Vale

by AShadowOfCygnus

Rating: teen
Tags: Adventure, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Other, Drama
Length: 39785

In the furthest reaches of Equestria, where the peaks of the mountains just brush the sky, a mare’s first duty is to her conscience.

War changed, and so did she.

Now, in the forgotten eastern reaches, where the empty forests fall to meet the glassy sea, the both of them learn to live with it.

With great and particular thanks to my pre-readers this go 'round, for getting through the longest story I've posted to date: Admiral Biscuit, Sunicathorsis, and my darling Dark River.

Published 2021-05-24 04:50:00 UTC
Last updated 2021-10-05 06:14:54 UTC

I.

‘Hey! Are you awake?’

I am now.

I groan and roll over. Even without the benefit of a window, I know it’s entirely too early to be dragging myself out of bed: about fifteen minutes before sunrise, about five seconds after she bounds out of bed herself. I’ve seen her do it. One second she’s asleep, then something in her internal water-clock ticks over and she springboards out from under the sheets and dashes off to go do whatever strikes her fancy.

And now she’s standing impatiently at the foot of my bed, waiting for me to join her in the morning routine. She’s not quite tall enough to be able to prod me from where she’s standing, but I know her sharp little eyes are regarding me intently over the edge of the bedspread. She probably thinks I haven’t woken up yet, and in another second, she’ll—

‘Come on!’ she says, and I can feel something pawing at the comforter just shy of my tail. ‘The sooner you get up, the sooner we can have breakfast!’

Water-clock.

Ugh. It was—what, two past the Aught when I fell asleep? Sun rises early this time of year, so . . . yeah. Three hours. Or less. Depends on how things are going in Canterlot this morning.

‘G’murnin ter you too, Princess,’ I say, the greeting somewhat muffled by the pillow I’ve thrown over my head.

‘I’m not a Princess!’ she wails, stamping her little hoof. ‘Princesses don’t get up early and do important things like . . . like have breakfast! And shower! And garden! And . . . and stuff!’

She gets so indignant when I call her that. I mean, really, it’s the only reason I do it at all. Can’t for the life of me understand what gets her so hacked off—every little filly I knew when I was young wanted to be a princess when they grew up.

Still, I can practically hear her pouting, and I know the limits of a good tease, so in the interests of starting the day on the right hoof, I relent.

‘A’ight, I’m getting up.’

‘Yay!’

She bounds away, and, after a few moments, I stir. With a practised motion, I throw back the duvet and perform the far-too-acrobatic-for-this-time-of-morning reverse-vertigo-flop out of bed and onto my waiting hooves. (Mornings! The best time of day for Words.) It’s not exactly what I’d call comfortable, but I can’t deny it does the job.

One of my bunkmates the first couple of years out of the Academy taught me that one—his way of getting back at the sergeants for keeping us up at all hours, he said. His ears were perfectly attuned to the clank of those heavy golden boots, and any time they drew near the barracks door, he’d be out of bed and at parade rest before it even finished opening. Bastard snuck in so many extra winks that first year.

My vision is still clearing, but even as I stretch and yawn and roll my neck, I can’t deny that I’m a lot more awake than I was a second earlier. He was always going on some homeopathic screed about getting the humours flowing and balanced and all that guff, but as far as I’m concerned, it just works.

That last roll of the shoulders produces a very satisfying pop, and I wince appreciatively at the release. You taught me that one.

When I look up, I fully expect to be alone in the room, but—no, there she is, still standing there in the doorway. Apparently there’s some doubt as to whether I’ll keep my promise and not crawl back under the covers, perfect track-record of breakfasts notwithstanding.

But it’s more than that. Her little body is tensed, and she has a massive grin plastered over her face. It takes a moment, but I recognise what she’s after.

‘Lookin’ for a race, kiddo?’ I mumble, stifling a second, truly massive yawn.

She nods vigorously.

‘Better get a head start, then. I won’t go easy on ya.’

She gasps, eyes wide, and gallops off down the hall, pushing off the bedroom door with enough force to slam it shut behind her.

‘That’s a false start.’ I call out as I amble over to the wood-panelled sliding door. ‘Ref hadn’t called it yet.’

I fumble with the latch for a moment, my horn—and brain—still getting used to the idea of using magic this early in the morning. The door rattles open just in time to cover whatever muffled apology was flung my way from down the hall.

I ponder my next move, leaning on the wall to steady myself as I stretch my back legs. Bathroom? Bladder’s not so full it needs immediate attention, and the shower can wait ‘till after breakfast, so probably not.

Pushing myself off the wall, I wander down the hall to the kitchen. The wood-panelling slips past, dream-like, along with a few more sliding doors. The house is surprisingly compartmentalised—lots of little rooms along the hall, bedrooms mostly, each with their own weathered sliding door. Only real outliers are the musty storeroom, where we got most of the furniture, and the surprisingly well-appointed bathroom down the other end of the hall. A quick survey is enough to confirm that none of the latches besides hers have been disturbed. Good.

And at the end of the hall stands the lone, triumphant filly, her fluffy chest puffed out with pride.

‘I win!’ she gloats, grinning widely.

I chuckle, again covering for an absolute ripper of a yawn. ‘Yeah, kind of amazing what you can do when you sabotage the competition right out of the starting gate. We’ll rematch tomorrow.’

‘You’re on!’ she positively squeaks. Still chuckling, I ruffle her mane affectionately and move past her into the kitchen.

Well, I call it the kitchen. Whoever built this place had clearly meant for it to house a dozen or so ponies at any given time, and, as such, the . . . conservatory, or foyer, or whatever damn fool thing the architectural types back home would have called the common area around the front door, comprises an open kitchen and dining area on one side, and a sort of spartan sitting-room on the other. The short stair leading down to the front door demarcates the two halves of the room, and an ornately-patterned rug – only slightly moth-eaten – leads from the top step to the end of the hall.

The sitting room side has a well-stocked bookshelf built into the back wall, and also contains much of the furniture we’d found in the storeroom: a low sofa, some assorted armchairs, an end-table or two, and some lamps. The kitchen, on the other hoof, was fully furnished when we’d arrived – wood-burning stove, countertop, sink, even an icebox (albeit empty). A short-legged slab of hardwood, fashioned in the Neighponese style, serves as our dining table, the soft cushions dotting its perimeter in lieu of traditional chairs.

It’s still fairly dark, but a faint glow is beginning to colour the shuttered windows on the west-facing wall. Unbidden, the little filly races over and begins flinging them wide as I head for the larder. I peer inside for a moment, thanking the non-existent gods of the hearth for dark-adjusting equine eyes, then reach carefully around the largest sack of oats for a box of cereal and some fruit. Grabbing some dishes and cutlery from a nearby cupboard in my field, I set about preparing breakfast for myself and the little one, who has since finished opening the windows and plopped herself down on one of the cushions. I slide a bowl of cereal and a generous helping of mountain berries in her direction, and she tucks right in.

If she misses the milk for her cereal, she doesn’t say anything. The last of our stock ran dry a few days ago, and . . . well, I don’t even remember the last time we saw a cow, much less one in a fit state to produce.

I stare for a moment at the bowl of cereal and diced apple I’ve thrown together for myself, almost unconsciously. You’d have managed to pull off something spectacular each and every morning with everything that lives in that larder. However much you tried to deny it, you always were an absolute wizard in the kitchen.

Me? I’ve been having enough trouble figuring out bread from scratch. Mixed greens, tinned beans, pancakes: those’re more my speed. And if it were just me I had to worry about—

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

My head snaps up. She’s almost done with her bowl and is looking at me inquisitively, spoon halfway to her mouth. A rueful smile crosses my muzzle as I belatedly pick up my own utensil and tuck in.

‘Yeah, sorry. Just waking up, is all.’

This seems to satisfy her, and she nods sagely before returning to her bowl, fishing around in the bottom for whatever berries might have escaped her before. It’s fascinating to watch her eat. She gets this little look of determination with every bite, like she’s trying to sample every little nuance of flavour, but at the same time, she puts it away at speeds even your old dad would’ve been hard-pressed to match.

Snapping up a last spoonful of berries, she grabs her bowl and heads for the sink. She tries to fumble with the faucet for a minute without using the stepping stool, then grumbles and admits defeat. She is a very little pony for her age, and that seems to aggravate her more than anything else.

‘I’m gonna go shower,’ she announces from the stool, giving her bowl a cursory rinse before setting it in the sink.

‘Okay. Do you want me to come with you?’

She considers that for a moment, then, a little unsure: ‘No. I think I got it.’

‘Alright. Shout if you need anything?’

‘Mkay!’

And she trots off in the direction of the bathroom.

I can hear the bathroom door slide open, then slam shut a second later. My ears flick in annoyance, and something beneath my horn twinges sharply in response. I hate having to talk to her about it again, but twice in one morning is enough to warrant the reminder.

I like to think I’m figuring her out, now. The worst days, when we were just starting out, and the magic was still bright-white fire in everyone’s heads and any sharp noise or surprise was a crystal spike to the eye-socket, I’d just scream. I know she understood, that she knew the difference between that and raising the hoof to her I never did, but I still see the fear in those eyes any time I start to get angry. Such a rutting balancing act.

She’s been getting much better about it lately, though: less flinching, more acknowledging nods. Maybe I’m finally rubbing off on her. Or—mm. She’s definitely getting on towards the age where the independent streak asserts itself, and she’s been doing a lot more around the house to make sure I ‘know’ she can take care of herself. It’s a very quiet and comfortable sort of rebellion, but it’s there. Nothing like the fights you and Marigold—

. . .

I open my eyes again. The last dregs of my soggy apple-and-cereal concoction are staring balefully at me from the bottom of the bowl. Food suddenly seems a great deal less appetising, but I force myself to down what’s left before walking over and depositing the bowl next to its sister in the sink—maybe a little more roughly than usual, if the clatter is anything to go by.

I’m sorry. It’s always been harder when it comes to her. I told you that once, and you seemed to understand.

Shaking my head furiously, I walk to the bathroom, where I can already hear the water running. I knock before entering—she’s not especially modest, but it’s still polite—and when there’s no complaint, I enter. The shower’s already running full-bore, filling the room with a thick, buoying blanket of steam. I breathe out a sigh of pleasure, and close the door quietly before any of the delightful vapours can escape.

She’s humming to herself in the shower.

‘Doing okay in there?’

‘Yep! I’ll be out soon. I wanna make sure there’s enough hot water left for you.’

‘Thanks,’ I chuckle, wiping some of the condensation off the mirror. The bright green eyes that greet me through the slightly-less-steamy hole are the same ones as they are every morning. Which is good. Wouldn’t want to wake up suddenly a Changeling or something.

Mane’s a mess, but that’s to be expected—starting to get too long to handle. I know you always preferred it short—so did I!—but guess which one of us actually did the cutting? And I don’t care if it is just one little filly who sees me on a day-to-day basis, I’m not going to risk the ember-ends trick all your friends in Canterlot used to suggest I try. The girls at the salon called it mange-fire for a reason.

Speaking of which . . .

Taking my mane in a magical grip and leaning in close, I pull back my bangs to check my rootline, running a practised eye over the length of the border between the wavy black strands and the softer tan fuzz beneath.

Nope, just as dark as ever; a few stragglers that escaped the magical field, but no grey. No fractures, either—good. Every instructor I’ve ever had has made it a point to tell me that I have exceptional magical stamina, but I doubt they ever considered the toll this level of activity could take.

I let out a breath I didn’t realise I’d been holding. Am I overthinking again? Probably. But it’s never exactly been a secret what can happen when we overexert ourselves, and it’s only gotten worse since the Pyre was lit. The kid and I saw more than our fair share of shambling dregs on the roads in the early days.

My eyes scan further down.

Body looks fine. Better muscle tone and a little less mass than you would remember. I was never a slouch, but the work I’ve been doing on the house has kept me fit. Probably thinner than I should be, of course, but that’s kind of inescapable these days, especially since it means she eats her fill. Coat looks good too; almost imperceptibly lighter where the scars are showing through, but no patches—means we’re getting enough protein. Thank the skies for tinned beans.

Behind me, the shower curtain is flung wide, and a dripping-wet-and-sputtering filly head pokes out, followed immediately by a reaching hoof. The latter grabs for a towel as the remainder of the filly hops out of the shower and onto the mat, not bothering to turn off the water.

She shakes off some of the excess before draping the towel over her back and beginning to scrub.

‘Want some help?’ I say, looking over from the counter.

‘Yes, please.’

She stands there patiently as I amble over and pull the towel off her back to start drying her off. ‘Good shower?’

‘Yep!’ she chirps through the towel as I swab her face. ‘You can go in now.’

‘Left me some hot water, yeah?’

She nods, rubbing up against the towel that’s now working its way through her obscenely long mane. Seriously, I’m complaining about mine—hers is practically dragging on the floor.

When it’s dry—drier—I pull the towel back and offer it to her. ‘You gonna be able to do the rest yourself?’

‘Think so,’ she answers, taking up the slack. I give her damp mane one last ruffle, then head towards the shower.

Ah, right, before I forget:

‘Hey, by the way, what’ve I told you about slamming doors?’

Her eyes fall. ‘Right . . . sorry.’

‘No sweat. You’re a big, strong pony, yeah? I just don’t wantcha breaking down the house, is all.’ I give her a hearty wink as I step into the shower.

At least she laughs.

I slide the shower curtain shut, and—ohh, the water’s still hot. Not just the usual high-altitude tepidity, hot. What goddess did I please this morning?

From the other side of the curtain: ‘Can I go outside when I’m dry?’

‘As long as you promise not to fly higher than the house, alright?’

‘Alright!’

‘Alright what?’ Yeah, I’m being cheeky. I’m also making sure she gets it.

She sighs. ‘I promise.’

‘Right-o, off you go, you little scamp. I’ll be out in a minute, okay?’

‘Kaythanksbye!’

She practically gallops out of the bathroom, sliding the door shut with a crash. It’s by no means a small noise by itself, but it echoes painfully through my skull in the enclosed space.

‘Door!’ I call out after her.

‘Sorry!’

The shower does wonders for my wakefulness, and I bask in every second of the white-hot stream, but it starts to cool before long. I step out of the shower and—following the kid’s example—shake myself down, spraying droplets everywhere.

It’s not exactly the most refined method, but if you need to get dry quick, nothing beats. Still, I grab my towel from the rack and quickly finish what the shaking started. I’d rather not leave her outside by herself too long.

When I’m mostly dry, I slide open the bathroom door, running a hoof through my damp mane to try and force it out of my eyes. I’m mostly successful.

As I wander into the sitting room, I notice that sunlight is streaming freely into the room from the eastern windows. Must’ve taken longer in the shower than I thought. Or—something. The days are strange now.

One final flip of my tail and I head down the stairs to the north-facing front door—which she’s left ajar. Sigh. I mean, I can follow the logic: if it’s not closed, it can’t have been slammed. Fortunately, it’s early yet, else the sun-caffeinated bugs would probably have gotten in by now.

I call out to her as I step onto the porch. She’s out on the lawn, muzzle-deep in a dandelion blooming in the thick grass. She waves when she sees me, and goes back to what she was doing. Perfectly fine; so long as I know she’s alright. I wander off to one side of the porch to take in the morning view.

It's a pretty morning. Those aren’t exactly a rarity around here, but I do my best to appreciate it nonetheless. Feeling the sun on your face is something you learn to appreciate when it’s one of the few things you can count on day-to-day, and watching it play off the water the way it does from up here is something I’ll never get tired of. I rest my head on my hooves, leaning on the balustrade, and just watch it for a while.

The—tch, I’m really not inclined to call it an ‘estate’, even if that’s very likely what it was at one point. The house, and its very nice grounds, are situated on a wide grassy shelf at the head of a narrow valley sweeping away to the east to meet the sea; the sheer cliff forms the eastern edge of our little domain. To the south, starting about fifty yards from the house, dense evergreen woods swallow the land completely, enough to muffle the thundering river that feeds the gorge below; to the north and west, the craggy spires of the Unicorn range lose themselves in the high mists of the coast.

The valley floor is all water—and I don’t mean, like, the river continues down there or something, it’s all water, fed by that torrent of waterfall down south—and if you catch it on a good day, you can see all the way out to the sea. I don’t remember the unpronounceable name the locals had for it (‘ffyord’ or some-such), or how it was marked on our official maps, but I do remember every single one of those giggly half-drunk joke names we passed around the table those first few nights: ‘the Divide’, ‘the Scar’, ‘the Mare in Repose’, ‘the Great Sucking Sea-Gash of the Eastlands’.

It’s all very sharp land, full of absolutes: you’re either halfway up a sheer cliff-face or perched on some idyllic grassy outcrop you could balance a wineglass on. Definitely a far cry from the rolling hills and sloping dales you’ll find just about anywhere else in Equestria. Would’ve inspired its fair share of rugged ink sketches, I’m sure—the rocks and the shoals, above and below.

Back home in landlocked Ponyville, the river was the biggest body of water most of us ever got to see. There were a few ponds scattered here and there around the outlying farms, true, but nothing on quite this scale. The closest thing probably would’ve been the artificial lake behind the dam, way up the river, and as far as I know it wasn’t really all that much of an attraction; I can’t remember anyone in town daytripping up there on a lark.

I never had. I’d never really paid much mind to water—it was just . . . there, ready to be drawn out of wells and taps and showerheads whenever it was needed. Those wells never ran dry, so we never wanted for it; the dam-keepers and the weather-tenders saw to it the river never flooded, so we never learned to fear it. It never changed an iota, and so we never appreciated it. I never appreciated it.

And then I saw the sea.

I caught it on one of the good days, couple of weeks after deployment. At first, I thought it was some trick of the light—not even the fields and forests back home, the tightly-ordered orchards and geometrical acres of grain, were so perfectly uniform. I could see all the way out to the horizon, and all along the shimmering length, from the foot of the cliff below me to that dim and hazy line eastward, the ripples, the colour, the grey-green alienness of it never changed, never faltered. Where were the trees? Where were the rivers and houses and roads? Where were the ponies?

I remember standing there, in the courtyard of the Dun, staring down the length of the ravine and out to the sea, just . . . dumbfounded, y’know? I thought maybe one of the other Unicorns was having a laugh at my expense with some kind of negative-space illusion—hazing one of the newbies or whatever. Or maybe just the opposite—some kind of art-piece to keep the enlisted rabble comfortable and entertained.

I asked the lieutenant about it later, and he just laughed. Had the same effect on all the down-homers the first couple times, he said. Even him. I’d get used to it.

All the time I spent at the Dun, all the distractions, even now—never really did.

It’s still there, of course, sure as I can trace the old contours: built half into one of the far walls of the ravine, grey and squat and foreboding as the name would imply—definitely designed by Unicorns. Who else would get it in their heads to carve something that damn ugly from the living rock at the ass-end of the world?

(Popular joke in Ponyville: After Canterlot slides off the mountain and into the river, will they build the new capital somewhere more sensible? Nah, they’ll just start with the smoothest side of the wreckage they can find and work their way out from there. Architects.)

Empty as it was when we got here, of course. No milling shadows against the rock, no wafting scents of ration-rolls and smelting iron, no bells to toll the Marks and Aughts. Just a quiet grey husk, barely distinguishable from the salt and weathered rock clawing it back into its own.

Not that I’m complaining, of course.

A swarm of seabirds scutters around the foot of the cliff below it, their cries lost amid the tumult of the crashing surf. I let my eyes linger on them for a moment, then, with a sigh, I push off the balustrade and stretch my back one last time. There’s things that need doing today, and while the sea’ll still be where it is now in a couple of hours, the sun won’t, and I’d rather get the work done before it gets too late. You wouldn’t think it would get that hot up here, with all the fog and diffuse light, but some days, when the sun hits just the right angle . . .

It takes me a moment to find my fellow naturalist among the tall grasses of the front lawn, but the sight of twin wings fwoomp-ing out of the green gives her away soon enough. I trot over to discover her watching a couple of bees—fighting over a particularly colourful chrysanthemum, as it turns out—with an intensity usually reserved for engineers and model train enthusiasts. There’s no difference between this and watching her eat: every detail is to be savoured. Every new discovery is suddenly the single most important thing in the universe, every new patch of earth her home, each new creature the apple of her eye.

She’s so focused on the two battling insects that I’m not entirely sure she’s noticed me walk up, and I stay quiet. It takes a few more moments, but the bees apparently finish whatever they were there to do and buzz off to go do more bee-ish things elsewhere.

She looks up at me, eyes shining, smiling brightly. ‘Did you see that?’

‘I did. What’d you think they were up to?’

Her little face scrunches up in thought. ‘Pollen-ating, I think,’–her split, not mine–‘I read about it in a book back at the last house.’

‘When certain bugs go around transferring pollen between flowers to help them breed, right?’

She beams. ‘Yeah! Sometimes the wind isn’t enough to blow it around, so a lot of plants let insects or other animals do the work for them!’

I nod along. It tallies; or at least, I remember being taught something equally simplistic.

‘I wish we could’ve stayed there.’ She frowns. ‘It was nice having so many books around to read.’

‘We’ve talked about that.’

‘I know. I just wish, that’s all.’

‘Well, hey, remember? I told you I’d take you down to the Dun in a few days, as soon as I’m done working on the house.’

‘You said that ages ago.’

‘I know. It’s just taken a little longer to get things finished than I expected. I’m not holding out on you, I promise.’

She looks up at me again, dubiously. ‘You mean it?’

‘I do.’ I try to think of some way to convince her, and, entirely unbidden, the old ditty our centenarian of a baker used to sing back in town flits through my brain. ‘Cross my heart and hope to fly; stick a rumcake in my eye.’

She giggles. ‘Okay.’

‘Okay,’ I echo, sticking my tongue out at her. ‘I’m going to be on the roof. Would you mind doing a circuit of the garden?’

‘Sure thing!’

‘You know what to do, right? Water the plants—’

‘—check for bugs, pull weeds, and tamp the furrows?’

‘And if there’s a problem, come fly up and get me.’

‘Got it!’ She beams, and scampers off towards the garden, quickly disappearing among the rows of assorted vegetation.

I watch for a moment, waiting to make sure there’s no problem. When neither hew nor cry issues from the foliage, I head in the direction of the shed, a little ways behind the house and off to one side of the garden.

The garden itself takes up a considerable portion of the north lawn. Legumes, potatoes, berries, and a startling variety of other produce grow in neatly parallel rows, each carefully marked and furrowed. Given the cold and the elevation, it’s amazing just how well these more temperate crops are holding up: the beanstalks alone are taller than any I’d ever seen, taller in places than the roof over the front porch.

I know better than to question it, even as a lifetime’s worth of secondhoof horticultural savvy screams at me to do so. All the seeds were things we’d found in storage here—maybe they’d been treated for the cold, maybe an Earth Pony did a rain dance over them at some point, and maybe we’d picked up a few tricks along the road; it didn’t actually matter. When the dry stores run out, the yield out here will keep us fed for a season or two, at least—long enough to get to the next house, if nothing else. As far as I can tell, the worst we’ll have to contend with is keeping the produce from going bad on the vine before we can get to it.

I have to cut across the last few rows to reach the shed, stepping carefully over a lettuce larger than my head and wending my way between a few stallion-sized blueberry bushes. The little one is nosing around in the foliage behind me, and a few of the nearer beanstalks wobble dangerously in response.

My mothers would have loved her—loved it here, honestly. Green-pasterns both, happy and well at home in the mud. Kind of wish I had something of them to show her, or to stick in the garden—a photo, mane-beads, the old gardening boots they swore Grandma Greensleeves had had enchanted.

Probably for the best, though. For all that they were tied to the earth, by blood, breed, and profession, they hated the thought of ending up in it when they died. They were never much for gathering moss.

