Aether Express

by MagnetBolt

Rating: everyone
Tags: Rarity, Adventure, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Drama
Length: 61564

Rarity needs to go far away, if she wants to find herself.

There's an old story told to foals about a train that goes to every place in the universe that ponies can imagine, and even more places that they can't imagine. It's a train that arrives only once a lifetime. It's a train that picks up lost souls and carries them to other realms.

Those stories say that if a pony rides it all the way to the final stop, they learn the secret that all alicorns know.

Inspired by Galaxy Express 999. Updated irregularly.

Published 2023-02-20 20:00:02 UTC
Last updated 2023-11-12 18:56:20 UTC

Long Ago

It was late at night, and Rarity’s sister was very young, and Rarity was very responsible, and those things along with very busy parents meant that Rarity was often in charge of bedtimes. She had tucked in Sweetie Belle. She had gotten her a glass of cold water. Now she was telling her a story.

The story was the kind of story you tell to foals, while they’re still young enough to understand it. It was a story about the Royalty, and about the entire universe, but also about trains. These were all things Rarity had enjoyed as a foal herself, and because she was young at heart despite being so very responsible, she still understood it and believed in it.

“Where do alicorns come from?” Sweetie Belle asked. That was the question that had prompted the story. It was a good question. It was a question that scholars and magicians and philosophers had debated.

Rarity knew the answer, of course. In addition to being very responsible, she was also very humble and did not mock the learned ponies who insisted on trying to answer the question Sweetie had asked with math and spellcraft and very long and boring books.

“You’re asking because of Princess Cadance,” Rarity guessed. Sweetie Belle nodded. One of the reasons their mother and father were not in charge of bedtime today was because of the coronation. They’d secured two tickets, and trusted their responsible daughter to take care of their younger, less responsible foal, while they were gone.

“She had to come from somewhere,” Sweetie Belle said. “Is it true she was just a normal pony, and she became an alicorn?”

Rarity nodded. She had listened well to the gossip and read all the tabloids, or at least the ones that were left in reach of a not-quite-adult pony’s hooves. Princess Cadance had not been a princess until very recently.

“Could I become an alicorn someday?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“Anypony can,” Rarity said. This was something she was absolutely sure about. It might as well have been engraved on her heart. “Did I ever tell you the story of the Aether Express?”

Sweetie Belle shook her head and fell silent, her fidgeting in bed stilling as she prepared herself to listen to one of her sister’s stories.

“It’s a train,” Rarity said. “A magical train that departs from a hidden station. It travels not just between stations, but between worlds. Ponies who travel on it can go to places beyond anything we can imagine! Worlds made of solid gold, or where everything is made of candy, or where the air is fizzy water you can breathe. Every world could be a paradise for some ponies, and every stop is a temptation, but if a pony stays true to themselves and makes it all the way to the end, they find a world where they can become a true member of the Royalty.”

“Then why aren’t there more alicorns?” Sweetie Belle asked with a yawn.

“Finding the Aether Express is the chance of a lifetime,” Rarity explained quietly. “Something that only comes once. The journey is long and fraught with peril.”

Rarity liked the word fraught. It sounded sophisticated and felt good on the tongue like she was a little more educated than the other ponies in town.

“To travel all the way to the end means a pony has to prove themselves worthy. They have to be brave, noble, and steadfast. Those that fail are often never seen again, and the few that do manage to return spend their lives thinking about what they could have done differently.”

The story continued for a while, but that had been the important part. By the time Sweetie Belle was asleep, her dreams were filled with stories of other worlds, and she had what Rarity considered a proper sense of the mystical nature of the Royalty.

Now Boarding

It was many years since the first time Rarity had told Sweetie Belle the story about the Aether Express. That had been a coronation day, and so was today, and that had made her remember being a filly.

Of course, Princess Cadance wasn’t being crowned again -- that would have been silly and absurd and Rarity already had a dress picked out and plans drawn up just in case it happened anyway, because Rarity was the kind of pony who spent a lot of time thinking about the Royalty. Not in the way the ponies at the tabloids did, not anymore. She’d long ago learned that the tabloids only wanted to find fault. Rarity wanted the Royalty to shine like diamonds.

Today, instead, was the day one of her friends ascended.

It was a grand ceremony. It was also one Rarity hadn’t planned, even a little. It wasn’t that she thought Twilight Sparkle was unworthy -- Twilight was one of her best friends! She’d been tutored by Princess Celestia, foalsat by Princess Cadance, and given every opportunity in life to succeed.

And yet…

Twilight lived in a tree. She was a librarian. Brilliant, yes, and a powerful wizard, but she didn’t have the kind of quiet dignity that Rarity expected from the Royalty. She was an adorable, fumbling mess, the kind of pony that was easy to befriend but who needed to be escorted to events to make sure she attended them instead of spending the night indoors and alone with the company of books.

Yes, Twilight had been their de facto leader, in a certain way, in the trials and tribulations she and her friends had been through. But they had all faced those dangers. They had all faced down gods and monsters and certain death. Most importantly, Rarity herself had faced all those things down, and with noble dignity!

So why was Twilight the only one rewarded?

Rarity felt ashamed somewhere deep inside even considering that thought. It was unworthy to be so jealous of another pony’s accomplishments. They were justly earned! Nopony could deny it. What ate at her was the sure knowledge that Twilight, as special and wonderful as she was, was not the only special and wonderful pony, and yet there was only one pony being crowned today.

“May I sit?” a quiet voice asked. Quiet is perhaps the wrong word here, actually. It sounded quiet, it didn’t carry far, but the voice imposed itself, impossible to ignore or mishear.

Rarity looked up and saw a pony she didn’t expect. She gasped and stood up, bowing.

“Princess Luna!” she gasped, again. “I am so sorry! I didn’t see you approaching! Am I in your seat?”

“Nay, Miss Rarity,” Luna said gently. “I simply wished for the company and saw you sitting alone. I thought you may wish for some companionship as well. If I am wrong, I shall take my leave.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rarity said. “Can I offer you a drink? I believe I still have half a bottle of rather fine wine here.”

It was a little less than half a bottle -- Rarity had been sitting alone for some time now with thirst and her own thoughts as her only companions. She’d told her friends she needed to get some air, but in truth, she had just needed to find a way to collect herself. She was still working on that front and was finding too many pieces still had jagged edges when she reached for them.

Princess Luna took the glass with polite dignity, holding it in the air against the light of the moon and looking at the contents, the red light filtering through it and splashing on her face.

“It’s terrible,” Princess Luna said.

“It is?” Rarity examined the bottle of wine again. Had it become skunked? She was sure she’d only opened it an hour ago. Certainly, she was drinking faster than she normally did, but she’d poured carefully to make sure no sediments had gotten into the Princess’ glass.

“Not the wine,” Princess Luna explained. “Living in the shadow of another pony, even one you love.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Rarity said carefully.

Princess Luna nodded faintly, accepting the lie. It was one Rarity was telling herself and would have been rude to point it out.

“It is sometimes difficult for me to speak to Twilight Sparkle,” Princess Luna said. “I am forever grateful to her and to all of you. You saved me from myself.”

It was true. Their first adventure, the first time they’d met, was in the pursuit of defeating the nightmare creature Luna had become. They should have become heroes in the process. Instead, their accomplishments had been hidden behind the dark side of the moon. Most ponies thought that Luna had simply come home from a long vacation.

Rarity had been happy to forego the fame to allow Princess Luna her dignity. If it had been known that jealousy had turned her into a creature of darkness and evil, ponies would have turned against her. Worse, it would have tarnished the name of the Royalty.

Having a secret shared with the Royalty was nearly as good as being a part of it, or at least it had been.

“It was my duty,” Rarity assured her. “And my honor.” She added.

Princess Luna swirled the wine around her glass. “Sometimes, Miss Rarity, I wonder. My sister raised Twilight Sparkle. She forged her into the mare she is, much the way a blacksmith forges a spear to point at the heart of an enemy. The spear is innocent of guile, but not the smith.”

“I don’t think Princess Celestia ever wanted to hurt you,” Rarity said. Was she consoling Princess Luna? If she was the type to have a personal checklist of things she wished to accomplish in her life, being a confidant for the Royalty was near the top.

“No, but she did want to stop Nightmare Moon,” Princess Luna said. She finally took a sip of wine. A long sip. The kind that ended with the glass empty and placed back on the table. “One was more important than the other, and always has been.”

Rarity wasn’t the kind of pony to understand that Princess Luna wasn’t merely speaking of her sister’s desires, but instead about which pony cast a longer shadow on history.

“I needed to tell you something,” Princess Luna said. “My sister and I sometimes have true dreams, glimpses of what is to come. I have not told anypony else yet, but I have had such a dream about you, Miss Rarity.”

Rarity felt a tingle of excitement shoot up her spine. The Royalty dreamed of her?

“Is it something you can tell me about?” Rarity asked.

“I feel I must,” Princess Luna said, avoiding Rarity’s eyes. “I know you had dreams of your own as a foal. Ones you have never let go of, even as an adult. They are good dreams, Miss Rarity. The dreams you hold onto are the ones that shape you.”

Rarity nodded. She thought she knew what the Princess meant. Ponies who chased their dreams were different from the masses who let life come to them.

“I saw you, in an uncertain future. You left the world behind to go after your heart’s true desire. I don’t know how the journey ends, but I know you are destined to stand at the crossroads and be given a chance to turn back.”

“Should I turn back?" Rarity asked cautiously.

“As I said, I do not know how the journey ends. All I know is that it reminded me of a story. A road between worlds joined with a train.”

“The Aether Express…” Rarity whispered. She was, despite the passage of years and the disappointments and disillusions that came with those years, young at heart. Somewhere deep inside, she still believed in magic older than unicorn sorcery.

Princess Luna nodded. “Yes. Take care, Rarity. I am not sure how your journey ends, but I know that it started long ago.”

Rarity sat at her drawing board. She had come home. Twilight Sparkle hadn’t. Or perhaps Canterlot was her home now. It was an odd thought. She’d only been in Ponyville for a few seasons and yet Rarity found it difficult to imagine the town without her. There was an empty place. Literally. They’d have to hire a new librarian.

Still, Canterlot wasn’t far away. It wouldn’t be such a burden to have their outings among the refined shops and gourmet restaurants in the capital. Twilight had always been the kind of pony who was all but allergic to spontaneous visits, and their time together as friends was not only marked on the calendar but included itineraries and checklists. Having to plan around her new duties as Royalty wouldn’t be much more of a burden.

Perhaps.

If she had time. If she could do the things she used to do. If they could still see each other simply as friends and not as part of a grand banquet or royal visit.

For the first time since the coronation, Rarity felt something besides the jealousy that she’d been trying to convince herself she wasn’t feeling at all. She felt the yawning gulf of distance between herself and a pony who had ascended so far beyond her station that she wasn’t sure what they were anymore.

Friends? Ruler and subject? Something between the two?

Rarity had been trying to distract herself by designing something. Anything. She’d seen hundreds of dresses at the Coronation, and given such short notice there hadn’t been a set style or theme aside from a celebration of Twilight Sparkle, and certainly no time to have anything custom-made. It had resulted in the rich and famous diving deep into their wardrobes to find something they hadn’t worn before.

It had resulted in styles from across decades and seasons all together at once, pairings of accessories and layers that hadn’t been seen before. Some particularly striking styles had caught Rarity’s eye, and she was sure with a few tweaks and some changes, they could be next season’s defining look.

But every time she started to draw, all that came out of her pen were sketches of trains. Train tracks ran along the borders of her drawing pad, crisscrossing in a way that looked beautiful but would have driven engineers to madness.

“I just can’t focus,” Rarity sighed. She took a sip of her coffee. Tried to take a sip of her coffee. The cup was frustratingly empty. This was the fifth time it had failed her this evening alone. She was going to need to invest in a larger cup. Again.

It didn’t help that her taste in coffee was refined, by which it is meant that her taste was expensive. Rarity wasn’t a foolish pony, of course. She knew that her palette wasn’t so refined at two in the morning to tell the difference between coffee grown in the jungles of some far-off exotic land and the cheapest grind at the local grocery store. However, she would never serve her guests the latter, and so she kept only the best in her pantry.

Rarity made her way down to the kitchen. The lights were off in the rest of her home, but she could navigate the way to the coffee pot even if she was totally blind. In fact, many of her mornings were spent doing exactly that. It was sometimes difficult to face the day without at least a cup of coffee in one’s body.

The moonlight streaming through the curtains provided more than enough of a glow for her to traverse the steps. She was alone in her home, but still took the time and effort to move with catlike silence. It was that time of night when one felt like an intruder even in their own home.

Rarity took a step, and one of the stairs creaked. Rarity sighed silently to herself. It wasn’t as if she needed to be quiet, but it was more dignified, wasn’t it? The creak felt like she’d failed the self-imposed challenge and--

Another stair creaked. This time, instead of disappointment, her blood ran cold, because she’d paused on the stairs after that first creak, and instead of it coming from under her hooves, it had come from several steps behind her.

Rarity shrieked, in a dignified and ladylike way. A scream that called out for a knight to rescue her. She was also a hero, so Rarity didn’t need anypony to rescue her, but it would have been a polite gesture for somepony to show up at that moment and sweep her off her hooves.

Her mind conjured visions from a dozen stories, half of them tales of blood-chilling horror, and half of them about gentlestallion thieves who found ladies of virtue and seduced them with roguish charm. She hopped down to the landing halfway to the bottom of the stairs and turned, ready to defend herself.

“I warn you, I may be a beautiful and dignified lady, but I’m also…!” Rarity looked up the stairs at what had been behind her.

A formless mass of darkness, like shadows floating in the air, boiled and tore at the air. It was halfway between a living creature and a cloud, as vicious as the first and untouchable as the second.

“Forgotten,” the cloud whispered. It surged, not directly at Rarity but around her, cutting her off from her only escape route. “Tossed aside.”

“If you can speak, then you must also know how to listen!” Rarity lit her horn, blaring light around her. It carved out what little open space she had, the walls of the cloud close enough that she could reach out and touch them if she wanted. “I command you to leave!”

The black walls closed in. “You are like us. Used. Cast away.” It hissed at her. Rarity thought she saw eyes in the darkness. It was all she could see. It had grown into a dome around her, and now she couldn’t make out the walls of her home. She was alone inside the creature.

If she had been Twilight Sparkle, she could have tried teleporting away, Perhaps it even would have worked. But she was not Twilight Sparkle. She would not have been approached by the darkness if she was, because it didn’t want somepony like that. It wanted somepony like Rarity.

“Go away!” Rarity yelled. She tried firing a blast of magic into the storm. Her magic had never been strong, but she was trapped by a cloud! Surely she could produce enough force to put a hole in vapors!

The beam of force and light was swallowed up by it. It was simply gone.

“You have a hole in your heart,” the darkness whispered. “Let us in.”

The space around Rarity closed tighter. The light from her horn started to flicker, fear and the darkness itself overcoming her tiny ember of magic.

“No!” Rarity shrieked. “Somepony, help me!”

The darkness surged in. Rarity fell into it, and there was no bottom to hit.

Rarity gasped and sat up. She was sore all over. That was mostly because of the bed she’d been lying on. The sheets were cotton, and not terribly fine at that. More importantly, the mattress was thin and worn to the point that she might as well have been lying on a wooden bench.

When she’d been a foal, Rarity had tried to train herself to feel a pea under a mattress. This had not borne fruit, except for some rather bruised apples and squashed grapes, but that sort of fruit wasn’t suitable for eating and her parents had made her clean up the mess.

“Where am I?” Rarity asked. Or groaned. She was a young pony, but sleeping poorly made her feel like an old one. The last thing she remembered was darkness, and then the total blank interval that meant the deepest type of sleep.

“You’re in my home,” a pony said quietly.

Rarity squeaked in alarm. She’d not expected an answer to the question and had certainly not expected a mare to have been watching her sleep. She covered herself with the thin blanket. It was poor cotton but it was also at least opaque.

The mare’s horn glowed, and she cast a spell into a lantern, filling the room with light so pale blue it was almost white, but only almost, and Rarity’s eye was keen enough to tell the difference.

“Princess Luna?” Rarity gasped.

The mare was tall, with a dark coat. She was also wearing a dark coat. Or a hooded cloak, at least. She pulled back her hood, and Rarity felt a blush rise to her cheeks at her assumption. The mare’s hair wasn’t the swathe of living night sky that the Princess’s was. It was short and pale blue, and now that Rarity looked closer at her, she seemed younger than Princess Luna, perhaps only a little older than Rarity herself, which meant the mystery mare was quite young herself.

“I apologize, I just thought--” Rarity wasn’t sure how to end that. She thought she was important enough to warrant a rescue from a Princess? That was hubris. It didn’t mean she didn’t want it, just that she knew that she shouldn’t ask for it.

“I’m flattered at the comparison,” the mare said, smiling faintly. “Please, call me Diana.”

Rarity swallowed. “I apologize again for the intrusion, Diana.” She glanced around the room. She wasn’t in Ponyville -- she could tell that immediately. She knew every building in Ponyville, and this was older and more worn down than any of them. If there had been a pony living like this in town, Rarity wouldn’t have been able to rest until they were more comfortable and less… dusty.

She politely coughed at the tickle of dust on the back of her throat.

“Would you like a cup of water?” Diana asked. Rarity nodded and slid to the edge of the bed. The taller unicorn poured water from a faded pitcher into a glass and gave it to Rarity. It was lukewarm, but that was for the best. Rarity had enough of a chill already from her experience and she wouldn’t demand anypony put on a pot of tea just for her.

Unless they offered, of course.

“How did I get here?” Rarity asked. “The last thing I recall, I was in my home in Ponyville.”

“I found you in the forest,” Diana said. “It’s a dangerous place. You weren’t on the path, and it is full of savage beasts. I brought you here.”

“How odd…” Rarity mused. “Not you, darling. I can’t recall what happened after…”

She remembered falling into darkness. It felt like that pit was right there when she closed her eyes, and the vividness of the memory was like living it again. She almost dropped the glass she was holding.

“Are you injured?” Diana asked.

“I don’t believe so,” Rarity said. She was polite enough not to mention how sore she was. It would have been rude. “May I ask where I am? I don’t know if we’ve met. I apologize if we have and I’ve forgotten, my head is a bit jumbled after such excitement.”

“Hollow Shades,” Diana said.

“Ah,” Rarity nodded. She was vaguely aware that the town existed, largely through reputation. It was another town near the Everfree’s borders. Whatever had happened to her, she’d somehow crossed through the forest on her own. Dangerous, but not so fearful that it was unthinkable.

Hollow Shades was a town with a bit of a reputation. It was a haunted town. Not a ghost town, exactly, since ponies did live there. It was simply that some of the ponies also un-lived there, if one believed the rumors.

Rarity was the kind of pony to believe the rumors.

“If you were looking for the Aether Express, you’re in the right place,” Diana said casually.

Rarity forgot about the rumors of ghosts because there was abruptly no room for trivial things in her mind.

“The-- the Aether Express?!” Rarity squeaked, for the second time. This time it was even less dignified. A squeak of alarm or shock was acceptable, but to have her voice crack like a filly’s? It made her feel foalish. “How did you know--?”

“You were talking in your sleep,” Diana explained. “You seemed almost feverish. I couldn’t wake you, but I stayed by your side to make sure you didn’t turn for the worse.”

“I see…” Rarity muttered. “I didn’t think it really existed.”

That was only partly true. She did believe. It was just not a belief that she was willing to share with another adult mare. It was a story for fillies, like the Tooth Breezy, or the Boogeymare. It was easier to deny it in public and fantasize when she was alone.

“It exists, though it only passes through once in every pony’s lifetime,” Diana said. “Are you going to board it?”

Rarity nodded quickly. “If it’s real, I must! Of course, first I’ll have to go back home and tell my friends and family. My parents will need to find somepony to watch Sweetie Belle, of course, and Fluttershy can look after my cat while I’m away…”

She had deadlines with clients, too, but she could make those excuses later.

“The train is leaving tonight,” Diana said softly. “You can return home, but if you do, you’ll miss its departure.”

“And it only comes once in a lifetime,” Rarity continued the thought.

Diana nodded with faint sorrow. Everything the mare did was faint, like she was only lightly touching the world with her existence.

“I have to go,” Rarity said. She felt sudden desperation. This was her one chance. Not just at the Aether Express, but at something grander. At whatever was at that final destination. At being something other than--

An extra. A stepping stone for others. Watching others live the grand stories she wanted for herself.

Diana smiled. She reached into her cloak and produced a slip of silver foiled paper. Rarity took it carefully, though when she touched it, she could feel it was far from fragile. It was indelible and indestructible.

It was also, more importantly, a train ticket. One wrought of silver and parchment and bearing the name of the Aether Express in ornate script.

“If you’re determined to go, I’ll give you this ticket, if you’ll agree to one small condition.”

“But this must be worth…” Rarity couldn’t even estimate the value. How did one put a price on infinity? “What’s the condition?”

“It’s a long and lonely journey,” Diana said. “I was going to leave on the train myself, and I have need of a companion to come with me. Would you care to travel with me, Miss Rarity?”

Rarity didn’t notice that Diana had used her name without being told what it was. Even if she had noticed, she would have assumed she’d said it in her sleep, or that she was famous enough to be worthy of the mare’s attention and memory.

“I couldn’t possibly refuse,” Rarity said. She knew she was excellent company. Really, the other mare was also getting a good deal. “Were you just going to go alone if you hadn’t found me?”

Diana closed her eyes, still smiling. “I don’t know if I could bear it. Loneliness can weigh a pony down until it becomes an unbearable burden.”

“Yes, I suppose it can,” Rarity agreed quietly. “I suppose I’ll have to apologize to my friends after I’ve returned. I’m sure they’ll be terribly worried. Perhaps I’ll find some souvenirs for them along the way to make up for being so careless-- ah! I don’t have any bits, or luggage!”

“The Aether Express will provide everything its passengers need,” Diana assured her. “There’s no need to worry about incidentals.”

“A full-service experience,” Rarity said to herself. It made sense. After all, it was the train of dreams and destiny! The opportunity wouldn’t be put in front of a pony and then be torn away because of something as small as a lack of bits. The lack of hats and outfits was a touch more concerning, but perhaps she’d find a way to make do.

“I look forward to the journey,” Diana said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

First Stop: Mare Tranquillitatis

Rarity had expected the Aether Express to be strange and fantastical, perhaps something like a palace on wheels. Instead, perhaps somewhat depressingly, it was almost exactly the same as the train between Canterlot and Ponyville, and not even the first-class cabins.

The designer had an eye for color, and to her trained gaze, the cabin had the look that ponies gave things like a bank or business when they needed to give off an aura of dignity. The carpet was a subtle two-tone sage green pattern that brought to mind the shapes of creeping vines and flowers without the colors involved. Curtains were soft, fuzzy velvet that half-covered the windows, and the fittings were almost all polished brass that looked nearly like gold to an untrained eye. The wood of the benches and wall panels was stained a dark color and covered in a thick layer of polish that made it shine nearly like a mirror.

Rarity looked at her dark reflection and wondered if she was doing the right thing. It was too late to turn back now, which meant it was safe to actually think about it. If she’d put too much thought into it before, the prospect of leaving everything behind to go off on a mad journey might have been enough to make her think twice and turn back. In the thick of it now, she had the luxury of regret without the burden of doing anything about it.

At least the train was comfortable enough, but as she sat across from the mysterious and quiet Diana on the bench, she couldn’t help but wonder why the wooden bench under her was so mundane.

“Are you feeling alright?” Diana asked. The tall mare sat with her eyes closed, and it was difficult for Rarity to tell if she was awake or in the midst of some dream.

“Oh, yes,” Rarity said, too quickly. She looked away from the ordinary-looking bench made of ordinary-looking wood and covered with comfortable (but still ordinary) upholstery. It wasn’t exactly brand-new, broken in just enough to take away the hard edges but without anything that might speak to some specific history or prior passengers.

“It’s not what you expected,” Diana surmised. She opened her eyes and turned that passive gaze on Rarity. She had the kind of look that could come down in a hammer blow, and was almost as powerful when she used it like this, a soft and velvet touch of understanding.

Rarity could have lied. She was a natural liar. Not a malicious one -- she didn’t lie to hurt ponies. Rarity would never do that. No, she lied for the opposite reason, to smooth over small faults and pretend she’d never seen them, to allow ponies to keep their dignity, to flatter them when they needed to be assured that they had good taste. Her business and livelihood relied on the social lubricant of pretending chartreuse and raspberry were a bold statement when worn together.

Under the soft touch of Diana’s long gaze, the white lies evaporated and she was left only with the naked, unclothed truth.

“It’s exactly the same as every other train I’ve been on,” Rarity admitted. “Why isn’t it more… magical?”

“The Aether Express is what it is,” Diana said. “Perhaps it’s shaped by your experience? It might even look different to every pony who boards it. How would we know, if it only comes once in a lifetime?”

“I suppose you might be right,” Rarity conceded. Before she could think to compare what she was seeing with what Diana saw, one of the doors at the end of the train car opened up, the noise of wind and squeal of wheels on rails pouring in along with a pony in a uniform that included a thick felt coat and peaked hat.

“Tickets, please,” the pony said, trotting over to them. He had a deep voice that echoed through the car, and his coat was the color of hard coal, even darker than his navy blue uniform.

“Ah…” Rarity hesitated. Diana came to her rescue, producing two slips of silver paper. Rarity leaned closer to look at them when Diana held them out. They were ornate and covered in a design that bridged the geometric and the artificial, a little like a too-perfect spiderweb crossed with lace.

“I have them here,” Diana said, giving them to the conductor. He checked them and nodded, giving one back to Diana and holding the other towards Rarity.

“Make sure to keep these safe,” the dark-coated pony said. “As long as you have your ticket, you’re a guest of the Aether Express. If you don’t have it, you’ll be thrown off the train, even if we’re Between.”

“Between?” Rarity asked, confused. She took one of the tickets when it was offered to her. It felt like it was made of thin, flexible metal. Not foil, but woven and pressed like fabric and with a sense of invulnerability. She wasn’t going to try and tear it, but Rarity felt sure that it would have proven impossible if she’d made the attempt.

“Between stations,” Diana said. “The Express travels from Realm to Realm. The stations are safe, but if you exited the train while we were in transit, there’s no knowing where you might end up. It could be nowhere. Drifting forever.”

Rarity looked out the window. It didn’t look particularly sinister outside. They were traveling through a dark forest, with a dense canopy above them. It was almost like being in a tunnel. After spending so much time in the Everfree, even the deepest jungle was only mildly concerning at worst.

The words, though, carried a weight that the mild-looking surroundings didn’t. Rarity clutched her ticket tighter as if she’d go drifting away without it.

“I see,” Rarity said, though she really didn’t. An odd boulder caught her eye, pock-marked and dusty.

“Our next stop is the Moon,” the conductor said. “We’ll be arriving in a few minutes. Please excuse me.” He nodded and left through the opposite door, moving into the next car.

“The Moon?” Rarity gasped. “In just a few minutes? How? We haven’t even left the ground!”

Diana giggled lightly. “Why would we need to do that?”

“Darling, I’m sure you can’t have avoided noticing that the Moon is in the sky.”

“A pegasus can’t get to the Moon just by flying towards it,” Diana said. “The Aether Express goes to places far further and far stranger than our next destination. The tracks weave between worlds, and the train follows. Look outside again.”

Diana turned to the window and nodded with her chin. Rarity followed the mare’s gaze. Outside, the forest was thinning. Boulder fields showed in the clearings, full of sharp-edged rocks and a thin coating of white powder.

“That’s so strange,” Rarity said quietly. “Snow, at this time of year?”

“Dust,” Diana corrected. It quickly became a thick layer of grey, blotting out all color and life from the world around them. The last of the trees swept past, and all that was left around them were rocks and dust. The train shuddered, brakes squealing. The landscape whizzing by slowed from the pace of a speeding locomotive to merely that of a train pulling into a station.

A platform slid into place, solid and real and obviously having always been there yet at the same time with the sense that it might have only just appeared.

The train blew its whistle, coming to a halt.

“Shall we?” Diana asked, standing up.

“You mean, you want to get out?” Rarity asked.

“We have a few hours before the train leaves. Don’t you want to visit the Moon? Only a very few ponies have ever set hoof here.”

Rarity did enjoy the idea of being part of such an exclusive group, and it was part of the Royalty’s domain. If she didn’t at least try to enjoy it, wasn’t that a bit of an insult to Princess Luna? She’d never dream of doing something so crass.

“I suppose I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs,” Rarity agreed, getting up and following Diana, trotting quickly to match the pace of the long-legged mare. Diana stopped and her horn lit with dark magic. She reached into the luggage space above the wide train benches, pulling down a pair of saddlebags.

“Here,” she said, putting them on Rarity’s back.

Rarity was pleased to see the bags were of relatively high quality, humble in design but made of sturdy and soft materials. They were a bit plain, but that simply meant she had room to accessorize!

“Thank you so much,” Rarity said, putting her ticket in the bags to secure it. “Are these yours?”

Diana shook her head. She lifted the edge of her cloak, putting her own ticket into one of the inner pockets in the soft lining. “I don’t need them. They’re just part of the service here. You’ll find a few bits in the other bag.”

Rarity checked, and just as Diana said, there were a few bits, not a fortune but certainly enough to cover the expense of a few meals or a small shopping trip. Given her current lack of fashion, the latter was an extremely attractive prospect, and she was willing to give up a few meals if it meant a hat and perhaps some sort of sundress. Or if that was inappropriate in the current surroundings, a moondress.

“So, where will we go first?” Rarity asked as they stepped off the train and onto a platform that seemed to be made out of concrete with silver railings. “I’ve never been to the Moon before.”

“You’ll find there aren’t many places to go,” Diana said. She motioned to the landscape around them. As far as Rarity could see, there were rocks and dust and very little else aside from the Aether Express itself and its rails.

Rarity’s dream of having fashion from another world vanished as quickly as it appeared. She sighed, disappointed. She hadn’t even known exactly what to expect but she still felt like those unformed expectations hadn’t been met.

“Why not take a walk?” Diana suggested.

“Is there anywhere to walk to?” Rarity asked.

“It’s about the journey, not the destination,” Diana said with obvious amusement. The light around them changed, pastel blue and green spreading across the dust. Rarity looked up.

All of Equestria looked back.

The world hung in the sky, bigger and brighter than the moon hung in the night sky from home. Rarity had seen maps before and recognized the shapes of Equestria’s east coast. Her eye for detail picked out a few of the larger landmarks - Manehattan island had to be right there, Fillydelphia there. A bright tangle of white was Cloudsdale in its slow drift across the continent.

It was beautiful. Every place she’d ever been before was right in front of her. Every pony she’d ever met. Every pony she’d ever heard of. Every fashion critic she’d tried to impress, every friend she’d made. All of it was on that little world hanging in a sea of stars.

Rarity held up a hoof and Equestria vanished behind it.

“It gives a pony a different perspective, doesn’t it?” Diana asked. She seemed almost as transfixed by it as Rarity was. “No borders or boundaries. Equestria and the dragon lands and the changeling kingdoms are all so close together, but you have to be this far away before you can see it clearly.”

“It really is something,” Rarity agreed quietly. “Does the Aether Express always stop here?”

“Who can say? It’s a lonely little world, but perhaps it’s a necessary stop. A place where ponies can be reminded of all the things they’re leaving behind.”

Rarity nodded, and she thought of her friends and family. “I’m going to go for that little walk.”

“I’ll be here when you come back,” Diana said. “The train will leave in a few hours, try to be back before then.”

“You’re not coming with me?” Rarity asked. She wanted to be alone for a few moments but didn’t want to offend the pony who had apparently paid for the trip.

“I’ve seen enough of the Moon already,” Diana assured her. “Don’t worry. Unlike some stops along the line, this place is safe. There’s nothing here to hurt you. Nothing to help, but nothing to hurt either.”

Rarity picked up a small stone, something exactly the right size to put on a desk to keep papers still or to display on a shelf. It was rough-edged and as dark as charcoal and in lieu of actually having a gift shop on the moon, it was probably as good as she was going to get for some sort of souvenir to bring back to her friends.

She’d followed a trail. At least it seemed like a trail. It was a path beaten into the dust and rock over time, worn into regolith by the passage of hooves. Rarity stopped and looked at one print just a bit outside the trail, preserved in the dust. It was twice the size of the tracks she was leaving.

The trail had been worn by one set of hooves, pacing for a thousand years. It would have been an appropriate moment for a sad wind to blow, but the moon was silent. Totally silent. Rarity had grown up in a small town and thought she was used to the quiet. The hours before dawn when a pony with a deadline might work despite every other soul for a mile around being asleep.

The moon was as silent as a cave dug deep into the earth, so quiet that the ringing in Rarity’s ears, the sound of her breath, even the beating of her heart all became audible to her. She tried to ignore them, but in that yawning gape of nothing the sound of her own joints creaking and moving was suddenly a chorus of noise. She started to panic, some primal urge coming over her for a moment.

It passed, and she was still there, still alone, and the panic hadn’t gone away.

“How did Princess Luna manage it for so long?” Rarity asked herself, needing to hear a voice, even if it was only her own. “I think I’d go mad if I had to spend much time here.”

Something caught her eye, a hint of regularity amidst the desolation. Rarity spotted a path leading off to the side, and she followed it to the crest of a small hill. It was a somewhat steep way to the top, perhaps easy for a mare whose legs were as long as Rarity’s whole body, but difficult for a little pony.

Still, she was nothing if not determined to make the best of the situation. It wasn’t something she’d be able to do later, and Rarity didn’t want to regret missing something. As she strode to the very top of the hill, there was a boulder, split in two pieces. One half was flat and free of dust, the other behind it. Together they were a rough seat sized for a giant.

Rarity sat on Luna’s abandoned throne and looked out over her creation.

A maze of paths swirled across the regolith, grey on grey. It took Rarity a few moments to realize what she was seeing.

Back home, in Ponyville, Pinkie Pie had a small rock garden. It was a box with sandy soil unsuited for any actual gardening along with a few smooth stones. She spent time with it, using a small rake to draw abstract designs in the sand, positioning the rocks in pleasing ways. Pinkie Pie had told her it reminded her of home.

The moon was a rock garden on a grand scale. A thousand years of tracing paths, using bare hooves and endless time and patience to arrange everything just so. There was a story in it. A design like the sun. One like the moon. Other shapes and figures, a collection of rocks that almost, if viewed in the right way, looked like a city.

It was art, so striking and raw that it brought tears to Rarity’s eyes. Even with the limits of the medium, just black and white on a blank world, she could feel some fraction of what Luna had felt. Of what Nightmare Moon had felt. There was rage there, hurt simmering for generations.

The images were huge. One image of a rearing alicorn was, by itself, probably large enough to encircle most of Ponyville. They were massive, so epic in scale they could only be seen and understood from high above.

And yet nopony on Equestria knew about them.

Every night, they were on display to the entire world. Shining down over millions of ponies. Luna’s pain and her story and her confession all at once and nopony was aware. So big they could cover a nation and so distant that they could be ignored. Forgotten.

She looked back towards the station, wondering if she should tell Diana about her discovery. It seemed further away than she remembered walking. With the sun blaring overhead Rarity felt as exposed as a model on a stage. Back home, the sun seemed so warm and comforting but now it was a searchlight pointed accusingly at her and casting everything in blinding white and deepest black.

It was suffocating. Rarity needed to find somewhere else, somewhere away from that imagined gaze. Somewhere out of the light.

She hopped down off the throne, finding the steep, narrow path down the hill.

Rarity’s delicate hooves found a loose stone under the layer of silt and dust, and she tumbled, falling down a steep hill and passing instantly from light to dark. She coughed and sneezed, the lunar soil as fine as ash and at the same time somehow as sharp as freshly ground pepper.

The young mare was in a depression, a small crater carved eons ago by a falling star. The rim of the deep bowl hid her from the panopticon view of the sun, and for a moment she felt odd relief. Rarity knew there wasn’t anything dangerous here. There wasn’t even anypony to see her, but it was still somehow better to be alone after such a humiliating fall. A mare past foalhood wasn’t really supposed to run or jump or do anything athletic at all beyond ballroom dancing.

