Stare Master - Extended Cut

Chapters

Whatever Happened to Twilight Sparkle?
'If it Bleeds, it Leads'
Like Headless Chickens
Hens' Teeth
Mahlwurfs and Mallets

Whatever Happened to Twilight Sparkle?

Fluttershy jolted awake to the sound of somepony knocking at her front door. Her bedroom was still pitch dark, and after a few seconds she was able to read the clock on her bedside table: a quarter to three.

The sound of impacts came again.

Cautiously and carefully, she glided down the stairs and peeked through the gap in the doorframe. A blue unicorn stallion in Royal Guard armor was standing on the other side, shifting awkwardly from one hoof to the other- Corporal Subtle Spark.

She fiddled with the latch and pulled open the door.

“Miss… uhh… Miss Fluttershy? I’m sorry to wake you,” he stammered, “but Spike asked me to come and get you. They hit the freight yard again, and we have a few things we’d, umm, like your input on.”

She nodded, stepped out onto the path, and shut the cottage door behind her. Spark followed, a respectful half-body-length behind her, as she made her way down the path and through the streets of the town proper. They met nopony else on their way. It was quiet- still closer to the middle of the night, really- one of those preternaturally still early-autumn mornings that frequently came to Ponyville; cool now, but practically humming with incipient heat.

Eventually the Station came into view, the rail yard lit nearly as bright as daytime by the big crystal floodlights at each corner. Figures in and out of armor were already busying around inside- a few of them turned to look at her as she approached. One of them was Rarity.

“I thought you had a big order due,” Fluttershy asked through the chain-link fence, “I hope nopony woke you up and made you come out here…”

“Oh, no, darling, I was… already awake,” the tailor stifled a yawn with one hoof, “I’ve been awake for a while, in fact. But the gold silk I’m making needs to soak for a few more hours, so I figured I may as well lend a hoof.”

Private Spark hauled open the gate in his telekinesis, nodded at Fluttershy once again, and then set back off down the road.

She stepped through the fence and over the rails to the center of the group, where Private Aqua Regia was standing in between Amethyst Star, Doctor Proper Verse, and Captain Marigold.

“… I heard a loud crash over near the northwest corner,” the junior Guardsmare was explaining, “and saw one of the fence segments tip over. I headed right for it, and heard what sounded… well, it sounded like a timberwolf howl. Smelled like a timberwolf, too. When I got over there, though, I couldn’t see anything. I went maybe… ten meters out beyond the perimeter before I decided it was too risky to go on alone, and when I came back to my patrol area the wagon was just… gone.”

Amethyst and Doctor Verse stepped away from the two Guards and headed off northwest. Uncertain what else to do, Fluttershy followed close behind. True to Aqua’s word, one of the sections of chain-link fencing had been ripped from its base by some sizable force. Near one end, shattered glass glinted in the lights. Fluttershy stepped closer to what proved to be a broken alchemical phial, breathing in the faint scent of rotting vegetation that still surrounded it.

Verse stepped up beside her, muzzle wrinkling under her thin metal-framed glasses, seemingly unsure of what to say. “That’s yeah, that does actually smell like… like a timberwolf…” she turned back to Fluttershy and Amethyst. “How… do you think a pony would go about making something this, this, realistic?”

“Oh. Well, you can buy mock timberwolf scent at hunting and adventuring shops,” Fluttershy explained, “particularly in Trailhead on the other side of the Everfree Forest. They sell enchanted calls, too, but… I don’t think the ponies who set this up were kind enough to drop theirs.”

“You need to get out of your office more,” Aqua Regia admonished a rather peeved-looking Doctor Verse. Then, she led them back to a covered plank wagon some distance away from the others that dotted the freight yard. While the others were arranged in neat rows and wrapped in neat beige tarps, this one was both tilted and very conspicuously empty. “Hey, this is the wagon that was missing, but…”

“Spike?” Derpy Hooves called out. “Can you come over here? What was in this wagon?”

The dragon slunk over after a few seconds, his posture unusually hunched. He unhooked a clipboard full of inventory tables from the chest strap of his messenger bag, and leafed through several pages. Then he paused, and flipped back to page one. “Sorry, sorry, just a minute… I’m… maybe I’m a little tired,” he muttered, and then more clearly: “Okay. It looks like this cart was going up to the camp on Castle Rock, and it contained… rations, clean tarpaulins, digging equipment, and a crate of Class III spotlight crystals.”

Doctor Verse looked over at Marigold. "So... what does that mean, exactly?"

"It means the ponies at Castle Rock are down to one meal a day, until we can scrounge up another shipment," the Guardsmare answered.

Aqua’s eyes narrowed, and she took a step closer to Spike. “Don’t dragons eat crystals? How do we know this wasn’t an inside job?”

The dragon took a few steps backward, holding the clipboard out in front of him with both hands. “Hey, hey, hey. Those gems really aren’t edible. Have you ever stepped on one? They pop, and give you a little lightning-shock for your trouble. I don’t want that happening in my mouth, would you? And in any case,” he briefly flipped the clipboard around and waved it paper-side-up underneath Aqua’s muzzle, “if I wanted to take gems from Project stores, I could just alter the inventories so it looked like there were always half as many.”

“Okay, fine,” faced with disapproving glares from Marigold, Rarity, and Derpy Hooves, Aqua backed off and waved one forehoof side-to-side. “Forget I said anything, Sun above…”

“Those gems aren’t even anywhere near jeweler quality,” the unicorn tailor added, “I suppose one could fence them to, I don’t know, a disreputable theater company or somepony else in desperate need of very bright lights, but there are easier places to get them than the Station. I’d guess the scoundrels that did this were more interested in slowing our work down than making any money for themselves… either our work in general, or our looking for dear Twilight.”

She looked at Spike, seemingly expecting some kind of response, but the dragon ignored her. Instead, he sat down on the lip of a container car and continued to stare at the same page of inventory he’d consulted previously.

“You know,” Captain Marigold finally said, “if somepony’s really looking to slow us down, making a move for Doctor Sparkle would be a pretty good way to do it. We’ve been looking in and around the Everfree, but she might not even be on the same continent by now if other ponies are involved.”

“Isn’t it after twenty-four hours that a missing pony becomes a Governorate-wide issue?” Derpy Hooves added.

“… and if Twilight’s really been compromised, then all of our security measures are as good as useless- she came up with most of them, and signed off on everything I or Daycaller or Verse ever submitted,” the Captain finished.

“Twilight wouldn’t tell anypony about that kind of thing, though!” Spike interjected.

Marigold’s expression drifted from simply professional to downright somber. “She might not have a choice.”

Nopony said anything for a little while after that. Proper Verse, Aqua Regia, and Marigold all began to walk back towards the gate. Fluttershy joined them, at first, but then decided to back off and stay closer to Spike.

“If… if somepony really is after Twilight,” the dragon said to Amethyst in a slow, measured tone, “then that’s all the more reason to keep looking, isn’t it?”

“We’ve already done pretty much everything we can,” the Councilpony replied, “we could notify the Governorate office in Canterlot, but I’m not sure what they could do for us that Marigold and her Guards can’t. We’ve already searched just about the whole town.”

“Then search it again,” Spike suggested, flatly and matter-of-factly. “Maybe this time we’ll notice something that we missed previously.”

“I am… working three different admuh… ad-min-ist-ra-tive positions here,” Derpy Hooves answered. “I’m sorry.”

“Would it help if we didn’t have to guard so much of the town?” the dragon asked, leafing through his papers.

Amethyst Star cocked her head to one side, looking for all the world like the idea had never once occurred to her before. “I… suppose?”

“So why not randomize the patrol routes?”

Captain Marigold strode back over from the cluster of Guardsponies, Doctor Verse following along behind. “Wait, wait, what was that?”

“Since… the thieves seem to know exactly where our guys are and… and time their hits for when we’re on the other side of the yard,” the dragon explained, slowly and haltingly, forked tongue protruding slightly from one side of his snout in thought, “why not create random routes… just before? They can’t look for patterns because there won’t be any patterns… and… they can’t steal a look at our schedules ahead of time because they won’t exist ahead of time…”

Amethyst Star shook her head. “That sounds… risky. What if the randomization leaves an area uncovered for too long? I think we should stick to the original patrol schedule.”

“What sort of randomization algorithm should we use?” Proper Verse added.

“Listen.” Spike shifted nervously from one foot to the other, his tail flicking back and forth behind him, “The way we’re trying to combat these… these ponies just isn’t working. I’ll rewrite all the patrol routes myself every day if that’s what it takes, but…”

Marigold’s eyes narrowed. “Twilight and I put a lot of thought into that system, I’m not comfortable throwing it out completely without somepony higher up signing off on it.”

Spike waved the clipboard in front of her, then scribbled something on the bottom right corner. “There. You were the one who said nothing Twilight worked on is secure anymore, remember?”

“We can’t use naturalistic random sources, we don’t know… we don’t know what kind of divinational capabilities these, these troublemakers might have access to…” Verse continued.

Marigold took the clipboard in one hoof, turned it around, and then pushed it back towards Spike. “I’m sorry, I can’t accept orders like this. This is way out of line for how we’re supposed to operate.”

“… and what if the, the thieves learn about what we’re doing, and decide to stop showing up?” Verse interjected.

“Then we won?” Spike looked from one skeptical face to the other, eyes narrowed to slits. “Okay. Fine,” he snapped, “if you want to be difficult, then I guess that’s what we’re going to do.” He stalked off out of the glow of the spotlights, clipboard in hand.

Proper Verse looked to Marigold, ears swiveling backwards. “Um. Well. What’s… what’s gotten into him?”

(♫)

They kept scouring the area for hours afterwards, on the ground and from the air. Fluttershy assisted in flying search patterns, not because she expected anypony to find anything – and, indeed, nopony did – but simply because she didn’t want to be rude.

Thus, it was close to five o’clock in the morning when she finally staggered back up the path to her cottage, sweaty, dirty, and profoundly exhausted.

In her half-asleep state, she almost didn’t notice when she nearly trod on one of her own chickens.

It also took a good few seconds to occur to her that her chickens had absolutely no business wandering freely around her property, at this unreasonable hour or at any other.

Blinking to try to clear her head, she staggered around to the rear of her cottage and stopped in her tracks. The fence surrounding her chicken coop was collapsed on one side and the door wrenched open, leaving straw, wood scrap, and feathery white forms scattered over a good portion of the yard. Many were moving. Some were not.

Fresh adrenaline pushed the tiredness away, at least for the moment. Once more able to focus, Fluttershy turned back to her cottage proper, methodically checking the windows and doors and peeking through into the main room. Everything remained locked, and nothing seemed out of place. She swallowed hard and stepped back over the ruined fence, then ducked down into the chicken coop itself.

The interior was even worse off than the outside. Shelves had been pulled down, leaving the floor a sticky mess of broken eggs, straw, feathers, and what looked to Fluttershy’s limited night vision very much like blood. Most of the latter seemed to be concentrated in one corner away from the door. Looking closer, the pegasus realized that the epicenter consisted of a mass of stained rooster feathers, unidentifiable shreds of bone and meat, and a torn-off head that still possessed a mostly-intact comb.

Fluttershy had dealt with raids by foxes and other woodland predators before- that just came with the territory when one raised poultry. But, as much as her rooster had been torn apart, nothing seemed to be eaten. If she didn’t know better, she’d call what she was looking at an act of pure spite. He never hurt another creature, he was just a chicken for Gaia’s sake! Could a pony have done this? Why? And why was I too busy to come and stop them?

She slammed her left forehoof into the coop’s plywood siding hard enough to leave a visible crack. The few chickens remaining nearby squawked and scattered in alarm.

Fluttershy closed her eyes and forced herself to focus. She stepped outside once again and circled her property, this time remembering to make a proper headcount of every chicken she could see. Both of her other roosters were missing, as were five different hens. If they’d run off into the Everfree -which was the most likely place, all things considered- she might as well give up on ever finding them again.

For the third time, she found herself back in front of the coop. This time she peered more closely at the door. It was usually kept closed with a simple hook-and-eye latch; now, the hook hung freely on its pin without a single indication of damage. A weasel or some sort of predatory bird might’ve been physically capable of that kind of dexterity, but would be unlikely to do something this complicated on its own.

Unless something -or somepony- more intelligent commanded it to…

She sat down next to the closest chicken, looked it in the eye, and focused on recalling the mapping that related the words and concepts of a pony’s mind to its own. Chickens could only conceptualize so much, but what they could understand was communicated simply. Where a pony would need to string together multiple abstract concepts to express something fairly concrete, they needed only a few signals. To Fluttershy now, for instance, the question “|How long have you been scared?|” could be expressed in only a single word.

The hen cocked her head, and through the magical bond the part of Fluttershy’s mind that was now a chicken’s extracted the concept “|Still Dark|”.

“|What are you scared of?|”, the pegasus asked in turn, or possibly just “|What is frightening?|”. The distinction wasn’t one most animals would understand, and as a result Fluttershy had to operate as though it did not exist.

She wondered if that meant the Everfree, stopped focusing on the hen, and let the communion link fade away. She circled the coop twice more, once nearby and once at a radius of about twenty feet. There were no tracks leading into the forest, but then again there were no tracks of any kind leading anywhere else either- other than her own hoofprints and the chickens’ directionless paths, of course.

Fluttershy started back around to the front door of her cottage, intent on catching up on her remaining few hours of sleep. Then she looked back at the dark mass of the Everfree, shuddered, and headed for the road back to town.

Her first stop was at the Station, to inform Marigold and the Guards. The Captain listened to her story all the way through without much more than a “Mm-hmm,” and then politely informed her that an incident like this was well beyond the military’s purview and she would be better off contacting the Ponyville Watch. That led her to Rising Star, the town’s sole night-shift constable. He followed her back to her cottage, took a statement, and nosed around the chicken coop for about an hour. Afterwards, he sheepishly admitted that he was unable to spot anything Fluttershy herself hadn’t already told him about. As understaffed and overworked as the Watch was at the moment, the odds of finding any leads for what was, in the grand scheme of things, a minor property crime were sadly remote. The only concrete action he could suggest was for Fluttershy to purchase insurance on her cottage and its surroundings, something the pegasus had never before even stopped to consider.

By that point, it was well and truly past sunrise. Fluttershy decided to abandon any pretense of getting additional rest, and staggered her way down the road to town for breakfast at Sugarcube Corner.

(♫)

It was a busy morning, at least as far as Ponyville ever became truly busy at all. The pegasus found herself peering at the faces of the shopkeepers setting out their wares, workers heading to early shifts, and the few children already up and about playing incomprehensible games. She wondered how many of them knew what was going on at the remodeled train station south of Sweet Apple Acres, between the disappearances and the thefts and all the rest. She wondered just how many of her friends and neighbors would think it worth caring about if they did know.

As she made her way across the town square to the bakery’s entrance, she spotted a familiar white-and-purple unicorn heading for the same point. Rarity looked surprisingly composed despite the early hour, but then again Fluttershy supposed the tailor would find a way to look composed even as a rotting corpse. Her makeup was, as usual, utterly flawless, but it didn’t quite manage to eliminate the bagginess of the skin just under her eyes, and there was a faint pinkish hue added to her eyeshadow. It made the bloodshot state of her eyes themselves seem almost natural, certainly moreso than trying to conceal it completely would have done, but the redness was still there.

She favored Fluttershy with a quiet nod, and pushed the door open. Spike sat at the counter inside, a cup of mineral broth in front of him that looked to have already cooled well below boiling. He was reading a section the Times of Canterlot- rather slowly, but that was better than simply staring at whatever was in front of him like she had seen him doing at the freight yard earlier. A few seats down, Applejack and Pinkie Pie were talking quietly to each other.

“Oh!” the baker turned around to look at them, “More customers, that’s usually good…” She chuckled, but there was a flatness underneath.

“Hey… umm… howdy, y’all…” said Applejack, before turning back to her coffee and donut.

Spike silently refolded his Times and started on another page.

“So… what can I get you?” Pinkie asked.

“Coffee and a Danish to go, darling” Rarity answered as she set a five-bit coin on the counter, “I still need to finish these last few dresses by three, and I’m afraid I really can’t afford to dawdle.”

“I’ll get right on it,” the baker said, and quickly busied herself against the back wall.

Finding herself temporarily forgotten for the moment -a state she was in fact more than comfortable with- Fluttershy slipped onto the seat at the end of the counter.

She watched Rarity sidle over to where Spike was sitting, still resolutely ignoring his mineral broth. “I don’t mean to pry, Spike, but are you sure you’re all right? You look a bit peaked,” the unicorn asked.

“I’m all right, I’m just… tired, is all.” Spike slowly let the newspaper drop back onto the table. “And, well, maybe a little nervous. What if this… antiquities ring, or whatever we’re calling them, goes after the Golden Oaks next?”

“That does sound awful, darling, but… I think that’s not the only problem?”

He shook his head. “You’re right. It’s… really tough not knowing what’s going on with Twilight, but… I have a whole project to worry about, whether or not she’s around to take the lead on dealing with it, and…”

“Well, perhaps the whole ‘project’ just needs to learn to better appreciate your creative contributions,” Rarity suggested.

Pinkie Pie leaned across the counter between them- which was odd, because Fluttershy was fairly certain the baker had just been busy on the other side of the kitchen. “That means ‘they need to stop giving you shit’, but, you know, classily.”

Rarity blinked for a few seconds. “… yes, Miss Pie. That. Exactly.”

Spike just nodded, and his mouth twitched upward ever-so-slightly at the corners.

“You know, if you ever do just want to… well, talk to somepony, I’m happy to listen…”

“Yeah… thanks.” The dragon took a sip of his mineral broth as if noticing it for the very first time, and then his snout wrinkled in disgust. “Cold. That’s… that’s been sitting there the entire time I’ve been moping, hasn’t it?”

“Pretty much, yeah.” Pinkie Pie said as she slid a disposable cup and waxed-paper bundle down the counter to where Rarity was standing.

The unicorn wrapped both in a blue telekinetic aura, uttered a quiet “Thank you,” and made her way outside. A few seconds later, Spike folded his paper back into his messenger bag and followed.

“And what about you, sugarcube?” Applejack asked Fluttershy. “You look like the rooster woke up early ‘n wanted everypony t’know it!”

The pegasus just swallowed and looked away, suddenly feeling vaguely ill. It was probably just her appalling lack of sleep. Probably.

“Aww, heck, you okay? You know you can talk to me, Fluttershy. What’s eatin’ ya?”

Fluttershy closed her eyes and shifted into a somewhat more comfortable position on her seat. “Somepony- or, at least, I think it was a pony- broke into my chicken coop this morning and killed a few of the chickens,” she explained, “I know they’re just birds, but…”

“Horseapples! Now why'd anypony go an' do such an awful cruel thing like that? Just 'cause they thought they could get away with it?” the farmer interrupted, “Say, Big Mac’s awful torn up ‘bout that Sergeant Leafspring pony goin’ missin’ too. Guess bad times ‘re catchin’.”

Fluttershy nodded, and then sat up a little straighter. “For now, though, Applejack, do you think I could… maybe buy a couple of your roosters?”

“Aww, there ain’t no need for bits, Fluttershy. Ah’ll send Apple Bloom over in a couple days.”

“… Thanks.”

“So, umm, do you want to go ahead and just have the usual?” asked Pinkie Pie.

“Ye- actually, no. I’d like a coffee today, not tea.” She dug into her saddlebags and set the requisite bits on the counter.

“Long day ahead?”

