The Immortal Dream

I sat in the coffee shop amid an awkward silence, starting to get the feeling that I needed to give Lissa and Flarefeather some space to talk about what I had just said.

It wasn't just about manners. I felt almost sticky from whatever came over me during Flarefeather's hug. Faye sat in my mind taking no pleasure in being right, and now neither of us knew what to do next.

"...Alright," Lissa finally said. "Let's say I believe you. Not sure if I do yet, but I can't think of a concrete reason why I shouldn't, so for now, let's see where this goes." She folded her forehooves beneath her chin, taking advantage of having a chair all to herself now. "So far you've told us that everything that's happening is caused by a tower that appeared somewhere to the south, and if you're going to fix it, first you have to go there and investigate. How do you know this, and what are you actually planning to do there? Is it related to this 'changeling queen' thing?"

"Yeah." I folded my ears. "Changeling queens have magical voids in our hearts. They're like really strong batteries or cages for things made of emotions. Now, these towers are grown out of structures that already exist deep underground called crystal palaces. Each palace has a magical keeper called a Flame of Harmony, which are really important to the stability of the world. When this happened in Ironridge, I went down to the bottom of the old palace and found that the flame had been really badly hurt by something, which was why everything went wrong. I also found that these flames are basically manifestations of certain emotions or concepts, which means they're the kind of thing I can put in my void."

Lissa frowned in thought. Flarefeather looked boggled.

"Actually fixing this, in theory, takes three steps," I continued. "First, I find the flame and take it away from whatever caused the damage, assuming it's still alive. Second, I take it somewhere it can be repaired, which last time meant the home of a flame that was still healthy. Finally, I bring it back to its own palace. But... like I said, I'm pretty bad at seeing things through. Last time, I only made it through the first two steps. So I don't know if things will actually go back to normal once the flame is restored, and if whatever caused the damage is still there, then this might just happen all over again unless I deal with that, too. And... all this is assuming I'm on a time limit and get there in the first place before it's too late."

Lissa blinked incredulously. "You know this and still went along with us exploring the manor last night? If that's true, wouldn't there be things a thousand times more important to do?"

"Power outage," I said, shaking my head. "And it was the middle of the night. Maybe I should have just left you all behind and started sprinting south on hoof. But, I figured, if there were any resources we might find..." I sighed. "What's done is done. The important part is-"

The cafe door banged open.

Flarefeather and I both jumped, and I spun around to see how un-private our private discussion room had suddenly become. It was a pink teenage griffon with an open vest and his crest done up in a spiky mohawk.

"Hey hey hey!" he announced in an outdoor voice, glancing between us and the now-awake bartender and the empty rest of the room to see if anyone else was here. "You dudes heard the news? The old crow's about to give a speech at the memorial crater stage! Be a good neighbor and spread the news on your way over, yeah? Maybe we'll find out what this power outage is about! Come on!"

"What?" I stood up. "You mean Crowscone?"

The griffon made a face. "Yeah, that guy. You look strong, by the way. Dig your glams!" He backed out the door, making a finger gun at us on his way.

I glanced at Lissa and Flarefeather.

"Hey," Flarefeather started, slow and ominous. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

The barkeep spoke up before either of us could answer. "You girls done over there?" he asked, getting to his hooves. "Don't wanna kick you out while we're still open, but it's not like I've got other customers today, and this sounds like the excuse I need to close up early. Want to hear what our mighty leader has to say for himself about this."

I glanced down at our tray, where two donuts remained.

Flarefeather swiped them, stuffing both in her mouth at the same time. "Yeah, we dome!" she mouthed around them, using her wings to herd me and Lissa towards the exit.

There it was again. That sensation, when she touched me, that I didn't deserve to settle for this. And neither, by the way, did I have to.

I stumbled forward away from her reach. This was not good. I trusted in my self-control well enough, but unlike the revulsion it displaced, resisting this greed was a matter of more than just proving I could do something.

As we stepped out into the foggy street, it seemed word was indeed spreading, and the griffon hadn't told a lie: a trickle of murmuring unicorns and earth ponies were moving steadily towards the richer district where Crowscone's manor was located, their tones weighted with expectancy.

"So?" Flarefeather whispered as we paused against the line of storefronts where the cafe was located. "You thinking it too?"

I frowned. "That if something big is going down, we might want to be there?"

