So Much For Strangers

by Bandy

Rating: teen
Tags: Sad, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Adventure, Twilight Sparkle, Slice of Life, Death
Length: 26878

Word of a three-eyed sorcerer wielding a strange new form of magic propels Twilight Sparkle on a journey into the ancient wilderness of the Equestrian north.

Equestria isn’t what it used to be.

The changes are too incremental for a normal pony to notice. But for Princess Twilight Sparkle, now several hundred years old, life is becoming an incomprehensible blur.

Word of a three-eyed sorcerer wielding a strange new form of magic propels the princess on a journey into the ancient wilderness of the Equestrian north. In a cabin hundreds of miles removed from civilization, Twilight grapples with the strange politics of cattle farms, the morality of infanticidal deer, and the raw memories of ponies pushed to the margins of a rapidly changing world.

Equestria isn’t what it used to be. Maybe it could be better.

A meditation on generational trauma and change.

Published 2021-08-15 18:30:02 UTC
Last updated 2021-08-15 18:30:02 UTC

Two-Headed Calf

The lasers might have killed a regular pony, but Twilight hadn’t been one of those in a long time.

The detachment of guards flying behind her scattered as another volley of red-hot plasma shot through the air. Her earpiece came to life, feedback laced with lancing shouts. The noise made her flinch. She wanted to rip the thing out, but the sergeant had insisted she needed to be able to hear everyone, especially with how the wind whipped up around the mountains and made barking orders impossible.

Then a second laser beam ricocheted off her side, and she remembered her mission.

The lasers came from a clearing in the endless forest below, a tiny cabin half-melting into the treeline, and a speck of a yellow unicorn standing beside it.

“Let’s land in the clearing,” Twilight suggested. Not ordered, suggested. But when she spoke, even casually, mountains moved. In this case, the scattered formation of pegasi guards raced into a spear-tip formation and dove towards the clearing, moving as a single fluid entity, dodging more laser blasts flung their way, cutting through the icy air towards their target.

Twilight flapped once, then glided down behind them.

By the time she landed, the guards had already transitioned to ground warfare. Each guard tapped their foreleg gauntlets, activating a sunlight-yellow mana shield large enough to crouch behind. They formed a shield wall two-thick and sounded off, one after the other.

Their voices rang in Twilight’s ears painfully. If only there was some way to turn the earpiece down. Or off. Off would be nice.

Then, all of a sudden, there was silence. The guards stood at the ready behind their shields. Twilight was behind them. Snow skittered over snow, a continuous whoosh from west to east.

In every direction for a thousand miles, the forest did not stir. Ten million million frozen pines creaked like long-abandoned homes.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a light appeared from inside the cabin. Wisps of smoke rose from the brick chimney.

The voice of the guard sergeant came through her earpiece in a terse whisper. “Could be a trap.”

“Or maybe she’s cold,” Twilight replied. She started to walk around the wall of guards.

“Princess--”

The cabin door cracked open. A bolt of scorching hot magic slammed into the shield wall. The guards bristled in surprise. Twilight paused.

“Stay away!” came a mare’s voice from inside.

“We just want to talk,” Twilight said.

Another laser beam hit their shields. It ricocheted off and roared into the sky. The guard growled, “Princess, this is getting us nowhere.”

“Be patient, sergeant.”

The sergeant motioned to his left, and a guard peeled off the shield wall. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long cylindrical tube with a mana crystal attached to the end. Twilight had seen it fired on practice ranges before. She didn’t have to imagine what it would do to the cabin.

In a single motion, Twilight leapt over the wall of guards and put herself between their shields and the cabin.

“Guards, move up!” the sergeant shouted right into Twilight’s ear. “Princess, get back.”

“Hold, sergeant. That’s an order.”

The wall wavered and paused. Twilight turned towards the cabin, half expecting more lasers. But nothing came. Light poured through the window, an orange inviting glow. Steam billowed happily from the chimney, utterly oblivious to their standoff.

“May I come in?” Twilight called out.

“No,” the mare shot back.

“What if I gave you something?”

“I’ll give you more lasers, you weirdo.”

“I have a peace offering.”

There was a pause. “What kind of peace offering?”

Twilight reached into her saddlebag. “Lavender soda and half a loaf of sweet bread.”

The mare paused to consider her options. “Got any butter for the bread?”

“I was going to save the butter for bargaining later. But since you didn’t shoot me when you had the chance, I’ll throw in the butter too.”

The door slowly creaked open. The guards tensed behind their shield wall. The sergeant drew a sharp breath right in Twilight’s ear.

The unicorn poked her head out. She had golden fur and a rough, royal-blue mane. Her eyes, the same shade of blue as her mane, darted from Twilight to the guards, then back to Twilight. She had some of a horn, but a good three quarters of it had been shattered, the stump worn smooth with time.

That wasn’t the most striking thing about the unicorn, though. At the base of her horn was a mass of scar tissue in the shape of a vertically-oriented slit eye.

“Leave them outside,” she said, gesturing to the guards.

Twilight spared a sympathetic glance at the sergeant. “Feel free to start a fire if you’d like.” She ripped the earpiece out with a great deal of satisfaction and tossed it to the sergeant before trotting to the cabin.

The cabin was dug half a meter into the earth, making for a surprisingly spacious interior. Over the fire in the hearth hung two kettles, one large and one small. The unicorn took the smaller of the two off the flames with her hooves and poured out hot water into two mugs. Into the mugs went pine needles and some herbs Twilight couldn’t recognize.

“I put some stew on,” the unicorn said as she hoofed one mug to Twilight. “It’ll be ready in a bit. You can have some if you want.”

Twilight nodded her thanks. “What call I call you?”

“You came all the way out here but you don’t even know my name?”

Twilight chuckled mirthlessly. “Kronr, right? That’s a northern name.”

Kronr nodded. “All the names in my family are derivatives of Chromatic. My dad wanted something more modern for me. That, or...” she pointed to her forehead. “He didn’t want anything to do with me.”

“We’ll get to that.”

“Goodie.”

Twilight let the word bounce off her like Kronr’s other laser beams. “You put a lot of ponies in danger, Kronr. You know that, right?”

Kronr shifted uneasily in her seat. “They made me.”

“But you still tried to hurt them.”

“They tried to hurt me first. Everypony always hits me first, then I get in trouble for hitting back. It’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not.” Kronr seemed surprised by Twilight’s concession. She closed her mouth and curled around her mug of steeping tea, a silent consent for Twilight to continue. “I did some research into your family, Kronr. Seems like they’ve been dealing with the question of fairness for a long time.”

“Oh, that. We never saw it like that.”

Twilight detected some malice in Kronr’s voice. “So how did you see it?”

“We didn’t see it as anything. We grew up with it. It was normal.”

“Your family was one of the first in Equestria to farm cattle. Ponies outside that industry don’t understand you. I don’t understand you. But I want to. Help me get it.”

Kronr smirked. The fire crackled. As Twilight watched, transfixed, the scar ripped--no, blinked open. A third eye rolled in its socket independent of the other two and fell with immense gravity on the princess.

Kronr’s lips peeled back. “How about that other half of that sweet bread?”

Chromatic Wind leapt over the fence and raced towards the barn where her brother stood. Sweat beaded on the small of her back and in the hollows of her pegasus wings folded tightly against her sides. It was summer. Scorching. Manure and magnolias choked the air. The fields were fat with crops and the barns were fat with cattle.

Her brother was named Chromatic Flowering Chrysanthemum--Chrys, for short. He held the door open long enough for Chromatic Wind to get inside, then slammed it behind them. Darkness rushed in, and her eyes adjusted to the light coming through the cracks in the side of the barn, thick as floating bars of gold.

“Let us out,” one cattle lowed. The rest took up the call. “Let us out.” “Let us out.” “Let us out.”

Chromatic Wind ignored them and raced to the back of the barn. The stink was monumental. A hundred sweltering bodies and mildew and hay and afterbirth.

A mass of cattle bodies crowded themselves into the corner of the last stall in the row. “Let us out,” they echoed in almost perfect unison. Chromatic Wind’s father had assured her there was nothing to be afraid of, that the many heads of cattle had one brain and spoke as a single unified organism, and it was completely normal. but that explanation failed to erase just how creepy it was to hear them all speak at once.

“Move,” Chromatic Wind commanded.

“Let us out,” they replied in chorus. “It’s so hot.”

“Move.”

“It’s so hot.”

“It’s back there, alright.” Chrys hopped from right to left, nervous energy gripping his twitching muscles. “Tell ‘em to move again.”

Instead, Chromatic Wind walked up to the nearest cattle and pushed it out of the way. The cow cried out and stumbled. The rest stumbled away in lock-step, like bowling pins. Collective cow tipping.

The mother cow sat curled up in the corner, too exhausted to lift her head. Her newborn lay before her, suckling happily on her udders. She stared at Chromatic Wind and Chrys with wide, terrified eyes. She opened her mouth but only puffs of hot air and strings of spit came out.

Her newborn baby looked up.

Chromatic Wind gasped and took a step back. Chrys let out a high, whistling whinny. The cattle who they’d knocked over a moment ago flew into a panic, bleating and mooing in a chorus of anguish.

The newborn baby calf stared placidly at the ponies through two sets of eyes, one on its main head, another on the second head growing crookedly from the side of its neck.

Kronr realized she’d found a clearing when she ran out of trees to lean against. She’d been stumbling from one to the next for what felt like weeks, an endless zigzagging plod north.

The clearing changed that trajectory. She pushed off from one tree, expecting to find another, took a few steps, flailed in empty space, and collapsed face-first into the snow.

Solve the pain first. Then the panic. She removed her grey beanie long enough to wipe the snow off her face, then pulled it back on. She paused when she saw blood on her hoof. She touched her face again. More blood. She’d scratched open her cheek and she couldn’t even feel it.

She picked herself up and plodded back to the treeline. It had been three days since entering the Northern Forest, and this was the first clearing she’d found since leaving the trailhead. Clearings spelled danger. There were pegasi somewhere overhead, hiding in the clouds and creeping through the canopy. They’d whipped up this storm to conceal their movements. They were tracking her. If she wasn’t careful, they’d find her. They’d dive in formation like royal guards. They’d... they’d...

The thought sent her into wild convulsions. Better to die out here than go back--she’d made that decision when she stepped off the trail. But she didn’t want to die, either.

She looked up. Low clouds ripped across the sky, grasping at the tops of the trees. Her survival experience--all eight days of it--told her to look for a hollow to break the wind.

As she skirted the clearing, she heard a branch snap somewhere across no-pony’s land.

She dropped to her belly. All the frozen snow and icicles clinging to her matted fur made her blend in with the snowbank. Careful not to cut herself on accident, she wiped the freeze out of her eyes and scanned the opposite side of the clearing for movement.

Half an hour passed with no sign of life. She could have waited half an hour more. She felt proud of herself for being so thorough. This forest seemed to be a wellspring of patience as much as danger.

She stood up again and moved to the other side of the clearing. Concealment was a breeze when she was stationary, but moving through thick snow was impossible without kicking up a storm of powder.

When she finally made it to the source of the noise, she found the place deserted. Whatever was there had seen her coming and stolen away.

She was just about to continue deeper into the forest when she noticed something green sticking up from a nearby snowback. There, she found a perfect pony-sized divot in the snowbank, complete with a bed of fallen pine needles.

Tiredness assailed her like a silent thief, stealing the last reserves of strength from her legs. She collapsed in the hollow. For the first time in eight days, the wind couldn’t touch her.

The house was pandemonium by the time Chromatic Wind and Chrys returned with the two-headed calf.

Fourteen of the twenty six Chroma family foals waited by the door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the calf. The older ten stood around the dining room table, shouting at one another over what to do with it. Aunts and uncles dashed between the two groups, hopelessly trying to establish order. Granny and gramps and great-granny sat in their usual spots on the living room couch, conversing in feeble whispers. Four dogs dashed beneath the panic, loving every second of it. Three cats sat on the staircase and stared with indifferent eyes.

Chromatic Wind was the first one in. She dashed through the gauntlet of Chroma kin on her way to the living room, keeping the calf tucked beneath her. She felt like a hoofball running back fending off a horde of defensive lineponies.

“Show us!” the other kids hollered at her. They grabbed at her fur, pinched her, nipped at her sides with bared teeth. “Let us see it!”

Just as she made it to the living room, the sound of a deep, authoritative voice made every last one of the Chroma foals freeze. Chromatic Wind fell onto her side and wrapped herself around the calf on instinct.

The sea of foals parted. Her father, Chrome, stepped into the room. Even by earth pony standards, he cut an imposingly large figure. As he approached Chromatic Wind, she noticed his forelegs were nearly as wide as her head. She might have been fifteen, but in that moment she felt no larger than a newborn foal.

Chrome knelt beside his daughter. “Let me see it, Windy,” he said in a soft voice.

Chromatic Wind nodded. Her father took the calf in his forelegs and held it up for the everyone to see. A collective gasp filled the room. All the foals started talking at once, but Chrome silenced them all with a stoney-eyed stare.

“When did you find it?” he asked Chromatic Wind.

“I found it!” Chrys pushed through the crowd of foals and stood beside Chromatic Wind. “I saw it this morning when I was cleaning the stalls. I didn’t know what to do. I ran over to the house, and Windy was there, so I took her over, and...” he trailed off. “Are we in trouble?”

The look on Chrome’s face softened. “No, Chrys. Nopony’s in trouble.” The mood in the living room lightened almost instantly. All twenty six Chroma foals let out a tiny sigh of relief. “I’m proud of you both for doing the right thing and bringing it to me. It must have been frightening, seeing it just lying there.”

“Yeah,” Chrys chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. “I wasn’t scared or nothing. Windy was super brave, too.”

Chrome’s eyes returned to the calf. “What did the other cows do when you took it?”

“Well, we had to push through them to get to the thing, so they were mostly lying on the ground. They put up a fuss, but they didn’t go after us none.”

Chrome nodded. “Cows aren’t smart like us, but they’re smart in their own way. They know what would come of this cow staying in the general population.”

Something about the way Chrome spoke made the hairs on Chromatic Wind’s neck stand up straight. “What would happen if we let ‘em keep it?” she asked.

“No telling what. At best, the other cows would work themselves half to death trying to keep the thing alive. At worst, it would actually survive and pass along faulty genes.”

The feeling of uncertainty formed a pit in Chromatic Wind’s gut. It was a bottomless pit, a well you threw pennies into when you wanted to make a wish. “Well, it’s alive now.”

“Yeah,” Chrome nodded. “But tomorrow? Or the next day? Do you know how to take care of a two-headed calf?” She shook her head. “Neither do I. Neither does anyone.”

“We gotta keep it. Or give it to the town vet. Maybe he’ll know what to do with it.”

Her father shook his head. “Look at the poor thing, Windy.” He held the calf up for Chromatic Wind to examine, but she wasn’t sure which set of eyes she was supposed to look at. They were black like lacquered marbles and blinking slowly. “It’s suffering.”

“It’s not suffering.”

“I’ve been raising cattle twenty four years now--”

“They’re called cows, dad.”

“Windy.” His voice gained a biting edge. She clamped her lips shut. “Look at its spine.” He traced the thin ridges of bone down the calf’s back. “See how it’s twisted?”

“Yeah,” she said. The words came out tasting bitter.

“It’ll never walk with a spine like that. Look at the head too. It’s all misshapen. I doubt it’ll even be able to talk to the rest of the cattle.”

“You don’t know for sure,” she said. Her voice cracked. Was she crying? She couldn’t tell. The foals were all so close and the room was so hot. It was unbearable. She wanted to tear the calf out of her father’s hooves and run as fast as she could.

“It’s suffering,” he said. He stood up. Gods, it felt so final. She thought she was going to be sick.

“You don’t know that,” she pleaded. “You don’t know.”

“Chrys.” He turned to Chromatic Wind’s brother, her closest friend and confidant of fourteen long years. “Fetch me a hammer from the tool box in the garage. The small one will do.”

Chrys hesitated. His eyes flashed over to Chromatic Wind. The two stared at each other, frozen.

Then he took off towards the garage.

“No!” Tears spilled down her cheeks. The air stifled her like tons of combustible hay. The room was hot, dizzyingly hot. She flung open her wings and lunged for Chrys only to strike her father instead. She swung as hard as she could, beating uselessly against his legs, screaming, “You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know!”

The twenty five other Chroma foals made a path for Chrome to the porch outside. Chromatic Wind clung to her father’s legs, screaming, weeping, begging him to stop.

