Children of Darkness and Light

Chapters

Prologue
Missing
Aliens
The Guildmaster
Soldiers
The Advisor
Villagers
The Corporal
Memories
Choices
The Pilot
Endings
The Liberator
Beginnings
The Mizuman
Crimes
Lost
The Mage

Prologue

“It all started,” the dragon told the little princess, “with a bet, I guess.”

“A bet?”

“Well, that’s the simplest way to put it. Princess Celestia thought the world should work one way, Princess Twilight thought it should work another, so… they made a bet. If Twilight could make it around the world in eighty-one days, and make diplomatic stops in all the biggest capital cities along the way, Celestia would get rid of leap years. And…”

Spike trailed off, and his eyes fell back to the textbook splayed on his desk. A Brief Introduction to Fluid Dynamics, by Artificer’s Guildmaster Stone Sluice was the title he’d see if he flipped the book closed — in other words, if he heaved the three hundred or so pages he’d already read back onto the seven hundred he’d yet to peruse. He could spare a few minutes to get lost in memories. Hopefully even several hours.

“And what?” Flurry Heart leaned forward in her chair, wings flared and eyes wide. “Did Auntie Twilight win the bet?”

Spike couldn’t help chuckling. “What, you don’t wanna hear the whole big story? Just gonna skip right to the end?”

“Uncle Spiiiiike, come on!” the filly groaned. “Did she win or not? And what’s a leap year?”

“Think you just answered your own question, ladybug,” Spike said through a smirk. Once he got the second groan out of Flurry he’d been waiting for, he swiveled in his own seat and faced her. “Yes, Twilight won. I helped, a lot, but she… we did it. And by the time the trip was over, I knew this–” He gestured to the textbook. “–was what I wanted to do with my life.”

Flurry made a face, and then pointed that face at the two visible pages on Spike’s desk, each covered top to bottom in numberless mathematical formulas.

“Hey, it’s easier than politics,” Spike added. “That’s what Twilight learned from that trip, more than anything.”

Flurry’s expression shifted again, back towards unsubtle curiosity. “You mean she learned how to be a Princess on her trip?”

“She learned how hard being a Princess could be. And what could happen if you… when you have to make hard decisions.”

“What decisions?” Flurry asked. “What happened?”

Spike turned back to his textbook, so he had something to look at besides the lovingly shaped curls of hair framing his niece’s cherubic face. He wasn’t sure how much to tell her — if she was old enough to hear the truth, or whether any creature ever could be old enough. Eventually, he explained it to her by not explaining it.

“Well,” he began, “our first stop on the trip was Griffonia, and then after that was Aero-Lipizzia. You know where that is?”

“No?”

“Of course you don’t, because it doesn’t exist anymore. There was… a really big war, and once it was over, the place that was Aero-Lipizzia split up into a whole bunch of new countries. Most of it’s either Aerony or Lipizzia now, so that’s simple enough, but there’s also Armăsar, Kůňský, the Plemena Planina, Senna, and that’s just the major players. With me so far?”

“Uh…”

“Good, because there’s lots of places where creatures who feel like they’re Aeronese are actually in Lipizzia now, and Lipizzans think they should be in Armăsar, and all of them are worried about Orlovia because a revolutionary party overthrew their monarchy and nobody knows who’s going to support who once that’s all sorted out. Oh, and the Water Empire might want to separate from the Crystal Empire, there’s territorial disputes in Kiria, Zaniskar still can’t decide whether to even recognize Twilight as Princess now that Celestia’s retired, and… geez, then there’s Zebraria. Wanna hear about Zebraria?”

“No,” Flurry moaned. “My head hurts.”

“And that’s what Twilight learned,” Spike finished with a grin. “That it’s all really complicated and every country wants different things, and at the same time most creatures just want to feed their families and feel like they belong somewhere.”

“And you learned you wanted to join the Artificer’s Guild.”

Spike bit his lip. Flurry definitely wasn’t old enough for that part of the story, though he could still tell her most of the truth. “I learned that, uh… that the world’s like a big, beautiful machine, and every creature in it is a cog. And you can’t choose whether to be a cog or not, but you can choose your shape, how you work, where you fit. So… I chose this. ‘Course, it’s different for Princesses. You’re a pretty big cog no matter where you go.”

