Spike studied the forest map as he rode upon my back. I'd roughly added in the two areas I'd seen on the station map denoting where the police were canvassing the Everfree.

"It looks like they're just guessing based on where they caught me," he mumbled. "I wasn't actually that close to the hideout. If this is right, we shouldn't have a problem avoiding them on the way."

"Is it possible they might find the hideout eventually?" I asked.

"They might find the entrance but they probably won't know it and they definitely won't get it open," he assured me.

"Uh… Shining? It's been a while since you saw Twilight. She's… I just feel like I should warn you, she's changed a lot from the Twilight we used to know and… you might not like what you see when we get there."

I turned my head to squint up at him. "What are you talking about?"

"She's losing it. It might be hard to see."

"What… You mean her mind?"

"Yeah."

I had a hard time envisioning this. Sure, Twilight had her freakout moments in passing but she was always still a pillar of reason after she came back down.

"Well does she get out of the hideout?" I inquired, trying to push back on his assessment.

Spike scratched his head. "Not really anymore. It's kind of risky anyway."

"She's probably just stir crazy," I argued dismissively. "You know how she gets."

Spike just sighed and ruffled the map. "Stay on this course and we'll be good."

Just then, we heard a distant howl echo through the trees. I stopped in my tracks to listen, ears pointed straight up. There arose a host of much closer howls in response, followed by a flutter of unseen birds taking flight in surprise. Spike crumpled attop me, wrapping his arms and the map around my neck.

"Timber wolves," I breathed absently.

"Yeah," agreed Spike, trembling on my withers. "Let's stay out of their way."

"I would if I knew where they were," I replied quietly, scanning the shaded forest for any movement. I continued walking carefully, now suddenly aware of how loud the dead leaves and branches were beneath my heavy hooffalls.

After several tense moments of walking in silence, I heard a rustling gallop building in my ears from an innumerable amount of pounding paws. With Spike all but choking me from behind, I dove behind the base of a thick tree and hoped that wherever the sound was coming from was on the opposite side of the trunk.

A powerful but quiet rumble swelled around us and I bared down as though I could will us invisible. The whole pack sprinted by like a gust of wind. In my peripheral vision, I saw flickers between the trees. There had to be almost ten of them. Not sure how I would have fared. I didn't stand again until I heard nothing but my own relieved sigh and Spike had melted into a boneless blob on my shoulders.

We continued onward, not much further.

"This is it," declared Spike, sliding gingerly off of my back. He walked over to a hollowed out tree and turned back to me.

"Okay, you need to ditch the uniform. She's super paranoid and on a hair trigger. Showing up in cop duds would probably be bad. I don't even know how she's going to react to your new look."

My forehead creased in worry as I took off the police uniform, folded it up and stuffed it in my pack.

Spike blew a blast of green fire into the hollow of the tree. A portal stretched across the void and I saw the interior of what looked like some kind of subterranean bunker. The ceiling was low and the walls were thick stone lined by torches that glowed orange with magical flames. I stepped in just behind Spike and the portal evaporated.

"Twilight," he shouted. "I'm back. I brought Shining Armor with me. He's alive." He delivered each syllable with precise clarity as if he were speaking with an old half deaf mare.

There were so many rooms so close together, all of them cluttered with books and every one had an iron grate over it, allowing me to see straight in. It looked like a prison. With each passing moment that I didn't see Twili, I found myself becoming more and more anxious.

"What is this place?" I finally asked, still looking back and forth at every passing doorway.

"This is the dungeon of the Castle of the Two Sisters. The real entrance to it is caved in, so the only way to get inside is magic. Twilight gave the place a ward enchantment and built this portal some distance away from the actual castle."

Twilight," he called again.

"Spike?" came a desperate voice from down the hall.

My heart skipped a beat.

Twilight clamored into the hallway from a door just ahead of us. She looked pale. Her mane was disheveled and her eyes were wild.

"Spike?" she blurted. Then she saw me. "Look out, behind you!" She charged up her horn and launched an energy beam at me. Spike hit the deck. I deflected the attack into the ceiling with a summoned shield, then another.

"Twilight, stop," screamed Spike, waving his hands in the air, still prostrate on the floor as a smattering of rubble landed before him.

"Twili, it's me," I shouted.

I heard another beam charging up but then abruptly die away.

"Me who?" she demanded, squinting suspiciously.

"Shining Armor," supplied Spike, picking himself up slowly.

"Your B.B.B.F.F.," I added desperately.

"Shining is dead and you don't even look like Shining," she charged, looking me up and down.

"I should have had you wait outside," muttered Spike. "It's really him, Twilight. He saved me from police custody."

"Sunshine, sunshine-" I began.

"Ladybug's awake," she responded feverishly.

"Clap your hooves and do a little shake."

She crept closer to me, head cocked curiously to one side, still incredulous to my authenticity. She stopped right in front of me almost muzzle to muzzle and stared into my eyes.

"Sh-Shining?" Her eyes softened and tears began to flow. She wrapped her forelegs around me. I hugged her back and began to cry too.