Chrys appeared a moment later with a shiny ball peen hammer. When Chromatic Wind saw it, she let out a wail and lashed out at Chrys. Her father’s massive foreleg scooped her up and deposited her next to Chrys, who wrapped his own forelegs around her to keep her in place.

“Stop it,” he whispered into her ear. “Please, just stop it.”

She tried to squirm away, but even though Chrys was a year younger than her he was a colt and an earth pony and three times as strong and it wasn’t fair, none of this was fair, this was wrong. They didn’t know. They didn’t--

Her father shut the screen door behind him. The blinds were drawn, and she couldn’t see onto the porch. Her cries caught in her throat as she listened to the floorboards creak under the weight.

Then there was a moment of silence. Then she heard two awful, sickening thuds, one right after the other. She screamed, and when there was no air left in her lungs she wheeled around and punched her brother square in the jaw and ran.

Twilight took another sip of her tea.

Finishing it was a diplomatic affair in which she took no joy or pleasure. But offending Kronr could prove disastrous. So down the hatch it went. She swallowed, hard, then asked, “What was your relationship to your family?”

“Great.” She had already finished off the entire chunk of sweet bread. The sugar and carbs seemed to bring her back to a more stable state. Her third eye rolled back up into her head and closed. “How many of them died in the explosion, by the way?”

“None.”

A slight frown crossed Kronr’s face. “Oh.”

Twilight didn’t like where this conversation was going, so she tried shifting their focus away from death and bombings. “Did you build this cabin all by yourself?”

“No.” It took an insistent look from Twilight for Kronr to elaborate. “There was a deer living around here. He helped me build it.”

“Just one deer?” Kronr shrugged. “Huh.”

“What do you mean, huh?”

“Well, it’s just that deer usually live in herds. It’s rare to find one by itself.”

“Yeah, well, this one was by himself.”

The ice in Kronr’s voice made Twilight reconsider her next question. Instead, she turned her attention to the cabin around her. “The joints look great.”

Kronr chuckled, a sad, sweet sound. “‘Moss and mud are the key. They trap heat and cover your sins’. That’s something the deer used to say.”

“What was his name?”

She paused. “Toeyak. The cabin was mostly his work. I just helped lift stuff.”

“Seems like Toeyak was a gifted survivalist. And you strike me as a smart pony.” Twilight paused to sip her tea. “I want to be up-front with you, Kronr. You’re going to have to make a difficult decision today.”

Something shifted in Kronr’s eyes. The great well of sparks in the fireplace moved in them like the reflection of a face in glass. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not just here to have tea, Kronr. These are some very serious charges being leveled against you. I want to help you. But I need to know you’re open to helping me back.”

“Why are you here?” Kronr asked suddenly.

“We’re here because--”

Kronr cut in. “You’re not listening.” She pointed outside. “They’re here because I blew up a barn.” Her hoof moved to Twilight. “Why are you here?”

Twilight channeled her inner Princess Celestia and sat up straight. “I’m here because I want to understand you. You blew up a building, but I don’t think you’re evil. It seems your experience growing up on a cattle farm and your unique interactions with unicorn magic--”

“I am not a unicorn.” Kronr leapt out of her chair and put herself right into Twilight’s face. Her lips pulled back in a sneer. “And there’s never been a unicorn born in the Chroma family. Never.”

Princess Celestia wouldn’t flinch. Twilight repeated the mantra in her head as she returned Kronr’s gaze. A stare-down was a useful diplomatic tool which Twilight had practiced over the two hundred or so years she’d been in power. She knew better than most that even when there was no chance for escape, ponies made decisions as if they could pull a ripcord and fly away at any moment.

Kronr hadn’t yet accepted her fate. That was okay. She would need time and space to do that, which Twilight was willing to give.

“Have you ever wondered why so many earth ponies are born on farms?” Twilight asked.

This question had the intended effect of throwing Kronr off balance. “No?”

“I’m serious. Why is it that earth ponies always seem to be born on farms?”

Kronr’s eyes shifted around the room, the rage replaced by awkward confusion. “Uh, that’s kind of an insensitive question, don’t you think?”

“Your hospital records list you as an earth pony, which we know isn’t entirely true. But I’ve been to your farm, and your siblings are all definitely earth ponies. All your neighbors are earth ponies. Friends, relatives--they’re all earth ponies. Why is that?”

Kronr backed off and slid back into her chair. Her eyes stayed locked on Twilight, but her gaze softened. She seemed genuinely curious now. “We’re prolific.”

“But that doesn’t explain the proportions relative to geography. Rural towns produce six times as many earth ponies as urban areas. Six times.”

Kronr looked around nervously. “Uh--”

“As it turns out, birth race has just as much to do with location as it does genetics. An abundance of earth pony magic in the local leylines increases the odds of a foal being born an earth pony. The correlation is even stronger with pegasi. Races are strongly represented in the geographical areas where they’ve historically been strongly represented. Farms are swimming in earth pony magic. Therefore, strong earth pony representation is logical. That, and the social proclivity towards big families.”

Kronr let out a thin chuckle. “My eighteen siblings would agree with you on that.”

Twilight returned the smile. This was good. Smiles were progress. She leaned towards Kronr and said, “It seems family played a defining role in your life, for better or worse. If you’ve ever had an inkling to go back and see them, I could help you with that.”

As soon as the words left Twilight’s mouth, she realized they were a mistake. The light in Kronr’s eyes turned angry. The smile faded. “Who says I want to do that?”

“I’m just saying that if you ever want to return to Equestria--”

“I don’t.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Believe me, I do. But I don’t think you understand the position the two of us are in. There’s a lot of things we have to square before I can leave this cabin.”

“My cabin.”

“Of course. But like I said, there’s a lot of questions that need answering. Like I said before, I’m here because I want to understand why you did what you did.” Getting no answer from Kronr, she continued, “The first step is filling in some crime scene details for us. We need to know how exactly you blew up the barn.”

“With a bomb,” Kronr replied.

“Right. But we need specifics. How did you make it? What kind of chemical agents did you use? We need to know if your family is still in some kind of danger.”

Kronr shrugged. “I sure hope they are. Maybe the bomb will open up a sinkhole and swallow the whole farm up.”

Twilight pursed her lips. In reality, the Equestrian Intelligence Service had already recreated the exact make and chemical construction of the bomb in detail. It had been made of farm implements, after all--nothing sophisticated. But it was as safe an olive branch as Twilight could extend without actually giving anything away. And she needed to get Kronr talking. “If you tell me, the ponies back home will see it as a sign of cooperation. They’ll be more lenient with you if you’re willing to play the game.”

Kronr stood up suddenly, tea forgotten. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll show you.”

Twilight’s concern turned to curiosity as Kronr levitated a cardboard box from the far corner of the room. She took out several pipes, fasteners, two empty plastic bags, and some wire. “Fertilizer goes in these plastic bags. The bags go in one pipe. Ammonium nitrate and my secret spices go in the other pipe. Separate them with something that burns--hay is fine. Put a primer charge in the middle of the hay. Run wires out. Bolt the two pipes together. When you’re ready, rig the wires to a detonator on a timer and run.” Kronr set her tools down on the table and gave Twilight an excitable look. “Are you sure nopony died?”

“I’m positive, believe me. If you were wanted for murder, our entrance would have been much different.”

Kronr let out a sigh and started packing the various materials back into the cardboard box. “I didn’t want to hurt them back then, even after everything they did.” She smiled wanly and shook her head. “Should’a put the ball bearings in.”

Kronr decided the clearing was a good-enough place to start her new life. Using the flimsy tools she’d stolen from the farm, she chopped down a few nearby trees and stacked them around the hollow. Then she stretched a tarp over the top and secured it at all four corners with twine.

This makeshift lean-to worked for all of six hours. When it started to snow that evening, the weight of the powder collapsed the tarp and nearly buried her. Loose snow found its way through the myriad of cracks in the siding and lashed at her face.

And on top of all that misery, she found terror, too. Through the wind and the creaking trees, she could have sworn she heard something walking through the snow.

She didn’t get much sleep that night.

The next morning, after re-tying the tarp on an angle to help sluff the snow, she circled her camp looking for hoofprints. She was just about to give up when she heard another branch snap.

Instinct took hold. She once again dropped to her belly, but this time she had nothing to hide behind and no natural camouflage to conceal her. Her ears twitched as she heard another sound, an almost imperceptible crunch of hoofsteps through fresh powder, twenty yards away and getting closer.

Her beating heart shot into her throat. Her first instinct was to bolt. But all her supplies were back at the hollow. If she took off deeper into the woods, she’d freeze before she had a chance to starve.

The hoofsteps grew closer. Fight or flight? She had to choose, but panic pinned her body to the forest floor. She fumbled blindly in the snow and came up with a small, smooth stone.

The hoofsteps stopped mere yards away. She clutched the rock tightly in her hooves and held her breath.

Then, a voice said, “Hello.”

She let out a very undignified whinney and leapt into the air. She let the stone loose with all her might. It sung through the air and smacked into a nearby tree with a tremendous crack.

She turned in the direction of her assailant and found a deer, dazed and clutching his head. A massive set of antlers, fifteen points and covered in ornate rune carvings, sat atop his head.

Or at least, they sat there for a moment. When the deer reached up to clutch his head, the entire right antler detached and fell into the snow.

“Ow,” he said. Then he collapsed.

Kronr realized with a sinking feeling it wasn’t a tree she’d struck with her rock. She raced towards the deer but paused a few steps away, still wary of the newcomer. Deer didn’t eat ponies. She knew that much. But she’d also heard they communicated entirely through telepathy, so who knew what other strange magic he was capable of?

Was. As in, past-tense. Because she’d just snapped one of the antlers off his head. Was that the same thing as breaking a horn? Her whole body shuddered.

She was about to close the distance and check his pulse when his eyes fluttered open. He sat up, looked around, then picked up the broken piece of antler and turned it over in his hoof.

He let out a little hmm and let it roll out of his grip into the snow.

Kronr took a step back and scanned the ground for another rock. “Sorry. You startled me.”

He looked at her, then at the bed of pine needles. “You’re the one who’s been sleeping in my hollow?”

“Uh.” She glanced back at the sad collection of branches and tarp and rope comprising her camp. “I didn’t know it was yours.”

“No harm, no foul.” The deer smiled, seemingly unaware he’d just been mutilated. “Are you just passing through?”

“I’m going north.” She glanced up at the vast skeletal canopy stretching over their heads. Clouds had rolled in almost imperceptibly overhead, obscuring the position of the sun. “Which way is that?”

He let out a little chuckle. “There’s a blizzard coming from that direction.”

“Doesn’t feel like anything’s blowing in.”

“Maybe not. But all the same, it’s coming. We should widen the hollow and hunker down.”

“Uhh. We?”

“It’ll be easier to make improvements on the hollow if there’s two of us. Your tarp-and-stick method would be fine if it were June or July. But it’s January.”

“My camp’s fine.”

“It’s most certainly not fine. Do you southerners not have cold where you come from?”

The utter deadpan sincerity in his voice made her laugh. “Look, I’m sorry I took your hollow. I’m kinda new here. But I’m just gonna keep going. Thanks for the advice.”

“Very well.” He stood up, wobbled on his hooves like a newborn, and fell backwards onto his haunches.

Kronr rushed to his side without thinking. Pony friendship instinct did not jive with self-preservation. But she’d thrown that rock. She couldn’t just leave him here.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Antlers grow back. Runes and all.”

“But you’ll be okay, right?”

He smiled sheepishly and prodded his one remaining antler like a foal wiggled a loose tooth. “I’ll be okay in no time. If it’s not too much to ask, could you help me start a fire?”

She unslung her saddlebag and pulled out some flint. “Just a fire. Then I’m leaving.”

“Of course.”

She paused a moment over his prone form, then hooked a foreleg under his and helped him over to the hollow. As she went to scrounge twigs off a nearby bush, she noticed him start digging a hole into the snow in which to plant their little fire. If nothing else, the deer was eager to help.

By the time she had returned, he had erected sloping drifts on either side of the hollow to break the wind more efficiently.

“I think I’ve been a bad host,” the deer said. “What’s your name?”

Host. His hollow. Kronr resisted the urge to scowl at the deer. She dropped the pile of tinder as passive-aggressively as possible and stuck out her hoof. “I’m Kronr.”

“Toeyak. Nice to meet you.” The deer stared at her outstretched hoof, his face placid and a little bit confused. “Are you trying to show me something?”

Kronr cringed and put her hoof down. “No, nevermind. Pony thing. Do deer not bump hooves?”

“No. But it’s interesting to know you’re a pony. With all that fur, I thought you were some sort of hybrid yak.”

Kronr looked down at the tufts of floof on her chest and remembered with eviscerating clarity exactly how long it had been since she last trimmed her coat. A hot blush rose on her cheeks, the first heat she’d felt in days. “Thanks,” she muttered.

Toeyak nodded his head enthusiastically. And that was when the other antler dropped.

“Uh oh,” he said, then collapsed again.

Kronr stared at the deer. Then the treeline. Then to the north--or was that west? More clouds, darker and angrier, peered through the canopy. She took a halting step towards Toeyak. Then reversed course. Then doubled back. Then tripled back. North was right there. Probably. Definitely.

...Maybe?

“Drat.” She settled down beside Toeyak and picked up the flint and steel. Might as well be warm if she was going to be stuck here all night.

Chrome took the body of the two-headed calf to the local university. There, the staff dissected it and had it stuffed and put on display for the students to gawk at. They paid him two hundred bits for his troubles. No one told the news. It would only get ugly if the news found out.

“...And then they had the nerve to lecture me about the condition of the heads!” Chrome let out a laugh. Bits of bread crumbs flew from his mouth. He reached across the dinner table for more brussel sprouts.

Twenty four of the twenty six Chroma children laughed politely along with their father. Chromatic Wind and Chrys shrunk in their seats.

“What did you say then, dad?” one of Chromatic Wind’s sisters asked.

“I shrugged my shoulders and told those high-falootin’ doctors, ‘Well, sirs, be happy you got two of ‘em!”

The house shook with laughter. Chrys joined in this time. Chromatic Wind wished she had put her head beneath her father’s hammer, too.

“So, Windy.” All at once, every set of eyes pivoted to her. Her heart leapt into her throat. She sat up straight and folded her hooves the way she’d been taught. “Decided to grace us with your presence, I see.”

Chromatic Wind opened her mouth, but only a squeak came out. She frantically gulped down some water before trying again. “Thank you for letting me back in.”

Chrome nodded. “Where’d you run off to? We were looking for you.”

“I was in the woods.”

“Woods are a dangerous place for foals.”

“I’m not a foal. I’m fifteen.”

“But you ran off like a little foal. None of your younger brothers or sisters ran off.”

“They--”

“They were being big fillies and colts. In fact, far as I can see there’s only one little foal at the table right now.”

Her cheeks burned like corrugated tin left out in the sun. “It wasn’t right,” she muttered.

“Sweetie, we don’t need to rehash this old conversation--”

“Maybe we do!”

The words all but exploded out of her mouth. The table fell dead silent. Twenty five Chroma foals buried their eyes in their dinner plates. For a long moment, the only noise in the house was the quiet shriek of silverware against plates.

“Windy,” her father sighed. The pet name carried no love. Not one ounce. She hated it. “That kind of pacifistic thinking will ruin any farm you try to run.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe I don’t want to run a farm.”

“What do you want to do, then?”

“I dunno. Maybe I’ll do some traveling.”

“Oh, so you’ll fly away like your mother? Leave us in the dust?”

Damn him. He knew how to hurt her. Twenty five Chroma foals, and she had to be the one born with wings. “That’s not what I meant,” she said. Her hooves gripped her silverware defiantly.

“Then what do you mean?”

“Windy, just stop,” Chrys whimpered from across the table.

“Be quiet, Chrys.”

Chrys wilted in his chair and shut his mouth.

Chromatic Wind jumped up from her seat. The chair made a horrible scraping noise, dragging everyone else’s attention back to her. “This is crazy,” she said in a cool, collected voice. “I’m running away.”

“Again?” Chrome laughed. “Where will you go this time? Think the neighbors’ll take you? We’re cattle keepers. Nopony wants us. They hate us.” Chromatic Wind ignored her father’s words as she walked into the kitchen and pulled open the doors to the pantry. “What are you doing now?”

“I told you. I’m running away.” She reached for a can of pickles spiced with mustard greens--her favorite.