Spike had meant his last remark as a joke, but instead of laughing, Flurry fluttered her wings and twisted her lips, and for a heartstopping moment looked like she was about to cry. “I don’t know,” she mumbled — and finally, Spike realized why she’d ambled over to him a few minutes ago, and peppered him with seemingly aimless questions about what he was studying and why he wanted to study it. “I don’t know where I fit. There’s so much I don’t know, and I’m supposed to know everything, but…”

“Hey, stop,” Spike interrupted, squeezing a claw around Flurry’s shoulder and holding on as she tried to cringe away. “You’re not supposed to know everything. Twilight sure didn’t at first. But she learned, and you will too. You’ve got plenty of time to figure it out.”

“But if I don’t, there’s wars,” came Flurry’s shaky response. “A-And mistakes that other creatures have to fix, and…”

“Flurry, listen to me,” Spike said, nudging her chin up with a clawtip so he could look her in the eyes. “Princesses aren’t perfect. Twilight isn’t, your mom isn’t, Celestia wasn’t. And wars… wars just happen sometimes, even when good creatures try to stop them, because the creatures who want to fight those wars can make decisions and mistakes too. Sometimes all you can do is your best. Okay?”

Flurry gave him a smile — a well-practiced Princessly one, pretty and hollow. Maybe she knew more already than she thought she did. Certainly more than he’d given her credit for.

“Are you worried about your mom and Aunt Twilight?” he asked. “About them freeing Cozy Glow?”

Flurry nodded, her gaze turned down towards her twiddling hooves. “Mom said she did some really bad things, and that Celestia shouldn’t have punished her like she did. But I just… I can’t stop thinking about being frozen like that, how mad I’d be.” She looked up at Spike again. “She’s gonna hate us, isn’t she?”

“She might, at first,” Spike admitted, “but even if she does, I think freeing her is still the right thing to do. And hey, you wanna know something it took Twilight a long time to learn? Every creature has something to teach you, if you’re willing to learn.”

“Even the bad ones?”

Now it was Spike’s turn to wear a mask of a smile. “Especially the bad ones. No harm trying to get to know her, in any event. Who knows? Maybe you could be friends.”

Flurry considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “I guess,” she said. “As long as she doesn’t want to talk about politics.”

“I… can’t promise she won’t,” Spike replied, and this time Flurry did crack a grin with him as he laughed. He turned back to his textbook, and as he flipped the page, Flurry piped up with one last question.

“Okay, seriously, though, what is a leap year?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Spike assured her over his shoulder. “It was dumb. Twilight was right about that.”

Missing

Spike strode forward on carefully placed claws, and the road crumbled beneath him and rose in clouds of dust in his wake.

Behind him stood pillowy green hills tucked under a blanket of ash-gray clouds, bisected by a valley with a glittering blue river running through its center and a narrow stripe of gravel tracing its southern bank. Ahead of him, the valley sloped down and widened into a basin, where the riverbed split into tributaries all feeding into the expanse of the western sea.

It was a perfect place to raise a city, and there had been once here for centuries. From his vantage point, he could still see the outlines of streets, the skeletal frames of brick buildings built to withstand earthquakes and typhoons — now clouded with dust and ash, smothered under a shroud of unnatural and total silence that darkened his violet scales, speckled his green frill, and dulled the gold of the cog-and-lightning medallion pinned to the lapel of his road-worn nylon coat.

“Oh…”

The pegasus who’d been following Spike for a mile or so had stopped, hypnotized by what looked like it had once been an unpowered wooden wagon. Its back half was more or less intact, save for the odd scrape and divot that any often-used tool would collect, and the right-side wheel even looked brand-new compared to the one on the left.

The front half of the wagon was gone — not smashed or burned, but simply not there, as if a cosmic chef’s knife had sliced the vehicle cleanly in two. Only on closer inspection could Spike see that the cut wasn’t clean after all. Irregular gray fingers of decay stretched back towards the wagon’s rear from a buffer of colorless rot marking where the vehicle’s front half should have began, perfectly aligned with where the road vanished, the river narrowed to a brown trickle, and the green grass turned to dead and empty earth.