Spike put a hand on my side. I couldn't believe we were all together again. In spite of this unimaginable meeting, no one could find a word to say. It didn't matter that Twilight was smarter and more powerful than me; I felt needed as a big brother in that moment.

"Spike needs medical attention," I murmured in her ear. Our long embrace broke and I wiped my tears with one leg.

She bent down to look the dragon over. "What happened, Spike?" she asked bluntly.

"I got captured by police when I went out for supplies."

"Oh, uh… yeah." She scratched her head, seemingly bewildered that she didn't already piece that together. "You need to be more careful," she chided.

I gritted my teeth. "Twilight, they were brutally torturing him for two days. He's missing a finger. I think if there was a lesson-"

I looked down to see Spike pulling a lock of my mane and shaking his head at me as if he didn't want to press the issue.

Twilight's horn glowed as she sent healing waves over Spike's body. When they dissipated, he sighed in comparative relief. His cuts were smaller and his bruises lighter.

"Ugh, I can move my arm again," he grunted, working his shoulder around.

"Sorry, I can't regenerate the claw," she shrugged. "Well, let's… let's eat something."

I frowned again and tried to shake off my sister's uncharacteristically tactless remarks as she led us down the cell block. My eyes continue to ping-pong between rooms, expecting to see some sort of livable or utilitarian space but it was just books on top of scrolls on top of books and they weren't even organized as I'd expect. She loves projects like that. What else did she have to do all day?

"I thought you left all your books at your old place. Where did you get all these?"

"The castle upstairs," she grinned. "I did bring a few of my favorites when I fled though."

We stopped at a T-section and entered an open cell that I supposed was the kitchen. There were sacks and barrels and a little fire pit with a black cauldron hanging above it.

"This is the boiled water," said Spike, flipping a wooden lid off the top of one of the barrels. "Only drink out of here."

Twilight hastily assembled two bowls of oats from a gunny sack.

"Uh… the oats are kind of old," he warned me, pouring himself a bowl of granulated crystals. "But we have a ton of them."

The three of us sat around a wooden packing crate with our MRE quality meals. The food was bland but spirits were high. We were on the run, they were living in a dark, stale hole. We had no plan yet to fix any of it but there was an inexplicable sense of electric hope in the air just from seeing one another.

I told them about how I survived and about Pinkie Pie and living in disguise while working in the mines outside Crystal City. I told them what Fluttershy and Applejack we're doing and what the inside of that Castle of Friendship looked like now. I told them how I wanted the story to end.

Twilight stood up with a start, a crazed look in her eyes. "Yes!" she exclaimed. "Yes! Eating is over!"

Spike buried his face in his hands.

Without warning, she teleported all three of us to a larger room without bars. There was a mattress on the floor in the corner and more crates scattered about with countless open books draped over them. Plastered to the walls were clusters of transcriptions, constellations of mind maps and matrices of equations. Shit. She went lunatic full wall.

"Since no one else will help, I've been trying to formulate a plan to save Equestria by myself," she blurted loudly in my face. "Potions, magic, enchantments, whatever! I keep running the numbers but nothing I've found has a high enough probability of success to justify an attempt."

Her words were rapidfire and full volume as if she were yelling to someone on a departing train from the platform.

"But now that you're here, we have two brains and twice as much magic.

Spike crossed his arms and muttered indignantly.

"Well, more like sixty or seventy percent more magic,'' I laughed awkwardly. I teleported my pack into the room and floated the book out. "I've actually been collecting my own intelligence on Sombra-"

"Gimme!" She snatched the book away with her own magic and began scanning frantically over the pages, abandoning the conversation and disappearing into her own frazzled mind. She paced around, muttered unintelligibly to herself.

This is all she thinks about, mouthed Spike.

"This is an excellent source of information. It reminds me-" She began whirling about, looking in every direction. "Uh… Where did I put- I thought I- Where-"

Flustered, she teleported away and I could hear ranting and raving emanating from down the hall as she rummaged through her book piles for what, I didn't even know.

Spike and I exchanged distraught glances.

"She's just… having one of her episodes," I whispered, trying to reassure myself.

"Shining, she's been this way for over a year and it just keeps getting worse."

"Yeah, well, it's not good for her to be locked up down here all the time," I countered frustratedly. "It's dismal. You can't even tell what time of day it is in this place. That can't be healthy."

"She does this to herself," argued Spike. "I can't make her do anything. I told you she was paranoid. And she's obsessed."

Obsessed, I thought. Like me. But unlike me, she was still attached to her role as a guardian of Equestria. My eyes landed on a gathering of six little clay figures that looked like twilight and her friends. I approached the small crate table they stood upon and noticed a few photos on the wall behind it. I leaned in closer and saw something I thought I'd never see again, Cadance and Flurry Heart smiling back at me. It was all three of us and Spike and Twilight. We were all smiling. We were all strangers. I swallowed and stroked the picture softly with one hoof, fighting back more tears. Since that day, I had only seen their faces in my nightmares.

"I'll find it later," blurted Twilight angrily, suddenly reappearing behind me. "I'm not sleeping till we figure this out!'

Author's Note

We're getting close to the end. It's going to get messy both literally and figuratively.