“Everything you take from there, you’re taking right out of your siblings’ mouths,” Chrome said. “We ain’t got enough to go around without you stealing it.”

“I’m not stealing.”

“It’s my food, and I say you’re stealing. I’ll have the constable throw you in jail.”

With a groan, she abandoned the spicy pickles and returned to the table. “Come with me Chrys,” she said. “You’re not like them.” The young colt's eyes went wide. They flickered back and forth from her to Chrome. His trembling lips opened, then closed. “Chrys, please. You can’t stay here.” Still, he refused to budge. Something started gnawing at her resolve. Was she really about to do this? Wouldn’t it be easier just to sit back down? “Please. Don’t make me do this by myself.”

“If you’re gonna go,” Chrome said, “best be going.”

Chromatic Wind gave her younger brother, her best friend, her compatriot, one final pleading look. Then she stormed out the door.

Outside, her composure broke. She hollered curses into the endless country sky. It was twilight, and the blue directly above her had just started its gradual gradient shift into orange near the horizon. Anger made everything feel good and horrible at the same time. Sleep in the woods? Goodie. Leave your life behind? Goodie. Leave Chrys behind? Goodie.

She unfurled her wings and gave an experimental flap. The feathers weren’t preened right, and she hadn’t used them for a few days besides the two-second flight up to the second floor loft of the barn. But flight was just like riding a bike, right?

In that moment, she regretted letting her earth pony family convince her she was better off staying ground-bound. One more reason to get away while she still could.

A voice cried out behind her. She turned and saw Chrys racing towards her across the lawn.

“Chrys!” Joy sprung from her heart like a gurgling well. “I knew they wouldn’t get you with that bad talk. We can--”

He stopped a few paces away. She noticed the tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I had to see it for myself,” he said, sniffling.

“What? C’mon, we gotta get outta here.”

“No.” The word flattened her. Her wings sagged. “This is what pegasi always do. They fly away. They leave.”

“Chrys, no. That’s dad talking, not you. I’d never leave you behind.”

“Then what are you doing right now? Go on. Lie.”

Chromatic Wind took a faltering step back. “But... you’re gonna come with. You are gonna come with, aren’t you?”

“Go on,” He snarled. More tears. There was anger in his voice. She heard joy too, all mixed up with the hate. Good and horrible all at the same time. “Fly away like mom. Leave!”

He picked up a rock, as big as the head of a hammer, and hurled it at her head.

Chromatic Wind ducked. The rocked sailed over her head, missing her by inches.

She spread her wings, clumsily dragging herself headlong into the sky before Chrys could find another rock.

True to Toeyak’s predictions, a blizzard rolled over the northern forest and buried the clearing in waist-high snow. One minute, the sky looked vaguely threatening. The next moment, the whiteout fell upon them.

The hollow was all but buried. It took near-constant effort from Kronr to keep the white at bay. The few moments of rest she managed to find passed her by in awkward slow-motion. She’d never been this close to a stranger before, let alone a deer.

Toeyak, once he regained consciousness, seemed remarkably unphased. His first snow-clearing shift was an unmitigated disaster, with more snow winding up inside the shelter than outside. But after the first hour, the fog clouding his mind passed, and he fell into a practiced rhythm of work. Every half hour he would dutifully clear the snow away from their hollow, then crawl back under the tarp where their meager fire sputtered and fall right back asleep.

After a few hours, rhythm and exhaustion finally caught up with Kronr. She closed her eyes to nap, and when she opened them again she found herself all tangled up with Toeyak. She wanted to pull away, but the warmth they passed between each other felt more vital than air. So she settled in. So much for strangers.

Her movement woke Toeyak. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I’m new to this.”

“First blizzard?”

“That too.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Being cold together is preferable to being cold alone.”

She let out a quiet hum of agreement. Her voice sounded louder than normal in this small, snow-lined space. “Does that always happen when you lose your antlers?” she asked.

“Depends. If they fall out naturally, it’s over in a few minutes.”

“Oh. Sorry, again.” And then, in an effort to change the subject, Kronr made a terrible mistake: she said, “Probably helps if you have a herd watching your back if you get knocked out.”

She didn’t notice him bristle. “Probably.”

“Where’s your herd?”

Toeyak’s face went as blank as an untouched show drift. He turned away from her. The heat from his body abated. She scrambled to latch onto his back and retain what warmth she could. No more questions, she decided. Not tonight.

When the blizzard subsided the following morning, Toeyak went out to forage while Kronr set about clearing snow. When he returned, he started a fire and divided the berries into two equal piles.

“Trees,” he said. “We’ll need lots of trees.”

“For what?”

“For structural stability. We’re naturally protected here, but with walls we can retain heat and keep all the wind out.”

“Toeyak, I’m still leaving. I have to go north.”

“You won’t make it a hundred yards in all this snow.”

Kronr shoveled the little pile of berries into her mouth and swallowed hard. “I appreciate your help. But I need to put as much distance between myself and Equestria as possible. So thanks. Stay warm. Good luck. And gooooood--”

She was back not five minutes later, legs quivering with strain, face frozen with chill, icicles of sweat and sleet clinging to her matted fur. She trudged into the hollow and collapsed on her side next to the fire.

Kronr waited until she could feel her face again to say, “We’ll need lots of trees.”

“Trees, yes.”

“And mud, too. Mud and moss for stuffing in between the trees.”

Kronr tapped the ground beneath her. Hard as iron. “Okay.”

“And tools--we’ll need tools.”

“Ah!” Kronr’s half-frozen features lit up. She dug around her saddlebag and produced several multitools, a collapsible saw, and an immaculate hatchet with a menthol-flavored mouth grip.

She noticed Toeyak’s attention gravitating towards the hatchet, so she hoofed it over for him to try. He gave the hatchet grip an experimental lick and went wide-eyed. Kronr burst out laughing.

Toeyak licked his lips where the flavor still lingered, eyebrows furrowed. “Pony witchcraft,” he muttered.

Trees were abundant, but the energy to cut them down was in short supply. The labor left Kronr baking in her winter clothes and close to collapse.

She sat down in the middle of the partially-constructed cabin and rubbed some snow on her forehead. This felt different than farm labor. The stakes were higher. Another blizzard could whip up any day and wipe them off the face of the earth.

Toeyak sidled up next to her and produced a sprig of something green and lumpy from his bag. “Hungry?”

“What is it?”

“Moss.” He pulled another tuft out of his bag for himself. “It’s good. Pretty fresh.”

Kronr’s eyes flashed from the moss to the deer, then back again. Her lips parted slowly, and she took a tiny bite. It was earthy. Mycelial. Sorta mushroomy, but in a different way than the portabellas she used to buy at the market.

She looked over to find Toeyak had already stuffed his entire wad of moss into his mouth. He noticed her staring and returned her gaze, one side of his face comically distended like a foal sucking on a jawbreaker.

A small laugh, a whispering trail of steam, escaped her lips. Then another. Then she was doubled over, laughing hysterically.

“What?” He tilted his head to one side, which only made Kronr laugh harder. “Is something wrong?”

Finally, the laughter stopped. “No.” She stuffed the rest of the moss into her mouth and wrapped her forelegs around herself. “Everything’s fine.”

There was always more work to be done. Like farm chores, only moreso. They worked until the walls stood shoulder-high. Toeyak seemed oddly eager to take on the laborious task of cutting down trees with the menthol-flavored hatchet.

“Got a vendetta against those trees?” she asked, smiling.

Toeyak licked his lips. “Industry is its own reward.”

Once the trees had been cut and arranged, the two packed snow against the walls in driftlike fashion to insulate the inside from the wind. This, Toeyak said, would suffice until the ground was warm enough to make more mud.

That night, then they built a meager fire in the middle of their hollow and settled in for the evening.

“Be honest,” Kronr asked. “Do you think I’ll survive out there on my own?”

“Probably not. But don’t take it personally. Deer have roamed this forest for ten million years, yet every spring reveals a few new sets of bones in the grass.”

Her tired eyes followed the flames, the scant sparks leaping off the wood and into the snow to die. “How long should we stay here?”

“Perhaps another month or two. The seasons change quickly around here.”

“A whole month?”

“Or two.”

She let out a long sigh. “Sorry. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to repay all your kindness. I don’t even have money to give you.”

“Ponies are so concerned with money,” Toeyak said. She thought he would say something else. But he didn’t.

“Why’d you help me?” she pressed.

“Ponies have shown me many kindnesses before. They taught me how to speak when I didn’t have a voice.”

“Ah.” Kronr nodded. Her mind raced to find a polite way of prying deeper. “So, you spent time with ponies before? That’s how you learned our language?”

“I’ve spent more of my life living among ponies than among my own kind. I was born under a blood moon. Very bad omen. The deer elders feared I’d blight the herd, so they used their magic to sever my psychic connection to the herd and left me in the woods to die.”

“That’s awful.”

Toeyak shrugged. “Maybe this decision saved the herd. Who’s to say?”

“Maybe it doomed them instead. They don’t know for sure. They don’t...” The words tasted like deja vu. And anyway, the look in his eyes told her that he’d been through this argument before. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Toeyak tilted his head towards her. His antlers were growing at an unbelievable rate. From nubs the week before, they’d grown to nearly six inches, with a thick layer of smooth velvet covering them. She noticed more runes in the velvet, like ink stains on parchment.

“Want to touch them?” he asked.

Her eyes went wide. Was this some sort of weird deer sex thing? The casual way he’d offered made her doubt that. After a moment of hesitation, she stuck out her hoof and ran it up the length of the outermost point on his antler. It was smooth to the touch, somewhat cold.

“They’re beautiful,” she said.

“You can’t read what the runes say.”

“What do they say?”

He smiled sadly. “I’ll spare you that detail.”

“I’m really sorry for throwing that rock.”

“They would have shed off some other way. It’s of no concern to me.”

She puzzled over his apparent lack of concern for some time. “So, what happened after your herd cast you out?”

“I was still a foal, so I couldn’t do much. But an earth pony couple from a nearby town found me and adopted me. Their sons had all perished at sea, so I was their little consolation prize.”

At that, Kronr bolted upright. Earth ponies meant earth pony villages. “Is there a town nearby?” she asked. “Can we go there?”

“I’m sorry. I left several years ago. It’s at least two hundred miles north of here.”

“Oh.” She slumped back into her snow-seat. “So you left your pony parents? After they took you in?”

“You sound angry.”

“No.” Okay, maybe she did sound a little angry. “But if there was a town nearby and you didn’t tell me about it--”

“I wouldn’t hide such things from you. Don’t be upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“I don’t have to be psychic to know that’s not true.”

She groaned. “I’m cool. We’re cool.”

“Do you have some sort of history with earth ponies?”

“Ask my eighteen earth pony siblings.”

He let out a laugh. “How prolific.”

“Whatever. We have beef. That’s why I’m out here in the first place.”

“Family is most important. Have you tried reconciling with them?”

“No.”

He was quiet for a time. The fire smoldered between them, the flame dimming to little more than smoldering embers. Toeyak stood up and fetched another log from their meager pile and set it atop the coals. Soon, the light and warmth roared back to life.

“You still didn’t say why you left,” Kronr said.

“That place was good, for a time. But no matter how hard I tried, I could never trick myself into being a pony. I was always something else. So I had to leave.” He frowned as a wisp of smoke from the fire kissed his face. “That town is as far away from me as your home is to you.”

Kronr frowned at that. Home didn’t feel all that far away to her. It felt quite present, in fact. Thoughts of home consumed her. They bounded after her like hungry wolves.

“What about you?” Toeyak asked, gesturing to her shattered horn. “Did someone get you with a rock, too?”

“No. He used a hammer.”

“Ouch.” Toeyak grimaced and poked the fire with a stick. Sparks fluttered into the night like so many fireflies.

Chromatic Wind waited until the moon was new before she struck. Just after two in the morning, the pegasus mare touched down on the edge of her family’s farm and crept towards the main cow barn. She was a shadow, a gust of air. After two months on her own spent flying around the countryside, her wings cut the air like hot knives. Her body was emaciated, but the lack of excess weight just made her that much more aerodynamic. Nevermind the dizzy spells.

Most importantly, she was silent. She barely breathed. Twice, she thought she saw an earth pony shape lingering in the dark, but both times it turned out to be her imagination. Luck seemed to be on her side. The lights in the main house were off, and the faulty driveway light, flickery on a good day, had shut off completely.

The cows lowed softly as she entered the barn. “Hello.” “Hello.” “Hello.” They sounded tired, and a little confused. More than anything else, they sounded conscious.

Chromatic Wind made her way up to the nearest cow and said, “Do you want to be free?”

“Do we?” “Do we?” “Do we?” the herd moo’d back as one.

“Follow me. And don’t make a sound.”

“We’re tired.” “We’re tired.” “We’re tired.”

“Come with me right now,” she hissed. “And don’t make a sound.”

There was no need to pass the message to the other cows. They operated as a hivemind, so when she told one cow to shut up and start walking, the rest fell into line.

She eyed their flanks as they filed out of the barn. Their family’s sigil, three cornstalks under a rainbow, had been stamped onto each cow in semi-permanent ink. The sight made her sick. All this oppression. All this injustice. She’d lived under that sigil for long enough. Today, she would bring it down.

She led the main mass of cows, nearly three hundred in total, to the northern edge of the farm. They moved over the grazing meadow in eerily straight rows, one after the other.

Chromatic Wind took to the air and checked the house again. Still no lights. A delirious, giddy sensation filled her chest. She might actually pull this off.

Then, below her, she heard a sound. One cow raised her head and asked, “Where did she go?”

Chromatic Wind’s eyes went wide, and she shot back to the head of the herd. “I’m here,” she hissed, “I’m fine. Keep going.”

But the damage was done. One by one, the question rippled through the herd. “Where did she go?” “Where did she go?” “Where did she go?”

Chromatic Wind grabbed the ears of the closest two cows and pulled them towards the edge of the farm. She glanced over her shoulder to see the house lights were still off.

The question burned through the herd, but after a moment silence once again filled the air. When they made it to the barbed wire fence signaling the end of the property, the herd halted.

Chromatic Wind pulled a pair of wire cutters from her saddlebag. She snipped the fence in one clean row and peeled the barbed wire back. “Go on,” she said to the nearest cow. “Git.”

Her efforts did not have the intended effect. Instead of looking grateful to be liberated, the cow stared at the hole with nothing short of abject horror. “Hole in the fence!” she moo’d. “Wolves gonna get in!”

“No, it’s safe, I promise,” she replied. But the sound of three hundred cows echoing the same frightened refrain drowned her out.

“Wolves gonna get in!” “Wolves gonna get in!” “Wolves gonna get in!”

“The real wolves are in that house!” She pointed a hoof at the distant shape of the main house just in time to watch one of the bedroom lights flick on.

A chill shot down her spine. Her master plan had just evaporated. “Back to the barn,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. The cows, all three hundred of them, cocked their heads and swiveled their ears towards her. “Back to the barn!”

One by one and way too slow, the herd turned around and started the long plod back to the barn. Before she could follow after them, however, she noticed a dark pony shape running towards her from the house.

Her breath caught in her throat. Her wings flared on instinct. She whirled around and dove through the gap in the barbed wire, to the treeline on the other side. There, she forced herself to quiet her breathing and trained her eyes on the hole she’d made in the fence.

The pony on the other side paused long enough to say something unintelligible to the cows. They lowed and shuffled off towards the barn. That left the pony alone to approach the hole in the fence.

“What in tarnation...”

The voice was male. Teenaged. She recognized it in an instant. Tears leap to her eyes and she threw herself out of the bush and spread her wings wide and said, “Chrys,” and rushed towards the gap in the fence.

But she pulled up just shy of the gap. The pony standing on the other side was Chrys, alright. He’d grown so much in just a few short months. She barely recognized him.

He was also pointing a pitchfork at her.

“Windy?” He rubbed his eyes and took a step closer. “Is that you?”

Every muscle in her body screamed at her to rush to him, embrace him, carry him away with her. But a primal fear remained, inarticulate and savage. He was older now. And in the low light, where shadows stole some features and left others, he looked an awful lot like their dad.

“Windy? Hey.” He swung the pitchfork around and stuck it in the dirt with alarming dexterity. “Stars almighty, you look like a skeleton.” She drew back. “Wait, I’m sorry. I’m just... what are you doing?”

“You gotta get out of here,” she said. “You gotta come with me.”