The pony lifted a forehoof and gently brushed it against the decayed wood, and the material disintegrated at his touch like a castle made of dry sand. He made another soft sound, then at last noticed Spike’s attention.

“Something wrong?” Spike asked.

The pegasus gave him a look that said, “What isn’t wrong about this?” but visibly bit back to the urge to put the thought into words. He was a soldier, after all: Staff Sergeant Garnet Sunrise of Her Majesty’s Crystallian Army. He knew better than to offer an opinion without an order to do so. Spike thought for a moment about giving him such an order, and then thought better of it.

“Nothing,” Garnet said, eyes darting back towards the wagon as he faced Spike. “Just… nothing.” He braced himself with a sigh, then nodded towards what lay ahead of them. “You wanna see it up close?”

“I’ve seen enough,” Spike replied. “You lead from here.”

“Right.” The pegasus took a few steps forward, then stopped just as he edged ahead of Spike. He spared another glance, this time at the annihilated earth beneath his frontmost hoof. “I don’t… know everything, Spike. I remember most of it, the general gist, but exactly what happened, what everypony said, I…”

“Just tell me what you can,” Spike said, gesturing with a gloved claw. “And walk while you talk.”

“All right, then,” Garnet murmured. “This way.”

Keeping just to the outside of the line demarcating where life ended and the wasteland began, Garnet passed in front of the dragon and pushed through roadside foliage towards the seemingly untouched forest beyond it. Spike took a breath, flexed his claws inside their fur-lined wrappings, and followed the pegasus into the past.

Aliens

===

“That was where we met, on the road back there. And… the wagon. That’s why I stopped a minute ago. There was this farmer, old, probably my dad’s age. One of his wagon’s back wheels had broken, and he was just cursing up a storm, half Equestrian, half Mizuman, like a radio that wouldn’t stay on one station. Would’ve been funny, y’know, if… anyway, I guess he got the wheel fixed. Just took too long. Wrong place at the wrong time…”

===

Garnet didn’t see the Princess arrive, and maybe that was for the best. A single Crystallian soldier this deep in Mizuman territory could be written off as a misplaced spy, or maybe an unlucky survivor from a thopter shot down in the surrounding hills. Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria being here was no accident, and much worse than just misfortune. It was a promise of change — of the state of the war and the world that war enveloped, and far too rapid to avoid casualties along the way.

Thankfully, the Princess understood who she was and where she wasn’t supposed to be, so she approached Garnet on hoof and obscured by a shapeless brown cloak, with only her chin and a stray lock of hair — both magically dyed red, rather than their usual shades of royal purple — poking out from the shadows inside her hood. He knew it was her at a glance, though. No amount of dye or magic could hide the loping gait of an Equestrian amidst the wider stances of native-born Mizumans, especially not an Equestrian princess.

“Sunshine?” he murmured anyway, just to make sure.

“Eclipse,” Twilight softly replied, and she pushed her hood back just enough to meet the eyes of the soldier before her. “Good to see you, Staff Sergeant.”

“Likewise, ma’am.”

On the far side of the road, a squat crystal stallion — opaque blue, with a scraggly white beard and a brow to match — gave his disabled wagon an irritated slap, then stalked around to its rear and threw back the cover from its bed, muttering as he rooted around for a set of as-yet invisible tools. Once Garnet was sure the farmer couldn’t see them, he nodded for Twilight to follow him and trotted off the road, doing his best to keep the brambles he pushed through from catching on the Princess’s cloak.

It was an easy walk through the forest, and the thoroughfare they’d met upon soon vanished behind indistinguishable chestnut tree trunks. Save for hooffalls on undergrowth and the whisper of wind through the leaves overhead, the trip passed in silence for a while, until Twilight broke it in a low tone that wouldn’t carry past Garnet’s ears.

“How are things here? Any trouble from the Mizumans?”

Garnet shook his head. “They’re spread pretty thin in this area. Focused on the skies and the city’s outskirts. We haven’t even seen a scout in days, let alone met one.”

