Normally, the Dreamtime of Canterlot is a comfort to me, but now I can’t find any peace in its Fog-wrapped streets.

Aria already sent a mass text to our little group with the grim news that we’re both painfully outnumbered and embroiled in what amounts to an interdimensional turf war between an Old God and an upstart thief of divinity.

No pressure, right?

It’s late morning by the time I flicker back into existence at the door of our shared apartment and, after carefully ensuring I’m not about to pop out right in front of someone again, I slice back into the Real and leave the Nightmare behind.

Pushing the door open, I step into the now-familiar den and pause at the threshold as my stomach twists itself into new and interesting shapes that internal organs probably shouldn’t be trying to maintain.

Tempest is sitting on the couch.

“Hola.”

“Hey.”

The tension is painful, but I step into the living room anyway and close the door behind me before tossing my jacket on the stand.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say quietly as I walk over to the loveseat across from the couch and sit down. “Are you okay?”

She chuckles quietly, that gentle baritone rumble that I like so much.

“Si, Mi sol, I’m fine,” she replies. “The cuts were shallow and… well, we heal fast, no?”

We definitely do that, now. Even the ‘normal’ Survivors like Tempest and Aria heal faster than any vanilla human should. It’s not quite comic-book levels of self-healing or anything, but you have to do some serious damage to a Survivor to put them down… Survivors aren’t called that for nothing.

“It still shouldn’t have happened,” I say.

Tempest nods slowly as she leans forward, bracing her elbows on her knees and resting her mouth against her clasped hands.

Her whole body is a weapon, and that’s something I will always admire about her. Tempest Shadow’s build is amazonian, with powerful slabs of corded muscle making up arms lined with the tattoos of a lifelong Chola gangbanger from the barrios of Las Pegasus, and a broad scarred back that has borne more weight that anyone has any right to have put on her shoulders.

Now, though, she doesn’t look powerful.

She looks tired.

“It will happen again,” Tempest says quietly.

“No, it won’t,” I reply grimly. “I promise.”

“Then you’re a liar, Mi sol.”

I jerk up straight in the seat to glare at Tempest who’s looking calmly at me over her knuckles with those cold, clear eyes of hers. The worst part is that she’s right. I want to get angry at her, I want to lash out at her for calling me a liar and that’s the point.

“You’re a Killer, Mi sol, whatever else you are, you’re still one of them,” Tempest says as she holds up her phone, which is set to ‘selfie’ mode so you can see yourself on the screen. “And you like it that way, I think.”

A pair of cerulean embers set into deep black like a pair of dying stars is staring back at me from the photo screen, and in that instant my rage is replaced with a deep, abiding shame.

Tempest sets the phone down as she stares at me, and I wilt back against the loveseat as I wrap my arms around myself.

“Adagio controls herself just fine,” I say.

“Si, she does,” Tempest allows. “Because she does not like what she is, because she tries to be better and stays away from the things that make her remember the monster she was so she can be further from it when it does come, but you don’t do that… you hold the monster close.”

“I have to.” I spit the words out bitterly. “There’s no one else! Someone has to be the monster who pushes back against other monsters! Why not me?”

“Because it’s killing you.”

Tempest holds out a hand across the table, and for a long moment, all I can do is stare at it. I want to take her hand, but at the same time, I’m terrified that if I do I’ll just hurt her again.

And again and again and again.

My fingers are blades made only to slice and cut.

I reach out and lay my hand in Tempest’s grip, and she tightens her grasp on me as she stands, pulls me around the little coffee table between us, and wraps her arms around me.

“You are beautiful,” Tempest says as she presses her face against my hair. “Just like this… you can be just like this.”

But what if I don’t want to be?

I don’t say that because how can I? How can I tell her that I don’t want to be me anymore? That I want to be hard and dead and filled with rage because it’s so, so much easier.

Despite that, something does manage to crack through my cloy self-obsession. Something icy and terrifying. Something very, very final about this exchange I’m having that gives me an awful premonition of dread in the pit of my stomach.

“I love you,” I sob.

"Si, te amo con todo mi corazón," Tempest mutters before pulling away and looking down at me. "That's why I am going to ask you this, Mi sol. That's why I am going to ask you to come away with me, now, and not look back."