“It’s already been a long day…”

“Yeah, let me tell you…” Applejack swallowed the last remaining segment of her donut, “this get-famous-for-savin’-a-Princess business ain’t what Ah thought it was gonna be like.”

“I know, right? We’re not that interesting. You could get maybe two or three little serials out of us, at most! Well, maybe… less than ten. Certainly.” Pinkie Pie slid a mug of coffee with extra cream and a plate of buttered toast over to where Fluttershy was sitting. “You know, we’re also the ponies who helped Princess Luna get over her weird gothy ‘seer’ thing. Some other ponies might be pretty mad at us for doing that… maybe mad enough to mess with us?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Applejack stared at her own reflection in the polished surface of the counter, “but who’d even care that much ‘bout Luna bein’ miserable and makin’ everypony around her miserable?”

“I dunno, it was just an idea,” the baker replied, then paused when the bell on the front door rang. Spoiled Rich stepped inside, and made her way to one of the tables in the back.

Fluttershy, for her part, elected to stay quiet and watch as the other mare sat herself down and began rooting through her designer Abyssinian leather saddlebags. It was amazing what one could find out about ponies, if one learned to just stay quiet and watch.

For instance, she knew that Spoiled was likely here in preparation for the weekly book club she headed for a few other ponies who could generously be called ‘Society’ mares. Rarity had been a regular participant for all of three weeks before declaring the whole enterprise shallow and gauche. Pinkie Pie only barely tolerated their presence because there wasn’t any actual pretext for expelling them- they were loud, they ordered only the most minuscule of portions, and they rarely if ever thought to tip, but were usually finished and gone before the lunchtime rush.

Spoiled finally seemed to find what she was looking for, and pulled out an assembly of thin soft-cover books -pamphlets, really- to spread around her table. The covers were all decorated in the same tasteful, abstract, blue-and-purple pattern, a pattern that Fluttershy vaguely remembered from a conversation with Twilight Sparkle about a certain “Society for Lunar-Equestrian Studies.”

Who indeed?

“Your Grace Princess Luna,” Spike wrote, “I’m afraid the situation in and around Everfree has experienced some disturbing developments. Doctor Twilight Sparkle has not been seen or heard from in the last three days, and we are rapidly exhausting our avenues of conventional investigation. Would it be possible for Your Grace to attempt to locate or communicate Twilight by means of her dreams? I am willing to provide any assistance or information necessary to make this possible.”

He paused briefly, then added “Additionally, I would prefer if Princess Celestia was not informed of these developments just yet. I would like to wait until we are more certain of where we stand, and I can make a proper and comprehensive report.

Warmest Regards,

Spike Spell-Born of Canterlot”

The day finally dawned in earnest, bright and muggy and simmering. Fluttershy told nopony else about what had happened to her chickens, but somehow by noon everypony she talked to knew anyway. There was no single, specific incident that Fluttershy could put her hoof on as she ran her errands, but the sense of tension was omnipresent. Filthy Rich, Roseluck, and Lucky Clover of all ponies even held a sort of perfunctory little demonstration outside of the Station, where they complained about not receiving prompt notification of emergencies. As she skulked along the edge of town, Fluttershy could vaguely hear Filthy shouting something about how “all this started after you came here and started making demands and meddling in the local antiquities trade, and now you don’t even have the spine to take responsibility for the wanton invasion of ponies’ homes…” She didn’t dare step out into the field to correct him.

Amethyst Star came to visit her around two, to relay that she’d written to the Dominion subsection of the Ministry of Justice. They’d replied that a solitary case of vandalism did not merit the involvement of Governorate resources, and the disappearances of a Royal Academy scholar and two Royal Guards did not much change that fact because there was as yet zero evidence of foul play. Bulletins with Twilight and the Guards’ photographs would be distributed to Watch officers throughout the Dominion, but that was all.

Fluttershy called Silver Spanner over to fix up her chicken coop that evening, and paid an extra ten bits for her to install a proper padlock on the door.

'If it Bleeds, it Leads'

(♫)

The next morning, Fluttershy had already woken up and made her first rounds of the day when there was another knock on her front door.

She put down the book she was reading and trotted over, to find Subtle Spark once again standing at her front step.

“Oh my, I hope there isn’t any more trouble up at the Station,” she muttered, more to herself than to the Guardspony.

“Umm, not exactly…” Spark whickered nervously, “but there is a… a sort of a… situation Rainbow Dash thought we could use your help with, out near Froggy Bottom Bog.”

For the second time that week, Fluttershy found herself pressed into the role of Ponyville’s unofficial coroner. The body she was supposed to be examining lay at the bottom of a shallow, dry gully that ran through the band of tall grass and low bushes dividing Froggy Bottom Bog from the Everfree Forest proper. In between the overhanging brush and the early-morning shadows, she wasn’t actually able to see it until Private Spark pointed it out to her- who or whatever it was, it was wearing some sort of voluminous cloak that was almost exactly the same color as the grass around it. In fact, as she drew closer Fluttershy saw the color and patterning of the cloak shift ever-so-slightly, revealing it to be enchanted camouflage. That material was expensive, to the point where not even the Equestrian military made regular use of it, although Fluttershy corresponded with enough hunters and trackers to know that it wasn’t restricted from civilian markets.

She looked up to the edge of the gully, where Rainbow Dash hovered in place next to Private Aqua Regia. Fluttershy waved a hoof in the general direction of the dead pony, and Rainbow nodded slightly.

Carefully and cautiously, Fluttershy pulled the cloak away to reveal a somewhat lanky, tan pegasus mare with a short yellow mane and a telescope cutie mark. Her left wing was swollen and bent, crudely splinted in place with a tree branch and what appeared to be gauze bandages. Another branch protruded from a bloody gash in her barrel just behind her left foreleg; judging by the angle and apparent depth it probably passed clean through both of the mare’s lungs. She was covered in other scrapes and bruises that Fluttershy could hardly even begin to count, but none of those looked nearly as serious as the first two injuries. In addition to the cloak, she had been wearing a pair of some sort of flight goggles, and an expensive-looking camera on a leather harness around her neck. The telephoto lens on the front was crushed, but the camera’s thick black-metal case appeared to have done its job- the film capsule in a slot on one side looked perfectly intact.

Up above, Rainbow Dash was nodding along as Aqua Regia explained herself. “I showed up at oh-eight-hundred to relieve Vortex, per schedule, but he wasn’t here to meet me. I called out for him… probably two or three times, and then started looking around. One of the trees -you can see the top of it from here, it’s that big yellowish-green one- looked like, well, like something big’d run into it midway up. I circled out around from there, and that’s how I found, well, this. I reported back to Marigold, and Marigold told me to come and get you.”

That explained the branch and the other injuries, Fluttershy supposed. She ducked down and took a closer look at the mystery mare’s flight goggles. The lenses were well and truly shattered, but the few slivers of glass that remained glistened the signature green of a night-vision enchantment. For a moment Fluttershy wondered if the broken glass had blinded the pegasus and sent her onto her collision course. However, her half-open eyes were untouched, while her eyelids sported more than a few thin red lacerations. Her eyes had already been closed when the goggles were destroyed. More curiously, the small wounds on her chest, neck, and shoulders were much more pronounced than the ones toward the ends of her forelegs. If Fluttershy had to guess, she’d probably say the mare had closed her eyes first, and only then swerved blindly into the nearest obstacle, failing to draw her hooves up to protect herself.

She took another look at the cloak, and discovered it contained quite a few pockets along its interior surface. The first contained a compass, a short survival knife, and a folded-up map; the next a basic first-aid kit and two empty potion phials, one with a label identifying it as a potent analgesic and the other an equally-powerful stimulant. The last pocket contained several hundred bits in various denominations, and a collection of business cards and identification badges. One claimed the pony was named Shutterfly- ironically enough- and worked as a freelance reporter. Another identified her as Sarsaparilla, drover and security mare for something called Gilded Wings VIP Transport Services. She was also a private investigator from Cloudsdale named Chip Minty; Bottlecap, a purchasing agent for the well-known Abyssinian import-export firm Siam International; a handymare named Serenity; Desert Dust, a surveyor for the Interior Ministry; and Agent Bluebird of Trotland Yard’s narcotics division. Irrespective of name, each badge included the same photograph of the dead mare’s face.

At the rustling of the foliage above her, Fluttershy looked up to see Rainbow Dash glide down into the gully. Aqua Regia followed on hoof, cursing quietly to herself about the overgrown slope. “So, uhh… you picking up anything that’d tell you where Vortex might’ve went?” The weathermare asked.

Fluttershy shook her head. “I don’t think so. It looks like this poor thing hit a tree and then made it as far as here before pulmonary edema got to her. There aren’t really a lot of tracks when the grass is this dry…”

Rainbow’s eyes narrowed, and her ears tilted down and back. “That’s what I was afraid of…”

“It is kinda weird, though,” Aqua Regia mused, “If she made it this far with those injuries, why didn’t she call for help? Any of us on patrol woulda’ been able to give her better treatment than that crappy little first-aid kit she’s got there.”

Fluttershy took another look at the map. From her presumable collision site, the mystery mare had ended up along a line pointing almost directly away from Ponyville. “Maybe she was… hiding?” the pegasus suggested.

“From Vortex?” Rainbow Dash shook her head. “I don’t get how she even hit that tree, anyways. ‘Don’t fly through a dense forest at night with your eyes closed’ is basically flight instruction one-oh-one.”

“Maybe she was hiding from whoever -or whatever- had already gotten Vortex?” Aqua continued.

“Pfft. Something here took out a Shadowbolt? Not likely.” Rainbow shot the Guardsmare a venomous look, but if anything her ears had tucked even lower and were twitching slightly in apprehension.

Fluttershy just kept her eye on the map, mentally retracing the terrain between the tree and the mystery mare’s location from the perspective of a flightless pegasus with a tree branch stuck through her barrel. “Why would she go directly away from town, then? There’s something we’re missing here…”

“Our most esteemed friend and confidant Spike Spell-Born”, Spike read.

“It is with a heavy heart that We must inform thee of the absence of the learned Doctor Sparkle anywhere within the Realm of Dreams. We cannot hope to speculate as to the meaning of this, for as We have so recently learned there is much in the world in which We now find Ourselves that may be able to cloud Our vision. Thou mayst rest assured, We shall continue the search for as long as thou deemest necessary, and inform thee shouldst We come upon any change.

May the subtle light of the All-Knowing Moon forever guide thine path.

Princess Luna, Daughter of None, Ward of Starswirl the Bearded”

(♫)

Applejack had been reluctant to make use of Sergeant Leafspring’s assistance when the Navy mare had been offering it. She was used to having only her family to rely on- proud of it, even. The idea that Leafspring might one day become a part of her family had changed that outlook quickly enough, and she’d set out running the mechanic through her paces to make sure she was worthy of the honor. Big Mac was hardly slow, but he had an accommodating streak that other ponies sometimes thought they could take advantage of. Now her brother had finally found a mare he actually seemed to like and who wasn’t a grinning snake with hooves, and she was just… gone. Again. And Applejack was stuck holding onto a four-yard stretch of wooden gutter while trying to nail it to the side of the barn entirely by herself.

She had just about finished when she saw Applebloom bolt around the corner of the farmhouse at a full gallop, looking just about on the verge of tears.

She slid down the ladder faster than was entirely safe, and ran forward to meet her. “Sis! What’s goin’ on?”

Applebloom skidded to a halt, panting heavily. She pulled in a big gasping breath and began: “So Ah was goin’ over ta’ feed the chick’ns, ‘cause it was… ‘cause it was mah day to do that, even though Ah think you forgot ‘n Ah coulda’ just gone off an’ met up with Sweetie ‘n Scootaloo like Ah wanted, but Ah didn’t, and… and… when Ah got there the whole thing was wrecked and Ah think some a’ the chick’ns’re dead and Ah didn’t do anythin’, Ah promise! Please don't be mad, I didn't do anythin' wrong this time! Ah'm tryin' mah best to be a good farmhoof, but Big Mac's stopped talkin' and you're all mad all the time, and I don't wanna get kicked outta th' far-h-h-hrm…”She trailed off into panicked sobs.

“It’s okay, sugarcube, Ah’m not mad, Mac ‘n Granny ‘n Ah still love you, and nopony’s ever gonna kick you offa’ the farm,” Applejack wrapped a foreleg around her sister’s quivering shoulders and gently guided her into the barn, trying not to show how fast her heart was beating or the icy cold of the blood in her veins. “Applebloom, stay in the barn. Mac, close the doors, ‘n don’t open ‘em for anypony you don’t know, you got that?”

The big red stallion looked up from the plowblade he was sharpening and nodded. “Eeyup.”

Applejack grabbed a sturdy sledgehammer in her jaws from the tool rack, and whistled for Winona. With her dog beside her she left the barn, passed the farmhouse -Granny Smith was somewhere in town, out of any immediate danger- and rounded the corner to the livestock pens. At first glance the chicken coop seemed in perfectly good condition, but looking closer she saw that the front hatch was open and a few white feathers were scattered nearby. That door was usually held closed with a proper deadbolt latch left over from when they’d built the farmhouse- there was no way something like a fox or a weasel could’ve gotten through it.

Winona whined and sniffed at the ground, then looked up at her. “Stay. Good girl,” Applejack muttered.

Using the hammer, she gently nudged the coop door the rest of the way open. Inside was a mess of bloody straw and feathers that might, once, have been three hens and a rooster. She’d thought Fluttershy had been exaggerating when she’d described birds being torn apart, but if anything the little pegasus had understated the amount of raw carnage.

She backed out and circled the plot, hammer still clenched tight in her jaws and Winona following along at a hesitant distance. She counted a single surviving rooster and eight surviving hens, and found not a single suggestion of tracks.

Applejack whistled for Winona. The dog zigzagged and sniffed, then barked once and set off towards the property line. Then after about a dozen yards she pulled up short, cocked her head, and whined in confusion- apparently, whatever trail she was following simply stopped. Applejack wondered if there was any way to pick up the traces of a scent-blocking spell of the type hunters used.

She went back to the barn, passed the hammer off to Big Mac, told him to take Applebloom into town to call the Watch, and then set off on the east road to Fluttershy’s cottage.

When she arrived, the building was dark and the door was shut. Hearing conversation from the back yard, Applejack slunk around to find Fluttershy once again standing in front of the ruins of her chicken coop, across from Amethyst Star in her full and proper Constable’s patrol vest. She only wore that during her yearly civics lesson with Cheerilee’s fourth grade class, and on the very rare occasions when papers needed to be served or an honest-to-Gaia arrest carried out.

“I’m really sorry for your loss,” the Watchmare explained, “but we’re stretched thin as is. We just can’t afford to post a round-the-clock guard on a chicken coop right now, I’m afraid.”

“Oh. That’s a shame.” Fluttershy muttered nearly inaudibly.

Amethyst cantered off without another word, ears down, looking tired and defeated. She acknowledged Applejack with a brief tilt of her head as they passed each other, and that was all.

“You too, huh?” the farmer asked Fluttershy, “What’s this, the second time?”

Fluttershy just nodded, head down and wings clamped close to her sides.

As carefully as she could, Applejack walked around the pegasus and towards the coop itself.

The door was open, a shiny new iron padlock hanging from the latch- Fluttershy’s doing, presumably. The interior was again covered in blood and miscellaneous detritus. This time, their mysterious prowler had eviscerated three other hens and the rooster Applejack had sent over late yesterday. Two of the plywood panels making up the floor were raised up and pushed aside- and looking closer, the farmer realized they hadn’t just been raised, but split with substantial force and ripped up from the beams underneath. Peering at the space below, she noticed for the first time just how much clearance there was underneath the coop, and how easily even a fairly large pony could worm her way underneath, brace herself with her back against the ground, and kick upward, all unseen from Fluttershy’s cottage.

She stepped outside and shot a wary glance at the Everfree Forest looming just past the property line. By unspoken agreement she and Fluttershy walked away from the chicken coop and into the storage shed some ways away from it. Overall it was in the good order that Applejack was used to expecting from Ponyville’s sole ranger, but a few canvas sacks had tipped -or been tipped- off of a higher shelf, and split up the sides to cover the floor in millet. Fluttershy’s eyes went even wider and she stopped short.

“Whoa up there sugarcube, when’d this happen?” The farmer asked.

She leaned in closer to one of the bags, examining the straightness of the cuts- the sacks hadn’t burst, they’d been ripped open by something reasonably sharp with a good bit of force behind it.

“I. Don’t. Know,” Fluttershy suddenly hissed, “I would’ve noticed if it was like this first thing in the morning, so it had to be while I was away at Froggy Bottom Bog…”

Applejack nodded again. “Same thing happened over at mah place- with the chicken coop, Ah mean, Ah didn’t even think to check the feed…” she scuffed a hoof against the grain-speckled wooden floor. “Ah’m gonna help you clean up best Ah can, a’course, and then Ah’m gonna head down ta’ the Town Hall ‘n have a nice long talk with Amethyst ‘n Marigold ‘bout this ‘sit-chew-ation’.”

The pegasus fumed silently for a moment, them visibly deflated, shifting awkwardly from hoof to hoof. “Oh, I don’t know, Applejack. The grain in here isn’t really that valuable, and neither are chickens. If these ponies wanted to really cost you, they could… I don’t know, set a fire in one of the orchards, or let out the hogs, cows, or the sheep. They could even lead them into the Everfree. And if they wanted to scare us, why don’t they ever…” she shuddered, ever so slightly, “do anything to us, or our houses? Or our families?”

Applejack just shook her head. “Ah dunno, sugarcube, but Ah’m keepin’ a lantern burnin’ late tonight.”

(♫)

Captain Marigold was called from her little desk in the officers’ barracks out to the edge of town at around thirteen-thirty. It then took her an additional fifteen minutes simply to get to the site of the disturbance. It was, after all, considered indecorous for a Guard officer to sprint outside of a combat situation or exercise, and doubly so to just shoulder aside the civilians in her way- as she often secretly fantasized about.

The disturbance in question proved to be a big panel wagon stopped at one of the roads leading out of town. The apparent drover had unhitched herself and sat on a park bench a few yards away with a can of Clydesdale Lite. Nearby, a dark brown earth stallion in an expensively ugly blue suit screamed at Private Parhelion: “… outrageous, simply outrageous, I tell you. I’m a Ponyville citizen, and a member of the Central Dominion Chamber of Commerce in good standing, I know my rights. I’ll take this all the way up to the Governor’s Office if I have to, and… and where in Tartarus is your supervisor?”

Marigold plastered on her best medal-ceremony smile. “That… uhh, that would be me, Mister… umm… Mister…” there was something vaguely familiar about the stallion, but she wasn’t entirely sure what. She knew she’d seen him somewhere waving a sign before, but in her line of work that didn’t exactly leave a narrow field of possibilities.

“Mister Filthy Rich,” the stallion answered her, “As in, the Barnyard Bargains chain? I’m sure you’ve heard of us?”

Marigold had seen exactly one shop with that name, in Ponyville just off the town square. She’d stopped inside, once, since she’d never seen one before anywhere else she’d been assigned. They sold cheap wagon equipment, cheaper junk food, and execrable coffee. They’d also given her a small golden helmet pin as part of their “military appreciation commitment,” and tried to get her to sign up for a ‘loyalty program’ called BarnBitz. The pin and the form had both subsequently been interred in the bottommost drawer of her desk, and would likely remain there long after the desk itself became the property of some other young officer.

Outwardly, though, she just nodded.