"No, dummy," Flarefeather hissed. "Remember what I was saying earlier? If we save the Consul and prove neither side offed him, then it might just be enough to get us out of hot water!" In her eagerness, her voice rose a little. "And with Crowscone out of the manor giving a speech, now would be the perfect time to go look for-"

The pink griffon stuck his head out from another shop's door right next to us. "Hey, did you just say you're breaking into the old crow's lair?"

Internally, I groaned. This griffon even had the sense to keep his own voice down, which at this point felt like rubbing it in.

"An interesting conclusion for you to draw," Flarefeather said, her tone somehow not guilty in the least. "Not sure where I implied that. Don't you have somewhere to be?"

The griffon tsk'd. "Come on, lady, I'd know that tone anywhere. You're sneaking. And my place to be is wherever I want! Anyway..." He glanced around to see who else was listening, closed the shop door behind him, and dropped his whisper to something quieter. "Fight me."

"What?" Flarefeather frowned.

"There's a good alley over there," the griffon said, gesturing with his thumb. "Just a quick brawl with me and my mates. I need to see how good you are, see. Find out if this is something we want in on, or if we should stop you for your own safety. Couple of fancy dressers like you, I bet you've got nothing to fear from a little dust-up, right?"

"We're seriously not committing burglary," Flarefeather deadpanned. "We're his guests. And there are politics involved."

The griffon nodded sagely. "No cure for politics like a good kick to the face, right? That's what the Master always says, and if you ask me, he's on point. So? Going once, going twice..."

I hesitated. I strongly doubted I could lose a fight to some juvenile delinquents, and troublemakers tended to know things. If this was a trap, likely the worst that could happen was wasting our time, but in the present circumstances, that would still be pretty bad...

"Sorry, kid." Flarefeather shook her head, spending much less thought on it than me. "And please don't follow us, alright?"

"Hey." The griffon shrugged. "Your funeral. Anyway, you change your mind and feel like earning a little street cred, the name's Gonkers. I'm not hard to find."

All three of us blinked as he slipped away into the mist.

"That's a name," Lissa remarked.

"Are we actually going with this, though?" Flarefeather whispered. "See if we can find the Consul?"

"...Yeah." I nodded. This was a good idea. Maybe not a safe idea, but it could keep things moving along tracks that possibly led somewhere. It was far, far better than being idle.

But just to be safe... Could Faye ghost me and handle this one herself? If we were going to try to cure the Consul, she was more in tune with our powers than I was, and that would let me keep an eye on Crowscone and fly back to the manor to warn her if he finished his speech and started returning. Plus, it would be good to have ears there in case anything important did get said.

"I'm not using our powers," Faye replied flatly in my head. "If we do that, it'll be together, after you're back. You have a point, though. Guess it's my turn to be back up front already..."

This wasn't fair, Faye thought to herself as she led the way back to Crowscone's manor.

By telling Lissa and Flarefeather how prone she was to starting things that she didn't finish, Halcyon had demonstrated her point in practice: she was gone now, Faye was up front, and there were likely a torrent of questions building that would be unleashed the moment she did anything to prove what Halcyon had been saying. It would fall to her to answer them, and one thing Halcyon hadn't dragged out into the sunlight was the difference between the two of them. Lissa and Flarefeather didn't even know she existed, let alone that she wasn't the mare they had just been talking to.

But, such was her lot in life. This was what she had signed up for, ever since she let Halcyon drag her back up to the surface, ever since she chose to take a role in the world again.

As they approached the manor, Faye saw the gate's usual pegasus guards standing in their usual locations. The guards took a moment to squint at them through the mist, but as she got closer, they quickly nodded in recognition, swinging the heavy gate open.

"If that griffon's still following us," Flarefeather whispered, "I wonder what he thinks now."

Faye risked leaning into her star sight, but predictably, it didn't tell her anything: there was still only a small area around her where the positions of the stars she saw perfectly conformed to the locations of people in the real world. It was like superimposing two drawings on two pieces of paper by pinching them together at a single point. If that griffon was following, she couldn't tell.

What she could tell, though, was something she had seen and ignored the previous night: the manor held two stars that both weren't right. One looked like any other creature's, ordinary in shape and intensity but colored a deep, pure red. Another, also red, was shaped more like a ring than a star.

And there were Lissa and Flarefeather too, of course, bright and desirable in ways that made her uncomfortable to stare at. But if their hypothesis was correct, one of those two red stars was probably the Consul.

The question was, which one? And what was the other?