“And how are you feeling? The troops? Do you need reinforcements, supplies?”

Another shake of his head. If he’d been standing still, Garnet would’ve paired it with a shrug. “Wouldn’t mind a smoke if you got it.”

“I, um… sorry, I don’t–”

“That was a joke, ma’am.”

“Ah… yes. Of course.”

They walked another quarter-mile, around a downslope covered in dark-brown leaves and over a tiny brook that gurgled politely as its two visitors carefully avoided disturbing its natural flow. Finally, Twilight asked the question she’d been dancing around before.

“How she’s doing? Is she…”

“She’s fine,” Garnet replied. “Far as I know, anyway. Seems in good spirits. Mane’s clean. Not much else to report.”

Twilight took a breath she meant to expel as another question, but Garnet stuck out a hoof and stopped them both in their tracks. The forest around them hadn’t changed — the tree trunks still swayed, and the leaves still rustled softly. It was the air that had gone still, inhaled without exhaling, settled onto lumps in the forest floor shaped precisely like unremarkable drifts of twigs and dirt.

Garnet stared into one of them, and a silver cylinder of iron stared back at him. Twilight startled. The staff sergeant didn’t.

“Sunshine,” a lump to his right whispered.

“Eclipse,” he told the one in front of him.

The lump shifted, and a unicorn — face and fatigues streaked with dirt, twin copper tags clinking on a chain around his neck — rose from behind it, popping the safety latch under his rifle’s stock and shouldering the weapon as he nodded in greeting. “Didn’t tell us you had a date, Sarge,” the soldier said, twitching his brow towards the Princess as more lumps around him materialized into Crystallian enlisted. “Woulda shaved.”

“There’s lots of things I don’t tell you, Private,” Garnet replied, “‘Specially when you haven’t shaved.”

“It’s for the ladies, not you.”

“Let us know when you bag one, I’ll ask her what she thinks of it.”

The private made a gesture with his forehoof that made the Princess startle again, then nodded back behind him. “Got back just in time,” he remarked as Garnet and Twilight passed him by. “Heard we’re pushing up soon.”

Twilight looked at Garnet, who said nothing. He’d heard the same. And then he’d heard he was being taken off patrol to escort a Very Important Pony to what must be one hell of an important meeting.

“This way, Princess,” he muttered once the forward scouts were out of earshot. “Outpost’s just over this hill.”

The Guildmaster

“It was a shitshow,” the earth pony said, tossing his dirtied sweat rag aside and eyeing Spike across the engine block between them. “Write that down: shitshow. S-H-I…”

“I know how to spell it,” Spike replied, scribbling something on his notepad that could’ve been an expletive, for all his fellow Guildmember would know. “The whole operation was?”

“The whole world was. But I guess to the Guild, it’s all the same.”

Spike made a note of that, and the pony whose workshop he was visiting snorted and ducked back beneath the engine, fiddling around in the guts of the pony-sized machine heart with something ejected from the bandolier of tools around his forehoof. The dragon had met Masters of all shapes and sizes in his time within the Artificer’s Guild, and this one seemed like all of them rolled together into a pot-bellied, gruff-talking whole.

“This isn’t a formal interview or anything,” Spike said once it became clear the other pony wouldn’t speak first.

“Could’ve fooled me,” came the Guildmaster’s reply, echoing through pistonless holes in the engine block. “Toss me a five-sixteenths, would ya?”

Spike found the requested socket wrench on a nearby tray and passed it under the block. With a grunt of acknowledgement, the Guildmaster slotted the tool into a free spot in his bracer and continued his work. “I’m just trying to get the whole picture,” Spike continued. “How we got to where we ended up.”

“For the Guild?”

“If they want to hear it, sure.”

The stallion paused, and when he straightened to meet Spike’s eyes overtop of the engine block, something flickered inside his gaze that hadn’t been there before. After a pause long enough to be noteworthy, he retracted all his tools and emitted another grunt which could’ve been a sigh.

