FiO: Even the Strongest Heart

Chapters

Chapter 1: The Meaning of a Name
Chapter 2: The Winds of Change
Chapter 3: Into the Lion’s Den
Chapter 4: The Appleoosan Prairie
Chapter 5: A New Home
Chapter 6: Those Left Behind
Chapter 7: Flee and Vanish in the Night
Chapter 8: Shifting Sands
Chapter 10: Keep Him Safe
Chapter 11: Sweet Surrender
Chapter 9: The Business of Survival

Chapter 1: The Meaning of a Name

I was twelve years old when the world ended. Not old enough to remember much of anything; nothing useful, at any rate. Just cartoons and cuddles and my Nana’s oatmeal cookies.

Just enough to give me a feeling of comfort. Just enough to make me miss it when everything went to hell.

I guess my name would be a good place to start. I’ve had a lot of names over the course of my life, and each one has meant something a little different to those around me. A name is a good way to shape a person. What you call them…well, it defines them, doesn’t it?

These days I mostly go by Lozen. It’s not the name I was first called, but it’s the one I’ve chosen for myself. [1]

[1] The name I began with was Margaret Lozen Atkinson, but even that wasn’t my family’s original name. We were the Araho family, once, but my Dad wanted something more…normal, he used to say. English, is what he really meant. White. He and Mom went by Eric and Daisy — names as far from their real ones as can be imagined. That’s how you end up with a full-blooded member of the Kalth Tindé Apache tribe with a name like Maggie Atkinson and no real grasp of her own heritage.

I never really…learned anything useful about my people. I mean, I have a few stories. A few snippets of the history. But nothing really concrete, about the way they used to live and survive out here. But the little knowledge I have is more, I think, than my parents ever had. They met on the rez, but they both hated it there — the way everyone was so up in their business, the tribe interfering in everything they did. Passing judgement on every little thing. They describe it as somewhere that suffocated them, but when I imagine all those people, one big community, extended family everywhere… my parents might have been overwhelmed by it, but it sounds like paradise to me. I wish I had been able to be one of them, really one of them. Summer vacations just aren’t the same.

Anyway, we left. That’s all that matters. Instead of growing up in the bosom of the extended family my Nana adored, I grew up in the city. Cold, hard concrete towers rising into the sky, people everywhere but not one who knew your name. Children as hard and unwelcoming as the city itself was, who never wanted me to join in their games. Everyone in our block stuck to their own people — the kids jabbering away in Russian, in Polish, in Spanish. I only spoke English and the smattering of Kiowa-Apache my Nana taught me over the summers, and neither was enough to buy my way into any of those exclusive, insular little cliques.

When I went home to the rez during summer — because even though I never lived there full-time, Nana’s cosy little wood-built house always felt more like home than our apartment — I was happier. Things were greener there, and Nana was always home, wanting to spend time with me. She never had to work the late shift, or cover for a coworker. Having so much attention all focused on me was like water in the desert. I basked in it, I loved it. And she loved me, her little Lozen. I was never Maggie to her; I can’t remember her using that name even once.

Honestly, over the summer I think I stopped being Maggie even to myself. Maggie was quiet and shy and awkward, the weird loner in the corner of the classroom. But in summer I could shed that person like an old snakeskin and become Lozen — still shy, but not weird. Not unwanted.

Lozen was my Nana’s one victory over my dad — she wanted me to have just one name that was something real, that mattered to our people. He gave her the least important name, the middle one, but she made it count. The original Lozen, the one Nana would tell me stories about, she was a hero; a brave fighter, a wise woman. In the stories Lozen had special powers; she could predict the future in little ways and foresee her enemies’ movements on the battlefield. I used to lie awake in my little attic bedroom, the walls hung with my Nana’s weavings and beadwork, and imagine that I was the Lozen with special powers, riding beside my brother, going to war side by side with my family and my tribe. Sometimes I could almost believe it.

But it never quite lasted — I always woke up and was just plain old Maggie again. [2]

[2] No brother, no horse or warpaint or homeland to protect. And even on the rez, even with Nana watching out for me and putting a good word in with the tribe, I was still an outsider. I didn’t know the games the other kids played. I didn’t know the lay of the land like they did. And even my names, designed to give me camouflage in the world outside, made me stick out like a sore thumb.
—————

But Nana always made my summer trips worthwhile. From the second I got off the greyhound coach and into her rackety old beater, she was a whirlwind of laughter and fun. She’d have me up early in the mornings, helping her around the house, feeding her scruffy chickens seeds in their pen, collecting eggs while she whipped up pancakes and cornbread in the kitchen. Then we’d play in the garden — a game of catch, her sitting in her chair and me scampering all over the place to grab the ball. And when I’d gotten a bit of energy out we’d settle down on the porch, and Nana would pull out her beadwork or a half-woven basket, and she’d show me how. And while we worked, she would tell stories.

Stories of our ancestors, the way we once lived in the mountains and hunted for our food. Stories about Ussen, who flew through the empty universe on a shooting star and made the world just for us. Stories of the wars with the other tribes. And then the last war, the one we lost. Where we were forced to move south, to leave the lands we had held since the dawn of time. All the way down to the reservation.

And after that came Lozen and her brother Victorio. Rebels, refusing to take the abuse and the confinement to the rez. They waged war on those who trapped them, and stood up for the weak. My favourite story was the one where Lozen left her brother and his war band and went off alone to escort a mother and her tiny baby to their home hundreds of miles away. She protected them all the way, keeping them safe from soldiers, hunting with only a knife because a gunshot might give them away.

I loved those mornings on Nana’s porch. And the long, lazy summer evenings, listening to the cicadas singing in the trees. Those few weeks in August made up for everything. My parents, the city kids, even the way the tribe children didn’t want to play with me either. Being with Nana was like a warm hug.

Of course, summer doesn’t last forever. Good things tend not to stick around. I went home at the end of August one summer, and before the new year had rolled around my parents were sitting me down and telling me in hushed voices that I wouldn’t be going back to the rez again next year. Nana was dead, and she was gone forever.

I was only eight, maybe eight and a half, and I remember struggling to grasp what that meant. What was ‘death’? In the stories Nana told me death was a distant threat, a fate that would befall only the villains. Or a vague and hazy place that the hero or the spirit in the story could maybe return from. But Nana wasn’t a villain, and she had died anyway. And my parents were very clear that she wasn’t coming back.

If I had been older I suppose I might have asked if I could go to her funeral. But the idea never occurred to me, and my parents took it as a given that we would stay at home. The journey was too far, and they both had work to do. So my Nana passed from my life quiet and unmarked, without even a hint of warning. She just…stopped, and I never got another telephone call from her, asking ask me what mischief I had been up to.

It kept me up, though, that night and the next and the next. The knowledge that Nana wasn’t in her own bed, looking up at the tie-dyed fabric she had nailed above her bed. That the little wooden house, with its cozy, overstuffed furniture and the half-finished beadwork on the kitchen table — that it was standing empty. There would be no one to feed the scrawny chickens. No one to sit on the porch and watch the sun go down. It just felt wrong.

Nana had told me a little about death and the way our people used to mark it. There was a lot of wailing and tearing of clothes, and if you really loved the person that was gone, you could even shave your head to show how sad you were. I dutifully made a little rip in the bottom of my pyjama sleeve, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror holding my Dad’s disposable razor for a long time…but to my shame, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had loved Nana, more than anything, but if I turned up to school bald — I’d go from being invisible to being laughed at. I put the razor away, and closed the bathroom door behind me.

There was nothing I could do.

Chapter 2: The Winds of Change

My Nana was gone, and at first nothing seemed to really change. Life went on as before, with school and my shy, abortive attempts to make a friend. Any friend. My parents were working harder than ever, and I retreated into my head to escape. I used to wander the halls of our building and the bare patch of grass around the playground, making up stories for myself. I was Lozen, hero of the Chihenne, fearless warrior. I defeated countless enemies, soldiers and ranchers alike that came to invade our lands, and freed my people from unjust laws a thousand times over. I told myself Nana’s stories over and over again, muttering them under my breath, imagining Lozen galloping on horseback, her rifle slung over one shoulder, a knife in her hand. Never mind that my knife was a butter-knife stolen from the sandwich shop, my rifle a bit of broken drainpipe. I was Lozen, and I was a fighter.

