[Redacted]

by McPoodle

Rating: teen
Tags: Adventure, Crossover, DJ P0N-3, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe, Sad
Length: 20569

Vinyl Scratch tries desperately to prevent the future that Twilight Sparkle is living through.

A war against the dragons that was prophesied to occur centuries in the future has just reached its devastating conclusion.

Twilight Sparkle finds herself in the blasted ruins of Equestria, trying to remember what went wrong, and desperately hoping that she is not the last pony left in the world.

Two days earlier, Vinyl Scratch wanders the streets of Canterlot as an agent of Celestia, witness to a world turned mad by war and falling prey to riots and conspiracies.

A prophesy once stated that Vinyl Scratch would save Celestia and all of Equestria...but the power of prophesies has been broken forever.

This is the conclusion of the Betwixt Silver and Gold series, which began with "Javelin" and most-recently included "Whopper of the Year".

The story is Alternate Universe-tagged because the idea for it originated before Season 2 began. Well that, and it doesn't look like the dragons are going to declare war on the ponies anytime soon. The Crossover tag is for the return of some pastiches of Invader Zim characters that I've used before.

Published 2012-09-03 16:24:01 UTC
Last updated 2012-09-07 05:23:40 UTC

Prologue

Betwixt Brown and Gold 6:

[Redacted]

- Prologue -

In her dreams, the ponies were fleeing, always fleeing.

They ran and flew as hard as they could, but it was never enough to escape. Their place of origin was a terror too awful to name, and their destination was a place equally horrifying.

In between, for this brief moment, they were safe, but only barely, for it was catching up to them.

Vinyl Scratch’s ears were full of the sounds of hooves pounding, of wings beating, of voices neighing in fear. No words could possibly suffice at a time like this, so no words were uttered. The smells of fear, of hopelessness, of failure, were everywhere. And clods of earth thrown up by pounding hooves assaulted them, as if the very earth had rejected them just as everyplace else had.

The dreams varied in how long they felt to Vinyl in the morning. Sometimes only a few minutes. Usually an hour or two. And one time, it felt like the dream lasted for days.

But it always ended the same way: Vinyl’s footing would slip, and she would be swallowed up by the crowd, her last sensation that of being unknowingly trampled to death by her friends and family.

The war was entering its second month.

Chapter T1: Denial

[Redacted]

- Chapter T1: Denial -

Today

For one brief moment, the metallic spacecraft hung in the late afternoon sky above the Everfree Forest like a silver medallion.

And then its thermonuclear payload detonated.

The pressure was unbearable.

From all directions it poured in, tearing molecule from molecule until nothing was left but ashes. The heat was so intense that the air itself started to burn.

And, in the midst of the swirling cataclysm, one single element of defiance: a small bubble of magic stubbornly resisting annihilation.

Inside that bubble, Twilight Sparkle was shining like a beacon, every hair of her coat alight with power, trying desperately to maintain the bubble of safety, and to expand it outward to encompass her friends who were stuck outside at the moment the sky exploded.

It was a fight she could not win.

A voice gently crept into the mind of the unicorn, the voice of a mentor and friend: Princess Celestia:

You must remember.

With a supreme effort, Twilight nodded her head, tears streaming down her face.

And then, suddenly, all was calm.

Twilight found that she was lying down on a perfectly-circular patch of bright green grass. She guessed that she must have passed out on the very spot where she had created the bubble.

Wearily, she got up to her hooves, and bumped her head against the top of a tent. As her vision came into focus, she saw that the circle of grass was surrounded by a floor of burnt earth. It reminded her of the aftermath of a fire she had once witnessed in the Whitetail Wood.

It suddenly occurred to Twilight that the only things she could hear at the moment were the sounds of her breath and her heartbeat. She should have been hearing the sounds of forest creatures, both natural and supernatural, going about their daily business. And if there was a forest fire, she should have heard or at least smelled that. Instead she heard nothing and smelled nothing. It was as if she alone was the whole of Creation. She cautiously walked up to the entrance flap of the tent and poked her head outside.

The Everfree Forest was gone. In its place was a flat plain of blackened earth, covered by a thick but uneven layer of fine ash. Twilight turned her head to look up, and immediately started coughing, for a silent ash was steadily falling from a slate-gray sky. She turned her head to the left, and spotted a flattened area that she recognized as the road the party had taken to reach this spot.

With more effort than she expected, Twilight created another protective bubble around herself, this one only a fraction as strong as the earlier one, to keep the ash out and the air inside fresh. As she walked towards the path, the bubble also brushed the ash away. Her eyes were intent on the road as she brushed it clean, and so for a moment she didn’t think it odd as she walked over the shadow of a tree. A few steps later, though, and she stopped in her tracks. She turned and looked up, to confirm that there was no physical object to cast the shadow that she had seen.

Retracing her steps, she bent down to get a closer look. The clay bricks that had formed the path had been subjected to an incredible amount of heat, so much heat that the patches with a high sand content had been converted into glass. As for the shadow, it was the outline of an area that had been baked somewhat less than the surrounding area. Twilight deduced that the rise in temperature had been so sudden that it had literally baked the shadow of a tree into the path before the same heat had incinerated the tree into vapor.

Next to the tree shadow was another, a rounded form that must have belonged to an animal. Twilight’s heart caught in her throat. And then the shadow moved, along with the baby dragon that cast it.

“Spike!” Twilight exclaimed in relief, reaching out her forelegs.

Spike ran forward through the magical barrier and hugged her. “I never thought you’d wake up!” he exclaimed.

The unicorn looked down at the dragon through teary eyes. “How did you get here?” she asked. “I left you behind in Canterlot so the court could get Celestia’s messages without her having to overtax her magic.”

“Don’t you remember?” Spike asked. “You teleported me to you right before you collapsed.”

Twilight remembered no such thing, but this was hardly the moment to argue. “So you’re the one who set up the tent?” she asked instead.

Spike nodded. “The ash was building up really fast, and it was lucky for us that it was your turn to carry it.”

“Have you seen anypony else?”

Spike shook his head. “I’ve looked everywhere, Twilight! Where do you suppose they are?”

“I’m sure they’re fine, Spike,” Twilight said confidently. “Celestia must have teleported them all to safety.”

“But what about you?”

Twilight sighed. “I foalishly thought I could save everypony, and had a protection bubble in place. I found I couldn’t save anypony after all, and I was too scared to dispel it so that Celestia could teleport me. It’s alright though—she told me to remember, so that means she wants me to document the aftermath of the blast before we all re-unite in Canterlot!”

“But Twilight!” Spike exclaimed, pointing one chubby claw at the faint circle of light low in the northwestern sky. “I’ve been here for hours, and the sun’s never moved.”

“Celestia’s too busy!” Twilight exclaimed nervously. “I’m sure when the crisis is well under control that she’ll remember to start moving the sun again!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes-I’m-sure!!!” Twilight quickly turned away so the dragon could not see the panicked look on her face. “Pick up the tent, Spike, and we can begin taking the path through Ponyville to Canterlot.”

Spike said nothing, and began to do as he was told. Eventually, Twilight noticed that her assistant was beginning to cough as much as she had when she was unprotected, so she bid him climb upon her back while she used her magic to finish the job. Just as before, she noticed that this simple task seemed far more difficult than it should have been.

“Alright,” she said between pants when she was done. “On to Ponyville! I’m sure everything will be fine once we get there.”

Unseen by Twilight, Spike smiled sinisterly. “Of course,” he said. “Everything at Ponyville will be just fine…”

Chapter V1: Acceptance

[Redacted]

- Chapter V1: Acceptance -

Two Days Ago

Vinyl Scratch was at the Manehattan Stock Exchange when she lost her mind and enlisted.

For two months after the declaration of war (three months if you counted from the news of Stalliongrad’s disappearance), she had resisted the siren call to “do her part”. She was in Equestria’s biggest city to prepare her company for its initial stock offering, and that effort offered more than enough of a distraction. Equestria Acoustics was in the business of manufacturing compact discs and CD players. The CDs reproduced an artifact of the Ancients, while the magic that powered the players was the joint creation of the DJ and Twilight Sparkle. The decision to take the company public was a natural consequence of the tremendous success of the company in recent months.

But none of that meant anything to Vinyl now that the IPO was complete. The blind unicorn stood quietly on the sidewalk outside the exchange, wondering what to do. And that was when she was caught by the sound of several elderly ponies singing:

We wrote the stories of the old brigades.
We know the glory of yesterday’s parades.
We’re celebrating yard by yard:
The soldiers of the old Home Guard.
The soldiers of the old Home Guard.

As the troupe of former soldiers marched past, Vinyl smiled and joined the growing group of following ponies.

Call out the navy, call out the ranks.
Call out the air force, call out the tanks.
From the cliffs of Plover call out the gulls,
And don’t forget the loyal territorials!

Who’s sticking in here? Who will defend
Every hoof of ‘Questria no matter what they send?
Who’s standing firm in our own front yard?
The soldiers of the old Home Guard.
That’s who!
The soldiers of the old Home Guard!

“DJ Pon-3, volunteering for duty!” Vinyl proudly announced at the recruitment station.

“Oh hey, I’ve heard of you!” the officer on duty exclaimed. “But, um, aren’t you…”

“Blind?” Vinyl answered. “Sure, but I’ve got plenty more to offer than just ordinary sight.” For a moment, Vinyl marveled at how well she was able to deal with other ponies knowing about her vision. Just a few months earlier, she was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep that fact hidden, so sure was she that she would be treated as an object of pity and scorn if it were ever to be discovered. “Thanks to my horn, I can see anything smaller than a grain of sand or larger than a city. The former might not be very useful, but the later surely could be used to detect the movements of armies being kept hidden from normal vision?”

“Hm…” said the recruitment officer. “I’ll make a note of that ability, and if Central Command finds a need for it, they’ll be sure to call you up. In the meantime, however, I think you can best serve Equestria as a morale officer.”

“A…morale officer?”

“Yes.” The officer took on a rather official voice. “Vinyl Scratch, also known as the DJ Pon-3, you are hereby accepted into the Princesses’ Army in the adjunct role of Morale Officer, Second Class. You are to report to Morale Officer First Class DJ AJ4X in Canterlot, there to work to maintain the morale of the civilians of that city until you are given a new assignment. Here is a copy of your official paperwork. Present it to him at 18:00 hours at this address…” The officer looked down at the slip of paper she was in the act of sliding across the table towards the sightless pony before her. Instead she took the slip back and read it out loud. “Can you remember that, Officer?”

DJ Pon-3 saluted. “Ma’am, yes ma’am!”

“This ticket will get you aboard the next ground transport to Equestria, departure time 10:00 hours sharp. You should have at least two hours to orient yourself in Canterlot between your arrival time and when you need to meet with your superior officer.”

Vinyl took the wristband of cardboard she was given. “Um, why not a dirigible?” she asked. “Wouldn’t that be faster, and able to carry more ponies?”

“All air transport for non-pegasi has been cancelled for the duration of the crisis. They are far too inviting a target for the enemy. For the same reason, unauthorized teleportations for those unicorns capable of it are also strictly forbidden.”

“Understood.”

“You are dismissed.”

Vinyl Scratch stepped away from the recruitment office, her space immediately taken by the next pony in line. Well, Pon-3, she said to herself, what have you gotten us into this time?

The transport to Canterlot contained a few mares who had volunteered to fight, plus more stallions than Vinyl had ever met in her entire life. Where did they all come from? she asked herself in bewilderment.

She discovered that the recruits who were slated to fight on the front lines were taking the transport all the way to its final destination, Fort Solaris at the far south of Equestria, which had been converted into their boot camp. Once they had been sufficiently trained, they would take the same transport across the whole of Equestria to the far north, to the area occupied by the Dragons. Only a small number of adjuncts and territorials would be disembarking at Canterlot or Fillydelphia.

Fillydelphia!

Vinyl realized as she stepped out of the transport at Canterlot Station that she still needed to inform her family of her sudden change in plans.

As soon as she had arrived at Canterlot Station and confirmed that she had some free time, she got at the end of a very long line for the Telegraph office. As she waited, she tuned her horn into the Canterlot Etheric Network.

“After last night’s sightings, there is no possible way that the government can deny the existence of flying saucers,” said the voice in Vinyl’s mind of Oars In Wells, noted Etheric producer and popular guest on mid-afternoon talk shows. “The public demands to know the truth: are these…these ‘Unponied Flying Objects’ Ours, or Theirs? Or are they neither pony- nor dragon-made, some totally alien visitor to Equestria, here to observe and judge this little war of ours? And what happens if they do not judge in our favor?”

