The Immortal Dream

Rainbow Dash dove, water hanging in the air around her and then beginning to rise as she pushed past the speed gravity could pull it.

She dove, a clammy, constricting darkness coiling around her like a contracting sphere. It cut off the heavens, the jagged rock walls speeding past her, everything but the water and the limp air under her wings.

She dove faster as the last traces of Twilight's magic and Starlight's glow sped out of sight, somehow falling faster than she was despite her breakneck pace. Rainbow's rainbow trail stabbed the darkness above her like a knife, its light refracting off the water falling around her and revealing absolutely nothing ahead.

The air didn't pull back her cheeks like it should have at these speeds. It barely gave purchase to her wings at all, like it was too thin to have substance. Or maybe like it just didn't care to do its job as air. And before Rainbow knew it, she wasn't diving so much as simply falling into the void.

Rainbow gulped, and tried to pull up. "Guys? This doesn't-"

She hit the bottom.

A sheet of water arrived out of nowhere, Rainbow plunging headfirst in. Except, it didn't feel like water. At her speed, the surface should have broken her neck, but it almost seemed to invite her beneath, slipping aside and letting her in with all the resistance of a spider web's gentle embrace. The water seemed to probe her, like something limp and curious and dead... but no sooner did Rainbow start to struggle than a force of incredible buoyancy pushed her up, back up to the surface, where she bobbed in place, floating a lot higher than she would in conventional water.

Half-stunned, floating on her back, black rain from the waterfall above falling on her face and body, Rainbow Dash got her first proper look at the world around her.

The sky was black. Oil spill black, with a faint corrupted-rainbow sheen if she stared long enough. The rain was silent and uniform, falling in a perfect, vertical distribution without the surges and sways that came with the gusts of a proper storm. There was no wind to blow it, and it made neither sound nor ripples when it hit the lake she was floating in, the water's glassy surface stretching perfectly mirrorlike as far as the eye could see.

Which was farther than it should have been. There was no light in this place, but it didn't seem to understand the concept of darkness either. Everything was dimly, evenly lit, without shadow or contour, as if a higher power had decided all this shouldn't need light to be visible. Not that there was much to see.

Here and there, a pillar or broken arch broke the surface, made of something colorless and reflective, in an architectural style that vaguely reminded Rainbow of Cloudsdale. And overhead, in the sky, thin reflective outlines belied the presence of hefty, almost-invisible links of chain, anchored to nothing, stretching from horizon to gray horizon.

"Guh..." Rainbow tried to get to her hooves, but the water was just buoyant enough that she couldn't: if she was right-side up, she floated with the water an inch below her belly, and the forces on her legs were impossible to control. "Guys? Guys?"

This wasn't working, and to make matters worse, the air held no purchase beneath her wings. But Rainbow was nothing if not a creative acrobat: she flipped back on her back, using her wings as oars, and found that the water let her propel herself at striking speeds towards the crumbling, partially-submerged architecture.

The columns and arches were made of ice. Not melting. Perfectly preserved, aside from their ruined state.

Rainbow hugged a leaning pillar, ignoring the cold - this whole place didn't seem to have much temperature, so it wasn't difficult - and shimmying her way carefully up, the ice somehow providing better purchase than the air and the water.

She reached the top, and it gave her enough height to see the world better. There really were chains in the sky, made of black metal that perfectly matched their surroundings, only visible by the sheen of water sliding around them as they caught raindrops and then released those raindrops back on their same, original trajectories, dripping water from their undersides as if they didn't exist at all. The distant horizon glowed slightly gray instead of black, letting her see the chains' silhouettes better: one ran close enough that she could probably jump to it, if only she had something better than the leaning cap of an ice pillar to build up speed on.

It looked a little familiar. Kind of like what she had seen down under Twilight's Crystal Palace, when Convergence dissolved the table and let them go under the Lifestream...

But this wasn't the time for speculation. She needed to find her friends.

"Guys!" Rainbow bellowed, using her vantage point to scan the horizon. "Twilight! Starlight! Hey! Over here! Shoot a flare or something if you can hear me!"

At last, there was crystal beneath Starlight Glimmer's hooves.

She patted the surface of her makeshift crystal boat to ensure it wouldn't wink out of existence again, a crystal canopy attached to a crystal mast preventing it from filling with rainwater. Her magic sort of worked in this place, but it required far more intent and focus than it used to. It was as if someone or something had changed the rules of reality itself, and she was trying to force magic to work like it was supposed to instead of using it the way it was.

But Starlight was good at forcing things to happen when she needed them to. And right now, she didn't have time to question what was different, because she had lost sight of Twilight while falling. She had to find her friend.

Starlight focused, commanding her aura to expand. It was hard, when she had to keep a corner of her thoughts on her boat, like stepping on a loose paper to keep it from blowing away. But something about it felt natural, as well, in an old, haunting way. Commanding this space to work as she needed it to. There was something familiar about this place, about this way of thinking. But she didn't dwell on that, instead sweeping her massive aura back and forth like a telekinetic dredge net, grasping weakly at the space around her and feeling for anything that didn't move like water.