“What? No. Windy--” He glanced over his shoulder. “Why are the cattle out? What are you doing?”

“I...” All of a sudden, she didn’t know how to answer. What was she doing? The cows couldn’t be left alone outside the wire. Their fear of wolves was not unfounded. They’d get picked off one by one until none of them were left. They’d starve and break legs and suffer.

She tried speaking again. “I tried... I was gonna...” Tears, confused and foalish tears, sprang to her eyes. “I don’t know. I wanted him to hurt.”

Chrysanthemum took a step towards her, still not willing to step behind the fence. He reached towards her. “Come back to the house.”

“I can’t.” She flinched away.

“It’s okay. It’s fine. I’m here. He won’t hurt you if I’m there. I’m stronger now. He doesn’t get away with stuff. Things are better.”

She glanced behind her. Towards the treeline. Towards the shadows. Her wings twitched.

“Just come back,” he said. “We got leftovers in the fridge. You gotta eat something. Please.”

“You sure dad won’t turn you in to the constable for stealing?” she hissed back.

“No. I’m tellin’ you, it’s not like that. You got to him. He didn’t want to lose you.” He paused. “I don’t want to lose you.”

A breeze blew in from the west. Cold air sent tingles up her spine. “I’m just like mom, right? Always leaving.”

“I’m so sorry I said all those things. I was scared outta my wits. But mom never came back. You’re here.”

All the things she’d wanted to say to Chrys, all the compelling arguments to make him understand, burned a hole in her throat. She stretched her wings and made one final honest effort to fly. But her wings just wouldn’t flap. The will was gone.

She hung her head and walked back into the wire. Chrys put his arms around her just as she collapsed.

“When I let ‘em out... The cattle... I was... I thought if I could bring one down...” She choked on her sobs. “I was gonna eat it.”

“I know you’d never do that,” Chrys whispered. He squeezed her tighter. It felt so good to be held, even if he couldn’t understand. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

Chrys set her down in the grass like an infant calf long enough to twist the barbed wire shut. Then he picked her up and led her towards the house and its single solitary light.

A happy little gurgling sound filled the cabin. Twilight Sparkle and Kronr turned their attention to the fireplace and the cast iron pot hanging over the coals.

“Dinner’s ready,” Kronr announced in a voice that made it perfectly clear refusal wasn’t an option.

“I know how scarce supplies can be,” Twilight said. “Please, don’t worry about me--”

“Shush.” Kronr walked over to the table and picked up two bowls. “Not much use for leftovers, anyway.”

Dinner was a hearty lentil stew with diced potatoes and a hodgepodge blend of spices. Twilight tasted garlic and fennel and black pepper and lots of salt. Nothing she would call good. But the way Kronr melted into her chair as she ate reminded her that great meals didn’t always have to taste good.

“Tell me something princess,” Kronr said between bites. “What do you think of cattle farms?”

The diplomat in her reached for a measured response. “At first I was confused. The cattle hivemind is a fairly recent development. They’d always shown tendencies of collective thought, but so did deer, and you don’t see anypony starting up deer farms.”

Kronr choked on her soup. Twilight stood up only to be waved off. “It’s nothing,” Kronr muttered. “Keep going.”

“Obviously, we couldn’t allow farms to sell cattle to the griffons. They use cows for meat and hides. We’d be accesories to murder. But farms like your family’s didn’t violate any laws, didn’t mistreat the cattle, and didn’t technically break any laws.”

Kronr chuckled. “We learned about the lease clause in home school.”

“Now that was a clever bit of legalese. Classifying the cattle as tenants who paid their rent in milk was a genius move on the farming board’s part.”

“But you still haven’t answered my question.”

Twilight paused. “I don’t like it. I was alive when cows were still individuals.”

“But they’re not anymore.”

“No, they certainly aren’t. I don’t interfere with the farming board unless I have to, and everyone seems to be happy with the arrangement, including the cows. But my gut still says no.”

Kronr nodded. “My grandma--she helped me escape. She hated it, too.”

“Did she help you blow up your farm?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Right.”

Something seemed to linger on the tip of Kronr’s tongue. “Princess, you’re old, right?”

“Well.” Twilight paused. “I’m not that old.”

“But you’ve lived a long life.”

“For a regular pony. In alicorn years, I’m only twenty four.”

“Uh-huh.” A devilish smile flickered across Kronr’s face. “And in real years?”

“Why’d you bring up your grandma?” Twilight asked, eager to move the conversation away from her age.

“It was something she said while I was getting ready to leave. The morning it all went down, a few of my siblings were scrubbing out the barn while the cattle were in the field grazing. I couldn’t plant the bomb with them in there. I was freaking out, trying to work up a new plan. Then grandma found me. She knew exactly what I was gonna do without even having to tell her.”

“Grandparent mind reading,” Twilight said with a nod. “Potent magic.”

“It wasn’t just that. She realized what I was doing, and she told me she wanted to help. I asked her why, and she said that a grandchild’s suffering is an extension of a grandparent’s suffering. She said we were connected by joy as much as pain.”

‘Your grandma seems like a thoughtful lady.”

Kronr nodded. “She called the entire family over to the farmhouse for a big announcement. No one says no when grandma calls. My siblings left the barn, and I got my chance.”

“Sounds like she did nothing wrong, legally speaking. Is that what you’re worried about?”

Kronr shook her head. “No. She died last year. I felt it happen. I’m not worried about her at all.”

“Oh.” Twilight raised an eyebrow. She got the feeling platitudes wouldn’t work to her advantage, so she settled on a more open-ended, “So what are you worried about?”

“That thing she said when she found me out--the thing about suffering--” Kronr looked up suddenly. The fire crackled and the logs shifted and threw up sparks, and in the dim light of the cabin Twilight saw tears dancing on her cheeks. “Princess, why would anyone ever have foals?”

For a long time, only the fire and the wind conversed. The true immensity of the forest bore down on them like the weight of water at the bottom of the ocean.

“I don’t know,” Twilight finally said. “Everypony is my foal, in a way. But I don’t have any myself.”

Kronr seemed to accept this answer. She turned her attention to the small window next to the front door. Outside, the outlines of the pegasi guards’ shields broke the solid wall of trees on the far side of the clearing. “Are they cold?” she asked.

Twilight shook her head. “They’ve been through worse storms than this.”

“Goodie. Hope the next one’s even colder.”

Kronr took her time finishing dinner.

Winter peaked and peeled away, passing like a fever dream. In short but lengthening days, Kronr and Toeyak worked the land. By the long light of the moon they huddled together for warmth. Kronr claimed it made her feel safer. It wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the whole truth, either.

When the snows finally melted, the days grew long and spotted with green. They no longer worried about freezing to death. But they still huddled together every night.

Kronr couldn’t articulate exactly why they continued this nightly ritual. After a long day of chopping wood and gathering berries and moss, neither of them smelled particularly good. As the months wore on and the muggy heat of summer descended like a swarm of mosquitos over the forest, she found even less reasons to keep it up. But every time she thought about sleeping by herself, a vague but palpable panic gripped her chest. It was enough to bring her back to the cabin night after night. Back to Toeyak.

Work on the cabin continued. The spring warmth exposed soft soil under the hollow, causing their walls to sink on one side. They relocated their efforts to the edge of the clearing and continued building what was fast becoming a full-sized log cabin. By now the weather was warm enough to make the mixture of mud and moss that would weatherproof the walls. They awoke early in the morning and wrapped up the mudding by middayso the sun could bake their efforts dry.

“We’ll need windows,” Kronr observed as she churned away at a batch of mud slurry. Really, she was just pouring gloop into a hole in the ground and stirring it until it turned into slightly thicker gloop. Toeyak insisted there was a science to it. Kronr retained a healthy skepticism.

“We don’t need windows,” Toeyak said.

“Uh-huh, we do.”

“Why?”

“It’s hotter than Tararus in there, that’s why. We’ll smother to death without windows.”

“Do you have the tools to make glass?”

“We don’t need glass. We’ll cut a hole in the side of the wall.”

“And invite animals in?”

“We’ll make it a small hole so no weirdos with giant antlers can climb in.”

“What if some foreigner breaks their antlers off with a rock?”

She flicked a stickful of mud in his direction. It landed squarely on the tip of his snout. He tried to stare at it, and his eyes went crossed.

She laughed until there was no air left in her. She’d never felt this way back on the farm. She couldn’t tell if she was happy, or if it was something else. The very act of searching for an answer made all the levity come crashing down like a thunderstorm out of nowhere. The panic returned.

She redoubled her efforts to turn dirt into mud.

They waited out the hottest part of the afternoon in the shade of the trees, not too far away from where their original hollow sat. They’d just laid down the beams for the roof, and they had to wait for the mud mortar to dry in the sun before they could continue working.

They reclined next to each other, neither speaking, utterly content. Toeyak’s antlers were completely grown in now, with only a thin velvet lace clinging to the base. She felt no discomfort about looking at them or the runes anymore. They weren’t painted on like she’d initially thought. They were a part of the whole, dark knots in the wood of a tree.

She dozed in and out of shallow sleep. Runes absently danced in her vision. There was no way to articulate this perfect comfort, perfect sluggishness.

Toeyak let out a belch. Several birds perched in a nearby tree took flight.

Kronr was mistaken. That was the perfect way to articulate this feeling.

“Have you ever made furniture?” Kronr asked.

“What’s furniture?”

She snorted. “Shut up.”

Toeyak smirked. The look on his face implied another belch was coming.

“I think we should make some,” Kronr continued. “Nothing crazy. A table would be useful.”

“What would we do with a table?”

“Put stuff on it. Prep food. We could make a big table too, and throw dinner parties for all the other deer.”

A grin split Toeyak’s face. “We’d need a lot of moss.”

“Not if we had other food.” Kronr rolled onto her side and propped her head up with one hoof. “I was thinking--”

“Uh oh.”

“What do you mean, uh oh?”

“Bad stuff happens when you do that.”

She slugged him in the shoulder. He let out another belch aimed right at her. She cackled and rolled away, to the edge of the shade. Faint sunlight kissed the fur on her back.

“I’m serious!” she giggled.

“So am I. Deer are very serious folk. I know several species of tree less stoic than us.”

“Toeyak. Hey.” She stared at him until she was sure he wouldn’t try and derail her again. “I’m being serious here. What if we found another source of food?”

“Other than moss and berries? I guess we could try boiling the pine needles.”

She gestured to the clearing. “I mean like a garden.”

Toeyak considered the thought for a minute. “The soil’s probably good enough,” he finally said. “We’d need tools.”

“Where’s the nearest trading outpost?”

“Fifty or sixty miles west, I think. It’s been awhile since I’ve been out there.”

“We can walk that both ways in a week. We can get all the tools we need. Maybe some soap too. Think about it.” Her eyes lit up. “We could eat something other than moss.”

Toeyak considered the prospect. They both knew a trip of that magnitude would take at least a week’s worth of preparation, followed by another week of walking there and back. She had no doubts about Toeyak’s ability to lead them through the forest. But would he actually want to do it? Helping a struggling pony build a cabin to survive the weather was one thing. A garden represented something more permanent, something beyond mere charity.

Finally, Toeyak let out a sigh and nodded his head. “If we forage enough moss in the next couple days, we can leave as soon as the roof is done--ooof--”

Kronr knocked the air out of his lungs with a powerful hug. She wrapped her hooves as far as they would reach around his larger barrel and squeezed with all her might. She tried to speak but her voice was all choked up.

“Think of the salads we’ll make,” she squeaked.

The earth was good to them. They foraged enough moss to last them the duration of the trip and then some. The weather cleared. The heat peeled away like a fine film. Every piece fell into place.

The night before they left for the trading outpost, Kronr found herself tossing and turning in their little nest. They’d completed the roof that very morning, and for the first time in nearly six months she couldn’t see the stars. They’d been her nightlight through the darkest period of her life. Now they were gone.

“You okay?” Toeyak murmured.

“Yeah. Just excited for tomorrow.”

“Me too.”

A worrying thought crossed her mind. “If we get lost out there, what happens?”

“We won’t. As long as we stick together, we won’t be lost.”

“But if we get separated--”

Toeyak turned over so he was facing her. Even in the pitch black of the cabin, she could feel his eyes on her. “I’ll find you.”

Her hooves found him, and she tangled herself up in his long limbs. In the dark, neither could tell where they ended and the other began. It was all fur and fear and musk and pine needles. Amicable symbiosis. Nothing more.

They set off before dawn, leaving the cabin and the clearing behind. Kronr snuck glances over her shoulder until the foliage fully obscured her makeshift home. Worry cut through the excitement, an ancient irrational fear that she’d lose her way and never make it back to the cabin. Was it so irrational, really?

Toeyak took notice of her trepidation. “Looking back only slows you down,” he said. “And we only have enough moss for four days.”

They blazed a trail through the forest at a slow but steady pace. By the time they paused to eat and wait out the hottest hour of the day, most of Kronr’s worry had melted away, replaced by a strong sense of curiosity.

“What’s this town like?” she asked Toeyak.

“It’s not really a town. It’s six buildings, and one of them’s abandoned.”

“Can we sleep in the abandoned building?”

“Probably not. Last time I was in town, somepony still owned it. He didn’t like anyone trespassing on his property.”

The concept of property had lost a lot of its relevance to Kronr since she bailed from polite society. She scrunched up her nose and said, “He’s not doing anything with it. Why not let us sleep there?”

“What if some stranger and a deer wandered onto your family’s farm and tried to bivouak in your barn?”

“They couldn’t,” Kronr said. A wide, toothy smile spread across her face. “I blew it up.”

They walked by day and slept beneath the trees by night. At the end of the third day, the trees peeled away to reveal an ancient road with wheel divots cut deep into the dirt. Kronr let out a howl of joy and ran the last four miles to town.

When she arrived at the outskirts, she looked back only to find she was alone. Her heart leapt up into her throat. Her panting redoubled. She hadn’t been more than a hundred yards from Toeyak for the better part of six months.

“Oh, look,” a voice said from behind her. “They tore down the abandoned building.”

Kronr let out a very undignified shriek and whirled around. Toeyak stood behind her, unflappable as always, staring passively at the outpost.

“How?” she panted. “I was...”

Toeyak just smiled and trotted placidly towards town.

Of the five buildings comprising the outpost, two were private homes, one was a general store with shuttered and locked doors, one was a combination doctor’s office and lumber yard, and one was an inn with a bar on the first floor.

“We can camp in the woods tonight and hit the general store tomorrow morning,” Toeyak said.

Kronr nodded absently. “Right. Smart.” Her eyes drifted towards the inn, where the sounds of clinking glasses and faint music floated their way. “Evening’s still a ways off. Maybe we could poke our heads in the bar and see what’s up.”

“I see no reason why not.”

Kronr’s eyes lit up. “I’ve never been to a bar.”

Toeyak laughed. “Don’t get your hopes up. As far as bars go, this is about as lonely and sad as it gets.”

“Lonely and sad. Goodie.” Kronr took off towards the building. “C’mon!”

Inside was exactly the kind of chaos Kronr expected--a town of twenty or so earth pony loners talking smack and downing ale at unhealthy rates. The conversation died the moment the two outsiders walked through the door. The music, canned player piano drivel, cut off a moment later.

Kronr and Toeyak shriveled under the hostile stares of twenty perfect strangers. Just as she was about to suggest they make for the woods and turn in early, the bar’s sole employee, an earth pony mare as old as she was wide, flashed a smile.

“Hot dog!” she hollered in a shockingly baritone voice. “Drinks all around!”

The bar exploded with whoops and cheers. A pair of ancient earth ponies placed themselves on either side of Toeyak and pulled him to the bar, where the bartender had already poured a round of shots into spotty glasses.

Kronr stood rooted to the spot, her jaw hanging open in shock. She watched from across the room and the old earth ponies toasted Toeyak and downed the shot, then ordered two more rounds. Toeyak turned his head long enough to flash a confused look to Kronr, then returned to the task of downing more drinks.

Kronr looked around helplessly. Was Toeyak some kind of celebrity?

“Howdy there,” came a voice from beside her. She turned to find an earth pony of about thirty standing there, a straw hat clutched in his hooves. “You look like a fish outta water, just standin’ there.”

“Do they know Toeyak?” she asked.

“The deer? Nah, we don’t get too many deer ‘round these parts. But seeing a deer’s a good omen. Means the forest spirits are watching out for you.”

“Really?”

The stallion snorted. “Of course! Everypony ‘round here knows that. You from outside the territory or something?”