Chapter T2: Anger

[Redacted]

- Chapter T2: Anger -

Today

The bomb-blasted landscape was still as featureless as it had been at ground zero.

Twilight in her bubble stopped walking when she realized that the path was gently sloping downhill. From the many times she had travelled between Ponyville and the Everfree in the past, this meant that she was very close to the outskirts of the town.

A look over her shoulder at the motionless sun behind her confirmed that she was indeed now walking westwards. Since they had started walking at the northern border of the forest, that meant they had somehow passed from the north-south Mountain Road onto the east-west Ponyville Road without her noticing. As a matter of fact, Twilight could not recall any part of her journey between when they had started walking and this point. She was confused and frustrated, and as usual she took it out on her assistant.

“Spike!” Twilight exclaimed.

“What is it?” the little dragon replied.

“We missed the turn-off to Fluttershy’s cottage!”

“Oh, did you want to stop there? You didn’t tell me. Besides…I doubt there will be anything to see there.”

“That’s not the point,” Twilight said with some testiness in her voice. “Celestia wants me to observe, and that’s a location I know very well so I can make before and after comparisons.”

Twilight refused to consider the fates of Fluttershy’s numerous animal boarders. In the back of her mind she told herself that they had somehow sensed what was about to happen before it happened, as animals frequently do, and were even now safe at the back of a big cave somewhere.

And then there was the matter of Rooky, the strange creature that had been given to Fluttershy by an Ancient. Twilight had reason to believe that the animal, who did not seem to be 100 % organic, may well have survived the explosion, even unprotected.

“Twilight,” prodded Spike, noticing that the pony he was standing on had stopped moving, “shouldn’t we be getting a move on? We’re nearly at Ponyville.”

“Why do I have gaps in my memory?” Twilight asked him in an accusing tone. “How can the landscape be so monotonous this far from where we started? Why does everything feel completely wrong on a level that has nothing to do with the events of the past few hours? And where is all of this ash coming from?” Her voice threatened to break on those last two words, as she suddenly imagined the ash to be the burnt remains of every book that had ever existed.

“Woah, woah, woah!” exclaimed Spike, hopping down so he could look the unicorn in the eye, while still staying inside the bubble. “Why do you expect me to know the answers to any of those questions?”

“I don’t, Spike. It’s just that I have nopony else to ask. If there was something I could do, something I could research, anything but just walking to make this better, it could keep my mind from driving itself crazy!”

“Well if you need a distraction, I can provide that, easy!” Spike proclaimed, climbing back on top of Twilight. “Tell me what happened after your last report, so I can put it in the report you’re preparing for the Princess.”

“Yes, yes I’m sure that will help. Thanks, Spike!” It occurred to Twilight to wonder why the usually-curious dragon had not gotten around to asking such a basic question before now. Putting that matter aside for the moment, she took a deep breath and resumed walking as she began to recount her memories.

“Well, to begin with, we made contact with the strange craft that had landed in the meadow at the north end of the Everfree Forest. As I had suspected, it was created by the Ancients. No Ancient can survive on Equestria now, because they come from a realm without magic. But they had somehow come up with a type of rubbery paint that prevented the two sets of physical laws from mixing, and had covered the craft with this substance.

“The craft itself was one giant machine, an intelligent machine, and once we had established communication, it explained the Ancients’ plans for us.”

Twilight thought for a moment before continuing. “The Ancients are very disappointing. They have a history of fighting epic battles against powerful enemies as well as their own darker nature. They have created incredible art and music that is so very similar to our own. Their fiction, from what little of it I have encountered, is completely unsurpassed in its discernment.

“And despite all of these things, they are the most petty, self-serving species in the universe!”

“Worse than the Diamond Dogs?” Spike ventured.

“Spike, they created a machine that could not only think, but also feel, a being fully deserving of being considered an equal of any Ancient, or pony. And they armed this machine with a thermo-nuclear bomb, and took away its ability to control it. And what is the purpose of that bomb? To ensure that they got the most-profitable trade agreement possible, with whoever was willing to deal with them.”

“I don’t understand,” said Spike. “If they can’t survive on our world, and we can’t survive on theirs, what could we possibly trade with them?”

“It turns out,” Twilight explained, exasperation with the Ancients apparent in her voice, “that if an object from Equestria is removed to the world of the Ancients, it continues to retain its magical properties for some time before becoming adapted to its new surroundings. The Ancients are extremely interested in obtaining a steady stream of these objects—they could be rocks for all the Ancients care. In return, they will give Equestria objects from their world, objects we were assured would be just as useful to us.

“Princess Celestia had misgivings over the long-term consequences of mixing the laws of two worlds in this manner. The ship told us that it had already negotiated with the Dragon Emperor, and he was willing to enslave the whole of Equestria in order to provide the Ancients with a mountain of rocks every single year. His only condition was that the Ancient craft use its bomb to destroy Celestia and cripple Equestria. The craft told us this, in hopes of getting an even better offer out of the Princess. In return, it was willing to do the same thing against the dragons as it had promised to do to us.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Spike in admiration. “And then what happened?”

Twilight gave Spike a strange look before continuing. “Celestia’s response was to pick up the craft with her magic and launch herself into the sky. She hoped to get the UFO outside of the world’s atmosphere before it inevitably exploded. But...she didn’t quite succeed.”

“Do you think the bomb was truly as powerful as the Ancient craft claimed?” asked Spike.

“No, of course not,” replied Twilight. “That was all a bunch of lies.”

“But doesn’t your Ancient history books call a therma…that kind of bomb…”

“…‘the Planet Killer’?” Twilight said, finishing Spike’s sentence. The books Spike referred to had come from the same source as Rooky. “That’s nothing but propaganda. Remember that it was the Ancients who wrote those books, after all. And see! There’s the proof right there—Ponyville is still intact!”

The bridge that crossed the river into Ponyville no longer existed. But that wasn’t much of a hindrance, because the river no longer existed, either, leaving an easily-crossed dry riverbed. The outer buildings of the town were more or less in one piece, but minus the thatched roofs. There was some smoke damage visible, and of course a thick layer of ash covered everything, but by and large it was remarkable how well the village looked…especially when compared with the lands leading up to the town, which were just as devastated as every other patch of land Twilight had seen to this point.

In addition to the buildings, Ponyville added something else completely missing from the trip thus far: outside sounds. Unfortunately, the sounds Twilight heard consisted of low, angry moans, like the sounds of several dangerously-hungry animals.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she said.

Chapter V2: Depression

[Redacted]

- Chapter V2: Depression -

Two Days Ago

“Spike, is that you?”

The ponies standing in line around Vinyl Scratch looked around them for a few seconds before giving up.

“I don’t see him,” the pony behind her finally said.

“But you did see a baby dragon, right?” Vinyl asked.

“No. Believe me, if a dragon who wasn’t Spike just walked by, you’d know it.”

“Huh.” Vinyl was certain she heard the sound of a small bipedal creature with scales walk right past her. But on second thought, the creature had sounded impossibly far away, and not even she would have been able to pick out the sound of a distant baby dragon in the busy square.

Unseen by anypony, the invisible dragon made his way deeper into the city. All along he was carefully adjusting the parameters of his invisibility spell: if he made it too perfect, the amount of magic necessary would attract the attention of the unicorn guards circulating among the crowd.

“Next customer!”

When Vinyl reached the booth at the end of the line for the telegraph, she was surprised to find that Ozone Telegraph wasn’t waiting to take her message, but instead a rather dour-sounding unicorn equipped with a large black marker that smelled like rotting artichokes.

“Where’s Ozone?” Vinyl asked casually.

“He’s in the light- and sound-proof box behind me,” barked the unicorn in exasperation. It sounded like she had answered that question thousands of times in the past few weeks. “Where’s your message?”

“Oh, Ozone usually lets me dictate it to him,” Vinyl said, gesturing at her sunglasses. “Why’s he in a box?”

The unicorn sighed like she was dealing with an idiot. “The Telegraphs can transmit information to the four corners of Equestria. For the sake of national security, they must be restricted in what they see and hear.”

Vinyl thought that was rather harsh. On the other hoof, she recognized that something should be done under the circumstances, even if the black box treatment would not have been her first choice.

“You may dictate your letter now. Please keep your voice low enough to reduce the number of ponies who might overhear you as much as possible.”

Vinyl shrugged to herself, then leaned in and whispered her message:

Dear Uncle Philo,

The IPO went off without a hitch--you would have been so proud of me!

I’ve decided to volunteer for the Princess’ Army. For now, I am stationed in Canterlot as a morale officer. I’ll send you any updates as soon as I hear of them.

Take care of yourself and the rest of the OCA.

Don’t worry--I’ll be fine!

Love,

Vinyl

P.S. Send any letters to me care of DJ AJ4X, Canterlot.

It was a very long, and therefore very expensive, message to be sending by Telegraph, but Vinyl had indeed done very well at the stock market, and had plenty of bits to spare.

No sooner than the sound of the unicorn’s pen scratching ceased, than it was replaced by the squeaks of the marker. This marking went on for nearly a whole minute.

“That will be fifteen bits.”

“What!” exclaimed Vinyl, at hearing the unexpectedly low rate. “Read that message back to me,” she requested firmly.

“Very well,” said the unicorn, who then leaned in close to Vinyl’s ear to read from the now very-smelly piece of paper she had written on:

[__] [___] Philo,

[_] [_] [__] [_] [_____] [ [________] [___] [__] [__] [] [___] [] [_]

[__] [_____] [] [_______] [_] [_] [_______] [___] [_] [__] I am [_______] [] [_______] [] [ [____] [______] [__] [__] [_] [_] [_____] [] [__] [] [ [__] [] [___]

[__] [__] [] [______] [_] [_] [__] [] [_] [__]

[___] [_________] [] fine[

[___]

[___]

[__] [__] [_] [_____] [] [] [__] [] [] [___] [_______]

“That’s it?!” Vinyl asked indignantly upon discovering that the message had been redacted to within a hairs-width of its life. She reached forward to feel the page, wet with fresh marker.

The unicorn stood up straight. “You were revealing vital Equestrian secrets! Who knows who might be listening in on the transmission?!”

This despite the fact that the Telegraph family transmitted their messages telepathically, and for that reason it was physically impossible to “listen in” on them.

“If you weren’t a volunteer,” the unicorn told Vinyl with a heavy dose of self-righteousness, “I’d be reporting you to the authorities this very moment as a possible subversive!”

“What part of ‘Dear Uncle’ is subversive?” Vinyl asked incredulously.

“It reveals your relationship to the recipient. If you were ever captured by the enemy, that could be used against you.”

“The name of my uncle is public knowledge!”

“Public pony knowledge, perhaps...”

“You didn’t even keep my name!” Vinyl pleaded. “How will he know it was from me?”

“He will rest secure in the knowledge that somepony he knows is fine. As a loyal subject of the Princesses, that will have to be enough. Now will you be paying the fifteen bits that you owe, or will I be forced to disintegrate this message?”

“Ugh, fine!” Vinyl said, and passed over the money.

She heard the note being slipped through a very narrow slit in what must have been poor Ozone Telegraph’s black box as she walked away.

Vinyl made her way to a newsstand she knew of bordering the train station. She had to walk slowly, pushing through a solid mass of ponies.

Her ears were awash in conversations. Canterlot appeared to be full to bursting with refugees. Ponies fleeing from anywhere to anywhere were all stopped here for processing. And so she heard the same phrases over and over again:

“Excuse me, ma’am, but have you seen this stallion? He’s my husband...”

“I’m just looking for my brother...”

“...son...”

“Does anypony know what’s happening in Stalliongrad?”

This last question was one Vinyl was curious about herself. She reached the newsstand and found a spot to sit and listen. She might not be able to read a newspaper unaided, but she found she picked up most of the news she needed by listening in on the conversations of the ponies who would gather here and debate each other on the headlines.

A few minutes of surveillance did nothing to ease her curiosity.

Speculation about the war was of course the top story. There were plenty of details about the speeches in the Senate, but it appeared that they knew next to nothing about how the war was actually being waged. What were the Princesses’ plans? Princess Luna was not in the capital, that was obvious--everypony assumed that she had taken personal charge of the troops, but where were they?

For that matter, where was news of anything happening outside Canterlot? The latest news in Ponyville almost always showed up in the “local” section of the paper, if only as a way for the sophisticated city-folk to look down their long noses at the antics of the uncultured masses, but this time Vinyl heard nothing.

The informal crew of news analysts that Vinyl relied on also noticed this problem, and asked the news vendor for an explanation.