They entered the mansion, its shallow, asymmetrical foyer projecting an aura that said you don't belong here. Faye took a deep breath. Right. First things first.

"Let's start by heading back to our quarters," Faye whispered. "I want to check on Coda, and it'll let us see what security is like while we're still somewhere we're supposed to be."

"You know," Flarefeather muttered, "Crowscone did tell the Black Knight to investigate this Consul thing. Now that I think about it, isn't it weird that he got mad at us for sniffing around? We were basically doing what he asked us to."

"In a very suspicious manner," Lissa said. "And he asked her to do it, not us. She presumably knows all the unspoken rules here about what not to stick her nose into."

About halfway to their room, they ran into their first guard. He was a pegasus in a business suit, virtually indistinguishable from all of Crowscone's other guards, and he gave them a brief, appraising nod. "You three. Turning in for the night?"

"Thinking about it." Lissa made a show of yawning. "You know if the Black Knight's here?"

The guard shook his head. "At Lord Crowscone's speech. You could still make it, if you've got nowhere better to be."

Faye and Flarefeather glanced at each other.

The guard shrugged and continued his rounds.

"You know what else is odd?" Flarefeather continued once he was out of earshot. "They get mad at us for sneaking around, but nobody's actually escorting us from place to place. Couldn't we accidentally stumble into somewhere we aren't meant to be?"

"Once again, we were pretty suspicious," Faye replied. "Remember the locked door? The guards we snuck past?"

Flarefeather sighed. "Look, I'm trying to poke some holes in the conspiracy here, spot the logical contradictions. Doin' my best to be helpful, alright? Just a little bit better at the talky-talky than the thinky-thinky."

Faye checked herself. If this was Flarefeather's way of not thinking about her missing flight... "You'll get used to it," she promised. "When I'm around, every problem turns out like this. But being confused and feeling helpless is at least better than getting injured."

They reached their quarters without further incident, Faye's bracelet casting ghostly shadows around the otherwise-dim sitting room, only a trickle of evening sunlight filtering through the fog to their window.

Lissa closed the door behind them. "Right," she said. "That was uneventful. What's the plan?"

Faye took a deep breath. If Halcyon could do this... "I have senses that normal ponies don't," she started. "One of them lets me see the lives of people around me. It works through walls, but it's not accurate outside of a very close distance."

Flarefeather frowned. "Is that how you were so good at spotting guards last night?"

"It was." Faye nodded. "Some of the presences I can see around here aren't normal. There are two in particular I think might be our Consul. But one of them is in Crowscone's office, in the closet we didn't check."

Lissa narrowed her eyes.

"I don't know where the other one is," Faye continued. "I haven't gotten close enough to tell where it is in the manor. Even though I can see it at a distance, it's hard to even tell what direction it's in. It's... hard to explain."

Lissa nodded. "So we wander the mansion innocently until we get close enough that you can pinpoint this second spot? Is that what you're saying?"

"That might be our best start," Faye admitted. "But It does involve asking you to trust in powers you might not even believe exist. I haven't done anything to prove what I said back in the coffee shop. And if we can't get physically close to where the second spot is, I wouldn't be able to find it, and we'd only be able to check the first one. And I'd rather check the one I don't know first, because we won't be breaking any rules by just walking around."

"Eh." Flarefeather shrugged. "Call it a test of whether you really can do stuff like that." She tilted her head. "What else can you do, anyway? Aside from, you know... whatever happened twenty years ago?"

Faye hung her head. "I don't know. Like I said, I've never had a teacher. Some things are straightforward, like being unusually strong and able to regenerate wounds. But I don't even know the threshold for how far away I can see lives accurately. I probably have powers I haven't even discovered. It doesn't help that a lot of the abilities I'm supposed to have are extremely dangerous when not carefully controlled."

Lissa stroked her chin with a wingtip. "This sounds like a job for experimentation. Not now, though. Is there anything else to discuss before we start aimlessly wandering and looking for the Consul?"

Flarefeather frowned, deep in thought.

"...Actually, could you give me a minute?" Faye asked. "I want to check on Coda."

Neither pegasus objected, so she pushed her way into her own room, taking their light source with her.

There she was, just as she and Halcyon had left her: Coda on her trolley, sitting in the middle of a crystalline block of ice so frosted that you could only tell what was inside by rubbing and polishing one of its facets. Faye did just that, staring through at the filly within.