She found it. That way, behind that crumbling carved ice wall, there was something floating in the water that felt like a body.

Using a crystal oar, Starlight guided her boat, the construct slipping and sliding around as if friction didn't exist in this subterranean world. She skidded around the wall's edge, reaching out with her telekinesis for the sodden thing floating high on the surface.

It was Misophaes.

Starlight hesitated, holding the dripping mare up in her blindingly teal aura. The world around her didn't seem used to its color.

"Oh," Misophaes said, looking up, meeting Starlight's expression with haunted, pinprick eyes and a jaded smile. "It's you."

"Have you seen Twilight?" Starlight demanded. "The mare who tried to shield you? You fell together. She has to be around here somewhere..."

"Are you dead?" Misophaes asked, something akin to bliss in her expression as she smiled sadly at Starlight. "No good deed goes unpunished, huh?"

Starlight blinked, putting to and two together. "This isn't the afterlife. We just fell down your abyss." She lifted Misophaes back up, around and into her boat, following what felt like the only natural course of action before scanning for bodies again. "Twilight! Where are you!?"

Misophaes was silent as Starlight set her in the boat, glancing around with her pinprick eyes, her permanently-haunted expression devoid of nuance that could explain what she was really thinking.

"Alright, maybe here..." Starlight moved the boat a little more in the direction she had gone to find Misophaes, then tried again. "Twilight!"

Rain silently slid into the glassy sea around them.

"I can't hear them anymore," Misophaes whispered.

Starlight's ears flicked. She was trying to listen for Twilight.

"The accusations," Misophaes murmured, rapturous. "They're gone."

"Unless you know where Twilight landed, it's not important," Starlight growled. "You two fell together, didn't you?"

"I don't remember," Misophaes apologized. "I... Killing me really worked. Is this what it feels like to be free?"

Twilight Sparkle couldn't tell if she was still fighting Aegis.

Her horn ached from exertion. Her body felt indistinguishable from her horn. How often had she pushed herself this hard? Should she have practiced before assuming she could just use the Lovebringer's power? All her training, all her conditioning, all her power as an alicorn... She hadn't felt a wipeout like this since early in her studies with Princess Celestia, when her mentor was showing her how to control her burgeoning power, in some ways boundless yet in others constrained by her little filly unicorn horn.

She might have been floating, though something about it felt wrong. And then, a telekinetic aura was lifting her.

It set her down on something flat, rocky and damp. "Twilight."

Twilight focused, channeling a faint current of power in her horn in an exercise Princess Celestia had taught her to help with those accidents, like snapping a disjointed limb back into place. It helped... about as much as it had helped back then. She'd still need to stay off her magic for at least an hour, and not get back to any heavyweight spells or training until the next day, but she could concentrate on things other than the throbbing in her horn again.

Kind of impressive, when she thought about it. That she could fight a world-destroying elder god and walk off the consequences in a day. Also kind of dispiriting, that she couldn't even hold it off for two seconds despite being an alicorn princess endowed with an artifact that could provide more power than even her nigh-limitless limits could handle...

Aaand there was a pony in front of her. A zebra, to be precise, made entirely of red flame.

Twilight blinked, taking in what she was seeing. Its stripes were solid, made of some material that was both reflective and transparent like crystal, yet curved organically instead of sporting facets. The area in between the stripes didn't exist, its body - and it was probably a her - marked out only by those skeletal, rib-like stripes, the zebra's core filled with a rising, falling, ever-circulating plume of ruby flame. Floating deep within, at the core of the flame, was a triangular red gemstone.

"Are you...?" Twilight asked the zebra, tilting her head. Their eyes seemed a little more real than the rest of their body, and a halo disk of glistening red runes surrounded their barrel, rotating slowly.

"The Flame of Love," the zebra agreed. "Are you alright?"

"I will be," Twilight groaned, getting to her hooves and looking around. "Tirek wishes he could pack a punch like that... Where are we?"

The black sky and grey horizon swooped over her senses like the shadow of an enormous bird, and Twilight had to sit down as suddenly as she stood up. Crooked ice pillars and leaning, crumbling architecture protruded from a flat sea around her, silent rain falling and matting her already-soaked coat. She should have been freezing, but this realm seemed to ignore temperature just like it ignored the rules of light: it was overwhelmingly flat and lifeless, with neither light source nor shadow, given depth and texture only by the reflective rainwater dribbling down from the chains in the sky.

Beneath Twilight's hooves was cold, gray granite, perfectly flat and so close to level with the water that even the rippling caused by raindrops could have caused it to spill over, if the rain had caused any. The edge was gradually curved and circular, and a short distance behind her, the rock rose up again in another circular ledge, disks of stone stacked like the tiers on a wedding cake. Something was at the top, but she couldn't make out what.

Twilight tried to fly, spreading and flapping her wings. Aside from spraying water and raindrops, nothing happened. The air ignored her.

She looked back at the zebra, baffled.

The zebra looked very, very sad.