“W-What?” I stare up at her, unable to properly believe what I just heard. “Leave? Just… Just leave? With everything that’s going on!?”

“Yes!” Tempest snarls as she grips my shoulders. “Yes! Because if we stay then you will slide deeper and deeper into darkness. So run with me! One last time! This last Trial! I am begging you to survive and come away with me!

She steps back and waves out towards the south.

“We can go away!” Tempest almost sobs. “We can do anything! We can cross the border and go to Marexico and you can sit in the sun and never think about the Fog again! You can be happy!”

Tempest links her hands with mine and grips tight.

“We can be happy.”

“What about Aria, Adagio, and Sonata?” I ask shakily. “What about Sour and Starlight and everyone in this city?”

A bitter laugh escapes Tempest’s lips as she shakes her head, sending her ragged, hanging fringe of hair scattering around her face.

“You don’t see it do you?” She asks.

I step back from her, staring up and frowning.

“You don’t see that they are only here because of you!” Tempest says angrily, and my jaw clicks open. “They stay because you stay, because you believe in what you’re doing and because they believe in you. If you left, they would follow. Your sisters would roam and wander again, Sour and L’strella would go off and be happy somewhere! But they can’t because they believe in you!”

“So it’s my fault?!” I snarl, ripping my hands away from Tempest. “I’m doing the right thing! I’m fighting for this fucking city despite everything that it’s taken from me because it’s the right thing to do!”

“MIERDA!” Tempest spits. “You’re not fighting because it’s right, you’re fighting because fighting is all you know how to do anymore and I’m done fighting with you!”

I take a faltering step back from Tempest as my gut tightens with a stony weight.

“What?” The word comes out as soft and brittle as wet clay “You’re not… you don’t mean that, right?”

Tempest’s expression hardens for a moment, then relaxes as she holds out her hand once more.

“Come away with me,” she says softly. “Please, Mi sol, I am begging you to put the darkness away and the Fog behind you and just… just stop fighting—” she stretches her arm out a little closer to me—“please… come with me.”

Tears trickle down her cheeks, the one from her right eye traces along the line of her scar down to her lip like a channel while her chest hitches and jerks like she’s trying to keep her heart from breaking by willpower alone.

“So that’s it?” I ask weakly. “You’re just going to run from the fight like a coward?”

“FUCK YOU PUTA!” Tempest snaps, her outstretched hand curling instantly into a fist as she puts a finger up to my face and advances on me.

“I’ve been fighting since I was born!” She snarls. “I fought in the dirt poor barrios! I fought in the streets with the Kings! I fought in more Trials than I can even remember! I don’t even know how long I spent there! I can’t even remember how old I am anymore because I spent so long in that fucking place so don’t you dare call me a coward!”

For a moment, I swear her eyes are red, and it takes me a moment to realise that the reason for that is because everything is red. My vision is washed in crimson as my blood is boiling in my veins. I’m itching for a fight that I know I’ll win because she’s just human. Durable and modified… but human.

Except she’s crying and so am I.

Everything is coming apart. The woman I thought I loved—that I was so sure that I loved—is screaming at me and I’m not any better. I hurt her, she hurts me, then we’ll apologise and do it all again.

Slowly, Tempest lowers her hand, then wipes at her face.

“Lo Siento,” she mutters. “I… I didn’t want it to be like this.”

“Me neither,” I say, and my voice trembles.

“You won’t come?”

I shake my head.

“You won’t stay?” I ask.

“No.”

I swallow thickly, then nod. I can’t stop crying and for once I don’t bother trying to curb the tears as Tempest turns her back on me to go to our… to my room. When she comes back out she has a large kitbag slung over her shoulder and a long heavy black coat on. Her hood is pulled over her head to keep the snow off, and her eyes are still the sharp, clear blue that enchanted me years ago when I first saw them in the Trials.

“I love you,” I say brokenly.

“Si,” Tempest replies quietly. “I love you too.”

“Please don’t go.”

She doesn’t answer except to shake her head. She doesn’t say anything else either. Tempest just puts her back to the apartment and leaves. A part of me screams to go after her, to make her stay, but I can’t find it in me, so instead I just drop to my knees and curl around myself as what is left of my heart falls to pieces on the floor.

“How are you holding up?”

