made it hard to sleep at all.

But the girl is sleeping now. And as she sleeps, she dreams of home.

She is in her bedroom, with her legs folded and her lower torso resting on the tatami mat. There's art on the walls: Japanese brushwork, which she fancies simply for the precise delicacy of it. The practice blade has its own mounting rack on a shelf, the bonsai is close to that, and she added a long, low table to the native furnishings. Something she can only use in comfort when she's just about flush against the floor, but... she liked the style. It also had the benefit of not having been used by ten generations of centaurs before this.

Additionally, when she's on the floor, she loses the height advantage. Their host can look down at her. Perhaps there's some way in which that might help.

(Maybe she needs to find a blouse which would display cleavage. Give him something he can look into. But that would mean going shopping.)

She's next to the table, sorting through the displayed brushes. There's also a few carefully-chosen combs. A number of specimens sport long handles. And after she chooses the first, she drapes a portion of her hair over one arm, begins to gently work bristles through strands...

Brushing her hair. Also her tail and, once she lifts the skirt somewhat, her fur. She has to reflect well on the program. On their host. And when one's overall appearance is seen as inadequate, proper grooming becomes all the more important --

My mother is beautiful.

It's an old thought.

I look just like --

That one is new.

The girl stops. Looks at the brush, examines the long blonde fall in confusion. Begins again.

She's been letting her hair grow out, even more than usual. The magazines and websites suggest that some humans like long hair. Perhaps he's one of them. She's already taken the overall lead in that portion of the household's collective race, but it might not hurt to get further ahead. Besides, centaur hair grows quickly. It'll give the others real trouble in catching up.

If he just likes long hair.
(If he truly likes her.)
(If he loves...)
I thought it had to be love.

...it takes a few seconds before she can resume.

Anyway, some humans like long hair. This one also likes grabbing onto things, especially when he's on her lower back and failing to find some degree of balance. The hair would give him an extra option. One which is going to hurt. And if he grabs onto her hair with the same amount of force which he uses for clutching at her breasts, she's going to be left with a bleeding scalp. If she could just get him to go for her upper waist --

-- there's movement in the hallway. Hoofsteps: she can hear the impact of keratin on the floor, and the girl automatically, almost frantically checks the room. Making sure it's clean enough, that there's nothing which has to be hidden because her mother --

-- no. The scent isn't there, the hoofsteps are too light, and that means it has to be someone else. One of the other girls, or a M.O.N. agent --

-- she's the only one with hooves.

The girl glances towards the door. It's a shoji screen style: more durable than the rice paper which the white patches so resemble, but still somewhat translucent in the paneling. It lets her see the outline of the party on the other side.

She recognizes the shape, and does so at the exact moment when she becomes aware of the dream.

The shadow of a horn is slightly lowered. Silhouette wings awkwardly rustle. And the outline of a left forehoof carefully knocks on the door.

It's a rather awkward sort of knock. The sound somehow suggests that the pony truly wishes to see the door open, while having no means of making it cooperate. It's a knock which is rather directly waiting for someone else to act and, barring that... well, based on the way the mare is shadow-shuffling her weight from hoof to hoof, it's a knock which is also waiting for the girl to tell it to go away.

The alicorn is within the dream: there's no other way for the knock to have occurred. And yet, she seems to be slightly outside it. Waiting for permission.

The girl carefully places the brush back on the table. Straightens all four legs, which takes a few extra seconds: the knowledge of the dreamstate has brought with it a memory of illness, and nausea tries to surge. Approaches the door, lowers her right hand, and carefully slides the barrier aside.

The dark alicorn's head tilts up. The crown fails to shift with the movement, mostly because it isn't there.

Softly, just a little too much so, "May we speak?"

The girl isn't quite sure what to do with that.

"If you do not wish to speak with me," the alicorn quickly adds, "I will depart. And not trouble your rest again in such a manner --"

"-- is this a debriefing?"

It was the first thought to arise in the centaur's mind, and the alicorn's little snort proves it was the wrong one. A sound which, just for a moment, almost comes across as bemused.

"No," the dark mare says. "Orders from one's... superiors... remain orders." With another snort, "Superiors in a rather limited, extremely restricted category -- and yet, one which continues to arise on..."

The mare's head dips. Dark eyes briefly close.

"...too frequent an occasion," the alicorn quietly finishes. "We have both have been ordered not to debrief you until the Royal Physicians feel you are ready. It is why they are reluctant to allow us into your presence, as they suspect that even the most simple questions might eventually create a path into Tartarus. When you awaken, if you choose to speak of this..." Both wings rustle again. "...you will be able to truthfully inform them that no debriefing took place. I simply wish to speak, and... this is the only means of communication currently available."

The girl doesn't move.

She's in my mind.
I don't want...
...the sword is right over --

She knows she's dreaming. She's also aware of what took place in the waking world and when that knowledge is brought into dream, the room is filled with the scent of melted plastic.

The alicorn's hooves awkwardly shuffle against the hallway floor.

"I ask permission to speak," the Princess requests. "To -- be here." And, as the dark head dips again, with the flow of mane and tail slowing enough to let the girl make out every dimming star, "Please. It..." One breath, then another. "...it should not take too much of your time..."

Permission.
When there are no hairpins. No defenses.
The offer of control.

The mare looks up at the girl. Dark eyes roam across strange features, pause briefly on shoulders and chin. And then she waits.

She was my liege...
The girl wasn't a very good Guard.

"Do you want to come in?" And immediately second-guesses the offer, because she's not sure about how her room is going to come across. Following local styles gave her a template, but -- the girl had never tried to decorate a space before. There's a lot of brown.

The mare, caught in the middle of examining the girl's skirt-covered flanks, blinks.

"Into the bedroom? No." Followed by a sigh. "I could argue to gain another glimpse of your world, but... some degree of boundary should be established. The hallway will suffice."

The girl nods, and the alicorn steps back. Making room. It still takes a few seconds before the girl can commit herself to emerging, and her ears never completely stop searching for sounds. She can't hear anyone else in the house. No siblings, and their host's voice is absent. It's just the two of them --

-- she doesn't even know how much of the house exists here. If any room only forms when she trots towards it.

The alicorn is looking up at her. Something about the mare's breathing is uneven. Not forced, but... weary.

"I shall be brief," the Princess states. "There are... two questions. Or rather, two which I see as crucial, and then perhaps a third."

The girl nods. Waits.

Uneven breathing from the mare. Visibly fighting to keep her hooves still, to make her eyes stay open as stars go out and the flowing night sky fades into light blue.

The words barely reach the level of whisper. And yet every syllable sends a little ripple across the walls.

"What must I do to prove atonement?"

The girl's breath catches in her throat.

"I..."

"To be forgiven, for words and deeds?" the Princess forces into the world, hooves scraping against the floor as feathers seem to twist against themselves and dark ears flick back and forth. "Things I have done, and those I did not. What do you require of me?"

...royalty is asking her...
She doesn't know how to deal with that. What to think of it or, with the impossibility directly before her, how to think at all.
She doesn't...

Her upper shoulders tense, then slump again. A deep breath tests the limits of imaginary buttons.

"...I don't know."

The mare's eyes close.