I’ve reached the shed, and throw the hook-eye latch before swinging the doors wide and stepping inside. It’s small and musty and thick with cobwebs, as the unspoken storage shed credo upheld around the world demands it must be, and also thick with clutter. Some of the mess is left over from the original inhabitants of the house, and is mostly composed of that particular brand of stuffy upper-class sporting equipment: tennis racquets, a croquet set, bats and wickets, and even a moth-eaten, deflated hoofball. The rest comprises what little we brought with us that we couldn’t bring inside the house. I’m sure I’d feel safer with a few spears next to my bed, but I can’t take the risk the little one might hurt herself on them.

Near the very back of the shed—as it must be, because I’m currently looking for it—lies my objective: a tall metal A-frame ladder. Grumbling, I begin to shift the teetering piles of rubbish carefully aside, working my way through the shed towards it. It’s a few tense seconds of dodging falling hockey sticks and rolling spider-filled wheelbarrows slowly enough as not to disturb their irascible occupants, but soon enough I’m dragging it from the dusty confines of the shed.

Hefting the miserable thing in my field, and ignoring the slight twinge of protest that emanates from the root of my horn, I head in the direction of the house, edging carefully past the garden and around the back of the house. It’s slow going, given the weight of the ungainly fifteen-hoof thing, but it doesn’t take me too long to find the spot I surveyed yesterday, on the side of the house overlooking the valley. Setting down the ladder next to a trio of rusty paint cans, I stretch out the frame and balance it as best I can on the uneven turf.

As I begin my careful climb up to the tile slatting, I find myself wondering—not for the first time—why ladders exist. They’re awkward, they’re cumbersome, and they don’t do anything another piece of equipment or better-equipped pony couldn’t. There’s a reason roof-repair businesses were staffed exclusively by Pegasi; even Earth Ponies prefer scaffolds and ramps. Nothing with hooves was ever meant to stand on something so narrow and rickety.

As if to prove my point, the ladder sways precariously and I’m forced to grab onto the gutter to keep my balance. Cursing, I kick the thing back into an upright position and hoist myself up onto the roof. The purlins shift and groan beneath my hooves, and I steady myself on the slanting jade tiles for a moment, praying the roof doesn’t pick this particular moment to cave in. After a moment, the groaning subsides, and, being careful to step only where I know the evenly-spaced wooden rafters to be, I begin to pick my way towards my goal.

It’s been impressed upon me repeatedly since we first got here that this house was not designed with Unicorns or Earth Ponies in mind. The roof I’m standing on isn’t the topmost portion of the house; rather, it forms a kind of ring around the two-room upper ‘storey’ of the dwelling, empty but for the cobwebs. The whole structure is built to look like some kind of sharp-edged, two-tiered wedding cake, and I’m wading through the dark ceramic—fondant? Fondant.

I didn’t come up with that one, I’m afraid. We’d all had a pretty good view of the house from the Dun, and the sheer strangeness of it made it a popular topic of conversation. Rumours were always circulating that it was the vacation home of some prominent, eccentric noble, obsessed with Neighponese culture. I’d tried to do some research on the place while on leave once, but I hadn’t been able to turn anything up from the Archives office back home.

Regardless, whoever it was that built this house obviously didn’t plan on having anypony along to remodel.

I make the last few careful steps to my destination, and tap the tile a few times to test its stability. Then, convinced that I’m not about to fall through into the bedrooms below, I set about my work. The rusty buckets sitting at the base of the ladder float up, set themselves near the wall of the empty upper floor, and begin to stir themselves gently as I ready the primer.

I really wish I didn’t have to do this. The original red-gold colour scheme was absolutely gorgeous, especially in contrast to the jade-tile roof, but anything that bright stands out like a beacon against dark evergreens and cool grey mountains. There were mornings, back at the Dun, when the sun hit it in just the right way, when we’d actually thought it had caught fire. We’d even used it to sight our field glasses before heading out on patrol. The only reason it’d taken me this long to get around to repainting was that there were so many other things that needed to get done to make the place liveable first.

Two things, fortunately. First, only the sides facing the valley need doing; we’re close enough to the mountains on the other side that anypony coming from that direction wouldn’t be fooled anyway. Second, the new coat doesn’t have to look particularly nice; it just has to be slathered on thick enough to cover the old, and that’ll save me time. Considering how little time it took me to finish the downstairs, I don’t foresee this taking the work of more than a couple of mornings.

That paint job was the first one that hadn’t been a wagon or a filly’s bedroom, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that as soon as you’re willing to sacrifice aesthetic, the work goes a whole lot quicker. The paint can run a little here. Long drips replace the Pegasi, cartwheeling along the sideboard; bubbles, the pink balloons floating across pale turquoise skyscapes. Flicks and splotches are romping jungle animals, and the careless splash of chartreuse on the railing of the crib . . .

Something pounds behind my eyes for a moment, and when I open them again, the world is far too bright. The dapple-dark green is a minor blessing.

I lift a brush, thick with primer, and begin slathering on the first layer. Primer goes on first, then the darker green, then the lighter, dappled patches. Do it by halves; can’t let it crack. I haven’t had the chance to see the effect from any real distance yet, but I’m hoping that between the jade roof and this forest-y colour of camouflage, the house will blend into the treeline a bit better. That’d buy us some time, at least.

The brush moves up, then down, almost hypnotically, in parallel columns, thick white strips silencing the intricate red and gold patterns. Two or three good strokes, then dip back into the can. Repeat.

We’d been lucky to find the paint cans in the shed. Most of them were warmer colours, most of them open and far gone by the time we got there, but there were a few unopened tins in darker hues at the bottom of the pile. Lord or Lady Eccentric must’ve bought a full rainbow set at some point—either willing to shell out for something that might prove useful long-term, or just not caring enough to economise. Whatever the case, their indulgence was our good fortune, and I’d been able to whip up a solid forest green after only a little in the way of curse-laden experimentation.

Half the facing wall’s primed now, and the sun’s not even halfway to the midday Mark; I can probably afford to slow down. Need to make sure it goes on thick, so the darker paint sticks.

Time passes; the sun climbs. I enter that comfortable state of non-thought that always accompanies hard work. The primer goes on in coats: one, then another. Then comes the darker coat of green, broad strokes swallowing up the white. Then the spirals and blotches and whorls of the lighter grey-green. Each coat is dry by the time the next one is applied; each stroke occludes the colour of the last.

Maybe I missed my calling; art’s in my blood sure as farming, if I’ve been told true. It was kind of a horrible surprise to discover my great-grandsire was the architect responsible for all those kitschy statuary fountains around Ponyville. I can’t remember who told me that—could’ve been my mothers, could’ve been you. You always did hate it when I went off about how backwards and classless the art there was.

It’s like they’ve never been up the mountain, I’d say.

They’re farmers, not artisans, you’d say.

Silk purse, pig’s ear, I’d say.

Don’t be an ass, you’d say.

The place hasn’t changed since it was founded, I’d say.

Nothing wrong with that, you’d say.

It’s not the kind of town I wanted to spend the rest of my life in, I’d say.

If you hate it so much, why are you still here? you’d say.

And then I would have nothing to say.

It takes me a moment to realise I’ve been holding the brush in the same place for awhile—long enough for a brush’s width of drips to harden in the unforgiving light of the suddenly noonish-looking sun. I crane around, trying to gauge my progress. I’m halfway through finishing the south-facing wall; to my left, the only remaining blotch of the original red-gold coat shines with an almost metallic splendour. The dappled green of my handiwork to the right looks all the more subdued in comparison. Craning further, I see that the entirety of the eastern wall where I started is also done. Just how much did I finish, wrapped up in my own thoughts?

I mean, on the one hoof, points to me for apparently hauling flank. On the other . . .

Well. It’s no secret I haven’t been sleeping as well as I should.

A fluttering of wings from behind me heralds the arrival of a small, impatient filly. She casts an appraising eye over my handiwork for a moment, then:

‘Aren’t you done yet? I finished in the garden ages ago.’

I carefully dunk the brush back in the can. ‘Not quite. But, hey,’ I say, waving a hoof in the direction of the two finished sides. ‘Progress, right?’

‘I guess.’

‘Oh, you. Just give me another half-hour, then I’ll be set.’

‘But it’s already getting on towards the Mark . . .’

I glance skyward and let the air out through my teeth. She’s right, of course. I’d noticed it even as I was marvelling at how quickly the painting had come. So much for expeditious reveries.

‘Yeah, you’re right. I’m not getting through with this thing today after all.’

Her previously dour expression brightens by several orders of magnitude. ‘Does that mean we’re going to the—’

‘Not today.’ The light disappears as quickly as it came. ‘Hey, I did say “as soon as I’m done”. And the sooner it gets done, the sooner we don’t have to worry about it anymore, right?’

No response.

‘Besides,’ I continue, hefting paint cans and beginning my trek back across the roof to the ladder, ‘It’s an all-day trip down there and back, and I want to get an early start when we do head out. Sunrise or earlier.’

That perks her up. Knowing there’s a plan in motion—assurance that I’m not just being arbitrary—always redeems me in her impetuous eyes. She positively beams.

Then again, that might just be the thought of mucking about before the sun’s up. I don’t know.

‘Sooo . . .’ she says, flapping a little closer as I descend the ladder, ‘It’s just about time for lunch, right?’

Aha. ‘One sec.’

The words are spoken; here begins one of our most important rituals: Where should we go today?

Just general enough to leave room for almost anything, but specific enough that we’ll always be doing something. Never more specific than today, in deference to whatever maintenance we’re obliged to undertake. It’s been its fair share of things, too: a morning hike, a lazy lunch under puffy white clouds, a hooves-free lesson on agriculture or ecology or natural philosophy, and sometimes even what she’d lovingly refer to as An Adventure, after the fact: rock-climbing, or a swim, or a good shallow spelunk, if I knew the cave didn’t delve too deep.

We’ve had a few good Adventures since we got to the house overlooking the valley—more than a few romps through the Wood, picking out all the different critters to be found there; a couple of swimming trips to the frigid headwaters of the river (as far as I can possibly get her from the falls); and, more often than not, putting off requests to finally go down the cliffside and visit the Dun. I’m running out of excuses for that last one—have to wonder how much time I can wring out of that last blotch of red-gold before she gets suspicious.

I cast a glance her way as I descend the ladder. She’s studying the intricately-designed roof tiles with the same intensity she had previously apportioned to the bees.

I can see the gears turning in real time. I was out of time as soon as she started asking why.

With a grunt, I descend the last few steps to blessed equa firma and fold the ladder again in my field. It gives out a grinding kind of shriek as the hinges protest, and both sets of ears pin back against our skulls.

‘Jeez. Sorry, scamp.’

‘That’s okay.’ She frowns, and gestures to the ladder as I swing it over my shoulder. ‘Has it gone bad?’

I hadn’t really considered that; everything else around here has been in pretty good condition, but, then, most of it is well-varnished wood and plaster. A closer examination of the hinges reveals that, sure enough, the inner mechanism is fairly choked with greasy brown oxidation. Even as I watch, a few flakes flutter off the bit I just moved to land on my shoulder.

I blow them off with a disgruntled huff. ‘Good call. I’ll have to take a look later.’

‘You shouldn’t have been up on it at all. What if it had broken?’ She has a much heavier brow than most fillies her age, so any time she frowns, her whole face darkens.

‘It’s fine.’ I wiggle the hinge for her. ‘See? It’s just that it hasn’t been used in awhile. Little work with a trowel and some oil and it’ll be good as new.’

Her frown is still firmly in place. ‘You’ve never had to do that in any of the other houses. I think it’s just bad.’

‘Well,’ I grunt, hefting the thing carefully over my shoulder again and tousling her mane on my way past, ‘Not much for it unless you’ve got another big ol’ ladder stashed under your bed or something.’

She giggles, trying to fix her mane. The frown is gone. ‘Noooo. But if you need stuff done up high, I could always fly up and—’

‘Nah. There’s repair work that needs doing up there that takes a horn.’ Good enough; she frowns, but nods. ‘Speaking of teaching, though—what would you say to a lunch-and-lesson out in the wood today?’

Her ears perk up. ‘Do I get to pick the lesson?’

‘Was there something in particular you wanted to know about?’ I grunt, teetering as I round the corner and begin the hike back across the yard to the shed. She keeps pace with me easily, hooves just trailing in the grass.

‘After we talked about the bees, I went in and looked through all the things I brought from the old house. There’s an ema— . . . enamatol—’

‘Entomology?’

‘Yes! An enatomology textbook in there I want to look at.’

‘Alright. Got an idea of where you want to settle in? Out by the cliff, maybe?’

She considers that. ‘Mm. By the river, maybe? There are quiet spots out there.’

‘Sounds like a plan. If you want to try scouting it out from the roof, go ahead. Just don’t fly higher than—’

‘—the house, I know. It’s okay! I know where we’re going.’

‘Well, alright then.’ We’ve reached the shed. ‘You want to go grab what you can while I wash up?’

‘Of course! Want me to get started on sandwiches?’

‘No dressing on mine, please.’

‘Sure!’ And off she shoots.

I watch her just long enough to be sure she’s inside, and aim a vicious kick at the door of the shed. Stupid. Didn’t even bother to check the damn thing before getting up on it. I can already hear you sighing in my ear, but dammit, I’m getting old, and too reliant on my tools.

The dull ache in my hoof and my horn pulls me back—sharper, clearer than I was. There’ll be time for recrimination later; for now, lunch.

She’s waiting for me at the boundary, flush with anticipation. The book, basket, and blanket are piled neatly beside her, a careful distance from the dark line of turned earth separating manicured lawn from natural bramble. I’m rubbing the last of the moisture out of my mane as I wander over; the sun’s high and hot, and there’s not much risk of me dripping on the blanket, but even so, there’s nothing worse than the feeling of something unexpectedly dripping down your neck.

She’s already gabbing as I walk up. ‘I saw some squirrels out in the trees! I sat down and they just watched me for a bit. It was so cool!’

‘You sure you still want to read about insects, then?’ I say, striding up to the line and closing my eyes. ‘We can always grab another book.’

I can feel her eyes light up in time with my horn. ‘Noooo, it’s okay. I can learn about squirrels and birds and things from you!’

That gets a chuckle, but I know she’ll be too busy watching the lightshow to listen to anything I might come up with by way of rebuttal. It should be routine by now, but just like everything else . . .

I do my best to relax, letting down my shoulders and trying to ignore the nibbling twinge building just south of my horn, probing along the invisible boundary for the familiar knots and locks and contours. She starts to say something else, but I shush her, quietly. I can feel the gentle purples, pinks, and blues playing all too briefly across my face before falling away to either side.

‘Alright, should be safe. Follow right behind me, okay?’

‘Okay.’

I take the basket carefully in my mouth, the blanket neatly folded atop; she folds the book gingerly under one wing, and together we step over the little tamped-earth ring and out into the fresh-smelling forest.

The wood is almost certainly safe—safe enough for brief forays like this, at any rate. We’ve yet to see anything larger than a skunk during the day, and those are only trouble if you startle them; the usual suspects this far north—the bears, the wolves, the greater fae—generally only wander at night, and generally much later in the year. Worst we ever got at the Dun was a timberwolf ranging way out of its territory along the south cliffs. Bitch to fight, but the wood kept us warm that whole winter.

We stop a few yards into the forest, long enough for me to feel the curtain close behind us, and at last I open my eyes. Dappled sunlight streams through the thick branches above, painting us both in mottled greys and greens.

‘So, what was it you were trying to tell me?’ I ask around the basket handle, as she steps past me.

She looks up. ‘Oh. Only that there was a rabbit that ran past while you were doing magic. It looked scared. Can rabbits sense magic?’

‘Some.’ She’s picking her way through the thin bramble, slanting off towards the thicker forest in the direction of the river; I follow. ‘Like anypony else, there are smart rabbits and dumb rabbits. Most of them know to avoid magical fields on instinct, but occasionally you get the dope that has to try anyway, y’know?’

She smiles at that, but a pair of passing cardinals grabs her interest and derails whatever train of thought she had going.

It’s quiet the rest of the way to the glade. The heat of the sun is cut by a thousand-thousand narrow leaves, and a gentle breeze lifts our manes as we meander through low scrub and over the moss-covered logs of our little alpine hideaway. She knows the way, and I follow at a distance, never letting the little head disappear for more than a moment around the nearest bush or trunk, watching her little eyes dissect every scampering rodent, every flutter of a feathered wing.

We never had much interaction with the wildlife around here, so I doubt they ever really learned to fear us in the same way as most creatures around Equestria do. Even the masters of the house back on the hill seem to have restrained themselves from the usual woodcutting or game-hunting. Pegasi are like that, I’ve learned; I still get shivers thinking about all the displays of pheasant and quail I saw the one time I ended up in Cloudsdale.

I follow her lead in hopping a truly prodigious collection of toadstools, and we’re there. The little brambly patch of heath she always picks when we come out this way is exactly as we left it—cool, quiet, and just far enough from the river that we can hear ourselves think over the burgeoning snowmelt roar.

I lay out the blanket, and she flops down immediately with the book while I get out the sandwiches. She’s thoughtfully marked hers with a little hoofprint, and I slide that and a small serving of barley crisps her way and settle in to my own daffodil, lettuce, and tomato on white. Everything but the tomato is fresh, and she even remembered to pat down the vegetables before slapping on the bread; we’ve long since agreed on the sheer vileness of a soggy sandwich.

She has surprisingly little to say this afternoon; absorbed as she is in flipping through the textbook—a seventh- or eighth-year primer on insects for the budding horticulturalist, probably a little old for her, under normal circumstances—she appears to have forgotten lunch entirely. I nudge the plate again with my hoof, and she jumps a little, glancing at me ruefully. It gets her to eat, though.

‘So—the bees. Learn anything interesting?’

‘Um, well . . . there’s a lot of different kinds,’ she starts. ‘I think the ones I saw this morning were, um, honeybees? The pattern was the same as the one in the book. So they would’ve had stings, and there’s probably a hive somewhere around the house. We could have honey?’

‘Only if we feel like braving the wrath of a hundred angry bugs.’

She frowns a little, not looking at me. I try again.

‘Anything in there about wasps?’

‘They weren’t wasps.’

‘I know. Still, I’d rather have a guide if we end up running across a nest somewhere. We always had to call out an exterminator for that sort of thing.’

‘Exterminator?’

‘Somepony whose job it is to kill or remove bad insects from a house or something. Wasps, cockroaches, parasprites—’

She makes a face.

‘Yeah, trust me, if we never have to run across a swarm of those again . . .’

She flips through a few pages without answering, then: ‘“Wasps can be a major difficulty for any farmsteader. They will aggressively defend their nests and, unlike their honey-producing cousins, do not die when they sting. Smoke is not as effective on wasps as bees, but can still work in a pinch if you can get close enough to the nest to light a controlled fire. If possible, wait until cold weather, or enlist the help of a local unicorn cap—capable of performing frost magic.” Can you do frost magic?’

‘Probably, yeah.’

‘Okay. “The cold will make the wasps sluggish, and they can then be disposed of as you see fit. Burning or drowning the hive is recommended?!’’

She snaps the book shut. ‘That’s horrible!’

‘They’re pests,’ I shrug. ‘Better to knock them all out in one fell swoop than have to try and get them piecemeal. It’s not like drowning a dog or something—something that has feelings.’

‘But they’re still animals! Why get rid of them at all?! Can’t you just leave them alone?’

‘Well, look at what the book says. What if they set up shop in—’ I cast around for examples, settling on something familiar. ‘—in one of the trees on your apple farm? You couldn’t buck that tree, or probably a half-dozen around it, without risking getting stung, right?’

‘Then don’t go to that part of the farm!’

‘And if you need all your crops to survive the winter? Or some other pony wanders in there by mistake?’

‘Well—’

I wait for her to finish the thought, but she’s just screwed up her little face, not looking at me. ‘It’s just not fair,’ she says, belatedly.

‘Life frequently isn’t, little one.’

She grumbles, but the frown subsides as she buries herself in the book again and her look of searing focus returns.

We pass the time that way for awhile, as the sun climbs and crests the Mark. Lunch is one of those things I’m comfortable letting run a little long, especially if she’s found something to keep herself occupied. She doesn’t invite me to read with her, and I don’t ask: comfortable silence, I think. Closeness without expectation. I shuffle a little on the blanket, settling in, getting my hooves under me, ears flicking this way and that to the snatches of birdsong piping from the treetops and the cliffs. A sunbeam has found its way through the branches to land comfortably between my shoulder blades, and nestles there like a warm and lumpy cat.

I can hear you laughing. You always loved—always hated—how easy it was for me to fall asleep like this. Those twinkling eyes you’d get when you’d shake me awake, curled into the windowseat with Marigold, or splayed across my bench, hammer and oil still clutched tight in my hooves. And always so gentle—pushing and prodding me into a comfortable shape, draping that old yak-hair blanket over me in the winters, dragging me to bed when you could. And sometimes I’d catch this perfect glimpse of you, just smiling through that mess you pretended was a respectable beard, and I could trace the laugh-lines around your eyes as your skin peeled and your bones bleached in the white-hot sun that spilled across the field and the grasses and into every home and I could see you turn to me and grip my face and scr—

My head snaps up in time to see a half-dozen gophers, rabbits, and squirrels go zipping across the grass at mach speed, scurrying into burrows and up trees. There is a squeak of alarm from beside me, and I whip around to see the last of the birds shooting out of her mane like little feathered rockets. The book and basket are open where I left them; the sun is still high and the trees still guard the edges of the clearing.

She’s trembling as I lay a hoof on her shoulder. I speak as gently as I can around the pounding in my chest, my throat.

‘Sorry! Sorry, scamp. I didn’t mean to scare them off.’

She stares at me through the part in her too-long mane, eyes wide. ‘I’m sorry. You looked so peaceful, a-and they just came out of the trees, and—’

‘It’s alright. They’ll be back—you know they can’t get enough of you.’

She relaxes slightly. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

A rattling breath. ‘Okay. I—I know you don’t like them getting too close to the house, so . . .’

Forced laughter. ‘No, no. Don’t even worry. If it’s, like, a bear or a wolverine or something? Then we can worry about them getting near the house. And maybe wake me up if that happens?’

Forced laughter from us both.

The late-afternoon sun is slanting beautifully across the bay the next time I really start paying attention again. We’re on the porch, and have been since we got back from lunch: she with her book, I juggling the ladder, oil, and our increasingly-ragged outdoor cloth. I’ve managed to strip at least the top layer of build-up off the hinge, and it squawks only vaguely like a stuck bird now, so I reckon I’ve done all I can with it for now.

I look up at Herself, still poring over page after page of facts and advices for budding farm-mares. Or apiarists, I suppose, though that was a dying art long before she was even born. Still, I’m impressed that she stuck around for all the cursing and shrieking of tortured metal earlier; she’s young, and her ears are still far more attuned to the loud and the shrill than mine are at this point.

‘Hey.’ She looks up. ‘You know you coulda gone inside any time, right? You didn’t have to stay out here and listen to the noise.’

‘I know. It was nice and warm out here, and I got to watch you work.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. After we talked earlier, I wanted to know how you could make the ladder all better.’

I sigh, rolling one of my shoulders. ‘Well, it’s never going to be perfect, but this should at least keep it from making a horrible racket every time I move it.’

‘Is it dangerous?’

‘Rust? Nah, not to us—not much. I wouldn’t go eating it, but . . .’

‘No—the ladder.’

‘Oh, that. Eh, it’ll hold up. There’s some corrosion in the hinge, but the beams themselves are fine. Worst comes to worst, I’ll pull the usable side off the A-frame and just balance it against whatever I need to get up. Old-fashioned, like.’

‘Corrosion?’

‘Uhh—metal rot. Kind of like the termite damage we saw at the last house, remember?’