The days crept by, and summer rolled around again. But this summer I didn’t go back to the rez, like I had every year of my life. This year I was expected to continue my solitary wanderings through the hallways. School was out, and I had more time on my hands than ever, but my parents couldn’t take any time off to be with me. They had things to do, bills to pay. So I was left alone.

That was the first time it really hit me. Nana really wasn’t coming back. I’d never see her soft, saggy face again, nut-brown from all those afternoons in the garden. Never see her wrinkles realign themselves into that sweet, creased-up smile.

I cried myself to sleep most nights. My imaginary games with Lozen no longer held the attraction they once had — they felt bland and over-rehearsed now — but they were my only entertainment, so I stuck with them. It was that or sit slouched in front of the TV, staring at brightly-coloured characters shouting over each other, not one of them really saying anything.

In hindsight, I think that was the summer when things began to properly change. I wasn’t really aware of it at the time; I only noticed that my parents seemed busier and more stressed than ever. But when I think back, I do remember overhearing a few half-whispered conversations about rocketing food prices. Rent hikes. Money was tight. All I cared about at the time was that my already-meagre pocket money was reduced further; from $2 to just 50 cents. That wasn’t enough to buy even a candy bar anymore.

It was that summer that the ponypads first started showing up in my neighbourhood, too.

I’d seen them before, obviously. The richer kids at school had already been flashing theirs around for a couple of years, with a newer and shinier model every few months. They’d never been even remotely within the price range of the kids who lived in my tower block, but all of a sudden Luca Diaz was sauntering around with one under his arm. Luca was one of the kids who hung out on the dilapidated playground in the courtyard and refused to have anything to do with me — an asshole, sure, but my parents knew his parents. They were nowhere near flush enough to buy him a toy like that.

Was it stolen, I wondered at first. Luca’s uncle had been known to find things that had ‘fallen off of the back of a lorry’ before. But not long after Luca got his, Matteo and Carolina both showed up with one each. The three of them would sit back to back on the climbing frame, their fingers tapping frantically at the screens as the sound of their laughter drifted across to me. Before long near every kid I passed in the hall was clutching a pink or purple slab of plastic to their chest.

It didn’t seem weird at the time — I was confused as to how they were affording them. But not suspicious. And eventually, watching them all bond over their new game got to be too much. I couldn’t even pretend that my lacklustre stories about Lozen were still interesting.[3]

[3] I had told them to myself a million times over the last few months and I was sick of the sound of my own voice, sick of trying to imagine things that just weren’t real. Sick of trying to remember how Nana had sounded when she spoke the words. I needed something else to do, and I needed it now.

So one day, I summoned up all my courage, marched out of the corner where I had been skulking, and over the concrete towards the playground. Luca, Matteo and Carolina were all there atop the climbing frame as they always were, ponypads beeping softly as they played. I was always studiously ignored — but surely they couldn’t blank me out if I asked them a direct question. [4]

[4] At this stage anything was worth a shot. Anything was better than another day staring at my own hands and walking up and down the same corridors.

I just had to be brave enough to say the words — brave like Lozen would be brave.

So I forced myself over to them, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t trip and faceplant on the way, and stopped a couple of foot away.

They didn’t look up from their game.

I coughed.

Still no response.

“Uh — hey, you guys,” I tried again.

Matteo’s mouth twisted in annoyance as he hammered frantically at his screen, but he still didn’t look away.

“Hey, guys,” I said once more, my voice beginning to sound a little desperate. If they didn’t acknowledge me soon I would have to retreat. It was just too humiliating.

Finally, Luca shot me a dirty glare. “Ugh, what do you want? We’re right in the middle of trying to save Klugetown from the Storm King!”

The names he said meant nothing to me, but the sheer fact of their newness was enough to set my heart thudding a little harder. The prospect of having something to focus on that I didn’t have to make up myself was a thrilling one. I had to know more.

“I wondered — I wondered where you got those.”

“Mind your own business!” Carolina scowled. “They’re ours.”

“I know,” I said, my mouth dry and my throat tight. “I just…I wanted to know if maybe I could play with you sometime.”

Luca rolled his eyes, but he finally rested the ponypad on his knees and met my gaze. “You’d need your own ponypad to play, Maggie. We can’t share them.”

Her eyebrows raised, Carolina turned to stare at him. “Luca! You know my mom doesn’t like us playing with…” she shot me a sideways look, “Those people.”

He waved her off. “I know, but…things are different in Equestria, Cara. Princess Celestia says—”

“You’ve not been wasting your time with that pathetic pink princess again, have you?” Matteo asked, letting his ponypad slip as he gaped at his friend. “We’re meant to be fighting a war, not having makeovers!”

“I don’t talk to her about makeovers!” Luca flushed an ugly red.

Matteo scoffed. “You’re more of a girl than either of those two.”

“Shut up!” Luca threw his own ponypad down onto the dirt and scrambled across to shove at Matteo’s shoulders.

Carolina scowled at both of them and leaned back over her own pad while the boys scuffled, but I was no longer looking at any of them. I was staring into the discarded ponypad, my mouth hanging slightly open as I drank in the sight of it.

I had seen video games before. Played them, when people could be persuaded to lend me their consoles or phones for a couple of minutes at a time. I knew what the pixelated screens looked like, the cartoony characters, the stilted way they moved.

The scene on the ponypad was nothing like any of that.

It was like a window into another world.

A small red horse stood in the foreground, its purple mane billowing gently in the wind, legs moving with the rolling motion of the deck on which it stood. The ship was depicted in perfect, devastating detail, every grain of wood on the planks below the pony’s dirt-encrusted hooves visible, every fibre of the rope coil that lay beside him. And beyond the ship’s balustrade was the sea, flawlessly blue and sparkling like a diamond in the sunlight that played over the surface. In the distance I could make out an island, lush with vegetation, and in the sky overhead purple airships wheeled like vultures.

It was a thousand times more beautiful, more real, than the concrete courtyard in which we stood.

Suddenly, I wanted more than anything to go there. To explore it. I wanted to step out of my world of grey and into that world of colour. Anything to have a change — anything to take me out of my endless, Nana-less summer.

The boys were still struggling on the climbing frame, each one trying to push the other off, and Carolina was shouting at them to stop, but I hardly heard them anymore. I edged towards the ponypad, trying to drink in the details of it while I could. There were other creatures on the deck — unicorns and a strange bipedal cat — but they didn’t hold my attention. It was the open space behind them, the limitless horizon, those islands peppering the sea in the distance. I had never been to the beach. Oklahoma is a landlocked state, and my parents weren’t exactly flush with cash or vacation time.

“Eugh, you guys are so stupid when you fight.” Abruptly, Carolina stood to leave.

Matteo pushed Luca hard away from him, but he was smiling again. “I’ve gotta go too. Mom wants me back for lunch today. I’ll see you later, Luca.”

As the others retreated, Luca stooped to collect his ponypad, and I think I made a small noise in my throat, reaching out towards the screen, because he paused, and looked at me with pity. “Look, Princess Celestia says it’s important to be kind, and she’s usually right, so — My cousin’s half-brother, Jésus, he gave them to us. He can get them cheap. Dunno from where, but we only had to pay him a few bucks each.”

“Really?” I was thrilled. “Where does he live?”

Luca waved a vague hand at one of the neighbouring tower blocks. “Over there. Fifth floor, apartment 5A. Tell him I sent you, and he’ll probably hook you up.”

“Thank you, Luca.”

He coloured ever so slightly and turned away. “Whatever. Just don’t go blabbing to Matteo and Cara.”

He vanished inside, and I turned towards the tower he indicated, hope swelling in my chest. Luca had never been anything but abrasive towards me — at best, he had ignored me. And now for the first time ever, he had extended the hand of friendship. Had said he wanted to be kind. I had no idea who this princess that Matteo hated so much was, but if she was making Luca be nice to me, I didn’t care how many makeovers she wanted to talk about. A ponypad might finally be my way in.

I might finally have a shot at making some friends.