"What happened?" Twilight asked. "Where are we? Is this...?" She stared up at the chains crisscrossing the sky, some of them quite low overhead. They reminded her, almost, of the chains she had seen down by the door underneath Convergence's room...

She swallowed. "Indus?"

"No," the zebra said. "I recognize this place. This is younger than Indus. But, it may not be a bad comparison."

Twilight flicked her ears, sending droplets flying. Rain continued to fall, soaking her to the bone.

"This is a city that was built and inhabited between five and six thousand years ago," the zebra explained. "By the ancestors of who you now call seaponies, at the floor of a body of water you now call the Griffon Palm Sea. They used ice for their buildings, created with nothing but their everlasting magic and the water in which they swam. After this city was abandoned, its ruins survived for more than four thousand years, until they were swallowed up in the creation of the Aldenfold and lost to my sight."

"We're beneath the Aldenfold?" Twilight asked, her eyes widening.

"Possibly," the zebra replied. "Or perhaps we are nowhere at all. The Lifestream does not flow here. This place is outside of the bounds of the world that my siblings and I give order to. I do not think this is Indus, as you asked. But it is just as dead. Just as separate. Just as gone."

Twilight's thoughts started to catch up with her. "Is Misophaes here too? I was protecting her when we fell..."

"I cannot tell," the zebra apologized, its runic halo spinning softly. "The Lifestream is my body. Here, in this place separate from it, I am nothing more than the body you perceive in front of you. My senses extend only from this singular point, in a fashion similar to that of a mortal."

Twilight's thoughts spun. "So you're... closer to being the original person you used to be, before you became a Flame of Harmony? Does that mean you were originally a zebra?"

"Is that the form I am taking?" The Flame of Love looked down at themselves. "Perhaps I was. I cannot remember."

"Well, we need to find Misophaes and get out of here," Twilight declared. "Except... my wings aren't working. Is something wrong with my magic?"

The zebra shook their head. "No. The fault lies in the medium you are applying your magic to. This place lies outside the boundaries of the world my siblings and I bring order to. The only magic that will work here is magic that you yourself brought with you."

Rainbow Dash was pretty sure there was no possible way she was taking off.

She had been flapping her wings for minutes now, but the air just wouldn't listen to her. It blustered aimlessly aside in tiny, useless puffs, refusing to congeal into something solid she could push herself off of, no matter how hard she flapped. Her ice pillar didn't give enough room to run or jump, but this wasn't the kind of problem a strong start could fix. Her flight was just gone.

That was why, after her calls were finally met with a flare in the distance, she didn't even try to flap as she leaped off the pillar, hitting the water and backstroking as fast as she could in the direction it had come from.

"Hey! I'm coming, don't move!" Rainbow bellowed into the abyss, wincing and growling as she rammed her head into a broken wall before changing course to swim around it. "Ow! Wait up, Twilight! I'm... on my way!"

The flare crackled again, and Rainbow righted her course, skimming the lake's infinite surface as black rain drummed softly against her belly. And finally, she saw her target.

A crystal boat, with an umbrella to keep the rain out, helmed by none other than Starlight.

"Starlight!" Rainbow panted in relief, struggling and failing to get upright in the unnaturally buoyant water. "Boy, am I glad to see you! Any sign of Twilight? And, uh, could you lean the other way so I don't capsize your boat while I climb on...?"

Moments later, the boat was successfully un-capsized, Starlight running her aura through Rainbow's fur with a spell that quickly and easily wrung all the water away. "Of course you're here too," Starlight sighed. "I was hoping I only had Twilight to look for... but since we've found each other, I guess the more eyes the better." She glanced out at the horizon. "But now I'm worried there might have been more that followed us."

Rainbow blinked, realizing she hadn't considered this possibility. "Uh, I just saw you and Twilight and what's-her-name... You mean like Seigetsu and Keeper could have jumped too?"

"Misophaes," said a disheveled lump in the back of the boat.

Rainbow blinked harder. "Oh. You're here too, huh?"

"Seems like I'm finding everyone but Twilight," Starlight sighed, turning her boat about and shooting another flare before passing Rainbow a crystalline oar. "Here. Better than not finding you. Twilight!"

"So your magic works here, huh?" Rainbow asked, taking her oar and rowing. "And, uh, what about hers?" She glanced back at Misophaes. "Because mine definitely doesn't. This whole place seems messed up, actually. You got any idea where we are?"

"I'm trying not to think about it," Starlight grunted. "My magic works if I force it to. It's not as natural as it's supposed to be. This place also seems familiar, in a bad way. It kind of reminds me of what moon glass feels like. I'm trying not to think about it too much."

"It feels good to me," Misophaes volunteered, speaking hesitantly, as though she was talking against her better judgement.

Rainbow raised an eyebrow at her. "You have a positive reaction to something? That's a new one. Weren't you having those clerics wipe your memories over and over or something to get away from whatever you were trying to get away from?"

"I can hear you normally now," Misophaes murmured, watching the water with pinprick eyes. "You sound annoyed by what I've done. Proportionally annoyed. Mad, even. I can understand it. It makes sense. No more malice for things I can't remember. It all makes sense, now that the voices are gone."