"A fair answer," the alicorn says. "Especially when the query is so unexpected. But the second... that may be easier for you." She won't look at the girl. Won't look at anything. "Do you hate me?"

You knew more about me than anypony.
Anyone. Ever.
You saw my life.
Every doubt.
Every failure.
And you wanted me anyway.

"No."

Fur ripples across the full breadth of the mare's tiny shiver.

"Then there is a third," the alicorn tells her. "After you rest, contemplate the first question in the waking world... may we speak again?"

There had been a meeting in the forest, and the girl had been shown a sort of kindness.
She hadn't done anything to earn that.

"Yes."

The alicorn nods. Turns, with her eyes remaining closed. Slowly trots away, and the girl watches her go --

-- nausea surges through her body. Her right hand tries to brace against the wall, finds it rippling into intangibility. Waking comes, and the sickness...

I need to give her a better answer.
I have to forgive her before I die --

Just about all of a centaur's upper body was double-jointed, and nothing in the overall arrangement would have ever allowed Cerea to put her forelegs over her head. Trying to start from a side-sleeping position (and it seemed that when she was sick, she slept on her side a lot) was only going to allow for faster fractures.

"Twitching a little there," the old stallion calmly said, and shifted no portion of his posture upon the bench. There was no need to adjust military-grade perfection. "Dreaming, or something from the fight?"

Which meant that while there was an official Greeting Stance for a graduate meeting their Sergeant, she couldn't assume it. One more failure for the top of the stack. But at the very least, she'd slept with the disc against her throat. Her waking hours were too irregular to keep taking it off all the time, and any resulting ear soreness was the least of her problems.

"A little of both," Cerea wearily told him, and Emery Board nodded.

"Doctors are still looking into the second," he stated. "They're good. They'll come up with something."

Your words can be confident, Sergeant.
Your scent isn't.

Her blankets vibrated. It wasn't from her own movement: the protesters were just especially loud today. Probably demanding to see Tirek's corpse. Or, more ideally, hers.

"Talked them into giving me some time," he evenly told her, gazing out from beneath the brim of the hat. "Sergeant's right to check on his own."

I'm not --
-- I'm not going to be --

"Told them it wasn't going to be anything close to a full debriefing," he added. "But I want to get one part of it. I want to hear about the fight. Because there's only one mare in the world who's gone up against Tirek, up close and personal. I know how it came out, Recruit, because I saw the results." And snorted. "He isn't all that intimidating when he's not moving or breathing, and he's down to the size of a colt. So tell me what happened --"

He hesitated.
He hardly ever --

"-- if you're up to it," the stallion finished.

She felt sick.

Maybe she needed to get used to it.

"Yes." The girl began to shuffle her way out of the blankets, trying to get into a normal sitting position. Fabric began to slide away.

"If you need to get dressed --" the Sergeant shrugged. Not that he cared about anything she might display, but...

She shook her head, moved one sleeve-covered arm out from under the draping and displayed the fabric. "I'm okay." While nothing had been done about the full-body nausea, or possibly could be done at all --

I have to give them a chance.
Maybe it'll go away.
Maybe this isn't forever.

-- the Royal Physicians had been satisfied with the way her upper torso was healing. Nightwatch had been allowed to bring in a blouse, along with a bra -- but not a skirt, because they still wanted to check on that bruising. It meant everything had to go on over the uneven hospital gown, and her exposed left flank stayed under the blankets whenever possible.

(Her breasts were still lightly bruised. Wearing the bra was producing a little pain, but that was something which mostly got lost in the nausea.)

The Sergeant nodded. "Whenever you're ready."

She did her best to give him all of the moves: everything she'd done, along with every opportunity she'd missed. (Her failure to completely test the armor's jointing was brought up twice.) He listened to all of it, while she waited for an interruption which never came. Cerea was starting to feel like he was saving up all of the criticism for the end and a very long, potentially very loud rebuttal.

(It would have to be loud. She'd had to raise her voice a few times to get past the increasing background noise. Cerea almost felt she was on the verge of making out the words within the chant...)

But he just listened. And after she finished...

"Smarter fighter wins," the Sergeant decided. And then kicked in a snort. "Especially when she's going up against Paddy One-Tactic. Drain and blast. Sounds like he didn't learn much from the first round. Probably didn't think he needed to."

Not when Discord is gone.

Her pasterns writhed under the skin. Fur turned against itself, and she fought to keep her expression steady --

"-- do you need to stop?" the earth pony checked. "I can get one of the doctors --"

Another spark floated past her eyeline, then drifted towards the open door.

"This is how I've felt since I woke up the first time," Cerea quietly told him. "If they think there's been a change, they'll come in."

It took a few seconds before he nodded. His expression remained impassive.

You smell so worried.

She almost wanted to tell him, if only to see if he could find control over that too.

"How many seconds was that fight?" he asked her. "Best guess at the total, starting from when you started the charge for the cell bars, and stopping when you both went down."

She thought about it, then automatically offered her estimate. She hadn't exactly been checking her watch during the fight, and there had been no opportunity to use it as a flail. The timepiece was currently sitting on top of the rolling cabinet. She'd been avoiding putting it back on, because nausea had a way of distorting time. Fighting for twenty subjective minutes of control was bad enough: discovering the objective duration had actually been less than five was worse --

-- the Sergeant's eyes had narrowed.

"Right," he said. "Next question. What didn't you tell me?"

And she knew.

...oh no...

"Had you out at the training grounds for weeks," Emery Board softly reminded her. "I know how strong you are. How fast. I ordered you to give me your best, and the stopwatch told me what that was. But the only way you could have pulled that fight off, with everything you did, every move, in that time... was if you were moving faster than I ever saw. So you get one chance to explain yourself, Recruit. Make it work."

She was leaving the Guard. (Technically, she already had.)
He wasn't her superior any more. She didn't have to follow orders.
But he'd spent hours with her. Talked to her, as much as anypony ever had. Taught her. Did everything he could to keep her alive.
She'd never had a stallion take an interest in her before.
I never had --
-- he wasn't her father.
She'd never really had a father. Just a stallion who was usually on the other side of the house, who had to be kept away from alcohol at all costs.
Who wasn't allowed in the same room with his daughter without supervision.

She felt her ribs shift. Upper, then lower. (For the lower, the bare shift was all she could manage.) And then she made a decision.

"It's... called the Second Breath..."

He was silent after she finished. It didn't feel like a natural state for him, especially when it held for more than twenty seconds.

"Why didn't you tell me before this?" took its time about coming out, mostly because it needed to make sure every syllable possessed an even coating of disappointment. "We could have built tactics around it. Unless you were planning on never --"

"-- I would have used the Second Breath, if the situation was important enough," Cerea softly replied. "I did. But it's not fully reliable, Sergeant. I don't have it mastered. Just about no one ever masters it. Plus you usually need to use it at the start of a fight, because pain can make it harder to initiate." Which was why she hadn't been able to get it going in Palimyno: she'd been hit too fast, and then she'd been fighting off too much at once. "And... it's dangerous. Even practicing too much is a risk. If I overused it during training --"

"-- I push," Emery Board told her. "I push recruits until they go under a tree for a while. Into the showers, and then into bed. I don't push them into the ground."

Blue eyes briefly closed with shame.