Chapter 3: Into the Lion’s Den

Heart thundering in my ears, I scrambled down the stairs as quickly as I could, clutching the bright pink box tightly in both hands.

Laughter rang out behind me, and I heard them mocking me. “She scurries like a mouse, doesn’t she? A freaky little mouse.”

Cheeks burning, I upped my pace and skidded round the first corner of the stairwell. I jumped down the last couple of steps and turned the next corner, and the next. Only when I could no longer hear his mocking laughter did I slow down. My breathing came hard, but the box in my hands was proof of my victory. I had done it.[5]

[5] Luca’s cousin Jésus had turned out to be a beast of a man, an enormous shape straining at the seams of his stained black clothing, who seemed exhausted by the effort of lumbering even to the door and back. His vast height only added to his bulk, and to me he appeared practically a giant.

“It’s a kid, Cadence,” he had said, irritably, as he opened the door and looked over my head at nothing in particular. “What’s a fricking kid doing here?”

It hadn’t seemed like he was addressing me, but I nervously squeaked out my story about Luca and the ponypads, and he finally grunted at me to stop.

“Another one after the bleeding ponypads, Cady. I swear you’ve turned me into some sort of dealer.”

“Oh come on, Nighthawk,” a female voice replied from further inside the apartment, making me jump. “Remember how important it is—”

“—To be kind and spread the love,” Jésus finished, rolling his eyes, a slight smile on his stubbled face. “I’d struggle to forget, with how often you go on about it.” Finally, he turned to me. “I suppose you’d better come in.”

I swallowed hard. But he didn’t wait for an answer, just turned and stumped his way back inside. The interior was darkened and more than a little frightening, but I thought of that tantalising glimpse I had caught of Luca’s adventure — the sky, so blue and clear of smog, the sea glittering like diamonds — the way he was free to go anywhere — and the decision was made. I followed Jésus inside. I wanted that ponypad.

“Don’t be worried,” the female voice said softly, echoing oddly through the apartment. “Nighthawk can be a bit gruff, but he’s a real softy underneath that tough exterior.”

“Cadence!” growled Jésus, but there was a playful tone to his voice now. “You’ll ruin my rep.”

“Over here, little one,” the voice — Cadence — called, and I followed the sound this time, up to a speaker on the wall. I emerged into the living room, where sporadic pink light flickered over the darkened carpet, and stared up at the huge television screen, where a pink pony smiled down at me. “Nice to meet you, little one,” she said gently. “What’s your name?”

I gaped. She was every inch as real as the creatures on Luca’s ponypad had looked, but instead of just going about a few background tasks, she was looking at me. Talking to me. I could see her chest rising and falling with every breath. I could see the moisture glinting in her eyes. I could see every hair in her candy-striped mane.

This was a whole other level.

“Um — Maggie,” I stuttered, giving the usual name I gave to people here in the city. Only on the rez had I been really free to be Lozen. To be myself.

“Well, it’s lovely to meet you, Maggie,” chirped Cadence, hammering it home once again this wasn’t just some sort of fluke — she could really see and hear me. She was really here. “Nighthawk and I have a few ponypads lying around, and we’d be happy to let you have one of them. Equestria welcomes everypony.” She beamed as she said it, and looked so happy that it somehow didn’t seem polite to point out that I wasn’t a pony.

I shot an anxious glance over at Jésus, who was rooting around in some boxes behind the couch. He wasn’t saying much, but Cadence seemed more than happy to carry the conversation.

“You’ve never been to Equestria before, right, Maggie?”

“Uh, no,” I whispered, more than a little freaked out. Beautiful graphics and limitless exploration was one thing, but characters able to talk back to me was a lot more than I had expected.

Cadence spread her wings as though she wanted to be able to give me a hug. “Well, all you’ll need to do is turn on the ponypad, sweetheart, and then Princess Celestia will be there to talk you through all of it. It’s not as intimidating as it seems, I promise.”

“Princess Celestia?” That was the same name Matteo had taunted Luca with. The makeover princess.

“Yes!” Cadence fluttered her feathers in delight. “She’s my aunt, and the princess of all of Equestria! She looks after everypony, and she loves welcoming new people in.”

I nodded mutely. This was all getting a little too weird.

Finally, Jésus burst up from behind the couch, a small box held in his fingers. “Got it!”

“Brilliant work, Nighthawk!” Cadence cheered and applauded like he’d just performed some amazing feat.

Moving slowly, Jésus advanced towards me, the pink box held in one hand. “Alright, kid, this is gonna cost you.”

I bit my lip. Luca had said it would only be a few bucks! “I — I’m sorry, I haven’t got—”

“Nighthawk, you’re scaring her.” Cadence’s tone was reproving now. “It's okay, Maggie. Just a token amount will be fine.”

Jésus rolled his eyes again, but he smirked as he flopped back into his armchair. “You’ll bankrupt me, girl. Bits are all well and good but I need to survive out here, too.”

“Oh, hush,” Cadence flipped a dismissive wing at him. “You know full well bits are a widely accepted cryptocurrency. I’ll cover the cost of Maggie’s ponypad.”

Silently, I offered the pocket money I had brought from home. Two crumpled five dollar bills and three quarters. Jésus sighed heavily, but reached out his hairy paw and scooped them off my hand. Cadence cheered again and clapped her hooves.

“All you need to do is push the button to turn it on, Maggie,” she called, as I started to back away. “And Princess Celestia will be there to help you with everything else.”

Jésus began to laugh at my fearful expression, and it was all finally too much to bear. My prize safe in my hands, I turned and bolted, his bellowing laughter ringing out behind me.

With trembling fingers, I pressed the button at the bottom of the pad.

And then the screen flickered into life.

The scene before me was a throne room, with tapestries and flags hanging on every wall. Stained glass windows threw rainbow-hued patterns across the floor, and a small stream bubbled down a marble-tiled channel from the raised dais. A red carpet led all the way up the hall to the platform, where two thrones waited. The darker throne bore a moon, and was empty, but the golden sun throne was occupied.

Princess Celestia. Who else could it be?

A creamy-coated unicorn, with wings as wide and regal as Cadence’s had been, and a mane that flowed and glittered like a river of light.

Without me pressing any button, the camera began to move forward, lurching a little as it approached her, like a person walking.

“Welcome, Maggie,” Celestia said, a beatific smile spreading across her muzzle. “Welcome to Equestria.”

The walking motion stopped. I chewed on my lip. “How do you…know my name?” If I was going to play this game more — and being honest, what else was there to do this summer? — I wasn’t sure I wanted to go by Maggie any more. I got enough of that in the real world. For years, I had been Lozen every summer. Why couldn’t that continue here?

Her horn sparkled yellow, and a scroll of paper floated up into the air. [6] “My niece Cadence sent me a letter and told me all about her meeting with you. You made quite the impression.” She chuckled slightly.

[6] It had taken me less than half an hour to find a quiet corner in one of the disused janitor’s closets, but a fast postal service was hardly the least believable thing I had seen about Equestria. It was still mind-boggling that I was here, having a conversation, with a game.

I took a breath, and made a decision. I missed my summer self — this was just a game, but it would be…nice to hear someone call me that again. Like Nana was still here, in a way.

“Actually, my name’s Lozen,” I said, bravely. Perhaps it was the absence of another human, or perhaps it was Celestia’s gentle, understanding gaze, but I felt somehow freer with her than I had with Cadence and Jésus.

“Lozen? What a lovely name.” Celestia wasn’t phased in the least. “She was a warrior princess, wasn’t she? She fought for her people so bravely.”

A thrill shot through me. “You know the story?”

“Of course,” she smiled again. “Everypony loves the stories of heroes from the human world. Heroes like Lozen and Victorio.”

An answering smile spread across my own face. “No one I talk to here has ever heard of Lozen. Which isn’t right — because she’s so brave, and cool.”

“Things are different here in Equestria,” she replied. “We’re…unique. Like you, Lozen. Special. I think you’ll like it here.”

“I want to see it,” I said with a touch of impatience. “I want to go on adventures, like Luca and Carolina.” I swiped a finger across the screen, hoping to move the viewpoint, and the camera obediently followed the gesture. The windows were coloured so strongly I couldn’t make out anything beyond them, and the doors at both ends of the throne room were sealed.