"Glad to hear you get that we're all down here because of you," Rainbow deadpanned. "Any chance you wanna do something helpful about it?"

"Do something about it?" Misophaes gave her a confused, still-haunted look.

Rainbow patted the crystal boat. "Starlight's being nice enough to pick you out of the drink and give you a ride on her boat. You gonna pay her back? Got any information to spill...?"

"She doesn't know anything," Starlight sighed, in between shooting flares and calling for Twilight. "Isn't convinced yet that I didn't kill her and she's not dead. Doesn't know anything about what happens when you go down the abyss, either, other than that no one and nothing has ever come back."

"I-I mean, supposedly," Misophaes stammered, sitting on her haunches and fiddling anxiously with her forehooves. "I don't remember enough to know, for sure." She looked at Starlight and deflated a little. "I always thought that when I died, I'd remember everything I've done and that's how it would make sense. Not that the accusations would just stop."

Starlight ignored her.

"Great," Rainbow said. "Glad you don't feel guilty at all for talking us into falling down this hole with you. Think you could turn that lack of remorse into something useful?"

"I didn't say that," Misophaes murmured, holding her hooves. "Just that it makes sense now. You're mad at me because I hurt you. It's just what I deserve."

"Great." Rainbow started ignoring her too. "Ugh, if only I could fly and search from above..."

"Keep rowing." Starlight shook her head. "We'll find her eventually."

Twilight was starting to feel silly, trying and failing to climb up to the next tier of the stone dais.

"Ugh!" Her forehooves could just barely cusp the edge when she stretched all the way up, but the wet stone was slippery and she didn't have nearly enough strength to pull herself up with such a shaky hold. "Come on! I... Nngh!"

The Flame of Love was sitting by the edge, staring into the water.

"Hey, umm..." Twilight gave up on surmounting the ledge, pacing over to it. "You pulled me out of the water, right? Was that with telekinesis? Could you... lift me up there, please?"

The fiery zebra turned to her, an unspoken why in the air.

"It would be a better vantage point?" Twilight raised an eyebrow. "I need to find Misophaes. And then... figure out a way out of here."

"There is no way out," the zebra said flatly.

"Isn't there?" Twilight raised an eyebrow. "I mean, I know my wings aren't working, but there has to be some way..."

"Flying would do nothing, even if it worked," the zebra told her. "I am cut off from my body. This is not a matter of spatial distance to be traversed. The sea is part of the world. The air is part of the world. If there was a path, it would connect me. There isn't. There is no way home."

Twilight frowned. "All we did to get here was fall down a hole... Unless that hole was some kind of one-way portal?"

"That could be a way to think of it," the zebra said. "I don't mean to cause you to panic. I love you. I don't want that. But we are in a space that has no harmonic connections to the world you know."

"Harmonic connections, okay," Twilight admitted. "This place doesn't seem very harmonic. What about disharmonic connections, or... Why is that an important distinction?"

"I do not mean harmonic in the sense that you understand it," the zebra told her. "Harmonic as in worldly, as in of the world born from myself and my fellow Flames of Harmony. Your chaos and disharmony are ultimately worldly concepts. The only true insulators to my body are Vacuum and Void."

"Vacuum and Void?" Twilight blinked.

The zebra nodded. "Vacuum is a state of absolute emptiness through which things can pass, but nothing exists. The existence of anything within it renders it no longer a vacuum. This is a concept mortals can observe. You should be familiar with it through your scholarly studies."

"Like a pressure chamber that sucks all the air out," Twilight said.

"Yes," the zebra told her. "Vacuum is the state that exists beyond the boundaries of your world, separating it from celestial bodies, other planets and the stars in the sky. Void, meanwhile, is anything that was overlooked when creating the world and determining what would exist within it."

Twilight leaned in closer. "Overlooked?"

"We are meant to be omniscient," the zebra explained. "Administrators of the world, by nature aware of all that goes on within it so that we can enforce its laws. However, there are some things we are unaware of, either by oversight or by design. Examples of things we flames do not know by design include... the future. Or who we used to be."

Twilight's eyes widened.

"Examples of things we are unaware of by oversight," the zebra continued, "are difficult to provide, because by definition I am unaware of them. The Aldenfold may be one, as I have told you we are unable to see inside its boundary. This place may well be another. But this is Void: things we cannot influence because they exist outside our knowledge. And this is the power that now separates you and I from our world. I could not see this place from the Lifestream. I cannot see the Lifestream from this place. They are separated by something unknowable to me."

"That sure makes it sound like we're just underneath the Aldenfold," Twilight pointed out.

"You deduce that using logic cultivated in the world my siblings and I administer," the zebra countered. "Can you claim with certainty that such logic still holds, freed from the rules of our world?"

Twilight squinted. "Can you claim that it doesn't? I'm looking for a way out, here. And it's hard to argue with someone who says the rules of logic aren't real, but it sure sounds more like you're saying we can't prove there is a way out, instead of we can prove there isn't one."

The zebra just sighed.

"...Are you alright?" Twilight asked, stepping closer.