Rarity was glad for privacy to compose herself. She sneezed again, this time more demurely.

“I suppose it would be too much to ask for a shower,” she said into the silence. Her voice didn’t even echo. The sound was muted in the way things seemed quiet in a snowstorm. “I hope the train has some sort of bath.”

She didn’t know any spells that would clean her coat -- she’d always enjoyed a long, hot shower, a bubble bath, a day at the spa. Getting clean wasn’t just a necessity, it was something to indulge in. Rarity could imagine the kind of pony who would rather use sorcery and get it done with as a bare necessity. They were also the sort of pony who would eat tasteless gruel instead of bothering to cook.

A pony rather like Twilight Sparkle.

“I wish I’d been able to tell her where I was going,” Rarity sighed. Part of her felt like she was abandoning her friend on a bad note. Princess Luna had noticed Rarity’s slightly soured mood at the coronation, and Twilight had still been in Canterlot when…

Rarity still couldn’t remember what had happened in that interval before she’d found herself in Hollow Shades. She’d fallen into darkness, just like the shadows around her now, and then been elsewhere.

The secluded shade around her started to feel less comfortable. A bead of anxious sweat dripped down Rarity’s neck and mixed with the scratchy, ashy dust. It crawled across her coat with the same sensation as a spider. Her entire body started to itch, phantom ants burrowing into her skin.

Rarity shrieked and bolted out of the shadows of the crater’s rim, fleeing into the light. In her panic she could have sworn the shadows moved with her, reaching for her legs and trying to pull her back and away from the sun. Perhaps it was just the dust swirling in the air, clouds of it hanging in the still, stuffy air. Rarity saw it around her, a wave of darkness closing in.

“Hold.”

The voice was firm. Rarity’s hooves skittered on sharp-edged pebbles. She started to fall again, and magic enveloped her, steadying her. Diana stepped in front of her, looking down at the smaller mare with concern in her deep eyes.

“Are you alright?” she asked. “I heard a scream. I came to make sure you hadn’t hurt yourself.”

“I--” Rarity looked back. She didn’t want to look back, but she was compelled to check. When she saw the empty crater there, she felt supremely silly. She’d been running from nothing except her own fears and imagination gone wild. “I feel rather like a foal,” she said quietly.

“Everypony is allowed to be a foal sometimes,” Diana said. She looked even more uncomfortable than Rarity somehow, stepping so gingerly on the lunar surface that it seemed as if she was afraid it would crack like ice over a lake in early winter.

“Perhaps we should go back to the station?” Rarity suggested, for both of their benefits.

Diana nodded and helped Rarity out of the crater and back to the hoof-beaten path.

“I’m sorry for making you come out to save me from myself,” Rarity said in the quiet. Diana made no sound when she walked, and Rarity felt like she had to say something in the silence if only to remind herself that she wasn’t alone.

“Can you imagine a thousand years here, alone?” Diana asked.

“There’s so much nothing that it becomes overwhelming,” Rarity said. “I couldn't take it.”

“Would you care for a snack?”

Rarity almost jumped out of her seat. She’d been sitting alone a few seats away from Diana, who had closed the curtain next to her and seemed to be asleep. A mare had snuck up on her while she’d been thinking of the designs she’d seen outside. She was pushing a brass cart along the aisle, bottles and cans softly rattling when she came to a halt next to Rarity.

“I’m so sorry, darling, I didn’t see you there,” Rarity said. “I was off in my own little world.”

The mare giggled at that, as if there was a private joke Rarity didn’t understand. When she moved, Rarity saw the light shift through her, reflecting and refracting through her pale blue body. The effect was somewhat diminished by the uniform she wore, a short shirt and tie along with a round cap that covered a smooth, glassy mane.

“Are you a crystal pony?” Rarity asked.

“You know, you’re the first pony to get it right in ages,” she said, holding back a pleased giggle. “They almost always ask if I’m a ghost!”

Rarity smiled. “I trust they at least think you’re a beautiful ghost?”

“You’re just trying to butter me up,” she accused, teasing Rarity. “You’re lucky I enjoy being buttered.” She leaned on the cart full of drinks.

“Rarity,” she offered, holding out her hoof. The crystal pony shook it gingerly. Rarity barely felt the touch.

“Kyanite,” the crystal pony said.

“I didn’t know the train had stewardesses, but I suppose it makes sense,” Rarity said. “I don’t suppose there’s anywhere I can wash up? I took a small fall and I’m a touch dusty.” She’d tracked dust in with her despite her best intentions. She didn’t even have so much as a drop cloth to keep it off the seats and felt terribly guilty.

“Sorry,” Kyanite said with a small wince. “You’ll have to wait until we’re at a longer stop. Then you’ll be able to go to a hotel.”

“Just knowing there are hotels is more than enough,” Rarity sighed, her anxiety fading a bit. Hotels meant civilization, which meant not every stop along the way was going to be a haunted tundra of ash and rock like this. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Kyanite said. “I bet you could use a little pick-me-up. How about something special?”

“Something special?” Rarity asked.

The crystal pony knelt down, reaching into one of the lower trays on the cart, and produced a small plate. Rarity took it and looked at it. On the delicate plate was a hoof-sized chocolate-covered dessert.

“It’s called a moon cake,” Kyanite said. “A marshmallow sandwich smothered in dark chocolate.”

“Thank you, I could use something with chocolate,” Rarity said. “It always does wonders for my mood.”

“It’s one of the only things that works just as well on adults as on foals,” Kyanite agreed. “I’m a big fan of sundaes myself, but I have to make sure I still fit into my uniform.” She gave Rarity a conspiratorial wink.

Rarity smiled and adjusted the way she was sitting so she could be more comfortable eating. Her hooves were still a bit dirty, not that she intended to eat with them, but it still seemed rude even though she was merely having a snack on a train.

“Could I have a few extra napkins?” Rarity asked. The crystal pony gave her a few extras, and Rarity quickly wiped her front hooves clean, the dust clinging with a static charge to her coat. She needed a proper bath, but at least this showed she was trying.

“I know it’s dry out there. I hope this helps.” She gave Rarity a small bottle of mineral water, of a brand the pony didn’t recognize. It was easy enough to tell what it was, even with the unusual script and branding that Rarity couldn’t read. She supposed she’d have to get used to that -- the further they got from home, the more things there would be that Rarity would have to learn.

“Thank you again,” Rarity said quietly.

Kyanite bowed and moved on towards Diana, speaking quietly with the tall unicorn. Rarity turned back to her own snack, not wanting to stare. The moon cake was all sugar, but that’s exactly what Rarity wanted. It helped her mood immensely and helped her forget some of the shapeless terror she’d found in the silent darkness.

It seemed impossible, distant, and foalish now, like a filly being afraid of shadows cast through her window at night. The kind of thing that Sweetie Belle might fear, not Rarity. Rarity was an adult and had been for as long as she could remember. It had taken some time to learn the nuance, naturally, how to conduct oneself in any social situation, how to wear makeup properly, how to walk and talk. Those were just the trappings other adults expected, work she had to put in to be accepted.

She wiped her hooves again, and the dark marks the dust made on the paper napkin caught her attention. She carefully laid one of the remaining napkins out on the seat across from her and started drawing, using a splash of the mineral water and the clinging dust to form a kind of crude ink. It was a bit like sketching in charcoal.

“What’s this?” Diana asked. Rarity didn’t jump or even react, this time. She was too busy thinking and trying to create to allow her body to do such a thing.

“I don’t have a drawing pad or pencils, but I want to try and capture what I saw before I forget too many details,” Rarity explained. It was impossible to capture all of it. The detail would have been microscopic and she was working with crude tools. It was all she could do to fill in the outlines of the grand shape Luna’s pain had carved into the moon.

“It’s beautiful,” Diana said.

“It’s only a poor copy,” Rarity said when she was as finished as she could be. She stepped back to look. It was something like a landscape combined with a painting of a painting, a shadow of something real.

“If you think that’s a poor copy I look forward to seeing work you’re proud of,” Diana said, putting a hoof on Rarity’s shoulder. “I know a spell that should protect it, if you’ll allow me?”

“Please do,” Rarity agreed.

Diana’s horn lit up, and the napkin flashed. “It’s a preservation spell that will keep water and wear away. I’m told it lasts a century or so.”

“That gives me quite a while to learn it myself,” Rarity noted. She held it up to look at it for a little longer.

What could she create, with endless lifetimes and nothing to fill them?

Second Stop: Chaostown

The train rattled on the tracks once it had finally started again. It had only been a few hours, but it felt longer. Rarity couldn’t explain it exactly but the time seemed to weigh on her, almost like some of those thousand years Princess Luna had spent imprisoned there on the moon had shaved off and mixed with the dust.

“Where will we be going next?” Rarity asked. The lunar landscape swept past. It was hard to gauge their speed. The horizon seemed too close and the air too clear and still. “The sun, perhaps? I’d love to see what Princess Celestia has done with it.”

Diana shook her head. She kept her gaze away from the window as they traveled. Perhaps she’d felt some of that endless time in the same way Rarity did.

“The Aether Express doesn’t go to the sun,” Diana said. “It’s for the best.”

She stole a glance outside. The sun hung on the horizon, far more distant than Equestria.

“It’s unapproachable. Blinding and hot. You can’t stare at it for long or else you come away damaged from it, and even the Aether Express can’t get close. No, I doubt anypony could get close to her.”

Rarity tilted her head. “Her?”

“Realms reflect their rulers,” Diana said. “You’re an educated pony -- surely you’ve heard that the health of the royalty is shared with their land. Princess Celestia is a very distant pony, is she not?”

“I’m not sure I’d say that.” Rarity laughed a little. For once, she felt that she knew more than the tall pony she was riding with. “I happen to know her personally! One of my best friends was her personal student, you see. I’ve even gotten to see a bit 'behind the mask' as it were.”

“You should be careful.” Diana closed her eyes, tugging a curtain across the window to keep the hot sunlight away from her face. “Ponies who stand in the sun for too long get burned by it, and when it crests the sky even the brightest stars are forced to vanish.”

“Did you have some sort of… bad experience with her?” Rarity guessed.

“I’d rather not speak of it, please,” Diana said quietly.

“Ah, right. I apologize. I don’t mean to press. Consider the subject totally dropped!” Rarity waved a hoof as if tossing something aside. “So where will we be stopping next? I was told that there’s a chance of a bath, which I would dearly love.”

A ghost of a smile washed across Diana’s face.

At the same time, a palm tree swept past, so quickly Rarity almost missed it.

“Somewhere tropical?” Rarity guessed.

Something pattered against the windows. For one brief moment the noise was calming and a welcome departure from the quiet of the moon. Then Rarity saw the thin brown stains, and the distinct slightly-sour smell of chocolate milk.

“No,” Rarity gasped.

The rain washed away some of the dust, revealing a multicolored checkerboard. Plants sprang up along the tracks, with flowers that were shaped like trombones and sousaphones and made rude noises as the Aether Express passed them by.

“You’ve figured it out already?” Diana asked.

Rarity gave her a flat look. “I’ve seen this before. They’re Discord’s creations, aren’t they? But that was back on Equestria! Please don’t tell me we’ve come full circle.”

“Discord is a being of great power, and naturally he has a realm of his own. I wouldn’t say it’s going to be as quiet as the moon, but it’s certainly going to be more lively,” Diana said. She seemed pleased. Rarity couldn’t tell if it was because there was almost no sign left of the moon in the increasing storm of chaos they traveled into or because she was looking forward to the destination itself.

“Somehow I doubt I’m going to get that spa treatment,” Rarity groaned.

She became even more sure that she wasn’t going to enjoy the stop when the train came to a stop and an announcement was made that they’d be stopping for just over a full day.

“Twenty-five hours and seventeen minutes?” Rarity asked. “That’s oddly specific.”

“We need to get fuel and water for the next part of the journey,” the conductor explained. He was a real gentlestallion, taking Rarity’s hoof and helping her down the steps to the station platform. “The workers here are reliable, but the amount of time it takes them is totally random. Last time I came through here, it was fifteen minutes, and the time before that it was a month.”

“A day is a useful amount of time,” Diana said. She let the conductor help her down, bowing politely to him in thanks. “It gives us time to see the local sights, get refreshed, and perhaps even sample the local cuisine.”

It would have been rude to suggest they’d be better off waiting on the train, especially if Discord was somewhere close enough to hear them -- and knowing the creature even a little, Rarity was sure that he’d arrange things to be in the worst place at the worst time.

“Do they have hotels here?” Rarity asked. Diana motioned for her to follow, and they walked through the neon-lit station and past nonsensical paintings that changed whenever one looked away from them for too long.

“Rooms are arranged for travelers at every stop that lasts more than a few hours,” Diana said. “According to the conductor it should be near the station…”

They stepped out into something like a town square. Booths of every shape and size were set up in a bizarre bazaar. Diana led her into a crowd of ponies, which looked almost normal at first glance. The longer one looked, the more one noticed unfocused eyes, colanders used as headgear, and the occasional burp ending in a brightly-colored bubble.

A pony floated past them, hanging in the air as if she was drifting down an invisible stream. She hummed a tune to herself, oblivious to everything else going on around her.

“That must be the hotel,” Diana said, her height making it easier for her to see it over the crowd. She took Rarity’s hoof and led her through the press of bodies, Rarity trying her best to block it all out until they emerged from the other side and went through a set of heavy wooden doors and into blissful quiet broken only by the twanging tones of what had been a pop song and was now being played on soft accordion and banjo.

The hotel was very nearly normal. True, it still looked like a pop-art fever dream, but the furniture was behaving and following all known laws of physics and the shag rug under Rarity’s hooves was neither moving nor changing color. She almost wished it would, given the color was a sort of dusty plum that managed to not complement any other color in the room.

“Hmmm…” Rarity rubbed her chin and prodded one of the chairs in the lobby with her hoof. It was shaped something like an ink blot but felt like velour. She made the bold decision to sit in it, and it made a sound rather like one of Opal’s cat toys did when trodden upon. “Do you think this hotel is safe?”

Diana picked up a pamphlet from the counter. “According to this, it should be.” She floated it over to Rarity so the designer could look.

It was possibly the most dull-looking thing Rarity had ever seen. It was black and white and beige and that was the entire color palette of the world the pamphlet’s designers lived in, but it had a solid weight to it, like it was made out of the finest cardstock. Somepony had tried their hardest to make it seem real and present and an anchor for ponies in need.

“Turvy Hotels,” Rarity read. “Guaranteed to have at least two Cuils of reality in every room or your money back. Offer limited to mortals and former mortals. Offer not valid in the state of Florida.”

She opened it up and looked at the many exciting things the hotel offered, like a single direction of gravity, electromagnetism, a constant flow of time in all rooms, and, available only for platinum club members, causality.

Rarity looked up. She’d heard the majority of the words before and knew what more than half of them meant, but that just left her with more questions than answers.

“What’s a Cuil?” she asked, flipping back to the front cover.

Diana shrugged. “I have no idea, but it sounds extremely official and there’s a seal of approval from the Equestrian board of measurements and weights.” She waited at the counter for a long minute, then leaned over to look behind it, obviously finding nopony.

“Darling?” Rarity said, politely. Diana looked over at her, then followed Rarity’s pointing hoof to a sign that said ‘ring for service’ hanging over a rubber chicken.

“Of course, how silly of me,” Diana said. She pressed down on the chicken and it made a deep ringing clang like a brass bell. A pony instantly appeared, popping up from behind the counter like a jack in the box.

“Pinkie Pie?!” Rarity gasped.

“No, don’t be silly,” the pink pony scoffed. She pointed to her face. “You can clearly see I’ve got a false moustache! Pinkie Pie never wears one of these!”

Rarity raised an eyebrow.

“Okay fine, she rarely wears one of these,” the pink pony admitted. “Seldom wears. Occasionally wears? She’d definitely only wear it if it was funny, and I’m not wearing it to be funny, I’m wearing it because I’m concealing my identity and don’t want to get popped like an overfilled balloon like all the others!”

“All the others…” Rarity frowned. “Ah! You’re one of that horrible horde of clones!”

“Now I’m only a party of one,” the clone said sadly, wiping a tear from her eye. “That was another good episode.”

“How did you even get here? Does the mirror pool connect to Discord’s realm?”

“Oh, you know. A daring escape! The details aren’t important, and they’d take forever to write out and contradict several canon events if I even tried! What really matters is that eventually Discord found me and brought me here where I wouldn’t have to worry about being exploded by Twilight Sparkle, turned into an alicorn and gone mad with power!”

Her fearful expression tugged a string as tight as a harp’s saddest span in Rarity’s heart.

“I’m sorry,” Rarity told her, reaching out a hoof to touch the clone’s. “We didn’t even think you were real ponies. We just assumed you were… illusions, or something similar.”

The clone nodded, giving Rarity a weak smile. “I know. I wasn’t sure I was real either.”

Rarity sighed. “You don’t have to wear the moustache. I’m not here to blast you with magic, not that I could.”

“I like the moustache,” the clone replied.

Rarity looked at Diana for help. The taller pony was stifling a giggle.

“Could we get the keys to our rooms?” Diana asked. “Our reservations should have been called in ahead of us.”

“Sure! You’ve got room 301 and room B.” The clone put the keys on the counter then leaned over to point. “Go down the hallway to the end, turn around and come back halfway, then go up the stairs to the fifth floor and your room is on the left.”

“Is that… room 301, or room B?” Rarity asked.

“Both, obviously,” the clone scoffed.

“When she said both I thought she meant they were next to each other, not that both doors led to the same room,” Rarity sighed. She took off her saddlebags and put them on one of the beds. It sloshed, which either meant it was a waterbed or else she was going to have a difficult night.

“I apologize if I’m intruding on your privacy,” Diana said quietly.

“No, no, I think it’s actually better this way! I wouldn’t want to miss the train tomorrow and, truth be told, I’m a touch nervous about staying here.” From the window she could see the landscape floating by. The train had stopped in an area that was something like an island of stability, but the further off she looked, the less normal things were. Sections of earth and stone floated in the void, somehow avoiding colliding with each other as they passed by. Some were large enough for entire farms. Others were precisely the right size for a single confused goat.

“Why don’t you get washed up first?” Diana suggested. “I know you’ve been looking forward to it.”

“Oh, thank you so much, darling, I’ll be quick!” Rarity practically ran into the bathroom. The polite thing would have been to refuse the first offer and give Diana another chance to step in ahead of her, but there was a limit to politeness and Rarity’s limit was the itching, crawling sensation of lunar dust. It had all the worst characteristics of charcoal combined with the irritation of powdered gemstone.

She rushed into the shower, reached for the faucet, and--

“Three?” she asked quietly to herself. She’d seen faucets with one lever. Faucets with separate handles for hot and cold. She’d never seen one with a third control. None of them were labeled, just anonymous chrome waiting for somepony who should have simply known which to twist.

Rarity put her hoof on the left-most handle. Would that be the hot water? She couldn’t feel heat through the fixture but that was normal for all but the poorest-quality construction. She stopped herself before committing. Why should she assume any of it would work the way she expected? The hotel guaranteed some level of reality, not of common sense.

So the right-most handle? She touched it. Ah, but perhaps she was overthinking it. It might simply be over-engineered! If there were water heaters, there could also be water coolers. One handle for hot water, one for cold, and then that would make the middle handle of the faucet tepid, and safe to start with.

Rarity smirked, having overcome the puzzle, and twisted the handle.

“Why does the shower have a tomato juice setting?!” Rarity demanded, after figuring out how to get a proper shower, then taking a second one because she was sure there was still a trace of pink in her coat.

“Tomato juice?” Diana asked. She was sitting next to the window, watching the city outside with obvious amusement. Rarity wasn’t happy to see that amusement extend to her predicament.

“I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve had an unfortunate accident with a skunk,” Rarity said flatly. “You should thank me for not letting you discover it on your own.”

“I admit I had a feeling there might be some twists we would need to untangle,” Diana admitted. “Just because reality is stable here doesn’t mean it was designed by ponies with the same sense of aesthetics and common sense as we’re used to.”

“And I was the perfect guinea pig?” Rarity asked.

“More like a canary in a coal mine. You did want that shower,” Diana reminded her.

“True,” Rarity sighed. She climbed up onto the bed. It sloshed under her, and there was an odd thickness to it, less like a waterbed and more like a mattress made entirely of gelatin.

She pulled back the edge of the blanket and wasn’t entirely surprised to see lime-colored gel with floating bits of fruit. She poked the bed more firmly and watched a cherry wiggle deep inside the mattress.

“You’d think they’d get ants,” Rarity mumbled.

“Be careful or you’ll unleash some kind of pun about aunts,” Diana warned. Rarity groaned and covered her face. “Try lying down on it while I get cleaned up. It’s more comfortable than it looks.”

Diana got up and swept into the bathroom. There was a long, significant pause of total silence, then she opened the door again and looked at Rarity.

“The middle one is the tomato juice,” Rarity warned her.

Diana nodded and ducked back into the bathroom. Rarity laid down on the jelly bed. She absolutely refused to admit it was comfortable and started making a list of all the ways it was disappointing right up until she fell asleep.

“You called out for him in your sleep,” Diana said. “You can tell me who he is, I won’t tell a soul. Is Tom your stallionfriend?”

Rarity felt a blush creep all the way across her body, making her almost as pink as the tomato juice shower.

“I’m sure I don’t know anypony named Tom,” Rarity said, technically saying something true if only because she was leaning very heavily into the term anypony. “Besides, I don’t remember my dream! It’s odd, usually they’re quite inspirational, but this time it was just… darkness.”

“It means you’re tired and hungry,” Diana decided, in exactly the same way a parent decided things for a foal. With kindness and understanding and a total disregard for what the other party might want. “Thankfully, your nap took care of the first and we can take care of the second together!”

She seemed excited. More excited than Rarity believed she or anypony had a right to be, given that they were walking into a restaurant in Discord’s realm. There weren’t even any hoof-rated establishments! Without a true guide to quality, she was going to have to take a chance on Diana’s instincts.

“What sort of food did you say was served here?” Rarity asked. The restaurant was certainly interesting, for lack of a ruder word. Hanging from the walls and ceiling were an incredible assortment of things, from clothing to paintings to, in one case, a bicycle that hung upside-down. It had the effect of a museum curated by a circus ringmaster and filled with cafe tables.

“I believe it’s called fusion food,” Diana said. She walked past a sign that asked the ponies to seat themselves - and in this case ‘asked’ was literal, as it was quietly speaking over the soft jazz playing in the background. The mouth was printed on paper but moved as if it was real, whistling when Rarity walked past it with her usual hip shimmy.

Rarity blushed and hurried past it to sit down in a surprisingly normal chair that could have belonged to a cafe anywhere in Equestria without drawing comment. Now that she really looked at it and her eyes adjusted to the lower lighting, the building seemed less intimidating. Yes, there were odds and ends everywhere, but that was only a veneer, a coat of chaotic paint over otherwise dull decor. In some ways it was more like a Hayburger Princess than some kind of culinary fever dream.

Menus had been left on the tables, and Rarity picked one up to look at it. There wasn’t anything on the menu she didn’t immediately recognize, but at the same time each item had been merged with something else. Noodle soup egg rolls, caesar stuffed peppers, sandwiches with pizza in place of bread.

“It’s certainly an interesting menu,” Rarity said. “It almost seems designed to push ponies out of their comfort zones by offering one ingredient they enjoy mixed with something they don’t.”

“Novelty is a tempting spice,” Diana said.

Something lurked in the gloom, moving between the maze of exhibits, hunting prey. Mismatched eyes in the dark. The sound of hooves and the softer padding of paws. Rarity felt herself freeze up, her instincts struggling to pull memories of how to cast a spell, any spell at all, out of her thoughts.

A creature with three heads, a tiger, a goat, and a snake. Rarity recognized it by reputation. A bad, predatory reputation that included a tendency to eat ponies. Whole, if the pony was lucky. In pieces, if they were less fortunate. A chimaera! It appeared out of the dark, rearing up and ready to pounce.

“Welcome to the Soft Jazz Cafe,” the tiger head said, its tone flat and bored. For the first time Rarity noticed it was wearing a striped shirt and vest, the vest covered in the strangest assortment of pins and decor Rarity had ever seen. There was no theme or even really feeling to it, like it had just grabbed things at random out of a box and pinned them to its clothing. “What can I get you?”

“Don’t forget to offer the ssssspecials,” the snake whispered.

“Drinks first!” snapped the goat. “Follow the flowchart!”

“I don’t suppose you have coffee?” Rarity asked.

“Of course, Ma’am. Chocolate or vanilla ice cream?”

“Ah, chocolate?” Rarity asked, giving Diana a look and trying to convey that she was rather put-upon by the suggestion of ice cream in her coffee and would have preferred a plain espresso. Diana couldn’t possibly know the Ponyville cafe had a drink that was as close to a milkshake as possible while still being a coffee drink and that Rarity ordered enough of them that it constituted a line item in her monthly budget.

“I’ll have an everyflavor soda,” Diana said.

“We’ll be right back with your drinks,” the goat said. “Go, go!” she nudged the tiger head, trying to push their entire shared body. The tiger groaned and padded off.

“I wasn’t expecting a chimaera,” Rarity said, watching it retreat into the shadows of the kitchen. Now that it had left, some of that paralyzing primal fear had gone with it. “I wonder if Discord had anything to do with its creation?”

“Perhaps she was hired to fit the theme,” Diana said. “Do you think she gets paid three times as much as other waitresses?”

“It would only be fair,” Rarity conceded. “And if I had a predator working for me, I’d certainly want to ensure they were in a good mood and well-fed on something other than customers.”

“Indeed,” Diana agreed. “It must be difficult to keep everypony here happy and safe.”

“Because of Discord,” Rarity agreed, until Diana shook her head.

“The reverse. Have you ever met a pony who was mad? Truly mad? They can be terrifying, unpredictable. I’ve seen families broken by it. They remember who the pony was, who they still are on good days, and live in fear of the bad days. When they’re unable to care for them, the ponies are locked away where they can’t harm themselves or others.”

Rarity swallowed, uncomfortable with the topic. Nopony could be comfortable with it. “I’ve seen ponies who had good days, and bad days. In Ponyville, when I was younger, there was an old mare named Candy Buttons. She was so kind and… fragile. She was never rude to anypony, but she’d wander and get lost and everypony in town knew how to lead her home. There was a kitchen fire one day, and she had to leave town to stay with her daughter and never came back.”

“I believe this is where those ponies go when they finally get so lost they fall out of Equestria entirely,” Diana said. “A world with none of the harsh rules of reality and where other ponies won’t judge them.”

Diana went quiet for a long moment, looking into the shadows. Not looking at anything, just staring into the middle distance, caught in an old memory.

“It’s terrible, when a pony really needs help and nopony is there for them. Not even family. Perhaps even enemies are better than a pony like that…”

Rarity wasn’t quite ready to think that well of the creature, even if he’d somehow, allegedly, learned that friendship had value. “I think you’re giving Discord too much credit,” Rarity scoffed. “He’s collecting ponies like… like zoo animals!”

“Perhaps so,” Diana agreed, taking a deep breath and smiling slightly, turning back to Rarity and pulling herself out of her obviously dark memories. “He’d probably agree with you.”

“I’ve met him on several occasions,” Rarity reminded her. She was sure Diana knew about it. The mare seemed to know quite a bit more than she let on. “I don’t think he knows how to be kind to other beings.”

“Maybe you’re right, but I imagine he enjoys praise. Where else in all the universe would you find a group of ponies who might appreciate Discord as much as the collection of lost souls that wandered their way here?”

Rarity nodded. She was willing to believe that. She’d love to have a captive audience of ponies who really understood fashion. She loved her friends, but Rainbow Dash certainly didn’t dress in style.

In the end, the drinks were delicious, if packed with sugar, and while fried rice risotto wasn’t as good as she’d hoped, the dessert menu was shamefully good and chili peppers were an excellent addition to strawberry cheesecake.

Rarity tilted her head and tried looking at the canvas from a slightly different angle. It was impressionist, a splash of motion and color that she was struggling to interpret. “It’s… a waterfall?” she guessed, glancing up at the artist for confirmation.

“It’s dignity!” the painter snapped. “Can’t you tell?! It’s like you’ve never seen an abstract concept before! See? Here are the dignity scales, and the dignity fire tail!”

“Ah yes, how could I have been mistaken?” Rarity agreed, trying to defuse the situation. “Of course. Dignity.” She felt slightly ashamed for not having understood the intent of the artist. It was far easier in a museum, where there were small explanatory cards written by ponies wearing tweed and the pony who had done the work had passed on a century before and couldn’t correct them.

“Would you like a print? Or perhaps a pair of calipers?”

Rarity thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “The color really is striking. And… dignified?” She threw that last in there as a guess as to what might please the artist and seemed to hit a bullseye, because the painter smiled broadly and took her bits. Rarity sighed in relief. She’d gone off on her own to do a bit of shopping with her allowance, and Diana had vanished to do… well, Rarity hadn’t asked, as it had felt rude to do so.

“I threw in an extra set of calipers,” the mare whispered, giving Rarity the protective envelope with the print inside. “Just in case.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Rarity said, putting it away in her saddlebags. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do with calipers. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to use them -- she actually did have two sets at home. One very well-adjusted and expensive set that she used in cutting gems, and a second pair which she’d ended up using as a clamp too many times and were as well-adjusted as the average pony in the crowd around her.

While Rarity was busy sorting herself out, a pony nearly bumped into her.

“Excuse me, Miss? You’re not from around here, are you?” the pony asked. It wasn’t exactly an apology, but the tone was afraid and on the verge of a panic attack.

“No, I’m just passing through,” Rarity said, looking up. The stallion was wearing a postal service uniform, and it looked slightly worse for wear. He’d clearly been in it for quite some time without having a chance to change or, if the smell was any indication, get a bath. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh thank goodness!” the stallion deflated slightly, lowering the guard he’d been holding against disappointment. “You have no idea how happy I am to see somepony else who isn’t supposed to be here!”

“Is that so?” Rarity asked. The stallion was clearly a bit cracked, but it seemed more from stress than anything else. “You don’t belong here?”

“My name is Parcel Post. I’m with the Equestrian mail service!” He turned slightly to show off his worn uniform. “I was only supposed to deliver a letter,” he explained. “I’m not even entirely sure how I got here! Nopony seems to know how I’m supposed to get back, either! I’ve been stuck here for…”

He stopped, and sweat beaded on his face. He wasn’t sure how many of his memories he could trust. This little patch of town was the most stable place he’d found, but before this there had been so much drifting in the void, with no way to tell time or place. For a while he wasn’t sure he was real. His whole life before the drifting could have been an illusion, created in an instant by an uncaring god who just needed a prop to give Discord a letter and was then done with him forever.

“I don’t know how long it’s been,” he whispered. “Days? It has to be days, at least. Maybe longer. How long has it been since the tea party?”

“That does sound awful,” Rarity said. “Why don’t you sit down over here where it’s a bit quieter?” She led him over to a calmer patch of the market plaza, helping him sit on the edge of a fountain full of golden water and crystal-clear fish.

“Thank you,” he sighed. “Y-you said you’re only passing through? Maybe you could help me! If you know how to leave, and you show me the way why… I’ll get you all the stamps you could ever ask for!” He laughed a little.

“That’s very kind of you to offer,” Rarity said. “I’m not sure I can do much for you.”

“What do you mean?” the stallion asked.

“I came here by train--”

“There’s a train?!” the postal stallion groaned. “If I’d known that, I could have been out of here already!”

“It, ah…” Rarity bit her lip. “I’m not sure you’ll be allowed onboard.”

Parcel Post started to stand up, alarmed and growing more upset by the moment. “What? Why not?! I’m an official part of the Equestrian mail service, you know!”

“I’m sure you are, darling,” Rarity said, trying to calm him down. “I’m just not sure how you would buy a ticket. I haven’t seen a ticket booth, and my ticket was given to me.”

“I have to get out of here,” the stallion mumbled. He looked at Rarity’s half-open saddlebags. The ticket inside seemed to glow slightly in the shadows, shining silver. He grabbed for it, snatching it in his teeth and bolting.

“Hey!” Rarity yelled. “Stop! Thief!”

A few heads turned to follow the fleeing post stallion, but nopony did anything about it. Or at least nothing useful. One mare howled like a dog, but it only served to make the stallion run faster with the keen instincts of a pony whose ankles had been chewed on by too many pets.

Rarity had to put her dignity aside -- the concept, not the print in her saddlebag, which she secured firmly this time -- and ran after him despite the well-known fact that a refined lady did not exert herself in public.

“I have to do everything myself!” Rarity huffed. She wasn’t exactly out of shape. By most accounts she was in wonderful shape, but that shape was ornamental rather than athletic. She lost him entirely when a brass band passed by, followed by a somewhat more skilled silver band and then a very skilled gold band.

By the time she was able to get around them, the stallion was well and truly gone, along with her ticket.

Rarity stood there, feeling alarm well up in her chest. If he had her ticket, she wouldn’t be able to get back on the Aether Express! She’d be doomed to stay in Discord’s realm, one sane voice in a symphony of chaos! There would be no escape, and she’d slowly be driven mad herself until she was just one of the babbling madmares.

And then she realized what she should have known right away. There was only one place the postal stallion could even be going. The train station.

“Is this yours?” Diana asked, holding Parcel Post up with her magic. Rarity’s ticket hovered just out of his reach, tugging away every time he made a grab for it. The conductor stood guard at the door to the passenger carriage, looking annoyed.

“I’m so sorry,” Rarity sighed. “He grabbed it from my saddlebags!”

“Please, you have to let me use it! It’s been so long since I’ve seen my family!” the stallion was in tears, and Rarity nearly felt bad enough about his situation to consider giving up her ticket.

“The ticket is for Miss Rarity,” Diana said. “Even if you got onboard, it isn’t for you.”

“What’s all this then?” coughed a scruff voice. A pink pony in uniform and with a tall, peaked cap marched up, swinging a baton in one hoof.

“Pinkie Pie?” Rarity asked. “Again? Or the copy, rather. Sorry. I’m not sure what the polite term is.”

“Please miss, when I’m on the job, it’s Officer Doppelpinkie,” the mare said, adjusting her official police moustache, which was fuller and more intimidating than her previous moustache. It was the kind of facial hair that could make a pony go mad with power. “Is this the troublemaker?”

“I’m not a troublemaker!” Parcel Post pled. “I just want to go home!”

“This isn’t your way home,” Diana said, putting the stallion down gently. He didn’t struggle or try to run. He just looked down at his shaking hooves, his knees weak. “We all have our destinies and obligations. Your destiny isn’t to be a thief.”

“I’m sorry,” the stallion whispered.

Rarity sighed. “I forgive you. When I thought I was stuck here, even for a few moments, I felt terrible panic. It must be even worse for you, hearing about a way out after so long. I don’t know if I’d make the same decision, but I understand why you did it.”

She stepped over to him and gave the stallion a polite hug, giving him a shoulder to cry on for a few moments. He took the opportunity to do just that.

“Isn’t there something we can do?” Rarity asked.

“It’s tricky,” the Pinkie clone said. “See, I know all about this stallion. He’s not even supposed to show up for a few more seasons! This is probably some kind of timey-wimey thing. It’s what happens when you end up floating through a spot with too much retrocausality. There’s this one pony in town that’s gone so far in the wrong direction that they’re CGI!”

“What does that even…” Rarity shook her head. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

“There is one way,” the conductor admitted, gruffly. He clearly didn’t like the idea, not least because he’d just had to kick Parcel Post off the train for trying to steal a seat, and now he was expected to help the stallion. “If they’re on official business, postal ponies can claim passage anywhere.”

“They can?!” Parcel gasped. He let go of Rarity. “Then… I declare that I’m on official business!”

“It doesn’t work like that,” the conductor said, shaking his head. “Do you have anything to deliver?”

Parcel Post’s expression fell. He looked in his mailbag. It was depressingly empty.

“No,” the stallion said quietly.