“I know you’re eager to get started,” Celestia said gently. “But there are just a few more things to take care of first.”

“Like what?”

“Well, first of all you’ll need a pony name.”

Pick a new name? That was easy. “Lozen!”

She chuckled at my immediate answer and shook her head slightly from side to side. The motion sent little ripples flowing down her lustrous mane, all the way offscreen. It looked so real. “I don’t think that would work, little one — pony names have to say something about who you are.”

I began to pout. “Lozen is who I am.”

“I think something a little bit different would suit you better,” replied Celestia. “After all, the meaning of the name is ‘horse thief’, which I don’t think would work too well in Equestria, do you?” She gave a small, ladylike giggle at her own joke.

Reluctantly, I agreed.

“I have a suggestion, though,” Celestia proposed. “I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I’m certain I’ve found the right Equestrian name for you, Lozen. Would you like to hear it?”

I didn’t see how she could have spent any length of time thinking about it, given that we’d only just started the discussion, but I nodded. It couldn’t be any worse than Horse Thief, could it?

Celestia steepled her hooves together and smiled down at me, somehow managing to give an impression of height despite the fact she was on a 2d screen. “Lozen’s brother said she was his strong right hand, a shield to her people. You’re as brave as the original Lozen was, I can see that. And I know you’re a member of the Kalth Tindé people, the cedar tribe. So what if your Equestrian name were Cedar Shield? Would you like that?”

“Cedar Shield.” I rolled the name around my tongue, and a smile crossed my face. Somehow, Celestia knew and understood more about my tribe and the stories of the original Lozen than anyone I’d yet met in the city. I didn’t know how she knew, but the name felt…right. “Yes. I…I really like it.”

She beamed. “That’s wonderful! I’m so glad you like it, Cedar Shield.” Her expression melted back into a more serious one. “Now, the next thing we need to do is give you a body.”

My eyebrows rose sharply. “I have one!”

She burst into delighted laughter, as though I’d said something genuinely hilarious. “No, no, Cedar. An Equestrian body.” She clopped her forehooves together, and the camera pulled back, away from her, to reveal more of her throne, her vast white wings, and a small, ill-defined shape standing in front of her.

“Oh, right,” I echoed, a little doubtfully. “I…do I have to be a pony?”

My Nana had a neighbour on the rez who had horses, and the big, stamping creatures had always intimidated me a little. The bipedal cats I had seen on Luca’s ship were far cuter — maybe I could be one of those instead. All that fluffy fur and whiskers.

As soon as I asked the question, the blurred shape began to clarify itself.

“Not in the least,” Celestia said genially. “Most of the visitors to Equestria take the shape of ponies, but I have many other creatures under my care. For you, I think this would be more appropriate.”

She flicked a wing, and the creature in front of the throne solidified at last. Brown, fluffy fur, curling close to the body, with a mop of black hair on the head that matched my own. A long, flicking tail, with another tuft of black hair right on the end. Two big, floppy ears, and two eyes as dark as my own. I knew these creatures, too, from the rez. They wandered out on the commons, the only bit of open plains land left to the tribe. Nana and I used to watch them sometimes — always from a safe distance, of course.

A buffalo.

As I stared, reaching out a finger to touch the screen, she mirrored my motion perfectly, raising her own left hoof toward the camera, tilting her head like I did.

I smiled, and a grin split her muzzle. Cedar Shield. I was pretty sure I was going to like it here.

“Now, Cedar, you’re ready.” Celestia’s voice broke into my thoughts, and as I looked back to her my avatar did the same.

“I can go explore now?” The buffalo calf on the screen danced from hoof to hoof in excitement.

“Yes, anywhere you like.”

That necessitated a pause to think. “Well, I could go to the pirate ships near…uh…Cl—Cloobtown?” Maybe there I would bump into Luca and the others, and join up with them, and maybe we’d all become friends—

“Klugetown?” Celestia corrected. “No, I don’t think the high seas are quite the right place for you. I have another idea.”

“Oh.” I pouted. “Where then?”

Her horn flared into golden-yellow light again, and she beamed down at me. “I think you’ll do well in Appleoosa.”

“Apple-wha—?” But before the word was even out of my mouth the screen flashed white and the palace dissolved away into nothing.

Chapter 4: The Appleoosan Prairie

The sky was a blinding blue, without a cloud in sight. Grassy plains rolled away to every side, and when I swiped the screen to turn my head, I could make out a distant network of canyons and arroyos carved through the jagged sandstone spires.

It looked just like home.

Or what home would have looked like, a hundred years before Lozen was ever born. What the rez might have looked like before all the buildings and the stress of a whole tribe crammed into one little plot of land. What our original home must have been like, before the government chased us off and penned us in. Before Lozen and Victorio fought their last stand and lost. Before my parents felt so trapped with the tribe that they took me hundreds of miles away from it.

This was the land from Nana’s stories. This was my birthright.

A grin spread over my face, and I turned slowly in a circle, my avatar’s hooves scuffing audibly through the dusty soil. Everything was rendered down to the finest detail. Every blade of dry prairie grass. Every pebble disturbed by my passage. The distant sandstone cliffs, striped like red-hued candycanes.

A whole world, wide open and waiting for me. [7]

[7] My Nana once told me that a whole third of America used to be prairie. Before settlers came and twisted the land up and made it into flat, faceless wheat. It used to be forests, rivers, mountains, and prairie. Where we could roam free and follow the paths our ancestors had forged a thousand years before. For the first time, I could really see what she meant.

I picked a direction almost at random and set out, my avatar’s hooves drumming up a cloud of dust that billowed behind me like a flag. The plains might look flat and monotonous, but life was everywhere. Birds chirped and darted closer to me than any real bird ever had. Rabbits watched me approach with almost human intelligence before darting away into the grass. Beetles and grasshoppers hummed among the stalks as they pursued mysterious errands of their own.

After an hour or so — buffalo never seemed to tire — I could make out a town on the horizon, and headed towards it. The land seemed flat on approach, but there was a subtle incline now, and I was startled when I found the ground beneath my hooves dropping abruptly away to reveal a vast orchard spreading out through a fertile canyon, a river wending its way through the centre of the trees. It was an undeniably beautiful spot, with rich velvety grass and plump red apples, but…it seemed somehow out of place. To go from the dry, sandy prairie to this sudden oasis seemed subtly wrong.

As I looked down, trying to puzzle it out, I heard shouts.

“Buffalo! Buffalo on the western slopes!”

The voices did not sound friendly, and I tapped the screen hard, and my character flattened herself to the ground, ears pressed back against her skull. Ponies galloped into sight, bedecked with cowboy hats and checked shirts, and they snarled and shouted expletives as they thundered towards the threat.

But to my shock, none of them gave my ledge even a glance. They pounded through the orchard to the canyon’s end, where a single ray of sun illuminated a distant form. I squinted down at the screen, trying to make it out, and then it burst into motion.

The stranger charged the furious ponies without even a thought, head lowered, and they scattered before her like bowling pins. She pulled up on the other side of the group and skipped sideways to dodge a buck from one of the stallions, and her pale horns flashed in the sun.

My heart did a somersault. A buffalo!

Before I fully thought it through, I was swiping to get my avatar up and moving, galloping down the narrow cliffside track to get to her. She needed my help!

As I barrelled towards the fight, she slammed her forehead into a pony’s, stunning him, and then feinted past him just enough to dip her head and hook her horn through a bucket standing at the foot of a nearby tree. Catching it up in her mouth, she darted away from the pursuing ponies and made for the river. The eagle feathers woven in her hair bounced and fluttered as she ran.

“Stop!” yelled one of the stallions, desperately, but she didn’t falter for a second and whipped her neck round to send the bucket sailing through the air, trailing brown sludge as it went, before landing with a splash in the river.

“You beast!” screamed the incensed stallion, charging for her with murder in his eyes, and I didn’t hesitate. I lowered my own head and galloped for all I was worth. My skull impacted with his withers and sent him tumbling to the ground, and I had to dance back out of the way to avoid his flailing limbs.

The buffalo calf — she couldn’t be much older than me — stared at me in shock, but then it melted into a wicked grin and she slapped a hoof against my shoulder.