“Well, then I’m sure you understand that we can’t afford these sorts of delays. Your goon here is going to have to let us into town without any of this… third-degree scrutiny.”

Marigold’s smile dropped a few more degrees below its freezing point. “Sir, all we’re asking is that we be allowed to check these wagons for dangerous Lunar artifacts smugglers may have planted. You saw what happened at the Summer Sun Celebration,” briefly, the Guardsmare experienced a surge of satisfaction as Rich went slightly paler under his fur, “it’s really in the interests of your own safety to let the Private here do her thing. Especially since there’s a mare lying in the hospital morgue right now who died of injuries she sustained snooping around Froggy Bottom Bog late at night. It’s only a small delay, we’ve certainly already wasted more time arguing about it than a search could possibly have taken.”

The stallion didn’t seem convinced, which was a problem because convincing him was just about the only option Marigold had at the moment. Without a Watch officer around to supervise and enforce a lawful search, the Guard had no actual power to investigate Equestrian citizens. “Yes, well, delays equal time, and time equals money,” he snapped, “money my shareholders- many of whom live right here in this community- are not making. That’s a problem, and I demand we see our share of restitution.” He jabbed an immaculately-trimmed hoof at the ground to punctuate his point.

“Really. If that’s all your after…” Marigold let the silence hang for a good second and a half. “… why is your family circulating literature from the Society for Lunar-Equestrian Studies?”

Marigold had been expecting some kind of defensive reaction from the businesstallion- surprise, anger, or guilt- but instead he just blinked, seeming completely and genuinely confused. “My wife enjoys a line of their cosmetics. I’m not sure what that has to do with… with anything at all, really. I’ve certainly never noticed anything out of the ordinary around here recently,” his thick black eyebrows drew downward, “aside from your steel-shod thugs crawling all over town, of course.”

“Grand.” Marigold snapped, “Because if Diamond Tiara went missing, then the whole town might start to care, and we can’t have that, now can we?”

That got his attention. “How do you know that name?”

“I work for the government, remember? I need good intel to do my job.” In fact, Marigold had learned that name along with a dozen others when Councilpony Cheerilee had insisted she visit the sixth grade class. She only remembered that one in particular because the filly it belonged to wore an honest-to-the-Sun jeweled tiara in the middle of class, and had thrown a paper airplane at Marigold’s head ‘to see if she’d freak out like Sly Stallion in that one movie’. But then, Rich didn’t exactly need to know that.

He backed up a few steps, and snapped back “Yeah, well, we’ll see what Canterlot thinks of this!”

Marigold smiled again, genuinely for the first time since this morning. “Good. I’ll see you there.”

That shut him up right quick.

She rode up to Canterlot on the two-fifteen public train, second class. Her golden armor and sheathed sword attracted quite a few stares, and she made a point of ignoring all of them.

The train made three stops around the city’s outer rings before reaching the one Marigold wanted- the smaller cluster of municipal offices perhaps twenty blocks from Canterlot Castle, which served the city’s secondary function as capitol of the Central Mountain Dominion. Half an hour after her scheduled appointment, Marigold thus found herself meeting with the local Associate Vice-Minister for Justice.

“I’m afraid you’ve not presented us with a great deal of evidence for… well, any actual foul play or criminal behavior here,” said the heavyset, dark blue unicorn mare. The placard on her big, paper-choked oak desk identified her as ‘ASC. VM. FINETOOTH’, and shared space with a frankly rather impressive assortment of various hoofball memorabilia. Marigold wasn’t able to recognize the team. “I’m sure Ponyville’s constabulary has a much better knowledge of their immediate environs than anypony we could bring in from outside. Keep up the searches, and I’m sure these friends of yours will show up sooner or later. We can post additional photographs here and in the neighboring Dominions, but that’s about the extent of it.” She leaned back in her chair and scratched underneath her muzzle, “Although, you said one of these missing ponies is a mage, yes? We could escalate her to what’s known as a Silver Alert, which is an elevated visibility system for cases where the missing pony is elderly and/or possess some form of mental disability…” she trailed off, grinning like a schoolfilly.

Refusing to acknowledge the joke, Marigold asked, "But what about the corpse we found? She had half a dozen forged IDs- some of them from your agencies! Isn’t that at least a little concerning?"

Finetooth stared down at her paperwork for a second, then replied, "Ah, yes. We appreciate you bringing her to our attention, but I believe she's in a place not even the… uhh, long foreleg of the law can reach now, isn't that right?"

"Is there really nothing else you can do?" Marigold shot back.

“Well, we could ask Vice Minister Bell to declare a state of emergency in Ponyville; that would let us send in the Army…” she leaned back in her chair and pressed a hoof against her chest in mock horror, “or, maybe, we could even send in the Royal Guard!” She grinned, and chuckled slightly. Marigold did not follow suit. “The point’s a serious one, though. There’s already a platoon of dedicated combat troops involved in the situation down there. I suppose, if you thought it would help, we could request that your unit be subordinated as assistance to the Ponyville Watch. Then you’d be able to make arrests under a Constable’s direction, but you’d also no longer be able to continue carrying out your original orders.”

Marigold braced both of her forehooves against the desk. “Vice-Minister, my unit is severely shorthoofed right now and the Watch isn’t much better off, we really aren’t capable of maintaining any kind of effective search operation.”

Finetooth leaned back in her chair again, and closed her eyes. “Not much we can do about military personnel assignments, I’m afraid. Have you tried contacting anypony at the Ministry of Defense?”

Marigold did, indeed, subsequently try to contact the Ministry of Defense. Specifically, she wrote a letter explaining the situation and urgently requesting a face-to-face meeting addressed to Commander Shining Armor. However, when she attempted to deliver it, the stallion at the government courier’s office informed her that ‘Due to recent concerns regarding diseases and curses transmitted by post, all in-going mail must be subjected to a Class I scan and undergo a mandatory 24-hour resting period, before it may be delivered to its recipient’.

As such, instead of Shining Armor, she ended up meeting with somepony named Colonel Golden Glory from the Third Battle Group, whom she had never remotely heard of before.

The Colonel proved to be a very tall, somewhat older eggshell-white unicorn mare with a close-cropped magenta mane and a nasty-looking scar tracking down her muzzle dead-center. Her office was extremely bare- deliberately so, Marigold thought, in the style of those silly “tide balance” decluttering exercises that had caught on decades ago from Mount Aris. There were very few books on the solitary bookcase, set out like display pieces instead of shelved efficiently for reference, and more than a few of them appeared to have been authored by Shining’s immediate predecessor, Commander Mad Dog. That was a bad sign- Mad Dog had been compelled to resign for good reason, after all, at least as far as the opinion of most of the rest of the military was concerned. The “Old Guard” he’d fostered were supposed to all have followed him into disgrace, but more than a few had stuck around to make trouble. That, combined with the rather condemnatory titles of several books covering the resolution of the Saddle Arabian Campaign- Abyssinia on Trial and Harmony Forsaken: Celestia and the Abandonment of Pan-Equinism stood out in particular-painted a rather dim picture of Marigold’s current chances.

“So I’m to understand your company is suffering from… disciplinary issues?” Glory rasped, in a voice that made it sound like she gargled with nails each morning.

“Not exactly,” Marigold explained, “My troops aren’t just going AWOL, they’re outright going missing.”

“Outright desertion is still a disciplinary issue, Captain.” The Colonel leaned across her desk to set herself more squarely at Marigold’s eye level. “In fact, I shouldn’t have to remind you it’s substantially more serious. This, quite frankly, strikes me as a matter best left to your base’s MPs.”

“Respectfully, sir, we don’t have any MPs because we don’t operate out of any official base. We’re a specialized, independent company consisting of one combat platoon, one support platoon, and an attached light airship- and right now, due to the issues I’ve just outlined, we’re critically understaffed.”

Golden Glory leaned back again and blinked for a few seconds, looking genuinely perplexed. Then she shook her head. “Have you brought any of this to your commanding officer?”

“She was the second to go missing.”

“Did you inform her commanding officer of this?” Golden asked, an awful, patronizing quality creeping into her voice.

“My commanding officer is a civilian. She has a supervisor who I’ve not been able to reach, but no official C.O.”

“I…see.” The patronizing levelness was gone now, replaced once again by simple perplexity. “Have you tried to contact anypony at the Governorate division of the Ministry of Justice?

(♫)

Town Hall quieted substantially after five o’clock. That suited Fluttershy just fine. She slunk her way through the lobby and into the conference room on the ground floor without incident. Pinkie Pie, Applejack, and a somewhat frazzled-looking Captain Marigold were already seated at the big table inside. She located an open chair as far away from everypony else as possible, and quietly slipped into it.

Corporal Spark had claimed Spike was the one who wanted to speak to them all, but the dragon himself appeared to be completely absent. The meeting was supposed to have started fifteen minutes ago. Fluttershy had spent the majority of that time either making sure her cottage and its grounds were thoroughly locked up, or negotiating the long road to Ponyville, but it was very much unlike Spike to be anything but on time.

For a minute, maybe two, silence reigned. Pinkie Pie coughed once, then again. Then Applejack asked, “So, er… how long we gonna wait ‘fore we call it quits ‘n send everypony home?”

“You all can leave if you want, but I’m not going to walk out on anything important,” Marigold replied, more than a little abruptly.

“Ah just don’ wanna be away from the farm any longer than Ah gotta be,” the farmer explained.

“Hey, where’s Rarity? She’s normally here too,” Pinkie Pie cut in.

“Aw shit.” Applejack shifted her hat further backward, “D’y’all think she’s-”

“Oh. She’s fine,” Fluttershy answered, “Just busy, still. I was over at the boutique last night, she needed a hoof with some stitching.”

“It is weird, though,” Pinkie continued, “she got waaaaay more publicity than you or Applejack did during the whole Seer-tastrophe thing… and, well, so did I, actually. Twilight even sincerely thanked me, and she’s never actually serious and means it and isn’t just being sarcastic when she does that! So… why is this conspiracy going after the two of you and not me and Rarity? Is their influence limited to chickens and chicken-containing structures, so Rarity and I are immune? Well, other than the gloom slowly taking over town having sharply limited everypony’s desires for pastries and so on… I’d run some experiments, but then the Equestrian Poultry Board might find out about it and change their strategy just to mess with me and I’d just end up traumatizing Princess Luna without accomplishing anything again.”

Marigold looked at Applejack.

Applejack looked at Marigold. “Ah didn’t get none a’ that.”

Fluttershy didn’t either, but she had to admit that the atmosphere in the conference room was now a bit less resigned and dreadful than it had been previously.

“You know,” the Captain mused, “I wonder if that… that store pony, what’s his name, Filthy Bits? … might actually be behind this. I’d like to take another pass at convincing Constable Star to open a proper investigation.”

“Ah doubt it,” Applejack shook her head, “Filthy might be slimier than an earthworm under a Manehattan pig farm, but he ain’t no criminal.”

“Clearly you’ve never tasted the coffee he serves,” Pinkie replied, and then fell silent as the door to the conference room opened once again.

Spike stepped inside and shut it behind him. He held a thick manila folder under one arm, and looked more disheveled than Fluttershy had seen him in a long time. The spines on the back of his skull had been knocked askew, the fins on either side of his jaw were limp and discolored, his scales lacked their usual bright polish, and his tail practically dragged against the carpet.

“Nice that you could finally join us… sir.” Marigold muttered.

If Spike heard her at all, he gave no sign of it. He loped over to another unoccupied chair, hauled himself up into it, and placed the folder in front of him. “Yes. Right. So. I think I’ve been able to figure out some additional leads on our mysterious dead mare. Rainbow Dash came up with the idea of sending all her IDs off to the records office in Canterlot at once. They’re all real ponies, but only one doesn’t already have an attached death certificate- it’s actually the ‘Shutterfly’ identity, so I’m feeling pretty confident in concluding that’s who she really was.”

He flipped open the folder and extracted a page of typewritten documents. “Born in Trotston in the year 1057, high school diploma and one year of a two-year journalism degree at Eastern Neighzarene College. She then enlisted in the Royal Guard in 1077 and attained the rank of Specialist First Class, as well as… something called a Reconnaissance and Covert Operations Badge. Then she was dishonorably discharged in 1081, for charges of accepting bribes and the unauthorized dispensation of confidential materials…”

“Crap, I think I remember hearing about this,” Marigold cut in. “In ‘81 the Saddle Arabian published details on a big operation against some earth-pony-supremacist groups, two days before it was supposed to start. They turned what should’ve been a bunch of routine breach-and-clear raids into a week-long marehunt through the middle of the Arimaspi Desert. Two Army grunts and a Guard ended up dead. If this mare was the one who leaked the plan, she’s lucky she’s not still rotting in a cell somewhere.”

“Umm… right.” Spike shuffled through a few more papers. “There’s a few other government records after her discharge, but I’ll get to that in a minute. After the official stuff dried up, I decided to look through some of the bigger news archives. A mare named Shutterfly was listed as the byline on fifty different Trotston Plane articles from 1083 up through 1086, all of them accusing celebrities or politicians of things like corruption, pedophilia, ties to extremist groups, and so on. Then in Blue Skies of ‘86 the Plane prints a full-page editorial retracting all of them and explaining their ‘star reporter’ had fabricated her evidence.”

“Sounds like a real fun pony,” Pinkie Pie muttered, “I bet she’d be a good fit with those ‘Lunatic Equestrian Studies Society’ types.”

“You know, I actually considered that, but it’s hard to say one way or the other,” continued Spike, “There’s not a lot of recognizable employment history for her after she got fired from the Plane, just some pretty sparse official records: she has citations for misdemeanor trespassing in 1089, 1092, 1094, and 1097, and she’s mentioned in three libel suits: City of Manehattan v. Gawker in 1088, Blueblood v. Equestria Daily, Inc., in 1092, and Shores v. Blitzfeed Media Group, in 1096. All of them got settled out of court, though, so there’s no full transcript.”

“So, I guess she learned the hard way that trees aren’t as amenable to settling out of court,” Pinkie added.

Spike set the thickest portion of the folder’s contents aside and pulled out a few sheets of bright yellow copy paper. “Yeah, about that. I picked these up from the hospital on my way here. The autopsy report pretty much confirms Shutterfly died of acute respiratory distress syndrome, which followed a… ‘noncardiogenic pulmonary edema arising from severe lung trauma’. They found traces of alchemical stimulants and analgesics in her stomach, which probably kept her walking but also exacerbated the bleeding. The time between her injuries and eventual death was estimated at between thirty and forty-five minutes.”

Marigold gave a low whistle. “For the Stone’s sake! I know she… wasn’t exactly a good mare, but nopony deserves to die alone and afraid out in the dark like that.”

Fluttershy thought she saw Spike pull away slightly, but couldn’t be entirely sure.

“Well, if’n it makes you feel any better,” said Applejack, “she coulda’ made it mosta’ the way ta’ town in thirty-ta’-forty-five minutes, or just hollered for help from Vortex or somepony any time. But Ah guess she thought hidin’ ‘n gettin’ away with whatever snoopin’ she was up to was more important.”

“That's contingent on Vortex still being around and in a position to help when she was injured,” Marigold amended, “But I get your point.”

After that stretched a long, awkward silence. Even Pinkie Pie looked subdued. Then Spike cleared his throat. “Speaking of snooping, I also had the film she was carrying developed- it’s a pretty high-quality formulation, actually, mixed for high detail in very low light, and we were able to get some very good prints out of it.”

He began passing a sheaf of page-sized photographs around the table. As each page in turn made its way to Fluttershy, she recognized the detailed carvings on one of the Lunar guide-pillars in Froggy Bottom Bog, followed by images taken outside -and then inside- one of the empty Cairns on the very border of the Everfree. The very last photograph was blurry and taken at a strange angle, low to the grassy ground and pitched sideways. It seemed to contain nothing but ordinary foliage and a strange, white, cylindrical object that extended upwards from the brush for maybe three inches, gradually tapering from an inch and a half at the base up to a domed top, with something reddish and vaguely organic-looking above. Fluttershy had to squint at it for a good few seconds before realizing it looked very much like the head of an ordinary white rooster, viewed from directly behind.

She looked up from the photograph to meet Applejack’s gaze across the table. “Land’s sakes,” the farmer muttered, “You think this Shutterfly pony was the one goin’ after us all this time?”

Marigold fiddled with the gauntlets on her forehooves. “I don’t know. There wasn’t anything in that packet about her being a registered druid, but then again I don’t remember seeing anything that ever said Fluttershy was a registered druid either. A lot of recon types in the Guard pick up at least a little bit of the craft ‘off-the-books’.”

“She was… Shutterfly, I mean, she’s tan, though,” Fluttershy replied. “The ‘chicken’ that attacked my coop was supposed to be green.”

“And I’m not going to say we’re done here until all my troops are back in one piece,” Marigold added.

“And Twilight…” interjected Spike.

“Yes. Right.”

“So, we’ve got a missing Night Guard I need to think of some way of telling Princess Luna about,” the dragon continued, “And a mare who died running and hiding from something. Given her skillset and equipment, I don’t think she’d be able to take on Vortex directly, unless she had backup that then wasn’t likely to just leave her. I think there’s another player in all this. How soon can we get troops in to really, properly stake out that area?”

Marigold shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think it’s safe, especially not at night. One pony’s already died out there, and another’s MIA, and neither of ‘em were exactly defenseless. We need to get a better idea of what we’re even dealing with before we send ponies out against it again.”

“That’s all well and good,” Spike replied, “but there’s really quite a bit of urgency. Twilight Sparkle, the pony most qualified to figure out what we’re dealing with, could be in serious danger right now! We can’t afford to keep sitting around doing nothing!”

“I know.” The Captain’s ears took on a stiff, downward, aggressive position, “It’s not just Twilight Sparkle, there’s a lot of good Guardsponies gone now. But we can’t afford to lose any more.”

“Isn’t it part of the Guard’s duty to protect and support your superiors?” Spike snapped, pivoting his chair to face Marigold directly, “Well, that’s Twilight, and she needs your help.”

“What, you think we’re expendable? I’ll-”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” the dragon practically hissed, “But Twilight Sparkle isn’t expendable either. It’s the Royal Guard’s highest obligation to protect her and… and… and ponies like her, because without ponies like her there’s no Equestria to serve anymore! Are you really so scared of a couple of washouts in minnow cloaks that you’ll-”

“We’re not scared, we’re just not stupid,” Marigold interrupted, her voice surprisingly level despite the edges of her mouth slowly curling into a grimace that almost resembled physical pain. “Those messages you’ve been sending to Princess Luna? You’re wasting her time and yours chasing Twilight Sparkle’s dreams when she’s got the best authorities on necromancy on the continent sitting around doing nothing instead of trying to pry any information that’s left out of that washed-up reporter’s head. You’ve got a direct line to both Commander Shining Armor and Exarch Mother-Rutting Celestia that could bring half the Home Corps out here and end this crisis right now, but you’re too scared of facing up to anypony to use it. Until you do, I’m not throwing any more lives after Twilight’s. I’m not putting any more of my mares in jeopardy.”

“Without… Twilight… this whole project is in jeopardy.” Spike probably thought he looked intimidating: this spindly little dragonling standing on an office chair with smoke curling from his nostrils, literally fuming, trying to loom over a veteran Guardsmare easily twice his age and size. Fluttershy thought he looked exhausted and angry and scared, and then realized that would’ve been a pretty good description of herself a few days before. “And when it’s shut down, everything we’ve fought for will be for nothing.” He tried to jab a claw into the table emphatically, and only managed to scratch it. “including the Guards you’ve already lost!”