“Yeah.” Kronr’s tone grew defensive. “I’m from the south.”

“Aah, an Equestrian. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“This is Equestria too.” She paused. “This is Equestria too, right?”

The earth pony shrugged. “It is, and it isn’t. The sun still shines on us, but ain’t no princess around for us to smile back on, y’see? At any rate, any friend of a deer is a friend of mine.” He smiled, exposing a set of grimy half-metal teeth. “Deer ain’t the only thing that’s considered good luck around here.”

“Oh?” Kronr took a step back.

“Pretty mares are a rare sight ‘round here. Can I interest you in a drink?”

“Uh--lemme check on my friend first. He’s doling out all those good omens, but someone’s gotta watch out for his, uh, omen levels.”

The earth pony furrowed his brow and nodded slowly. “Yes, right, of course. Well, I’ll be at my table over there if you want to come over.” She nodded and started towards the bar. “And if you don’t get the chance tonight, I’ll be back at the same table tomorrow night.”

“Ok!”

“And the night after.”

“Thanks!”

“Basically every night. You’ll know where to find me.”

“Cool!”

By the time she wove through the growing crowd of aging earth pony stallions and made it to Toeyak’s side, the deer was swaying on his hooves.

“Kronr,” he said when he noticed her, “did you know that seeing a deer is considered a good omen?”

“So I’ve heard,” she said, eyeing the number of empty shot glasses scattered on the bar. Deers were big, but they weren’t immune to the effects of alcohol.

“So when I found you freezing in the woods--” he paused to belch. “That could be viewed as quite the good omen.”

“I didn’t die that night. So yes, I would say you were a very good omen.”

Toeyak smiled to himself. “I’m a good omen.” His eyes glazed over. She thought the shots had finally taken him out of the fight, but she was shocked to see tears spilling down his cheeks. “I’m a good omen,” he said, his voice shaky.

“Hey, woah, slow down there!” the bartender said, and slapped a beer down in front of Toeyak. “There ain’t no crying in this establishment. Drink this, it’ll restore your vitality.”

Toeyak took it without a moment’s hesitation and downed half of the glass in one gulp. He belched loudly to the cheers of the assembled earth ponies and wiped the tears from his eyes. “I love ponies,” he proclaimed. Another cheer went up. Another round of beers flowed forth. One found its way into Kronr’s hooves. Then another.

The night was a happy blur of dancing to canned player piano music and warding off the feeble advances of the old stallions. Kronr and Toeyak circled the room at different social speeds. When they ran into each other, they hollered and embraced like foalhood friends.

The last thing she remembered from that night was the music shutting off and the barkeep shooing ponies out of the tavern with the business end of a broom. Kronr took a few halting steps towards the door and fell flat on her face.

She rolled onto her back and found herself staring into the big, inquisitive, swimmy eyes of Toeyak.

“You fell over,” he stated.

“Wow. So purse... per... ceptive. Thanks.”

Together, leaning against each other and stumbling in unison, they left the bar and headed for the treeline. A few of the older stallions sent jeering whoops their way. “Git it, young buck!” they hollered.

She felt Toeyak tense up. “What’s that mean?”

Kronr chuckled. “Nothing. Pony stuff.”

“Tell me.”

“They think we’re--y’know.” She bumped two hooves together. “Y’know.”

“Oh.” Toeyak pulled back suddenly. The loss of support sent Kronr tumbling into the dirt road.

“Ow,” she muttered. “Thanks.”

Something was off about the look on Toeyaks’ face. The cheerful glow had disappeared. His eyes darted back and forth between Kronr and the bar.

“Hey,” she said again, “what’s wrong with you?”

“...Nothing,” he finally said. With a grunt of effort he hoisted Kronr onto his back and hastened into the forest. Kronr sighed and wrapped her arms around his neck, mostly for support. Mostly.

For the second time that year, Kronr found herself alone in the woods, fending off death beneath the tall trees. She was even shivering, just like that last time--though now the cold wasn’t the culprit.

A quick look around revealed it was morning. Toeyak had made their camp about fifty yards into the treeline. The bend of a slight hill obscured them from view of the town. The remnants of a small fire lingered a few lengths away. Whether he’d started it that morning or the night before, Kronr couldn’t tell.

She tried to stand up and promptly puked all over what was left of their fire. The coals hissed in disgust, then went out. Kronr collapsed back to the ground with a new plan: go back to sleep and let the rest of this day go on without her.

She got a few more hours of almost-good sleep, but soon the sun became too much to ignore. The former was nearly directly overhead, stabbing through the trees and leaving spots in her vision.

She tried standing up again, much more slowly this time. Whatever demon had lurked inside her stomach had been exorcized. Hunger took its place with a vengeance.

There were only so many places in town for Toeyak to hide. The bar was empty, as was the combination doctor’s office and lumber yard. No sense in checking the private houses. She made a beeline for the last building in the lineup, the general store.

Inside, she found Toeyak looking no worse for wear. His rune-covered antlers swayed from side to side as he ducked his head around a display of gardening hoes.

When she walked up to him and put a hoof on his withers, his head shot up in surprise. The display of hoes hooked on his antlers and tumbled to the floor with a clatter.

The cashier, one of the older stallions from last night, sighed and trudged over to reset the display.

“I was worried you had left without me,” Kronr whispered to Toeyak.

“I did,” he replied. “I came here.” He took a hoe from the now-uprighted display case with a sheepish smile and added it to his kart.

Kronr took stock of what he’d already added: fertilizer, shovels, half a dozen different kinds of seeds, wire mesh, bamboo stakes, growing ladders, twine, a single large watering can, a hoe, and three replacement axe grips--all menthol flavored.

“Now might be a bad time to mention I don’t have any money,” Kronr said.

Toeyak smiled. “Ponies are so concerned with money.” At the register, he produced a simple but sizable cloth coin purse and laid it on the counter. “Will that be enough?” he asked.

Kronr’s jaw dropped. The cashier peered inside the coin purse and smirked. “I reckon. Hang on.” He grabbed an entire counter display of chocolate bars and dumped them into Toeyak’s cart. “Yeah, that’ll ‘bout do it.”

Toeyak turned to Kronr with an amused glance. “Could you help me carry this out?”

No sooner had the door of the general store closed behind them than Kronr half-said, half-shouted, “Where on earth did you get that money?”

“One of the ponies we met last night needed help with some home repairs, so I offered to help. That’s why he kept buying us shots. That and the whole ‘good omen’ thing.”

Kronr scrunched up her nose and tried to remember that conversation, but the events of last night were all washed out and smeared together. “You should have woken me up. I could have helped.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t. The stallion kept asking about you. It was kind of amusing the first ten times.”

“Stop trying to protect me.”

“I wasn’t under the impression you needed protecting.”

“Then why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Kronr, you drank nearly as much as I did last night. I’m a hundred pounds heavier than you, and I’m still hungover.”

She jabbed a hoof at him. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can. You’re so diligent with your work, but how much of that is you trying to prove something? You don’t have to prove anything. You’re here. You made it this far. You’re okay.”

Toeyak’s final sentence rang in Kronr’s ears and derailed every unreasonable response that popped into her head. In the end, she settled on a disgruntled, “Hmmph,” if only because she couldn’t think of any way to refute what he’d said.

They took their loot back to camp in awkward silence. There, they distributed the weight equitably and set off into the forest. Leaving left Kronr with mixed feelings. Her first encounter with other ponies in half a year hadn’t been what she expected. The garden supplies had been a necessary purchase, but part of her knew that wasn’t the only reason she’d convinced Toeyak to take her all the way out here to this lonesome trading post.

A few hours into their walk, and the silence bugged her like a swarm of mosquitos. “I can’t believe they didn’t say anything about my horn,” she said.

Toeyak raised an eyebrow. “Those ponies are loggers and landworkers.”

“So?”

“They’re all missing something. Didn’t you see all the amputees?”

“Oh.” She looked away, her face flushed with shame. Even if she had noticed, she’d been so drunk she could no longer remember. That little revelation wore a deep groove between them. It took all of Kronr’s courage to leap over it. “I’m sorry I’m being weird.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“You’re just being nice. I was acting so weird last night.”

“You were drunk.”

“Less drinks wouldn’t have made me less weird. Those old ponies were being all desperate and lonely, and I took it out on you.”

“Water under the bridge.”

She nodded. “And thanks for carrying me back.”

“Of course.”

For a minute, she thought that would be the end of it. But more words appeared, and she couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t go back to silence. “And thanks for helping me with the cabin. And for keeping me warm. And keeping me company. And feeding me. And protecting me from weird old stallions. And guiding me. And...”

She paused as she felt Toeyak’s hoof on her shoulder. The canopy danced under a warm breeze. Light fell through in wide, scattering brushstrokes. Greens and golds bloomed everywhere. The earth moved as one single organism. She felt herself swaying, too.

“Are you alright?” Toeyak asked.

“I’m fine.”

She started walking again, but Toeyak wouldn’t budge. He wore that same blank look he always did when he knew something was amiss but didn’t know how to approach it. In that sense, they were both going in blind.

“What happens after we finish the garden?” Kronr asked.

“We’ll finish the cabin.”

“And after that?”

He shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll find something.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” The trees swayed in the light, painting his runed antlers the color of cinquefoils. “This arrangement has been very good for me. I don’t like living in big towns. But being alone is equally miserable. The cabin offers the best of both worlds. Besides, you need a little good luck in your life.” He gave her one of his achingly sincere looks. “Do you really think I’m a good omen?”

Her eyes flashed to his rune-spotted antlers. Twenty four years of phantom pains welled up in her voice and choked her up.

So she tackled him instead.

They hit the ground hard and rolled down to the base of a dry riverbed, kicking up fallen leaves, leaving a trail two bodies wide through the tall grass. Their lips met. Toeyak’s antlers hit a rock. Another piece broke off.

Kronr pulled back and gasped, her face turning red. “Ohmygosh, I’m so sorry--”

“It’s fine,” Toeyak panted. “Everything’s fine.” Then he pulled her in again, and the tall grass enveloped them, and the whole forest swayed back and forth in the wind for mile after endless mile.

Chromatic Wind was asking for a broken hip the way she tore down the stairs of the Chroma family home. Miniscule grandfoals made way for the matriarch, awe and reverence in their eyes. They hadn’t seen their granny move this fast in ages.

She took the long way around the house to avoid the back porch, then broke into a dead sprint towards the barn. Twenty other Chroma kin in various states of duress followed close behind her. None dared pass her.

Inside the barn was pure pandemonium. Chromatic Wind’s son, Chromatic Edge, paced along the length of the barn nervously, flanked by several worrywart cousins. Further down, several more of Windy’s siblings stood silent vigil over the corner stable, their faces bleak. The cattle had been cleared from the corner stable, but they could still smell the fear and uncertainty and blood in their air. They lowed aimlessly, crowding the already crowded airwaves.

Inside the corner stable, two midwives stooped beside the writhing form of Chromatic Edge’s wife, Silver Locket. She peeled her lips back and screamed. The barn trembled. The cattle made nervous noises. The whole place was a whirl of blood and hay.

Chromatic Wind wondered if there had been this much blood during her births. Her memories were hazy. She tried not to give too much credence to the sickening stenches lingering in the hot air.

“How is she?” Chromatic Wind asked. It was a stupid question, but the midwives obliged her. One of them nodded to the corner, where a foal sat swaddled in the cradle.

The foal was a unicorn. But something was wrong with the horn. The upper half was missing. It spiraled into nothing and ended with an abrupt, jagged edge.

Chromatic Wind felt a horrible chill sink through her body. “Not again,” she whimpered. Then Silver Locket let out another scream, and Chromatic Wind remembered why she had run all the way out here.

“How can I help?” she asked the midwife.

“Get one of the colts to run into town. We need a doctor.”

“We already did that. What else?”

The midwife let out a ragged breath. “I don’t know. Bandages. Bedsheets. Something. The horn tore something inside her.”

From across the stable, an odd noise filled the air. Static electricity filled the air, a rhythmic vwoop vwoop vwoop followed by a pop and a puff of smoke. A tiny lightning bolt arched through the air and struck one of the midwives. In true earth pony fashion, she barely even blinked.

The newboal, on the other hoof, let out an agonizing wail.

“My baby,” Silver Locket moaned. “What are you doing to my baby?”

“He’s fine,” the zapped midwife said. A nasty welt formed on her flank where the magic had struck her, but she paid it no mind. “Everything’s fine. Your foal’s a unicorn. What are the odds, huh?”

Silver Locket groaned. “Something’s... wrong... somethin’ ain’t right. My baby... my baby...” Her eyes glazed over.

The two midwives finally started to crack. “Where in Tartarus is that doctor?” the zapped one hissed.

The other turned to Chromatic Wind. “Granny, can you get us some space?”

Chromatic Wind nodded. She spared one last glance at the foal before stepping out of the stable and announcing in her most authoritative tone, “Family meeting, outside, right now.”

There were no objections.

“I’m gonna fly into town and get that doctor here on the double,” she said once they were outside.

“Mom, you’re in no condition to fly,” said Chromatic Edge. He tried to put a hoof on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off.

“Them fool colts are taking too long. And what do I say about keeping me on the ground?”

“Mom, you’re being unreasonable--”

“What do I say?”

“‘If you hang on while I take off, you better bring a parachute.’ Mom--”

She unfurled her wings, glorious and grey in the primaries. “Don’t you ever forget it.”

But just as she was about to take off, the barn door creaked open. Both midwives stepped into the light. The stench of the barn rolled out behind them, hay and copper and coagulants.

Chromatic Edge rushed inside. Chromatic Wind moved to follow, but the two midwives stepped between her and the door. “Give him a minute.”

“Give him--what? We gotta--”

“Please, granny.” The midwife who’d been zapped fell to her haunches. “Just give him a minute.”

Her wings locked up and fell useless at her sides. She sat down along with the cousins and siblings and midwives, a silent vigil at the door of the barn. She was vaguely aware of dozens of sets of eyes watching the group from the back porch. For a fleeting moment, an ancient urge sprung up in her chest and screamed, fly away. But she hadn’t done much flying in the past sixty years. Who was she kidding? She’d fall from the sky like a stone.

A few minutes later, Chromatic Edge emerged from the barn. His eyes were blank, and he shuffled along in a shellshocked stupor. In one hoof, he clung to his swaddled, screaming foal. The way the foal sat on his shoulder, it screamed right into his ear. He didn’t seem to notice.

“She...” he fumbled to find his words. “I can’t remember what name we had agreed on.”

With his screaming firstborn in tow, Chromatic Edge trudged back towards the house.

From inside her saddlebag, Twilight Sparkle procured a second roll of sweet bread.

Kronr smelled it instantly. Her head flicked. Her ears twitched. Her third eye snapped open.

Twilight magick’d the bread out of Kronr’s reach. “Nuh-uh,” she teased. “First, I need you to do something for me.”

Kronr all but floated off her chair. “Yeah?”

“I want to trade. You get the whole loaf, but in exchange, you give me the bag of bomb materials.”

Kronr’s eyes never once left the bread as she bounded over to the corner and threw the bag of highly-sensitive bomb-making materials to Twilight, who scooped it out of the air in her magic. With a flash and a poof, it all disappeared.

Kronr devoured half the role in two bites. “Got any butter?” she asked as she chewed.

“Got any more bombs?”

“Regrettably, I am all out of bombs.”

The princess, ever benevolent, gave her the butter anyway.

Once Kronr had finished wolfing down the roll, her eyes turned to Twilight again. “I got a question for you, princess. How’d you find me?”

Twilight frowned. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.”

“C’mon. I really don’t have any more bombs. Just give me a hint.”

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t say.”

Kronr’s smile soured. “You know exactly who ratted me out.”

“The Equestrian special service withholds details about sources from intermediaries like me. I’m just a middlemare.”

Kronr looked away. The cold sneer returned in full. “Okay. That’s fine. Got any more sweetbread?”

Twilight upturned her bag onto the table, producing only crumbs. “Regrettably, I am all out of sweetbread.”

Kronr nodded. “That’s fine too.” She stared into the fire for a long time, not moving.

Twilight opened her mouth.

Kronr exploded. “It was one of those old koots from the outpost west of here. I knew it. Those old fogies had nothing better to do than ruin my life. I went back there last year by myself and tried to tell ‘em, but they didn’t care. I thought since they were so in love with him the first time, they’d at least care to know what happened to him. But nooo, all they wanted to do was hit on me. They had a million sweet words for me, but not one of them said I’m sorry.”