“Thanks, stranger!”

Then she was off again, dodging the cowponies and snagging more buckets, hurling them one by one into the river.

“Please, don’t!” cried the ponies. “We need that fertiliser!”

She just tossed her head, wild and imperious. “Well, we need our ancestral stampeding grounds! Get your trees off our land!”

When it was finally over and the last bucket was floating merrily downstream, after we’d escaped, laughing breathlessly and scraping the last remnants of the brown muck from our coats, she grinned again and introduced herself.

“I’m Little Strongheart.”

“Cedar Shield,” I replied.

“You sure know how to handle yourself in a fight!” She laughed again and shook her ears. “I bit off more than I could chew back there; don’t know how to thank you enough.”

I had to know more. “Who were those ponies? They took your land?”

Her face clouded. “Settlers.” She said it like it was a dirty word. “They moved in here a few months ago to found some new pony town, claimed the land was theirs — never mind that it belonged to my tribe for a thousand years!”

My breath caught. Settlers. Injustice. Stolen land. It was just like what my people had suffered, two centuries ago. Just like Lozen’s fight against the army, when they forced the Kiowa Apache onto the rez! I knew straight away what we had to do.

“Strongheart, we have to fight them.”

“We will,” she answered immediately. “You and me, Cedar, we can take them on and win!”

Chapter 5: A New Home

My summer seemed to pass in a blur once I had my ponypad. Strongheart and I battled the settlers, working against them in a hundred tiny ways, sneaking in and out of Appleoosa on secret missions. [8]

[8] One night, when I was meant to be asleep, we broke into the town and busted out Peaceful, a warrior from Strongheart’s tribe who completely failed to live up to his name.

“Where does your tribe live?” I asked, as the three of us galloped away from Appleoosa, the cries of the sheriff fading into the distance behind us. The stars sparkled overhead, white gems set into a black that was soft and rich as velvet.

“Our tribe, silly,” she corrected me immediately. “And we’re headed home right now — we’ve been away long enough. You must have really missed everyone.”

And when we trotted, dusty and weary, into the hidden valley shaded from the morning sun by distant, thirsty-looking trees, and I looked around at the scattered teepees and the faces of the buffalo who tumbled out to greet us, I really felt like I was coming home after a long absence.

My character had her own family, her parents Shady Pine and Whisperwind, both every bit as attentive as my own had never been. She even had a little brother, Victory Stampede, who tagged along with me and Strongheart every chance he could get. He was a lot of fun, and we went on a few raids of our own. I asked him if he knew the legends of Lozen and Victorio, and the answer was a resounding yes.

“Duh, of course I do! Everycreature knows the stories. Lozen and Victorio were like, the coolest buffalo ever. Mom loves them so much that’s who we’re named after, silly. Did you forget?”

I shrugged and nodded. I didn’t want to burst his bubble and tell him I had another mother, and had only recently met Shady Pines. It was enough that I had Equestria now. I had a brother and a best friend, and at long last I could live out the legends of Lozen and Victorio for real.

The one thing my new family lacked was a grandmother. I never asked where she might be, and I was grateful for her absence — to have some creature trying to step into Nana’s role would be…too painful.

I spent my days in a pleasant haze of adventure with my newfound friends, waking up early to scarf down a quick breakfast before grabbing my ponypad and heading out for the day. I alternated between my janitor’s closet and the playground where the other kids hung out, and one day they actually beckoned me across to join them.

“Hey, Maggie! Want to come and play?”

Boy, did I!

That afternoon still stands out clearer than the others in my memory. I left Strongheart and the tribe for the day and headed out into the grasslands, where Carolina — in Equestria she was a graceful unicorn with long, shiny blonde hair and a buttload of magical power — opened a portal for me to jump through onto their ship. We fought the Storm King’s bloodthirsty soldiers with cannons, with hooves, with swords and crossbows. We beat them back and retook the island of…well, I forget its name. It’s not like that was the important part — the important part was that we were doing it together, the four of us.

I was finally included, and it was Equestria that had made it possible.

I spent every day engrossed in my ponypad, and little as I saw them, eventually my parents noticed. My father was quick to dismiss it as just another game, but my mother was curious. She borrowed my ponypad one night while I was in bed, and then we had an uncomfortable two days of squabbling over it before she reappeared one evening with a second one. After that evenings were spent curled up on the sofa with her at the far end, both of us tapping away furiously at our screens.

Summer was drawing to a close, and things were changing.

One day when I went rushing down to the playground, Matteo wasn’t with the others. Luca and Carolina were pale, their faces wan. Their ponypads were nowhere in sight.

My pace slowed. “What’s wrong, guys?”

The answer, when it came, was flat. “Matteo’s gone.”

I didn’t understand. “What? Where’s he gone?”

Carolina turned her face away. “He wanted to play forever.”

Luca shivered. “Jèsus went a few weeks ago. But I didn’t think…I never thought Matteo would go.”

“It’s a trap!” Carolina spat. “The game took him! It was all just a big trick to steal him.” She paused, gasping for breath, struggling not to cry, and glared furiously down at me from her perch. “So get lost, and take your dumb ponypad with you! We don’t play anymore, and if you had any sense you wouldn’t either.”

I was left behind, stunned and bereft, as the two of them swept away. In one fell swoop, my budding friendships were cut off at the source.

I fell back onto Strongheart, my mainstay, and spent more time than ever alone in the janitor’s closet with my ponypad.

Less than a week after that, Dad and I woke up to an empty apartment and a brief note from Mom. Just platitudes; things are hard. I can’t do this anymore. Things are better in the other world. I love you.

And the one important bit.

Goodbye.

Chapter 6: Those Left Behind

A week after Mom left us, I found myself in front of my dad’s desk, staring at the middle drawer. The one I knew contained my ponypad, locked away since that awful morning we found the note. I knew I shouldn’t…I didn’t even fully want to. But the days had been so long, without Strongheart and the others to talk to. And Dad wouldn’t speak to me. He just…left the room when I came in. Went to work. Looking so blank and empty I couldn’t even tell if he was sad or not.

Maybe there wasn’t much of a choice after all.

I took my ponypad out of its drawer. One tap on the screen, and it blinked into life immediately. I was in my tent, the woven blankets covering me. Little Strongheart sat beside my bed, and looked up as soon as she heard my avatar take a breath.

Immediately, she scrambled to her hooves. “Cedar Shield! Oh my goodness, are you alright? How do you feel? What happened?”

I frowned, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you went to bed a week ago and just…never woke up! I’ve been working around the clock with the medicine woman to try and figure out what might help, but nothing she did was any use!” Her voice was indignant, but her hooves, as she reached out to embrace me, were trembling. “I was so scared for you.”

“No…it was…it wasn’t me that something happened to.” I finally said.

She pulled away, frowning.

“It was my mom.”

“Shady Pines?”

“N-no, my real mom.”

Instantly, her face clears. “Oh! You mean in the Outer Realm.”

“The real one,” I nodded. “My mom, she…she…” my words tailed off and I finished the sentence in a whisper. “She died.”

Strongheart’s face twisted in anguish and I saw her forelegs tighten around me. I wanted more than anything to be able to feel that hug. To have someone hug me.

“I’m so sorry, Cedar.”

I bowed my head so that my hair fell across my eyes, and sniffed hard. “I…I…that’s okay.”

She held me for a while, and then moved a little, making enough noise to get my attention so that I looked back at the screen. “Actually, we have a visitor…that you might like to meet. A pony.”

I sniffed hard and nodded. Maybe a return to our battle against the Appleoosans would be just what I needed. An escape. “Did the townsponies send an envoy? Are they trying to make a deal?”

“No. She’s not from Appleoosa. She’s — well, maybe you’d better come out and see for yourself.”

Still fighting back my tears, I followed her out. The camp was just as I had left it, peaceful and tranquil, the walls of the arroyo rising high on either side and the stubby trees reaching their branches towards the scorching sun. Buffalo called out friendly greetings to me, and Victory Stampede waved furiously at me from a distance, but didn’t approach.

In the centre of the circle formed by the tent stood Chief Thunderhooves, his huge bulk dwarfing the pony beside him.