“Wait! I know just the thing!” Rarity said. She pulled the print, in its envelope, from her saddlebags. “May I buy a stamp, my good stallion?” she asked.

“Why? Oh! Oh!” Parcel Post gave her one of his stamps, and she gave him a bit.

“And may I borrow a pen?” Rarity pulled out the print. Diana produced a pen from her black cloak, and Rarity scribbled a quick message on the back of the abstract print before putting it back in the envelope and adding an address before sealing it, finishing it by licking the stamp and pressing it firmly into the corner.

“A letter,” Parcel Post whispered, taking it from her.

“I’d like this delivered to Ponyville,” Rarity instructed him, with a very official tone. “It’s very important that this gets there as soon as possible so my friends know where I’ve gone and how to take care of my cat.”

“That sounds like official Equestrian Post business,” Parcel Post said. “Mister Conductor, I am officially requesting passage on your train so I can return to Equestria!”

The conductor sighed. “I’ll take you to the next stop,” he conceded. He clearly didn’t like the idea but it had also been his idea and that made it all but impossible to say no. “After that, you’ll have to arrange something else.”

“Good enough, as long as I can get out of this place!” Parcel Post scurried onboard the train. “The ponies here are crazy!”

“It seems to me that he’s already a bit mad himself,” Diana muttered, too quietly for the postal pony to hear her as he settled into a seat. “Perhaps he’ll wind up in Discord’s realm again before long.”

“Oh, probably,” the counterfeit pink pony agreed. “I think it’s a time loop. He’ll get back to Equestria just in time for his boss to ask him to deliver a certain letter. It’s one of those dramatic irony things, like in that show with the spooky door!”

“Spooky door?” Rarity looked at Diana to see if the other mare had any better idea what the clone might be talking about. The taller pony shrugged, just as confused by her layered references to multiple pop-culture icons from other dimensions.

“Anyway, my work here is done!” Constable Dopplepinkie declared, adjusting her hat.

“You didn’t even do anything!” Diana snorted.

The pink pony dramatically swept out of the train station, having accomplished nothing.

Diana shook her head. Behind them, the Aether Express’s whistle blew, warning the ponies on the platform that the train was preparing to leave.

“Time to go,” Diana said.

“Oh, I’m so excited!” Rarity said. “I wonder where we’ll go next?”

Fourth Stop: The Caged Place

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this next stop,” Rarity said. The ride was once again a long one between stops, and hours ago fog had overtaken the train and made it impossible to see anything outside except suggestions and glimpses of form punctuated by the occasional lamp post flashing past.

Diana carefully wiped her mouth. Kyanite had brought them salads to eat as a light lunch. They were nothing terribly fancy, a fall-inspired mix of dried fruits and nuts over dark greens and accompanied by a sweet dressing, but they were easy on the stomach even while one was on a rocking train and the anxiety of the unknown pressed in on all sides.

“It’s not going to be a happy place.” The Conductor trotted into the car, glancing at the opaque windows and tugging his coat tighter around him. “You’re right to have a bad feeling. It could even be dangerous.”

“More dangerous than Discord’s realm?” Diana asked. Not that she’d ever thought it was dangerous, but it was the kind of place ponies had to be cautious, at least so they didn’t end up as the butt of a bad joke.

“Much more,” the Conductor said. “We’re going to stop in a Realm called Clostra. It’s about as far from a vacation spot as you can imagine. It’s like one big foggy city.”

“That doesn’t sound too awful,” Rarity said. “There are plenty of perfectly nice foggy cities. Have you ever been to Trottingham back home? I swear they can go months without seeing the sun.”

“Clostra is different,” the Conductor said. “You’ll see when we get there. I wouldn’t go anywhere alone if I was you. Actually, if I was you I probably wouldn’t leave the train. There’s nothing worth seeing or doing there.”

That made Rarity curious. She was perfectly capable of defending herself, so the dire warning seemed more like an enticement. Rarity also couldn’t imagine it could really be that much worse than some of the worst neighborhoods in Manehattan.

“I’ll be careful,” Rarity promised.

Diana shook her head. “If you think you’re going to get foalnapped, I’d appreciate it if you scream loudly enough that I get a warning.”

“Please, darling, I’m not going to get foalnapped,” Rarity scoffed. “Besides, how bad could it be?”

“Don’t join any cults,” the Conductor warned, turning back towards the engine. He shot a glance through the window. Rarity followed his gaze, and for a moment she thought she saw something through the mist, something dark and reaching for her.

She remembered the shadow in her home, surrounding her in the boutique and cutting off all light and life. Panic gripped her. Darkness edged in at the sides of her vision, a tunnel closing in.

“Are you alright?” Diana asked.

Rarity blinked, and everything was okay again.

“Yes, of course,” she said, trying to play it calmly. Nothing was wrong. She shook her head, trying to shake off that feeling of falling. “I suppose all this travel just made me tired. It will be nice to sleep in a real bed.”

Rarity stepped off the train. The view from inside had remained all but totally obscured by the mist, but once she was on the platform it cleared up a bit. Diana pulled her dark cloak tighter and looked back at the Aether Express.

“How odd,” Rarity mumbled to herself. Fog still clung to the train like a ghostly shroud of cobwebs.

“It must be something in the train’s magic,” Diana decided. Rarity nodded. It made as much sense as anything else. She turned away to look at what little she could see of their surroundings. They’d arrived at an underground station, with a vaulted roof overhead and the tunnel curving slightly to vanish into the darkness just beyond the flickering gas lamps that provided light. It was dark, but not supremely so, merely the gloom of candles instead of midnight.

Murals and old posters covered the slightly curved walls, showing strange words and symbols that Rarity didn’t immediately recognize.

“Look at this,” Diana said. She motioned above them to an archway framing the stairs leading up. A wrought iron gate filled the space, hanging ajar just far enough that they could slip through without touching it. The single word ‘Clostra’ was worked into the metal at the top, as a combination sign and warning.

“Not a terribly inviting place,” Rarity said. Down here, it was damp enough that the fog was lingering around her hooves despite being indoors, almost masking the cracked tile of the floor. “How long will we be here, again?”

“Two days, almost exactly,” Diana said. She produced a pocket watch from inside her coat. “The Conductor said the hotel should be safe, or at least safer than the streets. We’ll have to be cautious until we find it.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” Rarity scoffed. “It’s certainly a bit spooky, but you’re from Hollow Shades, aren’t you?”

“I’ve seen into enough of the dark corners of the earth to know that caution and safety are a matching pair. As long as we remain aware of our surroundings, we shouldn’t have much to worry about.” Diana squeezed through the iron gate, thin enough despite her height that she had little trouble slipping through like a ghost.

Rarity had slightly more trouble. The designer knew her own measurements all too well, and was aware that she was a full-bodied mare in some ways -- something many stallions preferred! Long legs and lanky physiques would be out of season soon. She was sure of it. That absolute assurance is why she wasn’t mad at all, even when her flanks touched both sides of the gate at the same time.

She shivered. The iron was cold. Not in a weird, unnatural way, but in the totally natural way that something buried into the earth and untouched by the warm hooves of the living simply became. Cold like an icicle. Cold like a corpse.

“I hope the rest of this Realm isn’t so run down,” Rarity said. The stairs were long and narrow. A trickle of water ran down them from the leaking roof, though it was impossible to pinpoint a source.

Emerging into the street was like walking out of a mausoleum. The station entrance was a block of solid-looking masonry, big marble blocks framing a square building with a sloped roof, the whole thing decorated with a combination of vague geometric shapes that wouldn’t have been out of place in almost any place or time.

The cobblestone street was damp, and streetlights gave enough light to read by, but the fog was thick, and Rarity couldn’t see much further than a block in any direction. Iron fences tipped with spikes lined the streets, barricades protecting the creaking buildings beyond them that sprouted like mushrooms in the wet gloom.

Rarity only saw one pony in the street, a figure wrapped in a cloak and standing on the street corner, seemingly oblivious to her and Diana.

“Not quite as much of a vacation spot as our last stop,” Rarity noted quietly.

“There are bars on all the windows,” Diana noted. “The ponies here must value their privacy.”

“Perhaps we should check in at the hotel?” Rarity suggested. “I’m sure one of the ponies around here must know where to go.”

She walked up to the cloaked local, who didn’t seem to be threatening at a distance. Diana stayed close behind her, watching the shadows. The uncertain light and the many blind corners and shadows cast by bars and fences meant the shadows changed with every step, some of them in ways that seemed unnatural.

There was certainly something odd about the local on the corner. They didn’t turn to face Rarity as she approached. They stood on unsteady hooves, humming quietly to themselves.

“Excuse me?” Rarity asked. “I hate to be a bother, but I was hoping you could help me with… some… directions…” Her voice slowed down, the words coming out almost on automatic as she tried to get a better grasp on what she saw when the other pony turned to her.

The mare was wrapped almost entirely in bandages, only her mouth and snout showing. They were old, filthy rags, with a suggestion they covered more than just bruises and scrapes. The tiny amount of flesh that did show was pale, her coat thin and almost pure white. Not the same tone as Rarity herself, but that almost transparent, pinkish color of an albino.

“Directions,” the mare said, the word a sigh of lament. “Thou are lost. How sorrowful for thee, mare from a faraway land.”

“I’m not… that lost,” Rarity said. “I simply need--”

“This land is not a peaceful place. Tis a land of angry songs for those who know to listen. Raging iron prisons, singing of old conquest and fallen empire. Dost thou serve a fallen one?”

“We’re merely passing through,” Diana said.

“Heh heh heh…” the mare chuckled. “Thou would say that? Thou who art fallen herself? Take care and be wary that the jailers do not hear the song you sing, or it shall be a lament eternal.”

“I don’t believe this mare is sane,” Diana whispered.

“You might be right,” Rarity agreed, trying to be quiet.

“Left, then left again. Up the walk and down the bridge. Go through the field and past the prison there. Then thou will find what thou seeks,” the mare said. “Let it not be said that I did not aid thou, mare from a faraway land and her fallen master. Still thy wrath, and keep thy gifts. My own patron would think ill of me.”

“Thank you,” Rarity said. “Let’s… move on, shall we?” She looked at Diana. The taller mare seemed more than just uncomfortable. She was positively spooked, ready to bolt back to the train. Rarity nudged her, and Diana forced herself back to placid calm, stilling the panic that had started to boil.

“Lets,” she agreed, quickly walking to put distance between herself and the bandaged mare. Rarity had to jog to keep up with the fast, long steps.

“Did she scare you that badly?” Rarity asked. “What did she mean by ‘fallen one’?”

“I don’t care to know,” Diana said. It was clearly a lie but one that didn’t allow polite argument about the truth. They took a turn to the left, then the next left, and followed a narrow path hemmed in on both sides by iron fences that reached above their heads and joined into a trellis, eventually going over a canal of dark, deep water. Rarity could see lights in the water. Oddly-colored and worrying lights.

“Did you see that?” Rarity asked.

“It’s likely best not to look,” Diana said, keeping her eyes forward. Rarity tried to do the same. There were colors there, under the water. Colors she hadn’t seen before. She didn’t even have names for them. It hurt to look, and she had to turn away. The pathway opened up again as they emerged in front of a wide, open field.

“This must be some kind of park,” Rarity said. There were pathways leading in, along with benches. “At least it’s not all cobblestone streets.” Her hooves were already getting a bit sore from the uneven, slippery cobbles.

“She said to go through it,” Diana said. She led the way, staying on the path. The grass was just slightly overgrown, patches of harsher scrub plants growing tall in places. Circles of darker grass dotted the uneven ground, most of them only as large as a pony lying down. Some of them were circled with mushrooms. Rarity stayed away from them, instinct saying not to disturb whatever they were.

Rarity was so preoccupied with her footing that she didn’t notice Diana had stopped walking ahead of her. She bumped into the mare’s flank. Diana looked back at her, then nodded ahead of them.

It was something like a sculpture. Iron beams and stone were joined together, twisted into a shape that wasn’t entirely organic or artificial. It was roughly polyhedral, framed by girders around a silvery core that somewhat resembled a seashell and somewhat resembled a boulder that had been melted in some great inferno. Runes had been carved into it, geometric shapes and lines covering it like the markings on a surveyor’s map.

“What is that?” Rarity asked.

“I think it’s a meteorite,” Diana said.

Rarity’s ear twitched. “Do you hear that?” she asked. It was a strange sound, like a glass harp playing somewhere nearby. If she listened very carefully, she could just barely make out the tune. It didn’t quite repeat, and--

“Rarity!” Diana snapped. Rarity opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed them. She could have sworn she had been looking at the symbols and the way they glowed all the way around the meteor. She’d stepped off the path, and was halfway to the iron cage built around it.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Rarity apologized, hurrying back to Diana’s side. “I apologize, darling. It was the strangest sensation.”

“I can imagine,” Diana said softly. “Let’s get away from it. The hotel should be on the other side of the park, if that odd blind pony was correct.”

“Blind?”

“She had bandages around her eyes, anyway,” Diana said. “Blind might be the wrong word. I had the sense she could see quite a bit.”

“You know, this might be the first time I’ve seen you quite so out of sorts,” Rarity said, as they hurried their pace past the space rock. The other side of the park was visible now, and with the wrought iron bars around it, there was almost a sense that it was a prison cell keeping the meteor inside.

“Are you saying you’re at ease here?” Diana countered.

Rarity shook her head, felt an urge to look back at the captured meteorite, and fought it off. What she needed was a decent night of rest in a real bed.

They walked out of the park in silent haste and found themselves back on a wide boulevard, but this time there was no mistaking where they had to go. There was only one building with its lights on and its gates unbarred, but not unguarded. Two ponies stood at the door, one at either side, holding long poleaxes and wearing heavy, armored coats to ward off the weather and blows alike.

“Halt,” one of them said, turning his weapon to block the way in. He was a pegasus, fluttering his wings and knocking dew from his feathers. He must have been standing there for a while.

“They’re obviously not cultists, Rustung,” the other pony, an earth pony mare, replied. She knocked his axe away with hers. “These must be the travelers. You heard the train whistle just like I did.”

“Bah, Beil, you’re not careful enough.” Rustung relented and stepped aside, clearly not really thinking they were a threat. “One of these days a vault is going to crack and you’ll try talking to what slithers out.”

“A vault?” Rarity asked.

“It’s not wise to speak of such things out here,” Beil said. “Especially not so close to one of them.” She motioned with her chin towards the park and the thing inside it. “Come inside. We were told to wait for you and make sure you arrived safely.”

“You can buy us a drink for our trouble!” Rustung laughed.

“I admit I don’t have much of a taste for beer, but this is quite refreshing,” Rarity admitted. She was on her second mug, the ornately detailed pewter filled with a generous draft of sweet brew. It tasted like it was made with spices and fruit along with grain. It was, more importantly, strong enough to help calm Rarity’s nerves.

The surroundings of the inn helped just as much as the beer. It was all warm wood inside, with a crackling fireplace and candles that gave everything an orange glow. It defied the cold fog outside and kept it at bay, with murals on the walls showing a tapestry of ponies in the hills and valleys of someplace that had to be far from here, a place with real sunlight and tall mountains. It was better to look at those than the narrow, barred windows.

“I have to agree,” Diana said. She set down her mug and wiped foam from her lips. “This is far more pleasant than the streets.”

“It’s a pleasure to serve travelers from a faraway land,” the barmaiden said. She was young and had curves that Rarity wasn’t sure if she should be jealous of or simply have sympathy for. They were curves that drew wandering eyes and made athletic activity all but impossible. The earth pony carried herself like she was weightless despite that.

The mare put a platter down on the table. There was an odd assortment of food on it. A jar of sliced pickled beets, slices of dense black bread, raw red onion, and something like a black oat cake with a savory, seasoned scent to it.

“Something while you wait for your rooms to be aired out,” she said. “We haven’t had many visitors lately, at least not ones who need a bed.” She looked at Beil and Rustung significantly.

“We’re your best customers,” Rustung said, holding out his hooves helplessly. “I even paid off my tab!”

“Technically, Frau Rarity paid off your tab,” Beil pointed out. “And I paid it the time before that.”

“Let’s not squabble over details,” Rustung mumbled.

“Could you tell us a little about this place?” Rarity asked, cutting in. “I’m afraid we don’t know many details, and I worry that there could be dangers I’m not aware of.”

“Being aware of some of the dangers is what makes them dangerous,” Beil retorted. “Clostra is a prison.”

“That might explain the iron bars, I suppose.” Rarity shifted on the bench seat. “I suppose it’s a bit like Tartarus back home.”

“Yes,” Diana agreed, with a slow nod. “It is similar, isn’t it? The air is dead in the same way, like the entire world is somehow indoors.”

“You’ve been there?” Rarity asked. “I didn’t even know it was real until… well, there was a minor Cerberus incident. There was also time travel involved, I think. It was a strange week.”

“Briefly,” Diana said. “Before you ask, no, it wasn’t as a prisoner.”

“Ah, a guard, then!” Rustung declared. He patted Diana on the back. “Good! It’s better to be part of the solution. There’s little to do here except hunt monsters.”

“What kind of things are imprisoned here?” Rarity asked.

“You passed through a park to get here,” Beil said. “You must have seen one of the Vaults. They’re hard to miss.”

“I assume you mean the rather large… structure,” Rarity said. She didn’t have a better word for it.

Beil nodded. “They’re like prison cells, and they existed here before ponies started coming here. Each one holds terrible things. The smallest are only this large.” She mimed holding something about as large as a hoofball. “They get dug up from time to time or we find them hidden in little shrines.”

“Ponies worship the blasted things,” Rustung scoffed. “Idiots. Whenever one of them cracks open, monsters come out. Whole families end up eaten alive and our job is to clean up the mess.”

Beil sighed at that. “Our job is to try and keep ponies from getting hurt, but it’s not easy when they’re hurting themselves and they do their best to hide what they’re doing.”

“Why do ponies come here, if it’s so bad?” Rarity asked. She reached for the food. It would be polite to at least try it. She assembled the bread, onion, beets, and strange cake into something like an open-face sandwich.

The barmaiden leaned in to whisper. “If you listen to the legend, the Gros Eisenberg was the first thing here. It’s a Vault the size of a castle. It was banished here from some far-off realm, and everything else accumulated around it over untold eons. Ponies end up here because they were cast out of their worlds. It’s a prison for us, too. Some of us work to keep the peace, others just try to make do as best they can.”

“I see…” Rarity mumbled. She took a bite of what she’d put together. The oat cake had a metallic, bitter taste underneath the spices. The strong flavor of vinegar from the beets and the tang of the raw onion paired well with it and the black bread.

“We’ll have to be cautious,” Diana said. “If ponies were banished here, they might do anything for a chance to escape, including trying to take our tickets.”

“What is this called?” Rarity asked, taking another bite of the food. “I don’t think I’ve had anything quite like it.”

“It’s called a black pudding,” the barmaiden said. “We make them ourselves. They're good food for your health. Lots of iron in them.”

Rarity nodded and ate a bit more. Something called pudding couldn’t be all that bad, even if it was more savory than she’d expect with a name like that. The little puck of oats seemed pan-fried, with crispy edges.

“How do you make black pudding?” Rarity asked.

“You can’t still be sick,” Diana sighed.

“I will be sick as long as I want!” Rarity groaned from the bathroom. She’d managed to keep everything together until the room was ready and she could be sick in peace. It wouldn’t have been right to empty her guts in front of the mare who’d served them the food. Guests had to abide by at least some laws of hospitality.

The room hung over the edge of the building, the second floor of the inn larger than the first, whole rooms cantilevered out over the stone and iron walls protecting the lower level. It would have given a good view if there had been anything to see aside from fog and the buildings around them.

Diana rolled her eyes, lounging on a narrow bed that had so many layers of patchwork blankets and linens that she’d given up on actually finding a mattress under them. Half of the small, hard, lacy pillows had been put on the floor where they weren’t entirely in the way. “You’re being needlessly dramatic. You enjoyed it before you knew what it was.”

“That’s because I didn’t know it was made of blood!” Rarity snapped. She winced, worrying she might have been too loud. She quieted herself, not wanting to be heard out in the hallway. “Ponies do not eat meat, Diana!”

“I’m not sure blood actually counts as meat,” Diana mused. “Is it more like milk?”

“I know a few cows and I can assure you they’re quite happy to provide milk in return for lodging and fair payment from the farmer. If Applejack asked them for blood they’d assume, correctly, that she had gone mad and they needed to find somewhere else to live.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Diana conceded. “We’ll be more careful at breakfast.”

“I’m not certain I’ll be ready to eat anything by then.” Rarity stumbled to her bed, away from the small bathroom. She swooned and fell onto it, dust puffing up from the layers of linens. “We have to stay here for two days…”

“If you’re really uncomfortable, we can go back to the train in the morning,” Diana assured her. “As long as we’re here, there’s no sense not getting some rest. The beds are narrow, but not as narrow as a seat on the Express.”

“True,” Rarity agreed. She was starting to get sleepy. “Quite soft, as well. I believe they’re padded with pegasus down.”

“Sleep. I’ll keep watch while you rest.”

“Keep watch?” Rarity cracked open one eye that had already closed. “For what?”

“I don’t know yet,” Diana said. “I expect once it happens, we’ll know.”

Rarity woke up to Diana gently shaking her. She was about to ask what was going on, but Diana put a hoof to her lips, shushing her. Once she was sure Rarity was awake enough to understand that she needed to be quiet, Diana nodded to the door to the hallway.

It felt like the middle of the night. Late enough that even the most determined night owl would have turned in. Early enough that morning ponies wouldn’t be stirring yet. But outside the door, Rarity could hear whispers and scratching, the creak of hooves on floorboards. A rattle that she identified as keys once one was inserted into the door.

The door opened slowly, and stopped a moment later, hitting the dresser Diana had pulled in front of it while they slept. Somepony outside swore in a guttural voice.

“We need to leave,” Diana hissed.

Rarity had questions. A million of them, but this wasn’t the time or place. She tossed the blankets off and ran to the narrow window. It was barred from the outside, literally barred, a grid of iron protecting it. Or perhaps it had always been intended to be a cage to keep ponies inside.

“You get the screws on the left,” Diana said. The tall pony started pulling them out of the bars. Rarity copied her on the other side, struggling to get the stubborn fixture to move. They were rusted, just enough to almost seize them entirely. The ponies outside the room must have heard them, because they abandoned the pretense of stealth and started banging on the door, trying to force the dresser side.

“Come on…” Rarity mumbled to herself. One screw fell away, then another. The bars groaned. Behind them, the dresser shifted an inch.

“No time!” Diana yelled, taking a step back and turning to kick with her rear hooves, popping part of the bars free. A second kick , even harder, tore them out of the wall entirely, sending them to the street below.

Rarity looked down. It wasn’t a long fall, but it was enough to make her wish she had a spell that might slow her descent. Diana gave her a push from behind, and Rarity scrambled out, her flank catching in the narrow frame. She yelped.

“I’m--” Diana gave her a harder shrug before she could even finish telling her. She popped free with a sound not entirely unlike a cork coming free from a bottle. Rarity made a ladylike sound of surprise and distress, falling into the street and managing to catch herself with instincts born from years spent with unexpected adventure and surprise around every corner. She even struck a pose on landing, which was less than good for her knees but would have impressed anypony watching.

She dearly hoped nopony was watching, since they were in the middle of fleeing.

Diana landed next to her, not nearly as graceful. She yelped and almost immediately started to fall. Rarity caught her, pressing against her side and holding her up.

“Are you alright?” Rarity asked.

“I sprained something in my ankle when I kicked the bars out,” Diana said through gritted teeth. “That fall made it worse. You might have to leave me.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. I’m supposed to accompany you on our little journey, aren’t I?” She offered Diana a smile and helped her start to limp away, trying to find somewhere to hide if they couldn’t run.

Before she could even get around the next corner, the ponies finished breaking into the room and ran to the window. Rarity looked back when they shouted, and saw what kind of ponies had been chasing them. She couldn’t tell if it was a mare or stallion, only that they were wearing scraps of bandages and rags that were turning moldy around the edges from constant dampness. They wore an iron cage like some twisted medical brace, all around their head and neck.

“I think the Conductor might have been right when he told us to stay on the train!” Rarity yelped. The pony at the window snarled and retreated inside, probably running for the stairs. If they were using the front door, Rarity had a few moments while they ran around the inn.

“We need to get off the street,” Diana said, her voice pained.

Without time to look for a perfect solution, Rarity shoved against the nearest iron gate, pushing her way into the overgrown yard in front of a dilapidated row house. She heard hooves coming closer. There wasn’t even time to try the door. She shoved herself and Diana down behind the low stone wall.

Ponies rushed past on the street, iron clanging along with the march of hooves. Torchlight flickered above them. One of the ponies towards the rear of the pack stopped. Rarity could hear him there, just on the other side of the wall, so close that he could reach out and touch them. All he’d have to do was look through the bars and he’d be practically on top of their hiding place.

He sniffed at the air a few times like a mangy dog, then ran on, chasing after the retreating pack. Rarity waited a few more seconds for any other stragglers, then finally breathed.

“That was too close,” she whispered.

“I don’t know what they want from us, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to let them get it,” Diana said. She sat up a little, craning her long neck to look out into the street. “We should make our way back to the train station.”

Rarity nodded and started towards the iron gate to the street. Diana grabbed her hoof.

“Wait,” Diana said. She struggled upright. “They’ll be back this way soon when they don’t find us. We can’t outrun them. Or at least I can’t.”

“Since I’m not going to leave you, I can’t either,” Rarity said. “But what do we do? Clearly the inn doesn’t offer much shelter if they let those brutes inside.”

Diana looked up and Rarity followed her gaze. The row houses formed a solid wall of wood and mortar down the street. Even where a cross-street joined, the houses to either side met in the middle above it, growing together like architectural fungus.

“Can we get there just by going through houses?” Rarity asked.

“It wouldn’t hurt to try,” Diana said. She limped to the door of the house they stood next to, trying the handle. It rattled, opening slightly. A chain was visible through the crack, holding it shut. Diana’s aura tugged at it, freeing it from the door and letting the portal swing open. “Even if we can’t go the whole distance, we can find our way to another street.”

Inside, the house seemed abandoned. Cobwebs filled the corners and the floor was all warped wood under a thin, stained layer of carpet. Rarity shut the door carefully once she was inside, hanging the chain back up to secure the door behind them.

“I can’t say much for the decor,” Rarity said. The wallpaper was peeling, and it hadn’t been all that attractive even when it was brand-new. The hallway was choked with furniture and boxes, and had clearly been used for storage instead of any kind of actual living space.

“At least nopony is living here,” Diana said. “Let’s find a way through to the next house.”

It didn’t take them long. There was a hole in the wall on the second floor, a place where water damage and rot had eaten through plaster and wood. The edges looked almost chewed.

“Do you think there are rats?” Rarity asked. “I hate rats.” It was one reason she had a cat. Not that Opal was particularly good about hunting them -- it was more effective to just have Fluttershy ask the vermin politely (but firmly) to leave. Still, having a cat was a deterrent, no different from hanging a ‘no trespassing’ sign in the window.

Diana leaned closer, squinting through the gloom. Neither of them dared to use their magic to light the way. It would be too easily spotted from outside. Even in the half light leaking in from the street lights, she could tell any rat that had made those marks was the size of a foal and had inch-long fangs.

“I don’t think so,” she said, managing to make it sound reassuring. It was almost certainly true.

Thankfully, Rarity took that the way she’d intended. “Thank goodness. That’s the last thing I’d need after everything else today.” She cleared away some of the loose splinters with a rag before squeezing through to the other side and looking around for a moment. “It seems safe,” she whispered back.

Diana squeezed through, shuffling on her knees. Her height made it even more difficult than it had been for the smaller, rounder mare.

“What was that sound?” somepony said from downstairs.

“I thought you said it was safe!” Diana hissed.

Rarity gave her a sheepish smile and pulled her through. They walked to the stairs and saw shadows moving downstairs, coming closer.

“The attic!” Diana whispered, pointing up. Rarity nodded and helped her to the other set of stairs, narrowly avoiding the ponies coming up from the first floor. There was a door there, and Rarity barged through, but in a quiet and delicate way.

She pulled a steamer trunk in front of the door and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down.

“The door opens out,” Diana pointed out. “That trunk won’t stop anypony.”

Rarity realized she was right. She pretended she’d known all along. “Even so, it makes me feel better.” She turned around and froze.

“What’s wrong?” Diana asked. She followed Rarity’s gaze to the far corner of the attic. There were candles there, thick slow-burning tapers in dirty yellow, the color more like earwax than beeswax. They surrounded a low table, a circle of fire around an altar. And on that altar was a silvery stone, as big as Rarity’s head. A wide crack ran across the surface, and fragments littered the dark cloth it lay on.

“Do you remember what those guardponies said about… things escaping these Vaults?” Rarity whispered.

“My memory is all too good,” Diana mumbled. Her eyes flicked to the unseen corners of the room. There were dozens of boxes, pushed away from the altar. More than enough room for anyone or anything to hide without being seen.

Rarity couldn’t hear a tone like a tuning fork or breath blowing across a bottle, but it was getting increasingly hard to continue not hearing it.

“There’s a window,” Rarity pointed at a boarded-up section of the wall. “It must lead out to the roof!”

“It will be dangerous to go out there,” Diana said. “But not more dangerous than staying here.”

The two mares started pulling on the boards. One came free unexpectedly, and Diana stumbled back, her bad ankle failing her at the worst moment. She fell into the ring of lit candles, knocking one over and snuffing several more. She collided with the broken Vault and the fragments on the altar and gasped in pain.

“Diana!” Rarity was at her side in a moment, helping her up. Trying to help her up. Diana groaned and struggled. It was like her mane had gotten tangled in something sticky. Rarity whispered something to try and keep her calm and stepped around to her side to figure out how to help.

The open crack of the Vault was latched onto Diana’s mane, sucking at it like a mouth, trying to draw her through the opening.

“I can’t--!” Diana gasped.

“Hold on!” Rarity grabbed the Vault with her hooves, yanking hard at it. The stubborn thing was latched on somehow, despite the fact it should have just been a shiny rock it had a grip like a full-grown rockodile! It took both of them straining against it to get Diana free, losing a few strands of her pale blue mane in the process. The strands were sucked into the Vault, vanishing within.

Diana breathed heavily, backing away from the magical rock as far as she could.

“It was trying to eat me!” she gasped.

Rarity kicked it to the far corner of the room, the silver stone skidding across the dusty floorboards. The fallen candles had found something almost as interesting - a box full of old papers. The flames were starting to grow even as they watched.

The sound of hooves from downstairs increased, and shouting joined it.

“I believe some haste in leaving might be warranted,” Rarity said, her chest heaving. She grabbed the last board across the attic window with her hooves, needing a moment to collect herself before she could do anything. Outside, the moon hung huge in the sky, the fog clearing just enough that she could see it.

It wasn’t like Luna’s moon in Equestria. That had a kind of beauty to it, distant and glowing in the sky. The moon here was pale not like argent silver but like a bloated corpse, dark spots stretching across it that seemed more bruises than craters, horribly alive and dead and never alive to begin with all at once, a thing that shouldn’t be.

A chill went down Rarity’s spine, and that shock of cold was enough to give her the strength and focus she needed to pull the rotting board away and swing the window open. Diana was there in a moment, helping Rarity up and onto the roof before joining her, needing a helping hoof with her injured ankle.

“I’m not sure I can make it,” Diana said. “I’m ill-suited for acrobatics.”

“You keep trying to make me leave you behind,” Rarity said. “Darling, I’m beginning to think you want to stay here.”

Diana shuddered. “No. I’ve been imprisoned before. I can’t… I couldn’t survive it again. I could feel it when that Vault pulled at me, Rarity. There’s a feeling to an oubliette, a sense of terrible forgetting and isolation. I think if I’d been alone it would have sucked me inside and I would have been there for a very long time.”

“It was barely as big as my head!” Rarity scoffed, trying to dismiss the thought.

“Yes,” Diana agreed, her voice a dry whisper. “I don’t think it would have been pleasant.”

The way across the roof was a nightmare of gables and random slopes, the houses built by ponies of dubious sanity but impressive woodworking ability. Rarity tugged Diana along, urging her to hop across the short gap to the next house.

Something smashed into the roof ahead of them. Rarity squeaked in surprise. Talons squeezed tight, tearing into the dark wooden shingles and ripping them apart. A creature levered itself up, trying to climb up to meet them. Two more long limbs grabbed for purchase on chimneys and reached for the peak of the roof. None of them had the same number of claws.

It looked something like a dragon, if you preserved it in formaldehyde for a few centuries and let it pickle. It wasn’t rotten, but any trace of real life seemed long gone. Too many blind eyes in a rubbery, twisted face turned to look at them, black fangs parting in an evil grin.

“Get down!” somepony yelled. A barrage of flaming arrows peppered the rooftop. Rarity took shelter behind a convenient chimney. The dragon or monster or whatever it was screeched with a voice that seemed half mechanical and half bestial, falling back down and into the street below with a heavy thud.

“Perhaps we found somepony else sane?” Diana asked. She got up from where she’d found shelter and limped to the edge of the destruction. Where the arrows had hit the roof, the damp shingles had put them out almost immediately.

“Oy! Are you alright?” Somepony yelled from the street. Rarity joined Diana. Below them, three ponies stood in flickering torchlight. The horrible creature had landed badly, a tangle of limbs that seemed more akin to a tumbleweed than an animal. Something hissed from slits in its flesh that opened and closed like the gills of a fish, black ichor spilling out onto the stones and sizzling with the smell of hot tar and poison.

The tallest pony kept aim on it with a crossbow. He waved up at Rarity.

“The guardsponies from the tavern?” Rarity asked, recognizing them after a moment. The only one she didn’t recognize held up a Vault in her hooves, pulling it from underneath a ragged, tough cloak weighed down by iron bands of armor. The silvery meteor fragment was inside an iron cage, and when she opened it, the carvings on the fragment started to glow a purple-green color, and the creature screamed, siding across the ground and into a growing, flickering light from the stone.

Space twisted around it, and Rarity had to look away, the twisting making her feel motion sick. There was a sizzle in the air not entirely dissimilar to the ozone after a lightning strike, and when she looked back, the creature was gone. There were long ruts in the ground leading to the stone where the creature had fought against its pull.

“Yes, I think it would have been very unpleasant indeed,” Diana mumbled.

“We’re alive, but could we trouble you for some help getting down?” Rarity shouted to the guardponies. “We’re having a bit of trouble with the local color!”

“Get them down,” the pony with the Vault said. She closed the little cage around it and started wrapping it with silver wire.

“Thank you again,” Rarity said.

“Sorry about what happened in the inn,” Beil said. She offered Rarity her canteen. Rarity took a long sip and coughed, not expecting to find it full of beer. It wasn’t particularly strong, but she’d been prepared for plain water.

“We had to go take care of the basilisk,” Rustung told them. He leaned on the cleaver he’d used to finish it off. “Terrible thing with a taste for ponies. Barred windows and doors won’t stop them, either.”

“It was released as a distraction,” the third pony said. She wore a long, beaked mask with goggles over her eyes. “They must have been planning this for some time, waiting for the right victims.”

“The right victims being us,” Rarity surmised.

“Why?” Diana asked.

“It is dangerous to know too much about the star cults,” the masked pony said firmly. “They shine a light into the dark to learn what is there, but holding a lantern in a dark forest means everything else sees you, too.”

“Could we trouble you to help us back to the train station?” Diana asked. She winced as she tried to put weight on her injured leg again.

“Whatever they want you for, the best thing for this Realm is for you to leave,” the third pony said. “Yes. We will help you. But if you get caught, we will do what we must to ensure the safety of the Vaults.”

She checked her crossbow and trotted off, obviously annoyed with the whole situation.

“Sorry about her,” Beil said. “The Hunter has seen ponies die for a lot of stupid reasons, but the cults are the stupidest ones of all.”

“Can you imagine worshiping something ponies hated so much they banished it all the way out of their world?” Rustung scoffed. “If it was worth praying to, they’d have done it back where they came from.”

“Let me bandage up that leg, then we’ll get moving,” Beil said. “The Hunter can lead us on a safe route back.”