He slumped back into a seated position, breathing so heavily that Fluttershy was tempted to say he was on the verge of sobbing.

Marigold just kept watching him with that same wary, threatening expression.

“Spike?” Pinkie Pie asked after a few more seconds.

“Spike? Are… are you… okay?” Fluttershy added.

“What do you think,” he hissed, then slipped off his chair and stalked out without another word.

Applejack looked at Pinkie Pie. Pinkie Pie looked at Marigold.

“What got into him?” The Guardsmare asked.

“What do you think?” Applejack parroted back at her, more than a little sarcastically.

Fluttershy forced herself to speak up, fighting the urge to hide under the table and not come out again until somepony else had taken care of everything. “I… think we should… all take a moment to get some air. Actually, I… don’t even really think there’s anything left for anypony to say?”

Applejack and Marigold both nodded, and quietly shuffled out into the lobby. Fluttershy looked back at the strange, chickenlike photograph Spike had left sitting on the table, and quietly slipped it into her saddlebag before she too trotted out.

Only Pinkie Pie was left, looking from one empty chair to the next in sequence. “Wait… we never answered our question!”

Author's Note

Someday fairly soon I am probably going to have to create a dedicated map of Ponyville and its immediate environs that is “ECanon,” and make it publicly available. It’s becoming increasingly necessary to get (and give) a better sense of exactly where everything is. I’ve been using this one as a rough reference so far, but it already diverges from EC in a lot of ways. For instance, Sweet Apple Acres is both too far to the South and way too large, Sugarcube Corner and Carousel Boutique are both off the main square, there is obviously no Station depicted, and areas like the “Hill of Doom” that everypony seems to be drawn to like moths to a bug zapper in Mysterious Mare-Do-Whut no longer have any reason to exist.

In addition to properly mapping out the town, I am wondering if I should spend some time somewhere on the topic of exactly how the Royal Guard is laid out organizationally, and how it relates to the rest of the Equestrian military and government. It takes a lot of inspiration in various areas from the United States Marine Corps, but also differs substantially in many others. Thus, while I have a very clear vision of what it can and cannot do myself, I don’t really know how much of that is getting through into the story versus things just being confusing. I am not really sure where to put all that information, though, as at this point there is possibly more of it than just a narrative aside can really accommodate.

The green bits on the back of Spike’s head would likely be properly called a comb, but the show refers to them pretty consistently as spines.

Editor's Note: Just sneaking in here to say that Capt Marigold and her company are members of the Royal Guard, which we typically contract down to just Guard. The Night Guard is different and includes Vortex and Rain Chaser.

Like Headless Chickens

(♫)

Rarity made her way over to the Golden Oaks as soon as she heard what had happened at Spike’s meeting- which, admittedly, was late the next morning when Pinkie Pie stopped by with her breakfast. And then, of course, she had to wait until the gown she was assembling was at a good stopping place… so, perhaps, a few hours after she’d first heard. It would have to do.

The library’s windows were open, and she could just about make out some sort of movement inside. She knocked lightly on the door- the Oaks might technically have been a public building, but she felt it would’ve been quite rude indeed to simply barge in. It was perhaps ten seconds before she heard Spike’s voice rasp “Come in?”

She opened the door and stepped inside. The main room was surprisingly clean- cleaner than it had ever been when Twilight had been in residence, in fact- and aside from a few cardboard boxes stacked near the main table, everything seemed to be in place.

The topmost box was open. Inside, Rarity could see a collection of ancient, expensive-looking comic books neatly wrapped in transparent plastic sleeves- Ponies of Dark Water, Detective Comics #34, and other titles the tailor barely recognized. All of them were creased from heavy use and occasionally marked up with neat, blocky script. Some of the writing was Twilight’s; most of it was Spike’s, and for the first time Rarity realized how similar the two styles were. Underneath were a few framed photographs of Spike, Twilight, Commander Shining Armor, and two unfamiliar unicorns in and around the Royal Academy campus in Canterlot; a collection of stiff-bristled brushes presumably meant for scales; and a thick, neatly-folded wool jacket of Abyssinian cut. Feeling suddenly, horribly voyeuristic, Rarity quietly closed up the box with her telekinesis and stepped away.

She could see Spike through the doorway to the study, hunched over his desk, sorting through a pile of incomprehensible papers. He looked up when she entered, and waved slightly, but didn’t say anything.

The tailor cantered over to him. “I heard about what happened with Marigold…” she prompted.

“She’s a grown mare. She’ll get over it and move on with her life, on a Captain’s salary now.” Spike stated matter-of-factly, without looking up from what he was doing.

“I was… more concerned with how you were holding up,” Rarity amended.

He stopped leafing through the stack and leaned back in his chair. Contrary to how Pinkie had described him at the meeting, Rarity thought he looked to be in no particular physical distress. His scales were glossy and bright, his spines straight and slitted eyes focused, but there was a sort of hollowness to the way he carried himself that she couldn’t exactly put in more concrete terms. “I’m doing about as well as could be expected, I guess,” he explained, “I’m still trying to figure out how best to break the news to Celestia and Shining Armor… and the rest of my family, too. I don’t expect I’ll be back here once I do,” he chuckled, mirthlessly, “hence all the packing.”

Rarity shook her head. “Spike, darling, you can’t just give up. There’s still so much left to do!”

He stood up from his chair -rather abruptly, the tailor thought- and made his way into the main room. “I don’t really think there’s any point, when the whole rest of the project won’t listen.” He plucked a collection of ledgers off the table, gave them a perfunctory once-over, and then tossed them on top of one of the boxes. “Without Twilight, I’m just a sixteen-year-old freak of science in way over my head.”

Discreetly, Rarity skimmed over some of the notes on his desk out of the corner of her eye. One was a letter, written in Princess Luna’s distinctive mixture of flowing modern script and nigh-indecipherable blackletter. It took a bit of effort, but she was just about able to make out the words “absence”, “Doctor Sparkle”, and “realm of dreams”. She turned back to the dragon. “Spike, do you think it’s at all possible that Princess Luna could’ve just… missed Twilight? Ponies who are completely unconscious don’t dream.” That had actually been a plot point in one of her favorite Shadow Spade novels- ponies did dream under local anesthetic, and the Midnight Crew had tried to have such a dream admitted as legal testimony because ponies were not supposed to be able to dream under general anesthesia, and therefore the events must have actually occurred. She’d thought the distinction implausible at the time, but had looked up the properties of anesthetics and found the portrayal to be accurate. “And if Twilight’s somewhere in the Everfree, as far as she knows she could only have been gone for a few hours.”

“So, either some kind of… of gang, or terrorist outfit’s been deliberately keeping her drugged and unconscious, or she’s so deep in a distorted part of the forest that it could be decades before she finds her way out again, or anypony finds her.”

Rarity discreetly adjusted the curls in her mane. “I’m… not really helping you, am I?”

Spike sat down again, on one of the stools surrounding the big central table, and scratched under one of his fins. “I don’t know. Just… having somepony to talk to who isn’t demanding answers or trying to tell me what to do is nice.”

“Well I’m glad I can do that, at least…” She thought for a moment, and then slipped onto the stool beside his. “You know, darling, come morning, I’ll ask around town, and see if I can find at least a few ponies who’re willing to help you out. I… don’t like to brag, but I’d say around half of Ponyville owes me a favor for one trifle or another. And… perhaps you might want to… talk to Applejack about this whole… horrible business with Twilight?” she added, more gently.

“Thanks.” He just sat there for almost a minute, staring into space and drumming his claws on the tabletop. “Although, I think Applejack’s got her own problems to deal with right now… and, honestly, if I had the choice… I’d rather just talk to you.”

For a moment, the tailor wasn’t quite certain how to react to that. She thought of the remaining stack of unsewn patterns currently sitting on the table in her workshop, and all of the associated deadlines. Then she looked around her, at Spike’s piles of packed documents and personal effects. She leaned forward and crossed her forehooves against the table. “For you, Spike, I can make the time.”

Ponyville weathered two more muggy, oppressive early autumn days of utterly uneventful waiting. By some unspoken agreement, townsponies and Station personnel alike found themselves keeping silent on the issue of the dead mare from the Bog. The Constabulary informed the Governorate, the proper forms were filled out, and Shutterfly began the long, slow, quiet process of becoming yet another inconsequential cold case. The whole town seemed to have crouched down and dug in, waiting for… something, but nopony really had the faintest idea what.

Spike was only rarely seen; Rarity made a point of checking in on him several times a day, and usually found him asleep. She always left him a small velvet bag of gems; partially because it seemed the courteous thing to do and partially because she wasn’t certain he’d remember to eat if she didn’t.

Fluttershy, for her part, remained locked in her cottage. She left only for vital provisions and one or two trips up to the Golden Oaks, and spent the rest of her time reading every reference and bestiary she could get her hooves on.

(♫)

This time, when Corporal Subtle Spark once again knocked on her door in the wee hours of the morning, she was actually relieved.

Fluttershy followed him back out to the Station with scarcely a word. Rainbow Dash and Applejack were already there, alongside Private Rain Chaser from the Night Guard, just as she had been expecting. This time, however, neither Spike nor Captain Marigold were anywhere to be found.

“I was flying my patrol route as we’d agreed,” the bat-winged Lunar pegasus was currently explaining to Rainbow Dash, “and did hear movement in the bushes to the east, at mayhap oh-three-fifteen as we reckon it now. One of the wagons I saw was out of its row, and as I drew closer I saw a figure in a cloak flee into the brush- with a light blue tail, perhaps, I could not be sure.”

“So, what happened?” Dash asked, “How’d she manage to lose you?”

“I did not pursue,” Chaser dipped her muzzle downward in a vaguely guilty gesture, “but remained here and checked each of the wagons and box-cars I could see. The enemy has made such a use of tricks and diversions… I feared being deceived into abandoning my post…”

“Dun’ worry, sugarcube, you made the right call.” Applejack gave the Lunar pegasus a gentle rap on the shoulder armor. “No sense tearin’ yerself up over what mighta’ gone wrong.”

Meanwhile, Rainbow Dash had taken flight, and was now hovering over one of the carts on the very edge of the storage yard. “Hey, Chaser, is this the one they were messing with?”

Rain Chaser looked up and nodded. “Aye, the very same.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but unless this is all just an elaborate scheme to steal all the packing straw in Ponyville or something, I’d kinda like to know what’s in these carts that’s so valuable.” The cyan pegasus looked first to Applejack, then to Rain Chaser and finally to Fluttershy, and when none of them made a move to stop her she ripped off the cart’s canvas tarp in a single, rapid motion.

Inside was a large pile of ragged, dull gray stone.

She flew backwards a few yards, obviously confused.

Applejack chuckled, and then burst into full-fledged, unabashed laughter. “That’s a loada’ rubble Doctor Verse needed us to haul offa’ Castle Rock the other day,” the farmer explained, “but it’d got hit with some kinda’ corrosive spell, so the town dump wouldn’t accept it ‘n Ah didn’t know what else to do with it.” She kicked idly at a loose stone. “Shucks. If’n Ah’d’a known them varmints were gonna take it off our hooves, Ah’d’a stuck a coupla’ ten-bit pieces under that tarp for their trouble…”

Fluttershy swallowed hard and stepped forward. “So… umm… what does everypony want me to do about this?”

“Well, Ah was gonna have everypony search the area again fer wagon tracks’n the like, and we prob’ly coulda’ used a good tracker.” Applejack smiled and shook her head, “Now, though, Ah ain’t sure there’s even really much of a point.”

“Aye… the prowler I saw is by now likely long gone…” Rain Chaser added.

“We can’t afford to let down our guard, though,” said Rainbow Dash as she flew another quick circuit of the entire area, “These creeps’ve slipped up pretty bad, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still a threat.”

“Ah dun’ think so,” Applejack countered, “Ah reckon without their photographer pal, they’re up a crick as far as getting’ eyes inside Ponyville’s concerned. They tried another hit, just now, goin’ in blind, and got a nip on the muzzle for their trouble. That might just be enough to send ‘em runnin’ for good, really. The last thing they’ll want is to mess up even worse next time ‘n get themselves well’n truly caught.”

“I guess.” Rainbow Dash scratched at the back of her neck, and slowly drifted back down to ground level. There was a long pause after that before she scuffed at the ground and then continued all at once. “So, what, that’s it? We just… what, let them go? And try to go on just… just with business as usual, except without Twilight or Leafspring or Chamomile or… or Vortex?”

“Ah know it’s gallin’, sugarcube, but Ah dunno what else we can do. We could keep searchin’, but we’ve already turned this whole property inside-out ‘n come up empty, ‘n Canterlot ain’t exactly bein’ too helpful all’ve a sudden…” the farmer trailed off after that.

Rainbow Dash and Rain Chaser both just looked at her for a little while, and then at each other, and on some unspoken signal took off and glided away; Chaser towards the train platform and Dash towards the Weather Team building off the town square. Then Fluttershy, too, turned to go, but pulled up short and turned around when she heard Applejack step up behind her.

“Hey, uhh, Fluttershy? Ah know this is comin’ at awful short notice, but with Rarity bein’ so busy with her Canterlot orders ‘n also watchin’ over Spike now, she dun’ got much time left to take care’a Sweetie Belle. Ah figure Apple Bloom could use a little change a’ scenery fer a while, too…” the farmer fiddled with her hat, nervously, “And, well, the truth is, Granny ‘n Ah just think she’d have an easier time of it if’n she wasn’t around a buncha’ grownups who’re jumpin’ whenever a twig breaks- safer, too, if’n Ah’m bein’ totally honest. So… Ah was wonderin’… if maybe the two of ‘em and that other filly they hang around with, what’s her name again? Scooter-somethin’? If they might stay over at’cher cottage for a day or so?”

Fluttershy shifted from hoof to hoof. “Oh, my, I don’t know, I’ve been pretty busy myself, studying, and…”

“Yeah, that’s the other thing. You’ve been shut up in there for a little while now, just ‘bout turnin’ into a regular Twilight Sparkle, in fact…” Applejack must’ve caught the uncomfortable expression on Fluttershy’s face, because she immediately stopped, winced, and physically backed up a step or two, “Darnit, sugarcube, Ah didn’t mean it like that, but… you know what Ah mean. Ah just want’cha to think it over for me, okay? After all you’ve been through, some company might do you good…”

(♫)

Fluttershy sat at her small writing desk, one eye on the copy of The Natural History and Antiquities of Everfree spread out in front of her. Periodically, she looked over to the three fillies sprawled on the carpet in the sitting area, in their matching homemade red capes. Lacking much on hoof that she thought would be particularly entertaining to ten-year-olds, she’d even brought out her old Settlers of Canterine box from the basement. Back when she’d been their age, recovering from her near-fatal fall in the Ponyville hospital with no friends to speak of and little to do, she’d thrown out all of the settlement tokens and devised a way to run the entire game as a pure ecological simulator. The rules she’d written down on the box were admittedly fairly complicated, but she knew these three were bright. They’d figure it out.

She didn’t resent having to foalsit tonight, of all nights, or rather she understood the reasons why Applejack had decided to ask her. Unfortunately, that responsibility could not have come at a worse time. Twilight, Leafspring, Vortex and Chamomile were all still missing, and the more she read the less and less convinced Fluttershy became that equine saboteurs were responsible- in fact, she was growing ever more certain that their ill-fated spy had in fact fallen prey to the real culprit as well.

She already knew that whatever had attacked Applejack and herself was stealthy and strategic enough not to be seen, by ponies or domestic animals. It was clever and dexterous enough to manipulate relatively complex locks, and small enough to fit through a henhouse door- not much larger than a pony. Those facts alone ruled out the majority of the local wildlife, and in addition none of the chickens it had attacked had been eaten- just mauled. A pony could easily have accomplished all of those things, or some other animal under the control of a pony, but that explanation didn’t quite add up either. Something had killed Shutterfly out in the swamps, or at least forced her into a series of missteps that had ultimately proven fatal, and that wasn’t likely to be the doing of one of her own accomplices. There was another threat out there in the Everfree, and it was only a matter of time before it went after the rest of the Guards next- or members of the digging teams, or ponies on the outskirts of town proper.

She had considered informing Marigold of her suspicions, but wasn’t sure what possibility alarmed her more- that she’d be dismissed out of hoof; that she’d be taken seriously and great time and effort be spent only for her to turn out to have been wrong; or that the others would think they could handle whatever it was and charge blindly after a creature that had effectively dispatched several Royal Guards, an Academy mage, and a Shadowbolt.

So, instead, she sat at her desk and read.

… legends say that the first cockatrice emerged from an egg laid by a cockerel and incubated by a toad [10]. Whether or not this story is accurate, today's cockatrices are true-breeding [10, 8]. Dens are haphazardly excavated by as many as a dozen individuals in a loose hierarchy. Males greatly outnumber females in these flocks [11], and are distinguished only by their wattles and combs [12, 8]. Woodlands are preferred, but cockatrice dens have been reported in grassland, scrubland, peat bogs, and meadows [13].

While their diet consists primarily of seeds and petrified insects (which conveniently double in the creature's gizzard as both gastroliths and nutrition as they grind away) [14, 2], cockatrices fiercely defend their territories from anything they deem a threat, and the wanderings of rogue males seeking new spots to build dens sometimes bring them into unintentional contact with intelligent species [13]…

“Miss Fluttershy?” She jolted upright at the sound of Sweetie Belle’s voice, looking up from her reading to find the filly standing on the other side of her desk, slobbering all over the jacket of her mint-condition Ride the Lightning album. “Why’s this song called ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’?”

“I don’t know. I told you we should’ve just put it on the turntable,” Apple Bloom chastised, some ways behind her.

Fluttershy gently pried the record out of Sweetie Belle’s jaws with one wing, and looked the filly in the eye. “You know it’s terribly rude to touch another pony’s things without asking them… and some of those records really aren’t for fillies…” The fact that Fluttershy herself had been listening to that very album when she was the very same age held no bearing on the discussion. She had appearances to keep up, after all.

“Oh. Okay, then…” Crestfallen, the two of them plodded back to the carpet.

“Can we play outside?” Scootaloo asked, not even a second later.

“Oh, I guess that’s okay,” Fluttershy answered after some consideration, “Just stay inside the fence where I can-”

“Cool!” Sweetie Belle cut her off almost immediately. “I wanna check out the chicken coop! Scootaloo, have you ever seen inside a chicken coop? I haven’t…”

Just for a moment, Fluttershy thought she saw Apple Bloom flinch.

“Girls, actually, I… think it’d be better if everypony just… stayed inside, okay?”

All three of them nodded, one after the other.

“How do you even call a chicken?” Scootaloo asked.

“Like this,” Sweetie Belle grinned mischievously, “Scootaloo! Scoo-scootaloo…”

Fluttershy turned back to her reading.

…The cockatrice's ability to transform other creatures into stone is the creature's greatest defense, and a cockatrice lair can usually be identified by the petrified remains of predators [22]. Perhaps ironically, weasels and ferrets, the creatures most likely to slip into cockatrices' nests and consume their eggs [25], appear to be completely immune to the effect [27].

The interaction of cockatrices to the petrification of other cockatrices is not well-studied [26, 27] due to the difficulty of inducing specimens to attempt to petrify each other [27], although direct magical feedback is known to be lethal- having a cockatrice look at itself in a mirror is one of the most reliable ways to kill it [28]. Additionally, for unknown reasons, the cockatrice suffers severe mental and physical distress upon exposure to the vocalizations of ordinary domestic roosters [29]. Cockatrices are equally likely to flee or attack when confronted by domestic fowl; some reports describe relatively complex “raid-style behaviors” against flocks[29-31]…

“Miss Fluttershy?” Scootaloo called out. “I’m bored.”