“After the First War, Equestria was fine,” he said. “Did well for itself, relatively speaking, even once the post-war bubble popped and the whole world economy went to Tartarus. But everywhere else was beat to shit, and far as I saw, Senna got it the worst of everyone. They sent more soldiers to the front than any other part of Aero-Lipizzia, y’know? Lost more of ‘em too, and the ones that did come back were all but dead already and just hadn’t been buried yet. Missing legs, eyes… stuff between the ears. You couldn’t spot those ones as easily, but once you saw ‘em, you knew.”

The stallion heaved himself off the engine block and made for a workbench strewn with disassembled motor parts. Spike followed two steps behind, and took a stool next to the Guildmaster when silently invited to do so.

“So the operation, the big equinitarian cause Twilight talked the Guild into sponsoring. Wasn’t a backwater shithole in the world I didn’t see at some point or another, dodging old landmines and dud shells so we could toss boxes of freeze-dried veggies around and act like we did something good. But Senna… stars, you’ve never seen poor like Senna back then. Hope to Heart you never do, kid.

“Pferdorf wasn’t even the worst place, just the one I remember most. We show up, bumping along in gas-powered wagons loaded up with food, and it’s like we’re alicorns and rock stars put together. Just swarmed by everyone in town, shouting so fast they run outta breath and just end up wheezing, scrabbling for each box before we can even get it out of the cart. Some of the boxes break, and before a single corn kernel can hit the dirt, there’s little kids, skeletons in pastel wrapping paper, squeezing through the grownups’ legs to catch ‘em.

“And in the back of the crowd, I can see this family of changelings: mom and dad, I guess, buncha hatchlings, all bright-colored, not black like they used to be. And every time one of the parents tries to get in line… get in fuckin’ line, polite as can be, like they’re not skinnier than every other creature there, some pony or griffon or whoever shoves ‘em out of the way, and glares at ‘em like they’re waiting for an excuse to hit ‘em again. And so they just stand there, the whole time, ‘til we’ve unloaded everything and we gotta head for the next town in just as deep shit as this one.

“I wasn’t the only one to see ‘em. This initiate, Coral-something, so short her horn barely got up to my neck, she’s just a wreck, sayin’ we gotta go back, make sure the changelings get something, didn’t I see how hungry those little hatchlings were? And I tell her of course I fuckin’ see, and why don’t we turn around and open another cart, and start a whole damn riot in Pferdorf so the next five towns get nothing and the changelings probably still don’t eat? You can’t save everybody, I told her. I get it, but you… you just can’t. And it ain’t our job anyway.”

The stallion paused, eyes far away and lips pursed behind a filthy hoof he’d pressed against them. “It was so stupid,” he eventually muttered into his frog, before lowering it and turning back to Spike. “The whole changeling thing. Even back then, creatures hated ‘em, and for what? ‘Cause one hive was run by a lunatic way back when? ‘Cause there were maybe a half-dozen spies that even got to the places Twilight wanted ‘em, let alone did anything for that half-cocked First War peace scheme? They were changelings who were bastards, sure. There are ponies who are bastards, griffons, crystallions, fuckin’ kirins, even! But they were the bugs. The ones who didn’t belong.”

There was a grimace on his face now, growing into a scowl. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, right? But we should’ve known. With where Senna started, with everything how it was, we should’ve known right then and there how it was all gonna end. And all we did was feed ‘em.”

Soldiers

===

“We knew the Orlovians had taken Bärentatze, that the war in Senna was over, but the one in Mizuma was just beginning. Ten million creatures, down to the kids, ready to pick up a spear or a butter knife and die for the wrong Empire… we were scared. Nobody’d admit it, stars forbid talk about it, but who wouldn’t be? I don’t think a single one of us was still with the unit we’d started with. We’d all lost friends, brothers and sisters, everything we’d grown to know, and now we were about to lose it all again…”

===

The news of Twilight’s arrival spread through the outpost like ripples through gelatin: every creature they passed saw the staff sergeant with his guest, paused for a moment to twitch a brow up or let out a disinterested “Huh,” and then went right back to what they’d already been doing, which didn’t seem to be much of anything. If Twilight was disappointed at her reception, she hid it well. In fact, she seemed more distracted by the soldiers than they were by her, her gaze darting from foxhole to foxhole and her eyes widening with every step.

