Cammie

by Jarvy Jared

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: A New Generation, Romance, Zipp Storm, Adventure, Drama, Original Character
Length: 97305

A mother's journey to the north inevitably leads her to a journey through her own heart.

Chamomile isn't a train conductor. She isn't an engineer, either. She's just a widow taking care of her lonely Bridlewood tea shop and disabled son. Yet, when she receives word of a job opportunity from the newly instituted Equestrian Railroad Company, asking for ponies to extend the railroad to a forgotten realm in the Frozen North, she is intrigued. Perhaps such a place holds the key to changing her son's life for the better.

This simple task is colored by the group she's paired with: a reserved unicorn, a gung-ho pegasus, and an earth pony no less burdened than herself. As they journey forward, she'll find they bring out sides of her long since buried, and new sides altogether—not least the earth pony, whom Chamomile finds herself growing inexplicably closer to.

It'll be up to her how to react to this change—and what kinds of memories she wants to make.

This story is complete, and will be updated every Tuesday and Friday.

My eternal gratitude to all of my pre-readers and editors who, with all their various contributions, comments, and concerns, helped me bring out the best in this story:
Stinium Ruide
Ghost Mike
VoxArachne
Sledge115

Little Tigress provided the cover art. Their deviantart can be found at this link. Thank you so much!

This story was written and revised to be set during the Tell Your Tale YouTube Series and after the Make Your Mark special, and as such, departs from the Make Your Mark series. That said, I have tried to make it so that watching either the special or the series is not necessary to understand the story's contents.

Published 2022-11-29 13:20:00 UTC
Last updated 2023-01-31 17:34:37 UTC

2 - The Departing

The carriage moved in two distinct ways, depending on the type of road they were on. The dirt-back roads that had snaked lazily out of Bridlewood offered a rickety yet familiar bounce, while the gravel pavement on which they now rode was of a smoother variety. It was a small thing, not worth noticing when compared to the disappearance of the ancient, eldritch tree line, the sparkling shade, or the mistiness of the forest. Chamomile supposed that she only took notice of the difference in how the carriage moved because it reminded her more poignantly and presently of the fact that, in the end, she had made the decision to leave Bridlewood behind.

Penny had been good to her, despite how things had ended last time. She’d still asked if she was certain this was what she wanted, “and if it is, I’ll support you, one-hundred percent, guaranteed.” Penny was perhaps a bit too sincere for her own good, but it had warmed Chamomile’s heart a little.

Telling Juniper was a different matter altogether. Explaining why she was leaving was a complicated manner. She didn’t want to say she was leaving in order to get back his magic, because she didn’t think it right to get his hopes up for something she, herself, had little faith in. In the end, she simply told him that she was starting a new job, and that for the time being, the tea shop would be closed.

“Can I still sleep in our room?” he asked.

“No—I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone.” Alone with that cold shop and the memories. “You’ll be staying with Ms. Penny—she has a nice house—and the shop will be closed, so you don’t have to worry about anything, I promise.”

Those final words—“you don’t have to worry about anything, I promise”—troubled her upon reflection. Parenthood was full of promises, but Chamomile knew that that meant that it was also full of unfulfilled ones. Could she really tell him not to worry at all, when she knew there was much to worry about? But a parent must say that to their child sometimes, if only to preserve their view that the world makes sense and that the parent knows all there is to know. Perhaps, too, that was for the child’s sake, as much as it was for the parent’s herself.

When she arrived at the edge of Bridlewood, she found another unicorn there already. “Clip Styles,” he’d said quietly after she asked him who he was. Dark blue with a pale silver mane and horn, he had been a part-time mane stylist back in Bridlewood; Chamomile recognized him as one of the four barbers who’d occasionally trimmed Juniper’s frequently unkempt mane. A black comb and a silver-cobalt pair of scissors denoted his Cutie Mark. He’d been waiting at the edge of Bridlewood, not necessarily for her, but for the vehicle in which they were now sitting, and had spoken only that note of introduction. Like her, he’d packed a small bag, but unlike hers, which bulged with its contents, his was thin and spartan. The advertisement hadn’t given them a sense of what to pack aside from the essentials, but Chamomile wondered if she’d gone overboard.

Not long after she’d arrived, other unicorns had come, also carrying a few bags of belongings. While some words of greeting were exchanged, afterwards, all kept to a hesitant silence—for none of them knew what exactly to expect. Then, several vehicles made their way into the forest. It was like creatures from another world had arrived. The cars, with their four wheels, long, sleek frames, and rumbling engines, were unlike anything she’d seen in Bridlewood, causing her to reflect on how secluded Bridlewood had been before unification. She’d hardly had time to dwell on the matter before the unicorns were divided up and carted into the cars, Clip and Chamomile going together.

That was when Chamomile saw that there were two others: a pegasus and an earth pony. That they had been in the car before she and Clip had gotten on could only mean that the car had gone through Zephyr Heights and Maretime Bay first before arriving in Bridlewood, but they didn’t look like they’d been traveling for long. The pegasus was white like an enoki mushroom, and he’d greeted her and Clip with a confident, almost brazen smile. “Polar Blast,” he said, in a baritone voice, shooting one of his wings out so sharply that it nearly struck Chamomile on the nose. His Cutie Mark seemed to interpret his name literally, because it looked like a snowflake with squiggly directional lines around it.

“Oops,” he then said when he saw her flinch back; he was laughing, too, a bit impishly, which made her think that despite his voice, he was still quite young. “Sorry. Sometimes I forget not everypony has these things.”

That left the fourth individual, the earth pony. She was an azalea pink, with a long, poofy, honeydew mane tied into a braid. The mane was so fair, it was almost transparent. Chamomile guessed she was probably around the same age as her. But she hadn’t introduced herself; she’d only briefly glanced at Clip and Chamomile when they’d gotten on, and even after Polar had spoken, she’d remained reticent, couched on the other side of the car, distinctly separated from the rest of them. By the time they’d left Bridlewood’s dirt road behind in favor of the smoother roadway, she had done nothing but sit, as though stuck in a trance, gazing out the window of the car.

For a time, quietness seemed to be something they were all content with. Clip had his head bowed, as though sleeping, and Polar was absentmindedly picking at some of the feathers in his wing. The earth pony remained where she sat, watching.

Chamomile looked out her own side’s window. The trees of Bridlewood were receding into the distance and lush rolling hills that spoke to spring’s recent arrival replaced them. The other cars were following closely behind, dust and smoke flying out from under them.

She glanced at the unspeaking mare, wondering if she was simply shy, or if she was somehow afraid of them. Even though the division between the tribes now seemed like a distant memory, perhaps certain weeds had planted their roots far below where the eye could see, the heart could touch, could feel—perhaps echoes of who they once were, what they feared and hated, still lingered in the back of their minds. Like ghosts, really—ghosts of the secret shame they were all privy to, which no words could put to rest… ghosts…

Her mind was cast back to that morning, when she’d thought she’d seen Astral standing in the grove. Just as quickly, she banished that thought, returning her gaze to the inside of the car.

She was surprised, then, to see that the mare was looking at her. Or rather, her horn. It seemed odd that she should be surprised, for wasn’t it true that in Maretime Bay, there were unicorns already living there? Just as quickly as Chamomile had noticed this, the mare’s gaze traveled down and met her own.

The moment could not have been long, yet it seemed pulled to its limit and then some. The mare’s eyes were a sparkling blue, so rich in hue, it was like looking at shiny sapphires.

The moment passed. The mare, realizing she was staring, made a small sound in the back of her throat, one of shock, then lowered her head and hid behind her mane. For whatever reason, Chamomile felt her cheeks burn as though she was the one committing the social faux pas, and she, too, averted her gaze.

“Well!” Polar said.

Chamomile looked sharply at him. He was smiling. It was unclear if he’d been watching the little exchange between them. “This is exciting, isn’t it?” he continued. “Have any of you ever been on a train before?”

Clip was not yet asleep, for he answered somewhat tersely, “Never.”

“What about you, Chamomile?”

Surprised to be addressed, it took her a moment to find her tongue. “No. This is my first time. Or, it will be.”

“I’d guess that’s probably going to be the experience for a lot of ponies,” Polar said. He swiveled around to look at the other mare. “What about you, er…” His smile turned apologetic. “Sorry, I don’t believe I actually asked for your name. Rude of me to ask again.”

She turned her head in a sudden, whipping manner, and surprise shone clearly out of her face. She looked at him, then at the other two, and her gaze seemed to linger on Chamomile a little longer before she sighed. “No, it’s… it’s fine. I probably should have told you before, if you did ask.” She cleared her throat before introducing herself: “I’m Gaea.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Gaea,” Polar said. That early brazen attitude that Chamomile had detected appeared to be gone; she reasoned, perhaps, that that was because he was not actually a brazen pony, but simply an enthusiastic one, and her earlier trepidation about him began to fade. “Now, about my question…”

“What was it, sorry?”

“Have you ever ridden on a train before? I know from a few friends in Zephyr Heights that Maretime Bay has some… what do you call them… carts?”

“Oh, you must mean the trams.” She nodded a little. “Yeah, I’ve ridden on them a few times before, when I had to… But no, I’ve never actually ridden on a train train before. So this is new for me.”

Polar nodded, and went on asking a few more questions about the tram—it seemed he was fully capable of drawing this Gaea out of her shell, for after a few minutes she’d managed to converse with him over a few topics. But Chamomile had noticed that moment of hesitation on her part, when she’d trailed off so suddenly.

“It’s exciting, though, isn’t it?” Polar then repeated, looking at each of them.

“I guess so,” Chamomile said. “I just don’t really know what to expect. The pamphlet only gave out so many specifics about what we’ll be doing, not necessarily how we’ll be doing it. Or what’ll it be like.”

“Typical for an advertisement,” Clip said. Chamomile couldn’t decide if he sounded bitter or if this was his natural tone of voice.

“Still!” Polar’s eyes gleamed. “I mean, this is basically a big adventure, isn’t it? Going on a train north? Seeking out the frontier?”

His enthusiasm reminded Chamomile of Juniper, for how pure it seemed. And this caused two feelings to well in her chest: amusement, and then also regret at having to leave her son behind. She smiled, though, attempting to hide it, but sensed Gaea looking at her.

“I tell you, I never thought I’d be doing something like this,” Polar went on. “Back home I was just a simple courier, flying from door to door. Though, I guess before that, I walked door to door. No magic, you know? Oh, that reminds me!” He turned back to Gaea, his grin never once failing. “Is it true what they say?”

“What… What they say?”

“You know! Your magic! Zephyr Heights doesn’t get a lot of earth ponies coming around, but I’ve spoken to a few, and they say that yours came back! The flower power stuff, right?”

“Oh…” Gaea nodded. “Flower power. Right.” Suddenly a self-conscious smile came across her face, and another sound that was half-sigh, half-giggle, came out of her. “Frankly, I think that’s a bit of a silly name, but Posey made it up on the spot, and, well, I guess it’s popular with all the florists.”

“Like you?”

Gaea started, looking at Polar with a confused expression. “Your Cutie Mark,” he said. “That’s a flower, isn’t it?”

She looked at her flank as though she had forgotten her Mark even existed. It was not exactly a flower by traditional definition. Rather, three stalks with tear-shaped leaves jutted out from a central point.

“Wheat, actually,” Gaea said. She’d become subdued, and a shadow crossed her face, though it was unclear if it was out of distaste for her mark, or for the conversation, or something else entirely.

Polar at last noticed her change in demeanor. He winced once, but managed to keep smiling. “Sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”

“It’s fine,” Gaea said. “It’s true that I work as a florist, but…” Then, in a quick stream of breath, she changed the topic back to the former one: “But, yeah, we have magic again. It’s strange, seeing how we’d gone for a while without it.”

“All of us were like that,” Chamomile said. “It took us unicorns some time to get used to it.”

“And I can’t tell you how many times I crashed into clouds trying to get my wings to work.” Polar laughed, bright again. “Makes you wonder, though, why they invited ponies from all the tribes to come work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t imagine what being able to fly will do to help build a railroad. So I don’t really know why pegasi are here. Earth ponies, well, you can grow flowers, but—” He paused, catching himself. “Believe me, I’m not trying to downplay any of us. It’s just… well, when I think about it, it’s just a little strange. You’d think unicorns might be better at laying down tracks, just because they can lift stuff.” He looked at Chamomile’s horn to emphasize the point.

Chamomile had to admit that was a question she’d had in the back of her mind. “I’m sure they have their reasons for this,” she said, noting privately that “they” sounded ominously ambiguous. Next to her, Clip made a noncommittal grunt, but she couldn’t tell if he disagreed on any point. “Maybe they need each pony race’s specialty.” But saying that out loud seemed like rhetoric from a different time, a divisive time, and she regretted bringing it up.

Polar shrugged. “I guess we’ll learn more when we get there.”

“Wherever there is,” Gaea said.

From up front, the driver, apparently taking the tone as prompting, turned and told them that they would arrive at their destination in about an hour, which he described as a station of some sort. “You ponies had better rest up while you can—you’re probably going to need it.”

This, for whatever reason, signaled an end to the conversation. Polar settled into his seat, humming absentmindedly for a time before he lowered his head and fell into a quick nap. Clip was much the same as ever, though Chamomile didn’t think he was sleeping, based on how every now and then she’d catch his eyes snapping open and glancing at the non-unicorns with a sparkle of curiosity. Gaea returned to watching out the window, though there didn’t seem to be anything of interest to her out there.

Chamomile tried to rest, as well. But her mind was adrift, like a riverboat on the sea. She was thinking at once of what lay ahead, and also at once what lay behind. Her hoof clutched her bag, inside of which was, among her other items, were two photos: one of herself and Astral, and one of Juniper, which she had taken almost out of a superstitious fear that she could forget what he looked like.

She nestled into her seat and closed her eyes, trying to rest. She thought she felt somepony looking at her, but eventually, whatever gaze there was, faded into the recesses of perception. The smooth rolling of the car pulled her towards a somewhat peaceful rest.

In about an hour, the convoy of cars reached its destination. The early noon sun had risen to its zenith, shining upon Chamomile and waking her. Her companions had also stirred, and were looking out the window of their car.

It was some kind of supply yard, recently constructed. Pipes, bricks, and other building materials lay under sheets tied to them with thick rope, and workers were taking out the material to set up on the end in which they’d entered. Large barrels and boxes were pried open to reveal machinery and equipment that were taken slowly and carefully out of their containers in order to be set to work. The cars did not stop here, however; they followed a straight path lined by cones that led to a depot station made of concrete and brick, with tall dark windows obscuring any view inside.

Once the convoy came to a stop, everypony inside, sans the drivers, got out. An earth pony construction worker wearing an orange vest took notice of them. He came forward and spoke to one of the drivers, who waved a hoof towards the whole disembarked group. The worker nodded, then began to direct them towards the depot itself. His tone conveyed a certain impatience; he wanted to get back to work.

They passed a rumbling industrial engine carrying steel girders somewhere and other such contraptions of mechanical origin. Supports stretched high into the sky, metal and imposing, and catwalks and scaffolding stretched between them, on which scrambled workers to and fro, bits and pieces and tools jangling in belts, in holsters, or in mouths and magic. All of it reminded Chamomile of a forest—albeit a forest made of concrete and steel, a forest that swelled under not a canopy of thick leaves, but an open ceiling of sky and sun.

When they approached the wide-open entrance to the depot, she felt the train’s steam before she saw it. A loud, snake-like hissing noise preceded the steam that poured over the platform. Unprepared, Chamomile breathed it in too fast and coughed hard, and a few of the other ponies there also began to cough. The rest, including Polar Blast and Clip Styles, managed to continue forth, their coats and manes eaten up by the thick whiteness.

“You okay?” somepony murmured to her. Though her coughing, she saw that it was Gaea.

“I’m fine,” Chamomile wheezed. “Just give me a few moments. You go on ahead.”

But Gaea simply shook her head. “No, that’s all right. I can wait for you.”

A little kindness. It was enough to make Chamomile start, or she would have, had she not been fighting to get her coughing under control. Something in her turned in an odd manner—almost like the feeling one gets when they sense that the atmosphere in a room has changed ever so slightly—but she quickly forgot that feeling when the coughing returned.

Eventually, though, she was able to overcome her coughing. By that point, a lot of ponies had passed them, few sparing concerned looks her way. All the while, Gaea had stayed by her side, and though she seemed a little awkward, there was something a little sweet about the endeavor.

“Thank you,” Chamomile said softly.

Gaea nodded. The white vapors had come in—she’d gotten used to them so she didn’t cough—and they covered bits and pieces of her face. But Chamomile could have sworn she saw something faintly red peek out of her pink cheeks. “Come on,” Gaea then said, turning away. “We’d better catch up.”

Past the thick fog, the other ponies stood, facing the train. It was a violet steam locomotive, idling proudly in the lot like a victorious king. Two engineers stood in the cabin, their faces streaked with sweat, waiting to be told to start the engine. A long line of cars was attached to its rear, stylized for a certain aesthetic—rather than the wooden ones she’d seen in the pamphlet, they were pink and purple with white roofs on top, white like frosting.

On the platform, in front of the other ponies, was an earth pony conductor. He was checking his golden chain-watch and surveying the crowd. The steam had made him start to sweat under his cap, and the heat from the engine had warped his curly mane. He blinked rapidly. A couple of construction workers trotted past, and he stopped them to speak in indecipherable tones; they responded, likely, in the negative to some sort of question, for his lips twisted into a frown and he glanced back at the crowd with even clearer nervousness than before. Standing behind two earth ponies, Chamomile ended up listening to their conversation:

“What’s going on? I thought we were set to depart.”

“The conductor said he’s waiting for their commissioner.”

“A commissioner?”

“Apparently somepony involved in getting all of this together. Not sure if it’s the same pony paying us…”

“You don’t think they’ll stiff on us?”

“Don’t know. Can’t say I like how some of those pegasi and unicorns look.”

The other earth pony huffed. “Better stow that attitude, now, you know. We’ll all be working together.”

“Assuming we actually start working soon.”

They moved away, allowing an open space. Stepping into it, Chamomile was surprised to bump into Gaea again. She turned her head and caught her gaze. . Evidently, Gaea had heard what was said about Chamomile’s kind, and her eyes betrayed a soft kind of concern. Chamomile shrugged, not quite smiling, not quite grimacing, because she was not sure if she was or was not bothered by such remarks.

Then the conductor’s head turned so sharply, everypony noticed. He was focusing on something in the sky. While the pegasi murmured about some kind of shape, the rest, Chamomile included, saw nothing of interest except for the fact that the sky was cloudless.

Chamomile blinked. In that second, a white, graceful pegasus mare rocketed towards them.

A few ponies screamed (only a little, later they’d say), as did a few pegasi, but these latter ponies screamed, “Princess Zephyrina!” just as she landed in front of the conductor.

Princess?

Old stories returned to her, the kinds that had been passed down to unicorns through oral tales. Older than memory, older than generations of remembering, these stories spoke of platinum princesses of old, so magnificent that they could only exist in fairy tales and myth. One such princess had brought their kind to what would become Equestria, leading them with her grace, her beauty, and eventually her heart. Such myths had created for Chamomile the idea of a princess as naturally being a unicorn—she knew this was already a false view ever since magic had returned—as well as the idea that to be a princess, one must have that same kind of saving grace about them; they must conduct themselves as though they knew of their own importance, neither extolling it needlessly nor humbling themselves before others recklessly.

This Princess Zephyrina appeared to fit that definition. When she’d landed, she’d raised her head and spread her wings in a grand display of multicolored feathers. Her eyes had the kind of lofty regality best associated with royalty, and her mouth formed into a considerably neutral frown—one that did not betray either her thoughts or her emotions. She had the semblance of a leader, of somepony who could take charge of a situation, and, perhaps this, along with the other observations, caused some instinctual urge to bow to rise up in Chamomile, which she only just managed to resist.

The resulting gust blew back everyone’s manes and fur. Chamomile felt the flap to her bag open up, and, frantically, she closed it, just in time to see the princess smile abashedly.

“Heh… sorry, everypony. Flight school went on longer than I expected. Had to seriously pump my wings just to get here at some point.”

In an instant, that fairy-tale image of a princess—well, it did not quite shatter, but it did pop and wheeze out the last of its vitality. The way this pegasus spoke was not like how Chamomile had imagined a princess would speak. There was no refinement. And there was a clear youthfulness to the voice, an eagerness that suggested a regent-in-training, not a regent-in-reign.

The princess looked at the conductor. His mane was even curlier than before, and his cap ever more lopsided. “How are we doin’ on time?” she asked

He composed himself in an impressively short while. “We are still right on time, Princess Zephyrina.” Chamomile was surprised to hear that he had a bit of a country accent, and how he drawled out her name seemed a tad bit humorous.

She held up a hoof. “Please. Just call me Zipp—even my mom calls me that, now. That goes to the rest of you, okay?” she added, looking back at the crowd. There seemed to be a silent “please” tacked onto that statement.

While it appeared that the crowd was perfectly willing to accept these terms, the pegasi all appeared quite excited. They were pointing at Zipp with their hooves and their—what was the term; cell phones?—and clamoring and whispering among themselves. A few phones flashed—photos had been taken—and Zipp looked more abashed now than before. The conductor, noticing this, cast a stern gaze over the crowd, and all the phones were put away.

A princess who doesn’t like getting her photo taken? So there was more to this pegasus than what Chamomile thought she knew about princesses. Suddenly, it dawned on Chamomile that the easily lofty manner in which Zipp had appeared was but one kind of performance, and this embarrassed demeanor was yet another. Perhaps it was the truer one, given how she seemed to fall into it without effort or strain.

Chamomile tried to see if Polar was also as excited as his fellow pegasi. She scanned the crowd, looking for him. There he was, off a little ways, and he was looking at Zipp. But, unlike the others, who’d almost fanatically squealed, he was silent, staring at her with a thunderstruck expression, like he hadn’t expected her to drop out of the sky.

Because Chamomile was up front, she could just make out Zipp’s voice: “Have they… you know…”

The conductor shook his head. “No, Pr—Zipp. They only jus’ arrived.”

Zipp frowned. “Ah. Well, then…” She cleared her throat, then took a step forward. The movement was enough to cause all the excited murmuring to dissipate, and everyone looked expectantly at her.

Zipp pushed her nervousness aside. “This might seem like a silly question, but do any of you know what you’ll be doing?”

Clip’s distinctively dry tone rang out: “Building the railroad.” Some pegasi turned and gave him dirty looks. There was, however, a contingent of earth and unicorn ponies who laughed a little. Clip seemed to notice none of these reactions.

Zipp looked confused. “I mean, yeah, but… Wait, are you saying you don’t know?”

They mirrored her look. A furrowed line came over her forehead, and she looked at the conductor. “Do you have one of those pamphlets on you, by any chance?”

He hadn’t—the call went out for one. Gaea, being closest to the raised platform, took hers out of her bag and held it up. “Here. I’ve got mine,” she said—her voice seemed to echo plaintively within that depot.

Zipp took it with a grateful nod. She skimmed its page for a second, then her eyes widened. “Oh, ponyfeathers.” (Chamomile privately added that to her growing list of discrepancies—a princess who cursed?) “Did you all receive this kind of pamphlet?” she asked the crowd.

They said they did. Zipp groaned. “I can’t believe it! They sent you the wrong ones! Argh, I knew I should have overseen the actual send-off myself!”

“The wrong ones?” Clip asked, suspicion lacing his voice.

Holding the pamphlet out with an outstretched wing—the dexterity was remarkable—Zipp said, “These are for one of our normal railroad constructions—back when we were just starting to connect the three cities by train.”

Normal railroad construction? Chamomile frowned. She slid her own pamphlet out of her bag and flipped through the pages. No, it was still the same one that Penny had given her—there was no mention of building between the three cities. There was only the point about them laying down tracks northward.

Zipp was now whispering something to the conductor, who was whispering something back. Both their faces were twisted with consternation. The other ponies were no better, caught between confused murmurs and somewhat angry tones of voices. Chamomile glanced at Gaea, whose eyes had gone wide and whose body was shaking. Chamomile’s gaze swiveled to look at everypony else, who all had their pamphlets out to compare—and from what she saw, all were the same as the one Zipp had just presented as wrong.

All, except for hers.

“Excuse me,” Chamomile said.

She hadn’t said it very loud, but for some reason, Zipp managed to hear her anyway. “Yeah?” she asked, unable to hide her frantic tone.

Aware that some were looking at her, Gaea included, Chamomile nonetheless pushed the feeling aside and held her pamphlet up in her magic. “I actually have a different job advertisement. I’m wondering if it’s the right one?”

“You do?” Zipp took it in her wing and opened it. She flipped through it, then flipped back, then flipped more slowly through it again. Her eyes widened again. “Wait! This is the right one—the one we were supposed to send out!”

“It is?” The conductor asked to be given it, and after he had, he let out a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be! There it is—Expedition to the Frozen North: Railroad Workers Wanted. Yes, yes! This is the right one!”

The response was predictable—a clamoring of voices, all rising and confused, striking against the walls of the depot, echoing, echoing in their aimless way. Frozen North? Expedition? Some were troubled. Others were angry, and of them, a few made remarks to the effect of leaving altogether.

“Ponies, please!” Zipp shot both wings out, so sharply that they slapped the air and made a concussive sound. Instantly, that image Chamomile had had of what a princess could be returned. Zipp’s voice, which managed to carry over the turmoil brewing before her, quelled everypony. They looked up at her, expectantly.

“I know you are all confused,” she said. “And upset—you might feel like you were cheated out of a job. But please, let me at least explain what this was supposed to be—before you all decide to leave, okay?”

When silence met her, she took this as permission to continue. She folded her wings back and cleared her throat. She began to pace back and forth across the platform, tail swishing in an almost dramatic manner. Her voice took on a tone of intrigue. “You may have seen on your way here that there are a few railroads already constructed. These lead between the three tribes’ and their cities: Maretime Bay, Zephyr Heights, and Bridlewood Forest. A good portion of Equestria has therefore been reconnected thanks to these railroads. But there’s one area yet to be furnished… an area in the frigid north.” She paused, looking them over. One might have thought she was pausing merely for dramatic effect, except that her face was utterly grave and devoid of the joy of storytelling. “My friend, Sunny, has said how in ancient Equestria, there used to be a series of tracks connecting the rest of Equestria to a frozen kingdom. We’re going to be building towards those tracks, if not the frozen kingdom itself—whichever one we find first.”

Facing them directly, she allowed herself a sigh. “That’s what we’re building towards. I won’t lie—it won’t be easy. It’ll probably be one of the most exhausting things anypony has to do. I understand if that’s not what you signed up for—if you feel like this isn’t what you want to do, then I won’t stop you. You’ll still get paid, I’ll personally see to that, but…”

She raised her head, looking at them, each individually, as though meaning to captivate them all with but her brilliant blue eyes. “I can’t stress how important this could be—it’s more than a job; it’s a chance to do something amazing! It’s about rediscovering the past and uncovering answers to explain why things have been how they’ve been. It may even lead us to discovering how to prevent us from separating again. This!” She stomped a hoof, not aggressively, but in a manner as to punctuate her point. “This—this is bigger than you. This is bigger than me. Than all of us. That’s why I need you. We need you. Equestria needs you. So if you want to go, go, but it would mean the world if you stayed, if you helped us out.”

Then her voice faltered, and that regality which had swept up her personality with the grace of a zephyr vanished under sudden silence. The steam that the train lazily exhaled drifted up through the open ceiling of the depot, and a few birds flew across it, dark triangular shapes against the vacuous vapors.

Who was she waiting for? Them, Chamomile knew; but all of them? Was she expecting one of them to speak for them all? Who could, though? Who had that right?

And then a voice declared, “Well, I’m with you all the way.”

It was Polar—and even he, when Chamomile looked sharply at him, seemed surprised he’d spoken. But soon after his face adopted a determined expression. His wings pumped excitedly, he seemed about to salute Zipp, but something held him back, and so he simply directed his determination towards her and gave a fierce nod.

“Me, too.” Chamomile started at the sound of Gaea’s voice, quiet yet no less determined than Polar’s.

“Us as well,” came the collective voice of a group of earth ponies on the other side.

Presently similar assertive remarks rose out of the crowd, and it became apparent that nopony, despite their misgivings, thought about walking away. Something had called them—was it duty, responsibility, simple curiosity? Chamomile looked at Gaea but could not tell what it was that had driven her to say so.

Not that she was about to walk away, either. She thought of her son, and the decision was easy.

Zipp looked at them all, wonder in her eyes. Then she shook her head in amazement. “Heh… Ponies after my own heart. Thank you,” she said, bowing her head a little, “all of you.”

“But it will be quite cold up north,” somepony mentioned, somewhat in an offhand manner.

The conductor, hearing this, stepped forward, reclaiming a bit of his authority. “Don’t worry, y’all,” he said placatingly. “You’ll all be stocked with enough parkas and blankets t’ make a capybara jealous.” A few laughs broke the tense air like water through cracked earth. “Plus, this here train’s stocked with all the hot cocoa we could need!”

“Not that you should be needing any of those things for a little while,” Zipp said. “We’ll be heading slowly north, so the cold shouldn’t reach us until we’re basically there.”

“You’re coming with us?” somepony asked. A few of the pegasi also expressed excitement and surprise.

Zipp grinned. She was back to herself, Chamomile supposed—whichever self that was. “‘Course I’m coming along! After all, I was one of those who commissioned this!”

This seemed sufficient enough explanation, and spirits returned to a high point. Zipp nodded at the conductor, who took out his chain again, checked it, and nodded himself. He waved a hoof at somepony in the front of the train, and the doors to the passenger cars opened.

“Saddle up, everypony,” he said. “We’d best not delay any longer if we want daylight to be our friend.”

3 - Wishes in the Night

There was a time before she went to take the train job when she awoke in the middle of the night to hear the quiet sobbing of her son. Because Juniper’s room was next to hers, the sound easily crawled from there to her ears, and it seemed to infect the whole shop with an atmosphere of chilling vulnerability.

She found him hunched over on top of his bed, the covers clutched under his hooves. Turning on the light, she saw his eyes wet with big, drooping tears. “Oh, honey,” she said, wrapping him in a hug, feeling his face soak her fur, “what is it? What’s wrong?”

“I had a bad dream,” he said. This was why, later, when he awoke early much to her surprise, she’d asked if he’d had a bad dream.

“What was it about?”

“It was about Daddy.” By then he should have been too old to call Astral “Daddy,” yet that habit had persisted—perhaps because, to Juniper, that’d all he’d been; he had not gotten to the point where Astral could be called “Dad.”

“I dreamed I was talking to him, but then all of a sudden, I couldn’t see his face.”

“Couldn’t see his face?”

He shook his head, and pulled back to look at her. “No. I couldn’t even tell what color he was. And then in the dream, he was asking me a bunch of stuff”—that he could only speak of “stuff,” of vague things, struck her hard—“but I couldn’t answer him. He asked if I didn’t remember, and I realized I couldn’t, and then I still couldn’t see his face and—”

Chamomile buried his face in her fur again just as more sobbing took over. She willed herself not to cry—she’d shed enough tears for a lifetime. “Shh, shh,” she was saying. “It’s okay, it’s okay. It was just a dream, just a dream.”

This was not the first time he’d had such a dream, however. A few months after Astral’s death, Juniper had come to her in the night. In a low, trembling voice, he’d revealed he’d dreamed his father—or somepony who said he was his father—had visited him, but he couldn’t recognize him and had gotten scared. “That pony got sad,” he’d said, “and then I got sad and woke up. Was that Daddy?”

She couldn’t answer him right away. The pain was still too immediate. He must have seen this in her face, paled by the fingers of the moon, for his face scrunched up and, while he did not cry, he gave the impression of being perturbed by her silence. “I’m sure it was,” she said quickly. “It’s okay. Sometimes I dream about him, too.”

“But I couldn’t tell if it was him,” he insisted. He’d been stuck on that point until she’d at last soothed him into a sleep undisturbed by any dreams.

Similar incidents had played out throughout the years. Some were as minor as that, and others as intense as this one. After each nightmare, Juniper would spend a few days feeling guilty. Guilty! As though his subconscious was committing a crime under his discretion! She’d try to assuage his guilt; sometimes it seemed to work. He’d go a few days, maybe a few weeks, or, blessedly, a few months, without dreaming of his father. Then he would dream of him—or rather, dream of a lack of recognizing him—and the cycle would resume.

During those times, Chamomile would sometimes feel resentful towards Astral. This, in turn, spawned her own guilt, a second shadow to her name. Still, she could not help but think: it was Astral’s passing that made her son absorb guilt into his skin like a poor drink. If he had not passed… But it was useless to think about that. She knew this, yet some part of her still held on to that ludicrous idea.

She was thinking about all of this when Juniper, sniffling, murmured, “Tell me about him. Please.”

She hesitated only a moment. The window had its curtains pulled to the side—she couldn’t recall if she had done this, or if Juniper had—providing a view of Bridlewood’s darkness, thinned by the presence of light crystals which that ditzy, bubbly unicorn, Izzy Moonbow, had introduced a few months ago. It made her think about her son’s lack of magic again, and she was tempted to close the curtains.

She did as he asked, which he had asked every time he’d dreamed that kind of dream.

The two things that Juniper had inherited from Chamomile were her brown eyes and dark-brown mane, which, at times, he liked to wear as she did hers, tied up in a bun whenever she was working and didn’t want her mane to fall into the cups. Everything else came from Astral. Juniper had such a similarly colored coat that you would have been forgiven if you thought them the same color, and his mane had one bang periodically stick out, stubbornly refusing to be combed back, just as Astral’s had, to his amused annoyance. His nose was short like his, and his body was that same slender physique that seemed to indicate an artist more than a worker-pony.

Astral was an artist, of course. He’d worked as one of Bridlewood’s only newspaper ponies, and despite the fact that there wasn’t much news, he always did his job with a smile on his face. And what a smile! When he looked at her, it was like he was saying she was the whole of his world. It was the way any mare would want to be looked at. During their time together, it created a sense of intimacy between them—for there was no need to hide anything out of shame. That was one of the first things she’d fallen in love with.

“Aside from newspapers,” she told Juniper, “he liked to write other things. He wrote poems and letters to friends, even if they were only a short walk away, and sometimes he wrote songs, too, but he never sang them—I think it was because he was embarrassed, even though I tried to encourage him. We met at a poetry festival a few years before you were born.”

Usually she’d go on to describe more about Astral—the same song and dance which, in the past, had provided comfort, but which, in the intervening years, had gradually lost their splendor, like how gold, when rubbed over and over, loses its sheen—but her son suddenly said, “How was I born?”

It was an awkward question. Every parent must consider it, as well as what to say when their child inevitably asks it, but for that moment, Chamomile felt her brain freeze up. A particularly visceral, unusually passionate image burst in front of her eyes like a supernova before vanishing. She coughed so as to mask her embarrassment, then remembered a new way of telling it.

She said Juniper had been born under a very special star, one that could grant wishes. Not a magical star—because back then, of course, anything magical was forbidden—but a star made of wishes and generous in giving them to the right ponies. She didn’t bother trying to make Juniper believe this story or ask him if he did, because even though he may have been at that age where the old magical tales used to capture the hearts and minds of children begin to lose their sheen, some trace of their trueness still remained.

“You were our wish child,” she explained. “We’d wanted one for a while, but it took until we made that wish for you to come into our lives. And your name, well, Astral came up with that. He was looking at some of the plants growing in the back and thinking about how we’d built this place together, and how the garden needed something like we did, and he thought that a juniper tree might serve that…”

She detected his breathing had changed and looked down. He was falling asleep, not out of disinterest but because dreams and nightmares are an exhausting business. Smiling, she wiped his eyes then helped him back under the covers. She stayed there until she was sure he was asleep again. Then she stayed a little longer, before she kissed him on the forehead, gave him another hug, and left the room.

There were things she didn’t tell him about the star, though—things that she did not intentionally hide from him, so much as let sleep somewhere where mentioning them was not something she considered. One thing was that she’d never wished upon a star until she met Astral, and another was that she hadn’t believed in it until Juniper had come into her life.

Astral was the one to point the star out to her. One night, some years into their burgeoning relationship, he’d invited her to use a telescope he’d created all on his own. When she came out that night, confused but intrigued by his presentation of a date, he stood in an area of Bridlewood that permitted a view of the sky unobscured, grinning and shuffling on his hooves excitedly, like a colt with a secret to spill.

“Have you ever looked at the stars?” he asked. She said she hadn’t. He showed her the telescope, a white tube on a tripod pointing up towards the nameless dark. He demonstrated how to use it, then pulled out one of his journals—he had many—to show her his notes. They were largely mathematical in nature—coordinates and diagrams and little descriptions of the things he’d seen.

“There’s so much out there, so many things larger than us,” he said, his voice containing all the wonder left in the world. “One day, I’d like to map it all for somepony else to see.”

“But if you map it all, what’s left?”

“What does that matter? It’s that I can that matters, really.”

“You are such a strange stallion, Astral.”

“I know. But that’s why you love me, isn’t it? Here, let me show you what I mean.”

Astral’s love for the sky, for the cosmos, was not wholly something that took her by surprise. He’d spoken at length about his discoveries, about stars and galaxies and things called “nebula,” and of the moon, its darkness, its riveting beauty—he’d spoken so much about those kinds of cosmic wonders that she supposed she’d become an expert in them by proxy.

But when he guided her eye to the telescope’s eyepiece and adjusted the focuser, something new opened up to her—something larger than anything she could have imagined, which hinted at something larger than the silliness of being afraid of a certain word or two, or of the other tribes. A somewhat blurry white glob coalesced into the moon, with shadows that covered half of it in a way that seemed to suggest something on it was alive. He showed her another star, another planet—which was a bit dark to look at, shifting blue, looking cold and lonely yet also with a strange beauty attached—and then he asked her to step away. “There’s something else,” he said. “It reminded me a bit of you.”

He adjusted the telescope for a little while, and she watched him. There was nothing extraordinary about the moving of the scope, yet there seemed an enticing energy about what was happening in front of her, the kind a pony feels when they are so full of love that even the minutest of things are somehow precious and immortal. Three years later, this would achieve a special tragic irony, but at that moment, all she could think about was how his face shone brilliantly under moonlight, how her heart seemed to burst when he had to swipe at his face when that annoying bang tickled his forehead, and how lucky she was to enjoy this moment of solitude with somepony who made her feel all of this in the first place.

“Where are you… Ah! There we go! Here!” He was excited, and she was getting there, too. “Look at this.”

She peered through the eyepiece. At first, there didn’t appear to be anything. “Use the focuser,” he said. “It’s there, trust me.”

She did so slowly with a hoof, like she was handling a full cup of tea. Then she involuntarily gasp.

There was a star. The star. It shimmered and trembled with the same passion as a dancer, and was the same color as her coat. Somehow this finding felt both profound and humbling. It was the former because it was like she was out there, herself, in space, spinning and dancing through the cosmos attached to the pendulum of fate. And it was the latter because here was something obviously larger than her, more powerful than her, with, perhaps, its own kind of magic to tether it to its home—and Astral, upon finding it, had thought, “This is her!”

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, even though she felt that such a description was paltry. “You must have found this recently.”

He laughed, but there was a nervous energy behind it. She looked at him questioningly. “No, not really. I found it a bit of a while ago, to be perfectly honest. Actually, it was a little before we met.” His eyes twinkled. His grin achieved that knowing status. But the truest testament to his emotions was the blush on his face. “I, uh, found it, and made a wish on it.”

“A… wish?”

He nodded. “I wished that I’d meet somepony special.” He looked at her again, and his voice lowered to a whisper. “And, to my surprise, that wish came true.”

Later on, they would make wishes on that star. The wishes were, at first, small and innocent—Astral wished that when he woke up the next day, the coffee pot wouldn’t spill on his apron, and Chamomile wished that her burgeoning garden would survive the fall. They made these wishes with the air of superstitious reverence, with quick, knowing glances and giddy smirks that some ponies commented on but never quite asked about. It was assumed that they were simply acting in the way all ponies act when newly in love; their relationship became a safe haven for something as silly and as unbelievable as wish-making.

Then, one night, Astral asked if she’d like to have a child. After she’d thought about it, they went out into the backyard, found the star, and asked what it thought—and it had answered, some months later, in the form of a coddled baby resting like moss on a boulder in the languishing comfort of the forest’s shade.

After she left Juniper’s room, Chamomile considered returning to bed. She even stood outside her door, about to enter. But something prevented her. Her ears flicked, but she heard nothing. She scanned the darkened hallway for something that wasn’t there. She looked back at Juniper’s door, listening to see if he’d wake up, but no sound came from the other side.

She trotted softly down the hall. Twisting past an assortment of domestic items, she found herself under a square trapdoor in the ceiling with a string hooked in the center. She pulled it down, and steps dove out, leading up to the attic.

She went up. She turned on the light to see a space filled with old things. A familiar, lonely safe sat in the corner. There were mattresses and blankets and other spreads. A storage chest was propped against the attic wall, but she couldn’t remember if it was locked or not, and didn’t bother checking. What drove her through the attic, now, was the sight of the telescope which, covered in a light coating of dust, faced the window, and this she approached cautiously, like she didn’t want to spook it.

She pulled the curtains to the side to show a cloudless night. The canopies of trees could be seen just below the rooftops of Bridlewood’s houses, and past them rose the thick fog that had, for years, kept them isolated from the rest of Equestria. She now knew that there were two other cities of ponykind beyond them. She wondered if there were ponies there who also looked through telescopes once upon a time, who made wishes to voiceless celestial bodies.

But she hadn’t made a wish in a while. The last time she had, the disappointment of it not being fulfilled had so crushed her, she’d resolved never to wish again. She’d taken the telescope out to the back, lined it up with the sky, and sought out her star.

“I wish Astral was here,” she’d murmured. But it was not to be. And afterwards, seeing that things had continued either way, she’d packed the telescope up and put it in the attic to rest, to rot.

Her memory, now, came alive, but burdened. She cleaned the dust off the telescope and adjusted its angle, trying to line it up with an open patch of sky. She peered through the eyepiece and adjusted the focus several times, scanning each quadrant visible.

But her star was no longer there.

Of all the things Chamomile expected about a train, that the steady rumbling of the wheels, muted through each interlocking corridor, could induce sleep, was not one of them. It was with a sudden jolt that she realized she’d been asleep.

She’d been dreaming, but the dream was already out of her grasp. All she could recall was that it had been about Juniper. Her hoof instinctively found its way around her bag, and she tapped it, twice, as though to reassure herself it was still there.

It took a second for her to get her bearings. She was in one of the passenger cars, one outfitted with a rich, mahogany-wooden frame, plush seats, and automatically activating wall sconces that would turn on once it was dark enough. Ponies sat in their seats, and all were asleep. She saw Clip Styles and Polar Blast a few seats away, both also sleeping.

Her legs and neck were stiff—she’d curled up in an awkward way. She got off the seat, craning her neck side-to-side until her joints were limber. Nopony else was awake.

She looked outside. She must have been asleep for a while. It was past evening, and the full moon painted the sky in a soft luminescence, letting her see just enough through the window. The view was alarmingly peaceful. Tall trees and perfect, grassy plains rolled by at an even pace, and distant clouds hung in the air. It was a far different thing, this open peacefulness, from Bridlewood’s sequestered, sometimes stifling tranquility, and, combined with the hypnotic rumbling of the train, Chamomile could feel herself growing drowsy again.

She stepped out of her row, carefully avoiding making a sound. It was then that she noticed that, while she could place Polar and Clip, Gaea was missing from her seat. Had she woken up, too?

Chamomile shrugged. Well, if she ran into Gaea, she’d say hello. At any rate, she was interested in the train—they hadn’t had a proper tour, and she had no idea if there’d be time for one once they started working. If nothing else, she knew Juniper would be curious about the ride.

She decided to proceed to the back of the train, leaving her bag in her seat. She made for the passenger car’s exit door, and upon opening it, was met by the thrill of the night itself. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her just how fast they were moving, and so the wind blew back her mane with such abruptness, she might have tripped back. She grabbed onto the safety railings to steady herself.

Soon, the wind calmed, and she could stand without falling over. For some reason, she thought Juniper might have liked this feeling, if only for the thrill.

The next car’s door, when she entered, led to a passenger compartment in much the same vein as hers, with the only noticeable difference being the color of the seats. A few ponies were awake, however—three earth ponies who had taken one of the booths to play some cards. The other pegasi and unicorns were asleep. The earth ponies looked up, faces coated in shadows cast by the wall sconces. She froze. Maybe it was out of surprise to have them all turn to her, or maybe it was out of shyness. What was at most a second or two seemed to last much longer.

“Excuse me, miss,” said somepony behind her.

It was a dining cart pony. She was smiling kindly at Chamomile, but clearly had to pass. “Oh, sorry,” Chamomile murmured. She stepped aside, into one of the open booths, letting her pass.

When she had gone, the card players had gone back to their game.

She went through the other cars without, thankfully, further incident. She trotted through the kitchen and dining cars, marveling at how staples of pony livelihood had been converted to fit the form of the train. The staff were kind but busy, greeting her with quick nods and a few words before returning to their task. She passed cleaners, dishwashers, the occasional conductor, and others who were all in the business of keeping the comforts of conventional life in safe reach and working order.

Finally, she seemed to be reaching the end. The last car, a bit dim, was for storage, with bags, suitcases, and carry-ons laid across and under metal racks. By then, she thought her legs were newly awakened, and considered turning back now. Just as she was about to, a pink shape crossed the window of the door on the other end of the car—a pink shape followed by a trailing, honeydew mane.

Gaea. What was she doing outside?

Something compelled Chamomile to watch. Gaea was leaning over the railing. Her face was hidden from view through the window, but something told Chamomile she had her eyes closed. She seemed almost at peace, just like the land itself, despite the fact that the wind whipped her long mane around.

Chamomile opened the door. Gaea remained oddly undisturbed. Chamomile stepped outside, nothing that above them was a metal square roof which prevented the wind from knocking her over as it had previously. After closing the door behind her, she stood next to Gaea. She opened her mouth, meaning to greet her, but sensed that would be inappropriate.

After a time, Gaea opened her eyes and turned her head. “Oh,” she said, surprise mildly blossoming in her voice like a butterfly bush in the summer. “It’s Chamomile, right?”

Chamomile nodded. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I did, but then I woke up and couldn’t fall back into it. Thought I’d take a walk.”

“And you ended up here?”

Gaea laughed, in a manner both self-conscious and strangely innocent. “Well, I just sort of wandered until I came to the end, I guess. You couldn’t sleep, either?”

“No,” she decided to say, even though it was a lie.

Gaea nodded. Below them, the metal tracks scuttled towards the retreating sky like a land snake. The wind died down just enough for Gaea’s mane to settle over her shoulders. She had her lower lip slightly protruded, almost like she was pouting, but her eyes didn’t betray a sense of sadness in them.

Chamomile felt she was on the verge of intruding on something, or if she wasn’t, that she’d just caught sight of something private being exchanged. She suddenly felt awkward, standing so close to this other mare. And yet, Gaea didn’t indicate she wanted her gone, nor did Chamomile feel as though some wall had been constructed between them. The silence—that was the awkward thing, she decided. It needed breaking.

“On the car ride over,” she began. “You were talking to Polar and me about the trams.”

“I remember. They’re not quite like this train.”

“What are they like?”

“Smaller, for sure,” Gaea said thoughtfully. She raised a hoof to her chin. “We usually use them to get from one marketplace to another. There were two companies, actually—small ones, too—one that was for basic transportation, and one that Canterlogic sponsored.”

“Canterlogic?”

“Right, I guess that’s not really common knowledge. It was this big company we used to have in Maretime Bay.”

“What did they sell?”

Gaea looked abashed. “Er… not exactly quality products, in retrospect. Metal hats with anti-telepathy rods. Binoculars that could scan the skies. Things to… you know… keep us safe from unicorns and pegasi.”

“Ah.” There wasn’t much else Chamomile could say to that.

“We don’t have those anymore,” Gaea interjected. “In fact, the whole of Canterlogic has been rebranded. It’s focusing more on inclusivity for all the tribes now. It’s changed,” she added, then, in a murmur, she repeated: “It’s changed.”

They were quiet again—some disturbing barrier had been erected, something that threatened to bury the conversation altogether. Chamomile seized on that last statement, however, and said, “Everything’s changed.”

Gaea seemed relieved. “Yes. Everything.”

“For the better, do you think?” The question was out of her before she had time to think what she meant, and, instinctively, she looked at Gaea, hoping she understood.

“For sure,” Gaea said. “I mean, everypony’s got their magic back. That’s gotta count for something good, don’t you think?”

Not everypony, Chamomile thought.

In vivid detail she remembered the moment that magic returned, when all the unicorns suddenly came alive. The streets of Bridlewood had been lit up with newfound energy. She herself had felt a curious vibration in her head, a sort of inner humming that suggested she had been re-connected to a symphony beyond sensation. This itself should have served as memory enough of that event.

But what she always remembered—what had stuck with her in the days and weeks to come—was Juniper’s face, how his eagerly excited expression flickered, then faltered, when he realized that he still could not use his magic.

She detected Gaea watching her, curious and concerned. Chamomile did not want to dwell on the topic any longer, so she changed gears. “What do you think about what—” She almost said “Princess Zephyrina,” but, remembering the request, amended herself: “—about what Zipp said?”

The slight pause between Gaea’s answer revealed she was taken by surprise by the change in focus, but she recovered. “You mean how this is an entirely different expedition than the one we were initially recruited for? I mean, I guess it was rather surprising.”

“But you didn’t turn back from it.”

“Obviously not.”

It was a bit of a sarcastic statement, so surprising since it came from Gaea, that Chamomile actually smiled a little. “Obviously not,” she repeated. “But, well, I guess I’m kind of curious about that.”

“About… what? Me deciding to keep going?”

“Well, yeah.” Chamomile turned to face her. In that moment, she was surprised to see that behind the other mare rose the moon, and it seemed to fall on her in such a way as to highlight her profile with alarming intensity. Looking at her, Chamomile had a feeling she would remember Gaea looking this way sometime in the future, as though the image of her side-profile was so acute, it achieved a kind of immortality.

She sensed she was staring, and quickly looked back at the door to the train car, hoping Gaea hadn’t noticed. “I’m just curious,” she repeated in a murmur, feeling embarrassed again.

“It’s all right,” Gaea said. “Truthfully, I’m asking myself that very same question. Why am I still going if this wasn’t the job I signed up for?”

She returned to the railing, then swept a hoof out as though she was displaying the landscape. “Part of it is a simple understanding of distance,” she continued. “We’d already gone so far from Maretime Bay, it seemed pointless to want to turn back. And now, here we are, on the rails, heading north…”

She lowered her hoof. “This is the furthest I’ve traveled outside of my town, actually. Before that, the furthest I’d gone was to a toymaker’s shop on an alcove to the west, and that was only when I was a little filly.”

“So you want to keep going because you’ve already made it this far?”

“Sure, a little. Don’t a lot of ponies? Don’t they want to see what more is out there?”

Chamomile said nothing. What “more” existed had been buried three years ago in that grove. Now she was just going through the motions of life.

Gaea furrowed her brow. Her mouth was half-open, but then she closed it. The gesture was not lost on Chamomile, but she refrained from commenting on it.

Chamomile looked up at the sky. She heard herself say, “This is the furthest I’ve gone from my home, too.”

“And we’ll just keep going further and further,” said Gaea.

“Yes.” Chamomile thought Gaea sounded oddly wistful.

Chamomile could count the stars—so many, too many. But not one of them looked familiar to her. It was as though they had entered an entirely different world; or perhaps, the sky itself had changed from the one in her memory. She wondered if her star had simply burned out, had eaten through its fuel reserves, and quietly returned to the void from whence it came.

They were out there for some time, watching and waiting, before a yawn suddenly overcame Gaea. She blushed heavily, and Chamomile smiled at her in spite of herself. “Yeah, I’m getting a bit tired, too.”

“And a bit cold.”

“That as well.”

“I guess it’s getting late. Have you seen a clock?”

“There’s probably one inside, but it’s definitely past midnight by now.”

“Yikes. And we’ll probably need all the sleep we can get.” She stiffened up as another yawn momentarily melted into her voice. “Oh, goodness, I am so sorry!”

“There’s no need to apologize,” Chamomile said. “Here. Why don’t we both head in?”

She went to the door and opened it, and instead of going in first, she held it open and gestured to Gaea. For some reason, the other mare stared at her in shock, and her blush had not abated. Something about that tickled something in her, but she sought to ignore it. “Well?”

Gaea blinked twice, then nodded. In three quick steps, she entered through the open door, and Chamomile followed shortly after her.

4 - Ponyville Badlands

A few hours later, the train came to a stop at a withered, wooden station that hadn’t been painted or polished in uncountable years. The wood was flayed by the sun, exposing a white inner lining that reminded Chamomile of how bark peels in old pine trees. With a satisfied hiss, the train’s brakes activated, and steam rose out from under.

There were ponies at the station, clothed in workers’ overalls and caps, and when Chamomile disembarked, she noted that the majority were earth ponies. They had the weather-beaten, rugged, perpetually exhausted look of laborers—shoulders hunched forward, the rims of their eyes darkened—yet, upon seeing the new arrivals, they greeted them with enthusiasm, even kindness. This was the attitude of ponies who had not had visitors in years, it seemed. One of them, who bore a smile similar to the one Polar Blast had shown them, approached her and said brightly, “Welcome to the Ponyville Badlands, miss!”

“Badlands” was perhaps the most apt way of putting it. Compared to the lush landscapes they’d spent the last several hours traveling across, this place was as dead as dry. Crumbling heaps of sand were spread across a mostly flat terrain, so light that even the briefest of winds and words swept them up into temporary dust devils. The ground was the color of rust, with a few patches of sallow ferns dehydrated beyond measure. An unmerciful sun—it was hard to believe this was the same one that’d greeted them kindly when they’d departed—baked the air into a suffocating concoction so thick, it was like breathing in an invisible gel. Combined with the dust and general dryness, it was enough to cause Chamomile to cough uncontrollably.

Gaea came to her side. “Are you okay?”

Chamomile nodded, then turned away to cough. “Yeah,” she croaked. “Just dry. Water. I have a bottle in my bag—”

She was trying to undo the flap to her bag, but Gaea was quicker. She opened it and took out the bottle, uncapped it, then tipped it into her mouth before Chamomile could protest. The gesture was so simple, yet seemed also so intimate.

“Thank you,” Chamomile said after a few gulps. She already felt much better, but also felt something else. It wasn’t exactly a foreign feeling—it seemed an echo, a memory, of itself, from another time.

“You’re welcome,” Gaea said. She moved out of Chamomile’s gaze and nodded behind them. “We’d better move. The others are getting off.”

Leaving the platform once it grew more crowded allowed Chamomile to see more of the Badlands. Cottages with slanted, angular roofs were arranged in neat rows and columns, their windows and doorways boarded up, and separated by patches of ancient paths that snaked themselves between the buildings. The remains of some benches stuck out of the dirt like grave markers. There were other buildings, but the sun had beaten them beyond recognition—one could have been a store, another could have been a restaurant, and one, based on the fact that its only feature was a series of thin wooden frames, might have been a greenhouse with all its windows shattered. Everything was in that general state of disrepair which comes when time passes unannounced and unobstructed. Hinges and signboards creaked and groaned in a weak wind, and any words or lettering that might have announced the business had been lost to the elements.

Ponies had lived here, Chamomile realized. It was an obvious conclusion, but making it felt momentous, in a way that she couldn’t quite explain. Perhaps it was the fact that, in understanding it, she understood that what she saw was a testament to a past long forgotten, buried quite literally under the sands of time. She glanced from one building to another and found herself wondering who had lived there—a family, a couple, a single pony? Who had set up what could have been a fruit stand? Who had constructed the circle of fragmented stone which might have been a fountain? What about the large building in the center, a tall, wooden structure with dark oak beams, rectangular spaces for windows, and a caved-in roof—what function had it once served?

That latter building she initially thought was abandoned, but as she and Gaea continued to watch, she realized it was actually inhabited by various workers. Miners, construction workers, engineers, and more streamed in and out. A hall, Chamomile decided; this was some sort of town hall. Outside of it, more ponies loitered, carrying with them hard hats, shovels, pickaxes, and other equipment. More of those tools showed up when one turned their gaze through the center of the Badlands.

“What are they working on?” Gaea asked aloud.

“By the looks of it, excavation,” someone said.

They both started. Like a navy mist, Clip Styles had materialized without warning, and he regarded the land before them with, contrary to his normally dry demeanor, extraordinary, if restrained, interest.

“Excavation?” Chamomile said. “So something’s buried here?”

“It would seem so,” Clip said. He pointed outward. “This whole place must be like an archaeological dig site. Look at those tents, those flag markers, the equipment.” He frowned, lowering his hoof and tracing a small circle in the dirt. “Still… it doesn’t look like they’ve been at it for long.”

Before Chamomile could ask how he knew that, somepony behind them chuckled. “You’re definitely on the money there.”

All three turned to see Zipp Storm. She smirked at them.

“Ah, Princess—” Clip paused, then cleared his throat. “Right. Zipp. I was hoping I’d run into you out here.”

“Well, when a train stops and ponies get out…”

“That’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. Why have we stopped? I was under the impression we’d be continuing north.”

“You remind me of a friend of mine. He likes to ask questions.” Zipp never lost her smirk. “But that’s a fair one. The simplest reason is that we need to refuel the train. Traveling north might take longer than we expect and it’s better to have a full engine left over than an empty one by the time we arrive.”

“Why here, though?”