Fluttershy got up from her desk and trotted over to the rug, to find her Settlers tiles hadn’t even been taken out of the box. “Well, how about a different game?”

“A game?” Apple Bloom asked.

“Yes. Now, hop up on the couch, all three of you. Yes, just like that. Now, this is a game about who can stay quiet the longest, does that sound fun?” She poured as much smug arrogance into her tone and expression as she could manage, which admittedly wasn’t very much. “I’m the world champ, you know. Bet you can’t beat me…” She drew in an exaggerated breath and then clamped her jaws shut.

Apple Bloom looked at Sweetie Belle. Sweetie Belle looked at Scootaloo. Scootaloo looked back at Fluttershy and shook her head. “Wow. This game blows.”

“Scootaloo, you know, you… really shouldn’t be using that kind of language around other ponies…” Fluttershy stammered. She was going to have to have a talk with the filly’s parents the next time they were back in town. Assuming they ever did come back to town. Actually, on second thought, she should probably just cut to the chase and have her talk with Rainbow Dash instead.

“Yeah, well, your language blows, too,” the pegasus filly answered, her lips starting to curl into a smirk.

“Language doesn’t blow, Scootaloo!” Sweetie Belle admonished.

Perhaps fortunately, the two were interrupted by the rattling of glass on wood in the corner. Somehow, Apple Bloom had managed to sneak her way over to the big vivarium behind the couch without Fluttershy even noticing her absence. The earth filly had already pried the lid off, and was currently prodding at the coral snake inside even as it curled back in one corner and raised its head in a clear threat display.

Fluttershy dashed over, her heart feeling like it was about to burst into her throat, simultaneously calling out “Apple Bloom, don’t touch that!” and fixing the snake in her gaze. “|calm| |safety| |safety| |forget|” she thought, and after a moment it returned to its disrupted burrow.

Apple Bloom jerked backwards as if shocked. Fluttershy slid the top of the vivarium closed again and then looked at the filly, who stared back at her with wide, confused eyes. “But… but… That’s just a milksnake in there. See the stripes? Granny always says, ‘Red on black’ll kill a filly. Red and yellow, don’t be silly.’”

Fluttershy sat down next to her, looked her in the eye. and shook her head. “Apple Bloom, Carl’s a coral snake, and coral snakes are very venomous. The rhyme goes ‘Red on black, now don’t be silly. Red and yellow kills a filly.’ And even if you were right, it’s still a mean thing to do to pull him out of his burrow and bother him like that. Think about how you’d feel if somepony came into your house at night without asking you and tried to get you to play with them?” The filly winced, ducked her head, and briefly looked away. “If you wanted to see him, you could’ve asked me first. He’s a friendly sort, he’d come out if I called him…”

She looked around again, and counted three disappointed faces. “I’ll tell you what. How would the three of you like to learn how to talk to animals like I do?”

Sweetie Belle cocked her head to one side, “You mean for real?”

“Completely for real.”

They nodded and grinned in eerie synchrony. “Cutie Mark Crusaders creature tamers!”

Fluttershy wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but chose to interpret it as a well-meaning oversimplification. Her own studies more or less forgotten for the moment, she stood up and once more walked over to her bookcase, reaching out a wing to the very top shelf. Cautiously, almost reverently, she removed her copy of Introductory Spellcraft and the Animal Kingdom. It was dog-eared and densely annotated, tattered from heavy use, too many relocations, and more than a little intentional abuse at the hooves of Fluttershy’s uncomprehending classmates. She opened the vivarium again and, as demonstration, silently bade the snake inside to slither up her wing and burrow in among the feathers near her shoulder. She knelt down on her haunches on the carpet and opened the book in front of her, reciting the introductory section almost completely from memory:

“Now, most creatures -even the ones we might think of as monstrous- share more in common with ponies and other sapient species than we might think. They can recognize our emotions and expressions, and interpret the way we behave. That’s why druidry, moreso than any other branch of magic, is as much about empathy and mental focus as it is about spellcraft and knowledge of the subject’s behavior. At the most basic level, a druid needs to remain calm around her subjects, and present a non-threatening aspect. While the aim of most traditional meditative practices is to elevate the mind -to exemplify those qualities which most sharply divide the sapient from the insapient- a druid must instead strive to dampen her abstract thoughts. Only then can she interact on the conceptual level of the creatures with which she seeks to commune. We can start out with a few simple exercises. Everypony, close your eyes, and-”

“Wow. Druids blow.” Apple Bloom stated matter-of-factly, before dissolving along with the others into fits of giggling.

Fluttershy stood up and deposited her snake back in the vivarium. “O- Okay, okay, girls, that’s… really… enough…”

Still sitting on the carpet, Apple Bloom reached up underneath Fluttershy’s writing desk and tapped at the brace holding up one of the extendable leaves. It slid sideways, collapsing the entire leaf with a deafening crash, scattering books and papers all over the floor, and reducing a good portion of her mother’s Trotterford Crystal tea service to very expensive shards.

Slowly, Fluttershy pulled herself up from where she’d crouched, and tried to will her heart into beating slowly enough that she would once again be able to speak.

“Miss Sergeant Leafspring dun’ mind when Ah take things apart…” Apple Bloom muttered, seemingly more to herself than to anypony else.

“I… think now would be a good time for everypony to go ahead and go to bed,” Fluttershy suggested, feeling strangely uncomfortable the longer she looked at the filly’s crestfallen expression.

“But… it’s only eight o’clock…” Sweetie Belle protested.

Fluttershy stood up straight and picked her way across the debris-littered floor, gaze fixed on the three fillies. Almost immediately Apple Bloom seemed to outright crumple, and headed for the stairs. “Ah dun’ wanna argue, Ah’m headin’ up…”

Her two friends followed a moment later.

They had already slipped into Fluttershy’s own bed all as a group by the time she followed them upstairs, and the pegasus mare didn’t bother to protest. Her couch in the living room was more than comfortable enough.

She blew out the bedroom’s solitary candle, eased the door shut, and started down the stairs.

Then she pulled up short at the sound of voices behind her. She slipped back up to the landing and pressed one ear against the door.

“Ah really do miss Leafspring,” Apple Bloom was muttering, “She was awful fun to have ‘round the farm. She’d show me how to build things, if’n Ah wanted to, and she let me stick around ‘n listen whenever she ‘n Granny’d sit down with their drinks ‘n talk about their war stuff.”

“At least you got a cool pony from Canterlot,” Sweetie Belle replied, “I got a dumb one, and he isn’t even really a pony either. All Spike does is sit around and talk to Rarity all day, and ask me why I don’t help her more. One time he said he’d read a comic with me if I was good, and he said it was about Supermare being raised by dragons and it sounded really cool, but it was all just a bunch of talking and not any fight scenes. He also said he’d teach me how to balance an inventory, whatever that means, but I didn’t finish my homework on purpose so we didn’t do that. Now Rarity’s always just working on her new Canterlot dresses and going over to the Library to visit him, and she’s all mopey all the time. It’s dumb.”

“Mah sister says Leafspring’s the one who made Big Mac mopey, too,” Apple Bloom interjected, “just like Ocean Breeze did, but Ocean Breeze was never that nice, so Ah don’t know why she thinks that…”

“Yeah, that comic sounds lame,” Scootaloo interjected, “Rainbow Dash lets me read Sapphire: Equestrian Commando sometimes.”

“I asked Spike if we could read that once,” Sweetie Belle continued, “and he said it’s not a comic for fillies. But then he said it’s a comic for adults who never grew up, so I don’t know what he meant. He’s weird.”

“I think Rainbow Dash’s really worried about that creepy Vortex pony, too, though,” said Scootaloo, “But don’t tell her that, she’ll just lie and say no…”

Fluttershy took her ear away from the door. She swallowed hard, glided back downstairs as quietly as possible, and set about reassembling her scattered collection of reference material.

(♫)

Perhaps an hour later, something in her front yard went crack.

She looked up from her book. After a few seconds, something went crack again, and then she heard the squawking and fluttering of alarmed chickens.

She stood up from her desk and slunk over to the window. Nothing seemed remotely out of place in the yard, but she couldn’t actually see the chicken coop from this angle. Very cautiously, she eased open the front door and stepped outside. She focused on the treeline and made a low, almost inaudible hum in the back of her throat, and after a few seconds a lumbering brown figure easily twice her size became visible. Bears made poor watch animals for anything outside of their usual territory, but in a direct confrontation there wasn’t a lot that could get in their way.

“|stay here| |guard home|” she whispered.

The beast growled in acknowledgment and hunkered down near her front door.

“|good boy|: (|later|, |big fish|).”

She grit her teeth and stepped back around to the rear of her cottage. Two of the boards originally making up the side of the coop lay on the ground beside it, and a few chickens wandered aimlessly inside of the fenced-in section.

Fluttershy swallowed hard, jumped over the fence, and peered inside the structure. This time, there was no blood to be seen, no scraps of flesh or ruined shelving. In fact, aside from the hole through which she was looking, nothing seemed remotely out of place.

She squinted at the boards, and then at the spots where they’d once been attached. She was no carpenter, but it looked as though they’d been nailed to the plywood floor and not to the frame underneath. When the floor had been broken up they’d come loose at the bottom, and little by little worked their way free from the top as well. Once one fell off, the strain must’ve pulled the other down in short order.

She gingerly picked up one hen in her forehooves and set it back inside the coop, then the other, and then pressed the boards back into place as best she could. She’d have to call Silver Spanner back over to fix it all properly next morning.

Still flushed with adrenaline, she trotted back through the front door on unsteady hooves, sat down at her desk, and paused.

The interior of the cottage was utterly silent- the muffled conversation she’d been ignoring from upstairs had stopped completely.

Briefly, Fluttershy wondered if the three fillies had in fact simply fallen asleep, but then she looked at the clock over her mantle. It was barely after nine.

She stood up and circled the room, already fighting the panic that threatened to spill up into her throat. Fluttershy had kept the map Twilight Sparkle had made of her path through the Everfree on her desk ever since she’d assisted in the search party four days ago. It had ended up on the floor along with the rest of her papers when Apple Bloom had collapsed her desk, and when she’d picked up the rest… she didn’t remember where she’d put it. Wherever that had been, the map was now gone.

Very quietly and very carefully, she climbed the stairs to the bedroom. She took one more deep breath, and eased open the door.

Inside, her bed was empty, and the window next to it was open.

“Apple Bloom? Sweetie Belle? Scootaloo?” she called.

There was no response.

She stepped over to the window and called out again: “Apple Bloom? Scootaloo? Sweetie Belle?”

Nothing.

Looking down over her first story roof, Fluttershy realized for the very first time just how low her cottage was, and how easily some small and nimble prowler -a filly, for instance- could leap from the window to the first story and then down to the yard. She swallowed hard, climbed up onto the windowsill, pushed off and glided to ground level.

Something was moving, ever-so-slightly, on one of her fenceposts- a small scrap of cheap red cloth. Nearby, the grass was faintly trampled and pushed to either side, forming a clear trail that headed directly for the Everfree Forest.

She turned and set out for the road to town. Then she stopped, closed her eyes, and shook her head, trying to clear it. She thought of Amethyst Star, and her smiling dismissiveness as she took Fluttershy’s statement. She thought of Captain Marigold, slouched in her office chair as Spike screamed himself hoarse. She thought of the Dominion officials up in Canterlot, or rather she thought about their absence. Finally, she thought about her flight-camp counselor snickering right along with Cirrus Cloud and Parasol after she’d slammed face-first into a slalom gate.

One way or another, she was likely on her own.

She turned back to her cottage and grabbed her saddlebags. Then she opened up the box of survival gear she kept in the corner of her kitchen and extracted a lantern, a short field knife, a packet of weatherproof matches, her healer’s kit, a compass, flares, and a second map of the Academy routes into the Everfree. She paused, and then packed her small signal mirror as well, in a side pocket within easy reach of her left wing.

She stopped at her front step, once again concentrated, and spoke in growls and grunts. “|go to forest| |follow me|.”

‘Harry’ looked up at her, reddish-brown eyes big and bright and uncomprehending. “|forest|: |danger|. |I||guard| |home|.”

She shook her head. “|No|. |Cubs in danger|. |Need you|: |near me|. |Less danger|.”

“|I guard| |home|.”

“|Home| |important|. |I||guard| |home|.”

Fluttershy closed her eyes and let the communion link fade away. “Fine.” She put her muzzle to the ground and set off down the trail.

Author's Note

Since this is a pretty emotional “episode” for Spike, I was considering starting to develop his interaction with Rarity here (as I do intend to have that be a thing in EC). However, EC is a lot longer than the actual show, both in terms of its out-of-universe “runtime” and the in-universe time scale events take. Therefore, I think it’s fine for the Sparity dynamic (as well as a certain other interpersonal arc of great importance to the first few “seasons” of EC) to not manifest right away. Especially since Spike is sixteen here, and Rarity is in her early to mid 20s. EC could conceivably take up to an in-universe decade to progress to Season 9, so the proportional age gap between them could potentially decrease significantly.

The encyclopedic sources Fluttershy consults come from the D&D monster manual entry on cockatrices, and the cockatrice Wikipedia page respectively.

Editor's Note: Popping in again, there was actually a massive debate on when and how to present Fluttershy's suspicions that there's a cockatrice about; we had a duel at 500 words, sending each other comprehensive essays on narrative structure and character knowledge. The end product's one we both stand by, though.

Hens' Teeth

(♫)

It had been a warm, still night, but as Fluttershy worked her way deeper into the Everfree the weather began to change. The air grew cool, then outright chilly, and the leaves around her rustled periodically in response to a stiff, howling wind. The moon remained high, though- higher than it had any right to be at this time of year and this time of night, in fact, and it still very much appeared to be sporting the Mare-In-The-Moon pattern on its surface.

Fluttershy refused to let that bother her.

She had to give her young charges credit where it was due. Although their trail weaved and diverted and circled back every so often, for the most part they kept to the path Twilight Sparkle had charted a week ago on their presumably borrowed map. She considered it fortunate that their tracks diverged even as much as they did- she wasn’t sure if she’d’ve been able to gain any ground on the fillies if they’d been taking as direct a route as she was.

Far off in the forest, she thought she heard raised voices, and then something hissed.

For one confused, irrational moment Fluttershy wondered if she’d properly secured the lid on her vivarium, before dismissing the concern as ridiculous. Carl wouldn’t follow her all the way into the Everfree, and there were plenty of other creatures that lived in the forest and could hiss. She kept moving.

Then, after perhaps half an hour of walking, the path she was following bent off into a section of thick brush and did not come back to the main trail.

She pulled up short and looked around. Twilight Sparkle’s own tracks had well and truly been erased by now, but she remembered they had stopped for good at just about this exact same spot.

Carefully, one wing poised above the pocket in her saddlebag where her knife was located, Fluttershy ducked down and wormed her way through the thicket. For perhaps the first six or eight feet, leaves and branches pressed so tightly around her that she could barely see anything at all, but then abruptly the brush fell away. In its place was a broad, flat clearing, stretching out well beyond what she could discern in the dim light, dotted with massive tree trunks that spread out to create a uniform, leafy ceiling perhaps a dozen yards or more above.

She squirmed back through the clump of underbrush and found herself back on the narrow trail running to the Cairn.

Next, she circled around behind the patch and made a few experimental ducks into different sections of it. It remained nothing but a small clump of thorny bushes a little under two yards across at its longest axis.

Far off in the distance, something hissed again.

Twilight had mentioned structures like this developing in the Everfree. “Bubbles,” she’d called them, pinched-off sections of space that contained an arbitrarily large volume connected to the outside world by only the thinnest of bridges. Being essentially ‘new’ space that had not existed when the Everfree Forest was Everfree City, there was generally little of archaeological interest inside of them, and so the Canterlot expedition had assigned them a low priority. Fluttershy and her search party must’ve walked past the entrance to this one a dozen times or more during the course of their investigations, and had never once stepped into exactly the right spot from exactly the right direction to reach it- and if Fluttershy hadn’t been following the three fillies’ tracks, she likely wouldn’t have been able to find it now either. That made her wonder how her charges in turn had managed to enter… unless, of course, they too had witnessed something else either enter or leave.

Something hissed once more, fading into a low cackle, this time clearly audible from the direction of the bubble’s entrance.

Fluttershy squirmed her way through the thicket again, and trotted towards what she hoped was the center of the glade, or at least someplace more central than the entrance. For all she knew, the bubble could be the size of Cloudsdale, and of nearly any shape.

“Scootaloo? Apple Bloom? Sweetie Belle?” she called out.

This time, after a few seconds, she heard Scootaloo call in return, ever so faintly. “Fuh- Fluttershy?!”

She galloped towards the sound as quickly as she dared, keeping one eye on her compass and the other on the path ahead. The needle was now pointing back towards the entrance, instead of north; Fluttershy wondered if that was because the entrance was the only remaining section of normal space- and therefore astral polarity- it could detect. “Scootaloo? Sweetie Belle? Apple Bloom?”

In another patch of low brush up ahead, something shuffled. Fluttershy pulled up short, and then relaxed as three small equine figures slipped out into plain view.

“Fluttershy?” Sweetie Belle asked, eyes wide. In the dim light it was hard to tell, but the pegasus thought she was trembling slightly.

“Scootaloo got us l-lost out here for ages!” called Apple Bloom.

“I did not!” Scootaloo countered.

Sweetie Belle looked back to Fluttershy and then ducked downward, ears pulled back against her head. “Are… are we in trouble?”

“No, no, of course not,” Fluttershy soothed, then she paused and cocked her head. “Can you tell me how you found this part of the forest?”

“Well, we thought we saw one a’ your chickens go into the woods…” Applebloom began.

“… and we saw you had one of those cool maps like all the Guards have…” continued Scootaloo.

“I hope you aren’t mad that we borrowed it.” Interjected Sweetie Belle. Fluttershy chose to ignore the fact that the fillies had deliberately waited until she had reason to leave her study before attempting said ‘borrowing’, in the interests of moving their conversation along without any more petty recriminations.

“And we thought we saw your chicken go into those bushes…” Apple Bloom went on.

“… but we were looking all over and it’s not here.” Scootaloo finished. “So… uhh… can we… maybe can we just go home now?”

Fluttershy was about to answer when she heard that strange hissing, cackling call once again.

“In a minute, all right? Can… can everypony stick close to me?” She kept one wing over her saddlebag, and made her way towards where she thought the noise had come from.

Little by little, a pair of equine figures became visible in the hazy distance, uniformly colored and utterly immobile. At first, Fluttershy wondered if they were statues, even though the bubble up until this point had contained not a trace of artificial construction. Then the moon hit them at just the right angle through the foliage above to illuminate them fully, and she realized she recognized them. Sergeant Chamomile stood frozen in place in his andesite-gray armor, his mouth open and one hoof extended to point at empty air. Twilight Sparkle was crouched perhaps three yards away, fine stone saddlebags no doubt filled with fine stone instruments and a useless stone tracking gem, her forelegs spread out to brace herself, one eye open and her horn pointed down as though charging a nonexistent spell.

Behind Fluttershy, the three fillies gasped and staggered backward almost as a single entity.

“Twilight?” Sweetie Belle yelped.

“What happened to ‘em?” demanded Apple Bloom.