Coda stared back, her gaze fixed and unblinking, tears of frost dribbling from her wide eyes.

Faye held her gaze there for a moment longer. She didn't have the capacity to do anything for Coda right now, anything more than carrying her along on her travels. Not when her thoughts were preoccupied with not thinking of her friends as trophies. Not when the world was ending. And how would that go? Could she really afford to leave Coda unguarded in the manor of a stallion who had decreed she couldn't leave the city? Rhodallis was still out there, his claim laid to her and Coda both. She had dropped everything to come to the Griffon Empire and chase this filly. Everything. And even though Halcyon was the one who had really spent time with Coda, Faye felt their limits keenly.

What could she do? How could she balance this? Shouldn't a changeling queen have the capacity to do more?

She fought back a sniffle, and then another. It wasn't too late to try to juggle things, but she knew where this would lead. She had seen it before. And Halcyon had just given her stupid speech about their inability to commit! That wasn't that she stopped caring, or got bored, or afraid. She just didn't have the capacity-

"That kid means a lot to you, huh?" Flarefeather asked, standing with Lissa in the doorway.

"She's like me," Faye said, aware this wasn't her secret to tell. "A changeling queen. I found her being raised by a cult in Ironridge. She's a good kid who was raised to shoulder a destiny that wasn't her own. I wish there was more I could do for her."

"Anything I can do to help?" Flarefeather asked tentatively.

Something snapped in Faye's brain.

"Can you pull this cart?" she asked, a rigid sensation settling over her body. It had been her idea, but Halcyon was the one who made the choice to try to see it through... and now, something Halcyon had worked to dislodge seemed to have broken free for her, too.

"Um, probably," Flarefeather said. "Maybe not on my back like you can, but it's got wheels, right?"

Faye took a breath. "I need you to take Coda into the city and bring her to the hospital where I found the time-stopped batponies. Look for a doctor called Sophia. Tell her I sent you, and that if she can keep Coda hidden and safe, I'll be back later tonight with a way to cure her patients. I think she'll take your word for it."

Flarefeather's eyes widened. "You'll what?"

"I know it means sitting out on what we're doing here," Faye apologized. "But it would help more than you know. Lissa and I can meet you there once we have the unconscious Consul. Please?"

Lissa tilted her head. "You're planning on stealing the Consul, then taking them to that hospital?"

Faye nodded. "Assuming we're right about what happened to them. If we can cure the Consul, the Consulate might be grateful enough to secure us passage the rest of the way to our destination, and it's a lot more likely that they will than Crowscone. Besides, curing the batponies should be within the range of what my powers can do. I just... need to be comfortable with figuring out how."

Slowly, and then with mounting determination, Flarefeather saluted, realizing as suddenly as Faye did that they were past spitballing ideas: there was a plan. "You can count on me, boss. If that's what it takes, I won't let your friend out of my sight."

Lissa glanced between her and Faye. "I'll be sticking with you, right?" she asked Faye. "Or is this suddenly a solo?"

Faye shook her head. "I'll be a lot less suspicious if I'm not on my own. Think you can handle it yourself?" She glanced at Flarefeather.

"I will do my job," Flarefeather promised, "and I will not let you down. You can take Lissa for the time being. Just tell me how it goes when we meet up, alright?"

She threw in a wink for good measure, leaving her words almost ambiguously flirty. Suddenly, it clicked in Faye's mind just how much she needed to have something she could do.

Faye already knew that. She knew how much it hurt to have no agency in times like these. But now, feeling like she was swimming and had kicked far away from the safe shore, she really got it.

"Alright," Lissa said, nodding as Flarefeather started hitching herself up to Coda's trolley. "Let's do this."

Faye didn't relax as she prowled the manor hallways with Lissa, her legs stiff and impossibly straight. What was she doing? Had she lost her mind? And what if it actually worked?

The only guards they passed seemed to be patrolling rather than guarding specific points of interest. The patrolling ones, Faye quickly realized, were more interested in catching uninvited guests like that pink griffon than in shooing her away, and while they weren't much for conversation, Lissa eventually confirmed that any places they weren't supposed to be would have a guard directly stationed outside.

For those he had deemed worthy of being guests, it seemed, Crowscone wanted his manor on full display.

Lissa led, and Faye followed, the former taking point and tracking where they had already been so the latter could focus on her star sight. The red star seemed stubbornly elusive, refusing to conform to a spot on the physical plane, and soon Lissa was confident that they had scoured the entire first floor thoroughly enough to peer into any secret rooms.