“It’s a central hub. You know how far apart all the cities are, right? There’s some talk about rebuilding this place into a sort-of waystation.”

“But I thought the workers were here to excavate,” Gaea said.

“They are. Afterwards comes the rebuilding.”

Zipp walked around the group so that she could get in front of them to demonstrate her point. “These workers have been here for two, three weeks max,” she said, pointing at the town hall. “And from what I know, they’ll be here another two or three more before they’ve uncovered anything.”

“What are they looking for?” Chamomile asked.

“Old stuff. Artifacts, storage chests, documents.”

“That’s not entirely very specific,” said Clip.

Zipp shrugged. “On that point, we’d both agree. Sadly, Sunny isn’t sure of what exactly to look for in the first place.”

“Sunny?” Gaea asked.

“Yeah, her. Sunny Starscout. Earth pony, orange coat, reunited the three tribes, helped bring magic back?” Zipp looked at Gaea. “Thought you’d be familiar with her.”

“I… wouldn’t say I know her personally.”

Clip said, “Would I be right, then, in assuming that this Sunny was the one who commissioned this archaeological expedition?”

“You say that like she’s funding it herself,” Zipp replied, snorting. “But she did ask for it. And after some moaning and groaning, ponies got curious. They found some old maps and compared them to the ones Sunny had. After some time, they found this place. The first railways were built in order to transport them here, as a matter of fact.”

“What do you know about this place?” Clip asked.

“Not a whole lot. But it looks agrarian, right? I’d imagine ancient Equestria wouldn’t be as technologically reliant as we are—or as my sister is,” she suddenly mumbled, before continuing: “but this place seems like a small, cozy town. Or what used to be one, at any rate.”

She flicked a wing westward. “Over that way they found a large stretch of land. Lotta hills, lotta strange markings in the ground. It was probably some sort of farm—the largest one nearest to this place. Probably supplied most, if not all the food this town ever needed.”

“Abandoned, I presume?”

“It and every other place. It’s the strangest thing.”

“But they don’t know what they’re looking for?” Chamomile said, calling attention back to the matter of the excavators. “At all?”

Zipp shook her head. “Like I said. Sunny isn’t sure. All she has is her father’s notes, but…” She looked down, and her voice became measurably quiet. “I guess even he wasn’t sure what he could find. All that she knows is that there’s something here that might help us answer what happened to this place—if not also, what happened to Equestria that led to… well, you know.” She placed three of her wingtips together, then deliberately pulled them apart, looking between them all to see if they understood.

Chamomile looked at the Badlands, at all the decrepit and decaying houses. She began to notice another facet of the place: while there were indeed sounds—hammers and pickaxes swinging and hitting stuff, ponies talking, the occasional hum of some industrial equipment—these were only of work. There was nothing to suggest life was here, the kind of life one could settle down in after a long day. “Ponies used to live here,” she said quietly.

Zipp nodded. “That’s what all the signs point to. And of course, nopony lives here anymore.”

“The question,” murmured Clip, “is why.”

“Wanna hear a theory?” Zipp suddenly offered. They looked at her, and she seemed to become self-conscious. “Well, it’s not much of one, just… an observation.”

“What is it?” asked Clip. Chamomile had half a mind to think he might pull out a notebook and start scribbling.

“Well… you’ve seen the places outside of here, right?”

“On the train, yes.”

“What did they all have in common? Or, I should say, what did they have that this place doesn’t?”

Clip and Chamomile looked at each other, perplexed, but it was Gaea who softly answered, “Vegetation.”

“Right. Vegetation. Ponies, no matter what tribe, still need food to grow. If you can’t have that…”

“You migrate elsewhere,” Clip said. He sounded, however, not too impressed. “That’s fairly obvious, though.”

“It is,” Zipp agreed. “But consider this—everywhere else, there’s plants and vegetation, easily. Even the mountains of Zephyr Heights have some exotic specks, and we had our own farms feeding us for a while before we were all reunited. Yet, this place—only this place—is barren. More than that, if you were to go around the perimeter of the Badlands, you’d see that it’s surrounded by vegetation, by life—on all sides. A perfect circle.”

Chamomile realized where Zipp was going. “You mean, this whole place… it’s isolated from everything else.”

“A desert encircled by lush wilderness,” Clip murmured. He sounded amazed. “The opposite of an oasis.”

“Really? A perfect circle?” Gaea said doubtfully. “You’re sure?”

“Measured it myself. Perfectly circular.”

“Where’s the center? That building?” Gaea pointed back to the building out of which streams of ponies were flowing.

“No, though you’d think so, since it’s the tallest thing around.” Zipp’s voice took on one of musing. “In fact, we couldn’t find any building that would be the center, no matter where we looked.”

They looked blankly at her. “How can you not find the center of a perfect circle?” Clip said.

“I didn’t say that. I said we couldn’t find any building. We found the center, all right, but there’s nothing there.”

“Nothing there?”

Zipp grinned “It’d honestly be better if I show you.”

They left the station and traveled through the Ponyville Badlands, passing the workers and cottages and all the other signs of life long ceased. The air grew dryer, but there were water stations set up and several ponies around them. A few nodded to Zipp, handing them cups, but few spoke. They were tired—tired by the heat and by the work.

After a while, Zipp came to a stop. She flicked one of her wings out. “There’s the center.”

Gaea was the first among them to speak. “There’s… nothing here.”

Indeed there wasn’t. All that Chamomile saw was a flat plain. Too flat, in fact. Whereas what they’d just passed had on occasion shown rises and falls—things you’d naturally expect to happen under the burden of time and erosion—this piece of land was just flat. So startling was that feature, it suggested some uncanny hoof had been involved. Judging by the perplexed and troubled expressions borne by her companions, they’d felt that invisible force as well.

“Look at that,” Clip breathed. He took two steps forward and lowered his head into the dirt, seemingly unbothered. “Is that…”

“A weed?” Gaea said, coming up to him. There, growing almost admirably in the middle of all this deserted nothingness, was a thin sallow stalk.

Chamomile looked at Zipp. “I thought you said this place was a desert?”

“It is,” she said, “except for this one spot. And it’s not a weed,” she added. “It’s some sort of root.”

“A root?”

Chamomile looked back at the stalk. Now it looked less like that and more like a thin, needy finger. She tried to imagine what it looked like under the surface. She saw it twisting mightily yet quietly underground, growing thicker where the masses would center together in a large clump, growing out of a central unit…

“There’s another over there,” Gaea said. She stepped a little to the side to reveal a thinner stalk. “Dry, too. Dead, I think.” Raising her head, she scanned the area. “There are a couple more, actually. You can just barely see them peeking out.”

Now that they were pointed out, Chamomile could see them. But they looked so depressingly malnourished that there was hardly any point in calling them roots. Yet something about them obviously intrigued Gaea. She flittered between them, nose to the stalks. Then she did an odd thing. She closed her eyes and walked much slower, tracing a distinct path from one root through the flat plain, as though she was following water to the source.

“What are you doing?” Clip asked.

Gaea looked a little self-conscious. “It’s, uh, a little weird, isn’t it? I’m… following the root system.”

“Without digging it up?”

“I think it was a side-effect of our earth pony magic returning. I can feel the root, feel the shape it takes underground. I’m just following it.”

She did this, finishing one root, then followed another. After that, she frowned, confused by something. She sought out more roots and continued the tracing while everypony else watched. The heat should have been getting to them, and it was, but Chamomile’s curiosity was far stronger than her discomfort.

“Huh,” Gaea said when she was apparently done. She tittered nervously in place, leaning from one side to another, looking down at her hooves. She was in the middle of the plain, now.

“What is it?” Chamomile asked.

“These roots… they’re all connected. It feels like they connect—” She paused, took a step forward, then placed a hoof down. “Right here. And…” She closed her eyes again, furrowing her brow in concentration. When she opened them, they shone with confusion. “They go deeper underground?”

Zipp had not said a word throughout this examination. But now she did speak, nodding. “Yeah. That’s what a lotta our earth ponies said when we found this spot. Whatever had lived in this spot, it had an impressive root system. Very long and very deep.” She then looked a little displeased. “Not exactly the best description I’d heard, though. So it gives us no idea of what actually grew here.”

“Long and deep…”

Gaea was quiet, thinking. So was Chamomile. She stared at the flat earth. Indeed, it was a vague description, but something about it felt significant. She thought about the roots. Long and deep… an impressive root system stretching underground… sprouting up through the center…

You know, this garden… it could use something. Something to spruce it up. Like a…

“A tree.”

Both she and Gaea had spoken at the same time. They spun around, surprised. Zipp and Clip were just the same.

But the revelation quickly overcame any thoughts on coincidence. “A tree?” Zipp said. There was excitement brewing in her voice. “You’re sure about that?”

Gaea hesitated, looking at Chamomile. She nodded. “I… We are,” Gaea said. “I mean, I’m not sure of Chamomile's experience with plant life, but I know enough to recognize a tree root system. It fits.” Gaea sounded impressed, which caused some fuzzy feeling to well up in Chamomile’s heart. A sudden thought came to her: I should tell her about my garden.

“And it would make sense,” Clip said, “given the surface area. If a massive tree had once lived here, that could explain why this land is so flat.”

“A tree could have made it that way?”

“Not quite, but if that tree was the center of Ponyville—as it’s now reasonable to conclude—and if ponies had lived here, then they would have had to go past this tree, wouldn’t they? And it’d be easier to walk on flat land, artificially flattened land, than anything hilly or with extra terrain.”

“A tree in the middle of Ponyville.” Zipp had a manic gleam in her eye, followed quickly by an annoyed snort. “Darn it all, if only Sunny was here to hear this!”

Chamomile looked at her. “That mean something to her?”

“It’s something I remember her reading about from her dad’s notes. There used to be this ancient tree growing here… I can’t remember the significance of it,” she confessed, looking helpless; then she steeled herself and raised her head, and her smile returned like the sun. “But it was in there, and it was significant. Gaea, Chamomile, if what you say is true, this could be yet another connection to ancient Equestria. This could be another clue as to why everything changed, why the tribes separated, why magic was lost!”

Her excitement was contagious—even Clip was smiling. Zipp looked like she was tempted to hug them.

“I’ll have to let Sunny know as soon as possible,” she said. “But thank you. She’ll appreciate this, I’m sure of it.”

“Us?” Gaea flushed, then hid a little behind her mane. “Oh, we didn’t… I didn’t… it was nothing, really.”

“It’s something,” Zipp insisted. She touched her shoulder to get Gaea to look at her. “It may be small, but that’s still important to somepony.”

Then she stepped back and glanced at the sun. “Noon. And a hot one, at that.”

“It’s been a hot one since we got here,” Clip pointed out. He appeared not to understand why she laughed at his remark, why Gaea tittered and why even Chamomile smiled.

“Fair enough, professor. You guys hungry?” She searched their faces and found her answer. “Come on, then. Since we’ve got to wait a while for the train to refuel, we may as well try to enjoy ourselves, too. The food’s better than the heat, believe me.”

Chamomile was only a little surprised to see Astral hanging out just outside of the tent, smiling. Compared to the arid landscape that surrounded them, he stood out like a sore, green hoof.

She tried to ignore him, or at least to avoid looking at him. She was in line for the food to grab a plate. Gaea and Clip were somewhere ahead of her, and she was at the back, alone. Astral didn’t say anything, but he seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

To ignore him, she looked at what was inside the tent. Long tables had been set up in rows that seemed vaguely reminiscent of the rows of barren houses just beyond. It should have been sweltering since there were so many ponies, but the workers had hooked up several industrial-grade fans that provided some airflow, though they were about as noisy as the workers themselves. Many who’d been on the train had also come in, and they’d looked a bit like shriveled fish, mouths agape and gasping for water, expressions which were humorous to the workers; they nevertheless provided them with water, cold towels, and gruff yet friendly words which kept spirits high. There was something admirable about seeing this, Chamomile supposed. Workers toiling in the dead heat but not dying from it, suffering only in their bodies but not their minds.

“There’s something admirable about this, isn’t there?” Astral said.

She tried to mask her surprise—surprise not just at hearing him speak, but at hearing him mimic her thoughts—by looking at his hooves. There was no shadow under him.

“I don’t suppose you’d mind if I stepped under for a bit?” Astral continued. “It’s rather hot. Didn’t have a chance to rest, unfortunately. That train runs rather fast.”

“It’s a train,” she said out the side of her mouth. “Of course it’s fast.”

“Well, you can’t blame me for being surprised. It’s my first time seeing one.”

Still, he waited, and eventually, with a small sigh, she nodded. He stepped under the tent, the shade darkening his coat yet making it seem richer.

“Hello,” he said, smiling at her. “I think this is the first time we spoke, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer. The line advanced up a little.

“Sorry. I know this is rather inconvenient.”

Strange is more like.

“Yeah, I guess strange would be more appropriate.”

She glanced at him, and he smiled, apologetically. It was so much like Astral, she almost believed it was him. “Sorry, again,” he said. “Can’t help but hear your thoughts.”

Then he coughed. “But boy, is it hot here.”

“Maybe you should go back to the grove,” she said, keeping her voice quiet so that nopony else could hear her speak. It was not unkind how she said it. She simply was stating a clear suggestion. “It’d be cooler there.”

“I’d need a ride, and I don’t think they let ponies like me on trains anymore. Probably need a ticket.”

“But you can’t handle heat?”

“I’m not that good, dear.”

Chamomile smiled—then, remembering what was next to her, forced that smile away. “So you intend on sticking around?”

“Frankly I’m not sure I have much say in the matter.”

“I find that hard to believe. You’re here, now, aren’t you? Didn’t you decide that?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Hard, or just not something you want to admit?”

Astral frowned. “I get the feeling I ought to be asking you that.”

She was silent.

The line continued to move. She looked to where Clip and Gaea were. They were talking. Animatedly, it seemed.

“Is it just me, or are they a little different than before?” Astral asked.

“How would you know? You never met them before.”

“Neither have you. But you would agree, right?”

She would, she supposed. She reflected on the conversation in the car. Gaea hadn’t been much willing to speak about anything unless prompted, and Clip even less so. But there they were, talking, pleasantly. She wondered if the thrill of discovery had something to do with it.

“A unicorn and an earth pony talking,” Astral continued to muse. “Never thought I’d live to see the day. Well.” He paused, then chuckled self-consciously. “Poor choice of words. My bad.”

“To be fair, I didn’t think I’d see it, either. I don’t think any of us had.”

“Must be nice.”

“It… is.”

“Are they nice?”

“You ask a lot of questions for a hallucination,” she said, looking back at him. No point in hiding behind pretense; better to address the delusion head on.

“You answer a lot of them for somepony who thinks I’m a hallucination.”

“You say that as if…”

She trailed off. Astral cocked his head, then lifted a hoof and waved it in the air. He brought it down and dug the tip through the dirt. To Chamomile’s surprise, the dirt particles also moved, leaving a hoofprint-sized imprint on the surface.

“That’s not…”

“So, tell me about them,” Astral interrupted. “That unicorn, what’s his name?”

For some reason, she chose to entertain the conversation a little bit longer, in spite of her misgivings. She told him about Clip, then about Gaea—then she realized, almost to her annoyance, that she knew very little about both of them. The best that she could drum up in terms of description was the memory of how they’d behaved on the car—for not even the memory of that night on the train seemed substantial enough.

Yet Astral didn’t appear bothered by this limited information. He nodded to each one of Chamomile’s statements, as though they were universally right—which, she supposed, might have been the case, if he was a hallucination, born out of her heat-addled mind, meaning he would naturally agree with everything his creator thought and concluded.

Every now and then, she’d look down at the dirt. It remained displaced.

The line continued to move. They were growing closer to the food. Astral appeared no closer to leaving, and Chamomile wondered if he intended to stay for the rest of their time in the Badlands. Just as she was about to ask him, though, he said, “Didn’t you come with one other pony?”

“We did. A pegasus.” She quickly described him, then said, “Why does that matter?”

“Well, it’s the oddest thing. I don’t see anypony by that description anywhere in here, do you?”

She almost rebuked him, then paused. Had she seen Polar? In fact, had she even seen him get off the train? But he must have—they were told explicitly that nopony could be onboard while they refueled.

She turned around and scanned the tent. Ponies of various shapes, colors, and sizes swam and idled in the blazing heat—unicorns, pegasi, earth ponies all mingling together. She looked for that brush of white which would have indicated Polar’s presence; she strained her ears, wondering if she could hear his upbeat, excited voice. But it was to no avail. There was no pegasus of that description anywhere in the tent, not in line, nor in any of the groups that had sprung up and clung together.

“That is strange,” she said, turning back to Astral. “No, I don’t see him—”

Her voice cut out. Astral, without so much as a whisper goodbye, was gone. The dirt on which he’d been standing was also mysteriously back to its undisturbed state.

She looked at that spot, perturbed. Then, as she had for all her years since, she pushed that perturbation away and shook her head. The heat, she decided. The heat and the hunger—that was what had caused her to see him here. A dead pony doesn’t show up miles from their grave, anyway. And Astral was dead; there was no denying that.

She thought she would be angry with herself, or even a little bit scared, because if her mind could supply such a convincing illusion, that must mean she was truly crazy. And yet, for whatever reason, she felt neither emotion. In their place, there was some calm shoreline of an equally calmer, almost happy emotion.

Gaea and Clip sat at the end of one of the long tables. They looked up when they saw Chamomile standing a short distance away. “There you are,” Clip said. “We were just talking about you. You can sit with us.”

He didn’t notice the sudden look that Gaea gave him. Chamomile frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Wha—o-of course!” Gaea stuttered. She recovered with a smile, though, perhaps because of the heat, it looked to Chamomile a bit nervous.

In any case, since there were no free seats available elsewhere, Chamomile sat down. “What do you mean, you were just talking about me?”

A bit of warning unintentionally crept into her voice, which Clip noticed. “Nothing bad, I can assure you,” he said with a wave of his hoof. “We were just talking about how you noticed the tree root system just as Gaea did.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t think of you as an arborist,” he continued.

“I’m not, actually.”

“Really?” Gaea’s nervousness was now replaced with curiosity. “Then, well, how’d you know?”

“It just made sense.” She paused, then sighed. “Actually, I shouldn’t say that. Truthfully it’s because I’ve been growing this tree behind my house for quite some time, and I remembered that its roots were like that—long and stretching deep into the ground.”

“You have a garden of your own?” Gaea asked.

“A little one. I have a few plants here and there.”

“What do you grow?”

“Nothing special. At least, nothing as special as what you might find in a florist’s shop.”

She’d meant the remark to hold some humor in it, but Gaea seemed to regard her with a seriousness better suited for a philosopher. “I’m still interested, anyway.”

After taking a drink of her water, Chamomile decided to tell her. She tried not to dress it up too much, but wondered, as she described the plants and their bushy leaves and how she tried once to figure out the best combo of growing them together, if she was not embellishing the description a bit—and why would she? Was it just because she could, or because Gaea had asked?

Inevitably describing the plants meant she had to describe what they were for. “So you’re a tea maker,” Gaea said. She looked at Clip. “Have you had her tea?”

“Me?” He cringed. “Ah, well… truth be told, I am not really a fan of tea. I don’t think I’ve really been over to that side of Bridlewood.”

“Not everyone is. It’s all right.”

“Is Bridlewood really that big?” Gaea asked.

Chamomile thought about it. She looked at Clip, who shrugged. “The main village is mostly close-knit, but the outskirts make it seem more expansive. We don’t have what you’d call ‘streets’ or ‘neighborhoods,’ if that’s what you mean.”

“You haven’t visited?” Chamomile asked Gaea. She felt foolish afterwards; of course she hadn’t. If she had, she probably would have seen her around.

But Gaea was not put off by the question. “No, though I did start thinking about doing just that once all the tribes started talking again. When we stopped being afraid.”

She added the point almost unnecessarily, but it brought them to a brief moment of silence. Around them the clamor continued. The Ponyville workers and excavators were finishing their meals and preparing to return to work, but many of them stayed behind to continue conversing with the train crew. Chamomile caught a few curious voices asking about what they were doing, and she noted that the recipients to such questions were sure to keep their lips sealed, answering with vague, dismissive responses that at the very least satisfied others’ curiosity. She couldn’t remember if Zipp had sworn them to secrecy, but this seemed an appropriate act; she, and likely the others, had the dim sense that what they had embarked on was so important, they could not tell anyone unless they succeeded. The most anyone could say was that they were there to “lay down tracks.” Supposedly that much would be proven true by the time the train finished refueling.

The lull in conversation ended when Gaea asked Clip, “So what did you do before all this?”

“I cut hair,” he said, sipping his water.

“You’re a barber?”

“I suppose it’d be more accurate now to say, was. You know—since I’m on this job and all.”

“Why’d you decide to take it?”

Chamomile expected some sort of lengthy explanation—at least one that would be full of a dry, self-ironic wit—but what Clip supplied, without a trace of irony, was: “The job pays more than what cutting hair for a whole month does.”

“You’re kidding,” Chamomile said. “You did it for the money?”

“Simplest reason why ponies work.”

“I didn’t take you for someone interested in money.”

“I aim to surprise.”

Chamomile actually laughed a little at that, and even Gaea was grinning. But Clip looked at them, confused. “What? Was that funny?”

“A little.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Maybe I’ll explain when you’re older,” Gaea said between giggles.

He huffed. “Financial compensation is a perfectly valid reason to choose a job, you know.”

“All right, all right. No need to get too huffy. So you cut hair,” Gaea sped along, using the humor of the moment to return to the previous topic near-effortlessly. “You did that before magic came back, then?”

Clip appeared happy, or at least less annoyed, by the prospect of returning to his old job. “I did.”

“Is it any different?”

“It might be a little easier. I can still taste the cobalt from the scissors in my mouth sometimes… but sometimes I think I had a little more…” He searched for the word. “Not quite fun, but it kept things interesting, having to do everything by hoof.”

“Really?” Chamomile said. “You mean, you almost miss not having magic?”

He shrugged. “No, I don’t really think that. But it’s more like I got used to it. I couldn’t have imagined a life with magic in it, since all I grew up in was a magic-less world.” He looked directly at Chamomile. “Could you?”

“I…”

Her mind immediately returned to Juniper. Suddenly she wondered what he was doing, if he was performing well in school, if Penny Point was taking good care of him, if he missed her, if he was okay alone in their little shop. Was there a way for her to send him a message, she wondered. Did the Ponyville Badlands even have a post office?

She suddenly felt dizzy, and the tent seemed to swirl into a mishmash of shapes and colors. In the center of her vision was a stunted green form.

“Chamomile?” Gaea asked.

She came out of her thoughts with a half-strangled gasp, causing them to flinch back in shock. Her face burned.

“Are you feeling all right?” Clip asked.

“I… I’m fine.” She swallowed, feeling her throat dry up. “Sorry. I think the heat just got to me, there.” She coughed. “The air, too.”

“I can go get you some more water,” Clip volunteered, getting up from his seat. “You’re not feeling nauseous or anything else, are you?”

“I’m a little dizzy…”

“Might be mild heat stroke,” Gaea said, also getting up. She cast a worried look over Chamomile. “I’ll see if I can grab some wet towels.”

“I’m sure that isn’t…”

But the two of them had already gone to get help. Chamomile blinked, rather surprised how quickly they’d moved. She was sure she was fine, though. She figured she just needed a little time to cool off… well, that’s what they were now doing for her… but she hadn’t asked, or hadn’t expected them to do so…

“Seems you two have gotten along pretty nicely.”

Still dizzy, Chamomile didn’t turn her head. But she still recognized the voice as belonging to Zipp.

“Don’t you mean, you three?” she replied, looking at her.

Zipp’s grinned seemed only a little embarrassing at the slip-up. “Right, three.” But there was a particular gleam in her eye that suggested she knew and meant what she said.

She was balancing a tray on her wing and gestured with the other at the open spot next to Chamomile—for a moment, Chamomile admired how deftly she managed to perform the act, without upsetting the other side. “Would you mind if I sat with you? At the very least, it’ll keep you from being alone, in case—”

“In case I faint?” She partially observed there was an underlying sarcasm to her statement, so she quickly nodded. “I mean, no, I don’t mind. Go right ahead.”

Zipp slid into the open spot. “You’re not denying what I said.”

“About us three getting along? I mean, yeah, I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

Suddenly she felt like Zipp was the questioning mom, and herself the child who was caught in a lie they did not understand to be one. “If that’s what you think,” she deigned to say, hoping it was safe.

Zipp gave her a curious look. “You say that as though you don’t think you three have gotten along well. But you’re talking, aren’t you?”

“That’s not really much of a requisite for ‘getting along,’ I should think.”

“No, I guess not.” Zipp paused. “Though, a few months ago, talking would have been tantamount to treason.”

She said that last word with an abrupt sound of bitterness that Chamomile wondered if some personal vendetta had been attached. A shadow came across Zipp’s face, aging her into a crone, before Zipp turned back to face her, and the shadow vanished. “It’s good, though. You and Gaea and Clip getting along, as friends.”

Friends.

That word unsettled something in Chamomile. Were they friends? Penny Point was a friend, her best in Bridlewood, but how could Gaea and Clip compare to her? Clip, at least, lived in the same town—they could be friends by proxy. But Gaea…

It crashed into her—the realization that she knew very little about the other mare aside from what had been hinted at. All she knew was that she was a florist, but when Chamomile thought back to how she revealed this on the cart, she was struck by how deflective that confession had been. Was it because she was lying? But why lie about being a florist at all? There was no shame in being one—unless that shame was not for the occupation, but for something else.

Her mind then returned to that first night on the train, and the secretive manner in which she’d carried herself. Of course, she was entitled to her secrets, that much was perfectly reasonable. But now Chamomile wondered if the secrets and the shame were somehow connected—if they were not products of the same sequence firing off to make meaning out of the nonsense of living.

Zipp frowned. “Well… you are friends, aren’t you?”

There was a moment of silence that not even the clamor of the tent could penetrate. Chamomile stared at her plate. “I don’t know.”

Saying that seemed foolish. It sounded like something a petulant child might say when asked to explain why they thought hammering nails into the coffee table was a good idea. She half-expected Zipp to keep questioning her on the manner, to turn her thinking around and get her to confess.

Zipp, instead, chuckled. “Yeah, I get that.”

“What?” Chamomile looked at Zipp, and tried to phrase the question more elaborately, but settled only on, “What do you mean?”

Zipp drank her water. She swallowed, frowning slightly, a thin line creasing her forehead. “There was an… incident, a few weeks ago, in Maretime Bay. We were celebrating Maretime Bay Day, but all the ponies—the unicorns, the pegasi, the earth ponies—they were getting into arguments over magic. This was before the earth ponies got theirs, incidentally. Seemed many of them resented the ‘advantages’ the unicorns and pegasi had over them, and how magic could create as many problems as solve them.”

She picked up her fork and twirled it around. “The more that they fought, the more the Unity Crystals went into flux. Magic kept glitching in and out. Unicorns lost control of their levitation, pegasi stopped being able to fly. It caused more chaos and disorder, which made the earth ponies get more upset, which resulted in more fighting, which… Well, you get the picture.” Zipp looked at her. “Did you notice anything happening to your magic a few weeks ago?”

Chamomile thought back. “There was… some fluctuations, now that I think about it. But it wasn’t quite like we were losing our magic.”

“Huh. That confirms one of my hypotheses, then—that the glitching of magic is stronger where the disorder itself was created.” She sighed. “Well, either way, we were this close to losing magic again—so soon after we’d gotten it back.”

“But we didn’t.”

“No, thankfully. We managed to figure that one out, get things under control, make everypony happy. Even restored the earth ponies’ magic, which was great. But…”

Another shadow. And under its effect, Zipp looked like she’d aged a great deal. Suddenly Chamomile remembered she was a princess, which must mean her mother was the queen—was she, also, of this aged complexion, burdened and made old by the knowledge and wisdom accrued over a short timespan?

“Sunny believes that ponies can come together to overcome their differences. Our friendship is living proof of that. So I definitely believe in that, too. But back then, with what happened… well, I’ve seen that unity fall apart. Differences are sure to rise. It’s nice to hope that everypony can overcome their differences, don’t get me wrong, but ponies still have to face those differences head-on. Worst case scenario, we all lose our magic.” She shrugged, lifted her fork, ate her salad, and chewed thoughtfully. “Best case scenario, though…” She gestured with her wing towards Chamomile.

It took a moment for her to recognize what she intuited. “Best case scenario, we become friends anyway?”

“Uniting the tribes was the first step. The smaller ones involve seeing if ponies can be friends without needing magic to fix everything.” She smiled at Chamomile. “I think you and those two others are proof of that. Even if you’re not quite sure of it yet.”

She’d said, “two others,” but Chamomile knew she really meant “friends.”

She looked over to where Gaea and Clip were. Gaea had gone to get towels, a stack of which lay over her back. Clip was levitating a water cup in his magic. They met up in the middle, then began to walk back to the table.

They seem nice.

Astral’s voice was like an earworm to her, but she found she couldn’t disagree. For they were nice. Nice to her and for no other reason, it seemed, than, perhaps, that they thought themselves friends.

Then Chamomile wondered if she should tell Zipp about Astral. It was an absurd, random thought, one that she dismissed almost immediately. But it lingered in her mind either way.

And, in thinking of Astral, she remembered something else. She turned to Zipp. “This might be a long shot, but… is there a post office nearby?”

5 - Diagnosis

Summers in Bridlewood varied depending on what part of the forest you were in, and what weather had preceded the day. If you were lucky, and the weather was good, the air would be at a comfortable temperature and you could enjoy the bulk of summer’s warmth without feeling like you were suffocating under a mountain of molten malaise. If you were unlucky, it would have rained the night before, not quite enough to cool things, but enough to soak through the leaves, mist the earth, and trap the vapors under the canopy. The humidity would stick to your mane and coat, causing your hair to frizzle up, and sweating would feel deeply uncomfortable.

But that day, Chamomile was unbothered by the humidity. She lay against a thick tree, whose bark was riddled with curious lichen cool to the touch, surrounded by mushrooms that glowed blue.

It was her break day. The tea shop was closed, and while just a year prior she would have fought tooth and nail to keep it open, she now recognized the necessity of a pause. Astral did not have to beg, then implore, then connive with Penny in order to get her to take the day off anymore, thanks in large part to the charge which rested humbly between her hooves.

Juniper.

He liked to sleep—that much had been evident when he’d been born. The doctors had worried he wasn’t breathing, and had flicked his hoof a few times to get him to cry; it turned out he simply was lost in the infinite landscape of dreams, and had registered quite slowly the difference between the warmth of his mother and the frightening cold of the outside world. From this love for sleep had come the surprising feature that he was a quiet baby, much to her and Astral’s relief. The tea shop was a busy place, but Juniper slept happily in his crib, watched over by one parent while the other tended to the customers. The banging of pots and pans, the boiling of water, and the conversations which, due to the acoustics of the tree-shop, carried up the steps like restless spirits, never interrupted his slumber, and when he awoke, he was hungry, but never belligerent. “Where do you think he gets that from?” Chamomile had once asked, after he’d eaten and been put to bed.

“Not you, that’s for sure,” Astral said. He received a somewhat painful nudge in the shoulder, which did nothing, to her disappointment, to erase his cheeky smile. “What? You’re the restless one in bed.”

“And you’re any better, Mr. ‘I have to save my monkey?’”

“That was a one-time occurrence!”

“Still a weird dream.”

“Can’t argue with you there.” Astral laughed, then looked at his son. He had a habit of looking at him as though he was seeing Juniper for the first time, a look that had first manifested when they found out, a few weeks after making the wish, that Chamomile was pregnant. It was a look of pure wonder, if not a little bit of fear, but it was fear that he quashed each and every time he looked that way. And it seemed that look was a special antidote for the pervasive dullness and numbness that plagued unicorn-kind, for even the otherwise droll and dispassionate elders, when she and Astral walked around Bridlewood, looked up with sparkles of interest. Children offered a brief magic that was not taboo to entertain, it seemed.

With that kind of magic, too, it seemed that energy at last returned to many. Penny Point, among others, volunteered to help transform the upstairs loft of Chamomile’s tea shop into an actual nursery, taking apart the room that had once been her childhood bedroom and replacing it with all the things a newborn would need. They added a fresh coat of paint and decided to let the other children lend a hoof, leading to a room covered in a wild array of hoofprints. Chamomile’s tea shop coincidentally saw an uptick in business, which led her to once or twice joking to Astral, “Maybe we should have another!”

Even Alphabittle had assisted, in his own way, despite technically being a business rival. A fan of toys and games, he sent the parents-to-be a package of board games and puzzles. Astral thought it kind of gimmicky, but accepted nonetheless; Chamomile was secretly warmed by the gesture.

The magic, of course, didn’t last. The lack of their natural connection to real magic meant that excitement dwindled before Juniper was born, and Bridlewood returned to a familiar stupor which would not end for several more years. But Chamomile and Astral didn’t care for that. For them, that they were about to be a family was the only spell required to transform their lives from a series of daily, dry catalogs to days of great meaning and importance—and it was all thanks to this wish child, this bundle of joy (how cliché, she often thought; but then, pulling from Astral’s teachings, she’d think that a cliched truth was still the truth), which, at present, slept soundly in her hooves.

She watched him as he slept while she rested against the bark. A fog born from the humidity drifted lazily in front of her, and she entertained the fantastic notion of beasts coming through that fog to lay their heads at her hoof, to pay their respects to the newborn. She’d been having a lot of those fantastic thoughts since Juniper’s birth—perhaps as a side effect of either the procedure or the thrill of being a new parent—but in a way, she treasured them, because they helped fight against the monotony of daily life, which every day she could feel drip into her soul like an IV.

She wished, suddenly, that her parents could have met Juniper. Her mother no doubt would have expressed the similar sentiment, that of children having their own kind of magic, even though, as far as unicorns went, her mother was among one of the most superstitious. Her father, a stallion of broad shoulders and booming laughter, would no doubt have requested every weekend to spend with his grandson, to teach him about woodcarving and mushroom-finding, to educate him in the ways the world could seep into your skin and become you.

She then wondered what Astral’s parents might have thought about their grandson—let alone of their daughter-in-law. They had both passed away when Astral was young, and he had grown under the care of a distant relative. She had little to work off of in terms of description, for among the things Astral did not like to talk about, it was them. Only twice in their relationship had she tried to get more information out of him, and the only thing he’d provided her was that “They’d died from a sickness.” Only that—no specific disease, no ailment, no symptoms. She supposed that was because it was easier for him to think of death in this way, universal and without nuance, because by making it out to be so abstract, it could not engulf the rest of his life. The shadow of sorrow must not extend past the garden. Their deaths had not made him cold; they’d made him warm.

Thinking of Astral caused her to look around the forest. Just as she’d promised to take the day off, she’d also promised to leave in Astral’s hooves the closing and tidying up of the shop. A momentarily disquieting feeling wormed its way into her—that aspect of the job was something she liked to do herself, and while she’d grown to trust Astral, the idea that somepony else was inside, handling the cleaning and settling, made the obsessive business-mare in her rear up in agitation. But she shook her head—Astral knew what he was doing. And he’d promised that, when he was done, he’d come and join them outside.

“Besides,” she whispered, looking back down at her son, “there are some things more important than the shop’s condition. Isn’t that right, Juniper?”

He, of course, said nothing. He was dreaming. His nose was slightly scrunched up and his brow furrowed, but these gave no indication of whether the dream was good or bad. Additionally, he made no sound, save for his gentle breathing. Peaceful sleep! It must have skipped a generation, and with some amusement, Chamomile wondered if she should be jealous of him for this quality.

Watching him made her start to feel drowsy. So did the heat. So did the bark, to which her back had grown accustomed. She felt her eyelids begin to droop. She hoped Astral would come soon, like he said he would once he was done with the shop. They had the whole day ahead of them, which was rare, so they must take advantage of it, while daylight still peeked out from behind the leaves…

She awoke with a start and covered in sweat. The air was swelteringly hot. Frantically, still clawing her way out of sleep’s numbing embrace, she looked at Juniper, afraid that the heat had consumed him.

He was still breathing, thankfully, and was still asleep. But it was still terribly hot. They had to go back inside, she decided, before either of them passed out from heat exhaustion.

She stood awkwardly, her knees were tight and locked. Worry gnawed at her. She couldn’t understand why. It seemed to be linked to her sudden waking, like some sixth sense had intuited that something was wrong. But what?

Then it hit her. Astral wasn’t here.

She turned in place, scanning her surroundings. The fog was too thick to see more than a few yards ahead, but there were no forms, no cloaked silhouettes, standing in its midst. There was nopony next to or behind the tree, either. As far as she could tell, she and Juniper were the only ones in the area.

Juniper chose that moment to wake up. He yawned, looking at Chamomile with those impossibly big eyes. But while he had yet to speak, his eyes spoke for him. They conveyed, in their innocence, also a sense of confusion.

“I know,” she said. “We’ll go find him.”

She tried to smile, but it was a flash of one, barely long enough to register in Juniper’s mind.. She retrieved from the ground the portable bassinet and placed him inside, then attached it to her back.

She followed the cobblestone path, her worry continuing to grow. The heavily shadowed outline of the tea shop rose out of the mist with such dark foreboding, Chamomile nearly jumped. The lights were on, meaning Astral was likely in. But as she drew closer, she saw that the back door was half-open, like somepony had rushed trying to get it to work. She paused for a second, wondering if they’d been broken into… and if Astral was still inside…

In three rapid steps, she closed the distance. Remembering the threat, though, she slowed just enough to avoid crashing into the door. She raised a hoof hesitantly, trying to hear sounds through the small crack, but there were none. Her worry clamped a vice around her throat, silencing her.

Slowly, she pushed the door. Something stopped it, so she gave a somewhat harder push, and something slipped and fell into view. It was so quick that she couldn’t comprehend what she saw.

Her worry’s grip slackened just enough for her to realize it was a motionless, mossy-green leg.

“I’m fine, really.”

“You were not fine, Astral. You were unconscious. You were barely breathing!”

She hadn’t meant to shout; she’d intended on leaving the doctor’s hut with some measure of calm attached, but the moment he’d opened his mouth, her anger and fear flared up. She was thankful that Juniper was in Penny’s care at the moment—she didn’t want him to be around to hear this.

There were other patients, however, who could still hear them from inside the hut. They looked through the windows with mildly surprised expressions, before they looked away.

Astral took a breath. She whirled on him, daring him to say it again, that he was fine. But then his shoulders hunched. His head hung low. In a murmur unbecoming of him, he said, “You’re right. I’m not fine.”

Her heart softened. She guided him towards a bench nearby. The day’s humidity had finally lessened just enough to be bearable, and the air was no longer thick with it.

They sat down. “I’m sorry to have made you worry,” he said. “This was all my fault.”

She sighed. “No. I should have turned on a few fans before we left. That shop can gather a lot of heat rather quickly.” She chewed her lip. “Can you imagine if that happened to a customer? Maybe I should think about adjusting the ventilation and air flow…”

“That’s… not quite what I meant, actually.”

“Astral?” She turned to him “What are you saying?”

A guilty shadow crossed his face, darkening his eyes and giving him the frightful look of a skeletal, green being, hidden under his fall jacket. “It’s true that maybe some of the humidity caused me to faint, but… this wasn’t the first time I felt that way. It’s only the first time I’ve collapsed.”

She stared at him, long and hard. Without needing to, she convinced him to go on.

On that bench, surrounded by the peaceful lethargy of Bridlewood, Chamomile felt her world begin to crumble. Astral had a condition. He had had it for quite some time. It manifested as random bouts of fatigue and weakness in the joints, and headaches in the middle of the day that would disorient and momentarily confuse him, make him forget where he was or what he was doing. Up until that moment that Chamomile had discovered him, he’d been lucky enough to experience those symptoms when she wasn’t around. They were never so debilitating as to cause injury, so he had simply dismissed them as part of the process of becoming older, being a new parent, and facing the stresses of day-to-day living.

But the fainting was an indication. Something was wrong with him. It had progressed to this point and was likely to progress further. That much had been made clear by the doctor who, through a thick pair of glasses, a frown sculpted from cement, had announced the prognosis without so much as batting an eye. That was the result of them being magic-less, she knew; but still, she had never wished more for magic to return, if it meant that the doctor would at least feel something!

Astral did not talk long, only a few minutes. But they were quiet for far longer. The shadows lengthened and the birds returned to their nests. Across the way, behind the fountain, the schoolhouse opened its doors and children filtered slowly out and took their own paths home. Chamomile watched them, thinking about how in just a few short years, Juniper would be enrolled.

“How long?”

She meant to speak more clearly, but the words had come out as a hissing whisper, like she was the one in physical agony.

Astral looked at her, and tried to maintain his gaze—but couldn’t for more than a few seconds. A weary sigh, too weary for a stallion his age, escaped him. “The doctors couldn’t give more than an estimate when I was first diagnosed. Initially they said that it’d probably won’t happen until way down the line.”

“But things have changed,” she inferred. “This fainting spell.”

“Yes. It might have shortened things.”

“By how much?”

He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—say.

After another bout of silence, one that lasted just for all the children to leave and the silence of the forest to return, Chamomile asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Astral looked helplessly at her. “Would it have mattered?”

“Of course it would have!” She got off the bench and faced him with a glare. She wanted him to flinch. She wanted him to feel threatened by her. But all he did was keep that helpless look. And this only made her angrier. “Astral, how could you not tell me this?! I could have helped! I could have—”

“It’s terminal.”

“That’s beside the point!” She stomped her hoof on the dirt, her voice rising. She didn’t care if anypony inside the doctor’s office heard her. “I am your wife, mister! I made a promise that I’d be with you in sickness and in health! Well, I’ve been with you for the latter, and I have every intention of being with you in the former!”

“I know,” Astral said quietly. He lowered his head. “I know, and you’re right. I shouldn’t have concealed it from you.”

She forced herself to take a deep breath, and when she next spoke, it was with measured calm. “Then if you knew… why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I am a selfish pony, no matter what you think of me,” he said.

That threw her off. She nearly stumbled back. “What—selfish?”

“Yes.” He shook his head, then brought it back up. He was smiling, but the smile was as sad and as lonely as the moon. “I’m selfish, because I was happy when we met, and I didn’t want to lose that happiness no matter what.”

Chamomile’s mind reeled. “No, no. That’s not right, Astral. You’re not—you’re not selfish for… for…”

“But I am, my dear.” He slowly rose off the bench, his jacket sweeping under him like a cloak of loathsome darkness—her mind conjured up an image of a casket with a burial cloth covering it, and she shivered. “I am, undoubtedly, one of the most selfish ponies to have ever lived. Because I was afraid to tell you the truth. Because I thought happiness could only mean that one thing.”

He looked at her again. He was trying to be brave, trying to be noble in his confession, but she had known and loved him long enough to recognize the tiniest quiver of his lips, which occurred when he was at his most stressed; to note the flickering of his eyes as they attempted to determine what the subject before him was thinking of him; to detect the warble in his voice that indicated he was close to letting out a vengeful, horrid wail, the kind that would rail against the tragedy of his condition.

“That’s the truth,” he said quietly. “All of it. I swear it to you.”

So you say, she thought. But how can I take that oath? An oath lasts longer than a pony does. But what does it mean when the pony isn’t meant for this world for long? Does the oath last longer than their last word?

The humidity rose off their shoulders and a fresh, late afternoon coolness settled. Astral’s eyes were a metallic hue, unblinking in their sincerity. “Do you hate me for it?” he asked.

She almost didn’t hear him. Her mind was awash with sensations and half-thoughts. She was a traveler onboard the vessel to the underworld, surrounded by the infinite abysses of suffering and sorrow. But his words—and how scared they sounded—gradually made their way through the passage into her ear, and she looked at him with deep pity.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I never could.”

He looked like he was about to cry. She didn’t let him see if he did, however, for she stepped forward rapidly and embraced him, pressing her muzzle against his neck. She could feel both of them shaking.

“We’ll find a way, Astral,” she whispered. “I promise you that, and I promise I’ll keep trying no matter what you or the doctors think.”

He laughed hollowly. “You’re a stubborn mare… but I suppose that’s what I love about you.”

“But promise me one thing.”

“Anything.”

“No more secrets, please. Nothing between us but the truth. Can you do that?” She pulled back to look at him. “Can you do that for me, for us?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I promise.”

But he did not stop shaking.

6 - Leaving the Badlands

Chamomile’s pen fluttered in her magic. The words before her were blurry scribbles, and she had to blink a few times before she figured out what she was writing. She’d zoned out again, hadn’t she?

Looking up, she spied the clerk watching her, but he looked away once he realized he’d been caught. Some displeasure wound its way into her throat, and she almost called him out, but she realized that she must have been staring into space for a while now. That nopony else was in the post office at the moment was surely odd enough, so to have some mare stumble in, ask for a paper and a pen, and then spend several minutes not writing, must have accentuated that perplexity.

She sighed. The heat, she wanted to say—it had that consistently vicious effect of lulling her mind towards placidity, distracting her.. But something warned her that nopony would believe her, least of all herself.

She looked back at her letter. There was nothing left to say in it, so she quickly wrote the final line—Love, your mother—then sealed it in the envelope. She placed the stamp at the corner, then brought the envelope up to the counter. Another clerk—not the one who’d been spying on her—came and took it with a smile. She returned one in half-measure.

In the post office’s lobby, just outside of the main area, Gaea and Clip sat. They’d insisted on accompanying her to the office, because they didn’t want her to have another dizzy spell unattended. She’d tried to persuade them otherwise, but steadfastly they’d refused to give in. Their stubbornness was almost admirable. In the end, it was only with the promise that they’d wait in the lobby for her that she’d allowed them to come with.

Clip got off the bench. “Finished your letter?” he said.

Chamomile nodded, not trusting herself to say anything. Clip was frowning. “I still don’t know why you didn’t want us to come in,” he said.

“It was for privacy.”

“Over a letter?”

Hearing it out loud only reminded her how thin her reasoning had been. Clip had protested against it, citing her dizziness as reason to make sure she wasn’t alone for a while, but she suspected that he was simply curious as to what she was hiding.

And what was she hiding? Even now she was confused by herself. A letter to Bridlewood, to her son—that was hardly a secret worth keeping. But even as she knew this consciously, something prevented from saying it outright. It was not compulsion—it was instinct, learned, for protection. She supposed protection factored similarly here, but protection from what?

She could see the question on Clip’s lips. It was mirrored on Gaea’s troubled and forlorn expression. Both only increased her unease, but seeing it on Gaea felt more significant, somehow. As though she had sensed something that Chamomile had herself not, and that this added more to her befuddlement.

She opened her mouth, like she was about to ask her something. Chamomile had the impression that she would have a hard time refusing.

But instead, a sigh escaped Gaea. It was hard to tell if it was out of disappointment or general tiredness—while the lobby had cooled them, they could feel the sun beat through the glass doors, and Gaea’s pink coat was starting to alarmingly redden. “Do either of you know when the train will finish refueling?” she asked.

Clip and Chamomile looked at each other. “Not me,” Chamomile said. “Zipp seemed to think it wouldn’t be for a few hours.”

“That was this morning. You’d think it’d be ready by now.” She looked through the doors in the direction of the train.

“The conductor will probably let us know,” Clip said. “By a whistle, maybe. Or some kind of megaphone. We’ll know.”

“Yeah…”

Gaea seemed lost in thought.

“Why don’t we walk around for a while, then?” Chamomile suggested, as much to her surprise as theirs. “It’ll help pass the time.”

They agreed. Striding out the double doors, they were met with the heat of the afternoon, and an air whose stifling nature brought to mind that terribly humid day. Chamomile led them, walking quickly, trying to outrun that memory, and the other two had to up their pace just to keep up. The surrounding husks of buildings provided enough shade that walking under them was a relief, and that coolness brought Chamomile back to her senses, slowing her down long enough for the other two to catch up.

“What’s with you?” Clip asked.

She searched for an excuse. “I was just… thinking about Polar.” Then, not wanting to reveal her own surprise at reaching that topic, she continued deftly, “Have either of you seen him around?”

They shook their heads. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said.

“It is,” Gaea murmured. “You don’t think he’s abandoned the team, do you?”

“I don’t see why he would,” Clip said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

“Maybe we should look for him.”

“Why?”

“Because we should,” Gaea said. She nodded at Chamomile, who, given this sudden approval, felt a little something flip in her stomach. Gaea’s eyes were soft, her voice as distinct as a woodpecker. “He might miss the train.”

They resumed their trot, this time sticking a little closer together. Yet this proved to be a disastrous strategy. The sun moved just enough so that the shade lessened, and the air seemed to bake and broil. Soon sweat dripped freely down their bodies and their breathing became slightly labored.

They passed several ponies—workers, all of them—and asked if they’d seen somepony of Polar’s description. Most said they hadn’t, but one of them suggested he’d gone into a building just two blocks ahead. “At least, I thought I saw somepony of that description.”

“We’ll check it out. Thank you.”

Two blocks later, they now stood in front of a two-story cottage that dimly swelled with mild activity. There was a sign squeaking on a rusty hinge, but on it were only two letters—P and B, on different lines—and a bunch of empty spaces. The lights were on and some music was playing, but it was unclear if it was a band or a recording.

“Hmm,” Clip said. He peered through one of the windows. “I don’t see him… but if that pony said he’s here…” He continued to look while Chamomile surveyed the building from the road.

Gaea took one look at the building and froze. Chamomile smelled something off of her—which may equally have been the potency of the heat talking as much as that primal part of all ponies which are capable of registering certain emotive smells. It was the bitter, pungent smell of fear, and without thinking, she stepped closer to her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s… I…” Gaea opened and closed her mouth a few times, then looked at Chamomile. She started back. Chamomile then became aware of how close she’d gotten, and so stepped away, feeling her cheeks blossom. Clip continued to search, ignorant of what was happening.

“Gaea?” Chamomile prompted.

Gaea turned her head. Her jaw was set, and it took a moment for her to speak. “I’m not going in.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Why not?”

Gaea gave her a look. It was a quick, fleeting look, one that was erased when she looked away again, but it lasted long enough for Chamomile to realize she was intruding upon something larger than herself. It was a place where nopony could go without special permission and in special circumstances. It was that space deep inside one’s body, so deep that the light of the world cannot reach it, covered in the foggy cobwebs of the unforgotten, with scrawlings made in the chalk of secrets.

It was a familiar place for Chamomile. And she knew that it was not a place she’d want a stranger to enter.

“All right,” Chamomile said softly. Gaea’s head turned again, this time sharply, and surprise shone brightly in her face. “You wait here, then, all right?” She thought about smiling—it remained only a thought.

Gaea didn’t seem to understand. Chamomile was already backing away from her, though, so she stuttered, “Right.”

Chamomile approached the door, watching as Clip continued her inspection. Just as she was about to call out to him to say she was going in, she heard heavy hoofsteps from the other side. She turned her head just in time to see the door burst open, and a stallion stumbled out.

It was Polar. His mane was a shaggy mop and his eyes seemed to roll like they were spinning on their own axis. Some sort of sound—close to a gurgle—came out of his throat, and, as he stumbled forward, Chamomile smelled alcohol on it.

“What the… Polar?” Clip called. He left his spot by the window and ran over.

Suddenly, Polar pitched forward, forcing Chamomile to catch him—and instinctively she reached out not with her own magic, but her hooves. She was surprised to learn he was rather lightweight—and a distant part of her supposed this was natural to the physiology of pegasi—and even more so to hear him speak somewhat intelligibly.

“Why her? Why’d it have to be her?”

Chamomile pulled him off of her. He stumbled back but somehow managed to keep himself standing. He brought his head up and stared at her—his eyes were bloodshot. Drunk, and also crying?

“Oh, hey, Chamomile,” he slurred. “Not her. That’s good. Think she remembers me? I remember her…”

He hiccupped. “What brings you here?”

It took her a moment to recover. “We’re getting out of here.”

“What? Why?” He rocked back, wincing. “Gah, was it always this bright?”

Gaea, who had been pacing, now rushed over, stopping just short of them. “Goodness,” she gasped, “what happened to him?”

Clip turned up his nose. “He’s drunk,” he said bluntly.

“Drunk?!”

Clip kept going before Chamomile could interrupt. His voice dipped into stern disapproval, and he regarded Polar with the look one gives to seeing litter in the street. “Yes, drunk. Never mind that, though. We need to get to the station—the whistle—”

Just then, they heard a shrill sound coming from afar. It lasted a while, then repeated two more times, before the jazzy music returned to their senses. Clip’s ear flicked up, and he let out a grunt. “Well, there it is.”

“Yes, I just heard it.” Gaea looked concernedly at Polar. “Can he walk?”

He forced himself to stand, and took a few experimental steps. He grinned crookedly at them. But they were not entertained.

“We’d better get going,” Gaea said.

“Right,” said Chamomile. “Let’s.”

They arrived just in time to hear the conductor again blow his whistle. His country accent boomed across the Badlands in an almost machine-like cadence, alerting them to the train’s successful refueling, and informing them that they would depart shortly. It was time to go to work.

“Would it be so weird to say that, for a time, I forgot we had to work?” one pegasus said. They were going up the steps to the platform, accompanied by a flock of other pegasi.

“Nah,” said an earth pony nearby, chuckling. “Was a nice thing to forget!” A nice couple of chortles escaped out of the group, but, though it was pleasant to hear, Chamomile did not smile.

Gaea and Clip were behind her, supporting the disoriented Polar as best they could. His head lolled back and forth from a steady hold to an unsteady tilt, and he mumbled half-sentences out of the side of his mouth. Clip looked uncomfortable. Gaea seemed deeply disturbed. Chamomile felt similarly, and had even volunteered to take their place, but Gaea had been oddly insistent that she remain close to Polar.

That closeness resulted in a strange flutter in Chamomile’s chest, which she dismissed as momentary heart palpitations. She sought to busy herself by searching for a medic pony, but none were outside of the train or within view. The question of what to do about Polar pestered her—there was no way he’d be able to get onto the train without anypony noticing his state.

After a few minutes, Zipp appeared. She flew in from above and landed next to the conductor, greeting everypony with a bold smile that Chamomile wished she could even remotely mimic. They exchanged a few words. Then the conductor went back onto the train while Zipp addressed the crowd. “All right, everypony, file in! We want to get everyone on board in an orderly and efficient manner, you get me?”

Once they were organized, the doors to the cars opened up, and everypony began to enter. Preoccupied, nopony noticed Chamomile, Clip, and Gaea languishing behind, debating what to do.

“We can’t just sneak him onboard, can we?” Clip whispered heatedly.

“Past everypony? Doubt it,” Gaea said. “Not unless we could cover his mane, make it look like he isn’t inebriated.”

“Maybe if we had a hat,” Chamomile mused.

“A hat’s not going to cover up his drunk-walking.”

Gaea gave Clip a funny look. “Come on. No need to be so harsh on the guy.”

“No need? He’s drunk. Drunk, right as we’re about to leave!”

“Keep your voice down!” Chamomile hissed. “I thought the whole idea was to avoid making it obvious he’s—”

“Well, we can’t exactly do that while he’s in that state, can we?”

“Look,” Gaea said, turning to Polar while still speaking, “I’m sure if we ask him to just, toe the line, or whatever, he’ll be—”

She stopped short. That was because Polar was no longer next to them.

Before Chamomile could begin to search for him, they heard him bellow: “Hey! Prinschess!”

All of them turned to see Polar stumble onto the platform, nearly colliding with an onboarding group. His declaration caused Zipp to stumble back and look at him in total shock. There was a goofy smile on his face. “Hiya, Pr… Zchipp. Remember me?”

“Uh…”

“That idiot,” Clip muttered. He tried to approach the platform, but was cut off by another group of passengers who had yet to notice the commotion. “Oh, come on!”

“Let’s go around the other end,” Gaea suggested. They agreed and broke away from the larger crowd.

“You remember me, right?” Polar said, managing not to slur. He was a little quieter this time, more unsure of himself, and his ears wilted. Perhaps the liquor was affecting his face’s ability to compose itself, for now his frown threatened to pull down the whole of it with itself, in such a morbidly upsetting formation that it could have been comedic, had not his eyes and voice sparkled with alarming lucidity. No sober pony could look that sad—but only the saddest of drunks ever did, and it was always a sorrow sown and planted in some other time, in some other, happier place.

Zipp smiled uneasily. “Yeah, of course! You’re… that Polar guy, right? You’re in Chamomile’s group.”

If this was meant to placate him, it served the opposite effect—his ears flickered back, and his voice became irritated. “You really don’t remember me? At all?”

It seemed that he was getting angrier, and that the angrier he became, the more sober he was.

Zipp shook her head. “I’m, ah, sorry, guy, but if you’re saying we met before this expedition—”

“But we did!”

They were nearing the other side of the platform, but at the sudden exclamation, they stopped again. Polar had spread his wings, in a manner that Chamomile recognized as a pegasus’s way of warning somepony. Yet he seemed unaware of what he had done, and to whom.

By that point, the crowd had taken notice of the growing uproar. All movement onto the platform and train ceased, and it became harder for Chamomile and her group to push through. Ponies gathered to watch with morbid curiosity.

Zipp had remained calm throughout—impressively so. Chamomile wondered if this was what made her a princess. Zipp looked at the flared wings with a measure of distrust—she did not flare her own. She scrutinized Polar, who, realizing that a tense silence had descended, looked a little uncomfortable, and finally retracted his wings.

“You’re drunk,” she declared in amazement. The crowd gasped. Chamomile and her group pushed through and managed to finally reach the other set of stairs.

Polar wobbled. “Am not,” he slurred.