“She’s been turned to stone,” Fluttershy answered, careful to keep her voice soothing and level. “She’ll be okay, we just need to-”

There was another cackle, followed by a low, syncopated growling. It was much closer this time, almost right beside them.

“Girls?” Fluttershy asked, no longer bothering with pleasantness and focusing solely on packing her voice with as much calm, level authority as she could manage. “Stay behind me.”

She stretched out both of her wings, broad-sides-forward, in what she hoped was a sufficiently protective gesture.

A vague shape perhaps two feet tall sprang from one shadowy clump of bush to another.

“What… what is that?” Scootaloo whispered.

“It’s called a cockatrice. Don’t look directly at it…” The shape darted across the clearing again, faster and closer this time, and Fluttershy caught the definite impression of a long, snake-like lower body.

She felt a small hoof tap at the top of her right wing. “Wait…” she commanded, without looking back, “It can only petrify things up close. It’s trying to close the distance.”

The shape leaped into the open again, this time revealing ever-so-briefly a white, bird-like head before disappearing once more.

“So shouldn’t we be… runnin’ away?” Applebloom stammered.

“Wait.”

(♫)

There was a loud scream, almost like an alarm siren, as the cockatrice sprang out of the shadows and landed directly in front of them. Fluttershy recognized it almost instantly- its lower body was scaly and green in color, a cross between a particularly fat snake and a lizard with two long legs and a pair of membranous wings, transitioning midway up into a head that resembled a chicken’s only on a cursory examination. It had white feathers, and a rooster’s red wattle and comb, but the skull underneath was clearly more serpentine in construction than avian. Its eyes faced forward like a snake’s, big and round and almost luminously red in the dim light, and its half-open beak revealed a pair of folded-back fangs.

It fixed its gaze on Fluttershy. She no longer had the slightest doubt that its eyes were well and truly luminescent, a dim red light that seemed to seep out from somewhere deep inside its skull.

Almost immediately she felt a horrible twisting, pulling sensation surge up her back, leaving numbness in its wake- the feeling of flesh and bone hardening into solid rock. She refused to let it distract her her, as she forced the portion of her brain that usually formed words to instead confine itself to the concepts animals could understand.

“|stop this|” she commanded, as though she were talking to any other chicken.

“|stop this|” she commanded again, heedless of the numbness now having thoroughly overtaken her hind legs.

“|just another bully|.” The noise she produced was somewhere between an avian cackle and a staccato hiss. She had no idea if the concepts she was vocalizing were even making it through to the creature in front of her. She didn’t particularly care.

She reached for her signal mirror- and realized she couldn’t feel either of her wings anymore.

The light behind its eyes flickered. The creeping numbness halted, but Fluttershy was already beginning to feel faint and light-headed. The torsion of the heavy stone pulling against her skin burned in her barrel, and for the first time she wondered just how long she could continue to function with half of her internal organs effectively removed.

She pulled in a shallow breath, as deep as she could manage with her diaphragm frozen-not that it mattered when she couldn’t feel her pulse, either. It might’ve been from the lack of air, but for a split second Fluttershy thought she was staring down at a spindly yellow filly, scared out of her mind, who desperately wanted everypony to just stop looking at her. “|let me go|: |no more scary|. |let me go|: |roosters gone|. |let me go|: |ponies gone|. |let me go|: |den safe|. |you||safe|.”

The cockatrice tilted its head like a confused dog. It hopped from one foot to the other for a few seconds… and then the light behind its eyes cut out completely, and Fluttershy was able to feel her hind legs again. She gasped and staggered, briefly, her entire body tingling with freshly-restored circulation, but she didn’t dare take her gaze away from the cockatrice.

It just sat there, in the middle of the clearing, utterly transfixed by her. Now that it was standing still and out in the open, it wasn’t even particularly impressive- just an ugly, mismatched bird-like thing with a fat ungainly body and an almost comically chicken-like head.

She thought about the panic and days of constant, low-level dread she’d just endured, and the chaos that had swept through the entire town because of this silly little creature, and reached once again for her signal mirror.

Then she thought of how she’d felt when ponies had intruded on her own little sod-roofed bubble, and how silly Spike and Marigold and Filthy Rich had all looked, lashing out at the nearest thing that bothered them without once stopping to actually sit down and consider whether they were actually going after the right problem. Then she looked back at the petrified forms of Twilight and Chamomile, and pondered their logical significance in light of the other disappearances.

Fluttershy nodded, and motioned for the fillies still crowded behind her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, to follow along. “|show me.|”

(♫)

Spike sat at his desk in the Golden Oaks Library, now utterly empty save for an inkwell, a single quill, and the Royal Academy letterhead upon which all official reports were supposed to be sent.

He had no idea what to say.

“Dear Princess Celestia, we regret to inform you that…”? That sounded ridiculous. “Dear Princess Celestia, I’m afraid I’ve managed to misplace the head of the Ponyville Expedition, who also happens to be your personal protege…”? He wondered if he should send a report at all, and not just schedule an appointment, take the train to Canterlot, and break the news face-to-face. He wondered, not for the first time, if he’d be reprimanded for jumping to conclusions too early, or if there was some other lower-level official channel he was expected to have consulted first. Then he wondered if he’d be reprimanded for taking as long as he had, and not notifying Celestia as soon as Twilight had gone missing. He wondered whether it was appropriate in a letter like this to mention the difficulties he’d been having with the Project staff, Captain Marigold in particular. What would Celestia do if he told her? Would he only be getting himself in deeper trouble? Would he be getting Marigold in trouble? Did he want Marigold to be in trouble?

Apart from “Dear Princess Celestia” in the upper-left-hand corner, the paper remained blank.

He jumped, slightly, when he heard somepony open the door. Then he relaxed, and turned back to his paper. It was about the right time of night for Rarity to drop by and deliver her usual bag of gems, after all. Knowing Rarity, she’d probably leave it right by the previous day’s bag, which he hadn’t touched. Beyond that, she was unlikely to bother him- the tailor was very good at picking up on when he did or didn’t want to talk. Discretion was a rare quality in ponies these days, and he’d grown to appreciate it a great deal over the last week.

Then he heard Twilight’s voice call out from the main room. “Spike?!”

He pivoted around in his chair, letter instantly forgotten. A scrawny purple unicorn was standing in the middle of the main room, looking somewhat disheveled but very much alive.

“Twilight!” He dashed forward, leaped, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders.

“Hey, Spike. It’s good to see you again,” Twilight muttered, smiling ruefully. “It has been. A. Day.”

He didn’t let go, and fought to keep his voice from breaking as the nictitating membranes over his eyes slid half-closed of their own accord. “Twilight, it’s… it’s been almost a week.”

The unicorn gave his forehead a brief nuzzle, and then squeezed him even tighter. She screwed her eyes shut and shook her head. “You can’t be serious.”

Now that the initial shock of her arrival had worn off, Spike looked over at Twilight again with fresh eyes. She didn’t seem any thinner than the last time he’d seen her, or dehydrated, or sleep-deprived or for that matter even particularly dirty, although… “What happened to your tail?”

“Oh.” The scholar twisted her neck around to look behind her, then laughed nervously. “The end must’ve broken off. That happens sometimes with petrification, when they’re stone the individual hairs are pretty brittle, so…”

Spike held up his hands in confusion. “Wait, wait wait wait wait. Petrifi- what now?”

Twilight laughed again, and sat down at the main table. “Look, it’s a long and kind of stupid story, and obviously I have a lot to catch up on, too. But can we maybe settle it after I get the chance to shower? And get something to eat, too. I skipped lunch yester- well, a week ago, I guess, and my mouth still kind of tastes like rainwater…”

It had wound up taking them most of the night for Fluttershy and Chamomile simply to get to all of the other ponies the cockatrice had petrified, especially after Twilight Sparkle had insisted on heading straight back to Ponyville with the fillies- and taking her mental library of incredibly useful translocation and scanning spells with her. Then, once the cockatrice had shown them a quartet of petrified Lunars in another section of the glade, they’d decided they would need to free Vortex first and then return, lest the reanimated soldiers take issue with being rescued by ‘Solar loyalists’.

Even finding the Shadowbolt had then proven more difficult than expected- he’d been petrified midway through the process of converting himself into his vaporous form, and thus transmuted into a mixture of gravel and fine dust that sank into the marshy soil effectively without any trace. If they hadn’t brought the cockatrice along with them and convinced it to ‘explain’ what had happened, Fluttershy doubted anypony would ever have been able to identify his remains. Even then it had been a nearly hour-long process of communion, translation, and guesswork. After that came a sizable argument between herself and Chamomile about whether it was even safe to depetrify Vortex in his dissociated state.

Eventually, however, he was restored without any outwardly observable ill effects, and led back into the grove to meet with his comrades. Two of them proved to be revenants, and collapsed immediately upon being released. The others were confused and disoriented after nearly three months in stone, but they accompanied Vortex to the train station without incident. All three Lunars subsequently set off on the six o’clock direct line to Fillydelphia Harbor, bound for whatever treatment they might require for any lingering petrification sickness and a long-overdue reunion with their beloved Princess Luna.

After that, they sought out Sergeant Leafspring in a shallow ditch near the northern border of Sweet Apple Acres.

Then, all that was left for Fluttershy to do was sit quietly in the corner of the Station officers’ barracks as unobtrusively as possible, and watch Chamomile make his report to Captain Marigold. You could tell a lot about ponies, if you just sat quietly and watched.

“… so, they’re back with their families now,” the Sergeant was currently explaining, “but I’m not really sure who to talk to or what, really, to do, long-term, sir. Is this the kind of thing that the Guard follows up on, or the Watch, or… or Foal Protective Services or somepony? I mean, if Fluttershy here hadn’t shown up, those fillies might be statues right now. Sir.”

Marigold just shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Sergeant. Kids are more resilient than a lot of us might think, and they’ve all got families- or, well, guardians, at least, from what Rainbow Dash told me about the orange one- to talk with ‘em and help them work through anything that might be troubling them. They don’t need some busybody in a uniform looking over their shoulders. If anything, we should probably just talk to Councilpony Cheerilee about doing another school visit. Maybe it’d be a good idea to remind ponies that just because we go into the Everfree pretty routinely now, doesn’t mean it’s safe or easy for civilians- especially kids. And also that it’s not okay to throw things at us.” She laughed, surprisingly bitterly, and then continued, “So… what’d you eventually do with the cockatrice? The Academy types might actually want something like that as a specimen.”

“Actually…” Fluttershy swallowed hard and stepped forward, “I decided to let it go.”

“Let it go?” Marigold’s eyes widened, and she leaned forward in her chair. “That was a dangerous animal you had out there!”

“It’s not going to come back, or attack anypony else,” Fluttershy explained, “We took it deeper into the forest and let it loose in another bubble that was plenty big enough for it to set out its territory.” She reached out one hoof and tapped the relevant section on the map Marigold had unrolled across her desk.

“And, so, what,” the Captain demanded, “we just… declare that bubble off-limits? Forever?”

“Were you ever planning to send anypony into it again anyway?” asked Fluttershy.

“Well, no, but…”

“You can still go inside if you need to, as long as you’re cautious,” the pegasus continued, “but I don’t think anypony’s going to need to worry about that cockatrice for a long time. Really, I think all it wanted was just to be left alone. Now it is.”

Marigold reached up and kneaded at the bridge of her muzzle with one hoof. “I’m just going to put in my report that the two of you lost sight of it while you were trying to lead it back here for examination, and that bubble is where you think it ended up, okay?”

Sergeant Chamomile quietly nodded, and then turned back to Marigold.

Taking the unspoken cue to leave, Fluttershy stepped out of the barracks and trotted down the hall, out through the big double doors in the lobby.

She set off back towards the edge of town, and her own little bubble of a sod-roofed cottage, intent on catching up on her chores and much-needed sleep.

(♫)

Seated beside Spike at the library’s central table, Twilight set about telekinetically policing up their used plates and silverware. “… and, I guess that’s about it.”

The dragon set aside his nearly empty mug of tea-and-saltpeter blend. “Let that serve as a lesson to you, I guess. Always bring along at least two Royal Guards when investigating strange noises in a bush in an extradimensional forest. One isn’t always enough.”

“Spike, get me my good parchment, I need to notify Her Grace the Exarch immediatelyabout this groundbreaking new insight into the equine condition!” Twilight laughed, but then her expression became serious. “So, what all did we lose?”

“Mostly the artifacts I told you about, and critical but not irreplaceable supplies, but it looks like we’ve also come up short on weapons and some analytical reagents listed as controlled substances. It’s a mess, and I don’t think we’ll even know how far we’ve really been set back for a good long while.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame we never did catch the ponies responsible for all this.”

“I don’t think they’ll be coming back again if that’s what you’re worried about,” Spike countered, “They put on a pretty terrible showing without their cameramare to spy for them.”

“I don’t think she’s the only problem, though,” Twilight explained. “Based on what you dug up for me, Shutterfly didn’t sound like a stupid pony. She wouldn’t head directly away from Ponyville because she thought her chances were better climbing Maranduin and checking herself into a hospital in Canterlot. I think she was trying to meet back up with an accomplice. That cockatrice might’ve been responsible for the ‘attacks’ on AJ and Fluttershy, and it was probably what ended up killing the photographer, or at least she died trying to avoid it, but all the rest… I’m pretty sure somepony doesn’t want us to succeed out here.”

“That’s a bit of a leap,” Spike countered, “Maybe they were just after the artifacts and expensive equipment? They didn’t have anything against us, we were just a lucrative target.”

“Maybe. But Rarity made a good point back at the freight yard yester- a week ago, whatever. There’s easier places to rob than a fortified Royal Academy dig if you’re just after expensive artifacts. With all the resources these ponies were pouring into this, I’m not sure they’d even break even unless they had some kind of really dedicated buyer already lined up. I think they’re after something bigger,” She fished through the collection of papers Spike had unpacked, and extracted Shutterfly’s autopsy photos. “In fact, I’ve seen this mare before, in Canterlot and Fillydelphia just as things were starting to go south with the Cabinet Ministers. She divebombed me and kept trying to get me to do some kind of interview with Blitzfeed, it was… very strange. And then, everypony in the Governorate office just happens to have some reason not to get involved when the Guards and I went missing? That’s a pretty big coincidence, and arranging it isn’t something that’d make an ordinary smuggling ring any money.” She set the photos aside, “Listen, Spike. This is the second time I’ve been in serious trouble and not able to contact you. If it’s all right with you I’d like to add myself as a target to your firelink.”

The young dragon nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. We might want to include somepony who’s always in Ponyville, too, maybe Marigold or a member of the Council, in case we’re both left out in the wilderness again. I’d also like it if some of the mages could take a look at Shutterfly’s body- Luna's necromancers, especially.”

Necromantically prying memories out of a corpse was a fiddly and difficult science. Not only did impressions of sensory information quickly start to degrade after death, but bringing them back also meant bringing back traces of the pony’s personality- and the impetus to lie. However, Luna and her fellows had performed seemingly impossible feats of magic more than enough times already.

“But, before we set that up,” Spike continued, “I’m wondering… I don’t think you ever got around to telling me what you were doing out in that part of the Everfree to start with. Daycaller’s still trying to straighten out everything you did to the Lapwing, and there’s this pile of journals you left out that I haven’t been able to make any sense of.”

Twilight nodded, and poured herself another cup of strong tea. “I was going to talk about that once we’d unpacked again and you’d had a chance to get a decent night’s sleep, but since you asked… Spike? Get my notes…”

Author's Note

Serketry and I did indeed have this big long kind of circular argument about how to handle the reveal of the cockatrice. I wanted to have Fluttershy figure out or at least suspect that it was responsible fairly early on, and had originally had her specifically researching “every book she could find about cockatrices” during the two-day time skip where now she just reads generic bestiaries. Serketry wanted to stick closer to the original episode and withhold that knowledge almost to the point where she actually encounters the cockatrice, in the woods. We eventually agreed to write these big long court-case-style statements and then send them to each other, and, like, immediately afterward both agreed on a compromise solution which is how the story is written (although I’m not sure if it’s really a compromise or what Serketry had wanted all along and I just didn’t understand him).

Petrification and depetrification aren’t solely limited to cockatrices, but we came up with some limitations on the magic that prevent it from being widely used to, say, store perishable food or basically sub in for sci-fi cryostasis.

Something petrified is not technically dead; the “spirit” doesn't actually leave the statue. For powerful entities like Discord, this is why he can observe the world around him. For regular ponies, there's only so long a soul can hold onto solid stone, before they well and truly die. Possibly related to this phenomenon is the fact that the information about the original target’s composition, energy, and so on slowly “leaks” out of the stone and cannot be restored. If a pony is left petrified too long, they can come “back” with brain damage or gangrene-like conditions; and if left petrified for way too long they come “back” as room-temperature Spam.

Additionally, I don’t think petrification works well on damaged tissues. Damage after the fact can be repaired pretty easily- if Fluts had thought to hold the broken-off sections of Twilight’s tail up to the remainder when she was being depetrified, it would’ve reattached. However, petrifying a seriously mangled pony and then trying to reassemble the stone elements (or even just transporting them to a hospital that way) would probably result in their exiting in a much worse state than they were in before.

Apparently chickens will scream like an air-raid siren when they charge at things. For the cockatrice, that screeching behavior probably serves the additional purpose of making everything around look directly at it.

Also, apparently, CHICKENS WILL CHARGE AT THINGS. Hens will also murmur to their eggs, which will then chirp back when they are ready to hatch. I did not know that*. Now you know it, too.

*You're welcome, Admiral.

Really, the more I have read about chickens in the process of researching this, the more vaguely terrifying they have become. I don’t think I will ever look at a plate of war su gai quite the same way again.

Friendship is metal.

Mahlwurfs and Mallets

(♫)

“That’s the third one this week!” Twilight Sparkle snapped at nopony in particular. “Do we know what exactly was taken?” She looked out over the big storage yard behind the Station, and kneaded the spot between her eyes with the frog of her left hoof. The fact that she’d been called out here at the utterly unreasonable hour of eight in the morning wasn’t the only reason for her current crushing headache, but it certainly did not help.

She turned back to her companions, all clustered behind her at the complex’s front gate. They’d installed chain-link fencing not long after renovating the Station, for all the good it had ended up doing.

Vortex, one of Princess Luna’s Night Guards, had been patrolling the area the night before and had been the one to notice something was amiss. He had called in Captain Marigold. Marigold, in turn, had notified Spike and Twilight herself. Applejack, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash hadn’t been formally involved in any of it, but had caught wind anyway and made themselves available to lend a hoof if needed.

“All right. All right.” Twilight forced herself to focus on the matter in front of her, instead of the pebbles currently jammed inside her skull. “Spike?”

The small dragon fanned quickly through a sheaf of typed inventory forms he’d extracted from his omnipresent leather messenger bag. “You know that big silver monstrance we pulled out of Froggy Bottom Bog last month? That was the only thing.”

“Damn them,” Vortex muttered, kicking at a loose stone with surprising force. It sailed a good twenty meters and landed somewhere in the strip of tall grass that separated the Station from the back quarter of Sweet Apple Acres.

Rainbow Dash dropped out of her usual low hover to sit beside him, and shot him a quizzical look.

“That monstrance was salvaged from the great Lunar temple in Everfree City, just before our rebellion began in earnest,” the Shadowbolt explained, “T’was smuggled with great effort out to Hardfrog Valley, and then lost when our encampment was flooded. Luna… we were all overjoyed when thine diggers found it intact, after so many centuries.” He shook his head, expression unreadable behind his tinted yellow flight goggles, “Ponies better than I gave their lives to see that it was safe; thine own comrades spent countless hours to restore it to its former glory… and, the night before t’was to be returned to us, it is gone. No doubt destined to collect dust in some Canterlot noblemare’s secret trophy-room.”