"I am severed from my body," the zebra said, ruby flames swirling within its frame. "This means I am no longer present to administrate my domain. My Crystal Palace has no more flame; I cannot reach it. Likely, the surrounding lands will have been visited with a calamity like to the ones that afflicted Ironridge, Abyssinia and the Aptann Valley when their flames could no longer touch their seats of power. Our world, which has endured for thousands of years, is dying. We are failing in our mission. Hope, the one of us with the will to claw back what was lost, has been absent the longest and now confined to flesh. And the thinking creatures who live on our world do not yet possess the technology required to repeat the construction of a new world that saved them last time."

Twilight hugged the zebra.

It was warm, a motherly warmth that could cradle even the stars in the sky, that had seen children countless beyond measure, like Princess Celestia but orders of magnitude older. It was fragile, like an antique knife blade still peeling fruit in the hooves and mouths of chefs who had forgotten just how old it was. And it was broken. Twilight could tell, with a deep-seated instinct that might have come from her cutie mark, that it was missing so many parts of itself, and had been for a very long time.

This empty, burning, vaguely crystalline shell was all that was left. The rest had been discarded so that it could better serve its purpose. And still, it wasn't enough.

These were no abstract, mechanical thoughts that a machine could have. Twilight knew them intimately, from when she prepared for Princess Celestia's tests and found herself inadequate to face them on her own, from when she had sacrificed fun for studying and her career as a librarian to help rule Equestria. All so that she could do her job, serve her purpose. And still, she wasn't always good enough, sometimes lay defeated on the floor as somebody else saved the day or the map table called everyone but her.

And she had... made her peace with it. She was the Princess of Friendship, not the Princess of Doing Everything Herself. She didn't have to be sufficient on her own. But in this god that had given everything over an unfathomable span of time and still come up short, she recognized that feeling keenly.

Twilight hugged it harder.

"You have not failed," she insisted, eventually taking a step back so she could look it in the eyes. "Sure, you've suffered a lot of setbacks, but do you know how many times my friends and I have pulled Equestria back from the brink? You'd better, because it was your power we used to do it. The magic of friendship? You know?" She patted her cutie mark. "The world is still standing. It's still filled with smart and strong people who are willing to work together to survive... Not everyone, but enough! I don't know how the ponies of Indus accomplished what they did and built a new world to move to, but if you and I do everything we can to preserve this world and still come up short, you can bet they'll do it again. Do you understand?"

She held the flame by its shoulders. "This world is not a lost cause. We can still fix this and get all the flames back in the Crystal Palaces where they belong. And if it turns out I'm wrong, it'll still be okay, because I know there are people out there who want badly enough to survive that they'll figure out how."

"You are truly a Princess of Harmony," the zebra said weakly. "But do you understand what you are promising? If you alone could survive the end of all things while all other life perished, would you consider this promise to be upheld?"

Twilight didn't even give the idea consideration. "It's not going to come to that," she said, brushing it away. "I don't limp across finish lines. I cross them with my head held high, or watch my friends do it in my stead. You know how to count on your friends to be the missing piece you couldn't provide, right? Or is that idea only part of Convergence's domain?"

The zebra was quiet.

"Sounds like I've made my point." Twilight patted them on the head with a wing, internally wincing at how she was treating a deity that far outranked Princess Celestia yet certain it was the right thing to do. "Now, back to our actual problem. I don't know how to get out of here either, but I'm going to start with finding the pony I fell down here protecting. And for that, I need to get a better look at our surroundings. Will you help me up to the top of this dais?"

The zebra nodded, their runic ring spinning faster, their internal flames swirling to match. Suddenly, they erupted with flame, a sphere of red expanding outwards like a shockwave, passing through Twilight with a sensation that was pleasant and almost stabilizing. For a moment, they continued to expand... and eventually, slowed to a halt, a massive dome of thinly-dispersed red flames centering around the zebra's now-empty body, gone save for its eyes, crystal stripes, and the floating Lovebringer at its core.

Twilight sniffed, feeling the air against the back of her throat. It felt... ever so slightly less alien.

"The purpose of harmony is to impose ideas on space," the hollow zebra explained. "To replace the existing entropy with the rules you are familiar with. I am only one among nine, separate from my siblings and the machine that allowed us to create your world. But my control over this space, so long as you remain within the sphere, should be sufficient to allow for pegasus flight."

Twilight stared at the zebra. One of the nine pillars of reality, fueling her friends' harmony lasers, propping up her world and all that she knew... on its own, barely strong enough to establish pegasus flight in an area small enough that she could throw a stone and hit its edge.

Hadn't she felt the Lovebringer's power, surging through her, far exceeding the throughput her alicorn body was capable of? Where was such a magnitude of difference coming from? Was it the presence of the other flames, the establishment of a status quo that had lasted for millennia? Or was she underestimating just what it took to allow pegasi to fly?

This observation probably should have been discouraging. But at the same time, it made it feel just a little more tangible that the Flame of Love had once been a real, normal person.

Satisfied, Twilight nodded, pumping her wings and focusing. The air didn't feel like it did in Equestria, but it still caught beneath them, and she was able to jump up to a higher rung.