Chamomile ascended the stairs. She was aware she was breathing rather heavily, and at the sound of her hoofsteps, Zipp turned to regard her. “Zipp, hang on a second,” Chamomile tried to say.

But Polar interrupted her. With the tone of a petulant child, he nearly shouted, “I am not drunk!”

“You totally are,” Zipp returned. She sounded more disappointed than angry, which, for whatever reason, caused Polar to stiffen up. “What, did you stumble over to Brewster’s and down a couple of drinks? I know they’re pretty good, but you knew you’d be working today. Why’d you go and get yourself into this state?”

Polar must have been unaccustomed to being scolded, for his mouth flapped open wordlessly. Chamomile’s companions joined her on the platform, and Gaea was next to speak. “It’s true. We found him there.” She started forward, then hesitated. “He’s—he’s not too, drunk, though, right? He can still work?”

Zipp furrowed her brow. “He’s drunk. He’s not going to be able to do a whole lot.”

That brought Polar back to reality. “Hey, I’m right here, you know!”

“I know that.” Zipp turned sharply to him, her disapproval evident in every word. She stepped forward and tapped his chest with her hoof. It was barely a touch, yet he still slightly stumbled back. Her frown deepened, and then, almost to herself, she muttered, “Definitely more than a few drinks…”

Chamomile sensed some internal deliberation was occurring. She stepped forward. “Zipp, you’re not thinking of just leaving him here, are you?”

Zipp turned around. “What? O-of course not!” But her face betrayed her. “I was just—”

“What?” Gaea unexpectedly stepped in front of Chamomile, and her voice had become filled with incredulity. “N-no, you can’t—you can’t just do that!”

“I—” Zipp furiously shook her head, then looked behind her at the crowd. She saw their confusion and their antipathy. Putting on a smile, she said, “Er, never mind us, everypony. Just keep filing on board in a timely manner, okay?”

Some murmurs rose up—they were more curious as to what was happening than to the prospect of work. But eventually the crowd began to move again.

Stepping close to the group, she lowered her voice. “I hate to be that pony, but we’re causing a scene here.”

“You can’t seriously be thinking of leaving him behind,” Gaea protested.

“It doesn’t matter what I think. There are regulations I have to follow, and if that conductor comes back and sees that your friend is—well, you know—”

“That still doesn’t justify—”

“She’s right,” Chamomile said. They both turned to her, gazes so intense that they made her self-conscious. “Gaea, I mean,” she clarified. “Zipp, it… even if regulation permitted it, it wouldn’t be right to do that to him.” She sighed. “Look, I’m sure if we get him aboard the train, he’ll be fine.”

“Fine? I’d be surprised if he can even fly!”

“I can fly!”

They all looked at him and said collectively, “No, you can’t.”

Inebriation fueled an ego that could not be quashed by group dismissal. “Pfft. I totally can!” he slurred, crouching. “Just watch me!”

Four pairs of eyes widened, and four voices rose in alarm. “No, no, no, wait, wait—”

Polar sprang into the air, his wings keeping him aloft by several feet. It was actually impressive how he was able to achieve a certain degree of equilibrium, and for that singular moment, he looked completely fine.

Then he pitched sharply to one side, banked low, and flew headfirst into the station’s clock. A brutally hollow sound echoed throughout the Badlands, causing all movement to cease. He crumpled onto the platform, and startled gasps were heard.

Chamomile and Gaea were already moving, as though they’d decided unanimously that he was their charge. Behind them, Clip was cursing, and Zipp raced alongside him, calling out for somepony to get a doctor. The sound of the princess commanding them to action spurred a commotion, and the crowd began to summon one posthaste.

Chamomile was sure that the blow had been enough to render Polar unconscious before he’d hit the ground, but she checked him out anyway. She pulled open his eyelid—his pupils didn’t dilate. Gaea knelt next to her, ignoring how suddenly close they were, and placed an ear on his chest. “He’s still breathing,” she said, relieved, “but if I had to guess, he’s going to have one heck of a concussion when he wakes up.”

“If,” Clip said.

The glare Gaea sent him could have burned out the sun. “When.”

Chamomile couldn’t help but stare at her. Where did this protectiveness come from? Gaea had hardly spoken to Polar.

A doctor rushed out of the train cars, so quickly that Chamomile barely registered her appearance. “What happened?” she asked.

“He hit the clock,” Zipp said. She appeared to be in a state of shock herself. “Headfirst.”

The doctor pushed them aside and knelt to conduct her own spurious examinations. “He’s a pegasus, so his bones are less dense than the other races. We’re going to have to transport him into the med bay.”

Two more ponies arrived—nurses carrying a gurney. They quickly loaded Polar onto the flat bed, and Chamomile couldn’t help but watch with a sickening feeling as Polar seemed to dangle lifelessly on top. Gaea kept close to him, a hoof wrapped around his—an oddly intimate gesture between strangers.

“Miss,” the doctor said to her, “you’re going to have to let go, now.”

“I…” Gaea seemed to awaken, and she let go of Polar’s hoof. “Y-yes, of course. Sorry.”

The doctor nodded. Then she looked at Zipp. “By the way, the conductor wanted to let you know that we’re departing in five. You’d better get on board. All of you.”

Zipp was shocked to be addressed at all, let alone in such a calm tone of voice, given the situation. “R-right.”

But they did not leave immediately. When the doctor, the nurses, and the patient were gone, the four of them remained on the platform, facing each other. None of them knew quite what to say. Chamomile had a lingering feeling in her. It was like while she consciously knew the situation had been resolved, the rest of her had yet to catch up with that realization.

“He said he knew me,” Zipp suddenly said. She looked at them. “Any of you get what that meant?”

After a moment, Clip offered, “You’re both pegasi. And you’re the princess.”

“Yeah, but the way he said it…” She frowned, then shook her head. “Never mind. It’s probably nothing.”

“He was probably confused.”

“Maybe.” Clip and Zipp began to walk towards the train, though it was clear by their halting steps that their minds were still preoccupied.

Chamomile immediately thought back to what she’d heard in front of the tavern. That scattered series of sentences had made no sense then, and the ones she’d heard now were just the same, but what if… But no. Surely it was just the drunken ramblings of a stallion lost to his senses.

But how sad had he looked when Zipp expressed confusion…

Chamomile turned to go as well, but stopped. Something compelled her to look back at Gaea. She looked lost and confused and scared, like it was not a stranger who had gotten hurt in front of her, but somepony much closer. Her eyes flickered from the train to Chamomile, searching for something, and they were wet with helpless tears.

Chamomile recognized that look and those tears. For she had once shed them herself.

She stepped closer, intending to say, “He’ll be fine.” But the words sounded hollow in her head. She had no way of knowing if that was what Gaea even wanted to hear. So, instead, she opted to put out her hoof.

After a moment, Gaea took it. Together they began to trot towards the train.

Just as they boarded, however, another feeling came to Chamomile, and she turned back around. She had the oddest sense of being watched. She scanned the Badlands, trying to discern among the myriad of workers who looked her way.

At one point, she thought she saw a green pony standing in the middle of the road. She thought it was Astral, but he was too far away for her to be certain. And when a bit of dust and wind blew up and irritated her eye and she blinked, whatever or whoever that pony was, vanished into thin air.

7 - Earth Cycle

In the recreation parlor was a clock, and it ticked and tocked so regularly that it could lull ponies to sleep. The parlor’s silence, crafted by the thick walls of the train, enhanced the somnambulistic effect.

Chamomile felt dull. The movement from hot hair to cold conditioning should have sharpened her senses, but they only weakened them. She sat on one of the parlor’s sofas, counting the ticking of the clock and the frequency of her breathing, feeling herself falling closer and closer to slumber.

She knew she should rest, knew that if she approached the upcoming work with anything less than her one-hundred percent, she’d suffer. She was as liable to be kicked off the job as Polar had been, and he had, at least, now, the excuse of a concussion to keep him from working. What would exhaustion before the job had even begun look like to Zipp? But despite the comfort of her seat; despite the ever-steady, every-rhythmic throbbing of miles of track running under them; despite the mesmerizing nature of the waning moon and the impossibly serene, slumbering world that existed but a windowpane away; despite all of that, she could not rest. Not in the slightest.

Her companions were much the same. Clip sat next to her, examining a deck of cards in his magic. Earlier, when energy was still running high, he’d entertained them with a neat party trick that he could do with his hooves only, involving some sleight-of-hoof and a surprising bout of showmanship and bravado they would never have thought the reticent stallion capable of having, but soon after he had grown weary and settled into a familiar silence. Gaea’s energies, while clearly depleted to a certain extent, were not so low as to bring her to sleep. At present she sat with her hooves tucked under her, reading a book. She wore reading glasses for only this occasion, and the effect was one of startling maturity.

Every now and then, she would look towards the door at the end. It led to the medbay, where Polar now rested under the supervision of the stern doctor who’d impressively secured the situation on the platform. Gaea had wanted to stay with him, much to the surprise of both Clip and Chamomile. “We can’t just abandon him,” she’d said. But her voice lacked the conviction behind the buzz. She was trying to convince either them or herself, and failed. The doctor, with signature, professional aloofness, persuaded her to leave, insisting that there was nothing more to do but monitor Polar and wait. “Monitoring and waiting is what they made us learn back in second year,” she’d said—a joke, but she had not said it cheerily.

Chamomile watched Gaea read. There was nothing remotely special about it, and had she had the energy, she might have chided herself for staring. But Gaea was intriguing, in a way that could not be explained by words. Chamomile thought about her behavior towards Polar. There was an almost maternal, apologetic aspect to it, which reminded Chamomile so much of how she’d behaved towards Astral back then, that she wondered if somepony had been taking lessons, as impossible as that thought was.

But the parallel—circumstantial at best—was not the only thing which interested her. Gaea might have been trying to hide it, but Chamomile had caught her looking back a few times in the last half-hour. Silence had, perhaps, caused her to absentmindedly turn her head, but each time, her gaze had focused on Chamomile. She could not read it, and it was gone with a flick of Gaea’s head, her face obscured by her mane; but it was enough for her to recognize she, herself, was also being watched.

She felt strange all around. She blamed the hypnotic nature of this parlor and of the train at night—it made a pony feel and think curious things. And yet, whereas when confronted with the possibility of madness, one might feel inclined towards anger, frustration, even protestation, these strange feelings did not arouse displeasure in Chamomile. Only the same feeling which she felt towards Gaea: intrigue.

And so, she watched her with intrigue; watched her read, watched as, whenever her glasses started to slip, Gaea’s nose scrunched up and she brought a hoof up to correct it; it was cute, really, endearing, something that could make anypony giddy just to see. She watched Gaea turn the page in her magazine, her brow drawn together in concentration, like the glasses were not enough for her to read; she wondered if she had contact lenses, then wondered if she might like colored ones, then thought, Why have colored ones? Her eyes are pretty enough. And so was the rest of her, if she was being honest. Her pink coat had somehow not been dirtied out in the desert of the Ponyville Badlands. Chamomile was both impressed and a little jealous. When she worked at the tea shop, she’d spill stuff all over her aprons if she wasn’t careful, and some teas were harder to clean out than others. Maybe she’d ask her about it. Maybe she’d ask her to come to the tea shop and show her how not to make a mess on her coat like that…

Chamomile started. The movement caused Clip and Gaea to look up from what they were doing, each one reflecting concern in their eyes. Chamomile’s face burned. “Uh,” she said, smartly.

“Everything all right?” Gaea asked. Her voice was soft, and Chamomile was drawn inexorably to her gaze.

“Yeah,” she said, but her voice seemed distant to her. “I was just… dozing off, I think. Woke myself up by accident.”

Gaea stared back. Then something broke this “thing” between them. She made a startled, gasping sound, then ducked behind her mane, nearly tossing the magazine onto the floor. “Sorry.”

“It’s… okay.” Chamomile also looked away now. She could feel Clip watching them both, confused, and this thought made her both feel incredibly embarrassed, yet also strangely energized.

Which meant, of course, even less of a prospect for rest. She resisted the urge to sigh, and, seeking to push away that complicated concoction of emotion now surging up in her, she pulled from the magazine rack her own periodical and tried to bury herself—and her face—in the words. Silence resumed, interrupted only by that clock, by the dull thundering of the train.

She wondered if Gaea was still casting those fleeting glances at her. Amazing, really—how she could think that, as though she missed what had not lasted very long at all.

Eventually, Clip said, “I have to ask.” In the shared solitude, his voice was like shards of glass shattering down a staircase; but he did not ask.

Both Gaea and Chamomile turned to him. It was unclear whom he’d meant to address.

Clip sighed. He put down the cards, neatly arranged them into a stack, then slid the stack back into the box. He placed his front hooves between his legs, frowning in both his lips and forehead.

“You have to ask?” Gaea prompted.

His gaze swiveled to her, but she didn’t shrink away. He said, “You,” then paused, watching her.

It was a stilted attempt at asking permission, but Gaea, after a moment, granted it with a somewhat perturbed nod.

Clip’s voice became quieter and more uncertain. “There’s… no real way of putting this kindly, so forgive me for this transgression.” He paused, cleared his throat, raised his head and looked straight at Gaea. “Why are you being so nice to Polar?”

Chamomile nearly answered. Gaea’s reasons were her own, and they had no right to pry. But she could also not deny that the matter had also been bothering her.

Gaea, instead of answering, removed her reading glasses and placed them on the table.

“I mean, I understand if you don’t want to say why,” Clip continued. “But I’m just… curious, I guess.”

After a moment, Gaea sighed. “I… should have known that. Anypony would be curious. You.” She looked at Chamomile. She must have read her expression perfectly, for then she said, “You both are. And,” she added, shaking her head, “I probably could have, maybe even should have, explained myself earlier.”

“If you don’t want to,” Chamomile tried to say, but Gaea interrupted her with an even fiercer shake.

“I do. You…” And Chamomile thought she was going to say, You’re my friends, something simple yet heavy. But Gaea gathered herself and said, more definitively, “You deserve to know, I think, and I don’t believe in hiding anything.”

Another pause. She added, a bit awkwardly, “It’s… kind of a long story, though.”

Chamomile glanced at Clip, who deferred to her with a simple nod. She didn’t quite know why. She looked at the clock ticking on the wall, then at Gaea. “I think we’ll have time for it.”

Gaea nodded. She closed her book, shifted around her seat to get more comfortable, and began to speak.

For a farmpony like Gaea, silence was the punctuation separating the earliest and latest moments of her life. She heard it when she rose at the crack of dawn, before even the roosters had crooned their morning curses, when the world was still waiting for the immaculate conception of the day. It was a good hour to rise because the farm would have, in her view, the best kind of lighting: a fast, immense spread of deep, Byzantine violet and indigo would coat the skies and swaddle the earth below in soft contours. When she was awake at that hour and could see the farm all hushed and heavy in that silence, she was at her most peaceful. When night fell, the silence there was similar, but she much preferred this one.

She rose earlier than anypony else on the farm, even her father, who owned those twelve acres of land and had grown every crop and tree himself before he had met his wife and had his two children. He regarded her as a bit of a beloved anomaly, and the surest pony to inherit the farm, for her brother, despite all the strength in his hooves, was not one for the mornings. “Gaea,” her father once told her, when he joined her outside just as the first of their roosters awoke, “you might be the only farmpony I know who loves the dawn over the dusk.”

When her brother awoke, he would join them in the work. The three of them checked their animals and their feed, harvested the eggs to be sold at the market, watered their crops, checked for invasive bugs and field mice, weeded and tilled the soil, and all the other duties that came with the pride and price of owning and tending to the land. Her brother also would go into Maretime Bay to barter their produce and return with fresh supplies for the farm.

Gaea had an additional responsibility, one that she took much pride in. She managed their expenses and balanced the dusty ledger inside the house, logging what they sold and what her brother bought. The ledger had been passed down the generations of farmers in her father’s line who had come and gone, and its binding had been stitched and repaired to such a degree that you could not turn it over without seeing a swathe of scars and staples where clean book-bindings had once lain.

Once, noticing as his sister counted up their account, and that the ledger’s number of pages was starting to dwindle, Gaea’s brother asked their father why they wouldn’t buy a new one and put the old one away. It had, truthfully, been on Gaea’s mind for a while, but only her brother had the courage to ask.

Their father was not offended. He even seemed a little embarrassed, as he crossed the room and asked Gaea to let him flip through the ledger. “I will grant that, one day, we will need a new book, once this one has run out of pages,” he said, showing them what was left. By Gaea’s estimates, there were enough entries for at least two more harvests, if not three. “But, look here, Enkimdu.” Their father flipped to some of the earliest pages. There, hoofwriting so immaculate it seemed almost criminal for it to be in such a dirty old book tracked the farm’s earliest profits in long, sloping curves, ornate kennings, and punctuation marks. It made art out of arithmetic.

“This was your mother’s hoofwriting. And while it is true we have photos of her, this… this was the first thing to preserve her for me.”

Their mother had died when Gaea was very young, from a rare, viral infection that had caused her to deteriorate within only a few days. Unlike other parents, their father had been open with her death, though never excessively. He had grieved, had revealed to them the necessity of grieving, yet had also shown how dedicated he was to their family, impressing upon them the sanctity of life and also the understanding that death was not the end.

“The single blade of grass tells us this,” he liked to say; he said it was from an old poem from a gray-bearded, gray-eyed stallion. “No one ever leaves us, not truly. Your mother will always be here with us.”

In this way, they each mourned her passing, yet celebrated her coming, in ways that solidified Gaea’s resolve against letting tragedy overcome her—a feat which she would badly need in the days to come.

Despite being nine years her senior, Enkimdu was close with Gaea. He was actually the one who taught her how to plow the field and sow the crops while their father had attended to more task-heavy duties.

But unlike her, who enjoyed the farm work, Enkimdu, at best, merely tolerated it. He never complained, and always did his fair share. But when they were outside, working together, sometimes Gaea would see his gaze turn westward away from the farm. At first, she thought he was looking towards the setting sun, but it occurred to her that he never appeared to show much interest. His gaze saw something vaster than the horizon. Sometimes she’d venture to the edge of their farm and stare off into that distance, searching for whatever it was that had claimed his heart, but she only saw the sun and the clouds.

Gaea never asked Enkimdu to explain himself. She believed that a pony’s heart was theirs to keep, and that whatever voluptuous desires it held, only the owner was privy to.

For a time, he stared off only every now and then. But over the years, those looks became more and more frequent, cutting into his work on the farm and filling him with a sensitivity towards distraction. Along with this trend, Enkimdu’s face grew long and haggard, like something was draining him of his youth. It became bad enough that, after a near-accident involving the farm equipment, their father took Enkimdu aside.

“Son, what is the matter with you?” he demanded in a quiet but stern voice. “You’re acting like a lovesick pony!” His well-wintered, bushy eyebrows rose, like interested caterpillars. “But… have you—”

“No, father,” Enkimdu replied. The bitter intonations that came with barely restrained guilt affected his voice so profoundly, it nearly made Gaea cry. “It’s just that I’ve come to realize I’m no longer happy here.”

“No longer happy? Why?”

Instead of answering, Enkimdu looked to where Gaea stood, the doorway to their little cottage’s kitchen. “I don’t know if I should answer that while she’s here.” He had spoken for fear of hurting her with further revelations, but she took it personally and ran off.

She talked to neither of them for the rest of the day. Nor did she let herself see them, for doing so resulted in a confusing build-up of tears and a sense that she was committing some great wrong. Instead, Gaea, busied herself in all her tasks, as well as the ones her brother left behind in his stupor. But she was still young, and so she quickly became exhausted by everything she made herself do.

By that evening, when the stars arrived and a silence not too dissimilar from the one that marked her favorite time of day descended, she was ready to throw herself onto her bed and sleep the rest of the month away. She hung her overalls and hat by the wash-bin, dirt, dust, and debris coming off like fleas from a corpse, and stepped into the shower to wash herself. When she was done and had dried, she found she was a little hungry. She went into the kitchen for a snack, only to discover her father slumped over the table, his tweed-woven farmer’s hat crumpled into a ball, his eyes red, and his breathing distinguished by sighs powered with the tell-tale signs of a stallion grieving.

“Papa?” Gaea asked quietly.

He looked up at her. Cleaning his throat, he spoke with that familiar acceptance of great tragedies: “Your brother is gone.”

Gaea’s heart dropped into her stomach. She was distantly aware that her father was attempting to explain more, but his voice was lost in the scuffle of her hooves as she ascended the stairs and headed for their shared bedroom.

It was empty. The drawer that had held Enkimdu’s clothing had been cleared out—even his boots were gone. His coats and personal effects had been removed; when, she couldn’t say. She fell upon her bed, feeling tears begin to well, when she saw a piece of paper sticking out from under her pillow. Taking it out, she saw it was an envelope addressed to her. Inside was a small letter, written in her brother’s blocky hoofwriting:

Gaea,

By the time you find this, I will have already gone. I’d write it more legibly, but that would take up too much time, which isn’t on my side. I have to write this quickly, too, while courage beats within my heart and fear not against it.

The truth is that I’ve never been happy on the farm. It took until now for me to realize that when I thought I was, I was lying to myself. The dirt and grass and crops do not really speak to me as they speak to you or Papa. I feel, and have felt, like a foreign son to it all, displaced and wandering, forever in search of where I belong.

You will recall that I’ve gone into Maretime Bay on supply and market runs. But I’ve done more than that. I’ve talked to sailors and swimmers and all sorts of nautically inclined ponies. I’ve heard stories not just about the immensity of the sea, but also the frightful and awe-inspiring power it commands. I’ve never considered myself an overly inquisitive pony, but when I was with those sailors, I found I never wanted their stories to end—stories about adventure, bravery, beauty, the peacefulness of the sea.

Thanks to those stories, I realized I am not called to till the earth, but to sail the sea. When I work the dirt here, I feel only exhaustion and confusion, but when—and I’m sure you have seen me—I look out past the hills and valleys towards the sea, and imagine myself perched on even a simple raft, I find I cannot contain my excitement.

Some sailors are in need of crew members for an upcoming expedition. They need able-bodied ponies who can lift and carry and follow orders. Having talked to many of them, I think I have a good chance of being hired. I have to take this chance, Gaea—but that, I know, means leaving you and Papa behind.

You and he—and Mom—you all have your roots here. I understand that, and I don’t think that’s wrong. In fact, I admire you for being able to get up early and face the day excitedly. When I was younger, I was even a little jealous of that, wishing I could feel as you did when you watched the world awaken. Here, you are happy. Here, you belong. I’d never want anything less for you.

But I have to go, Gaea. I have to find my place. One day you may understand what I mean when your chance for happiness appears. Should that day come, I tell you—seize it, no matter what that may mean. The world is too vast to stay in only one plot of land. Each of us deserves to try and see what more is out there.

But do not think I am leaving hatefully. I love you and Papa both, truly. And though I did not feel the farm life is for me, the farm will always be home, in some way. Life’s desires won’t change that.

One day, I’ll come back. I promise. In the meantime, take care of yourself and Papa. I know you can.

Love always,

Enkimdu.

Gaea had taken that letter out of her bag to read it to them, but Chamomile had the feeling doing so wasn’t necessary—in all likelihood, she must have read that letter hundreds of times, had committed each pencil stroke to memory in the same way her father had immortalized his wife’s writing. She read it so certainly, so steadily, that one might not have thought she was still affected by it, had they not seen, as she lowered the letter, her wipe her eyes.

“Enkimdu’s been gone for almost twelve years,” she said softly. “He never returned.”

The matter-of-fact way she revealed this deeply wounded Chamomile. “He didn’t write any other letters?”

Gaea shook her head. “Not even one. I tried to ask which ship he’d gone on, but there were always a dozen ponies who fit his description. I think he might have used a fake name. I don’t think he was even officially on a crew member list. Perhaps he stowed away as one.”

Gaea sighed, rubbing one fetlock over the other. “Papa took it personally, despite the fact that Enkimdu never said he hated him. Papa felt he had failed his son, because he hadn’t seen how sad he was becoming until it was too late. And when he had… they said some ugly things, from what I can tell. Things no father and son should ever say to one another without remembering first how much they are loved. In the end, though, Papa couldn’t have stopped him from leaving… and I think he took that as failure, too.”

“Your brother could not have at least come back once before deciding never to again?” Clip pointed out.

“I thought that, too. But it wasn’t long after that I realized he couldn’t have, even if he wanted to. It would have been impossible.”

“What do you mean?” Chamomile asked.

Gaea sucked in a breath. “Shortly after my brother left us, we were caught in a ferocious storm. The worst that had ever struck Maretime Bay, actually. I doubt you’d have heard of it?” They shook her heads no. “It was awful. The storm, when it came to our farm, destroyed nearly all our crops and silos. It ruined the coop and barn. The fields were so torn apart that we wouldn’t have been able to replant, assuming we even had the money left over after everything else had been repaired. But that wasn’t the worst of it. That storm ripped our house apart. We only survived by hiding in the storm shelter. But we forgot…”

Gaea bit her lip, willing herself to continue. “We forgot to take the photographs and the ledger with us. So when we finally emerged, all of it was gone. And I think that finally broke Papa’s spirit.”

They were at a loss for words. Even the clock seemed to have stopped, hanging lifelessly on the wall.

It seemed impossible for Gaea to keep going, and yet, she still did. Though her voice was kept to a faint murmur, she was able to reveal all that happened next.

They could not muster enough money from their savings to repair the whole farm, and so, had to sell it off at less-than market price, just to have some money left over. Homeless, they lived in the homes of friends in Maretime Bay who could only afford to take care of them for a short while, before having to ask them to leave—all the town had been damaged, and all suffered financial strain.

Eventually, Gaea was able to secure a cheap apartment. It sat atop a small florist shop, where she was able to get a job, taking care of the bouquets and house plants under the watchful gaze of an earth pony mare who seldom spoke more than a few words. But Gaea was unable to land her father a similar job, for it seemed that, with his heart and spirit so thoroughly shattered at three losses—his son, his farm, and any mementos of his wife—he could no longer tend to any living thing. Plants wilted, dried out, and died when he was near, meaning he could not be in the florist’s shop for long. And even if he could, Gaea suspected he would have never been able to attend to them as he dutifully had his crops—roses and tulips were not the same as wheat and corn. His talent was forever lost to him, and he suffered similarly.

And as he could no longer care for crops, he could no longer care for himself. What money he had was spent at the bar, where he would spend most of his time in increasingly longer intervals. There were moments when Gaea had been uncertain where he was, for he’d go out, drink, and fail to return. When he did, it was with the company of the sour stench of liquor and shame, for he knew, despite his inebriation, that he was letting her down. Many times he tried to stop, only for the cycle to viciously reassert itself. He divorced himself from reality and sought union with drink and could not dig himself out of the bottle.

“And eventually, his body couldn’t take it anymore,” Gaea finished. “He died three years ago.”

She was looking at the door to the medbay as she was saying this, her face caught between pity for what lay beyond and sorrow for herself. “That’s why you’ve been so kind to Polar?” Chamomile asked quietly.

She nodded glumly. “He reminds me of both Papa and Enkimdu in some ways. That bravado, that earnestness, I mean. I know he’s nothing like them, but…” She sighed. “Every sad pony I’ve met over the years just looks like them to me. And I can’t help but think if I help any one of them just a bit, then my brother… my father…”

She did not say. But there was no need to. Chamomile understood. In every broken pony there is a faint memory of who they used to be, smudged by the years and the torment. One cannot help but yearn for what is lost, and hope that it can be found in the dissolute faces of others who face the world similarly.

“But if you were working in a florist shop,” said Clip, “why did you take this train job?”

“The bits,” she admitted, only somewhat self-consciously. “This job pays more than the florist’s, enough that… that I could actually buy a new plot of land. They only recently managed to open new acres for a bunch of farmers, and if I can get enough funds together quickly, I think I can get us a new farm.”

“Us…”

“Oh. I mean me.”

“But what about your brother?”

Chamomile knew the answer before it was said. She read it in Gaea’s eyes, her posture, her tone of voice. But it still hurt all the same.

“That storm that took our life away? It took my brother, too. He’s dead, Clip.” She shook her head. “He’s never coming back. It’s just me now.”

Another silence. Even the train’s rumbling appeared to have faded, like all motion had come to an abrupt, final stop.

“It’s just me,” Gaea whispered.

Chamomile got up and approached Gaea. She bent low and, ignoring the squeak from the other mare, wrapped her hooves around her. She said nothing. Gaea began to shake. Something hot and wet fell on Chamomile’s back. In response, she hugged her even harder.

Then she felt another pair of hooves fumble around them both: Clip. Though it began awkwardly at first, soon he settled into the hug.

They stayed like that for the rest of the night.

9 - Last Will, First Confession

“I need to write a will.”

Chamomile did not look up from her reading. “You have one already.”

“I need a new one. For you and Juniper’s sake.”

She snorted, then shut her book, a bit louder than was necessary. “For the stars’ sake, Astral, do we have to do this now?”

“We do,” he replied quietly.

They were in their living room. Chamomile sat in a recliner she’d gotten from her parents, while Astral took up the better part of the larger sofa. Neither of them had planned on sitting separately; it was as though they’d agreed it was necessary, safe, even. Juniper was in a stroller near Chamomile, sleeping off his breakfast.

Astral sighed and leaned forward. His gaze was as steady as his voice. “We can’t kid ourselves.”

“Who’s kidding anything?”

“I know that you don’t want to believe it, but—”

She glared at him. “You don’t know what I believe, Astral.”

He stared at her, then shook his head. “No. I guess I don’t.”

He was quiet again. She begged that it would be the end of that.

There was a certain irony in the fact that he was at his most cognizant when they had these arguments. The normally foggy impression he gave was replaced with the quiet, meticulous determination of a pony wanting to make a grave point, the closest to whom he’d been before the first fall. But this was never received with relief. It was only the other side of the reminder that he’d never be the same—that neither of them would.

Juniper made a little whimper, so Chamomile closed her book to check up on him. Having just woken up, he blinked at her, then said the word he’d come to associate with meaning the whole world: “Mama?” It always made her smile a little when she heard it, but lately she’d been taking some partially guilty satisfaction in it, because he said it first and more often than “Daddy.”

“Good morning, cutie,” she said, leaning down to boop his nose. “Are you hungry?”

He nodded. She took him out of the stroller and helped him stand. He found his balance and teetered towards the kitchen, Chamomile following.

She heard Astral following as well, but ignored him. “What would you like?” she asked Juniper.

“Apple.” Sentences weren’t quite his forte yet.

She opened the fridge and pulled one out. Placing it on the counter, she retrieved a knife and began to slice it, awkwardly, since she had no magic with which to wield the tool, both son and father now watching wordlessly. She tried not to let her irritation show.

When she was done, she placed the slices in a bowl, then handed them to Juniper. “You can eat at the table,” she said. He gratefully took them from her, then wobbled over to his seat. After placing the bowl down and climbing into the seat, he began to eat happily.

She and Astral watched him from the kitchen. Even now she had to marvel at how much he’d grown. How was it that having a child meant that the days passed differently, that years were condensed into seconds?

“It’s science,” Astral said.

She glanced at him. “Sorry?”

He pointed at Juniper. “You were thinking, I’m guessing, about how much he’s grown, all without us noticing?”

Still sore from earlier, she simply nodded.

“It’s science. Everything has mass, and things with mass affect time relativistically. The more mass you have, the greater the effect—the more time slows. There are things in this universe so large that if you were to approach it, to an outside observer it would look like you’d stopped moving—that your personal space-time had stopped moving entirely.”

“But he’s only a child.”

“But he’ll grow. And he’ll keep affecting time. Soon he’ll be walking and talking fine. Then he’ll have become a teenager. Then an adult. He’ll go on dates, maybe settle down, have a few kids—all in a blink, if anything.”

Astral sounded pleased by this notion, but Chamomile couldn’t say she was. Let him be a boy a little longer, she thought; let him have that. Don’t thrust the burdens of the world onto him before he is ready. Don’t make him grow up before she is.

“You and your notions of time,” she murmured. There was not as much bitterness in her voice as there could have been, and Astral, noting this, glanced at her. “I’ve got a notion for you, actually.”

“Do go on.”

“You told me about the second law of thermodynamics,” she recalled. “The state of a system tends towards entropy. Emptying out until the energy is equally distributed, and nothing more can occur.”

“Yes, I remember that conversation.”

“But that has to happen over time. The longer time goes on, the more entropy increases. Inevitably it all ends—time, entropy, systems—quietly—that’s what you told me.”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Why does it have to end, Astral? Why can’t it go on just a little longer?”

“That’s just how natural systems work.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t be.”

“You want to stop a fundamental law of the universe?”

“I do, and I should—isn’t that what living is? A rejection of the inevitable end?”

He was quiet for a moment, then said, “This is about the will.”

“No, it—” She sighed. “Fine. It is. It always is. You’re always talking about it, and now here you are, talking about time and slowing it and I’m thinking about entropy and—” Her voice shook. “Goddess above, Astral… why?”

“I don’t know. It just… is what it is.”

“And it shouldn’t be!”

He flinched at her outburst. In the dining room, Juniper, having not heard, continued to eat his apples.

“It shouldn’t be,” Astral agreed in a voice barely above a whisper. “But we have no say in that, my dear. I am sorry we don’t.”

She turned to him, and before she could stop herself, fell forward and embraced him. She was aware she was crying. He patted her back. Oh goddess, he was so frail to the touch, so thin. Wordlessly she begged for a pause in things, for time to stop thrusting itself forward. She wondered: if she made herself big enough, would that be enough to stop Astral from decaying further? Could that be achieved? Was that what a child was for—to slow the advance, long enough to reconcile with it?

Later that day they went to the doctor’s office for a routine check-up—routine, in that it was one of the many that Astral had had to start taking since the fall. Chamomile had become intimately aware of how they’d go and what tests the doctor would perform to the point that she could replicate the check-up herself. Nothing had changed except that everything had, and sometimes she wondered if there was a point to these appointments, when all they did was confirm what she already knew.

But today felt different. Astral had gone in, alone, while she sat in the waiting room. She was entertaining Juniper with some wooden blocks she’d found. He stacked them and watched them fall, but did not cry. He seemed fascinated by how they could fall from the slightest touch. The other patients watched with unreadable expressions—were they amused, were they annoyed?

“Juniper, stop being noisy,” she chided him gently. But he did not listen. He continued to stack and knock them over, staring at the mess like he was a scientist recording data. “Juniper, listen to Mommy, okay? You’re making a big mess.”

But he kept at it. She looked at the other patients and tried to smile apologetically, but her nerves were frayed and she feared she might snap.

Then the nurse came in and called for her. “Ma’am. The doctor wants to talk to you and your husband.”

“Oh. That was quick.”

But the nurse did not appear as pleased by this as she was. A shadow loomed over her face. She seemed shaken. Ice-cold dread pierced Chamomile’s heart as she stood. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“I…” The nurse recovered by shaking her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. But the doctor… he said…”

Chamomile grabbed Juniper away from the blocks and walked swiftly past her, heading for the examination room. Juniper was crying out for the blocks. She shushed him. But he kept crying and crying, as though the blocks were his whole world, and they’d just been wrenched from him by the cruel hooves of fate.

She entered the room and saw Astral, pale and depressed, and the doctor just the same. Both of them looked up at her sudden entrance. “Astral?” she said.

Astral couldn’t speak, couldn’t meet her gaze. The doctor cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I have some bad news…”

Chamomile was not fully surprised to discover that she could not fall asleep that night. While everyone else went to bed without a care, she remained awake, struggling to get comfortable in her seat. But no matter what position she tried, either on her belly or her back, some ridge or edge poked or prodded her body; her pillow was either too lumpy or too warm; her blanket kept falling off; and on and on, until finally she threw her blanket off and stood, grumpy and irritated.

Nothing stirred. In another bed was Clip, peaceful, his smile suggesting he was enjoying a particularly pleasant dream. Chamomile doubted she would fall asleep anytime soon, and decided that she might go somewhere else for the night. She turned around to grab her blanket and pillow, then paused.

Her eyes fell on her bag. She put her items down and opened the flap—without her magic, because this felt more intimate, more real, and she had opened and closed it for years on end without it. Reaching inside, she first took out the photo of herself and Astral. Had it always looked that faded? Had the corners always been that creased? She looked it over in the darkly lit corridor of the compartment, but she couldn’t say what exactly she was looking for.

She put it back inside, then pulled out the photo of Juniper. This was taken about a year ago, when he’d just turned seven, and he had a party hat on. Seeing him made her smile, but only for a moment—for once more she was reminded that a great distance separated them. She wondered if he was all right, if he’d received her letter. Then she worried if he, too, was having trouble sleeping. Did he still wake up in the middle of the night asking for his father, forgetting his face, forgetting his voice?

She wondered which was worse, or better: forgetting, or remembering.

Chamomile shook her head. She slipped the photo back into her bag.

Remembering her original plan, she picked up her blanket and pillow. Then, after thinking about it, she also lifted her bag and slung it carefully around her shoulder, before she walked out of the compartment as silent as the moon.

But where to go? Truthfully she had no plan—her legs seemed intent on walking on their own, as though they meant to expend her energies that way and let her collapse in some random car. She crept past sleeping workers and cleaners and the occasional conductor, all of whom passed her wordlessly. At one point she had the insane thought that they simply didn’t see her; that she’d vanished from their perception, slipped into some invisible fold of existence.

Then, at one point in her wanderings, she stopped, realizing where she was. It was the recreation parlor where Gaea had spoken about her past—as silent and as empty as a tomb.

But this caused no distress in her. Instead, in this absence of ponies, she felt quite comfortable, and so she chose one of the seats and sat down, intending to rest. As she lay on her pillow, though, she noted that tiredness had yet to consume her. Some other feeling had taken its place—something akin to anticipatory dread. Dread of what, though?

Dreaming, she realized. She did not want to dream. She did not want to sleep and remember Astral’s final days and wake up crying and confused.

Chamomile sat up with a light groan. She needed sleep. She rubbed her eyes, then looked at her bag, considering it.

She flipped it over, unzipped another flap, and pulled out the other significant item she’d stored inside: her portal electric tea kettle. It was as old as the tea shop itself, an item of inheritance bequeathed by her parents on her cute-ceañera. This she placed on the coffee table in front of her, and afterwards, she brought out a bottle of water and a small, thin, clear packet. Inside were the thin granules of a particular root: ginger.

After she poured water into the kettle, she plugged it into the outlet behind her. A faint hum began to sound as the water boiled. Listening to it, Chamomile could feel herself starting to drift—it was an almost relieving feeling. She tapped her packet of ginger absent-mindedly and closed her eyes.

“Chamomile?”

Her eyes shot open, and it was only through immense personal effort that she did not fall out of her seat or cry out. Turning to see who’d spoken, Chamomile gaped at the sight of Gaea standing at the other end of the car, looking just as surprised as she was.

“What are you doing out here?” Gaea asked.

“I could ask you the same thing!”

She’d been in the shadowed part of the car, but when she stepped forward into where the moonlight was falling through the window, Chamomile could see that she had a bag of pretzels tucked under her hoof. She looked down at it, then, when she brought her gaze back up, it was clear she was embarrassed. “I was hungry…”

“Oh.” Chamomile thought she should say more. She looked at her tea kettle, then said, “I was thirsty.”

Smooth…

Gaea nodded. The two of them were frozen in a situation that only somewhat mirrored the one wherein Gaea had spoken about herself. But there was a noticeable tension in this one which made it different—a tension so palpable, Chamomile could just taste it.

“Could I sit with you?” Gaea asked suddenly.

Chamomile hesitated. She had no idea why she hesitated, and seeing the surprise on Gaea’s face at her hesitation made her feel resentful of herself. “Sure,” she forced herself to say, scooting over a bit.

Gaea sat down, the bag of pretzels crinkling in her hoof. She finished eating while Chamomile continued to wait for the kettle to finish. The whine seemed to grow louder. Steam was starting to billow up, but the heat the kettle generated was nothing in comparison to the heat brought on by Gaea’s close proximity—and the heat that was making its thorough way into Chamomile’s cheeks.

She was confused, and flustered, and trying to think of ways to end the situation—whatever ending meant—when Gaea said, “What is that, by the way?”

It took Chamomile a moment to realize she was pointing at the kettle. “It’s, ah, it’s my portable tea kettle,” she explained. “I’m brewing some tea right now.” Well, obviously! You don’t need to explain that—she can see for herself!

Not that Gaea appeared to mind the obvious. She simply nodded and threw the bag of pretzels into the nearby trashcan. “What kind of tea?”

“Ginger.”

“I thought the train would provide us with its own tea?”

“It does, but… Well, I don’t think anypony else is awake who’d brew it for me,” Chamomile said. “Then there’s also the fact that I like to make my own tea.”

“That’s right… you and that tea shop you mentioned before.”

It was a small gesture, remembering that detail, but hearing it from Gaea made Chamomile feel oddly fuzzy.

“Yeah. And besides,” she continued, “I doubt the train has this specific blend.” She lifted her packet of ginger in her magic, and surprising pride entered her voice. “I grew them myself, actually.”

“You did?” Gaea’s eyes widened. “Oh, that’s right! When we were in the Badlands, and you were telling us about your garden!”

More fuzziness. Why did such a small thing mean so much to her? Why did it matter to be remembered for the little details of life?

“I’m surprised you remembered,” Chamomile heard herself say.

“Why?”

The question made her pause. “Why? It’s just… I don’t know. It was just a thing I said.” She put the packet down, feeling bad for being confused. “And as I said then, it’s just a little garden. Nothing special. It probably doesn’t compare to your farm… well, I mean, when you had… Sorry, that’s a little insensitive of me—”

“It compares,” Gaea replied. She said it as though it was as true as a name, which perhaps it was. She reached out and touched Chamomile on the shoulder. “Trust me. It compares.”

Chamomile looked at her, speechless. Gaea continued, “Growing anything takes effort. But it’s effort that always pays off, no matter how big a plant you’re nurturing. Even the smallest fruit is deserving of recognition.”

“Is that something your father used to say?” Chamomile asked softly, before realizing that that might be just as insensitive as her earlier remark.

But Gaea shook her head. “No. It’s something I say. Don’t sell yourself and what you do short, Chamomile. Everything matters.”

She paused, then retracted her hoof. Chamomile’s shoulder felt colder without it. Her breath hitched. Gaea shifted in her seat, placing her hooves together, and she appeared lost in thought.

The kettle dinged, a sound that was a noticeably lower volume than the whine it’d been making. The water was ready. Chamomile, needing to keep herself occupied, unplugged it from the outlet, then clumsily reached into her bag to take out a cup. She paused, her hoof gliding over the second, spare one.

She looked at Gaea, weighing her forthcoming words.

“Would… would you like to share a cup of tea with me?”

It felt far too formal to ask, stiff and spectacularly self-conscious, and she almost regretted asking it. But when Gaea looked at her, and when her face broke out into a beaming smile, the regret vanished.

“I would, thank you.”

Chamomile poured the water into both cups. She opened her packet and did her best to evenly divide the ginger between them. She grabbed a stirrer from her bag and swirled it in both, steam and ginger-scent rising like hot breath in the winter. She gave one cup to Gaea, who accepted it with a grateful nod, then set her own down in front of her.

Gaea blew across the surface of the tea. She brought the cup up to her lips, and her eyes widened.

“Oh, wow. That is good.”

The blush that erupted across Chamomile’s face could have heated the water just as well as the kettle had. “Oh, well, thank you. But it could probably be better, actually. If I had all of my ingredients here and not just the packet—”

“Even with just the ginger, it’s really good. I do mean that.”

Chamomile nodded, because words no longer came to her. She felt lightheaded, and, thinking something was wrong with her heart, brought her hoof to her chest. It beat like a burst of timpani drums, so loud and so heavily that she was surprised that Gaea couldn’t hear it.

She needed to calm down. She brought her own cup to her lips, and, after blowing it, took a long sip, turning thoughts over and over.

I don’t understand. I’ve had ponies compliment my tea before, even my basic green and black. But when Gaea says it… Why is that so different?

That, however, was not the question to ask. She realized the appropriate question a moment later: Why was Gaea so different?

They drank in silence, listening to the train rattle. The ginger tea began to take effect, but it was not nearly enough to calm the stampede of thoughts crashing through Chamomile’s mind. She felt jittery and even more flustered now than when Gaea had initially sat down. When she looked at the other mare, she couldn’t tell if she felt similarly, for her face was a placid sea of pink bliss—and for this, Chamomile thought she was jealous of her. If only she could relax! If only she could figure out why she could not sleep, could not rest, could not even sit still!

Gaea put her cup down. “So…”

So? Chamomile set her cup aside, too afraid to do or say anything.

“It’s my guess that we’re nearing the end of this journey.”

“What makes you say that?”

Gaea shrugged. “It’s just a feeling. And I noticed, earlier, when we had breakfast, that the landscape was starting to change. It even felt different, in a way.”

Chamomile supposed that made sense—she was an earth pony, likely more in tune with the environment than the average equine. “Any idea where we’ll end up?” she asked.

“None whatsoever. Maybe a depot, or another station, or another abandoned town. It’s hard to say. I wish we had a map.”

“Most of this area is largely unexplored.”

“Then I wish we could make a map for ourselves.”

Gaea leaned forward a little, looking at Chamomile sideways. “But either way, I think this might be the last day we get to rest. Then it’s time for work, whatever that will entail. Afterwards…”

“You mean, after the job is done?”

Gaea nodded. “Yeah. I mean… when that happens, we’ll all have to head home, right?”

“Right…”

“And that means we’d all have to go our separate ways.” She said this in a somewhat subdued tone. She was looking carefully at Chamomile.

“Ah. Right. I… I guess that makes sense.” But that seemed insufficient of a reply. She had a dim sense of what Gaea was getting at, but no means of articulating the point. “You’d head back home to Maretime Bay, Polar to Zephyr Heights, Clip and I to Bridlewood…”

“I’d love to visit, one day,”

The declaration caught Chamomile off-guard. “You would?”

Gaea nodded again, and a soft smile came over her face. “It’s funny. Prior to this job, I never would have thought about leaving Maretime Bay. But now I’d like to see other places.” She paused, then said, “I think I finally understand what my brother meant when he said that the world is too vast to stay in one plot of land.”

Then she looked at Chamomile, and her smile widened. Her voice became even more demure. “Thank you.”

“Me? What for?”

“For helping me realize that.”

They were staring at each other, now, and it was different from the other times they’d met each other’s gazes. Chamomile was struck by the way the moonlight struck Gaea’s eyes, how it seemed to enunciate every part of her smile. She could smell something earthy, something with a slight coconut scent to it—it might have been the lotion Gaea had used, or something else.

They were coming closer to one another, but Chamomile only barely registered this. She was too focused on how her breath seemed to stall, how her heart was, at once, beating in her ears with primal anticipation. Gaea’s lips were slightly parted, invitingly. Chamomile could feel her own lips begin to part. Every part of her seemed to tingle, like a low-voltage electric current throbbed through her body.

“I am really glad to have met you, Chamomile,” Gaea whispered. Chamomile could feel her hot breath washing over her face.

They were so close that Chamomile felt the butterfly touch of their lips. A hoof was brought up, as though to grasp the other’s.

But Chamomile’s right hoof, lifting slightly off the seat, curled itself upward, as though holding another, invisible, painfully malnourished hoof.

She remembered, too, the first photograph in her bag.

That sensation and memory suddenly brought her back into herself. She made a strangled sound, so quiet and pathetic that it was barely perceptible, but because Gaea was so close, she heard it. Her movements ceased, and her eyes looked at Chamomile with confusion.

“I can’t,” Chamomile heard herself mumble. “My… husband…”

The word sounded like a profanity, how it’d brutally escaped her lips. Gaea’s pupils shrunk, and then, a second later, she scooted back so quickly that she almost knocked over her cup. “I—I’m sorry—oh my gosh, I-I mean—I didn’t mean—”

Seeing that she was on the verge of panicking, Chamomile tried to reach out to calm her, but Gaea moved away from her hoof. “It’s fine,” Chamomile then tried to say, but her own voice sounded hollow to her. “You didn’t know.”

“I should have—I shouldn’t have—” She looked like she was about to cry. She hunched over and buried her face in her hooves, groaning.

“Gaea—”

“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I shouldn’t have… I’m so, so sorry. Oh, I’ve made an utter fool out of myself, haven’t I? I thought—I had thought that—” She peeked out from behind her hooves at Chamomile, before covering her face again and making an indecipherable noise.

Silence fell once more, as heavy as sorrow. Chamomile wanted to say something to break it, to comfort Gaea—but no words would come. Inside of her was a scream, as incomprehensible as the moment, unable to escape her caged heart.

After some time, Gaea appeared to have calmed. At least, as much as one might have thought her capable of doing. She lowered her hooves, then removed herself from the seat, stepping so deliberately onto the floor that it was painful to watch. She took a deep breath but was unable to meet Chamomile’s worried gaze.

“Thank you for the tea,” she said stiffly. “It was nice.”

Then, before Chamomile could respond, she turned and galloped away. The moonlight caught something sparkle from her eyes, but it vanished before it hit the ground.

10 - The Job

They arrived a day later at a depot far smaller than had front-ended the journey. It was either unfinished or falling apart; one wall was crumbling into dust and a batch of construction supplies sat abandoned in one of the storage crates. Beneath a gray, cloud-heavy sky, a single crane dangled its hook lazily like a fishing pole over the glass ceiling, its metal girders groaning with each swaying movement. Fewer ponies were here, too, meaning it was so quiet, Chamomile could hear the individual pipes of the train exhale steam like a chorus of sighing macaws. The few ponies she did see seemed somehow paler and less corporeal than their southern counterparts, as though being this far north had started to wean them of their connection to Equestria.

The landscape was similarly weaned of Equestria’s features. The miles of hills and grassy terrain, staples of the scenery for the past several days of their journey, faded into the south, and the wilderness, stretching out of the edge of the horizon, was so thick with foreign trees, bushes, and other festering plants, no one could see past them. To the east and west, the land grew bumpy and uneven—rising steppes and tumultuous mesas offered a view that seemed to vibrate and shimmer with each wayward movement of the eye. To the north, hills melted into purple rises and blue mountains, and though they were still far away, the unmistakable white glint of glacial-capped summits spoke to the endeavor’s destination: the Frozen North, and the ancient train tracks that awaited them.

“By the stars,” Clip murmured from next to her. They were standing outside of the depot, looking over the landscape. “It’s like we’re the only ponies left on Equestria.”

Chamomile concurred silently. All that wilderness, all those displays of geographic immensity, removed all semblance of civilization. With no homes or buildings and only a lone track vainly stretching backwards, they seemed truly cut off from the rest of the world—and each other.

“Can you feel it, too?” Clip said. “The air?”

Chamomile paused. “Yes,” she said. “It’s… colder, isn’t it? But that’s to be expected, given how far north we are.”

Clip nodded. He did not seem put at ease by the observation. “Not a fan of the cold?” Chamomile said. She tried to throw some levity into her voice, but could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

“I think I prefer the Badlands to this.”

As though summoned, a knife of cold air burst through the clearing. The crane’s steel girders groaned and in the spaces between the bars, the wind shrieked at an in-equine pitch. The hook swung to-and-fro precariously, threatening to smack into one of the sides of the building, and behind Chamomile and Clip, the train seemed to buck and bow. But then, as quickly as it had come, the wind vanished, like a ghost’s final breath before departure, and all was still. A silence that seemed so unheavenly insular as to only come from the underworld descended. The contrast caused chills to race up Chamomile’s spine.

“We should head inside,” Clip said.

Chamomile nodded, but just as she was about to head in, Clip touched her shoulder. “Hold on a moment. Where’s Gaea?”

Chamomile carefully averted her gaze. “She got off before we did. She’s probably inside with everypony else.” Then, before he could ask any further questions, she trotted into the depot.

It was thankfully warmer inside. A loading bay area, previously filled with crates, palettes, and rolling U-boat shelves, had been cleared for use, and the workers had gathered underneath the hanging office area that rose above them on metal stilts. A smoky light seemed to filter from the industrial bulbs attached to the walls, coating the workers in a pale, yellow glow. At the other end of the depot was a giant red metal container, and a couple of construction ponies loitered next to it, holding cups of cocoa and dressed for the cold weather. They seemed either miserable or bone-tired, and it was unclear if it was because of the work they’d been doing, or because of the almost violent change in climate. They watched the ponies stream in with unreadable expressions that seemed unbecoming of Equestrian natives, and Chamomile suddenly felt like she and the others were intruding upon sacred ground.

She and Clip managed to slip closer to the front, but Clip raised his head to scan the crowd. “There’s Gaea,” he said, pointing. “Why don’t we go join her?”

“Wait,” Chamomile said, stopping him with a touch on the shoulder. He looked back at her, startled. She took a breath, trying not to look in Gaea’s direction. “We shouldn’t disrupt. I have a feeling that they’re about to begin.”

“But Gaea—”

“She’ll be fine.” Chamomile was surprised by how quickly she insisted on it and knew immediately that she did not know if it was true. Hoping to avoid the topic once more, she said, “Come on, scoot over—let the others through.”

Clip did so, and he and Chamomile eventually settled into place, waiting. But Chamomile could feel his gaze on her. She tried to ignore it, and tried to ignore the fact that Gaea was only a few steps away. In time, his gaze turned away.

At the other end of the loading bay area, Zipp stood, flanked by the conductor and another worker. She wore an orange ski vest and had laid out several papers on a folding table, and, based on how her head swiveled and her hoof jabbed emphatically at the papers, she was in the midst of an intense conversation. The conductor seemed uncertain, while the worker looked more confused than anything. “But the weather,” Chamomile heard her say.

“We’ll cover that,” Zipp replied. The other pony didn’t look pleased, and said something back, quieter, which caused Zipp to furrow her brow.

Chamomile tried not to give into temptation, but, growing anxious and antsy, quickly glanced in Gaea’s direction. She didn’t acknowledge Chamomile; her attention was arrested by the scene in front of her. There seemed a deliberateness to it, an overt and obvious attempt at seeming nonchalant. It was almost painful to witness, and it was enough to wrench Chamomile’s gaze away. I shouldn’t have looked, she thought. I shouldn’t be concerned with her.

Upon thinking that, though, guilt, colder than the climate, impressed itself upon her heart.

Eventually, Zipp’s conversation ended, and she looked up from the table. “Can everypony hear me?”

Once they all murmured yes, she nodded. She took from the table a large sheet of paper and threw it on the back wall, pinning it quickly with four tacks. When she stepped away, it was revealed to be a large, blown-up map of Equestria, with the three tribes’ cities neatly labeled and a series of lines crisscrossing the space between them—railroads, Chamomile guessed.

She retrieved a long pointer-stick from the table, holding it with her wing. “Right, then. I… hang on a second.” The stick traveled to where Maretime Bay was, where, marked by glitter and colorful paint, were the words, “Zipp’s New Home!”

Zipp groaned. “Izzy…”

Some ponies chuckled, but Clip and Chamomile exchanged surprised, knowing looks.

Zipp struck the map with the stick, eliciting a tremendous crack. Instantly all laughter ceased. There was a look of intense focus on Zipp’s face as she moved the stick to the middle of the map. “This is where we are, folks. About the furthest from the rest of Equestria you can get and still call it home. And this—” The stick slid up the map to its northernmost edge, which she tapped twice. “This is where we’ll be going.”

“The end of the world?” somepony asked.

It was meant to be a point of jest, but Zipp glared at whoever had spoken. “Not quite,” she said. She brought the pointer away from the map and swept it in front of her. “No doubt when you were getting off, you could see the mountains in the distance. That, everypony, is the last obstacle—the last barrier separating us from whatever else lies beyond.”

“The Frozen North?” somepony else said.

Zipp nodded. She returned to the map, jabbing at the edge. “Now, I told you all that there is a set of ancient railroad tracks somewhere up here. The thing is, despite our best efforts, we haven’t been able to find any outside of these mountains. This leads us to think that they are actually inside them. Like an above-ground tunnel system, if you will. This means we’ve got two goals in mind.” She twirled the pointer across her wing. “First: we need to lay down tracks as we keep moving north. And second: we need to figure out where those railroads are.”

“And if we find those railroads?” That was Gaea, and Chamomile nearly started.

“Then mission accomplished,” Zipp said with a slight grin. “And then we can all go home and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.”

There were murmurings, brief and uncertain. A hush seemed to settle, and all eyes turned from the map to the train. Chamomile could guess what everypony was thinking—they’d done it. They’d come to the end of their journey. Now, all that was left was completing it—whatever, or wherever, that meant.

“And how exactly are we meant to do this?” somepony else voiced.

“I’m glad you asked,” Zipp said. “First of all, you should know that you’ll be working largely with the ponies you arrived with—the ones that were in the cars with you. Hopefully you’ve already met them, and hopefully you’re prepared to work with them. These are your partners, through and through—rely on them, and also be aware that they are relying on you, too.”

Clip and Chamomile looked at each other. No surprise there, now that they thought of it. But then Chamomile thought about Polar, and then Gaea, and she frowned.

“Now, here’s how things will run:

"Pegasi, we’ll need you in the air not only to make sure the rails are straight, but also to help keep an eye on the weather. This is uncharted territory for all of us, and we can’t be sure that everything’s gonna play nicely. You’ll also be helping with carrying some of our supplies—the lighter stuff—from up and down the depot chain when need be. We will also need you if we have to whip up a tornado—a small one, mind you—for clearing out the land. This far north, we’re sure to find some particularly stubborn trees and shrubbery.”

“I didn’t know I was signing up to be a lumberjack,” one pegasus called out. It was an obvious joke, and some quiet bouts of laughter ensued.