She wrinkles her nose. ‘Are there things that eat metal? Like termites?’

‘Well—dragons, maybe. But there definitely aren’t any left around these parts. Or, y’know, small enough that we couldn’t see them zipping around causing trouble.’

She giggles at the thought. ‘Tiny dragons.’

‘Zipping.’

She giggles again, and I rise, tossing the ladder into the grass. ‘Still—if you’re wanting to learn something useful, go grab me some of the soap flakes from the kitchen and come out to the spigot, alright?’

She trots inside as I heft the ladder back into the shed—closer to the entrance this time, I remind myself, rolling my eyes as a spider the size of my ear darts furtively into the corner. Might have to hunt that little bastard down next; the big ones don’t tend to be poisonous, in my experience, but I’d still not rather have a reason to test the theory.

I’m just locking the door as she trots back out, a box of soap-flakes in her mouth. We meet at the earthenware garden spigot, and I pull the horrible orange-stained rag off my shoulder. The poor thing’s seen more than its fair share of use since we got here: birdshit, paint thinner, cobwebs. One size fits all.

‘So,’ I start, turning the handle and waiting for the water to clear. ‘Water’s usually enough to clean this thing the way we want, right? Gets the dirt off, the grease, whatever. Soap,’—I jiggle the box—‘is great for ponies and plates, but get anything harder than food or sweat, and it stops being nearly as useful.’

I gesture to the rag now draped over the spigot. ‘See the rust? That’s hard. You saw how long it took me to get it off the metal. If we want to be able to safely use this thing again, we’ll need to work even harder to get it off of here. So—’

I pick up a hoof-full of tilled earth, and begin working it into the fabric, just like we were taught to do in the field. ‘We’ve talked about how dirt is actually a bunch of little rocks and particles and things, and that’s what we want—this is called an abrasive, and it’ll do a better job of working the gunk out of the fabric than just water and soap.’

I take two corners of the towel and rub the dirt between them vigorously. I can feel the sharp little bits and stones rolling between my hooves.

‘How does that work better than soap?’

‘Soap works chemically, not frictionally. It makes it easier for water to wash things away, but it doesn’t really do anything by itself.’

‘Frictionally?’

‘You know how your hooves warm up when you rub them together? Or your wings when you go into a really steep dive? That. It’s a natural force.’

‘Like magic.’

‘More basic. Physical.’

‘Okay.’

She doesn’t get it, but whatever. What’s theory to a kid? The proof’s in the pudding.

And so it seems to be. I know it’s a crap trick at the best of times, but it seems to be working fine now: the rag is filthy, but a lot of the excess gunk that had started to seep into the fabric seems to have popped out a little.

‘See, there? The stain is starting to lift.’

‘It’s just brown instead of orange, though.’

‘Which is why we’re going to give it a good strong wash with soap now that the dirt’s done its job.’

I walk her through the rest of the process, and we let the rag soak for a bit as the sun nears the horizon. I keep checking it over my shoulder as we work; I want to make sure she has plenty of time to eat before she knocks out for the night.

Soon enough, I’m running the thing under the tap, and the whole ugly mess just slides right off and into the runoff ditch. ‘See? And there we are.’ I rinse and strain it a few more times, and throw it over the line to dry—still a clown’s kerchief of ugly earth-tones, but far lighter and thinner than it had been earlier.

She looks positively bedazzled as we head back inside. ‘Seriously? Dirt can make you cleaner? Why don’t we all just do that, then?’

‘Instead of bathing? Some do. It’s common enough among animals, and I think even the Zebras had it down to an art-form at one point. Sand-dancing, or something.’

‘Why them, and not us?’

‘We don’t live in a desert, and water’s easier.’

‘Oh.’

I check the twilit sky as I usher her inside. A warm, peachy sort of sky, fuzzy at the edges, promising fog—means we should both get near enough a full night’s sleep. She’s already rubbing her eyes, there on the doormat.

‘Aw, come on, Princess. You can’t tell me you’re tired already.’

‘It’s laaate.’

‘It’s barely even sundown. Watch the moon hit the Aught, then you can tell me it’s late.’

‘I don’t caaare.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Are we having dinner?’

‘Something small,’ she yawns, even as I light the little oil lamp I’ve rigged to the stove.

I fumble for a moment in the pantry as she flops down at the table, trying to figure out what I did with last night’s bean-and-canned-olive salad. As much credit as I have to give her for burning through the days, she’s only got about twelve hours in the tank, and once that’s gone, you could put a Hearthswarming banquet in front of her and she’d hardly notice. You probably would have.

Ah well. That’s what leftovers are for, as far as I’m concerned. Who can stomach cooking after ten hours in the yard?

She’s fading fast by the time I slide her bowl across to her, and for the next quarter-hour I watch her pick apart a third or so of the vegetables, nibbling listlessly. She shrugs off conversation, and the several querying gestures I make in the direction of the pantry. It’s never a guarantee that someone her age is going to want something besides what’s put in front of them, but always worth checking. Seems the switch has been flipped, though, and that’s all there is to it. I finish one healthily-portioned bowl, and then another, in the time it takes her to finish a half-dozen olives, and by the time I’ve washed up, she’s resting her head on the table next to her bowl, glazing.

That’s my cue, I think.

‘Alright, scamp,’ I sigh, dropping my bowl in the sink to dry and levitating hers over to the counter. ‘Let’s get you squared away for the night, hm?’

She doesn’t protest as I gently nudge her off the pillow and onto her hooves. Her head is drooping, and even her mane drags across the worn wooden boards as we amble down the hall in the direction of her bedroom. The sun’s gone completely, now, and out here in the darkness of the frontier, the only indications that any world exists beyond the heavy paper-panelled shutters are the soft sounds of waves rushing up from below. Seems there’ll be no moon tonight.

The covers on the low bed have been flung wide—presumably some nanoseconds before she was bouncing off the lintel in my room—and she clambers in without much prompting, flopping down on her side. She tries to blow a few strands of hair out of her face with much the same efficacy as the lettuce-leaf.

I pull the covers over her, gently pushing her mane out of the way.

‘Hey.’

I stop. ‘Yeah?’

‘I don’t blame you for scaring the rabbits.’

‘I—thanks.’

‘You can tell me if you have bad dreams, you know.’

I really can’t.

‘It’s alright. I was just dozing and heard a noise. Maybe one of the little varmints came up close.’

I receive only a little half-nod by way of reply, and take that as my cue to leave. At the door I pause, glancing over my shoulder one last time as she rolls over into a more comfortable position. Over the rustling of the covers, I can just barely make out a soft ‘Goodnight’, and then all is still.

‘Goodnight, Princess,’ I say softly.

And when she doesn’t respond to the honorific, I know it’s safe to shut the door. Nothing in life should be so painstaking as moving without waking a child.

The pantry itself is easier; I’m far enough away that I can risk magic without the bleedoff getting her attention. The panic room slides open easily, as no doubt it was designed to: an entire section of wall, shelf, and well-oiled rollers glides neatly to one side to admit me, and I hop lightly over a few sacks of grain to the well-lit space beyond.

All is as I left it: tables, stands, the case, the pinboard. Maps and notes undisturbed, spotty ink flickering in the soft purple glow of the crystal magefire lamp; more ink than paper in some places now. I should sit, and plan, and figure out where we should focus on heading next, but that can wait. All it would do is get me thinking.

The reflected patterns of light and shadow beaming off my old, gold-struck breastplate are more than distraction enough themselves. I throw the blanket back over it, cursing last night’s sleepless lack of care. There’s no point going over the scrivenery again anyhow; none of the enchantments have changed, and all it’ll do is wear my tired stag-stick of a horn out. Still not something I can afford.

The teeming swordrack gets a similar treatment, courtesy of one of the dustcovers we pulled off the beds in the spare room; the worked metal reflects everything, and even the tiniest sliver of light peeking through the crack I know is there would set little minds a-racing. Hard as that might be with Her sitting there, in pride of place beneath her intricate shell of glass and gold and light.

I’m only in here long enough to satisfy my paranoia, and then the door is sliding shut again. I turn, pause, turn again, and hastily shove a few sacks closer to the seamless frame. Then the pantry too is shut.

Giving silent thanks to the lunatic noble who felt the need for a secret sex dungeon on top of everything else wrong with this stupid wingbeater house, I trot out onto the porch and light my horn. It is dark out here—the stars are doing their best, but there are few enough of them now that even those that can break through the night-time fog are little more than pin-pricks against the velvety, enveloping black.

I stifle a primal shiver, standing there on the edge of the little ring of light cast by the oven-lamp. Nights like this are always the worst; whatever they sold us in boot, we weren’t built to be predators, and there’s only so much of a warren one mare can build.

The wards are holding steady, near as I can tell. No disturbances since last night, only the faint shimmer on my consciousness where the newer spells overlap the old. It’s a welcome surprise to find that none of the wildlife from this afternoon’s adventure decided to brave the field in its terror; I can’t say I’m looking forward to explaining the resultant fricassee to a sobbing child. Everything else seems to be in order, though, and—

No. There. North-by-northeast, along the cliff edge. One of the directed-energy aegi is buckling, and I can’t let that one go. I’ve been debating with myself whether I need to worry as much about physical repulsion on the cliff-edge, but letting that one fall would give us away to anyone with even a hint of the Gift about them. As it is, any slack-jawed second-year apprentice could pick up on the half-mile-wide deadzone I’ve burned into the natural weave of the mountains, but anyone with that level of training would pose a threat for other reasons.

Am I hedging? Of course I’m hedging. I very desperately do not want to step off the porch and into the ocean of dark grass beyond. For all the assurance in the universe, for all the knowledge that the wards would scream a violent green tattoo against the inside of my eyes at even the barest hint of intrusion . . . there’s nothing like darkness to make you feel like a child again. And it’s not as though I can just unhook the lantern and bring that along without risking her notice.

Venom, basted in (un)healthy doses of fear, and I sway. The distant tide is loud in my head, the rhythmic pulse of wind and leaf and branch stabbing like pins against my pinning ears, and the racing heartbeat as I push myself into your breast—

With a hiss, I light my horn as bright as I dare—bright enough to illuminate the grass at my hooves—and canter as quickly as my nerve-stiff legs will allow to the northeast corner of the perimeter. My head is on a swivel, seeing without seeing, tracing the endless patterns and tapestries I’ve woven, layer after layer, pulsing steadily in time with the thudding at the base of my horn. The pool of light around me is little comfort, and it wavers like crystal aerials as I focus my attention this way and that, the sick dread building in my stomach, on my neck.

And then I’m there. It’s a half-second job—a simple thing of friction and miscalculated tree-branches. I reach out, guiding myself through my own pinprick tunnel, and slice it off at the trunk. It flops quietly against the windy, misty soundscape, and I breathe again, shoring up the layers, painting and pasting and priming and soothing.

And then something rustles in the dark grass behind me.

I whirl, fumbling for anything close enough at hoof to form a makeshift defence. Heart in my throat, blood in my ears, pounding, adrenaline drowns the biting pain as the soft pool of light sharpens and bursts outward around me, silent and bright as She herself might have been.

It’s only a rabbit. Wide-eyed, darting away from the shimmering light for the safety of the darkness beyond. Miserable, rotten little thing, I curse, forcing the panicked flare back down into my horn. Had it snuck in on the way back from lunch? There was no reason anything that large should have made it through, unless . . .

I steady myself for a moment, quickly scanning the perimeter from my dimming, radiant sphere; the soap-bubble sheen of it echoes along my horn, whole and unbroken anywhere but the tiny thing I just fixed. Fine, good—if I need to hunt the thing down tomorrow, so be it. Enough for tonight.

As the pounding recedes, and the usual dull ache returns to replace it, I notice with a start the longsword hanging next to me in my field. I don’t . . . remember conjuring one, but it’s a familiar enough design—whitesteel, tapered, unadorned crossguard; a thrusting sword, Guard standard. I might have summoned one from the house, but . . .

Unnerved, I pull back a mound of topsoil beside me and let the sword fall. It produces a quiet but satisfactory thud as it hits the cooling earth, but I make to cover it nonetheless. Real or not, imagined or not, I don’t need any more reminders that I’m losing my grip. A few tamps of my hoof and the little grave is almost indistinguishable from the dark, turned earth around it.

Good enough.

It’s all I can do not to sprint back to the house, across the silent vegetable patch, past the skeletal shed. The world is pitch-black, save for my little ball of radiance and the warm and welcome blot of light streaming from the open door. The presence of one more potential alarm system running around nibbling on the vegetables does nothing whatsoever for my nerves.

I practically leap through the open door, and bolt it shut behind me. The windows, the latches, the blinds, the catches—and at last I can settle in at the table and try to get my breathing under control, feeling the burning oil-light falling gently on my shoulders. I don’t know how long I sit there, only that I have to jerk my head up when I remember that I need to go properly to bed. There are niceties to be observed.

I rise, turn to the stove, and pause with my hoof on the gas-switch. It is a very long moment before I turn it, and the darkness that follows—warm as it is—brings with it none of the usual bedtime comfort. Turning, hunched, I pad as softly as I can past squeaking boards and onto the low bed, wrapping myself in every sheet I can summon, swaddled close. I close my eyes, and the pitch-dark room looks exactly the same; I open them again, and I can almost make out the gentle rise and fall of your shoulder under the blanket beside me.

It’s almost reassuring, and I almost hear you chuckle as I mutter it to the dark and empty room.

II.

They told me I couldn’t know what it must have looked like, but it starts the same way every time. Mid-morning, and we’re going about our usual business. Marigold is playing with some of her friends, and we’re shoulder-to-shoulder, walking down the street. Everything is as it ever was, for as long as I can remember: the sun is bright, but not blinding; the Pegasi are shifting clouds in their usual skittish frenzy. The market is a-bustle, and five generations of overripe produce hawk their wares to passers-by. The baker is screaming.

You kiss the top of my head, beard pushing through my mane to the scalp, where the soft tickle is likeliest to get me to sneeze (you bastard). I give you my best Eohippic frown, and you smile oh-so-patiently at my intractableness. I start to tell you off and then—from the east, from the forest, from whence it must have come, a blinding flash, rippling outwards. Three waves: light, pressure, heat.

Everyone staggers, panics. There is screaming, a stampede backwards.

Then the second wave hits. Houses blow down like matchsticks, an afterthought. Ponies slide apart where they stand, splayed like tanning leather along the lines their shadows cast. The luckier ones are crushed against buildings, slam into each other like war-hammers, or simply break their necks as they’re tossed end over end over end.

We’re not spared: I’ve been thrown clear of you, dashing my head against a stall, feeling my horn snap jaggedly against it like so much brittle china, wailing as I cast about for you. And miraculously, you’re there, and bleeding, and still safe. And I paw at your face and tell you I love you and all the things I’ve always wanted to tell you and never did, and all the things I should’ve fixed and never did, and you shush me and hold me and our blood forms little contrails in the dirt in the second we have before the fire comes and I watch you boil away in front of me from the inside out, screaming.

And I wake many miles away and I’m screaming, and I wake again and I’m here and I’m silent and I choke.

The dream-colour pearling at the edges of my vision can’t hide the tears. I bury my face in my pillow, kicking futilely at the horrible rat’s nest of blankets I’ve managed to tie myself up in. It’s dark still—she wouldn’t hear me if I screamed—but even so, the nameless, thoughtless impulse is there: you’re the adult; don’t wake the child.

As if I’m the adult. As if there is such a thing. We look at our collective spawn, and pride ourselves on how far we’ve come by comparison, and go back to barely treading water ourselves. Asinine.

I finally disentangle myself from the blankets, throw the whole sweat-soaked mess off the edge of the bed, and stand. I’m trembling, dripping—mane plastered to my forehead, horn still rutting aching. I drag myself on sleep-numb legs to the bathroom, perform the requisite steps—toilet, tap, showerhead; teeth, coat, hairline.

It takes until the water hits my neck to really snap fully awake, and even then the lathery knead of shampoo against my scalp is almost enough to lull me back again. Hateful. No winning that one, and nary a hoof-full of coffee grounds left this side of Las Pegasus to make the choice for me.

I can chase my tail forever, in my little Orouboros wend. And not just in this—showers are beautiful things, and moreso still the more you have to wash. A quarter hour passes, half, and you find yourself soaping the same bits, in the same rolling motions, and as fleeting as the comfort is, it feels like something.

I have the cleanest shoulders in all of Equestria, and you’re not even here to appreciate them.

. . .

I’ve already been over it with you more times than I can count. We were hunting down another of those pop-up doomsday cults outside of Hoofwich—some madmare and her band of rabid rutting werecats. Barely even a blip on the celestial radar, given everything else we knew was brewing by then. I’d just thrown the last one on the fire when we felt the shockwave.

We were too far away to see it—see anything—but somehow I knew. Speaking in tongues, they said, and fire rolling in my eyes. Just about killed Sarge when he grabbed for my spear. Still surprised that got me leave; field executions were already being rolled out by that point, and usually for less.

And I ran. Caught the first airship I could back from the front, made it as far as Canterlot before the red tape came out. ‘Unstable metamagic’ this, and ‘living spellburn’ that. And I mentioned you, walked the camps, knowing even as I checked the rosters.

Still didn’t hit me until I got there, though. Got clearance, volunteered for one of the containment crews trying to leech the residuum back off into the war-crystals they were still using at that point. There were dozens of us there, scattered across the glasslands like ants on a dish, playing goddess with energies we barely understood. I watched my fair share of Gifted Unicorns burn themselves to rapture inside their pretty plastic suits.

Gave it a few hours, let them get distracted. ‘Got separated’, found the house.

Found the shadows.

She looked so small in your hooves.

Something wrenches inside me, and it’s all I can do not to empty my stomach into the drain. Bitch to clean, if nothing else, and harder to explain.

But it’s done. I’ve run the course, and you’ve—I love you—you’ve receded a little since last night. Some days you’re still the best thing in my world, but days like today, I need you at a distance.

. . .

I know.

The tap shuts off, just as I hear the bathroom door creak open.

‘Hey.’ Too ragged. Smile.

‘Hey yourself!’ The inquisitive little snoot is followed by deeply expectant eyes. ‘I heard the water running.’

‘Yeah, I was up a little earlier than expected this morning. Still plenty warm for you, but I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to wait for breakfast.’

‘Oh, did the banging upstairs wake you up too?’

My heart’s in my throat almost as quickly as I’m out of the shower. ‘What banging?’

She blanches. ‘I don’t—it was just a couple of minutes ago? It sounded like something falling.’

I’m already out in the hall, dripping all over the hardwood. ‘Okay, thanks for telling me. Get yourself some breakfast, and I’ll go—’

‘Maybe it was a phoenix?’

That brings me up short. ‘What?’

‘You know, a phoenix.’ She’s bobbing excitedly next to me, dancing around the growing pool of shower-dribblings. ‘I read about them in one of the books at the last house.’

‘No.’ Firmly. ‘There aren’t any left in these parts. And even if there were, we’d know by the house being on fire.’

‘Oh, they only do that when they’re getting ready to reic—reicklenate.’

‘Reincarnate. Stay here.’

The fewer words I use, the better she listens. She stops dead behind me in the kitchen as I stride outside, shimmering like a showmare in my shower-slick altogether. The western ridge is steeped in pink and reflected cloud-tangerine; the precipice east still inky black, the house itself mired in shadow and half-light. I don’t even bother with the ladder; there isn’t time, and if something’s up there . . .

I square my shoulders and, in a wild burst of shuddering blue-grey light, grip myself by the horn and heft myself swiftly but silently onto the dark and slanting tile above.

It’s agony. My horn sparks and spits with outrage, crackling silently even after I’ve touched down, and the sharp echoes of its displeasure ring through my skull all the way down to my teeth. Still worn out from last night. Still burning through the excess faster than the New Ley can replenish it. So close and yet so far.

Agony.

It’s enough that I almost stop then and there—flop onto my side and let the breeze just whisk me away like so many dry leaves. But even as I swim and sway, my body—ever the good little soldier—takes over, and I watch myself creep, low-slung and silent, over the lip of the open wall and onto the loose and creaking boards beyond. Terrifying, if it were the first time, but they teach you things about minds and bodies at the Academy, and I can relax into the autonomic as the Pyre-bright pain behind my eyes begins to cool.

The upper floor is still as empty as I remember it: open to the elements, everything of value long since stolen or rotted away. The little steeple-slant jade roof is barely supported at all, and inconsistently for its apparent weight: four cross-hatched corner beams of the same dark wood as the rest, cut with steel or starsilver or good old-fashioned levitation rods. The only enclosed space up here—the only hiding place, directly above the bedrooms—is the paper-walled tea closet in the far corner.

Or, at least, that had been the assumption. One of the boys I used to get paired with for patrol did a tour in Neighpon, and had the whole thing figured for some weird wingbeater take on a private sitting-room—the kind of place you sequestered your most honoured guests for an afternoon to talk politics and philosophy, and the best ways to skin a chimera.

Back in the day, with the mountains, it never would’ve gotten direct sunlight past about noon, and the ocean breeze would filter in comfortably on the summer thermals. Back in the day, this whole place would’ve been lit up brighter than a Crystalline stripper’s ass this time of morning.

One more curse to add to the litany I’m muttering under my breath as I edge toward the back-room. The wood’s fared worse for its exposure to the elements; the varnish is all but gone, and the boards scrape and groan at even the lightest touch. I’ve been up here a few times, though, and it’s simple enough to trace my own past trails over the crossbeams. My head is still pounding, but I can feel control slipping back to me again: directing the carriage from the backseat, by proxy; slowly taking the reins again. By the time I’ve spidered my way over to the far wall and flattened myself along it, I’m the only one driving.

The door is just slightly ajar, and I crane around as far as I dare to check the corner behind me before daring a peek inside. Pitch-black, obviously, and dead-silent. I rap the jamb with the back of my hoof—once, twice, and on the third time, something shifts within. My ear turns to the familiar cue: the slough-rustle of dry skin, the subtle hiss of chalky tongues. I can feel the hair lifting along the back of my neck.

Heart pounding, I brace myself against the jamb, and kick the door open.

The worst part of any breach was always that terrible half-second of uncertainty after blowing the door. If you were lucky, you stacked up near the back, and the worst you had to worry about was covering whatever hapless sod ended up on point. If not, well, you just had to hope there wasn’t much worse than a crossbow bolt bearing down on your breastplate; all the armour in the battalion couldn’t save you from alchemist’s dragonflame or a well-timed fleshripper hex.

The abyss yawns before me for a briefest of moments, a perfect dark square silhouetted against the greying room—then, all at once, an explosion of shrieks and feathers and confusion, tearing past my cheek and out into the pre-dawn gloom to my right. I leap backwards, but even as I crack one of the boards underhoof and kick it into my waiting grip, I catch sight of the two dusky V’s climbing falteringly away over the vegetable patch and veer back toward the cupola overhead.

Half-right. She was half-right.

With a disgusted sigh, I poke my nose back into the little room, letting my eyes adjust to the now far less foreboding darkness. And, sure enough, there it is, stacked in a haphazard inverted dome of twigs, cloth, and what looks to be a not-inconsequential quantity of familiar mane-fluff: has to be the third or fourth nest I’ve had to break up since we got here. I’m surprised they didn’t come out with tiny pitchforks and torches and stab me to death.

After a quick and cursory once-over to make sure there aren’t any surprise eggs this time around, I scoop the thing up with my makeshift bludgeon and toss it unceremoniously over the nearest roof-edge. The plank follows soon after.

I sweep my hoof around the dark space, making dead certain there’s nothing else waiting to entice the little snipes back up here, and then pull the door firmly shut. Either I forgot to do so the last time I was up here, or their little conniving beaks actually managed to pull the damn thing open; either way, this should keep them from settling in too comfortably up here. There’s more than a little outraged chattering from above me as I make my way back out onto the roof over the patio, and I can almost feel the four individual little black eyes boring into the back of my head as I square myself for the drop.