“It might be more difficult than I thought,” the Hunter said, walking back with slightly more haste. “We need to take a wide path around. We’ll need to pass close by the Gros.”

Beil hissed through her teeth.

“Is that bad?” Rarity asked.

“You are both unproven,” the Hunter said sharply. “Even ponies with strong wills can hear the call of the First Vault.” She said it with extra capitals. She stepped closer to Diana and reached into her mane, grabbing something.

Diana yelped. The Hunter produced one of the fragments of silver meteor that had been on the altar that had almost eaten Diana alive. It was stuck to several strands of Diana’s mane that the Hunter had pulled free along with it.

“The Vaults are tools of great good. They yearn to seal evil away from the world. They’re harmless to normal ponies. I wonder what you did to make yourself so attractive to them…”

“I did nothing,” Diana said sharply.

“Perhaps,” the Hunter allowed, nodding. “Sometimes a being is imprisoned unjustly. Sometimes. But never without powerful enemies. When we approach the Gros Eisenburg I will watch you with great interest. If it starts calling to you…”

She trailed off, leaning closer to Diana.

“Please, there’s no reason to fight,” Rarity said. She stepped between them. “Diana is a good friend of mine. I trust her with my life.”

“You should never trust anypony with your life,” the Hunter said. “There are too many ways ponies can fail you. Being so foolish that you forget that is how you fail yourself.”

“You must be a very lonely pony,” Rarity said, feeling sympathy for the masked pony.

The Hunter stared at her in silence for a long moment. A horn blew somewhere in the street behind them, something between the rude noise of a vuvuzela and a brass blast from a tuba.

“We need to move,” the Hunter said, pushing past them to lead the way.

The path led uphill, through side streets where stairways joined different levels of the city together. A light rain had started up as they walked in silence. It wasn’t the quiet where ponies didn’t have anything to say to each other, it was quiet where Rarity felt hunted by unseen predators. Things moved in the shadows around them, hiding just when she turned to look. She held her breath sometimes, straining her ears to listen for the clop of hooves on stone.

Curtains moved as they walked past. In the middle distance were voices, just on the edge of hearing, too far away to make out the words themselves and leaving only the bare sense that words had been spoken, the pattern and pace of conversation with the meaning blurred away. Worse than that were the inequine hoots and indescribable sounds. Some of them had the Hunter raise her hoof for them to stop while she checked the area ahead of the group.

It was unnerving, like being in a jungle instead of a city.

They crested a hill, and the light rain that had been coming down around them started to peter out.

“There it is,” Rustung said quietly, nodding into the distance.

It emerged out of the fog like a ship pulling into port, the weather breaking around it. It was a huge fortress of ornate, gothic towers and iron, a literal mountain made by ponies. It was bigger than any castle had a right to be, uselessly large, overgrown and impossible. It made Canterlot look like a mere summer cabin.

And it sang. It sang with a low, thrumming voice that Rarity couldn’t hear with her ears but she felt in her bones. It sang and called for ponies to gather. It sounded like power, and like something so far beyond her understanding that from the perspective of whatever was making the sound, Rarity and an insect were all but indistinguishable.

“The Gros Eisenburg,” Rarity whispered.

“The First Vault,” Beil confirmed. “The heart of this place. We don’t know who built the castle around it, or what they built it for.”

“There’s only one reason to build a castle,” the Hunter said. “You build it to keep ponies out. It was built by something larger and older than ponies. Something that could build a mile-high tower without having the whole thing collapse.”

“It is rather intimidating,” Rarity said. “And the First Vault is inside?”

“We must be cautious,” the Hunter growled. “There are few enough sane ponies here, and most of the ones who can fight have to work hard to keep the cultists away. They live inside that thing for as long as they’re able. Most only last a few years fighting the mad before they retire or die.”

“Not much of a career path,” Diana noted wryly.

“No. Good, devoted ponies lead hard lives,” the Hunter said. “Most of us can manage to be determined, but to be truly good… we likely wouldn’t end up here in the first place. So we must try harder. That is what it means to sacrifice.”

Rarity was very familiar with sacrifice. She often sacrificed sleep in service of deadlines, or profits when a pony was in need and simply couldn’t afford her normal services. What sacrifice really meant, to her, was taking on the burden of another.

“So I take it we are going to be… going inside that leviathan?” Rarity asked.

“Perhaps if you have any plus-sized clients you can use it for inspiration,” Diana tried to joke. It fell flat in the face of the looming shadow of the mountain of steel. They fell into silence as they walked closer to it, and Rarity could see how the land seemed to be piled up around it, clustered around it like filings to a magnet. For the first time, she could even see the seams in the town itself.

“These buildings were banished here too, weren’t they?” she asked quietly. There were places were a home simply stopped, cut halfway through by an invisible knife. Places where the streets didn’t quite line up.

“Yes,” the Hunter’s voice was little more than a whisper. Somehow, this close to the Eisenburg, its shadow fell in every direction, the lights in the sky perpetually behind it. “They’re not all from the same world, before you ask. We believe there were wars, great wars we can’t imagine, and weapons were used that simply erased places from their universe. They ended up here. Not imprisoned, just victims. Poor souls.”

She shook her head, old sorrow hurting like the ache of an infected wound.

“How horrible,” Diana mumbled. “I wonder, is it worse to be imprisoned alone like Luna, or locked in a madhouse like the ponies here?”

“You won’t have to find out,” Beil assured her. “We’ll have you out of here. Don’t worry.”

Rarity felt less and less sure about that as they approached the Eisenburg. Only a block away from it, the street stopped entirely. The ground dropped away, cracked and broken and crumbling at the edges like a meringue. The only way across was a long, narrow bridge. With the fog rolling back in, it was impossible to see the far side.

“Rustung,” the Hunter said. “Fly across first and make sure the way is clear.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, taking off and soaring across the gap.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” the Hunter muttered. In most of the city, the air had been deadly still, caught between narrow streets and holding tight onto the fog lingering between rows of dilapidated buildings. Here, there was enough open space in that yawning canyon that the wind could breathe, a slow mournful moan. Just above it was an urgent hiss.

“Down!” Rarity gasped, but the Hunter was already in motion, turning to put her back to the moat and rearing up to cover the others with her own body. Arrows hit her back, armored coat catching the bolts.

The Hunter grunted and collapsed to her knees. The thick layers of material had stopped most of the projectiles, but not all of them. Two had gone in deep, crooked shafts of splintery wood skewered into her flesh.

Rustung flew back overhead, cursing and coming in for a hard landing. “Archers!” he yelled. He’d caught an arrow in his own flank.

“Thank you,” the Hunter said shortly. “Here.”

She reached into the coat that was now pinned to her body and hissed in pain, retrieving two dirty glass vials. She gave one to the pegasus, and he yanked the arrow free and popped the cork on the potion, drinking it quickly. The injury healed over near-instantly.

“Help me with these,” the Hunter ordered, motioning towards her back. Beil yanked one free, then the other. With the second arrow, she swore, looking at the broken end of the shaft she’d pulled free.

“The arrowhead is--”

“Yes, I can tell, thank you,” the Hunter said. She raised her mask a little with one hoof and drank the potion anyway. “I’ll dig it out later.”

“There are a lot of them,” Rustung said. “If you go out on that bridge, you won’t make it halfway across before you’re a pincushion.”

“I don’t suppose either of you know any spells that might help?” the Hunter asked, turning to Rarity and Diana.

“I know something that will get stains out of your clothing,” Rarity said. “I don’t think it would be particularly handy for storming a fortified position.”

“No,” Diana said shortly. She stared into the mist. The Eisenburg looked as big as a world from this close. “I think it might be unwise to even use magic here. There’s a presence in the air.”

“True enough,” the Hunter agreed. She pointed to one of the nearby buildings. “Get the door.”

“We’re going inside?” Beil asked.

“No. I said get the door.”

“I can’t believe that worked,” Rarity said. Rustung tossed the door aside. It was peppered with dozens of arrows, a deadly pincushion that had come down in a rain heavy enough to make the heavy timber start to crack and splinter.

“Survival means using everything we have at hoof,” the Hunter said. “This is a place of scarcity. Little food, almost no fuel for fires. Much of what we do have has been discarded. Unwanted trash.”

“Used up and tossed aside,” Rarity mumbled. Something tickled at her memory. She’d heard something similar before.

“Would you say that about these ponies?” Diana asked. “Are they garbage?”

The Hunter shook her head. “Of course not. The fact somepony else threw them away is infuriating. Do you know how most ponies arrive here? As unwanted orphaned foals. I do not know what world banishes them, but if there was any justice, it wouldn’t exist.”

“Is that how you came to be here?” Rarity asked.

“No,” the Hunter said. “I know why I’m here. I accept my fate. That doesn’t mean others should suffer the same way. Come along. There may be more cultists.”

“They never stay scared off for long,” Beil agreed. “I’ll watch our rear for stragglers.”

Inside, it was clear the iron castle of the Gros Eisenburg had not been designed for ponies. The first thing to come to Rarity’s mind was Canterlot, but that was entirely inadequate to describe the scale of the black fortress. Across the bridge they found themselves in what seemed like an aqueduct but which Rarity realized after a few minutes of standing in fetlock-deep water was merely a gutter for a sloped roof.

Boards had been placed to provide a ramp onto the roof proper, and a crude walkway had been built across what resembled a cliff face more than a building. The pitons and rope guideline reminded Rarity of something she’d seen before - photos from the early days of mountaineering, when ponies vanished in avalanches.

She swallowed and resisted the urge to look down.

“Just a little more,” Diana encouraged. Rarity fixed her gaze forward at the end of the path. There was a ledge. A window ledge, true, but still as large as the grand gate of Celestia’s palace. She felt the thin planks under her hooves wobble and made a sound so high-pitched that only certain species of batponies were able to detect it.

Rarity tried to scramble to safety and freeze in alarm at the same time. Diana shoved her from behind and the balance was broken, sending her forward. Rustung caught her, steadying her and keeping her from slipping off the window ledge.

“There we go,” Rustung said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“You have wings,” Rarity accused, breathing heavily.

“And that’s why I had to go on ahead,” he said. “We can go inside here. That should be better, right?”

“I’m starting to think there isn’t anything better,” Rarity mumbled.

“You’re right,” the Hunter agreed. “Even so, we’re almost there.”

“I hope so,” Diana said. “I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up, but we don’t have forever.”

Rarity gasped. “You’re right! How long do we have before the Aether Express leaves?”

Diana produced her silver watch. "I didn't get a chance to keep this old thing wound... I’m not sure. Half a day at most. I’d still like to get there as quickly as possible. The cultists might be determined, but it should be impossible for them to touch us once we’re onboard.”

A wail rose up around them. Beil was the last one across the bridge, and she stopped, holding her spear in her teeth and looking around for the source of the sound.

“Above us!” the Hunter yelled.

Somehow, the cultists had found their way up a level, to a second ledge above them. They were pouring over the edges with ropes wrapped around their limbs, coming down like screaming marionettes with knives in their teeth and wearing broken cages around their limbs like armor.

One pony wasn’t using a rope at all, and just slammed into the thin walkway in front of Beil, smashing through it like an anvil and laughing madly all the way down to the mist below. The earth pony guardsmare yelped and dropped her spear, grabbing onto the rope guideline and catching herself on it as the path collapsed under her, straining to hold on for dear life.

“Beil!” Rustung yelled.

Rarity instinctively grabbed for her with her magic. The best she could do was help tug the mare into a better position, hooking her legs around the rope so she could spread out her weight a little.

“I can’t carry her myself,” she said. “Diana?”

Diana strained, trying to help Rarity lift her, but after a few moments of effort they lost their grip and nearly dropped her, Beil only barely keeping her grip with the shock of the drop.

“Go on without me!” Beil yelled. “I can figure something out!”

“Don’t be stupid, I’m not leaving you!” Rustung shouted back to her. He threw his spear, severing the tether of one of the descending cultists and sending him tumbling down past the walkway. There were only seconds before the first of them arrived.

“We need to save her,” Diana said. “Maybe if Rarity and I try again--”

“If you’re here it will make things more difficult,” the Hunter said. “They’re after you. More will come as long as you linger.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?” Rarity asked.

“Take them to the exit,” Rustung said. “I’ll stay back here with Beil and hold the cultists off.”

“I understand,” the Hunter said. “Come.”

She turned, her heavy coat sweeping around her, making a clear effort not to look back.

“But--” Rarity started.

“Don’t argue,” Diana whispered. “They’re right. We’re the cause of this. If we leave, the cultists will follow after us and give Rustung a chance to save his friend. We can’t help.”

Rarity didn’t like it, even if she could see the logic behind it. Behind them, the first cultists landed on the ledge. Rustung bellowed a challenge and charged at them.

“Don’t get distracted!” the Hunter snapped, bringing Rarity’s attention back to what they were doing. The three ponies galloped inside and into a room that was just too big. There was no other way for Rarity to think about it. It was so large it was developing its own weather systems, with clouds and fog obscuring the edges of the space. What she could see were columns stretching up to a distant ceiling, with rafters as wide as streets. Occupied streets. There were moving torches above them.

“They’re looking for a way down,” Diana said.

“Most of the pillars have ladders bolted to them,” the Hunter said. Rarity tried not to think about climbing a ladder that went up ten stories.

“We don’t have to go up there, do we?” Rarity asked. She was sure she’d never make it. It was perfectly acceptable for a lady to be afraid of heights and even if she wasn’t, she’d still seen plenty of heights already today.

“No. We cut through to the other side,” the Hunter said. The cloaked pony set a hard pace to follow, as tireless as Applejack or Rainbow Dash but without the encouragement that either one might have given Rarity. Instead, she had only Diana there to support her, and the mare was fighting off pain from her bad ankle already. It was enough to shame Rarity into pushing herself harder without complaint.

The huge room ended in… well, it was a portcullis, in theory, but Rarity couldn’t imagine what kind of army it was designed to guard against. The bars were so thick she could have wrapped her hooves around it and only gotten halfway there. Even a full-sized dragon might have been able to squeeze past the gaps.

It seemed impossible for the gate to hold anything back, but the Hunter still hesitated on the threshold.

“What is it?” Rarity asked.

“Be cautious. Close your heart and focus your thoughts only on following me.” She took a deep breath. “Do not trust your eyes or ears.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Rarity asked. A hunting horn from behind her drove her to stop asking questions and hurry on. She stepped between the bars and everything changed.

The cold iron and fog vanished into glowing gold and light, a shimmering aurora flowing around her hooves. It was a river of light and stars. The walls of the fortress had suddenly grown resplendent and covered in fine fabrics and jewels, murals and tapestries replacing arcane symbols hammered into steel.

The Hunter was there, seemingly unchanged. She was whispering something to herself over and over again. It sounded like a prayer. Rarity wasn’t sure if she was praying to whatever was here or praying for protection against it.

“Come to me,” something whispered. The river of light flowed from it. Rarity found herself drawn towards the sweet, soft voice. It sounded the way a foal imagined a fairy queen would sound.

Diana said something behind Rarity, but she didn’t quite catch it. There was soft singing in the air, a chorus of bell-like voices that drowned her out without even being as loud as a lover’s muttering.

There was only one way to go anyway, so surely it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead. This part of the fortress was warm and inviting. It must have been the part where the rest of the Hunter’s friends lived, the ones she said guarded this place. Yes, that made sense. She could feel reassurance that she was right and safe, coming from all around her like the warmth of a fireplace on her coat.

She smiled and followed the entrancing lights, flickering balls as big as her head floating around her like disembodied torches in every color of the rainbow, and a few she didn’t recognize. It was the same color she’d seen in the river, deep below. A color she couldn’t quite describe.

It took Rarity a moment to realize she’d been led into a throne room. There was a huge lounge-shaped seat, for the equally huge lounging inhabitant. Part of Rarity was tickled pink to see how it was nearly identical to her own chaise lounge.

The being on the throne was difficult to see. They were right there in front of Rarity, but they were veiled, literally and figuratively. Twice or thrice the size of Celestia, covered in almost-transparent veils, lit from behind in a way that cast their features into shadow aside from hints of gold and the gleam of amber and ruby.

“Thou hast journey’d far and overcome much,” the great being said. “Please, come closer, little one.”

Rarity found herself drawn a few steps closer. As she approached, she stepped into that being’s shadow, and her eyes started adjusting to the shade. She could make out a few of its features, the veiled alicorn seeming almost to be cast out of seamless marble, yet breathing softly.

“There is beauty in your light, little one,” she said. “Let me admire it for a time.”

“M-may I ask who you are?” Rarity asked. The beauty of the great one was otherworldly. Unnerving in a way, the details hard to hold in her mind in the way it was hard to read in a dream. Ideas came through, feelings and emotions that seemed more like they were imposed than truly felt.

“For tens of thousands of years, I led the revels of my empire, and the stars themselves burned sweet and clear. In time the jealous and short-sighted rose up and sent me into exile. Would thou not offer me thy name?”

“Ah, right, of course. I am a guest, I should introduce myself. My name--”

“Stop!” A voice came sharp and hard, cutting through the chorus. Diana’s hoof gripped Rarity’s shoulder and yanked her back. The world shifted in an instant. The gold vanished, tarnishing black. The light snapped off. The floating lanterns suddenly seemed as pale as corpses.

The great and ancient being was gone. Rarity was standing not in a throne room but on the edge of an iron walkway. Before her was a silver pyramid of cratered, pock-marked silver that looked older than the universe itself. Tendrils of shadow and mist reached out towards her, like the wake of an invisible octopus caught only in reflection.

Rarity scrambled back, terror gripping her heart.

“What happened?!” Rarity gasped.

“It tried to take you,” Diana said.

“The thing imprisoned inside is older than the stars,” the Hunter warned. She stood far back. She seemed unwilling to approach closer, clearly afraid to even be this near to it. “It nearly had you. Your friend saved you. I was wrong about her. I thought she would be the weak link.”

“I would never let anything like that have my friend,” Diana said. She helped guide Rarity back to safety.

“We must be away from here,” the Hunter said. “Hurry. There is an exit to the Curdle nearby.”

“The what?” Rarity asked, still feeling dazed. Her head was still spinning, and the size and sameness of the corridors made it hard, impossible really, for her to do more than simply follow along, hooves running down a labyrinth of cold hallways and vast empty spaces. “Why is it called that?”

“You’ll see,” the Hunter said.

“No,” Rarity gasped. They’d gotten out of the fortress, and now Rarity wished they could go back inside.

They’d exited a massive archway onto a drawbridge as wide as a city block and held in place by iron chains with links thicker than tree trunks. Shacks had been built on the edges of the bridge, and even with the dirty hovels clinging to the sides, there was still enough room for a Manehattan avenue between them.

Whatever ponies lived here were hiding, and Rarity had to assume they were hiding from the horrible odor.

It was some kind of swamp, or at least that was the best way to describe it. There were islands of packed garbage and hardened sludge, but it was mostly puddles and slime, all in unnatural colors. The water had a rainbow sheen of oil, and the mist here was a worrying shade of yellow-green. Even with most of the smell gone, some part of Rarity knew the foul air wasn’t safe to breathe for long.

“It makes sense,” Diana mumbled. “If you had a spell that could simply banish something entirely out of the world, one of the things you’d use it for would be to get rid of… undesirable waste.”

“It’s not an open sewer, even if it smells like it,” the Hunter said. “This is why I wear the mask. Here.”

She produced a small bottle and some rags.

“This is peppermint extract. It’s obnoxiously strong.” She dabbed some on the rags. “Wrap it around your faces. It will keep the worst of the miasma out.”

Diana and Rarity took the rags. The mint scent was so powerful it was choking, but it was still several orders of magnitude better than the alternative. Rarity wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to eat a candy cane again, though, without thinking of the Curdle.

“There’s a path through the mire,” the Hunter said. “Some ponies trawl the trash heaps for anything useful that they can eat or sell. You see the guideposts?”

She pointed out the nearest set. There were ropes and chains strung up between some of them.

“You’ll be following them. If you see lights, ignore them. You’ve already seen what the wisps can do. They’ll create illusions and lure you off the path into deep mud. If you follow them, you will die. If you get lost, you will die. If you see another pony…”

The Hunter hesitated.

“You’ll die?” Diana guessed.

“They’re not all completely insane savages who eat pony flesh, but too many of them are. Keep your distance.”

“Thank you for all the advice, but you’re saying it like we’re parting ways,” Rarity said, chuckling slightly.

The Hunter nodded. “This is as far as I can take you.”

“Why?” Rarity asked. The Hunter didn’t need to answer. Behind them, the first cultists finally appeared, spotting them and yelling for others to follow.

“I’m going to stop them here,” the Hunter said. “You’re an important pony, Miss Rarity. I’m not sure why or how. I doubt it’s limited to just this world. There’s someplace you need to be. I can’t let you get trapped here with the rest of us.”

“You can’t hold them all back,” Rarity said. “You’re only one pony!”

The Hunter chuckled. “Yes, but I’m not alone.”

She reached into her cloak and produced the caged stone she’d used to trap the basilisk a few hours ago. The Hunter shook it, and it rang like a bell, in the way that a chunk of stone shouldn’t be able to.

“I’m going to do something incredibly unwise, but it should give you more than enough time to escape.”

“Will that work?” Diana asked. “If I remember, you said they were the ones to release it in the first place.”

“Just because they released it doesn’t mean they can control it,” the Hunter said. “Don’t worry. The beast is no friend of theirs. I’ll release it once you’re far enough away that it won’t spot you.”

“And then?” Diana asked.

“And I’ll recapture it later,” the Hunter said. “You’ll be well away by then. It’s nothing you need to be concerned about. My job will be easier if I don’t have to protect you at the same time.”

She put the lantern-shaped cage on the ground and put her hoof on it.

“Before we go,” Rarity said. “I never… you never told us your name. Miss Beil and Mister Rustung called you Hunter, but that sounds like a title.”

The Hunter hesitated, then reached up and took off her wide-brimmed hat and her mask, shaking out her mane. It was white, but shot through with a band of metallic rainbow colors like pastel bismuth.

“Taffeta,” the blue-coated mare said. “But it’s been a long time since I used that name.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” Rarity said quietly. “I’ll remember it.”

The Hunter nodded and put her hat back on, leaving the mask off.

“Go,” Taffeta said. “You have a train to catch.”

Rarity sobbed and struggled against the impossible.

“It’s all over!” she wailed. “I can’t go on!”

“Ah, so I should leave you here,” Diana said, not immediately launching into a pep talk or doing her duty as a friend to immediately tell Rarity how amazing and beautiful she was, even with her white coat tarnished by muck. The tall unicorn simply nodded. “That’s too bad. It was nice knowing you.”

She started walking away, and Rarity somehow found the strength to pull her hooves out of the squirming, stinking mud.

“You could at least have had the decency to finish me off!” Rarity yelled. “How could you leave a friend here?!” She chased after Diana and managed to find another puddle of water that was somehow ice cold but also possessing a distressingly warm current that brushed against her skin.

“I wouldn’t,” Diana said. “But I knew you’d be along. You’re stronger than you think. You simply enjoy being rescued.” She sounded exhausted but still slightly amused.

“You have those long legs like stilts,” Rarity huffed. “You’re not even half as dirty as I am!”

“And yet you continue on,” Diana noted. “How admirable.” She didn’t make it sound enough like a compliment. Rarity needed one at the moment and latched onto it despite the slightly soured flavor.

“Do you think we’re getting close?” Rarity asked, after a few moments of silent trudging.

“I hope so,” Diana said. She slowed to a halt, looking around. The mist was thick around them, and the poor quality of the air was making every breath burn slightly, half from exhaustion and half from the slow poison of the fuming swamp. “Do you see any sign of the city? If we’re truly going back to the station, we would have to see some buildings, right?”

Rarity peered around. All she could see was effluence and rot. There were a few scraggly trees of the sort that were determined to grow in even the worst conditions, with only a few blighted leaves and exposed roots that sank like greedy talons into the mud.

“I’m sorry, darling. I don’t see much of anything at all,” she admitted.

“Did we get lost?” Diana mumbled to herself. It took Rarity a few moments to realize that in addition to not seeing the rows of buildings that they should have been approaching as they closed with the station, she also didn’t see the path.

“Diana, do you…?”

“We’ll have to retrace our steps,” Diana said, resigned to it. She turned around, looked past Rarity’s shoulder, and froze in alarm.

Rarity turned, her hoof caught in a soft, slippery spot that suddenly seemed greased instead of merely wet, and a bandaged hoof caught her.

“Alas, to have strayed so far from grace,” the soft voice of the pony who’d saved her said. She waited for Rarity’s balance to recover before letting go. “Thou mare from a faraway land, I heard songs of thy flight, and yet thou wander in the doldrums.”

“Be careful, she might be one of them,” Diana cautioned. She peered around in the toxic mist, looking for signs of other cultists.

“O fallen one, I do not serve a mistress but if I did it would be one such as thou,” the bandaged mare whispered. “I did not wish for thy song to end here. For one to have been set on a journey, it is the duty of those who remember the light of the stars that do not shine here to be thy guide.”

“What does that mean?” Rarity asked.

“Come along,” the bandaged mare said, ushering them into the mist.

“Should we follow her?” Rarity looked at Diana, but the taller mare had no good answers, only bad ones.

“She gave us directions to the Inn,” Diana said. “Which is also where the cult tried to get us. But…”

“But we have few options?” Rarity asked.

“I am very nearly ready to let the cult take me if it means getting out of this bog,” Diana admitted. Rarity felt the same way. It wasn’t merely that the place was awful, it was a place that felt actively hostile, trying to kill them in every way it could. Even if it was a trap, perhaps it was a trap that had been set near the correct path. A wise mare knew that when the enemy knew the land better than she did, the snares they placed were almost as good as guideposts.

The bandaged mare moved slowly and steadily, letting the two follow her and never getting so far away that they felt rushed. She picked her way from dry patch to dry patch, somehow managing to avoid ever falling into a surprise puddle or trip on a half-buried branch. Rarity found herself following exactly in her hoofsteps and everything felt instantly more manageable.

“We’re going downhill,” Diana noted. Trickles of something that was mostly water went past them.

“Yes,” the mare said. “To the faster path of darkness and flow.”

“What does that mean?” Rarity asked. “Is it-- ah. Of course.” The mist parted, and the answer was revealed. The river was ahead of them, cutting a path through the landfill of the swamp, the sides revealing strata of garbage and diseased slime. None of it seemed to end up in the water itself, which seemed supernaturally pure in comparison.

“Nearly there,” the bandaged mare promised. “Look.”

She pointed to a collection of boards and broken branches, lashed together into an uneven platform.

“A raft,” Rarity nodded. “Thank goodness.”

“Were you worried you’d have to swim?” Diana joked.

“Don’t be silly,” Rarity scoffed. “I’m a very strong swimmer, darling. Summer fashion is all about swimsuits, you know. A lady has to know how to make them look good in the water, not merely while sunbathing.”

“Of course,” Diana agreed. The awful smell was lessened here. The air felt cleaner. They could very nearly breathe normally, and Rarity found herself sucking in deeper breaths as if she’d been holding her nose for a long time and only breathing the bare minimum.

The bandaged mare stepped onto the raft, picking up a pole. “Come along, fair travelers. It is nearly at its end.”

It was almost a calm end to the journey. The river was slow and the cultists apparently hadn’t thought to post guards along it. The blind mare took them downriver, humming a song to herself that seemed to wax and wane without ever settling on a tune. Eventually, they found themselves at a ladder, just to the side of the bridge near the train station. Rarity recognized it even from this low angle, thanks to the enclosed cage of bars around the span.

“Alas, I must leave thou here,” the mare sighed. “O fallen one, I hope you will dream of me.”

“When she said fallen one, she means you,” Rarity whispered to Diana. “You should say something to the poor dear. I believe she’s infatuated!”

Diana gave Rarity an inscrutable look and then acquiesced. “Thank you for your help,” she told the mare. After another moment, she gingerly put a hoof on her shoulder. “I wish I could be whatever it is you need me to be. I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologize, dark one,” the mare said, shaking her head. “There are times when things are wrong and times when they are right. A great syzygy is coming!”

“I… I see,” Diana said. The strange bandaged mare seemed almost ecstatic. Before she could ask what the mare meant, and before Rarity could ask what the word syzygy meant to begin with, a whistle cut through the air.

“The train!” Rarity gasped. She scrambled up the ladder, pulling Diana up with her. The bandaged mare gave them a last wave as they hopped down over the stone wall and into the street beyond.

“It’s just on the other side of the block,” Diana said. She limped on three legs. Rarity tried to offer help, but Diana waved her off. “I’m fine!”

The two bolted down the uneven cobblestones. The whole city felt haunted, as dead as a graveyard, and the ruined buildings loomed like huge tombstones in memory to some lost civilization. Had it really all been banished here in the middle of some terrible war? What kind of world would be left if entire cities were erased?

The whistle blew again, just as the station came into view. A solid block of a building, a stop leading down underground. They’d made it.

“That was horrible,” Rarity sighed, collapsing onto the floor of the train car.

“I did warn you,” the Conductor reminded her. “You should have stayed here.”

“I promise next time, I’ll take you more seriously, no matter how much I might want to sleep in a real bed.” Rarity sighed. The train’s whistle blew again, and it started into motion with a soft rumble. Rarity blinked and looked up, a thought arriving as their bodies left. “Shouldn’t you be up front?”

“Hm?” the Conductor tilted his head.

“Driving the train, I mean,” Rarity explained.

“It’s a magical train,” he reminded her. “It drives itself. That’s why it’s important you don’t miss the departure time. I can only do so much to delay it. If you’d been a minute later, we’d have gone off without you.”

“Thank you for worrying about us,” Diana said, the first thing she’d spoken since sitting down heavily in her usual seat.

The Conductor nodded, tipping his hat. “I’ll go check on our arrival time at the next station. Ladies.”

He made his leave.

Rarity sighed, laying there until the cold, hard floor made her more sore than she was exhausted, and she managed to motivated herself enough to stand and find her way into a seat.

“Diana, can I ask… some of the things that ponies said to you, and that… event with the Vault…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Diana sighed. “Isn’t it enough that we escaped?”

“I suppose you’re right,” Rarity said. “I wish other ponies could say the same. Not those awful cultists, but the innocents.”

“Can we say they were not also innocent?” Diana asked. “It’s not the guilty that go mad in prison. Most of them probably wished for an explanation. Why me? Why was I banished to this terrible place? A guilty pony has the answers, an innocent pony must invent them.”

“And a guilty pony might think they know how to escape,” Rarity guessed.

“While one who has simply suffered an injustice might go mad reflecting on every sin they might have committed.” Diana sighed, her eyes closed. “Do you remember how Taffeta said she knew why she was banished?”

Rarity nodded.

“It let her be at peace with herself. Those of us who know what we have done wrong cannot always make things right, but we can remember not to hurt ponies the same way again.”

Fifth Stop: It's Snowing On Mt. Fuji

“Snow!” Rarity gasped, as she watched it falling outside the train windows. They’d exited a tunnel and found themselves riding the rails along a mountainside, and the fog and depressing atmosphere of their last stop fell away to be replaced with crisp and clean air that made Rarity all too aware of the state of her mane and coat.

“Unless I’m greatly mistaken, it does also snow in Ponyville,” Diana joked.

“Yes, but it was the middle of the summer when we left! Has it really been that long? It doesn’t feel like we’ve been gone for months…” It was actually rather difficult to keep track of the days. There was a constant countdown to the next stop, but even when hours went past the days seemed to flow into each other.

“Each Realm has its own seasons,” Diana said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were places where it was always winter. Perhaps that’s the case at our next stop.”

“I hope there will be a chance to get warmer clothing,” Rarity said. “You might have your warm cloak, but I don’t have anything appropriate!”

“I am sure that no matter what, you’ll find a way to make a grand entrance in style,” Diana assured her. “Think of it as an opportunity to explore what the locals wear. Whatever that will end up being.”

“Hm.” Rarity rubbed her chin, thinking. “Perhaps something like the yaks? Layers of finely made blankets in all sorts of colors?”

“You should consider more exotic options,” Diana said. “What if they use spellcraft to keep warm? Perhaps they cloak themselves in living flame.”

“I should hope not,” Rarity said, her mood souring. “It’s difficult enough to understand ponies who think formalwear is when they put on a hat. If the locals here are running around au natural in a snowstorm I might well stay on the train!”

Diana giggled lightly. “If that’s the case, you can bring civilization to them in the form of skiwear and scarves.”

“Truly a terrible burden,” Rarity sighed.

Rarity stepped out onto the train station with a little shiver and a happy hop in her step.

“Look at all this, Diana!” Rarity gasped. Her breath fogged the air like dragon’s smoke, but she forgot the cold for a moment while she looked at the wonder around her. The station was a long, low building framed with dark wood and decorated with carvings of birds and nature in simple abstract swirls of texture. Multicolored paper lanterns hung from the rafters, casting everything in soft light.

Even the trees were decorated, lights hanging to them in small twists of wire around jars containing fireflies that flashed in a rainbow of pastel blinking. A pathway had been carefully cleared leading away from the station and into a picturesque town that looked perfect for a real vacation.

A pony in robes greeted them as they stepped out. They bowed, and Rarity returned the gesture.

“Hello!” Rarity smiled. “I must say, everything here looks wonderful. Are you an official greeter?”

The pony said something in a language Rarity didn’t speak. It had the tone of a pleasant greeting, but Rarity didn’t know the words. Actually, she wasn’t sure of a few things. The pony’s robes were thick and looked quite warm, with at least three layers she could see, the outermost decorated with a pattern of small squares and triangles. It was the kind of clothing that would work equally well for a mare or stallion.

It would have been nice, actually, if Rarity could tell if they were a mare or stallion. They were beautiful either way, and it only further made Rarity feel a need for a shower and some proper clothing.

“I don’t suppose you speak the local language?” Rarity asked Diana.

“I’m afraid not,” Diana said softly. “But this pony seems friendly. Perhaps we should just go with them? They went to the trouble of being here to greet us.”

“You’re right of course, anything else would be intolerably rude,” Rarity agreed.

The robed pony motioned for them to follow, making the gesture big and obvious, clearly aware there was a barrier in understanding. Given that nothing was bleeding, obviously haunted, or on fire (aside from the candles in the lanterns, which were supposed to be in fire), Rarity was willing to take things on trust and followed the pony down the clear path, past several shops set up next to the station.

She slowed to look, and their guide stopped to give her a moment to see. The shops had their goods displayed outside under brightly colored awnings, wide and low tables angled just a little to ensure that ponies could see everything they offered. Rarity couldn’t even begin to name half of the fruits and vegetables she saw, but she forgot about them entirely when she saw the next stand.

“Oh! Diana, look at this~!” Rarity gasped, swooning. There was fabric on display, some of the finest bolts Rarity had ever seen. She looked to the shopkeeper for permission and the pony nodded, this one obviously a mare and wearing a surprisingly simple robe in earth tones - Rarity understood at once, of course. It wouldn’t do to wear something finer than what she had on display.

“I suppose this means you’ll be doing some shopping?” Diana asked. Rarity held up a length of fabric dyed to look like the sea, with a subtle gradient and a pattern like the sun shining on waves.

“It would be a nice way to spend the time,” Rarity said. She put the silk down and picked up some thick, fuzzy wool in light grey. “I don’t see anything finished, but heavens knows I can do my own tailoring if I have the materials. I should see about getting a sewing kit while we’re here.”

“I’m looking forward to warming up with a hot shower,” Diana said. “Perhaps a meal that didn’t come from the train’s teatray.”

She gave the shopkeeper a small, polite bow and excused herself, sensing that Diana wasn’t entirely enthused with the idea of looking at fabric.

“No offense to Miss Kyanite, but there are only so many small salads and bags of nuts that a pony can eat before they want something with more substance,” Rarity agreed. “She does make a wonderful cup of coffee, though.”

The path wound on, clearly the kind of road that had once been a simple trail and had been smoothed and worked by hooves and not industry. It had a hoof-crafted feeling to it, going around trees that were centuries old and decorated with braided rope and ornaments, leading through decorative arches that would have showed the way even in a new snowfall and finally leading to a wide, low building up against the rocks of the mountain.