Onwards to the second.

Minutes ticked by like a heartbeat as they crisscrossed the manor's four wings, passing by the alcoves with the paintings where they had stopped to ponder Crowscone's history with never-aging mares the previous night. Now, trailed by the late evening sun, they moved with far more precision, taking care whenever a guard saw them to appear as curious tourists researching for Crowscone's play. And whenever they weren't being watched, they hurried.

They searched the northwest wing, and found a room they were reasonably sure was directly beneath Crowscone's study - the walls and doors were laid out in such a way that it would be hard to notice the space taken up by the staircase to the basement unless one already knew it was there. As they searched, Faye saw the red ring star come into focus, the one she knew to be within Crowscone's closet.

It wasn't safe to check that one first. But this confirmed that her range was good enough to pinpoint things a floor above her. That would make this much easier.

So they continued, checking each wing as they went. The northeast wing had nothing, as did the southeast. But in the southwestern wing, overlooking the manor's front courtyard and the two guards standing watch over their gate in the fog, Faye finally felt the normal red star drawing near her.

Third floor. It was directly overhead.

"Right," Lissa whispered after hearing this information. "Now what? Is your shadow sneaking still unreliable? The stealthier we can do this, the better."

Faye glanced at the ceiling. This wing's second floor was made up of a windowless hallway surrounded on all sides by unfurnished bedrooms, each one too opulent to be a servant's quarters, yet too austere to be a guest room. Like all of the manor's interior, they felt just barely unfinished, as if Crowscone had built this place to have an impressive exterior facade without any ideas for how to use the space, building guest rooms for the guests he didn't have.

One of the things that was missing was the covers on the ventilation shafts.

Faye wandered into a west-facing bedroom, her neck craned high. The red star was almost perfectly above her; it had to be in the room right on top of this one. The problem was that the area around it held no fewer than five normal stars.

"It's guarded heavily," Faye whispered, wary that her voice could carry through the open ducts. "If I can get up to that opening, my sneaking should make it easy to get through the ducts. But I want to try poking my head up somewhere else first, to see if I can get a better look at the guards."

"They won't see you like last time?" Lissa breathed.

"I doubt it," Faye breathed back. "Last time, things went wrong when I tried going through glass. I was in a hurry then too, since I couldn't hold my breath as long with passengers for some reason. If I'm patient, I should be fine."

"Feathers crossed," Lissa said warily. "I'll stand watch down here, then. Where are you going up?"

Faye's eyes found the room across the hallway - a spot that should hopefully give her a vantage point of the pair of stars closest to her target. "Let's start with there."

Lissa nodded, following her across the hall.

This room had a ceiling vent too, though reaching it would be tricky. The door swung inwards, and if she could somehow balance on top of it while it was open... Faye swung it to the proper angle, weighing how much noise she would make if she simply jumped to get on top.

Lissa's gaze followed hers. "I'll hold it steady. Doff your armor, climb on my shoulders, and you should be able to get up there without much of a ruckus, if you're limber."

Faye blanched. Doff her armor? "What are you going to do with it if someone patrols through here?" she asked, fishing for a practical excuse why this wasn't wise.

"Think you can get up there quietly with it on?" Lissa asked. "Or you could boost me up there. But I'm not a sarosian, so I'll make a cacophony in the ducts."

Faye looked up at the air vent, then down at herself, then across at Lissa. They weren't anywhere yet that they weren't supposed to be. If she did make noise and attracted a guard, would they really guess what was going on just by seeing Lissa here? If she was guarding an empty pile of armor, that would be far more suspicious.

Right?

Lissa gave her a look. "You did just tell us not to take no from you for an answer. I dunno how important it really is to scale this door silently, but I can tell when I'm being misdirected. How good is the real reason you don't want to?"

Technically, Halcyon had told her that. But she was right. The only reasons Faye could say out loud were just excuses.

Faye sighed, forcing herself into another promise that only momentum could get her through. "There's gotta be a bathroom around here somewhere. I'll lock my stuff inside and then shadow swim under the door. Then you can stand guard outside and say I'm in there if anyone asks."

Lissa nodded, and they spread out to look. A bathroom didn't take long to find: the suite at the end of the hallway was bigger and nicer than the others, albeit still unfurnished, and featured its own private bath off to the side.

Faye clicked the lock shut, its mechanism sounding like a tick from a clock.