“Logsgarden? You walked to Logsgarden?”

Kronr’s fury dimmed only for a moment. “Is that what it’s called?”

“Kronr, the town cemetery has more occupants than the town itself. They’re not callous. They’re just used to bad news.”

“He was their good omen. They were so nice to him, and then they just... they didn’t care... they didn’t care.”

Suddenly the rage returned. She picked up her chair and threw it against the wall. It smashed into a dozen pieces. She picked up what was left and whipped it against the wall over and over, until there was nothing but splinters left.

Twilight sat perfectly still. The rage flowed around her in waves but dared not nick her hide. Her eyes glanced outside. If the guards heard all the commotion, that overzealous sergeant might try to make a move. Then things would really go south.

But the guards stayed put. Either they didn’t hear over the wind, or the sergeant trusted Twilight enough to handle the situation. Either way, Kronr would wear herself out soon. Twilight resolved to see this through in silence.

“They put that stupid idea in his head. They said he was a good omen.” Her roars turned into sobs. “They didn’t know.”

She flung what was left of the chair into the fire. Flames touched the wood and took hold in an instant. Whatever varnish she had used on the wood turned the fire a hissing, spitting shade of blue. She stood there in front of the fire until her breathing subsided.

“Funny you would mention Logsgarden,” Twilight said. “The guard received a notice from the town constable stating a distraught mare fitting your description tried to burn down their tavern a couple months ago. Would you happen to know anything about that?”

Kronr, shoulders slumped, forelegs covered in splinters and nicks and bruises, eyes glazed, sat down on her haunches opposite Twilight and resumed sipping her tea.

Kronr, now one half of a very odd couple, all but floated back to camp.

Their nightly cuddling ritual took on a different flavor after they returned from the trading outpost. At first, Toeyak seemed hesitant to even touch Kronr, so fragile was the thing sprouting between them. When he finally went for it, his legs felt awkward and stiff. It wasn’t until he fell asleep that he finally relaxed.

Day by day, they sculpted the clearing into their perfect little garden. Using leftover lumber from the cabin build, they constructed raised beds for their more delicate crops and ringed the boxes in wire mesh to keep critters out. Into said boxes went a combination of soil scratched up from the far side of the clearing, compost, and fertilized potting soil from the outpost.

Kronr made Toeyak handle the compost. In return, she promised to do all the weeding forever. Toeyak rolled his eyes, but agreed nonetheless.

The boxes would be easiest to seed, so they did them first. They chose three different kinds of peppers, tomatoes placed next to grow cages to keep their spindly vines from choking out the rest of the box, salad greens, beans, and cucumbers.

Next came the backbreaking labor of tilling the clearing itself. The going was slow and rests were frequently needed, but by the end of the day they’d turned nearly half the clearing, a full third-acre of land, into neat rows of upturned soil.

In these rows they planted onions and potatoes and squash and carrots, as well as a single row of watermelons just for fun.

The hot months of summer floated away like waves of heat radiating off sun-baked rocks. They took their work day by day. And night by night, their little garden grew.

Late one August night, the kind of evening that clung to the heat and fantasized summer was still in full swing, Kronr had a strange thought.

“We could stay out here forever,” she said absently. She poked the fire in the hearth with a stick and watched sparks pepper the air. “If we wanted to.”

Toeyak looked up from the table on the other side of the cabin, where he was fiddling with one of their shovels. The shaft had cracked, and he was trying to take it apart so he could fit it with another homemade handle.

“Was that not the idea?” he asked.

“I guess it depends. What did you want to do with the rest of your life?”

“Deer stuff. Eat moss. Frolick. Don’t get eaten. Chase doe.”

“You’re not allowed to chase doe anymore, mister.” She smirked and stuck out her tongue. “Seriously though, is that really all you want to do?”

“Yes.” He noticed the incredulous look on her face. “Well, not the chasing doe part, obviously. Deer don’t have egos like you ponies do. If you hadn’t come around, I’d still be sleeping in that hollow.”

Kronr laughed and drew her knees up to her chest. “When I left home, I just wanted to run away. I didn’t know where I’d wind up. I thought I’d go to a big city and blend in, but I don’t know how to live in a city. And the first town I came to had wanted posters with my face on them.” She shook her head. “I’d have to live like a criminal.”

“You are a criminal,” Toeyak pointed out.

She stuck her tongue out. “You like bad mares.”

A rare fiendish smile appeared on his face. He opened his mouth to speak, but just as he did, some invisible presence outside caught his attention. He leapt to his hooves, ears swiveling, eyes wide.

Kronr put the stick down and raced to take the axe off the wall. The faint taste of menthol kissed her lips. Toeyak was already moving out the door. She followed him to the porch and paused, scanning the treeline.

“What is it?” she asked.

In response, Toeyak raised a hoof to the treeline on the far side of the clearing. “There’s someone there,” he whispered.

Panic gripped her body. Her heart fluttered like a hummingbird. She hadn’t seen another soul besides Toeyak since they went to the outpost. Ponies didn’t just stumble into their clearing.

After a moment, her eyes adjusted to the dark. Faint four-legged shapes emerged from the treeline, and she realized it wasn’t ponies who had found them.

The herd was twenty strong and spread out over the entire far side of the clearing. Kronr counted the studded antlers of six bucks. The rest were does and fawns. They moved across the earth like ghosts, without sound or material presence. Their large eyes gleamed in the dim half-light of evening.

They got as close as the edge of the garden, then stopped. The lead deer, presumably the elder by the size of his antlers, kicked at the wire mesh around the garden experimentally.

Kronr opened her mouth, but Toeyak put his hoof on her shoulder and shook his head.

The two tribes stared each other down for a full five minutes. Neither side budged. The deer didn’t even seem to blink.

Then, the elder shook his antlers back and forth. The whole herd turned as one unit and melted back into the treeline.

The faint sound of insects and wind whooshing through the trees returned. Kronr set down the axe and let out a sigh. “What the heck was that all about?” She looked over and was surprised to find tears streaming down Toeyak’s face. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“When two herds meet, it’s customary for their elders to exchange information. Where’s the good lichen, where are the wolves--that sort of thing.” He gestured to his runed antlers. “They didn’t want anything to do with us.”

Pity filled Kronr’s heart. She wrapped her forelegs around Toeyak and squeezed as hard as she could.

“I have to do something about this,” Toeyak said.

“No you don’t. Ignore those jerks. They’re wrong.”

His eyes drifted to the side of the clearing where a collection of stones laid in a pile. They’d picked them out of the ground where they had tilled earlier that summer, but so far hadn’t found a use for them. “Maybe I should get rid of them.”

“The deer?”

“No.” He let out an incredulous snort. “No Kronr, jeez. My antlers.”

“Oh.” Kronr frowned. “Is that... Can you do that?”

“I don’t know.” His eyes fell. “I’ve never tried removing them intentionally before. Maybe that’s what needs to be done.”

She squeezed him tighter, until the tension broke and a low sigh escaped his lips. She led him inside and set him down next to the fireplace, where they stayed until they both nodded off. But it was plain to see Toeyak’s mind was not with her. It was still across the clearing, searching for those shapes as they disappeared into the dark.

There was a lake about a mile south of the cabin. The water was a tad scummy at places, but it was fed by a clean well and in the summer months the temperature was perfect for swimming.

Following the incident with the deer herd, Toeyak started spending more time at the lake. He never shirked his chores or left Kronr in the lurch. But four or five nights out of each week she would return to the cabin for dinner to find he’d stolen away by himself. He always took the same path, never disguising his intentions, but never inviting her along either.

After nearly a month of this, Kronr decided she’d had enough. She purposefully missed dinner and lingered in the woods north of the clearing to give him an easy exit. Then, when the sun slipped beneath the canopy and shadows fully enveloped the clearing, she took off after him.

She found him sitting by the water on a wide, flat stone. His eyes alternated between his reflection and the tiny waves lapping against the opposite shore. Trees hugged the water on the other three sides, casting their roots into the water like fishing lines.

His ears twitched as she approached. “Did you finish what you were working on?” he asked.

“No.” She took a seat beside him. “We need to talk.”

He nodded. His silence felt intentional. Expectant.

“You’re letting those deer jerks drive you crazy.”

“You’re right.”

His sudden agreement took her off guard. She floundered to put together another thought. “Then... stop letting them. Worry about moss and frolicking. Chasing doe.”

A wan smile crossed his face. “If you could make a horn out of clay and go back to the pony world, would you do it?”

The question took her aback. “No. My family would never take me back anyway.”

“I didn’t say go back to your family. I meant pony life in general.”

“Oh.” More grasping for words. Why did his silence always make her feel so clumsy with her words? “I guess... maybe? I’d still be a criminal.”

He let out a little hum. “I guess it’s not really the same.”

His eyes returned to the lake. Hers followed. In the utter stillness of the evening, she could see the faintest ripples of insects alighting on the water, held above the surface by tension alone. If bugs could think, would they realize their tenuous purchase? Would they look down and feel afraid?

“I’ve made my decision,” Toeyak said. “I need to cut these antlers off.”

Kronr’s eyes opened wide in shock. “You were out for a whole day when I first knocked them off, and they were about to fall off anyway.”

He shrugged. “I’ll need your help.”

“Are you crazy? No. You’re not doing this.”

“I am. I can’t keep doing nothing. I just can’t.”

“Absolutely not--”

“I need you to be on my side. Please. This might leave me incapacitated for weeks.”

The reality of his words hit her like a crushing weight. She rose from the stone and set off towards the cabin at a vengeful clip. Toeyak called after her, “Please don’t try and stop me.”

“I won’t,” she called over her shoulder. “Remember when we’d just met, and I wanted to walk through that blizzard? You let me do something stupid and I almost died. Well, time for me to return the favor.”

She spun around and continued on her way. Her legs trembled with rage and fear. The trail beneath her turned liquid, and she lingered on the surface for a split second, held in place by tension alone. Then she plunged under the surface.

In the week that followed, Kronr learned a few very interesting things about the deer species and culture.

Deer didn’t keep written records. As far as pony anthropologists knew, the runes that comprised their written language were entirely contextual. Deer anatomy was also somewhat of a mystery, as very few deer cadavers had ever been offered up to pony scientists for dissection. Most of the time, when a deer died, the tribe simply left the body where it dropped and moved on.

The function of antlers was also up for debate. Although it was common knowledge that antlers functioned as a magical resonator in the same way a unicorn’s horn did, very little was known about the exact nature of the connection and whether it functioned more as a psychic voicebox or a more pony-esque conductor of raw magic.

All this led up to the slow, agonizing realization that no one had any idea what would happen if a deer were to cut off his antlers at their growing peak.

Summer waned. The harvest came around. All week was spent pulling up dusty carrots and potatoes, appraising the tomatoes, patching the bailing wire, pickling, dehydrating, canning, observing.

Every night that week was a feast. The odd couple lit bonfires in the clearing, screamed and hollered at the moon as it moved impassively across the sky. Their cries turned increasingly animal, and their shadows danced across the treeline. They flickered like the fire until they ate up all the oxygen in the air and burned out. It was love, but it was desperate, insatiable, rabid with hunger. A predator with its ribs showing.

And then, all of a sudden, one late afternoon, the harvest was complete. Everything that could be preserved had been preserved, and everything left had been eaten.

Kronr and Toeyak stood on the porch and stared blearily at the empty patch of scratched-up earth that had consumed them for the past four months. Their eyes were bloodshot and puffy. Their bellies distended past comfort. They swayed slightly, threatening to tip.

Toeyak let out a belch that echoed through the forest. Distant birds took flight.

“We should plant some of the potatoes again,” Kronr said. “I’ll bet we can get one more harvest in before winter.”

Toeyak shook his head. “I’m gonna get the saw. Meet me out here in twenty minutes.”

She turned to him. Her brain swam in inflammation. Her ears buzzed. “You can’t be serious. Right now?”

He put his hoof on her shoulder and gave it an encouraging squeeze. Then he turned around, gagged a little, steeled himself, and walked into the cabin to fetch the saw.

Something sickly and acid bubbled up from within Kronr. At first she thought she was going to puke, but when she opened her mouth she instead vomited a torrent of curses in Toeyak’s general direction.

The cursing continued as she stormed over to the side of the house and dragged a large flat section of tree stump into the clearing between the house and the farm. She got even more creative as she grabbed a satchel full of first aid supplies from its hanging spot on the porch wall. Configurations of words she’d never heard before came tumbling out as she fetched a bottle of grain alcohol for physical and mental sterilization, stoked a fire to burn the saw clean, and prepared bandages and a bucket of clean water.

Then she saw Toeyak emerge from the cabin with a serrated saw in his teeth, and the curses turned into sobs.

Toeyak’s eyes were laser-focused on the stump as he approached. He moved the bucket of water closer to him for easy access, waved the saw over the fire before washing it with disinfectant from the first aid kit, then cleaned his antlers with an antiseptic wipe.

“You have to--” he paused to let her sob some more. Then when she paused to take a gasping breath, he said, “You have to hold my head down so I don’t move. I need to make the cut straight. It shouldn’t bleed.”

More tears from Kronr. With gentle but firm hooves, he guided Kronr to his side and placed one of her hooves on his temple and the other one on his shoulder. Kronr choked. Soot and heat from the fire flew into her face. The sun lanced her eyes.

“I can’t--” she sputtered, even as she applied her weight as leverage to Toeyak’s head. “I can’t--”

“You can. You’ve made it this far.” He set the teeth of the saw against the base of his right antler and prepared to make the first draw. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

When Kronr was just six years old, one of the cattle on her family’s farm stepped in a gopher hole and broke her leg. The way the cow’s weight fell on her twisted leg turned a minor break into a full-blown compound fracture.

Kronr’s father, Chromatic Edge, had no choice but to amputate the poor cow’s leg. He and the four oldest Chroma boys cleared one of the stables in the barn while the remaining kids herded the other cows into a distant pasture so they wouldn’t hear the cries of pain.

This, of course, failed to account for the psychic connection the cows shared.

When the surgery began, every cow in the pasture bleated in pure terror and took off running. Typical stampedes were relatively organized, every cow running at the same speed in the same direction. This was different. Pain and fear overwhelmed their collective decision making, and they took off every which way. Cow pinball.

Kronr, barely half the size of the herd’s heifers, was powerless to stop them. Their hooves churned the earth around her. It was all she could do to not get crushed. The only relief came when the cow being operated on died from shock.

The cattle in the field paused, looking around at each other in confusion. “Oh no,” they lowed, “Oh no,” “Oh no,” “Oh no.”

Kronr scrambled to the edge of the field where her other siblings had congregated. They hugged each other and checked themselves over. Nothing but scrapes and bruises, thank goodness. The near miss felt pointless--worse, preventable. Bitter bile built up in her throat.

It was then that she noticed Chromatic Edge, along with her four oldest brothers, open the doors to the barn and step outside. The younger siblings let out a gasp. The smell wafted towards them like poison gas, death and copper and fresh pollen.

Her father and brothers were covered head to hoof in blood.

The surgery to remove Toeyak’s antlers was unsettlingly bloodless.

The sound of saw teeth cutting through bone rang in her ears for hours after they had finished. They left the antlers in a heap next to the stump. Kronr helped a woozy and disoriented Toeyak into the cabin.

She realized something was wrong the instant his body hit the nest of pine needles. His breathing became short and sharp. His eyes bugged out of his head. His head bobbed back and forth erratically without the familiar weight of the antlers atop it.

“Mom?” he said. His voice came out a in fluid-choked croak. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s Kronr. It’s me.” His eyes lolled over to her, but they peered right through her like she wasn’t there. “What’s wrong with you? Talk to me.”

“Mom... I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Everything’s fine, remember?”

“I’m sorry I left. I couldn’t... couldn’t stay...” His hooves started to shake. The color drained from his face. “I couldn’t stay. I just couldn’t.”

Kronr put an ear to his chest. His heart pounded faster and louder than a deer’s heart should. She raced across the cabin to rifle through their scant first aid supplies. Bandages, disinfectant, and little bottles of pain relief pills clattered to the floor.

“Mom,” Toeyak groaned.

“Hang on,” she said to him, though she was certain he couldn’t hear it. She dumped the entire first aid bag onto the floor and kicked through the contents. Nothing. Her own heart started beating faster now.

She checked the pantry was next. Poultices and herbs sealed in jars rattled on the table. She hastily threw together Californeigha poppies, blue violets, and lotus flower to form a makeshift sedative.