“I believe this is our hotel,” Diana said.

They followed the pony inside, through several sets of sliding doors, and ended up in a warm, welcoming room. More ponies were there, and they were quickly escorted to a private room, ponies taking their luggage for them, arranging pillows on the floor for them to sit on, and finally putting warm cups of tea in their hooves.

“These must be some of the friendliest ponies I’ve ever met,” Rarity noted. “It’s all so…” she tried to think of the right word. She was a pony who noticed details, even very small ones. There had been a flurry of activity but it had been purposeful, with no confusion or even need for discussion. Every pony had done exactly one thing - sliding a door aside, arranging the pillows, pouring the tea - and then stepped back. It had been coordinated like a ballet dance, each pony playing a part.

“Not mechanical,” Diana agreed. She took a small, slow slip of the tea. Rarity mirrored her and found it to be somewhat vegetal and herbaceous, more of an infusion of medicinal herbs than real tea, but perhaps that was perfect against the winter’s chill. “Very practiced, though.”

It didn’t feel sinister. It felt like the busy purpose of art, when things were going just right and Rarity got into a flow.

Rarity shifted on her seat. She felt uncomfortable, not because the surroundings were unpleasant, but because she felt barbaric and uncouth, a wild animal being pampered in a salon. She delicately sniffed at herself.

“Do you think we can find a way to ask for a shower?” she asked.

“Oh this is infinitely better than a shower,” Rarity groaned. She leaned back in the hot water. It turned out that the inn had been built around a hot spring, and there were a number of pools out back, tended and treated and decorated. She lounged in one of the warmest, letting the natural mineral water wash away the dust of the road and the muck that had worked into her coat.

She’d been in the water for only a few minutes and felt like she could spend hours simply steeping like pony tea. There was a gentle burbling to the water that brought to mind a soft, ethereal massage across her entire body. Behind them, one of the attendants had settled down with an odd instrument somewhere between a harp and a kaleidoscope. It made pure tones, fading in and out as her hooves played on crystalline strands.

“Isn’t that pool a little warm?” Diana asked.

The warm baths varied in size and temperature. Rarity had picked the hottest of the lot without hesitation. After some of the things that had happened to her coat and mane, she would have been halfway tempted to jump in even if it had been boiling instead of merely bubbling. It had stung a bit to get in and Rarity was sure she would be as pink as a party pony when she got out, but it felt wonderfully cleansing and purifying.

“It’s hot enough to poach an egg,” Rarity agreed. “If I pass out, be a dear and have somepony pull me out before I drown?”

“Mm,” Diana said. “On reflection, I’ve decided this Realm is decidedly not sinister. It is a wonderful change of pace.”

Rarity opened her eyes and looked around the hot springs. The warmth of the volcanic pools had created an oasis where things were green despite the winter chill in the air outside, and the ponies running the inn had built walls to trap the heat and steam. A garden was blooming, and it was so beautiful and precise that Rarity still wasn’t entirely sure if it was real or a sculpture. Every flower was perfect, not a single leaf was blemished.

“The language barrier is worrying,” Rarity said. “I’ve always considered myself to be quite cultured, but I don’t even know where to start!”

“It’s something I should have anticipated as well,” Diana agreed. “The further we get from your native Realm, the more things will change.”

“Thank goodness they’ve been kind enough to forgive whatever faux pas we’re making,” Rarity sighed. “I hope we don’t come across as being demanding or too terribly rude.”

Rarity was a mare of two worlds, in a way. First and foremost, she considered herself a member of the upper class. She deserved the best in life and she had good enough taste to tell when she was getting it. Rarity was also a mare who worked something that was ultimately a combination of retail work and commission and had the stress of both worlds. Demanding clients were the stuff of nightmares.

No, that wasn’t true. Nightmare Moon had been a force of evil and darkness that tried to plunge Equestria into endless night. She was nowhere near as bad as the average client. Rarity would have considered serving the ancient evil if she’d offered Rarity the power to force demanding noblemares to listen to reason about deadlines and alterations.

“Ah well,” Rarity sighed. She’d nearly drifted off to sleep. She stretched and felt her sore joints pop softly. She felt loose and comfortable, and when she rose out of the steaming pool of springwater she felt like a brand new mare. She reached for the towel that had been next to her, but found that a young mare had already taken it and was assisting her with drying off.

“I think this is beginning to verge on spoiling us,” Diana noted. She was receiving the same treatment, though with her taller frame the mare assisting her was having a bit of trouble reaching the high spots on her back.

“Yes, this is a bit unnecessary,” Rarity tried to assure them. “I actually do know a few spells that can assist with this.”

“You do?” Diana asked.

“A lady doesn’t cut corners but she does learn to be efficient. In lieu of having the proper tools and products, one must still be able to take care of their mane.”

Rarity focused her magic, and her aura washed backwards through her mane, gently drying and heating it, tightening the natural curls into her usual style.

“I could do your mane as well,” Rarity offered. “I did learn the spell by rote, so I can’t change it too much, but you’d look simply divine with curls.”

“Thank you for the offer, but I’m fine the way I am,” Diana assured her. “Perhaps I’ll try something more daring later.”

“Of course,” Rarity said. “Now, we should--”

More ponies came out of the inn, these carrying bundles of cloth. Rarity wasn’t sure what was happening until they were already halfway through dressing her, and it took until they’d secured the outermost layer of robes for her to recognize something else.

“This cloth-- it’s what I was looking at in the market!” she realized. “But those were just raw bolts! It can’t have been more than an hour, and they didn’t even have my measurements!”

“Very skilled indeed,” Diana noted. They’d found clothing for her as well, in dark colors similar to the black cloak she’d been wearing and had, in fact, almost completely worn out after only a few adventures. Few items of clothing were hardy enough to survive the action-filled life of a traveler on the Aether Express.

“They must have tailored these while we were bathing,” Rarity said. “Do you know how much this would cost in Equestria?”

“I’m beginning to worry about how much it will cost here and now,” Diana mumbled.

“There’s no need to worry,” somepony said, the first time they’d heard words they understood.

The ponies attending to Rarity and Diana took a step back and bowed deeply as a pony stepped out of the inn, and it was very clear why.

She was a tall mare, colored like coffee with cream and with the placid, worldly aura of a princess. Also she had the horn and wings of a princess. She was, in short, very princess-like and Rarity very quickly found herself bowing along with the ponies who had been dressing her.

“Please, there’s no need for that,” the alicorn assured her, waving her hoof dismissively. “You are my guests. I hope that you’ve been comfortable so far?”

“Yes, of course,” Rarity said, very quickly agreeing. “I apologize, I had no idea about you or this and we went and took a bath when--”

“When you needed one after a long journey,” the alicorn finished for her. She smiled. “Don’t apologize. As I said, both of you are my guests. It’s my responsibility to ensure that you are taken care of, not that you bow before me.”

“Even so, thank you,” Diana said, nodding politely.

“You are also a wonderful test for the ponies here,” the alicorn said. “I should introduce myself. I am Kaolin. This Realm is my home, a place for ponies to seek perfection in themselves and their art.”

“They do certainly seem skilled,” Rarity agreed.

“That’s because they’re motivated by more than money or fame,” Kaolin said. “In this place, those who achieve the pinnacle of excellence can ascend.”

That had been more than enough to make Rarity want to ask several dozen questions all at once, realize it was extremely rude to start belting inquiries rapid-fire at an alicorn while literally just out of the bath, and find the restraint to hold herself back until a more appropriate venue could be found.

They’d been invited to a meal, which had seemed like it would be perfect for conversation but there was some small amount of difficulty. Or maybe small was the wrong word, and the right word was something like ‘muscular’ or ‘toned’.

“And he is…” Rarity hesitated.

“The serving dish,” Kaolin said again. A stallion was lying on the floor between them. Small morsels of food had been placed on his broad back, and they were expected to eat off of him.

“Customs change from place to place,” Diana reminded Rarity.

“Yes, it just seems a bit…” Rarity blushed.

“If he’s not to your taste, I can find another stallion or mare,” Kaolin offered.

Rarity knew without even being prompted that it would have hurt the dignity of the pony that was a combination of centerpiece and entertainment. She certainly didn’t want to offend him, and he wasn’t hard on the eyes.

“No, no, he’s quite stunning!” Rarity smiled at him and took another one of the bite-sized portions from the small of his back. The food reminded her of the gourmet fare from Canterlot’s best restaurants, small and controlled portions involving only a few elements, each one offering a perfect bite.

This one in particular was seasoned rice along with a strip of strongly pickled radish. It had a clean, sharp flavor.

“I believe Miss Rarity wanted to ask about alicorns,” Diana said. She was considerably less perturbed, barely even seeming to notice the stallion she was eating off of.

“Ah,” Kaolin nodded. “I expected as much. Almost all ponies who come here ask the same question. Is it possible for me to become an alicorn? Can a pony really ascend?”

“They can,” Rarity said. “I’ve seen it happen.”

The room went quiet.

“She’s telling the truth,” Diana confirmed. “It’s happened twice within living memory.”

Kaolin smiled. “That is good. To see others excel is to give us all something to aspire to!”

“Yes, something like that,” Rarity agreed. She very nearly meant it. In the abstract she certainly did. As a designer she’d seen great works from others and taken inspiration from it. “I left on this journey to, ah, find myself.”

It felt like an excuse because it was.

“I understand,” Kaolin said. “I was merely an earth pony, not long ago by immortal standards. I remember the distance that opened up between myself and the ponies around me.”

“Perhaps you can offer some insight for Miss Rarity?” Diana suggested.

“If I could grant every pony here the wisdom to ascend, I would do so in an instant. For some ponies it is the work of a lifetime, coming by inches after endless work and toil towards a single grand task. For others it comes in a moment of inspiration.”

“That sounds like how a pony gets their cutie mark,” Diana noted mildly.

“Yes. I would agree with that.” Kaolin nodded slowly. “It’s something like a second puberty. But a cruel one.”

“Cruel?” Rarity asked.

Kaolin nodded. She turned slightly to look outside into the snow, past the trees at something only she could see. “A world where only a chosen few are allowed to grow to be adults. How awful is a universe that sees all but one in a million die as a child.”

Rarity sat under the awning and looked out at the cold. Night had fallen after a while, and a moon hung in the sky, but not the one she knew from home. The moon here was blank and white, as polished as a marble.

She held a cup of tea in her hooves but she didn’t drink it. It served well enough to keep her hooves warm.

“What are you thinking about?” Diana asked, sitting down next to her.

“You can’t guess?” Rarity looked down at her tea. If she angled it just right she could see her own reflection in the surface, lit by moonlight.

“Unfortunately, I’m not a mind reader. Nor do I have any particular talent at all.”

Rarity flinched. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to Diana’s flank. It was covered by at least three layers of fabric, but she could still see the blank coat in her mind’s eye, the empty space where a cutie mark should have been.

“I was thinking about the ponies here,” Rarity said. She motioned ahead of them to where a pony was slowly and carefully carving a block of ice. “All of the ponies here are true artists. They don’t even use money! I tried to pay the tailor who made these robes and utterly embarrassed myself. Apparently even the idea of trading art for mere wealth is beyond the pale.”

“How does she get the fabric, then?” Diana asked.

“The pony whose art is weaving gives it to her as a gift. And that pony gets the materials for their dye from farmers who pride themselves on their harvest, and so forth.”

“Ah,” Diana said. “So really not so different from Equestria, just with less accounting.”

“I suppose if there’s ever a pony who does have finance as their cutie mark they’ll have to invent banking,” Rarity muttered. “But even so, ponies here are sure to have a roof over their heads, and food on their table.”

“And some of the tables are ponies,” Diana noted.

“Did you know there was apparently quite an argument about which stallions were to be given that honor, to be our tableware for dinner with Kaolin? It seems their art is their own personal beauty and it’s extremely competitive.”

“I can’t imagine a pony with a special talent like that is particularly interesting to spend time with,” Diana said. The ice carving across the way was starting to take shape as some sort of fish.

“I suppose they’d have little to speak about except themselves,” Rarity agreed.

“And they’d be discouraged from doing anything else. A whole life spent worrying about that first wrinkle.” Diana shook her head. “Perhaps it’s not something I can understand. May I ask you a very personal question?”

Rarity smiled. “Of course you can, darling.”

“How did you get your cutie mark?”

“Ah, well…” Rarity sighed. “You know, I told my sister and her friends a rather simplified version of this story not long ago. I was quite a young foal and I’d volunteered to be the costume designer for our school play. I put my heart and soul into it but they just weren’t coming together. I’d followed basic patterns and they worked well enough, but I didn’t know enough about design or fashion to understand why things were done in certain ways, and so when I tried to alter them it was a disaster!”

“And you had a sudden flash of inspiration?” Diana suggested.

“Oh no. That would have been wonderful, but what happened was I got frustrated at myself and everything else in the world and had a screaming, crying temper tantrum.”

Diana chuckled. “That does sound a bit like you.”

“Yes, I suppose I am a touch dramatic when I’m overwhelmed. I ran away from the ruined costumes and everything else because I felt like a failure and I couldn’t face anypony. My magic flared up in my desperation to find a solution and led me right out of town and into the middle of nowhere!”

“Not the most useful spell I’ve heard of.”

“No, I didn’t think so either,” Rarity agreed. “I ended up finding a big, ugly rock and nothing else. I was working myself up to another panic attack when there was the most amazing thing! The entire sky lit up like a rainbow!”

“A rainbow?”

“Much later I’d find out where it came from, but in that moment I was entranced by the sight.” Rarity sighed. “I didn’t get a chance to look for long before the shockwave hit. That cracked open the rock, sent me flying, and gave me quite a bump on the head. I would have started crying all over again if that rock hadn’t ended up being a massive geode.”

“I see. So you got your cutie mark for finding the geode.”

“No. But my parents did find me shortly afterwards once they’d noticed I’d been missing instead of merely quiet. I tried to recapture some of the beauty of that rainbow in the costumes I created, using the gems I found. And since my mother decided to help me with some of the more technical aspects, they were much improved, largely by her skill rather than my own. My cutie mark came along with the pride of seeing my work being worn proudly in front of a crowd.”

Diana nodded in silence.

Across the field, the ice block that was slowly turning into a leaping salmon cracked, a single mistake ruining the entire thing. The pony who had been carving it froze in place.

“So your magic helped you find gems, and so you got a gem cutie mark?” Diana prompted.

“It’s been invaluable to being a designer. I might not know many spells, but finding diamonds at a moment’s notice can be an indirect solution to many of life’s problems.” Rarity stifled a small laugh.

“If you’d been born here, you’d be a miner,” Diana noted.

Rarity paused, looking over at her.

“Your talent is finding gems,” Diana explained. “Everypony here is trying to perfect their talent. I’m not sure if you’d be expected to find the most perfect gems, or find them more quickly, or the largest veins, but I suspect you wouldn’t be occupied by thinking of stylish headwear.”

“They have a shocking lack of hats here,” Rarity said quietly. “But darling, my calling is to design fashion of all sorts, not mining!”

“I don’t think that would matter. I’ve been watching the ponies around us. Each of them does exactly one thing. They don’t have time for hobbies or anything except mastering that single art, and all of them are doing only what their cutie mark tells them.”

“But…” Rarity frowned. “I suppose it makes sense, doesn’t it? They want to become alicorns. There has to be something to their methods.”

“I might be more convinced if there were more alicorns here,” Diana said.

They watched another block of ice be secured in place, and the pony started carving again.

“Sencha is very close to ascending,” Kaolin whispered.

The green stallion was twice as old as Rarity’s father, and was moving with slow, deliberate care as he poured steaming water into a cup, swirling it around the sides. He was seated alone in the center of a garden, surrounded by a few simple tools. Over the last hour he’d boiled water and crushed dry leaves into a fine powder.

Rarity was starting to think he might get around to actually brewing tea by some time next week.

“How long has he been practicing this?” Rarity asked.

“Every day for the last fifty-six years,” Kaolin said. "Before that, he was busy studying in the abstract."

“And it still isn’t perfect enough?” Diana asked. Her patience seemed more and more strained the longer they spent in the peaceful realm. It was as if there was some subtle personal mockery being leveled at her that Rarity couldn’t sense.

“It’s not for me to judge,” Kaolin said. “I can’t detect any mistake, but every day it is the same. He brews a single cup of tea, with the perfect temperature, the perfect blend of leaves, the perfect grind, the perfect technique. At least… all perfect as far as I can tell, but…”

The older stallion waited, taking a deep breath full of the steam coming from the steeping tea. He smiled, then shook his head and stood up, walking away from the cup.

“He didn’t even taste it!” Rarity scoffed as he left. Ponies started cleaning up what was left. Kaolin motioned to them, and they brought the full cup over.

“Would you like to try it?” she asked.

Rarity nodded, and she was given the small cup of tea. She took a sip, and the flavor was deep, rich, but at the same time full of life. It had the bright tones of a fresh flower and the earthiness of roasted roots, all in the same sip.

“It’s amazing!” Rarity gasped.

“To us,” Kaolin sighed. “I cannot hope to make tea even a fraction as well as he does, but at the same time he has learned to see flaws too small for anypony else to detect. Only he knows what he could do better, and there can be no harsher critic.”

Diana shook her head. “This is wrong.”

“Wrong?” Kaolin asked.

“Is this how you became an alicorn? Doing the same thing over and over again for decades until everything is aligned just so?” Diana asked.

“Diana, she’s our host!” Rarity hissed.

Kaolin held up a hoof. “And it isn’t taboo to ask. You want to know if these ponies are wasting their lives. I don’t think they are.”

“If you don’t want to tell us…” Rarity trailed off. It was terribly rude to ask the Royalty anything personal. They were supposed to be above that, without a real beginning or end. Something eternal. Even when Princess Cadance had arrived, her birthplace had been left a mystery, brought to Equestria from another land, only a foal a little older than Rarity. It was better not to know where she came from. It made the world seem bigger. Big enough for divinity.

“A long time ago there was a sculptor,” Kaolin said. “They mostly made pots and cups and plates, because those were the things ponies wanted and needed. It was simple and honest work and the sculptor took pride in it.”

She took the cup from Rarity and spun it slowly in her magic, examining it closely.

“The sculptor also made art, from time to time. It was what she truly wanted to do, but she only dared practice with the extra clay left over from her real work. One day, she found herself using her finest clay to sculpt her finest work. It was supposed to be used for a tea set for an emperor, but instead she had formed it into a pony. The most beautiful pony she had ever seen. So beautiful she fell in love. But…”

“But?” Rarity prompted.

Kaolin put the cup down carefully. “The clay was the very finest. To use it for anything other than her appointed task was to risk execution. Even if she dared fire it, the size of the sculpture virtually guaranteed that it would burst in her kiln. But if she did not, the beauty of it would melt away.”

“She fired it anyway,” Diana guessed.

“Of course,” Kaolin confirmed. “And there was a great explosion, a huge fire, and in the end I was what you see before you.”

Rarity tapped her hoof against her chin, thinking.

“This might seem like a silly question, darling,” she said. “But were you the sculptor, or the sculpture?”

Kaolin smiled. “Both, of course. We all create ourselves.”

Rarity bowed again. An entire crowd of ponies had gathered around the train platform. A half-dozen musicians played soft notes in a kind of freeform jazz, clearly not used to working with each other or out of isolation at all. Dancers tried to find graceful movements that matched the improvised notes. One pony was simply juggling knives and ignored the rest, while the others kept a wide berth.

“Thank you for seeing us off,” she said. “I imagine you must be busy taking care of all the little ponies of this realm.”

Kaolin’s eyes twinkled like gemstones. “What do you mean?”

“I thought about something when I was watching a pony carving ice blocks,” Rarity said. “He had all night to work, and as much ice as he could ever want. The pony who made my robes didn’t have to negotiate for fabric or needles. Everypony here is free to better themselves without worry because the small details all get smoothed over.”

“It’s the least I can do,” Kaolin said. “Mortal ponies only have one life. Such a short time. It’s my responsibility to make sure they can make the best of it.”

“You’re a good ruler,” Diana admitted.

“But you disagree with my ways anyway?” Kaolin guessed.

“I think ponies need adversity to grow,” Diana said. “Perhaps the reason so few ponies here can achieve perfection is because they’re never tested to find where they’re weakest.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Kaolin said. “I suppose I spoil them. I hope that wherever you go on your next stop you find inspiration for your art.”

Rarity nodded. “I will, and I appreciate the gifts. I don’t know if I can ever repay you.”

Her saddlebags were stuffed almost to bursting with bolts of fabric and sewing supplies, a wealth of silk and cotton and thread that would keep her busy for days just organizing it all.

“You don’t have to,” Kaolin said. “You gave my ponies a chance to display their art, and having seen it, you’ll carry it with you forever. That is all they, or I, could possibly ask.”

Kaolin bowed, and Rarity and Diana matched it. Behind them, the train whistle blew again, the engine of the Aether Express coming to full steam and just about ready to leave. Rarity gave the crowd a wave, and a few of the foals waved back. Rarity hoped that whenever they found their special talents, they’d enjoy them, since this was a Realm where those talents would be the sum of their fates.

Track Delay: Middle of Nowhere

“Another two days?” Rarity gasped.

“Sorry, that’s just how long it takes,” the Conductor said. “We might seem to be going in a straight line, but the path to the next stop is actually rather complicated. Just not in a way that’s easy to explain, like, um…”

He rubbed his chin, trying to think of the best way to describe it.

“Imagine a really long rope with an ant crawling around it, and there’s a knot in the rope…”

“That is entirely unhelpful,” Rarity sighed. “Thank you anyway, I’ll just accept that it’s magic and I don’t understand.”

She trotted back to her seat and sat down heavily, looking at Diana. The taller mare was either asleep or resting her eyes, and in either case managed to do it while sitting upright with the kind of dignity usually reserved for pharaohs and cats.

“Hmm…” Rarity considered.

“Worrying won’t make the time go faster,” Diana cautioned her, proving she hadn’t been asleep, or that she was particularly skilled at talking in her sleep.

“I wasn’t worrying. I was thinking. Isn’t that cloak uncomfortable?”

Diana had worn a cloak most of the time Rarity had known her, aside from a few hours on the beach when it had been so inappropriate even Diana hadn’t managed to get away with it. It made the tall pony look practically like a witch or wraith. The thick material muffled sound and hid her form, as if she didn’t want ponies to look at her despite her beauty.

“It’s fine,” Diana said. In truth it was starting to get a little ragged around the edges and needed a good wash. Still, it was clearly comfortable and well-worn. Like a security blanket.

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have something else,” Rarity said. “I have all this fabric, and it’s difficult to make anything for myself when I can’t be my own model, but you! You’re practically perfect!”

Diana started to feel worried. “What did you have in mind?”

“I think this is a bit much,” Diana said. She stood as still as possible while Rarity worked. The mare was circling her like a shark with a needle and thread. She adjusted seams, folded things just so, and made adjustments as she thought, using pins to mark measurements.

“Don’t be silly,” Rarity said. “Everypony in that last world was wearing a suit.”

“That doesn’t mean I need a fitted suit,” Diana said. “I’ve been standing here for three hours.”

“Everypony looks good in a suit,” Rarity countered. “Besides, all you’ve had to do is stand there. It’s not a difficult job. Just a little longer so I can get the rest of your measurements? I’ve got all this wonderful fabric and I want to use some of it.”

Diana sighed and steadied herself, trying to stay still. It wouldn’t be that much longer.

“Is this the last one?” Diana asked. Rarity tested the temporary seam of the soft, plush fabric. It was loose around her, but in a deliberate way that flowed without making her look like she was wearing a tent.

“Sleepwear is important,” Rarity said. “I wish I had a bit more elastic. I barely have enough for a sleep mask!”

“Yes, but I don’t need pajamas, and Kyanite gave us both blankets and pillows.”

Rarity frowned. “Yes, and no offense to her since I’m sure she didn’t pick them out, but the pillow is a bit… well, it’s not quite right for my complexion. I worry I’ll break out if I don’t sleep on silk! I should make a pillow case after we’re done.”

“Are we nearly done?” Diana asked.

“Almost, darling. Next, socks!”

“A sundress?” Diana guessed. Her legs hurt from trying to stand still.

“I invented something new! A moondress!” Rarity grinned madly. “It’s not exactly the opposite of a sundress, you see, that would be an evening dress. One is casual, the other is something worn to an event. A moondress is like a sundress, but for places sundresses wouldn’t be practical!”

“I see?” Diana had no idea what Rarity was talking about.

“Exactly. So stay still while I work out how to make a half-length raincoat that will still keep the skirt dry.”

Diana yawned. Her eyes were still closed when the heavy fabric was draped across her back. She blinked in surprise at the familiar feeling. “Hm?”

Rarity was fastening the cloak around Diana’s shoulders, smoothing out the thick fabric and tugging at the edges. It smelled like roses and lavender, somehow, whereas when she’d taken it off, it had smelled like… well, like less than fresh laundry, the way a very comfortable shirt got after a few days where a pony was too depressed to change out of it.

“The edges were getting a little frayed, but I think I repaired it quite well,” Rarity said.

“It’s… thank you,” Diana said, touching it gently.

“No, thank you for letting me indulge myself,” Rarity said. “I know I can get carried away, but I just find it hard to sit still. If I was back home… Well, I had to worry about rent, and food, and my reputation. I never had enough hours in the day.”

“Didn’t you tell me you spent a lot of time in the spa?” Diana asked, smiling.

Rarity scoffed, tossing her mane. “Part of my job is taking care of myself! I had to sell myself to my clients! I could hardly meet Sapphire Shores looking slovenly!”

“I doubt you’ve ever looked slovenly,” Diana retorted.

“Of course not, but that’s because I make the effort. Now, I think I’ll just put these away for now.” Rarity carefully packed away the half-finished suits and robes and hats.

“You’re not going to finish any of them?” Diana asked.

Rarity shook her head. “They’re all perfectly fine designs, but none of them quite sparked with you. I saw you weren’t terribly enthused. Putting that robe back on you… that was what made you happy, not a new suit or fancy dress.”

“But it made you happy to make them.”

“Mm. A bit. But nothing makes me as happy as bringing a smile to a friend. There’s no better way to spend time.”

Seventh Stop: Tears in Rain

“There won’t be a whistle for this next stop,” the Conductor said. He sounded subdued. “You’ll need to be careful and make sure to watch the time. We’ll only be here for thirteen hours.”

“No whistle? Why?” Rarity asked. She looked outside for clues, but it was hard to see much. Rain pelted the window, slow and heavy, the drops just a little bigger and darker than they would have been back home.

“The ponies here don’t like being disturbed,” the Conductor explained. “You can ask around yourself. This place is perfectly safe. Even if you break the rules, nopony would hurt you here.”

“What is the realm like?” Diana asked.

“It’s a sad place,” the Conductor said. “I don’t know how to explain it better than that. Ponies came here to learn from the ruler of the place, but…”

“But?” Diana asked.

“You’ll see for yourself,” the Conductor said, shrugging. “Remember, thirteen hours, no whistle.”

The rain was still going when they arrived, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop. Rarity shielded her eyes and glanced up at the clouds. The buildings around the station were all sad looking affairs, dark and heavy with ceramic tiled roofs. Balconies were connected from one building to the next almost continually, providing a dry walkway.

“I suppose there’s no weather service here?” Rarity asked. She reached out a hoof into the drizzle, letting one of the big, warm drops land on her fetlock. At least it wasn’t cold.

“I wonder if it’s worth trying to buy an umbrella,” Diana mused. “Only a few hours of rain, but…”

“The point of an umbrella isn’t to use it only once,” Rarity scolded. “If we can get them, we’ll also have them for the next time we run into poor weather.”

“Ah, that’s not bad wisdom,” somepony said. “Mind if I make a note of it?”

Rarity and Diana turned to find a pony in a ragged overcoat with wide blue and white stripes. She nodded happily to them and scribbled in a notebook.

“Philosophy from another world,” she said. “Maybe that’s the real ticket. Mind if I follow you around a bit and just jot a few things down?”

“Are you a reporter?” Rarity asked.

“Reporter? No, no, who cares about the news? That’s just stuff that happened! Why would that matter? What’s important isn’t stuff, it’s ideas and interpretation. The ‘why’ something happens instead of the ‘what’!”

“So what are you, then?” Diana asked.

“A philosopher, of course!” the mare chuckled. “This is the best place in the world to do philosophy! A real hot spot! Everypony else is trying to learn from ol’ Bleaker, but not me! I’m going to forge my own path!”

Rarity and Diana shared a look.

“I see,” Rarity said slowly. “And this Bleaker is… the ruler of the realm?”

“Eh something like that,” the mare shrugged. “I’m Vocce.” She offered a hoof and when Rarity reached out for it, Vocce bumped it instead of shaking.

“What can you tell us about this place?” Diana asked.

“A little trade, huh? Info for info? Or…” Vocce sighed. “The only reason ponies come here is because of Bleaker. You’re really here for him, aren’t you? Him and all his supposed wisdom. There’s not much else to see.”

“We’re just passing through,” Rarity said.

“Good, because even if everypony else is obsessed, there’s nothing there and I’m gonna make a new, better philosophy on my own!”

“A philosophy with nothing behind it!” somepony else snapped. An older stallion stormed up. He had to be as old as all three mares put together, with one eye lazy and drifting in its socket. “The Bleak Writings come from an immortal! You think you’re smarter than somepony who’s lived a thousand times longer than you?”

“I think he’s a sad old stallion who doesn’t even know what’s going on around him,” Vocce countered.

“That’s because you don’t know how to properly interpret what he’s trying to teach us,” the older stallion sighed. “The least you can do before you infect these newcomers with your useless new philosophy is expose them to real cosmic truth so they can see the difference between that ancient wisdom and whatever new foolishness you’re peddling today.”

“It’s not foolish!” Vocce huffed, puffing up her cheeks.

“Last week you tried to tell ponies that it was impossible for us to understand each other,” the older stallion pointed out.

“Because language is imperfect and most understanding comes from context!” Vocce groaned. “Like the word ‘bark’ can mean the sound a dog makes, or the skin of a tree!”

“It’s also a type of chocolate treat,” Diana noted.

“See?” Vocce said. “So the word means something different depending on the context! And even in context, it can be ambiguous if you’re talking about something like a timber wolf or dogwood beast!”

The stallion scoffed. “I understand you just fine, you just don’t make a good point. Let me know if you ever decide to become a real philosopher!”

He tossed his head and trotted off.

“Ugh! I can’t stand that guy!” Vocce groaned. “He’s Bilous. He heads one of the local Book Clubs. He thinks anything new can’t be worth thinking about because somepony would have already thought of it if it was worth considering.”

“So what do they do with their time?” Rarity asked.

“Mostly they write endless interpretations of interpretations. It’s like eating leftovers of leftovers and never eating anything new.” Vocce’s stomach growled. “Speaking of which I should go get some lunch. Could I interest either of you in a small purchase?”

“A purchase of what?” Rarity asked.

“Philosophy!” Vocce scoffed. “Or if you were asking about the specifics, I have some self-published pamphlets. Trade you some solipsism for a sandwich?”

The cafe had been normal, if choked with pipesmoke and experimental music. The air had been thick enough that it was worth eating outside even with the constant patter of slow, heavy rain. They took shelter under awnings and ate as they walked.

“As long as you’re here you should see Bleaker,” Vocce said.

“I thought you said listening to him was a waste of time?” Rarity asked. The wrapped baguette of her sandwich was nine-tenths crusty bread and a thin layer of extremely salty butter and shaved smoked carrots and dried tomatoes.

“Yeah, but it’s the touristy thing to do,” Vocce explained. “It’s sort of the only game in town anyway.”

She led them through the town, sticking to the covered walkways and avoiding the streets, which were universally damp and muddy.

“We can cut through here,” Vocce said, ducking into a building. Slow jazz played inside, almost covering the sound of machines. Rarity looked around in the low light and found ponies working on printing presses.

“Are they making books?” Rarity asked. “It seems a bit slapdash.”

She hated criticizing ponies who were working for a living, but there was very little care being taken in the actual production. At one end of the line, ponies were putting cheap pulp paper into the press, and at the other end they were being bound into softcover tomes. Even in the low light, Rarity could see the ink was faded and uneven, a step below newsprint quality.

“Next door they’re turning yesterday’s books back into paper,” Vocce explained. “The ponies here don’t have a lot of new ideas but they’ve got a lot to say about the ones they’ve been chewing on for a while.”

She grabbed one of the books out of a box and tossed it to Rarity. Rarity opened it up and gave it a quick glance, skimming over the contents.

“The nature of the reflection which is brought to bear upon instinct places it before itself, calculates its value, and compares against other natures with their meanings and worth. The instinct is one that comes with a whole of satisfaction from the achievement of primal urge and the reflection absolves it of barbarism-- what does any of this even mean?” Rarity asked. She put the book in another box as they walked through the room.

“It means the pony who wrote it wants other ponies to know they’ve got big ideas and the best way to show them off is a lot of words,” Vocce said. “Some of these ponies get paid by the word, and that means a lot of padding. Some of these books are just copies of other ponies’ books but with commentary added!”

“At least it keeps the publishers busy,” Diana noted.

“Everypony has the same ideas, so they pat each other on the back and talk about how right they are,” Vocce scoffed. She led them back outside into the next street. “And all of it comes from in there.”

Rarity wasn’t sure what to expect anymore. In a way, the realms they’d been to had been palaces for the immortals that ruled them. Equestria had Canterlot castle, but alicorns in other worlds could be found anywhere from the edge of a cliff to a tower so tall the top couldn’t be seen from the ground. The only common things seemed to be height and drama. Rarity particularly liked the latter. Meeting an alicorn should always feel important, in her opinion.

This alicorn apparently hadn’t gotten the memo on height. The building Vocce led them to was a long, low building, no taller than the ones around it. An adobe wall cut it off from the street, wrapping around the block. A single guard stood at the open archway leading inside. He didn’t look like a heavily armored knight, more like a groundskeeper watching the door.

“No visitors today,” he said when they approached.

“Come on, they came here on the train!” Vocce said. “They’re only in town for one day.”

“The train?” the guard frowned. “There’s no trains on seconddays.”

“It’s a special train,” Diana said. She held up her ticket, the silver ephemeral and ghost-like in the rainy half-light.

The guard frowned and scratched his head. “That looks like it’s above my pay grade. If you want to go in and see him, I suppose it’s okay. But if he gets upset, you leave right away, you understand?”

“Is he having a bad day?” Vocce asked.

“No, it’s a good day. That’s why I don’t want him bothered too much. Can’t remember the last time he had a really good day but this is close enough and I don’t want it spoiled. Doesn’t deserve the troubles he has.” The guard shook his head.

“If it’s too much trouble we don’t have to be here,” Rarity said. She was starting to feel distinctly unwelcome and didn’t like it.

“Sometimes he likes having visitors,” the guard said. “Maybe the reason he was in a good mood was because he knew you were coming. He’s terribly wise, you know. They say he knows everything!”

“Everything?” Diana raised her eyebrows.

“Everything in the universe. Doesn’t seem too unlikely to me, either. Anyway, you go on in. Vocce, you know the rules, make sure they’re on good behavior. No loud noises, no sudden movements, and if the master asks you something directly you answer.”

“Don’t worry, these two seem like good ponies,” Vocce assured him.

“You’re right, I should probably make sure they foalsit you,” he huffed.

“So the alicorn here is particularly touchy?” Rarity asked. She shook the last few drops of rainwater out of her mane once they got inside. The palace, because it was a palace no matter what else it looked like simply because of who lived in it, was a bit more sparse than she expected. There were only a few pieces of furniture in the foyer, though everything was soft and comforting. The lighting was low and indirect, and music was playing from hidden sources.

“A better word might be ‘fragile’,” Vocce corrected. “You’ll understand when you see him.”

Vocce looked around, then picked a direction and started walking. It took a few tries and dead ends before Rarity heard anything, and that thing was the sound of something scratching on paper. As they walked, Rarity couldn’t help but notice that the entire palace seemed… she wasn’t sure how to put it. Plush in a way that left every corner covered and every hard surface turned into a cushion.