“If even,” Spike muttered, “Nopony’s been able to track down any of the other artifacts circulating in the usual black- and gray-markets, either.”

“So thou… truly hast not even a guess of what these blackguards want with Our Luna’s heraldry?” Vortex asked, ears pivoting sideways in confusion.

“Maybe they’re just meltin’ it down,” Applejack suggested, “that is an awful lotta silver…”

“Or, worst case scenario,” added Twilight, “we’re dealing with some kind of hardline anti-Lunar outfit that’s actively destroying artifacts as a goal in and of itself- like those ‘Discordic Panic’ types back in the 1080s.”

“We don’t know that!” Rainbow Dash snapped.

“Girls, girls, calm down,” interjected Rarity, “that monstrance was mostly fine filigree. It’s not very dense. If somepony wanted to steal a few pounds of silver, there are larger and much less noticeable ways to get it- a few serving trays from one of those bigger Canterlot estates, for instance, would probably have the same raw silver content if not more.” She knelt down on her haunches to look Vortex in the eyes- or, at least, the goggles. “If I were you, I’d stop worrying about what’ll happen in the future, and finding the ponies who did this, now.”

“Umm. Right.” Twilight left Rarity and the Shadowbolt to settle their affairs in peace, and made her way carefully over to the only train car in the yard that wasn’t sealed shut. Instead, the big panel door on one side had been slid open, the stamped tin tie-band across it was neatly cut, and the orderly grid of close-packed crates inside held a suspiciously square hole in the center. None of the other crates had been remotely disturbed, and the door had only been opened the distance required to get at the one that was removed. That suggested whoever was responsible had known exactly what they were after ahead of time.

She grabbed the door itself in her telekinesis, experimentally sliding it back and forth against its track. It made an audible rattle if she moved it at a rate greater than about two centimeters a second, but was relatively quiet below that speed. Given that it had been open about a meter and a half when she’d arrived, that meant the thieves had spent at least a minute and a quarter simply moving it. Or they had some method of magically suppressing sound that was also not clearly visible- but for safety reasons, muffler candles and similar items were legally required to include an illumination spell demarcating their area of effect, before they were permitted to be sold on the civilian market.

Next, she focused on the locking mechanism, muttering the cantrip to her favorite mage-sight spell and painting the world around her in false-color auras. The password enchantment on the lock appeared to still be functional -she’d have it taken off the train car and sent to her lab for a proper dissection later on- and displayed the appropriate six-digit numerical code. Those codes weren’t a closely-kept secret- enough ponies needed to load, unload, and maintain the trains that knowledge of them was in fact fairly widespread- but they were also changed daily and only then written down.

“Vortex?” She called out, “can you tell me again what happened last night?”

There was a very faint whisper of displaced air as the Shadowbolt took wing and then glided over to her location. Applejack and Rainbow Dash both followed behind on hoof. “Aye, though there is little to tell,” he said, “I circled the yard most of the night and saw nothing. I passed this car on my rounds as usual, perhaps just after three-thirty as the clocks now reckon it, and it was closed and locked. Then perhaps five minutes later I passed by again, and ‘twas as you see it now.”

“And the tracking gem?” Twilight asked, already leafing through the papers in her saddlebags for Vortex’s patrol route.

“We found it a couple yards from the train,” said Applejack.

“Just like a ruttin’ magic act…” Rainbow Dash muttered.

With the proper document finally floating in her telekinesis, Twilight studied the path Vortex had taken. The car that had been broken into had been out of his sight for perhaps all of four minutes at any given time. More interestingly, a note on the margin informed her that he’d chosen to keep the entire watch as a cloud of immaterial vapor, courtesy of the strange Lunar magic Twilight and her team were still struggling to get a handle on. Having seen the phenomenon first-hoof several times, Twilight knew that at night it rendered him effectively invisible. The fact that the thieves had still known exactly when he’d be away from this specific train car suggested an extremely high degree of planning, and very detailed foreknowledge.

“I just don’t get how this can continue to happen to us over and over again,” Spike snapped as he loped over to Twilight’s position, alongside Rarity and Captain Marigold. “Aren’t these Guardsponies of yours supposed to be the best of the best?”

“Outside the EUP Platoons, yeah,” Marigold shot back, “But we’re soldiers, not police, and Vortex and his Night Guard buddies aren’t even officially soldiers yet. We don't have the authority to start knocking on ponies' doors and holding an investigation outside of our own little patch of borrowed land. And even if we did, we're so short-hoofed we can't afford to pull anypony in from the other patrols. Searching the town would mean pulling troops out from guarding Froggy Bottom Bog, and then they'll just hit one of those camps again.”

“Couldn't we ask the Watch for help?” Spike offered. “This is technically still town property that’s being invaded; Ponyville can’t just abandon their obligation to keep it in order after they agreed to let us stay here.”

“I'll put in another request, but Amethyst Star said they can barely cover their own patrols.” The Captain scuffed an armor-shod hoof against the gravel in frustration. “It’s all just one big never-ending game of Mahlwurfs-and-Mallets.”

“If… I may offer a suggestion, darling,” Rarity spoke up, “What if we made the Lunar artifacts less profitable to steal? Right now, this… outfit is the only one offering any up, but if we sold a few ourselves, or even just put them on public display… maybe their demand would dry up? Crime is a business like any other, after all.”

“Yeah, why do we gotta keep all this business so darn quiet, anyways?” Applejack cut in, “Ah mean, Ah’m all for keepin’ them reporters outta Ponyville, but… maybe they wouldn’t try so hard to get in here if’n a few of us went someplace else and talked to ‘em?”

Twilight shook her head. “I’ll mention your suggestions to Celestia and Shining Armor in my next report, but I personally don’t think either is a good idea. For one thing, we aren’t the ones who decide what happens to Lunar artifacts at all- they belong to Luna and the other Lunar survivors, and those ponies have been pretty unanimous in what they want done. They fought pretty hard to keep up their gear during the Rebellions, and now they want to make sure all of it ends up back in Fillydelphia Harbor with them. We -umm, the Academy- are really incredibly lucky to have been given the chance to study these artifacts at all.”

Sitting down across from her, Vortex nodded.

She looked out over the yard, briefly expecting that the missing crate to appear, magically overlooked, safe and sound on the loading dock. It failed to materialize. “Some of this stuff is also really dangerous in ways we didn’t immediately recognize. Think about the pillars we found in the Bog. We spent weeks passing over them and thinking they were completely inanimate, but they have extremely powerful magical defenses. What if we’d decided they were safe to exhibit to the public, and then one decided to start spawning those ghost construct things in the middle of a crowded museum? A lot of ponies could get seriously hurt! We just… we still know so little about any of this, even less than we thought when we started working on the problem, and I’d rather give out no information at all than give out information that turned out later to be completely wrong. Ponies could get into serious trouble following our bad advice, and creeps like that ‘Lunar Equestrian Studies Society’ or whatever they’re calling themselves now would eat it up with a spoon.”

“So much of what we’ve uncovered is also… well, it’s kind of personal to Luna and her Guards,” the scholar continued, “The press would have a field day with things like… like what happened to General Silver Shade, or the condition of some of those Lunar soldiers we saw as ghosts, and that’s really not any of their business.” She shook her head. “Right now, I… guess there isn’t a lot more we can do here except clean up.”

She looked over to Marigold, who made a small “over here” gesture with her right forehoof.

Confused, Twilight followed the Captain over to a section of gravel between two other train cars, out of sight of the rest of the group. “Listen,” the Guardsmare muttered, “right now, we need to start thinking about somepony inside our operation being connected to this. Now, the Academy staff and my Guards all went through pretty serious background checks just to get here, but these Ponyville mares… well, that Apple farm takes a lot of bits to run, and somepony who can walk off with our gear could just as easily make sure the Defense Ministry ‘loses’ a few of Rainbow Dash’s old files…”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed, and her ears snapped forward. She wanted to ask just how Marigold could possibly have known that, but then realized doing so would only confirm what were, most likely, just suspicions on the Captain’s part. After a moment of open-mouthed stammering, she settled on “What’s all this about Rainbow Dash having files?”

“Listen, Doc, I’ve seen Dash out in the field, and I read your report about everything she did to help take down Nightmare Moon. The only reason she hasn’t made Master Sergeant by now is either she never actually wanted a career in the military -which I doubt- or somepony higher up than you or me blackballed her file.”

“If, that’s the case, and I’m not saying one way or the other…” Twilight scuffed half-heartedly at the gravel with one hoof. “… then that’s her business and not yours, understood?”

Marigold’s expression shifted in an unreadable sort of half-state for a few seconds, before finally settling on professionally blank. “Yessir.”

Twilight looked back over her shoulder at Applejack, Dash, and Vortex, before turning back to Marigold. “And since you read my report on Rainbow Dash, you know there's not a chance in Tartarus she'd do this to us.” She stepped past the Captain and back out into the main section of the Yard, waving at her assistant. “OK. Right. And, Spike? We’ll need another box of gold wire for the locks, I want to switch them all out with a different design.”

“Already ordered.”

“And we’ll want to-”

“Shuffle the work shifts for the volunteer yard workers? I’m halfway through drawing up another schedule. I’ll also go around this evening and change the lock codes to new ones after the trains are loaded, myself.”

“And what about the-”

“Had one of the Guards go pick up your new thaumoscope yesterday.”

She gave him a quick pat on the shoulder. “Thanks, Spike. Oh, and do you know where Sergeant Leafspring’s gotten off to?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her since… like, six o’clock last night, actually.”

“She didn’t report for duty this morning, either,” Marigold added, “Of course, it’s Leafspring, so she might just be sleeping it off in a ditch somewhere. She doesn’t have any part in yard security, so I’m not too worried.”

“She came ‘round the farmhouse a little after eight last night,” Applejack interjected, “she’s been chattin’ up Big Mac an awful lot lately, not that Ah really mind or nothin’. Ah sold ‘er a basket of apple fritters to share with you other grunts, she set off again ‘round ten, and that’s the last any of us ever saw ‘er…”

“Well, she’s also the only other pony in town who’s qualified to program the thaumograph’s discrimination matrix, so I guess I’m going to have to go ahead and spend the rest of the morning doing that myself,” Twilight muttered, already heading for the gate.

It was probably going to be another long day.

(♫)

Spike awoke, as he usually did, at approximately eight-thirty the next morning. He tidied his basket, scrubbed himself clean in the Golden Oaks’ tiny shower, and picked up the Times of Canterlot from the front step. He skimmed over the daily report from the Station that Derpy always carried over along with it, and after confirming that no urgent crises were in development, left both the report and the Times on Twilight’s desk. Then he considered breakfast at Sugarcube Corner before settling on homemade pancakes, careful to separate out the batter he’d mixed with glass beads and natron from Twilight’s unadulterated portion. His guardian managed to hospitalize herself frequently enough under her own power already, without his contributing.

It was only when he sat down at the Golden Oaks’ main table with his plate in front of him and the day’s inventories and budgets beside it, that he noticed the silence. Normally, by this time of morning, Twilight would’ve been awake and moving around up in the loft. Today, he heard nothing. She’d still been away on some sort of investigation in the Everfree Forest when he’d come back from supervising the Station late last evening; and he hadn’t even thought to look over and see if she’d returned when he’d awoken.

“Twilight?” he called.

There was no response.

He climbed back upstairs, cursing himself for volunteering to reset the combination locks in the Station so late last evening, and stopped short when he found the loft empty. Not only was Twilight absent now, but her bedsheets were still in order, something she never bothered to fix until after she’d eaten. She hadn’t returned at any point in the night. That was uncommon, and usually rendered her more or less unable to function for the following day.

Now somewhat concerned, he loped down from the loft and continued into Twilight’s lab in the formerly secret room in the basement. He’d expected to find her either still resolutely chewing on some arcane problem or slumped over asleep in her chair, but the lab was dark and empty.

“Twilight!” he called again, louder this time.

Once again, there was no response.

He walked into Sugarcube Corner to find Rainbow Dash the only other customer. “… we staked out the scene,” the pegasus growled, “had Vortex on the perimeter, ready to move in as soon as the tracking gem so much as wiggled. And then… nothing. Not even one dirty hoofprint!”

“Ooof, sorry. Those Night Guard types really should’ve let you train ‘em into proper mall ninjas!” Pinkie Pie replied from behind the counter.

“Heh. Yeah.” Rainbow Dash nodded, and then her eyes narrowed and her ears flipped backwards. “Hey, wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”

Spike coughed softly. “Um, hi, have… any of you seen Twilight today?”

Rainbow flicked out her wing in a negatory gesture. “Nope! Not since yesterday morning, actually. Why?”

“She didn't come back to the library last night.”

“Heh, maybe she's shacking up with the Guards at the Station again?” Rainbow Dash snickered.

Spike ignored her. "What about Rarity?" he asked.

The pegasus cocked her head, confused. “Why would Rarity be at the Station?”

“I meant have you seen Rarity?”

“Oh, she was here earlier, grabbed her coffee to go, said something about magical silk?” Pinkie Pie answered.

“Okay. Thanks.”

He made his way to Carousel Boutique and found it unlocked, with the front showroom completely empty.

“Rarity?” he called out.

“In the back, Spike. Feel free to join me.”

Somewhat cautiously, Spike slipped through the curtains surrounding the workshop, into an environment of general disarray. A bored-looking Sweetie Belle paused from rolling a loose spool back and forth on the floor with her hoof -generating an appalling tangle of unrolled thread in the process- to look up at him, and then returned to what she was doing. Rarity herself sat hunched over a sewing machine, nearly smothered in stacks of some sort of fine golden silk. It did, admittedly, look quite impressive.

He cleared his throat, and when Rarity barely twitched an ear in his direction went ahead and asked, “Have you seen Twilight around lately?”

“I’m afraid not, darling,” the tailor said without looking up from her work. “But I’ve been more or less shut up in here ever since yesterday afternoon. I… might’ve taken on an order a bit larger than I’d initially figured, you see.”

Spike nodded, then remembered that Rarity wasn’t looking anywhere near him. “I… yeah,” he finally said, “I know how you feel. Twilight hasn’t shown herself since we visited the railyard yesterday, and I’ve probably got a dozen different forms on my desk by now that all need her approval.”

Rarity paused, briefly, and tilted her head sideways. “Where all have you looked?"

"Just Sugarcube Corner, and here."

“You know, darling, there’s no such thing as a twenty-four hour waiting period before the Watch can declare a pony missing. Suspicion of foul play is more than enough.”

He shifted from one leg to the other, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. “Rarity, it’s, umm, a little early for that, don’t you think?”

“Sorry, sugarcube, ain’t seen ‘er since last mornin’,” Applejack looked up from the irrigation ditch she was digging to answer. She waved the shovel she was holding in the crook of her foreleg over to the red stallion unrolling a wad of canvas liner beside her. “Big Mac, you seen anything?”

“Nope.”

“Last Ah saw, Twilight was on ‘er way up to the Station for somethin’. She looked in an awful hurry, so Ah didn’t stop ‘er to ask. That woulda’ been ‘bout… two-ish?”

Big Mac just stared off into the distance for a while, work seemingly forgotten. Then at long last, he said. “’M worried ‘bout Leafspring, too. Ain’t like her to just disappear like this.”

Spike tried his best to produce a reassuring expression, which was difficult when one’s muzzle was pointed and filled with tiny, needle-like teeth. “I’ll… umm… see what I can do."

Captain Marigold peered at him over her little desk in the corner of the officers’ barracks. Her usually crisp white uniform tunic was ever-so-slightly wrinkled, and her intensely yellow coat was doing a poor job of hiding the bags underneath her eyes. “She had the Lapwing out running some kind of search or recon over the Everfree, from about oh-nine-thirty to fourteen-hundred. After that, she came back here and asked if she could have Sergeant Chamomile assigned to her for the day. They grabbed some supplies, mostly survival gear and some instruments from Daycaller’s office, and that’s the last I saw of either of them.”

“Did she file her flight plan like she was supposed to?” Spike asked.

“Yeah. She also dumped a bunch of notes here that I’m not really sure what to do with.” Marigold waved a hoof at one of the several imposing stacks of paper that filled most of her desk’s surface. “I thought of running ‘em over to Verse or Daycaller, but everypony from the Academy’s tied up pretty good as is.”

“Maybe I could take a look at them?”

“I don’t see why not.” The Captain slid the entire stack across her desk, “Just… do it someplace other than here. I’ve got a meeting with the aircrew in five minutes to figure out who might be able to fill in for Leafspring, and now there’s whole infantry squad I’ve gotta get in shape without my First Sergeant.”

(♫)

Spike sat in a folding chair in the corner of Doctor Daycaller’s combination office-lab, watching as the Academy mage fiddled with a collection of brass instruments and chalk markings that surrounded a small crucible of molten tin. Applejack and Rainbow Dash had both decided to join him after about his first hour of waiting, and currently occupied two other chairs on the other side of the mage’s desk. Spike was surprised at how grateful he was for their presence.

The crucible hissed and bubbled as Daycaller muttered a long string of incantations, then grabbed a pair of long metal tongs in his jaws. He picked up the packet of hairs Spike had extracted from the brush in Twilight’s bathroom, and held it under the gas flame that heated the crucible until it was completely consumed. Then he tipped the crucible itself into a much larger cast-iron cauldron full of cold water. Spike watched the molten metal hiss and crackle, solidifying almost instantly into a long, snake-like shape that didn’t quite seem to fit into the three ordinary dimensions. Daycaller fished it out and set it on a wad of paper towels on his desk, then spent a solid minute leafing through a thick leather-bound book and occasionally turning the metal piece to one side or the other.

“Anything?” Spike asked, feeling suddenly impatient.

Daycaller looked at the book one last time, and then shook his head. “Nothing. As far as positional divination goes, taglocked molybdenomancy is about as reliable and… and difficult to frustrate as one can really get, but… it looks as though the metal is just cooling randomly. There should be recognizable planes and bubbles, and I’m not seeing anything like that.”

Rainbow Dash cocked her head and squinted at him for a few seconds, and then asked “So, is there anything else you can do?”

“Well…” Daycaller plucked the metal off the paper towels and carried it over to the compact alchemical workbench on the other side of the room. He dropped it in a small ceramic bowl of fuming orange liquid, into which he added the contents of a few dark glass bottles whose labels Spike didn’t even bother trying to understand. The resulting inky, faintly smoking mixture was poured back into the cauldron, and after that Daycaller adjusted a few instruments, scuffed out some of the runes surrounding them, and chalked in new ones.

The surface of the cauldron gradually stilled and blackened, resembling more and more a hole into some dark, voluminous space than the surface of any liquid at all. Then all at once, the figure of a small purple unicorn snapped into view inside of it.

Applejack whistled appreciatively, then sucked in her breath as the image in the cauldron looked upwards, spun around, and began to gallop in place. After a few seconds, the Twilight-image seemed to cry out and lose her footing, hanging in space for an agonizing moment before tilting at a strange angle with her hooves scrabbling at some unseen surface.

Rainbow Dash’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. This looks like what she did when Nightmare Moon was shooting at us on that big stone platform! That was, like, three months ago. See, look, next she’s gonna grab onto a ledge, and then she’s gonna yell at me not to try and get her…”

True to Rainbow’s word, the unicorn image ceased its frantic scrabbling and then called out something inaudible.