She stuffed the leaves into his mouth and screamed, “Chew!” into his ear. His jaw worked slowly. He instinctively wadded the half-chewed lump into his lip like a foal with a jawbreaker. She fished it out of his mouth after a minute so he wouldn’t choke on it.

“Mom?” he asked again.

“It’s Kronr. Everything’s gonna be okay. Just rest.”

“I’m sorry... don’t leave.”

“Don’t worry about the house, Toeyak. Just--”

Suddenly, the deer shot up out of bed and grabbed Kronr by the shoulders. She went limp in his grasp. She knew Toeyak was strong, but the way Toeyak’s hooves dug into her skin sent a chill of terror up her spine.

“I’ll never forgive you if you leave,” he hissed. His breath reeked of copper and chlorophyll. “Don’t go.”

“What?”

“I’ll burn the house down. Salt the farm...” he lapsed back into fitful silence, then rebounded. He reached for Kronr again only to collapse under his own weight. “Don’t leave me.”

“Stop it,” she wheezed. “Stop.”

“I’ll torch it,” he said. His voice was congealed and blacker than soot. “I can’t live there without you.”

Then a tremor overcame his whole body, and his grip loosened. Kronr shoved him back onto the bed of pine needles and threw herself on top of him until the thrashing stopped.

Her will broke. Sweat and fur choked her nostrils. Toeyak’s lingering tremors reverberated through her body, until after what seemed like an eternity of waiting they finally subsided. With a groan, he fell still and slipped into unconsciousness.

The inside of the Chroma household reminded Chromatic Wind of a pasture beset by a herd of stampeding cattle. Adult nieces and nephews ran from one room to the other, barking contradictory commands to each other and the swarm of grandkids. The two pegasi of the family, not counting Chromatic Wind, returned from town with news that the doctor was away on a house call to the other side of the county. They were promptly cursed out and told to get him anyway.

The newborn sat on the porch. Chromatic Wind watched her through the living room window. Her screams shook the house and rattled Chromatic Wind all the way down to her bones. They felt magically amplified--but how could that be? How could a foal use magic like that?

The Chroma family was an earth pony family, and an isolated one at that. The collective wisdom of the family only went as far as farming and hoofball. When it came to unicorn magic, they were next to clueless.

Chromatic Wind turned her attention back to the living room, where the family elders were assembled in the living room, half brainstorming, half screaming arguments. Chrys, now advanced in age but still just as gangly and strong as ever, sang out over the din, “Now now, no one’s saying we ought to do anything drastic. Poor Edge has been through an awful lot today, not to say anything of the foal.”

“So you’re saying we shouldn’t give it to the orphanage?” another of Chromatic Wind’s cousins chimed in.

“Now now,” Chrys replied, “no one’s saying that, either.”

“That little monster’s been taking pot shots since it got in here. It’s not safe for us. And the way it’s been screaming, the poor thing’s in a lot of pain.”

“She,” Chromatic Wind said softly. “She’s a filly.” The other arguments drowned out her voice.

Just as the voices in the room reached a fever pitch, a harsh white light coming through the living room window stole the room’s attention. Everyone went silent as the sound of hissing static filled the air, accompanied by the smell of burning bread and ozone. Vwoop, vwoop, vwoop--

“Hit the deck!” Chrys cried.

Those who were physically able threw themselves on the floor. Chromatic Wind, with her worn-out hips and creaking knees, hugged the couch and screwed her eyes shut.

A moment later, a blast of magic erupted from the porch. It melted right through the window and shot through the house, obliterating part of late grandpa Chromatic Feather’s porcelain collection.

The family stood up slowly and followed the path of the laser with their eyes, marveling at the near miss. A beat of silence passed. Chrys hurried out to the porch and moved the foal, crib and all, to the middle of the front yard.

By the time he got back to the house, the arguing had started once more.

Chromatic Wind, unable to get a word in edgewise, silently marked the time by the number of magical discharges the foal made. Four additional flashes of light and magic shot harmlessly into the sky before the group collectively noticed Chromatic Edge standing on the stairs, watching them all argue.

The conversation flopped and died. Chrys cleared his throat. “Uh--hey, Edge. How’re you feeling?”

Edge shrugged.

“Y’wanna come down, maybe?”

He shrugged again, then said, “I remembered the name we were going to give her,” he announced. His voice rattled like copper coins in a glass car. Chromatic Wind’s heart broke all over again for her poor son.

“Yeah? That’s great, Edge. What is it?”

“Kronr.”

A confused look passed between the group. “Is that... short for something? Like Chromatic Chronography or something?”

“No. Just Kronr.”

“Huh.” Chrys looked down at the floor and rolled the name around on his tongue. “Chromatic Kronr.”

“No,” Edge said again. “Just Kronr.”

“Just Kronr? That’s... modern.”

All at once, Chromatic Wind found her voice. “Absolutely not,” she hissed. Her eyes went wide, but it was too late to take back. Everyone, including Chromatic Edge, was looking at her now. She had to defend herself. “She’s one of us. You can’t do that to her.”

“Mom...” Edge started.

“No. I don’t care. You’ve all been bickering and arguing about this poor filly like she’s one of the cattle. She’s not. She’s my granddaughter.”

Chrys stood up and trotted over to the stairs. He put his face right against Edge’s and whispered in a voice just barely loud enough to hear, “Tell me what you’re thinking, nephew.”

“I just...” Edge shook his head. “I don’t know what to do.”

“If you need some space, we can take care of things here as long as you need. Maybe go into the woods for a bit. Do some thinking. I know you’re hurting, but don’t take it out on the kid.” Another wail came from the yard. “You’re her dad. You get to name her whatever you want. But if you name her that... she’s gonna grow up feeling like she ain’t even a part of this family.”

The air suddenly filled with a static charge, a faint whiff of burning bread and ozone. “Heads up,” Chrys hollered, and dragged himself and Edge to the bottom of the stairs for cover. Chromatic Wind hugged the couch again, feeling very exposed. A moment later, another blast of magic cut through the house. Melted glass sprayed across the carpet, barely missing the ponies sitting across from Chromatic Wind.

“She’s gonna keep doing that if we don’t do something,” Chromatic Edge said as he stood up. “I read in a new parents’ book that unicorns discharge a lot of magic when they’re born.”

“How long does it last?” Chrysanthemum asked.

Edge shrugged. “The book said an hour to a day. And nothing this powerful.”

“So she’s an overachiever,” Chrys chuckled dryly. “She’s one of us, alright. Maybe we could get an inhibitor ring from town.”

Chromatic Wind cut in. “At this age? That would stunt her magic growth.”

“I think her jacked up horn is gonna stunt her magic growth regardless.”

She pointed to the spray of molten glass still burning holes through the carpet. “Does that look stunted to you?” Another shriek from the foal in the yard. “We have to do something. The magic is hurting her. Everytime she zaps the place, she cries.”

“Maybe the horn is messing with her ability to channel it,” Chrys suggested.

“Are you sure?” Edge asked.

“I’m just spitballing. I don’t know nothing about unicorn foals.” He turned his gaze to the group, who offered helpless shrugs in return. The Chroma family was an earth pony family, and an isolated one at that. No one knew what to do.

The silence got under Chrys’s skin, and he started to hyperventilate. “Alright... nobody panic. We can figure this out before the poor filly blows herself up.”

“She can do that?” Edge asked. His eyes went wide. He stood up a little taller. “She’s in danger?”

“No! I don’t know. I don’t know jack about unicorns. Isn’t that what I just said? Why isn’t anyone listening to me?”

Edge turned a panicked gaze out the half-melted window to his foal in the yard. He brushed past Chrys and walked out into the yard.

A dizzying rush of deja vu hit Chromatic Wind. The bottom dropped out, and she was falling into the pit of a bottomless well, the kind you threw pennies into when you wanted to make a wish. “Where are you going?” she called out. “Edge?” He didn’t look back. The dizziness intensified. She stood on wobbling hooves and followed her son. “She’s okay for now.”

“Yeah, she’s okay for now. Do you know how to take care of a unicorn with half a horn? How can you--” He made it to the crib and paused with his back to Chromatic Wind.

“What are you saying, Edge?” She made it to her son’s side and put a hoof on his shoulder. “You--”

He grabbed her hoof with the full strength of an earth pony stallion. “Mom,” he said in a voice she hadn’t heard since he was just a foal himself. “What is that?”

Chromatic Wind looked down and gasped. The dizziness washed over her in waves. She heard rushing wind in her ears, louder and louder.

The foal’s horn was profoundly broken, but that wasn’t the source of her magic. A thin bloody gash had opened up at the base of her horn, exposing a glowing third eye with a tiny vertical slit of an iris in the very center. The rest of the eye was black like a lacquered marble and blinked slowly.

“I’m cursed,” Edge murmured. “I’m cursed.”

More magic built up in the air. The foal’s third eye turned a milky, pearlescent white. The two grown-ups ducked just in time to avoid another blast of magic. The bolt arked from the foal’s eye to her broken horn, then discharged into the air. The foal wailed in agony.

“It’s the horn. She’s killing herself,” Edge said. He turned around suddenly and started back towards the house. Gods, it felt so final. “I won’t lose both of them in one day.”

“You don’t know what she’s doing,” Wind pleaded. “No one knows. You have to slow down. You have to--”

“Chrys,” he called out. “Get a hammer from the garage. The little one.”

Chrys hesitated. His eyes flashed between his nephew and his sister. Chromatic Wind stared at him, frozen. Helplessness, cold as the dead of starless night, clawed at her heart. She knew what would happen next.

He took off towards the garage.

Chroamtic Wind raced back to the crib and put herself between Edge and the foal. “Don’t touch her,” she begged, her voice cracking with age and strain. “I won’t let you.”

“Don’t tell me to let my child sit there and die,” Edge said. He held the hammer in one hoof like a war club. His eyes burned behind a veil of pain and confusion. “Don’t make me lose them both.”

As he came into range, Chromatic Wind flung herself at him. Her blows fell uselessly against his face, his shoulders, his sides. Chrys was on her in a second. She fought back, but he was a year younger and twice as spry, and he hadn’t wrecked his body rearing so many foals, and it wasn't fair, none of this was fair, it was happening all over again. They didn’t know what was going on. They didn’t know. They didn’t--

The baby wailed again. More magic latched onto her horn and discharged as white-hot sparks. They floated to the ground and ignited the grass around the crib.

There was a moment of near silence, and all Chromatic Wind could hear was the faint chirp of birds in the woods and the crackling fire as it spread through the grass. Then Chromatic Edge raised the shiny ball peen hammer a fraction of an inch and brought it down, and she heard a faint sound like glass shattering in another room, and the infant baby Kronr cried out one final time, and this time Chromatic Wind’s old body simply had no strength left to run.

Toeyak slept for three long days and nights. The only way Kronr knew he was even alive was his snoring. In that respect, he was still very much alive.

When he finally came to, it was nearly dusk. A scant fire clung to a few thin logs in the hearth. Kronr stirred a pot of soup that was more water than broth. She glanced over her shoulder, noticed Toeyak sitting up in the bed, and nearly leapt out of her skin.

“You jerk!” she cried as she slammed into him with a bone-crushing hug. She choked down a few hysterical tears and peppered his chest with little kisses while he regained his bearings.

Toeyak patted her on the back, still clearly dazed. “Am I okay?”

“I don’t know.” Kronr peeled herself off Toeyak. “Are you?”

He put his legs beneath him and tried to stand up. The lack of weight on his head threw him off balance, and he collapsed back down to the bed in a spray of pine needles.

“Don’t worry, just stay there. How are you feeling otherwise?”

“I’m not sure. You know how when you put earplugs in, all the sounds get kind of muffled? It feels like that, but for everything.” He shook his head. “It’s all kinda fuzzy.”

Kronr wrung her hooves together, all nervous relief and elation. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“What happened after I sawed my horns off? I can’t remember anything after starting the surgery.”

“You were in and out for a few hours. You were acting like you’d had too many drinks at the outpost. Except this was a lot scarier.”

“I see. Thank you for taking care of me.” She shrugged and went to tend the soup. “Kronr. I mean it. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Something caught in Kronr’s throat. She nodded mutely and went back to the hearth.

“Is something bothering you?” Toeyak asked.

“No.”

“Kronr.”

“I’m fine.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s nothing. You were probably delusional, anyway.”

“What did I do?”

Kronr stared into the sad, watery excuse for a soup and nudged one of the carrot chunks back and forth. “You said some things that kinda scared me.”

“I have no memory of doing that.”

“No, it’s fine, really.” She tested the soup for taste. Watery. No surprise. “Nothing to worry about.”

“What did I say?”

“It was just some crazy stuff. You were probably in shock. And if you don’t even remember saying it, it’s probably not important.”

“But I want to know.”

Kronr sighed and set the ladle aside. “You begged me not to leave you. You said you’d burn the cabin down and salt the clearing if I ever left.”

“Oh... Kronr, I am so sorry. I have no idea where that came from--”

“No, it’s fine. Really.”

“Even if I was just acting crazy... I would never do that.”

“I know.”

“Look at me.”

She turned around and bore the brunt of that achingly sincere gaze. “I’ll never hurt what we built here. Even if one day we have to part ways, this place is your home.”

He might as well have punched her in the gut. She stood up and fought off a rush of dizziness. “Our home.”

All of a sudden, finding some bowls and serving up this soup was the most important thing in the world. They were getting close to something far too hot to touch, some exposed bundle of nerves, the base of a broken horn. Something raw. Something real. She was never all that good with words anyway. Soup would do just fine in its place.

After dinner, Kronr cleaned up the pots and bowls and stepped outside to get some air. The evidence of trauma still sat in the grass between the cabin and the farm--the stump, the saw, the embers of a fire, the horns. But it all felt so distant. The fire was out. The saw was dull. A few leaves fell to the grass and skittered lifelessly away.

Toeyak’s antlers sat in the grass, the runes no longer looking sinister.

This was okay, she decided. This was good. Everything was going to be okay.

She came back inside just in time to hear a strange strangled gurgle coming from Toeyak. She let out a yelp and rushed to roll him over before he could drown in his own fresh watery soup vomit.

Kronr didn’t make any more soup. She barely made anything for the next few days. Everything Toeyak ate, he just vomited back up. After every attempt, he’d grow faint and lie down. These naps grew longer and longer, until he was sleeping nearly the entire day.

Then again, sleep wouldn’t be the best way to describe it. He kept his eyes open. But he didn’t move. The blank stare secretly terrified Kronr, who tried to put on a brave face while she figured out what was wrong.

She tried every vaguely medicinal poultice and herb she had at her disposal. When none of those worked, she tried the ones she knew wouldn’t work. After a week of worrying and wondering, she was no closer to figuring it out, and Toeyak’s ribs were starting to show. Panic followed like the ghost of an old enemy, like the threat of being found by the authorities. Never far from her mind.

“What would you do if you were me?” she asked him.

She wasn’t expecting much in the way of a response, and jumped slightly when Toeyak opened his cracked lips and replied, “In deer culture, if a member of the herd is too sick to move, we fashion a sled and drag them.”

“That’s really nice.”

“But it’s also expected that if the illness gets to be too much, the sick deer will wander off into the woods so as not to burden the herd.”

“Oh.” Less nice.

Toeyak shrugged. “It’s a judgement call. You’ll know when you’re too sick to go on.”

Something about the flippant way Toeyak said that made Kronr angry. “We’re going to figure this out,” she snapped. She glared at him and waited for him to respond. Only after a few minutes of silence did she realize Toeyak had drifted off into open-eyed slumber while she was speaking.

Autumn fell. The days grew shorter, paranoid whispers of daylight breaking through the canopy, their garden a grey memory under millions upon millions of falling leaves. Toeyak got steadily worse week by week. Something about what he’d said that first day he was awake stuck in Kronr’s mind. She wouldn’t let him out of her sights for more than a few minutes at a time. If she turned around, and he was gone...

At least he could walk again. Not that it mattered much. Every few days, he stood up, paced the cabin until he found a new spot, and settled in for an extended stay.

Kronr brought him his meals and sat with him when she wasn’t busy with chores. They rarely spoke. She didn’t want to force anything out of him, but it wasn't long before she started to wonder whether there was even anything in him left to force out.

Each evening, she retreated to their bed of pine needles while Toeyak stayed rooted to his spot. She locked the doors and barred the windows before bedding down, just to be safe. Once, nighttime illuminated a larger world in the stars. Now, the dark shrunk her world to a few hundred square feet.