“Oh, I’ll give you an explanation,” said the vendor, “the doors to Canterlot are closed, literally and figuratively. Any pony who wants can come in, but nopony can leave.”

The ponies accepted this revelation with equinimity. Canterlot was the best-protected city in Equestria, even when the Princesses were visiting elsewhere. If there was any one place a pony might choose to be confined in for all eternity, Canterlot was not a bad choice by a long stretch.

The fact of this did not satisfy Vinyl, however. She wanted answers, and she knew where to get them.

Vinyl Scratch’s internal clock told her that she had more than an hour before she had to report in, so she chose a route that took her past the palace.

The DJ had had the extraordinary luck to have met both princesses on more than one occasion (she carefully refrained from classifying this luck as “good” or “bad”). From what she could judge of their characters, she was fairly certain that neither one of them would have instituted a security system as silly as the one she had encountered at the Telegraph booth.

I mean, if the Princesses actually had a good reason to be that paranoid, surely they would have instructed their agents to fill in the spaces between the words, to make it harder to guess the original message? she asked herself.

As she approached the plaza in front of the main palace entrance, she heard the growing voices of an angry crowd. Buzzing and shouting gradually coalesced into understandable slogans.

“No dragons in Equestria!” “Dragon diplomacy is deplorable!” “What are they doing with those hands of theirs, anyway? Whatever it is, it can’t be good!”

Vinyl stopped at the back of the crowd and listened quietly. There were nearly a hundred angry ponies here, lining the main route by which the Diplomatic Dragon Corps (or DDC) would pass every morning and every evening walking to and from the palace.

“So what did the DDC do, anyway?” she asked a random protester.

“They refused to let us tar and feather them!” she replied.

Now dragons, being nearly indestructible, probably would have considered the application of boiling tar at least to be a luxury, but Vinyl supposed that their pride probably prevented them from acquiescing to the mob’s demand.

In between the slogan shouting, Vinyl picked up an absurd number of rumors about what was really going on in the war: The soldiers had been sent south because that was where the war was actually being held. The dragons hadn’t taken Stalliongrad, they had taken Cloudsdale. Princess Luna had overthrown Celestia and disguised herself as her sister. Luna was personally leading the pony armies. Luna was personally leading the dragon armies. The Dragon Emperor was in fact Nightmare Moon. The Dragon Emperor was in fact Spike, and Twilight Sparkle was actually a stuffed pony that Spike used like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The dragons had planted a sleeper army underneath Canterlot five thousand years ago, and were just waiting for the moment to send them erupting out of the sewers. And, finally, there was no war, and Trollestia was watching the panic she had created from a tower at the very top of the palace and laughing her tail off.

“Let us have the dragons, Celestia!” a member of the crowd suddenly demanded.

“Unless you want us to think you’re a lowdown dirty dragon-lover!” shouted another. “Maybe you’re the reason we haven’t won this war yet!”

Vinyl gasped softly. Am I actually hearing a mortal pony accusing her creator of treason? she asked herself in disbelief.

In response to the accusation, the gates of the palace opened and the trumpets announcing the imminent arrival of the Princess were sounded.

Vinyl, not sure what was going to happen, edged away from the crowd and prepared to slip away to safety if necessary.

“Citizens of Equestria,” declared Princess Celestia, as she stepped out of the palace, followed by a rather-large crowd. Her words were calm and rather low, but her magic ensured that they were heard by every pony in the plaza. She also sounded very tired.

Vinyl decided to risk staying to hear her out. In the worst-case scenario, she hoped Twilight Sparkle or one of her friends would get her out of jail if she was mistakenly rounded up with the others.

“You see before you all of the diplomats and ambassadors that have the honor to attend me at the Royal Court of Equestria. They number ponies and zebra, deer and griffons. And yes, they include dragons. They are all, every one of them, devoted to the cause of advancing our mutual interests through friendly negotiation. Many of the dragons you speak against represent clans that wish to ally with Equestria against the tyranny of the Dragon Emperor. Would you include them in your scorn?”

“Give us the Emperor’s dragon!” shouted the angry pony from before. She was safely far enough away that the Princess’ guard could not easily catch her.

“Ah, but without him, who would relay the Emperor’s surrender to me when I ask for it?” Celestia asked gently, causing a good part of the crowd to laugh loudly.

“What’s really going on, Princess?” asked a voice.

“What happened to Princess Luna?” asked another.

Vinyl noticed that the crowd gave the Princess time to answer this last question, but she refused to say anything.

“You can’t trust a dragon, Your Majesty,” pleaded a voice from the back of the crowd.

“I can trust these dragons,” Celestia said in a somewhat patronizing tone.

“But what if you’re wrong?”

This apparently struck a nerve. “What if I am wrong?!” Celestia asked in something approaching the “Canterlot Royal Voice”. “My trust is never misplaced! And do you know why, my little ponies? It is because I do not trust, I know. I know what is in the hearts of each and every one of you, and what is in the hearts of each and every one of them! I know what is best for you, ponies, and I will carry this war to a successful conclusion. That is all you need to know. Now go home, ponies. Go home.”

The spell accompanying these words caused the crowd to instantly disburse. Vinyl found herself unaffected, perhaps because it was pretty much impossible for her to go home under the circumstances. She stood and listened to the sounds of the palace for a few moments, before turning to leave.

“Hmm...” From a window in the tower at the very top of the palace, a young female dragon noted Vinyl Scratch’s presence, and watched as she walked away. Or, to be more precise, it was a being that looked like a young female dragon.

“Vinyl Scratch, alias DJ Pon-3, reporting for duty.”

The other pony in the room, a young earth pony stallion, rushed forward to grasp her forehooves. “Pon-3, it is such an honor to meet you at last!” he exclaimed, shaking her hooves vigorously. “You’ve been an inspiration to me all my life! I turned away from the family business to follow in your hoofprints!”

Judging by his faint accent and a distinctive scent in the air from his half-eaten dinner, Vinyl Scratch was willing to bet that DJ AJ4X’s “family business” was apples.

“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “I snuck into your Canterlot premiere when I was just a foal, years and years and years and years...”

“...yes, that’s quite...”

“...and years and years and years and...”

“...that will be quite enough, AJ4X...sir.”

“Oh, don’t waste time with titles,” the stallion stated. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re my superior, not vice-versa.”

“Well,” said Vinyl, gently disengaging herself from the endless hoofshake, “you do have the advantage of me in one area: how I may best serve Equestria here in Canterlot. Besides the music, that is.”

DJ AJ4X drew himself tall on being reminded of his duties. “The job of morale officer has a good deal more to it than just DJ’ing. We are the Princesses’ eyes and ears and...I can’t believe I actually said ‘eyes’ to you, of all ponies. I’m such an idiot!”

Vinyl laughed. “You don’t have to prance on eggshells around me, AJ4X, I don’t mind. So we just use our position to get a sense of how the citizens are feeling? I started on that job before I even got here.” And she told him what she witnessed outside the palace.

“Yes, I was there too,” AJ4X said grimly. “It was a large group, so I’m not surprised I didn’t spot you. I’ll be writing up a report tonight, and I could use your input.”

“Alright. What is our schedule for tonight?”

“Let me get it. Each day, our orders will be left for us under the false back of the middle drawer of this desk. The lock on the drawers is the same as the lock to my house, and the same as the lock of the house that has been provided to you.”

Vinyl heard AJ4X unlock the desk, open a drawer, and remove a wooden partition to retrieve a piece of paper, which after a brief study he promptly burned in the waste basket before putting the partition back and locking the desk back up. “There’s four different parties tonight,” he told her, “but the first one doesn’t start until ten.”

“I figured there’d be a curfew?”

“Not yet,” the stallion said as he slid on his saddlebags. “Come with me. There’s a late-night session at the Senate tonight, and somepony I want you to...um, hear. After that I’ll take you to where you’ll be staying. Have you eaten yet?”

“No, I haven’t,” admitted the unicorn.

DJ AJ4X dropped the saddlebags. “Well, that’s first priority. I’ll warm up some carrot and apple soup.”

A half-hour later, the two of them found places in the second-floor gallery of the Equestrian Senate. Vinyl heard the chatter of several other spectators from all around the floor. Below, the floor was mostly empty, as only a few senators stayed to listen to the debate.

“Fillies and gentlecolts,” declaimed one of those senators, a unicorn stallion. “Given the fractious history I have just outlined, given its isolated location, given its miserable climate, its suspect sovereignty, and the thousands of bits wasted every year in subsidies, I must ask the question: why are we fighting for Stalliongrad?”

AJ4X leaned over to whisper into Vinyl’s ear. “That’s Prince Constant, leader of the opposition.”

“That’s a curious statement to be making,” observed another voice from the floor, a voice that seemed centuries old yet full of equal parts strength and sarcasm, “seeing as the fall of Stalliongrad provoked this war, the declaration of which I remember you voting for.”

“And that’s the head of the loyalists,” said AJ4X, “Professor...”

“...Stein,” finished Vinyl. “We’ve met before.”

“I made that vote, Professor,” said Constant, “before all the facts were in my possession. Facts, I do not need to state, that were known to the Princesses and yourself at the time.”

“No,” the professor drawled, “of course you don’t need to state for the record, for the fourth time this week, the existence of facts that were given to you under the strictest confidence. But you did it anyway, out of the kindness of your heart.”

“And you still insist on calling the event the ‘fall’ of Stalliongrad,” the prince sneered. “Let us call it what it is: the defection of Stalliongrad.”

This revelation produced an uproar in the gallery, which the pounding of a gavel by the Senate chairpony did little to diminish.

“You gave your word!” declared the professor several times as the crowd finally settled down.

“I gave my loyalty to the ponies of Canterlot and of Equestria, and I will not allow this sham war to go on for a minute longer!” shouted the prince. “The ponies shall know the truth, and they shall know it now! Know, citizens, that the city of Stalliongrad was approached three months ago by a dragon delegation bearing proof that the city had been founded on lands granted to the dragons by the legitimate pony authorities over five thousand years ago. Proof, I might add, that we have yet to see.”

“Another addition to the official record,” said Pr. Stein sarcastically. “You are being most generous tonight, dear prince.”

“The inhabitants of Stalliongrad had a free and democratic vote, and they decided unanimously to sever their ties with Equestria and align themselves with Draconia. A vote I am asking this Senate to confirm.”

“Yes, that was a very interesting vote,” Pr. Stein observed. “Did you ever wonder how the dragons managed to produce a unanimous vote? If this body is any judge, getting a group of ponies that large to agree unanimously on anything is simply impossible. And yet this vote happened within a week of the ambassador’s arrival. Did that never strike you as odd?”

“I do not judge by hearsay,” Prince Constant replied coldly. “I have asked repeatedly for the right to question the Emperor’s ambassador on the Senate floor, and you have consistently refused me. You cannot deny that he is here. So why don’t you produce him?”

The professor said nothing.

“Is it perhaps because you do not think Equestrians can handle an opposing point of view? Are you, perhaps, worried about the consequences to yourself if Equestrians learned the truth, the entire truth, about this war? Worried about losing Celestia’s favor, worried in fact about losing something a good deal more intimate than merely her favor?”

“You, sir, are out of bounds!” declared a loyalist.

“Am I?” asked the prince. “Am I?!”

There was a tense silence on the floor.

“Very well,” the Professor said, walking over to the door. “If this is a night for revealing truths, let us have the whole truth.”

“Professor, no!” cried out the loyalist senator from before.

“Admit the Emperor’s ambassador!” Stein ordered.

If the revelation about Stalliongrad was shocking, the entrance of the ambassador was mind-blowing, as the entire gallery was silenced by a simultaneous intake of breath by everypony.

Everypony except for Vinyl Scratch.

“He...he...he...!” was all AJ4X was able to say.

“Ah, ponies, it is good, to be among you, once more,” the new voice began.

Now it was Vinyl’s turn to gasp. “It can’t be!” she exclaimed.

But it was.

The Dragon Emperor’s personal ambassador to Princess Celestia was none other than Prince Steadfast, Vinyl’s old enemy.

“...brother?” Prince Constant asked in confusion.

“Indeed!” replied Steadfast.

Vinyl noted that there was something...off...about his voice. He spoke when he breathed in instead of when he was breathing out. And it seemed as if that breath was going into a pair of lungs not completely under his control.

“He’s wearing...” AJ4X managed to choke out.

“I come bringing the glad tidings,” announced Prince Steadfast, “of my master. Yes, the Emperor is my rider, and I will go, where he bids me!”