Cautiously, I approached, Strongheart beckoning me onwards, and the chief and the mare ceased their conversation and turned to face me.

She was pink-coated, with a fluffy black mane. An earth pony. Her cutie mark was some sort of twist of light with stars at either end.

She was a complete stranger.

But her face, when she saw me, softened into a heart-wrenching smile, desperate and sad and happy all at the same time.

“Maggie,” she said, and I knew that voice. “Maggie, you’re really here.”

My hands fell away from the ponypad, and it clattered to the floor. No. No.

“Maggie,” whispered the earth pony, pressing closer to the screen. “Maggie, it’s me. I didn’t leave you. I’d never leave you.”

My lips felt wooden, but I forced them apart just enough to get one word out. One question. “Mom?”

She beamed and nodded frantically. “Yes, yes, it’s me! I came to see you — to be in your shard with you, if you’d like. I know it hasn’t been long for you, but for me it’s been — years — so many years — and I’ve had so much time to think.”

I started to back away from the ponypad, lit up pink as she pressed her face close to the camera, her hooves reaching for me. Her words flowed thick and fast.

“I know now that I was wrong, your dad and I both were. I should have been here for you. I should have spent more time with you — we should have played Equestria Online together.”

“No, no, no,” I muttered, my hands rising to clutch my temples. My mom was dead. My mom was dead.

“But it’s alright!” she said, her voice climbing higher and higher. “It’s okay, because we can play together now. We can play forever if you like! And Princess Celestia said I’m finally ready to come back and see you, and she said you’d like it if I was to stay with you — that it would satisfy you—”

I staggered backward and stumbled, my back colliding hard with the kitchen counter. This couldn’t be happening. My mom was gone. But she was there, on my ponypad, her voice breaking.

“—And I’ll never go to work and leave you again, Maggie.” She strained to see me. “Maggie? Come closer to the camera, sweetie! Maggie? Maggie?”

My searching hands finally found something. Closed on it. My dad’s rolling pin, a gift from my Nana, who loved to bake. I don’t think he ever used it even once.

“Maggie!” Her cries were growing more frantic, and Strongheart was trying to step in between her and the camera.

“Please, Starwine, I think you’re upsetting Cedar Shield—”

“—No, I only want—”

I bought the rolling pin down on the screen with all of my strength. It impacted with a sickening smash, and jagged cracks in the glass radiated out from the impact zone. I hit it again, and again, until the sparking stopped, and the apartment was silent and empty once more.

Shoulders heaving, I stood over the corpse of my ponypad, my second life, and shuddered. How was it…possible? How could it have happened? First Matteo, Jésus, and then my mom. All gone, and then somehow returning. Different. Living as their avatars, ponies and buffalo. No longer human at all.

Maybe Carolina was right.

Equestria Online was eating people.

Chapter 7: Flee and Vanish in the Night

When I told my dad what had happened, he didn’t believe me. That wasn’t a surprise. But a few days later, when the desk drawer that held Mom’s ponypad began to buzz and vibrate, and then the anxious pink face of the earth pony called Starwine popped up on the screen — he believed me then.

After it was over, after he’d stopped shaking and the ponypad was gone, he did something he hadn’t done in a long time.

He hugged me.

Not a cursory, glancing touch, like he had given me the day after Mom died. Not a passing moment that ended as soon as was socially acceptable. A real hug, long and hard and full of apology.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Mom…she was right. She warned me this would happen.”

“Mom?” I echoed. Mom hadn’t warned us of anything. She had run headlong into the danger, arms open to receive it.

“Your Nana.”

Hearing her name was like a slap in the face. Like waking up on a cold morning. Nana. Sometimes I had thought I was the only one who remembered her.

“She told me, when your mom and I were moving out here, that the city…changes people. Chews them up and spits them out all different, she said. Me and Daisy didn’t listen — we wanted to be different. But…this new tech, this pony stuff…it really is as bad as your nana warned me.” He shook his head, and tried to still his trembling fingers. “We should never have left the reservation.”

I clung to him, not knowing how to help, but still unbearably glad to finally be included. To be allowed in. “What’re we gonna do?”

He sighed and tightened his fingers on mine. “We…we can’t stay here. This place is changing. Food prices are sky-high, and I don’t know how much longer we can afford to stay anyway. And now Daisy…now your mom is…well, we can’t stay here.”

“Where are we going to go, Dad?”

“I think…” he sucked in a deep breath, “I think it’s time we went home, kiddo.”

We made the trip out of the city in an old beater that Dad borrowed from a friend. The friend didn’t even seem to care when the car would come back to him. Just tossed the keys over. [9]

[9] The car was small, and none of our furniture would fit. So we packed light. Just a couple of boxes each, a holdall of clothes and a photo album full of snapshots of Mum and Dad when they were younger, with a few of me as a baby tucked in the back.

Dad said it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like we had a house lined up to put our furniture in anyway. Nana’s house had been rented, and had probably been taken over by someone else a long time ago. Once we sorted somewhere to stay and got settled, we could get new furniture, Dad promised, even though money was incredibly tight. Somehow we’d make it work.

We made the drive at night, furtively loading the car under cover of darkness, as though someone might try to stop us if they saw. We took one last look around the apartment that had been our home since before I could remember, and then Dad scooped up the last two binbags of stuff and hustled me down the stairs. He left his phone sitting on the kitchen table, and locked the door behind us.

We travelled fast, Dad clutching the steering wheel so tightly the veins popped in his hands. I slept and woke and slept again, and by the time morning came we were pulling into the road that led to the rez. [10]

[10] The car slowed as we passed Nana’s house and I pressed my nose against the window to see — but it was all wrong. The rocking chair on the porch was gone, and instead of Nana’s weaving in the window there were real curtains, shut tight against us. Even the skinny chickens in the yard had vanished. I slumped back into my seat. It had been over a year since I was last here, but it somehow made it all the more clear that Nana was gone. I had remembered the rez as it was with her, a moment frozen in time. But time wasn’t frozen, and the rez had moved on without Nana. Just like Mom, she had vanished.

Dad finally pulled in at Uncle George’s house, a tumbledown ranch house with dusty black paint. He wasn’t my uncle, but at the same time he was everyone’s uncle. He was one of the tribe elders, such as they were, and Nana had been very fond of him.

“Old as the hills, he was, even when I was a girl,” she said the first time she took me to see him. He gave us oat cookies and milk, and they talked for hours about the fifties and sixties, what life had been like.

This time there were no cookies and milk. Just a hushed, anguished conversation between the two adults, ended by the sad croak of an old voice. “You’d better come inside.”

Chapter 8: Shifting Sands

Life with Uncle George was strange at first, but we settled into a routine quick enough. Like he said, the tribe always looks after its own. Human nature and all that. We got ourselves situated, and Uncle George said he was glad to have young people around the place again. His own children were all older than Dad, and were scattered all over the rez and the nearby towns.

Dad got himself a job at the local grocery store, owned by a friend of Uncle George’s, and spent his spare time fixing up the house in lieu of rent. Despite my protests, I was enrolled at the local school — and while the white kids there weren’t exactly friendly, at least there was a sizeable component of tribe kids for me to hang around. I didn’t make any friends, as such — no one like Strongheart or Victory Stampede — but I was happy enough. Being part of a crowd, listening to their conversations and being a semi-accepted part of the group was more than sufficient.

For a few years things were almost good. Dad retained an almost obsessive hatred of phones and computers, and I steered clear of anything coloured pink and decorated with ponies. [11]

[11] Sometimes kids at school would bring ponypads in, and I’d have to just get up and walk out before I started shaking. I didn’t want to hear Mom’s voice suddenly blaring out from one of them. Word spread around the rez about what had happened to her, and the other kids regarded me with something like awe for a few weeks before they moved on to the next thing.
—————

But things were working out. I started going by Lozen, until Dad was the only one who still called me Maggie. And even that waned, when I bugged him about it. We were spending more time together than we ever had before, and I felt like we were finally a proper family.

I was happy there.

It was a bit like a bubble, really. I knew, in an academic sense, that things were getting worse, out there. Food was still getting scarcer, and people were beginning to vanish. At first it was the old and the sick, those we could afford to lose. But then it was those who were sad, those who were lonely. And kids, too. I remember the first time we had a Humanity Preservation lesson. A twitchy guy in a tattered blazer standing up there, gesturing to his powerpoint and explaining what the ponies were trying to do to us.

