I bolt past Starlight and Sour Sweet, racing down the unadorned white halls of our apartment building. It’s funny what you think of when your whole world is crashing down around your ears because right now all I can think is that this hall is in desperate need of a few pictures. Maybe a wall scroll.

I could dash for the elevator but I don’t have the patience. I could go for the stairs but that’s just the second verse same as the first only slightly less so.

What I sprint for is the upper courtyard. It’s called a courtyard, but it’s really just a door leading out to a section of exposed roof with reinforced railing, a few plants to spruce the place up, and a four-story drop.

I aim for the drop.

My blood is boiling. Fog is curling around me. I barrel out the door leading to the roof overlook. I hear the glass pane of the door’s window shatter, and I feel the metal crumple under the force of my impact. The strength of a Killer is nothing human, normal, or natural.

Even the cold air of Canterlot can’t clear the heat from my lungs and the burning from my veins. I need air! I need to—

I hit the railing, mantle it, and drop, and as I do the Fog explodes around me. My skin seethes to an angry red as the boiling heat finally finds purchase elsewhere, and as it leaves my veins I feel my blood run cold as ice. One moment I’m falling as Sunset Shimmer, the next I’m the real me.

Down and down and down, the way I did a lifetime ago from a certain roof of a certain school, but this time I’m the one in control! I’m the one who decides if I live or die! Not them! Not those people who called themselves my friends, and certainly not some hope-eating eldritch horror made of beetles and shit!

I flicker between the dream and the real and suddenly my coat is flapping in the wind like a black flag. I hit the ground like a missile of Fog and it billows out from around me to fill the area I land in at the base of my apartment building with unpleasant ash-and-blood particles.

“SUNSET?!”

Their voices split the night but I can barely hear them over the hammering in my ears. My heartbeat. Theirs. Maybe it’s Quill-damned Entity’s for all I know, assuming that old stain even has a heart.

Doubtful.

I take a step, flicker, and I'm on a rooftop half a mile away in the Commons near the East End. Another step, another flicker, I’m on another rooftop on the other end of the Commons. I’m not even going anywhere I’m just running. Just sprinting through the Fog, getting as close to that domain of despair and hate called the Trials as I dare to without actually stepping into it.

And I could.

Deep in my bones, I know that I could. If I really wanted to, I could go back, and the worst part is I know that the Old Stain would let me. He would welcome me back with open arms, or whatever he has that passes for arms. He would welcome back his wayward daughter and cradle me in his chitinous embrace. He would wash me clean of the human world, and bathe me in the Fog until my mind was finally free of the pain of my memories. He would take them out and give them back as knives, shiny and silver and oh-so-sharp.

I drop down onto another roof, one of a thousand, and curl up to bury my face into my knees. Everything looks the same in the Fog, so one roof is as good as any other. I curl up on the edge of the roof shaking as I fight the vibrating urges in my skull telling me to find someone worth killing and drag them screaming into the nightmare.

The euphoria is the worst.

Every time I slice into someone’s mind, dig into their hindbrain, and force them into my realm, it fills me with a kind of elation I don’t have any good comparison for.

Not anymore, anyway.

Now, the only thing that stirs my heart that way is terrifying people. Hurting them. Or worse.

I wonder how long I’ll hold out.

Adagio does her best to keep her Huntress relegated to short-as-possible forays. She travels to the city via the Fog and then retreats back to live on a defunct campground with Timber and his sister. The lack of people, she says, helps.

She doesn’t spend every free moment indulging a dangerous addiction to being the thing that nightmares are made of.

“How much longer before I’m like them?” I mutter, thinking back to the raving-mad Legion.

I wonder if they’re as addicted to their power as I am.

Taking a deep breath, in and out, I look up and out over the skyline of Canterlot. It’s my city, for now. I protect it the best I can from the danger that I brought to its streets. Every drop of blood spilled by a child of the Fog is another drop on either my hands or the Thief’s.

Between the two of us, we’re practically drowning in the stuff.

A pair of pinprick lights flicker in the periphery of my vision, and I squint down at my chest.

Two lines of light are shining brighter than the rest. Sapphire and citrine strands are trailing outwards from me and they’re almost solid, and I groan as I realise where I probably unconsciously ended up.