“He’s wearing a saddle and bridle made from...from an animal!” the DJ finally managed to say.

Several spectators backed away from the railings in a mixture of disgust and fear. But none of them were willing to leave.

“All who oppose my master will be, over-ridden,” Steadfast intoned in his strange voice. “Just as Stalliongrad was over-ridden.”

“Tell them what your master wants,” Professor Stein said coldly. “Tell them what you told me.”

“My master is, most generous,” Steadfast said. “He does not need your, obedience. He is quite willing to live, in peace, with the ponies. All he wants is, the settling of the, the ancient debt, between our two nations.

“Millennia ago, the dragons, were the dominant race on, the planet, and our magic, was supreme. But then one of your kind, an alicorn, put all life on, this planet, in jeopardy. It was the dragons, who tipped the balance, the dragons who, saved us all, at the price of their supremacy, and most of, their magic. All the emperor...asks is for, that debt to be, repaid. Give us the damaged, alicorn. Give us...Luna. By falling to Nightmare, she has proved, herself undeserving. Give her to us! We will drain, the magic, and life, out of her, drop, by drop! It will take, a million, days for her to, die, a million, days of the, most exquisite, pleasure...!”

“Brother or not, you’re going down!” exclaimed Prince Constant, leaping over his desk to tackle Steadfast. Over the sounds of the beating could be heard the tittering of Steadfast’s laughter, growing more and more insane with every minute.

The ponies in the galleries fled in terror.

Chapter T3: Bargaining

[Redacted]

- Chapter T3: Bargaining -

Today

Twilight found herself and her bubble located in the exact center of Ponyville. A blink of an eye earlier, she could have sworn she was still at the outskirts. With an inaudible sigh, she started picking her way through the deserted village. The growling sounds could still be heard, but whatever was making them was moving in such a way as to avoid being seen.

From his vantage point on Twilight’s back, Spike stood up and looked around in all directions. “You know,” he told her, “all this talk of ‘planet killers’ reminds me of the Battle of Pelican Fields.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that battle, Spike,” the unicorn answered with uncertainty. With the way her memory was playing tricks on her, it was entirely possible that she had written an entire dissertation on the battle and just forgotten it now.

“Oh, I’m not surprised,” he told her with an air of superiority. “It happened far before the dawn of pony history. Pelican Fields is where the Dragon Elders turned back the madness of the Black King.”

“Th...the Black King?” asked Twilight in sudden fear. Her only knowledge of the infamous figure came from a stained glass window in Canterlot Palace, the oldest existing glasswork in all of Equestria. She knew that the Black King, before the madness, had been the only individual to ever unite all of the races in the world under his rule. Dragons and serpents, constellations and spirits, griffons and minotaurs, diamond dogs and wolves, the deer and all of the other hooved beings, had submitted themselves to his wisdom. And particularly the Black King’s own race, the most fractious creatures of all: the alicorns.

The most precious thing in the world to the Black King was his wife, the White Queen. But she suffered from a fatal disease, and as she was gasping out her last moments of life, the jealous alicorns keep him from her bedside, in hopes of taking over the government when he gave in to grief.

The Black King did not give in to grief. Instead he gave in to madness. He drained all of the magic from his fellow alicorns, and used this to power an infernal device, a device designed to send every living being on the planet to the same place his beloved bride had gone.

“The dragons in those days were the master race of the planet,” Spike continued. “Their heads touched the clouds, and there were no creatures that did not fear them. But they did not know unity, until they met the Black King. They invested him with the power to rule over them all. When the Black King went mad, when he made himself the Enemy of Life, his daughters had the chance to do the right thing, but they failed.” The dragon spoke this last sentence with utter contempt, causing Twilight’s eyes to narrow.

The Black King’s daughters were Celestia and Luna, and they were little more than fillies at the time, still in mourning for their mother. As for the “right thing to do”...well that particular act goes by the name of “patricide,” and Twilight didn’t think she wanted somepony capable of doing that as her monarch, so she was quite happy to know that they were incapable of doing it.

“This left the dragons with a choice,” said Spike. “They had the power to protect themselves, to survive the cataclysm with their strength intact as the lone species left in Draconia. But instead they made the worst decision in their entire history. They sacrificed their power by pouring it into the Black King until he overloaded.

“When the battle ended, the dragons lost their chance to easily rule the planet, and Pelican Fields looked exactly like this--nothing living could ever set foot upon it again.”

“Oh, and it looks like we have visitors!” Spike announced happily.

“What are those things?” Twilight asked Spike, peering desperately through the cloud of kicked-up dust at the creatures shambling towards them.

“Zomponies,” whispered Spike.

Twilight looked over with shock at the dragon on her back then faced forward.

The creatures were now emerging from the gloom, twisted parodies of the citizens of Ponyville. They were all a grayish-green in color, and Twilight was horrified to notice that all of them had parts missing. Some were missing an eye, others a leg, but none of them showed any signs of being in pain, despite the obvious bite marks.

The leader of the pack, the pony who had once been Lily, opened her mouth and attempted to say something, but it just came out as a sort of strangled gurgle.

“What will you do?” asked Spike. In Twilight Sparkle’s ears, his voice sounded less of desperation and more of arrogance.

The unicorn tried to back away, but suddenly found herself against a wall, a wall that she could have sworn was not there a minute ago.

The Lily-zompony reached out a leg. Instead of a hoof, it presented a broken-off and sharpened bone, which it used to draw blood on Twilight’s side before she had a chance to get away.

Twilight tried to run, but almost immediately collapsed in utter exhaustion.

Sadly, this was no longer a surprise to her. She had finally figured out why she had been growing increasingly weaker: radiation poisoning, caused by the length of time she had slept in that tent before putting up any kind of defense.

The creatures were now surrounding her on all sides, scraping at her with their hooves.

Lily fastened her jaws around Twilight’s hindleg, causing her to cry out in pain.

The desperate mare kicked out feebly, causing Lily to fall onto the pavement.

The instant she landed, she dryly broke into about a dozen pieces.

“It’s not fair!” Twilight cried out to the sky.

Lily’s place as the chief of Twilight’s feasters was taken by zompony Rarity.

“It’s not fair!!!”

From the sky erupted the sound of riotous laughter at Twilight’s fate, a laugh from the voice of Princess Celestia herself.

Chapter V3: Bargaining

[Redacted]

- Chapter V3: Bargaining -

Two Days Ago

Vinyl wandered the streets for several minutes, trying to come to terms with what she had heard. Even in her scattered state of mind, she kept her mental map of Canterlot before her at all times, and the ponies in her path let her by with quiet comments to each other at her emotional state that they thought she couldn’t overhear.

Finally, on a quiet street corner, she stopped and turned to the pony who had been following her. “How much did you know?” she asked.

“Some,” admitted DJ AJ4X. “Not much.”

“How does he do it?” she mused mostly to herself. “How does the Emperor ‘over-ride’ somepony?”

“I...I don’t know.”

Neither of them said anything for a couple of minutes.

“Are you going to be alright?” he asked.

Vinyl exhaled loudly and nodded her head. “You’ll find I’m made of sterner stuff than that. So...um, where is this place you’ve picked out for me to stay? I was thinking of staying with my friend Octavia.”

“Octavia’s Ensemble is in Fillydelphia,” said the earth stallion DJ. “And I know that she rented out her room to a couple of music students.”

“OK,” Vinyl said. “And I suppose Rarity’s penthouse apartment and the palace are also taken.”

“I’m afraid so. However, Rarity’s friend Pinkie Pie arranged a place for my eventual assistant to stay as soon as she heard I was asking for one. Follow me.”

The two ponies worked their way far from the palace, into the bowels of the lower city. Finally they reached an open area at the edge of town. The smell, for somepony as sensitive as Vinyl Scratch, took some getting used to, but she supposed she’d adjust eventually.

“This was a place where visiting caravans would park their wagons and trailers while they did their business up above,” explained DJ AJ4X. “Eventually those that failed to get what they wanted from the Princess moved into their trailers, and this came to be known as a ‘trailer park’.” He produced two keys from his saddlebags and unlocked the door of one of the trailers with one of them. “This is where you will be staying, and here is a spare, just in case. It’s one of the bigger of the trailers, and certainly the most-comfortable of the ones I’ve been able to examine.”

Vinyl quietly walked through the three rooms of the trailer and listened to make sure the elevated floor wouldn’t crack open any time soon. It seemed sound enough.

“There’s something else,” the stallion said. “Follow me.”

He led her to the center of the “park”. By the sounds and feel of the objects they walked over, Vinyl judged that this area was used as a sort of communal junk heap. She wondered what could possibly be worth visiting here until she heard a couple of reedy notes forming a discordant mixture. She pushed her way forward to place her hoof beside where AJ4X had just pressed.

“A dragon organ!” she exclaimed. A few touches revealed that, although it was far from being in tune, it was not so far gone as to be unsalvageable.

“Pinkie told me you’d like it,” AJ4X said with satisfaction.

Vinyl Scratch suddenly turned on him. “She said that I, specifically, would like it?”

“Oh, well no, of course not!” the other pony backpedaled. “How could either of us possibly know who would get the job of my assistant? I put out the ad a week and a half ago, Pinkie gave me the key a couple days later, and now here you are, the first DJ to enlist after my request was approved and circulated. Pinkie just told me that whatever pony I got, would love the organ.”

Vinyl pressed a single key and held it down. “Tell me, AJ4X, is that a pleasing note to you?”

“Ah, well, I’m sure if you take it in context...”

“Be honest with me. Does this sound good to you?”

“Ah...no. To be brutally honest, I’ve never seen the attraction in dragon music. Could...could you stop playing? That note is putting my teeth on edge.”

Vinyl removed her hoof from the keyboard. “Exactly. I am the only DJ I know with an appreciation of dragon music.”

“And that means...?”

Vinyl paused. She had heard from Twilight Sparkle what happened to those who had come too close to figuring out how Pinkie Pie works. She sighed. “It means Pinkie Pie was being random,” she said. There, Universe, she added mentally. Are you happy now? Nothing fell on her head, so she took that as a “yes”.

It was still several hours before Pon-3 and AJ4X would begin their hosting duties for the night, so Vinyl sent her boss home while she played a few dragon folksongs on the organ. She then went around the trailer park to introduce herself to any pony willing to answer a polite knock at their door.

“Zip does not have time for your foolish games, Dib,” came the voice of one who did not wish to answer his door. “Go home and think of another plan which is DOOMED to fail.”

Vinyl then heard the sound of a blowtorch being ignited inside the house and a hammer being pounded on something metallic. “That tickles!” cried out the high-pitched and slightly-distorted voice of a little diamond dog.

Vinyl grinned in recognition. “Don’t bother to put yourself together, Zip Perturb,” she told him through the door. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m your next door neighbor. A word of advice, though: we ponies dearly love our puns. So this Dib fellow, whoever he is, is guilty of foalish games, not foolish ones.”

She turned to walk away, but as she suspected, the sound of a raised curtain was quickly followed by the frantic sounds of somebody putting on an elaborate costume that involved one really long zipper, followed by the sudden unbolting and opening of the front door.

“Vinyl Scratch!” exclaimed the occupant. “What brings you to this miserable corner of Canterlot? Is it perhaps to visit the humble abode of the Almighty Zip?”

Vinyl turned with a laugh. “That speaking in the third person business reminds me of somepony else who lived in a trailer,” she remarked. “How did you like my playing?”

“So that was the, err, sound that I heard. Sound which, as a foalish pony, Zip has no interest in whatsoever!”

Vinyl laughed once again. From what she had been able to observe, she doubted that Zip’s pony disguise fooled anypony who saw it. And as a pony capable of distinguishing species and breed by voice alone, that disguise might as well be made of clear glass. “Of course, Zip, of course,” she said.

Zip closed the space between then. “So is it true what Zip has been told, that you are a blind pony?” he asked her quietly.

Vinyl lowered herself to her knees to be at his level. “Why don’t you see for yourself?” she challenged him.

Zip paused for a few moments, and then reached out and lifted her sunglasses.

Neither of them said anything for nearly a minute. In Vinyl’s mind, this alone would have been proof of Zip’s true nature, for no pony could stand to look beneath those glasses for so long.

“I know not of pony magic,” Zip said as he replaced her glasses, “but the dragons are capable of transforming pearls into new eyes. When this...foalish war is over, you should think about approaching them on this matter. Zip might know one or two dragon wizards you could ask.”

Vinyl got back to her feet. “I’ve learned to live with what I was born with, Zip. You may label that a strength, or a weakness. Now then, where are your guardians?”