It’s not a long one—three yards, if that—but even so, I can feel my knees tighten uncomfortably in anticipation even as my horn reminds me that, yes, it’s there and still all manner of tender. Took me a long time to understand what Mum really meant about aging being so exhausting, but days like today are reminder enough—it’s not just watching your body fall apart, it’s the calculus. Horn or hoof? Can I afford to make that walk? How tired will I be after I get back, and will I make it to dinner-time?

She and Ma would’ve gotten a kick out of this, though. Me, up here, pawing the edge like a Pegasus yearling ready to faceplant into the lake? That’s the kind of thing they’d have hooted ‘round the book-club after one too many glasses of sherry.

I hit the ground hard, and my forelegs almost fold under me, but I only stagger a little as I make my way back inside, closing the door perhaps a touch harder than I strictly need to. She’s already set herself a tidy breakfast of oats, berries, and a whole apple besides.

‘I’m back—false alarm.’ I manage, evenly. ‘Our friends from the garden built a nest up there.’

‘See!’ she chirps through a mouthful of fruit, ‘I told you it was birds. I could hear them chirping through the wood.’

‘No, you said phoenixes,’ I grunt, leaning on the counter as I get out the fixings for myself. The paring-knife I leave aside for now, even if it means doubling down on what’s left of the berries. ‘If you’d told me it was just the magpies I wouldn’t have bothered going up there. Did you already put everything away?’

‘Uh-huh!’

‘Thanks. How are we doing on apples?’

‘There are a couple still in the bag.’

‘Good deal. Make sure you finish that one, since you brought the whole thing out.’

‘Yep! And it can always be part of lunch if I can’t finish now.’

I settle in opposite her and begin gently grazing. The little eyes are on me instantly, gently probing.

‘You aren’t using your horn.’

‘Can’t. Used up a lot of energy digging around upstairs for your mystery bird.’

‘If you’re not feeling okay—’

‘Nah, it’s fine. Painting doesn’t take much out of me, and it’s easy enough to do by hoof.’

‘You said you don’t have all that much left to do, right?’

‘Right.’ The word’s out of my mouth before I can catch myself. Tartarus.

‘Oh, great! Then we’re still on for the Dun?’

‘If I get everything done today, yes.’ Tartarus. ‘And assuming my head clears up.’

‘And if not?’

Then I get to keep putting this off. ‘Then it’s a couple more days. I don’t want to go in anything less than full strength. Remember what we saw on the road?’

She meets my gaze for a long moment, then looks away. ‘Yeah.’

‘As long as we understand each other.’

‘. . . yeah.’

Too far.

‘Hey.’ I lay my hoof out on the table near her bowl, wiggle it this way and that. She looks up, catches sight of it, and gets her evillest grin on. She knows the game. My hoof meanders its way casually around the pepper-shaker, edging closer to her water-bowl. Closer . . .

She lunges with both hooves, but I jerk back just in time. She guards left, I roll right; she jabs forward, I snake under. We dance like this for a minute, wending our way through the forest of tableware, until she finally ‘corners’ me at the table edge. She feints left, I go right, and there’s her other hoof waiting to pin me.

‘Outfoxed!’ she crows, grinning at me as the other hoof flies over to join its sister-in-arms. I make sure to let her see me laughing as I reach over with my free hoof to tousle her mane.

‘Alright, you little mug. If you want to help me get started, and if you can manage it safely, you can drag the ladder over to where the cans are at the back of the house. Remember from yesterday?’

‘Yep!’ She’s grinning ear to ear, blowing a lock of hair I mussed out of her eye. She’s off her pillow in seconds, trotting merrily toward the door.

‘And you come back and get me if it’s too big for you, got it?’ I call after her as she disappears outside. I hear some muffled cry of acknowledgement from the porch, and she’s gone.

As soon as I’m sure I have the necessary thirty seconds to myself, I lay my head down on the table, and let the gentle coolness of it spread comfortingly across my aching forehead. We used to laugh about That Ol’ Ague Obscura, I know, but ‘sblood . . .

I’m going to be basically useless today, it’s becoming apparent. And that’s not even counting whatever I’m going to try to pull to keep her off my back about the Dun.

I don’t know why I’m so reluctant. It wasn’t exactly a strategic hub even when I was there; once the fighting started in earnest, I’m sure they were cleaned out and sorted within a week, if that. I know exactly where the stores will be, know exactly how much of it we can carry between us, and which of Smiley’s whetstones I’m planning to steal. I’ve been running the calculations since we got here.

We can be in and out in five minutes, if she lets me.

. . . is that it? Am I just worried it’s going to be reduced to an Adventure?

And shouldn’t it? Crumbling old ruins, secret passages, the odd gleaming helmet or horde of pre-Unification coins to catch a filly’s eye. It’s like every Daring Derp novel ever published rolled into one. Perfect for a girl of her age and disposition, right? Would’ve been for me.

Would’ve.

I slap the table, hard, by my ear. It’s enough—jerks me back, peeling sweat-fur and gummy cheek away from the oh-so-inviting hardwood. Bleh.

I drop the bowls in the sink, clean my teeth for the second time this morning, and heave myself out the door after the little rapscallion ruining my well-kept lawn.

To her credit, she did manage to get it out of the shed. I don’t dare look in there just now—despair at the hash she’s made of the careful spider-nonaggression pact I’ve upheld since we got here would undo me completely.

‘Nice work getting it out. Any trouble with the locals?’

She shakes her head. ‘I saw a rabbit in the vegetable patch. Do we need to let him out?’

‘Oh, it’s a him, now? Yeah, saw him last night as I was locking up. Guess he must’ve slipped in when we went out for lunch.’

Again, a pensive shake. ‘No . . . I was watching, while you had your eyes closed. Both ways.’

‘Huh.’ Worrisome. ‘Well, the magpies managed to fly under the radar until after I’d gotten the wards up. Here, help me with this.’

I take the end nearest me, guiding it carefully over my back. A screw wedges uncomfortably between my shoulder-blades, but I do my best to ignore it; it’ll only be a few minutes’ walk around the house, if that. She hesitates for a moment, then wiggles her way under the narrow end, pushing up carefully. One wing flits out, falteringly, stabilising.

‘Careful with that, okay? You get tired or start hurting, you get out from under there and let me take it the rest of the way.’

‘Okay.’

I let her set the pace, only calling out directions where I need to. We make our way carefully around the vegetable patch, along the long strip of unkempt grass where the lawn meets the sloping rubble of the incline. We have to turn when we get closer to the house to avoid hitting any of the wards, and she calls for a break.

Give her credit, the girl’s stronger than she looks—wiry and all that, I know, but she’s still a kid. She pops out from under the ladder, a little out of breath, and after a moment I let my side fall too. She catches me looking and does her best to look nonchalant. I cover with a long, low stretch, feeling my hips and shoulder pop unsubtly as I languor my way through the cat-like undulation.

‘Hey, um.’

I look up. ‘Hm?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, go on.’

‘Are—are we going anywhere today? I know not down the cliffs, but . . .’

I bump her shoulder, gently. ‘Hey. Of course we are. May have to stay inside the wards today, but that just means we won’t have to carry the basket as far, right?’

She studies me carefully. ‘Okay. I’ll come and help once the gardening’s done.’

I hum out my assent, admiring a swallow that goes swooping by just outside the wards. Somewhere above, the magpies croak out a few territorial protestations. It disappears off into the trees out towards the coast. A nest . . . ?

I shake myself. ‘Alright. You ready?’

She nods, flexes her shoulders, and works her way under the ladder again. I take up my half behind her and together we trot around the back of the house to the neat little row of paint cans still standing at attention along the worn siding. I only trip once, over a little clot of dirt inauspiciously placed in the middle of the lawn.

I take over from there, heaving the thing skyward and flicking the A-frame open. It cracks heavily against the gutter as the legs settle in the soft earth, and we both wince at the clatter.

‘Alright,’ I announce, testing the lowest rung gently with a hoof. ‘Looks like that’ll hold. You going to be okay in the garden?’

‘You going to be okay up there?’

‘Haven’t fallen yet, have I?’ I say around the handle of the paint can, halfway up the ladder.

‘Don’t say that!’ she wails, flitting suddenly skyward to hover next to me.

‘It’ll be fine, kid. Mind passing me those other open cans? The . . . second and third from the left?’

She does so, hefting them easily over the lip and onto the tile before giving me another appraising look. I give her a Look of my own in turn, nod in the direction of the garden, and she rolls her eyes, smiling, before disappearing over the cupola. I catch a drift of faint, wordless cooing at the magpies, the rustle of a blueberry bush, then nothing.

I let the mask drop, then, and let out the ragged breath I’ve been holding.

Useless.

It’s an effort to pry open the paint cans by hoof, the last elegant patch of red-shot gold staring at me expectantly from under the heavy arch of the cupola. The brush is tacky and stale between my teeth, a paint-splotch here or there brushing against my unaccustomed tongue.

I begin to paint.

Primer first. Long strokes. One, two; up, down. Slather-white glue in runny, uneven streaks. Dip, hold your breath against the fumes. Misjudge the distance, paint on your muzzle, running down along your chin. Long strokes. Up and arch and down again, feel it running from neck to back to legs. One coat, two, but don’t breathe in, don’t get too close. Melodic, nothing, white, silencing the flame. Dripping down onto the tile, drippings on your chest.

Ragged breath, but not because I’m out of it.

The last beam runs up to the tile; the corner, from earlier. Longest yet, and even half-scaling the wall, braced against it, I can barely scrape the furthest edge with my brush, the filigree. The shiniest prizes, the furthest out of reach. Taunting me, at that, wavering like heatstroke in the warming sun. The frayed yellow weave of the paper-fibre walls beyond, silent accomplices, dance hypnotically in the breeze—dry skin against cracking half-timber bones.

I half-fall onto my haunches, shaking my head. Gotta clear the air.

I drop the brush back in the bucket, and totter unevenly over the too-narrow purlins to the corner facing the sea. The watery sun has crested the mountains now; the fog, the curve of the bay. It’s hazy this morning, wet, and while there’s not a cloud on the horizon, we might get rain yet. The mountains are odd for that, I’ve found—and doubly so at the coast. Even the most beautiful day can turn to torrential mud-grey slop in a heartbeat and a half-hour, but all the low cloud and coat-cling clag in the world isn’t a guarantee of storms to come.

Weird place. Wild place.

Some slice of cloud above me parts, letting the sun through to lay itself full and warm across my neck. I glance up at it, and—not for the first time—wonder to myself who’s left to roll that stone. Not Her, for whom those first graceless fire-dancing, phoenix-birthed, Mount-bestriding ballads were written, so many ages past. Dawn, maybe, if she weren’t still too busy hiding behind that mourning-veil; Dark wouldn’t really have the stomach for it, save perhaps to share a last gallows-laugh with her sister.

It doesn’t really matter. Either could do it, and the both of them have surrounded themselves with enough worried mares and stallions, sputtering along with their little spectacles and vellum, to know better.

May be a moot point, if what we got out of those sunbleached border-town fishermares was anything to go by. If the Starcrossed Dyad are still in the picture at all, they’ve got enough on their plates that they may’ve just thrown up their hooves and foisted it back on the Unicorns, like we’re back in the days of rutting yore. It was kind of an open secret that was part of the Grand Design—lightbringers and luminaries, phoenix-bright they, but only as long as it took for the rest of us to catch up. After She walked into the Pyre—well, maybe their work was done, and they could go with clear conscience to their eternal rest, like sister and daughter before them.

Maybe the planet still spins on its axis simply because we think it should. It would go a long way toward explaining how ass-backwards everything’s gotten.

I heave a sigh, and look out over the picturesque valley again. Shadows play across the grass, across the bay, scuttering long and shallow in the high mountain winds. Gods, they had so much power, and we loved them for the world we knew they were building for us—with us. Dusk, Day, Dawn, and Dark: the Fundament, grand and spacious, and room for all in the wheels of the Celestial Clockwork. Every pony a point of light; every day a chance to be the next engine for betterment, the next name all up in letters across the Elysian marquee.

Who doesn’t grow up with the stars in their eyes, and the world turning at the tip of their horn?

I did, and like most foals I came to learn better. We get our Marks, and with them our choices: we don’t all raise the moon, but maybe we raise a statue in a square; we don’t all save the kingdom, we save a battered stallion, a hungry filly, a sobbing Griffon cub. And of course there’s freedom in that; of course there’s liberation in the abdication, willing or otherwise: heal what you can, grasp what’s in reach.

That’s good. That’s what the kids back home used to call ‘adulting’.

But that’s never enough, is it? We all settle in, and get comfortable, and it never, ever takes long before we’re unsatisfied again—stuck in our bloody-minded sureness that we could be doing something more, or better, or different, even if it’s completely out of reach.

Were they any different? Just as I can sit here and know that damnable itch of my grandsire’s blood runs strong in me, know that I could close my eyes and map the whole sprawling canvas, every curve, every whorl, and never, ever make it further than a canvas wet with mistakes—what did they dream of that never went fulfilled?

They preached Elysium, and beauty, and hope. Could they have known? Was it even possible for them to see past the intricate clockwork they crafted for us?

Did She?

Did Dusk?

Silk purse, pig’s ear.

I rouse myself, cast a glance over my shoulder. The primer’s flat and dry against the wall, and the cans of green stink of chemical heat. I rise, and amble over to save them from their fate.

Lunch is quiet without the usual entourage. The little one managed to scrounge up a round of hard cheese I’d forgotten we had, and I whipped up a basic compote on the stove with the last few cups of berries. I cut conservatively around the mould, and the worst of the green-blue-white gets thrown in a bucket for disposal outside the wards.

All in all, it makes for a nice little picnic. The compote is warm, the cheese sharp and rich, and a half-dozen slices of fluffy white bread, fried but gently in the compote-skillet, round out the affair. I’m impressed our reserve loaves have held up this well, but a factory seal and a queen’s gallon of preservatives will do wonders. ‘Sorbet Eight’s takes it to the Nines!’, indeed. I’m sure the Rockdogs’ll be digging this stuff up in the same condition a hundred years from now.

I’ve tasked her with figuring out what we need for baking our own, but for now, our stocks will hold.

She’s moved on from bugs today, and—apparently gearing up for what she still assumes is happening tomorrow—is asking me everything about everything about the sea. Seems she shares my confusion at the sheer scope of it, too—begged me to promise we’d get the best cliff-side view of it we could before we leave. It’s fabulous anaesthetic for everything swirling through my head and horn; between that and the rich food, I’m almost back to my Comfortable early-afternoon Numb.

‘So why does it make waves?’ she’s asking through a mouthful of bread. ‘Is it all flowing somewhere?’

‘Take small bites. And it’s a combination of things, as I understand it—the Seaponies fiddle with the currents the same way the Pegasi do the clouds, but it’s also a combination of wind and the moon. The moon pulls on it, the same way the world pulls on us. It’s another natural force called gravity.’

She swallows, heavily. ‘Like friction, then.’

‘Like friction, yes.’

‘Does the moon pull on us too?’

‘I suppose it has to. Back in the day, folks used to think that your humours—y’know, blood, and all that—could get out of balance if your birth aligned strongly with the Moon Court calendar. You know the word “lunatic”?’

‘Yeah . . .?’

‘Well, “Luna” is another word for “Moon”.’

‘Moonatic?’

‘Well, don’t let the cows hear you saying it, but . . .’

That gets the laugh. Then: ‘Is it true, though? About the humours?’

‘Nah. The only people that still think that way are the backwoods Horse types who’ve been breeding in the same cottage since the last millennium and the crackpot thaumatheoreticians you used to hear on the radio who’ve been banned from practising medicine.’

‘Science!’

‘And don’t you forget it.’

I drag myself to my hooves, rolling the sharp taste of the cheese on my tongue one last time. It’ll be a while before we see anything that decent again.

‘Alright, I’m going to go get the ladder put away and organise the shed. You gonna stay here with your book?’

She’s been trying off and on to find us on the maps in her battered little copy of The Royal Gamekeeper’s Almanac, liberated from some abandoned guard station or other outside of Fillydelphia. I know she won’t have much luck, but I don’t discourage her; orienteering is something she needs to learn, even if the best we’re usually going to be able to do is point to the little ‘Here Be Dragons!’ illustrations at the fringes.

‘Yeah, I think so.’ She settles in comfortably, laying the book open before her on the blanket.

‘Don’t get into too much trouble, alright?’

She’s already fully absorbed, and I barely rate a murmured ‘Mhm’ before she’s tracing some river or other east of what used to be Manehatten with her nose. I chuckle a little, and make my way over to the shed, humming gently.

We’d already dragged the ladder back past the vegetable patch while the stove was heating up, so it won’t be too much trouble wrangling the thing back inside. Means we’re square, too, after this morning; all-around win.

I crack the door, nervously awaiting the hail of spiders no doubt preparing to drop on my head. None are forthcoming, however, so I swing the door open to survey the full extent of the damage.

It’s both better and worse than I’d feared: she did, as expected, drag the ladder directly through the neat piles of garbage we’d been planning to go through sometime after the early-summer harvest, but the bigger stuff towards the back is mercifully undisturbed. Making sure to check directly overhead as I do so, I step inside and start kicking a path clear to the wall I’d had the ladder in after yesterday.

It quickly becomes apparent that I’m only going to end up making more of a mess than she did if I don’t start from scratch. It’s the standard arrangement: try to pull the obvious-looking hockey stick, the rake and four other garden instruments go catawampus; grab the hoofball or the croquet mallet and four sacks of seed are all over the floor. One thing leads to another, and suddenly the whole place is a squalid tornado of misery and shame.

I start with the seed-bags, seeing as they’re the heaviest and most likely to exacerbate the existing chaos if ripped. I gingerly stack them outside the door, trying once again to decode the faded pictograph labels. They’ve fallen out of vogue the last ten years or so as the Literacy Reforms really started picking up steam, but it’s not much of a surprise to find them out in the boondocks like this. Lentils, cabbage, tubers, tomatoes, and a half-dozen kinds of fruit acclimated to the northern climes, as well.

It’s still amazing to me that we found this place as well-stocked as we did. We’d always had it figured for a summer home, but the fact that no-one had been hiding out up here, that no-one had come along, well . . . either they were buried under the whispering sands of Manehatten, or they’d been among the poor unfortunates who’d tried to make the trip north to Haliflanks.

I’m just preparing to drag the tangle of sports equipment out onto the lawn when I hear her scream.

No no no no no.

I’ve never moved faster. One moment I’m in the shed, the next I’m halfway back to the house. This can’t be it. This can’t be the one time I let her out of my sight.

She’s scrabbling backward across the grass, almanac forgotten, away from the blanket, away from—

The air hisses out between my teeth. Dark, flat head; tongue tasting the air; hunched and defensive, coiling into that characteristic, springloaded ‘S’. Maybe a hoof’s length that I can see, bobbing on the air like roots in a current. Small, but still well within striking range.

The sword is at my side before I know it, spraying earth and sparks. Everything blurs, miasmic speed and vertigo, as I hone in on the point directly behind its head—the kill-spot. I can see it curling, watch the muscles contract in precise and rhythmic order as it bares its tiny, sharp fangs. Her wings, clamped tight against her body, flare in instinctive alarm as I rush past, and the snake reacts as its tiny angry brain dictates it must.

It lunges the same time I do.

With a roar of rage and surprise, I fumble to turn the overhoof swing into a stab—a pin. The snake snaps wide of me, and the sword comes crashing down like a thunderbolt, driving one hoof, two, three full lengths into the soil, a third of the way down the dark, scaly length.

The snake writhes and twists, hisses and spits, but I leap clear, and all it can do is thrash madly at the air. The damage is done, though, and after a moment, that too is stilled.

I whirl, and grip her by the shoulders. She’s wide-eyed and shaking, her wings at a fearful half-attention, staring past me at the place the snake’s head had been. I drag her further away from the blanket, checking her over for swelling or bites or—

‘Did it bite you?’ I can’t keep the tremor out of my tone, and it rattles her harder still.

‘I—I d—’

I shake her, harder than I intend, my voice rising. ‘Did it bite you?’

‘No!’

And when she looks up at me again, I can see the familiar look she’s never worn back there again—the terror and the rage and the incomprehension, and all of it wells up inside her in the space of a moment, and she bursts into tears. I pull her close, and she doesn’t resist, and in an instant you rush in and I’m home. I rock her, gently, as she wails into my chest. Whispering, to her, to myself. Mari, my baby girl. I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.

‘You killed it,’ she keeps sobbing. ‘You killed it.’

She’s mostly stopped hiccupping one I get her set up with a book and the best approximation of hot chocolate I can come up with—a candy bar melted in boiling water with some honey. It’s too hot out for it, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s just been kind of silently staring at the four walls as I bustle around trying to loudly play house.

Still verbal, which is good. She nods when I tell her I’m going out to check the perimeter, goes back to her book. I lock the door behind me.

Thing’s still lying there where I left it, twitching, nearly bisected. With an effort, I pull the sword free with my teeth and—clumsily—put it out of its misery. It doesn’t even snap at me, just kind of . . . lies there, piteously, shuddering.

I gather up the bits in a bucket, kick some dirt over the stains, and throw what’s left of our lunches out for the magpies. I check the blanket for anything untoward and, finding nothing, toss it on the wash-pile anyway. The contents of the bucket are scattered against the west-facing ward. They spark and hiss where the wetter parts hit them and, with a couple of violet flashes, vanish.

Takes me a couple of tries to get it all on there, and I do my best to spread it out across the breadth of the invisible wall of force, never putting too much pressure on any one spot. The bucket clatters away once I’ve finished.

It’s still somehow only early afternoon, and the sun is in an ideal spot directly overhead. I scour the lawn, looking for any sign, any trace—turned earth, tracks, the discharge of a previous meal. I circle around the back of the house, where it’s coolest, and—yep, there, a couple of yards from the foundation under the high bathroom window.

It’s the little white cottontail I see first, which strikes me as oddly poignant. I turn it over with the shovel I’ve brought, observe the twin blotches halfway down its leg. Definitely poisonous—venomous? I can never keep them straight—then. Didn’t even know we got anything like that this high up. But it didn’t have any of the signs, either, so . . .

Smaller than most I’ve seen, too. Would’ve had trouble getting its head around a decent-sized dormouse, let alone a rabbit four times its weight. I know they’re deadlier when they're young—poison’s more concentrated, or it hasn’t learned moderation, or something.

The rabbit must’ve scared it—come up on it unawares, put it on the back-hoof (so to speak). What would it be doing approaching a snake, though? Everything woodland born knows its predators, soon as it hits dirt out of the womb. Something else, then, something—

I’m seized by a sudden and very uncomfortable idea. Making as much noise as I can in the event we have any more surprise guests, I start sweeping the grass in wide arcs with the shovel. Here and there I’ll bounce off a rock, a partially-emerged root, a solid tuft of turf.

The surprise appearance of the rabbit should’ve tipped me off. The kid said nothing came through the barrier the last time we went out, and it only showed up last night. Even if a rabbit had the wherewithal to skydive off one of the outlying trees, the wards form a solid dome overhead.

Dome.

Not sphere.

The shovel hits the turned earth at an angle, spraying a little over the hole. I scoop it back out quickly, and, after a moment, step back to admire the rather brazen burrow just sitting there in the middle of the lawn. Plain as day, when you come at it from the right angle. Idiot. Of course they’d both shy away from the barrier itself, and of course, the snake would’ve followed the scent down and under, but why the hell would the rabbit tunnel up here?