"Why?" the Sergeant repeated. And waited.

"...I was scared."

"Of me," felt as if it should have emerged with more tone. Any tone.

"Of letting anypony know." She was fighting to keep the nausea from surging. To let every word be audible. "Because the ones who didn't hate me were afraid, and the ones who were afraid could have it take over, and... it was the last thing I had, Sergeant, if everything went wrong. It almost felt like the only thing. I was holding it back, because..."

It was becoming hard to keep her head up. Shame had weight.

"...I was scared," she just barely finished. "You keep secrets because you're scared..."

His expression was steady. Nothing about his posture shifted. But the Sergeant was silent, and...

...his scent changed.
I think...
...Nightwatch after the training exercise, the Princess outside the locker room...

The hat slipped forward, and brown eyes slipped into shadow.

"Yes."

...remorse?

"Sergeant?"

He tilted his head back. Careful ear pressure readjusted the hat.

"Yes," the earth pony repeated. "That's exactly right. No blame, Recruit. You -- used it when you had to."

The camouflage-patterned tail slowly swept across the bench. Left, then right.

"Nightwatch tried to talk you into staying," the stallion told her. "Asked me to take a turn. But she just wants you to stay in Equestria." His eyes narrowed. "I want you in the Guard."

"I can't," was the most immediate part of the protest. "Without --"

"-- so we treat you as a minotaur," he cut her off. "Only with four legs, who can't twist themselves into the ground --"

"-- they have their magic," she forced in. "Strength." Which still had some outliers, and he'd told her about a few of them. So many of the species seemed to be about categories of magic... "I don't. It won't work --"

"-- they've served with ponies," the Sergeant volleyed back. "I told you that. Not in the Guard, but in armies. Our oldest allies."

"In battle," Cerea countered. "Not as Guards. It's different when you have full units on the battlefield. There's more people involved. You can have ponies on watch. But with Guards, it's usually just a few at a time. A squad might be a dozen ponies, for something big. There aren't enough --"

"-- so you work with a partner. Guards cover each other. You're already working with --"

The girl took a breath. Illness flowed down the branching trachea, then failed to come back out.

"Every pony Guard," the centaur said, "can look out for themselves in one category of magic." Presumably earth ponies had a way of blocking wasteland. It was probably channeling extra power into the soil. "And somepony can help them with the other two --" the stray thought got through "-- unless there's been alicorn guards?"

He gave her a Look: one which, among pony expressions, was distressingly familiar. It was the Look which said that no one else in the world would have asked that question.

"No," the Sergeant answered. "Let's just say the population's a little low. But the Generals guard each other."

She fought back the blush, nodded. How rare is that bloodline...?

"I can't fight off anything," she quietly said. "I can't even improvise, trying to use whatever I have to withstand somepony else's tricks. Or someone's." Ibex stability, rooting in place to stop a unicorn's telekinetic lift... "Sergeant, there would have to be a Guard focused on me at all times. And a Guard whose primary task is watching me -- won't be looking out for the Princess. It's the wrong priority, and... you know it."

It briefly silenced him. But with the Sergeant, that state was always going to be brief.

"You're focusing too much on magic," the stallion decided. "Same mistake Tirek made. Nightwatch too, far as that goes. Not everything is about --"

She felt her arms spread out to the sides, the palms turning up. "-- am I wrong? What if I get caught alone? And --" the thought was almost funny "-- somepony could always just drop a rock on my head."

His tail swayed again. None of the scents changed.

"Nightwatch told me a lot of things before I went in," the Sergeant informed her. "Nothing too personal. Just a couple of details which came up before. Thought they might sound better coming from somepony else. So... what if the world still needs a centaur?"

She had an answer for that. And if only for a moment, it made her smile.

"The world needed a sword," she replied. "The centaur just happened to be holding it."

He inhaled. "Recruit --"

"The sword is gone, Sergeant," Cerea softly told him. "It can't be reforged: there's barely enough left for a dagger."

"So you make a dagger --"

"And even if there was, I don't know how to work with plastic." And paused until the wires stopped hissing. "Plastic which doesn't cut through magic any more. I also don't know how to recreate the base material and even if I could, I don't think it would ever have the same effect. Making a fake out of metal means waiting for somepony to call my bluff and when that happens, I'll just be helpless." Decibels fell away. "I don't think that can be kept a secret forever. Eventually, everypony's going to know I'm vulnerable. It was always the sword, and... there isn't a sword any more."

"So they'll attack you," the Sergeant concluded, "because they're still afraid. And you would be defenseless."

She nodded.

"And what happens when the Generals tell them the full story?" he asked. "That you killed Tirek?"

A few small instruments skittered atop the rolling cabinet, jolted by passing vibration. They both watched, waited until everything came to a stop.

"Getting loud out there," the earth pony muttered. "Timing's lousy. Recruit, what happens when everypony finds out you're the reason some of them can start sleeping for more than two hours at a time?"

Her eyes closed.

All I do is make things worse...

No. Tirek was dead. It was something which made the world a better place, and that wouldn't change.

But she could still make things worse for herself. For everypony who knew her.

Her words had some tremble within them, and part of that was illness. But some of it came from power. Honesty possessed a strength of its own.

"They'll just say one monster killed another. And the survivor must have been the stronger, so... I'm the bigger threat."

She heard hooves pushing against wood. A wiry, solid body stepping down to the floor.

"You're not a monster," Emery Board decided. "If you were... then that thought wouldn't have hurt you." She heard him inhale. "Cerea --"

-- the sound hit them, and four twisting ears could barely take it all in. It was shouts and yells and in the translation provided by the disc, it was the overlap of too much at once, where it was impossible to understand any of it --

-- she couldn't make out the words.
She didn't have to.
They both heard the screams.

What does it take to get into the palace?

Under normal circumstances, most of what's involved is a willingness to wait in line.

There are tour groups, and a nominal admission fee helps to keep taxes down. (School groups come in for free.) They follow a familiar route through the public sections of the structure: something which is regulated, closely observed, and still has ponies trying to sneak off. It's easy to track those ponies, because there's generally a trail. One leading off towards an alicorn bedroom, made from excess sweat, and that was in no way what the stray meant all those years ago when they wrote that letter. The one which featured a heroic excess of the word 'fluids'.

Don't want to join a tour group? Need a little private time? Both Princesses host Open Palace sessions once per moon, where any citizen who's willing to wait in what's often a very long line might gain the chance to speak with royalty directly. The last few moons have seen a lot of ponies approaching to talk about the centaur, and just about all of them believed they were saving the alicorns from themselves.

And when the holidays approach? Hearth's Warming is the season for gifts. But the sisters have been dealing with the groupthink of a herd species for a very long time. In order to prevent the palace from being flooded with wrapping paper, ponies who wish to give something to a Princess have to submit their names moons in advance. There's a random draw, two hundred winners (per Princess), a price limit, far too many baked goods -- and in all cases, there's a security screening. Everything is inspected. Everypony is looked into. Because the Princesses have been at this for a very long time, and they aren't stupid.