The fogbound sunset filtered in through a frosted, floor-to-ceiling window, painting the shower tiles orange and rose pink. Faye hurried, unstrapping her asymmetrical cloak and then her shoulder pauldron before she could come to her senses, laying them quietly on the floor one after another. Soon there was nothing left but her boots.

Was this really necessary? Faye questioned it once more as she stepped out of each one in turn, leaving them standing in place like the trunks of dead trees. But the twice-muted sunlight struck her legs, playing off their glaring, blood-red fur and turning them a shade of dappled orange ever so slightly closer to their original color, if Procyon was to be believed.

Of course it was necessary. Just not for any of Lissa's reasons.

Faye straightened up. If tonight was a night for breaking limits, to see if she really could succeed when she held nothing back, then she might as well run with it as far as she could. And then, when the consequences inevitably arrived - consequences like that new feeling living rent-free in the back of her mind, telling her that her friends were toys and she had no business sharing - she could weigh them against whatever she achieved, and judge once and for all whether her inhibitions were worth the cost.

She dove into the shadows and slipped out under the door.

Lissa was waiting when Faye returned.

"Right," Faye said awkwardly, swimming with just her neck above the ground. "I probably should have asked this before, but can you wait until we're out of here to ask questions? I'm really pushing myself here already."

Lissa shrugged. "Depends. Earlier, you asked us to ask more questions. But I won't ask irrelevant ones."

Faye sighed, and forced herself to surface.

Lissa's eyes instantly snapped to her legs, widening in sympathy and a bit of disgust. "Oh. Okay. Most ponies are born with a somewhat complimentary color palette. I can... see why you wear boots all the time." She shook her head. "Yeah, I guess you meant to say no commentary, not just no questions. My bad. Let's get this done quickly."

Faye winced hard. All the rationalizing Halcyon had once done about how this color scheme could be pretty, wiped away in an instant. But if Lissa was thinking about the royal spectrum, or about what that could mean for her lineage, she wasn't showing it. "Right," Faye agreed. "Let's do this."

They crossed back to the other room, where Lissa grabbed and steadied the door, standing on her hind legs and acting as a living ladder for Faye to climb. In hindsight, it was probably possible to get up there using shadow sneaking as well, since batponies could swim up walls when necessary, but Faye was anything but an acrobat, and trying to climb out of the wall onto the already-narrow door sounded like a recipe for a tumble.

Instead, she stood on Lissa's shoulders, grasping the top and pulling herself up. She balanced, wobbled and stood up again, ignoring the feeling of satisfaction in the back of her mind for using her friend as a stepping stool, managing to hook her forehooves over the rim of the ventilation shaft before she lost her balance and fell.

Perfect. From there, it was a simple matter of bracelet strength to pull herself up, and she was inside.

Faye swam through the air duct, dipping into the shadows to reduce her profile and glide silently along, searching for light filtering down from the ceiling. The floor grates weren't as big as the ceiling ones, and these actually existed, forcing her to be a lot more selective about where she tried to come up... but finally, she found one that had something dark close overhead, providing cover for her to take a look around.

Stealthily, silently, she edged her head up for a peek. Miraculously, a hanging tablecloth greeted her: she seemed to be in some sort of dining establishment, beneath a table easily long enough to seat sixteen, and had chosen to come up under perfect cover. Faye crept forward to the tablecloth's edge.

The entire wing was taken up by a bar lounge. The head of her table was centered on a curved window looking out to the south and west, with several smaller tables for two positioned against the window as it straightened out and overlooked the front courtyard. Two of the stars she had seen were seated at one: a pair of guards, taking a break and playing cards over drinks in the sunset's dying light.

They must have just gotten off their shifts. Still on duty was the bartender, yet another pegasus stallion in a business suit. Did Crowscone never get bored of his own tastes? This stallion was making a show of shaking a drink, or perhaps just practicing, looking as if he wished he had more customers instead of less. If Faye had walked in here by accident, she doubted he would have shooed her away.

And finally, two more guards stood, on duty and behind the bar, guarding the entrance to what was either a supply closet or the wine cellar. The red star was just inside it.

Right. Of course. Hadn't Crowscone said when they arrived that the Consul collapsed while they were drinking together? This must have been where it happened. And what else were responsible servants to do but stuff the body in a supply closet?