"Sure would be great if I could only fly," Rainbow complained, rowing away at Starlight's crystal boat. "At least one of us can do their thing. Hey, Misophaes! Does your horn work?"

"I haven't tried." Misophaes smiled, somehow both contented and nervous as she stared into the water. "I don't want to."

"Don't wanna find out that your horn went and bailed on you, huh?" Rainbow raised an eyebrow. "Or don't wanna get conscripted into helping if it turns out it works?"

"When I use magic, I imagine the things I might have done," Misophaes said, a slight sing-song tone to her voice. "It made the screams louder. It was my punishment, since I had to use it to stay alive. Now I can't hear them anymore. Why would I want to bring them back?"

"Enough." Starlight silenced them, her own thoughts trying to run from whatever it was she recognized about this place. "Focus on looking for Twilight."

Sometimes, idle chatter helped her, distracting her from whatever was on her mind. Not always. Not today. Her thoughts felt like a mountain that were piling up, and she could only find peace by shoveling her way to the bottom, solving every puzzle and every problem. Finding Twilight was only the beginning. Then, there would be getting out of here, dealing with Misophaes again, going back to the north, fighting windigoes, something about the Flames of Harmony... The only place to start was at the top. It was too unpalatable to handle all at once. It was piling up too quickly not to handle. And the only way she could make progress-

"Woah, look at that!" Rainbow interrupted, waving to catch her attention. "Yo! Starlight! Bring us around!"

Starlight dragged her oar through the water like an anchor, the boat sliding smoothly around to face off to the side. In the distance was what looked like a tiny constellation of red stars, twinkling and possibly slowly growing. She narrowed her eyes. The same red as Twilight's Lovebringer magic.

"Bet you that's an epic flare," Rainbow said with a grin, bringing her own oar around. "We see you, Twilight! We're over here!"

Together with Rainbow, Starlight worked her oar, sending the boat skimming towards the constellation as it rapidly drew closer. The stars didn't fade, and Starlight soon realized they were actually red flames, arranged in a dome over a strange, dark structure that didn't look like it was made of ice.

The moment her boat hit the flame-sphere's boundary, it lurched, nearly throwing her and Rainbow as the water became more viscous and less buoyant. Friction seemed to apply to the hull again, and before the craft could capsize, Starlight leaped to the shore, letting her crystals dissipate and catching Rainbow and Misophaes in her telekinesis.

"Uh, thanks for the save? I totally had that," Rainbow said, inspecting the wet granite on which they now stood. "Woah, actual rock. And I'm getting wet again."

Starlight sighed. "Deal with it. Making crystals is harder here. I need a mental break."

But she also needed to see what was special about this island. Twilight had to be here; the space inside the sphere felt just a little more familiar than the air outside it. And since the island was short, conical and made of tiered layers...

"We're going up to the top," Starlight declared, conjuring a crystal staircase after a moment of effort. "To take a look around. Keep up."

Her hooves clinked against the crystals with sounds that didn't sound quite natural, as though her crystals and hooves didn't have the normal idea of what they were supposed to sound like. Black rain dribbled into her coat and matted her mane. As she crested the island's central tier, Starlight couldn't decide if this place didn't want her here, or simply didn't notice her at all.

At the pinnacle was a machine... Was it a machine? Or a creature? Or maybe just an art fixture. It was a stone nautilus shell, about five times her height, sitting upright on a pedestal with its mouth pointing off into the distance. It seemed to have been modified into something evoking a harpoon, and from its mouth stretched one of the black, glistening chains that crisscrossed the sky, disappearing taut into the horizon.

More importantly, Twilight was examining it.

Twilight looked up when she heard Starlight's hoofsteps, her eyes widening in surprise and confusion. "Starlight?"

"Don't remember me jumping after you?" Starlight raised an eyebrow at her confusion.

Twilight's expression turned a bit sheepish. "Look..."

"What's done is done." Starlight crossed the platform, Rainbow and Misophaes appearing behind her. "We'll talk about it later. Is there anyone else with you, or do we finally have everyone and can focus on getting out of here?"

Twilight scanned her companions. "Rainbow? And... Misophaes. No, it's just me and the Flame of Love here. I... didn't realize you had followed-"

"The Flame of Love?" Rainbow interrupted. "What, like, the harmony one?"

The crystalline outline of a red zebra appeared from behind the nautilus, the Lovebringer floating in its core, hauntingly incomplete and empty. "I have been with you for some time now. But now, I am only here." It nodded sadly to Starlight. "And you are here too."

Rainbow raised an eyebrow at Twilight. "Anything we should know? And, uh, what's this big shell thing?"

Twilight glanced uncertainly at Misophaes. "Is, umm... Since I saved you, do you mind, like..." She looked squarely at Starlight. "Would it be bad to talk about certain things around her?"

Starlight gave Twilight a sigh. "Now you want to listen to me about what we should do with her? I don't know. I don't really care. I think I've found everyone, and now I want to get out of here."