Zip quickly retreated until his back was to the front door of his trailer. “They, err...they are on a business trip. Yes. They have business to do, and will return when that business...had been brought to a business-like conclusion.”

Vinyl frowned. Fire Engine and Eggplant Perturb were far more competent at this “dragon pretending to be a pony” business than Zip was, and without them there was a very real chance that the little egomaniac could get himself exposed. “Zip, if you’re in trouble, tell me about it. I can help.”

“You’re asking Zip to trust you? A miserable little ponyling?”

“Watch it, squirt,” she said jokingly, easily towering over him. He was only a baby dragon inside that suit, after all.

“Why should Zip trust you?” he asked. “I’ve known you for what...a year? Compared to my...err...some pony’s lifetime, that is nothing! Come back in ten years, and then we can talk.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Vinyl. “You remind me of me, when I was...a year younger. Wow,” she suddenly realized, “time really flies in the vicinity of the Gang of Six. I’ll pass on one of the lessons I learned from them: everypony deserves the right to at least prove whether they are deserving or not of your trust. Anyway, you probably have no need for this advice whatsoever, coming as it does from a ‘squishy mammal’, but I stumbled across a nearly-complete set of electromagical capacitors near the left side of that dragon organ. Just the thing for repairing a broken robotic pet. Not that I would know anything about such a thing, of course. Goodnight, noble steed.”

Zip stared silently at Vinyl’s retreating back, before sneaking after her and stopping at the organ to look for those capacitors.

The parties that night were some of the most-intense that DJ Pon-3 had ever hosted. The dance floor was thick with ponies, grooving their hearts out. None of them wanted any of the slow songs either, just fast music to dance mindlessly to. Like any good DJ, Pon-3 prided herself on her near-mystical bond with her dancers, and these seemed to desperately suck the life and vitality out of her and each other. They needed to be reassured that life was worth living.

At the same time as Pon-3 was working the records and the CDs, Vinyl Scratch was listening to the Etheric. Playing at this time of night was a government-sponsored program: “Deeds of the Noble Steeds”. She heard about a shy pony who faced down a dragon after all of her friends failed, before his smoke could make her town unlivable. She heard about another pony who had overcome her own insecurities to accomplish her signature stunt at a competition, but only as a way to save the life of a friend who had mistakenly put her in her funk in the first place. A third story was about a silly pony who was the only one who knew the solution to a plague that threatened to destroy the livelihoods of everypony in town, especially after the brainy pony had completely lost her marbles.

Of course Vinyl Scratch knew instantly which ponies were the inspirations for these stories. She only hoped that these sorts of stories were enough to combat the rising tide of panic and hopelessness she felt in the ponies DJ Pon-3 played her music for.

Afterwards, Vinyl Scratch stumbled home. It was only a few hours before sunrise. She was fitting the key into the lock of her new home when she heard some other ponies pounding on a thin door, threatening to break it down.

“Open up in the name of the law!” one of them commanded.

It was the door to Zip’s trailer.

“We got you now, Zip!” exclaimed the nerdy voice of a unicorn colt. Dib, Vinyl was willing to bet.

“Can I help you, officers?” Vinyl asked, after having raced up beside them.

“Do you know the individual who lives in this trailer, Madame?” one of the royal guard officers asked.

“I do,” she said quietly.

“And do you know that he’s secretly a reptile?” sneered Dib. “Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Vinyl dearly hoped that Dib would never be selected by a superior race as a random representative of Equestria to determine the survival of the planet, because in that case, they were all surely doomed.

“What a curious assertion!” she exclaimed with mock cheer.

“He is a dragon!” exclaimed Dib. “And don’t try to tell me that he’s one of those exiled dragons that oppose the Emperor! He’s living among ponies instead of his own kind, and he’s in disguise like he’s afraid that some dragon will hunt him down--that proves that he must be a loyal subject of the Emperor!”

Dib and Logic were apparently not well-acquainted.

“Really!” Vinyl exclaimed.

“I’m telling the truth! You just have to look at him!”

Vinyl raised an eyebrow as she caught an easy way out. She pulled out the morale officer credentials that AJ4X had issued to her and presented them to the two guards. “Officers, I have met Zip Perturb, and he is not a threat to Equestria. In fact, I am absolutely certain that, to my eyes, he doesn’t look like a dragon at all.”

“That sounds good enough to me,” one of the guards remarked to the other. “Besides, what kind of spy would live in a dump like this?”

“You try this kind of stunt again without proof and we’ll be hauling you in instead,” the other one warned Dib before they turned to leave.

“This is not finished, Zip!” Dib vowed.

At that moment, a clay shingle fell off of the roof of the trailer and fell on Dib’s head.

“Ow!” he exclaimed, retreating.

“Why...does he have such a big head?” asked the faint voice of Zip’s dog.

Vinyl heard a window on the trailer being opened, so she walked up to it.

“Why did you do that?” a bewildered Zip asked her. His voice sounded much clearer than she had ever heard it before, leading her to suspect that he might actually be out of his suit. “These ponies are treating dragon sympathizers as badly as they are innocent dragons. You could have gotten yourself arrested!”

Vinyl stood up tall. “The day I let a pipsqueak like that Dib colt order the Royal Guard around is the day I turn in my pony citizenship card,” she said proudly, and then turned and walked away.

It was an incredibly lame excuse. And “lame excuses” were practically Zip’s second language.

Vinyl returned to her trailer, drew the blinds, and quickly fell asleep.

Within an hour she had been awakened by her usual nightmare.

With a sigh, she got up and started exploring the trailer’s tiny kitchen. She found it well stocked with the sorts of foods that Pinkie Pie might consider essential. She found that one of the few foods that wouldn’t rot her teeth was a container of nonfat milk, so she heated some up on the stove in hopes of soothing her jangled nerves.

As she waited for the warm drink to take its effect, she idly tuned into the Canterlot Etheric Network.

“Oars in Wells presents Chapter Five of Citizen Kravitz” the magical voice of the Etheric said in her head.

Vinyl sat up. Kravitz was one of the seminal figures in the history of dragon music. He was also the court composer to the first dragon to unite their warring tribes 6500 years ago: Emperor Reznicek.

“I remember the first time I set eyes upon Reznicek’s court,” said the voice of an elderly actor stallion.

“Loyal Kravitz,” said the stately voice of Oars in Wells himself.

“Your Imperial Majesty,” replied the actor playing Kravitz.

Wells was playing the First Emperor. Given the size of his ego, this was hardly surprising to Vinyl. She also noticed the song being played by the court orchestra: the Waltz from Masquerade, which strictly-speaking would not be composed for another five years at this point in the story.

“I need your advice and counsel,” said “Emperor Reznicek”. “My subjects present me with their problems instead of their praise. I have sent them all to the ice mines of Thembria to die slow horrible deaths, but now I have no subjects to dig up my gems. What do you suggest?”

“You could bring them back.”

“What do you suggest that will not end with you joining them?”

“I suggest that you make some more dragons.”

“What an excellent suggestion. I knew I kept you around for some reason.”

Vinyl tuned out the station in disgust. This was far beneath Wells’ normal class of work. And even as clumsy anti-dragon propaganda, it was all wrong. Reznicek’s history was littered with plenty of atrocities, many of them with direct parallels to the current situation, so there was no possible reason to attach this old tale to him. And the line about “creating more dragons” was completely out of place. Reznicek was no god, and certainly could not make more of his kind.

As a matter of fact, this was pretty-much identical with part of the old “Lunar Republic” deception, the one that claimed that Princess Celestia was a tyrant who had banished an innocent Luna to the Moon for suggesting that she relinquish some of her power to the ponies. The deception had persisted from its birth a few hundred years after the imprisonment, all the way up to Nightmare Moon’s return, when the facts had pretty definitely refuted it.

The unicorn didn’t like the direction that these thoughts led her, so she got up and walked outside for some night air.

In these predawn hours, the trailer park was utterly quiet. Beyond the city limits, an owl hooted.

Having decided to share her suspicions on Oars in Wells with her fellow morale officer when she met him next, Vinyl turned to return to her home.

“Beautiful majestic Luna of the Night most serene, please hear my prayer.” It was the voice of Zip Perturb from the roof of his home and for him, it was rather quiet.

Vinyl wasn’t sure if it was right of her to listen in on this. Prayers are very private things. But on the other hoof, he was clearly in need of her help to resolve whatever problem her guardians appeared to be in. And given that Luna was probably on a battlefield right now tens of thousands of pony-lengths away, it seemed unlikely that she would be the one to answer the poor dragon’s pleas.

“Please keep Fire Engine and Eggplant safe. Please help them to keep clear heads, because they sure can be dumb sometimes. Oh, and never let them know that I called them ‘dumb’. But you know everything, so it’s OK telling you the truth. Lend me your strength, Luna. Well, not all of it, you need a lot for this war, but a little would be nice. Grant me the cleverness to fix GIP, because without him I don’t know how I’ll be able to get through this.

“Your night is so beautiful, Luna. Its beauty sustains me through my trials and tribulations. And its stars are all the wealth I could ever need. May the friendship of these ponies keep me from the greed that stirs within the heart of every dragon. May I continue to prove myself worthy of your protection and your sovereignty. Amen.”

After waiting for Zip to open a hatch in his roof and return inside, Vinyl walked silently into her trailer for a few moments, then walked over to Zip’s door and slipped the spare key under the welcome mat. The key had her trailer’s number on it, so she knew he would know who it came from.

She hoped in this way to spare him another dose of the terror he must have gone through when he had heard the royal guard pounding on his door.

She was walking past the organ when she heard a sudden strumming sound in the air. She cocked her head up and tried to find the source of the sound. Ponies poured out of the other trailers, including Zip in his disguise. They all gathered in the center with Vinyl.

“There it is!” one of them exclaimed, directing his voice skyward.

“The U.F.O.!” declared another.

The others had the advantage of Vinyl, in that they could actually see it. All she could tell was that it was big and made a loud noise. It used no magic that she could detect (not that she was especially good at detecting magic) and yet also failed to generate any kind of exhaust like a non-magical machine would be expected to produce.

“What do they want?” Zip asked in wonder.

Chapter V4: Anger

[Redacted]

- Chapter V4: Anger -

Yesterday

“What do you want?” the doorman asked Vinyl Scratch.

“Pony Joe sent me,” she said, and was admitted inside.

Vinyl had picked up the pass-phrase thanks to her oversensitive ears. She had found the door by overhearing and then following Double Echo to this spot.

Double Echo in turn was the sound effects pony for Oars in Wells.

Inside the small dilapidated theater she encountered a close group composed almost exclusively of stallions. Vinyl circulated around to get a feel for the place (and to confirm that Pony Joe was definitely not in the building), and then found a spot right next to the stairs leading up to the theater’s stage. She didn’t feel safe in this building, and she had heard a door closing only a few steps backstage in this direction.

“Gentleponies,” Prince Constant said as he emerged from behind the curtains and onto the stage. “I trust you’ve all heard by now of the events in the Senate from last night?”

The angry grumbling in the room made that abundantly clear.

“Citizens of Canterlot,” the Prince told the crowd, “I share in your outrage. Before I learned the truth, I was fooled into thinking that the dragons were an empty threat, but now my eyes have been opened! And what of the source of this deception, our ‘fair princess’? Just what sort of ponies does Celestia think we are? Does she think we would faint at hearing what the Emperor had planned for us? Does she think we would be cowardly enough to try to surrender Luna to him? Well, are we?”

“NO!” the crowd shouted.

“That is not the voice of cowards!” the Prince told them. “That is the full-throated voice of true warrior-citizens! Do you remember the traditions, my friends? Do you remember what it was like when stallions ruled Canterlot, when this city was the capital of a mighty kingdom? No king of Canterlot ever backed down from a righteous fight! No king of Canterlot would lie to his brave subjects! Do we want more of the Princess’ lies?”

“NO!” the crowd shouted once more.

“Under kings, Canterlot stood atop the world. Under kings, Canterlot was respected and produced artists the likes of which the world has never known! What have we gotten under the rule of the Princess? Friendship.” He spat this last word out like it was poisonous to him. “Canterlot under kings created the greatest masterpieces of art and science. Canterlot under Celestia has invented...the cuckoo clock. Let Celestia remember who she is: the goddess of the sun. We are thankful for that, but that is all she is. For six thousand years, that is all she was, while Canterlot ruled supreme!

“You remember, of course, how Celestia became our ruler: Because we felt sorry for her! Our ancestors saw how she grieved at the banishment of Luna, and we gave away our sovereignty so she’d have something to do, something to distract her from her sorrows. Well look around you: can’t you realize that that was a mistake? She has taken our power, and made us into milksops! Well no more. NO MORE!”