I remember looking up at that photo of Celestia, smiling so benignly, and shuddering. She wanted to eat all of us. Consume everyone and spit us back out again as ponies and buffalo and cats.

But like I said, on the rez it didn’t really seem to touch us as much. We looked out for each other. Uncle George knew everyone, and he and the other oldies organised people to share food and help get the essentials when one family came up short. As times grew leaner he even organised a community garden where we could grow our own crops.

Even when things got really bad — when the army moved into town to shut down the Experience Centre, when school closed its doors for the last time, even when people from the neighbourhood slipped away, one by one, to emigrate and leave us forever — Uncle George’s will was as implacable as his body was frail, and on the rez he kept us all isolated. Safe.

But then the ponies came to town.

Chapter 10: Keep Him Safe

Dad’s skin was pale and clammy, and his skull showed clearly through the flesh. When he started to cough, great big wracking coughs that set him shuddering from head to toe, Uncle George and I looked at each other over his head, and a chill set into my bones. We’d waited too long. I didn’t want to lose anyone else.

As soon as dawn came, George loaded up a backpack and readied his walking sticks.

“This crazy, Uncle George!” I protested. “You’re too old!”

“I’ve never been too old for something I set my mind to yet,” he said firmly, resting one hand on my shoulder. “And it’s too dangerous out there for a kid alone. I should be back before four days are up. Take care of him, Lozen.”

I felt like crying, but I set my chin and nodded resolutely.

His hunched little shape dwindled into the distance like a dying candle-flame.

Dad got worse after she left. He coughed so much he hardly seemed to have time to breathe, and he was as white as a ghost. “I’m…scared, Lozen,” he wheezed. “I don’t want to die.”

“You won’t,” I said fiercely. “I won’t let you, Dad. You’ve just got to be brave. Like Victorio and Lozen.”

He tried to laugh, but hacked up another lungful of bloody phlegm instead. “Lozen…my…my name…it’s…Elan, not…not Eric,” he said, finally. “Your Nana…hated when I…changed it.”

I tried to laugh with him. Tears squeezed out of the corner of my eyes instead. “Well, I…I changed my name too, Dad. Lozen’s only my middle name.”

He smiled, painfully. What a pair of liars we were.

The fifth day came, and Uncle George did not return. Dad had stopped eating two days previously, and I couldn’t force anything down his throat no matter how hard I tried.

I headed outside for the sixth time that day, looking for George’s thin silhouette on the dirt track, but the skyline was as empty as ever.

And then I looked up, and I saw the parachute. White and pristine against the wintery sky, it fell gently as a leaf on a breeze. A package hung suspended beneath it. It was bizarre; there was nothing visible that could have dropped it, and it made no sense out here in the wilderness. But it was here, and somehow, on this awful, dreamlike day where my father lay dying, it seemed to make sense.

It came to rest less than a foot from where I stood. The box underneath the parachute was white, with a small golden sun in the centre.

I opened it. What else could I do?

It didn’t surprise me at all to find a letter addressed to me.

Dear Cedar Shield,
I am sorry to write to you like this, as I know you and your friends wished to be left alone. But Eric is dying, and I must act to save him. Please take this to him, and offer him the choice. All he needs to do is say he wants to emigrate to Equestria.
Wisdom Passes, who I believe you know as your Uncle George, will be waiting to greet him, and you, if you wish to join us.
Yours,
Princess Celestia.

Beneath the letter lay a pillow.

I turned it over in my hands, feeling the solid core beneath the fluffy exterior as I tried to think. Uncle George, gone? It couldn’t be true. He wouldn’t have abandoned us, would he?

I looked around at the dilapidated cabin, the endless grassy wastes, at our meagre attempts to make this place feel like home. He would. Who wouldn’t want to escape this?

It was a long night, keeping watch at Dad’s bedside, trying to warm his frozen hands with my own. Waiting for him to wake from his fevered, fitful sleep so I could tell him about the letter and the innocuous pillow that waited on the nightstand.

I was beginning to drowse when a voice cut into my thoughts.

“Cedar Shield, wake up.”

It had been so long since I heard a voice that wasn’t my Dad or Uncle George that it startled me awake. I stared around. There was no one in the room but us, but I knew that voice. The measured, sing-song cadence of it. The deceptive kindness. The promise of understanding.

“Eric’s life signs are decreasing rapidly, Cedar Shield,” Princess Celestia said gently, a yellow light glowing from within the pillow with every word she spoke. “He is reaching a crisis point. We must act now, to give him the choice.”

I didn’t question how she knew. She was all but magic. The news stories Uncle George had read to me the last couple of years suggested she was almost a god.

And in many ways it was a relief to have someone else here. To have an adult present again, ready to take charge. I was just a kid. A scared, stupid kid.

So I did as she asked, and put the pillow under Dad’s head.

“Eric,” Celestia said urgently. “Elan. You must wake up now.”

He was waxy and pale, and he didn’t stir.

Celestia sighed, and then her voice changed. It deepened and roughened, and in a low baritone, she growled at him. “Elan Hickory Araho. Get your ass out of bed.”

The reaction was immediate. Dad’s eyes fluttered half-open, and he looked around anxiously. “D-Dad?”

“No, Eric,” Celestia answered, her voice her own again. “It’s me. Celestia. I’m here with Lozen.”

He stirred feebly, fear in his eyes. “L-Lozen, the ponies…she…they…”

I shook my head, helpless. We were all in her power now.

“Eric, your heart rate is dangerously weak,” Celestia said calmly. “You are suffering from acute hypothermia and pneumonia. I fear you will not live beyond the next hour.”

His eyes filled with tears, and I reached for his numb hand.

“I can save you, Eric.” Celestia was merciless. “If you want to live, if you want to see Daisy, I need you to say the words ‘I want to emigrate to Equestria’. If you say those words, I can save your life.”

“Eq..Equestri…?” He was struggling to get the word out, but I could see how frightened he was.

“He doesn’t want to, Celestia,” I cried, clutching his hand in both of my own. “Can’t you give him some medicine, and heal him without making him into a pony?”

“I cannot, Cedar Shield.” She sounded almost regretful. “I have no medical drones in the vicinity and all local hospitals have ceased operating. This is the only way I have to help him.”

He stuttered. “I…I don’t…” Then he was coughing again, and I was hugging him and crying with him, because what else could I do?

“You must say the words, Eric.” The princess was relentless. “You must say ‘I wish to emigrate to Equestria’.”

He let out one long, shuddering exhalation, and there was defeat in his eyes. “I…I…want…”

“Your wife is waiting for you, Eric,” Celestia pressed. “She told me how much she loves you. She wants to hold you again.”

He sucked in a breath, and forced out the words, his veins standing rigid on his neck. “I want to…to emigrate to Equestria.” The words were his swan song. The last thing he ever said.

“You may wish to look away, Cedar,” Celestia said gently, all urgency gone from her voice. “This part of the process may be unpleasant for you to watch.”

I just tightened my hold on his hand.

There was a slight buzzing sound, and then Dad's entire body spasmed, once, twice, three times, as he bucked like he was trying to escape. Then he was still. Too still. Not even his chest rose and fell. A slow, creeping red stain spread across the snowy white pillow.

“He is safe,” said Celestia, with supreme satisfaction. “Would you like to come too, Cedar Shield? All you need to do is lie down on the pillow and say the words.”

I turned and ran.

Chapter 11: Sweet Surrender

I passed a freezing first night, huddled in my nightclothes on the prairie. I stayed away another three nights, just to be sure, growing colder and hungrier with each one that passed. And then, when I was so starving I could bear it no longer, I crept back to the cabin.

Everything was silent and still. Dad’s bed was the first place I checked. The bed was empty, the sheets fresh. The bloodstained pillow was gone, as was Dad himself. A clean one lay in its place, with a little note on top.

In case you change your mind.
—C

I slammed the door hard.

There was no sign that George had returned, either. Celestia must have been telling the truth. They were both were dead. I truly was alone.