"About that..." Twilight took a deep breath, then started explaining everything the zebra had just told her.

"And so, I don't know whether there's a way out or not, but the flame doesn't think so," Twilight finished, wilting a little from Starlight's stony expression. "I was thinking... Umm... Look." She hung her head. "I'm sorry, Starlight. I didn't realize how unprepared I'd be to accept your decision. On... what to do with Misophaes."

"Is this the most important time for apologies?" Starlight tilted her head. "If it's eating at you, sure. But the best way to make it up to me is getting us out of here. And I'm almost certain the hole we fell down isn't going to let us back up."

Twilight stared at her dismissal. "Yes, it is eating at me. But it sure looks like it's eating at you, too."

Starlight shook her head. "What's bothering me most is something on the tip of my tongue I can't place. There's something wrong about this place. I don't like it. Maybe it's because I'm a Flame of Harmony and am removed from the world I belong in, like you said. But it feels... familiar, somehow."

"You have been removed from the world you belong in for the last thousand years," the red zebra said. "Confined to the moon, prior to taking on the flesh of a pony. Even though that time predates your equine life, perhaps its impact makes you more sensitive to these conditions?"

Starlight glanced at the zebra, changing the subject. "So Eylista being on the moon caused my Crystal Palace to break because the vacuum of space cut it off from the Lifestream, right? What about you? Didn't Twilight say she found you in some cross-dimensional space?"

The zebra shook its head. "The mirror world I was confined in is a pocket dimension, yes, but it is still adjacent to the Lifestream. People are still born there, sharing the same flow of souls that underlies this world... and often sharing the same soul at the same time. The dimensions are bridged by harmonic magics. Though it was a confinement of the physical representation of my soul, I was still free to meet with you in my palace when you arrived there as a child. Now, were anyone to visit that place, I could not see it."

Rainbow Dash scratched her head. "I'm still a little confused by this whole difference between the gemstone, the flame, the Crystal Palace..."

"All of it is me," the zebra said. "The world, the flame, this manifestation. The gemstone that you have carried can move across the world just as your head can move on your neck. Being cut off from the world... You could no more easily cut your wings off. All of it is a part of the body that I share with my siblings, and administrate together with their minds."

"So we're in a pocket dimension that doesn't border the Lifestream," Starlight said, moving the conversation along. "At first I thought this rain was the remnants of the waterfall, but it's been too constant since I got here. And the villagers told us you can't plumb the depths of the abyss, and anything you send down only returns the last bit of the rope if you try to pull it out. That means the abyss is likely a portal, and likely works in only one direction." She glanced at Twilight. "Right?"

Twilight nodded. "That was my assessment as well."

"There's something else I've remembered," Starlight added. "The entrance to the cave Misophaes made her village in was protected by the Aldenfold's magic. Remember?"

Rainbow Dash blinked. Twilight, for her part, did a double take. "It... was. That was how the dragons never found it, wasn't it?"

Starlight nodded. "And the Lovebringer says that this place is disconnected the way the Aldenfold is, and also that it used to be part of the real world until it got crushed in the Aldenfold's creation."

The red zebra nodded.

"Then we have to be beneath the Aldenfold," Starlight declared. "I know what you said, that this space doesn't follow the same rules as the world we're used to. But it must follow some rules, right? Water still falls down. Stone and ice are recognizable as stone and ice. And life existed on Indus before the flames came along and made our current world. You know how my power works. There can't not be a way out of this."

"Does the big shell do anything?" Rainbow asked. "Because literally no one has talked about the big shell yet."

"I can't tell," Twilight apologized, turning to the stone nautilus that held the end of a chain. "There's an inscription on the side in a language that used to belong to Pegasopolis. I'm a little rusty, but I think it says, 'We join our hooves to bar the way for the king.' Does that mean anything to any of you?"

Rainbow raised an eyebrow. "Nope. Nuthin'. You really learned a whole dead language while studying a different random race's historical city just for the sake of it?"

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Do you even realize who you're talking to? Pegasopolis is a critical part of Equestria's heritage! This one, I'm actually embarrassed I'm not more fluent in. It's not something wildly obscure, like that old zebra dialect we found beneath Convergence's..." She trailed off, glancing again at the red zebra. "Were zebras just really important to the world's founding, somehow? That can't be a coincidence."

"Zebras are an ancient race," the flame said. "Over the first three thousand years of this world's history, they were often considered to be a fourth species of pony, along with earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi. It is only within the last few millenniums that they have grown more separate and fallen in number."

Starlight, though, was muttering under her breath. "Twilight, when did the Pegasopolis dialect this inscription uses come into use?"

Twilight scratched her head. "Well, history is pretty foggy before the two-thousand-year mark when Equestria was founded. We have a huge amount of reference material written in it because, as part of the founding treaty, the Unicornian nobility adopted it and it was spoken all across high society for the first few centuries of Equestria's existence. It gradually fell out of favor across the map due to handling slang and adaptations from other languages poorly and having a rigid grammatical structure, and the last place it was actually used was as the official language of the Canterlot government, spoken in the palace and used for writing laws and stuff. That was about a thousand years ago, and it didn't survive the reorganizations triggered in the wake of Nightmare Moon-"

Starlight cleared her throat, interrupting. "But when it began to be used? I'm... just looking for evidence that this statue and these chains aren't as old as the rest of the things here, which apparently is very old." She stared at the nautilus. "It's certainly made of different materials. Stone, instead of ice. If it was newer, that would mean someone might have been here more recently."