Even here, I can’t let her go.

Standing up from the rooftop I follow the line of light with my eyes to a dingy apartment building that’s probably seen better decades, much less days. The lines of light both terminate at the same window which prompts a memory.

What was it Zephyr had said?

She’s going to college to be a therapist, and she’s looking after her best friend at the same time…

Of course.

I take a deeper breath, and this time I’m not drawing in air. I’m breathing deeply of Canterlot’s Dreamtime, and the Fog that suffuses it. I drift into the shadows, cloaking my heartbeat as I move to the very edge of the roof I’m on. The window is one floor down, but only about ten feet from me, and it looks in on a bedroom.

If my heart were still beating it would have stopped.

Fluttershy is lying in bed half under the covers leaning against the headboard and reading a book. She’s more beautiful than I remember, from her cherubic face to her soft waterfall of pink hair. Cradled in her slender hands is a book, and although I can’t see her entirely, from the look of her bare shoulders and arms I’d say she’s probably naked beneath the blankets, sheets, and the thick comforter.

She really is the ideal beauty, and all I can see is her face twisted in grief and rage as she spits what I had thought was our friendship back at me.

You’re not our friend! You never were!

It’s almost like a silent movie. Her window is closed so all I can do is watch while Fluttershy turns the page and, halfway through, yawns, before raising her head to look over at something, or someone, else in the room. I watch her mouth move soundlessly, responding to something I think, then she smiles, and I hate that even her smile has gotten more beautiful.

I’ve just gotten uglier and more hateful.

Fluttershy sets a blue silk bookmark at her page, closes her book, and sets it down. She’s bare-chested, I realise, and a sudden itch of voyeuristic shame crawls through me as she raises a hand and holds it out.

My eyes widen as a blue hand enters the truncated picture I have through the window and takes Fluttershy’s, and Rainbow Dash sits down at the bedside. Her hair is cut short to a pixie bob, and she’s wearing a slightly damp bath towel and nothing else. Her hair is faintly wet from a fresh shower, and she’s smiling—SMILING—at Fluttershy.

This is barely the Rainbow I knew. The one I knew didn’t have so many scars. Scars in patterns like fingers made of blades dragging across flesh. She remembered me, she remembered my touch. She bled and scarred and bled and scarred over and over, I can see, even from here, the way they crosshatch over one another. She remembered me!

But for how long?

How long until she forgot?

How long until the scars in the mirror stopped reminding her of the girl that she murdered.

I can barely breathe as I watch Rainbow sidle further onto the bed, dropping her towel away as she does to bare herself, then crawls seductively towards Fluttershy who flushes a brilliant scarlet. Rainbow pushes the book away and it clatters silently off the edge of the bed between the sheets and wall, and then crawls over Fluttershy, naked and brazen, to claim her lips in a gentle, familiar kiss.

“You…” I hiss, feeling my blood turn rancid and hot in my veins. “Even you?!”

Loyal Rainbow Dash. Kind Fluttershy.

How dare they smile. How dare they just move on!

Rainbow Dash presses Fluttershy down to the bed with a kind of tender strength as she slides beneath the sheets to join her warmth before settling on top of Fluttershy, and a moment later they begin to kiss and move together. Even in the silence, I can hear their soft gasps and cries, and it sickens me.

My gorge rises as I stagger away from the edge of the roof.

Here in the Nightmare dream of Canterlot, I can scream and rage as much as I want. So I do. I put my back to Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy as if that would help bleach the image of their coupling from my mind and scream wordlessly, soundlessly, into the dark. I score the concrete roof with my fingers, slicing gouges from the manufactured stone as I rage mindlessly.

I could do it.

Right here, right now! I could walk into their little slice of dream and turn it into the blackest nightmare. I could drag them both screaming into the Fog with me and throw them at the Entity’s feet and say: ‘Look Father! Look what I’ve brought you!’

‘Aren’t you proud?’

I thrash and rage on the rooftop, clutching at my head hard enough that my own fingers slice into the skin of my scalp and temples as I try to scream out the hateful noise that’s drilling into my mind. I need to get away from here! I’m falling… I’m falling fast and far and if I’m not careful I fall right back into the Trials.