The afternoon sun is bright in the winter, but fortunately, it rarely sticks around for long. Down here, in the canals, the shadows are deep enough that I can exist in my Killer shape without too much pain, and whatever pain I am in right now is far lesser than it would be if were I still wearing my human flesh.

It’s easier, right now, to just be numb.

“So you know?” I ask quietly.

“She sent us all a message,” Adagio replies. “And asked us to look after you.”

“Of course she did.”

I walk along the wall of the canal where we found the dead vagrant, scraping my fingerblades along the graffitied stone. The Legion must have come back at some point because their sobriquet is stenciled across the wall in bright green, purple, and orange paint.

The Legion.

“Her heart was never in this fight,” Adagio says softly as she steps close to me. It’s easier to be near her than anyone else. She’s not human. She never was. “She’s tired and the Trials ate at her… that she came out even modestly intact is a miracle.”

“Do you think I should have gone with her?” I ask as I turn my demon’s eyes on my elder sister. “Should I have left this all behind? Said ‘fuck Canterlot’ and run half a world away to relax on a beach somewhere?”

Adagio shrugs.

She really is beautiful in that classical sense. She’s tall, but not towering, with noble, patrician features, and a strong bearing. Right now she’s wearing something that looks like it belongs about a century out of fashion, and yet somehow she makes it work. Her beige and blue dress is made from thick fabric, the kind worn in the northern climes, and she has a colorfully knitted shawl wrapped around her shoulders which could easily be wrapped over her head if it began raining or snowing.

“In a way, I wish you had,” Adagio replies finally.

“Why?”

She smiles wanly at me.

“Because you’re my sister and I love you, you dolt,” Adagio says. “Because I want you to be happy.”

“I don’t think I know how to do that anymore,” I admit as I turn away from her.

“One day you will,” Adagio says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

The touch of another is an alien sensation in this body. Not even Aria is fully comfortable with my Killer shape, and I think it might be the case that she loves me more fully than any of my other friends.

Adagio, though, has no fear of me, regardless of how stable or unstable I become.

“She thinks I’m going to become like them,” I say, turning to look at Adagio. “Like my older siblings, like the other Fogborn.”

“It’s a rational concern,” Adagio replies.

“Do you think I will?”

She doesn’t reply immediately, which is a reply in and of itself, and when she does answer it comes out with a touch of weary resignation.

“I think that Tempest was right to be afraid for you,” she says slowly. “That she was right when she said that you cleave too close to the Fog.”

“I’m fine.”

My fingers clash against one another as I stare up at the graffiti. I have no actual proof of my suspicions regarding Legion’s true identity, but my gut is telling me I’m right. It makes sense… if the Thief was looking for someone who was tailor-made for conversion, then they’d need an ex-Survivor, and even though the brats were only in there for a couple of Trials, they were still touched by the Old Stain and changed on the inside, just like Aria and the rest.

Adagio joins me, standing at my side and staring up at the graffiti. She isn’t really looking at it, though.

Her regard is on me.

“You know something.”

It isn’t a question.

“I think the Legion might be Anon-A-Miss,” I say quietly.

Adagio’s gaze hardens as she turns to face me properly. The first expression crossing that achingly beautiful face of hers is disbelief which lasts all of a heartbeat before morphing to calculation, then dread, then weary acceptance.

“It’s… possible,” Adagio admits uneasily.

“I did some snooping around Rarity’s head earlier,” I say. “Her sister went missing months ago, and something happened to Scootaloo just prior to that; do you think you can do a quick search?”

She pulls out her phone in reply, opening up her web browser and tapping away at the search engine. It barely takes her any time at all before she clicks her tongue quietly and turns to hold up the phone for me to read.

The Canterlot Herald; a local rag that had always been relatively to-the-point and avoided a lot of the yellow journalism that plagued some of the other smaller news outlets after they made the switch to online content management. Their headlines tended to be dry but informative, which I prefer if I’m being honest. I’m not reading the news to be titillated, I’m reading it to learn something

“I… was I wrong?” I ask, feeling an odd mixture of regret, relief, and an odd pang of sadness.