Even so, there are those who would say the palace operates under a shocking lack of security. (Others would claim the true shock is in the lack of decorum. That there are no rules for how ponies should speak, let alone whether they should be allowed to speak at all.) But the government needs to operate with some degree of openness. Yes, there have been times when the palace was locked down -- but not during periods of peace. Citizens should never feel as if the Princesses are completely inaccessible, or shut away from the normal world. The dream is that they might approach as nothing more than one pony to another and one day, it might even come true.

So for the most part, the palace is more concerned about where ponies go once they're inside. There are public sections. There are also private ones and no matter what the cumulative sweat of generations might desire, the bedrooms are going to stay in that category. Keep the divisions clear, and all is well. That's how it's always been.

As definitions go, 'always' is rather fragile.

All it takes is one exception.

The plan was put together in haste, because there was no other way. Nopony's sure of when the interrogation might take place. It has to happen too fast if it's going to happen at all, and...

...there wasn't much time to plan. To set things up. To consider everything which might go wrong, and -- for the last, there wasn't a lot of that happening at all. For those who truly believe, this has become a day which will change everything. And when it comes to the one who touched it all off... she doesn't care if it fails.

It's all been worked out. The details caught on quickly. Bad ideas often do.

Weather? Starting conditions are dictated by the Bureau schedule, and there was some luck there: cold, but clear. Less than ideal in many ways, but it's just about winter now. At any rate, climate-based attacks won't matter once they get inside. And cold, but clear... it's a reason to dress up. Clothing hides marks. Hoods obscure features. Some went as far as fur dye, and those within the crowd that aren't involved in the plan are starting to wonder about the massed scent.

When to move? There's a popular theory which claims the palace is at its most vulnerable when shifts are changing: one group tired, the other not fully ready to take over yet. It's very likely true. It also means that the building is either occupied by a doubled population or may have quite a few departing staffers in hearing range and ready to turn back. So with very little of the clock to work with, knowing that the interrogation is being done by the alicorns and hoping they'll at least have breakfast first...

The Lunar staff is believed to be somewhat smaller than the Solar. However, taking advantage of that means having a large group outside the palace under Moon. The night protests, even during the strongest surges, have been smaller than those which arrive during the day. Even with the surge initially produced by the stories of renewed magic drain, a huge night crowd would look suspicious -- and the ponies foolish enough to believe the Princesses about Tirek's death have gone home.

(There are still doubters. Some of them remain outside the palace, demanding answers. And even so... there are two stories moving through the crowd. One of them concerns Tirek. Can he truly be dead? Who was responsible? What's the proof? Perhaps there would be less to fear, and healing might be possible -- if it wasn't for the other centaur. The monster. The one who, despite the shape of her lower body, is nothing like a pony at all.)

So it'll have to be the Solar shift. More numbers to work with, spaced within a more natural-seeming protest crowd. Far enough into the day for the Lunars to be either back home or most of the way there, unable to return so easily. There's no other choice.

Additionally, it took time to notify everypony involved. The heads of three organizations had to contact as many followers as they could, with only a few hours to work with. Part of that ran into the early morning, and... the results are not ideal. A rough majority of the memberships have shown up. Anything under a hundred percent means some ponies stayed home. Because they were afraid, felt this was the line they couldn't cross, or they didn't believe and decided everything would fail.

Not offering support, at the moment it's needed most. The ones waiting outside the palace are already wondering about when their leaders will begin to cull the ranks.

(Their leaders aren't going to be part of the first wave. They've been told that's part of the strategy.)

The believers are present. They've told themselves that they're about to prove what real ponies can do. And because there's three factions, there are three definitions of 'real' in play. No single meaning agrees with the other two, and the fragile alliance already has several within it wondering if they'll get a chance to kick a few inferior ribs when nopony's looking.

Real ponies are going to act. Not the sheltered, or the brainwashed, or the freaks within the palace: that last category will just be pushed to safety once everything starts. (All of the ones who came truly believe that and for a few, it's the only reason they were able to show up at all.) They will prove the strength, the willpower, and the drive of true Equestrians. And there will be no consequences. There can't be. The court system is only so large, and you can't arrest that many ponies at once. Their leaders said so.

Besides, the courts would only come into play if they lose. That won't happen.

They've been waiting for this day. For some, it's a wait which has gone on for most of a lifetime. They're going to do something which matters, and that means it'll be the day which changes everything.

(They're right.)

How could the attackers have been identified within the crowd, before it all began? The scent of fur dye. Extra clothing layers present on those who previously claimed their species was hardy enough to take anything. But they're also the loudest, because all of that energy has to go somewhere. They're chanting and shouting and sometimes, they pause to pass on a story.

The crowd numbers surged when the news of renewed magic drains broke, because so much of Canterlot was hurt and wounded and effectively raped, and -- they needed reassurance. To be told it wasn't real, or that it wasn't going to reach them again, or that there was some other way to save everypony when Discord was gone. A number of those believed the palace when the claim of Tirek's death came, went home. Others are looking for proof. And they talk about whether Tirek is truly gone this time, those waiting for their hour to come do the same...

...there would have been a pair of additional ways to identify them.

Two stories are moving through the crowd. Both concern centaurs. But only those waiting to begin the assault will hear the second.

'The centaur is no longer a problem.'

It was the sword. It was always the sword, only. And the sword is gone.

If they find the centaur, they can win.

Some of them plan to look.

(It won't be a crime. A crime is something you commit against a pony. 'Pony' is solely defined as 'those who completely agree with you'. It's so obvious.)

All they have to do is get inside.

They also keep looking up. Over and over.

And as for how they're getting in...

They can't really use a tour group, because there's too many ponies for that. Sneaking a few inside as advance scouts might have been possible moons ago, but some of them have been screaming at the walls for just about that long. (For a few, it's their job, insofar as they still have one.) It might make them recognizable, and participating in the tour means having to take a hood off.

(The ones who can truly think about becoming recognizable through everyday presence, compared to the supposed protection of a hood, are the ones who stayed home.)

Also, there's been less tourists since the centaur arrived. They have to pass through the protesters to get in, and nopony likes to be screamed at.

The next Open Palace session is in two weeks. (Before this, it would have mostly been about the centaur.) Hearth's Warming is a little less than a moon away. Far too long to wait.

They can barely wait for the signal.

And then it appears.

The pegasi arranged for this part. (Two-thirds of the alliance will grudgingly decide the featherbrains are good for that much.) It's a cloud. One made into a very special, extremely distinctive shape. It moves into the open sky above the front of the palace: the only cloud in the area, riding a wind which the Weather Bureau never arranged.

There are Guards watching the ground-based portion of the crowd. Others check the sky, because there are pegasi among the shouters and you never know. It means just about everypony sees the cloud at the same time. And before the Guards can truly react, even when so many think this is just a pointless use of the symbol, white and wispy with no lightning lurking within at all...

...the alliance moves.

They've made this shape before, on a smaller scale. Now it's just so many more of them doing it at once, and it takes up just about all of the street space available. They need the palace to know why this is happening --

-- no, it's more than that. They're saying who's responsible. Identifying the party who's truly to blame, just for existing.

More than a hundred pony bodies form the symbol. A hand superimposed over a hoof.

And then they charge.

There had been some hope for herd instinct to take over. Emotions always run high in this kind of crowd. Get the herd worked up enough and where one goes, all others might follow. There are potential reinforcements everywhere in the form of those protesters who aren't organization members, and all that's needed is for a moment of clarity to show them the way.