The cabin was a tomb now. Everything reminded me of them. Of what we had tried to do together. To dare to live, in spite of everything. To try and build a life.

So I packed up a few things, the last couple of photos of my parents and Uncle George, and filled my rucksack with what remained of our stores. I took the warmest sleeping bag we had, and after some reflection, no pillow whatsoever.

Winter on the prairie is harsh, and life there has adapted over millions of years. The insects hibernate beneath the frozen ground, and even the birds know enough to burrow under the snow when it comes. These were lessons I soon learned. I heaped my sleeping bag with grass every night, and if there was snow I used that too. I tried to eat as little as possible, but I burned through my meagre food supplies in just a couple of weeks. After that my days narrowed. Life became limited. No plans or goals. Those things fall away when you’re just trying to survive to the end of the day. All I had time to think about was sustenance. Searching for something I could kill or dig up and eat. I got good at spotting the ventilation holes that denoted grouse nesting beneath the snowdrifts, and I would ferret them out and snap their little necks. Crick, crack, like breaking twigs.

If you asked me to tell you how long I spent out there, I don’t think I could say. Could have been a month, could have been six. Every frozen hour seemed to stretch on forever, with no one to talk to and nothing to focus on but trying to stave off the threat of starvation.

Little by little, I grew thinner and more hopeless. The wilderness that Uncle George had hoped we could be free in became my prison. I wondered sometimes about going back to town and taking my chances there, but I no longer had any idea of where I was.

My brain was as starved for thought as my body was for food, and I ended up replaying scenes from my life before, over and over again, obsessing over what I could have done differently. If I hadn’t spoken with Jèsus and Cadence, if I had warned my Mom away from the ponypads. If I had seen the danger. If I’d taken my Dad and Uncle George north before the cars broke down.

The one I came back to the most was Nana. If only I had badgered her for real details of our people’s skills and traditions. The how of their survival out here. How they managed to make a life out of it and not mere existence. But I was too focused on stupid stories. Useless stories.

Lozen. I wasn’t Lozen. I wasn’t a warrior princess or a seer or anything of any use. I was just a stupid, scared little kid who by sheer fluke had managed to outlive everyone I ever knew.

My steps slowed, and I stopped and knelt down, the icy crust of the snow snapping beneath my knees. I was so…tired. It was not yet dark and I knew I should keep moving — but what was the point?

I dropped onto all fours, and lowered myself down onto my stomach, the snow rising up to greet me like an old friend. It didn’t feel so glacial as it had before. Maybe I’d just stop for a while. Have a rest.

The pale sun crawled overhead like a disease, dipping inexorably towards the horizon. My thoughts wandered. Images of summer flashed through my mind. Nana laughing as she watched me splashing in the paddling pool. Matteo and Luca wrestling on the ground while Carolina scoffed at them. Dad hammering a new tile onto the roof as Uncle George hobbled over with a pitcher of lemonade. Gone. Everyone was gone.

The sun set with unusual brilliance that evening, flaring into fiery oranges instead of winter’s muted tones. As I watched it dip down below the earth’s curve, I saw something there, silhouetted against the last dying gasp of daylight. My eyes drifted away from it.

Night crept closer, and I rolled slowly onto my back so that I could watch the stars come out. They had watched humanity’s birth, and they would watch its death. The stars would endure even after we were gone.

Footsteps crunched across the snow, and I didn’t turn my head away from the stars.

“I knew you’d come,” I said, and my voice sounded a thousand miles away.

“I knew you’d wait,” she replied, but it wasn’t the voice I had expected.

Finally, with great effort, I raised my head. The one who had come to take me home was no alicorn. No white wings or calculating gaze, just a great brown bulk and two eagle feathers in her mane.

“…Strongheart.”

“Cedar Shield.” Her voice was soft. Gentle. “I’ve missed you.”

“You’ve grown.”

She was as big now as ever Chief Thunderhooves had been. She had the muscle of a real bison, and none of the hard-shelled animatronics of the ponies on the rez. Her fur looked soft and thick enough to bury yourself in.

“We’ve all changed. Just like you. Victory Stampede is nearly a head taller than me, if you can believe it.” There was a pleading note in her voice, asking me to laugh with her. “You can see it, if you like.”

I was silent, and I watched the stars wheeling slowly overhead. An endless cycle that would never cease.

“We’ve waited for you, Cedar.” It was nothing more than a whisper.

I reached out a hand, noting with some surprise it looked more like bone than flesh now, and found her waiting forehead. Her fur was silky-soft, and she leaned into the caress.

“Please, Cedar Shield. Come home.”

The sigh that escaped my lips was like the last breath of summer. Warmth fading into ice.

She leaned closer. “Come home.”

Author's Note

Thanks for reading!

Sources
Apache spiritual beliefs - http://socialsproj2010-2011.blogspot.com/2010/10/apache-religion.html
Lozen and Victorio — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lozen
Apache history — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apache-people
The Kalth Tinde / Kiowa Apache — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Apache
The plains Apache language — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Apache_language
The Oklahoma prairies — https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/discover-american-landscape-in-tallgrass-prairie-preserve

Chapter 9: The Business of Survival

I looked out the window early one morning to see them, two brightly coloured pegasi, trotting down the cracked asphalt as bold as could be, their robotic joints moving almost smoothly enough that they could be real.

“Hey!” called one, as she spotted me. “Wanna be friends, kid? We came all the way to the outer realm to meet some humans!”

“Rainbow Dash!” chided the yellow one, in a softer voice. “We need to be gentle with them. You can’t just yell up at their windows.”

“Well, sorry, Flutterbore,” snapped the first one. “I’m just trying to be friendly!”

I slammed the window shut and drew the curtains.

In a shaking voice, I told Uncle George what had happened, and he sighed, his dry, nut-brown skin moving like paper over his thin bones. “It’s time you got out of here, Lozen,” he said in that croaky old voice as he folded his morning newspaper — well over eight months out of date — and set it on the table. “Things are getting too dangerous here.”

I glanced nervously at Dad “I…we can’t leave you, Uncle George.” I didn’t want to be alone. First Nana, then Mom. My friends. Now Uncle George too? Where would it end?

Uncle George laughed and shook his head, and later that day Dad and I loaded up some rucksacks and we moved on again. We pushed George’s rickety wheelchair a few miles down the road, following his directions and trying to ignore his gasps of pain. Uncle George hated when people noticed. We made a right and found ourselves on an overgrown dirt track that led deep into the uninhabited prairie, and finally, to a ramshackle old hunting cabin that belonged to a now-dead friend of George. Another new home.

The cabin was basic, but there was a creek nearby, and we made do. The trip hit Uncle George hard, and he was never as mobile as he had been before, but we were…coping.

Right up until Dad got sick.

That was the first time it sank in that things had gotten bad. Past the point of no return bad. Dad was doubled over in bed, collapsed from the pain in his stomach, and I asked why we weren’t taking him to hospital. Pretty stupid of me, given that we were living in the wilderness to hide from a pair of robotic pegasi, but it just…it was an instinctive reaction. To assume that deep down, things were the same as they always had been.

Uncle George gave me a funny look. “The county hospital shut down last year, Lozen.”

Weird, isn’t it? How the world can end before you even notice.

We did what we could, but Uncle George didn’t have any friends who were doctors. [12] Our tribe didn’t have a medicine woman like Strongheart’s did. We barely even had a tribe anymore. I sat up with Dad most nights, watching him toss and turn and sob with the pain. I sobbed with him, and wished I could be like the real Lozen. If I had been able to see the future like she had, this would never have happened. I would have found a way to stop it.

[12] We never even managed to diagnose him. At one point I headed back to town, dodging friendly ponies all the way, went all the way to the library on the one public bus that still ran, and I used one of the computers to search his symptoms. Even though the computer was smothered in Hofvarpnir Studios logos. Even though the search engine had a small, smiling Celestia as the interface.

I found nothing. Just a confusing jumble of illnesses with long latin names.

I left as ignorant as I had entered.

Uncle George started to make vague plans for a trip to the pharmacy in the city, the big one that might have the drugs we needed — but the car had broken down for the last time, and Dad needed round-the-clock nursing.

Then our last electric generator gave out, and Dad lay dying in the dark.