The article webpage carries a picture of a familiar young girl with hair cut to a short pixie bob, a confident smile that’s almost a smirk, wearing a hoodie, and the headline above the image reads:

Crossfire From Gang Massacre Kills Local Teen

Early this evening officers of the Canterlot Police Seventh Precinct answered a 911 call originating in the Ponyville Commons near the area colloquially recognised as the ‘East End’ with a warning that gunshots had been heard coming from a local warehouse. They arrived in force and cordoned off a three block area, and it was during this initial point in the operation that the police discovered the body of a young girl who had been reported as a runaway some months earlier.

This terrible tragedy unfortunately requires some context. The reason for the 911 call and the source of the shots being fired were discovered less than an hour later once the police entered the warehouse where they discovered a scene of exceptional violence. CSI reports and Police witness statements agree that some kind of fight broke out in the warehouse, likely internecine, and resulted in a shootout that, from the scene, devolved into a brutal melee. Many of the bodies in the warehouse showed signs of serious physical trauma, both impact and hacking.

Curiously, the investigators on sight were unable to determine exactly who was fighting whom. There were hundreds of spent shell casings on the ground, and the volume and angle suggested that the victims, who all appeared to owe allegiance to the same gang according to their tattoos and clothing, were all firing at the same thing.

The tragedy, then, continues with a scene that the CSI’s were able to piece together from physical evidence alone. The body of the young female victim was found in front of a door which had been thrown open and current reports state the following as the most likely course of events:

‘The female victim approached the site to investigate the noise, then approached the door to listen or open it to peek through. An armed member of the local gang trying to escape the melee most likely then opened the door just as the victim approached, and reflexively opened fire.’

Coroner records state that the cause of death was a result of over a dozen rounds from small automatic arms fire striking her in the back suggesting she saw, and attempted to flee, before being gunned down. It’s possible she was killed to keep from reporting the truth of the matter to the police, but unfortunately, as it currently stands, we may never know the truth.

“Was I?” I ask, looking up at Adagio.

She turns to look over the article again, confusion on her features as she reads through it again and again.

“It’s the Ogre,” she says finally, looking back up at me, and I blink in confusion a few times before realising what she’s saying.

“The gang massacre,” I say quietly, my last two brain cells actually firing for once. “The Ogre is what they were trying to kill, but clearly they failed and got hyper-murdered instead.”

A moment later the other shoe drops and I shake my head in disbelief. I can’t help but laugh a little weakly as I gesture at Adagio’s phone.

“So wait,” I say. “That means that Scoots heard a gang unloading half an arsenal trying to kill an immortal hellbeast and thought, ‘hey, that sounds keen, lemme get in on that!’ or something?”

“That’s crazy,” Adagio replies.

“That’s a teenager,” I say dryly. “But then that puts the kibosh on my theory…”

“Maybe,” Adagio says quietly as she turns back to her phone and starts flicking through again.

“Wanna share with the class, ‘Dagi?” I ask

She doesn’t reply. She just keeps searching for almost ten minutes flicking through different sources and web pages. I’m a little impressed. I mean, I’m good at digging up dirt, but Adagio has literally been doing this since before I was born.

“Here we go,” she says as she turns the phone to me again.

“Funeral home break-in?” I read the headline off as I look over the phone at Adagio. “You think?”

“They didn’t report anything stolen, just broken windows,” Adagio says. “But the article suggests the break-in hit the small morgue inside the home where they keep bodies prior to the funeral.”

“Did they still have a funeral?” I ask.

“They did, but…”

“Let me guess,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “It was closed-casket.”

She nods. “And private. It doesn’t even list where she was buried.”

My fingers clash against each other again as I turn back to the graffiti on the wall, a new pit opening up in my stomach as I consider everything I just learned. It’s possible. It’s still goddamn possible.

“Find me that grave.”

“Give me forty-eight hours,” Adagio replies. “Should I tell the others?”

I shake my head.

I don’t want to put them on a wild goose chase, I also don’t want to get their hopes up in case I am wrong. More importantly, though… I don’t want to tip my hand too soon. The last thing I need is to trip at the finish line, so I’ll let Adagio do the footwork and when we turn up a real lead, that’s when we’ll move.

“What about you?” she asks.

My mind turns to a certain bridge, and the coming evening.

“I’ve got a meeting.”

Author's Note

Those without the stomach for this place must move on.

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