The red zebra looked thoughtful. "I can provide little insight on spoken languages, because I speak to hearts instead of tongues. But I do not recognize this shell or these chains from this place's time as a ruin on the seafloor. Someone has constructed these since this place was last a part of me."

"So within the last thousand years," Twilight said. "Which was about when this language disappeared. So either they really wanted to pay homage to a bygone civilization..." She looked up. "Or it was someone closely involved with Canterlot's government."

"One of the Princesses?" Rainbow guessed.

Twilight took a shaky breath. "I've never pressed Princess Celestia too hard on why she created the Aldenfold. But... if this was made by Princess Luna as she was becoming Nightmare Moon... Could she have made the mountains to cover it up? Something she wanted to bury after their fighting was done?"

She turned, expectant, to the flame.

"I don't know," the flame apologized. "There are parts of that conflict that we were not able to witness. Many of the powers Luna created under the influence of the Nightmare, which you know as Nightmare Modules, are related to the concept of Void. They hide information, obscure the truth, destroy memories and veil ponies in impenetrable shadow. Of this, our memories are clouded."

"Well, I know this much." Twilight straightened up. "The Princesses will definitely find out what happened to us. There has to be somebody up there who didn't fall down that hole. Corsica stayed on the airship, if no one else. And Seigetsu was there, and Keeper, and Aegis, too. So if they do know how to reach this place, they'll definitely open the door for us to get out. And they definitely have one, because one of them has used it themselves."

"Alright," Rainbow said, pounding one hoof with the other. "But that's no reason to sit on our hooves waiting to be rescued, right? If this is really a princess hidey-hole, there's gotta be stuff down here that's worth finding, right?"

"Or stuff that was never meant to be found," Starlight muttered. "I'm a little bit more familiar than either of you with the kind of skeletons Luna kept in her closet. I've used those skeletons and paid the price. Is that really something you're eager to find?"

Rainbow hesitated. Twilight glanced at her, bidding her to go on.

"Think about it," Starlight said. "This isn't a conventional hiding place. A conventional hiding place wouldn't need to be hidden from the eyes of the overseers of this world's order. If we were talking about normal skeletons, they could have put them in a secret room in a library, or something. A spot like this, you'd only need if you were trying to hide something you needed the world's rule enforcers not to know about. And maybe it's just because I'm one of those enforcers, but I can't think of anything good that could come of finding a thing like that."

"I can," Misophaes quietly said, speaking up for the first time since climbing the stone dais.

Everyone turned to her.

"It's nice here," Misophaes murmured, still haunted, yet somehow at peace. "I don't have to listen to the screams. Everyone says the rules don't work here. Is karma a rule where you all are from? It doesn't need to be one. It's nicer when it isn't. And now they can't find me anymore. I don't have to care. I don't have to feel guilty. If only I had known about this years ago. This is the kind of place I always wanted Abaddon to be: a place where no one will ever, ever come looking for you again."

End of Act 4

...

Discord whistled cheerfully to himself, lounging on a tree branch hanging over the wall to Gawain's compound. The branch was covered in snow, and the snow didn't particularly want to move, resisting the natural, harmonic idea that show should fall off when you pushed it. Fortunately, Discord was an expert at resisting natural, harmonic ideas, and the snow was now piled high behind him in a statue of Halcyon's face as a token of their friendship.

Ponies and griffons were busy down in the courtyard below, trying to manage far too many children as dawn broke and the need to play in the snow fought with wariness over a weather system that had simply stopped. Funny how things broke down when you messed with the world like that.

Senescey was still asleep, though, working off a nasty magical whack from the previous night's events, and Papyrus was doing much the same for lazier and more conventional reasons. No good viewpoints anywhere to be found, especially now that Rainbow Dash had gone down that hole and Corsica was timeskipped a week or two into the future and was waiting for everyone else's perspectives to catch up. Maybe he'd go pester Halcyon again... He was still sore that Papyrus hadn't used the boop how he was supposed to.

Maybe it was time to promote someone new?

Discord pulled out the script and consulted it, rubbing his goatee with his talons. Nope, no, not that time yet. The cast he had for now was plenty. Couldn't go growing it too fast, after all.

This certainly was a tighter production now that he had all the viewpoints playing by his rules. Just thinking about how chaotic it must have been back in Starlight's heyday, when he was stuck as a statue and couldn't interfere, now that must have been a sight to see.

And he was the Lord of Chaos, wasn't he? Ulterior motives were awful. Maybe he should just say screw it and promote everyone again. But no, not now. You had to have some form of self-control to get proper entertainment, after all.

Yes, bothering Halcyon was definitely the next play. There would be plenty of time for handing out viewpoints later.