They had plenty of food stored for the winter. But neither ate. Carrots, potatoes, lentils, canned tomatoes, cucumbers, pickled vegetables of all kinds, parsley, mint, dill, and thyme, all collected dust in the food cellar.

One bleary autumn morning, Toeyak looked up.

His chair, the wooden table chair by the hearth, creaked. Kronr’s heart leapt into her throat. She whirled around.

He paused for a moment. Then he said, “I think a blizzard’s coming.”

When a deer predicted the weather, one would be wise to take it as gospel. All afternoon long, Kronr dragged logs into the clearing and chopped them for wood. The menthol flavor in the handle was almost worn away. She counted one more handle replacement in the toolbox.

“Want to help me out?” She waved the fresh handle in the air. “It’s got your name on it.”

It took a moment for her to realize he’d fallen asleep again.

The sight of Toeyak suspended in open-eyed sleep sent a different signal to her brain than it normally did. An icy chill swept away the pity and fear of the last few weeks, leaving only the anger beneath it.

So a blizzard was coming? Goodie. So her lover was dying? Goodie. So she couldn’t do a single thing about it? Goodie. She chucked the old worn-out handle into the middle of the clearing, snapped the new one into place, bit down, and dove back into her work with a vengeance. The crack of the wood felt psychotically good, like snapping spines, like setting bombs. It had been so long since she’d set the timer on that thing. She’d all but forgotten that part of her existed. But it had never left. No, it was hiding, biding its time. And at the end of the world, at the end of her rope, with a blizzard bearing down on her and a half-dead deer in her cabin, Kronr remembered what it was to hate life. And it felt good.

She reduced the logs to splinters.

When there were no more logs to be cut, she dragged over the stump they’d used for the surgery and slammed her axe into it over and over until it was barely more than pulp. Sweat streamed down her face. Her breath puffed out in ragged clouds around the handle of the axe. Her molars ached and the familiar coppery taste of blood mingled with the menthol flavoring on the grip. She kept going. It felt so good. Just one more swing. One more. One more after that. Another. More.

The axe bounced off a knot in the pulverized wood and struck her right foreleg. She dropped the axe with a cry of alarm and stumbled backwards. For a few seconds, nothing happened. But after a moment, bright red blood started weeping from the wound.

This could turn bad in a hurry if she didn’t do something. She gathered up what logs she could carry with one foreleg and retreated inside. The clouds had turned black without her noticing. The blizzard was upon her.

Snow battered the walls in waves. It drifted over the porch and partially blocked the front door. Kronr could still crawl out one of the shuttered windows, if she had to. She hoped the snow would drift and block them, too.

Right now, she had two pressing missions. Mission one: keep pressure on the axe wound in her arm. Despite the theatrical amount of blood, the cut was not life threatening. As long as it didn’t get infected, she’d be fine.

Mission two was somewhat more pressing: keep Toeyak locked in her embrace, and don’t let go.

She found that by wrapping herself around the deer, then rolling his weight onto her arm, she could accomplish both tasks at once. Excellent thinking for a mare who’d just lost all that blood.

A waning fire crackled in the hearth, just loud enough to partially conceal Kronr’s voice as she whispered nonsense plans into Toeyak’s ear. “Once winter’s over, we can expand the garden. Make more boxes. With the south part of the clearing, I was thinking a chicken coop. Chickens would be tough to get, but if they survived the trip they’d be a sinch to keep. Have you ever had scrambled eggs?”

Toeyak’s eyes rolled around in his sockets, then came to rest on Kronr. “What’s a scrambled egg?”

Kronr dropped him with a start and leapt into the air. Her bandage clung to Toeyak’s thick fuzz, exposing her wound to the open air. She hissed in pain as more blood trickled down her arm.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing. It’s fine.” She pulled the bandage off Toeyak and re-wrapped it around her wound. “I was cutting firewood.”

“Is it supposed to get chilly tonight?”

“There’s a blizzard. Do you remember that?”

Toeyak returned her gaze with serene confusion. “I believe you.”

“That wasn’t what I asked,” she growled. No sense pushing the matter, though. She plopped back down in the pine bed next to Toeyak and resumed her earlier position, arms wrapped tightly around him, his weight providing pressure for her damaged arm.

“What are you doing?” he asked. He tried squirming away from her, which made her cling tighter.

“I’m cold.” It wasn’t a lie--she was cold. And Toeyak was freezing.

“I can’t breathe.”

“I don’t care.”

“Kronr--”

“Don’t leave. Please.”

“What do you mean?” He smiled that achingly sincere smile, and for a moment it was like nothing had changed. He was still the same oblivious, wise, stupid, perfect deer he’d always been.

“What do you mean, what do you mean?” An incredulous smile graced her lips, sharing his confusion. But it died a moment later. “You... you don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

She pushed him off her arm and sat up. “Where are you?”

“I’m home.”

“But where, specifically?” He shrugged. “What’s outside?” A blank stare. “Who am I?”

“That’s not for me to say,” he said.

She exploded in a wild, animal roar. She picked up the closest thing to her, the table chair, and flung it against the wall as hard as she could. The pieces went into the fire, where they kicked up a cloud of soot and sparks. More blood trickled down her arm.

“This was supposed to be ours!” she screamed at him, gesturing wildly to the cabin. “We made this. We... and... and now, you don’t know?” She flung a bowl across the room. It hit the wall but failed to shatter to her satisfaction. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

Toeyak sat up, his face an impenetrable mask. “I just don’t know. Please, calm down. Everything’s going to be fine.” Then his eyes grew glassy, and he laid back down, his eyes wide open and fixed on the fire.

On the other side of the room, Kronr watched his chest rise and fall as she struggled to regain her own breath. Something in her lungs rattled. Outside, the snow kept on falling.

She collapsed in front of the embers of the fire. She just needed to feel warm for a change.

Kronr didn’t think dreams held meaning. They were absurd, often noisy, and sometimes oddly sexual. Dreams contained multitudes--too many multitudes, in fact. If someone took something away from a dream, it was merely because they were remembering something they wanted to see out of millions of things they didn’t.

But that night, Kronr dreamed a flock of birds descended from a winter storm and flung open her door and dragged her out of bed. She reached out for Toeyak, but he was asleep, his eyes closed, perfectly oblivious to her kidnapping.

The birds took flight with Kronr still in their grasp. She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. She was paralyzed, limp and helpless as the birds soared over the endless forest.

Just as they pierced the final layer of clouds, the birds all turned to her at once and screeched in her ear in a unified voice, “Don’t go!” “Don’t go!” “Don’t go!”

She thought she heard birds when she woke. But the blizzard’s wrath was complete. Everything of color had been obliterated. There was nothing left but white.

She watched with the detached fascination of a half-asleep mare as her first waking breath condensed into vapor and curled towards the ceiling.

Her lips cracked. A strange, sickening chill swept through her body. The fire was out. She mentally chastised herself for being careless. Ponies died for less in winter. She tried to stand up only to collapse. Her teeth chattered and everything ached. Her mind moved so slow. How had the fire gone out?

Then she turned her head and saw with creeping horror the open window on the opposite side of the cabin, and the empty bed of pine needles beside it.

She threw on every article of clothing she owned and rushed to the door only to batter uselessly against it. The snow must have drifted and blocked it. Goodie. She vaulted through the opened window instead, tearing her scarf and outermost coat in the process.

“Toeyak!” she called out. Her vocal chords ached miserably from a night of sleeping open-mouthed. Still, she called out again and again.

He’d left no tracks--not that he needed to. She couldn’t see any sign of him in the clearing, and besides the clearing there was only one place he was liable to go.

She found him in the hollow.

A snowdrift had partially buried his lower half. She knew the moment she saw him. Some part of her said she shouldn’t stare, but she couldn’t look away.

She resolved not to leave him to the elements, but the earth was hard as stone, and she hadn’t the proper tools to dig. When her shovels failed to make a dent in the rocky soil, she pulled her hatchet from the toolbox in desperation and swung the flat side into the earth over and over again.

The menthol grip wore down until all she tasted was copper.

Twilight spat out her tea. “He did what to his antlers?”

She wasn’t thinking whether or not Kronr would be insulted by the gesture. She was more concerned with the strong chance she’d choke on it, or have it shoot out her nose.

“How were we supposed to know?”

“They’re magical organs. No less important than a horn is to a unicorn. It’s no small miracle you survived having your horn broken, even if medically speaking the circumstances were different.”

“They fell off every year. It seemed worth a try.”

"On their own time. The trauma of having them removed so close to peak growth must have been--" she realized she was lecturing and stopped herself from twisting the knife any further. "It was the timing."

"Well, good to know.” Kronr pointed to a corner of the room, where the joints between floor boards were loose. “I still have the antlers. Want to touch them?”

Twilight’s jaw hung slack. She forced out a terse, “No.”

“Suite yourself.”

Twilight struggled to regain her bearings. “Under your circumstances, I see why you wouldn’t have the medical know-how to complete a surgery--not that you should have even attempted something like that in the first place. The ethics are... weird, given that he consented to it.” The books swirled around her head furiously, then disappeared one after the other--pop pop pop pop pop. “I don’t know how to process this.”

Twilight’s last remark sounded stupid even before it left her lips. But it was a truth she could cling to in all this uncertainty. She fully expected Kronr to go on the offense, throw another chair, curse some more.

What she wasn’t expecting was for the hardened criminal to sniffle and ask, “Have you ever kept a garden, princess?”

The question threw her for a moment. “No.”

“Any plants at all?”

“Some houseplants here and there, but never a whole garden. Maybe in a metaphorical sense. Equestria is something like a garden to me.”

“No, that’s not the same. Nevermind.” Kronr shook her head. “I encouraged him. I didn’t try hard enough to talk him out of it. I held his head down. I think it’s my fault.” Her voice rose. “It’s always me. I always ruin everything. I’m the one who’s cursed. I blew up my family farm. I haven’t paid taxes in three years. I killed a deer. I tried to shoot down a princess. I--I was--”

Kronr’s eyes strayed to the crackling embers of the fire. In the absence of words, her chest heaved up and down. Her body was a cavernous space where her ribs poked from her skin, her limbs thin and tall like trees, her belly full of bears disturbed from hibernation, eyes like icy moons, her horn shattered like an ancient mountainside. When she breathed, it was the fury of a blizzard.

“Could I see where he’s buried?” Twilight asked.

Kronr stiffened. Her breathing slowed. An imperceptible chill in the air gave way to the resurging fire. The bears in her belly laid back down and closed their eyes.

“Sure,” she muttered, and started for the back window.

“The door,” Twilight said.

“The guards,” Kronr said back.

Twilight conceded and followed Kronr out, silently hoping her larger alicorn form wouldn’t get stuck in the window frame.

Day faded wearily into night under a thick cover of clouds. A bleak shade of indigo stained everything. The drifted snow looked almost blue as Twilight and Kronr trudged some twenty yards into the treeline so the guards couldn’t see them. Then they traced the clearing north until they came upon a divot two pony-lengths wide in the snow.

A simple pyramid of rocks stood in the center of the hollow. A hatchet, the menthol-flavored grip long-since eroded away by wind and weather, was wedged in a groove between two of the top rocks.

“We could have lived our whole lives out here,” Kronr said in a voice so soft the wind almost stole it away. “It’s not fair.”

“Is that what he wanted?”

A wan smile cracked her lips. “He wanted to eat moss and chase me around.”

“What did you want? Sorry, what do you want?”

Her third eye snapped open, glowing with pure magical energy. She picked a few bits of lichen off a nearby rock and placed them at the foot of the grave. The magic faded. Her eye closed. The scientist inside Twilight Sparkle leapt out of her seat and screamed in amazement, but the princess held her tongue.

Kronr sunk to her haunches. “I don’t... I...” A gust of wind sent a bitter chill down her spine. “I don’t know. I can’t go back, and I can’t--I--.” The mask slipped. The dam cracked. “I can’t leave him.”

A far-off look crept over Twilight’s face. She tried to hold in her mind the image of a forest that went on forever, pine trees frozen white, creaking and crying like abandoned homes. “The punishment for your crimes in Equestria would be banishment. But it’s clear you’ve already taken it upon yourself to do that.”

Kronr sat there silently in the snow, processing Twilight’s words. “You wouldn’t come all the way out here just to tell me that,” she finally said.

Twilight shook her head. “You have a knack for engineering and a determined mind. That, and your unique way of channeling magic could open doors in places we’ve never thought to look. Kronr can stay here and disappear into the forest. But if our detachment happens to stop in the next outpost over and stumble upon a gifted sorcerer in need of an escape... '' Twilight paused. “You could do so much good.”

Kronr shivered. A phantom pain welled up in her voice and choked her up. "You really think I could?”

Twilight unfurled her wing and hung it around Kronr’s shoulders to ward off the cold. “I know it.”

The wind kicked up, blowing hard against their backs. They leaned into each other until the air went still. Soon it would be so dark even the spirits couldn’t see.

But as the natural light slipped away, a new one blossomed in its place. The pyramid of stones started to glow pale green.

Twilight took a step back in shock. Her first thought went to deer spirit magic. But as she took a closer look, she realized the rocks were merely rocks. No spirits here. It was the menthol-flavored handle wedged into the rocks. Of course, she realized, feeling a little silly--it glowed in the dark.

Epilogue

Sergeant Lionheart’s life was little more than a cloak and a series of fires to huddle around.

Six years with the guard led to three letters of promotion, four medals (one for combat), and one creaky wing. He had no other possessions to his name. The guard took care of the rest.

This mission actually presented him with a surplus of little things. Not only did he have a cloak and a fire, but one of the other ponies in his squad found some kind of wooden planting boxes lying in the clearing. They’d overturned them and now reclined on them next to the fire.

It was the little things.

Just as he was starting to get a feel for the planting box’s softer spots, the guard on watch let out a whinney of alarm. “Something’s in the woods!”

The guards heaped snow on the fire and dashed into formation. Spears out, eyes up. For a moment, Lionheart saw nothing but the absolute black of the forest, heard nothing but the ambient vwooo of their shields.

But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw what the guard on watch was talking about: a faint, pale green light breaking through the trees behind the cabin.

His mind immediately went to deer magic. They typically fought with slings and rocks and stone hatchets, but he’d read in books of their powers of mindreading and psychic warfare. “Get the mana tube ready,” he said to the pony next to him.

Two figures emerged from the treeline.

He reared back and prepared to order the charge when he recognized the alicorn shape of Princess Twilight. “Hold!” he called. The pony with the mana tube pointed it at the ground.

“Seems your fire’s gone out, sergeant,” the taller figure said.

Definitely the princess. Lionheart let out a sigh of relief and lowered his shield. The rest of the guards followed suit. The mana tube went back into its holder.

“You were supposed to be in the cabin,” Lionheart said.

“There was something in the woods I needed to see. Don’t worry.” The princess gestured to the fugitive. “She’ll be joining us.”

Lionheart raised an eyebrow but said nothing. She had been trying to kill them a couple hours ago. But stranger things had happened. At any rate, she hadn’t blasted them with lasers yet. Things were already going better than before. The magic of friendship strikes again.

The princess saw right through him. “Trepidations, sergeant?”

“No, princess.”

“Good. You’ll be flying her out.”

Lionheart let out a silent lament for his creaky wing. Still, ever the professional, he let his face betray nothing. He drew a harness from his pack, essentially an adult-sized foal carrier used for transporting ground-bound arrestees via air.

He stepped towards the fugitive, who had strategically placed herself half-behind the princess. Her whole body was bent like a spring, ready to leap away at a moment’s notice.

He caught a glimpse of the fugitive’s face illuminated in the light of the mana shields. He recognized her in an instant. A strange, tingly feeling shot through his body. Goosebumps appeared on his legs.

Her eyes, all three of them, locked on him. She recognized him, too.

But Lionheart was a professional. Whosoever trusted in the princess, he trusted in return. “Seems we’ll be getting to know each other over the next few hours,” he said. “My name is Sergeant Chromatic Lily Lionheart. You can just call me Lionheart.”

In the almost-blackness of night, he noticed the princess’s face flicker. She grew pale and wide-eyed, like she was about to throw up.

The fugitive took an inquisitive step towards him. She eyed him carefully as the princess scrambled for something to say. Before the alicorn could step in, the fugitive’s face relaxed, and she stuck out her hoof.

“My name’s Rainbow Breeze,” she said. “Don’t drop me.”