Surprisingly, Zipp was unbothered. “Ha, well, consider this you picking up a new hobby.” She continued without missing a beat:

“As for the unicorns, you’ll be handling laying down the tracks themselves. First, you’ll set up the crossties, and then the beams. You’ll be paired up for this, given how heavy they are. Don’t strain yourselves, though. We’ll need all hooves—and horns,” Zipp added with her signature smirk, “available at a moment’s notice.

“Finally, you earth ponies will be responsible for finishing setting up the rails. You’ll be driving in the nails and rivets once the unicorns have finished setting everything in place. Be careful with the rivets, though—they’re very sharp and liable to pierce your skin easily. We have several medics available in case of injury, but it should surprise none of you when I say make sure they aren’t.”

Then Zipp nodded to one of the workers at the depot. A crate was opened, and they began to hand out gear similar to what Zipp was wearing: scarves, hats, hoof-gloves, and coats and parkas. “You’ll be needing these sooner rather than later. Trust me.”

The parka given to Chamomile fit snugly, and she worried that she might overheat long before the true cold hit her. She kept the scarf loosely wrapped around her neck, then helped Clip with his. Gaea, she saw, took no chances—already she had bundled herself up, and a thick pair of snow goggles hung over her hat.

The last item to be handed out was far humbler: a small flashlight, which they could deposit into their pockets. This seemed unnecessary to Chamomile—Zipp wanted them to work during the day, only.

Zipp cleared her throat, getting everypony’s attention once more. “There’s one more unofficial thing I’d like to add. I don’t say this lightly. This might look like a simple railroad construction job, but Equestria is counting on us to succeed.” She paused, letting her words serve the weight they intended. It seemed she was looking intently into everyone’s eyes.

“Work together, and look out for each other,” she finished solemnly. “Understand?”

They understood.

Almost immediately, Chamomile’s group ran into a problem: they had no pegasus.

“Polar didn’t get off the train, did he?” she asked Clip while they were waiting for the supplies to be unloaded.

“Not that I saw,” he said. “Then again, I didn’t check up on him to see if he was still in the medbay. Maybe Gaea knows. Why don’t you ask her?”

Chamomile looked over to where she was. Gaea stood a little distance away from them, talking to one of the engineers who was teaching her and the earth ponies how to use the various railroad equipment they’d been provided. Her goggles and hat bobbed whenever she nodded along. She was so focused on the lecturer that she didn’t notice Chamomile staring.

“She’s busy right now,” she said to Clip, not once breaking her gaze.

He frowned, and opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. “I’ll go talk to Zipp,” he said. “Maybe she has an idea for what we’ll do instead.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“There’s no need. No point in crowding her, anyway. Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”

He was gone before she could protest, vanishing behind a line of workers carrying a beam onto a cart. Circling in place, Chamomile saw that everyone else had re-grouped, and despite the enormity of the situation, they all appeared to be in relative states of excitement. As far as she could tell, she was the only one who was on her own, and this only furthered her agitation.

The lecturer finished talking. He left to go find another group of ponies, and the former group dispersed until all that was left was Gaea. She saw Chamomile standing on her own and froze. They stared at one another, fighting one urge to run, another urge to stay and see, between them, who would break the tension first.

Chamomile raised a hoof. She offered a hesitant wave. Gaea didn’t return it, but appeared to have understood—slowly, casting looks left and right, she trotted forward to join Chamomile.

“Hey,” Chamomile said. She tried to say it casually but knew that it was anything but.

“Hey.”

Another silence. How strange that in the raucous chatter that surrounded them, that silence could be so loud.

“Clip went to talk to Zipp about finding a pegasus for us,” Chamomile said.

Gaea blinked, then nodded. “Oh. Right… because Polar still hasn’t recovered.”

“Right.”

More silence. Gaea scuffed a hoof on the dirt and observed the train. Chamomile twisted around, rubbing the back of her head while she watched a group of pegasi carrying bundles of rope and other tools to dump into a supply cart. She felt stifled by her parka, wanted to take it off, but thought doing so would be awkward. She sighed, then faced Gaea. “Look, about last night—”

“Wait,” Gaea interrupted, pointing a hoof. “Here comes Clip and Zipp.”

Though somewhat annoyed, she turned anyway. Clip, approaching them, was fiddling with his scarf again—somehow, he’d managed to undo it, and was trying to get it around his neck. He saw them looking, then grunted. “Confound this infernal thing.”

“Here,” Gaea said before Chamomile could, “let me help you with that.” She stepped forward to intercept him. Chamomile believed she’d done so just so she could get away from Chamomile for a few seconds, and this wounded her.

Zipp reached them. “Clip told me about your situation. Shame about Polar. I guess that concussion is going to lay him out for a while.” Then she grinned. “Which is why I’ll be taking his place alongside you guys! Hope you don’t mind.”

Chamomile nodded distractedly. She watched as Gaea fumbled around with Clip’s scarf—the knot was a fierce one, vexing every attempt at straightening. Seeing the intense look on Gaea’s face filled Chamomile’s stomach with butterflies, but equally, seeing her stand that close to somepony else caused those butterflies to burn.

Zipp’s grin fell, and her ears wilted back. “Oh… so you do mind?”

“What? N-no, of course not! I mean, I’m really grateful, truly.” She turned back around and tried to smile. “Thank goodness we won’t have to wait, I mean.”

Zipp quirked an eyebrow. “Okaaaay… well, let me know if you encounter any problems. I’m going to check up on everypony. We should be starting soon.”

Meanwhile, Gaea had finally managed to fix the scarf, and Clip was smiling gratefully at her. The sight captured Chamomile’s attention once again. She did not see Zipp leave. The carts that had been brought out of the depot now jostled noisily as they were pulled forward, full of beams, nails, rivets, rope, and other supplies. The carts were moving to the end of the current length of track to expand it from there. After some of the railroad had been laid down, the train would advance a bit forward, making sure never to overtake the progress of the workers. The current track’s length from the depot was short—less than half a mile—and when the carts reached the end, the unknown north, its uncertain terrain, and its casual immensity rose like spirits of the earth before them, forming a different kind of horizon than the one that dwindled far behind them.

Zipp, returning, assessed the situation. “Is everyone ready?” she asked. They asserted in the positive, but Chamomile had the feeling that they would not have said no even if they had believed otherwise—to them, there was no choice left but this one; no further path back, only forward.

Zipp gave the signal, and the job began.

While the pegasi took to the skies and the earth ponies stood at ready, the unicorns got to work. Naturally, Chamomile and Clip were paired up, while Gaea waited nearby, her face carefully masked by her goggles and hat. Chamomile tried not to let this bother her; the task would take up her entire focus. The first cart was opened, and they brought out the crossties, planks of evenly cut wood which they laid out flat on the ground, six or eight at a time, with the same amount of space between them. Once that was done, another cart was opened, revealing the steel beams, around which the unicorns began to gather.

Clip lit his horn to lift a beam. His face took on visible strain. “Hnng. These are heavy. Chamomile, could you…”

She nodded and lit her horn, trying not to grimace. It was heavier than she expected, and the resulting feedback caused her horn to vibrate in a perturbing way. She reflected on how magic itself had been a strange thing to recover, how it made “feeling” things different. There was a certain, disconcerting disconnect, because while indeed she could grab things in her magic, she could not feel them as she would with her hooves—it was closer to the idea of feeling something than the touch itself. Certainly, she felt more “complete” with her magic, but she could not escape the irony of it all. Perhaps her son—

“Chamomile?”

“Yes, yes, right.” She squinted and concentrated on helping lift the beam.

They managed it. From above them, Zipp called out, “That’s it! Now just lay it down there flat on the ties, careful, careful…” Down the line, the other unicorns were performing the same act, with the pegasi partners assisting them.

Guided by her voice, Chamomile and Clip managed to lower the first beam into place, making sure it was flush with the ties. Once that was done, they grabbed the second beam. It was easier this time around and they did not need as much guidance as before.

“All right,” Chamomile said after taking a breath. She turned, about to let Gaea know that it was her turn, but her voice suddenly froze up. Gaea was finally looking at her, yet seemed surprised to share any sort of look.

“Come on, you two!” Zipp’s voice broke through. They both averted their eyes. Chamomile stepped aside to allow Gaea to perform her duty.

Hesitant at first, Gaea grabbed a sledgehammer in her mouth and swung it experimentally, getting a feel for its weight. She lined up the spikes with the railroad ties and drove them in with the hammer. Down the line, other earth ponies joined her, fastening the spike to the baseplate above the tie until the whole pair of beams were secured. The sound of hammers railed like hard rain against the iron spikes—ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk—and carried upwards into the atmosphere until it was eventually eaten by the silently observing clouds.

A cheer went up, then, one that Chamomile did not share, too shaken up by the brief exchange of gazes. Technically they had accomplished little—they’d advanced only a couple of meters—but there was a certain thrill with having begun the construction process. The next squad of ponies, spurred on by the prospect of progress, eagerly set about replicating and improving the process, and the other groups did the same, until each one was working in tandem, like an assembly line of perfectly synchronized machines.

They worked diligently. One meter of track became three, then six, and continued to multiply as the carts were pulled forward, spikes and baseplates and ties set down and fastened in place. Somehow the depot shrunk to a fraction of its size in the span of what felt like minutes, but Chamomile would soon learn it was actually several hours.

At noon, a bell chimed, and everyone was instructed to take a lunch break. Evidently the train company wanted to keep everyone’s spirits high, because they brought out a veritable buffet from the food car. Vegetable dishes, steamed and seasoned, rolled out on wide carts accompanied by mountains of fresh pastries and baked goods, and hot tea, fizzy drinks, and spring water were also provided.

“If I knew we’d be getting fed all this, I’d have quit my day job ages ago,” one earth pony joked, to the amusement of several others.

“Honestly, I don’t feel I deserve this,” one pegasus remarked. “I mean, I haven’t done anything back-breaking yet.”

“Does that mean you want to trade places?” the earth pony replied.

“Nah, you look like you were enjoying it. I’d hate to take that from you.”

“Count your blessings now,” said a unicorn to that pegasus. “I’ll bet you anything that once we get closer to those mountains, you’re gonna be flapping your wings off trying to keep the weather managed.”

“Afraid of a little snow?”

“Being cold doesn’t make for speedy work, you know.”

“I’ll flap extra hard for you, then.”

It was all in good fun, and there was more laughter over the food and the shared experience than there had been for the rest of the expedition. Zipp, watching and listening from a secluded spot next to one of the carts, said nothing, and perhaps would have appeared disinterested, but Chamomile observed that a small, satisfied smile glowed across her face.

But Chamomile could not join in on the merriment. Her mind kept jumping back to that fraction of a second when she and Gaea had looked at each other. Something felt different, and it wasn’t just because of the awkwardness of the situation. Some unreadable, inscrutable, yet still palpable feeling had disturbed the space between them, weaving a through-line from one heart to another She might have tried to talk to Gaea about it, but throughout the lunch, Gaea kept her distance. She spoke with other ponies, but did not smile or laugh as they did. She, too, then, had been affected, and like Chamomile it was affecting her ability to mingle with the crowd. Sooner or later somepony would notice, and then—then questions, and answers. What would those answers be, she wondered—what must Gaea be thinking of her now? But it was just as likely that maybe there’d be no answers, that neither of them would be able to explain their behavior.

She couldn’t decide which was more upsetting.

After lunch ended, the workers returned to the job, working off the calories and ensuing food coma with only a marginal degree of disgruntlement. Somepony down the line took up singing a somewhat jaunty tune, and, like a bad game of Telephone, all the others attempted to continue it, with disparate, barely connected lyrics filling the air. Spirits were high. The day was not yet over and everyone—save for Chamomile—entertained the notion that they were on an epic, life-affirming quest—one, perhaps, that was meant to save the world.

By evening, though, energies had been depleted. The depot was such a distance away that only the pegasi, with their incredible vision, could see it as more than just a dot in the distance.

“All right, that’s enough for today,” Zipp said. “Head back inside, take a shower, get some rest. We’ll be starting again tomorrow morning. Great job, everyone!”

The workers began to climb aboard the train, and despite the general exhaustion, were animated enough to talk amongst themselves. Chamomile stuck close to Clip, but still looked out for Gaea. She spotted her lagging behind a majority of the ponies, her head held high. It seemed an attempt to mask the otherwise obvious signs of expense: her shoulders slumping, a stiffness in her walk that could come from having to overexert her leg muscles, and her lips parting to allow a sigh of relief to hiss out of her mouth.

I should help her out.

As soon as that thought came, Chamomile shook her head, feeling foolish. No. The last thing the two of them needed was a chance to make things even more awkward between them. Better to hope that time, space, and the job would allow the discomfort to evaporate on its own.

There were showers available in one of the cars, but hardly enough for all of them, due to limitations on compartment size. A line formed of ponies in varying states of tiredness and stink that stretched to two other cars. One had to shower quickly to avoid holding it up. Chamomile took hers and then went back to the sleeping car, where she found a majority of its occupants under the deep hypnosis of sleep. Clip, however, was not. Wrapped in a blanket that demonstrated his thin, angular frame, he was busy holding in his magic a mirror and comb. He was using both to fix his mane, with the dutiful expression of a craftsman in their element.

He stopped when he saw her. She gestured for him to continue and politely sat across from him, letting him finish. When he had, he swung the mirror around his head to make sure all sides were as he wanted them to be.

“Do you always take such good care of your mane?” she asked him.

“Try to, yes. Do I succeed? Doubt it.”

“It looks fine to me.”

His head was turned away, but she could see him smirk in the mirror. “They say doctors are their own worst patients, and barbers their own worst customers. Sometimes I wonder if that extends to other jobs as well.”

He put his items down, satisfied—or perhaps finished for the moment—then turned back around to face Chamomile. “You tired?” he asked.

She nodded. “And sore. In my body and in my—” She pointed to her horn. “I feel like I’ve had a few drinks too many.”

“I concur with that sentiment. And that’s just from lifting a couple beams!”

“To be fair, they were quite heavy.”

“Still, it makes me worry about what tomorrow may be like.” He frowned thoughtfully, then gave a dismissive shrug. “Though I suppose that is more of a problem for future me to handle—present me must contend with another.”

“And… what would that problem be?”

“Resting, obviously. I hope you don’t mind.”

He gestured to his blanket, then to the pillow next to him. Chamomile blinked, then realized what he meant. “Oh. No, I don’t mind. In fact, I was planning on trying to get some rest for myself, actually.”

“Good. Now, then—”

His voice was cut off when they heard the sound of the door to the car sliding open. When Chamomile turned her head to look, her breath was seized by the sight.

Gaea had trotted in. Her honeydew mane, wettened by her shower, now hung as a graceful, lengthy braid over one shoulder. Her eyes, pulled down by dark rings, were inexplicably iridescent in the manner that Chamomile was quickly associating with Gaea and Gaea alone. More than that, though, she was in the middle of quietly singing something, a song that was different from the one that had been carried by the workers throughout that afternoon’s task:

Every time I shed tears
In the last past years
When I pass through the hills

Those three lines alone were enough to cause Chamomile’s heart to ache. Yet it seemed almost therapeutic to hear such melancholic intonations. To hear Gaea’s usually light voice dip down, humming and murmuring the notes in a somewhat scratchy voice, was, itself, a phenomenon—one that Chamomile found herself not wanting to end.

But end it did, when Gaea noticed them. She froze between notes, her hoof halfway to meeting the floor. Her eyes shimmered with impossible splendor, capturing Chamomile and rendering her speechless.

Yet, as if by magic, Chamomile managed to find her voice. “Hi,” she said.

Inwardly she cursed. It was too insufficient. She should have complimented her singing.

Gaea lowered her hoof. “Hello,” she said. There was a certain aloofness to it, a dangerous kind, which annoyed and worried Chamomile.

“Um… I’m here, too, yes,” Clip said.

Gaea turned to look at him. She blushed, then managed to recover quickly. “Y-yes, you are. How are you, Clip?”

“I’m all right. Tired, mostly.”

“Yes, I’d imagine we all are.” She was careful, Chamomile noted, to only briefly glance her way, before returning her gaze back to Clip.

“You seemed surprised to see us, anyhow,” he said. There was a note of accusation in his voice.

Gaea shook her head as though denying it, then, thinking better of it, shrugged. “I guess I was. I’d have thought you’d be asleep by now…”

“We were just talking about that,” Chamomile interjected. She hesitated, then added, “There’s a free spot right over here—”

“Oh, no, no, it’s fine,” Gaea said far too quickly. “I mean… I’m not tired just yet. I’ll probably just wander around for a bit.”

“Is that really a good idea?” Chamomile said without thinking. “You probably shouldn’t stay up. Tomorrow will—”

“I’m positive, Chamomile.” Her terse reply caught both of them off-guard. Gaea cleared her throat. “I mean… Thank you, but I’ll be fine. Really.” She looked at both her and Clip, as if to ask if they would say anything more.

When they didn’t, Gaea nodded to herself. “Well, I should say good night to you two, then. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

She left without so much as uttering another word, the door sliding shut behind her.

Chamomile didn’t have a second to think before Clip turned to her and said, “Okay, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” she replied, not meaning to sound so defensive.

“Don’t give me that. You and Gaea have been acting strangely all throughout this journey, and now you’re acting as if you don’t know each other at all.” He gave her an exasperated look, a look that suddenly filled her with annoyance. “So? What gives? Did you two have some sort of fight?”

I wish it were that simple. “No, nothing of that sort.”

“Then… I don’t understand.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It really doesn’t seem like nothing—”

“It’s nothing.”

She stared at him, and he returned a defiant stare of his own. She tried to think of him as just a child—that was why he didn’t understand, why he couldn’t—but she could not fully regard him as such. Perhaps that was because a part of her knew he was right to ask, because for the life of her, she herself did not know what this thing between herself and Gaea was. Or what it meant, going forward.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” she said quietly.

“Look—”

“Please.”

His stare softened. “Okay. Okay, Chamomile. I won’t ask about it.”

She nodded her gratitude wordlessly. He wished her goodnight, then turned away, throwing his blanket over himself, and, seemingly, in a few minutes, was asleep.

She tried to do the same, turning away and putting on her own blanket. But sleep did not come. And, for whatever reason, she thought that, wherever she was, Gaea fared similarly.

11 - Visitation Rites

Over the course of three days, the coiled clouds thickened and darkened like gluttonous snakes, obscuring the sky with their heaviness until, with a teeth-chattering clap of thunder, they released their burden. A ferocious downpour stampeded into the valley, battering trees and bushes down to sticks. A furious stream of runoff channeled through the ground, splitting the dry earth and dirt into unstable mud. For some of the earth ponies on board, the storm reminded them of the one that had, a generation ago, flooded all of Maretime Bay, and for this reason not many were surprised or startled by it; but for the unicorns and pegasi, this was their first experience with torrential conditions and nature that would not yield to either will or worry. They crowded the interior of the train to watch, fearful mumblings and morbid curiosities only assuaged by the fact that, since the train was so bulky, no wind could topple it.

“We can’t work in this,” one pony said.

“Obviously,” said another. A formal announcement had yet to be made, but no one doubted that it would come—it would be cruel to force them to work through such a downpour, especially given how, with it, the earth was too unsteady.

But work was the furthest thing from Chamomile’s mind. So was the storm, even though it raged a breath away from her. Sitting in one of the dining cars, she played with her salad, picking and jabbing at it with her magically held fork. Frequently, there would be a terrific flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by thunder so powerful it rattled the windows and glassware. She didn’t have to count the spaces between lightning and thunder to know they were right under the storm.

Around her, the workers of the train continued their jobs as though the storm did not exist. With cheerful smiles, they refilled glasses, spoke to the passengers, exchanged pleasantries, fulfilled orders, and kept, in general, an air of calm about them. When one of the diners asked if there was a possibility for a power outage, a kind unicorn replied, “No, madam, that is unlikely. This train runs on a completely insulated system of connections powered primarily by the coal furnace and backup generators. You’d have to strike from the inside to cause any sort of damage!”

Chamomile wondered if these cheerful messages were but methods of hiding their own worries and doubts. She tried to observe them, to see if any cracks would show, but could come to no consensus.

“Pardon me,” one of them said to her, catching her staring. “Would you like something, miss?”

She was too tired and irritated to wave away his concern. “Just another glass of water, please.” Of course, I could always go outside to refill mine, she thought dryly.

As the waiter went away to grab a pitcher, Chamomile looked across the table at the empty seats in front of her. She looked at the clean plates and neatly folded napkins. She saw her reflection in the glass of water opposite of her, saw how it was warped and elongated. Was it just her imagination, or did it somehow make her eyes seem redder than they actually were? She couldn’t recall crying recently.

Then again, for these past three days, she felt that she’d been crying anyway.

Since that night, Gaea had wanted nothing to do with her. Chamomile had worked with her, laying down the tracks and assisting in fastening them, but whenever a break was called, Gaea would depart before Chamomile could talk to her. On the train, the earth pony frequented distant areas of the train, and Chamomile was unable to get close. A coldness had settled between them that could have been mistaken for professionalism had she not known the reason for it. It tore her up inside to think that this was all her fault, that, in one fell swoop, she’d pushed Gaea away—without, she realized, really wanting to.

She wanted to apologize, but because Gaea never gave her the opportunity, that desire simmered into heated indignation. Resentment, like the fire in the train’s furnace, burned bright and true. But it fumigated guilt just as remembering what she’d said and done did, leaving her a mess of conflicting emotions, which she was sure the Gaea could sense, and which only made her avoidance sting even more.

The only relatively comforting thing about this was that Clip, true to his word, did not ask a word about what had happened. But Chamomile suspected that it was just an illusion.

“Astral,” she murmured to her reflection in the glass.

An emptiness throbbed inside of her with his name. She missed him—but this was a different kind of missing than the one that had cursed her since the day he’d died. It was deeper, heavier, in a way that she didn’t think was possible. She’d thought she’d felt the full extent of what it meant to miss somepony—she’d thought she’d learned, over time, how to bear it so that she was not destroyed by it. She thought she’d come to understand the nature of loss. But perhaps she’d been naïve. Perhaps you never stop missing so acutely, as much as you become numb to it, or convince yourself that you are numb to it. And in time, that numbness might be mistaken for understanding, even for moving on. Yet, every now and then, in the shades and contours of life that progress without stopping for the dead, some thing or another—a song, the stillness of Sunday morning light through the window, the august whispers in autumn’s evenings—will sparkle in the mind’s eye like a jewel, and you will be reminded of that pony you miss, who that pony was, what they meant, how they made you feel—and the pain of missing them will return, like a phantom limb’s kind of pain, and you, having convinced yourself that you do not feel it, will be swept in an intensity so extreme, you will feel like your heart is freshly tearing itself apart. And perhaps when you miss somepony so strongly, when you realize you miss other things not related to them, all those missing items would be stitched together as a giant quilt of your losses, and you would be struck down—as those very trees outside were being struck down by the rain—by the immensity of your sorrow.

If only you were here, Astral. You’d know what to say, what I should do, how I should do it.

Chamomile paused. Who was to say he couldn’t be here? Even a ghost of him would suffice.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to draw forth the same image she’d seen of him back in the Badlands. Surely if heat was enough to make her hallucinate him, a little bit of willpower would do just the same. She could just imagine his late morning smell, and the flashing of his eyes, and the weak smile, the pale skin, his hair beginning to fall out in clumps—

She opened her eyes. He was not there.

Now she did feel the urge to cry, but she fought it valiantly, blinking away tears that began to gather. She could not cry out here, in public, with ponies watching. And on the chance—and it was a very slim chance—that Gaea entered the dining car, she didn’t want her to see her tears.

She stood just as the waiter returned with the pitcher. He looked questioningly at her, and she shook her head. “I’m no longer thirsty, sorry.”

“That’s quite all right, miss. Do you need anything else?”

“No, thank you. I think…” But she did not complete that thought. Instead, she shook her head, then walked off, the waiter looking after her.

But where to go? Going to find Gaea was out of the question—even if she succeeded, Chamomile wondered if that wouldn’t be considered inopportune. There was Clip, but she had no idea where he was. She could wander for a time if she wanted, but that thought made her feel restless. She realized she wanted somepony to talk to—not necessarily to discuss what she was feeling, but to fill the gap left in her. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her morning dwelling on what was lost. Then she remembered: Polar was in the medbay. They didn’t know each other all that well, but perhaps that was what she needed.

She left the dining car and walked on, making sure she didn’t bump into anypony. Though she was slow in her steps, the other cars seemed to fly past her, as did the other passengers, who were, thankfully, too busy watching the rain to notice her. Her thoughts were focused on the medbay, so focused in fact that she almost missed seeing it when it appeared in front of her.

When she was about to hit a door, she stopped, then backed up a bit to see where she was. She recognized now that she was in front of the entrance to the medbay. She realized, too, that it’d been a few days since she last checked up on him. Another wave of guilt washed over her, but she shook her head and forced herself to open the door.

Trotting past an empty waiting room, she looked to see if there were any staff present. One came up to her to ask for her business, and she said she was here to visit a patient: Polar Blast. “Another visitor?” the nurse said, blinking owlishly. “I didn’t realize he was so popular… though I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.”

Chamomile was about to ask what that was supposed to mean—as well as to clarify if what she saw on the nurse’s cheeks could be considered a slight blush—but chose not to. She let the nurse direct her to Polar’s bed.

He was awake, and, surprisingly, without any sign of medical injury—no bandages or casts covered him, no tubes stuck out of his body. There was a wire that traveled from his chest to a heart rate monitor gently beeping next to the bed. He was leafing through a medical journal that’d been part of a stack of magazines on the nearby table, but looked up when he saw her. His smile was bright and warm. “Oh, hey! Chamomile! You came to visit?” He sounded coherent, which led her to think that his hangover and concussion had been resolved.

“I did,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all! I’m the only pony here, actually—aside from the doctors and nurses, I mean.” He blew a strand of hair out of his face. “Can you believe that? It’s almost embarrassing.”

“I can imagine. How are you feeling?”

He groaned, snapping the journal close. “Oh, please, don’t ask me that. That’s all that the doctors and nurses ask me.”

“Well, they have to—it’s their job.”

“Yeah, but it’s so boring! I want to talk about other things—like what’s been happening outside, are we there yet. I haven’t been able to leave this room in, like, forever!”

His brashness and brazen nature were enough to momentarily lift the cloud of despair hanging over Chamomile’s head, and she smiled a little at his antics. “All right, all right. But I am curious as to how you’re feeling.”

He relented. “A lot better than I was feeling when I first woke up, here. No sign of headaches, and my hangover’s gone.” He grimaced. “Gosh. I can’t believe I went and got drunk like that. You know, back in Zephyr Heights, I never drank a whole lot.”

“Why exactly were you in that place?”

“It was hot and the tavern was cold. That’s about it.”

“Makes sense… but… drinking?”

“Oh, yeah… well, here’s the thing.” In a somewhat embarrassed tone, he revealed that it was a bet between himself and some of the bar’s patrons. They’d wanted to know how a pegasus compared to the tolerance of an earth pony. “And, you know—not wanting to damage the pride of the tribe, I took up the bet.” He shook his head. “Either the stuff they call alcohol is a lot stronger than anything we pegasi could make, or—and I hate to admit this—we’re just not as hardy as earth ponies.” But he said all of this with a note of amused irony in his voice, and while he was clearly embarrassed, he never stopped smiling.

“I have a feeling your ‘pride’ might bite you one day,” Chamomile said.

“What, isn’t it biting me already? I guess not.” He hummed. “Still, it was… fun, really. I mean, before I blacked out. I think maybe one day I’ll return to that bar and challenge them again.”

Then he looked at her. “By the way, I didn’t do anything embarrassing while I was drunk, was I?”

“Well…”

His face fell, and she laughed at the look of utter dismay. “Oh, no. No, no, oh, no.”

“It wasn’t anything too bad, really.”

“But your look—you have to tell me, what did I do?”

“Nothing, nothing!” She waved his concern aside. “You just said some… stuff.”

“What stuff?”

She, feeling merry, mimed zipping her lips shut—only to momentarily realize the irony of that statement.

Polar was quicker than her. His eyes widened. “Oh, no. What did I say about Zipp?”

She would have laughed. But his voice was full of dread, dread that sobered her and made her consider him again. She could leave the matter behind, but Polar’s eyes were pleading. And truthfully, she was a little curious as to what he himself meant by what he said.

“It’s just strange, is all,” she began, looking away from him towards the window. “You were saying things like, ‘Why doesn’t she remember me?’”

She looked back at him. He mouthed those words to himself, then asked, “Did she?”

“She knew you from when you spoke up at the station.”

He seemed simultaneously relieved and upset by this. “You were like that, too,” Chamomile added, “when you said that.”

“Ah. I… I see.”

He fell silent. Both listened to the crash of thunder and slap of rain on the windows, which remained as intense as ever.

“What did you mean by that?” Chamomile asked. “Even Zipp was confused. Does that mean you knew her before you took this job?”

He shuffled in his bed, the blanket rustling restlessly under him. “I mean… everypony did. Or at least, every pegasus. She’s the princess. You grow up in Zephyr Heights and you know about the entire royal family from the moment you’re born.” He looked up at her, scoffing. “You’d have to be blind or deaf not to know her.”

“I suppose that makes sense…”

But she didn’t think it truly did. There was something missing in his statement—an explanation for why he’d sounded so upset with Zipp. It couldn’t just be from the distance naturally found between a princess and her subjects. He’d seemed to be intimately aware of her in a way that was not shared, and this seemed to have crushed him. Did he, perhaps, truly know her in some other context that only he was privy to, that she had forgotten? Was that why he had been so upset?

“Still, I guess you’re right,” Polar said.

“Huh?” She’d been staring into space.

“It wasn’t that big of a thing, what I said.” He spoke a bit rapidly. “So, that’s a relief to hear.”

She nodded, though privately she was uncertain. “Right.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “that’s enough about me and my problems. You’ve got to tell me what’s been happening out there!”

Though she was tempted to return to the subject prior to this one, she recognized that Polar had no intention of doing so. It’d be easier to relent to him. She brought him up to speed, starting from when they’d left the Badlands to their work yesterday. She spoke only about the job and none of what Gaea had said to them that night. There wasn’t much to say, at any rate, and she finished in a matter of minutes.

Polar groaned. “Great. I’ve missed out on a solid set of days’ work!”

“Zipp said that you’ll still be paid in full.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t been able to help out at all. I’m sorry, Chamomile.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she automatically said.

He shook his head. “Don’t give me that. I made my decision, and now I’m paying for it.” He sighed. “Well. At least it sounds like you still have a lot of work left to do, before the job’s done. Maybe I’ll be able to join you soon.”

“Assuming the doctor lets you out by that point.”

“Yeah…” He spoke dubiously, glancing back towards the medbay entrance, as if he saw the doctor just through the wall. “I’d much rather get to it sooner rather than later, that’s for sure.”

Then he shook his head and looked at her, smiling again. “Either way, thanks for checking up on me. It means a lot.”

She smiled back. “Sure thing, Polar.”

Having said and done all she needed to say, she left his bedside and made for the door at the other end of the car. Just as she reached it, she stopped, remembering, and turned back around. “The nurse said ‘another visitor’ when I came in. Does that mean somepony else was here?”

He nodded. “Yeah. That was Gaea.”

Chamomile wasn’t too surprised, but she started anyway. “Oh. And… how is she?”

“She’s okay, I guess. But she seemed… lost, somehow.” He tilted his head, one ear flopping down. “Did something happen?”

She wanted to say no. Instead, she was quiet. Her smile slipped away, and she couldn’t face Polar anymore.

“Oh,” he said quietly. A beat passed, before he said, “Did something happen between you two?”

And for some reason, unlike with Clip, she answered him, sighing. “I’m not sure. Maybe. But I don’t know what.”

“I see…”

They were both quiet, the rain beating upon the windows without end. Thunder shook the train twice, and lightning cut across the sky, flashing Chamomile’s shadow onto the door. Then Polar said, “Well, for both your sakes, I hope you work out whatever it is that’s happening between you two. You’re good for each other.”

“What?” She turned and looked at him, wide-eyed.

He grinned. “Hey, don’t look too shocked. I’m a pegasus. My eyesight’s better than most. I could tell you were good for each other the moment you two met.”

“I…” She frowned. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Polar. I think you might be mistaken.”

“Hmm.” He was, surprisingly, unoffended. “You know what, I could be. After all, I still might have a concussion. I could be seeing things that aren’t there.” He paused, then, tilting his head the other way, he said, “Or maybe…”

“I think I’d better let you rest,” she said, reaching again for the door. “Though I do hope that you’ll be able to join us soon. On the job, I mean.”

“Of course. You take care, Chamomile.”

She could feel his smile on her back as she left, his words still swirling around in her head.

12 - Fracturing

Chamomile’s prediction proved correct. At dawn the next day, the rain had stopped, and within a few hours, the clouds had cleared, allowing the sun to gently dry the deluge-soaked land. By the time the passengers awoke, the world was that humid purgatory indicative that a storm had recently passed through. Steam breathed against the train and the smell of wet grassland entered through open windows. The water had left behind deep grooves across the surface of the ground, snaking around and around in crossing patterns like they were their own kinds of miniature railroads, and some of the earth ponies commented on how they made the land look heavily scarred.

With the weather fair and their visions unobstructed, all the ponies could see the mountains nearly in full.

There were some trees in Bridlewood that were massive, with trunks and branches thicker than any torso, and leaves that could block out the sun on even the summer solstice—but these were mere imitations of the idea of the gargantuan. The mountains rising before them encompassed the entirety of that word and then some, casting shadows the size of a city. Impossibly steep on all visible sides, shrouded in impossible darkness on one end with a faint halo vainly attempting to shine over the other’s edge, and airship-sized cumulonimbi swarming the peaks like fluffy planetary rings—these were among the first features Chamomile could discern. The near-incomprehensible vastness of those mountains and how they seemed to eclipse the whole sky made her tremble, and she could see that a similar reaction affected many of them. Even the stalwart Zipp appeared in awe of the sight.

Only one pony was unaffected.

“Well, it’s about time!” Polar Blast exclaimed, standing next to the train and looking at the impressive expanse. He was grinning, flapping his wings in clear excitement. “Didn’t think we’d make it!”

Clip, standing behind him, let out a snort. “I take it your concussion is officially gone, if you’re that enthusiastic?”

Polar’s enthusiasm didn’t falter. He grinned at Clip. “You got it! The doc gave me the go ahead—just in time, too!” He flipped his wing to show them a note that was so illegible, it could only have been written by a doctor. As quickly as he’d taken it out, he packed it into his bag. Then he lifted his other wing. “I’ve even got the winter gear I need.” He showed off the coat and scarf like they were trophies, before throwing them into the air and expertly flying through them both to put them on.

“You’re awfully excited by the prospect of manual labor,” Clip noted when he came down.

“Well, duh! You try being cooped up in a bed for days on end and not go crazy wanting to actually do things!”

Chamomile watched the display with only some amusement. The rest of her was hyper-fixated on the fact that this was the nearest to Gaea she’d been in recent memory. The two of them were standing behind Clip and Polar, watching while they chatted, Gaea with a noticeable smile—perhaps she was relieved that Polar appeared all right.

Chamomile wanted to talk to her, but she couldn’t get the words out. Even if she did, she doubted she’d know what to say. What gulf expanded between them could not be bridged by words alone, yet she felt that words were all she had. She chose to stay quiet, hoping that Gaea would not find her silence offensive—or, even better, not notice it.

Zipp flew down to meet them, and she gaze uncertainly at Polar. “You sure you’re up for this?” she asked.

He blushed under her gaze, before recovering. “I’m fine, Pr—Zipp,” he said, though his smile seemed a tad bit nervous. “Really. Once I get going, I’m sure it’ll be a breeze.”

“And you know what you’re doing?”

“Of course!” He raised a wing and counted down his feathers. “Coordinate the direction of the beams and keep an eye out for adverse weather conditions. That’s about it, isn’t it?”

Zipp was taken aback momentarily. “That’s… indeed about it, sure.”

“See?” He paused, then stepped forward, straightening his back in a manner reminiscent of cadets. “I won’t let you down. I promise, Zipp.”

Zipp seemed taken aback by his declaration. So was Chamomile. It was simple, yet, by how he said it, it held great significance.

“Well, all right.” Zipp looked past him at the others. “But I don’t think it’s necessarily my call to make. What do you guys say?”

Surprised to be addressed at all, Chamomile fumbled with her words. Without meaning to, she looked to Gaea for guidance, and surprisingly, she offered a nod. It seemed encouraging—or perhaps was simply saying, Whatever you say.

Polar was looking at them, too, and he appeared worried by the silence. Around them, ponies were starting to rally themselves to start up the work again. He was antsy to join them. But if that was a good or bad thing…

“He can join us,” Chamomile said. Polar grinned and seemed about to hug her. Next to her, Gaea looked away, but Chamomile had the oddest feeling that she approved.

Zipp was quiet, weighing her words. Then she said, “All right. If that’s your call, that’s your call. Polar, you’re back on duty.” He beamed, and, seeing this, Zipp chuckled. “Man, you look like I just kissed your baby or something.” She looked away, spread her wings, and flew off—and in doing so, missed his ferocious blushing entirely.

Polar trotted over to Chamomile and Gaea stood. “Thank you,” he said. “I know I messed up pretty badly back in Ponyville, but I really appreciate you giving me another chance.”

“Sure thing, Polar,” Gaea said. Her voice was quiet but filled with conviction. “Everypony makes mistakes. It’s better we learn from them when we can, and move on.”

Something about the way she said this suggested she meant more than to just encourage Polar. But Chamomile had no time to question it, for as soon as these words were uttered, Gaea flicked her mane and trotted after the other workers, leaving the three of them behind. Chamomile stared after her. When she glanced at her companions, she found them staring, too.

“Is it just me, or does Gaea seem different?” Polar said.

“No, I’ve noticed it, too,” Clip said. He looked knowingly at Chamomile, then hesitated, remembering what she had asked him.

“Yeah,” Polar continued, not noticing, “she seems more… distant, actually.”

“Maybe she’s just trying to stay focused on the job,” Chamomile suggested.

But Polar shook his head. “No, no, that’s not it, I can tell. Something else is bothering her. Something…” He paused, and his eyes flickered over to meet Chamomile’s. He opened his mouth halfway, a thought just about to form, but then he himself seemed to hesitate.

She remembered what he had said in the medbay, what he had asked of her. Then she remembered what else he had said—how she and Gaea were good for each other. No doubt that same memory was playing behind his earnest eyes, but the thought of him voicing it only caused her to feel sudden, inexplicable pain.

Chamomile turned away. “We should get started, too,” she stated briskly. Not bothering to look behind her, she trotted forward to join the other workers. But she could still feel their questions, silent yet loud nonetheless, batter her hide, questions that—she was trying not to remember—resembled much of her own.

Work had a distinctly awkward atmosphere to it afterwards. Between steel beam guiding, laying, and crosstie nailing, Chamomile caught Polar and Clip whispering amongst themselves, in terse, half-formed sentences specific to those conversations meant to convey information quickly and secretly. Though they did not point, it was obvious they were talking about Chamomile and Gaea, and they seemed to be trying to come to a consensus as to what was going on, or who to ask, or if they should say anything.

She spent that morning in a heightened state of anxiety which she pushed aside with a willpower she had not believed she had in her for many years. While her physical efforts were spent on carrying each steel beam to their place, her mental efforts were expended on trying to portray outwardly that she was perfectly calm, that Polar and Clip’s misgivings were misplaced, that nothing was occurring between herself and Gaea, and for some time, she could convince herself that it was true. Then her head would tilt up, and she would catch sight of that mare standing only a few feet from her, brow furrowed in concentration as she swung the sledgehammer with great, steady precision, and Chamomile would suddenly remember their last full conversation and how it had ended. She would recall the closeness of their bodies and their breaths, and her face would flush, and she would lose her concentration and have to recover the beam’s position. Each time this happened, she knew Polar and Clip were watching, and this only furthered her anxiety. For whatever reason, however—perhaps out of respect for the immediate necessity of their job—they did not speak to her or Gaea about the matter.

The afternoon could not arrive soon enough. When it did, it was marked by a singularly throbbing sun that gleamed harshly off the sides of the mountains. The air had grown steadily cooler and cooler, which Chamomile did not notice, owing much to her heated cheeks and flushed form. She paused a moment to fluff her parka and air out the insides, reveling for a moment in the fresh coolness. She rubbed an itch out of her head, removed her hat, inspected the inside, then replaced it with a grunt. She looked back towards the train. It was some distance from them, and the supply depot was no longer in sight.

She became aware, then, of something missing. It took a moment for her to realize what: the sound of Gaea’s hammering. Hesitatingly, Chamomile turned to see what had happened, and saw Gaea frowning with the sledgehammer still in her teeth.

“Gaea?” Chamomile said.

Gaea lowered her head to gently deposit the tool onto the ground. “Something’s off,” she muttered—there was a strange warble to her voice. “Can you feel it?”

Chamomile paused. Gaea addressing her was monumental enough. But she didn’t feel anything other than the cool weather. “No…?”

Gaea turned her head, looking down the length of it back towards the train. Her eyes were scanning for something, but she wouldn’t say what.

“Hey!” Polar exclaimed from above them. “What’s the hold up?”

“I’m not sure,” Chamomile answered. She watched Gaea closely, trying to figure out what was going on. Gaea’s face was drawn, the afternoon sunlight highlighting her cheeks. She seemed to be wrestling with some sense only she could feel.

On the opposite side of the track, Clip let out an observant grunt, which Chamomile took as him figuring something out. “What is it?” she asked.

“Might be nothing,” he said. He stepped across the track and stood next to Gaea, looking the same way she did. “Or… might be something. Look. Actually,” he added swiftly, “don’t just look. Listen.”

Chamomile tried to do both. At first, nothing occurred to her, but after a few moments, she realized that the usual clangs that would have echoed down the line were eerily missing. Earth ponies, instead, all stood with their hammers, rivets, and fasteners in mid-position, and many of their fellow non-earth-pony workers peered at them with concern. Even the afflicted themselves appeared at a loss as to what was happening, because they looked at each other, at the others, and at the ground, all without moving.

Polar flew down and landed next to Chamomile. “Guys? What’s happening?”

Chamomile didn’t answer him. She drew close to Gaea, and, to her astonishment, saw that she was trembling.

“Something’s wrong here,” Gaea said, turning sharply to Chamomile. Her eyes were wide and filled with such confused fear that Chamomile didn’t think she was lying.

“Do you know what, exactly?”

“I’m… not sure. I don’t know why you haven’t felt it.”

“But clearly the other earth ponies have,” said Clip.

“What are you feeling?” Chamomile asked. “Can you describe it?”

“Nauseous, I think. Unsteady, dizzy… and, floaty?”

“Floaty? Like, light-headed?”

“No, not that.” Gaea chewed on her lip. Though still garbed fully in her winter attire, her pink coat had turned pale. “It’s like… have you ever been going down the stairs, and normally you’d go down fine, reach the bottom and all, but on the last step, you miscalculate and end up lurching ahead, and you’re caught between walking and falling?”

Gaea looked like she was about to faint. She brought up a hoof, but seemed perturbed by it, and scuffed it gently against the frozen ground.

Polar glanced between them. “Maybe it’ll pass? We really shouldn’t be stopping for this, you know.”

“Gaea’s not feeling well,” Chamomile said. She noticed that she had stepped protectively in front of the other mare, and, realizing this, stepped back self-consciously. “Isn’t that reason enough to stop?”

“For her, yeah, but for the rest of us…”

“We should at least try to figure out what’s going on,” Clip said. “Especially since it’s not just us.”

Polar made a grunt of his own. He looked back down the line, then at them. He fluffed his wings, not quite in an impatient manner, but it was clear he was displeased to have stopped.

“Maybe you’re just tired,” Chamomile offered—but she didn’t even believe that herself.

“Maybe…”

Gaea took a step forward. Then she swooned and dove for the ground. Chamomile caught her in her magic, crying out, “Gaea? Gaea, what on earth—”

“It’s not just her!” Clip cried.

Down the line, every earth pony appeared to faint. Some pitched onto their sides, nearly crashing into their partners, and others managed to remain somewhat standing. The other workers cried out in alarm, rushing to check on their companions.

Somepony whistled shrilly—a sign for the medics, no doubt. The pegasi had come aground, and Zipp, among them, was busy with one group, trying to figure out what was going on.

Chamomile, meanwhile, was attempting to rouse the other mare. But Gaea would not respond to her voice. She felt monstrously light, to Chamomile’s growing horror.

Polar then stepped in front of her, leaning down to be at eye-level. “We need to move Gaea.”

“Move her?” Chamomile gaped at him. “She can barely stand!”

“Neither can the other earth ponies. Getting them on the train would be a good idea,” Clip said, shaking his head and frowning thoughtfully. “Look, something big’s happening. If it’s affecting just them—”

Just then, Gaea mumbled something too quiet for them to hear. “What was that?” Chamomile leaned closer.

“The earth…”

“The… huh?”

Gaea’s eyes shot open. She flailed her hooves around, accidentally hitting Chamomile in the nose. Crying out, she let go of Gaea, who fell to the ground in a mess of disjointed limbs.

They tried to help her up, but she managed to stand on her own. Her eyes were wild, and she was breathing rapidly. “It’s the earth,” she gasped, and hearing the panic in her voice made Chamomile forget the pain in her nose. “Something—something’s wrong with the earth!”

Polar looked quizzically at her. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Gaea shook her head. “I don’t—I don’t know. I just know—I can feel it, okay?”

When she looked at Polar and Clip, however, they were obviously doubtful of her word. Gaea, seeing this, looked hurt. “I know how it sounds, but I’m telling you…”

“Let’s just focus on getting back onto the train, okay?” Polar said.

Gaea rapidly shook her head. “N-no, I don’t—I don’t know about that…” She looked fearfully at the train, like she was afraid it would rear up and attack her.

Down the line, the other earth ponies were beginning to stir. A few shouted incoherently, scaring their cohorts. Panic was growing, and some ponies were already backing away from the tracks, as though something in them was repulsive. Zipp quickly became overburdened with shouts and questions. Chamomile doubted she would have heard them if they shouted for her.

Still, if whatever was happening was only affecting the earth ponies, then it seemed a good idea to centralize them. And getting on the train appeared to be the best choice, even if she didn’t like it.

“Let’s move you first,” she told Gaea. “Then we’ll figure out what’s going on.” She nodded to Clip and Polar. The former lit his horn while the latter stepped back to let them pass.

Gaea then fell forward into her. Was she suffering from vertigo? An inner ear problem? “Chamomile, we can’t be here,” she whispered fiercely.

“Here? On the ground?”

“Here, there, anywhere—oh, I wish I could explain it better than this!”

“I really think the train might help—”

“It won’t.” Gaea shook her head. “This whole place—this whole area, train or no train—it’s unsafe. Everything’s unsafe!”

Chamomile tried to hold her up, but she was shaking so badly, her goggles threatened to slip off of her hat. “I can tell you think so,” she said carefully, “but I just don’t understand what there is to be afraid of—"

A mighty, high-pitched whine briefly preceded a sharp wind-burst that tore into their bodies like a phalanx squadron charging ahead. It was so powerful that Clip, the lightest among them, tripped forward, and with a startled yelp, he collided into Polar. The two of them went sprawling. Gaea, meanwhile, was lifted up off her hooves. It was only thanks to Chamomile’s magic that she was not taken away.

“Hang on!” Chamomile shouted, but the wind almost immediately stole her voice away. It picked up, growing not only colder but also shriller, so much so that it easily pierced Chamomile’s parka and disrupted her magical concentration. The levitation field around Gaea spluttered like a pony gasping for water.

“Chamomile, I’m—”

The wind struck Chamomile so hard that she lost her concentration, and with a cry, Gaea was sent flying.

“No!”

She tried to turn to look to see where she’d gone—where anypony had gone—but then her vision burst into blinding whiteness. Snow, she dimly realized, but unlike the soft flurries that sometimes fell in Bridlewood, these were ice-tipped spears that stabbed her exposed fur and forced her to duck her head. The wind surged and piped with maddening, growing intensity, a cacophony of chaos that strummed a discordant melody in her ears and left her shaken and disturbed. Her scarf flapped and fluttered against her face, further blinding her; sightless, she crouched protectively down, trying to not get swept away herself.

It was all happening so fast. She barely registered the terrified screams of the other workers as that impossibly frigid air stampeded through their ranks. She couldn’t see where Gaea or Clip or even Polar were. Calling out for them proved impossible, for her voice was lost in the uproar.

A voice cried out from way behind her—some part of her managed to recognize it as Zipp. Somehow, she managed to shout loud enough to be heard above the wind: “It’s a frost storm! Everypony get inside the train!”

Distant hooves thundered in aimless reverberations around her. Chamomile tried to stand, but she could barely move, let alone think of moving. It was like the cold had welded her legs to the ground. Rapidly, she could feel the coldness infect her joints, and even her very bones felt chilled to their core.

There was a rumbling sound, and because she was surrounded by so much whiteness and wind, she didn’t know where it was coming from—but she sensed it was somewhere in front of her. But rendered discombobulated by the elements, she had no idea what the rumbling meant.

Somepony rushed up to her. It was Polar, and were he not wearing his colorful coat, he would have blended in perfectly. His face was covered by his goggles and his lips were curled back into a determined snarl. “Where’s Gaea?!” he yelled in Chamomile’s face.

“I—I accidentally let go of her,” she yelled back. “She’s gotta be somewhere nearby—”

“Never mind that! We need to get you out of here!”

She would have protested, but fear had flooded her system and she was falling back on self-preservation instincts. She tried to move, but felt something take hold of her legs.

“I can’t move,” Chamomile gasped.

Polar look down. He spat a curse. “It’s your hooves! They’ve iced over!” Sure enough, four tubes of ice had sprouted and propagated up her legs in rapid succession. But she was so cold, she couldn’t feel them.

Polar tried to pull her out, but he wasn’t strong enough. The ice held firm. “Never mind me!” Chamomile shouted. “Gaea and Clip—you’ve got to find them!”

“I’m not leaving you—”

“Do it!” she screamed at him, not caring how her fury and desperation caused her voice to crumble, caused her to look at him with such hatred that he could only listen to her, because in that moment she didn’t want to think about Gaea being left in the cold alone.

“Fine!” Polar agreed with a sharp nod. “But get yourself outta here while I get them, you hear?!” He waited for her to nod, before turning around and galloping back into the blizzard, his scarf trailing behind him.

Once he was gone, Chamomile continued her struggle. No amount of effort on her end yielded any result; she budged not an inch from her icy shackles. She swore her lips were beginning to freeze, and her fear and desperation mounted. She threw her head around, searching for something to use. At the last possible second, she spied Gaea’s discarded sledgehammer, too heavy for the frost storm to pick up. Fighting the wind and the freezing temperatures, she lit her horn and enveloped the handle with her magic and brought the hammer over.

No time for elegant solutions. She brought the hammer close and swung it against the ice, hoping not to break her own legs. It worked—the ice broke just enough that she could crack her hoof free, and she set about freeing the rest of her.

Now free, she thought she could no longer feel anything at all. A part of her, so numb with cold, wanted to curl up into a ball and wait out the storm. But she couldn’t. She stumbled forward, calling out for anypony, for Gaea, Clip, Polar—but her voice was utterly lost in the chaos unfolding around her.

Time is both heightened and lessened in extreme situations, and when bereft of the senses, the effect is compounded. For Chamomile, this meant she couldn’t determine for how long she lurched forward—an inch, maybe a centimeter—crying out and having her throat filled with millions of icy particles. The rails and train and Equestria were a distant memory. She was alone and completely terrified.

And then she saw them. Like tortured specters in some hellish, frosty mist, they—Gaea and Polar, with Clip held up between them—shambled forward, hats pulled over their heads and coats baked in snow and ice. Clip had a cut above his eye which was starting to bleed. Gaea looked sickly pale, and even Polar was starting to exhibit signs of cold exhaustion.

Upon seeing her, Polar’s face became furious—but the fear was evident. “What the heck, Chamomile! I told you to get out of here!”

She would have rushed forward to hug them, but she was still too cold and weak. Instead, she let them approach, letting out a grateful prayer that was lost in the wind.

“The ground,” she heard Gaea shout in her ear.

“Never mind the stupid ground, we have to get out of here!” Polar exclaimed, and for once, Chamomile agreed with him. Clip didn’t speak. Chamomile feared he was unconscious.

All four attempted to go back the way they came, trudging through piles of snow that never seemed to stop growing. Gaea, her voice a low vibration in Chamomile’s ear, was still muttering about the earth; the cold, then, had rendered her inconsolable. But the chaos had removed all sense of direction. More than that, they couldn’t find the railroad itself, as though it’d been swept away by all the snow.

Chamomile was about to step in a random direction, when Gaea screeched, “The ground! The ground’s coming apart!”

They stopped against all instinct. Ahead of them, there was nothing but white; then, a few yards ahead, the ground seemed to slope downwards. An awesome popping sound, like a barrel of fireworks, exploded and collided with the howling wind in a battle for auditory supremacy. So spooky was the contrast that Chamomile’s hair might have stood on end, had it not been frozen solid.

Then what Gaea said came true. Cracks appeared and spread like wounds being ripped open all across the earth. The tapestry moved so swiftly that the many yards between them and it shrank in mere seconds; the ground continued its horrid bending, and the pops climbed and climbed in both volume and frequency.

“We need to move, now!” Polar cried.

Before anypony could follow his order, they felt the ground beneath them shift. More cracks appeared under their hooves, revealing ghoulishly dry dirt and plates of dead, decaying soil. Chamomile felt her balance tip against her will; she became aware of them all falling back, and the cracks growing in size. Then she felt floaty, and, recalling Gaea’s earlier words, was engulfed by sheer horror.

With a final, near-deafening explosion of dirt and ice, the ground beneath them was rent asunder.

13 - The Fall

The Crystal Tearoom throbbed with a purple offered piously by the colony of lava lamps standing stoic vigil behind a short wooden stage up front, and a thick atmosphere of subdued excitement—one that smelled, oddly, of exotic incense, and sounded of melodic jazz—carried itself over every table, booth, seat, and occupant. It was the most packed of the shop that Chamomile had ever seen—and for a poetry SLAM, of all things, which by its very characteristics was unlike Alphabittle’s other planned Party Game Nights. It was the first of its kind, but one would not have been rebuffed for believing it was a popular tradition for Bridlewood. Seemingly all of its residents had filed in, from the old to the young, impossibly swept up in the equally impossible splendor of promising poetic amateurs and their precocious attempts at the art. The normally dull-eyed unicorns now looked at the currently empty stage with some interest, while the less dour—the ones who had not by their magic’s absence lost themselves quite yet—chattered at their tables in muted voices.

Food and drink were being served, and it was really for this reason that Chamomile had come, more than any interest in poetry. Her little tea shop, recently opened, had enjoyed moderate success in the small sector of Bridlewood in which it resided, but she had expressed a desire to expand into other fields of business. Recently, as though being driven by the yarn of fate itself, Alphabittle came to her and offered a proposition—the Tearoom’s selection was limited, and her shop’s exotic, home-grown, customized mixes could spice up his stock. But Chamomile knew a shrewd business deal was underway, and so she decided to try and manipulate the offer: show her that entering into a partnership wouldn’t pull business away from her, and maybe she’d consider officially accepting it.

“How about this, then?” Alphabittle said. “Give me a few samples of your most exotic mixes. For the upcoming poetry SLAM, we’ll dispense them, generate interest, and direct those who want more to your shop.”

“But then you won’t make money from your tea.”

“Truthfully, it’s not the tea I need. It’s the bodies, the customers. What do you say? My place gets a little more presence, and you get free advertisement!”

Eventually she agreed to the little experience—hence why she was here now. A candle that smelled of vanilla and strawberry burned in front of her, and from behind its flame she watched and observed the other customers as they sat and ate and drank her tea, gauging their reactions.

The SLAM would not begin for a few more minutes, so she had plenty of time to sit and observe. More ponies streamed in through the crystal-polished doors like souls of purgatory looking for the ladder of ascension.

“Pardon me, is this seat taken?”

Chamomile turned her gaze. Another unicorn, male, with moss-green fur and a dark, thick mane, stood smilingly by her. There was something altogether pleasant about him—perhaps it was the serenity of his smile, which did not seem overly sanguine as to be cheesy, or the twinkling sparkle in his eyes that spoke of the secrets of the stars, and which seemed to hold the whole of her in its infinite fixations.

“It’s not,” she said. “Would you like it?”

“I would.” He sat down opposite of her. She noted he had a small satchel bag, and that sticking out of it were some scraps of paper.

“I’m Astral, by the way,” he said.

“Chamomile. What have you got there?”

“These?” He lifted the flap of the bag, as though surprised that it was with him. “Oh, they’re nothing, really. Just some scruples of creative integrity.”

“Poems?”

He nodded. His smile became a little self-conscious, but he did not appear wholly embarrassed by the admission. “And songs. Sometimes.”

“Are you entering the SLAM, then?”

“Me? Oh, heavens, no,” he laughed. “I’m just an amateur. I’ve hardly actually tried to write them—and even if I did, well, I doubt I’d qualify.”

She thought about that word: amateur. She recalled a lesson from her youth, from a teacher who was one of those rare unicorns who could still act cheerful and alive in the face of magic’s absence. It was a funny word, because while it meant somepony who did something with less skill than a professional, it actually came from an older word, “amare,” to love—and the noun form of it, “amator,” a lover. An amateur was someone who did a thing purely for the love of it—but she didn’t say this, kept it to herself, because it did not seem an appropriate time or place to foist such passionate revelations upon a stranger.