Could it be one of the ones I frightened yesterday? I know they’re supposed to be incredibly stupid when startled, but even that’s testing the limits of my disbelief. Did it recognise the wards for what they were, think it’d be safer in here? I’d ask Little Miss Fae-Warden to ID it, but, well . . .

Either way, it’s pretty clear what I’m going to have to do, here. Can’t magic the damn thing shut, can’t collapse it, and can’t extend the wards—not today. Can’t dig up the whole lawn, can’t just knock the thing down from above without creating a hole at ground-level for something else to squeeze through.

That leaves one very unpalatable option.

Pyreblight, I am an idiot.

I glance over my shoulder, checking for any anxious little faces at the window. Nothing. Moving swiftly, I take up the stiffening carcass with the shovel and walk it back over to the hole, trying very hard not to inhale, and harder still not to think.

Everything hates the smell of its own dead.

They don’t dig much wider than the little they need to squeeze through.

It’ll fit.

With the last of the loose earth tamped down, it’s practically indistinguishable from any other patch of dirt on the lawn.

The shower does me good, and the clarity it brings with it is surprising, if not unwelcome. Adrenaline maybe; recrimination certainly. Still simmering bitterly away in resentment at my horn and the fumes for spacing me out, even as they themselves begin to dissipate.

I make my way out front to find her huddled on the couch, staring at nothing. A hoof-ful of books are splayed open around her, but her attention seems to be focussed on the pillow clamped tight to her chest. She doesn’t say anything as I move one of the larger books and take up a place beside her, getting my hooves under me. After a moment, though, she leans into me, hard, her cheek pushing into my shoulder.

We sit like that for a long time, as the afternoon slowly reddens to evening: she, cat-like, burrowing into my side; I, alert to every change in the wind, watching the afternoon sky. She jerks a little with every twitch of my ear to the creaks and groans of the old house; the exotic tern-calls echoing weirdly off the cliffs below; the rustle of long grasses in the breeze. Each time I gently shush her, and each time she pushes harder into my side.

The haze I’d noticed earlier is heavier now, and thicker, colouring the air around us with sea-tang and cloying humidity. We’ll almost certainly be getting some rain overnight, and more than likely tomorrow, as well; even considering the general propensity for high-altitude Fug I'd noted earlier in the day, moisture doesn't stick around this long without leaning toward making a whole production of things.

The wards are attuned to ignore water droplets below a certain volume, much as with air, so I at least won’t have to worry about doing any extra layering tonight. As long as everything’s still in place, I can do my usual rounds and . . . well, relax is too strong a word.

Eventually, the light from the setting sun is shining directly in my eye, and I stand briefly to close the blinds. She inhales sharply when I shift, and makes a grab for my leg, but I gently move out of her reach, turn, and settle her comfortably on my back. She wraps her forelegs around my neck in something just short of a chokehold, and, after checking she’s secure, we go from window to window, room to room, and lock up the house for the night.

The seed-bags are drying on the hardwood by the front door, and I step over them gingerly as we make our way outside and do the evening patrol. She’s seen me do it before, and if she reacts at all to the gentle probing light from my horn sweeping over the wards, the grounds, the grass, she doesn’t give it voice. I prefer doing it after she’s gone to bed, just so I can focus on getting it done without the added distraction, but there’s no point in trying for that tonight.

Unsurprisingly, she shakes her head when I ask whether she’s hungry, and by the time we get back to the house, she’s already drooping, and her little grip slackens. Moving with care, I carry her back into the house, bolt and lock the door, and take her to the bathroom. She cleans her teeth sluggishly, dripping a little on my shoulder.

She doesn’t speak again until I’ve tucked her in under a mound of blankets, pale and wan. If I didn’t know better—hadn’t checked every inch of her for a bite she might’ve been concealing for fear of worrying me—I’d almost think it was fever.

‘Hey.’ Her little voice is hoarse.

‘Hey yourself. Do you need anything? Water, snack, painkiller?’

‘Would you stay until I fall asleep?’

‘If you’d like.’

‘Would you—’

‘Would I what, little one?’

‘Would you sing to me?’

The earnestness of it hits me like a crossbow-shot. She hasn’t asked for something like that in years, easily. Books were always the easier companions, and maybe the occasional stuffed rabbit, if it weren’t too moth-eaten. In the earlier days, I’d read to her some nights, sung on others—it was a habit we’d always kept to with Marigold, and it . . . only seemed natural that she get the same. The sheer intellectual rabidity with which she attacked each new subject that piqued her interest seemed to imply that had been the right call.

She’d stopped asking right around the time we first started heading north, and there were always enough other things on my mind that I left that for her to decide. It hurts more than I want to admit that there might have been some measure of comfort in that for her—or might still. I barely remember any of the words, and the horn-fuzz still clouding the edges of my thinking isn’t doing me any favours in that department.

‘It’s okay if you don’t want to.’

Another arrow.

‘No, it—I just need a minute to think of one.’

She blanches. ‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘No, kid. I promise, it’s okay. Been a right arse of a day for the both of us, hasn’t it?’ She joins in for the punchline: ‘But don’t let the donkeys hear you saying it.’

She laughs a little, and I use the opening to cast about for something to sing. The only things coming to mind are the bawdy roundelays we used to belt out after hours at the Dun, and—

Tartarus.

I clear my tightening throat before meeting her expectant little eyes. ‘It’s been awhile since I’ve . . . well, just bear with me, okay?’

She nods, and I begin: humming at first to find the melody, and slowly building into lyrics once I remember how. It’s low, and heavy, and contralto—or at least the best approximation I can manage after nearly half a decade of doing my level best not to think about it:

Somewhere bright across the sea,
Lies the home I know to be,
Green of heath and hill and tree:
It calls to me,
It calls to me.

You left for there one autumn night;
Not fire nor ill nor deathly blight,
Bore you sightless from our sight,
Just the shining light,
Just the sacred light.

Now you walk the foreign shore,
Of the home that I yearn for,
There to stay forevermore,
Past the breakers’ roar,
Past the breakers’ roar.

White mare stands upon green hill,
Braving wind and winter chill,
Waiting long and waiting still,
‘Till you reach that hill,
‘Till you crest that hill.

To your side I’ll someday fly,
Breathless, joyful, and eyes dry:
Softly, wings, and bear me high.
To summer skies go I,
To summer skies go I.

My eyes are wet, but I pride myself on not letting it get further than that. I look down at her again, only to find that she’s nestled in tight around the hoof I used to tuck her in. She looks dead to the world, but her eyelids flutter open when it becomes apparent that the song has ended.

‘You have a nice voice,’ she mumbles thickly, face half-lost in pillow.

I suppress a snort. ‘Thank you.’

‘You do, though.’

‘I did say thank you.’

‘Is it a happy song? You made it sound like it was, but . . .’

I chuckle a little, withdrawing my hoof and myself from the bed. ‘We can get into the specifics of lyric analysis tomorrow, little one.’

‘Okay, but—will the little filly see her family again?’

I pause at the door, fixing my gaze on a point somewhere to the right of her expectant, probing little eyes.

‘Yeah,’ I lie. ‘Yeah, of course she will.’

‘Okay,’ she sighs, before loosing a truly stupendous yawn. ‘Goodnight.’

‘G’night.’

I slide the door gently shut, and lean heavily against it, and slide to the floor myself. Everything I’ve held in abeyance rushes in at once the moment my rump touches wood: the heavy thudding of my horn, the ugliness of the afternoon, and now this. Everything I’d done to distract myself from this morning, last night, you—all of it gone in an instant, and everything comes flooding back, bright and shining-new, playing out for the thousandth time in perfect crystal clarity.

It’s the last night: a crisp, clear evening, and you’re expecting me back from the station. You weren’t there to pick me up, but that wasn’t unusual; the curfew wasn’t in place by then, but they’d restricted unnecessary travel after dark. It was gorgeous out that night, with the wind whispering through the summergreen trees and the little oil lamps painting the dirt-pack roads in soft umbers and heady yellows. It was maybe a quarter hour to our house from the station, and I let myself wander a little.

I remember looking up at the sky, the way we do when we’re all alone with the wind and the night. The moon was a slender, smiling crescent, and things were looking up: no hindbred rutstags giving us grief on the train, and now here, at home—the heady promise of two whole weeks’ leave, and all of it for the three of us. The stars were twinkling very prettily that night, and all of it seemed like it was just for me.

I let myself in through the back, like usual—waited for you, in the kitchen. Your mother was there in the living room with you, screaming at you about sole custody again. I caught a glimpse of you over her shoulder, and you just looked so tired. As if we didn’t have a hundred better things to worry about at the end of the world. We were still joking about that, then.

I don’t know if you saw me, but you told her to go home: the bread line would be opening early that day, and she kept saying she wasn’t getting enough . . .

She stomped out, and I walked in. You didn’t say anything, and you didn’t wait for me to, either. We just . . . touched, forehead to forehead, and when you wrapped your hooves around me I thought I might melt into them forever. You had the best hugs. It wasn’t even fair.

One last squeeze, and you went off to make dinner. I went upstairs, but her door was locked. The bass thrumming out from the little crack between it and the floor made my stomach turn. I knocked, she cranked the thing another notch; I knocked again, louder still. I don’t know if she knew, but you didn’t say anything when I came back downstairs alone.

You did your best with the bean salad, and between that and the little wine you’d kept, it almost felt like a normal night to ourselves. I probably should’ve given more weight to those last few drops sliding out of the bottle; portentous, that’s it. Did the job, though—got us loose enough to go to bed, spend those last delicious hours reminding ourselves we still loved each other.

After we’d showered, long after you fell asleep, and long after even the endless thumping 4-minute cassette-loop had finally, mercifully shut off, I lay there thinking about Marigold, and what we were going to do with the time we had, now that we had it. You’d mentioned she’d become something of a night-owl the last year or so, started hanging out with Those Kids at school.

It struck me that there was still so much I just didn’t know now, even around your very dutiful husbandly letters. Who were her friends? Did she still play with little Apple Sprocket, or giggle at those cat-shaped cupcakes at Sugarcube Corner? Did she still do her mane in the same little asymmetrical bob that the kids in Manehatten were going crazy over a year ago? What did she like? What did she love? What did she want to do?

I remember the little despairing note in my head—how long I’d been away, how many emergencies I’d had to attend to, how little I understood my daughter. It was a strange feeling—carry something in your womb for two-and-a-half seasons, change its diapers, watch the joy in its eyes as it discovers its own limbs, its touch of magic, you think you’ve seen all there is to see.

And the Tartarus of it was, I still couldn’t think of that as a loss. Things had happened, things that I hadn’t been there to see, sure, but—wasn’t that just an opportunity to learn and grow with her again? Wasn’t that what this whole two weeks could be about? To relive, relearn, reconnect?

Did I have the luxury of lamenting the time we had, when half my life was spent cutting short those who’d just as soon do the same to us? To the innocent? To my husband? My child?

And I know—I know it would’ve ended in tears. I know there would’ve been screaming, and fights, and bitter recriminations at my absence. I’m not stupid, and even in my fondest memories of that night, there’s always that little hint of guilt that I didn’t see that coming—too wrapped up in my own selfish glee at being home, in my own bed, with my own family.

On some level, it’s a mercy I was still up to take the call that morning—a wee-hours dispatch from headquarters, calling me back up. They’d had word of this cult out in Hoofwich, I explained to you over a hurried breakfast, and folk were disappearing. This could be a big one—the lead we were looking for, some way to get ahead of whatever had the seers and the Swarm so panicked.

I’m not sure you were awake enough to look properly disappointed, but you were kind—it wasn’t my fault (I knew), you hoped I’d be safe (I would), and that you’d all be there when I got back.

Five days later, a thousand miles away, I felt the World-Tree tear itself to pieces in the Everfree Forest, and for the first time I knew what it meant to really be lied to. And when I walked the glasslands, and found you, and when I walked the camps, and found the intelligence officer presiding ever-so-calmly over the rubble . . .

Him I had to beat until he talked; you’ve never stopped once since.

And when he told me what they’d done—what Dusk and the Six had set out to do—I knew they weren’t to blame. Ponyville wasn’t to blame. We weren’t to blame. Dusk was ours—Ponyville’s, the people’s. She was the last to be raised, and the first to fall; firstborn of mortal blood, and the last borne aloft on goddess’ wings.

And she was bright, and loving, and wise—and she never did anything without her Mother’s knowledge and assent.

Her Mother, who sleeps so soundly in Her golden Egg in a little back-pantry here at the end of the world.

Her Mother, who sleeps so soundly behind the little door against which I lie slumped and sobbing.

III.

Are we more than the sum of our parts?

Kind of a dumb question, on the face of it: unsubtle, vaguely sophomoric, obviously slanted towards the kind of pedantic positivity we used to pride ourselves on. It’s a hallmark of all the wrong kinds of collegiate Canterlot-corner coffeehouse company, smugly stirring a few lumps of moral superiority into their free-trade tea—the kinds of folk you used to accuse me of running with before we sat down and had that shouting match after class.

It has its beauty, though: the more you read into it, the more complex a question it becomes. Define we; define parts. What are we so desperate to be ‘more than’? Get yourself a sparring partner for an afternoon—an evening, as it later became—and it becomes one of the best intellectual chew toys around. Get around the knee-jerk, really sink your teeth into it, and you have a recipe for all kinds of comfortable self-discovery.

Which of course means that somepony had to come along and ruin it by bringing it into the public consciousness.

Few decades back, FlimCorp finally managed to get somepony around the cordon Dusk and Dark had conspired to set in one particular, forgotten corner of the untrammelled Everfree. It wasn’t a particularly nice cave; dank and dark as most are, and lacking in abundance the graven, verdant splendour of the World Tree, or the Long Spire’s dulcet crystal veins. But it was a place of power, and by that late stage, the more conniving entrepreneurial types had learned well the value and profit in such things. Still more so in bottling them up for the public consumption.

The whole flimflammery family of them were big on that: framing themselves as the heroic, down-home sorts standing up to the ‘provincial intellectualism’ of traditional Unicorndom and the ‘stifling bureaucracy’ of the Tetrad to bring “needed innovation” to folk who coveted it most. It was the usual marketable anti-Alicorn poppycock, barely bothering to distinguish itself from flat-out Tribalism, and most knowledgeable folk treated it accordingly. There were suits and punitive court orders galore, and for awhile it was even a popular game to see how much you could win betting against anything the family had a hoof in on the Manehatten Stock Roulette. But, somehow, they always managed to scrape together enough money and popular support in the rural prefectures to keep themselves afloat.

They were never a profitable enterprise—just a stably failing one.

And then they found the Mirror Pool.

Their agent—whoever he was—was tremendously underpaid for the sheer competence he displayed in the field. Dodging multiple cordons, pirouetting past trip-wires and bear-traps and root-snares like they weren’t even there, grinning all the while? The Serpent Himself couldn’t have done it better.

By the time the alarm-wards triggered and the guards went rushing in, he’d already dipped himself enough to hit platoon strength, and he kept right at it as the guard fought unsuccessfully to push the clone-horde back. One stallion—one, albeit many of him—managed to overwhelm an entire regiment of trained Guardsmares and make good his escape. By the time Dusk arrived on the scene, nearly two-hundred black-clad bruisers had boiled out of the cave and into the surrounding forest, crisp leaflets in their pockets and a slick pitch on every tongue.

It took only a few weeks for the clones to be rounded up and dumped back in the pool, but by then the cat was well out of the bag, and the merits of magical cloning were on every tongue. Pub-crawlers and dainty tea-sippers whispered into their steins and saucers, and the corporate rags oozed their characteristic malcontent. Some questioned the morality of destroying these thinking, feeling creatures; others questioned whether they had a financial, or a scholarly, or a reproductive right to the power of the pool. Summons were sent, suits were filed, and FlimCorp rode the wave back into the black—for a time.

I don’t think it’s possible to describe in words the anguished litany of curses that must’ve fallen from Dusk’s lips as she rived that ancient body of unearthly wonder to its constituent enchantments, but a copy of the FlimCorp Certificate of Legal Dissolution hung in pride of place in her archive until the last.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The questions had been asked, the synaptic threshold reached; if the magic—however complex, however unachievable—existed, it could be sought, and could be used again. And for years we argued precedents, argued limitations and reasonableness and authority. Barren mares and wizardlings, sexpots and entrepreneurs: everypony had their day in court, and everypony had their say, and after ten long years of off-and-on deliberation, the Tetrad went ahead and banned it anyway. Too dangerous, and too open to the kinds of abuses we had the least trouble imagining.

Though I suppose, as there always is, there was that niggling little asterisk left somewhere in there, the ‘see me after class’: make a convincing enough case, work in a lab with the appropriate oversight and ethical constraints, and we’ll hoof you the resources ourselves.

I remember you and I talked about it the night the verdict finally came down; the papers had been on pins and needles for days, and the address itself was blaring from every front window open to the piny summer breeze. I was nursing Marigold, and you kept pacing on and off your soapbox.

Surely they’ll see the merits, you said.

They have the experience to know better, I said.

We don’t know how lucky we have it, you said.

I’m grateful for it every day of my life, I said.

You don’t think of anyone but yourself, do you? you said.

You’ll wake the baby, I said.

And then you had nothing to say.

And maybe that’s why I couldn’t help but laugh when she locked gazes with me through the roaring Pyre, when they strapped the ash-blasted bassinet oh-so-gently across my back, and the roiling alloyed Egg beside it.

Did it have a soul? The Tetrad said it did.

Would it grow to be more than a hollow shell? She certainly thought it would.

How did it come to be? Ethical constraints and oversight.

I’d never understood why She, of all of them, never bore any children of her own. She always insisted in the interviews that we—the ponies, the populace—were all She could want in that regard, but of course us dinner-table gynaeco-psycho-sociologists always had theories of our own. Maybe She’d poured all that magic into making the last two; maybe the Dusk and the Dawn were the limits of Her imagination. She always did seem to look at things like that in artistic terms: the philosophic Right; two out, two in; a balance.

Maybe it would’ve left too much left to chance. Mid-life apotheoses you can guide, and choose, and control; the right job to the right pony, another perfectly-tended branch blossoming along the singing, silver-sharp arc of the World Tree. Biology, though? Biology has this nasty habit of turning around and spitting in your face just when you think you’ve got it right. Even with all the care and pre-term fiddling She’d be sure to do, the good stock She’d be sure to slurry in, there was never any guarantee She’d end up with anything but another golden Apostate: another dangerous princeling, another disappointment.

And maybe that’s all it was, in the end. She looked at all her options, all the things that could go wrong, and She decided she didn’t want to. I could respect that. Even when things were at their best, when it was down to a few crazies ranting on the fringes and the worst we had to worry about was arguing politics at the dinner-table, you and I talked about the kind of world we’d be bringing our daughter into—had brought her into. Would she have all the opportunities she deserved? Could we guarantee her health, her safety, her happiness? Even with the school expansion, and the cockle-warm promise of a fresh-off-the-press Princess just across town, two centuries of perfect peace—was it fair?

And in the end, the question we always settled on—the question that always settled us, chuckling into our wine glasses: do we inflict the world on our child, or our child on the world?

As I held her for the first time, tracing the tiny exhalations beneath the swaddling-blankets, feeling the Sun pouring out of the sigil-spires and into my horn—and as I watch her now, bounding in and out of the murky fog-bank ahead of me—I know we always had our answer.

It’s a grey morning; the rain held off overnight, but the haze I’d noted yesterday has grown and thickened into a truly egregious pea-soup. I almost vetoed our trip down the cliffside on that basis alone, but the little expectant eyes I awoke to find peering eagerly over the foot of the bed killed that thought in its cradle.

‘Hey,’ I say, raising my voice to be heard over the thundering falls a quarter-mile ahead of us. ‘I know you’re having fun, but you need to stay close to me from here on, okay? It gets steep around the falls, and I still don’t trust your wings yet.’

She reappears beside me like a little ghost, swathed in mist and morning-dew. ‘Nyeh!’ A little puff of the stuff shoots off her nose to land daintily on her stuck-out tongue.

‘Yes, boo, you got me. Do you understand or not?’

‘Yes. Now can we hurry up?!’ She grins at me again, executing a perfect cartwheel over my head.

‘No, I’m serious. I haven’t been back there since my tour ended. I don’t know what state the place is even in. If you can’t commit, I’ll turn us both around and we’ll spend the entire day in the garden.’

‘But—’

‘Weeding.’

She huffs. ‘I understand.’

‘Good. You can fly ahead to the river, but wait for me at the falls.’

She barely waits for me to finish my sentence, and my entire coat ruffles in the wake of her mach-speed departure. I blow the bangs back out of my eyes, grumbling under my breath, and continue on toward the none-too-distant roar of the river.

It’s slow and careful going, and she returns several times to check up on me before I make it to the bank. The rocky, needle-strewn forest floor—the only certainty in the tidal avalanche of grey—slides by sedately beneath me, and the trees on either side. I’m careful to always keep one of the lush coniferous trunks in view on my left side; they never grow too close to the edge, here, and so I’m in comparatively little danger of accidentally throwing myself to my doom.

The river is wide but shallow: thirty yards or so across, and perhaps a tenth of that deep at its midpoint. The falls it feeds form the point of the sprawling V below; if conditions were better, the Mare’s legs would spread evenly to the north and south from this rumbling, gushing head. The waters themselves are choppy but not unmanageable, and strewn with enough boulders and other detritus carried down from its high-mountain source over the eons to make smooth going for even the least acrobatic of the regiment back in the day.

Was it Redmane or Tiberius who always slipped on the petrified log when we’d run obstacle drills up here? I don’t remember, though they both more than likely had their moments. I’m fairly certain you’ve never lived until you’ve seen a full-grown stallion drag himself out of the water, covered in murkweed and spitting like an alley cat.

Tartarus, who was it? One of them ended up being ‘Swamp-Thing’ for a while.

‘Course, that’s undeniably the pot calling the kettle black at this point: I am, in fact, aging, and there’s no guarantee the old route is even there anymore. One particularly heavy winter, one good run of snowmelt in the last twenty years is all it would take to dislodge a boulder or plumb a mud-caked shallows. And that’s not even getting into the tenuous tree-trunk bridges we used to have to wrangle.

Fortunately for my dignity (and perhaps sanity), our path lies not over the river, but under it. Another trick of camouflage those ingenious sappers came up with however long ago: a narrow path, wending along the cliff-edge and under the lip of the waterfall, charmed and reinforced to withstand the pressure of erosion and mottled perfectly so as to blend in with the slate-grey walls of the valley itself. You’d only know it was there if you happened by while someone was walking along it, and even then it’d look like they were just treading air.

I whistle, and she’s back at my side in an instant. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she had a little of the Bat in her, though I suppose the Bird works just as well.

‘Listen, we’re going to be going down a very narrow path along the cliff. You know how far down the valley the Dun looks from back up at the house?’

She looks at me quizzically. ‘Yeah . . . ?’

‘We’re going to have to walk that whole distance to get down there, and we’re going to need to take it slow. I don’t know how well the rightrock spells have held up since I was last here.’

She groans a little, but touches down behind me.

‘Got your pack? Got the torches ready?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Shield it with your wings, if you can. At least while we’re under the falls, okay?’

An affirming nod. She’s funny, in her small-child way: give her a hundred good reasons why something can’t happen, and she’ll accept about half of them, and even then only with protest; give her one thing to do and she’ll drop everything to get it done, no questions asked.

‘Okay. Stay close, and watch your footing. You have any trouble, you tell me. Something cracks, you fly straight up and land on the cliff. You don’t worry about me.’

A nod, again. It’s hard to miss the look of trepidation, but she doesn’t give it voice and so neither do I.

‘Okay.’