“There’s, ah… not much cover out here,” she said to Garnet, a questioning — or maybe just uncomfortable — hitch in her final word.

“There’s enough,” Garnet told her. “Trees keep us out of view from above, and if anyone gets past the outer patrols, we’ll see ‘em coming.”

“But what about artillery? If the Mizumans knew you were here–”

“Then we’d probably all be dead, yeah.” Garnet gave the Princess a sidelong glance, keeping his stride steady even as she lost a step behind him. “Good thing they don’t know we’re here, then.”

Twilight bit her lip, and said nothing else. A private might’ve rolled his eyes, but Garnet knew better. She was a capital-P Princess, and she couldn’t be expected to be casual about anything the little ponies beneath her encountered out in the field. It wasn’t something to be bitter or dismissive about. It just was what it was — and he suspected, but never said aloud, that his understanding of that was why he was a staff sergeant and the privates were still privates.

It didn’t take them long to reach the “airstrip”: a gap in the trees just wide enough for a column of sunlight to reach the ground unmarred by branches or leaves. At the edges of the clearing, pegasi and griffons performed final checks on single-creature ornithopters, one of which — stenciled in black paint with the Crystallian royal crest and a blocky number “82” — rose vertically from the clearing’s center and ascended past the treetops as the staff sergeant and his guest approached.

From there, Garnet led Twilight to the left and up a small rise towards a squarish tent bedecked in camo netting. Just beyond it, he could see clear blue sky and open air where the forest ended and the valley began. He’d only been up there once, when they’d first scouted the area several days prior, but he could still picture the view perfectly in his mind’s eye. After four years of fighting the Mizumans on islands and archipelagos across the endless sea, it had been the first time he’d ever laid eyes on one of their cities.

“In here, ma’am,” Garnet told Twilight, gesturing at the tent’s front flap before coming to a halt outside. Twilight stepped past him and raised a hoof to pull the flap back, then paused.

“Aren’t you coming in?” she asked him, and he was just quick enough to disguise his snort as an officious clearing of his throat.

“My orders were to get you here safely, Princess,” he replied, as gently as he could. “Nothing more.”

The Princess glanced at the tent flap, then set her jaw. “Well, what if I order you to accompany me? I’m pretty sure I can do that.”

Technically, she could — but less in the chain of command sense, and more in the sense that a robber holding a knife to your throat could order you to hand over your wallet. Instead of telling her that, Garnet continued to stand at attention and waited for the Princess to provide further instructions. Soon enough, Twilight added, “You seem trustworthy, Staff Sergeant. And frankly, I… I could use the backup. Will you accompany me?”

“Is that an order, Princess?”

“Yes, it is.”

At that, Garnet relaxed, lifted a hoof to pull the tent flap open, and inclined his head. “Then after you, your Highness.”

Twilight entered the tent, and Garnet followed just far enough to occupy the spot inside the tent opposite where he’d stopped outside. From across a metal table covered in maps and typewritten memos, the tent’s only occupant gave him a questioning glance, and he answered it with a nod towards Twilight — violet magic washing down from her horn as she restored her natural color and form. The staff sergeant received a nod of acknowledgement in response, and was promptly forgotten.

“It’s good to see you, Flurry Heart,” Twilight said, proffering a thin smile across the paper-laden table. Princess Flurry Heart, Supreme Commander of the Eastern Alliance Forces, did not smile back.

“It’s good to see you too, Twilight,” Flurry replied, closing the file she’d been reading with a snap of thoughtless magic. “What can I do for you?”

The Advisor

“Is this on the record?” the unicorn asked, focusing much more on the mirror in her hoof than the dragon seated behind her. “Because if it is, my answer is that I served twelve wonderful years at the behest of Princess Twilight Sparkle, and I treasured every second I spent in her magnificent, sagacious presence.”

“Mm-hmm,” Spike said, suppressing a sigh as he added to the largely inane scribbles on his notepad which this meeting had produced so far. “I’m a Guildmaster, though, not a journalist.”

“Is that so? Well, in that case, it was a fucking nightmare, and I’ve never regretted a resignation less.”