“NO MORE!” echoed the crowd.

“It is time for Celestia to step down. It is time for her to become merely the goddess of the sun once more. And if we tell her this, she has no choice but to step down. She would have no choice but to respect our wishes!”

One of the ponies in the crowd stepped forward. “We will demand the restoration of the Kingdom of Canterlot! Who will be our king?”

“KING CONSTANT! KING CONSTANT!” demanded the crowd.

The outside door of the theater suddenly burst in, letting in a stream of ponies. “Treason! Treason!” they shouted, and started to assault the crowd.

“The Royal Guard!”

In Vinyl Scratch’s experience, all Royal Guards carried the faint smell of a rather unique bleaching chemical on their coats. These ponies completely lacked that scent.

Taking the ruckus as her cue to leave, Vinyl quickly made her way up the steps and out the side door. Hearing somepony about to follow her outside, she climbed up and into an empty dumpster.

Two ponies emerged from the side door. One of them turned and locked the door they had just used.

“That went...rather well, don’t you think?” The voice had begun as the audience member who prompted the crowd to nominate Constant as their monarch, but midway through it transformed into the voice of Oars in Wells with the faint “pop” of a disguise spell being broken.

“I must compliment you on your performance,” Prince Constant told him.

“Oh that? Riddled with flaws. You should have heard me in Hearts in the Clouds! It’s the sad truth that I started at the top in the acting business, and have been working my way down ever since.”

“What about those so-called ‘guards’?” Prince Constant asked. “Are you sure they will fall to that rabble? I saw an awful lot of them.”

“Don’t you worry about those ponies’ worthlessness in a fight,” Wells assured the prince. “Beating the royal guard will be just the thing to cement their loyalty to you.”

“So I have myself an army now. What about the Princesses? You don’t actually believe that nonsense about them standing aside and letting me take over?”

“I have that well in hoof, my future sovereign. Even now the Etheric advances my plan.”

Vinyl tuned into the Etheric, and was surprised to hear the voice of Oars in Wells. “The existence of these strange flying machines can no longer be denied! I humbly request that the Princess herself investigate this matter, before one of these ships decides to do something more than just observe us.” It appeared that Wells had invented a means of recording Etheric broadcasts, and then kept that invention to himself.

“You make a very good point,” Princess Celestia replied Etherically. “Citizens of Canterlot, I intend to lead an expedition to the Everfree Forest, which my student Twilight Sparkle has just discovered is the resting place of this mysterious flying object. I will be bringing Twilight and her friends along on this expedition, and I extend my hoof in invitation to Oars in Wells, who has been so diligent in collecting information on this craft and bringing it to my attention. We will be leaving by dirigible in one hour.”

With her level of magic, the Princess was probably making her reply directly from the palace instead of visiting the station. Nevertheless, Vinyl heard the producer pony make a mad dash for the station as soon as he recognized her voice.

Vinyl Scratch needed to make a report. She had certain evidence of a plot against the Princess, the raising of a private army, the mystery of what happened to the Perturbs, and finally, there was the matter of poor Pony Joe’s good name. He had refused to give a donut discount to Oars in Wells, and now it appeared that the producer was getting his revenge by associating the loyal baker with a conspiracy of which he was completely ignorant. For some reason, this was the charge that outraged Vinyl the most.

Vinyl raced through the streets of Canterlot until she arrived at DJ AJ4X’s place of business. The door was unlocked, but the building was empty. She went to the desk and used her trailer key to unlock it. Behind the false back of the second drawer she found a piece of paper. The words had been deliberately written with a heavy hoof, allowing her to read the message by brushing the back of the paper against her lip.

“I am on an urgent mission for the Princesses,” the message read. “Do not try to find me.” This was followed by details of the five parties she was expected to host by herself that night.

Vinyl sighed in frustration, then burned the message to ashes with her magic, reset the desk, and made her way to the palace. Along the way, she wondered how far up Prince Constant’s conspiracy went. Who could she trust in the palace with what she knew?

There was a huge crowd gathered in front of the palace.

“Please step aside,” she insisted as she tried in vain to make her way through the crowd. “I need to warn the Princess!”

“So do I!” raved the pony beside her. “An army of angry cucumbers is hiding in the dirigible’s basket!” Her voice was being amplified somehow.

“The UFO is beaming farm reports into our brains!” another mad pony declared, with the same magnifying effect. “Tin foil is your only defense!”

Vinyl could faintly make out the sounds of the Princess and her party boarding the dirigible right in front of the palace.

“Princess Celestia! Twilight Sparkle! Pinkie Pie! You are all in terrible danger!” Vinyl shouted, trying desperately to be heard above the crowd of lunatics surrounding her.

“Nightmare Moon has returned, and she’s living in my box of Puffy Wuffies!” bellowed a member of the crowd, easily drowning Vinyl’s voice out.

“Farewell, My Little Ponies!” the Princess said, as the airship took off.

“Slumber party!” a pony declared, unrolling a sleeping bag.

The rest of the crowd unrolled theirs as well.

“John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt! That name is my name, too!”

The entire crowd of over a hundred ponies started singing. They couldn’t stay in the same key to save their lives.

Vinyl turned in despair and walked away.

“And a good evening to you, Miss,” Double Echo muttered to herself as she continued to operate the audio equipment that ensured that nopony would be able to stop the departure of the dirigible.

Vinyl arrived back at her trailer a half hour later. She hoped she would have enough time to come up with a viable way to get a message to somepony trustworthy at the palace.

“Welcome home, Miss Scratch,” a voice ominously welcomed her as soon as she had shut the door.

“Waking Terror!” she replied in shock, which soon turned to relief. “Princess Celestia is in terrible danger--you’ve got to warn her!”

Waking Terror was a spirit, similar in nature to Nightmare Moon, who had been assigned the job of corrupting Princess Celestia. She had betrayed her sinister master by siding with the ponies, and for this was rewarded with the body of a young dragon created for her by Celestia, since she could not exist in this dimension without a body of some kind.

“About Oars in Wells?” the disguised entity asked calmly.

“You know?” she said, sitting down in amazement.

“Well, we had our suspicions.”

“And you allowed this to go forward?”

“My dear Vinyl,” Miss Terror assured her, “this is how a magical war is fought.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Shall I tell you?” Miss Terror asked eagerly. “The truth is a rather ugly thing in this case, far, far worse than any raving of the mad Prince Steadfast.”

“I can handle it,” she told him with a steely voice.

“You know what? I believe you. Out of all the ponies I have met, you appear to have an almost endless appetite for absorbing misery while retaining your sanity. Alright, this is what happened...”

Vinyl Scratch woke up. She was on the floor, curled tightly into a ball, and sucking on the edge of one hoof.

“I had to erase your memory again,” Waking Terror calmly told her. “This is the third time now. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

Vinyl stood up and faced her. “Yes.”

Miss Terror sighed. “Well, you have been lasting longer and longer before your inevitable collapse. Maybe you’re building up a resistance.”

“Just tell me.”

“Very well,” the false dragon said, and then began her explanation:

Emperor Vasilyevich is the most-powerful being on the planet. His power dwarfs that of Celestia and Luna combined. This is because he is in possession of the source of all magic in Equestria.

In a forgotten castle deep in dragon territory, there lies a portal to Faerie, the realm of magic. All the power that Celestia and Luna possess, they derived from that portal, seven thousand years ago. One day a few hundred years ago, a tiny dragon named Vasilyevich stumbled upon this castle. He had been exiled by his fellow dragons for daring to question the official dragon opinion that the Battle of Pelican Fields had been good for dragonkind. He found a boarded-up spot in the basement, and he passed through the pillar of fire that dissolved his very being and transported his spirit into Faerie.

There he encountered the ruler of Faerie and my former master, the Great Will, and utterly destroyed it, making himself the ruler of the realm. Infused with immense power, Vasilyevich took over the mind of Prince Steadfast and used him to free himself, forming a new body. With the ability to take over any dragon mind, and nearly any pony mind, he rapidly conquered Draconia, and set his sights on Equestria.

By the rules of magical warfare, only one mage from each side are allowed to fight each other. The use of armies is strictly forbidden, except in the unlikely case that the mages manage to wipe each other out. The princesses have agreed that Celestia would be their champion, while Luna would command the armies. So far, Emperor Vasilyevich has attempted to defeat Princess Celestia three times, using the tricks that the Great Will planned to use against her, and thanks to my counsel, has failed miserably all three times. Celestia has in turn attempted to defeat Vasilyevich four times using her magic, and has unfortunately not yet succeeded. Those attacks were within the first few days of the war. Since then, the Emperor has not attacked, and the Princess has been unable to find the Emperor.

He is clearly playing a waiting game. He knows if he waits long enough that the ponies themselves will tear Equestria apart for him.

“Now that’s taking your cynicism too far!” Vinyl interrupted.

“Oh, is it now?” Miss Terror replied archly. “Tell me, Morale Officer Scratch, how has the morale of the capital been faring over the past two days? Even as we speak, your fellow DJ is trying...and failing, to stop an anti-Celestia riot in the marketplace, sparked by the ‘Lunar Republic’ propaganda of the past few nights. If he does not succeed, Professor Stein will be forced to call in the Royal Guard, which will only serve to make things worse in the long term.”

“The ponies are being provoked. Controlled. This is not what they are like.”

“Ah, but this is what they are like. Miss Scratch, you have the unique privilege of seeing Celestia’s little ponies as they truly are. For seven thousand years the Princess has been using her magic to tame you, but under the strain of searching for both her enemy and her lost sister, she has allowed that spell to fail. The Princess likes to talk about the world she will leave behind when she finally departs this plane of existence. Well, you’re witnessing it right now.”

“You lie! We can get through this!” Vinyl insisted.

“The alicorns created the ponies in their image. But the alicorns themselves are created beings. The Ancients created them for one purpose, and one purpose alone: as beasts of war. To carry their masters upon their backs, and to kill each other at the whim of those masters. Why else do you wear bridles and saddles, but to be ridden? That is how Stalliongrad was taken: the ponies were subjected to so many nightmares that they gladly surrendered themselves into the Dragon Army to escape! That’s why all of the pony army but the most-powerful unicorns are stuck in a training camp on the opposite end of Equestria from the front, because otherwise they’d be fighting against Equestria instead of for it! Face it, Vinyl, feeling fear and inflicting terror are the only two things every pony can do well. Every other aspect of alicorn and pony society is a sham!”

“No!” Vinyl replied with a steely voice. “That is what the Great Will believed of us, but that is not the truth. We have the power to transcend our origin, to become anything we want to be. Our cutie marks are the visible sign of this.”

Miss Terror said nothing for several moments, and then barked out a harsh laugh. “You actually made it through the entire explanation this time. Congratulations.

“Celestia and I suspect that the Emperor is using Oars in Wells as his last attempt to strike at her, and so she has deliberately stepped into his trap. But at the same time, he is alone on a dirigible with no allies. Wells alone is no threat, so wherever he is, Vasilyevich himself must be close by. In fact, he’s probably in Canterlot this very moment. I will keep you informed of any further developments. Now I believe you have a party or four to host.”

A second later, Vinyl Scratch was alone in her trailer. Waking Terror was after all the inventor of the teleportation spell, and was therefore justifiably fond of using it to make her entrances and exits.

The parties that night were, if possible, even more intense than the previous night. After the misogynistic rally of earlier that day, Vinyl was acutely aware of the fact that these parties were exclusively populated by mares but not stallions. They numbered politicians, businessponies, the movers and shakers of Equestria, now literally moving and shaking themselves on the dance floor.

Vinyl put on the song “Boogie Wonderland” by The Three Elements. The song was nearly as old as she was, and one of her “go-to” tunes to get a particular mood out of her guests. And yet this was the first time in her life that she actually bothered to pay attention to the verse:

Midnight creeps so slowly into hearts of mares who need more than they get
Daylight deals a bad hand to a stallion who has laid too many bets
The mirror stares you in the face and says, “Filly, uh, uh, it don't work”
You say your prayers though you don’t care; you dance and shake the hurt.

In her imagination, the dancers on the floor before her transformed into the fleeing ponies of her nightmares, but these ponies were running towards their destiny instead of away from their torments. Bridles and saddles materialized in their mouths and on their backs, and bestriding each saddle and gripping the reins were tall insubstantial dragons, ready to over-ride them to do anything their master wanted of them. The song had become a march, and Vinyl’s fans had become an army of death.

Today

Vinyl swiftly brought down a hoof and smashed the record, breaking the spell.