One of the waiters came by and deposited two cups in front of them. Taking her own but not drinking it, she observed as Astral took a spoon and stirred the contents of his cup. She wondered, rather suddenly, how he might like her tea, and with that thought there emerged in her some nervous expectation. She watched, with her breath held, as he brought the cup to his lips and drank slowly, clearly savoring every drop.

“That,” he said, putting his cup down, “is different from Alphabittle’s usual.”

“It should,” she said, unable to contain a note of pride. “After all, I made it.”

“Did you?”

One might have thought the question to be condescending, but from Astral, it sounded like he was genuinely impressed. Chamomile, her smile only somewhat obscured by the shadows that fell from the ceiling like talons, began to explain what she meant. When her explanation was done, Astral looked back at his tea, then up at her, with a look that conveyed he was delighted.

“Well, you’ve earned yourself an eager customer,” he said jovially. The flames from the candle lit his face and made his smile seemingly glow with otherworldly light. “I think, if it’s all right, I’d like to come by your shop one day.”

“Glad to hear it,” she replied, and she knew she meant it, too. “And that would be more than all right, Astral.” And she took her own sip of her tea and was pleasantly surprised to discover it tasted fresh and new to her all the same.

Gradually, over their drinks, their conversation shifted back to the event. Astral asked if she was here, like he was, to listen. “Yes,” she replied, humming a little thoughtfully to herself. She glanced away from him towards the stage, which remained empty. The chattering around them had grown a level, and some ponies expressed a small degree of impatience. “I’m honestly not sure what to expect. They didn’t give us a ‘program’s guide’ or anything.”

“I think that’s intentional. Adds to the atmosphere. You don’t know what to expect or from whom you’d hear it, so you can’t come up with any preconceptions.”

“This is for the poetry?”

“For the poetic performance. That’s what a SLAM is, after all.” He said this with the air of a sage, but none of the condescension, which only endeared him more to her.

But she would have no time to tell him this, either, not for many years. For at once, the purple glow was banished, snuffed out by an invisible hoof; then there came a single, pale, moon-like spotlight falling upon a lone microphone. From the side came a light-gray mare with a deep-violet mane and a red beret and collar. She looked young. She approached the microphone, casting an almost priest-stern gaze over the room, silencing them. Then, in a rough, slightly monotone voice, she said:

“Please listen politely, and from your applause, refrain: welcome our first performer, Magenta Rain.”

She left the stage. A stallion took her place, ordinary in appearance in every way. He had on a pair of small reading glasses and looked closer to a cozy academic than a poet.

He announced the title, then performed.

Later, Chamomile would be unable to recall what he had performed. It had to be a kind of magic, the kind which was not loathed and scorned under the banner of suspicion and jinxes—it was an older, primeval, universal kind of magic, the magic of words. But though most of its intonations failed to collect in her memory, she knew she’d been moved—not quite to tears, but close to it, like that poet had reached out and touched her heart and revealed the aching desires and fears which she had kept hidden from the unkind world. And she knew that he had moved everyone else, for when she thought of this night in the days and months and years to come—in the many shades of happiness and shadows of despair, in the blistering summers and winters, in the empty expanse of her heart before and after—she could vividly see the strange yet calming tears sprinkled in many eyes, and hear the awed silence that transformed that humble tearoom into a ceremonial blessing-ground for them all. Who knew words could be so transformative, could remind anyone of what life was, what even love was?

She couldn’t recall the whole thing, no matter how hard she tried, yet, with exact, tremendous clarity, she could the last four lines:

And we, who think of ascending

joy, would feel the emotion,

that almost dismays us,

when a joyful thing falls?

“That’s my favorite line, too,” Astral would say years into their future, before his life came to a close. “But it’s probably also the scariest, don’t you think?”

“How so?”

“Think about it. A joyful thing falls—then what? You can’t just fall, you fall, and something stops you.” He’d look at her and become grave-faced. “A joyful thing falls—but it’s not the fall that dismays us. It’s the stop at the end.”

She stopped falling and came awake with a strangled gasp.

Yet she could hardly be sure she was even awake. A heavy darkness had thrown an impenetrable funeral veil over her eyes. She felt herself blink rapidly; nothing changed. Her heart leaped into her throat, but then, she remembered her horn, and attempted to activate her magic.

Almost as soon as that pale glow lit up the space before her, her head began to ache. A staticky sound buzzed, and her magic momentarily sputtered, before recovering.

She was in some sort of cavern. Her horn-light revealed an intimidating array of stalactites and stalagmites jabbing the air like dispatched teeth. Boulders her size and then some stood nearby, blanketed by miniscule particles of floating, nomadic dust. Her light was not very powerful; it reached only a few feet around her. She was afraid that trying to intensify it would inadvertently dispel it entirely, leaving her once again blind.

Experimentally, she stood. A soreness seemed to bubble all over her body, but she didn’t appear to suffer any extraneous injuries. A glance downward revealed the state of her gear: her parka was shredded, and her scarf lay crumpled under her hooves. She picked it up, wrapping it methodically around a leg.

“Hello?” she called into the dark, startled by how hoarse her voice was. She coughed hard, lungs squeezing air and spit out of her. She swallowed, tried again: “Clip? Polar? Gaea?”

For a moment there was nothing but the echo of her voice, and the sound of her heart beating a deafening tune in her ears; then:

“Chamomile?” Whispery, deathly and whispery.

That was Gaea. Her voice was faint, but she seemed to be somewhere far in front of Chamomile. “Where are you? Are you hurt?”

It was a few seconds—a few heart-stopping seconds—before Gaea was able to answer, still with that same weak voice. “A… A little. I can see your light—I don’t know where I am.”

“Can you come towards me?”

A grunt followed, then tense seconds. Gaea let out a pained sigh. “No good. I think I’m trapped under something.”

Chamomile tried to stow her panic long enough to think of what to do. She tested her hooves against the ground. Her joints ached but did not lock up from the pain. She looked up and into the dark, towards where she imagined Gaea was.

“Stay there. I’ll come to you.”

“How?”

“Just… make some noise. I’ll try to locate you that way.”

There was more silence, and briefly, Chamomile feared Gaea had lapsed into unconsciousness. But then, with a weak, staccato manner, the darkness of the cave was illuminated by that haunted, melancholic melody Gaea had started singing a few nights ago.

Every time I shed tears
In the last past years
When I pass through the hills

Chamomile began to follow it. Her limited light source, combined with the abnormal acoustics of the cavern and the shuddering breaths Gaea took between each verse, intensified her fear to teeth-chattering levels, forcing her to move far more slowly than she would have liked. Every shadow seemed to hide a ghoul, every dark crevice some unspeakable horror—but she tried to focus on Gaea’s singing, and Gaea’s singing only, no matter how haunting it was. A part of her wondered why this song in particular had been chosen, what it meant to Gaea.

Oh, what images return

Oh, I yearn

For the roots of the woods

That origin of all my strong and strange moods

Yet, for how haunting it was, hearing it comforted Chamomile. It was not just because it evidenced that Gaea was alive. Chamomile thought about her own woods, about Bridlewood, about her son—all in fragmentary images that scattered like frightened morning doves in her mind. Thinking of home brought a bittersweet achiness to her heart, but it was one that, inexplicably, she thought she could take comfort in.

I lost something in the hills

I lost something in the hills

Finally, she found her.

Upon seeing her, Gaea stopped singing. “Oh, thank goodness. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to sing the whole thing.”

“It was lovely… where was it from?”

“It was something Dad used to sing, actually, on the farm…”

“Well, you sang it very well.”

Chamomile said this with forced levity. It caused Gaea to chuckle, allowing Chamomile, for a moment, to ignore the dried blood that ran down the side of her face, darkening the lovely pink underneath. Her mane had soaked up a little bit of the blood in its tail, and the rest of it was covered in dirt and mud. The goggles she wore were cracked in one lens, but it appeared they’d managed to protect her eyes. Looking past her, Chamomile saw what kept her on the ground; a slate slab lay across her hind hooves.

“I… don’t suppose you could help me out?” Gaea said weakly.

Chamomile nodded. She concentrated her magic on the rock and forced it to rise, little pebbles crumbling off the surface. Either it was heavier than it looked—which was already quite impressive—or she’d been severely weakened by the fall. “I can’t do this for too long,” she grunted. “Can you slip out on your own?”

“A little bit more—”

Already her magic and light were beginning to splutter. She couldn’t tell if she was even lifting the slab anymore—she prayed that she was.

Gaea grunted. There was the sound of her dragging her body forward, as well as the sound of her coat being torn as rocks cut up against it.

“Gaea!” Chamomile gasped. “I can’t—”

“I’m out, I’m out—”

Chamomile’s magic faltered, and with a feeble hiss, the light cut out. At the same instant, the slab was released from her hold, and landed with a horrendous crash.

“Gaea? Gaea, are you there?!”

“I’m here, Chamomile!” She felt hooves wrap around her. In the darkness, she frantically searched for their owner—and upon finding it, clutched her with all the strength she could. They were both shaking, and Chamomile herself felt like she was on the verge of crying.

“I’m here, I’m here…” But it was unclear who was saying that.

They stood in utter blindness for an incalculable amount of time, before Chamomile realized. “You can stand?”

“Yeah,” Gaea whispered. Her voice was a little shaky. “Sore all over my hind hooves, but I’ll live. Us earth ponies are super durable, believe me. How are you feeling?”

“Sore, as well. And my magic…”

A magical hum filled the air as she re-activated it, revealing Gaea’s damaged body, a sight that Chamomile tried to ignore. They turned their heads up. A little orb of light emanated out of the tip of her horn, its size in a state of flux. “What about that flashlight we were given?” Gaea suggested.

Chamomile had completely forgotten about that. She inspected her pockets and felt something small and hard in one of them, but when she brought it out, she made a grunt of dismay. The flashlight had been crushed.

Gaea found that hers was in a similar state, and she dumped the contents onto the ground. “Of course,” she grunted. “It couldn’t be that easy…”

She looked back at Chamomile, and then, realizing how close they were, stepped away. The air seemed to turn to ice at that moment.

“Where are the others?” Gaea asked, looking into the darkness around them.

It hurt that she would so quickly change the subject, but it also hurt that Chamomile hadn’t given enough thought to them. “I’m not sure. We must have gotten separated in the fall.” She paused to look around them. “Speaking of, where exactly did we fall? It’s definitely a… cave, of some sort.”

Gaea took a moment to slip her goggles carefully off her head, letting them fall to the ground with a dull thud. “Looks like it. One that was under our hooves the whole time.”

The statement caused Chamomile to connect a few dots in her mind, and, turning back around, she regarded Gaea carefully. “Is that what you sensed earlier?”

Gaea’s frown was tight and strained. “I think so. I must have sensed that the ground was coming apart right before it did.” She seemed unnerved by the revelation. “I… I had no idea I could even do that.”

Or that it was something that only earth ponies could sense. “That wasn’t an ordinary earthquake, then.”

“No…” Gaea chewed on her lip. “Earthquakes are caused by plates under the earth sliding against one another and building up pressure. This…” She paused, then looked up. “You remember that storm, right?” She could, but the memory sealed her lips, and she simply nodded. Gaea continued: “If that storm was that heavy, and if we were going into someplace extremely cold… That must be it, then.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“The rain caused cracks to form, right? The water would have seeped into the ground, filling out every hole. In most cases this just makes the ground soggy and unstable, but what happens to water when it enters a cold environment?”

“Well, if it’s cold enough, it freezes.”

“Right. But if water’s in some kind of crevice or crack when it’s freezing, it’ll expand, weakening the cracks even further. And if that happens quickly, the ground can’t compensate. It splits apart. Maybe explosively.”

“Resulting in what we saw on the surface,” Chamomile realized. “So, if that thunderstorm hadn’t rolled in…”

“And if we hadn’t been struck by that sudden frost storm immediately after…”

They looked at each other in the darkness, feeling a chill creep along their spines. A whispering dread—the kind that invades the edges of dreams just about to tilt into nightmares—also seemed to be audible, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was enough to cause Chamomile to look over her shoulder back into the darkness as though expecting to find some speaker there, but all she got was the sight of the black nothingness that leered greedily without eyes at them, and the coldness of an underground world unused to the presence of ponies.

Not wanting to continue that thought, Chamomile returned her gaze to Gaea. “What happened to your bags?”

Gaea gasped. She searched her body, found nothing, looked at the slab, then groaned. “Oh, dash it all… it’s probably crushed underneath that dumb thing.”

Chamomile looked down. “So, we have no supplies… no food or water… and we’ve fallen who knows how far into wherever we are now.”

Gaea swallowed, considering everything. Chamomile could see panic rising in her—it was rising in herself, too. But she forced it all down to say, “We should try and find Polar and Clip first. Any ideas how?”

Being given an objective appeared to calm Gaea down enough to think. “Let’s just start walking,” she suggested. “We’ll call out for them—hopefully they’ll respond.”

Agreeing to this, they chose a direction that looked almost welcoming, and, cautiously, so as to not exacerbate any of their injuries, they began to walk. Chamomile’s light did not have a large reach, but what it did reveal was that the cavern was of monstrous proportions, with a craven darkness so intense that it seemed that the shadows the light cast swallowed the steps and spaces they left behind. In regular intervals they called out for both Clip and Polar, but only echoes, hollow and mocking, answered them.

Little familiarity existed—or rather, too much of it. They first went the way that Chamomile had come, but when they went further, it looked like they’d simply stumbled upon a clone of that area. When their soreness had come back and they could no longer continue on adrenaline and fear alone, they paused to rest in a space beset by shadows and stalagmites, listening to distant, underground noises that sounded like unearthly moans from some blackened demon. Then they got up and continued to wander and call. Their voices grew more and more hoarse with each utterance, until “Clip” and “Polar” became monosyllabic and disyllabic inferences without meaning. That nothing answered them—not even a faint resemblance of a voice not their own—must have meant two things: either they’d been more separated than they’d imagined, or Clip and Polar were…

“Ow!”

Just as Chamomile had begun to entertain that grisly thought, she’d bumped her head against something hard. Her horn buzzed with pain like how a springy doorstopper vibrates when struck by a hoof. Falling onto her haunches, she rubbed her head and made a hissing sound.

“Chamomile!”

Gaea dashed over, voice flooded with concern. It seemed almost comical, how her voice carried more energy when it came to shouting Chamomile’s name than it had in the past whoever-knew-how-long spent chanting “Polar” and “Clip.”

Gaea stopped short of her, though, hesitating. She looked torn between reaching out and leaving her be. And it was easy for Chamomile to recognize why, a recognition which came with annoyance and self-inflicted bitterness. She pushed herself to stand, shaking.

“Are you okay?” Gaea asked somewhat needlessly.

“Yeah… Yeah. I just bumped my head, that’s all.”

She could feel her face burning up. She wanted to tell Gaea off for not helping her, but what good would that do? Besides, didn’t she understand the hesitation anyway? If she understood so much…

She shook her head, then looked at what she’d run into. A blank, clay-colored wall stretched up towards a sharply sloping ceiling. Past it was more darkness which her light could not touch. “Dead end,” she murmured. She looked to the left and the right, finding only more darkness. “I guess we should pick a direction?”

She worded it as a prompt, but when she turned to see what Gaea thought, all she got was a deliberate avoidance of her gaze. Chamomile let out a hot breath. Fine. I’ll decide, then.

She chose to go left, and trotted briskly ahead, not bothering to forewarn Gaea. After a few seconds, she heard her hoofsteps come after her. Gaea still kept herself at a distance, just at the edge of her hornlight, as though preparing at any moment to dive back into the dark.

They didn’t call out. There didn’t seem to be much point, at any rate. In a silence burdened by the weight of unspoken words, they trotted further and further into the unknown.

But eventually, Chamomile had had enough.

“Okay, stop!”

She stomped her hoof against the hard ground, eliciting a loud smack that reverberated off of the unseen walls. Gaea yelped at her shout, but obeyed it, looking at Chamomile with a confused gaze. “Is… is something wrong?”

“Don’t,” Chamomile warned heatedly. She paused, however, trying not to let her emotions overrule her judgment. This was a delicate situation, she realized, and her getting angry would only drive them further apart.

She turned around and looked directly at Gaea. “We can’t keep going on like this.”

“Like what?”

Chamomile’s gaze softened. “Gaea… you know what.”

It was like shattering a particularly obstinate mask. Gaea’s face lost its confusion and transformed into an expression of resignation. She sighed—it was long and burdened, filled without a shred of relief at expending it. “Yeah… Yeah, I guess I do.”

“We need to talk about it.”

“Is now really a good time? We’re still in the middle of this cave.”

“Yeah, I know.” Chamomile grunted. “But if I had any say in the matter, we would have talked way earlier. But you have been avoiding me ever since it happened. I haven’t had a chance to speak with you one-on-one until now, when we’re literally in a situation that forces us to interact.”

She said this as calmly as she could, but she could hear frustration bubbling in her voice. Gaea looked guilty. Chamomile tried to ignore what that look made her feel. “So, yes, even though it isn't ideal, we’re going to talk this out, now, while we have the chance, because we have to. All right?”

Even though the question was entirely rhetorical, Gaea nodded anyway.

“Good! So.” Chamomile cleared her throat. Her bravado was starting to slip already. “So… Why have you been avoiding me?”

Gaea started. “That… that’s what’s bothering you?”

“A lot of things are bothering me about… whatever this is, Gaea. I just figured I’d start with the easiest question.”

Gaea rubbed one hoof over the other. Then, as she began to speak, her hoof came up and tugged at her long mane, brushing it of all the dirt and mud that polluted the fibers. “It’s just… how you reacted that night, how shaken you were… It made me realize I’d hurt you. I’d violated some part of you.” Gaea’s voice shook with emotion and self-disgust so acidic to hear, it hurt Chamomile. “Your husband… If he knew what I almost did, he’d… and you, and then I…”

Hearing that, Chamomile’s heart softened just a little. She stepped forward, then stopped. Gaea was still at the edge of her light, and Chamomile worried that if she got closer, Gaea would step away again.

“And afterwards, I just… I couldn’t be anywhere near you,” Gaea said. “It hurt too much, remembering what I did. And I didn’t want to hurt you further, so I thought…”

“So you thought avoiding me would mean neither of us would have to deal with it.”

“Or we could pretend that it never happened. Go back to the way things were before that night. Could we?” she asked. She was looking at Chamomile, and her eyes glistened. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Chamomile simply looked at her. Gaea’s eyes lost their plea, and she lowered her head. “I know, I know… it’s a foolish thing to wish for. But I just wanted to forget it happened.”

“I couldn’t forget it,” Chamomile murmured. “I never could.”

Gaea flinched. “I couldn’t either, to be honest. And I’m sorry for that. Really, I am.”

Chamomile wanted to respond to that, but for some reason her voice would not emerge. The distance between them seemed to grow exponentially, even though neither had moved from their positions. Gaea tugged nervously at her braid, unable to keep her gaze, and Chamomile shifted uncomfortably on her hooves.

Maybe this was a bad idea after all, she thought. Maybe I should have waited. But who knew how long that would be? And who knew if ever again she’d have that momentous, fleeting bravery—and its partner, frustration—to spur her to action?

She was aware they were wasting time by doing this—by talking, and now, by saying nothing—but—

“Do you hate me for it?”

Gaea, looking away, had spoken barely above a confessional whisper. But her words hissed like a hydra in Chamomile’s ear, and her head turned sharply. For half a second, her mind did not believe that it was Gaea who had spoken. Instead, it had construed out of her words the disembodied, suffering voice of Astral, back from beyond.

“Well?” Gaea’s voice turned harsh. She glared at Chamomile, but there was no strength in it, only heated sorrow. “You surely must. That’s why you brought it up.”

Their positions had swapped, Chamomile realized—now she felt like shrinking back into the darkness around them. She knew she had to say something, but still her voice refused to work. She looked helplessly at the other mare, as if hoping that she could speak for her.

“Go on,” Gaea said. Tears gathered in her eyes, tears that would not fall. “Say it, okay? Just say it.”

“I…”

“Say it! You hate me, I get it! Say it so we can both just move on!”

Move on… move on… move on…

So those words warbled in the darkness surrounding them, warbling and wobbling and teetering towards nothingness, and even after they had faded, they continued to strike, to pound, to hammer.

“Please,” Gaea said hoarsely. “If you say it, then I can move on from this. I can let go of this. I know I can.”

She believed her. She believed utterly that if she said those three words, Gaea would summon all of her strength and be done with the matter, whether it left her standing or not. Three little words. That was all it would take. Then they could, perhaps, find the others and make their way out of this goddess-forsaken cave for good.

Three little words. Nothing, in the grand scheme of things.

And yet…

Chamomile felt herself slump forward, like she was about to fall, but at the last instance, she caught herself. She forced air into her lungs with a slow, precise, artificial intake of breath. The air tasted of some unspeakable or indescribable flavor, a mix of their sweat, cave odor, and something else.

“I won’t say that,” she said in a muted voice. “I won’t, because it wouldn’t be true.”

Gaea sucked in a breath, but didn’t say anything.

Chamomile continued: “I don’t hate you, Gaea. I…” She swallowed. “I never could.”

She thought this would bring relief to the mare, however little that might mean. But Gaea simply shook her head. “But when you go home, and when you tell your husband about this…”

There it was. The reason behind the reason. The great shame that dwelt hideously in Gaea’s heart was not that she should yearn, but that she should yearn for the forbidden—that in yearning for it, pining for it, she had intruded upon something impermissible and sacred.

She seemed frail. Her legs wobbled; she might collapse at any moment. Chamomile’s heart split in two, and more than ever, she wanted to reach out and steady her. But this, she sensed, would not be welcomed—not now. Nor would letting this mourning continue under such pretenses.

“My husband is dead.”

So quiet was Chamomile’s voice that it did not echo. It barely seemed to move the lethargic air around them, even less to actually be heard. But Gaea’s ears, facing away from her, twitched, and she raised her head.

My husband is dead.

How often had she thought this, she wondered to herself. How many days and nights, and weeks and months and years, had that thought inscribed itself upon the fabric of her mind? How many times had it pierced her when she, sleep-deprived, cared for Juniper or the shop? In how many shadows had that thought lain; in how many of her cold, lonely beds; in how many tears shed and voices trembling, how many shambling steps through the blurred corridors of her life?

And yet—how was it that, up until that point, Chamomile had never said those four words out loud?

“What?” Gaea murmured back to her.

Some precipice had been crossed, some threshold transcended. Chamomile had the impression that she could not have stopped herself even if she tried. She wasn’t sure she would have wanted to.

“His name was Astral,” she explained, taking a step forward, cautiously, so as not to startle Gaea. “He loved the stars, and enjoyed talking about space nebulae and all sorts of things I didn’t understand. He had his own telescope. He showed me my star, once.” She paused, realizing that she wasn’t getting to the point she wanted. She slightly lowered her head. “But that’s the past. He’s dead, now. He died a few years ago.”

“Oh, Chamomile… You don’t, you don’t have to tell me…”

“I want to. I need to.” She took another step, paused, and looked intentionally at Gaea’s anxious eyes. “We had a son together.”

“A son…”

“His name is Juniper.”

The rest followed. It was hardly easy. Chamomile strung her words together with the deliberation of a surgeon trying desperately to plug a sudden aneurysm. She spoke haltingly, sometimes in fragments, aware only by distant measures of how little she said, yet also how much. Throughout, she was slow to approach Gaea—she was hardly aware she was still doing so—and throughout, Gaea herself did not move. She was enchanted by Chamomile, and Chamomile by Gaea. Then they were within only a few feet from one another, neither of them shirking or shrinking away—and Chamomile continued to talk.

She told her everything she could about Juniper—how he was born under a lucky star, born of a wish between father and mother; how he had beheld the unicorns’ lack of magic not with the stoic apathy which had, for generations, instructed and guided their race towards a quiet oblivion, but with curiosity so rare that it could only be kept safe by being made into a secret; how, after magic had returned, it was to her shock that she saw he himself could not wield it; how she had taken up this voyage to the north, far from the comfort of her shop and son, from the grove in which Astral lay, because she had heard tales surrounding that northern frontier; how she had thought that, if magic had lain previously in Equestria’s dormant but deathless past, then it might be possible that answers to its absence in Juniper might be similarly found in the isolated, crystalline shades of a world so long hidden from their present as to be forgotten without intention. She was hoping for answers, if not a cure, for Juniper deserved no less than the opportunity to feel whole, rather than live in subjugation to another generation’s familiarity with what had been missing and lost to time immemorial.

Why was it that she could speak so verbosely about her son, but not her husband? Why was it that Juniper received the treatment, the privilege, of a full story, whereas Astral received only that single statement—“My husband is dead?” Perhaps it was because when you talk about the dead, you cannot speak of death and death alone; you must also speak to life, and the lives around the deceased. Perhaps the only way to speak of death fully is to embrace its connection to life, even as it appears to sever it.

And it seemed, then, to sever Chamomile’s voice, too, for, without warning, she stopped talking. Some vice had clamped around her throat—no, that wasn’t right; she was crying. The tears choked back her words, and she could make no audible sound to otherwise release her heart.

She looked at Gaea through blurry vision. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but seeing her there was somehow enough. She raised a hoof, almost out of some instinctual desire, and held it there, not knowing quite why she was doing this. Just as she was about to lower it, however, Gaea crossed the distance between them, and hugged her.

She realized they were both crying, and that her earlier assessment—of there being no sounds—was wrong. Their breaths came shudderingly. Half-words and half-sounds filled the air and echoed in that lonely chamber of shadows. Gaea’s long mane wrapped itself around Chamomile’s muzzle like an extension of her hug.

They hugged for a time they did not bother to count—perhaps against their better instincts. When they separated, it was with noticeable hesitation, for neither wanted to let the other go, for fear that, in doing so, the darkness would reach out and claim them. Chamomile dried her eyes; Gaea did as well. They were still close enough to be within a hoof’s length of the other.

For another little while—the length of which Chamomile was only somewhat conscious—they said nothing, staring into the reds of each other’s eyes. It was then, with an incredulity bordering on hysteria, that Chamomile realized that the blue of Gaea’s eyes was, in fact, two slightly different shades. The left was a little darker than the other, and there seemed even a little green in it, a mossy flake that floated in the ocean of her vision with an admirable casualness to it. A flaw in an otherwise ornate design—yet seeing it made Chamomile feel fuzzy inside, like she had come across an innocent secret that spoke not to some sinister entrapment, but the beauty of the ordinary and flawed. And upon witnessing such a thing, she thought, without aid from her hornlight, that the oppressive darkness of the cave receded, like scattered centipedes.

“I am sorry, Chamomile,” Gaea whispered.

“You? What for?” Chamomile actually chuckled weakly. “No, Gaea, I’m the one who should be apologizing. I just unloaded all of that onto you.”

“No… I mean, yes, that’s true, but what I mean is.” She began to play with her braid again, looking between it and Chamomile. Her cheeks were a little flush. A few tears idled on her cheeks before falling to the ground lazily. “I’m… sorry to have made you uncomfortable. And I’m sorry about your husband. Astral. He sounded… sounds like a good pony.”

“He is.” Then Chamomile reached back to grab her bag, only to remember—she’d left it on the train. It, and the two photos. But this did not dismay her. “Thank you for listening.”

“Of course.” Gaea paused, tilted her head. Her eyes were large and ornate again. “And besides, I think you needed to tell somepony… to tell me that. After all this time.”

Chamomile thought about it. “Yeah… Yeah, I think I did.” She managed a small smile. “I’m glad, then, that we managed to talk about everything. About what happened between us… I feel better.”

“I do, too.” Gaea giggled self-consciously. “I guess we should have from the start. Maybe then things wouldn’t have ended up so messed up between us.”

“Well, we’re a couple of messes, aren’t we?” Chamomile reached forward and touched Gaea on the shoulder as she did this, and Gaea seemed momentarily startled by the gesture.

She was about to retract her hoof, only for Gaea to gently cup it with her own. She leaned her head against the hoof, and Chamomile could feel her breath gently wash over it. She was staring so deeply at Chamomile that she might as well have been staring through her, but for whatever reason, this did not bother either one of them. “At least we’re a couple of messes together,” she said, so softly it was like a sigh.

Gaea slipped away from her hoof, adopting a resolute expression. “Let’s go find our friends.”

Their careful examination of the cave continued for a little while longer, yielding much the same as before—dead ends, echoing chambers, and geologic features that blended together. In the midst of their wanderings, Chamomile felt something wet beneath her hooves. She looked down, and by some miracle, only a brief chill raced through her.

“Blood.”

Gaea stopped next to her. She stared at the puddle, then looked at Chamomile. An unspoken decision was reached between them, and Chamomile gave a resolute nod.

They traced the puddle’s trail. At times, the trail thickened—the pony had stood still, let the blood drip in one spot, before continuing—then thinned back into a wobbly line. But it didn’t seem like the pony had been moving at an even pace. The trail was closer to a smear than a series of drops.

At one point, it wound around a corner leading them to a narrow corridor, with pumice and basalt replacing the clay. Neither of them was conscious of how their breathing quickened, how adrenaline forced their pain and exhaustion aside.

They raced down the corridor, following the trail—then skid to a stop, letting out a throat-crushing whinny of alarm.

Clip Styles was propped against the wall, his whole body slumped forward. His winter coat had been shredded down to cloth fragments, revealing a torso covered in a patchwork quilt of black-and-blue bruises. His head was lowered, his eyes closed. Blood dripped steadily from his head, pinkening his pale-silver mane. That blood alone, however, was not what had elicited their strangled gasp. It was what protruded above it—or what had protruded above it.

Where his horn had once proudly stood, there was a half-stub. Chamomile could see the brittle grooves where it had been split across the shaft, and it was a clean cut, so clean that it revealed the slightly off-colored nature of the horn’s living bone core, a sponge-like material that made up the extremity’s interior. Chamomile could not turn away, even as her stomach churned at the sight.

Gaea’s voice trembled towards panic. “What the—is he even alive?”

“I think so. A unicorn’s horn isn’t a vital organ.” Chamomile felt coldly detached—I’m in shock, she thought. “There was… there is a story, or a few of them, about some unicorns losing their horns, long ago, and still living.”

“But—”

“I know,” Chamomile said. She tried to keep calm by focusing on everything but the stub. She knelt close to Clip, then held her breath. After a few seconds, she sighed. “Okay. He’s still breathing. I guess the shock is what’s keeping him unconscious.”

“The bleeding, though.” Gaea came forward, audibly swallowing. “We’ve got to stop it. Any ideas how?”

“You’ve got your coat still, and I have mine. Maybe we can tear a couple of clean parts out of them, make some bandages.”

They proceeded to do just that, working quietly yet precisely, ignoring their growing desire to flee from the crumpled form. Gaea’s sleeve and Chamomile’s scrap of scarf were torn up and tied tightly together. Chamomile, afraid to exert her magic past the light she already provided, awkwardly managed to twist the makeshift tourniquet around Clip’s head wound. She tied a knot using her teeth. Blood entered her mouth, but somehow, she managed to not vomit, and it was only after the tourniquet was applied that she turned and spat. A trace of the metallic taste remained no matter how much she expunged.

The bandage darkened considerably, but at least now the blood did not drip down his face. “That’s probably the best we can do for now,” Chamomile said.

“Any idea when he’ll wake up?”

“No idea.” Privately, she wasn’t even sure if that would be a good thing. The stories of unicorns living without horns were, to her memory, vague as to how being hornless could affect the pony. It ranged from slight sluggishness to complete voiding of all faculties—though those were in the more extreme stories. Still, she did not want to think of Clip deteriorating while they were stuck underground.

Then she realized something. “Wait, how’d he get here? He didn’t walk all the way… did he? He was unconscious back on the surface…”

“Maybe he woke up just like we did?”

“Maybe… But do you remember how that blood trail looked?”

Gaea thought back. “Yeah. It was more like a smear than a series of drops. Like he was being dragged instead of walking on his own.”

Just as she said this, a loud whoosh bristled their fur. It came from down the corridor, past the impenetrable darkness. They stepped protectively in front of Clip, Chamomile brandishing her horn like a sword, and looked in the direction of the sound. A second later, there was a crashing sound, hooves landing awkwardly on rock, and a voice: “Ah, darn this stupid thing!”

Chamomile’s eyes widened. “Polar?!”

“Huh? Hey, it’s you guys!” He sounded a bit far off, and Chamomile couldn’t make out his form from the darkness of the cave. “Are you okay?”

“We’re fine!” Gaea answered. “Just some bruises and soreness.” She gulped. “But Clip…”

“Yeah, I saw. I was actually trying to do something about that.”

There was a grunting sound, then shuffling, followed by another grunt filled with pain. Chamomile scanned her surroundings, then took a step forward. “Where are you? I’ll come to you—I have a light—”

“No, it’s fine. You shouldn’t separate from him, anyway. Don’t worry, I’ll come to you.”

“How?”

The answer arrived when he did a few moments later. He grinned, though was enervated, his breathing pained. Sweat glistened his brow. His coat, curiously enough, appeared to be missing. He pointed at his eyes with a hoof. “Pegasus eyes are pretty good at seeing in the dark.”

“Your wing…” Gaea breathed.

His right one was fine, but his left wing was clearly broken. Some feathers were out of place and the whole thing looked like a foal’s approximation of a wing. He glanced at it, and though he spoke calmly, his voice pulsated with exertion. “Yeah. The fall screwed it over good.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?” Chamomile asked.

“Oh, like a beauty. But I’ll manage.”

“At least let us put it in a sling!”

His bravado didn’t last as long as his pain, and so he trudged forward for treatment. Gaea ripped apart the rest of her coat to start creating a makeshift sling. Chamomile noticed that he dragged behind him some sort of sack made from tied-together scarves, tool belts, and his heavy winter coat. “What’s this for?”

“Clip,” he said. “I can’t imagine him waking anytime soon, nor us being in any shape to carry him ourselves for any extended period of time. This should make it easier… yipe!”

His yelp was from Gaea trying to gently place his broken wing into the sling. “That was surprisingly well thought-out for you,” she said.

“When have I never thought things through?”

“What about when you were drinking?”

He winced, then after a moment, let out an impressed chuckle. “Heh. Touché, little pony, touché.”

For some time, the only sounds were Polar’s grunts as Gaea and Chamomile worked to set his wing. Chamomile’s adrenaline was beginning to wear off; pain, familiar like an old love, began to return, and her hidden weariness began to rear its head.

Once the wing was secured, each of them turned towards Clip. “Where’s his horn?” Gaea asked in a haunted tone of voice. “Maybe if we could find it, we could… reattach it, somehow.”

“I think it snapped off during the fall,” Polar said. His voice was low, regretful. “I tried looking for it, but… it might have been crushed under some of those rocks that came with us.”

Chamomile couldn’t stand to look at Clip anymore, so she forced her gaze onto the others. “What were you doing before we found you? Aside from making that drag-net?”

“I heard water—a lake, maybe, one underground.” He pointed back towards the darkness. “I thought I could follow it to its source—maybe it was coming from a mountain stream. If it’s fresh, we could drink it, clean our wounds, clean him. Had to turn back once I heard you, though.”

“Let’s head that way, then. You guys put Clip in the net.” They did so smoothly so as to not wake him.

“I can drag him,” Gaea told Polar just as he was about to slip the makeshift harness around him. He opened his mouth to protest. “Your wing,” she reminded him, both gently yet firmly, like an older sister to a younger brother. “There’d be no sense in you tearing it any further. Besides, you have to lead the way with Chamomile.”

He relented the load with a sigh. After Gaea slipped it on, he joined Chamomile at the front. With a nod of encouragement, she signaled for them to get moving.

With their injured numbers and Chamomile’s magic on low, they had to advance sluggishly through the dank, nebulous chambers, their steps and breathing echoing hollowly like a parody of a percussion section. Gradually the browns and blacks began to transform into lighter, almost greener complexions, and then even lighter, exotic shades of purple and violet. Chamomile reasoned that that was because they had to have passed into the mountains themselves, but this was a guess made only to assure herself that they were making some semblance of progress. Otherwise, the cavern was the same as before—high sloping ceiling, near infinite darkness, and a lack of clear direction. The only difference, she supposed with some relief, was that they were together.

After a time, her ears detected a faint, popping sound. “Water,” she guessed. Next to her, Polar nodded, his brow furrowed in concentration.

“It sounds like it’s coming from this direction.” They made a left and found a ramp of pebbles and gravel sliding upwards. They trudged on, feeling the ground steepen. Gaea nearly slipped a few times, but managed to keep pulling Clip forward. Meanwhile Chamomile’s legs burned with exhaustion, threatening towards a deathly cramp. She didn’t know how long she could keep her magic activated, how much she had left in her.

The ramp plateaued into noticeably softer rock, silt, and clay. The cavern spilled open even more, revealing spines of stalagmites accompanying their ceiling-bred cousins. They kept on, barely taking note of the differences in their immediate surroundings, their minds preoccupied with moving one step at a time.

“There it is!” Polar exclaimed.

Ahead of them lay a lake of dark emerald-green, its surface so clear that it perfectly reflected the rocky surroundings and spiky overhang. It was so large, too, that its edge could not be seen; instead, it vanished into the surrounding darkness like an optical illusion. They paused before it, caught by its sheer size—then Chamomile felt her knees buckle, and with a soft “oof,” she sat on her haunches.

“Whoa, whoa, we can’t stop now!” Polar faced her, wincing as his broken wing awkwardly attempted to follow his body’s movements. “We gotta figure out where it’s coming from!”

“Just give me a second,” she said between breaths. “Not all of us have pegasus stamina.”

He was about to retort, when Gaea said, “We really should rest while we can.” She pulled up next to Chamomile with the harness and Clip still attached. She sounded winded; no doubt carrying Clip while she was fighting off her own pain had been an upward battle in and of itself. But equally no doubt that their last exchange had tired her out as much as it had Chamomile.

“Oog.” Gaea let out a sound that was a mix of a sigh and a groan. “That water looks soooo refreshing. You think I could take a bath in it?”

“Better make sure it’s clean first.”

“How would I do that? Go up, grab a drink like it’s a self-serve bar?”

“Yeah, and hope it isn’t salt water. Might have some pebbles in it, though.” Gaea giggled. Chamomile felt light, and this made her chatty.

Polar looked at the two of them with wide eyes. “Goddess above,” he murmured, “just how badly did you hit your heads?”

But Chamomile didn’t care about the tone he was taking. Through a nearly delirious haze, she watched Gaea stretch out her legs and neck. “Watch Clip, would you?” she told Chamomile. “I’m going to take a sip.”

“A dip,” Chamomile said, some levity in her now.

“Sip, dip, whichever one comes first.” She began to step out of her harness.

“If the water’s clean, we ought to clean his bandages, too,” added Chamomile.

“Good idea. Here I go, then.”

She cracked her neck, then trotted up to the lake. It was miraculous she could express soreness at one moment, then push herself to keep moving in another; Chamomile wondered if it had to do with her farmpony background. Polar was watching them, his mouth slightly open.

Gaea’s lapping filled the air; afterward, her contented sigh. “Oh, goddesses above and below. It’s fresh!”

“Save me a couple of drops,” Chamomile said.

“Get your own, girl, this lake calls to me!”

Chamomile laughed a little. She’d missed this, this levity between them. Amazing what one conversation could do—albeit a conversation conducted in a life-threatening situation. But she still laughed, perhaps because the only other option was to clam up and suffer. Laughter was a distraction from her pain and her spent energies. Laughter, she decided, was necessary.

But the laughter seemed to disturb Polar greatly. He snorted like a donkey, and spoke severely. “All right. You two. You’ve had your fun. Can we get going?”

“Not until I’ve had a chance to rest myself,” Gaea said, coming back over. She looked a little refreshed now that she’d drunk something. She smiled at Chamomile, tiredly but still warmly, like they were sharing a private joke.

“There’s no time for that,” Polar grunted. He stomped towards them. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re currently trapped underground, with one of us unconscious and bleeding. And Clip’s horn—” He hiccupped, unable to complete the statement; he shook his head wildly, grit his teeth, looked at the mares and the mares only. “We can’t let up now,” he forced through his clenched jaw. “He’s hurt, we don’t know how much time he has—ugh!” Polar flapped his wings in an irritated manner, but, forgetting that one of them was broken, he cried out when it pulled against his sling. “I don’t see how any of you can be so calm about all this! Have you forgotten where we are?!””

This managed to break their cheerfulness. Gaea’s voice became defensive. “Hey, whoa, it’s not like we’ve forgotten, Polar. But look, we really are tired—”

“There’s no time to be tired! Don’t you understand that?!”

The fog around Chamomile’s mind began to lift. “Polar, wait—”

But Gaea was growing a little more heated. “Polar, we do understand. But we can’t push ourselves beyond what we’re capable.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

At this, Gaea bristled. “What? Do you seriously think we don’t care about what’ll happen to Clip?!”

“All I know is that we have to keep going, that we have to get out of here!” His voice was growing shriller and shriller by the second. He was nearly spitting his words, now, and his eyes danced with taunting misery. But his voice betrayed something deeper—worry that hid behind the scathing nature of his words. “Yet all I’m seeing are two ponies who would rather go for a swim than actually find a way out!”

“For goddess’s sake, Polar, it was just a joke!”

“Does it look like we’ve got time for a joke?! For resting for even a second?!”

“What’s your problem? Not ten minutes ago you were perfectly calm and level-headed!”

“My problem is that I’m stuck underground with two mares who don’t have the decency to be scared of what might happen—”

“Who says we aren’t?”

Chamomile had hardly raised her voice—it was certainly far quieter than either Polar or Gaea. Yet, somehow, it quieted them with its gentle intensity.

“Who says we aren’t scared, Polar?” She rose, feeling everything in her pop into place. A serene clarity seemed to settle in her mind, and she spoke without haste or hesitation. “Because let me correct you there: I’m scared. Oh, yes, I’m definitely scared. Maybe the most I’ve ever been. I’m scared for Clip, of course.” She looked at him, overcome by pity. “I don’t know if he’ll live for sure, or if he’ll wake up. Or even… If he does, will he still be the same? Will he ever be able to use his magic in the same way? Will it be gone forever?”

She looked from him to Gaea, who seemed startled by the change in focus. “And I’m scared for all of us. I’m scared Gaea won’t get back to her farm, to her father…”

She heard Polar mutter, “Farm? Father?” but she ignored this and faced him. There was an urge to smile, not in a comforting sense, but rather the kind of existential, ludicrously accepting smile one has when facing down sudden and inevitable oblivion. “Heck, I’m scared for you, Polar. I don’t know a whole lot about you, or where you came from, or why you took this job. But I was hoping you’d be able to complete it, whatever your reason, and be able to go home, proud of your accomplishments. But now you might not. I’m scared if that’s truly the case.”

Polar didn’t respond. That was all right—she didn’t need him to.

She looked over the lake. It did look good for a swim, distressingly so, but she became aware of the possibility that if she jumped in, she might not get out. Her hooves might cramp, either from the shock of cold or just sheer fatigue. She might drown and her body might never be found. This should have frightened her into curling up into a ball, and yet, it went in and out of her like a foal’s idle, classroom fantasy. “And I’m scared for me, too. I’m scared I won’t make it out of here. I’m scared I’ll die—everypony is, I guess, but it’s different now, it feels more real, a real terror. And if I don’t make it out, I’m scared for Juniper—my son—”

Here her voice broke; she could not let that thought go on. Next to her she heard Gaea approach, as if to comfort her, but then she backed off.

Polar said nothing. He did not appear particularly struck by the revelation that she had a son.

“And I’m scared that my horn will fizzle out,” she said, pointing up to it. “If it does, we’ll be left in the dark. Sure, you could probably see a bit, Polar, but Gaea and I wouldn’t be able to. You’d be guiding three blind fillies to whoever knows where.”

She looked away from the lake and faced the three of them. An edge came into her voice, but she manipulated it so that it wasn’t as cold. “So yes, Polar, I am scared. We all are—you can bet on that. But let me ask you—what good will being scared do for us? What’ll it do for us? I can tell you right off the bat what it’ll lead to.” She waved a hoof in the air in a general manner. “It’ll lead to this. To more fighting and arguing. And nothing good will come from that. And we won’t make it out then, for sure.”

She sighed. Now it hit her how tired she was. It seeped into her bones, into her soul. “We need to rest. All of us. You’re right that we shouldn’t rest for long—who knows how far we’ve got to go? But we’re going to rest.” She defined this with a short stomp that echoed around them. “Then, when we’re ready… we’ll continue on. For however long that will be.”

Something deep below churned and moaned, like the earth was once again threatening to split. In its wake came the steady drip of water onto the pale-ground they’d heard before—drip—driiip—dri-i-ip. Chamomile looked at that ground, watching the drops disintegrate into the dirt.

Polar fluffed his one good wing, said, “Fine,” and turned around. Chamomile did not watch him go for a time, listening instead as his hooves grew more and more distant. When they stopped reaching her ears, she looked in the direction he had gone. He had gone to the side of the lake to sit, just within the perimeter of her light.

“I’ll go wash Clip’s bandages,” Gaea said, to which Chamomile replied, “Yes,” even though they both knew she wasn’t asking permission.

Chamomile sat back down. She was tired, too tired, it seemed, to properly fall asleep. So instead, she lay on her back and looked at the ceiling. She thought of Juniper, held onto the memory of his face before it could tumble out of reach.

14 - Requiescat In Memoria

Their bedroom didn’t resemble a bedroom anymore. Everything else in the room had been stripped bare so as to make sure that enough space existed for both patient and caregiver. The mirrored vanity had been taken down so that there was more room for the various pill bottles he had been prescribed. The telescope which had been Astral’s prized possession had been moved to the attic without notifying him, and he had spent a few days in a delirium over it, before the fact finally settled sadly in his mind. His papers and scraps of ideas had been shoved into a locker that had also been taken out of the room. The carpet was removed to expose the wood underneath—they did not want particles getting stuck in the fibers and possibly affecting his breathing. They had moved all the drawers to stand outside the room so that the hospice equipment, which consisted of rubber hoses and tubes, a metal rod for hanging fluids from, and rudimentary electronic devices, could sit close to the bed. The doctors said they were meant to check all of Astral’s vitals, but which Chamomile believed were just examples of pointless specialization speaking to the same observation: he was dying. He was dying very soon. She didn’t need the five or so doodads hooked up to their hastily constructed supply of electrical energy to know that.

Even their bed had been changed. The queen-sized mattress which, for years, had been their little hideaway from the world, was in storage somewhere. In its place was a thin hospital bed that had been outfitted to provide maximum comfort to Astral, but which was so small that he was the only pony who could sleep in it. Bars had been constructed so that he could use them to pull himself up, but he always did so with faint noisiness, and it was a struggle to watch. At night, Chamomile had taken to resting in the wheelchair which had brought him from the hospital back to their home. Sleeping in it proved almost as nightmarish as waking, for she could never stay still for more than a few hours, and after the first night, she’d developed a crick in her back that only worsened with every shift of her muscles or bones.

But she’d never complained, though her tongue flapped against the lid of her mouth whenever the pain shot through her. Who was there to complain to, after all? Astral, under a spell of heavy medication, slipped in and out of consciousness, and even had he not been treated to the ambrosia of painkillers, he would not have heard her, for by that point, his world was full of beeping machines beeping and pumping ventilators. Juniper was off-limits, obviously. But so were any friends that might have dropped by to assist.

“If you ever just need to vent,” Penny had told her one day, “I’m always here.” Chamomile knew Penny too well to think that she was doing this out of mere obligation; her word was as true as her name. But she’d never take her up on that offer. To vent would mean giving up, in some way, in surrendering to the forces that wanted her to lose her stoic resolve. It seemed selfish of her to complain of her woes when, just in front of her, was a pony who was suffering without even fully realizing it. How could she allow herself that, if it meant prioritizing her discomfort over the dying?

The ventilator made a hissing sound—a gap had emerged, and air leaked like a cat dripping water onto the floor. Chamomile rose from the wheelchair, feeling everything in her jostle around. Astral’s eyes were closed, but his breathing slightly changed to reflect the disruption of the device. She reached over and re-adjusted it so that it better fit over his mouth, and after a few seconds, his breathing returned to normal—as normal as a shuddery pattern could be. Chamomile sat back down and watched him.

Sometimes, when she watched him, she’d entertain the idea that one day was better than the last. That he was not worsening; that, in fact, he was growing stronger. She’d attribute this to a change in the rhythmic beeping of one of those confounded machines. If the sound was louder, perhaps that was a good sign—his heart was gaining strength, perhaps. Sometimes she’d attribute it to this, his breathing—if it seemed less shallow, less hesitant, less like his body was rejecting the air itself, then perhaps that was a good sign. But she knew that this was nothing more than fantasy. In contrast to their earlier huffing and puffing, the doctors were quite certain as to his state, as well as to its progression. “We’ll do what we can to keep him comfortable,” they’d told her.

“Here, at the hospital?” she’d asked.

“But of course.”

But of course—as though she was expected to accept that for whatever time remained, he would be under the dutiful yet coldly clinical gaze of doctors prone to prod his skin and perform an enormous number of tasks and tests just to see if one hoof would jump over the body to hold the other. No, she told the doctors. That would not be necessary. Astral could no longer stay in a hospital anymore. He had to come home, where he belonged.

That was why all this equipment had been set up, why their bedroom had been steadily converted overnight from a place of respite to a place of final rest. Why their wedding album, which used to sit in a drawer beside the bed, had been replaced with gauze strips and needles and extra catheters. Why framed photographs on the dresser had been usurped by even more pill bottles and vials.

She heard somepony bumble up to the door. Turning her head, she saw that it was Juniper. Despite being three, his father’s condition had somehow aged him to the point where he looked, in certain lights, like an old stallion in a colt’s body, with eyes dulled by untold burdens and lips that rarely smiled. He was quiet when he came in, ambling up to his mother and raising his hooves. She understood the gesture and lifted him up to sit on her lap. He was not much of a talker—he preferred gestures over loud babbling these days—and sometimes Chamomile worried that this was the result of what was happening before him, that he was silencing himself in a freak imitation of Astral also growing quieter and quieter.

They both looked at Astral. If one could ignore the tubes and the machines, one might have thought he was almost at peace. Chamomile wondered if, in that drug-induced haze, he even dreamed, and if he did, if those dreams were good and kind to him, kinder than they were to her.

She glanced down at her son. She wondered how he dreamed. In the nights that followed after Astral had come home, she couldn’t recall if he had any nightmares of his own. He seemed to sleep fine. A part of her—a part that only made her feel guilty and selfish—wished she could be like him in this way—seemingly unperturbed by the situation, without bags under her eyes, a slow gait to her trot, clear evidence of her spiral downward. But to do that she would have to be young, and foolish, and that was impossible.

“I’m hungry,” Juniper said.

“Are you?” Chamomile murmured into his mane. “Very well. Why don’t we eat something?”

“Can we eat here?”

Technically they were not supposed to, in case a mess was made. The body was frail at this stage and an infection or reaction to anything could yield catastrophic results, no matter how slim of a chance that was. But Chamomile saw no point in denying her son the pleasure, however limited, of spending time with his father. “Sure. Just be careful not to spill anything.”

She looked at Astral and said, “We’ll be right back, honey, don’t you worry.” To her mind he might have nodded. But she could easily have been mistaken.

A few times, Astral would be weaned off of the painkillers and the medicine in order to recover consciousness. During those times, he’d almost pass off as normal. He could follow a conversation, respond, even. He could nod his head or look at them. But then Chamomile would observe his body, so thin that the individual bones and joints jutted out of his sagging skin. She’d see the way his smile would strain itself against his lips, like it took every ounce of strength just to move them. He was trying to pass himself off as normal for her sake, she’d easily realized; and thus, for his sake, she’d try to act like she was grateful for it.

“The will,” he said one evening, after Juniper had gone to bed. At first Chamomile didn’t hear him, but when he started to violently cough, she looked up in alarm. He’d removed the ventilator and was struggling to push himself up, and by doing so had caused his body to start coughing.

“Wait, wait,” she said, getting out of the wheelchair to help him. She propped him up with a hoof while, awkwardly, she shifted the pillows around so he could sit up straight. She was always careful doing this, terribly so, because she was afraid that any touch could break a bone or rupture a tube. And Astral was extremely cold, too, despite the many layers of blankets under which he dwelt.

“Thank you,” he wheezed. He smiled, but it was a sickly grimace, one that she could not look at for long.

“What was that you said?” she asked.

“The will. I need to see it.”

They’d made the will shortly after the last hospital visit, back when he was still strong enough to not need artificial means of keeping his faculties. The argument they had about it seemed a lifetime ago, and Chamomile still regretted it. If only she hadn’t been so angry with talking about a last will and testament. If only she hadn’t been so afraid to accept that it was going to happen whether she liked it or not.

She nodded. “All right. I’ll go get it for you.”

She left the room and went up to their attic to find the locked safe in which the will resided. In an empty cabinet she retrieved the key, put it into the safe’s lock, turned it, and retrieved the battered piece of paper, then went back downstairs to give it to Astral. “And a pen,” he croaked. “Could you get me some ink and a pen?”

“You want to make changes?”

“Add something,” he struggled to say.

Chamomile frowned. “But I thought… I thought we’d finished with that.”

“We did. But I remembered something.” He looked at her, and an echo of strength came into his voice. “Have to tell you something on paper, now. It’s important.”

“If it’s so important, I’ll write it—”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. The movement was so fierce, he knocked over the ventilator, and began to cough. The machine beeped angrily. Chamomile went to retrieve it while also attempting to calm his coughing.

“No,” he repeated. “I have to do this.” He looked at her with his star-swirling eyes, the ones that had promised long ago that she was his world entire. “Please let me.”

Please let me. Had he, then, come to the conclusion that she was controlling every aspect of his life at this point? Every meal, every bedpan, every dumping of the bag connected to the catheter?

Ignore that. “Oh… okay, Astral.”

There were no pens or ink bottles in the room. She had to leave to go to Astral’s office, which was not an office so much as it was a medium-sized closet with a single desk, a couple of blank papers, and a few books, to retrieve such items. She opened a drawer and found a bottle, but discovered that all the pens were broken at the tip. When had that happened, she wondered, for it didn’t seem recently he’d been able to write.

Then she discovered the feather quill pen she’d given him for their first anniversary. It was tucked away, alone, in another drawer, perfectly preserved. She held it between her hooves. It seemed frail, frailer than she’d ever remembered, as though a single breath would disintegrate it—and so thinking, she went back to the hospice room without breathing.

She gave both items to Astral. He looked at them, then looked at her. His face was drawn haggard with pain. “Could you give me some privacy?”

It hurt to hear. Hurt even more to nod and accept this. She had the grim thought that even though now she could not see what he was writing, later she would be able to, when he was not around to stop her.

“Just let me know when you’re done,” she said before leaving.

She waited a few minutes, then a half-hour, growing more and more distressed. She called out to him, and he answered, “Almost done,” but she failed to hear the scribbling of the pen upon paper. Still, she waited.

Then finally he called her back in. His face had twisted up and darkened. She thought he was in pain, so she went to inject the medication again. His hoof stopped her. “Take this,” he said, gesturing to the will.

She did. She was about to unroll it when his hoof grasped hers in a surprisingly taut grip. “Don’t read it,” he gasped. “Not yet. Not until…”

“Why?” she asked.

He looked helplessly at her. “Please,” he said. His eyes conveyed a meaning wholly lost to her. His grip began to weaken, and a pained mumble escaped his chapped lips.

Against her instincts, she nodded, promising she would not until it was time. Then she retrieved the syringe, injected it into his IV tube, and watched as he drifted back to sleep.

At the end of the month, he was dead.

Clip was still unconscious when Polar returned from his spot at the edge of the lake. Gaea and Chamomile had just finished washing and replacing Clip’s bandages, twisting and wringing the cloth out over a dry spot, and the dirty bandages had been placed in a pile to be disposed of later. When Polar came, they had just finished discussing when they ought to change the bandages next. The sight of all the bandages had reminded Chamomile of Astral.

“Do either of you have a stick I can use? Preferably one that’s dry?” Polar asked.

Initially surprised to see him, Chamomile looked at Gaea. She began to search their spare supplies for such a thing. Having no bag, she was forced to look through the components of the makeshift harness—specifically, the pockets of its tied-together belts. “I’ve got a few sticks in here,” she said, of one pocket. “I think they were spare crossties.”

She hoofed them over, and he grabbed them and sat down. From his good wing he produced something small and triangular.

“What’s that?” Chamomile asked.

“Flint. I found a good supply of it earlier, before we found each other. I completely forgot I had it when we were busy moving Clip.”

She noticed that he would not look at Clip. It was a deliberate act of avoidance.

“Since we’ve got no flashlights… well, here’s what I mean.” Polar placed one of the crossties on the ground. Then, with the piece of flint, he struck it hard. The scraping sound bounced off of the walls but did not do much else. He struck the crosstie again and again. Soon, a small orange flame manifested like a mystical djinn before them.

Polar let out a self-satisfied hum. “That should do it. You can turn off your magic, now—conserve your energy.” Chamomile did so, feeling the heat of the flame lick her face tepidly. Even though it was so small, she was still grateful for it.

“How long is that going to last?” Gaea asked. “It’s not going to burn through all our air, is it?”

“To the first question—probably as long as this stick is. To the second…” He grimaced. “It shouldn’t, since it’s so small. But we should still keep that in mind.” His eyes flicked to the side, dwelling on something unseen.

Chamomile waited for him to suggest that they stop resting and start moving. But instead, he simply rose, handing the burning crosstie over to Chamomile, who took it in her magic—levitation, with any luck, would not exhaust her reserves. He looked at Gaea. “How many crossties do you have in there?”