It almost works. A few of the weakest see the movement, start to follow because that's where everypony else is going -- but then they see what's happening, and it's a shock greater than freezing water. Stronger than lightning. There are limits to what herd instinct can both accomplish and inflict. Limits which accompany rules, and one of the latter allows thought to return. There are a number who start to charge unawares, who almost join in -- but then they stop. Try to find a way out, and too many fail. They become the first of the wounded, kicked and trampled because there are so many more of the others. And yet they keep trying to push themselves away, because the herd does not casually attack its leaders.

But the attackers are going directly for the gates. And unicorn fields pull at the great hinges, pegasus winds push on metal and earth pony strength kicks into the bolts, the collective weight of the assault is piling against the gates and the spells activate as the Guards are starting to move, to call for help which will have time to arrive because the effects meant to hold the line are keeping everything intact, but none of them can raise a shield that quickly, something which would still need time to harden and Captain Armor is in the Empire, the sheer scale of the attack is draining the local charge levels too quickly, the attackers are trying to counter and negate everything and an inanimate call for more thaums is sent through silver and copper and hidden iron --

-- a call which passes through everything the saboteur had done.

There is a single instant where the power doesn't respond.

It is the same moment when the gates fall.

Zealot

It was still a lovely home, at least when regarded from the outside. The unicorn stallion, whose hat had been carefully tucked into his right saddlebag just before he'd begun his quest through interior shadows, was starting to wonder if that was because there hadn't been enough time for the owner to burn it down.

It had been easy to get in: the most difficult part had been waiting under Moon until he'd been sure nopony was present to witness it. Staying near Mrs. Panderaghast at strategic times had allowed him to get a good sense of her security and while he felt that the palace had at least tried to see if anypony was home, they hadn't investigated beyond that. There were no physical barriers around the house, much less any new spells which would alert them of intrusion. Everything he'd been able to pick up on with an unlit horn had been completely familiar and, due to that long-time familiarity, easily defeated. But once he was within...

The air within the house was oddly humid, and he put that down to a lack of properly-maintained wonders. Unlike some of the deepest fanatics, Mrs. Panderaghast was willing to purchase pegasus creations -- but she had some difficulty in finding anypony who would sell them to her. Drop addresses could only do so much, especially when payment vouchers had to be signed. And the scant self-loathing token pegasus members of CUNET tended to be rather low in magical strength, so whatever was acquired eventually lost its charge. (She had similar problems in getting outside pegasi to reenergize her purchases.) The only other option was choosing to pay for platinum: something which raised the price to the point where it could easily take out two parties. Possibly three. So the abandoned home was mostly heated by fireplaces, and to have the near-winter air inside displaying higher humidity than that without -- there was probably a wonder malfunctioning somewhere. She'd had those kinds of issues before. It made things uncomfortable, but not distressingly so.

Immediately activating lighting devices had been out of the question. He was carefully moving through the deep shadows inherent to a large house at night, and doing so by the light of a glowstick: something dangling from his neck on a loop of soft cord, and his mouth held up the edge of a drapecloth which could be dropped over it at any time. It was something he hadn't risked until he'd been well away from any window and even now, he wasn't going to ignite his corona unless he felt he was in immediate danger. All it would take was one stray gleam with an embedded sparkle, and somepony outside might wonder why a unicorn was within. And he'd tried to let his eyes adjust as much as they could, had hoped to go without the weak yellow-green illumination entirely -- but that hadn't worked. He was looking for something and in order to start on his own long-term goal, he would need to see. Outer senses assisting on the first part of the path towards fulfilling an inner vision.

Also, as it turned out, he really needed to be capable of spotting where all of the splinters were.

The stallion was roughly familiar with some small portion of Equestria's laws, and so knew that being found guilty of certain crimes could potentially see a number of possessions seized by the government. Sold off, with the proceeds used to offer reparations for the injured, or to pay for damages. And Mrs. Panderaghast, who had chosen to run...

When it came to the home's interior, possessions mostly existed in two forms: presumed worthless and therefore abandoned -- or destroyed.

Some of the destruction was less than complete. He could tell that a horn had been involved in a lot of the work, especially in the places where the wood had been gouged. (She hadn't been particularly artistic about it.) But the mare's field strength was fairly average. She was incapable of breaking or crushing things with a thought, and so had settled for damaging them to the point where any minimal resale value would have to be offered up by the scrap market. It was still a lovely home on the outside, because there hadn't been enough time -- but several of the expensive decorations had been dented, fractured, or kicked out of shape. And any horn was perfectly suitable for ripping a painting into pieces.

It all looked like the work of a single mare. Nothing seemed to have been touched, much less searched. From all appearances, he was the first pony to get past the entrance hall.

He had to be careful of leaving hoofprints in the debris, and kept back-nudging small displaced pieces towards where they had started.

Eventually, he found the first of the closets. And to be rather frank about it, Mrs. Panderaghast was fat. There were very few mares who could have used her dresses or rather, you wouldn't find all that many cases where you didn't need two of them to use one at the same time. But the rage had been decidedly more effective here, and the walk-in now served as raw material storage for Canterlot's largest quilting bee.

Dental impressions in the kitchen leftovers told him that the preferred method for getting rid of the exotic foodstuffs had been through eating most of them. But even the mare had a maximum capacity, and she'd eventually reached the point where she had to simply kick things into the overflowing trash. The rest had been left out to spoil.

She hadn't been able to carry much: the stallion suspected letters of credit made out to the bearer had been most of it. Everything else had either been abandoned as worthless, or been made so. But he felt that one thing was worth more now, and that was what he had come to acquire.

When the assault had been announced, he'd smiled, nodded, listened to the happy chatter from those who'd believed that victory had been guaranteed through the simple act of planning to show up, and known it was all going to fail. So when it came to actually showing up... he hadn't.

(Of course, having so many ponies in heavy clothing and robes would make it easy to claim he'd been there and just managed to get out ahead of the capture. If such happened to become important.)

Then he'd realized that failure was the best possible result.

Because the stallion believed in the Cause.

Mrs. Panderaghast had mostly worshiped at the altar of Profit.

He'd figured it out fairly early in his membership: that the leader was dedicated to maintaining the sort of eternal holding action which allowed her to send out letters announcing Emergency Fundraisers at any time, mostly because never accomplishing much of anything meant there was always going to be an Emergency somewhere. And he hadn't been happy about it, but... what could he have done? When it came to Canterlot and a good part of what lay beyond, CUNET was the unicorn organization, and the mare was the one designated to lead them. Trying to start his own group would have left him with very few ponies to recruit, and trying to split the herd... that had its own consequences.

So he'd smiled. He'd nodded. Special pains had been taken to stay close to that leadership. And he'd always been careful about what he'd paid in -- but still, when he'd initially planned on breaking into the abandoned residence, he had done so with a vague determination to examine all of the rich furnishings along the way. He was somewhat curious as to which piece was technically his.

(Even now, the half-broken house was an inspiration to him. It told him something about what could be achieved -- as long as your only long-term goal was to never truly achieve anything at all.)

He'd smiled. He'd nodded. But he hadn't said anything, because he hadn't been sure if there was anypony who would have listened to all of it. And now...