At that moment, the clock struck midnight.

The next morning, the sun failed to rise.

Chapter T4: Depression

[Redacted]

- Chapter T4: Depression -

Twilight focused on running--it provided a valid excuse for tuning out the sound of her goddess mocking her.

The zomponies swiped at her as she dodged past them. Every so often, however, she failed to avoid knocking one of them over, which would inevitably mean their destruction. She tried her best not to look back.

She noticed that none of them had attacked Spike. Or rather, that thing on her back that pretended to be Spike.

Chapter V5: Denial

[Redacted]

- Chapter V5: Denial -

Zip Perturb walked swiftly across the trailer park in the pre-dawn hours to the home of Vinyl Scratch. He knocked on the door, but nopony answered. This was not surprising, as he hadn’t seen her come home, but he wanted to be sure the place was empty before he used the key in his possession to go inside.

Zip desperately needed somepony to trust. In a few hours, Equestria would awaken to realize what had happened to their princess, and the whole world would fall apart. If only he had somepony to talk to, he could figure out what needed to be done.

Zip wanted that pony to be Vinyl Scratch, he truly did. But 68 years of being betrayed by everyone close to him was not easily overcome by a pony Pinkie Pie had introduced to him a single year earlier. He had to have proof.

In a cabinet, he found a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He rewound the tape and played it.

“DJ Pon-3’s Best Mix Tape ever, 7016 edition!” proclaimed the voice on the tape. It was Vinyl Scratch’s voice, but not quite. Zip had noticed that Vinyl tended to refer to her DJ persona as if she were a different pony from herself, reminding him of himself when he tried extra hard to pretend to be a pony. The tape continued with a list of various songs and how best to combine them to create a variety of moods. Zip let the tape play as he continued to search the trailer for clues to Vinyl’s character. He made a mental note to ask her later if he could borrow the oscilloscope he found, as it could prove handy in removing the annoying burr from GIP’s voice.

The voice on the tape was now definitely Vinyl’s, and no longer Pon-3’s. She was remarking on the emotional qualities of a set of CDs owned by Pinkie Pie. As he was listening to this, Zip tripped over a full waste basket and knocked its contents onto the floor.

Zip set the basket back up and started putting the trash back in it. His attention was caught by a crumpled piece of paper with pink writing upon it. This is what it said:

Hey Pinkie,

This one’s bad. I mean really, really bad.

“How bad is it?” I can hear you ask. You don’t want to know.

That’s how bad it is.

I know, right?

So, what do you need to do?

You need to introduce Vinyl Scratch to Zip Perturb. That’s it. Well, I hope that’s it. It better be it. So just do that and none of this will ever happen.

It took me 15 years to figure that out. 15 years of guerilla armies and a mopey Luna.

That’s right—you now owe me for 15 years of unfun.

Yours in Eternal Pinkness,

~~Me

Of course it was a Pinkie Pie letter. Nothing else on Equestria made less sense.

Just then, he heard the sound of the dragon organ playing. Looking out the window, he saw Vinyl Scratch at the keyboard.

Quickly, Zip finished filling the wastepaper basket. He shut off the tape recorder and closed the cabinet, then raced to the door, but when he put his “hoof” to the knob, he saw it begin to turn, so he hid behind the desk.

A weary Vinyl walked into the room. “I don’t mind you visiting, honest I don’t,” she announced. “But I really need to take a nap.”

Zip started to get up.

“So you don’t even want to hear what I’ve come to say?” said Miss Terror.

Zip quickly ducked back down. He had no idea how this strange dragon had suddenly materialized in the trailer.

Vinyl paused for a moment. “Go right ahead,” she then said, with a tone as if she had been talking to her the entire time.

There was a knock at the door. “I should get rid of my visitor first,” Vinyl added.

“I’d let him in if I were you,” Miss Terror advised.

Vinyl cautiously opened the door partway. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I hope so,” said Professor Stein. “Miss Dash, please stay out here and keep an eye on things.”

Vinyl immediately let him in. He was followed in by a very solemn Spike. Rainbow Dash stayed behind.

Zip tried to shrink down even smaller behind the desk.

“What happened?” Vinyl asked.

“Something’s happened to Celestia,” Miss Terror said.

Vinyl’s gasp was loud enough to cover up Zip’s.

“There was an explosion on board the royal airship a couple hours ago,” Stein explained, “which caused it to crash into the Everfree Forest. Both Celestia and Twilight Sparkle were found unconscious, and nopony was able to awaken either one of them. They have now started manifesting spontaneous injuries.”

“What about Wells?” Vinyl asked.

“The others have him in custody, but the problem is that he’s awake.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Celestia and Twilight are the victims of a dream trap spell,” Waking Terror explained. “They have been sucked into the dream of a spellcaster, who now has complete power over them. Every injury they sustain during the dream will be inflicted upon their sleeping bodies, up to and including death.”

“Since Wells is awake, he can’t be the caster,” added Professor Stein. “Twilight’s friends found the remains of a magical device on him that he used to trigger the spell and link the two victims’ minds with the spellcaster’s, almost certainly the Emperor. So far they have been unable to get Wells to tell them where the Emperor is hiding, and they can’t trace the link. The only way we can break this spell without hurting Twilight and the Princess is if we can force the spellcaster to wake up.”

“What can I do to help?” Vinyl asked.

“We’re taking a team of chariots out to the Everfree,” said Stein. “Miss Terror will stay here and handle the inevitable panic.”

“Perhaps not,” Miss Terror said, turning her head.

“The sun’s rising!” exclaimed Spike.

Stein and Miss Terror rushed to the window.

“Thank Celestia!” cried the professor.

“Thank Luna, is more appropriate, I think,” remarked Miss Terror. “If Celestia had recovered, you can be sure that she would have sent a message to Spike here.”

Everyone stared expectantly at Spike, but he failed to produce a note.

Professor Stein sighed. “As I was saying, Miss Terror will stay here, while you and I will head out to the crash site. We should be there in a couple of hours. With my help, you’ll be able to see inside Celestia’s mind. Hopefully, you’ll be able to pick up a clue as to where the Emperor is hiding based on what you learn.”

Vinyl backed away. “That’s an awful longshot,” she told them. “They might be dead in two hours, and I’ve never used my horn sight on dreams before. Is that even possible?”

Stein sighed. “I have no idea. But what other choice do we have? Celestia’s life hangs by a thread.”

Zip Perturb took in a deep breath, and then stood up. “What are the material components of a dream trap spell?” he asked.

The other four inhabitants of the room stared at him.

Finally Spike lowered the eye ridge he had raised and answered the question. “For the dragon version of the spell? Four rubies, seven pearls, and the perfect likenesses of the victims carved out of a narwhal’s horn.”

“My guardians, Fire Engine and Eggplant, handed over those exact items to a mysterious dragon who seemed to have complete control of their minds,” said Zip. “He then left with them, but not before leaving me with this.” He unzipped the front of his costume and pulled out a piece of parchment.

The ponies looked away from the animal skin in disgust.

Miss Terror made a gesture with her claws, and the parchment floated out of Zip’s hands and crossed the room to her, where she read it out loud without touching it:

I know you’re around here somewhere, Coward.

Fine, keep hiding.

Do not follow us. If any dragon or pony other than me gets within fifty feet of either one of your fathers, my spell will ensure that their heads will pop. Quite messily.

“They are being held in a warehouse on the east end of town,” Zip said. “I’ll...lead you there.”

“But that will mean their deaths!” Spike exclaimed.

Zip drew himself up to his full height. “The Perturbs are citizens of Equestria. All three of us are willing to lay down our lives to save the Princesses.”

Chapter T5: Rejection

[Redacted]

- Chapter T5: Rejection -

“...move the entire village!” the voice of Celestia mocked from above. “What kind of foal could have possibly fallen for that!”

On the ground below, Twilight Sparkle rocked back and forth, her head buried under her forehooves. A part of her hoped that doing this enough would cause the earth to crack up beneath her and drop her into a bottomless pit where the sound of her mentor could never follow.

“Forget about banishing Luna; thinking that that I could find anything worthwhile in you has got to be the biggest mistake I have ever made! The first thing you did after I brought you into the palace was to mistake asbestos for the talcum powder I asked for; if it wasn’t for my immortality, your stupidity would have killed me!”

Twilight tried to shrink even smaller, but then suddenly stopped. “Wait a minute,” she said, getting up. “You’re not immortal! I only thought that when I was a filly. And you didn’t put asbestos on your coat; that was just a silly misunderstanding on my part. You’re not Celestia!”

“What?! How dare you...!”

“And this!” Twilight exclaimed, taking in the whole world with a sweep of one forehoof. “It’s all wrong!” The thought caused a huge smile to break out on her face, and tears to joy of appear in her eyes. “A motionless sun would cause temperature fluctuations that would have generated thunderstorms and tornadoes by now! The unending amount of ash in the air would have sparked an unending rain of lightning bolts! There’s no way that many zomponies could have survived this long if they were so ridiculously fragile! There’s only one conclusion, non-Celestia--do you know what that is?”

The voice in the air was speechless.

“I’M DREAMING!” Twilight shouted, rearing up onto her hind legs and twirling about in giddiness. “None of this has happened! Equestria is intact, and you...the real you...still believe in me! This is just a nightmare!” She dropped back down on all fours as a thought struck her. “I’m going to need a lot of therapy after I wake up. No normal pony would dream something as awful as this!”

And then another thought struck her. “Why am I still here? I figured out that this is a dream, so that should have ended it!”

Zompony Fluttershy jumped on her back and started tearing at Twilight’s flesh. “Ow!” Twilight exclaimed, bucking Fluttershy off in anger. The monstrosity fell into fragments as it reached the ground. The unicorn paid absolutely no attention to the fate of her friend, knowing now that she was but a phantom.

“Why can I feel pain?” Twilight asked herself nervously, pacing around in a tight circle inside of her bubble. She then looked down at her hooves. “This pace is all wrong!” she observed. “The stride is far too short, and where’s the slight roll in my right hip? I mean, even in a dream I should know how I walk! It’s not like somepony else...is...in charge of reality....A dream trap spell!”

“Pyrite!” cursed Spike from just out of Twilight’s sight.

Without a second’s thought, Twilight bucked Spike into the nearest wall. Hard.

She quickly turned on the dragon, watching warily as he put his claw to a broken rib. “I figured out you were not Spike as soon as you opened your big mouth about the ‘dragons’ worst mistake’,” she told him. “I take it that you are the Dreamer?”

“If you distrusted my identity for so long,” the familiar-looking stranger asked, “why didn’t you turn on me? Why didn’t you leave me behind?”

“The Ancients’ have a saying,” she replied. “‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer.’ This is hopefully the first and last time I’ll ever have to use it.”

A little purple dragon smiled in a manner that Twilight knew would give her nightmares for weeks. “A nice bit of advice there, about the weather...”

With an immense tearing sound, lightning bolt after lightning bolt started pouring down from the heavens at Twilight Sparkle. She tried to dodge, and when that failed, she tried to use her magic, but she was both physically and mentally exhausted, and could not prevent herself being hit on her flank. For an instant, her legs utterly failed her and she dropped to the ground.

“And now, Celestia’s student,” Spike cackled with a voice a millennium old, “it is time to meet your maker!”

In an instant, Twilight’s eyes went wide, as facts in her possession suddenly re-arranged themselves in her mind:

Her last certain memory was of the royal dirigible crashing into the Everfree. She and the Princess had been confronting Oars in Wells with evidence of his treachery, and he had produced a thoughtcaster. No...two thoughtcasters! Twilight wasn’t the primary target of the dream trap at all! But that must mean...

“Celestia!” the unicorn screamed out, searching around her with her magic. Finding the alicorn’s distinctive magical signature embedded in the solid earth below her, Twilight did something that would mean certain death in the waking world: blind-teleporting into solid matter. It wasn’t until she was mid-leap that it registered to her that Celestia’s magic had been dwarfed in her scan by the magical field emitted by the frustrated baby dragon behind her.

Twilight Sparkle materialized in Tartarus. That had to be where she was, for before her an immense black alicorn was re-enacting Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son with one of his own kind. It disturbed her that she knew the horrific Ancient painting well enough to instantly make the connection.

The rocky landscape around her was draped in darkness, held back only by the gutting flames of a half-dozen cauldrons on slender stands. The flames fed on pools of animal fat, but even this gag-inducing scent was overwhelmed by the smell of death. Every bit of ground that Twilight could see was covered with the half-devoured carcasses of alicorns.