Gaea checked. “A couple. Not enough to start a bonfire…”

“But enough to have a few torches on us.” He nodded. “Okay, that’s good. We’d better try not to burn through them all, then. Could you give me one, actually?”

After he had an extra and had made another torch, he cleared his throat. “Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d like to… return to my spot, for now. Just for the time being.”

Chamomile wordlessly nodded, while Gaea said and emoted nothing. He nodded, then turned and walked away. The flame’s light jostled in his wing and threw long shadows over the rocks and other cave features.

“Well, then,” Gaea said, a bit awkwardly. “I’m going to… check over our supplies, then.” There was no need to—they’d already checked it while Polar was away—but Chamomile suspected Gaea needed something to do.

She watched Polar for a time. He had not sat down—instead, he was pacing back and forth, looking at the lake, then away. Every now and then, he’d move in a manner that jostled his broken wing, and he’d wince, but not cry out. It was a strange thing to see, him roving around in a small circle, aimless yet not quite directionless.

“I’m going to go talk to him,” Chamomile announced before she’d even thought it through.

Gaea stopped her inspection to look up at her. “Didn’t you already?”

“This is different. I think he needs someone to talk to.” She looked meaningfully at Gaea, who, after a moment, nodded.

“And you think… he’d talk to you?”

“What choice does he have? Clip’s not awake. And, no offense, but you two got pretty heated there.” She glanced at Gaea, her look apologetic. “I don’t know if he’d want to talk to you just yet.”

Gaea sighed. “Yeah, that’s… fair, I suppose.”

“Trust me on this,” Chamomile murmured. “Please.”

After a moment, Gaea nodded. “All right. Give me your torch. I’ll stay here and watch over Clip. But don’t take too long talking,” she added. “As much as I hate to admit it, Polar’s right—we should move sooner rather than later.”

After giving her the torch, Chamomile trotted to where Polar paced. He didn’t hear her coming until she was mere feet away, and flinched when he saw her. “What is it?” he asked. “Something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. I just…” Now it sounded silly to her, but she ignored her doubts. “I just wanted to join you for a bit, if that’s all right.”

“I… I guess it’s fine.”

Because he would not sit, she decided she wouldn’t, either. Instead, she stood, looking at the lake from this side. Polar continued to pace.

“You don’t like being underground,” she said.

He paused for a moment. Then he chuckled bitterly. “What gave it away? The pacing?”

“We’re all nervous and scared.”

“I know.”

“If you don’t believe that—”

“No, I do, really,” he interjected with quick desperation. “I wasn’t thinking when… when I said what I said, earlier. Pegasi and cramped places don’t really mix, you know? Brings out the worst in us. I’m sorry for that.”

She nodded, accepting the apology, but now she looked at him. She was able to note what she had been unable to note before, when emotions and panic were running high. His hooves, for example, were covered in a thin layer of dirt and dust, but along the front of one leg, she saw a red smear. Traveling over it, she saw that it lined up with a small patch of red on the side of his torso, like he’d had his wing draped over something that dripped red onto his body.

She realized, then, what had happened. “You were the one who carried Clip.”

Polar looked frightened by her observation, but said nothing. She continued: “That explains the blood pattern Gaea and I saw. He couldn’t have moved on his own, could he? He’d been unconscious… but…”

She looked directly at Polar. Her horror mounted. “If… if he’d been rendered unconscious not just by the fall, but by his horn getting cut off, and if you’d found him in that state…”

He looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.” His good wing struck out, as though he was preparing to lift off, but he stayed put, looking at the lake.

“Polar, do you blame yourself for what happened to Clip?” She stepped forward and laid a hoof on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Gaea was telling me earlier about—well, about what might have caused us to fall. If water—”

“I don’t care about the fall!” Polar suddenly exclaimed, throwing her hoof off.

His shout echoed throughout the cave, disturbing the water’s surface. Gaea looked at them, then rose, about to head over, but Chamomile waved her off.

“I just… I just don’t…” He sank to the ground. His shoulders heaved and he covered his face in his hooves. Chamomile lowered herself next to him, but was careful not to touch him. For a time, all that could be heard was a hiccupping, stifled noise. His body convulsed.

“He looked bad,” Polar said after a few moments. His voice was muffled behind his hooves. “He was the first of us I saw, and he looked… he looked like he was dead. I didn’t even register that his horn was missing until I pulled him out from the rubble, and when I did see that, I froze.” He brought his head up and snorted angrily. “I shouldn’t have frozen! He was bleeding, right on top of me, but I just… I just froze up. If I hadn’t, maybe I could have gotten him someplace safe, could have stopped the bleeding, could have gotten him awake, but I just panicked and—”

“But you did get him someplace safe, didn’t you?”

“Yeah? I didn’t even bother covering his head when I did. I just let him bleed and bleed while I went to follow some dumb water.” He groaned, placing his head back under his hooves. “Some recruit I was… no wonder I dropped out.”

Chamomile’s ears perked up at this. But she chose to wait a few seconds, to let Polar recover a bit. Eventually, he brought his head back out, and looked pathetically at the lake, his eyes screwed up and his lips curled with displeasure.

Then she said, “You were a recruit?”

He stiffened, then shook his head. “Agh, you don’t really want to hear about that. Besides, I thought you were here to lecture me about what I said earlier.”

“I never said that. I never said I was going to lecture you about anything. I just said I wanted to join you.” She looked at him, then back at the lake. “Seeing a unicorn without their horn… it’s a scary thing. I think I get that more than you can even imagine. So I don’t blame you for freezing up. And as for what you said earlier…” She tilted her head towards Gaea, though without really realizing it. “Would I be incorrect to think that you were just lashing out because you were scared?”

He said nothing. Chamomile nodded anyway.

She stood for some time, looking at the lake, saying nothing. Their reflections stared slanted at them, and Polar’s flame crackled quietly, coating the small portion of the lake that it could touch in amber. Polar seemed to be trying to scry something out of it, with how intently he peered into its surface.

Chamomile asked, “You were a recruit?”

For a moment she was afraid he didn’t want to talk, but then he said, “I was.”

Terse. But it was a start. She continued cautiously: “For what, exactly?”

“The pegasus royal guard. Back in Zephyr Heights.”

“This was what you were doing before you joined this job?”

“Oh, no. I was a courier before I joined. No, that guard stuff… that was when I was younger.”

He slowly rose to stand beside Chamomile. “I had that dream of joining the guard back when I was a foal, actually. They were the best. Their shiny, polished armor and helmets, their impressive weapons and gear, which they used to protect us—not that there was a lot of protection needed, since even back then, the tribes were divided, and everypony was afraid—” He paused, then chuckled self-consciously. “Well, that’s how it was back when I was a teenager, at any rate.”

“You wanted to join them for the gear?” She realized only belatedly that she sounded almost accusatory.

But Polar didn’t take offense. “That was part of it, sure—they were just that cool-looking—but I also wanted to join because I wanted to protect the Queen and the Royal Family.”

He stopped so suddenly that Chamomile took a second to realize it. He had frozen, his lips slightly parted. He stood as one does when they involuntarily give up some secret. Before she could prompt him further, he said, “The Royal Family. I don’t suppose you know much about them?”

“Not more than anypony else, I don’t think. You have a queen, as you said.” Her mind then flashed back to what had occurred at the station all those days ago. “And a princess. Princess Zephyrina. Zipp.”

“There are actually two princesses. Princess Pipp Petals, and then Princess Zephyrina Storm. Or Zipp.” He nodded near-imperceptibly, but there was a thing in his voice when he said her name. She could not measure or weigh it by any means or factor, couldn’t even say it was something she heard, but it was unmistakably there.

And upon feeling that was there, she found that she recognized it.

“Anyway,” Polar continued, “I joined the guard recruitment program when I was old enough to register. It was tougher than I’d imagined. They made us practice our tennis ball throwing to make sure we could land it on a unicorn’s horn in case of emergency. They taught us how to confuse earth ponies with big words and convoluted sentences. That was alongside the usual physical training, of course, which was itself brutal. Do you have any idea how many burpees a pegasus can do on end?” He laughed. “A lot more than I thought I was capable of going in, that’s for sure.”

Half of those exercises didn’t sound like training to Chamomile, but she didn’t say that. “But you kept going?”

“Of course! I had a dream. I could see myself in that armor, serving the Queen and the city and…”

He trailed off so suddenly that this time, Chamomile looked at him. His face had erupted into a terrific blush, in such a way that it made him seem like a schoolboy caught passing notes. It didn’t take long to infer what he meant, and she couldn’t help but smile at him. “And Zipp.”

Another nod. “When you’re a kid growing up in Zephyr Heights, you get to know a lot about the princesses and the queen. Queen Haven likes to keep up a good public appearance, and Princess Pipp—well, she’s got her livestreams, and her daily vlogs. They both make it so that royalty doesn’t feel all that far away. And this was back when we thought they were the only ones who could fly. But Zipp… Zipp was different. She didn’t like the limelight as much as her mother and sister did, maybe even shied away from it. She didn’t have as many fans as Pipp, either, and didn’t like being pushed into the public’s eye. She was about as much of a princess as, well, you or me, really.”

“Did you meet any of them during training?”

“Of course! They’d come out every now and then to check on the progress of the recruits. The first time, we were doing basic tennis ball drills. And I was so nervous because—well, I mean, come on, the Queen and the princesses were watching!” He laughed at himself. “When it was my turn, I chucked that ball so hard that it crashed against the opposite wall and, on the rebound, almost struck Zipp in the face—thank the goddesses she ducked. I was mortified!”

But he said this in a cheery tone, one that caused Chamomile’s lips to twitch a little. “Did you get into a lot of trouble?”

“Oh, I might have. My drill sergeant probably would have kicked me out then and there. But Zipp, well—all she did, after she’d retrieved the ball, was walk up to me, hoof it back, and say, ‘Nice arm, recruit.’”

He was grinning, reveling in the memory. “It was then when I figured out what made her different from her mother and her sister. She had this kind of coolness about her, but it was a coolness that didn’t call attention to itself. She just… knew how to act. How to lead. Pipp might be more confident than her sister, but Zipp… Zipp isn’t afraid of anything, I don’t think. And that’s truly admirable.”

He paused, then said quietly, like he was afraid Zipp might hear, “That’s why I think that she’d be a great ruler, even if she doesn’t think she would. Sometimes, during training, I thought about telling her that, but…” He shook his head. “Well, it’s not my place to decide who should succeed Queen Haven. It’ll be Zipp, or it’ll be Pipp. Either or.”

There was a brief interlude where he seemed to have run out of things to say. Chamomile filled it with a question that was not much of one: “You liked her, didn’t you?”

He made a sound—one that escaped audible definition, but which conveyed his embarrassment, and which made her giggle. “I didn’t—I never—oh, laugh it up, then why don’t you?”

“It’s fine,” she said, still laughing. “It’s cute, really. No, don’t look at me like that—I mean it in a nice way. It’s cute!”

Gradually, her laughter infected him, and he sat down next to her, also laughing quietly. If Gaea heard them, she did not indicate it. Perhaps she was happy to hear that the conversation was going well.

Then Polar sighed. It was a decidedly whimsical, sentimental sigh, the kind one might hear in overplayed movies. It was long and held a trace of melancholy in it, too, such that Chamomile’s laughter dried up and she looked at him in confusion.

“Yes,” he said. “I did like her. Oh, but it’s such an old tale, isn’t it? So cliché.”

“What do you mean? What is?”

“This one. Mine. A lowly knight-in-training falling for his princess in the castle.” He looked at Chamomile, smiling sadly. “In training, the recruits had this little poll: which of the princesses do you like the most? It was a silly thing, I know—churlish, really—but, well, predictably, almost everypony preferred Pipp. They said she was cute. They said she was feisty. I never answered that poll, because it seemed wrong—like you were tallying up someone for artificial reasons—but if I had to… I would have chosen Zipp in a heartbeat.”

“And… Did you ever tell her that?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to, but I just couldn’t find the courage to. I thought it’d be inappropriate during training, at any rate, so I tried to focus on that instead, and what came after, well… I’d figure it out from there.” His brow furrowed and his voice became regretful. “But in the end, it didn’t pan out the way I wanted. I flunked out of the guard. Just couldn’t keep up with the others, I guess.”

He paused, then said, “That was years ago, though. I’m over my dream of joining the guard. I like my courier job. Heck, I like this job! For the part I was able to do, anyway…”

“But Zipp…”

Chamomile wasn’t sure where she was going with this. Polar looked at her in confusion, and she almost apologized—but then she remembered how he acted when he was drunk, then how he’d spoken in the medbay when Chamomile went to visit him on her own. His denial of any significance to him asking Zipp if she remembered him—it all made sense. “That’s what you meant,” she realized out loud.

“What?”

“You remembered her from training. And you thought…”

His face fell. She’d hit upon it at last, but it was clear that he didn’t want her to. Still, he let out a resigned sigh. “Man, maybe I’m getting transparent in my old age…” He shook his head. “Yeah. It’d been years since I’d seen her in pony, really. I thought that I’d put those feelings aside, but when I saw her at the station, it… It just all came rushing back. I guess I never learned how to let things lie.”

Yes, that’s certainly one way of putting it. “But how you acted—”

“I’m not proud of it, no. But I think I know why I acted the way I did.” He raised his head, and a degree of tragic nobility entered his torch-illuminated profile. “She’d made an impact on me, so much so that I couldn’t forget what she’d done and how she’d made me feel. I guess I thought… that it’d go both ways between us.”

“Polar…”

“I know. It’s stupid. I should just move on.” He hesitated, then said, “But I just don’t know how. How do I move on from that, if it’s clear I never left it behind?”

He was looking at her for an answer, his eyes large and pleading. Suddenly she thought they resembled Juniper’s eyes and how they’d appeared during Astral’s funeral, how they’d looked at her, at once frightened and confused, wanting to know how he could understand this, how he could move past this, how anyone could put back together this world.

She gave Polar the same answer she’d never been able to give her son, but which she knew to be true all the same: “I don’t know.”

Bile-tasting regret filled her body when she saw Polar’s weary nod. “Yeah… Yeah, I guess nopony does.”

“But you have to move on somehow,” she insisted. “You can’t be stuck in the past forever…” Her voice ceased. What was she saying? Who was she to say such things, when… when…

“I know,” Polar said. He turned away from the lake. “I know that. Consciously, I do. I just… Well, maybe…”

Then he fell silent. The flame at the end of the burning crosstie seemed to diminish ever so slightly, threatening to be put out. She thought about giving him an apology, but could not imagine how to word one. How things are—sometimes there are no apologies for it. They just are what they are.

Just as she was about to get up and leave, he said, “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Chamomile. I… I think I needed that.”

She looked at him. “You… you did? But I didn’t do anything.”

“You talked. And you listened.” He looked back at her and smiled. “Who knows? Maybe after this, when we get out of here, I’ll tell her the truth. Might as well try to get some closure there while I can, before the job’s over.”

Chamomile said nothing, mostly because she wasn’t sure what more to say. Polar leaned over and touched her on the shoulder. “Give yourself some credit. You talked and you listened,” he repeated. “Trust me. That counts for something.”

She stared at him in shock. Then, slowly, she nodded. “… All right, Polar. I’ll try.”

Then the two of them stood silently, watching the lake and their reflections and the flame behind Polar’s wing, and Chamomile felt quite strange; she was not happy, but she was not upset. She felt herself transitioning out of some state into another. What did it mean, to feel such transience? Was it a good thing? Could she trust it?

They heard Gaea calling them: “Um, guys? I think Clip’s waking up!”

15 - Crystal Chamber

Clip was, remarkably, coherent. Aside from the bruises stitched across his body, he spoke of no pain. Not even his horn throbbed. Yet it was clear he was in a daze—though his horn did not physically ache, the stunted stub had resulted in a fogginess that, according to Clip, made his head feel like it was partially submerged.

But dutifully he listened as they summed up everything that had happened. Chamomile was careful to keep her and Polar’s conversation to herself, figuring that it was a private matter. For her reticence, Polar seemed grateful, and while Gaea could tell that she left things out, she did not ask what had occurred between them.

“And that’s everything,” she finished, almost breathlessly. It occurred to her that all she had spoken about had happened only a few hours ago, yet she felt like she had recalled more than a month’s worth of horrific experience. Looking at her companions, she saw similar bewilderment on their faces. Time underground was a powerful spell. It melted reality and refashioned it into something that made recollection itself an ordeal.

Clip had spoken rarely throughout the explanation, and now she looked at him with concern. His head was bowed and his brow furrowed, showing that he was thinking, but with his head tilted this way, he could not help but point the stubby horn at them. Chamomile had to fight off her nausea, and next to her, Gaea and Polar were similarly fighting their own disgust.

“I see,” Clip said after a time. “And there’s no way for us to get out the way we came.”

“None,” Gaea said. “We fell too far. The opening’s sure to be sealed.”

“So traveling ahead—that’s our only option?” He glanced up, chewing his bottom lip. He was wrestling with a particularly uncomfortable thought, Chamomile realized, but seemed to be waiting for permission to share it.

“It… would appear to be,” Polar said, his discomfort with his friend’s condition very much apparent.

“I see,” Clip said again. “And yet, there’s no guarantee that up ahead… well, that there’s anything up ahead?”

“The lake,” Chamomile began to say, but Clip interrupted her: “Yes, the lake, but that could easily lead to another chamber, another cavern below us. It could lead to a mouth too small for us to navigate.”

They looked at each other. The possibility was there, and they had each thought of it, but only Clip had had the courage to bring to light what they all feared was true.

“We don’t have much of a choice,” Chamomile ventured. “And… you being in this condition…”

He winced, glancing sharply up at his horn. “I… I am aware. I just don’t like the idea of having to wander through more caves.”

“None of us do,” Gaea said, “but… we’ll be together.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s right.” He looked, then, at the two mares. The look seemed to convey that he had sensed a difference in their behavior from how they’d acted before the fall. Chamomile wondered how he could tell. But before she could ask, he gave a self-satisfactory nod. “No choice but to go through, then. Well, that’s not so bad.”

“Was that a joke?” Polar asked.

“An attempt at it. Why? Was it distasteful?”

“No, it…” Polar blinked. “I didn’t think you joked, to be honest. Or even got the concept.” Next to her, Gaea coughed into her hoof, a poor attempt at concealing a surprised bout of laughter.

Clip pouted. “What? I do joke, from time to time. Ask Chamomile and Gaea. They heard me, right? You remember, back at the Badlands?”

Whether he had intended for it to happen or not, the resulting laughter at Clip’s fumbling brightened the somber mood. “All right, all right,” he grumbled at them. “If you’re done mocking me…”

Chamomile, once she had calmed, asked if he could stand. Clip tried to; he swayed a bit but remained relatively poised. When asked to walk, he did so in a circle, and seemed capable. “All right,” she said. “But if you feel any dizziness or weakness, you let us know so we can stop.”

“I will,” he replied. Then he tilted his head. “Actually, I had another question about everything you just told me. A quick one, I trust.”

“What is it?” Gaea prompted.

“You’ll recall that right now, we’re under those very same mountains we saw—the ones covered in snow. And we’re pretty far north, correct? And underground, too, with not much of a heat source besides those torches.”

“Yeah, and…?”

“So,” he said, punctuating the word by dragging a hoof over the ground, “if it’s cold up there, and, in theory, it should be cold down here—why aren’t any one of us shivering?”

None of them could answer him. Chamomile hadn’t even realized it. She had felt chills, yes, but actual drops in temperature? That hadn’t even occurred to her. But now that Clip brought it up…

Seeing their disquieting expressions made Clip whinny self-consciously. “Well, so much for an innocent question…”

“Maybe we’ll find out as we go along,” Gaea suggested. But it was really a prompt for them to get going, and none of them wanted to dwell on the matter any longer.

Their route was simple—they would follow the lake upstream as previously planned, to find out from where it originated. This plan, however, was now colored with Clip’s observation, though none wanted to point this out. They would use the torches as much as they could, but when they burned out, Chamomile’s magic would have to be substituted. If her magic failed, they would be reliant on Polar’s eyes. Doing so would make progress slow—hardly ideal. And should anything happen to Polar, then they would be left even more blind.

The torch cast long shadows over their backs and painted their faces in a ghoulish orange light. Their expressions were vaguely ominous, as grave as fireflies at summer’s final evening. If this was the last leg of their journey, none knew how long it would be, or even if they would see it through. But between the four of them was sealed a mute covenant. They had started this journey together. Now they would end it just the same.

After they’d packed their supplies, and after Gaea cast one final look at the glittering pool, they formed a close-knit line and proceeded forward. Chamomile and Polar took the lead, the latter holding the torch in his working wing. The ground sloped a little as they trailed the edge of the lake, which they followed as it narrowed to a gently flowing stream that babbled and gurgled almost seductively. Not even here was the air remotely cool. There seemed something remarkably artificial about the temperate atmosphere, but Chamomile couldn’t figure out what.

They passed columns of dolomite, rows of flowstone, and walls of both those and limestone, while the river steadily curved up and up at a very slight angle. They ducked under needle-like stalactites and herded around oddly shaped pillars of salt and stone, hoofsteps echoing sonorously behind them. At points, the sense that they were climbing faded, and Chamomile worried that the river they followed was of infinite and unyielding length; then there would be a turn, a clear slope, a sound of water rushing from one higher plane to a lower one, and her perspective would re-adjust.

They traveled in quelled silence, agreeing, perhaps, that further conversation would waste both air and time. Their shadows followed like mocking, warped pageantry puppets that stretched and bent at every flicker of flame. The torch itself burned quicker than Chamomile had thought it would—and she couldn’t tell how far they’d come, if “far” was indeed a justified approximation.

Polar yelped just as the flame crawled down the stick and stung him on the tip of his feathers. The pain caused him to jerk back, instinctively loosening his hold on it. “Agh—no!” he cried, for the crosstie-torch, its flaming end up, bounced away with a skeletal clatter. He darted forward to grab it, but missed. The torch was sent over the edge and into the water, extinguished—and leaving them in total darkness.

Chamomile’s heart raced and a panicked whinny nearly escaped her lips.

“Your horn,” Gaea whispered to her. Chamomile felt foolish—she’d become so reliant on the torch so quickly, she completely forgot about her magic. After a grateful nod towards Gaea—whom she could not see—she lit her horn.

Immediately, however, she noticed something wrong. “It’s not as strong as before, is it?” she asked Gaea.

Gaea nodded. “You must have drained it quite a bit earlier.” Her eyes stared at the thin beam of light emanating from the tip.

“In that case, we should act quickly,” Clip said. “Gaea, you have the extra ties?”

“Yeah. And Polar, you have the flint?”

“I do. Move the ties up here.”

Gaea reached into the belt’s pocket and brought one of them out. She awkwardly attempted to move it up, but stumbled a bit. The stick slid out of her hooves and landed in front of Chamomile.

She was about to grab it, when Clip bent down and took it in his teeth. “Careful!” Polar said. “You don’t want to get any spit on it!”

“Dn’t wrry,” Clip said around the crosstie. He turned and deposited it into Polar’s outstretched wing. “P-too! Those things taste like battery acid.”

“I don’t think I want to know how you know what that tastes like.” Polar positioned the stake vertically, then, after he’d balanced it, he struck it three times with the flint. This time, the flame was quicker in catching, and he brought the torch back up. He let out a sigh of relief. “Okay. That’s that. Gaea, how many do we have left?”

She paused to count. “Not a whole lot. Maybe four left in total. We used the rest earlier.”

Polar shook his head. “My fault for dropping it. I’ll try to avoid doing that from now on.” He wrapped his wing around the bottom of the tie, making sure to keep the flame away from the feathers, and brought it up. “Now, let’s see where we are—”

His screech caught them unawares, sending Clip tumbling back into Gaea. “What is it?!” Chamomile exclaimed, rushing to Polar’s side.

His whole face, already pale, had lost even more color. “Look,” he said shakily, nodding at an area in front of them.

She did, and nearly screeched herself.

Like a grinning madmare, a skeleton—a pony’s skeleton—sat against the far wall. Dust coated its exposed shoulders, limbs, and ribcage. Some sort of tattered jacket remnant hung mournfully around its torso, so heavily aged that it was without color, and a cap rested on top of its head—blue with gold trimmings, like a mail carrier’s. A horn protruded out of the skull, providing a painful reminder of Clip’s condition.

“A unicorn?” Gaea said, coming up to them to look. “What’s a unicorn doing this far north?”

Empty sockets and unnaturally pristine teeth answered her question. Gaea shivered.

Clip came to the other side and inspected the headpiece. “That cap… doesn’t it remind you of something, Chamomile?”

She thought about it. “Now that you mention it… it’s kind of what the mail carriers back in Bridlewood wear.”

“So it’s a courier of some sort.” She looked at Polar, hoping for confirmation, but he refused to look at the skeleton.

Clip looked around the body and noticed a strange lump placed behind it. Apparently unfazed by the skeletal remains, he deftly stuck his hoof out to grab it. It was a small satchel. Across its flap was some sort of insignia: a blueish heart, faded, that seemed to resemble crystal, with gold trims holding it up. “If I had to guess, they were delivering something,” he said, the only sign of his perturbation being the quiver in his voice.

“Mail? Down here?” Chamomile asked.

“It seems more likely that she came here as a last resort. Why else would she have no signs of supplies?”

As a last resort… Did that mean that she hadn’t meant to fall down here? And if that was the case…

“She must have come in from wherever the lake originated,” Polar said. Fear quivered in his voice, but it was lined with confidence at the possibility. “That could be our way out!”

Clip brought the satchel up and flipped open the flap. He paused. “I’d ask if we could stop and read the contents, but… I sense we really ought to keep moving.” He looked to Chamomile and Polar for guidance.

“Can you read while we walk?” Polar asked.

He shook his head, then pointed to his missing horn. “The torchlight will help me see, but I can’t hold the letter and walk. If I had my magic…”

“Here,” Chamomile said, before any awkwardness could settle. “I’ll use mine.” She lit her horn and began to pull out whatever was inside.

“Are you sure?” Gaea asked. “You could burn yourself out.”

“A simple levitation shouldn’t result in that. Besides, this feels pretty light. It won’t tire me.” The truth was that she had no way of knowing her limits. But she did know that worrying would do them no good. She hoped that she sounded calm enough and that they wouldn’t question it.

“In any case, let’s get going.” She looked at the skeleton one last time, mostly out of an uncanny sense of courtesy. If her mind was not playing tricks on her, she might have sworn it seemed to nod in an urgent manner, trying to hurry them along.

A letter was revealed while they resumed their close-knit walk. After Chamomile unfurled it, Clip made a disappointed hum. “The ink has faded in areas,” he reported. “Some of the words are missing.”

“But you can still make them out, right?”

“A few. Let’s see here…” He cleared his throat and, as they walked, began to read out loud by the light of the torch.

Scouting Report: NC005F

Carrier: Lucky Break

Designation: Priority Alpha…

Dear Princess…

The numbers you sent have been confirmed on our end. No more thaumaturgical background presence in anything but the most central of sectors. Magic is… If Starswirl was still around, he might have been equally impressed and terrified…

[“A whole paragraph is missing,” said Clip. “But it doesn’t look like the result of time. It’s more like someone scraped it away, with some fine instrument.”]

But we’ve noticed activity coming from under the… impossible to pinpoint. There’s little doubt in my mind that it has to be… must not have finished him off properly last time, or otherwise he held onto something…

Oh, enough of the formal talk. Auntie, I still can’t understand why you thought…

[“Auntie?” Gaea asked. Clip shrugged. Polar asked him to continue.]

… I’ve dispatched six couriers with six copies of this report. But only one of them contains the true message. Please forgive my… have to account for growing dissent in… And the Houses are… I fear calamity may very well be at our doorstep.

Trust nopony. We don’t know who has and hasn’t been compromised… just last Tuesday one of my guards apprehended a maid who’d loitered outside of Dad’s… poison in the glass she’d been about to offer…

[The text, Clip noted, now had odd dark stains on it. Not ink, though—lighter. “Tears?” Gaea suggested. But that surprised Chamomile, who did not think tears could last for years on a page—not unless they were somehow special.]

… Mother sleeps little, and I haven’t gotten more than a few hours. Trying to keep the Kingdom from panicking is proving a monumental strain… if you are also having nightmares, then it seems what Princess… is true. Our governance over the realms is in peril.

I’m scared, Auntie. More scared than I’ve ever been. Sometimes I’ll awaken in the dead of night, turn on my lamp and—I swear—see a smoky shadow dart into a corner and vanish… Sunburst wrote and said the School is experiencing greater amounts of insomnia and paranoia, the likes of which haven’t been seen since that filly tried to…

… I trust your judgment, but I worry anyway. You’ve defeated him twice, yes, but that’s two times too many. And now with magic… Tyrants should stay dead, even forgotten. Otherwise their shadows will rise again. And I don’t speak metaphorically…

… write to you soon… hopefully we’ll have stopped him before he escapes… Mother says she may have to seal herself away as a final countermeasure…

The letter ended there. There was no signature attached and no other sign of the original writer. They paused for a moment to let Chamomile fold it into one of their bags, yet none of them appeared ready to move on.

“Six copies, six couriers,” Gaea eventually said. “That’s one heck of a safety measure.”

“But safety for whom?” Clip asked. “Or from whom, for that matter?”

“The carrier—I guess that’s Lucky Break back there—never arrived, so… were they holding the complete report?”

“And the stuff about magic…” Polar murmured. “The nightmares… tyrants…”

“Him,” Chamomile said. Even uttering that specific word seemed to draw a foul presence around them. “Whoever he was… he had ponies scared. Like that Princess this pony was writing to.”

Then, almost unconsciously, they looked behind them. An immense darkness had spilled out over the walls and floor and had devoured the river flowing in the opposite direction. By now, they should have been comfortable with that darkness, having walked out of it. But at present this shadowy oblivion seemed supernaturally enhanced, made of shadows darker than void-full black, promising some hideous, macabre display of horrors to seize a pony’s wild and fear-driven imagination. This seemed like true darkness, the utter absence of anything not fit to that mold.

“We need to keep moving,” said Chamomile, unable to contain her unease.

They pressed on. All the while, Chamomile thought back to that unicorn, Lucky Break. What were they doing down here? If Clip was right, that they didn’t originally mean to, then that must mean they’d been forced into these caverns. They could not have failed to deliver the letter otherwise.

But if that was true, who, or what, had forced them?

They’d burned through two more of the crossties when Polar stopped without warning, and Chamomile, watching the water as it traveled behind a funnel-like column of rock and out of view, bumped into him. “Polar?”

“Do you see it?” he whispered.

“See… what?”

“There.” With a hoof he pointed down the tunnel. “There’s something glowing.”

“I don’t see anything,” Gaea said, and Clip concurred. Polar let out a troubled hum.

“No, I’m sure there’s something glowing up there…”

Chamomile wondered if his eyes were simply fatigued, or if they were constructing a visual hallucination as a result of their mindless wanderings. “Well, let’s keep going,” she said placatingly.

They didn’t have to travel much farther. Within a few minutes after Polar had noted it, Gaea said, “Wait, now I think I see something. It’s like… purplish?”

“I see it, too,” Clip muttered. And so had Chamomile. They glanced at each other, before curiosity hurried them forward.

After ducking around the corner—which led away from the flow of water they’d been following—they skidded to a stop. An imposingly tall, hefty chamber, rising an uncountable number of feet into the ceiling, was home to equally imposing crystals. Each one glowed a variant of the violet spectrum, but unlike the artificial glow from most other light sources, they seemed far livelier, like purple suns captured in rectangular prism. Some were small, grouped together in plate-sized nodes along the ground and twinkling like mauve stars, while others were as large as a pony, protruding out of the ground defiantly. Some were even larger and seemed to make up sizable portions of the wall, cutting through bits of stone and rock and coating every surface in that hue.

In the center of the chamber was a different crystal. Smaller than most others, it was a bright ruby red and glowed with a quieter luminosity. But it seemed to vibrate dangerously with power and life, as though the energy that flowed through it was only just barely contained by its crystalline structure. Something about it, more than its exquisite complexion, drew Chamomile’s eye. A quick glance at Clip revealed that he, too, was intently focusing on it.

But also written on his face was hesitation. It was something that Chamomile felt, as well. Something didn’t sit right with either of them, but that feeling of uncertainty seemed to exist only on the periphery.

Gaea was the first to speak. “Goodness,” she breathed. Throwing caution to the wind, she trotted past the others and up to one of the crystals embedded in the wall. Before Chamomile could call out to her, she reached a hoof out and touched it. “It’s warm!” Her hoof traveled to one of the pony-sized ones. “So’s this one!”

Polar was the next to move. He touched one of the nodes in the ground with the tip of his good wing. “Huh. So are these. They must all be warm.”

Curiosity persuaded him to also forgo all caution. He joined Gaea as she darted from crystal to crystal. “This must be why the whole cave isn’t a freezing hole for us!” she exclaimed. Her reflection jumped from crystal to crystal as she did, growing either longer or shorter, thinner or thicker, depending on which one.

Chamomile and Clip exchanged looks. He shrugged. “Well, we might as well take a look.”

Chamomile nodded. But she’d distinctly heard the note of trepidation in Clip’s voice. Yet surely there was nothing amiss. Sure, a chamber full of crystals wasn’t exactly natural, but as far as she could tell, they weren’t in any danger. Perhaps it was just a strange natural place under the earth, much as these tunnels were.

She trotted forward, glancing at each geode. She noted that the shimmer coming from them seemed to ebb like how a flame does, reminding her again of the star analogy. Intense and unyielding, it made her squint and look away, and she was surprised that neither Polar nor Gaea appeared affected. In fact, as she observed them, they seemed to grow a bit calmer. Gaea’s exclamations grew less frequent until she was hardly making any sound. The two moved between the crystals, watching their reflections stare mutely back at them.

Chamomile found herself approaching the red crystal. So was Clip. They looked up at one another, blinking, and that familiar peripheral sense of uncertainty flashed at the corners of conscious feeling. But it was only a flash—not enough to stop her from entertaining her own curiosity. She figured it was just her exhaustion talking.

Clip looked at the red crystal, and Chamomile joined him at his side. Their reflections appeared slightly warped, like a prank mirror. “These crystals,” he said, “they’re… familiar, aren’t they?”

“They look a little like the ones in Bridlewood. But I thought those ones grew out of the ground.”

“That’s what we were told. But we were also told that magic just went away one day, remember?”

“You think there’s a connection?”

“Maybe. It might explain that unicorn skeleton from before.” He tilted his head, examining his reflection, but his focus was on that thought. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious to me that we unicorns didn’t all come from Bridlewood. We just live there now. And according to what we know now, all ponies used to live together all across Equestria. So maybe some of us—us unicorns, I mean—came from the north, too.”

It seemed not an entirely unlikely idea. But it didn’t explain the unknown, heart-shaped insignia on the skeleton’s belongings, nor, in fact, what it was doing down here in the first place.

While he stared at the crystal, Chamomile looked at their other companions. She saw that their mouths were moving, but, for some reason, she couldn’t hear them make any sound.

That peripheral uncertainty took a step towards conscious feeling again. She watched their mouths, deeply troubled, but unsure why.

Something’s not right.

She nearly started. Who’d said that? It sounded vaguely male, vaguely familiar. She looked at Clip, but he had a troubled expression on his face. He paced around the giant crystal, glanced up at the ceiling, looked back at the crystal, and hummed inquisitively to himself.

Yet she couldn’t hear his humming. Why couldn’t she…

Something’s not right, Chamomile.

That was… Astral? Why did it sound like him? Why did it sound so certain, too?

Trying to understand why she thought she heard him, she looked back at Gaea and Polar. Gaea had picked up a small gem of her own and was tossing it between her hooves happily. Polar had approached one of the taller crystals again to check out his reflection, but he seemed to be chanting something—something that she couldn’t hear. Which was strange, she figured, because it wasn’t as though he was that far away. By all accounts she should have been able to hear whatever he was saying, let alone understand it… right?

She then thought: where was the water? They should have still been able to hear it through the walls, since even though they’d veered away from it, it had to be somewhere close by.

Something’s not…

Why? She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to stop that thought—that imitation of Astral—from droning on and on. Another sound had to take its place—it was the only way to drown it out. She strained her ears, trying to focus on anything but the thought, anything that the others were saying, doing, anything—

Her eyes snapped open when she realized it.

She felt, suddenly, Clip back into her. He was shaking. They both were. “Chamomile,” he said—did he say it, or did he whisper? It was like his voice was being pulled out of him, one octave at a time. “This might sound crazy, but… I think something’s wrong.”

“It’s not crazy.” She forced herself to swallow. It hurt, or seemed to hurt, straining her ears just to hear his voice, just to hear her own. “I… I just noticed something.”

“Me, too.” He paused. “You go first.”

She sucked in a breath. “Clip… You can hear me, right?”

“Yeah… Barely.”

“Can you hear Gaea and Polar talking?”

“… No…”

“Do me a favor. Hit the ground. As hard as you can.”

He shuffled, confused. But then she felt him rear up and bring a hoof down. She closed her eyes, hoping she was wrong.

A moment passed. Then another.

“Chamomile.” Clip’s voice was hoarse. She, unable to speak, nodded. “I stomped, but… I didn’t make a noise.”

She let out a breath, and yet not even that elicited a sound—it was more like her mind supplied her with the memory of what sudden exhalation sounded like. “Yeah. That’s what I noticed.” She looked at him, catching how his eyes simultaneously revealed both his attempts at solving this, and the wild, undulating panic that she felt building inside of her.

“I can’t hear any movements,” she continued. “I can’t hear Gaea tossing that gemstone, or Polar chanting, or any sign of water. Or you stomping. Clip, there’s… there’s no sound here, except for our voices, when we’re close to one another.”

He nodded, agreeing with the assessment. “That… is certainly strange. And it makes no sense. We’re not in a vacuum—we can still breathe—so…”

She gulped. “What did you notice?”

She watched the bob in his throat go down, then up. “It… may be related to this… auditory phenomenon.”

He pointed at the red crystal. His hoof was trembling. “At first, I thought it was because of my head injury”—he said this with clinical detachment, making her shiver—“but now I am not so sure. Would you be so kind as to lean forward a bit and… listen to the crystal?”

She didn’t want to. She had a vague premonition that she would regret it. But the fear in his voice and eyes appealed to a perverted intrigue. With a nod, she leaned forward, her horn but a breath away from the crystal’s surface. She closed her eyes and listened.

There was nothing at first, and, combined with the dumb-hole they were in, the lack of sound seemed to drive her mind in circles, desperate to find the needed auditory stimulation. Then, however, she heard something—or perhaps felt was more accurate, yet it bordered so close to something she could hear, that it was maddening. The best way she could describe it was as a buzzing sensation, not unlike one she might feel were she to cast her magic—and like that, it seemed to come from inside her head. Yet she dimly sensed that it was also coming from the crystal. It was echoing—no, that wasn’t the right word. It was resonating. Like two magnetic poles calling out to one another.

And she felt herself being called, being pulled, like she was falling into the crystal itself. She heard her voice describe the buzzing to Clip, heard him agree, but everything seemed dulled and fading, like her head was submerged in a thick, viscous liquid. Deeper and deeper did that sensation bore into her mind, and louder and heavier did that buzzing rain, until it was all she could hear, feel, taste, touch, smell, until it was her, it was everything, all of existence condensed into the one throbbing note of buzzing eternal—

All at once, it stopped. A vast emptiness consumed her, like all had been wiped out.

Then—she heard it.

A voice, formless, shapeless, yet unmistakably male, shattered and scattered into infinite shards of nothing, reeking of unhinged, unrestrained malice.

I. SEE. YOU.

Chamomile threw herself backwards away from the crystal. When she landed, the lack of a sound to accompany her resulted in dizzying disorientation. She was hyperventilating but could hardly make out her breath over the sound of blood beating like sinister timpani drums in her head.

Clip ran to her. “Chamomile? What—”

She seized his outstretched hoof. She didn’t bother trying to hide her shaking, in either her body or her voice—shaking which she was grateful for, for it meant that her voice was still working. “We need to leave. Now.”

He nodded, fear freshly bursting in his eyes. “I’ll gather our supplies and start looking for a way out. You round up the others.”

She didn’t like the idea of him being any distance away, but there was no other option. She stood, legs about to give under her, and ran for the rest of their group, trying to ignore how her hoofsteps refused to thud.

Gaea was playing with her crystal gem, muttering something about how “This is sure to buy back the farm.” And Polar, over by another crystal, seemed utterly hypnotized by it. Chamomile didn’t bother being polite. She knocked the gem out of Gaea’s hoof, and when the earth pony was about to argue, she pushed her face into hers and said, “We’re going!”

Something in her voice must have pierced whatever compulsion had so effectively enraptured Gaea, for she blinked, as though seeing for the first time. “Going…?”

“Yes! Now!” Chamomile declared. She pulled Gaea to her hooves and, not bothering to explain further, ran over to Polar. “Let’s go!”

But he did not seem to hear her. He tilted his head, staring at the crystal, at the warped reflection therein. Chamomile tried to pull him away, but it was like something had nailed him to the ground. He would not—or could not—budge. Frantic, she tried to appeal to Gaea for help, but saw her instead draw closer to that same crystal, like a moth to a flame. Her eyes seemed to gloss over like she was falling asleep.

“Come on, you two!”

The way they’d come was shrouded in darkness—yet Chamomile’s eyes were drawn to it, like they sensed, before her brain did, that something about that darkness was wrong. Like it was a darkness that could not exist on this earth. She stared without comprehending, fear and loathing building to a shrieking symphony inside of her.

Then the darkness seemed to collect itself together, shaped by some external, invisible force. She couldn’t tell what shape, but somehow she knew it was some evil formation—like a part of her, left over from eons-gone days, when ponies were simpler, fearful, instinct-driven creatures, remembered what shape the first instance of absolute terror had taken.

The thing she heard in the crystal echoed—if it was memory or real, she didn’t know.

I. SEE. YOU.

Chamomile didn’t think. Instinct and terror guided her next action. In a sweeping motion that would have put even the strongest of ponies to shame, she twisted around and bucked the crystal holding Polar and Gaea captive as hard as she could.

It shattered—and seemed to do so a million times over, because sound rushed back in at an impossible volume. Her head throbbed and her ears seemed to be filled with a horrific screeching. It might have been the crystal; it might have been herself; it might have been Gaea and Polar, who collapsed and covered their ears with their hooves. In her peripheral vision, Chamomile saw the darkness coalesce and take on a pursuing stance.

She activated her horn and pulled the other ponies to their hooves; then, knowing that it might burn herself out, turned and threw them forward with all her might. They yelled, landing on their hooves just as she raced towards them.

“Move!”

This time, Gaea and Polar did listen.

Clip had made it to the other side of the chamber, their meager supplies dragged along behind him by way of the makeshift bag that he had slung over his shoulder. He was holding the torch in one hoof. “I think we can get out this way,” he said. “And I think the crystals are illuminating the passage for us, so—”

He looked behind them and his eyes bulged. “What’s—” He dropped the torch with a soundless clatter. Gaea and Polar began to turn around.

“It doesn’t matter!” Chamomile was nearly crying, the way she screamed. “We’ve got to get away—now, come on—”

Frightened galloping at last returned actual sounds. Racing past more crystals that shimmered and buzzed maliciously, they kicked up loose stones and rocks, their breathing quickly becoming labored. That impossible screeching noise seemed to pursue them with every step, though it was not as intense as before. Chamomile only looked back a few times, and each time she regretted—for while their way was lit by the crystals, behind them, like some massive, Tartarus-cursed beast, the darkness consumed the light left behind them. And it also seemed to be gaining on them no matter how fast they ran.

“Through here!” Clip shouted, sighting another path leading into a narrower section of the cave.

They cut through a claustrophobic corridor no less illuminated as before, fleeing as quickly as they could. Gaea, however, stopped midway, nearly leading to Chamomile colliding into her. “Gaea!” she shouted. “What are you doing?!”

“We have to slow it down somehow, right?” she yelled right back. Before Chamomile could push her forward, she planted her forehooves in the ground and grunted. Green sparks of magic traveled from her hooves into the ground, and a moment later, the earth around them shook with tremendous strain. It seemed to fight the sound of screeching in a battle neither could win.

Looking back, Chamomile could see the darkness gaining. “Gaea, seriously, we can’t stay here—”

“Give me a second!”

She wasn’t even sure they had one. But Gaea didn’t seem to care. She grit her teeth and, with a shout of her own, brought her hooves back up, before stomping the earth again.

Behind them, from the walls of the narrow corridor and the ground underneath, thick roots shot out and crisscrossed the path separating them from the darkness. That terrible thing crashed into the roots, shrieking in in-equine frustration. The whole corridor shook, but the roots had done the job—they’d stopped it.

Flower power, Chamomile remembered. “You did it!”

But there wasn’t any time to celebrate. The whole corridor was shaking, like the entity was trying to ram itself through. The roots trembled. Dirt and dust flew up. A squelching sound, like a raw vegetable being cut, noisily filled the thin space. The roots would not last forever.

But how? If that thing is just darkness, it shouldn’t be able to hit anything like that! Unless it was physical… unless it had form…

“Come on, you two!” Polar shouted back at them. They bolted out of the corridor and back into a wider tunnel.

Soon after, they came across a startling discovery: minecart rails. “These have to lead to a way out,” Polar said, panting. “But darn it all—if only there was an actual minecart!”

With no time to lose, the group followed the rails. They flew under creaking wooden posts covered by so many cobwebs it was like someone had thrown them everywhere. Abandoned mining equipment—pickaxes, empty gas lanterns, a few hard hats—blew past them. Everything was condensed into a taught package of fear, so tightly that they could hardly register what they saw, but a tiny sliver of Chamomile’s sane mind did: for not only did signs of previous evacuation activity stick out here and there, but—unless her eyes deceived her, which she hoped they did—so did grotesquely white fragments, segments, and other grisly remains of the excavators and miners themselves.

The rail was, thankfully, a straight path, and the occasional crystal—white, now, as opposed to the previous violet and red—illuminated the way. Then it seemed to grow brighter without the need for crystals—were they, at last, drawing nearer to the surface?

The earth suddenly shook, causing them all to trip and fall. A groan—impossibly guttural and filled with hatred—paralyzed them. Then there was a roar, a baritone, all-powerful roar that sealed doom in their hearts. Chamomile chanced a look backwards. Thin tendrils of shadow clawed and scraped at the walls, and began to thicken into nefarious limbs.

I. SEE. YOU.

“I hear something,” Gaea gasped. “It’s… in my head? How can that—”

Chamomile forced herself to stand. “Don’t think—just run!”

They all rose and resumed their flight. The corridor curved, slanted upwards, twisted, turned, teased at escape—all the while, Chamomile thought the darkness was just a breath away, no, less than that. Her fear hurried her steps to the point where she nearly overtook the others.

It was for this reason she saw before they did the corridor widen into another maw. She also saw the rails suddenly end, like they’d been chopped off, and she dragged her hooves to avoid careening over. Peering over the ledge, she was surprised that water churned below them into a terrific vortex, emptying out into more unseen chambers.

She looked up. A rickety wooden bridge protruded partly across the chasm. Many of its legs looked like they were close to rotting away. On top of it were the twisted remains of the tracks, bent at painful, impossible angles. And beyond that, glimmering like a halo, was some kind of whiteness—it could only be the surface.

The others reached her and saw what she did. “We need to cross this,” Clip said. “But how?”

“Rope?” Gaea suggested, trying to catch her breath. She stumbled around them to hastily check the bag that Clip carried. “We might have some…”

“Even if we did,” Polar said, his breathing the least labored of theirs, “assuming we could latch it onto something up there, any weight could drag that whole bridge down with us.”

The earth rumbled. The darkness was growing closer.

“We can’t stay here!” Gaea exclaimed. “Should we take our chances with the water?”

Clip was grim. “It’s as likely to kill us as it is to sweep us into some deeper part of the cave. With that thing still following us.”

“If only both my wings worked,” Polar groaned. “Then I could fly us up there!”

The ground rumbled again. Another sound—laughter, hazy and discordant, poured out of the rocks and shook everything around them. It was impossible to tell how far or how close it was.

They all began to speak at once, all except Chamomile. Her mind raced. No rope, no wings… was there truly nothing left? She looked helplessly at the others, at Gaea, at Polar, at Clip, whose broken horn jutted depressingly out of his head—

“That’s it!” she exclaimed, making them all jump. “I can levitate you all up there!”

“What?!” Polar looked at her. “Are you serious?”

“I am. I should be able to… or push myself to, at least.” She cringed at how uncertain she sounded. “It shouldn’t be that hard, though, right? I’m pretty sure you guys don’t weigh as much as those steel beams.”

“But with those,” said Clip, worried, “you had another unicorn to help.”

“Your magic’s already on the fritz,” Gaea pointed out. “What if it stops working in the middle of—”

Chamomile shook her head. “We don’t have a choice. We have to try, or else we’ll…” She had no idea how to finish that sentence, but by her friends’ expression, they knew well enough.

And they knew she was right. They had no other choice.

They quickly figured out their weights and set up an order, doing their best to ignore the tremors all around them. Polar was to go first. Chamomile lit her horn and concentrated, feeling her magic surround him in a bubble. When it didn’t dissipate, she tried to lift him, and found success. Then she carefully levitated him across the chasm and onto the platform.

Her head was throbbing after that, but it worked—he was across.

“Quickly!” he hissed, gesturing for Clip to go next.

She tried to go quicker this time, but her magic momentarily popped out of existence while she experimented with lifting him. “Just concentrate,” Gaea murmured. Chamomile nodded and tried again. This time she was able to carry him up there.

Then she groaned, falling to her knees. Her head felt like somepony was whacking her horn over and over again.

“Chamomile!” Gaea came to her side, helping her stand. “Gosh, you’ve gone pale—you might not be able to—”

“Never mind that, Gaea.”

“But you—”

“Never mind!” Chamomile shot her a scared yet determined look. “You’re going up there, one way or another!”

She tried to ignore the plain worry on Gaea’s face. Wrapping her in her magic, she was about to lift her. Then—she gasped. The throbbing became too much, and her magic sparked out once more.

“Chamomile!”

Gaea made to rush to her side, but Chamomile, fighting through her pain, forced her magic through her horn. A somewhat sickly glow swept over Gaea, stopping her in her tracks. Then Chamomile began to lift. The throbbing in her head was matched by the sheer desire to succeed, but she had to lift Gaea painfully slowly, afraid that pushing herself anymore would cut the magic short.

But she did it. With a gasp, Gaea leaped out of the hold and landed on the rails above. The wooden bridge creaked and moaned, and they all stood still, afraid it would fall.

In that moment of stillness, they heard the roar again. Chamomile looked behind her. Far off in the distance, behind all those railroad tracks, the darkness had triumphed against the roots, and had formed into a somewhat recognizable shape. Vaguely equine, with a twisted extension resembling a horn protruding out of its smoky head, it glared at her without need for eyes. More darkness gathered under it to form a massive, tenebrous body.

Chamomile felt spent. She could barely summon the strength to stand, let alone cast her magic. The others were calling out to her, imploring, begging her, but she could only stare at the creature of darkness that advanced towards her, advanced without need of hooves or wings.

I. SEE. YOU. LITTLE. PONY. THERE. IS. NO. ESCAPE.

She believed it. She was tired, so very tired… she would be trapped down here, by that thing, for all time… she would never see anypony else again, not Zipp, or Clip, or Polar… or Gaea… Gaea, whose lips had come so impossibly close to her own…

(That she remembered wanting to know filled her with a mad glee …)

YOU. ARE. MINE.

… she would never see Bridlewood again… never make tea again… hear poetry… see her son—

Juniper.

YOU. CAN. RUN. BUT. YOU. CAN’T. HIDE—

Juniper!

She seized his name, his face, his essence, seized it with her mind, then her heart. She struggled to her hooves.

Behind her, as if sensing the change, the figure began to advance even quicker, gathering more shadows into itself until it resembled an enormous, caliginous cloud, exuding malice with every turn of its mane, every throb of its body, every tremor of the earth.

Chamomile lit her horn. She felt her magic fall upon her, felt the throbbing so intensely that she nearly passed out. She forced herself to be lifted—the effort of a few inches seemed to suck her newfound energy dry.

NO. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE ME. I WILL HAVE YOUR BODY—

Juniper!

Chamomile was screaming incoherently, aware of everything and nothing at all. Her vision collapsed into a singularity. The cave vanished. Her friends vanished. Blind, desperate, on the brink of insanity, she rose higher and higher and guided herself by instinct alone to the other side.

NO! I HAVE WAITED TOO LONG! I WILL BE FREE!

Juniper! Juniper! Juniper—

The throbbing burst, like an engorged blood vessel. Her magic cut out before she even registered her horn exploding with agony. Momentarily, her vision returned, and she saw her friends in front of her. They were reaching out to grab her.

At the same time, the darkness shot forward, surrounding her with a tyrannical hold. Something screamed blasphemies inside her head.

She knew, then, it was too late.

She found Gaea’s face, her lovely, terrified, tear-stricken face. She smiled at her.

Juniper… Gaea… everyone…

Then the darkness stole forth, stole her vision, stole everything she had left in her.

16 - Once Upon A Time

Let me tell you a story. You may have heard it before, but listen anyway.

Once upon a time, a mare and a stallion met in a tea shop and fell in love. It was a rare kind of love, the one you hear about in the stories—the old ones, I mean, the ones that came well before us. It flowed gently into both of them, like a river, I suppose—ugh, I was never fond of aquatic similes, as you know.

But they fell in love. They had a son, who was beautiful and perfect in his own way, and always would be. They were happy with this son and with each other.

But perhaps it was because they were this—happy—that life reminded them of the transitory nature of things. Happiness is here today, gone tomorrow. Is it selfish to think it should stay? Maybe—maybe that isn’t for us to decide, though. Maybe it’s not something we’re supposed to judge.

I’m rambling, aren’t I? Sorry. You know how I am.

The stallion, one day, collapsed. He was taken to the local doctors who pronounced a grim diagnosis. Only the stallion was not surprised to learn that he had a rare sickness, that it was terminal, for he had known he’d had it before he’d met the mare. He just hadn’t known how long he’d had.

The mare was broken. How could this be, she asked, especially since they’d only just had their child?

The stallion could not answer her, but very quickly realized that he had no need to. What he needed, instead, was to show her that even the smallest sprout shows there really is no death. That the words of one of his favorite poets was eternally true no matter what darkness lay ahead.

In this way, the stallion made peace with his impending death, and did his best, in the time he had left, to set his affairs in order so that she wouldn’t have to.

… Well, you know how this goes, so I won’t continue this pretense. I died years ago, after all, and was buried, as requested, in a small plot of land behind your tea shop. I left you regrettably behind, but even so, I tried to guide you, anticipating as best I could what was to come, post-me.

I wrote a will and put in it a final decree. Of course, it was done with a poetic flourish. Only the shameless, and those who do not think themselves good at poetry, would write with such flourish. And besides, these were my final words. They had to at least sound like me!

I spent a long time coming up with them, though. I think that was because my mind was already going. I didn’t have as much clarity of thought as I might have wanted. Now I’m thinking, with the hindsight that comes with death (now that I am no longer arrogantly alive, ha ha!), that, because of this, you misunderstood my words. If so, then I must apologize.

Here is what I said. I pulled it from a poem (of course I did!): “Remain tight in a bud.”

Really, what was I thinking? I wasn’t, obviously… but somehow you understood this as me saying, cloister yourself off until the seasons have all faded, open again when next I find you. Beautiful, tragic; I suppose it fits me, especially at the end… but ultimately, it was not what I meant.

I gave you the wrong part of the poem. I should have given you the whole line. Let me rectify that. You ready? Here it is, with my own spin to it (there must always be a spin!):

And the day will come when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

You have loved and lost much, my dear Cammie, and I am sorry that you had to face it all and after without me. But I didn't mean to suggest you refuse to let your heart sing! I never wanted you to close off from feeling the electric current of life and all of its beauty. I never, ever, wanted you to never love again—only the opposite.

You have so much love in you. Perhaps that was why I was not worried about how you would take care of our son after I was gone; I knew you would love him unselfishly. But you had so much love—so much, in fact, that, even as you have tried to lock it away, it has naturally seeped out. Love drove you to befriend those quirky companions of yours—to talk to them, to listen, to comfort. Love drove you to this job, love for our son, love for his wish, however impossible it may be. Your name may generally mean peacefulness and rest, but don’t forget that the chamomile flower will bloom all the way to the first frost—and then return, renewed, ready to sprout and spread and reinvigorate its world.

(Oh, yes. I know you found my “flower meanings” tiresome. Ha ha! But I use them anyway, because despite their triteness, I find their simplicity endearing. Sometimes I think that’s what drew you to me.)

My point is, you have loved so much, lost so much, given so much of your own love away. Isn’t it now time that you let somepony love you? Let yourself be loved? Let yourself choose. Let that Gaea mare in. You will not have loved me any less.

Let yourself blossom, my dear. You deserve it, no matter how much you think otherwise. Let yourself blossom; let yourself live; let yourself love, and love her, as you loved me. You are not meant to end here—that much I know for certain!

You agree? Excellent! Then it’s time for me to go. My train, after all, is about to leave.

One day, I know, we’ll meet again. Perhaps at this very same station, about to board this very same train. But that won’t be for a while. And I hope when I return, I’ll be bringing you and Gaea with me on my next trip. It would be good to meet her properly, not in the middle of the desert like last time.

Until then… My dear, I think it is time you woke up.