Applejack shook her head. “Everfree?”

Daycaller nodded. “Everfree. We should… really be lucky we’re able to get any kind of a lock at all.”

“Can you… adjust any of this?” Spike asked, “I’d really kind of like to be able to see where Twilight’s located right now.”

“The spell is already supposed to be synchronized with the current time,” Daycaller tapped a particular array of instruments, “if I tried to refocus it into the future to compensate, these two lenses here would have to be inside one another. Maybe if I had a few weeks I might be able to redesign the focusing element, but there’s no telling what it would show or how reliable it would be.” He shrugged, and twisted a valve at the base of the cauldron. The liquid began to drain away, and the image inside became more and more transparent until it had faded away completely. “I wish there was more I could do, but divination into the Everfree… I’m frankly amazed this worked even as well as it did.”

Dash and Applejack both accompanied Spike back to the Golden Oaks. His feelings on the two looking over his shoulder as he attempted to decipher Twilight’s notes could best be described as mixed. On one hoof, their very presence was distracting- Twilight knew when to leave him alone. On the other, however, he still welcomed the company. The library simply wasn’t meant to be this silent at three in the afternoon, without a skinny purple unicorn leafing through texts and muttering to herself in the office.

Much of the material they’d brought back from the Station consisted of copied articles and lists of citations dealing with alchemy, liminology, and esoteric types of matter. Many were from foreign researchers, Abyssinian and Minotaur mostly; some were dated a hundred years or more in the past. All of them were quite dense even by Twilight Sparkle’s standards, and well beyond Spike’s own knowledge. However, he vaguely recalled some of the documents as having come in via firelink not long after Twilight’s trip to Fillydelphia Harbor three days previously. He wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to be pawing through her stuff like this?” Rainbow Dash asked.

Spike leafed through a selection of what appeared to be thaumospectral response equations written in Twilight’s small, blocky script. The first few were recognizable as having been copied from the references he’d already seen, and then Twilight had begun making alterations; to what end he couldn’t determine. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said aloud, “I’d be seeing this sooner or later either way, just to organize and file it. Usually, I’d be the one transcribing these kind of articles, even. And it’s not like there’s anything personal in them- not like the… literature she keeps stashed in the nightstand where she thinks I don’t know about it.”

“Okay, yeah, forget I even asked.”

Finally, he chanced upon a document that was just about comprehensible- a table of coordinates and corresponding thaumograph response numbers. He unrolled a map of the Everfree Forest, one of several copies currently scattered throughout the Golden Oaks, and began marking down the locations. For the most part they formed an even grid over the whole of the forest, but the later entries were all clustered around the location of a particular Lunar Cairn. The Academy archeological teams had designated it 77E- it was one of several that had been found open and empty, although none of the Lunars whose names were listed inside had been recovered alive in Ponyville.

He turned back to Rainbow Dash and Applejack. “I… think we should go and get some of the Guards’ gear. And try and find Fluttershy, too.”

(♫)

It was raining in the Everfree, off and on in dense little torrents, and the air was unaccountably chilly. Despite herself, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Captain Vortex having made it into the forest at four in the afternoon, Fluttershy could see that the sun was most definitely canted towards the west. She recalled that Ponyville’s last scheduled shower had been last week, around ten in the morning, and the clouds above were still tinged dawn-red. In a strange sort of way, that almost made sense. As far as she was concerned, it was just another incentive to keep her head down and her wings clamped tightly to her sides in her borrowed Guard armor.

In addition to their armor and clairaudio-enabled helmets, each of them carried a comprehensive booklet of maps and a tracking gem. The gems were linked to a set of compass-like devices with an enchanted needle pointing to each, as well as to true North and to a magical beacon set up at the main camp on Castle Rock. Finally, Spike had insisted that they all pack a set of magical flares coded to their respective cutie marks, in case they needed to split up. White flares would be sent up every five minutes to establish that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Blue meant to fall back to wherever they had split off from at a careful pace. Green indicated something interesting but not urgent had been found, yellow that prompt assistance was required, and red “Don’t bother coming to save me. Just run.”

If she hadn’t already known the path Twilight and Sergeant Chamomile had taken, Fluttershy doubted she could’ve followed them. Sometimes, their tracks were fresh and clear; sometimes the entire path was nothing but rain-slick mud; and sometimes the path was perfectly undisturbed, but no traces were to be found at all. Still, follow she did, more or less, with the others all trailing along behind her.

For the most part, barring the occasional strange interruptions, two pairs of hoofprints closely followed the geodesic curve Spike’s notes described as the most “direct” path to Cairn 77E. Then, perhaps a hundred yards away from the site, they stopped and did not resume.

Fluttershy held up her left wing in the agreed-upon signal to stop, her heavy pack saddle sliding into the back of her neck. “I’ve been going on for about twenty yards now, and the tracks aren’t picking up again,” the little pegasus explained.

Rainbow Dash scratched the underside of her muzzle with an armored hoof. “Wait, didn’t Twilight and that guard have gems, too? Why didn’t we just ask for a compass for them?”

“Spike tried that, castin’ the spell himself, back at the Library and it didn’t work,” Applejack said, “Remember?”

“Yeah, but, are we sure the gems even work out here? Because nothing really works out here, ”the weathermare asked.

"We could track the gem you ate, right? Back when we were goin’ up against Nightmare Moon?"

"I ate it, I don't know how it works! I'm not a... gastro...gem...ologist? I'm not an egghead."

For the first time since they had set out, Captain Vortex spoke up. "Ah... so that was how you found us so easily."

Applejack cocked her head. “You didn’t know that?”

“Nay! We thought you had tracked us by skill alone!”

“Cool!” Rainbow Dash paused, then looked back at Fluttershy. “So, umm… what do we do?”

“I say we advance to the Cairn, then spiral outwards, until somepony returns to where the tracks are visible,” Vortex suggested.

Fluttershy nodded, slightly. Her friends followed suit.

Their hike up to the Cairn was uneventful, and accomplished much more quickly without the need to keep following often difficult-to-spot traces. It was, just as Spike had told them he’d left it, undamaged and completely empty. The crate of supplies the first survey team had stashed inside for ponies who might later come this way in trouble was unopened, and the ledger atop it where visitors were supposed to record their arrival and departure times still showed only a single entry- one month ago.

Fluttershy looked around, and saw the others were all occupied sketching out a search pattern on one of their maps. She quietly picked up the provided quill in her teeth and signed their names on the form along with the date.

After a few more minutes of discussion, they began to file out of the Cairn. Vortex split off from the group and stepped over to her location. “Fluttershy, I would ask thee to remain here. Should any of us become lost, it would be best if there was a pony with a tracking gem to guide our return.”

Quickly, she nodded. “Okay.” It was drizzling outside again, and she wasn’t overly fond of getting wet. That, and the uneasy feeling of unwelcoming that pervaded the whole of the Everfree seemed a little bit more bearable inside the Cairns and the Academy’s camps.

For a few minutes she was left alone in the structure. Applejack’s voice echoed over the spell in her helmet, “Nothin’ yet,” and then a little later “Rainbow? Vortex? Shit, spell must be toast.” Then, a little while after that, she heard the same phrase again, weak and distant like a long-delayed echo. “Nothin’-yet-Rainbow-Vortex-shit-spell-nothing-yet-toast-Rainbow-Vortex-yet-nothin’-spell-Rainbow-yet-Rainbow-Vortex-yet-yet-yet…” The sound twisted around itself and faded to an inaudible whisper, and then eventually nothing at all. Towards the end, Fluttershy could even fancy hearing words the farmer hadn’t originally spoken, although she would’ve been be hard-pressed to explain what they might’ve been- or even to confirm they were in Ponish at all.

After that, they switched to using the magical flares. Fluttershy watched from the entrance as lights arched into the air every five minutes, a triangle for Vortex, three spheres for Applejack and a jagged line for Rainbow Dash, all of them colored everything’s-alright white. After four rounds of this, she stepped outside and realized she could see another flare off in the distance, this one Lunar purple. It launched, fizzled out, and then launched again in an endless loop. Strange.

Then another flare went up, this one with Applejack’s cutie mark colored found-something green.

Fluttershy stepped out of the cairn, stretched her wings, kicked off and glided through the woods towards the flare. Then she braked, thought to herself, and turned to follow Applejack’s compass needle. Then she stopped again, remembered that the ‘direct’ path could in fact take much longer to traverse, headed back to the Cairn to check the map, and set about retracing the same spiral search pattern the farmer had originally followed.

She caught sight of Applejack after perhaps ten minutes of jumping-and-gliding-and-jumping-again, standing in the middle of a small round clearing surrounded by thick, gnarled gray trees. Scattered around her were what appeared to be gray-coated, blue-armored bodies.

Fluttershy swallowed hard and trotted closer. All of the bodies were indeed clad in dark blue astral steel armor, and all of them were horribly desiccated and emaciated- Lunar revenants. Indeed, the term ‘bodies’ was itself somewhat inapt, as more than a few had been torn to bits by something large and strong and sharp, to a degree that made getting even an accurate count of them difficult. As she walked among them, noting the dented armor and scattered weapons and torn-up soil, Fluttershy supposed there had been between twenty and thirty of them originally. Anypony who gave a number more precise than that would simply be guessing. The whole area smelled very faintly of rotting vegetation, but then again so did a lot of places in the Everfree.

She turned back at the sound of rustling foliage, and watched Rainbow Dash and Vortex glide into the clearing as well. Dash just stared, open-mouthed for a moment, while under his goggles Vortex’s expression shifted from surprise to concern to confusion. “Was… was this place how you first found it?” He asked Applejack.

She nodded. “Didn’t touch a thing.”

“I… think this was a timberwolf attack,” Fluttershy suggested, “they hunt in packs, and wouldn’t immediately be able to distinguish between living ponies and those revenants.” Timberwolves fed so rarely, and were otherwise so territorial, that whether they would’ve found the revenants edible or not was more or less a moot point.

Vortex just nodded.

(♫)

“Hey, up there!” Rainbow Dash called, flicking a wing at one of the gnarled gray trees on the border of the clearing. Fluttershy and her friends drew closer, and in the dim light the pegasus was finally able to detect equine forms slumped in the lower branches of the canopy.

She kicked off the ground again and drifted closer. All three of the bodies were Lunars clad in dark blue armor, their ashen coats even grayer than usual, their eyes sunken in and dried shut, very much dead. A pegasus mare with a beak-tipped helmet still had one leathery wing pressed against a long gash that ran from her shoulder up her neck; given the depth and lack of appropriate tourniquet, blood loss had probably claimed her. Two stallions, another pegasus and an earth pony, were huddled up against each other in an odd position, heads tucked down and their legs curled up against their barrels- they were in poor enough condition by now that it was difficult for Fluttershy to tell, but if she were to guess both had simply frozen to death in the middle of summer.

From the ground below her, Captain Vortex uttered a string of curses so vicious and archaic that Fluttershy had never heard them outside of her record collection.

Rainbow Dash gave a low whistle. “Hey, uhh, you doin’ okay?”

He stood stock-still for a little while, then swallowed hard and nodded.

“They’re… pretty far along in… well, in decomposing,” Fluttershy finally muttered, unsure of what else to say. “I think they’ve been out here ever since the Summer Sun Celebration.” Of course, this being the Everfree, she would’ve also believed their having decayed right down to skeletons after being seen alive three hours previously, or having been casualties of the original Rebellion a thousand years ago.

“Then why has nopony found them, before us?” Vortex demanded.

“Ah dun’ think they were properly here before,” explained Applejack, “or maybe ‘here’ wasn’t here before, either. This parta’ the forest’s tangled itself up worse’n a crockpot fulla’ garter snakes.”

“Yeah, I think I was picking up my own tracking gem a little ways back,” added Rainbow Dash. “I found my own hoofprints, too. Either mine, or yours or Vortex’s. What’d Pinkie always say? ‘Time is bent and space is flexible’ or something?”

“Ah bet Twilight’d know…”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence before Vortex spoke up again. “This, at least, explains why their Cairn was found empty. I fear their fellows in the others may have met the same fate…”

Fluttershy let herself drift back down to ground level, briefly examining the discarded Lunar equipment scattered at the base of the tree- a broken potion bottle, a small buckler shield, a rune-inscribed stone, and two smashed canteens. “Do you think this might’ve been what Twilight was looking for?”

Nopony answered. After a few seconds, Rainbow Dash shot a quick look over at Vortex and then ducked her head. “Girls? Do you think this is… our fault? All the Lunar zombies keeled over as soon as we fried Nightmare Moon, and if they were fighting timberwolves at the time…”

Fluttershy stepped back through the patch of torn-apart underbrush that made up more or less the center of the ‘battlefield’. The Timberwolves might’ve hauled off a few intact corpses, but everything she could see was effectively shredded. “I don’t think we need to worry about that,” she said out loud, “all of these… bodies?… were torn apart, they didn’t just collapse.”

“So, why didn’t the guys in the tree just fly away?” Rainbow asked.

For the first time since she’d arrived in the clearing, Fluttershy looked directly upward at the dense forest canopy. The longer she stared, the deeper it seemed to become. Light was coming down from somewhere, but it was anypony’s guess as to where. “They couldn’t.”

“We should… prob’ly get outta here, sugarcube,” Applejack suggested. “This place is… well, it’s givin’ me the screamin’ willies. And,” she looked back at the tree, where Vortex had quietly picked up the dropped runestone and was currently in the process of slipping it into his pack, “the Station an’ Fillydelphia Yards’re both gonna wanna know ‘bout these bodies sooner, rather ‘n later.”

(♫)

“… and… I think that’s about it,” Fluttershy explained to the others gathered around the scuffed oak conference table in Ponyville’s town hall- Spike, Derpy Hooves, Amethyst Star, Captain Marigold and Doctor Daycaller. Vortex had already boarded the six o’clock train to Fillydelphia Harbor, to inform Princess Luna of the discovery of her wayward troops.

The small purple dragon leafed through another stack of charts. “Those Lunars you found were pretty much dead center in the area Twilight was scanning. Umm, so to speak.” Nopony laughed. “The focus depth of her last few scans was a couple of meters lower, though. She started scanning underground and never made it up to treetop level; in fact she stopped right at the ground.” He scratched absentmindedly under one greenish fin. “I wonder if there was anything special they were carrying? I’d actually like to take the Lapwing out for another look at the forest.”

“That’s, uh, actually going to be a little bit complicated,” Daycaller spoke up. “Captain Marigold had me take a look at the thaumospectral system, and it’s… set into a configuration that… well, makes it basically unusable. I’m not… actually sure how to undo some of the changes.”

“I was mostly wanting to just search visually and maybe use the sound system to try to signal anypony,” Spike amended, “if Twilight just sends up a flare, we might be able to follow it back down to her.”

Marigold’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’re already dealing with potentially aggravated timberwolf activity here; I don’t think we should be flying around making loud noises over the forest. Especially while our airship mechanic’s decided to go AWOL on us.”

“What about a wider search with infantry? Fliers and ground teams?” the dragon suggested.

“What sort of divinations would they be using? Would we have time to train them?” Daycaller asked, leaving Fluttershy wondering quietly to herself at what point it had been decided that eyes and ears alone would not have been sufficient.

Marigold rapped her hoof against the table. “Negative on that one. We’re short-hoofed enough as is, I just don’t have the troops to pull away from patrols.”

“Then I’ll revise the patrol schedule so some are free,” Spike shot back.

“Not without Twilight to sign off on it you won’t,” Daycaller muttered.

Very, very briefly, Fluttershy considered saying something to the Academy pony in return, but it seemed the entire group had already more or less forgotten her.

“I wish I could send some of the weather team to help you,” said Derpy Hooves, her laborious pronunciation even slower than usual, “but we’re working double shifts on watch anyway. My ponies need to spend some time with their families, you have to understand…”

Spike looked over at Amethyst Star. “What about the Watch? This… this can’t be the first time somepony’s gotten lost in the Everfree around here, can it?”

“Spike, my officers were the first ones Doctor Sparkle booked up with additional patrols near the Station.”

Marigold leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and shook her head. “I really wish there was something I could do for you, Spike, but… the project’s got other problems in front of it right now, and there’s not a lot of chips left on the table. We’ll just have to wait and see, and hope for the best.”

Author's Note

Well, here we are again, with another very original-content-heavy episode. Much like Feeling Pinkie Keen, Stare Master was an episode that originally stood out to me solely due to the monster making an appearance at the end. After rewatching it, I decided that the CMC disappearing (and, by proxy, Fluttershy’s attempts to wrangle them) were serious enough to merit including as well, but it’s still a slice-of-life episode pretty well contained within a 22-minute runtime. As a result it was a great place to continue to develop the wider “Twilight’s investigation versus the world” overplot.

They won’t all be like this; some will be more like Friendship Is Magic EC in terms of similarity to the original episode, or even more similar, especially later on. But comparatively few of those come from Season 1 of the show, and even fewer of those are staying in “Season 1” of EC. Part of this, I’m sure, is that Season 1 of the show contained a lot of rough, strange, and otherwise not-so-great episodes; as a result I had to “fill in” a lot more original content for them. Once I decided that this “season” would contain mostly original content, other episodes that needed a lot of patching naturally gravitated to it. Season 1 of the show was also before it started really having a lot of arcs and continuity in it (other than “occasionally mention the Grand Galloping Gala is going to be a thing”, as discussed previously). Therefore, it has become a repository for a lot of “loose” episodes with nothing really connecting them to anything else, and a lot of those episodes ended up having more original EC material added to make them connect.

Unlike Feeling Pinkie Keen EC, this whole project came together extremely quickly over the course of about a month, from the middle of March into the middle of April. This will probably be the last “clue-and-deduction-based mystery” EC story for a little while, as later ones will focus on more direct problems that need to be directly confronted. It’s just kind of a coincidence that Feeling Pinkie Keen EC and Stare Master EC ended up back-to-back after the already somewhat clue-and-deduction-based season opener.

Thanks, as always, to Serketry for rewriting between half and a third of my dialogue, solving the Big Puzzles, reading all of this crap before it’s been edited*, and otherwise generally being a coauthor.

*and editing it right now, Admiral.

He pointed out that in the show, while facing north, the sun moves from west to east through the sky, which is the opposite of how it appears on IRL Earth.

That was weird, so I decided to keep it in.

Extended Cut’s “official” theory about what Timberwolves actually are was mostly inspired by this drawing Serketry and I chanced across one day, although it takes more than one dead regular wolf to form a single Timberwolf. Rather, they’re made of an entire pack that died all at once, and coalesced into a sort of “collective average wolf spirit,” like a Jungian archetype of lupinity. They can appear outside of the Everfree, but only very rarely, after forest fires, mass exterminations, and so on. There is indeed a reason why there are so many more in the Everfree, but that’s a story for another day- specifically, Castle Mania Extended Cut.

Serketry and I had different theories about how their metabolism operates. I figured they were in fact hollow and derived energy solely from the plants that made them up, only going through the motions of “eating” because that’s what wolves do. He posits they can in fact hold food inside of themselves, and “digest” it in a plant-like way, with roots. Neither system is particularly cleanly or self-contained, hence the distinctive odor.

This explanation raises the question of why there aren’t, like, Timberaphids or Timberlemmings, or any other creatures that regularly die en masse in environments with enough living plant detritus to support them. However, I think it makes sense for only animals above a certain level of intelligence and sociability to have the psychic persistence to aggregate the way wolves do. Interestingly, corvids are also highly intelligent and highly sociable, creating the possibility of Timberravens, and I have zero problem with this.