Right back into the chittering grip of that Old Stain.

With one last agonised bellow I wrap myself in the Fog, reach for somewhere in Canterlot far from this place, grip hard, and fling myself through space towards wherever I took hold of. I don’t care, all I care about is getting away from her. Away from Rainbow Dash.

I’d done so well up until now. I’d avoided her for a good reason and now… now I know it was the right decision. I should have kept to it. I shouldn’t have indulged my idiot curiosity and followed that fucking line of light, and for a moment all of my senses are drowned out in an all-consuming maw of total vertigo.

There’s no up or down, left or right. Just endless Fog in limitless darkness, and somewhere in that twisting mire of hate and despair, I blessedly black the fuck out.

I come back to consciousness slowly and only under protest and, Killer biology or no, apparently having a brief psychotic break does nothing for one’s mood.

My head is pounding as I force my eyes open and sit up, and I squint at the shift in light. It must be morning. Even though the change in the Dreamtime is only faint, the barest lightening of dark grey to grey, my eyes perceive the difference enough that it irritates me.

“Damn it.” I spit on the ground as I try to clear my throat before standing shakily.

I have no idea where I am. Everything is one giant bank of fog, and not capital-F Fog either. It’s the Dreamtime reacting to my confusion. That’s the problem with this place. It’s a reflection of the Dreamer’s mind as much as it is a reflection of the world, meaning that if I don’t know where I am, then it probably doesn’t either.

I’m somewhere coterminous with the Real, and that’s about all I know other than that I’m nowhere near them.

“Later,” I mumble, pushing the memories of… of what I’d seen away. “Time to step outside.”

Now that I’m not just projecting myself from my mind and I’m actually wearing my Killer-skin the way that Adagio does, it so much easier to step between realms. That said, the impulses to drag people into my Nightmare are a lot stronger too, so I understand why she spends as little time as possible under the mask and does her level best to avoid the city.

I don’t have that luxury for the moment, though. So I reach out and slice through the skin of the world and force myself through the Wall of Sleep.

The cold strikes me across the face hard, and I take a deep breath of air that carries a familiar scent. My feet are settled on an old concrete roof which I'm standing right at the edge of, and the vista beyond is one I never thought I’d see again.

“Horse shit,” I growl.

Then again, given the nature of my Trial back when I went near-full Killer, I guess ending up here was probably inevitable.

Canterlot High.

The place where I died.

It’s almost Christmas break, but not quite, so the school below me is buzzing with young minds. The school is a cocktail of fledgling neuroses, insecurities, hopes, dreams, and despairs, all big and small, and it’s so overwhelming that it actually helps to shut it out.

I step back from the edge, mindful that if anyone had looked up they would’ve seen a nightmare specter in black looming over them, and wrap my arms around myself.

This is bad.

I never wanted to come back to this miserable place. I’d much rather have my Trial if I had to walk its halls again. At least there, I knew every inch of it. It was mine. My Trial. My torment. And all of it under my control.

All this place reminds me of is when none of that was true.

“I should go,” I whisper into the winds. “I have to g—”

The roof door opens with a clatter of nostalgia, and the memory of it, of my last moments as a human being before I was taken, hits me hard enough that I don’t react fast enough.

“—na, I know how you feel about today, but—”

“—but nothing, sister, it was my fault and—OH MY GOD!”

My drift into the shapelessness of the Dream is fast, but not instantaneous. It takes split-seconds of time to breach the veil, and a heartbeat longer to move between worlds.

Principal Celestia and Vice Principal Luna stepped out of the roof access door at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong place. The sound of the door opening combined with where I am made me hesitate. For a moment, I was back on the roof two years ago, back on the razor edge of despair and right at the end of my life, and it made me hesitate just long enough.

Long enough for Luna, who was looking forward rather than up at her sister who had her head turned to regard the younger Vice Principal, to see me.

Only briefly.

She would have seen a shadow of a girl with fiery red hair streaked with gold wearing ragged black and with eyes like a cold inferno.

A bouquet of flowers hits the grounds with a distorted echo as I settle into the dream world while cursing myself for an idiot. She saw me. She saw me!