I steel myself for a moment, closing my eyes and feeling for the enchantments. They’re faint—always were—but between the general gloom and the extra layer of mist kicked up by the falls, they’ll be a more reliable guide at the moment than my hooves. Moment by moment, I map the contours from the waterfall back up the ridge, following the little sparks and lines of nascent magic, the familiar glyphs and hallmarks of the anonymous spellweaver who put the thing together. I can almost hear her humming in the rock beneath my hooves.

Ah—there. The last little concavities build themselves up into a path before me, slanting away under the rushing torrent. I make for it, carefully, and she follows along behind.

If we go carefully, it should be about three-quarters’ of an hour walk down, and—accounting for the incline—probably the full hour back. I’m glad we packed lunch.

The worn grey path is stable underhoof, and exactly as I remember it: slippery when wet (and it is) but wide enough that won’t be a problem unless one of us (me) truly goes ass over teakettle.

I open my eyes again as we near the falls proper, passing under a tall overhang. Once upon a time, this part of the path had been conceived as a blind: had the Dun ever been attacked from the cliff-tops or from the sea, spell-snipers and even archers could have been sent to pick off the attacking force from behind the waterfall. As a result, the stone shelf was necessarily wider here—pushed back further into the wall behind the falls for cover and to provide manoeuvring room to larger forces and materiel. Unfortunately, it seems that someone forgot to reinforce the overhang as well as they did the path, and what used to be dry ceiling has crumbled away to let the river in, slicing the mist and fog like icy daggers.

Architects.

I sigh. Wasn’t really expecting to get started so early today, but . . .

‘Hey. Gonna need you up on my back for a minute, okay?’

She looks up from the little sparkling oil-bubble rivulets the water forms as it slides across the enchanted rock. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m going to need to shield us from the falls, and I can only extend the field so far.’

It’s a simple spell, but as yesterday and my still-clenched jaw will attest, even that isn’t a guarantee these days. My horn feels less like exploding after a night of . . . well, emotionally-drained sleep, if not strictly restful, but I don’t really plan on pushing myself any harder than I absolutely have to today.

Leisurely, that’s it. A leisurely walk into an abandoned military outpost that probably hasn’t been touched in the last decade. What could be simpler?

She hops up without further prompting, huddling between my shoulder-blades. Once I’m sure she’s secure, I step forward, horn awash in refracted rainbow glow. The waterfall slips around us in a hazy sphere, tracing the edges of the field I’ve set around us: a drumbeat of droplets, gentle as they are plentiful against the dome, against the inside of my head. It’d be wonderful if it weren’t so damn cold: rain on tarpaulin, the showerhead massaging the back of your neck.

I can hear the gentle intake of breath from behind me; can almost see her eyes shining in the soap-bubble reflection of the field. She’ll have so many questions later.

For my part, I’m having to actively focus on my footing—the wet rock glides mercilessly underhoof, and while the blind is wide enough we’re not as much at risk of a long and ugly tumble, a sprain or a bruised flank will put us off the day just as easily.

Was this always so hard? One careful hoof in front of the other, even strides, even as my knee creaks and my hooves slip ever so slightly, step by step. I used to do this in full patrol-plate, girded and armed—is one little bird-boned filly and a double-sack of provisions really all it takes to—

And then we’re through, and I hear her gasp aloud.

I’ve said more than once that this place feels like the end of the world—the great salt-sure expanse marking our eastern border, the sharp and sudden cliffs dipping down to it, the silence. But the atmosphere plays as much of a role in that as anything else: at this altitude, at this far of a remove from any weathermakers’ guild or seasonal schedule, the clouds have minds of their own, and twist in gorgeous and unearthly ways along their myriad courses.

The fogbank we’ve descended from fills the sky above us, dark and grey and thick as sharp-cut buttercream. Below, lapping along the walls, another, roiling slightly where the waterfall cuts through it, like the sea has risen three hundred yards and bloomed to cotton surety. Layer cake again, or perhaps the flat plane between two mirrors: the space between is smooth and even and bright with the refraction. Crystal clear, for all the haze that surrounds us; pristine infinities stretching to the dual horizon even as the world resolves to the narrow path we walk along it.

We stand there for a time, savouring, before I feel her slide wordlessly off my back to peer into the silvery depths below. Not that I can blame her: my own spine tingles with the familiar electric glee of experience. Where else in Equestria could you hope to see something like this? In what other time could you have hoped to catch a glimpse of it alone, and hold the ownership of it in your breast? All the same, I murmur a few words of gentle reproachment, and she scurries back from the edge to follow me again.

We continue our walk in silence, wending our way along the path, along the rippling, breathing cliff-face. The ocean of clouds rises and tumbles below; the iceriver sky above stays and echoes and refracts. Any closer, sandwiched tighter, and we’d see the ghosts of this place walking along beside. Wintermute and Whitefeather, Sandy Banks and Skylark Stele, armoured and free-coated, welcoming and reproving, familiar cries of greeting echoing on the wind.

And then my hoof scuffs on the rough-hewn cobble, and we’re there. The wide dead doors of the Dun yawn cavernously on the right, and the empty courtyard whispers with the sense of things long-gone and never-there.

I can feel it rushing in, the stillness between two flat planes—the weight of it. Everything whirls: the thick-cut pavers underhoof, the long low wall, the sea, the sky, the grey, the Dun. Peripheries and borders, like celestial spheres, slowly closing in. And there in the centre, me, revolving slowly, little fresh graduate in her big mare’s world—merry-go-whirlwind in my little shrinking snowglobe.

She cuts through the fog, flittering beside me; I don’t remember her going. I don’t meet her gaze—I can’t stomach the look of understanding I’m sure I’ll find there.

Another look, a proper one this time. The courtyard is as it ever was: the inlaid whorl of cobbles, spiralling out from the centre like a Vendragon stone-garden; the stone benches shorn from the low walls at the periphery, scuffed by the passage of many hooves and satchels, whetstones and lunch-trays. The great doors, hewn from the living rock—one still stands a stony sentinel; the other lies in pieces, spilled along the floor of the foyer beyond like so much forgotten clod dragged in after a rain.

The state of things had never been in question. If anyone had been living here—if I’d even suspected any of the old garrison might still be out here . . .

. . .

It’s one thing to know the old house is empty but for the dust; it’s always another to walk those halls again, and know they’ve joined a thousand others in that final stillness, that—

‘Come on,’ I say, hoarsely, and that’s all I let myself have.

She follows close beside as I step through the weathered crack-stone archway. It’s pitch-dark within—not helped by the general dourness of the morning, but also confirming for me that the various crystal capacitors we’d kept around the place have finally run down. Without the ambient magic of proximate Life to sustain them, so many of our little contrivances have guttered out their last; only fitting that the lights would share the same fate.

As I usher her inside, and prepare to start lighting the torches we’ve brought, my ear turns to a faint plip from the courtyard without. A few seconds later, another follows, and then another, and by the time I’ve dug my head back out of the pack slung over her back, we’ve descended into a full-on drizzle. I grit my teeth silently. With luck, it’ll clear up before we have to leave; the path back up the canyon is hazardous enough without the added joy of rain slicking the rock the whole way back.

I hoof her one of the torches—a shambolic little thing of dead branches and alcohol-doused rags. ‘Hold this against the door.’

She does so, and I strike the villa’s hearth-flint sharply against the stone beside it. There’s a spark, and a flash, and she starts visibly as the rag goes up. I smile a little to myself; still got the trick for that down at least, though what I wouldn’t give to be able to spare the oil for a lantern . . .

‘Thanks, scamp. Here, pass it over.’

She looks incredibly grateful to be rid of the torch, and I lift it high before turning to her again. ‘We’ll hold onto this one until we find a junction, and light another then if we need to.’

She looks nervous. ‘Don’t you know what it’s like in here?’

‘The layout, you mean? Yes, but there’s no guarantee there hasn’t been a collapse or a blockage somewhere.’

I may be overstating things. Even at its busiest, the Dun wasn’t much larger than a Whinnypeg office block, end to end—maybe a couple hundred yards square, and cut just far enough into the cliff to be liveable without obliging some architect to really bother lifting a hoof—but it was full of blind corners and oddly-placed load-bearing columns that made orienting yourself that little extra bit weird. Even if everything’s still as it was back when I left, it’d be wise to set up checkpoints along the way before we start getting as far back as the smithy or the kitchens.

She kicks up a little cloud of dust as I lift the torch higher and try to get my bearings. Before us, the hall stretches out of sight beyond the range of our little makeshift light; to our immediate left, flush with the door, the empty guard-post; to the right, an expanse of graven wall. The crystal-lamps, as I had surmised, are dark, their little refractive-quartz hearts long since stilled by the lack of any latent magic to draw from. I can perhaps see the stirrings of humming white life in one or two along the nearest wall, but that might just as easily be a reflection of the torch in my upraised hoof. Over everything else lies the thick grey cladding of accumulated dust, and in places, the self-same sea-rime that had claimed bits of the ladder and some of the metal fixtures around the house.

If memory serves, the main hall ran almost the full length of the muster and the barracks. Two sets of barracks, by the end: that latter addition had been the storage space they’d converted just before I left, just on the other side of this wall. That space—what we’d laughingly called the ‘walk-in closet’—had fed into the communal showers, and the other further down towards the rec room and kitchens, which themselves shared a wall and a chimney with the smithy. Everything else from there—the store-rooms, the officers’ quarters, the shrines, the places I’d never really had much reason to go—were something of a question mark.

The kitchens, the stores, and maybe the smithy if we had the time and room on our backs; everything else was strictly discretionary. I’m fairly well-stocked on the weapon front, so depending on what we can find in the way of dry stores and seed, we may be out of here quicker than I thought.

Hoped?

What was I doing here?

‘Hey, do you see that?’ Her whispered question startles me from my reverie.

‘Hm?’

‘There, at the end of the hall.’

I follow her hoof, squinting against the darkness. I’d be surprised if there’s something I’d missed, but you always used to say Marigold had better night-eye than the two of us put—

I feel my heart stop, then leap into my throat with a sickening lurch. There, thirty yards or so down the corridor, just before the T-junction leading to the stairs: two tiny, flickering embers, burning yellow-gold in the uneven light of the torch. There’s no way—it has to be a trick of the light, a reflection off of some brass reinforcing-plate on one of those damnable columns.

There was nothing to feed them out here. Even if the garrison had stayed until the last, beyond and past the Pyre—it couldn’t be.

Could it?

‘’Sblood,’ I hiss. ‘Stay behind me—stay close—and get ready to run if I tell you.’

I feel her fall wordlessly into position behind me, even as the familiar prickling shudders up and down my spine. I haven’t brought a sword with me, just the little utility knife I use for digging open locks and the gutted wood of old chests. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here; there wasn’t anyone that was supposed to know.

They never liked the light, but the fact that it’s just—sitting there, crouched low along the ground, those self-same eyes motionless, glittering.

I barely breathe, pressing myself and the little one flat up against the wall of the guard post. Slowly—carefully—I pull another torch from my satchel, and brush its ragged tip against the other. The flame sputters wildly in the dusty air, rising up hot and bright against the druidic whorls adorning the walls. With only the barest hint of magical thrust to aid my throw, I heave the second torch as far down the hall as I can.

It comes to rest, as I thought it would, directly at the hooves of whatever low-slung horror is waiting for us at the end of the hall.

The torch gutters as it hits the ground, but flares up again just as quickly, to reveal—what? A loose collection of chitinous plating, heaped where it had fallen; the glassy husks of many-lensed eyes, staring blankly; the glittering points of a dozen-odd broken bolt-heads protruding from its side.

A Changeling, and a very dead one, at that.

I breathe out a sigh of relief and exasperation. ‘It’s alright, kid. Good eye, but false alarm.’

She peers out from around me, looking tentatively from me to the Changeling and back again. ‘Are we sure it’s dead? It’s not going to—’

‘No. Look around the floor there. See the blood? And the fire isn’t running from it.’

‘Good.’ She nods, fervently, but I can feel the shiver run through her as she hugs my hind leg. ‘But what about the Changing? Didn’t you say they were all way far away?’

‘Out west, yeah. Don’t worry, we’re going to figure out what he was up to.’

She’s not wrong; last we’d heard, the few remaining boils had thrown in their lot with the Crystal City garrison—something about the Heart having birthed their Dead-Queen. Everypony had kind of scratched their heads at that, but word was they were as vicious in their defence of the Dawnspire as they ever were squaring off against the Guard, so I doubt anyone was really complaining.

As to what our late friend was doing back here? Frankly, who knows. With the Lusting Gestalt—their sanity and guiding light—gone, a lot of them just went feral, roving across the continent. You’d hear a ghost-story now and then, maybe the local constabulary would get a call, but they were never much more threat to the outlying townships than a timberwolf or a lost Ursa-Fae cub. Rumour had it that with the hive-mind broken, some of the individual personalities were starting to reassert themselves; maybe they’d served here, in life, and felt some call to return; maybe it was one of my old bunkmates.

Can’t say I’m the biggest fan of the theory, but . . . still, better than the alternative.

Moving a little closer, I can’t say that anything I’m seeing really sets him apart from other bugs I’ve run across—none of the maroon “officer” barding, none of the extra horns their equivalent of casters would grow—and nothing to distinguish him as somebody I’d have known. They say you’re supposed to be able to recognise their faces; maybe that’s supposed to be some kind of comfort. Personally, I’ll take the uncertainty.

The shots, though—too many and too evenly-scattered to have come from a single crossbow, even in quick succession; that much I can tell even from this distance. Probably some kind of jury-rigged defensive measure he’d been too addled or too careless to notice. I can think of a few ponies off-hoof who’d be up to something like that—for better or worse, I was probably one of them.

Just to be safe, I do a quick sweep of the halls with my horn: nothing magic-based, as far as I can tell, and none of the tell-tale holes-where-magic-should-be that accompany the average stealthing-hex. Mechanical, then, if there’s anything left to be tripped. We’ll need to be careful.

I watch her out of the corner of my eye as I scan. If the state of the body rattles her at all, she doesn’t show it; she seems more curious than anything. The usual gears are turning, the usual connections being made, and I can predict with uncanny exactness the spots her eyes will be drawn to, the particular plates she’ll run a hoof over. There’s a kindness to the motion as she slides the poor sod’s eyes closed.

It’s safe to let her touch, distasteful as it might be; he’s been dead long enough even the characteristic stink of their insectile ichors has receded. That, and the peculiar resistance of his ilk to disease, means there’s little chance of anything even being there to pass on. Their biology, so finely-honed to the spread of their own pestilence after two thousand years’ careful tending, permitted no contention: can’t have your horde losing bodies to plague, and can’t have inventive minds weaponising plague against you.

She’ll still need to wash up before she puts anything in her mouth, of course, but that’s nothing if not a given with her. Fastidious. So many damn words I’d forget if not for her.

She draws level with me as I finish my sweep, pressing hard into my side for a moment in a gesture of solidarity and—perhaps—protectiveness. Mine won’t end up like that, or something like it. I return the sentiment, leaning a little into her little shoulder before turning to face her again.

‘Alright, it looks like things should be pretty quiet, but we’re going to need to keep an eye out for mundane traps. Remember that old coot we had to deal with in the woods? Outside Pittsbull?’

She nods, clearly not savouring the memory any more than I do.

‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing to be on the lookout for. Bolthead bombs, bowrigs, wires, loose tile or turned earth—you know the drill. We’ll scout nice and slow, room by room, use light early and often, just like we did up at the house. Any questions?’

She shakes her head, then frowns at the carcass beside us.

‘Are you sure he was the only one?’

I sigh. ‘No, but since we’ve been sitting here talking and they haven’t come screaming out of the walls for us, I’d say it’s a safe bet that anyone else here is dead, gone, or indisposed to attacking us on sight. Be good for us if there were, though—might have set off a few more of the traps.’

She studies me for a moment, nods. ‘Okay.’

‘Any objections to starting with the bunks? Figure that’ll be quicker than the kitchens.’

‘No, that’s fine. Are they closest?’

‘Yeah, a little way back down the main hall.’

‘Okay.’

She falls in behind me, and we head back down the corridor in the direction we’d come, tracing our hoofsteps back through the dust.

The bunk-rooms are almost perfectly preserved, but for the accumulated grime. Every mattress has been stripped, and the moth-eaten cairns of neatly-folded bedding on each of the row of side-tables attests to the orderliness of the retreat. All the personal effects will have been cleared out, then: they were abandoning the position, and no matter what anyone might have told them, by the time we started recalling the border forces, we knew we probably weren’t coming back.

‘Hey.’ Again she cuts through my reverie. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? You’ve been really quiet since we got here.’

‘I’m—yeah. Just mulling.’

‘Mulled any traps?’

‘Probably not in here, no,’ I reply, shaking myself a little. ‘But just to be safe, let’s give it a once-over with the torch anyhow.’

A pair of sconces flanks the opening onto the main hall, their dull crystal lamps reflecting only the flicker of the burning rag. With some effort, I slip off the housing and swap it out for the torch. The crystal disappears into my saddlebag, and another torch flares to life in my hoof as I touch the rag to its mate.

The uneven light is little comfort in a room this size; the musty corners are still swallowed in cavernous darkness, and only the faintest glisten here and there along the high ceiling marks the cobwebs no doubt wafting there. Fortunately, a quick search reveals no tripwires or other signs of traps. It does make sense: with the official word being that the place would ultimately be regarrisoned, the barracks would more than likely be the first stop for future deployments. Let the troops get their packs off, give them a chance to settle in, and then start having them disarm the improvised popguns and rivet-mines.

I chuckle a little at that, and an inquisitive head turns back my way, but I wave her off. There isn’t much to see here—the beds are stripped, the trunks are open and empty, and the showers are dry and barren—but as we wander through the long rows, I notice that characteristic furrow beginning to show through her mane again.

‘Something up, scamp?’

‘I—hmm.’ She purses her lips at the nearest neatly-carved wall. ‘Why—no, never mind.’

‘No, go on.’

‘Well—I guess I don’t understand why they made the walls all pretty. It was only soldiers stationed here, right? And underground? Isn’t that a little . . .’ —she struggles for the word— ‘. . . not necessary?’

That gets a bemused chuff from me. ‘This from the girl who’s been living in a very fancy housefor the past few months?’

‘Ohhhh.’ She sticks out her tongue. ‘See? I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.’

I laugh. ‘No, it’s a fair question. It struck me when I first showed up, too—you can see more of it out in the hall. If I had to guess, well—even soldiers need to feel like they’re at home, right? You’re already stuck out in a rabbit warren at the edge of the world—shouldn’t you feel at least a little like it was built with you in mind?’

‘But isn’t carv—carving? stone kind of a big deal? Like, it’s not as easy as drawing a picture or something, right?’

‘Well,’ I demur, poking my nose into the second set of showers and finding nothing for my trouble but a centipede the size of my hoof that disappears down the nearest drain as soon as the light hits it. ‘I guess it depends on the artist, right? There’s a lot you can do by horn if you’re already trained. I think I remember someone saying that the rock around here was pretty easy to work, too.’

Another huff. ‘Unicorns have it so lucky.’

‘Ah, don’t worry—if you really want to learn, I’m sure we can find you a rock-hammer or something to get started.’

‘And books?’

‘And books.’

She immediately perks up. ‘Hey! Is there a library here? Can we go look at that next?’

I lead the way back out into the main hall, adopting my best Ponyville hayseed accent. ‘Heh—naw, we weren’t that excitin’ out here, bucko. Jess’ maps an’ dirty dishes ‘n back.’

‘Aw.’ Visible deflation.

‘But, that said, if there’s anything left over in the officers’ quarters, I’ll let you have first crack at ‘em. How’s that sound?’

‘Yay!’

I have to catch her by the tail as she goes zipping past me down the corridor.

The next few rooms have been scoured as thoroughly as the barracks; the guard-post is empty but for a single, salt-eaten wooden stool, and the most exciting thing in the muster is the sandbag training dummy. ‘Mr Smiley’, we used to call him, and he almost got his head taken off as the goofy chalked-on grin loomed out of the darkness at me in the dim torchlight. The weapon-racks are fairly dire, too: only a hoof-full of second-rate spears, axes, and a very dented iron hammer. Everything else must’ve walked out with the garrison.

The only item of real interest is the ballista tucked away in the far corner nearest the guard-post. It’s a monstrous thing, easily two or three yards across at the cams, and probably twice that in length, and in obvious disrepair: the limbs are buckled and uneven, and the tensor-cables have all but rotted away. Even if I could string the thing back together, I’d need to make two or three trips just to get the whole assembly back up the cliffside.

Besides, what exactly would I do with it? Nail the passing wildlife? These bolts were meant for dragons, for skies’ sake—they’re as big around as cherry-trunks. And as comforting as the promise of friendly artillery is to any soldier, there are only so many wolves and snakes one can reduce to a fine mist before it starts to lose its amusement value. I think the little one would object in any event.

Passing by the great doors out onto the patio, it’s evident that the rain has no intention of abating any time soon; the steady patter and dribble of drops along the wide stone platform is equal parts familiar and aggravating. There’s plenty for us to do here, and plenty of time in which to go about it, but that nagging part of me that’s developed so acutely this last couple of years yearns to be back inside my well-shielded oil-slick cocoon of enchantments and comfortable paranoia.

She, on the other hoof, is quite clearly making herself at home down here. After the initial scare, and a single stern reminder about tripwires, she’s found herself—in order—diving excitedly under the beds in the barracks to hunt dust-bunnies (she’d apparently forgotten the distinction until I reminded her); trying in vain to lift a horn-axe; and holding an animated, sotto voce conversation with Mr Smiley when she thought I wasn’t looking.

For whatever it’s worth, I did politely pretend I wasn’t. It’s . . . well, it's reassuring to see her back up to her usual standard of bounciness, especially after this last few days. She’ll always have the Pyre in her eyes, but that spark still needs tending. Only risk is carelessness, and that’s what she’s got me around for, right?

Right.

. . .

I know. It’s the same look I catch her giving me from time to time—beyond calculation, beyond knowing, wanting.

She’s found one of those beautiful plumed parade helmets in a back cupboard while I’ve been surveying the artillery. It’s comically oversized, of course, and it rattles around her head like a Nightmare Night rat-skull lantern. As the heavy visor slides down over her eyes for the fifth time in the last minute, she asks me excitedly if I ever used to wear one of these—beams when I chuckle out my assent. I lift it over her head, careful not to let the cobwebby straps get caught in her mane, and brush the dust out of the beautiful purple-pink colonel’s plume. She sits back on her haunches, enraptured, as I explain the meaning: rank, stature, heraldry, royalty, godliness.

Bitter. That’s a word. And all the worse because I’m aware of it.

It would be so easy to fault her for it. It would be so easy to fault myself for recognising it. Knowing I’ll never hold my baby girl again, knowing that for all the cavorting, all the eager questions and the attentiveness and the hard work she puts in, she’ll never be the little filly we used to chase giggling through the White Tails after the autumn runners, or drag out of the fights she’d picked with the big mean boys at school.

It was never hard to fault myself for wanting her to be.

I can’t—I don’t have the luxury of indulging this. Not now, not when there are monsters and traps and skies know what else afoot, here in this dusty little memory at the edge of the world. And I know this isn’t getting better; the last few days have been proof enough of that. The more time I have to think, the less imminent the danger, the more I wander.

And that’s the real Tartarus of it, I know: if it were just as simple as lying down and relaxing for an hour, a day, finding someplace safe enough for both of us to let those walls down, I could almost—almost—see myself doing it. But so long as we’re still on the road, so long as there’s still a duty of care to be done, I still get to be of two minds about this. Just as with the horn, my magic, slipping.

And all the worse because I’m aware of it.

I take a steadying breath as I slide the helmet into my bag. Useless in a stand-up fight (of course), but gold is worth its weight in rations if we should chance to meet an entrepreneurial sort on the road between this house and the next. And if all else fails, it’s a good conductor for magic—assuming I can find a way to slag it down into proper filament, I could probably wring another two or three hours per casting out of the wards, assuming I could find the right runic arrangement.