Faye pulled back before she could laugh. This was a good sign: if there actually was a corpse, no one would have left it to decompose around valuable drinks. No one would still be guarding it, either; even without her star sight it was obvious something was there. And the bartender was making just enough noise that he could cover up a tiny bump or scrape while searching.

She slipped back down into the vent, taking a different turn and seeking that red star. Unlit stones brushed past her fur and tickled her eartips; Crowscone had been too cheap to plate his ducts with metal. A right, and then a left... No light was filtering down from above, but Faye could smell the musky scent of old wood, and the red star was close enough to reach out and touch. This had to be it.

Silently, she climbed out of the ducts again, lighting her bracelet as dim as she could possibly maintain and shielding it from the doorjamb with her body. This was indeed a wine cellar, her eyes dilating until they could make out the silhouettes of two dozen barrels lining the walls on racks, crates stacked haphazardly between them.

One of those crates housed the red star.

Heart hammering, Faye crept up to it, daring to lift and slide back the lid.

Her bracelet was too dim to make out anything more than the barest contours of a body, stuffed in the grate along with something bulky and shiny that might have been a removed set of Consul armor. She didn't need their armor, did she? Thoughtful of whoever put them here to take it off, since she couldn't shadow swim with them as a passenger if they were fully clothed...

She brushed their fur with a hoof. No breathing. No pulse. And yet they were still warm and felt limber, exactly like Sophia had described. There was no doubt about it. No possible exception: the Consul was a sarosian who had met the same fate as all the others.

Faye swallowed. Next on the docket would be actually fixing this, and she hadn't just promised to try, she had promised to succeed. As quietly as she could, she heaved them out of the crate, made sure she had a good grip, and dove for the grate, plunging both of them back into the ventilation shaft.

It was far more awkward swimming in the vents with a passenger, though since they weren't breathing and she could keep her nose free anyway, it was still easier than last time. The real trouble came from her proximity to their star.

Just like Lissa and Flarefeather, physically touching them was different. This Consul had something valuable, something she could take and keep for herself, she could see it. That dark feeling in her mind was vibrating, eager to examine and appraise her catch. And yet, last time, it had been two friends she touched, ponies she already knew things about and had determined she wanted to be around. This Consul was such a stranger. The only thing Faye knew about them was that they were unconscious.

That made her desire hit different. With her senses, she thought she could hear parts of this pony's worth, like notes in a song that were played without proper amplification. They were... intimately acquainted with betrayal. They had vestiges of an intense faith that had been shattered and left to rot. Her own paranoia was a distant ancestor at best to this, something almost unrecognizable: she and Halcyon worried about whether it was wise to trust someone, while this note had long ago abandoned trust as a concept. There was nothing here but nihilism and a desire to symbolically atone, since real atonement was long since impossible.

Faye and her unnatural desire both blanched. Was this really something they wanted to eat? Sure, this creature wasn't good for anything else, and sure, this was what her void was for, but she could afford to be a little selective. What was the point of her power if it didn't give her choices?

...She forced that desire back down. The real problem here was that this plan banked on the Consulate being willing to repay a favor - an organization she knew nothing about. If their face was a pony like this, hopefully she wasn't making a terrible mistake.

Faye reached the hole where she had entered, her star sight helpfully drawing her to Lissa below and alerting her that no other guards were nearby. She peered down, saw Lissa loitering next to the door, and clicked her teeth to get her attention.

Lissa looked up.

"Got 'em," Faye whispered, loud enough to be heard. "I'm gonna land as gracefully as possible, but help catch them if you can. Hope we've got time to grab my armor, because we're ready to run."

Lissa nodded. "Ready. We're not going to check the one in Crowscone's office?"

Faye shook her head. "I've got the Consul. Best not to push our luck. If we talk and decide it's important, it'll be far better to come search when we don't have a body to cart away."

Lissa braced herself, making no protest. As fluidly as she could, Faye maneuvered the Consul in the darkness, getting them out in front of her through the shadows, dangling them out into the room, and finally dropping them for Lissa to catch.

Faye herself followed shortly, satisfied and yet still unnerved by the pair of soft thumps. But when she looked at the Consul in the evening's last vestiges, it became immediately clear that something was wrong.

"Hold on." Lissa frowned, setting the unconscious stallion down. "This guy's not a sarosian. He's a unicorn."

He was a unicorn. And not just a unicorn, but one Faye had seen before.

It had been months ago, but their meeting was impactful enough that she would never forget his face: Izvaldi's Consul was Vivace, changeling of Aldebaran.