The assault had been announced, and he'd heard a few members talking about how the alicorns would just surrender. That they would see what real ponies truly thought of them, and simply -- leave. And it didn't work that way, because CUNET didn't have the numbers. The Diarchy wouldn't step down because a faction didn't want them any more. It would take a nation.

Or at least, those who controlled it.

Mrs. Panderaghast was gone, and a lack of further need meant she'd abandoned the best thing he ever could have asked for. Somewhere within the once-lovely home was the list of CUNET's full membership. And it wouldn't be in a filing cabinet: he just felt that. The security required for such a precious document had to place it within a safe.

Mrs. Panderaghast was gone. The herd needed a new leader.

Kitchen. Bedroom. A very small library: one where dust tended to slip down between unread books because that was what happened when texts were meant solely for display. He'd been through all of that, and hadn't found anything yet. But he'd never entered every room during the owner's previous parties, because it was a very large home for a lone divorced mare -- he'd never been sure as to why she'd kept the 'Mrs', as it didn't seem to add any gravitas -- and certain sections had been off-limits. There had to be an office somewhere...

He had to find the office. Find the list. If necessary, he could just take any safe home with him: that was what the larger drapecloth in his saddlebags was for. And he preferred to find it quickly, because that unseen wonder really wasn't doing well.

And after that...

The first thing to do would be identifying exactly which members had been lost to trials and potential prison time. (This was why he felt the value of the list had increased: the majority of the idiots had effectively taken themselves off it for several years.) After that, he'd have to consolidate what remained of the group. Demonstrate why he had to be the leader, and part of that would be distancing the survivors from what had happened at the palace. He'd written out the first draft of a speech concerning how certain members had never really understood what the organization was for. It was Canterlot Unicorns Need Equal Treatment, yes? It was in the name. So how could any part of that be concerned with superiority?

If he successfully distanced CUNET from the assault, then the herd would have to recognize him as the lead stallion.

And once that was done... once he was the draft pony, and everypony else had been harnessed up so that they could only follow in his wake...

He'd already been making plans. And he'd realized what he had to do.

He needed to think like an alicorn.

The stallion had come up with that one in the privacy of his own home, and had nearly wound up half-curled on the floor from the force of compulsive laughter. Because he'd realized it was the key to everything, the way to win -- and two seconds later, he'd also realized that it sounded like the title for the world's worst self-help book. But it was what had be done. Because thinking like an alicorn didn't mean willful blindness, or buying into the simultaneous lie and delusion of equality. It certainly didn't indicate that he was now required to force his thoughts into the patterns enjoyed by freaks.

It meant taking the long view.

How many opponents had the Solar Princess defeated? It was a significant number, and the stallion wasn't stupid enough to believe that every victory had come from the opponent somehow being even weaker. But a notable percentage had been taken down through the most simple route available: she'd outlived them.

She obviously thought about matters in generational terms. This occasionally stretched out to centuries. When it came to the recovery of the lesser sibling from Whatever Had Happened, a full millennium. And that was taking the long view. Slow, subtle changes, made over an interval so vast that just about nopony noticed that change was taking place at all. You only recognized the distance crossed when you glanced back at the very end of the journey, and that meant CUNET needed new leadership. In fact, it was going to need new leadership again and again, because the stallion intended to exercise regularly, maintain his health, and still didn't believe he would live anywhere near long enough to see the work complete. He'd already started to consider the requirements for identifying and properly training his successor --

-- the long view. And part of that meant stepping back from even limited activism for a time. CUNET had to let things go quiet. They had to wait it out, until ponies inevitably began to forget. And after that -- well, they were going to need a new business model.

For starters, he'd been thinking about going into publishing.

Bulk-printed form letters with blank spaces for signatures hadn't gotten the job done. Newsletters needed to be circulated privately, and recruitment pamphlets probably had to be put aside for at least a year. The stallion's dreams were bigger than that.

He was going to print textbooks.

...still not the office. He'd found another closet, and distantly wondered whether Mrs. Panderaghast's departure would actually have an effect on the local price of cotton. (The glowstick's radiance was doing strange things to the fabric colors.) The stallion nosed around for a while just in case there was a hidden safe anywhere, found nothing, and then had to snort hard twice to clear the moisture from his snout.

Textbooks. The Spinner mare had said something once, hadn't she? (He didn't know if the assault had reached her, and wasn't entirely certain how he would have felt if she had been killed. It would certainly be a regrettable loss -- but he had very little time to spare for those whose will could be broken so easily.) That history was mostly read about by those who hadn't been there. And that held true for everypony. Even the Solar Princess was only omnipresent across time: she couldn't be everywhere at once, and had directed the majority of her limited awareness at marble walls.

There were educational standards: he was aware of that, and found them fully lacking. A government agency reviewed printed material for approval, and a few school boards echoed that on the local level. The stallion was certain that it would be easy to get CUNET members into positions of control there. It was certainly going to be more simple than putting them into the palace itself, at least on that level which collected a pay voucher.

If you printed textbooks, then you were the one who was telling children what history had been.

Slow, subtle changes. He felt that the first thing they could try was to stop mentioning the species of any relevant pony. And if challenged? Claim that it had been done in an attempt to avoid discrimination, because the species of a historical figure should never be important. They were all ponies in the end, yes? So the writers wouldn't bring it up. They would just be careful to only mention horns and spells and castings.

Textbooks were a good start. But what came with textbooks? Education. And for true education, you needed educators.

So he was going to look into what was required for starting a college.

...it felt as if moisture was starting to bead within his fur, and that was immediately followed by the sensation of having the strands absorb it. He didn't want to reach the point where he started to drip.

Keep going into the house. Deeper and deeper, through debris and wounded wealth and splinters which felt as if they were trying to aim for his frogs...

...the college. It would probably take at least a decade to get that going. Build the school, make sure it was entirely private because government supervision there was the last thing he wanted, line up the instructors, and start producing teachers. (He didn't even have to worry about getting the proper talents to enroll: a marked teacher was a precious thing, but there were more educational positions in the nation than there were marks to fill them.) When his CUNET began recruitment anew, it would be to find those who were willing to spend their lives among the young. To look out from behind a desk every day, gazing at open, smiling, eager, naive faces. Those who were willing to believe anything they heard, because it had come from somepony they'd been told to trust.

The long view. Expand the college, to the point where it would be a dominant force. Tilt the curriculum for fillies and colts a little more with every generation. And after a while, it would seem as if everything important had been accomplished by unicorns. It was all you read unless you engaged in independent study, and how many children bothered with that? It was certainly all you were taught.

The world would start to believe that no pegasus or earth pony had ever done anything at all. Phrase the text carefully, and two-thirds of the young readers might start to feel that they couldn't do anything.

At some point, they would stop trying.

He wondered if there was a mark for having given up. What it would look like, especially in bulk. The other option might have been blank-flanks...

...somepony else would get to see that. He was just the first to have the honor of trying to imagine the results.

...he was currently imagining backtracking to a restroom on the way out. Drying devices were wonders, but he was sure he could find multiple scraps of towel. Going outside in the chill when his fur was this damp didn't feel like the best idea...