She’s standing impatiently by the door, sneaking what I suspect she thinks are surreptitious glances at the chitinous husk mouldering at the far end of the hall. I don’t keep her waiting long.

The T-junction and the length of corridor leading to the kitchens are mercifully free of traps, though I do find the device that caught the Changeling: little more than a tin of black powder and arrowheads, as surmised. I pull her behind the adjoining wall, warn her to cover her ears, and roll the tin down the length of the junction—two more thundering pops, in quick succession, and we’re home free. I admire the delicate patterns the barbed points make in the dusty walls as we pass; cold-iron constellations, flickering with reflected light.

It’s a fleeting comfort. Even as I guide her to the kitchens at the far end of the rightmost branch, the sickly-sweet stench of rot assails the both of us, overpowering—we can write off the fruit preserves, then, and maybe more. The little one gags audibly beside me.

‘Oh, eww,’ she groans, looking at me with undisguised distaste. ‘This smells worse than that house outside Manehatten. Could I have a bandanna, please?’

‘One step ahead of you, kiddo,’ I murmur, halfway through my saddlebags. I’d made her wait outside that house, and I’m still damn glad of it. ‘Pink again?’

‘Yeah.’

I keep a half-dozen kerchiefs and sundry-cloths in the bottom of my saddlebag for exactly this sort of thing. Cotton-mix is just about ideal for our purposes—warm in the winter, cool in the summer, moisture-wicking enough for sweat and thick enough when soaked to keep the worst smells out. They used to sell these things by the bushel at every gift shop and grocer’s stand from here to San Palomino, so even when one inevitably does start falling apart, there’s two-score standbys in hoof’s reach.

She does hers up deftly, dabbing water from the canteen across the muzzle; I do the same with mine. It’s a little musty, and the excess damp dribbles clammily on my chest, but the rancid pall wafting out of the kitchen is abated somewhat.

‘Ready, my little bandito?’

‘Mhm!’ She beams at me from behind the floral pink print.

Alas, it was more than just the preserves. Whatever the garrison didn’t pack for the road, the rats appear to have made quick work of in their absence: grain-sacks torn, seed-packs scattered and gnawed-upon. A dozen carelessly-placed mousetraps—some sprung, some still occupied—litter the floor near the far wall

And as for the preserves? Of the four casks I can see from the doorway, at least two have split and are weeping a sickly, pale-pink mush coating the rough-hewn tile from stove to pantry. A thousand-thousand pale somethings writhe in the cracks where they’ve pushed the staves apart—the idiots didn’t even bother to air-seal them properly before they left.

‘Damn.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘Yeah. Do you see the—’

‘Oh.’

‘Yep,’ I sigh. ‘Goat-skulled morons, the lot. Come on, this place is shot.’

‘Was there something you really wanted to find in there?’

‘Well, there was this one cooper who really knew his way around a peach . . .’

I tell her the story as we round on our heels and make for the smithy—Cobbler’s ranch background, a little of what he’d shared with us about his family and the longstanding feud with the prominent families of Ponyville. He was a sniffy sort, and probably a poorer fit for the Guard than he or his family would’ve ever admitted, but damned if he couldn’t whip up a gourmet dessert out of nothing but fruit and reconstituted flour. It seems to distract her well enough.

The smithy is connected to the kitchen by a shared hearth, so it's still masks-on in here. Fortunately, however, it seems to be in much better repair than its neighbour—the in-progress jobs are neatly stacked on the several low stone workbenches lining the walls, and several buckets of scrap-iron scattered throughout. I nose carefully through the buckets, picking out a few of the choicest bits of scrap. There’s plenty there that’s free of rust, and a quick sniff at the bandanna suggests the smith was generous with his oil. Somepony around here could be counted on to do his damn job, at least.

That would suggest that the forge is likely in pretty good condition too. I briefly consider bringing the thing back online—at least long enough to work on some of the weapons here, or those we’ve sequestered back up at the house—but, no. Even assuming the rats hadn’t completely blocked off the chimney, the smoke would (and always had been) a dead giveaway. It’s a shame, though—there’s plenty here that we could use. I grab a couple of spare whetstones, make a few mental notes in case we ever end up finding ourselves down here again, and lead the way back into the hall.

There are no traps along the other arm of the cross-hall, save one about halfway down its length—a thin, well-oiled length of piano-wire, roughly neck-height, and taut as bowstring. I can see the little one’s eyes go wide as I oh-so-carefully cut the thing down.

That leaves the shrine, and the officers’ quarters upstairs. I’d never had much cause to find myself in either, really; there were plenty of avid practitioners among the soldiery (and I personally still think Whitefeather was a closet Luminate, with the way she’d go on about Ascension), but I kept my head down on that front as well as I did with the upper crust.

I sweep my hoof around the door, but—no, nothing. The solid oak glides gently along its hinge as I push, the familiar runic relief swirling cool and smooth under my hoof. I know if I stopped here long enough I could trace the whorls as easily as the spiralling pavers outside—the same door, always, from here to Vanhoover. Every shrinelet, every cathedral I’ve ever set hoof in, ever seen blown to smithereens by a mad-eyed cocksure prophet bore the same mark.

Welcome friends.

It’s a small and cluttered room that greets me as the door bumps softly off the wall. Nothing grand or ornate—no ethereal beam of watery light pouring in from a convenient crack in the high stone ceiling, no poignant, scattered ornaments of forgotten spirituality. Four little altars at the corners, four cramped pews facing them, and a small dry fountain filling the space between. It’s dark, and dusty, and perhaps a little forlorn in the flickering light of the fresh torch I drop into the bracket by the door, but otherwise well-tended. Even the tale-tapestries along the altars seem to have escaped the worst of the cavern mildew, and shine with their usual rich weave of thread and minute gems.

I hesitate on the threshold.

The door, the torch—reflex action. A quick sweep for traps, a quick stock of provisions, soldier and scavenger, again and again, as I would for any other room in any other garrison in any other corner of the world. Flickering in the dim light, caught in tableau: one hoof flung wide out to hold back the little one, one held high with torch or sword or timeworn tool. That was never the hard part.

What am I doing here?

The little one, who’s been craning desperately over my shoulder for a better look, ducks under my outstretched hoof and trots a few paces into the room, pulling down her bandana. She turns this way and that, eyes wide, taking in every part of the dusky space—the altars, the elegant fountain, the busts. A whispered ‘wow’ is all she can manage.

It’s enough. I follow her in, haltingly, and swing the door softly shut behind us. The torch burns bright in the sepulchral space, in the churning chasm behind her eyes.

‘What is this place?’ she murmurs, turning around and around and around.

‘A shrine.’

‘What’s that?’

The words almost won’t come. My eyes are fixed on one of the busts—the golden one, phoenix-wreathed, beatific. ‘A place ponies would come to be close to the Sisters.’

‘Their sisters?’

‘Sorry—the Tetrad. It’s another name for the Four.’

‘Ohh.’ Her forehead wrinkles slightly, trying to follow my gaze. ‘But—they were there, right? Way back when, all they had to do was go and talk to them. Wait . . .’

Her eyes light up. ‘Ohhh! I get it! These heads were magical, right? The sisters could talk through them any time they wanted! That’s so c—’

‘No.’ I don’t mean to cut her off, but it’s that or choke. Hate. ‘They were just ponies, after all. As good as they were, they couldn’t be there for all of us at once. They had to raise the sun and the moon, govern their lands, eat, sleep—all the things we’ve talked about. So if someone—a soldier—felt lonely, or worried, they could come here and . . . ask for help, or guidance. Or comfort.’

‘So they couldn’t speak through the heads, but—could they hear?’

‘Plenty of folk thought so, yeah.’

A pregnant pause.

‘Did you ever—’

‘No.’ Still too quick. Damn it.

‘Oh.’ She fidgets a little. ‘Well, um—would it be okay if I asked for help? For—’ She swallows, trying to read my face. ‘For both of us?’

I blink, very hard, lean down, touch my forehead to hers. ‘Of course you can.’

She relaxes into me instantly, a rattling exhale shaking her tiny frame. I let her choose when to break the embrace.

She does, eventually; looks around, sniffling a little. ‘So, um. Which of the Sisters are still alive?’

I point to the corners nearest the door—to the polished obsidian bust, stern and unwavering; to the coral, eyes alight with laughter and love. She nods, squares her shoulders, and trots past me towards Dawn.

I leave her to it, taking a moment to sneak a look behind the fountain and the other shrines. A few small coins are scattered around the base of the fountain, and a small, tasteful bouquet of dried flowers has been laid on Dusk’s altar, but beyond that there’s very little of value here. Should probably have expected that.

When I turn back around, she’s clambered up onto one of the pews, looking helplessly over her shoulder at me.

‘I don’t—I don’t know what I’m supposed to do? Is there something you’re supposed to say, or—’

I am not the pony for this.

I stand there for a moment, then falteringly make my way over to the fountain and settle on the rim closest to her pew. ‘Well—Tartarus, kid. What do you want to ask?’

‘That we, uh—well, that we’re safe, y’know? And that there’s lots of food and shelter and books to read, and—’ She studies me for a moment, lost. ‘And that—that we’re okay, y’know?’

‘We’re always okay, kiddo.’

‘But forever, though.’

‘Well—’ I bite my lip, change tack. ‘Mm. As I understand it, there’s nothing you really need to say. You just . . . talk. Out loud or in your brain. Like—like wishing on a star, right?’

I’m grasping, but it seems to take; she frowns, but nods. ‘Thanks.’

‘Any time, scamp. Do you—do you want me to stick around, or . . .?’

‘No, it’s okay. Did you want to check upstairs? I can come join you when I’m done.’

A moment’s hesitation. Then: ‘That works. Just keep the door shut until you’re ready to come up?’

She nods emphatically. ‘Mhm! Don’t worry, I’ll be safe.’

I ruffle her mane. ‘Alright. See you in a minute.’

‘Okay!’

A smile forces its way onto my lips as I rise and slide carefully behind the pew towards the door. I cast one last look over my shoulder at her—at the bust rising behind her, eyes glittering in the flickering torchlight.

--maybe we’ll both get what we want.

I roll the echo on my tongue a moment, watching as she settles into the bench: a little pale dust-bunny with a little pink scarf wrapped around her neck. Then the door is gliding shut behind me, and the stairwell looming darkly ahead.

It’s not a long escapade, unfortunately. Something gave—or, more likely, detonated, considering the state of our Changeling friend down the hall—in the ceiling along the upper floor, burying it and the upper part of the spiralling stairwell in its wake. The rest of the structure is sound enough that I’m not worried about it collapsing on our heads, but just the same, it’d probably be best if we didn’t stick around too much longer.

Is it a loss? Possibly. As far as I know, the records-room was up there alongside the officers’ bunks, but beyond some general strategy documents and the locations of a few local emergency stashes, there’s likely not much we missed. Maps we have aplenty, and I’m familiar enough with the local geography to get us past the mountains again if we need to.

That’s what I tell myself, at least. There’s always the niggling little worm of a doubt that there’s a magical flying spear buried under the rubble up there, or one of those magic endless tablecloths our favourite fairy tales used to bang on about, but there’s no point frustrating myself (or my stomach) with indemonstrables.

The little one isn’t finished yet, which gives me some . . . time. Not the most valued of commodities at the moment, I’ll admit—too much chance of another wander, especially given what I know is lurking on the other side of that door.

Ugh. Too many memories, and none of them pleasant. I forcibly push them aside, pulling open my bag and—belatedly—pulling down my own ragged bandana. The sepulchral must of the place sweeps into my nostrils again, familiar as discomfiting, and after a moment, settles into the background. I shrug off the saddlebag, and poke through it in search of a reasonable distraction, focussing firmly on the dim contents of the bag.

After a brief shuffle, I remember the sandwiches we’ve brought, and unwrap a thin stack of bread, pressed wheatgrass, and a relish of indeterminate pantry origin. It’s vinegary, and a little sour, but the expiration date wasn’t for another ten years—how awful could it actually be?

It’s quiet. It’s . . . comfortable, almost. I chew; I swallow; I take another bite. No screaming, no panic, no wild-eyed excitement over the latest bit of flora or fauna. Just me, my cud, and the sweeping stone patterns guttering in the torchlight. Perking an ear past my own chewing, it sounds like the rain has stopped—thank Tartarus for small favours.

I polish off the sandwich and a small bag of long-stale hay-chips before the door creaks open and Herself wanders out. She grins when she smells the relish, and wordlessly, settles in next to me. I hoof over another wrapped sandwich, and she tucks in with gusto.

For awhile, we just sit there, chewing steadily through our rations, in companionable silence. Then she gets that look in her eye, and turns to me, mouth full of daisy, and—

There is a distant clatter on the pavers outside.

Everything stops. We lock eyes for a moment, and scramble into silent action. Wrappings are carefully stowed, bags closed, bodies pressed flat against the wall. I slide forward as stealthily as I can, and she follows close behind.

The Changeling is where we left him—good. The corridor behind is empty—lit, obvious, but empty. Equally good. I slow to a crawl as I approach the corner of the cross-hall. My hooves barely brush the packed-dirt floor; she, feather-light, I can barely hear breathing. A chunk of rubble from the stairs floats silently in my field.

Tense seconds pass as I wait at the corner—a sign, another slip. There’s no sound but the crackling of torches, and the low thrum of my steady heartbeat in my ears. If there’s someone there, he’s being as careful as we are. No obvious shambling gait, no characteristic choking breath. A live one, then, assuming it wasn’t just a falling bit of masonry.

Another soft scuff, and a stifled curse. That’s it, then—he’s inside, the amateur, about halfway down the corridor. Maybe level with the barracks? I can hear the water dripping from his coat, the slight shuffle of a jerkin. Is he even trying?

My mind whirls. There’s no way that anyone is out here by chance, no way he could’ve made it down here without seeing the house. That leaves two options: either he’s the lucky scav that somehow scored himself a map of military installations along the coast, or—

Then I hear the characteristic whirr of spellcraft—feel the gentle probing touch of another field against the contours of my own, and my decision’s made. I whirl out from around the corner, magical sling poised to put a dragon’s fist-sized chunk of crafted stonework through his horn.

We lock gazes for perhaps half a second, and I see you in his eyes, see Ponyville in the burns scarring his tattered scout’s vestment.

‘Major?’ he whispers, and the rubble drops from my field with a clatter.

IV.

[4.]

The words cut through me as sure and steady as her gaze.

‘You know perfectly well why.’

‘Perhaps. But sometimes it helps to hear it from you.’

‘You gave the order. You knew the risks. What were you thinking?’

‘That I wasn’t going to lose a daughter.’

‘Don’t try to—’

‘To what?’ She turns to me again, gentle, comported. ‘To lessen your grief with my own? Your husband? Your daughter? Do you really think I mourn your loss any less than my own? That your loss isn’t my own?’

‘You never even knew them.’ A chink, at last; a slight widening of the eyes. ‘You could never be bothered, up here in the safety of your little perfect snowglobe. Never seen the ribs on a yearling four days without food, never watched your loved ones snuffed out by something you couldn’t predict or control.’

‘You know that simply isn’t true.’

‘Isn’t it? When was the last time you didn’t know the outcome in advance? Couldn’t plan or predict your way around it?’

She gestures, vaguely—widely. Self-evidence.

‘So you still arrogantly—’

‘It was a routine operation, something she’d done a hundred different times with a hundred different Aspects. There was no reason that this time would have been any different.’ She paces, absently—teaching. ‘That’s why we’re investigating. We don’t know—’

‘You don’t care.’

And the pin drops for us both.

‘Of course I—!’

‘No. This—Ponyville—was just one more data point in a line. “Oh, another hundred dead. I’ll save the rest.” “Oh, another empty thousand slouching toward San Palomino, burning in Dusk-Dark spellfire. We’re still winning.” Careful, stately maths.’ I let the words hang there for a moment; the two of us, orbiting. Then: ‘What were we to you?’

‘Not experiments, if that’s what you’re driving at. Setting aside that I wouldn’t . . . I don’t have the luxury of second chances, not in this.’

‘Don’t you? You have the power for it, the magic.’

‘Not if I wanted you to be as you are—thinking, feeling, truly alive.’ The moonlight from the window etches Her in profile, a moment of lines, within and without. She looks old, or wants me to think so. ‘We learned that lesson early, Crystal and her Heart—and she as lost as they, now. One mind, one hunger, bereft of life or possibility; the both of them trapped.’

She turns to me again. ‘That’s always been the crux of it. We did have the power; we do. We could make you dance on any string, peal to any pattern, burn in any colour of the stars—played out all the possibilities and permutations. But if we had, if we denied you your battles and made all your choices, you’d—you’d have been a dead end, as much as any Changeling.’

‘And yet you’re still here. Not waiting in the wings for us to reach our full potential, but here, trying to guide us to it.’

Her head hangs, Her voice barely above a whisper. ‘Yes.’

‘And you still believe that’s different?’

‘Does a responsible mare abandon her children before they’ve learned to fend for themselves? Before she can be sure they’ll live their lives full and happy? Does she leave them to the mercy of the wolves? The ravages of disease?’

My jaw is tight as steel cable. ‘Does she?’

There is a long moment of silence, and I think at last I may have stepped past her. But then She's turning to me again, and once again she’s calm; quieter, but calm. I have to concentrate; can’t let her distract me, can’t push all at once.

‘I take it you’ve worked out why she was there by now.’

‘The Last? Playing tender to the Tree? Yes, it doesn’t take a genius.’ Stall; pivot; thrust. ‘Then again, Ponyville wasn’t exactly overrun; which city were you planning to glass?’

A flicker; disappointment, perhaps. ‘Just the opposite. It was an extension of her work with the fifth-generation Aspects, and the archon echoes the Elements left in the tree when they were destroyed—the notion of cadence within the Harmony; isolating each note and thread in the weave of Ley-Song, drawing them forth. It was beautiful work; the best I’d ever seen from her.’

‘But?’

‘But nothing. The theory was sound, and the spellcraft thorough and as uncomplicated as ever she was capable of being. It should have worked. It just . . . didn’t. She was the closest you ever came, and she could have set you free.’

It’s a moment of weakness I’ll chide myself for until the end of my days, but even as I try to tamp them down, the words come tumbling from me in a choked and broken slurry.

‘Do you really think any of us could ever have been like her?’

Goddesses, the bloom, the brightness in her then. “Yes. Oh stars above, yes. Look at all that you do—the art, the science, the thoughts you think. Do you have any idea how rare those are? The little joys, the greater wonders? The love, the kindness, the gentle impulses? The magic of you?’ She beams at me now, eyes shining. ‘How many lives have you saved? How many bettered?’

‘And how many dead?’

She starts. There—the crack I need, at last. I tear her down with innocent eyes, rend her with a slight choke I don’t even need to fake.

‘You want us to be like you—bright and beautiful stars in an infinite sky. Great. How many bodies do we have to pave underhoof to reach Elysium with you? What happens to them?’

It strikes true. And for a crystal-clear moment, I know she knows—sees. Not just what I’m saying, but what I’m doing. For the briefest moment I let myself hope, lock my eyes to hers, scream without screaming.

Do it, you bitch. Do what I can’t.

Please.

It’s not yet light.

Wakefulness is . . . odd, this morning. Slow, maybe even languid. I suppose I’ve become so used to jerking awake at the slightest provocation—be it the little one’s explosive sunrise ambushes or the nameless little things lurking in the recesses of my own poor brain—that even the act of waking naturally is unto itself disorienting.

I can feel my heart beat warm and steady in my chest, the way yours used to feel against my back at night. A water-clock, slowly pulsing out the seconds and hours. Even here, with my face pressed deep into the hardwood, I can let out a little sigh—feel my shoulders loosen and my hip pop gently against the joint.

Hardwood? Did I fall asleep at my desk again? Heh. Silly me.

Your face swims in front of me again, smile lost under all that goat-beard fluff, lost but for your eyes. Morning, Sunshine. I reach out to bat at your nose, to start that game of soft kisses on hooves and foreheads we used to play on weekends when we had the energy, when we had the time. I can feel your breath on my—

Desk.

My eyes snap open. With a soft plip, I peel my face off the warm desk and gaze around the empty workspace, in the little cubby behind the pantry. Soft golden light spills from the table beside me out from the pantry and into the dark and silent kitchen.

Mumbling a stifled curse, I totter as quietly as I can to the pantry door, peeping out towards the foyer, the sitting room. The door is locked and bolted; the neat little pile of armour lies undisturbed beside the couch, folded square and inspection-grade. Its owner, one hoof lolling, still snores gently into the blanket bunched under his head, his side rising and falling under the other I draped over him. Good.

A few rabbit-soft, rabbit-hasty steps into the hall, undo the latch. She sleeps as soundly—murmurs a little as the door creaks open. Better.

I don’t let myself breathe again until the secret door is sliding shut behind me, then loose the most violent stream of whispered curses I feel I can risk, even counting the thick walls of my little fortified donjon. My gaze settles on the little glowing spheroid, resting contentedly in its housing. Who else? For whatever definition of ‘conscious’ the echo inside it meets, for everything its light touches . . .

I shudder, violently. The morning, the night—its doing. Hers.

I will my heartbeat to slow as I lock gazes with the thing, with the magenta-grey eyes I know I’ve seen floating there.

The last of that conversation—the compact, the penance—rings altogether too clearly in my ears, carried on the last crusty waves of fading Dream:

Redeem one, redeem us both.

Maybe we’ll both get what we want.

The secret door is shut and piled with grain, my face is washed, and my head is clear. Little cracks of fuchsia light silhouette the shutters on the west-facing wall. Anticipation and the restive energy of the predawn; something primal there, no doubt—post-sleep, pre-light, the safest time to move without drawing hungry eyes.

It’s hard to find a place in a house this size to sit, when everyone else is asleep, and all the moving parts are gruff and scraping wood. But the letter lies crisp and stately on the table where I tossed it last night, and my chair pushed away just so. It looks . . .

Do you remember those home catalogues we used to go through sometimes whenever you’d get the bee in your bonnet that we needed to swap out the furniture? Sitting among the earthenware and dinner-things, it feels almost pastoral: a letter from that friend across town, an invitation to the Gala, the acceptance letter your daughter has been fretting about for the last four weeks.

I run my hoof across it again, absently. The vellum itself is beautiful, thick and finely woven; the ink-work all very formal and official—even has that very nice illuminated ‘M’ rounding out my rank. Old royal stock, unless I’ve missed my guess; probably predates the cotton-fires at Baltimare, at any rate. And if the signature line is to be believed (and it can; who could ghost-write for Her?), I can even forgive the thicket of Ald Eqosi I had to wade through to parse it.

And then, of course, our courier. Small, mousy-haired, rail-thin—the perfect mailrunner or pathfinder. We had a few like him at the Dun, usually reserved for those rare times a Relay would be out sick somewhere across the network and unable to communicate. Usually Horse, too—even without training, they’re good at blending in, creeping through caves and underbrush the rest of us would never think to scuttle through.

I follow the gentle, rhythmic trail of sunset-purple flame purring gently at the tip of his horn, beating a steady tattoo in time with the rise and fall of his chest under the thin blanket. Even High Command can’t afford to be choosy these days, it seems. His aura’s a similar colour, conforming to him like a sheath; I sweep over it almost unconsciously, unmoving, taking in the tapestry of dents and whorls yellowing its pale surface. Here, an old half-melted hexburn, almost camouflaged by fur and field; there, a cabbage-sized lump of scar beneath the skin—souvenir of a medic frantic and unskilled in his art.