17 - Two Kinds of Crying

Chamomile blinked. A warm, vaguely orange light streamed through an unobstructed window, and she squinted at it, confused by its presence. Squinting and squirming as one does when they are not yet certain they are awake, she felt something brush up against her foreleg. She turned her head. A thin tube led from her upper leg to a slowly dripping IV bag. Next to her was a small metal cart with various capsules, bottles, and rolls of bandage strips that jostled every few seconds. The IV bag swayed in a similarly regular manner.

She was on a bed, her head sinking into the fluffiest pillow she’d ever felt. Her lower body rested under a thin blanket, while the rest of her was covered by a thin, polka-dotted gown. Something smelled unnaturally clean—her, maybe, or the bed itself, and then she smelled another thing: something balmy and spicy. On the other side of the bed was a table, and on it was a ceramic vase with carnations tilting towards the sun.

She finally recognized where she was—the medbay. Her eyes continued to rove, and she glanced in front of her through the rectangular windows, watching as green and emerald hills rolled by. The train was moving at a steady pace, such that it seemed to hypnotize her. She nearly closed her eyes, feeling sleepiness approaching.

But the act of closing her eyes, of inviting darkness in, caused panic to flare up in here. She snapped her eyes open, gasping, and involuntarily sat herself upright, just as the side door to the carriage opened and a honeysuckle earth pony wearing a white nurse’s uniform and cap walked in.

“Oh my!” the nurse exclaimed. She’d been carrying a clipboard—how so very nurse-like, Chamomile thought drolly—and it fell to the ground. She stooped to pick it up, still talking. “You’re awake? I mean, you’re awake! She’s awake!” This she shouted behind her, and a flurry of voices resounded similar cries of shock.

“Um, yes, I’m…” She didn’t get to finish. The door practically came off its hinges as a group of nervous nurses and a doctor rushed in. “… awake. I think.”

Though excited, one stern clearing of the throat from the doctor—a lean, periwinkle mare with a perpetually no-nonsense expression and tone—reminded the nurses of their duty. “Ms.… Chamomile, isn’t it?” she said. She seemed familiar, and it took Chamomile a second to realize that it was the doctor who’d attended to Polar.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I’m Dr. Yeo.” She pronounced it “yo,” but the name sounded so short that Chamomile was inclined to believe it was short for something. Dr. Yeo spoke briskly, however, and it was clear she did not want to tarry on any topic but the one she’d chosen: “I understand you’ve been through quite the tumultuous event. I need to ask you a few questions…”

Chamomile didn’t mind, and it turned out to be rather standard procedure. Dr. Yeo asked for her name, date of birth, and what year it was. She asked if she had any pain; surprisingly, Chamomile did not. Yeo asked if she was hungry or thirsty—only a little, nothing terribly drastic. Then she asked what was the last thing Chamomile remembered.

It took some time for her to answer. That was not because she remembered nothing. On the contrary, she remembered too much—though it was fragmentary. There was the cavern in which she’d awoken and found Gaea; there was that corridor where they found Clip’s body; the underground lake and Polar; the crystal chamber; the chase, the flight, the screams, the shadows, the fear; the malignant entity that saw her, needed her, that grew closer and closer to them…

She couldn’t decide on what to say but couldn’t figure out how to lie about it. Eventually she decided to say, “My magic cut out at some part.”

Dr. Yeo nodded gravely. “In all likelihood, it did. When we found you, your horn looked like it’d been torched. Your channels suffered similarly upon examination.” She saw the dark look that passed over Chamomile’s face. “But the damage wasn’t permanent. Your channels were only temporarily overloaded. In a few days, if not a week, if not two, your magic should return.” The doctor nodded at an area just above Chamomile’s head. “In the meantime, though, we’ve treated, bandaged, and nullified your horn. Nothing, not even a spark, should escape. I encourage you not to try.”

Chamomile glanced up at herself. There indeed was a tube of gauze wrapped along the tip, and some sort of heavy, metallic ring around the base. Overloaded channels—the direct opposite of her son.

Yeo looked expectantly at her. “I won’t,” she said; then she added, because it seemed insulting not to, “I promise.”

There was a knock at the door. One of the nurses opened it, revealing Zipp. Her eyes lit up when she saw Chamomile. “Hey! You’re awake!”

No sooner had she said this that Yeo turned and fixed her with a stern gaze, and Zipp’s excitement fluttered into nervous embarrassment. “I have yet to finish my examination, Ms. Storm. If you would be so kind as to wait outside…”

“Oh. Right, of course. Sorry, doc. My bad.”

After she left, Dr. Yeo returned to Chamomile, who blurted, “Was that really necessary?”

The doctor quirked an eyebrow. “Ms. Chamomile. You fell through what geologists call a cryoseism—a frost quake, as it’s more commonly called. You fell into an impossibly deep hole, a hole that quickly became packed full of debris, which made excavation completely impossible. You went missing for several hours, nearly a whole day, during which numerous teams attempted to locate you, to no avail. And when next you appeared, it was under considerable thaumaturgical strain, with a horn as black as coal, a body that looked heavily emaciated, and a mind that could only utter nonsense in some ungodly other tongue. To top it all off, you’ve been in a comatose state for days, recovering. My professional opinion is that you should not experience any sudden bouts of excitement, either from internal or external sources. My asking Ms. Storm to leave before she accidentally triggers a cataclysmic relapse, therefore, was not only necessary, but also morally required.”

The slew of information, packaged under a neat, tidy voice, threw Chamomile for a loop. “Sleeping? For days?” she said, like the word had no meaning. “No, that… that can’t be right.”

“I assure you it most definitely is. The entire expedition halted while several rescue missions were performed—and we were on the verge of calling in help from other companies and the three tribes’ cities just as you reappeared.”

Dr. Yeo paused. Then she lowered her voice. “You were extremely lucky, Ms. Chamomile. But you will have to forgive our caution when considering your luck as anything but extraordinary.”

She changed topics, asking to conduct a few physical examinations. Numbly, Chamomile went through them—her body was examined by the cold stethoscope, her heart beat a special tune on the monitor, and her knees danced with each hit of the small rubber hammer. She was asked if she could stand, walk forward, say the alphabet backwards; Yeo again grilled her on her name, as though at any second she threatened losing it. All the while, Chamomile’s mind was elsewhere, scrambling to make sense of what she now knew. It couldn’t be true—it just couldn’t.

Eventually, Yeo gave a terse nod. “All things considered, you appear on a clear path towards recovery. All goes well, you’ll be out of this bed by the time we return to central station.”

“Return?”

“Yes, return. The expedition wasn’t just halted. It’s been canceled. Too dangerous to continue. It’s quite a sensible decision—you do not mean to tell me that you are disappointed?”

“No, I…” Maybe she was, a little bit. Maybe she assumed she’d be working a little longer. “No, I… I’m fine.”

“If you’re worried about payment, I am told that all the workers are receiving their fair share, as if the job had been completed.”

“That’s good.” Workers…

She started forward, the heart rate monitor trilling. One of the nurses coaxed her back into her pillow. “Wait. You said I was found. But what about the others? Gaea, Clip Styles, Polar Blast—”

“They’re fine,” the nurse who’d first entered said. Evidently, however, her speaking violated some sort of protocol, for the doctor gave her a disapproving look.

Yeo sighed. “Yes. We recovered them at the same time we recovered you.” That word, “recovered,” soured something in Chamomile. Like they were not ponies, but mere salvage lost at sea. “You were all clumped together, barely coherent. But they wouldn’t leave your side. Especially that pink mare—Ms. Gaea, as I recall. She’s fond of you.”

Chamomile flushed. Yeo continued unbothered: “We had to sedate them just to separate and treat you all. Thankfully they didn’t have too many injuries. Mr. Polar’s wing was easy to set, and Ms. Gaea had a few cuts cleaned and stitched.” Her eyes became suddenly somber. “Mr. Clip exhibited no outward signs of distress, but his horn…”

“I know.” Chamomile swallowed. “I… we found him like that. Is… Is he going to be okay? I wasn’t sure…”

Yeo appeared reluctant to answer. Chamomile sat forward. “Please. I have to know.”

Yeo sighed. “I admit, my expertise is limited since I myself am not a unicorn. But after consulting with several other unicorn doctors, as well as conducting a few tests, I… believe things are promising on his end. His mana channels are actually quite intact, more than yours were—he just won’t be able to do anything more extensive than lift an item more than five pounds heavy.”

Like a hair razor, Chamomile supposed, or scissors. “So his magic…”

“It’ll return. Forever limited, but not gone.”

“That’s a relief,” Chamomile said, and she meant it. Her heart rate calmed, and she felt as though a large part of her had been extinguished by the revelation. “Could… Could I see them?”

But she already knew the answer before it’d left Yeo’s lips. “Later. We want to make sure—”

“I know, I know. That my luck isn’t about to run itself out.”

A few more questions were asked and answered before Yeo was satisfied. “A nurse will bring you food in a bit. You’ll receive a check-up every half hour, until we reach the station.” Her tone made it clear there was no room for negotiation. Then the doctor said her goodbyes and led the entourage of nurses—sans the first one—out the door.

The nurse leaned in and whispered, “Off the record, I think she likes you.”

“I hear stern doctors are usually the best ones,” Chamomile tried to quip, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Do I really have to wait, though? I really would like to see them.”

“Doctor’s orders. I’m sorry, Ms. Chamomile. I know how much they mean to you, but…”

The nurse trailed off. Chamomile looked out the window, watching the blurring landscape. It was likely that they’d reached central station in a few hours—she could imagine the long trek in her mind and the train carving a path back the way they came. After that…

After that, we all go home.

Home.

The thought of it was entirely remarkable to her. How quickly can a word, which had nested for years as the anchor for a pony’s sense of reality, become like a stranger on a passing train…

Was she ready to go home? She didn’t know. She didn’t know why she didn’t know. What prevented her? Sure, her job was technically incomplete, but—

Juniper’s magic.

She frowned—the frown shook and, not wanting the nurse to see, she turned her head and buried her gaze in the IV bag. To have traveled this distance, so far from home, only to turn back before she’d even had a chance to try! What would she tell him? What could she say? How would he react? Would he hate her?

She began to cry. It was a silent cry, when one becomes too exhausted to do anything but wordlessly shake out the cobwebs of their grief. The nurse mistook the reason for the tears. “Hey, hey, look! If… If it really would mean so much to you, I’ll… I can try to arrange something.”

Chamomile was too tired to ask what she meant, so she simply nodded. The nurse smiled sympathetically. “Tissues are to your right,” she said, before leaving.

Chamomile cried until there seemed to be no more tears in her. Oddly enough, her mind felt less clouded. Perhaps it was because she knew, now, what was inevitably to come, and like a pony at the gallows, felt more resolved to face it. It would not come now, it had yet to, but it would—there was no point in denying it.

Somepony tapped three times on the door. “Hey, uh, Chamomile?” came Zipp’s voice. “I saw the last of the nurses leave. You, uh… mind if I come in?”

She blew her nose, then tossed the tissue into the wastebasket. She remembered what Dr. Yeo said—no visitors—and decided the doctor was wrong. “Sure, Zipp.”

Zipp entered, easily noticing Chamomile’s red eyes. She stood at the end of the bed. Her eyebrows were drawn down into a deep V, and the corners of her lips twitched from one kind of frown to another.

Chamomile waited. She had a feeling she’d be waiting a lot.

Finally, Zipp sighed. “There’s no real way to say this without some degree of awkwardness.” She looked at Chamomile with large, vulnerable eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Well. That was not how Chamomile thought this conversation would begin. “You’re… sorry.”

“Yeah, I…” Zipp sighed, shamefaced. “I… I…” Then she shook her head violently, and nearly shouted, “I should have tried harder to find you guys! When I saw that massive fissure in the ground, I tried to dive in, I really did, but—the storm sent me flying back, and by the time it was gone, there was just so much debris in the way, and I… I couldn’t lift any of it, or slip through, and at the same time I had to make sure everypony else was all right and—”

In the middle of her rant, she’d started to hover, and only stopped when she bumped her head against the carriage ceiling. She drifted back down to the floor, rubbing her head. Her voice, Chamomile noted, seemed about to break; she spoke emotionally, openly, and for whatever reason, this reminded her of what Polar had said in the cavern, how Zipp oozed a kind of one-ness with herself.

Another thought intruded upon that one: would Polar ever tell Zipp how he knew her? How he felt?

“We searched for hours. We had no idea if any of you had survived, but we searched anyway. I thought about blasting another hole in the ground just to see if we could tunnel our way in, but our engineers told me that could hurt or trap more ponies.”

“The doctor… she said we’d been missing for hours. And that we’ve been… asleep, for the past several days.” Chamomile looked down at her sheets. “Is that true?”

Zipp nodded. “All of it,” she murmured. “After the storm hit, we spent all day trying to dig you out, but we couldn’t. We tried to find another way underground through the mountains, but we couldn’t find any openings. By the next day we were considering bringing in help from the other tribes.”

Just for us? “But… days?”

Zipp looked miserable. “Yeah. Your friends, they were able to come around a few hours after we’d found them, but you…” She scrunched up her eyes and could no longer look at Chamomile.

She couldn’t blame her. Days in a coma. Days that she’d lost. Astral had been like that, slipping in and out of consciousness, and she remembered that at times she wondered if he had any idea of the time that was passing him by. Four days seemed miniscule compared to all the wasted time he suffered through. Yet even so, she could hardly believe she’d experienced that for herself.

“If I hadn’t hesitated,” Zipp was now saying. “If I had, maybe, pushed us a little more… maybe we would have found you sooner. That’s why I’m sorry, Chamomile.”

“Zipp,” Chamomile said. A firmness had settled into her voice, surprising even her, and she leaned forward, touching her shoulder with a hoof. “What happened—you can’t blame yourself for it; it’s not your fault. I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“Did I?” Zipp laughed bitterly. “I told you about us looking at the tunnels to see if there was any way we could reach you. But the truth is, I didn’t even consider it a possibility until the last minute, when somepony suggested it to me. Maybe if I had actually thought about checking the mountains—”

“You couldn’t have known. None of us could have.” Chamomile lowered her voice, her hoof, and her eyes. “Really, we… we just got lucky, getting out.”

Zipp stared at her, sour-faced. “That’s not really comforting.”

Chamomile shrugged helplessly. “I don’t think luck usually is. It’s just… another way of measuring life. Like the years, or the seasons…”

“I guess so…”

But it was clear Zipp would not accept this reversal. Chamomile wasn’t sure she could, either. She did not blame Zipp in the slightest, but also was aware that there was no comfort in accepting that the universe, on occasion, played dice with their lives. She tried not to think about what would have happened if they’d been trapped underground any longer—if that thing that had chased them had not just captured her, but her friends as well.

That made her think about the skeleton they’d found underground. Lucky Break. The letter that skeleton had carried. Its contents. Luck hadn’t drawn that carrier underground; misfortune had. But maybe misfortune and luck were just two sides of the same coin. Not that that made her feel any less creeped out.

She paused in her thinking, going back over what Zipp said. “You said we came out of a tunnel?”

Zipp nodded. Chamomile felt cold dread creep into her heart. If they had come out… “Was… Was the tunnel open when you found us?”

“Open?” Zipp blinked at her, surprised. “It must have been, since that’s how you got out. But when we went to check on it, it was sealed up shut, like it’d collapsed in on itself.”

“Collapsed—oh, thank the stars…”

Zipp stared at her, but Chamomile didn’t care. She sagged forward, and it seemed like one massive sigh traveled through her body. A wave of emotion crashed into her, and she closed her eyes, nearly chuckling with hysterical relief.

“Why do you ask?” Zipp said. “Were you afraid that something was going to escape with you?”

“I…”

Chamomile hesitated. The gnashing, fearsome darkness returned to her mind’s eye, as terrifying as it had been when she’d first seen it, and she very nearly bit her tongue to avoid speaking out loud. But something told her that this was not something she ought to keep hidden. She was grateful that the windows were uncovered, that sunlight and warmth streamed generously in, because they filled her with a degree of iron fortitude. “Zipp, we found something underground.”

Her tone conveyed some taboo notion, such that Zipp moved closer and nodded. Chamomile spoke in a throaty whisper, revealing the thing that had chased them through the many tunnels. She also spoke about the skeleton, and the letter which they’d read, adding, almost off-handedly, that it was probably somewhere in their recovered items. Zipp ought to read it—it was probably important. Presently, though, she found she could not describe the entity in anything more specific than shadowy descriptions as thin as smoke—which, she supposed, given the creature, was fitting.

“It chased us. Chased me. I thought… I thought it managed to get me in the end. But I guess I was wrong.” She stared past Zipp, at the receding landscape. “If the tunnel collapsed, though, then… then it must be trapped under there.” She tried to sound confident in that assessment, but already doubt was starting to pool. Could a collapsed tunnel really contain something that had chased them through all those corridors and cavernous passageways? And even if it could, for how long?

Zipp was speechless, and the room became so quiet that Chamomile could have sworn she heard the IV bag dripping and tap the metal pole to which it was attached. Something else could be heard, just at the edge of auditory perception. It seemed like a whisper, deep and scintillating. It reminded Chamomile too much of that voice in her head. It caused her to shiver.

“You believe me, right?” Chamomile asked desperately. “Please tell me you do, Zipp. I’m—I’m sure the others would say the same thing.”

It took another moment of silence passing before Zipp answered her. “As spectacular as that sounds, I do believe you. It fits with…” She’d been about to reveal something, but caught herself. Now she wore a look of morbid wariness. “Well, I mean… Yeah, I believe you.”

She spoke sincerely, and that was enough. Let her have her secrets. Truthfully, Chamomile wanted to forget what she saw, wanted to forget that she had ever been underground.

The train took a slight turn, slowing, and Chamomile felt herself lean into the bed. There were a few ponies outside—a traveling caravan, it seemed, walking along the railroad tracks like a group of gypsies. They were there for but a second, before the turn was completed and they were gone. Before they’d vanished from view, Chamomile had noted their glowing faces, how they seemed to dance and sing in that moment in time, how, in doing so, they were superimposed in her mind and thus made to live forever.

Chamomile realized something. A scene that innocent could live forever in the recesses of one memory just as much as something as nefarious as that experience buried beneath the earth could. The mind had no preference for what it recalled, either good or bad; what haunted it, haunted it, regardless of nature or circumstance. And she realized that no matter what she desired, she would never forget what had happened. Just as she would never forget that night with Gaea, those days with Juniper, and those last moments with Astral. They would live with her for as long as she did. But she couldn’t say if that either comforted or alarmed her. It was just a fact of life—and of death.

She felt disquieted.

“Anyway, uh…” Zipp rubbed the back of her head. “I just wanted to… check up on you. And apologize. Which I did, heh…”

“It’s not your fault,” Chamomile repeated.

“I know, I know. But I still felt I had to.” Zipp nodded to herself. “But yeah. I should get going. That doc probably doesn’t want you to get too stirred up, and you… you probably want to rest.”

She didn’t, but she knew the conversation was over. She nodded.

When Zipp reached the door, she paused. “It probably doesn’t need to be said, but I’m glad we found you all in time.”

She looked so awkward that Chamomile couldn’t help but smile. “I’m glad you found us, too.”

Zipp returned the smile. Seeing it, Chamomile had a sudden thought: I’m older than her. She nearly laughed. Here was a princess, a leader of Equestria’s first railroad company, a pony who took personally the potential loss of any under her—and yet, she was barely grown, likely years younger than Gaea, undoubtedly as old as either Clip or Polar. She was young yet now seemed older, too, made so by worry, and this caused Chamomile to inexplicably feel regret for causing her to age.

Zipp left, and Chamomile now had only her thoughts for company.

She watched the clock tick closer to noon. Its movements were laggard, deceptively so; Chamomile did not think that was a fault, so much as deliberate design. The ticking was not that loud, but she was thankful for its presence—any noise, no matter how small, was better than silence, which only reminded her of the silence they’d suffered in that crystal chamber.

The nurse returned. “Hi, Ms. Chamomile. I’m not bothering you, am I?”

Chamomile briefly tore her gaze from the clock, but found herself slowly returning to it mid-speech. “No, no, I’m just sitting here. Is that clock deliberately several milliseconds behind?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m just a nurse.”

Another nurse had already removed the IV bag, so all that this nurse did was ask Chamomile a few other questions and check her vitals in an efficient manner. As she did this, Chamomile saw her name written on a tag: Calendula. Under it was written in quotation marks: “Cally.”

“Are you hungry, by any chance?” Cally asked.

Chamomile was about to say no, when her stomach let out a growl. Two pairs of eyes drifted towards her abdomen, then faced each other. Cally smiled; Chamomile, abashed, said, “I, uh, suppose I’m getting there.”

“Sounds like your stomach has a better sense of time than the clock,” Cally said, laughter in her voice. “Well, hold tight. I’ll see if I can get you some food, and…” When she stopped talking, her smile became mischievous. “Well. Get you food, yes.”

Chamomile raised an eyebrow at the fragmentary statement, but chose not to question it. After a few more questions and checks, Cally left through the door, leaving Chamomile alone again. She watched the clock, trying to determine if her eyes were playing tricks on her.

The clock had a soothing effect, though, and soon, as the minutes counted down, she felt herself beginning to drift. Each time that she was about to close her eyes, though, she’d jerk away, remembering everything all over again. The monitor would trill and screech before she forced her heart to calm, and she would let out a groan and sink back into her pillow. She looked at her hooves and saw that they were shaking. With effort, she stilled them, but felt some other part of her in a state of convulsion—it was not some physical part of her, however, but something even more.

She wished she had a book to read, tea to drink, a friend to talk to—anything that would keep her awake, keep her away from remembering, from thinking. Her stomach growled again, and she amended that list to include food.

A few minutes later—she’d stopped actually counting—she heard something approaching the door. A rolling sound, like a cart. Food at last, then, perhaps. Several voices, muffled and low, accompanied it, but she could make out Cally’s among them. She was saying something to the effect of, “Now, be careful, don’t excite her too much.”

Chamomile’s ears flicked as she heard the knob being turned. Visitors? But Dr. Yeo had expressly forbidden—

The door opened, and in walked Cally. She smiled broadly at Chamomile. “Hope you weren’t waiting for too long. I’ve brought drinks and sandwiches, and…”

That last word she said in a sing-songy voice, turning over her shoulder and gesturing with a hoof. A metal food cart, carrying a pitcher of water, cups, and sandwiches—far more than was necessary for a single pony—rounded the doorframe. Chamomile’s blood seemed to freeze even as her heart raced, the monitor beeping imploringly at her, but that was not because of the sight of the cart.

It was because of the ponies who were behind it.

Clip Styles. Polar Blast. And Gaea.

They, unlike her, did not wear any hospital gowns. Their faces glowed when they saw her, and for half a moment, she seriously believed that they had escaped unharmed. But then her eyes traveled over them more fully. They saw the stubby bandage wrapped around Clip’s shattered horn. A sling wound around Polar’s broken wing. Gauze strips applied to parts of Gaea’s legs like she’d suffered freezer burns. And their faces… Although they smiled, their faces were ragged and haunted. There seemed an uncleanliness that no amount of hospital ammonia could remove. And when they looked at her, she could see fear in their eyes. For a moment she thought they were afraid of her; then she realized, no: they were afraid for her. Afraid that she was not really awake, that she was, perhaps, mere moments from slipping back into unconsciousness.

For a time, no one spoke. The ticking of the clock was the only noise in the small compartment. Cally looked between them, then, shrugging, trotted over to check Chamomile’s heart rate monitor. Something was in the air. Tension and something else. They were waiting for somepony to speak, but could not decide who should go first—or even what to say.

Then Polar—brazen, enthusiastic Polar—stepped around the cart and made a mock bow, in a stiff, deliberately slow manner. His good wing flashed in front of the cart like he was presenting it. “Mademoiselle, it iz our supreme honor to present you zis fine, ‘ow-you-say… launch!”

In that instant, the tension shattered. Chamomile was caught between a cough and a laugh, while Gaea turned away, choking on something that seemed similar. Even Cally was chuckling. Clip groaned and facehooved. “Clearly they did not teach you Prench during recruitment. Never speak again, I implore you.”

Polar bristled. “What? No one else was talking.”

“You call that talking?”

“Eet iz, how vous say…”

“Good grief, please! Stop with the accent or I will snap off the rest of my horn and shove it down your throat!”

“Sounds like someone’s getting the hunger cranks!”

The other mares finally let their laughter sing while Clip and Polar continued to bicker. That they were bickering, but not fighting, must surely have been a good sign; that Clip was making jokes about his injury, was perhaps also a good sign as well. Chamomile’s heart relaxed just a bit, and the machine’s beeping dropped a few levels.

“I’ll leave you all to it,” Cally said once her laughter had dimmed. “I’ll be checking in on you in a half-hour, but you better have skedaddled by then—wouldn’t want the other nurses or, goddess forbid it, the doctor, to find out you’re all here.” She winked at Chamomile before making her exit.

Now it was just them: Polar Blast, Clip Styles, Gaea, and Chamomile. It seemed all became aware of this, for the laughter and bickering slowly dissolved, and an air of uncertainty took their place. Chamomile sat up, the sheets slipping away, and crawled a little bit forward, so that she was closer to them. She wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Her eyes were drawn towards the sandwiches.

Polar lowered his voice and dropped his accent. His smile was soft and kind. “I know you have a lot on your mind, but let’s eat first, okay?”

They handed out the sandwiches and drinks like a sacramental tradition. The resulting atmosphere was a bit like that, stuffed with silent holiness, but it was not an unwelcome air between them. Rather it was like they had agreed for the moment they must tend to their bodily needs before their emotional ones.

Eventually, while they ate and drank, conversation made its way between them, natural like the mist off the mountainside. At first, it was snippets—little observations about their surroundings. Gradually, though, the topics advanced into fully-fledged dialogue, light and hearty, like the food they ate fueled some engine of cordiality.

Then the discussion of pay came up. “The doctor said we’re still getting paid in full, despite the expedition ultimately failing,” Chamomile said. She shook her head. “That’s crazy to hear.”

“How much exactly are we getting paid?” Polar asked. “I actually never bothered to ask.”

Clip told him. “That’s more than I expected,” Polar said evenly, but his voice betrayed his excitement.

“Well, I’d imagine there’s some compensation for the whole thing ending early. Wonder where they got all the money from, though?”

Chamomile looked at Gaea. “Do you think it’ll be enough for you to help buy a new plot of land for you and your father?”

Gaea frowned thoughtfully, then brought a hoof up as though she was examining invisible numbers in front of her. “Let me think… If I combine that with what I’ve saved up… Well, it won’t buy a place nearly as big as home was.” She smiled. “But I think it’ll be enough. Any land is good land, and Dad… Dad will be happy.”

Chamomile nodded at this. She looked at Polar, expecting him to be surprised, but he didn’t react beyond also nodding. Gaea must have eventually told him about her family while Chamomile was unconscious.

She looked down at her half-eaten sandwich. “You know, it just occurred to me…”

“Yeah?” Gaea said.

“This…” She waved a hoof at them all. “This is the first time we’ve actually all eaten together, isn’t it?”

The other three looked at each other. “Is it really?” Polar asked.

Gaea nodded. “We… Well, Clip, Chamomile, and I ate together at the Badlands, when you were…”

“Making a fool of myself?” But he smiled without bitterness. “But, yeah, wow, it really is our first time together.”

They continued to speak about the matter with curious and amused tones of voices. It suddenly dawned on Chamomile that these really were her friends—friends who came in all sorts of colors and shades and backgrounds. She thought back to what Zipp had told her back in the Badlands—a time that seemed a generation old, by this point. About them being friends already. She remembered how she’d responded—dubiously, unable to see that, or perhaps unwilling. But now that had changed. Here they were, eating, drinking, bickering, laughing about crushes, like they’d known each other for far longer than a few days.

Her eyes traveled over them, her mind no longer listening to their words. Recalling the awkwardness of their first encounter with each other, she could not fathom it had ever occurred, for they were now interacting so naturally, it was almost uncanny. Suddenly, she could not imagine a life—her life—without them. And that made what had happened underground all the more harrowing.

Their jokes dwindled when they noticed her beginning to sniffle. In a quick motion, Gaea was there. “Hey, hey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Chamomile choked out. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just…” She felt tears building again. She was surprised—she’d thought she’d emptied herself of them before. “I’m just so happy to see you all again.” She tried to wipe her eyes. Tried and failed and tried again and failed again.

She felt somepony touch her hooves with her own. It was Gaea. Through her tears, she saw that she was also crying. “And we are just as happy to see you,” she whispered.

Her voice was a magic spell. Chamomile became overwhelmed by emotion, and for the first time in what seemed forever—a forever that had been defined by a numbness, a coldness; a forever that had featured a bud closing in on itself, refusing to bloom, refusing to touch the sun again—she opened her heart. She cried and cried, not out of exhaustion, but out of necessity. Gaea was crying, too, stroking her mane, crying into it. And Polar and Clip, while quieter, were also crying. They, too, came over and joined the embrace. It was good, and warm, and safe.

There are two kinds of crying in life, both of which happened in that small hospital bay. The first one hides—the second one heals.

But the half-hour was finished all too soon. Cally came in to warn them, and Clip, Polar, and Gaea began to pack up.

They had spoken of much, but the topic of what had happened in those tunnels had never come up. Like the clock, this did not seem a fault of circumstance—it was deliberately chosen. It was too sensitive of a matter for them, too closely held to their hearts, and goddesses only knew how long it would be before they were ready.

Before leaving, Gaea leaned in to whisper in Chamomile’s ear, “I’ll come back later. There’s more I want to say.” She smiled, but seemed disconcerted by a prospect which only she knew, and Chamomile didn’t have a chance to ask her before she slipped away.

18 - A Long Overdue Conversation

It was evening. The lights in the hospital bay had been set to dim, and the only light came from outside. The clock said it was nine-o’-clock and outside the world had cooled into mere silhouettes and approximations of geography. Earlier, the darkness would have made Chamomile uneasy, but seeing her friends again had abated that fear. She’d spent the hours beforehand reading a book that one of the nurses had been kind enough to fetch for her, as well as listening, without feeling quite as sleepy or as scared as sleep as before, to the clock as it wound its way back to a normal rate of ticking.

Gaea entered the compartment on silent hooves, and only the sliding of the door announced her. She’d brushed her mane and smelled lightly of something sweet. When she saw Chamomile was awake, she smiled at her. She glanced towards the light switch, thinking of turning it on, then apparently thought better of it.

It took a moment for Chamomile to realize that Gaea carried a small bag over her back. A shape of some sort bulged against the fabric. It was easily recognizable, and Chamomile’s gaze drifted up to meet the other mare’s. “That’s my bag, isn’t it?”

Gaea nodded. Her smile became self-conscious. “I thought I’d bring it over and we’d… Well, maybe it’s best to show you.”

Gaea trotted over to a chair next to the bed. Easing herself into it, she pulled the bag into her lap and began to undo the flaps. She pulled out what was inside, and Chamomile couldn’t help but smile at it.

“My electric tea kettle.”

Gaea nodded. “That’s not all, though.” She fished out the same two cups and the remainder of the packet of ginger Chamomile had opened all those nights ago. She gave the bag over to Chamomile, who placed it at her side. Then she held the cups and the bag of ginger in her hooves, These she held between her hooves, looking between them and Chamomile. “I recognize it’s a little weird, but… would you mind having a cup of tea with me?”

Chamomile didn’t answer at first. She was looking at the cups and thinking.

Seeing this, Gaea said, “I promise, no ulterior motives here. Just a drink. Between friends.”

After a pause—one filled with the ticking of the clock, and the rumbling of the train—Chamomile said, “Sure thing, Gaea.”

She still had to show Gaea how to set everything up. They took the water from the nearby pitcher, poured it into the kettle, turned it on, and let it boil. Afterwards, Gaea poured the water—she insisted on doing this part by herself—then stirred in the rest of the ginger until the water had become a light-brown haze. Chamomile, unable to use her horn, brought the cup to her lips with her hooves. She took a sip. It was good and warm.

“How’d I do?” Gaea asked.

“You did well,” Chamomile answered.

For a time, that was all they did. Sip, sit, and watch the world return to a sleep that would not be broken until the next day. It was peaceful—therefore, it was wrong.

Chamomile set her cup down. “As enjoyable as this is, I can’t imagine you came here to drink tea with me. At least, not to do only that.”

Gaea also put down her cup. She gave a somewhat resigned shrug. “No. I wanted to talk to you.”

“What about?”

Gaea scooted her chair a little closer to the bed. “I need to know.” She looked at Chamomile, and the moonlight played interesting shadows across her face, and made her eyes glow with a kind of nervous curiosity. “In the tunnels, when we were running… What exactly do you remember?”

Chamomile told her what she could, which was close to what she’d told Zipp. This time, however, it was far easier to talk to Gaea about it—perhaps because she knew they’d both experienced this, had feared it together.

“That lines up with what I remember. And with what Polar and Clip said.” Gaea pursed her lips. “Do you remember anything after you jumped?”

“No. I was just told that we somehow managed to come out of the tunnel, but nopony’s sure how.”

“Well, I can tell you—it wasn’t through any action of ours,” Gaea said gravely.

Chamomile gestured for her to explain. Gaea dropped her head, clinking her hoof on the rim of her cup like she thought the answer might manifest there. “That thing down there… It seemed like it was nothing but hate, consumed by it, powered by utter loathing.” She shuddered. “I can still remember seeing it, just a glimpse of it, before I brought those roots out. And hearing its voice in my head when we were fleeing. It made me think of an enormous spider, one made out of nothing but that hatred.” She swallowed. “Before that, though, in that chamber full of crystals… if you hadn’t shaken me out of that, I…”

She shook her head self-consciously. “Sorry. I’m rambling. I know it’s been a few days, but I don’t feel like I’ve really processed everything.”

Chamomile said nothing. She understood completely. She took another sip of her tea. It had cooled quite a bit already.

Another shaky breath was taken before Gaea continued. “Right as you were about to reach us on that bridge, that thing seemed to grow ten times in size. I watched as it shot forward and surrounded you completely, I couldn’t even see your magic. It just… engulfed you. And you didn’t even make a sound. Didn’t even scream.” She glanced quickly at Chamomile, then away. Her voice dipped into a throaty whisper. “Then you were gone, just like that.”

Gone.

She had known it in her bones that she’d been taken away, but gone? For whatever reason, that had not occurred to her. Hearing it from Gaea, Chamomile felt like somepony had just walked over her grave, and her shoulders bunched up. The air in the compartment rapidly chilled and the moonlight seemed to twist and snarl. She glanced down at her cup and thought she saw some amorphous face-like structure briefly manifest on its surface like a wish gone wrong. Her mind traveled back to that cavern, to the creature, to the darkness, and tried to imagine what it must have looked like to Gaea. But her mind invited only gaps, not revelations. Darkness had mercifully claimed her memory, but it left her, of course, in the dark.

Gone.

“That’s…” Chamomile searched for a word with more weight, more exactness, than horrific, but could not find one. So she stayed silent. Looking back at her cup, the surface had returned to an undisturbed state.

“But listen,” Gaea said. It was like a light had been thrown on by her voice—something sparkled, or shimmered, or gleamed, out of it. Her voice cracked with emotion. Not fear—awe. “Just as you’d disappeared, there was this brilliant flash of light!”

“What? Light?”

“I saw it. It was… Oh, I wish I could even begin to describe it.” Gaea brought her head up and closed her eyes, like she was trying to inhabit that memory. “It was… No, it felt like the opposite, the complete opposite, of that monster. Like, if that thing was built entirely out of hate, this light was built out of the opposite of that. Out of love.”

“Where did it come from? Another part of the cave?”

“That’s the strangest thing. It didn’t come from someplace else—it came from inside the monster.”

Chamomile’s look conveyed enough. Gaea squirmed. “I know it sounds completely crazy. But that’s what I saw, I swear—Polar and Clip and I, we all saw that. It was teal and radiant and—and—” She stuttered a bit, making odd sounds, before finishing with a murmur. “—and it spoke.”

Chamomile stared at her. “It… spoke?”

Gaea nodded. Her voice remained a whisper, but there was a frantic energy about it, like she was afraid that she’d run out of voice before she’d said everything that needed saying. “Did you ever, when you were a filly, imagine what kinds of voices inanimate objects might have if they could speak? Like, trees would have this kind of whispery voice, rocks might sound cranky and brittle? This was like that, for something… like the sun, I guess, or… something as old and as powerful. It sounded motherly, yet furious, like it couldn’t believe that monster was trying to escape. And it burst out—I guess it was trapped in it?—and it spoke and there was light and—”

She was starting to lose Chamomile. Trying to draw her back to a concise point, Chamomile asked, “What did it say?”

Gaea paused, shaken by the interruption. She dipped her head down and swallowed the rest of her tea. “Just two words: never again.”

Chamomile struggled to understand. A light that could speak, a light that came out of darkness… darkness so gluttonous, it devoured everything in its path…

With a flash of insight, she recalled something that Astral had told her once, before he had gotten sick. Something as big as a star, at the end of its life, could collapse into a singularity. At such a point, the gravitational field would be inescapable. Not even light could get out, and it’d be trapped, endlessly gyrating towards the center. Astral called this phenomenon a “black hole,” a rather innocent-sounding, almost cutesy term for something so cosmically destructive.

But Astral explained another thing: a black hole cycle through the cosmos, eating planets and stars, but in doing so, it would release incredible amounts of energy. The matter it attracted would spin around its singularity at speeds no pony could comprehend, generating heat so terrifically scorching that the substance would begin to glow. And it could out-glow, out-shine, out-luminate virtually everything else in the sky, even the sun! Were it to happen in their lifetime, a pony could see such a burst of light with but eyes alone.

“It’s called a quasar,” Astral explained. “The brightest thing in the universe. Yet perhaps also the most poetic thing in it, too, which is why it’s my favorite thing out there. Think of it: a black hole, something so immensely powerful it won’t allow even light to escape; yet it is the source of light so intense that it can outlive, even outrace, the darkness itself!”

She began to imagine that whatever that dark entity was, it was, perhaps, a kind of black hole, one that drained everything in its wake—everything a pony thought and felt—without ever quenching its voracious appetite. That light—bursting forth from within—was its quasar.

Even now you are still explaining things to me, with the same excitement you had when you were alive, when you showed me my lucky star. But this thought did not embitter Chamomile. Thinking of Astral now did not hurt as badly as before. It did not mark her sorrow. Oh, the sadness was still there, but it felt different. Had it changed?

No, she realized; she had.

“This light,” she began cautiously, “after it spoke, what did it do?”

Gaea seemed surprised that Chamomile had not rebuffed her. She took a moment to think. “Well, like I said, it came from inside of the darkness, so after it spoke, it… it shot out.” Like a quasar, Chamomile thought, nodding. “The darkness… screamed, like all that light was hurting it. It writhed and struck the cave’s surroundings. Everything was shaking. We thought the tunnel might collapse. Then…”

She grimaced. “It spat you out.”

“Spat me out?”

“Yeah, just spat you out over the bridge. Polar managed to catch you and pull you to us. Afterwards…”

In a somewhat halting voice, Gaea continued her story. Whatever that light did, it generated an increasingly erratic response in the darkness. It thrashed about harder and harder until, when it struck one of the walls, massive chunks of rock and granite tumbled down from the ceiling. They smashed into the platform and rails and broke the ground beneath them. Everything was dragged into the watery vortex underneath, to vanish beneath the crashing waves.

By then, they’d realized they couldn’t delay. Unsure how long the darkness would keep thrashing, they, along with the unconscious Chamomile, gained the rest of the sloping tracks. The rumbling and shaking of the earth seemed to not only increase in frequency but also in pitch, to the point where Gaea doubted she’d get the ringing out of her ears. When they, at last, located the mineshaft’s entrance, everything behind them gave one last, desperate heave; then, exiting, they were saved by a tail-length of space between them and the opening. They watched as boulders the size of houses plummeted from the mountains and landed in front of the entrance, sealing it shut.

The last thing they heard, before a silence comparable to death settled around their ears, and before the frozen wasteland swept up their bodies, was a roar, furious beyond meaning, sunk below the earth, from a depth and place best left unseen and unsaid.

“After that, we tried to forge ahead, but we really were at the end of our rope,” Gaea said in a quiet voice. “Between how tired we were, and how cold it was… Well, it really was pure luck that somepony from the railroad company found us. And then…”

She shrugged, focusing her gaze on her cup.

Chamomile didn’t respond. She looked outside. Night had arrived finally, and stars twinkled their lives away.

Even though it wasn’t asked, Chamomile said, “I believe you. I wished I understood it more, but I believe you.”

After a moment, Gaea laughed softly, but it was a depressingly weak, feeble sound. “I wish I understood it at all. I wish I understood what happened to us.”

“But we’re here now. We survived. Maybe that’s all we should understand. Afterwards…”

“Afterwards?” Gaea looked at her, lips slightly parted.

“We… live, I guess. Choose to live. Choose to…”

Let yourself choose. Let that Gaea mare in.

She looked briefly around her. His voice was as fleeting as a shadow, but far more comforting than one. It seemed to brush her hair like he was running a hoof through it. It tickled her snout, brought wetness to her eyes that she blinked away.

The clock sang out a short, almost peppy tune. Ten-o’-clock had arrived. Had an hour really passed? Yet Chamomile didn’t feel sleepy. She felt more awake than ever, not from fear but something better, more fulfilling.

She felt Gaea sitting next to her, quiet, her eyes starting to droop; she felt her breathing like it was her own. It was a curious, yet not altogether uncomfortable, feeling. It was a feeling of completion, she realized—a feeling that this was where and when and why she was meant to be. With whom she was meant to…

She must have made a sound, because she felt Gaea stir. She half-hoped that, in the dim parlor, her blossoming cheeks would not be noticed, but then she thought that perhaps that would not be such a bad thing.

Another thought came to her. She reached over to her side to retrieve her bag and began to fiddle with the other straps. Gaea sat up, watching her, but did not interrupt.

“I want to show you something,” she said as she finished her search.

She had retrieved the two photos that had sat in her bag ever since she left Bridlewood. When she pulled them out, she was surprised that the colors had not yet faded. So much time, it seemed, had passed from when she first began this journey, that she’d expected the photographs to have lost their sheen, but there they nevertheless were. “Here,” she said, turning back to Gaea, the photographs in her hooves.

Gaea scooted closer. Chamomile hesitated for half a second, before flipping the photos and gently easing them towards her. “That’s my husband. Astral,” she said, pointing to the first photograph. It was taken some time after they were married, she recalled. They were on a bench in Bridlewood in the fall, and were looking at the camera with wide smiles. Then she pointed to the second photograph. “And that’s—”

“Your son?”

Chamomile nodded. “Juniper. He must have been only a year or so old in that photograph.” She smiled at the upside-down depiction of her son, marveling at how the camera had managed to capture the beauty of his eyes, how they gleamed with extraordinary splendor.

She watched Gaea look between the two photographs. She tried to read her face, determine what she was feeling. Inwardly, she was asking herself why she had presented the photographs at all. Her answer was both unsatisfactory and yet true. She had to. She needed to see Gaea looking at them, needed her to understand what she could not put quite into words.

Please.

“They’re beautiful,” Gaea murmured.

“The photos?”

“Not just them. Astral. Juniper. You. Everything here.” Gaea looked up, her blue eyes shimmering in the moonlight. “You had a beautiful life, Chamomile.”

“Yes.” Chamomile looked from her face back down to Astral’s. It seemed his eyes were looking right at her, his smile playful. She could make out his voice—some sly remark, an allusion to a poem. He might as well be standing in this very room, watching over her as she had him. “But I still have a life left to live. And…”

And I don’t want to live it alone.

Her mind traveled backwards through time, past the last days of the expedition, past the first, past even the departure from Bridlewood. She saw herself in the past and saw a stranger, somepony who went through the motions of life without recognizing the hollowness of her movements. She saw this pony opening and closing the shop, yet not once opening the curtains to let all the light in. She saw this pony dismissing Penny’s concerns. Saw her tuck her son in then stare into space. She looked back further, saw this pony standing over the grave, looking down at the words written on its face as though they were the archaic chants of some elder race of equine, lacking meaning in the present. She saw this pony and pitied her and realized: she did not want to be this pony any longer. She did not want the loneliness of the past to become the emptiness of the present, and she did not want that void to become part of her future.

“I don’t want to remain in a bud forever. I want to blossom,” she whispered.

Gaea looked at her uncomprehendingly. Chamomile almost laughed. “Sorry. It’s something Astral told me once. But that’s not the important thing. This is.” She waved a hoof between them, searched Gaea’s eyes again, to see if she understood.

“Chamomile,” Gaea whispered. It was a question, one filled with caution, with worry. Chamomile could almost read her mind—could sense her thoughts as though they were her own. Worry also was there in herself but there was another feeling in the mix, a stronger, purer feeling. It was a defiance of all previous oblivions. A protest against endings. Spring, returning. And more than that, it was a tiny, stardust-speck burning bright in the night sky, the foundational element of existence itself: hope.

“This… thing between us,” Chamomile said carefully, trying not to be entranced by how Gaea’s eyes shimmered. “Whatever it is. I’m scared of it, I will admit. I don’t know what it means or where it will lead.”

“But…”

“But… I want to give it a shot. No promises,” she added. “But a shot. That is… if you would like that.”

Gaea’s eyes brimmed with tears, and her laugh was both bubbly and blubbery. “If I—honestly, a shot’s more than I think I deserve, Chamomile.”

“Cammie.”

Gaea stopped laughing. “Huh?” she said, tilting her head and looking at Chamomile with big eyes.

Chamomile was smiling. Her eyes were misty, but she thought she’d never seen clearer. She held Gaea’s hoof in her own. It seemed there was an extra weight on top of their hooves, like somepony else was holding them together. It lasted only a moment. “Call me Cammie.”

19 - Last Stop

“Thank you for sweeping up, Juniper,” Ms. Penny said. She was looking over his shoulder at the now spotless classroom, and both her voice and smile betrayed that she was more than impressed.

Juniper flushed with pleasure. “Oh, thank you, Ms. Penny. I just did my best, is all.”

But secretly he felt satisfied, too. Not a few minutes ago, that year’s T.U.E.S. Day had successfully come to a close, and its remnants—piles of glitter, beads, cut lengths of string from friendship bracelets, cardboard paper—had made themselves quite plain over the desks and seats of the classroom. From outside, the cries of rapidly retreating children—not just unicorns, but pegasi and earth ponies who had come to Bridlewood for the day—tickled their ears. Juniper could have followed them. There were two children in particular—an earth pony and a pegasus—whom he’d befriended. But he’d chosen to stay behind to help Ms. Penny clean up the room.

“Still,” she continued, glancing at him then away, “you did an excellent job.”

It was a fleeting glance, but lasted long enough for him to realize that she’d looked at his horn. But he wasn’t bothered. Ponies had stared at his horn for as long as he could remember, and he’d gotten used to that. He knew they felt sad for him, but he did not. Why should he? After all, he felt fine—and with a smile, he looked over the clean room, which he had accomplished with only the broom and his body, and no magic.

“I think that’s everything, then,” Ms. Penny said. She was rummaging around her desk, and he wondered if she was looking for candy. It was no secret she had a weakness for jawbreakers. “Why don’t you head home? I’ll be there after I’ve finished up some paperwork. Do you have the key?”

“Uh huh.” He liked the fact that she gave him a key to her house. It made him feel older. He started to head to the door, then stopped and turned around. His voice became shy. “Could I have one of those candies in your desk?”

Outside, he chewed on the sour-sweet treat that Ms. Penny, flushed with some embarrassment but also laughing at herself, had given him. It was a warm afternoon. An owl in a tree hooted at him, and he grinned and waved at it before it flew away. He trotted ahead on a dirt country road, humming to himself and passing familiar locales: the playground, Alphabittle’s shop, the twisting treehouse of Ol’ Ms. Grayhound (she had another name, but nopony called her that, not even herself). Scattered crystal nodes guarded the edges of the road, making him appear taller or shorter depending on the angle.

He came to a crossroads and stopped. If he took the one on the right, he’d head towards Ms. Penny’s house, where he’d been staying these past several days. But if he took the one on the left, he knew he’d end up at the tea shop.

He hadn’t told Ms. Penny that he’d taken that path every time he left school, just before he arrived at her house, counting on the fact that her paperwork always took her a little bit to finish. He was always only at the shop for a short while, not long enough for anypony to notice. He would look at the curtained windows and think about the items inside, the pots and glasses and mixing bowls that his mother used to brew her delicacies. A few times, he thought about going in, to breathe the stale air of a building abandoned, but each time he’d realize the hour and would turn back, to return the next day.

He looked down that path, picturing the shop in his mind. There was a strange sense that he was forgetting something, but all he could focus on was what he missed about that place. He missed its walls, its tables, the upstairs loft where his bedroom was. But most of all, he missed his mother, missed finding her downstairs already getting breakfast started, missed seeing her set up shop, missed wanting to imitate her. It felt like she’d been gone for months. She’d written him a single letter, which hadn’t told him much—just that she was somewhere called “Ponyville,” and that she loved and missed him, too—but each night since its arrival, he’d gone to bed clutching that letter like it was a stuffed animal to ward off bad dreams.

He liked staying with Ms. Penny. That was true. He liked her big treehouse with more rooms than seemed possible. But it was not the tea shop. It was not home.

That feeling returned—of him forgetting something. But what? He looked down that path, which was marked by shadows and swirling leaves and secrets, and thought that it had to do with the shop.

He was about to take that path, when he heard some sort of commotion coming the other way. Turning around, he made out several voices, all excited. They originated from the heart of Bridlewood. His curiosity was piqued, and he forgot about what he was forgetting to follow the voices.

A crowd had gathered on the crystal-lined path that led out of Bridlewood. Most were unicorns, but some were also earth and pegasi families who had stayed over. Juniper grumbled, too short to see past them.

“... my son,” he then heard somepony say. He recognized it immediately, and as it continued on, he tried to push through the crowd. “I’m looking for him. Have you seen him? He’s got green fur and—”

With a cry, he zipped through an opening he’d forced, rushing blindly forward. At the last second, somepony swept him into her hooves. Her mane tickled his muzzle, making him laugh, and he smelled that familiar scent of tea and wood that could only belong to his mother.

“Juniper!” Chamomile hugged him close. It was then that he noticed that there was another scent on her—several, in fact. Coal or charcoal, and something flowery and earthy, too. “Oh, I missed you so much!” She planted a kiss on his forehead, tickling him pink.

As she set him down, another voice said, “So this is Juniper? He’s absolutely adorable!”

It was a mare. Looking past his mother, Juniper saw that it was an earth pony who had spoken. She had a pink coat and a light-green mane, long and graceful and braided at the end. She smiled kindly at him, and her blue eyes twinkled with good humor. He nearly gasped—she seemed to have stepped out of one of those old fairy tales his mother had once told him.

“Yes, this is him,” his mother said. “Juniper, this is Gaea.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Juniper,” Gaea said. She trotted forward and lowered her head a little to meet his gaze evenly. He felt a little self-conscious, but smiled up at her and did a little bow.

“Oh my!” Gaea exclaimed, bringing a hoof to her lips. “Cammie, you never said your son was a little gentlecolt!”

He grinned impishly, but was more surprised to hear the nickname. Not even Ms. Penny called her that, and they were best friends. He looked at his mother, hoping for an exclamation, but instead, witnessed her cheeks pinkening and heard her emit a bubbly laugh. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard her laughing.

“I’m not sure who taught him that, actually,” his mother said.

“Well, it is adorable, believe me.”

His mother smiled, then twisted around. “Now, where’d Clip go? He was with us a moment ago…”

Her voice trailed when she saw the crowd, and Juniper, realizing this, followed her gaze. The crowd had diverted its energies to a unicorn stallion who stood a little distance from them. Juniper didn’t understand they were murmuring around him; he looked ordinary enough. In fact, he thought he recognized him as one of the town’s barbers. It was only when he saw another pony pointing a hoof towards the unicorn’s head that he realized that his horn was missing. Juniper unconsciously started back, more out of surprise than revulsion.

The unicorn stallion looked a little miffed, but appeared more uncomfortable with the attention than with his injury.

“I’ll go help him,” Gaea said.

His mother looked back at her, concern etched into her brows. “Are you sure?”

Gaea smiled at her. It was a beautiful, self-assured smile. “Yeah, it’s no problem. Why don’t you and your son head home? I’ll come find you once I’ve helped out Clip.”

“Okay, Gaea. See you soon.”

Gaea nodded. She glanced at Juniper, catching his gaze. He couldn’t help but look at her in wonder. She seemed a little embarrassed by his staring, but offered him a little wave, before going over to the crowd.

“How are you?” his mother asked him. “Are you hungry? Did you eat? How was school?” She’d settled back into a mothering role so efficiently that Juniper almost didn’t notice himself slip back into quick responses in turn: no, he wasn’t; yes, he had a big lunch today; school was good, it was T.U.E.S. Day and he made some friends. This made her pause, and he asked her what was wrong. “Nothing,” she said, smiling. “I just missed you, that’s all.”

But her smile betrayed some other emotion or thought. She rose, looking down the Bridlewood path. “I guess we should head home, then.”

He nodded—and then, he finally remembered what he had forgotten. His mother read the feeling across his face and became alarmed. “What is it? Is the shop okay?”

“Yes!” he said, a little too quickly, a little too high-pitched for his tastes. He swallowed his excitement and tried to appear calm. “Yes, I, uh, just remembered something, that’s all. Here! We should get going, then!” With a twirl of his mane, he sauntered forward, and heard his mother trotting softly behind him.

Chamomile was standing outside of the shop when Gaea arrived. The other mare was frowning with concern as she approached her. “Everything all right?” Gaea asked.

“I’m not sure,” Chamomile murmured. “Juniper said he wanted to take care of something real quick, and asked me to wait outside for him to call.” She glanced at Gaea. “How’s Clip?”

“He’s fine. A little overwhelmed, I think, but I told him that’s because ponies care. That’s what surprised him, for whatever reason.” She laughed a little. Chamomile smiled, but she did not laugh.

“How’d you find this place?” Chamomile asked next. “It’s a bit out of the way.”

“I asked around. You’re right, it’s a little bit away from the main part of town, but I like that.” She looked around her, taking in all of the foliage. “It’s a cozy place. Both Bridlewood, and this shop. I can see why it’s yours.”

“It’s the same feeling you’ll get when you think about your new farm, I’d imagine.”

“I think so.”

“How’s that coming along?”

Gaea sighed, twirling her mane braid. “Well, while I have the money now, the paperwork is going to be a pain for a few weeks. Bureaucracy of a small town and all that. I’ll have to stay at the florist’s a little longer while that’s being settled, then, I suppose.”

“But when the farm’s ready for you, you’ll probably be busy with getting that up and running, right?”

Gaea looked hesitant. She nodded. “Just getting supplies and figuring out what crops to plant for the first rotation is going to be a real time-consumer.” She looked quickly at Chamomile. “I’ll try and visit when I can—I mean that. It’s just—”

“I know,” Chamomile said reassuringly, smiling at her. “We each have our lives to live. But I told you—I’m willing to give this a chance, no matter what comes up.”

Gaea smiled, and then, almost impishly, gave Chamomile a wink. “When the farm’s ready, I hope you’ll visit as soon as I let you know.”

“If you would let me.”

“I would.”

Chamomile nodded, then turned back to the shop. She closed her eyes, trying to discern what her son was doing, but heard nothing coming from the other side. She tried to visualize it—the chairs and tables in their place, each item painstakingly arranged so as to maximize aesthetics and accessibility—but each image she drew up seemed somehow lacking, like her memories of this place were starting to dwindle into twilight-hued husks—a thought that secretly terrified her. She held up a hoof, as though she meant to push through the door, but stopped. The door seemed an impossible distance.

“You’re afraid?” Gaea asked, though it wasn’t much of a question.

Chamomile nodded, slowly turning to look at her. “It’s the silliest thing, I know. This has been something I’ve been thinking about ever since we got back to the Equestrian mainland. Ever since we stopped off at Zephyr Heights…”

She glanced up, as though thinking that, through the leafy canopy, she’d see that city in the distance. Her thoughts collected themselves into a recent memory. Gaea watched her patiently.

After they’d arrived back at the depot, they’d taken another train to drop the workers off at their respective home cities. For the sake of efficiency, three trains were allotted, one for each city, so Chamomile and her friends would end up splitting before she and Clip returned home. But Gaea had said she’d take the train to Bridlewood before catching another for Maretime Bay. Neither Clip nor Polar appeared surprised by this, and, instead, looked knowingly at the two mares. Chamomile could have slapped them as much as she wanted to hug them.

“Then I guess this is where we say our farewells,” Clip said, a bit morosely.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Polar replied. He was standing in front of the train that would take him back to Zephyr Heights. “It’s only goodbye for now. I know we’ll see each other in the future. You ought to stop by my place! Ma’s got this great cookie recipe that I know you’ll love!”

They promised they’d keep in touch, hugging each other before getting back onto their respective trains. Chamomile, before departing, suddenly felt a need to look at him one last time. When she turned around, she saw he was still on the platform. He was looking up into the sky, and when she followed his gaze, she realized he was looking in the direction of Zephyr Heights—and no doubt the royal palace. She could read his thoughts as though they were her own.

She trotted up to him and asked, “Have you decided?”

He looked at her. His grin was short, yet determined. “I’ve thought long and hard about it, but… yeah. I think I’ve made up my mind.”

“You can’t expect anything, you know.”

“I expect nothing, don’t worry. But I have to do this.” He sighed, looking longingly back towards the palace. “I… I need that closure. It doesn’t matter what that entails, because I think, so long as I have it, I’ll be fine, you know?”