Only one alicorn was left intact to witness this madness: a tiny pink filly, trembling so violently it looked like she would shake herself to pieces. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not take her eyes away from the carnage being enacted before her.

Twilight nodded grimly to herself, and then teleported herself between the two living alicorns. “Celestia!” she cried out.

The filly looked down at her hooves in confusion. “Lu...na?” she asked in a frightened voice.

Twilight kneeled down and smiled gently. “Celestia...” She closed her eyes and thought back, trying to remember the pet name Princess Luna had for her sister. “...Tia?”

Little Tia looked up at the purple mare standing before her. “Aunt Twilie?”

“Not quite,” the unicorn replied, “but I’m pretty sure you arranged for me to be named for her about five generations in advance. You’re clever like that.”

Twilight glanced over her shoulder at the gnashing monstrosity behind her. When she looked back, she was startled to see that the alicorn before her was now a teenager, although still pink and lacking her cutie mark. “This is just a dream, Tia,” she said.

Tia nodded. “I know,” she said in a voice befitting her new form.

“...his dream,” Twilight clarified, pointing behind her.

“I know.”

“And that’s not your father.”

“I...I know that, Twilight,” Tia said with a stutter. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Now if we combine our powers in a sudden assault, that should be enough to...what do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

“My mind knows who that is,” Tia explained, the fear growing in her voice, “but my heart is still fooled. He is my everything, Twilight. The sun, the moon, Neu...Equestria, the entire universe beyond the Shell of Stars, they are nothing to me next to having my father back.” She said this with the utmost self-loathing, knowing that she was betraying all of her ponies and the few surviving members of her kind, but she knew she couldn’t help herself.

“He’s not your father!” Twilight shouted.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Twilight changed tactics, addressing her accusations against the pony Celestia believed he was. “He killed your family, your friends, thousands and thousands of your own kind!”

Tia burst out in tears. “It doesn’t matter! I can’t hurt him, Twilight, I can’t!”

Twilight looked hard at the trembling little princess, and then steeled herself. “Then I’m going to have to take him from you myself,” she said.

Before she had even finished the sentence, she whipped around and started firing magical bolts into the gigantic black alicorn. The creature quickly put up a shield, and then began firing back at her, lowering the shield for just an instant to let each bolt through.

Twilight staggered backwards, and then felt a more feeble series of bolts striking her from behind.

“Leave my Daddy alone!” Tia screamed. She had reverted to being a filly again.

A frustrated Twilight reached out a hoof in preparation for sealing Tia up in a protective bubble. And then she noticed how she towered over the tiny alicorn, and thought back on the stained glass window Celestia had commissioned to document the madness and overthrow of her father, and she knew what she had to do.

Closing her eyes and concentrating, Twilight began to grow, bigger and bigger and bigger. As she grew, her fur roughened and turned into scales, and her tail flared out and suddenly became fleshy. She reared up onto her large hind legs and roared as her teeth became pointed and flames shot out of her snout. Her immense form now dwarfed the black alicorn just as that alicorn had once dwarfed her.

Dragon-Twilight reached out a hand towards the Black King, and it began to glow.

The dragon disguised as an alicorn knew this scene, and for the first time since he had returned from Faerie, the Dragon Emperor knew fear.

This was the turning point in dragon history. This was the moment when they had made the ultimate sacrifice, stepping down from their godhood to save the world they had come to love. From this moment, Draconia would become Equestria, and the world would be governed by Friendship instead of Greed.

Vasilyevich braced for the end, but then he realized that something was different. The dragon elder before him wasn’t pouring death into his body, but instead taking his god-magic into her puny pony body. It was a trick!

The Emperor retaliated with a burst of magic too intense for the pony to absorb at once, knocking her out and forcing her to revert to her true appearance.

But in doing this, he had resumed his true form. Tia shook her head, clearing it of the powerful charm spell controlling her, and then raced over to the unicorn, growing older with every step she took.

The god-magic had caused Twilight to grow to nearly twice her former height, and extend her horn to be as long as her muzzle. The teenage Tia quickly nuzzled her awake. “Could I...?” she asked shyly.

Twilight looked up at her from the ground and smiled. “Of course,” she said, and leaned her horn over to touch the filly’s.

With a blinding flash of light, Celestia was restored to her full power, while Twilight once again became merely the third-most powerful pony magician in the land.

Together, they laid their full power into the Dragon Emperor...and found that even together and with so much power stolen from him, they were still only strong enough to create a dangerous stalemate between them.

“That’s it!” he declared. “I’m winning! As long as I sleep, I will grow more and more powerful, while you two will grow weaker and weaker. It may take days, but your defeat is now inevitable!”

“Then maybe it’s time for you to wake up!” came a voice from above.

The three combatants looked up to see an immense golden orb floating above them. Despite lacking a cornea or pupil, they all somehow knew this to be a gigantic eye looking down upon them.

“Waking Terror!” cried out Celestia, recognizing the voice. She then pointed up with uncertainty at the orb. “And...Vinyl Scratch?” Was this what horn sight looked like from the other side?

“I still don’t know what kind of world-shaking business your sister got me out of the last time,” the shiny orb “said”. “But it looks like you’ve got me back in it.”

“Spirit of the Fae!” the Dragon Emperor said, pointing a claw at the blackness that hid Waking Terror from him. “You are in the presence of the Supreme Will, Master of Reality and Tyrant Over All Life! I order you to slaughter these ponies! ...and that eye thing. It creeps me out.”

“No can do,” Waking Terror quipped. “I think instead I’ll live up to my name!”

The world around them was suddenly shaken violently. The ground crumbled into nothingness, and the alicorn bodies tumbled down into infinity. Twilight, Celestia and Vasilyevich tried to use levitation spells to keep themselves in place, but they were suddenly battered by the falling cauldrons.

With a mad look in his eyes, the Emperor tried to flee, but all three of them were soon covered with fuel and set alight. The Emperor screamed, louder and louder as he tumbled endlessly into the abyss. The alicorn and the unicorn were about to follow when they were caught up in a flash of magic that had been channeled through the golden orb.

Epilogue

[Redacted]

- Epilogue -

Twilight Sparkle and Princess Celestia awoke at the Everfree crash site, surrounded by the other Elements of Harmony with looks of horror on their faces regarding the prisoner who had just escaped from their custody. Celestia had higher priorities, though, first consulting a Spike-sent note that materialized beside her, and then teleporting the entire group to a warehouse near the heart of Canterlot.

There they found the Emperor in a permanently catatonic state. He had been forced to relive the most terrifying moment of his life, when the flames of Faerie had consumed his mortal body, and the reminder had broken him utterly.

The Emperor’s unwilling allies, Fire Engine and Eggplant Perturb, were found alive and well by Waking Terror, who had walked right up to them and lifted the spells that were both charming them and threatening them with death if either dragon or pony had approached them. Lucky for the Perturbs, Waking Terror was neither of these.

Thanks to the magic that Twilight had stolen from the Emperor and passed to the Princess, Celestia was now stronger than she had been for thousands of years. She effortlessly healed herself and Twilight of all of the injuries they had sustained during the dream. After taking control of the Sun back from Luna, she retired back to the castle for some well-deserved rest.

“I have a question,” Celestia asked Twilight a few days later from her bed after hearing her account of the dream. “How were you able to summon enough magic to transform yourself into an elder dragon?”

Twilight laughed. “Oh that was a trick Pinkie Pie taught me once, Princess; it wasn’t even magic! After all, we were in a dream! Even if the dream was not my own, the dreamer of a dream trap spell is controlled by the same rules as any other dream. I followed the plot every dragon knows so well, and he had no choice but to see it through. I didn’t even know for sure what an elder dragon looked like--they are just shadows in the stained glass, and I’ve never seen them depicted elsewhere. It was Vasilyevich himself who did most of the work.”

“That was very...manipulative of you, Twilight,” Celestia observed with a trace of unease. “You need to hang around me less and your Ponyville friends more in future.”

Twilight nodded, a bit unsure of herself for a moment, then turned and opened the door to admit a stream of well-wishing ponies and a few Perturbs.

Celestia thanked them all individually, spending a fraction of a second longer on Pinkie Pie’s name than on the others. Only the pink party pony caught this distinction, and she nodded calmly to herself.

She’s that much closer to figuring me out, Pinkie thought. Which means I’m that much closer to my last party. I wonder if there’s a sale on jujubes?

In a corner, Vinyl Scratch sat, the pair of headphones covering her ears plugged into the Equestria Accoustics Trottman she had built with her own hooves, playing DJ Pon-3’s signature tune in her ears.

As far as she knew, she was the only blind pony who had ever lived. She had saved the life of the ruler and creator of all ponies using a gift, the Golden Horn Sight, which only a blind pony could possibly possess. And just now she had just saved her life again, this time by using the power of friendship, on a dragon.

There was no possible way to top this. Vinyl Scratch had just fulfilled her reason for existing.

Oh I dunno, replied the mental voice of DJ Pon-3. The Elements of Harmony thought they’d never be able to top beating Nightmare Moon, and then they found themselves face-to-face with Discord.

Who? Vinyl Scratch replied to herself.

The Chaos God! Surely you remember the way he turned Equestria upside down?

Um...not exactly. Was this yet another mental block implanted by Celestia in the minds of her ponies?

Ah come on! Everypony was crazy! Octavia was a circus clown, Pon-3 told her, and you were her...

...I remember! I remember! Please don’t say anything else!

It occurred to Vinyl that this particular mental block served a very good purpose. The block to keep anypony from knowing Twilight and her friends had defeated Nightmare Moon acted to protect their privacy and their friendship. The block to keep anypony from remembering what Discord had done acted to protect the sanity of everypony who wasn’t Twilight or her friends.

So what happens now? she asked herself.

Here’s a suggestion, the mental voice of DJ Pon-3 replied, have you considered just winging it? After all, those six ponies behind you are the frickin’ Elements of Harmony, and they seem like well-adjusted members of Equestrian society to me!

Vinyl chuckled to herself. All those ponies are crazy! she answered.

...says the pony with me in her head!

You have a point, Vinyl reluctantly concluded. “So, when are we getting this party started?” she asked out loud, getting up on her hind legs.

The others cheered in anticipation of another of DJ Pon-3’s epic musical sets.

Vinyl reached down, and found the familiar table and twin record platters, supplemented by one of her company’s CD players. It hadn’t been there a few seconds ago.

There was a time when this sort of thing made her nervous.

But this was the magical land of Equestria, and weird stuff like this happened all the time.

T H E E N D

Author’s Notes:

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with extra credit given to Lauren Faust for the specifics of the series. The characters of DJ Pon-3 (aka Vinyl Scratch), Twilight Sparkle, Princesses Celestia and Luna (and Nightmare Moon), Spike, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Lily, Pony Joe, Octavia and Discord, and the locations of Manehattan, Canterlot, Fillydelphia, Cloudsdale, Ponyville and the Everfree Forest (or what’s left of it) are taken from that source, although any fault with their interpretations lies with the present author. Stalliongrad and Trollestia are purely fan creations (so far). The characters of DJ AJ4X, Oars in Wells, the Princes Constant and Steadfast, Pr. Stein, Emperors Reznicek and Vasilyevich, Waking Terror and The Great Will, The Black King and White Queen, Double Echo, Uncle Philo and Rooky, the location of Fort Solaris, the Battle of Pelican Fields (obviously named after Tolkein’s Battle of the Pelennor Fields), the concepts of horn sight, the Telegraphy family, and the Etheric, and the company Equestria Acoustics are all my creations.

“The Old Home Guard” is a song from the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). “Boogie Wonderland” is a 1979 song by Earth, Wind & Fire featuring The Emotions. Dib, GIP and the members of the Perturb family are pastiches of characters from the series Invader Zim, created by Jhonen Vasquez and property of Nickelodeon. (Why “Perturb”? Because “perturb” is a synonym of “irk”, that’s why.)

Citizen Kravitz is of course inspired by Citizen Kane. If I’m going to have a character inspired by Orson Welles in this story, then of course I’m going to sneak both Citizen Kane and War of the Worlds in (plus The Third Man [the cuckoo clock] and ‘F’ for Fake [the trajectory of Oars’ career], but those were weak references, so they don’t really count).

Postscript

Oars in Wells stood in the basement of Castle by the Sea, looking into the impossible portal that linked it with the realm of magic.

“Fae,” he addressed the teeming magnitudes circulating on the other side. “I’ve been speaking with your Great Will, and I got him to agree to name me as his successor. And so I stand, not so humbly, before you. Would you mind, terribly much, if I made a teensy little withdrawal?”