And I can’t just drag her into the dream to modify her memories. It’s the middle of the morning! She’s wide awake! And by the time night comes, the memory will be written into her long-term and at that point, the best I’ll be able to do is maybe distort it a little.

“Luna?” Celestia looks up between her sister at the edge of the roof. “Luna, what’s wrong?”

“Did… did you—?” Luna points a finger shakily at the edge of the roof. “You d-didn’t see that?”

I twitch my fingers nervously, taking comfort in the metal rasp as I watch the exchange between the two sisters. Celestia clearly looks worried, but more so for her sister’s wellbeing than for anything else. Luna, on the other, looks like she just saw a ghost because for all intents and purposes… she did.

“Luna?” Celestia repeats softly.

“I… I thought I saw…” Luna mumbles but trails off as she lowers her hand.

Luna wraps her arms around herself, tugging her dark blue jacket more tightly around herself as she kneels to gather up the bouquet with a numb expression on her face.

“Sister?” Luna starts quietly as she stares down at the blooms of the bouquet.

“Yes?”

The silence stretches out for several painfully long moments before Luna finally looks up from the flowers and starts walking towards the edge where I’m standing shrouded in the Fog of the Dreamtime.

“It really was my fault you know,” Luna says quietly.

“That’s not true,” Celestia insists.

“It is,” Luna repeats. “Even if I didn’t know it at the time, that was the moment when I could have changed things. It was right there in front of me, she was right there in front of me, and all I had to do was show a little kindness, give her a little grace, and maybe if I had she would still… s-still be—”

Luna loses her words in a wash of sobs and tears as she lowers herself to her knees slowly and sets the flowers down on the edge of the roof right at my invisible feet.

She’s not the only one crying either, Celestia is standing watch over her sister, silently weeping but keeping her sobs to herself out of respect for her sister’s pain.

“I could have stopped all of this!” Luna cries. “All I had to do was hold out a hand! She was… she was right there! She was right in front of me and I let her slip away!”

The Vice Principal’s hand is hovering inches from my boot, extended as if reaching out for someone clinging to the edge of the roof.

Celestia kneels by her sister and puts a hand on her shoulder, turning her slowly and pulling her into a hug.

“She was just a child, Celly,” Luna sobs. “She was brilliant but she was just a little girl!”

“I know,” Celestia says in a raw voice. “She was brilliant. She was so terribly bright.”

Any words that were left to the Vice Principal fall away as she starts sobbing loudly and bitterly against her sister’s shoulder. I hate so much of myself right now. I hate that there’s a certain bitter satisfaction in my chest alongside the guilt. I hate how conflicted I am about these people who were, at least in part, responsible for what happened to me.

Grief and death go hand in hand.

I remember someone saying once how it’s funny that the worst day isn’t the day that someone dies, but all the days after that they stay dead.

That they stay gone.

I hate Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy and the rest of them. I hate them because I don’t know how to do anything else anymore. There’s so little of Sunset Shimmer left in me, I think, and all that is left is the bitterness and the hate. Just the angry ghost of a dead girl wrapped in the skin of a nightmare.

But still…

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say softly, even though I know they can’t hear me. “You had the best intentions, VP… you really did, and I know you tried your best, but sometimes you can do everything in your power, do your absolute best, and still fail.”

As I turn my back on the crying sisters, I pause to look down at the bouquet. It’s an awkward looking thing made up of sunflowers, daisies, and marigolds; so much so that it takes me a moment to recognise the intent behind them. They’re all heliotropic flowers. Or in other words, they’re all flowers that, in their youth, are forever turning towards the sun.

I lean down and brush my fingers over the petals, causing them to shake and shiver unseen by the two sisters.

“You tried your best,” I say again softly before standing, turning, and reaching out to vanish again through the Fog.

Maybe it’s time I checked in on the others.

Zephyr was being hunted, and it may have been a coincidence that he just so happened to be Fluttershy’s brother, but I doubt it. I don’t believe in coincidences like that, and that means if there was intent behind it then the others might become targets as well.

I don’t know if I want to protect them, but at the very least they might make decent bait, so since I know where Rainbow and Fluttershy are and am fairly certain about Applejack too, that means I have two more to look over.

Rose or Opal.

Eenie meenie minie moe.

Author's Note

Mortality clarified...

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