She did know. She turned away from him, briefly, looking back at the passenger cars. There, she caught Gaea’s eye, and they nodded at each other.

“If that’s the case, then: I guess I should wish you good luck,” Chamomile said, returning to Polar.

He chuckled a little. “Luck? Ah, luck’s got nothing to do with it. It’s my decision.” He grinned at her—it was just like the grin he’d given back when they’d first met, brazen, gung-ho, enthusiastic, genuine. “That’s what matters, right?”

And she agreed, giving him one last hug before he stepped onto his own train, and she hers.

But now here she was. Standing outside the shop, seeking her own closure, and unable to enter it—not because of Juniper, but because of herself. She realized she was still holding up her hoof, and brought it down, but the earth felt equally distant to her, like she was about to float away altogether.

Then Gaea was holding her, keeping her grounded. She was telling her to breathe slowly, and it was then that Chamomile noticed that she hadn’t been; her breath was haphazard, rapid. She forced herself to inhale and exhale, deliberately controlled, until she had her breathing back under control.

“It’s all right,” Gaea said. She kept her voice low, between them, so that Juniper would not hear.

“No, it isn’t. How can it be?” She looked at Gaea, who did not waver under her gaze. “I have to walk in there and tell him—tell him, what, exactly? That I failed? Isn’t that the truth?”

“If that’s what you need to tell him.”

“It’s what has to be said.” Chamomile shook her head, closing her eyes. “I just—what if he hates me?”

“He won’t.”

“How can you possibly know that? How can anypony—”

She felt, then, something pressed against her lips. Something warm and delicate. Startled, her voice slipped away. The sensation was quick, fleeting, and when it was gone, she found herself missing it almost as much as she’d missed her son. Gaea’s cheeks were red, but her eyes sparkled with belief.

“He won’t hate you,” she said, “because you’re his mother, and you love him. And….” Chamomile thought she was about to say something else, but instead, Gaea finished, “that’s the truth.”

Chamomile believed her. How could she not? Because Gaea now knew the whole of her. She knew her as Astral once had. She nodded, slowly, not breaking her gaze.

They waited a little longer. Then they both looked at the door. It hadn’t moved or changed, but it still seemed that impossible distance. “It’s been a little bit since he said he’d call,” Chamomile murmured worriedly. “I should…”

“I know,” Gaea said. Chamomile felt her touch her shoulder. “If you want me to go in with you…”

“No,” Chamomile said. Then she added, “Well, not yet. I… I think this is a conversation I need to have with him, on my own.”

Gaea didn’t argue. She pulled her hoof away and offered her another nod.

Chamomile let out her breath. She approached the door. Touched it to make sure it was real. Then, with some effort, she called, “Juniper, I’m coming in,” turned the knob, and let herself enter.

Even though she expected it, she was still surprised to see that everything appeared exactly as she had left it. The circular tables and log chairs, which she now thought were too empty. The walls, dark and shadowy. Curtains that had, for seemingly years, remained stoically still; now, at the opening of the door, they danced awkwardly when the breeze hesitantly touched their spirits. The plants on the shelves, wilting and decaying.

Everything was so overtly dismal and small that she marveled at how she’d failed to notice it. Her mind began mapping out a plan for renewal—the walls would need new paint, and she’d have to ask Alphabittle for his recommendations for mood lighting. Candles, too—scented candles to bring light to the tables, to bring presence and calmness to the customers. Perhaps she’d change out the curtains for brighter colors, things that did not absorb the light so much as redirect it inward. And the plants. New ones were in order—but she knew already who she’d go to for that.

She was so busy planning ahead that she nearly missed the fact that Juniper wasn’t anywhere in the shop. But soon she noticed, and for a moment, panic seized her. Then, as her eyes scanned her surroundings, they perceived that the back door was slightly open. She put her plans on hold, took a breath, and walked through the memories of buried days towards that opening.

Juniper was at the grave. He was squirming over it, and when Chamomile got closer, she realized he was trying to take a sponge to it. A bucket with soapy water was next to him; next to the bucket was a pair of shears. He was grunting with exertion, and did not notice her come up to him until she was right beside him.

“Oh,” he stuttered, putting the sponge down and looking up at her. “Sorry, Mom. I forgot.”

“You forgot? Forgot what, exactly?”

“Forgot to clean Daddy.” He held up the sponge. It had turned gray with his efforts. “After school, I used to come here and sneak around the house to clean, but I forgot to do it today.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said quietly. “I could have handled that when I got back.”

“I know. But I wanted to. It made it seem like you were here, too.”

She felt her breath stolen from her. There was another urge to hug him, but she held herself back. She looked past the grave towards the surrounding woods, blinking rapidly. There was nothing there—nothing standing between this space and the woods, nothing that lingered—yet she felt something watching anyway. She understood.

“Here,” she said, kneeling down next to him. “You can help me.”

Together they began to clear the grave of obstruction. She showed Juniper how to handle the shears, encouraging him to cut away the vines, the grass, the lichen. She took the sponge and used one side first to scrape away what remained, then the other side to throw water freshly onto the grave’s face. Juniper dragged over the bucket and brought out another sponge, and she couldn’t help but smile as he went around the other side and mimicked her actions. Soon the light of the afternoon shimmered down from an open spot in the canopy, falling upon the grave, and it seemed to transfigure it from mere granite to marble. Even the words etched for all of posterity on its face—Here lies Astral, much loved and forever missed—seemed to glow.

As they cleaned, as they cut, as they shared in this task, Chamomile heard herself begin to talk. She could not tell him everything, of course—the monster, for instance, could not be mentioned, for she did not want to inflict another nightmare onto Juniper—but mostly everything else, that deserved retelling. Juniper was quiet throughout, listening without interrupting. She told him what she believed was relevant, what she thought was important. She finished by confessing why she’d gone: that she’d wanted to see if there was a way to get his magic back. “But I didn’t find a way,” she said, as much to him as to the grave. “I’m sorry, Juniper.”

Silence.

The wind did not disturb them. The forest melted away until it was just the two of them and the grave. She was aware of every sensation, every nerve firing, and yet curiously felt detached from herself and the scene, like she was partly watching from a distance. She waited. And waited. And resolved to wait for however long it took.

Juniper came around the grave. His face was a carefully drawn mask. She looked blankly at him.

Then, before she could react, he darted forward and hugged her.

Then came his voice, so soft and sweet against her leg: “It’s okay. Thank you for trying, Mama.”

It was enough.

After a time, they gathered up their tools and went back into the shop. “Are you going to open up, now?” Juniper asked after they’d put their tools away.

“We will,” she said with a smile, “but first, there’s somepony else I’d like us to welcome.”

She guided him and herself to the door. Together, they opened it, and like a promise, Gaea was on the other side.

Out in the grove, a solitary figure, dark-green and with a mane the color of sand, watched through the window. He knew she would not see him—would not, in fact, for a very long time, if she was lucky. But the figure did not mind.

Then Juniper turned his head and glanced out the window. It lasted a second, before he turned away. It was unclear if he had seen the figure, or if the figure had truly seen him.

The wind rose a little. A shrill, whistling sound, like a conductor’s signal for departure. The figure nodded to himself and then, because it seemed appropriate, gave a final wave, before he faded back into the forest’s loam like lines of tracks vanishing into the past—or even the future.

The End

Dedications

This story is dedicated to:

My editors and pre-readers; Stinium_Ruide, VoxArachne, Sledge115, and Mike Cartoon Pony. Though their contributions varied, their quality was always superb. It is thanks to their help, insight, and feedback that this story can be read.

applezombi, whose massive work, Rekindled Embers, was instrumental for me to consider writing a longer work for the first time in years.

Ninjadeadbeard, whose courage and compassion inspired me; whose humor and authenticity in his Anarchyverse writing gave rise to my own attempts at an authentic narrative. I'll miss you, my friend, but I will always treasure our having met.

Rambling Writer, whose Adventure and Mystery OC-centric fanfics of Hinterlands and Urban Wilds ultimately were the catalyst for my own try at a largely OC cast.

Chessie, whose epic, Starlight Over Detrot: A Noir Tale, reminded me of the fun one can have when writing something for a long while.

The reviewers and members of the Reviewers Mansion, whose passion and drive has always been a joy to share in. Though I am currently retired, I will treasure the time I spent there as a reviewer, and look forward to seeing what else you churn out.

The Elements of Justice team, who, without knowing it, inspired me to start and finish this story; whose endless passion and drive towards this project has been a source of encouragement and happiness for me. I am immensely grateful for the opportunities they have granted me.

My literary heroes: Leo Tolstoy, whose novel, Anna Karenina showed me a story the closest to literary perfection; Gabriel García Márquez, who demonstrated the beauty of the stylistic voice; and Harper Lee, whose quiet, lovely wonder, To Kill A Mockingbird, has long proven my belief that the best stories are the ones that seem truer than life.

Both My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and My Little Pony: Make Your Mark, both of which I consider myself a fan, no matter their differences; both of which have inspired me to write creatively at pivotal moments of my life, and which have inspired countless others to find their passion and love for creation and art.

And you, the reader, who has hopefully stuck out to the very end. Happy endings are rare, but I hope that though this is tinged with the melancholy, you have found it to be worthy of Cammie and Gaea. I think they deserve happiness, no matter what the future may bring.

Thank you for reading!

1 - A Custom

One morning, Chamomile saw Astral standing in the grove, which was only a little odd, because he was dead.

The grove was where she went every morning since his death, because it was there where his grave resided. It was a humble thing, made of granite as opposed to typical crystal. Surrounded by the natural overgrowth of the forest and beset frequently by the musky vapors and mist sown in the shade of Bridlewood’s thick canopy, it periodically became damp and covered in moss and vines that had to be cut away each day. When it rained, as it had the night before, the water would splash mud all over the marker, meaning that she had to clean the surface too in order to preserve what had been carved onto its stoic face.

That morning, when she had come to the grave armed with her shears, a bucket, and a sponge, she caught sight of Astral standing just at the edge of the grove. His mossy-green coat and wavy, sand-colored mane nearly blended in with the verdant supply, and it was only because of how his eyes shined like stars in green space that she was able to see him. She glanced up from her task, the shears held in her magic. He was looking at her with a kind of knowing smile. He seemed almost healthy, too, without the emaciated form of a dead pony walking.

She looked quickly from him to the grave, then back to him. He hadn’t left, nor had he come any closer to where she stood, and she wondered if something was holding him back. She blinked, and he was still there. She frowned at him, but he kept smiling, and now it seemed that the smile, for how knowing it was, was also tinged with sadness, though that could easily have been the result of the long shadows that cascaded down into the grove like lightless figures.

Seeing that he appeared unwilling to leave, she resumed her task. With grim determination, she cut the lichen and vines growing all over the grave, discarding the cuttings onto the patches of a cobblestone path laid behind her. Then she dipped the sponge into the bucket and pulled it out all covered in water and soap. She scrubbed the surface of the grave with a thoroughness that comes when one dedicates themselves to the task and the task alone, when one momentarily can forget they exist in the world, and only every now and then did she glance up to verify if Astral still stood at the perimeter, which he did.

All of this was conducted slowly, tediously, as daylight began to stream through the leaves and the temperature of the forest began to rise with the hour. Everything around her seemed to shimmer with the freshness of a new day, but she remained focused on her task. She would not be satisfied until the granite slab gleamed like marble. The next day would, she knew, require the same diligence, for the vines, if nothing else, were as stubborn as she was. All the days, all the mornings, followed this routine, in which she found the comfort of habit but not much else. But that was all right to her. She would spend all of her mornings cleaning and trimming, going slowly through the task, methodically and meticulously removing the extraneous material and polishing the stone until all that was left was a shiny slab of sorrow stating to the empty air:

Here lies Astral, much loved and forever missed.

It seemed a pitiful thing, that epitaph. A short one had not really been her idea, but a short one had been preferred. It just felt wrong to her. How could something so brief encapsulate the life of any pony, no matter how old they were when they died? And Astral had not been old, she often thought—he’d breathed his last when they weren’t even middle-aged. She imagined sometimes, as she cut away the vines or sponged away the dirt, that each thing removed was an attempt at representing the number of years he’d lived, and because she took her time in removing them, they represented the incompleteness of his life—and the incompleteness of her own.

Finally, she was done. She levitated up the cuttings and tossed them somewhere into the grass, placed her sponge back in the bucket, and pocketed her shears. She was filled with the urge to touch the grave with her hoof, like she wanted to reach through it to the supine form underneath—indeed, she’d used to do that every morning. But she banished that urge to the far reaches of her mind. The temptation to reconnect with the dead had gone out of her since his death.

Now she could look at the grave without much feeling or thought associated with it. It was a thing to clean. The throbbing echo of grief, while it remained in her chest like a secret, came from a far-away place—as one was aware that their heart beat, but only as a distant realization against the noisy backdrop of everyday life, so, too, had her grief become. Time had diluted her sense of it until it was already too late to turn back the clock.

There was a breeze, swift and brief, and it brought the smell of metallic sky with it. Chamomile looked back at the edge of the grove. No flicker of surprise jingled in her soul when she saw that Astral was gone.

Astral had written a will. He had written many things, actually. He wrote poems and letters and scraps of songs he never sang, all by hoof—this was before magic had returned to the unicorns—and she could still remember how his face lit up when, for their first anniversary, she got him a feather quill pen that she’d discovered by accident one day in her flower bed when she was gardening. It was like moonlight consecrated into feather form, just as she was trying to find a perfect gift for him.

He had used that pen to write everything that came after, the will being the very last.

She kept it in a locked safe above the tea shop. Before then, she had spent every night for a month reading that will, combing its sparse text like it was a cryptic artifact from another time, to the point that she could not sleep or function during the day. When she began falling asleep while attending to her customers, she realized she couldn’t continue torturing herself with these nightly reading sessions, and so, she locked the will away and threw the key somewhere deep in the forest behind the shop. She hadn’t opened the safe in all the years since.

Even so, the will was never far from her mind, and today, as she returned to the tea shop, dwelling on that phantasmic sight, she found herself thinking it back over.

All that he’d written, in black ink, and using that moonlight-consecrated pen, was a single sentence: “Remain tight in a bud.” It was completely unlike Astral in every way—Astral, who liked long poems and often spoke with a verbose, voluminous quality to his words—to the point that she had thought, perhaps, somepony else had written it. But she recognized his hoofwriting, knew it was him and could only be him. This did not erase the ambiguity of his final words. All those nights spent reading the document crystalized in her mind as attempts at discerning their true meaning. “Remain tight in a bud”—she knew he was fond of flower imagery, and had little doubt that he was referring, in some respects, to the floral origin of her own name, but what was the significance of what seemed a highly unusual command?

It could not be literal; it had to be metaphorical. But no amount of consideration could reveal anything about the words beyond the observation that they were ambiguous. One of the other reasons why she’d therefore set the will in its safe for good was that she was too tired to try anymore—perhaps it was one of those mysterious gaps in understanding reality that Astral was fond of proselytizing, an example of what he called “negative capability.”

At the back door to the shop, the will and its hidden meaning came rushing back to her, and for whatever reason, she struck upon an epiphany. Flowers remain in their buds because the season is not yet right, and when spring comes, that is when they bloom; perhaps this was what Astral was telling her to do.

Yet almost as quickly as it had come, the epiphany vanished under a torrent of fresh questions. So Astral was telling her to wait for spring to bloom? But it could not be a literal spring, could it? And what did that mean, then, to “bloom?” Was he saying that she was an unripe flower? That she was past her prime? Had the seasons come and gone without her noticing?

She paused as those questions rushed over her, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. Then she shook her head. She had spent the last few years trying to question little. It would not do to fall back into that spiral.

She opened the door to the tea shop and stepped inside.

Once upon a time—as all the stories went—it had been a warm, well-lit, quiet place, a humble yet compelling locality in Bridlewood that she had poured her heart into. It used to be the home of her parents, and after their death, she’d inherited the building and transformed it into a rustic tea shop, filled with round oak tables and chairs, scented candles, mood lighting, and, of course, an assortment of flavors. She grew the flowers and petals herself in a garden plot to the side of the building, and had an eye for combining flavors to create an exotic and exquisite taste far more unique than what Alphabittle could offer at his Crystal Tearoom. All were new things that served to push aside the fact that here, ponies had once lived, and here, ponies had once died.

But in the wake of Astral’s passing, death had crept in like a rather petulant repeat customer, sweeping aside the need for mood lighting and scented candles. The shade that the blinded windows provided every morning seemed darker than usual. Even when she opened them, there were corners of the shop the light could never reach. More effort had to be expended on dusting the tables, the chairs, and the counters. Her plants, growing outside of the shop, fared far better than the decorative ones that lived on the shelves, half of which, in the first week, had perished, dried up by an invisible sun, yet frigid to the touch.

She’d grown used to these changes, adapting and changing to them in order to keep up the appearance of a functioning business owner. It had come to a point where she no longer really noticed how different the shop was from how it had been not only when she first had opened it, but in the burgeoning years when she and Astral worked together in it.

That morning, however, perhaps because of what she had seen in the grove, she became far more sensitive to all the changes, and for a moment, felt the stifling confusion one feels when they step into a building they no longer recognize. She was aware of how small it felt. It had always been small, which was part of its attraction—you could come and settle in a cozy place. But today it felt far too small for anypony, let alone her. She looked around, trying to determine if it was because the walls had shrunk closer together—but that wasn’t an accurate way of describing that sense of smallness, she realized; it was more like some invisible thing had taken up so much room that there was little seemingly left.

Familiarity came only when she went to the counter and began to set up all her wares, routine providing momentary relief.

The shop was empty. Consciously she knew this, verified as much with her eyes and her ears—so why, then, did this feeling of a cramped enclosure haunt her? What was causing it?

She shivered; then, inexplicably, she looked at the back door. It was a quick look, nervously given and nervously returning to her shelves, but in that moment, she could have sworn that Astral had appeared there.

“Mama?”

Chamomile nearly jumped. Her mane and tail whipped around, and she cried out when she accidentally jostled the shelf. Luckily none of the items fell. She set them back into place and looked at the speaker.

“Juniper? What are you doing up this early?”

An olive-colored colt with a bushy, bark-brown mane blinked sleepily at her. “I had a dream,” he murmured.

“Oh, honey.” Chamomile left her spot behind the counter and approached her son, who fell easily into a maternal hug. “Was it a bad dream? Is that it?”

He shook his head into her chest. “I don’t think so. I think it was a good dream, and that’s why I woke up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I dreamed I could lift the broom with my horn, Mama. That’s why I think it was a good dream.”

Chamomile was thankful that he had his head buried in her chest, because that meant he didn’t have to see her wince. She stroked the back of his head, thinking, Yes, of course he would dream that. Why wouldn’t he? Ever since…

“But I also woke up because I was thirsty,” he said, voice muffled.

She felt the urge to sigh, but forced it away. “Well, I suppose since you’re up, you may as well have breakfast. I’ll cook us both something.”

“Okay. Can I help set up the shop?”

He had pushed away from her and looked up with sparkling, sincere eyes. She managed to smile. “Now, why would you want to do something as boring as that?”

“Because you do it.”

That sincerity caused her heart to swell with pain, but this, too, was forced aside. “I’ve already done it, honeybun, but, when you’re older…” She ruffled his mane, making sure not to accidentally hit his horn. “In the meantime, though, you can at least set the table for us.”

Given a task, he now went away with a slight spring in his step, as though something as mild as table-setting was somehow a great accomplishment. But, she supposed, her smile growing sad, that was true for Juniper.

After all, it was quite the feat for a unicorn to go about their day, addressing normal concerns and performing normal activities—all without the ability to use his magic. And not once, in all his seven years, had he ever been able to.

While they were eating, there was a knock at the door. Chamomile glanced over, surprised that a customer came this early—usually she was open by nine-thirty, and it was not yet even eight. “Stay here,” she said to Juniper, unaware that her command held trace amounts of an overprotective fear.

She approached the door and opened it to find a tall mare. Her mane was cut short in the style of a colt’s, and her coat was close to copper in complexion. She had a small bag over her shoulder. “Morning, Chamomile,” she said. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“No, no, of course you’re not, Penny.” She thought about asking her about what had brought her to the door, but noted that some excited, nervous energy seemed to have entered the other mare. Penny Point fidgeted on her hooves. Her smile was at once kind and concerned. Chamomile chose another course. “Would you like to come in?”

Penny nodded. Chamomile closed the door behind her, and they now stood bathed by the faint illumination of the sun streaming through the glass panel.

“Oh, Ms. Penny!” Juniper exclaimed from his seat. He quickly wiped his mouth and trotted over, smiling up at her.

Instantly, the nervous attitude which had occupied Penny vanished, replaced by genuine cheerfulness. “Good morning, Juniper. Are you excited for school to start?”

“Uh huh! I got my homework done and everything!” He beamed, then looked a little embarrassed. “But won’t the other kids get mad? They didn’t get to do homework this summer.”

“I’m sure they won’t mind,” said Penny. She glanced at Chamomile, and Chamomile knew what the look meant.

“Juniper, could you be a dear and clean up for us? We’ll be just a minute,” she said to her son.

Dutifully and excitedly he nodded, leaving them to talk in the foyer of the shop. Chamomile watched as he brought each plate over to the sink and, standing on a little stool, began to scrape and scrub.

“He’s the only kid I know who gets excited about doing more work,” Penny murmured.

“How has he been doing? I haven’t been keeping up with all his grades.”

“Well—or rather, more than well. You have a sharp son, Chamomile.” Chamomile noted how, in saying her name, Penny seemed to draw it out slowly and deliberately, like she was testing out the waters. “His math scores are the highest in the class. Why, I think he may have a future in engineering—when we had that earth pony construction worker visit as a guest, he couldn’t stop hounding him with questions.”

“I see. Then you aren’t here about his grades?”

“No, oh, no, no, I’d never come to your place over…” Penny paused, cleared her throat. Chamomile watched as she re-oriented herself. She was her oldest friend in Bridlewood, but despite that, Penny had a habit of trailing off when pressured by anything. It was a miracle she was a teacher.

“I wanted to, ah, show you something, actually,” Penny confessed.

“Show me something?”

She gestured to sit down, and they did at the nearest table. Penny opened her bag to retrieve with her magic a sheaf of paper. “It came by in the mail,” she explained, showing the front side to Chamomile.

It was a job advertisement, printed on a yellow sheet, with a photograph of a pony wearing a cap and coat that both bore a blue-and-white-striped patterning. He looked comically cheerful, like invisible pins stretched his smile across his entire face. He was standing on some sort of platform and next to him was a massive steam locomotive—Chamomile guessed so based on the plume of white that rose in a frozen spiral out of a funnel-like structure at the front. Underneath was text presenting the viewer the opportunity to join “the first Equestrian Railroad Company.” Below that they had a list of jobs—most of which were evidently of a manual labor sort.

“I didn’t take you as somepony interested in trains,” Chamomile said, looking back at her friend. “But it does sound interesting. Do you know where you’ll be going?”

Penny shook her head, so vehemently that it was like Chamomile had uttered some reprehensible accusation. “As interesting as it does sound, I’m afraid it’s not for me. I’m too married to my job, you know, and we don’t have nearly enough teachers in Bridlewood for me to even consider changing it.”

Chamomile quirked an eyebrow. “Then why…?”

In answer, Penny tapped the advertisement with a hoof and flipped it to the next page. “Here: it says that the expedition will be heading north. North,” she repeated, “and away from the three tribes’ cities.”

“Yes?”

“I was thinking you might be interested in joining them.”

It was like Penny had suddenly declared that the moon. Chamomile stared at her, feeling laughter quietly bubbling in her, which she suppressed with an intake of breath. “That’s quite the joke, Penny.”

But Penny stared at her—stared at her with hopelessly pitiful eyes that made Chamomile’s lips twitch in annoyance, eyes that were large enough to contain the entire sea of sorrow with which everypony had looked at her for all these years.

“When was the last time you went anywhere, Chamomile?” she whispered urgently. “I mean outside of Bridlewood. Have you visited any of the other towns?”

“No,” Chamomile said, a bit defensively. “I haven’t had the time. The shop demands most of my attention.”

“So much of your attention that you can’t be bothered to take care of yourself?”

Chamomile looked harshly at her friend, who did not shiver under her gaze. “What do you mean by that?”

In answer, Penny activated her magic to grab Chamomile’s hoof. She held it up so that the light from one of the ceiling lamps cast an eerie glow around it. Both could see the outline of her leg. Chamomile felt like she was under sudden observation. “You’ve thinned,” Penny said with a tight frown. “Paled, too—I can tell.”

Chamomile pulled her hoof away just as Penny’s magic dissipated. “That’s none of your concern!” she whispered harshly.

“It is most definitely my concern. You’re my friend, Chamomile, and seeing you waste away in this tea shop ever since—” She paused, chewing on her bottom lip, while Chamomile stared angrily and shamefully at her. She felt exposed. Hideous, even. But she also knew, deep down, that Penny never meant her harm by her observations.

There was the high-pitched squeal coming from the sink, and both of them turned. Juniper had turned off the nozzle and, having not heard their conversation, was smiling quite obliviously at them. “All done!” he said. “Mama, can I go out to play?”

“Of course, dear,” Chamomile replied. “Just don’t wander too far, all right?”

He nodded, before racing back upstairs to grab a few items. Some seconds later, he reappeared with a small backpack packed full of whatever supplies he thought were necessary for playing. Smiling again at them, he left the tea shop, though not before giving Chamomile a hug and a kiss goodbye.

Once he was gone, Penny lowered her voice. “I’m worried about you, Chamomile, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also worried about Juniper in all this.”

“You think I’m not capable of taking care of my own son?”

“Just the opposite. You’re more than capable. But I’m afraid all you’ll do, or all you plan to do, is take care of him, at the expense of your health. Sitting here, day-by-day, while nothing changes for you, while nothing goes on…”

“So now you want me to get back out into the world? Is that it?” She nearly scoffed. “That’s rather cliché of you, Penny, don’t you think?”

But Penny remained undeterred by her bitterness. “I think you need a change of scenery. A change of pace, even. And I think this”—she jabbed a hoof at the pamphlet—“might do that for you.”

Then she hesitated. Some unknown factor had come into her mind, something that clearly she considered important, yet also possibly earth-shattering, for her to hesitate this way. Chamomile’s bitterness was replaced with intrigue.

“There’s also another thing.” Penny leaned forward. “I have a few friends in Maretime Bay who got this same offer, and they said that the company is… looking for something. I’m not sure what. But they said that it has to do with…” She sucked in a breath, then said, “Magic.”

How she said that word—how venerating, how startling. It was as though the past year had not passed at all, that their time as a fearful tribe had never ceased. Chamomile half-expected one of them, if not both of them, to start bing-ing and bong-ing.

“Magic,” she repeated, though gradually it was beginning to dawn on her as to what Penny was driving at.

Penny nodded. “They say that up north is something old. Very old, like pre-modern-Equestrian old. Maybe there are secrets hidden up there that could, well… help out, as it were.” Her face became grim, carefully guarded from expressing any excitement. “It’s a rumor, I will admit that much. But… well, if the possibility even remotely exists… wouldn’t it be best to try?”

To try?

Trying was tedious. Trying was what you did in the first few days after life ended and you had to keep going. Eventually you could not try any more, because you would be too exhausted by the constant stream of disappointment after disappointment that followed like a bad series of doctor’s check-ups.

But Chamomile said none of this. She merely looked down at the pamphlet, feeling herself torn.

“That’s why I brought you this,” Penny said softly. “I care for you. You and Juniper. And if nothing else, both of you deserve a chance at happiness—and I know you think he deserves it, most of all.”

“And if it’s all just a rumor?” she heard herself say, almost unbelievably.

Penny shrugged. “Then you’ll know. And then I think none of us will have that hanging over our heads anymore. We’ll know, and then…” She made a strange motion with her hoof, a sort of warding or permitting of some strange custom.

Penny rose from her seat, touching her shoulder. “At the very least, please, think about it. I really do think the travel will do you some good. If you say yes, I’ll take care of Juniper until you get back. You know I can do that.”

Chamomile didn’t respond to that. Penny stood there for a moment longer, before a sigh—a heavy one—escaped her. Chamomile felt her hoof slip away, and a few seconds later, she heard the door swing open and shut again.

The pamphlet was still sitting between her hooves, with the pony in front smiling up at her. She stared back. Then she looked up at the back doorway, as if expecting to see that pony, or anypony, there. But, yet again, it was empty.

“Magic,” she whispered.

And she almost smelled, as if an attempt at an answer of its own, something celestially metallic.

8 - The Death Rattle March

Years after the fact, Chamomile could divide her life into two uncomfortably clean halves. The first was everything before Astral’s death. The second was everything during.

They celebrated Juniper’s first birthday in the living room of the tea shop. Several unicorns had been invited, including Penny Point and a younger, beardless Alphabittle, who boomed with laughter and entertained some of the fillies and colts with his games and antics. Special fairy lights that he’d sold Chamomile at a discount hung from the fake wall of lichen and lit up the area like fireflies.

That had been the only decoration Chamomile had planned—her mind had been too scattered for her to consider adding anything else. Luckily, a certain spry, purple, blue-maned filly, who spoke with a bubbly voice that was a stark contrast to nearly everypony else, had taken it upon herself to craft a string of graphics to be hung all over the living room. She’d taken paper and cut out letters, then glued glitter—nopony knew where she’d gotten it—onto them, and these she’d positioned on the wall facing the doorway, so that those who entered could read, “Happy Birthday!” in big, bold, and brash lettering. Using Alphabittle’s impressive height, she'd set up box lanterns up in the room’s high corners. By the time she was done, the humble living room had been utterly transformed so as to be virtually unrecognizable, but the effect was momentous: Juniper, starting to speak with that usual lisp seen frequently in foals, babbled over the bold lettering, and crawled his way after the laughing unicorn filly as though she was his personal muse. The other unicorns were equally impressed, or as impressed as a magic-less race could be.

“Do you happen to know whose kid she is?” Chamomile asked Penny Point while this was happening.

Penny shook her head. “No. I thought she was Alphabittle’s, but he said she wasn’t.”

“Who’d she come with, then?”

“Well, apparently, that was also Alphabittle.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

She went to ask him about that. With a guffaw and a twinkle in his eye, he explained: “Her mother dropped her off at my place for the day, actually. She’s a painter, wouldn’t you know, but painters need their time alone to paint, and this filly here wasn’t about to let that happen. Since I was coming to your party, I figured it would be okay if she tagged along—wouldn’t want to leave her alone or unsupervised, you know?”

He gave her a knowing look, and Chamomile realized he was speaking to her as a fellow parent would. For some reason this made her smile even as it also reminded her of Astral’s condition.

Chamomile continued to help set up the arrangements, putting out plates and utensils, all while Juniper exhausted himself running after the rambunctious filly who seemed to have infinite energy. When she was done, she looked up and found Astral standing against one of the walls, a cup in his hoof. He was watching his son with a pleased smile on his face, but the shadows cast by the outlines of the box lanterns fell upon his face like ominous markings of prophecy. She doubted anypony but her would have noticed the bags under his eyes, nearly disguised by his green coat, a coat which—she did not want to believe—seemed to have diminished in richness and hue.

He noticed her staring, and made a hesitant gesture with his head. She walked over and joined him at the wall. They watched the busy scene unfold.

“Has anyone asked you yet?” she murmured into his ear.

He picked up on her meaning immediately, and shook his head. “No, they’ve been busy saying congratulations. Which is kind of funny, don’t you think?” He laughed a little. Chamomile tried to ignore the paranoid sense she had, which told her that the laughter sounded a bit fragile. “I mean, you and I didn’t really do anything to get Juniper to age one. He sort of did that on his own.”

“We did prevent him from chewing off the end of that tea cup.” Said tea cup was currently on the highest shelf in the shop, with the handle bearing the trace markings of a foal mid-teething.

“It’s still a bit odd, don’t you think? It’s his birthday, yet we’re also being celebrated. Funny.”

“Being a parent usually is.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

She was grateful that nopony had asked about his condition yet, or had noticed. She looked across the room and saw Penny watching them. Aside from herself and Astral, she was the only other unicorn there who was aware of it, and she’d sworn not to tell a soul without their permission.

Good friend, Penny. And friends were needed now more than ever.

Just then, that unicorn filly paraded past them, only to suddenly stop and whirl around. She looked up at Astral with large, luminous eyes. “You…” she said.

Something about her gaze made Chamomile uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the brief glimpse of pity, the kind grown-ups had for many indifferent situations. Perhaps it was also the fact that Astral seemed to sense something that could not be seen, for he stiffened up, and his smile became forced. “Me?” he said, a bit dumbly.

“Your luminescence,” she whispered. Tears suddenly sprang into her eyes. She surged forth and hugged his leg, causing him to nearly drop his cup. “It’s so dark…”

It was then that Chamomile knew that this filly knew their secret. But who could have told her? She looked at Astral, who appeared astounded. She looked at Penny, but she was busy talking to another unicorn.

“Izzy Moonbow!” Alphabittle’s strong voice preceded his approach. Izzy let go of Astral and looked at the other stallion, surprised as much as they were to see his stern, down-drawn face. “You know better than to hug ponies randomly. Don’t you remember our conversation about personal space?”

She looked embarrassed, even a little flustered, and answered with a wordless nod. Alphabittle sighed. “I understand that you’re excited, but please, do try to remember that we are guests here, and guests must conduct themselves accordingly. Understand?”

“Yes, Mr. Alphabittle.”

“None of that, now. You know I’m just Alphabittle around here.”

“Yes, Alphabittle.”

He nodded. “Good. Now, why don’t you go help those colts over there”—he pointed to a group of them looking at one of the box lanterns that had fallen—“fix that up, okay?”

“O-okay!” Izzy made a mock salute—or was it really a mock? Chamomile had the feeling that the filly never did things half-earnestly—then left them to join the colts.

On Alphabittle’s back, there was a little cry, and then Juniper stuck his head out. He looked forlornly at Izzy’s retreating backside. Alphabittle chuckled. “Heh. I think little Junie here’s got a bit of a crush already.”

“Oh, please,” Chamomile managed to say. Alphabittle reached around and deposited Juniper into her outstretched hooves. “I don’t want to think about my son dating for a good long while.” Then she added, “Thank you, by the way.”

“No problem. I thought you looked a little uncomfortable.”

“Right…”

Astral hadn’t said a word. He was looking towards Izzy, and his face painted an unclear expression. Chamomile quietly nudged him, and he started. “Right. Yes. Thank you, Alphabittle.”

Alphabittle cocked his head. “She didn’t scare you or anything, did she?”

“Scare me?” Astral managed a laugh that, thankfully, did not sound wholly ingenuine. “No, no. I’m just… surprised how affectionate she was, that’s all. I can tell she means well, though.”

Alphabittle nodded. “Izzy does. But still, it is a bit frustrating when she doesn’t seem aware of… a few social mores, let’s say.”

He left them alone after that to go join her—or perhaps just to keep an eye on her, in case she wandered off and hugged another random pony. When he was gone, and with Juniper secured to her, Chamomile leaned into Astral to ask if he was okay.

“I’m fine.” But he was terse about it.

Then it was time to bring out the cake. They sat Juniper down at the end of the table, and his eyes seemed ready to fall out of their sockets when he saw the cake. A single, massive, refined candle stuck out of the middle in the shape of 1. When it was lit, Juniper was completely enraptured.

It was supposed to be a happy time, then. And when they all began to sing happy birthday, and when Juniper had blown out his candle—all by himself, quite impressively—and when they had sliced up the cake and shared it among all who gathered, Chamomile could have believed that it was.

But Astral was frowning all throughout, his face muddled, his mind racing backwards and forward through half-formed thought after half-formed thought. And Chamomile was suddenly bitter towards that Izzy filly. If only she hadn’t come. If only she hadn’t told him that his luminescence, whatever that was, was dark.

But then… How did she know?

Chamomile was awakened by a feeling of wetness on her cheeks. A swirling vision of the recreation parlor appeared before her, along with an equally swirling manifestation of some dark, dismal shape. It looked to be a stallion, a familiar one. She reached forward—

—only to pitch off of the seat. A cry brought her to her full senses, though not nearly soon enough to prevent her from hitting the ground. Thank whatever goddess was responsible for trains that the floor was covered in a soft carpet.

Groaning, Chamomile raised her head. There was a coolness on her face left not by air but by water, and when she reached up to touch her cheeks, her hoof came back wet. Tears. She’d been crying. But why—

I was dreaming.

Astral.

She might have cursed herself for being so predictable. Most dreams faded at the moment of consciousness, and her nights were often nebulous with their images and meanings. But every dream of Astral was as distinct as life, such that she could never forget a single one. How many times had she woken up, crying, since his death? She could not recall it happening recently. So why now? Why was she dreaming of him again?

She got up and looked around. Gaea and Clip weren’t anywhere. When she faced her seat, she saw a little note tucked under the blanket.

Chamomile: we went to get breakfast. Didn’t want to wake you. Come join us if you can!

It was signed by Gaea. Chamomile stared at the note for a long while, then, inexplicably, picked it up in her magic. She looked around for her bag and, after finding it, deposited the note in there before she had a chance to think it over.

She wondered how long she’d been asleep, how long she’d been crying. Perhaps not long enough for them to see—and if it was true that they hadn’t seen her in that state, then she would be grateful. She was in no mood to answer the question, “How are you?”

Still, she knew she had to get herself ready for the day. A glance at the clock revealed that morning was already dwindling.

But Astral…

She sighed. The train creaked and groaned around a slight curve, as though trying and failing to emulate that sigh. After she freshened up in a bathroom, Chamomile walked through the cars until she came to the diner. Immediately she spied Gaea and Clip seated at a table, next to one of the vertical windows that opened up an impressive view of a bright, sunny morning. The sun shone through and fell upon Gaea, highlighting her profile. Chamomile paused for a moment, before forcing herself to continue forward.

Gaea saw her and waved. “Hey, you’re up,” she said, smiling. Based on her tone, it appeared that Chamomile’s efforts in the bathroom paid off—any trace of her tears or tiredness were gone.

“We saved you a seat,” Clip said. He used his magic to pull out a chair.

Chamomile sat down. “Thank you. What are we having?”

“Basic breakfast. Toast and butter, blueberry jam.”

“Blueberry jam?”

“It’s pretty good,” Gaea said. “I used to know a pony who made this sort of stuff, and she’d probably say the same thing.” She happily took the knife from the bowl and spread the jam over her toast.

A waiter came by to refill their drinks, then to ask what Chamomile wanted. “Coffee, with cream and sugar,” she said. She caught afterwards the somewhat shocked expressions on both her companions’ faces. “What?”

“I half-expected tea,” Clip said.

“Tea? In the morning?”

“It’s not so unheard of, is it?”

“No,” Chamomile admitted. But now she was beginning to see the humor in the moment, and she managed a small smile despite herself. “You know, even though it’s my name, it’s not just tea that I drink, you guys.”

“Of course, of course,” Gaea said. She was smiling, too. There was something in her voice. Chamomile couldn’t quite describe it, but it caused her to put her food down and watch her. Eating her toast, Gaea looked out the window, unbothered by the sun. In fact, she seemed to revel in it, as it traveled in a beam over her face and into the frills of her mane, which seemed to achieve a particular glow. When she smiled, her crows’ feet were distinct, suggesting that she was accustomed to smiling quite often.

Chamomile blinked. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? Then she realized: she hadn’t had a chance to see Gaea up close in the daytime.

Gaea noticed her looking, and before Chamomile could look away, she said, “Something on your mind?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said quickly.

Gaea stared at her. Chamomile rubbed the table cloth and fought an urge to cough. She couldn’t look away. Clip was too busy chowing down on his toast to notice.

The waiter returned with the coffee, giving Chamomile an excuse to turn away. She poured herself a cup, dropped in the cream and sugar, and stirred the concoction. When that was done, she set the cup down. “Actually, there is one thing…” She cleared her throat and attempted to continue casually. “It’s just that, I can’t help but notice you seem awfully… cheerful this morning.”

Gaea blinked. “Really?”

Clip looked up at that. “Now that you mention it… Yes, you do seem quite cheery today.”

“Especially given yesterday’s… well, you know.”

“Oh, yes.” Gaea was quick to nod, but she kept smiling, unabashed. “I guess, knowing that, it would be a bit odd to see me like this. But truthfully, I just feel a lot better, for whatever reason. I guess talking about it helped.” She paused, then, in a somewhat lower voice, said, “You two are the first ponies I’ve told.”

“You haven’t told anypony else?”

She shook her head. “Not even that florist knew the full extent of it—she just thought we were a father and daughter down on our luck.”

She gave them both a meaningful look, then returned to gazing out the window. Clip, satisfied, went back to his meal, but Chamomile kept on looking. Was it her imagination, or had the look Gaea had given her held some greater significance? And if so, what was that significance?

Or maybe I’m just seeing things. She thought back to the Badlands, to seeing Astral. This reminded her of her dream, and her mood darkened. Seeking to hide it, she lifted her cup of coffee and resumed drinking.

For the rest of the meal, they were mostly silent. A few words were exchanged, but the breakfast was largely content to enjoy the morning’s silence. Gradually Chamomile’s dark mood left her, leaving her ready to face the day—but she couldn’t tell if that was because of the coffee or the company.

After they’d stacked their plates to assist the waiter, they all rose. “Thank you,” Gaea said.

Not quite having heard her, because her mind was still elsewhere, Chamomile said, “Sorry?”

“For hearing me out, yesterday,” Gaea explained. Although she was still cheery, she had lowered her gaze in an almost shy manner, her long mane covering one side of her face. She held the tail of it in a hoof and was stroking it. “I know it was a lot to unload on you.”

“It’s no problem,” Clip said.

“None at all,” Chamomile agreed. “That’s what friends are for, right?”

Gaea nodded, then, sharply, raised her head. “Friends…?”

Chamomile blinked, and then her mouth formed into a little “o.” The word had slipped right out without any thinking as to its meaning. And obviously, its meaning was clear, if the somewhat dazed and stupefied looks on Gaea and Clip’s faces were of any indication.

“Hmm,” Clip said. “Friends. Yes, I think that is about right.” He was grinning a little, a coltish grin—but this, strangely, did not bother Chamomile.

She looked at Gaea, whose smile had returned, shining brilliantly behind her long mane. “Friends,” she said—but was there a note of disappointment in her voice? And why was she looking at Chamomile as though trying to convey something through her eyes alone?

Chamomile resisted the urge to shake her head. She smiled in kind, but only quickly, and looked away immediately after making it.

They finished gathering their belongings. Afterwards, Gaea said, “We should probably check up on Polar. He might be awake.”

“Awake, and in a lot of pain,” Clip said, “but, all right, let’s.”

They began to make their way to the medbay car, Clip and Gaea in front, Chamomile behind, falling back into her thoughts.

The next time Astral collapsed, Chamomile was lucky enough to be there. She’d heard the thud from upstairs, where she’d been feeding Juniper, and had come down with him cradled in a blanket and a bottle in her hooves. She was unlucky enough to not catch Astral in time before his head struck the counter and he passed out.

Her shrieking alerted her neighbors, who managed to overcome their usual lethargy to burst open the door to the shop. During that time, Astral hadn’t stirred. A wound had opened up on the side of his head. It was not very deep, but the blood was profuse, and Chamomile tried to seal it with a clean cloth as best she could. The makeshift tourniquet absorbed some of the blood before turning completely red, and the rest of it began to leak down the side of his head just as the neighbors arrived.

“What happened?” one of them asked.

“What do you think?” she nearly shrieked.

They loaded him up and transported him as quickly as they could to the doctor’s. She was advised to come with, and she certainly wanted to, but there was the matter of her son. She’d made sure he didn’t see his stricken father, but had no doubt he had heard her cry out. She could not leave him alone—nor Astral.

In the end, she arranged a makeshift baby-hammock from towels and hung it around her neck. She placed Juniper into it. He did not cry once, as though aware that his mother had enough things to worry about.

In the waiting room, there was only the geriatric for company. While they were friendly enough towards both her and Juniper—with one mare even asking if she wouldn’t mind her holding him for a bit—the sight of them scared her. How could she and Astral be in the same vicinity as the old? They were young—they had a child—they could not be facing the same treatment as ponies more than twice their age.

She tried to think if there were any signs of this collapse, but nothing came to mind. It just happened. A freak accident, she wanted to say, yet, knowing Astral’s condition, she did not really think so. She didn’t want to think about it at all. But she had to. The wellness posters and information pamphlets which polluted the waiting room insisted that it never be too far from her mind. She was torn between wanting to stay—wanting to hear from the doctor any news about Astral—and wanting to run, and for feeling this latter emotion, she succumbed to her guilt and cried into the towel that carried her son.

She had no idea how long she’d waited—long enough for her crying to cease—when a nurse approached her and said that the doctor wanted to see her. She was led past rooms full of the elderly in various states of care, arranged in such a way as to remind her of life’s eternal passing. Her steps fell like distant staccatos of some terrible symphony. She was aware that the nurse was saying something about Astral’s condition, but only a few words clung to Chamomile’s memory: “was unconscious for a time,” “just woke up,” “may be uncertain,” “critical,”—words that even together did not seem to suggest any real meaning.

When they came to his room, she saw that he was awake. She nearly wept from relief. He was speaking quietly to a doctor, but she could tell something was off. His speech was slow and he took a long time to put a word after another, like he was having difficulty remembering how to speak.

The doctor saw her, then gestured to her. “Do you recognize her?”

Astral looked at her with squinted eyes. Her heart seemed to have stopped beating.

“No, I don’t think so…”

Everything in Chamomile went cold. Her vision blurred, and the doctor, nurses, and Astral all became smudges of color. She was aware of herself running out of the room, pursued by the nurse who escorted her.

They later said that the fall had resulted in momentary memory lapse, and that it would be a few days before it returned. This was said as an attempt at comfort—it was not that he truly did not recognize her, but that he was simply confused.

She spent those days camping out in the waiting room, attended to regularly by the staff. She witnessed the old come in and never come out, an observation that she tried not to focus on. She hardly saw the doctor assigned to Astral’s case except for the rare instances when he came out when she had gone into the lunchroom for food, and even then, he did not talk to her. It was always one of the nurses or another physician.

“He’ll be fine,” they would say. “Give it time. He’s a strong pony.”

Buzz words. Hollow ones. Spoken only because it was their duty. Chamomile tried not to get mad at them, especially since they had been so kind as to supply her with food that Juniper could eat, changing his diaper when needed, and other such services, but it was impossible not to be vexed.

Eventually, though—long after Chamomile had stopped being able to count the hours, long after her mane had become fully disheveled and she was sure she smelled as bad as she felt—she was called back into Astral’s room. It took more than a few words of encouragement for her to get out of her seat and approach the room.

Astral was sitting up, and he gave Chamomile a familiar dopey grin. “I see you,” he said simply.

This time, she did weep. Her tears splashed onto Juniper, but with a grace only a god could have, he did not cry. He simply reached up with a gentle hoof and touched her cheek.

The effects were obvious afterwards. A difficulty remembering things, even the most mundane of tasks, defined the days where Chamomile would find Astral had failed to water the plants, or finish cleaning a table, or even what the date was. He had difficulty remembering orders, and when he wrote them down, he did so much slower, as though he was struggling to take the words in his head and put them down.

“It hurts to focus,” he privately told her. “It’s like I have to seriously sit and think myself into a state where I can actually work.”

“The doctor said it would be like that,” she tried to reassure him. “You just need to practice, that’s all, until it’s natural again.”

Though he never expressed it, she knew he didn’t believe either her or the doctor. And secretly maybe she didn’t, either. Like the nurses who told her that everything would be fine, she spoke hollow words only because they seemed the best words she could say—which meant, then, that they were not words worth saying.

Soon, it became necessary to seek treatment beyond the exercises that theoretically would strengthen his memory. She talked to the doctors, but the only treatment was time and patience—treatment that she found sorely lacking. So she turned to private means. Chamomile poured over the few books Bridlewood had to offer in its humble library, but found little written about how to restore his cognitive function. She took as many notes as she could, or as little as she could, and brought them back to the doctors—look at this, she would say, don’t you think this would work. But each and every time, they fixed her with the unmovable gazes of physicians convinced of the futility of the task. “Time and patience,” they’d reiterate. “You must have both for his sake.”

This frustrated her. She had both, but that was clearly not enough. She may have vowed to be there for him, in sickness and in health, but that did not constrain her to watching from the sidelines while her beloved went into the dark alone and frightened.

After one more of these ventures in vain, she returned, despondent and spiteful, to the teashop. She stopped in the doorway. “What the…”

Juniper was crawling around, naked. His discarded diaper hung on the cot—a new one had not been replaced. That should have been Astral’s job while she was gone.

“Come here, you.” She picked Juniper up and placed him on the cot, then went to work affixing a new diaper herself. “Where’s your dad, Juniper?” she asked him. “Where’d he go? This isn’t like him at all…”

But then again, what even is, at this point?

When she was done, she was afraid to leave him alone, so she placed him in that makeshift neck-basket she’d constructed and carried him with her while she explored the shop, calling out for Astral. But he was in none of the rooms on either of the floors. Had he gone out? But why would he?

It was only by chance that she saw a fleeting smack of dark-green outside the backyard window. She came out, calling to him, “What were you thinking?”

Astral spun around. He had a frightened look on his face. “What… Where am I?”

She stopped short just as she heard this. “What do you mean, where are you? You’re in our backyard.”

“Our… backyard?”

He circled in place. “Are you sure? It doesn’t look like it.”

“Astral.” She couldn’t hide her worry. “You left Juniper inside alone.”

“I did?” He looked at her again, fright transforming into panic. “No, no, that… I’d never do that. You know I never would.”

“But you did. And now you’re out here, and you don’t even realize it…”

He started to protest, but stopped short. He looked down at his hooves. He was trembling. “I…”

She wanted to comfort him, but truthfully she was also scared. Why, though? This was her husband. She had no reason to be scared of him. But he had left Juniper behind, by accident, yes—but still—

“Let’s… let’s just go inside, then,” she suggested after a moment. Her throat felt dry.

“Yes, we… we should, yes,” he muttered.

He went ahead of her, stiffly, his eyes glued to the teashop like he was afraid if he looked away, it would vanish from sight. She watched him, to make sure the same could not be said of him.

She hadn’t realized that she’d slipped once again into memory until Clip’s voice shook her out of her reverie. “Huh? Wha?” She looked around, and realized that they’d arrived in the waiting room of the medbay without her noticing.

“I said we need to wait here,” Clip said.

“We do? Why? I thought we were going to visit Polar.”

“We are, but for the moment they’re allowing only one pony to visit,” he replied. He looked at her, then pointed to the door. “Gaea went in, so we’re waiting here.”

Chamomile nodded, feeling awkward and a little frightened. Zoning out while walking seemed an invitation for disaster, and she hoped that she hadn’t missed anything too important.

“You okay?” Clip asked her. “You look a little out of it.”

“Sorry. I was just… I was just thinking.”

She realized the flimsiness of the excuse the moment it left her lips, and, alarmed, she glanced at Clip. But he didn’t appear to have noticed. Instead, he nodded, then took one of the seats next to the door.

Chamomile waited a few moments, then trotted over to the seat next to his. But she felt like her senses were heightened, that everything was operating at sudden and intense sensitivity. The seat felt too soft, the wood of its arms too hard. Awkward and fumbling, she squirmed in her seat, tried not to, failed, then tried again. Eventually she managed to settle long enough to release a sigh.

Clip looked over at her. “So are you going to tell me or…”

She realized she was caught. She searched for something to say. “I’m just… I guess I’m just worried about Polar, that’s all. He took quite the hit,” she added, a bit needlessly.

Yet this seemed to suffice as an explanation. Clip nodded somberly. “Yeah. I don’t blame you for worrying. That was a pretty nasty crash.” He paused, then seemed a little uncertain of his next words. “I’m not the best when it comes to this stuff, but… don’t let it get to you. I’m sure he’ll be fine. I mean, Gaea’s in there, checking up on him, so she’ll probably tell you the same.” He paused, then shook his head, cheeks reddening. “Sorry. I’m not that good at that sort of thing.”

“No, no, it’s… it’s okay. You’re right, he probably will be fine.”

She was grateful for the silence that fell between them, because it gave her something to focus on—something else than Astral. She looked around Clip back at the door, wondering how long ago Gaea had slipped in.

Gaea…

That thought suddenly brought to mind their interaction this morning. The looks Gaea had given her over breakfast. How meaningful they seemed, even if that meaning was lost on Chamomile.

Something about that nagged her. Something she was sure was important, something which she knew she ought to know—and yet it failed to render in her mind, like some blindness had struck her in that area. She tried not to let her consternation show, choosing to busy herself with one of the medical magazines—but reading these served only to bring her to another kind of thinking, one that returned to Astral.

She would have sighed had Clip not been there. Sighed, or perhaps grunted angrily to herself.

Why couldn’t she escape him? For that matter, why was she feeling haunted by Gaea? For all she knew, these were just looks and nothing more. And yet…

She tried to recall their previous interactions to see if an explanation lay there, but nothing came up. Inexplicably, her mind was drawn to an hour earlier, in the breakfast parlor, when the sun cast down onto Gaea’s face in stunning fashion… Why that image, she couldn’t say. But thinking it made her feel something. She couldn’t explain what.

The door opened, Chamomile nearly jumped, and Gaea stepped out. The first thing she said was, “He’s awake.”

Chamomile permitted herself a sigh. “That’s good to hear.”

“It’s about the only good thing, though.” Gaea lowered herself into the seat next to Chamomile. The close proximity caused her face to light up, but it seemed that Gaea was too distracted to notice. “The doctor said he probably has a mild concussion from the crash. The hangover probably isn’t helping him, either. They want to keep monitoring him for a while. Won’t let him leave without the doctor giving permission.”

“Won’t let him leave…” Clip sat up. “So that means he won’t be able to work.”

Chamomile frowned. No doubt Polar would take the news poorly—he’d been the most gung-ho about the job from their very first interaction.

Gaea’s nod was grave. “Poor thing,” she muttered. Her gaze was distant and distracted.

“By ‘for a while,’ do they mean for the next few hours?” Chamomile asked, just to avoid thinking so much. “Or the next few days?”

But Gaea shook her head. “The doctor could only give an estimate. She’s not specialized in pegasi physiology, so she’s mostly guessing based on what she knows about earth ponies. Apparently, even though the tribes have been reunited for a while, not all information has been exchanged completely. They’re still working on getting a network of hospitals communicating between all three cities. Still, it’s nice to know something.” Gaea rose and stretched her neck. “Better than being in the dark, waiting for something to happen.” Then, almost to herself, she said, “But I do hope he gets better soon, if only for his sake…”

Tender.

The word came to Chamomile as a flash of insight, and she looked at Gaea with brand-new understanding. This was somepony tender. A total stranger had crashed his head and made a fool of himself, and yet, here she was, worried about him as though he was anything but.

But isn’t that right? After all, she said Polar reminded her of her father.

Now Chamomile was in a position to contest Gaea’s reasoning. No, it wasn’t because some kind of striking similarity could be found between the two disparate ponies—if drink was the main shared symptom, then any of the ponies in that tavern could have qualified. Nor was it because, to Gaea, Polar somehow was her father in everything but name. It was because this was Gaea—someone with a tender heart, opening it to a very cruel and frightful world of chaos and mischief. It was all so astonishing to Chamomile, for reasons bereft of words—but she could feel her heart quicken, as though energized by this realization. And it seemed to her that Gaea shined a bit differently, sparkled a softer yet still vibrant hue…

“Chamomile?”

Chamomile gasped. She realized Gaea was looking at her, and her cheeks were a faint red. “You okay? You… you were staring at me.”

“I… I was?” Chamomile closed her mouth, mind racing for an explanation. She wanted to hide, but there was no means of escape.

Eventually she settled on breaking her gaze. “… Sorry,” she said, knowing it was awkward. “I’m just… thinking, I guess.”

“About what?” Gaea asked softly. She had leaned in a bit closer, and Chamomile could almost feel her breath on her face.

“Just… stuff.”

“Stuff. Really?”

“Uh huh.” Goddess strike her down, now, she was acting like a filly!

She abruptly forced herself off the seat, and was vaguely aware that she began to speak rapidly. “Anyway, since there’s nothing left we can do for Polar, we should probably leave. Don’t want to clog up the waiting room.”

Clip and Gaea looked at her, astounded. She knew she couldn’t hide her intense blushing, but was even more surprised to see that an even more fierce one flashed across Gaea’s face. Another urge to groan was resisted, but only through supreme effort.

“I suppose you are right,” Clip said, standing. “Even if I suspect you may not be all right.”

“I’m fine. I’m just tired.” She tried not to snap at him, and, recognizing the inadequacy of the statement, amended it: “I had some funny dreams last night, that’s all. So that’s why I’m kind of all over the place. You understand, right?” she asked Gaea.

Gaea looked surprised to be addressed. Her blush receded back into her usual pink. “I… Sure, I guess I do.”

Clip quirked an eyebrow. He looked between the two of them, his ears swiveling like he was trying to listen to their heartbeats.

Then, he smiled. There was something mysterious in it. His eyes had an oddly knowing glint. “If you say so,” he murmured to Chamomile, before making his way to the door.

After a moment, Gaea did as well. She didn’t look at Chamomile as she was leaving, much to Chamomile’s shock. But then she doubled back, and there was an odd spring in her step, and her voice, while low, reveled in excitement. “I had some funny dreams, too,” she whispered in her ear. Then, with a flash of a smile, edged by rosy cheeks, Gaea trotted away.