“There he is,” Vocce whispered. She nodded up ahead. Two maids were standing a respectful distance from a pony who was hunched over and muttering to themselves. The pony was obviously an alicorn in a riot of colors like a peacock. He took a few moments to scribble something down, and Rarity could see he was using a soft-tipped marker, holding it in orange magic and writing in large, uneven letters.

“Leave us,” the alicorn said. He had a gentle tone. The maids glanced at him, then at Rarity, Diana, and Vocce. They didn’t go right away, despite the order. “It’s fine. This meeting is a pleasant one. I won’t need any help for a little while. I’ll call you back when they leave.”

The maids bowed and left, clearly not intending to go very far at all.

“You might as well come closer,” the alicorn said. “This meeting isn’t a very long one.”

“I’m sorry if we’re interrupting,” Rarity apologized.

“Everything is an interruption of something else. Sometimes you interrupt boredom. Sometimes something important.” He kept writing as he spoke. “You have a lot of questions. I have all the answers but no time to give them or think about them.”

“Miss Vocce said we should meet you,” Rarity said. “I’m--”

“Riding the Aether Express to become an alicorn,” the prince noted. He still hadn’t looked up at her. Rarity tried to resist the urge to look over his shoulder at what he was writing. It wasn’t an essay, more like the outline, a sketch trying to put ideas to paper. It was something about crabs. He crossed it out and tossed the paper away, starting again on a fresh sheet on a different topic.

Rarity blinked. “Yes! How did you know?”

“I know everything. That’s how I became an alicorn. I found a well of knowledge. A way to learn everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s too much. Too much! I learned everything but every idea has the same weight. It’s hard to focus--”

He stopped writing and squeezed his eyes shut in anguish.

“My mind races. All the time. When I get ideas out on paper, I can get them out of my head. Someday I’ll write down everything, and then I’ll have peace. Until then, I have some good days and some bad ones. This is a good day.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rarity whispered.

His mouth twitched with a smile. “Meeting you made it a good day. I knew it would be. You want to ask if there’s really a way for you to become an alicorn. There is. I can’t tell you what it is. You have to find it for yourself. But you can. The future isn’t set in stone yet. I hope you’ll make the right decision.”

“What is the right decision?” Diana asked.

“You’re better at wrong decisions,” the prince laughed. “You’re a bad influence. But a pony needs good influences and bad ones, or else they can’t grow. You learn from mistakes, not from success. I made a big mistake, learned too much too quickly.”

He shook his head and took a deep breath.

“Don’t take the quick path. Make good mistakes. The right mistakes. Making the wrong mistake would be the biggest mistake!” The alicorn started to laugh and got back to writing. “Sorry. Prophecy is easy when you see it coming. Harder to give ponies advice they’ll listen to. You can only change a little if you still want to see what happens.”

He shrugged.

“Is there anything we can do to help you?” Rarity asked.

“No. This whole world is ponies helping me. They’re too kind to me. It feels bad knowing that they rely on me and I’m not as wise as they think. They see shadows and think my knowledge is something great, but it’s just…” he struggled for a moment. “I can’t get the right words out. I only learned facts. Not how to tell other ponies.”

“It’s impossible for ponies to perfectly understand each other,” Vocce nodded. “Language only conveys meanings both ponies already understand. If I invented a new word you wouldn’t know the definition.”

“Yes, exactly! My knowledge came with… a lot of ideas ponies haven’t had yet. The worst part is waiting for them to catch up. Now, you should go. I need to get these ideas down. It’s getting bad again.”

The alicorn turned back to their work, scribbling faster. Rarity could see the moment his attention turned away, snapping off like a light. She might as well have stopped existing.

“Let’s go,” Vocce whispered, leading Rarity back. The maids reappeared, taking up their places near the alicorn. One of them moved a pile of papers that had been filled with writing and replaced it with a fresh stack.

“Is he always like that?” Rarity asked.

“No, sometimes he’s a lot worse,” Vocce said, as they walked away and it became safer to talk. “Old Bleaker there is having a good day. On bad days he writes on the walls instead of the paper and starts yelling at ponies for not understanding him. It’s like he’s practically speaking another language sometimes. Laughing at jokes we don’t understand, drawing symbols that don’t mean anything. Once he just drew cats for three days straight. Cats!”

“The burden of infinite knowledge,” Diana mused. “A mind trying to hold every idea at once. It’s a wonder he can focus enough to speak at all.”

“I wonder how other alicorns manage it,” Rarity said. “There was the prince of the beach, who simply forgot everything. That seems even worse.”

“Perhaps in a thousand years you’ll get your own answer,” Diana suggested. “He did say you had the potential, remember?”

Rarity gasped. “You’re right! I was so worried I barely even noticed, but… if he says it, it must be true, yes?”

“Be careful,” Vocce warned. “The ponies around here think he’s perfect and all that does is disappoint them. There’s plenty of ways to misinterpret what he’s saying.”

“He was rather direct, though,” Diana noted. “We should take it as a good sign.”

“Are you sure this was wise?” Diana asked.

Rarity scoffed. She pushed the box full of books under the seat. “We’ve needed reading material since this little trip started! Last time it was three full days between stops!”

Diana was about to say something, but remembered what Rarity had done. The hours of standing in one spot, waiting while Rarity built clothing around her and discarded it just as quickly. She’d been a living poniquin and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. Especially not when Rarity got distracted. Diana had ended up poked by too many pins.

“Maybe the books aren’t the worst idea,” she admitted. She picked up the top book on the pile, and was relieved to see that Rarity at least at least bought a selection of books and not a full box of a single tome.

“Philosophy,” Rarity sighed. “I would have preferred something in the realm of fiction. Perhaps romantic fiction. One would think that any publishing house would support itself with a steady backbone of heaving muscles and brave knights and perhaps a few daring firefighters, but my choices were treaties on the zeitgeist or extremely detailed studies of fish.”

“Fish?” Diana asked.

Rarity held up one of the larger books and opened it up. Inside, there were shockingly lifelike pictures of fish, none of which she could identify at a glance, not that either Rarity or Diana would have been able to distinguish between a Southern Sunrise Sunny and a Purplish-Green Snapper.

Actually they might have been able to pick out the latter, but the pictures were printed entirely in black and white, so the name was less helpful.

“Apparently Prince Bleaker, or whatever his real name is, spent much of last month focused entirely on fish. It lent sort of a theme to things for a while. Some ponies took it as a metaphor, trying to puzzle out what he really means when he says anglerfish use a dangling lure to trap prey. Plenty of fish in the sea. That sort of thing.”

“And the others decided that fish were just important on their own?” Diana guessed. She flipped to a page with a hideous looking eel, then slammed the book shut, shivering. “I can’t imagine how a pony builds a complete structure of thought entirely through the lens of ichthyology.”

“The good news is we’ll be able to learn that,” Rarity said. “Last month’s books are particularly inexpensive. I have at least half a dozen texts on lobster pots and shark tanks. I’m hoping the more metaphorical approaches will at least be amusing.”

Diana nodded and picked up a lone pamphlet that didn’t fit with the others.

“And something by Vocce,” Diana said. “A novella about the ways ponies push each other away and don’t fit into society.”

“She says her next work will be based on us,” Rarity said. “I’d like to come back someday and read it.”

“Mm.” Diana nodded. “Once we’ve learned something by ourselves, I think.”

Eighth Stop: Some Assemby Required

“This reminds me of Manehattan,” Rarity said.

“What?” Diana yelled.

“I said, this reminds me of Manehattan!” Rarity shouted over the crowd. Ponies pressed at them from all sides, half of them offering pamphlets and trinkets and the other half begging for bits. All of them wanted attention and snapped at each other like piranhas trying to get any scrap they could.

“Help!” Diana squeaked, sounding unlike herself. “Rarity!”

“Oh, get away from her!” Rarity yelled, pushing at the crowd. “Stop-- no, she doesn’t want to buy a knock-off pocketwatch! Get back, I say!”

Rarity ushered Diana away, trying to escape the press of ponies. She pushed through a doorway, leaving them behind. The noise of the herd was cut off the moment the portal closed, leaving them in sudden silence.

“Are you alright?” Rarity asked.

“I will be,” Diana said, starting to calm down. “I hate being crowded like that. So many ponies and voices and dragging my attention in every direction.”

“Take your time,” Rarity said quietly.

“I get claustrophobic and panic,” Diana said. “I apologize. It’s shameful.”

“Nopony is perfect, darling. Nor is it something to be ashamed of. They were terribly rude! Now, where are we?”

Rarity finally had a moment to look at where they’d ended up. The Realm itself wasn’t terribly strange - it was no more foreign than Seasaddle or Neigh Orleans. A hint of strange accent and possibly a new word to learn for a fizzy drink, but Rarity had acclimated to far stranger without a hitch. The room where they were standing was some elaborate entrance hall, full of murals obviously painted by foals, along with pillows and low tables.

A pony cleared his throat, not rudely, just enough to get Rarity’s attention. She looked over to see him sitting at one of the low tables.

“It’s a community center,” he said, standing up. “We watch foals for parents and provide other services. Meals to those in need, a place to sleep for ponies without a roof over their heads.”

Rarity smiled. “I apologize. We’re not ponies in need, we’re just passing through.”

“Nonsense,” the stallion said. “There’s nothing to apologize for. You’re welcome to be here, even if all you need is a few moments out of the sun and a place to sit.” He motioned to the pillows around the room. “It’s a bit dead today, I apologize.”

“Quiet is perfect right now,” Diana sighed. She found a large cushion and settled down on it in a loaf, wrapping herself in her cloak and obviously trying to block out the world for a few moments.

“Would you like some tea?” the stallion asked.

“That sounds lovely,” Rarity said. “Let me help you with it.” She waved to Diana, but the tall pony didn’t respond. She clearly wanted some solitude and distance. Rarity followed the stallion into a small break room where a kettle was waiting.

“Usually we have more ponies here to help,” the stallion sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s been a tough week after what happened with our leader.”

“Your leader?” Rarity asked. It had clearly been an invitation to ask.

“Ah, so you hadn’t heard,” the stallion nodded to himself. “I thought you might actually be here because of her. It’s terrible, really. She was one of the best leaders we’d ever had and she had to go and…” He sniffled and shook his head.

“She died,” Rarity surmised.

“Died?” the stallion blinked in surprise. “No, of course not. That would be awful! She became an alicorn. A terrible shame.”

“She… what?!” Rarity squeaked.

“Yes, I know. Our own leader became one of them! After spending years teaching us how we only needed to rely on each other, she had to go and have that happen to her! We were all terribly embarrassed. I’m sure most of the staff will come back, but it’s disheartening. How can anypony take us seriously now?”

“I’m not sure I understand, darling.”

“None of us are sure about anything. I mean, we’re sure about one thing. Alicorns aren’t real, so she obviously decided to try some sort of scam on us.”

“...I’m quite sure they’re real, darling.”

The stallion smiled patiently. “I’m sure you think they are, but they’re not. One simply has to consider the facts. Alicorns are supposedly immortal, right?”

“Yes, they certainly are.”

“Aha! But if they were immortal we’d be swimming in them! Ones from tens of thousands of years ago would be hanging about. Even if there were only one every century or two you’d have a whole city full of them. Since we’re not outnumbered by them, we can be sure they’re not around.”

“I suppose that is one kind of logic,” Rarity admitted. “Unless the alicorns all left to go somewhere else.”

“What, hiding south of the border and waiting for the right moment to jump out?” The stallion chuckled.

“Or much further away,” Rarity suggested. “Where is your former leader?”

“Banished, of course,” the stallion said. “Can’t have a scammer like that around. I’ll have to clean out her office later to make room for the new head of the department. Terrible thing. I have a lot of fond memories but she had to end up trampling them.”

The kettle whistled. Rarity got an idea at the same moment.

“Perhaps there’s a way I can repay you for the cup of tea, darling.”

“You offered to clean?” Diana asked.

“It’s the office of a pony that became an alicorn,” Rarity said. “It wouldn’t hurt to look. Perhaps there are some clues to how it happened.”

“If the pony became an alicorn at all,” Diana noted. They walked into the small office. It was the kind of place that was common among organized ponies who weren’t quite as obsessive as Twilight Sparkle. Things were neat and fairly clean, aside from a few stacks of files that were either being worked on, referenced, or the pony who was responsible for them simply promised themselves they’d get around to dealing with them soon.

Diana stopped to look at one of the pictures hanging on the wall. It showed a few ponies standing in the wilderness on some kind of camping trip.

“There’s no reason to assume she didn’t,” Rarity said.

“Aside from the fact that everypony here seems to assume she was somehow running a scam,” Diana reminded Rarity. “It is more likely, you know.”

“Of course, but I have to believe we’re here for a reason. It’s not simple random chance that brought us to this office.” Rarity started shuffling papers. “Ah, look at this! It seems like our alicorn was keeping notes.”

She cleared her throat and started to read.

“Dann’s Day, 34th of Spring. Had the recurring dream again. I was standing in a field outside the city, like the camping trips we took last spring. The stars were impossibly bright. I could hear them singing and I could almost make out the words.”

“Should you be reading her diary?” Diana asked.

“If she detailed her ascension it could be vitally important to future generations!” Rarity held up the spiral-bound notebook, waggling it at Diana. “When Twilight Sparkle ascended, she didn’t have time to take notes because she was having several panic attacks at the same time, and I believe Princess Celestia actively discouraged her from saying much later. This could solve the mystery!”

“You think Princess Celestia would have censored her?”

“I think Twilight Sparkle is the kind of pony who would take a gentle suggestion as an absolute and unbreakable order if it came from the right pony,” Rarity clarified. She flipped ahead in the diary and read more. “Here, let me skip a bit, there should be something, ah!--”

“Frey’s Day, 42nd Spring. The stars were in my dream again. I think the doctor was right that I was seeing them just because I was thinking too much about my dreams before going to sleep, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that I’d have a recurring dream. I’m going to make an effort tomorrow to curl up with a good book and think about something else.”

Diana leaned in to look. “Hmph. Why would a dream bother her so much she’d go to a doctor about it?”

“Not just go to a doctor, but write about it over and over again. She has some days marked on the calendar with stars,” Rarity moved papers to reveal a desk calendar with notes scribbled on it in shorthand.

“Satyr’s Day, 43rd Spring,” Diana read from the journal. “The stars were still in my room when I woke up. They sang to me. I think I am going mad.”

“That would be here,” Rarity noted on the calendar. “The marks stop a few days later. What are the last entries?”

She took the diary back, flipping towards the end.

“46th Sping, I can almost tell what the stars are asking me to do. They want me to follow them and they’re telling me a secret path. I believe this is the way to the heavens for everypony, a way that will lead to happiness and the truth beyond truths. It will finally fix things that have been broken and repair this world’s foundations. I will record what I find for all those to come after me so they can walk the same path!”

“Diana, this is it!” Rarity cried out. She turned the page.

“Nevermind, figured it out,” Rarity read. She frowned and turned the next page to find it blank.

“Figured it out?” Rarity repeated. “That’s all she wrote?!”

Diana snorted with laughter.

“It’s not funny! She could have written anything! Even if she didn’t need it anymore she could have told those to come who were having the same problem! What kind of inconsiderate pony would do this?!”

“Perhaps there’s a reason alicorns aren’t thought of kindly around here.”

“It’s just silly, darling. When I make a dress I take extensive notes and sketch plenty of designs! I want to be ready to manufacture them en masse if-- I mean, when I really come into my own. One has to plan for the future. An immortal should know that better than anypony else! They shouldn’t just write ‘nevermind, figured it out’!”

“We don’t know if she really was an alicorn,” Diana reminded Rarity. “She might have been insane, or doing some sort of scam. The ponies here seem to think it was the latter.”

“Well I hope wherever she is, she’s happy with herself,” Rarity huffs. “I swear. When I become an alicorn -- and I will! -- I will write a detailed guide for others, with… with pictures! And I’ll make it so simple that even Applejack would be able to figure it out if she cared to!”

“A very noble cause,” Diana agreed.

“Now, let’s finish cleaning,” Rarity sighed. “I did promise to help.”

Ninth Stop: For Endless Fight

Rarity peeked over the windowsill as the train rumbled down the tracks. It was moving slowly, like a cautious animal. Rarity felt the same way. Outside, it looked like late afternoon, with orange light and long shadows. Dust filled the air from countless hooves beating against the dry rocky plains covered in scrubgrass. A place that was too barren for farming, but perfect for something else.

A crossbow bolt hit the train window and broke against it, the glass remaining impervious to attack.

“We’re perfectly safe,” Diana assured her.

“We’re in the middle of a battlefield, that’s hardly safe!” Rarity hissed in a whisper, as if she was afraid she’d be heard by ponies outside, and that they’d notice her over the sound of the train.

“The Aether Express is immune to mundane harm,” the conductor said. He offered Rarity a hoof, encouraging her to stand. “There’s no need for fear! We’ve come through far worse than this. You’ll see.”

“Why are we even here?” Rarity asked, finally allowing herself to sit back in a proper seat instead of taking cover. Outside, she could make out the shadowy forms of ponies through the dust, running back and forth in every direction.

“Not every Realm is peaceful,” the conductor says. “We still need to make our stops. The Aether Express needs water and fuel, and our destinations are decided by… well, that’s not important,” he said after a moment of consideration. “Management doesn’t like us second-guessing them. It’s a sort of destiny thing. A bit like cutie marks.”

“I’d love to speak with the ponies in charge of those,” Diana noted wryly.

“Eventually you might have a chance,” the conductor said. He sounded like he meant it. Diana nodded. “We’re almost at the station. Please be ready to disembark.”

“Into a battlefield?” Rarity asked.

“You can remain onboard if you want.”

“I can’t imagine why I’d want to leave!”

Rarity screamed. Behind her, the dining car went up in flames.

“Perfectly safe my flank!” she swore. She hadn’t even seen what had happened. One moment she was trying to find a good bottle of wine to settle her nerves, the next she was surrounded by chaos. Something had crashed into the station, and debris fell around her, forcing her out and into the dusty field outside.

Rarity covered her head, hoping that Diana, Kyanite, and the Conductor weren’t hurt.

A pony holding a long polearm charged out of the smoke and dust, snarling with rage. Rarity screamed again and threw herself to the ground, narrowly avoiding a swing from the deadly steel.

The pony adjusted his grip and got ready to swing again before somepony intervened, stepping between him and Rarity.

“Hold!” the mare shouted. She held up a hoof. “She’s not wearing a uniform! Which group are you with? You are required by law to tell us, prisoner.”

“Which group?!” Rarity coughed, the dust in her mouth and the disorientation scattering her thoughts. “I was on the train!”

“The train?” the mare looked past Rarity and groaned. “She’s a civilian. Raise the yellow flag!”

The squad of ponies behind her echoed her annoyance and raised up a tall saffron-colored banner. The sounds of war around them started to quiet, more yellow banners going up. The mare held up a hoof when Rarity tried to speak again, silencing her. She looked into the dust, the blue-armored mare waiting for something.

That something proved to be a mare in red armor stepping closer and looking equally annoyed.

“What is it, Freehold scum?” the red mare asked.

“Civilian on the field,” the blue mare said, pointing at Rarity. “She says she was on the train.”

“Passenger or crew?”

“Civilian either way,” the blue mare said firmly. “We can’t fight here if there are civilians in the way. You know that’s against the rules of engagement for this Trial.”

The red mare kicked the dirt and nodded. “Where’s the judge?”

“Here!” A pony in black and white armor trotted through the soldiers, their ranks parting for the tall mare. Her waving mane was tied back in a tight, elaborate topknot that kept the moving strands from escaping. Her slim horn helped Rarity to her hooves, and her wings pushed some of the pervasive dust and dirt away. “Ah. So we did have visitors after all.”

“Judge, I demand we end this Trial immediately,” the blue mare said. “Clearly there are elements in the field that need to be cleared out of the way. It was the responsibility of Clan Guts to make sure this was a suitable place and they have failed.”

“This could be a Clan Glory trick!” the red mare protested. “There were no civilians here when we conducted our scouting report! The train station seemed abandoned and wasn’t in use by either side!”

“I don’t believe this is an intentional gambit by either side,” the alicorn Judge replied calmly. “It is merely an unfortunate event. Civilian, are there others here?”

“My name is Rarity.”

“I apologize. Civilian Rarity, are there others here?”

“Yes, my friend Diana. We got separated, and there’s the staff on the train! We have to help them!”

“I see,” the Judge said. “We will pause the battle until the civilians are all accounted for. Please return to your camps. I will conduct the investigation myself. Thank you. Raise red flags.”

The red mare stomped her hooves. “Bah! You Glory scum are lucky! We were about to overrun your positions! Take this as a small mercy and know that we will return and crush you after this short break!”

“Ah yes, that’s just what I expect from Clan Guts,” the blue mare dismissed. “Words and not action. You bid poorly and you’re lucky you’re being given a chance to find a new strategy. We were clearly winning!”

The Judge cleared her throat, and the soldiers retreated. Rarity noted that many of them were helping those from the other side pick up dropped and fallen equipment and returning it to the owners.

“What is going on in this place?” Rarity asked, confused.

“War, of course,” the alicorn said. “Clan Glory and Clan Guts both have claims to this land. Your train station was used as a convenient focus point for a Trial of Possession. You act like you’ve never seen a war before, Civilian Rarity.”

“We haven’t had a war in… longer than I’ve been alive!” Rarity protested.

“How uncivilized. I can’t imagine how you get anything done.”

“Thank goodness, I was worried about you,” Rarity sighed. She hugged Diana. The mare sighed.

“I thought you might have been killed,” Diana said. “The dining car is a wreck!”

“I am told the explosion was an unfortunate accident,” the alicorn said. They’d regrouped on a high ridge well away from the dusty field around the train station. A small cluster of tents had been set up, and ponies with surveying equipment and maps argued with each other around maps. “Both clans were attempting an operation to take the station and the engineering teams, ah, met in the middle.”

“I see,” Diana said coldly. “And our lives were only accidentally at risk.”

“Both clans will make formal apologies,” the alicorn replied calmly. “It was never their intent to put civilians at risk. Involving non-combatants is against the rules of war.”

“I wasn’t aware war had rules,” Diana said.

“What an odd thing to say.” The alicorn raised an eyebrow. “I suppose civilians might not understand. We have some time, so I will do my best to educate you. Perhaps if you understand why these things had to happen, you’ll appreciate the efforts of the ponies who serve the state.”

She motioned for them to follow her into the tent.

Rarity found something waiting for them inside, a game board with black and white pieces.

“Ah, a chessboard,” Rarity said. “I’m familiar with this particular metaphor, darling. Chess was designed as a game to replicate war, with pawns in front, pegasus ponies hopping over them, unicorns going around the board, and all protecting their Princess.”

“It’s nothing like war,” Diana retorted.

“You’re absolutely right,” the alicorn Judge agreed. “It’s nothing like real war. There have been many great ages of war. Long, long ago, there was something we might consider a golden age. It was before even my time, so as you can imagine, we have few practical details. It was an age of plenty. Ponies built and created and innovated, and then… war. And they innovated with that, as well. When it ended, maps had to be redrawn, and ponies knew they needed rules to keep politics from ending the world. They needed to find a safer way to resolve their differences.”

“Well, darling, I can tell from the mess outside that they didn’t find a better way,” Rarity scoffed. “They’re still trying to kill each other!”

“Everypony fighting chose to fight,” the Judge said. “They want to be here. They’re honored for their decision. No civilians are supposed to be involved, which is why the battle is being conducted here, away from towns and fields. The combatants are limited, so it doesn’t simply become a matter of which side brings more bodies to the field. The weapons are regulated to avoid unneeded brutality or destruction. No disintegration rays, no null-cannons, no black blades of disaster. I am serving as an impartial referee to ensure that it is conducted fairly.”

“Absurd.” Diana shook her head. “It might as well be a game. If both sides hold back that much, what’s the point of fighting? Playing a sport would serve just as well and be less wasteful of lives.”

“The rules of engagement allow for that,” the alicorn said, nodding her head. “A Trial of this kind can be conducted in many ways. There have been entire cities won and lost with games, as long as both sides agree to it. Conducting a war tends to produce the fewest arguments later, though. Fifty years ago things nearly turned into a slaughter when two clans disagreed about the nature of the game of hoofball. Apparently they were playing by entirely different rules in their own leagues. The balls weren’t even the same shape.”

“This is all a bit much,” Rarity sighed.

“Perhaps we should have a short game ourselves?” the alicorn suggested. “You said you were familiar with the game.”

“I’ll play,” Diana said. She sat down in front of the board. “I’ll take black.”

“Putting yourself at a disadvantage?” the alicorn asked. She sat down, moving her first pawn before even completely settling her frame.

“In the real world, going first isn’t always wise,” Diana countered. “You might win the initiative but you lose in other ways.” She pushed a piece forward.

“You’re right,” the alicorn agreed. “When you speak, I can feel quite a bit of contempt. And not the same kind as your companion.” She gave Rarity a look. “She isn’t familiar with war. You, on the other hoof…”

“I find it distasteful to reduce it to a game. When lives are being risked, ponies should not play at half measures.”

“Interesting. I would love to know how you would conduct the battle between Clan Glory and Clan Guts.”

“War shouldn’t be something done so lightly.” Diana continued moving her pieces, neither pony taking long to contemplate as they committed their pawns and rooks to battle. “War should be something awful. Something ponies fear. It should be the last resort, not the first.”

“Taking away rules leads to madness. Ponies would live in fear, like beasts in a dark forest. The way the world works is the only sane way a world can work. Ponies know that when they wake up in the morning, things will be much the same as when they went to sleep. Even if governments fall and they’re conquered by their neighbors, that simply means a new flag hung on the walls, not pillaging and death.”

“And that always works for you?” Diana asked. She moved a piece. Rarity cleared her throat.

“Darling, that can’t go there. You moved it--”

“I am aware,” Diana said. She moved another piece before the alicorn could respond. “Chess is a game replicating war, yes? Sometimes the unexpected happens. Not everything in a battle is neatly taking turns.”

The alicorn frowned and moved her Princess. Diana followed it closely.

“Stop that,” the alicorn said. “You aren’t taking this seriously!”

“Neither are you,” Diana replied. “I believe that’s the problem. Someday a pony will decide not to play by your little rules and they will conquer this place.”

“A pony not playing by the rules would bring the wrath of all the clans down on them. It would be suicide.”

“Would it?” Diana asked. She knocked over the alicorn’s Princess. “Checkmate.”

“I was not in check.”

“Yes, well, I prefer poker to chess,” Diana said with a shrug. “You wouldn’t enjoy the game. It’s about deception and chance. And occasionally violence breaks out when ponies disagree about the number of aces that should be in a deck.”

“It sounds uncivilized.”

“Terribly. That’s why it’s a lot more like a real war.”

“The damage isn’t as bad as it seems,” the Conductor said. He sighed. “Only the dining car was really a problem. We’ll pick up another one at our next stop and leave the damaged one here at the station.”

Rarity watched as several of the soldiers working together pushed the blackened train car onto a side track.

“I could have managed it myself, but I don’t mind the help,” the Conductor said brightly. “For ponies fighting each other in a war, they work together even better than they fight!”

“I’m glad neither you nor Miss Kyanite were hurt,” Rarity said.

“I got knocked around a bit, but the train protected me.” The Conductor put a hoof on the engine. “The Aether Express is a tough customer. It makes me wonder just how the dining car even got damaged like that in the first place. It’s unusual for anything outside the train to be able to do that kind of thing.”

“It is a bit odd,” Rarity agreed. “Perhaps it was meant to happen?”

“What, to make you run out and almost get killed?” the Conductor scoffed. “The train wouldn’t do that. She protects ponies.”

“Excuse me, may we speak with you?”

Rarity turned to find the two mares she’d seen on the battlefield. They kept a respectful distance from each other as they approached her. She recognized the looks they shot each other, rather a lot like the looks two cats had when they met and hadn’t yet decided on a pecking order. Cautious equality with each one ready to claim dominance.

“We apologize,” the red-armored mare said. “Harming civilians is one of the greatest taboos.”

“It’s unbecoming of soldiers,” the blue mare agreed. “Clan Glory is devoted to the law, and we recognize Clan Guts is, as well. They’ve always conducted themselves well.”

The red mare nodded. “We also recognize Clan Glory is... worthy. We might have disputes over the control of land, but not honor. After discussions, we both take equal fault with what happened, and offer tribute to you as apology for damaging your train.”

The mares bowed deeply, and retainers brought lacquered boxes forward, putting them down and opening them.

“We offer these bottles of rice wine,” the blue mare said. “You mentioned your dining car was damaged. We’ll also provide any provisions you need for your journey, of course, but that’s common courtesy. These bottles come from the finest brewer, and are normally reserved for our soldiers.”

“It looks lovely,” Rarity said. Truth be told, she had no idea what she was looking at. The opaque ceramic bottles were sealed with corks and paper seals. She certainly wasn’t going to admit anything. She’d spent a solid year of her life just learning to tell good red wines from bad ones, and learned most of the difference was how well the pony selling it could explain defects as features.

“Our tribute is more practical,” the red mare said, sounding smug. “Wine is pleasant, but we offer medicinal herbs. They’ll serve you well in case you get injured by… incautious warriors.” She gave the blue-armored mare a sideways look. “I am told you were nearly killed when you were trying to find shelter from the flames.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” the blue mare huffed.

“Please, don’t fight over me,” Rarity said. “Thank you both for apologizing. If I might ask, what will you do when we leave?”

“Once you’re clear of the area we’ll resume our battle,” the red mare said. “We’ve discussed it with the impartial observers. We’ll retreat to the positions we were holding yesterday to reset things to before the accident, and this time the train station will be declared off-limits to both sides.”

“Of course, to make things fair, we revealed our positions to each other, so both sides have an equal opportunity to plan out the day’s battle,” the blue mare specified. “Don’t worry, Civilian. We’ll still be able to conduct the battle fairly!”

“That’s… good, I suppose,” Rarity said. “But you’re both here and talking, can’t you simply discuss your differences? Perhaps you could even become friends!”

“Friends, with someone from her Clan?” the red mare laughed. “That’s a good joke.”

“Perhaps you should listen to her,” the blue mare retorted. “After all, I was about to win our last battle. Half of your warriors are little better than foals!”

“I brought foals on purpose so they could get experience fighting an easy opponent,” the red mare parried. “It’s good training for when they fight a real foe!”

Diana leaned out of the train. “Let’s go, Rarity. The train is about to depart.”

“Yes, I think it might be best if we…” she looked at the mares, who were continuing to argue and had forgotten she was even there. “We’ll just go, then,” she said quietly.

Diana looked past Rarity, watching the arguing mares. “I swear they’re about to kiss.”

“Don’t give them ideas, darling,” Rarity said. “The wedding would be a disaster.”

Third Stop: Remember Me

The scenery outside the windows had shifted away from the chaotic floating islands and checkerboards of Discord’s realm into something more sane, water washing over everything until the train rose up slightly, the tone of the wheels on the tracks changing as they passed onto a bridge, the water falling away into an ocean far below.

At first it was beautiful, a huge expanse of pure blue water that brought to mind the most exclusive resorts and far-off places in the world. Rarity could watch it for hours, just thinking about the kind of place they might end up. An endless paradise of sun-washed beaches and white sand? Perhaps some kind of undersea palace?

Hours passed. Then more hours. A full day. Rarity fell asleep and woke up to Kyanite offering her tea and biscuits.

“Thank you again, darling,” Rarity yawned. “We’ve been traveling for quite some time, haven’t we?”

The crystal pony nodded. “We’re leaving the realms closest to Equestria. Discord’s realm forms sort of a border between the inner and outer realms. The Aether Express goes to places ponies in Equestria have never even heard of.”

“And it takes longer to travel there,” Rarity guessed.

“The first time you leave home, it always feels like forever,” Kyanite said quietly. “But when you’re going back, it’s like it takes no time at all.”

Rarity nodded. She hadn’t been on a trip like this since she was a filly. Ever since she’d started to grow up, the world had shrunk. A visit to Canterlot went from an exciting event to a dull commute. Manehattan or the Crystal Empire needed a touch of planning but were still old hat, merely places to go instead of adventures to experience.

This, though, even merely being on a bridge that took more than a day to cross at the speed of a rushing express train, was novel, and she had no idea what might be at the other end.

“You’ve been on this route before,” Rarity started. “We’ll be… no,” she stopped herself. “I was going to ask where we’ll be stopping next, but I think I rather want to be surprised.”

“I think it’ll be a pleasant surprise,” Kyanite said. She gave Rarity a warm smile and moved on with the jingling snack trolley. Rarity felt her spirits buoyed by her words. This time, no matter what they found, she was determined to try and make the best of it. Discord’s realm hadn’t been so bad in the end, and part of her was regretting how much time she’d wasted before she’d even tried to relax and enjoy it.

This time, she was going to savor the journey and the destination.

Rarity made an excited, high-pitched squeal not entirely unlike that of a porcelain teapot coming to temperature -- a balmy, breezy summer temperature complete with the scent of the sea and the crowing of distant gulls.

“It’s everything I could have imagined!” Rarity swooned. The edge of the train platform was right up against the beach, the tracks parallel to the line between land and sea. She leaned against the wooden railing, made deliberately to be slightly rough, not unlike a weather-beaten dock, as if the train itself was a ship that had come to port. Decorative fishing nets and brightly colored floats decorated the platform.

“Look this way,” Diana said. Rarity turned, and a pair of sunglasses were deposited on her face. “There we are!”

“Don’t forget sunscreen,” the Conductor said, his mood bright. He took off his cap and adjusted his mane, squinting in the glare of the sun. “We’ll be here for sixty-seven hours and eighty-nine minutes. You’ve got almost three full days to get a nasty sunburn.”

“I’m not going to complain about having some extra time to enjoy the climate,” Rarity said cheerfully. “Though I don’t feel properly dressed without a hat and-- aren’t you terribly warm in that, Diana?”

Diana looked back at her cloak. It was made of thick, plush material, certainly thick enough for all but the coldest climate and entirely inappropriate for the tropics.

“You might be right,” Diana agreed. She lowered her hood, shaking out her pale blue mane, and unclasped the cloak from her shoulders, taking it off and folding it carefully.

Rarity watched her with interest that was somewhat unseemly when a mare was undressing. Not that ponies had anything to hide, but even so. There were social rules. She couldn’t help herself this time -- she half-expected to see wings on Diana’s sides to go along with her horn, but they were bare.

It wasn’t the only bare thing, and perhaps that was the most shocking thing. Diana’s flank was not only naked of wings, it was also unmarked, with no cutie mark painting her coat with color and the magic of her talent.

Rarity let out a small gasp. Diana sighed. It was the tone of a pony who had heard the same question many times. A pony who didn’t like giving the answer anymore if they ever had to begin with.

“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t have a cutie mark. And I don’t wish to discuss it, please. It’s a private matter.”

Rarity nodded. “I’m sorry for staring, darling.” She looked away, feeling ashamed. There was nothing wrong with a pony not having a cutie mark. No, that wasn’t quite it. A pony with no cutie mark at Diana’s age was the sign of some tragedy, as much a visible disability as a unicorn with a shattered horn or a missing limb. To comment on it or judge a pony for it only truly passed judgment on those who thought less of them for it.

“All ponies who ride on the Aether Express have a reason for their trip,” Diana said, offering half an explanation, and more than enough to satisfy Rarity without making either pony uncomfortable with personal details.

“Here’s your luggage,” the conductor said, having ducked inside the train to get the bag for Diana when he saw her start to undress. Rarity hadn’t noticed Diana even carrying luggage - in Discord’s realm she must have left it onboard the train due to the short duration of the stop. It was an old bag, a carpetbag made from some ancient rug, only part of the design visible. Diana snapped open the locking clasp and carefully put her folded cloak inside.

“There we go,” she said, holding the bag at her side with her magic. “Shall we?”

The two passed ponies in the streets, a few families but mostly couples. It reminded Rarity of some of the finest vacation spots, places appropriate for a honeymoon or to find the kind of pony one might want to go on a honeymoon with.