...education might be the single most crucial facet. But he couldn't ignore politics. Of course, he had the same problem: CUNET had to back off for a while, and Tattler districts would be better off running candidates who both understood the meaning of 'subtle' and could spell it two times out of three. But once there were a few of his own ponies in place, you could start to propose... reasonable bills.

For starters, it was perfectly reasonable to legislate pegasi into separate restrooms. Why? Molting. Really, did any reasonable unicorn (or earth pony, because they had to be included for a majority) want to use a trench which was half-clogged with shed feathers? And you ignored the fact that there was only so much molting during a single year, that most of it happened away from restrooms and everypony shed fur and hairs occasionally, you concentrated on a single issue and you sounded perfectly reasonable the whole time. You'd been so reasonable as to practically force a Princess into signing the results. And then you'd shoved the pegasi into a private corner, which was the first step to shoving them back into the clouds.

...moving through the depths of the empty home was -- strange. He was beginning to feel as if every little sound was being made by something which was personally tracking him, and had to tell himself that there was no such thing taking place. He also felt as if the bases of his ears were hosting tiny puddles, and shook his head frequently to clear them out.

Maybe if he went down...

And earth ponies... well, they were the nation's source of food supply. Everypony knew that. But how many actually worked as farmers? The minority. Most earth ponies just let the background magic of their Cornucopia Effect contribute to the overall fertility of energized soil, and called it solved. Well... Equestria's population was expanding, wasn't it? You had desert settlements now. Perhaps more new settled zones would open up over the decades, and they would all need to eat.

Would it do any harm, to write a bill asking earth pony youths to spend some time on a farm? To make a direct contribution, so a growing nation wouldn't go hungry?

You could call it a summer camp program. The government would pay for it. Get all of the colts and fillies together among freshly-budding crops. There would be songs and sports and moons spent together. They certainly wouldn't be near anypony else. And those young and markless enough to be still thinking about their future would be standing among furrows, summer after summer. A path which only led one way.

The long view. And it would be hard to sell that to the membership -- or rather, it would have been before, because the survivors were clearly the ones who had recognized what blinder-blocked thinking would get them and had thus stayed out of it entirely. But even with those who remained, he knew it would take some convincing. To tell them that they would never see the true victory. Their grandchildren wouldn't be the ones to witness it. They had to be willing to make the sacrifice of living in an unfair world, so that those they would never know could have a perfect one.

It would take generations, and the alicorns would have to be factored in across the whole of that duration. But the Diarchy couldn't be everywhere. They couldn't stop everything. And when all of the changes in his growing plan came to full fruition, when the alicorns finally looked outside the palace and found a world which no longer wanted them -- they would step down.

They would depose themselves.

Because you didn't do it all at once. You drove little wedges, made tiny cracks. Watched the network spread. And when all of the fractures met, the old society would crumble. The earth ponies would be trapped with their soil, with the pegasi returned to the sky. And the unicorns, all of whom had been taught to think the right way, would be in charge.

The new CUNET.
Smile.
Nod.
Bide your time --

-- he'd had to work his way to the lowest level, and had not been particularly surprised to find one more closet. It was, however, something of a minor shock to see that it was both open and completely empty. No debris, no scraps, not even a single stray hanger. It was likely where the best dresses had been, and so that was what she'd taken with her.

But there was one more door on the exact opposite side of that corridor and when he opened it, he saw what had once been a fine desk. Recently kicked and gouged, but it was still possible to spot where the money had gone. The same was true for the bench, and the twisted abacus, and the one untouched painting. Something which automatically called attention to itself when the previous owner had probably been trying for the opposite, because ripping the canvas had to mean exposing the safe...

The humidity had reached the levels of horror. He felt as if every step was being taken across the bottom of a lake. His fur had dripped all the way down the last ramp, and none of that mattered.

The stallion, moving with purpose, crossed the threshold.

Most of the water tried to enter his lungs.

It all happened at once. He tasted liquid, he swallowed it, then he was breathing it and he could barely breathe at all, the drapecloth fell away and he didn't notice, he was choking on air which had been trapped between states of matter and he had to get out, he had to get out of the office and find a place where he could get one clean breath which he could hold long enough to go back in, find the wonder which had to be within the office and smash it, he just needed to --

-- his legs, working of their own accord, scrambled into reverse. But he wasn't facing in that direction, and so the bulk of the bright flash struck him from behind.

The stallion heard the heavy hooffalls stepping forward, too heavy, he spun around as best he could without twisting himself into a puddle-covered floor, coughing water as he did so while his horn ignited on instinct alone and a small burst of red light emerged from the device which was floating next to the giant mare's left wing --

-- the light reached his horn, and did so almost too quickly to be seen. He'd been expecting the artificial corona to attack, while not understanding why the mare would need to carry anything for that purpose. But he couldn't really see his own horn, and it meant he missed what the artificial casting truly did. The red glow surrounded a tiny portion of his corona, enclosed it, and the tiny bubble was pulled back towards the spiraled electrum housing. The collected sample went inside. And then the device did nothing more than rest within the bobbing field bubble.

There was something else floating next to her right wing. The stallion didn't want to look at it.

He was facing her now, still coughing because he couldn't seem to get rid of the last dredges from the lake. She watched, with her own horn surrounded by a partial corona. Something which had her ready to strike at any moment, even as it placed him within Sun's light.

"Hello, Covert," the Solar alicorn softly said.

It took a few more coughs before he could try to speak. (She did nothing to help.) And then he smiled.

"I'm glad you're here," he told her. "I was looking for a friend -- well, no need to tell you who, not when we're both in her home. I was worried about her. Nopony's seen --"

"-- and not for lack of searching," she interrupted. "But if you were looking for clues to her location, then I'm sorry to tell you that there weren't any. I already sent a team through."

He made something of a show of not staring at her.

"It didn't look like anypony had been in here," he said.

"No," she quietly replied. "It wouldn't. Because they're professionals."

"She gave me access a few years ago," he lied. "And I didn't find any magic which indicated that the palace had wanted this home closed off --"

"-- no," the alicorn softly broke in. "You wouldn't. Because it's not what you're willing to see as true magic."

He blinked. Water ran across his eyes.

"It's actually an old pegasus war technique," she told him. (He immediately decided to leave it out of the textbooks.) "When they lace magic into the air... they call that a weave. Threads of power. And if you can make threads, you can create tripwires. Things which don't just potentially tell the creator when they've been crossed. They also serve as a sort of -- standing instruction. If this thread is touched, then something else happens. Like concentrating all of the extra humidity into a very specific spot. A talented pegasus would have spotted the danger, but -- why would that pegasus ever come in here? You're in no shape to fight anypony right now and as it turned out, I was the one who responded. Striking would be particularly ill-advised, Covert." And her lips shifted into the thinnest of smiles. "I'm willing to take you in quietly. But I can't say I'm in a particularly good mood. And there's enough charges against you already."

He was staring at her. He hated that, along with just having to stare up. But he knew how to keep a smile going, even in the face of shock.

"Charges?" the stallion casually inquired. "Why would there be charges?" It certainly wasn't for the assault against the palace. He hadn't shown up (while making sure he could lie about the opposite to the right ponies) and he'd made sure to have two neutral witnesses for his actual location during the events. All he'd needed to do was hang out in the right store. "I do have access to the house. And even if I didn't, the sufficiency clause would let me break in to see if a friend was hurt or sick --"

The alicorn's right forehoof came up. Then it came down.