He groans—shudders. I must’ve brushed too close without thinking. Dumb; taboo. Not used to having someone around to notice, or to care. Still, not the best of first (second?) impressions, especially with the journey we have ahead of us. Another shudder, and then the familiar jerk of a sudden waking. His head whips around, first one way, then the other, finally settling on me. I wave.

An incoherent noise of assent. He throws back the blanket and sits up, balling his hooves against his eyes for a moment. Again his horn flickers—a rapidly-shifting aurora of purples and indigos as he finds his footing again. I do my best to ignore it; none of us can help how it manifests.

I leave him to it, taking the opportunity to get up and quietly begin opening the shutters. He groans once or twice as the light hits him, and I murmur a brief apology as I move to the east-facing windows nearest him. The Valley is dark; the water nearly invisible in the pre-sun hour. Only the faraway clouds are lit—streaks and mounds of running oranges and pinks, the last remnants of yesterday’s cloudburst.

The stallion—the corporal—joins me at the window. His eyes sweep the dark valley for a moment, then turn to me curiously. I gesture vaguely at the horizon, and he nods his assent; it’s a familiar enough reveille, and in the manner of such rotations, never too strange with a stranger.

A brief flash at the horizon; a single forking line cutting from low-hanging cloud to water. We watch together in silence as another joins it, a little ways further north; then another, and another.

‘Wow! Everyone’s up so early this morning!’ a little voice pipes up from behind us. She trots over to the window, squeezing between us and craning her neck to see over the sill. ‘Did I miss anything exciting?’

‘Just the last of the storm,’ I reassure her, lifting her onto my back. ‘Did you catch the lightning when you came in?’

‘Aww, no!’ She places her hooves on the sill, balancing catlike between myself and the wood. ‘Dang it! It’s been a while since we had a good thunderstorm! We didn’t get any lightning yesterday.’

The corporal had moved back a pace to let her pass. It was something I’d noticed on our walk back from the Dun, as well—he seems to be doing his best to keep some distance between them. Deferential, almost. He’s giving me kind of a strange look, but seems to shake it off when I meet his eye.

‘Ready for some breakfast?’ I ask, glancing distractedly back at my little amateur acrobat.

She leaps down, ignoring my grunt of protest. ‘Totally! Should I get down bowls?’

I look back at the stallion. ‘Hope you don’t mind old-style boxed cereal, corporal.’

‘Of course, ma’am.’ He bobs his head deferentially.

‘At ease. And consider it a standing order.’

‘Yes, m—yes. Thank you, ma’am.’

Nervous about that. Not unexpected; he’s been on the frontlines far more recently than I, taken his lashes with the chain of command. Probably a recent commission too, given the sheen on his rank pips. Still feels vulnerable in front of an officer—least without a gang of seven or eight of his classmates around him.

I can work with that.

We amble over to the table as the little one clatters around getting out the fixings; he settles in at the table, and I duck into the pantry to see what else we can dig up. I carefully place a serving-bowl over the letter as I pass.

‘Do you mind apples with your cereal?’ I call out over my shoulder.

A pause. ‘An apple would be wonderful, thank you.’

‘When was the last time you saw one?’

‘Does a bag of mould count? Eighteen months.’

I don’t respond for a moment, testing the last half-dozen in our burlap sack with a hoof. ‘Logistics getting that spotty?’

‘Past the mountains, yes.’

‘Are we anywhere else?’

Another pregnant pause. ‘Canterlot and the Dawnspire are both holding, yes. Las Pegasus, though we moved the civilians out a long time ago.’

The little one chimes in as I exit the pantry with three healthy apples and begin dicing them. ‘Is Las Pegasus the place you told me about? With the big gambling halls and the salt-licks?’ She looks to the corporal. ‘Are they still open? Can ponies still play there?’

He blanches, eyes wide, and after a moment I step into the gap. ‘Probably not, kiddo. Soldiers generally don’t have that kind of time on their hooves, especially considering what they’re doing with the rest of their time.’

‘Ohhh.’

She settles in at her accustomed place across from my chair. I cast a quick glance over my shoulder, letting my horn do the work for a moment. She’s got that look again—studying the corporal in exquisite detail, and obviously gearing up to bombard him with another round of questions.

I take the opportunity to steer. ‘You’ve been very forthcoming, corporal—thank you. We’ll probably have more questions later, but is there anything that you need to know from us?’

‘Well, um—’ He looks between the two of us for a moment, sensing the effort on my part but not seeming to know where to start. ‘H-how—how have things been on the road for you? Any updates?’

‘Oh, we’ve been here for a while now!’ The little one beams, her gaze never faltering. ‘I think the last house was outside of Barb—Bharb?’

‘Bay Harbour, yes.’ I chime in, sheathing the knife with the flourish and floating over three mixed breakfast bowls. ‘Well-stocked, and the aristos all tried to make a beeline for Haliflanks as soon as they got the word out of Manehatten.

He winces a little, waiting until I’m seated to start on his; the little one of course doesn’t hesitate to tuck in. I nod.

‘Yeah. We never made it that far north, but the fishers there told us what they could.’

‘Did they seem alright? I mean—’

‘Well, they didn’t start trying to sacrifice us on any crude altars to the Serpent, but I think they were happy to see us go.’

‘Were there any other kids there?’ asks the filly, cheeks puffed out with chaw. ‘I don’t remember seeing any.’

‘Probably in the houses,’ I lie. ‘You know how protective parents can be. And chew your food.’ I turn back to the corporal. ‘Jokes aside, yes, they seemed like they could hold their own—or get out to sea if things really went to shit.’

He looks at me for a moment, then nods, quietly. ‘Good.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Mhm!’

The remainder of breakfast passes in silence. The little one finishes first—including seconds—and finally drops her bowl off in the sink. So far she’s gotten the hint, but I can see her angling for an interrogation again as soon as she turns.

‘Hey, why don’t you go hit the showers, kiddo? We’ll clean up out here and figure out our next move for the day.’

She catches on immediately, and gives me her best pleading look. ‘But—’

‘No buts!’ I say, mock-imperiously, nudging her towards the hall. ‘You can give him the third degree later. For now, clean.’

‘Nyeeeehhhhhh.’

I have to chase her all the way to the bathroom door—something I haven’t had to do since she could fly a straight line. When she finally stops digging her heels into the hardwood and hops over onto the tile, I position myself squarely in the doorframe.

‘You don’t have to stick around,’ she pouts. ‘I’m going.’

‘I know,’ I reply, as casually as I can, leaning on the jamb. ‘But I have a question for you.’

She leans on the counter, trying very hard to match my look. ‘What?’

I lower my voice a fraction. ‘Just wanted to get your feel for our guest. We haven’t had a chance to talk about him yet.’

‘He seems nice.’

‘Only seems?’

‘Why does he keep calling you “Major”? That’s not your name.’

Ah.

‘Well—it’s a bit like how I call you “Princess”. You know, a nickname.’

She stares at me for a long moment, then nods.

I can see the conversation’s over. ‘Anyway—have a good shower, alright? We’ll be out front.’

‘Thanks. I won’t be long.’

I’m turning to leave when she speaks up again.

‘Be careful, okay?’

I give her my best winning smile, sliding the door shut on her piercing frown. ‘You know me, kiddo.’

When I return to the kitchen, he’s exactly where I left him, staring at the letter he’s slid over from my place. He jumps a little when I step back into view, rattling the table, his little Pyre-candle flaring spasmodically overhead.

He clears his throat. ‘I—uh. Is that—’

‘Really her?’ I chuckle, settling back into my seat. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’

‘I never thought she’d be so—so upbeat?’

‘Not something the histories would be likely to go into any great detail on, no.’

He shakes his head a little, mousy mane fluttering a little with the motion. ‘No, I mean—I was a squire in the castle when I was a colt. Even on Her best days, She never seemed the type to, um. Bounce?’

That gets a laugh. ‘It’s been an adjustment, for sure.’

He scratches his head, seemingly reassured. ‘How have you managed to keep it up? All these years, and She never . . . ?’

‘Those were her orders.’

Magenta-grey, boring into mine.

‘Yeah, that was what I was—what they told me, too. I, uh . . . I’m just trying to get a feel for how to play it, I guess. It’s going to be a long trip.’

‘Well, you won’t be doing it alone. But, yes, anything you want to ask, this is probably the best chance you’ll get before we get underway.’

He fidgets. ‘Well, um. What—what was it like? Being so close to Her?’

I shrug, leaning back a little in my chair. Practised nonchalance. ‘Like raising a kid, to be honest. She’s smart, a little rambunctious. Getting towards the rebellious stage.’

Again, I catch a flash of something else. I know they wouldn’t have sent just anyone, but . . .

‘You have kids of your own?’

He shakes his head, seemingly abashed. ‘No! N-no, ma’am. Never had time, around the . . . well.’

‘Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s easier than you think, especially once you get a feel for her. Just keep her talking about books, and—’

‘What about you, ma’am?’

I let it hang there for a moment, mouth open. Then: ‘Yeah. Ponyville.’

Too-bright light.

‘Oh. Oh no. I’m—I’m so sorry.’ He looks it. ‘Um—Appleoosa. My folks.’

I wince. ‘Likewise. Apples?’

‘Married into; my mother’s side.’

‘I’m sorry. We had a few ourselves, as I’m sure you can guess. They were good folk.’

Wooden stalls, flattened against their owners.

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

Another moment. The sound of running water carries through the house.

‘But yes,’ I finally resume. ‘As long as you treat her like a person, it’s as simple as dealing with any other kid. Think you’re up to it?’

His eyes have been locked on the letter. ‘Yes, I think so. But—nothing before we reach Canterlot?’

‘Nothing,’ I affirm. ‘Did they brief you on the rest—the Egg?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Then trust in Their wisdom.’ The oldest of bluffs. ‘Dark and Dream will see her through.’

And there again—just the slightest flash, never looking quite at me. He flickers, steadily.

‘Why now?’ Genuine curiosity; something I’ve been meaning to ask. ‘The letter doesn’t say.’

‘I wish I knew. High Command is worried, thinks we’re losing ground too fast. The Dyad weren’t . . .’ He lifts his eyes ceilingward, sighing. ‘Stardusk help me. Enthusiastic?’

‘Oh no?’ Neutral now; too obvious he’s gauging.

‘I had some trouble with it myself,’ he admits. His hoof traces a gentle circle next to the vellum. ‘Apparently the marshals made a good case—maybe in conjunction with whatever’s left of the Arcanum.’ Another fraught pause, then, finally: ‘There’s talk of another Pyre.’

I’m sitting up straight in an instant. ‘Another? Do they really think we’ll survive a second blast?’ Third.

‘The Arcanum have refined the process. Apparently.’ He shrugs, helplessly. ‘Not really my, uh, field.’

Conversational. Something. ‘What was?’

“Artist, long time ago. Used to dream about shapes. Buildings and landscapes.’

‘Architect?’

He looks taken aback. ‘No? Why?’

‘Just checking. Thought I might have run into your work.’

‘That’s thoughtful.’ He smiles. Almost like he means it. ‘But, no—I was just a kid when this whole thing got started, and uh—even if there were much call for painters these days, the Pyre—’ He gestures helplessly to the sputtering candle burning out of his skull. ‘I don’t have quite the fine control I used to.’

‘Monuments?’

‘They stopped after—well.’

‘Ponyville?’

‘Yeah.’

The gorge rises again. ‘Sorry—that was indulgent.’

‘I don’t mind.’ True? He seems more at ease.

Switch tacks again, keep him off-balance best I can. Why is he so hard to read? ‘So—the Pyre.’

‘I know. When—’ he swallows, carefully. ‘When I received the letter, I was told I could take my time. That the line would hold more than long enough with—with the last infusion.’

She burns, and so do we.

‘Not through official channels, I take it.’

‘No.’

I feel my heart rate increase; feel the heat brush along my shoulder, feel the light in the room wax, just a little. I try to keep my voice level as it pulses behind my eyelids.

‘And they sent you with the message.’

‘Yes.’

‘In person.’

His eyes snap back to me, and I see the wall go up. There. ‘Yes.’

I sit very still, very careful. ‘Then I suppose that means—’

‘Only after we’ve returned her safely to the Mount.’

I set my jaw; feel something crack. ‘I see. Anything else?’

A turn, then. He almost looks apologetic. Almost. ‘More that can be said on the road. But . . .‘

‘But?’

His gaze doesn’t falter this time, even as his voice performs its all-too-characteristic waver. ‘I have to know—did it . . . was it easier? All this time, having Her to yours—’

I’m on my hooves, and it’s a wonder they don’t go through the table. The chair behind me bangs off the sideboard. He doesn’t run; doesn’t blink.

The water shuts off.

He takes the chance to break the gaze; I don’t attempt to re-engage, instead opting to right the chair and—shaking—collect up the plates for the sink. The warm rush from the tap and the familiar clatter of earthenware fill the silence.

The little one emerges not long after, mane wrapped in a towel. She looks first to me, then to the stallion still sitting at the third side of the table. ‘Is everything alright? I heard a bang.’

I open my mouth, but he cuts in first. ‘N-no, little Miss. Something fell, in the sink.’

“Oh . . . alright.’ She looks to me for confirmation. After a moment, I force my jaw to unlock. My hooves move mechanically over the dishcloth, the sponge, the little flecks of non-abrading soap.

‘It’s alright, hon. Get yourself dried up and we’ll talk about getting set for the next step.’

She nods, looks between us both again, and disappears into the back. A small trail of water is the only evidence of her passage. There is another long moment of silence, and the distant sound of a bedroom door gently meeting lintel.

Then:

‘”Hon?”’

I don’t know if he says it. I don’t know if he thinks it. But I do hear it.

Her light blooms around the hidden door.

The plate cracks in my hooves.

It comes in waves after that.

The plates are scraped and washed, a neat pile catching the rising sun. The shattered fragments are swept and disposed of; the bucket stands ready. At some point he rises, and dons his armour. It slides effortlessly over him, lacquer and oil, and I catch sight of the two shining metal studs at his collar. Newsteel is easier even than onyx, I suppose. Or more abundant.

I spin.

He won’t look at me, and I can’t read your face. Those little moments of fury were the worst: the deaths, the arguments, the choices. Never the crises themselves, but always the moment just after—the decision made, the shrapnel just beginning to fall. Nothing at your side but for the dagger—you never carried—no stains on his vest save those of a continent’s worth of undergrowth.

Who is this stallion I married?

Light pours from my right, invisible, hot, knowing, yearning—purpose again, cathode-bright, coursing through air and sinew and bone and horn. Bluebell flames lick the air around him, engulfing; my horn is light as air, as it has been in days, weaving over my head like thick poison joke.

And among all of it, bounding, She. To every question a clever rebound, every excitable spark a careful-lancing snuffer. She knows the a-hoof, and a winding road ahead, but the joy is in the knowing, the game, the summiting.

And from the back he watches me still, sees the lines and patterns that emerge as I veer to automatic, as we skirt around the house and read and catalogue and confirm—bundle up and tie off and cover. Dead-house, panic-box, and all stowed away.

And when I come to, we’re in the garden.

‘Just like we did at the last house,’ I say, placing the little faded rucksack beside her. ‘The more we can fit in the wagon, the better off we’ll be.’

She nods, and smiles, and flies off.

One task left to perform.

Though little, there were materials we’d agreed were needed from the Dun—things we couldn’t get elsewhere and would need for the road. No more words between us; he knows it well as I.

He follows me around the back of the house to the barrier, obviously taken with the tall, shifting evergreens. I can trace the patterns in his eyes, the little flecks of hope for a stray bird or squirrel.

I hold out a hoof to forestall him, gesturing to the faint shimmer of the dome I know he can see. He nods absently, neck still arched to peruse the treeline, and I let my horn begin to glow.

It’s odd to have another Unicorn in such proximity; I can feel his field rubbing unconsciously against mine, around the wards—lonely, eager, dog-curious, tracing contours. If the confused smile he’s wearing is anything to go by, he’s assessing the spellwork, as well.

I open my eyes again, gesture to him, step through. He follows directly in my hoofsteps, watching the grass as he goes. Suppose that means he does know his way around a spell-trap; after yesterday’s performance at the Dun I was starting to wonder.

I turn to start raising the wards again; he disappears behind me, eyes still skyward. I trace him by his field, feel the little flare of brightness behind me as he scans through the undergrowth.

‘Major? Permission to speak freely?’

His tone is conciliatory, even apologetic. I nod, silently, eyes still closed. He walks over to face me, standing parallel to the invisible bubble-sheen wall.

‘Look, I—I know you’ve had it rough. Real rough.’ He sighs. ‘What I said back there? It wasn’t fair.’

‘Corporal—’

‘Please, Major.’

I relent.

‘It’s rough, out west. Rougher than I’ve let on—didn’t want her to hear. We finally lost Pitsbull about a year ago, and the Griffons did . . . something along the coast to try and keep them from coming ashore. The bodies—’ His voice cracks slightly. ‘The seaponies are gone. We know there are a couple of dragons trying to do their part in the north, but it’s just so bleak, y’know?’

A sniffle, and a silence. My closed eyes, the shimmer and focus of my horn, are all the privacy he seems to need. I can guess.

‘I guess what I’m trying to say is, knowing that she’s still out here—that she’s coming back?—is going to bring so many people back from the brink. There are so many ponies out there just on the verge of giving up. It—it lit a fire in me I didn’t think I had. And—and—’

And before I can stop him, he pulls me sideways into a tight embrace. I struggle to keep my footing, my horn sputtering against the wards and the pressure. Even through his armour, I can feel the raggedness of his breathing. I know.

‘Thank you,’ he chokes out. ‘Thank you for keeping her safe. We were all so worried about her. We shouldn’t be at each other’s throats. I’m sorry.’

I pat him gingerly on the back as he finally bursts into tears, shifting slightly so the studded leather isn’t digging quite so hard into my shoulder. As the sobbing grief continues, I finally shift to face him; the last of the wards are up, now, but my horn remains aglow.

‘Corporal. Look at me.’

He lifts his head from my shoulder, red-eyed, not breaking the desperate embrace.

‘It’s okay. It’s going to be alright.’

The emptiest words, and the easiest. I know how to make them sound reassuring.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers.

‘Me too.’

If he senses the tapered length of metal rising into the air behind him, blade poised in the kill-spot just behind the head, he doesn’t have time to react. My horn glows brighter . . .

It’s over in an instant; the single thrust is all it takes. His body twitches silently for a moment, and I see the magical aura around the sword flicker as the autonomic vestiges of his magic struggle to countermand mine. Then, with one last, futile convulsion, he slumps against my shoulder like the sack of wet leather he has suddenly become.

The world swims, daintily, as I pull the sword free, bury it again beneath the earth underhoof. I do it carefully, trying not to disturb the body, to make the leakage any worse. I pull the undershirt from beneath his armour, wrap it around his head; it staunches the worst of things. Hurriedly, looking over my shoulder toward the house, I heft him onto my sweat-soaked back and head into the forest. His one dull eye stares at me accusingly.

You know perfectly well why.

He’s both lighter and heavier than I expect; the small, mousy build they favoured in scouts and officers serves me one last time. I can’t believe I ever thought he reminded me of you. The dangers of going too long without seeing a stallion, I suppose.

I’m well within the treeline now, and far enough from the house that the noise of my flight won’t reach her. I break into a run. The swimming world blurs further still, haphazard: the vanishing sky streaks blue and grey between the thicket of branches above, the paint running at last; the sea-dark foliage rips past on either side in an endless tattoo. A chorus of croaking corvids float about in an ash-blanket hail as I crash through a thicket.

The corridors of the castle loop endlessly around me, a maze of twisting passages all horribly, tangibly alike. The faces run on tapestries, each bust a spy or warden. I’m silent and swift, my cup o’erruneth with proximate Purpose; and it does what caution and hatred alone will not.

Swords flicker in and out of sight around me, clattering along trees and thrashing through branches, and I force them down down down into the earth again, where I buried them a lifetime ago, another defence, another ward around my heart, around the child.

The door slides open like a dream, and I knife through it, airborne, the sword arcing with perfect grace toward Her throat.

Shades dance around me, ghost-eyed and hollow, as a white-water roar fills my ears. A decade’s ceaseless nightmare chattering hammering through my bones like a thousand arrow-shards blown from a rusty tin can. Changelings quiver in the trees, and a dead rabbit’s neck twists impossibly to follow me as he disappears down a dark, dark hole.

I’m slamming into the wall, as She rises gracefully, effortlessly, tossing aside the shattered blade. The look in Her eye is one of terrible sadness, and questions, and the echoes of motherly fury.

‘Why come all this way, just to die like this?’

I’m on all fours, retching into the river. The meagre trail follows the wrapped and muddied body, and both go tumbling over the falls.

I’m writhing in front of the Pyre, feeling the vestiges of Her burn their way into my mind, my horn, as she looks on, burst-eyed, melt-fleshed, screaming from the fire. One spark, one torch, reflected a thousand-thousand times across all of Equestria—a bequest.

I’m teetering on the cliff-edge, knowing that the sweet release of that clatter-bright mirror will only ever be that close: I can’t do it now any more than I could in the howling ley-fires of the Ponyville glasslands.

I’m holding the thing—the excuse—in my forehooves, knowing the favour She thinks she’s done me, knowing I can still prove her wrong. It mewls, shedding ember and possibility, its magenta-grey eyes staring into mine. The Egg, the once-and-future, the memory, roils in its birth throes, and the body wails a pain it does not understand.

I’m wandering the forest, gathering myself, caking on façade—so much mud to cover so much blood and water and spite. But I’m the mother again and it’s time and I have to, for however long it takes for her to grow up and learn and feel the weight of everything I’ve kept from her—everything I’ve kept her from.

You always said it was give and take.

Maybe we’ll both get what we want.

Maybe we’ll both get what we want.

I stand before the wall.

The sun is high.

My hooves are clean, my back; the shaking has mostly passed. Even you seem to have receded for the moment.

I give it another minute, to be safe.

Then I let out a rattling breath, and summon a tune to hum as I set about taking down the wards.

The little one greets me, zipping over the house and looking around expectantly for the rest of the erstwhile party.

‘Where’s the soldier?’

I smile, fondly, ruffling her hair. ‘He heard a Princess needed rescuing and had to go off and be the hero.’ Not entirely untrue. ‘But he said he might be back someday.’

‘We didn’t have to go with him?’

‘Well, I’m no Major, now am I? He couldn’t exactly order me.’

‘And I’m no Princess!’ She beams at me, and her eyes could pierce the stars.

I look past her, smiling, leading the way back to the front of the house. ‘Not at all, kiddo.’

The grass is soft and pliant underhoof. There’s a soft fragrance of flowers on the air—beautiful and welcome, even if unnatural for this time of year. The hair ruffles my mane, brushes gently against my tender, pulsing horn. So many beautiful distractions.

She hesitates a moment as we reach the porch, looking out over the Valley—at the squat little hump of the Dun crouched, tumorous, along its length. Somewhere behind me potentiality burns, sharp and spiteful, digging behind my eyes, my horn, knowing.

Good.

‘Did he say when he’d be back?’

‘Not really. It sounded like an emergency.’ I let out a long breath. ‘But until then . . . why don’t you go and get unpacked? Then I have to ask you an important question.’

She looks concerned again, and her voice is very small. ‘What question?’

‘Oh, nothing super special,’ I say nonchalantly, brushing some imaginary dust off my shoulder. ‘A fun question. An exciting question. An awesome question.’

She leans forward, hanging on my every word. ‘Yeah?’

I lean forward too, and bump noses with her, nuzzling affectionately for a moment. Then, a wide grin spreads across my face, one she quickly matches when she hears what I have to ask:

‘Where should we go today?’

Author's Note

Vale: ([vāl] noun; ant.) a valley, cleft, or dale.
Vale: ([ˈvälā] exclamation; from Latin): farewell.