“What a wonderful place!” Rarity said as they walked, passing shops selling swimsuits and summerwear and varieties of food that she couldn’t even begin to identify. There were signs in at least three languages she knew, and even more that she didn’t.

“It’s not a large Realm, but it’s quite pleasant,” Diana said. “It seems to only be as large as this island and the sea around it. I think you could gallop around the whole thing in a few hours.”

Something occurred to her.

“Diana?” Rarity asked. “We got here on the Aether Express, but I can’t imagine everypony arrives the same way. What’s across the sea?”

“Nothing,” Diana said. “This place isn’t like Equestria. If you sail too far, you’ll simply arrive back here.”

“That’s how Equestria is, too,” Rarity noted.

“I suppose it’s similar in some ways, though on a much smaller scale,” Diana agreed. “But to answer your other question, ponies arrive here through many means. Magic is the easiest way, of course. There are some spells that allow travel between Realms. There are also thin places in every world where one can slip from a Realm into another. The Aether Express makes use of places like that in its route.”

“Ah, I see,” Rarity nodded. Diana could see she didn’t quite understand.

“Often, ponies don’t even realize they’re in a different realm,” Diana continued. “They might think they’re in a jungle valley where the sun doesn’t set, or that they found a hidden city of gold, or they found a lost world deep under the earth. Connections between realms can be permanent until they seem to simply be the same as any normal part of the terrain.”

“And the connection here is so easy that ponies use it as a vacation spot?” Rarity asked.

“Some places want to be found,” Diana said. “If you ask around I suspect many of these ponies come from entirely different worlds, and they’ll return to them when they leave. A tiny few might find their way to another realm entirely. The Aether Express is the only sure way to travel the many worlds.”

“Mm.” Rarity smiled. She felt a little more special just hearing that. Yes, the ponies around her might have found their way here, but how many even knew it was a separate Realm? How many would keep traveling on? It made Rarity different from the crowd, which only made sense to her. After all, Rarity couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t the main character of her own story.

Perhaps a few moments, when Twilight was clearly the leader. But not now. Twilight was far away, and this time the spotlight didn’t have to be shared.

Diana followed along behind Rarity, placid and tranquil.

Rarity ran into the hotel room with the energy of an excited foal. The hotel, or, rather, motel, was designed like the typical building turned inside-out. A wooden frame formed a skeleton around adobe walls painted salmon-pink and aquamarine. Walkways on three floors ran around the building on the inland side, with balconies in every room looking out over the ocean. Inside, the rooms were a touch shabby, that kind of decor you expect in a room where they know ponies won’t be spending much time.

Rarity barely even looked at the wallpaper and thin carpet, bee-lining to the balcony. Their room was on the top floor, and from here she had a wonderful view of the ocean. The water was pure blue, with palm trees swaying in the breeze, their tops at eye level from this height.

The sand was-- Rarity looked down at it and frowned. She hadn’t really looked at it before. Certainly, it was a busy beach, with ponies walking and picking over the sand, but there was something wrong.

“Is it… dirty?” she asked. It seemed like a silly thing to ask about sand, which was only slightly removed from being fancy dirt itself.

Diana deposited her luggage on one of the beds and stepped out to join Rarity on the balcony, following her gaze over the dunes and seagrass to where the shore met the sea. From this distance it was difficult to make out, but the sand wasn’t a clean, blank canvas. Debris in every color of the rainbow lined the beach, the surf gently pushing it up further onto shore. Ponies walked around the largest pieces, obviously aware of what looked like a half-buried landfill.

“It doesn’t seem to bother them,” Diana noted. “How odd.”

Rarity’s excitement deflated slightly. “Perhaps it’s just this one stretch of beachfront,” she suggested. “I’m sure they can’t all be like this.”

Diana nodded in agreement. She could sense Rarity’s worry. It didn’t take an empath to see how the well-groomed and detail-oriented pony would be bothered by such a filthy excuse for a seaside.

“It’s probably just from tourists. Or a shipwreck. Or a party!” Rarity tossed her head, trotting back into the room with determination. “It will take no time at all to find a proper place to relax.”

“This is absurd,” Rarity groused. She had gone so far as to buy herself a new hat to try and improve her mood, a wide-brimmed stylish summer hat, a peanut-colored floppy-brimmed do appropriate for the sun, complete with a huge bow made from hoof-dyed tie-dye ribbon.

The hat wasn’t what Rarity thought was absurd. No more absurd than Diana spending almost the same amount of bits as she had, but on coconut-scented sunscreen and a drink inside half a pineapple that looked and smelled nearly the same as the sunscreen. No, what she found absurd was that they’d walked two miles and found only more and more debris along the shoreline.

“Perhaps the ponies here simply don’t value cleanliness the same way we do,” Diana said. “You must remember we’re far from Equestria. The ways ponies live won’t be the same as they were back in your home. This is even more distant than Discord’s realm of chaos.”

“But then what about the rest of the city?” Rarity asked. The entire city was like a resort, every street a curated experience full of friendly ponies ready to help others find exactly what they needed to enjoy themselves. If they had truly been the type of ponies to allow a beach to get this filthy, why was the city almost perfectly clean?

“I’m not sure,” Diana said. “Let’s ask somepony.”

She led Rarity to one of the small stands within sight of the beach. This one was selling shaved ice.

“One small shaved ice,” Diana said. “And could I ask you a question?”

“Only if I can ask you one,” the mare running the stand replied. She started turning the handle on an old crank-powered machine clamped to a heavy table, shaving a block of ice into snow to fill a small paper cup.

“We were curious about the beach,” Diana continued. “Why is it so… dirty?”

“Oh, you must be new here,” the mare said, slowing down. “That’s a little hard to explain. It’s not dirty, it’s just full of memories.”

“Memories?” Rarity asked.

“Before I’ll answer that, I need you to answer my question,” the mare said with a smile and cheeky wink. “What flavor do you want? We’ve got blue, red, mint, and tutti-frutti.”

“I didn’t know blue and red were flavors,” Rarity said.

“Well, then you’ll want half and half,” the shaved ice mare carefully poured syrup onto the mound of shaved ice, coloring half of it bright blue and the other half candy-apple red. Diana gave her a bit for her trouble, and the mare gave them the shaved ice along with a small spoon. “Most ponies know about this place and come here on purpose, so it’s a little surprising you two don’t know about the memories.”

“I have a feeling we might be using the word differently than you are,” Diana said.

Rarity tasted the shaved ice. The blue was distinctly flavored like a great many berries without being exactly like any one of them. The red was similarly like cherry and strawberry and red licorice but only like them and not mimicking them. The flavors really were blue and red and it was difficult to think of them as anything else.

“Ponies come here looking for things they lost,” the shaved ice mare said. “This beach is special, because no matter where something vanishes, it can be found here if a pony spends enough time looking for it.”

“Really?” Rarity blinked. “So it I lost a sock in the wash…”

“It’s here somewhere,” the mare confirmed. “But most ponies are hoping to find something a little more meaningful than just mismatched socks.”

“Perhaps we should have a look?” Rarity suggested to Diana. “At least to see if it’s true.”

“Just… one thing,” the ice mare warned. “You’ll know when you find something that’s yours. It’s polite to leave everything else alone so the right pony can come and find it someday.”

“Of course,” Rarity agreed. It did seem like the polite thing to do. She nodded and walked with Diana, who had gone a bit quiet as they walked towards the sea. Rarity looked up at her, catching the expression on her face. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Diana assured her. She stopped walking to give Rarity a somber smile. “I suppose I’m just not sure I want to find my past here.”

“Before we start worrying about our foalhood diaries, we should see how true it is,” Rarity said. “I’m not even sure how we’ll distinguish one lost earring or misplaced set of keys from another.”

The ponies here obviously trusted they’d find something. Now that she knew what she was looking at, she could see the ponies walking along the beach didn’t have the happy, easy gaze of tourists. Their expressions ranged from determined to desperate, eyes fixing on every bright bit of color half-buried in the sand before moving on. All of them were looking for something, and the otherwise beautiful beach was merely a distraction to them.

“At worst, I’m sure we can find somewhere to sunbathe,” Diana said, looking up at the sky through her dark glasses.

“There’s no harm in taking a quick peek,” Rarity said. She walked closer to the water, her gaze falling on damp stuffed animals, a pair of glasses mostly buried, a mug decorated with a faded cartoon. It was all remarkably undamaged, even the worst of it needing little more than to be toweled off and dried.

She stepped around the junk. For her many virtues, Rarity wasn’t a pony with the patience to keep at something that seemed pointless. She preferred to be precise and replace brute effort with skill and precision. Applejack was her oldest friend, and where she would consider the work itself to be worth doing, Rarity preferred to know she was making the best use of her efforts.

So she almost quit early, until something caught here eye and wouldn’t let go, a bulge in the sand, just a tiny bit of a curved shape visible. Rarity stopped and started clearing sand away. It only took a moment, shifting some of it off the soft surface. Impossibly, a balloon floated into the air, and unnatural panic gripped Rarity as it passed above her head. She grabbed it with her magic, tugging it back down to safety.

“That’s… not possible,” she whispered. Memories flooded back, something she’d almost entirely forgotten. It wasn’t even anything of consequence. It had been just before Sweetie Belle was born, when she was an only a foal, barely more than a toddler. Her mother and father had taken her to what she saw as a fancy restaurant for her birthday, one of the loud and colorful family restaurants that always felt like a celebration to simply be there. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for dinner, but it had ended with ice cream, the sundae cup coming to the table with a balloon tied to it.

This balloon. It had the name of the restaurant printed on the rubber along with the cheese-wedge it used as a logo, but the establishment itself had closed almost a decade ago, and Rarity had lost the balloon almost immediately, losing her grip on it right outside the front doors. It had floated off into the sky and she’d cried with the kind of loss only a foal could experience. Her parents had offered her a replacement, but she had refused. She’d lost her balloon, the one that had been special, the one that had been hers.

And now it was back. It was worthless, just junk, not even the good kind of balloon that Pinkie Pie brought to parties. Yet seeing it again brought back all those memories, finally resolving a rift of deep sadness Rarity hadn’t even been aware of, something imprinted on the soul of a filly and as lost to time as the balloon itself.

Tears welled in her eyes and wouldn’t stop. It was silly and stupid, but she found herself crying over a balloon as if it was a long-lost friend, and she was ashamed to have forgotten it.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?” Rarity asked. She’d left the balloon in their hotel room, and every time she looked at it, it was like coming home.

Diana took a moment to apply another streak of sunscreen to her cheeks and horn before answering. The floral smell of something almost, but not quite like the way ponies imagined coconut must smell like wafted through the air.

“I’m not all that interested in collecting junk,” Diana said. “It’s a novelty to sit under a new sun, one Princess Celestia never touched. If you believe the stories, apparently the sun and moon here take care of themselves.”

“How odd.” Rarity shook her head. “Very foreign.”

“It must be more difficult than it seems,” Diana agreed. She added another stripe along the bridge of her snout. “Perhaps that’s why it’s summer here all year-round.”

Rarity gasped. “Does that mean they’ve never experienced winter fashion? They’re missing out!”

“I’m sure they more than make up for it with swimsuits,” Diana joked.

“Last chance,” Rarity warned her. “You never know what we might find out there!”

Diana shook her head firmly, looking away from Rarity’s gaze and over the ocean to some distant and invisible shore. “I left home because I wanted to escape the past, not dig it up.”

Rarity leaned on the shovel she was holding. She’d rented it, at a price just slightly less than it would have cost to simply buy one of her own. There were stands up and down the beaches selling buckets and sifters and shovels. There were even some foals who’d pestered her for bits in return for their help in searching the beach. “It’s just a bit of harmless fun to pass the time. Isn’t there anything from your foalhood that you’d like to see again?”

Diana shook her head and laid down on the beach chair she’d rented, adjusting the towel under her head that she was using as a pillow. With her eyes closed, she looked like she could have been sleeping already.

“Not everypony had a happy childhood,” she said quietly. “There are things I would bury even deeper if I could. I hope you enjoy whatever it is you find out there.”

Rarity felt guilty for pressing her. There was obvious hurt there, and she’d stepped right into it. She made quick apologies, which were just as quickly waved off, and made her escape down to the edge of the beach. Ponies were there -- she wasn’t sure some ponies ever left -- squinting at the sand and examining everything they found as if it might fit some hole left in their memories.

She started by carefully sifting sand away, uncovering things she didn’t recognize at all. Most of it was truly junk, but that made sense in a way. The balloon she’d found had meaning to her, but without that meaning, it was little more than garbage. There was probably somepony out there to whom the things she was finding were treasure, even if to her eyes they were a doll with one leg missing and a mane that had been cut into something that was either daringly punk or, more likely, styled by a foal who was aware of manecuts but not how they were done.

“I suppose some things are universal,” Rarity said, turning the doll over in her magic. It wasn’t hers. There wasn’t that spark of recognition. Still, she’d had one not entirely dissimilar to it. Rarity was sure every filly did at some point in their lives. Hers wasn’t lost, though. It had gone on to greener pastures -- she’d repaired it, given it a rather sporting custom outfit, and gifted it to Sweetie Belle.

“Hey!” somepony snapped. “That’s not yours!”

Rarity turned to the voice, finding a furious pony storming across the beach to her, an older mare with red cheeks and that combination of anger and embarrassment that comes when somepony’s hoof has been caught in a cookie jar.

The only thing to do was try a soothing smile. “I apologize, darling. I was just looking.” She offered the doll to the other pony, who snatched it out of her grip.

“It’s rude to poke at memories that don’t belong to you,” the mare mumbled, taking it protectively. The way she cradled it in her hooves made Rarity instantly and absolutely sure that it belonged to her, or at least had belonged to her decades ago when she’d been far smaller and hadn’t yet earned that hairdressing cutie mark on her flank.

“It’s my fault,” Rarity conceded in further apology. “I’m not from around here, and I don’t know the local customs.”

“I suppose it’s fine if you didn’t know,” the mare said, putting the doll away, sufficiently appeased by Rarity figuratively, and almost literally, bowing and scraping for forgiveness. “Just remember if you find something that doesn’t belong to you, you need to leave it where it is.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to dig things up and find the pony they belong to?” Rarity asked.

The hairdresser shook her head. “Things find their way here for a reason. If a pony goes and takes them, they get lost all over again! It’s like defying destiny, and some ponies are even worse.”

“Worse?”

The mare looked around, then leaned in conspiratorially. “There are ponies that deliberately go around and take things. Then they sell them back to the ponies that the memories really belong to, and charge them a princess’s ransom! It’s against the law, but that doesn’t stop ponies.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t stop them if there was a profit to be made,” Rarity conceded. “But how would they match ponies to memories?”

“Ponies get desperate. Everypony here on the beach is looking for something, and if they can’t find it, they sometimes turn to the black market. Everypony knows it’s a bad idea to even go looking because it encourages them, but…”

“I understand,” Rarity said quietly. It was blackmail of the worst sort. “Why don’t the authorities do anything about it?”

“They do, when enough ponies complain, but by the time they’re involved the damage is already done. The memories are out of place and there’s no way to know where they should be.”

“I’ll make sure to be careful,” Rarity said. “Both of other ponies memories and to make sure I don’t get scammed.”

The hairdresser nodded, smiling. “I’m glad we could help each other. You found Princess Silver Saddle. Maybe that’s how I was meant to meet her again!”

Rarity nodded and they gave each other the quick, polite hug that could be given to near-strangers, and when the pony trotted away, whispering to the doll, Rarity felt a little warmth in her chest. It wasn’t quite as good as finding something for herself, but helping others was its own reward, and she knew not to go to the wrong part of town.

Naturally, she only lasted another hour at the beach before she just had to go and see the wrong part of town. To familiarize herself with it and know what she shouldn’t be doing, of course, it had nothing to do with the frustration of finding old shopping lists, novelty telephones shaped like cats, and one wedding ring that she had very carefully placed back in the sand exactly where she’d found it, suddenly terrified that she might have broken whatever chain of destiny would reunite it with its lost owner.

“You lookin’ for something special?” a pony asked, from a dark alleyway. He had a mask over his face and wore the kind of long coat that a pony didn’t wear to the beach unless they were deliberately trying to be mysterious. Or they might wear it if they were some kind of pervert, which that opening line did not rule out.

Rarity answered with a raised eyebrow that was precisely inclined to indicate that if he was about to show her something untoward, she knew at least three types of martial arts and one of them involved knitting needles.

“Nothing like that,” the stallion said quickly, catching her suspicion. “Wrong part of town for that sort of thing and you seem more like the kind of fine, educated lady who ain’t interested in a show.”

“You’re right about fine and educated,” Rarity allowed.

“Just so, just so,” the stallion agreed. “Perhaps I can interest you in some memories?”

Rarity knew full well that she wanted to see, just in case something of hers had ended up in some back alley being traded around, but she was experienced enough not to seem too eager. “I thought it was against the rules to sell them?”

“It’s against the rules to go digging them up,” the stallion corrected. “I would never do such a thing. Why don’t I show you my shop? It’s not something to discuss on the street if you catch my drift.”

“Alright,” Rarity said. She was sure she could defend herself. She’d fought off all sorts of monsters. A pony trying to scam her barely even counted as a speedbump, and at worst she could simply buy her way out of the problem with a few bits and acting like a rube.

She followed the masked stallion into the alley and to a cart parked on a back street. He motioned for her to step back, then pulled a rope, the side of the cart opening up into a small stand, still on wheels and ready to roll in case of emergency. The stallion hopped inside and behind the counter.

“Plenty to see here, Ma’am, good chance we’ve got something you might find familiar if you catch my drift.”

Rarity stepped closer to look. Inside the booth, there were shelves lined with what seemed like a random assortment of junk. It wasn’t quite the same random assortment that she’d seen on the beach, though. The merchant had picked out things that had obvious value even beyond the sentimental. Jewelry, old books, a wedding dress that hung like a ghost from the back wall.

“Don’t you feel bad about keeping all this here?” Rarity asked, her eyes scanning the shelves. A bag of marbles. A photograph. A golden necklace.

“No, ma’am! I’m doing a public service, trying to reconnect ponies with the things they lost that others snatched up. Reselling things stolen from where they should be. Can’t rightly put them back, can I? So I sell them at a reasonable price to discourage ponies from taking what isn’t theirs.”

“Oh yes, very reasonable prices. Like for that book there?” Rarity pointed at a blank book that was lightly worn.

“Ah, well, this here is somepony’s personal diary,” the stallion said. “Plenty of secrets and dirt in here that I’m sure they wouldn’t want anypony to know.” He took it down from the shelf, holding it in one hoof and not quite letting Rarity touch it.

“So you wouldn’t sell it to just anypony, then?” Rarity asked.

“I’d be happier if it went to the pony who wrote it, or at least a family member. It’d go against my personal code otherwise.” He paused. “Of course that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be willing to let it go for a little extra, to soothe my soul.”

“Yes, I’m told bits are wonderful for that.” Rarity’s tone dripped with sarcasm, but it didn’t seem to bother the merchant.

“None of us are perfect. I’ve even sold some of my own memories off, for the right price. A pony does what they have to in this cruel and uncaring world.” He wiped a phantom tear from his face. “So how about it? Call it a hundred bits?”

“Don’t be silly. I’m not going to buy somepony else’s…” Rarity rolled her eyes and felt her attention waver, and for a moment she felt positively tipsy. She belatedly realized she’d spent quite a bit of time on the beach, in bright sunlight with very little to drink in the way of fresh water. “Perhaps I’m dehydrated,” she mumbled.

“Ah well, that’s life. One last look around before you go?” the stallion offered, his green eyes piercing. Rarity looked up, glancing at the shelves. She hadn’t felt any of that surge of sudden recognition that she had before when she’d found a genuine memory, so it wasn’t likely that--

She froze. Something caught her attention, pushed into the shadows on the back of a high shelf, where she must have missed it the first time. “What is that?” she asked.

“Hm?” The stallion followed her gaze, stepping to the side and dramatically reaching back to the shelf, pulling it free. “Do you mean this?”

Rarity looked at it and gasped. Memories flooded through her. It was a torrent of recognition, like a tidal wave pushing everything else aside. “Yes! I have to have it!” She reached into her saddlebags, putting all her bits on the table. “I’ll pay anything!”

The stallion smiled behind his mask.

“You gave him all your bits for a piece of cheese?” Diana asked.

Rarity rolled her eyes as hard as she could. “You don’t understand, this isn’t just cheese! It’s…” She held it up, ready to explain herself. Then she looked at the cheese. There was no wash of recognition. It was a bit of somepony’s leftovers.

Diana waited patiently for Rarity’s thoughts to catch up to hers. Like a tortoise chasing a hare, they eventually got to the finish line.

“That…” Rarity gasped. “That stallion scammed me!”

“Yes, it’s terrible when you can’t trust a criminal,” Diana agreed. Rarity gave her a look that would have made a foal run in terror, but it washed over Diana like water. “You were warned and went looking anyway. You’re upset you were fooled but you should be blaming yourself. Don’t think of it was being tricked, think of it as spending bits to learn a lesson.”

Rarity huffed and sat down heavily on the sand. Diana was right, which was unfair because it didn’t feel like her fault.

“I didn’t fall for some simple trick,” Rarity mumbled to herself. She went back through the events. There was a haze over them, of the type that usually only accompanied weddings, holidays, and wednesdays. Like she’d been drunk.

It would be one thing if he’d tricked her with some razzle-dazzle false gemstone that seemed real in low and indirect light. She’d forgive herself if it had been something that seemed familiar but wasn’t once she’d looked twice. Perhaps if it had belonged to a very famous pony who surely wouldn’t miss it, she’d even be tempted enough to take something that didn’t belong to her.

No matter what, though, she would never throw money at something without even trying to haggle. That was half the fun of shopping, and buying from a mysterious merchant in a back alleyway? Rarity knew better than to take the first offer! If he’d asked for two hundred she could have talked him down to twenty and both of them would still feel happy about the deal.

“Weddings… of course!” Rarity gasped and shot to her hooves. “That stallion must have used some kind of mind-control magic on me! I’ve seen it before!”

Diana took off her sunglasses, clearly more interested now. She raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yes!” Rarity started pacing. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. There was this feeling, like I knew the cheese from somewhere. It wasn’t some silly story that I bought at face value. He somehow made me feel like that!”

For a moment, Rarity feared that Diana’s opinion of her was low enough that she might doubt the explanation. The taller mare obviously didn’t think much of anything anypony around them was doing. Rarity stopped when Diana’s hoof touched her shoulder.

“You’re right,” Diana said. “I’m sorry. You’re no foal being tricked out of her lunch money. We’ll go together and find this stallion of yours.”

“Are you sure you can take a break from your sunbathing?” Rarity asked.

“There are other suns,” Diana assured her. “I can’t let a friend be a victim and do nothing when they ask for help.”

She squeezed Rarity’s shoulder a little tighter in support.

“He was here?” Diana asked, once they’d reached the alleyway.

“Yes, but it was a cart,” Rarity said. “I’m sure once he used his spell and took my bits, he was smart enough to leave before it could wear off.”

Diana nodded. This alleyway had escaped whatever public servants kept most of the city spotless. Sandy mud collected in the low spots between cobblestones, and there were tracks on the ground that showed where the cart had been, protected enough by the walls of the buildings framing the alleyway that the sea breeze hadn’t erased them quite yet.

“I doubt it’s the first time he used the same trick,” Diana said. “This kind of preparation means he knew what he was doing.” She looked over her shoulder at Rarity. “A professional criminal, instead of a crime of passion.”

“And now he’s long-gone,” Rarity sighed. “We’ll never find him.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Diana said. “His scam relies on finding ponies who are looking for memories. That means he can’t stray too far from the places tourists might gather. And there’s something else -- his hoofprints are here. Look between the lines of the cart wheels.”

“Can we follow him?” Rarity asked, excited.

“We have some idea on where he went, and the ruts for the wheels are quite deep. It must be a heavy load, and he’s no earth pony.” Diana narrowed her gaze, walking slowly and looking at the tracks. “No earth pony at all.”

“What is it?” Rarity asked. She looked at what Diana was examining. The average pony might have missed the details, but Rarity didn’t. “Oh!” She understood immediately. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I believe so,” Diana agreed. “Now we just need bait. We’ll catch more insects with honey than vinegar.”

Rarity could have corrected her. She’d used the same metaphor in front of a certain pony who was too well-read to recognize a metaphor and not point out a tiny flaw in it -- flies actually preferred vinegar to honey. However, unlike that pony, Rarity wasn’t the type to split hairs when a friend was helping her.

“I certainly can’t be the bait,” Rarity said. “He’ll be looking for me.”

“You’ll have to help me pick out an outfit,” Diana said.

“Darling, I’d love to.”

Diana looked like a rich heiress, or at least that was the intent Rarity was aiming for with her outfit choice That meant a sleeveless dress, sunglasses several sizes larger than the ones she had been wearing, and slightly too many bangles and necklaces along with a tiny handbag too small for any practical use.

Diana was a quiet, polite mare who was too kind to point out that Rarity was spending most of her bits in bits in a bid to get back the ones Rarity had been scammed out of. Instead, she tried to enjoy the role, swinging her hips more when she walked, posing dramatically, looking inconvenienced at every tiny delay.

She looked and felt like an unbearable, overbearing mare who’d never heard the word ‘no’ in her life and didn’t think a pony with a real job was actually a person. A pony with more money than common sense. A pony who couldn’t tell gold from polished brass. It made her the perfect mark for scammers.

Rarity trailed her at a distance, staying back far enough that they didn’t seem to be together. For her own disguise, she’d found the perfect way to become invisible. She wore an apron and carried a broom. Most of the ponies in the street were the kind of people Diana was pretending to be, and their eyes slid past anypony who might be doing manual labor.

Whenever Diana stopped and gave predators in the crowd a chance to pick up her scene, Rarity paused and started sweeping the street. There wasn’t much there to sweep, but it was a beach city. There was always a tiny bit of sand she could push around with the broom. It was more than enough to discourage conversation or comment.

From her vantage point a block away, Rarity watched Diana turn around and start speaking to somepony just off the street. They exchanged a few words, and then Diana stepped into an alleyway, following them away from the bustling crowd.

Rarity gasped. This was it.

“Here!” Rarity pushed the broom into a passing stallion’s hands. He looked confused, saw her determined expression, and started sweeping with urgency inspired by fear. Rarity ran after Diana, chasing her into the alleyway. They’d just gotten to a very familiar cart when Rarity caught up to them.

The masked pony looked up. Rarity’s back hoof collided with their chest, tossing them back into the wheel of the cart hard enough to snap a few of the spokes.

“What?” They asked, coughing and not really hurt but definitely stunned. “Who--?”

“Sometimes I’m an aspiring new designer! Other times I’m a shrewd detective! And sometimes I even pretend to be a streetsweeper! Behind all of those disguises is the real me, Rarity!” Rarity’s horn flashed with magic, and she dramatically removed her disguise with a spell meant to help strip models between rounds on the runway. Rarity struck a dramatic pose for effect.

“Oh. You,” the masked pony said, unimpressed.

“So, you thought you could get away with scamming me?” Rarity asked, panting for breath after the jump kick. “I’ll have you know that I’m not so easy to fool!”

“Please, miss, I didn’t mean any harm!” the masked pony held up his hooves. “I needed the money for my sick mother! She’s just so sick and I had to do something to afford her medicine!”

“I didn’t know that,” Rarity said, her exuberance fading in the face of a harsh, cruel reality. Maybe it would be best to just let him go. Her bits were worth more to him than to her, and she could always go and get more if she really needed them. Wasn’t the health of a mother worth more than any amount of--

“Rarity,” Diana warned, clearing her throat. “Mind control magic.”

Rarity looked down at the masked pony. A lime-green glow was coming from inside the hood of his long coat. He gave her what had to be a sheepish smile. “It was worth a shot.”

Diana helped Rarity pick them up, holding them still while Rarity removed the mask the pony was wearing. Rarity’s own face stared back at her, sneering.

“None of that,” Diana warned, shaking the pony by the scruff of the neck. Rarity’s face vanished in a flash of green, ghostly flames that produced no heat, and the real monster behind the whole scam showed itself for the first time.

A terrible, horrific mockery of a pony was revealed, with chitinous plates instead of smooth fur, glowing blank eyes, and a sour disposition about being found out that was entirely understandable.

“I knew it,” Rarity huffed. “A changeling!”

“Alright, alright, you got me,” the bug pony buzzed. “It’s not illegal to be a changeling!”

“No, but it is illegal to defraud ponies,” Diana said. “You’ve been using your magic to weaken their wills and deceive them. Let me guess, you change your apparent identity every few days to throw off anypony looking for the mare or stallion who took their bits?”

“It’s a living,” the changeling said with a shrug. “It’s not hurting anypony! I just get them alone in an alleyway and show them my junk, then use a little special magic to make sure they have a good experience.”

“Did you have to phrase it like that?” Rarity looked disgusted.

“Absolutely.”

“We’ll have to turn him over to the local authorities,” Diana said. “I’m sure they have ways of dealing with ponies like this.”

“There’s no need for that!” The changeling tried to wiggle out of DIana’s grip, then turned into a snake, a rock, and a tiny cute foal when attempts to actually escape failed and it was time to lean into sympathy. “Couldn’t we come to some kind of arrangement?” the adorable foal asked, sniffling and on the verge of tears. “I’ll give you back your bits! I’ll even let you have some of my really good stuff!”

“We’ll take the bits back,” Rarity said. “But these things don’t belong to us.”

The changeling switched back to normal and grabbed a jangling bag from inside his coat. Rarity took it and opened it, then scowled wordlessly.

“Oh, that was my bag of bottlecaps, sorry,” the changeling said. “You’d be surprised by what a vintage cap can be worth to a collector!”

“I’m not a collector,” Rarity said sharply.

“Right, of course not, you’re a very practical pony,” the changeling produced a second, identical bag. Rarity checked this one again, then when it appeared to be full of bits she bit into one lightly to ensure it wasn’t something silly like a bag of chocolate novelty coins.

It seemed real enough, and she nodded to Diana.

“So we’re square, right?” the changeling said. “You can keep the bottlecaps as an extra for putting you through a bit of trouble over your, uh, bits.” It laughed a little at its joke. “I’m very sorry and I’ll never do it again, so we’ll part ways as friends, yeah? Ponies love friends!”

“Aw cheese,” the changeling grumbled, as a broad-chested stallion hoofcuffed him. He clearly tried to change shape to slip out of them, but the cuffs sparked and he snapped back to shape without even managing to put a smile on his face.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” the chief of the beach police said. Rarity couldn’t stop looking at his mane. It was up in a shape not entirely like an airship parked on his head, a stiff swirl of hair that extended almost to the tip of his snout. He wore the same uniform as all the beach ponies, mirrored sunglasses and a tight pair of red shorts. Despite being several blocks from the nearest water deeper than a kitchen sink, all of them carried life preservers.

“Somepony had to do something,” Rarity said. “I’m glad I could assist you with your investigation.”

“What will be done with the cart?” Diana asked, posing a question that had also been on Rarity’s mind. “I assume despite being junk, those are still memories somepony might be looking for?”

“It’s impossible to say,” the beach policepony sighed. “Not everything is a real memory. If you lose a receipt from your spa session, it won’t turn into a memory and wash up on shore. You’ve probably got plenty of stuff that just doesn’t matter all that much to you.”

“True,” Rarity conceded.

“The only one who might be able to tell would be the Prince, but…” the policepony sighed.

“The Prince?” Rarity’s eyebrows shot right up at the word. More than that, she could sense it. A tragic backstory. Royalty she’d never heard of before. Even better than that, Royalty of the stallion sort, which was sometimes easier to fantasize about when she wanted to imagine being swept off her hooves, though she wouldn’t have said no if the right Princess had made an attempt.

“The ‘but’ at the end of that sentence is concerning,” Diana noted.

“Is he sealed away with a terrible curse?” Rarity asked, her imagination immediately running to the breezie stories she’d heard as a foal. As a practical and adult mare, that imagination also added additional details a foal wouldn’t worry about, like what type of lip gloss to wear when kissing somepony to awaken them from eternal sleep, and the importance of breath mints in such an occasion to make a good first impression.

“Not exactly,” the officer said, looking less worried and more embarrassed by the line of questioning. “He’s just a bit…” He held up his hoof, clearly struggling for the right word. He went through his limited vocabulary twice and didn’t find anything with the correct flavor. “You know how some ponies are total party animals?”

Rarity scoffed and put a worldly hoof to her chest. The poor stallion thought she was the kind of pony who didn’t get out and about. “Darling, I am very good friends with a pony who I strongly suspect is some sort of eldritch horror made of frosting and party favors. I know party animals.”

The stallion nodded. “Cool. I don’t know what some of those words mean. Anyway, the Prince is like… sort of the opposite of that. He’s, you know.”

“Kind of a drag,” one of the other beach cops suggested.

“Yeah! That’s the word! High-hoof!” The two well-toned, tanned ponies clapped hooves. “Yeah, he’s a drag, so nopony really hangs out with him much and he doesn’t do anything except sort of sit on the beach over near Rockdive Cliff.”

“I see,” Rarity tapped her hoof on her chin. “Is there some special way ponies need to approach him? A gift I should bring, perhaps?”

“I donno what would make him happy. I’ve never seen him happy. I don’t think anypony has.”

“I should warn you, Miss Rarity,” Diana said, as they walked towards Rockdive Cliff. The way was well-marked, though few ponies seemed to follow it. It seemed odd to Rarity. How could ponies resist the urge to see a member of the Royalty? Certainly, it was possible that the locals had grown calloused to his presence, much in the way that Princess Celestia was something of a fixture and mother figure rather than an object of worship.

“Warn me about what?” Rarity asked. “I hope you aren’t going to reveal that the Prince is some long-lost relative.”

Diana chuckled a little at that, clearly more at some private joke than the actual humor in what Rarity had said. “No. But you need to be aware of what it means to create a Realm.”

“You think this Prince created this whole Realm?” Rarity asked.

“He did.” Diana seemed absolutely sure. “Every Realm is… how to explain it? It’s like a soul turned inside-out. A genus loci in reverse. Imagine if you were so powerful that your dreams lingered even when you were awake, and that’s what a Realm is like.”

“That’s evocative and poetic, but this doesn’t seem like a dream.” Rarity could feel the road under her hooves and smell the salt in the sea breeze. They’d eaten food and had drinks and those were certainly real enough to sustain them.

“A dream never does, while you’re in it,” Diana noted.

“Princess Luna and Celestia didn’t create the sun and moon,” Rarity pointed out.

“No. Equestria’s origins are lost to time. From what I understand, Discord’s invasion of the world unbound it. One could say that the Princesses inherited it. They’re also among the most approachable and… mortal of their kind.”

“You’ve met other alicorns?”

“It’s wise to study where you’ll go before you set off on a long journey,” Diana said. Rarity couldn’t tell how much the mare really knew. Was she being deliberately mysterious, or was it an act to cover up supposition and second-hoof hearsay?

“Very well, keep your secrets,” Rarity sighed.

The path up to the cliffs had an odd feeling to it. The whole time they’d been in the tropical paradise, it had felt like a perfect summer day, not too hot, not too humid. It was a perfect vacation spot, even without the draw of the memories that collected on the beaches.

The cliffs were different. The path gradually became steeper and less accommodating. Side paths and distractions and turnbacks tempted them on their way up, and the ground even felt harder and more treacherous. Overhead the sky darkened, clouds gathering but not quite raining, just hanging on that very precipice of precipitation, with the occasional phantom drop of rain just light enough that Rarity wasn’t sure if it was starting to rain or not.

The colors became gloomy, gardens turned into scraggly scrub brush and ugly rocks. Everything in the world was trying to tell them to go back, find something else to do, leave the pony at the top of the cliffs alone. Maybe it would have been wise, but Rarity was a pony who was willing to chase after her goals even when the path was difficult.

As if the realm itself decided they weren’t going to turn back, Rarity found herself at the top of the cliffs, and sitting on the other side of the plateau of nearly-bare rock was a being that should have been seated on a throne.

The alicorn prince was grey, but not a healthy off-white, the grey that came when something was so aged and sun-bleached that every possible color had washed out of it and left only faded nothing behind.