The echoes went on for a while and when they died, he found his words had briefly gone with them.

"We can start," the Princess stated, "with both harboring and transporting what I'm sure you'd like me to describe as a pony of interest. However, at this point, I'm going to upgrade into 'fugitive'."

You had to learn how to get along in the world, when you were surrounded by those who didn't understand how it should work. To smile, nod, and not show when his heart had just tried to retreat into his stomach.

"Based on recent events only," the stallion began, "along with the fact that I truly have no idea where my friend is, and I'm clearly not transporting her at the moment -- I'll assume you're talking about the alleged arsonist."

"You can remove 'alleged'."

"It's not exactly a minor accusation," he calmly noted. "What's your evidence?"

Every measured alicorn syllable hit the water-covered floor like a crashing boulder.

"She told us you were there."

no

He'd... figured out some part of what the attack was meant to do. (The necessity had been regretted.) But he'd never believed the unicorn mare would actually talk...

The stallion didn't let any of it reach his face. The Princess hadn't truly trapped him. You smiled, and you thought, and you chose your words carefully.

"Some of the rumors going around the capital," he shrugged, "along with a few of the articles, suggest she's... not well." And added a sigh. "Mentally, I mean. It's a pity. You have to feel sorry for somepony whose illness brings them to the point where a foal is hurt. Where they attack children. But at the same time -- how could you trust her testimony on anything?"

Spinner...
No. The mare wouldn't give up a source.
But the reporter had been in the palace --
...she wouldn't --

"You can't," the alicorn readily agreed. "Searching her words, hoping for places to start -- that's possible. But putting her in the witness stall? That would be harder." And then there was a soft sigh. "If she was willing to accept an attorney, then her defender would just about have to plead insanity. Maybe she wasn't fully gone when the fire was set, but... she's lost, Covert. Almost completely. And she's been sliding down that slope for a while. I looked at the -- let's call them 'sketches'. The ones she made in the palace cell, and the ones from the last house. They're degrading. It'll take a lot to make her accept help, and I don't know if she can ever come back."

He briefly closed his eyes, dipped his head. The alicorn didn't move. Giving him a moment for regret, when he could always pretend that his moment of mourning had been a little more generic.

She had such a lovely smile...

...had anypony cleaned up the damage to the walls at the Ponyville rental?

It didn't matter just yet. The Princess couldn't know where that was. There was plenty of time to sort it out.

"It's a loss," he said, and did so without looking at the Princess. "Any pony broken that way is a loss. But... you just agreed with me, Princess. She can't be trusted as a source."

"You're right," the Princess calmly admitted. "That's why I'm going with the carriage drivers."

Every muscle went tight. Insertion ligaments strained against his skeleton, trying to fracture it from within.

"Because we did track the carriage," the alicorn softly added, as that huge form took a single hoofstep forward. "White cedar wheels... well, that's a level of cheapness which doesn't come along very often. Added to how scarce ground carriages are these moons, along with knowing how certain parties tend to not spend -- it didn't take long to locate the rental company. And one of the wheels had been swapped out, but it hadn't been collected as trash. The investigators recovered it from the pickup group. Yes, the booking is under what I'm sure is a false name -- but you rode along, Covert. The carriage drivers could identify you, and they'll have to if they want to save their own coats."

"And my attorney will say they're trying to save themselves through looking for somepony they can knacker," he quickly argued. "Ponies can lie --"

And she laughed.

He'd never heard her laugh before, not directly. It was a quick sound, faster-paced and higher in pitch than her normal speaking voice. For a second, it suggested a mare who was trying to get her mirth in all at once, before anypony spotted it --

"-- I've noticed!" the Princess declared. "Especially those who see Honesty as something less than a virtue. More of a weakness. So yes, it's within the realm of theory, having them lie. They might somehow even decide that a single night's ride formed a bond so long-lasting that they could never speak against you. Ponies lie --"

Two more hoofsteps, almost too quick to see. And then she was just about on top of him. Over him. Looming.

"-- but devices can't. Tirek drained that carriage. Ponies recharged it. You were one of them. Yes, with a normal casting, the signature would be faded by now, possibly beyond identification -- but you sent yours into wire, where it could rest safely until used. It didn't take the whole of your donated thaums to get the carriage back to its yard, and it hasn't been used since. And you can argue that a device distorts the signature, because it does -- but an expert knows how they change. The prosecution's thaumatologist can get an occlugraph of the device's charge, then readily separate your signature from those of the others who participated and explain the process to a jury."

"You'll never --" he started, and then stopped.

He had more words. But he'd just realized that the smile was gone.

"Chart the distortions," the alicorn said. "Then restore the original. Because there's a basis for comparison." The spiral-shaped device silently bobbed next to the folded wing. "You ignited your horn when you saw me. A possible attack. I can't charge you with that, because you didn't actually try for a casting. But I took the opportunity to get a sample of your signature." And casually shrugged. "You might be able to claim Rhynorn's as an excuse for why you couldn't cast later on, but you're clearly fine now. As opposed to suffering from the outright pandemic I have going on in the palace basement. The epicenter of a phantom outbreak, which has yet to infect any unicorn Guard -- but they've chosen their lie, as a herd. And as a herd, they mostly managed to collectively forget about the blood test."

The field bubble next to the left wing bobbed along. The one on the right moved towards his frozen form.

"Consider yourself to be under arrest," she told him, and the restraint began to assemble itself around his horn. "You'll have a chance to contact an attorney before you reach a cell. But if it helps, that may be in a familiar place."

"I," he heard himself half-spit, "have never been to prison --"

"-- it'll probably be here," the Princess smiled. "Because nopony's using this house right now. And once the investigation wraps up, it's just -- open space. Rooms which can be converted into cells." Her corona went around his legs, lifted. "I have a lot of ponies awaiting trial, Covert. They have to be kept somewhere. Maybe I'll even put you in the office. You can use the safe to store the drafts for your jury arguments. There's plenty of space available, because I already took the membership list out. Shall we go?"

She turned, and her field made sure his suspended body turned with her. Trotted back towards the makeshift gatehouse.

The alicorn's field was around his legs, and the restraint was on his horn. But she'd left his head free.

He could nod if he wanted to. He could even smile. But no part of that seemed to be working.

He could still speak.

"This isn't over," he told her. "It'll never be over --"

"-- I know," she cut him off, ducking somewhat to get her horn under the door frame: a casual effort kept him from bumping into the sides. "And one day, you might even win."

He couldn't fully control his neck or face. And for a single moment, the stallion lost all control of his eyes.

"...you believe that," the stallion half-whispered, helpless to stop staring at the ancient foe. "You know we'll beat you --"

-- her head turned, and the thinnest, grimmest, angriest smile ever to radiate soul-scorching heat lanced into what was left of Covert's soul.

"No," Celestia stated as the corona around her horn began to build, gathering power for the teleport. "I don't believe that. But when I'm about to send somepony into a decade or so of what's sure to be personal torment, as the first stage to my personally monitoring them for the rest of their lives... I like to give them a little hope."