“We could still leave,” Diana said quietly. “I’m not sure he wants visitors.”

“You’re already here,” the alicorn Prince said. His voice was deep and resonant, seeming far more alive than the rest of him. He turned back to look at the two mares. He had the long, thin look Celestia might have if she was put off cake for a few centuries, and still appeared in the prime of his youth, perhaps even younger-seeming than Rarity despite obviously being so old the word ‘age’ scarcely seemed to have enough depth. “You might as well tell me your business.”

He motioned with a wing for them to join him at the edge of the cliff. Rarity stepped over carefully, but it was sturdy and safe and the Prince made no sudden motion to scare her. Diana stayed back, watching them.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you,” Rarity said.

“It’s fine,” the Prince said. He wasn’t upset. He was just exhausted, emotionally drained until he couldn’t be upset at an interruption. “I can tell you have important business. Something more important than your own desires.”

Rarity nodded. “Oh, I’m doing all this out of order. I should introduce myself. My name is Rarity. I came here from a far-away land. You have a beautiful Realm.”

“Thank you,” the stallion said, his voice quieting slightly. He seemed almost embarrassed by the compliment, or perhaps ashamed somehow. Rarity thought she could understand it. She’d poured her own soul into her work on many occasions, and even positive feedback could feel like baring oneself to another. “Please, call me Anse.”

“Thank you, Prince Anse--”

“Just Anse,” he corrected. “I’m not your ruler. I’m not even really the ruler of the ponies here.”

“If that’s what you want,” Rarity said, pleased and trying not to show it. A member of the Royalty was letting her be so familiar! And so soon after meeting him! Clearly her dignity and charm was winning him over. He smiled but seemed pained a bit by what she said, as if she was far off the mark and he was too polite to mention it.

“What did you need from me?” he asked.

“I’m sure you’re aware that this island is a place where momentos wash up on shore in an impossible way,” Rarity said. Anse nodded, so she continued. “Some ponies have been taking things that don’t belong to them, and I want to find a way to somehow ensure the memories they took go to the ponies that need them.”

“Oh. I see,” Anse said, looking down. “It’s not the first time ponies have done this. You should cast them into the sea.”

“Just… throw them into the water?” Rarity asked, confused.

Anse nodded. “As far from shore as possible. It’s best if you can only barely see the isle. You can never sail so far it leaves the horizon, but you can get close. They’ll wash up again, eventually.”

“I… I see. But--”

“If two things are destined to come together, they will, and nothing can keep them apart. Even if you locked those memories in a locked chest and buried them under a mountain, they want to find their owner. That’s how memories can be. It’s how I want them to be.”

Rarity watched his expression. There was pain there, or the ghost of it. Hurt so old it stopped being a real ache and just became part of a pony.

“You want to know how this place came to be,” he said, not looking at her. He gazed out over the ocean.

“I admit I’m curious, but I wasn’t going to press if it’s a painful subject.”

The corner of his mouth twitched up. “All true experiences are a bit painful, I think. Things that are too easy never seem important, do they? The things that are there every day, the ones you rely on… they slip away.”

Rarity swallowed. The Prince touched his chest with a hoof, holding it over his heart. It was the gesture of a pony who was missing something nameless.

“When I was a mortal, before I became this, I had a lover. She was my world. I made her my queen, and we ruled a kingdom. Not here, somewhere far off. It was a bigger world, but all I needed was at my side. We grew old together. Or, really…”

“She grew old, and you didn’t.”

“I got taller!” Anse laughed, then shook his head. “So I changed too, but not like she did. We spent decades together. Then it was over, and I spent centuries mourning her. And one day, I realized I couldn’t remember her name, or her face, or the sound of her voice. I remembered only the feeling of her hoof in mine. The only thing left were memories of how I used to feel, unanchored and ghostly. I spent thousands of years trying to remember her, fighting to keep my grip on what little I had. I left everything else behind and tried to find traces of her. Echoes left in the world. Eventually… all of this.”

“How did it happen?” Rarity asked. “Creating this Realm, I mean.”

“It formed around me and inside me. Your world has pearls, yes? It’s a bit like that. This land formed inside me, crystallizing around a tiny kernel of desire to remember. One day, I lost my attachments to the old world, and I woke up in this place.”

“And because of your desires, it collects memories,” Rarity said.

He nodded. “Yes. Some day, maybe it will even find the ones I want. Until then, other ponies come here, live here, and some even make new memories.” He smiled. “I think it’s helped a few others come to terms with their past.”

“It has,” Rarity assured him.

Anse started to stand, then abandoned the effort, not for lack of ability but merely desire. “Thank you for listening,” he said. “It’s good to tell my own story from time to time. If even a fragment of my love lives on in others… it means I’m not the only pony to remember them.”

Rarity reached for his hoof, but stopped herself before she did anything untoward. He was still in terrible mourning, not for a real pony but the idea of one. It would have been the greatest hubris to do anything to come between them in even the slightest way. Even just as a friend.

“I’ll take me leave,” Rarity said. “And I won’t forget what you told me.”

Rarity stood up and bowed, walking away. It felt like a dismissal. More than that. It felt like the moment she left his sight, he’d forget her. Not out of malice, just because he only had room in his mind for a single mare, and all the pieces around the empty space where she should have been.

“So that’s the only memory you found?” Diana asked. Rarity held tightly onto the balloon. Despite being pristine when it came out of the sand, it was starting to deflate in the way a cheap bit of rubber would.

“It’s more than enough,” Rarity said. “It’s proof that even something I only loved for a short moment loved me back.”

“It’s already mostly deflated,” Diana pointed out.

“Nothing lasts forever. That’s why we have to value what we have while we have it.” She stepped onto the train, tugging the balloon along with her, the toy following like an obedient, elderly pet

Sixth Stop: Day At The Office

“License and registration,” the pony said again.

“I don’t have either,” Rarity said, also again. They’d gone around in circles for what must have been half an hour. She was seated in front of a pony in a small booth and apparently an even smaller number of words in her vocabulary. As soon as they’d arrived in the station, they’d been herded into something that was either customs or inmate processing.

Rarity hoped Diana was having better luck than she was.

“I’ll try to explain this again,” Rarity said. “We aren’t from this Realm. Whatever local paperwork you have, we don’t have copies of it. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have and perhaps you can call a manager or supervisor or somepony with more authority to make decisions, hm?”

The pony adjusted her glasses. Her expression didn’t change from the annoyed, flat look of a retail worker at the tail end of a day a dozen hours too long. She was chewing gum that must have long ago lost its flavor, because Rarity had to assume if there was any joy at all in the pony’s world they wouldn’t be quite so obtuse.

“I went on this journey to find out how to become an alicorn, and since I am not immortal yet you are wasting my time,” Rarity said, starting to feel testy. “Please, get me a supervisor!”

“You can’t speak to the supervisors without going to the office,” the customs officer explained. “They only take walk-in appointments at the office.”

“I’d be happy to go see them at their office,” Rarity sighed. This was starting to go in a familiar direction already, like she was walking in a rut that had gotten knee-high.

“The office is through customs. You can’t pass through customs without filling out the customs inlet form,” the mare said. She held up the clipboard, tapping it with her pen.

“I understand that,” Rarity said.

“I need your license and registration to fill it out,” she concluded, sounding triumphant. It was clear the mare thought that she was not only being extremely helpful but that she thought Rarity was slow and needed things explained several times in the same way just to understand how to stand in a queue.

“There must be some other process,” Rarity said. She wasn’t a foolish mare. She’d met all sorts of ponies before, and was starting to suspect there might be a faster way to get through this. It wasn’t her first option - in truth this was somewhat uncouth - but it might be the path forward.

She reached into her saddlebags and fished out a few bits, sliding them onto the counter in front of the pony.

“Ma’am, are you attempting to bribe me?” the customs officer asked.

“Perhaps we could instead call it a fee for expediting my request?” Rarity asked.

The mare looked down at the bits, counting them. “This is only twenty-four bits. The standard bribe for a customs officer is thirty-two.”

“Oh, my apologies, I miscounted.” Rarity put another ten bits on the desk. The mare slid two back.

“Thank you for your patronage,” the officer said, producing a stamp and slamming it down on the paperwork. “Let me get you a receipt.”

“I thought you’d get through customs faster than I would,” Rarity admitted, an hour later when Diana finally joined her outside the platform. Diana looked particularly annoyed by something. She huffed and sat down heavily on the bench next to Rarity and then yelped and immediately stood.

“The bench--!” Diana growled.

“Shocked you,” Rarity said. “It got me, too. You can’t sit down unless you buy something from one of the vendors.” She held up a small can of some soft drink. She couldn’t read the can, but it tasted like the color blue and buying it had given her a place to sit while she waited.

“I think I’ve already developed a dislike for this world. Our tickets should have been enough to serve as a passport.”

“If we’re going to do anything in this Realm we’re going to need paperwork of some kind,” Rarity said. “I suggest before we even try the hotel we correct that.”

Diana nodded.

The city reminded Rarity of Manehattan. The streets were a perfect grid, numbered instead of named. Ponies moved like they were on rails, keeping to the right and never stopping or getting in each other’s way. Uniformed stallions and mares stood in every intersection, watching the crowds with impassive dedication to order.

“They seem like the obvious ones to ask for directions,” Rarity said. “Excuse me, sir?”

She waved to attract the attention of one of the uniformed stallions. It was an impressive uniform, to be certain. It struck her as being midway between a knight and police officer, armored but with a badge, tie, and a billy club instead of a sword.

“Can I help you citizen?” he asked.

“Ah, yes,” Rarity said. “I apologize, but my friend and I are new in town and we need to get our paperwork renewed. Could I trouble you to assist me with directions to the nearest office where we could get that taken care of?”

“You don’t have any paperwork?” the stallion frowned, and with half his face hidden with sunglasses it was difficult for Rarity to tell if he was angry or concerned. “That’s a very serious matter. You realize that if you were stopped and asked for your identification you’d be looking at fines and possible imprisonment?”

“That’s why we want to make things right as quickly as possible,” Rarity assured him. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Good. I like it when ponies avoid trouble.” The stallion reached back and pulled a small notebook from his belt. “I’m writing you directions to the office. This is also an official notice of warning. If you go directly to this address and get your identification, all you’ll get is the warning. If you get stopped, show the officer this and let them know what’s going on.”

“Thank you so much,” Rarity sighed with relief.

“And if you don’t get it taken care of by the end of the day, the warning will be on file and you’ll get three years in the cubes instead of a fine. Understood?” He scribbled notes in the notebook and tore off the top sheet, separating two extra carbon copies.

“Ah, yes sir,” Rarity said, less relieved. She wasn’t sure what the cubes were, but they certainly didn’t sound good. She took her copy of the warning and backed away quickly, running back to Diana. “How long do we have to stay here?” Rarity hissed through her teeth.

“Two days, plus a few hours,” Diana said. “Three years might make you late for the train.”

“I’m sure it won’t come to that. The ponies here care about the rules. I’m sure as long as we cooperate and do our best, things will work out.”

“This is the worst!” Rarity sobbed. She was inconsolable. Of all the things that could have happened, this was absolutely the most humiliating, awful thing. She collapsed in the lobby seat next to Diana. These didn’t shock them on sitting down, but there was a sign above them that started counting down and telling them how long they were allowed to remain seated before they’d be considered to be loitering.

“A bad photo on your ID card is the worst thing that ever happened to you?” Diana asked. She held up Rarity’s card. It was still warm from being laminated. It had taken almost an hour to get the license made. Not because it was a long process - they were happy to issue them licenses once the fees were paid.

It had taken almost an hour for them to wait in line to fill out one form, then a line for payment, then a line for the photo, and then try to get Rarity to take a picture without smiling or making a sultry look or acting for the camera at all.

“I look like a potato!” Rarity wailed.

Diana raised an eyebrow. “The most attractive potato in the patch, I promise.”

“That’s not terribly reassuring, Diana,” Rarity huffed. She took her ID card back and put it away before anypony else could see. At least they hadn’t forced her to remove what little makeup she had. That would have been beyond the pale. “It’s silly! How is anypony supposed to recognize me when the photograph on my identification looks like a totally different pony? A lady lives and dies by her smile!”

“Two days from now you can put it in the bottom of your luggage and never look at it again,” Diana assured her. “Mine isn’t much better.”

“Well, I suppose it might be the fault of the photographer,” Rarity said, feeling a little better now that she had company in her misery. “If they couldn’t get attractive pictures of either of us, it can’t be our fault.”

“Certainly not your fault,” agreed a third pony who Rarity was sure hadn’t been there a few moments ago. He was wearing a very precisely tailored suit with pins that were positioned and affixed with the importance and dignity of rank markings on a military uniform. If there had ever been a pony who could be described entirely using a ruler and square angle, it was him. Even his mane was cut at perfect angles.

“Can I help you?” Rarity asked. She glanced above her seat to make sure they weren’t straying beyond the time limit.

“I think we can help each other,” he said. He held out a hoof to shake. “I’m Factol Mil. I’ve been hearing a lot about you.”

Rarity looked at Diana, then carefully shook his hoof. Mil was clearly aware of her hesitation but chose not to acknowledge it.

“You know, it caused a little bit of alarm when ponies came through here claiming they arrived on the Aether Express. That’s a train that’s not supposed to even exist, and yet here it is, as big as life and with none of the permits or permissions it should have. Obviously that’s not your fault at all but we can’t even figure out how it got to our station and we’d love some answers about that and some other things.”

“It’s starting to sound like you want to interrogate us,” Rarity pointed out.

“No! I’m not a Judge!” he laughed. “I’m just a curious pony who works in weights and measurements. Very important branch of the government, as you know. If things aren’t standardized and measured, nopony would be able to get anything done. Like trains! Couldn’t make the trains run on time if the rails were all made differently or clocks disagreed on the length of a second!”

Rarity nodded. It was true enough. She’d traveled practically from one side of Equestria to the other and standardization was still a stumbling block. There were amazing inventions and ideas that never got further than a genus stallion or mare’s hometown because of it.

“I just want to ask a few questions about you and where you come from, say… over dinner?” he offered. “And as a show of good faith, what if we start by getting you a better photo for that ID?”

“You can do that?” Rarity asked.

“Of course. I have a little pull with the ponies around here. I once even got them to allow a pony to wear a hat on his ID! He didn’t want ponies to know he was going bald. Never took the hat off anyway so it seemed fair enough to me. You seem like the kind of mare who always looks her best, so your ID should match that, right?”

“You’re absolutely right!” Rarity agreed. She stood up. “I’d be happy to help you fill in the gaps in your reports. I assume this is all for some sort of report, that is.”

“Everything ends up on a report eventually,” Factol Mil said. “Otherwise, why would we have them?”

“The way we do things here is purely based on logic and rules,” Mil said. They’d gone to a small restaurant after Rarity had a new photo taken for her ID and they’d been immediately seated. She’d expected it to be sort of soulless and mechanical, but it was actually a charming place. “Like this restaurant. There are certificates in the window that show it’s been inspected, that it has a license to operate, and a few details about average menu price and meal length for those who need a little more information to decide where they’re going to eat.”

The meal had been interesting. Rarity couldn’t read the menu, but Factol Mils had been happy to order for them, and they’d ended up with soup and sandwiches. Rarity couldn’t identify the multicolored greens in the salad, but the fried cheese patty in the sandwich had been a surprise along with the spicy sauce on it.

“That’s not so different from home,” Rarity said. “Of course it’s not as tightly controlled as your realm here.”

He nodded. “And you said you just rode the train here? Any idea how it actually arrived on the tracks? We’ve got an automatic tracking system for safety, designed to detect the passage of trains on the system. Apparently your Aether Express just appeared out of nowhere between two sensors, and that shouldn’t have been possible.”

“The Express moves between worlds,” Diana said. “You should ask the Conductor for the details, but from what I understand, the magic of the train makes rails in different realms overlap. So it rides one set, then for a time it rides in two worlds at once, and then when the overlap ends, it is in another realm.”

“Interesting,” Factol Mil said. He took a sip of the foaming cider in his glass. “I’d love to know how it all works. Even here, there are two standard rail gauges. Does the train only go to worlds where the rails are compatible? Does it change itself to fit the rails in each world?”

“That, I’m not sure,” Diana said.

“It has to run on some kind of rules,” Mil said. “Everything does. If you know all the rules, you have power over anything governed by them.”

“Not everything runs on rules,” Rarity corrected. “Magic is unpredictable.”

Mils shook his head in disagreement. “Magic has more rules than anything else! That’s why there are whole libraries about how to properly cast spells. If you follow a spellbook exactly, you get the same effect every time.”

“He’s right,” Diana agreed. “But there are things that are truly unpredictable. Ponies.”

Mils shrugged. “Yes and no. There are statistics and trends and if you know a particular pony well enough you can guess what they’ll do, but you’re broadly right. It’s like magic, not impossible but with too many hidden variables.”

“But if you knew all the rules you could make a pony do anything?” Diana guessed.

“You might end up breaking them, but in theory,” Mils shrugged. “If you really wanted to make them do something, you might have to isolate them to remove all the variables, break them down a little at a time. Get them to trust you. It’d be deeply unethical. Anyway, there was something else I wanted to ask.”

“Please, ask away,” Rarity said. “You’ve been so kind to us.”

He smiled. “Tell me about alicorns.”

Rarity blinked. “Alicorns?”

“You mentioned to the pony who let you through customs that you were on a journey to become an alicorn. Immortality. Now that’s something I’d really like to get details on.”

“So would I,” Rarity sighed. “Nopony seems to know much, not even the alicorns themselves!”

“You must have some in this realm if you understand the term,” Diana pointed out. “Why don’t you ask them?”

“I have. The details of their ascent are state secrets.” He shrugged. “I spent a year filling out forms and writing requests and eventually got a hoof-written letter. They kindly informed me that additional alicorns could be destabilizing and that my interest was noted but my expertise was needed in my station.”

“I’m sorry,” Rarity said. He seemed almost more amused by it than sad, but she understood the frustration of hitting a dead end pursuing one’s dreams.

“Why do you want to become an alicorn?” Diana asked. “Power? Prestige?”

“Both would be lovely,” he agreed. “It started with curiosity. Now it’s just because I don’t like being told no.” He smiled. “The truth is I’ve already got plenty of power and prestige. I keep my grip on it by not telling anypony else all my secrets, and I have to assume the Empresses are like that too.”

“Empresses, hm?” Diana asked. “I suppose it’s an appropriate title.”

“Is it?” Rarity asked. “Princess Cadance refused that title when she was given stewardship of the Crystal Empire. She said, and I agree with her reasoning, that it’s a touch sinister.”

“They’re not like that,” Factol Mils said. He sighed and glanced out the window. There was a tall spire visible even from here, reaching up and past the clouds, impossibly slim for its seemingly infinite height. “When I was young, I was in love with them. Maybe I still am.”

He turned back to Rarity.

“I didn’t think the Aether Express was really real. A lot of my colleagues are trying to ignore that you even exist, which is why I’m not so worried about talking to you.” He took a breath. “And I know about the rumor. That at the end of the line on the Aether Express, there’s a way to become an alicorn.”

“Somewhere,” Diana agreed.

“That’s why I had to speak to you in person. I needed to know if it was worth it. Giving up your life and everything you had to go on a quest.” He looked pained, then reached into his carefully pressed suit and produced a wallet. It was old and faded, but when he opened it there was something shining silver inside it.

“You have a ticket,” Diana said.

“I spent a small fortune getting it,” Mils confirmed. “Then I spent years waiting for my chance to take the train and I wondered if it was even real. But in that time… well, I spent a small fortune but I earned a much larger one.”

“It would have been easy to make the decision before,” Diana said. “And now you have, as you mentioned, power and prestige.”

“Quite a bit of both,” he confirmed. “I’d have to give it all up. You can’t take it with you, as they say. Do you regret leaving your old lives behind?”

Diana closed her dark eyes. “No.”

“It’s complicated,” Rarity said. “I suppose my situation was a bit like yours. I didn’t have much time to decide. It took quite some time before I even found a way to send a letter home to let ponies know where I’d gone! They must be so worried about me…”

Factol Mils chuckled. “That, at least, is one thing I don’t have over my head. My secretary might have to break in a new supervisor, but she’s done it before.”

“If you want my advice, I think you already know your answer,” Rarity said. “One of the legends of the Aether Express is that it arrives only once in a pony’s lifetime. It’s here, and you have a ticket. I think it’s destiny. That’s also why I knew I had to leave.”

She sat back in her chair, thinking of some of the worlds she’d seen on the tip already.

“If you simply stay in one place and do your single job well, you’ll never become an alicorn. I’ve started to think a pony can only ascend by pushing themselves to their limits. Not just facing down challenges of the kind they’re already comfortable with, but going outside of their comfort zone.”

Diana nodded. “Well said.”

“I admit, I am very comfortable where I am,” the Factol said. “Part of me thought about selling this ticket over the years, but I always kept it somewhere safe. Now I’m worried if I’m the right pony to have it.”

“If you have the ticket, it means you can be the right pony,” Diana said. “The tickets only seem to appear where they’re needed, passing from hoof to hoof. If you refuse the call, it will go to somepony else eventually. After all, you’ll know it’s useless to you, since the Express will never appear before you again.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Mils said quietly. He downed the rest of his drink. “Thank you again for meeting with me. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll make sure your bill is paid, and if you want to have a few extra drinks, it’s on my tab.”

He stood up, putting the ticket away in his coat pocket and producing something else.

“Oh, and take these.”

He put two yellow slips on the table.

“What are these?” Rarity asked.

“In case you do have those extra drinks, this is a pass so the Judges won’t have you arrested for public intoxication,” Mils explained, amused. “We take the rules seriously around here, remember?”

Rarity didn’t see Factol Mils again until the Aether Express was almost ready to leave. In truth, the realm was dull and there was little to do in the time they had to them - almost everything had some waiting period or queue attached to it. Every purchase came with a detailed receipt and even tax forms began to make appearances.

She’d given up on doing more than window shopping when she learned that even hats couldn’t be purchased off the rack because various laws had been created in the distant past about properly fitted clothing for safety reasons.

They ended up on the train platform, with what little they’d brought with them, repacking their saddlebags after going through customs. They’d been given a detailed search just in case they managed to make it to the next platform on the line instead of traveling to another Realm. They’d also been given extra forms to give to the next customs agents they saw in the hope of creating inter-dimensional trade law.

That last part had been explained to Rarity with the glittering, hope-filled expression of a pony who was seeing their greatest dream come to life.

“Can you believe that mare didn’t believe that I was perfectly capable of adjusting my own hemlines?” Rarity huffed. “What kind of society makes laws about skirts having a minimum length?”

“I saw the way you looked at her,” Diana scolded her. “The moment she said they had to be no more than an inch above the knee, you were already making plans for a hem lying halfway up your thigh.”

“It would have been my right as a free pony!” Rarity huffed. “Fashion is about being daring and taking chances and standing out!”

She stopped and grabbed Diana’s cloak, giving her an intense, almost burning look of fashion passion.

“Can you picture it, darling? I could be the first pony in this realm to wear a miniskirt! I’d be a legend, Diana! A legend!”

“I’d have loved to see it, though I think you’d get arrested in the process.” Factol Mils said. He waved from where he stood, waiting next to the Aether Express.

“I wasn’t sure we would see you again,” Diana noted.

“I wasn’t sure either,” Mils said, with a smile. “I had to do a lot of thinking, and I do my best thinking when I’m brushing up on codes and regulations. There’s nothing quite as meditative as a book that is absolutely, perfectly clear about the way the world should be and the best way to fix things when the world fails to live up to the ideal.”

“That sounds… riveting,” Rarity said.

Mils laughed. “You know, rivets were actually part of the volume! It was all railway regulations, steam boilers and rails and the like. I was reading it for obvious reasons. I’d never really thought about it before. Tested on it once in school, then never used it again. That’s the whole reason we have reference books.”

“Were you thinking of writing the Aether Express a citation for improper design?” Rarity asked.

“No, no. I’m sure I could come up with a good excuse for it if I had to. Not registered with our nation, so it isn’t subject to our laws, that sort of thing.” He waved a hoof. “No, what struck me was something else. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

“Conductor?” Diana called out.

“Fifteen and a half minutes,” the Conductor said. Rarity and Mils both jumped a little. The coal-black pony seemed to appear out of nowhere when Diana called for him.

“Plenty of time,” Diana said.

Mils nodded. He sat down and sighed. “When I was reading those regulations about boiler construction and the design of steam tubes, I realized I didn’t know why most of the rules existed. Why does a steam vessel of a certain size have to be made out of steel, and only steel with a few named grades? Why do the rivets have to be exactly this size, and in this pattern? Why are the rails exactly this distance apart?”

“Your rulebook doesn’t say why?” Diana asked.

“Speaking from experience, there’s usually a reason,” Rarity said. “You wouldn’t want to make a steam engine out of glass. It’s a bit like a dress code in a restaurant, isn’t it? Certainly there are ponies who wouldn’t need a tuxedo to be in style, but by requiring it you can avoid some foppish noble from demanding service while wearing only a rude T-shirt and a bad attitude.”

“You’re almost certainly right,” Mils agreed. “That’s the same conclusion I came to. It’s all about being as safe as possible, even if it means things are overwrought or checked too many times or filed away in a cabinet where nopony will ever look at it again.”

Diana nodded. Rarity felt sorry for Mils. She could see that the understanding was weighing on his shoulders like a great weight, a mass of rules and regulations that he was starting to question the necessity of.

“You can escape it with your ticket,” Diana noted. “But you aren’t going to.”

“I’m not going to,” he agreed, smiling again.

“You wouldn’t have needed to ask about the time otherwise,” Rarity realized. “But why?”

“When I was younger and bought this ticket I didn’t have anything to give up, so it would have been easy for me to leave. Now? I’m in a position where I have control over my destiny. It took me until last night to realize I could try and change things from within. The Empresses told me they didn’t want another immortal upsetting the balance, but I think a regular mortal might still be able to stir up some trouble.”

He chuckled and winked.

“I’m going to stay here because there are ponies like the younger me, who want to make the world better. I’m going to help them grow. The rules shouldn’t chain us, they should help us all work together to build things up.”

Rarity sighed and gave him a sad smile, approaching the stallion and pulling him into a polite hug.

“It would have been a pleasure to travel with you,” she said. “You are a gentlestallion.”

“Oh, that reminds me!” He reached back, producing a paper bag. “Here. I got you a copy of the law volume on railway regulations. I don’t actually expect you to read it, but it might help you think of me from time to time.”

Rarity took the bag and the shockingly heavy book within. It must have had almost two thousand thin pages, like an entire dictionary covering everything from seating arrangements to minimum wages for coal shovelers.

“You’ll want this, too,” Mils said. He opened his wallet and produced his ticket. It shone with pure silver light, perfect and untarnished. “I’ve had this for decades and look at it. Not even a wrinkle.”

Factol Mils shook his head and offered the ticket to Rarity.

“But Darling, I don’t understand.”

“I want you to take this. Not as a gift,” he said, moving it a little when she tried to take it. “I want you to give it to a pony who needs it. If you find a pony who wants to escape or find some bigger universe out there, I want you to make sure they get it.”

Rarity nodded and carefully took the ticket, holding it tightly.

“If you’re sure,” she said quietly.

“I’m sure. Thirty years ago I’d be the right pony for that ticket. Now? It deserves to find its way to the right colt or filly.” He gave Rarity a pat on the shoulder. “I’m sure this is the right thing, because now that it’s out of my hooves I feel relieved it’s gone.”

“I understand,” Diana whispered.

“In return, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me about the pony you end up giving it to if you ever come back to this Realm.” Mils laughed. “I’ll buy the drinks!”

Interlude: A Discussion Between Stops

“What do I know about alicorns?” Rarity asked, raising a delicate eyebrow in carefully calculated disbelief. “I’m on this quest to become one, darling, I know quite a bit.”

“I assumed so,” Diana agreed, nodding with the placid calm of a pool of still water. The tall pony smiled ever-so-slightly. “I was asking for my own education. I only know a few scraps of lore.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, darling. The Royalty is a bit like the weather. Above us and commonly discussed, but rarely in academic terms.”

“Unless one is a pegasus,” Diana noted. Rarity’s train of thought was momentarily derailed. Part of her mind tried to imagine Rainbow Dash defending a doctoral thesis and came up entirely blank, unable to even begin sketching an outline of such a conception.

“No offense meant, but the average pegasus is more… physical and practical than theoretical,” Rarity said with the most careful diplomacy. “Besides, it’s of no matter! I’m sure I can help fill in any gaps in your education, at least as well as any mare from Equestria. I was present at the ascension of an alicorn, after all, something only a few ponies in all of history can say.”

“Yes. That’s actually what made me think. You were present when somepony else ascended - did it not occur to you to use the same method to ascend by yourself?” Diana asked.

“Of course the thought crossed my mind.” Rarity sighed and sat back into the train’s seat. The carriage rumbled under them, hitting a section of slightly rougher track. Rarity glanced outside, seeing nothing. It had been pitch black for some time, as if they were riding through black velvet.

“And?” Diana pressed.

Rarity looked back at the cloaked mare. “It wouldn’t have worked for me, darling. I could feel it. The whole event was tied to cutie mark magic and I could feel it in my bones. My cutie mark was telling me it was Twilight Sparkle’s ascension and nopony else’s.”

“How did it happen? I’ve heard vague stories from newspapers, of course, but you were actually present. I’m sure you have a personal perspective.”

Rarity nodded. “It started with an ancient spell from Star Swirl the Bearded. My friends and I were… well, I’m not sure what to call it. Twilight tried casting an incomplete spell and we were caught up in it.”

Diana nodded, motioning with her hoof to continue.

“It was… something like an enchantment, but a curse is more accurate. Our cutie marks were swapped. I was compelled to take over the life of a weather pony, and one of my oldest friends who is a darling and a hard worker but with the manual dexterity of a clump of mud and a style a hundred years out of date did her best to live my life.”

“Ah.”

“Yes, ah,” Rarity agreed. “And for fixing her own mistake, Twilight Sparkle was made an alicorn. No, that’s wrong.” She sighed again. “She did fix her mistake, by completing the spell and casting it correctly. The Elements of Harmony-- I’m sure you know what those are?”

“I’m very familiar with them,” Diana said quietly.

“Yes. They refer not just to gems but to my friends and I. It’s more of a title than anything else. The Elements hold great power, and they were the focus of the spell, but the magic itself tends to have a life of its own. The completed spell activated the magic through us, and Twilight Sparkle was… truthfully I’m not sure. The magic is primal, and part of me…”

Rarity frowned, furrowing her brow.

“I am very familiar with my friends, darling. I know her measurements to the millimeter. I know the angle of her legs when she stands. The length of her neck. The size of her hooves. These are things that don’t change, not quickly. Some of them don’t even change after a pony has left the most awkward stages of puberty behind. After she came back… she was different.”

“Yes, having wings does that,” Diana agreed.

“Not just that. In smaller ways. Subtle ways. It wasn’t that wings were simply added to her body like a mare trying on a new accessory. There were changes that only somepony familiar with her would notice, and when a mare adds them together, they tell a different story. She didn’t simply gain wings, her whole body was remade. She stands differently. Her hooves are shaped slightly differently. The ratio of her-- well, trust me, darling, there are things a professional tailor notices. She’s not the same mare she was.”

Diana nodded, not looking as shocked as Rarity thought the news deserved to make her. “What does that all mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Rarity admitted. “She acts like the same mare, but…”

“But?”

“But I’d been under a curse immediately before it happened. I thought my destiny was to take care of the weather! I was trying to work out how to make a bespoke thunderstorm! I didn’t even have a client for a thunderstorm, it would have been a terrible waste of material.”

Diana giggled.

Rarity smiled. “My point is, darling, I’m not sure how well I trust my own recall of the events. I was hardly myself in some ways.”

“I see. And what of the spell itself?”

“A part of me is absolutely sure it would only work for Twilight Sparkle, and it was left unfinished just for her, as part of some greater destiny, but… even at the best of times I am hardly an expert at magical matters, darling.”

“Surely she tried casting it again,” Diana prompted.

“After the incomplete casting cursed us?” Rarity scoffed. She rested her chin on her hoof and looked through the window. They were silent for a moment, with Diana watching Rarity’s expression. “I asked,” Rarity eventually said.

“She said no.” Diana said it as a statement, not a guess.

“She wanted to study the spell. And then she met with Princess Celestia, and they talked, and then it wasn’t discussed again. The scroll is locked in some archive.”

“It seems a bit rude to do that.”

“Yes, well. Apparently she fears we’d lose our connection to the Elements of Harmony if we strained it again,” Rarity said bitterly. “I am no fool. I know when a mare says ‘later’ or ‘perhaps’ that they mean to say ‘no’, but without offending the listener. That spell will never be cast again. Not in my lifetime. Perhaps it was even destroyed instead of being locked away.”

“I’m sorry,” Diana said quietly.

“For what?”

“For your friends. If it affected all of you, perhaps it could have been used to help them as well. You’ll never know for certain.”

“I hadn’t even considered that,” Rarity realized. She felt guilty. “Anyway, I have to assume it’s for the best. I do love and trust Twilight. I do! She’s one of my best friends, and it was all set up so perfectly for her.”

“To use you as a tool?”

“She wouldn’t think of it like that.”

“You do.”

“Yes, but I am a spiteful mare sometimes, and jealous and full of envy even though I’m the very spirit of generosity,” Rarity joked. “I am allowed a few bad habits alongside my good ones. The important thing is to know when one’s feelings are best kept tamped down. Envy isn’t a good look on any mare. Anyway, we’re going in circles. The point is, it was a huge magical event. Practically an explosion sending her into another world. I’m still not certain if she was teleported or disintegrated.”

“I see. It reminds me of what happened with Princess Cadance.”

“Ah yes, I remember reading about it,” Rarity nodded. “It was another rather large magical explosion for her, wasn’t it? Some kind of artifact exploding in her face after she saved her family and town from an evil witch.”

“That is my understanding,” Diana agreed. “I wish I’d been there to see it.”

“Perhaps I simply need to find a rather large magical accident and stand in the middle of it,” Rarity sighed. “I’ll either become Royalty or die trying.”

“I’m sure it’s not always like that,” Diana said. “Princess Celestia and Luna were born alicorns, you know.”

“Born alicorns?” Rarity raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. They were part of an entire tribe.”

“But… I never knew there were others. Where are they now?”

“An excellent question,” Diana agreed. “Perhaps we’ll find others from their tribe as we travel. Of course…” She shrugged. “It’s not likely.”

“Why not, darling? I thought most Realms we were likely to visit had some sort of immortal ruler.”

“Because to make a Realm, a pony has to have vision and ambition,” Diana said. “I believe that’s why Celestia and Luna remain in Equestria. They lack that drive.”

“Darling--”

Diana held up a hoof. “You’ve met ponies born into the nobility, Miss Rarity. How many of them were ponies with direction and motivation?”

Rarity saw, very clearly, Prince Blueblood in her mind’s eye. It was easy to encompass his entire self, because it was petty and tiny.

“Not enough of them,” Rarity admitted.

“Without some desire to improve a pony could never ascend, and being born an alicorn… well, Celestia especially doesn’t have any real motivation, does she? She spent a thousand years simply letting things happen. She’d simply go on vacation forever if she could.”

“That’s a bit presumptuous. I didn’t think you knew here, darling.”

“I know enough,” Diana said. “Luna, at least, had some drive. She wanted to surpass her sister. It’s a bit bare as far as desires go, though.”

“Like the moon itself?”

“Perhaps. Empty.”

“Do you think my own motivations are that…” Rarity looked aside, guilty.

Diana sighed. “Rarity, if you weren’t a pony destined to succeed, you wouldn’t be here. This train isn’t for ponies who can’t make use of it.”

“I hope you’re right,” Rarity said.

“Don’t lose sight of what you want, and you will get it,” Diana promised. “Remember that. Even if the journey there is long, there is something at the end. This train always takes ponies on the trip they need, and sometimes the destination isn’t right until they’ve gone the long way around.”