The acerbic response hung in the air unaccompanied for a moment, then — with a blink Spike saw in both the hoof mirror and the vanity mirror dominating the dressing room — the mare seemed to realize who she was talking to.

“I don’t mean to disparage her character, of course,” she added, tone still level even as her gaze grew apologetic. “She was perfectly lovely one on one, and heroic to a fault. I suppose that more than anything was the… struggle we all faced. She simply couldn’t be convinced not to handle everything herself. Even the things for which she was, bless her heart, somewhat ill-equipped.”

Spike nodded, scribbled on his pad, and let the silence drag out again. He knew he’d done enough by now to get the mare talking without his interference — and once she deposited her hoof mirror in her purse and swiveled to face him, that was just what she did.

“She trusted too easily,” she said. “Feels strange to criticize any creature for such a thing, but that was the unfortunate truth. We compiled report after report of developments in Senna: the rise of the Freiherde, how Chain Lightning went from Chancellor to dictator all but overnight, the anti-changeling rhetoric of course, and she was as concerned as any of us about all of it. But all she would say is that we couldn’t interfere in the democratic decisions of another nation. As if ‘interfering’ was what we were suggesting.”

“What were you suggesting?”

“That we ought to be more than just concerned. That the Freiherde were largely combat veterans looking for anyone to blame for the lot they’d drawn after the First War, and that creatures with broken bodies and minds can be convinced all too easily that their soul is a fair price for the power they feel they deserve. It was cynical, yes, undoubtedly, but no matter what Lightning did, through all the purges and the propaganda about Lightning and his lackeys being the ideal equine forms, she could never bring herself to believe they might actually do the things they spoke of.”

The mare folded her hooves in her lap, seeming to compress herself atop her stool as if trying to force a feeling in her heart from bursting out through her chest. “She was the same with Zaniskar,” she murmured. “We’d tell her about the Celestians, about the threat they posed to her legitimacy and authority, and she’d say, ‘Who am I to tell another creature who or what to believe in?’ And with the Water Emp… with Mizuma, the very same: ‘So what if they want to govern themselves without the Crystal Empire butting in? Doesn’t every creature deserve to be free?’

“She had such ideals, such an unshakeable belief in the goodness of every creature, if only one could find out what they wanted and give it to them. It was inconceivable to her that someone given a gift would next demand a hoard. She couldn’t wrap her head around the idea of it, never mind the reality. And I wish she’d been right. I truly do. The world she thought we lived in was a better one, a beautiful one.

“But Senna… no intentions could be good enough to excuse that. Seeing rallies in the hundreds of thousands, buildups of troops on the borders, intrusions over those borders into the sovereign territory of other nations, and then looking us all in the eyes and saying, ‘Don’t worry, Chain Lightning assured me that he just wants to reunite his ponies with their families. That part of Kůňský is majority-equine anyway. He promised me he’ll leave everyone else alone, and Orlov will help make sure of that.’ She’d spoken with Gavriil Ironclaw too, you see. Received promises from him as well.”

The advisor snorted, and looked past Spike’s shoulder just long enough to wave off a pegasus bearing a clipboard, who’d been halfway through telling her that her panel was about to begin. “You know what she called that?” the mare said through a sour smile. “Her little ‘give them what they want and they won’t ask for more’ scheme? ‘Peace in our time.’ Peace for who, you ask? Not the Kůňskians, that’s for sure. Or the changelings.”

The mare stood, and through the door the pegasus had left cracked open, the rumbling drone of ponies stuffed into folding chairs in an airless recording studio served as backdrop for her final thoughts. “She wasn’t naïve. She was intelligent and kind, zealously so in both regards. She was a Princess. And it wasn’t her fault that what we needed was a leader.”

“And you’re saying that on the record?” Spike asked, following the unicorn through the dressing room door and stopping at the stage’s edge.

“On the record,” she replied as she strode onto the stage and into the spotlight’s glare, “is there anything else worth saying?”

Villagers

===

“She had this pendant: a little shard of the Crystal Heart, I guess from when it was attacked all those years ago pre-war, glowing bright enough you could see it even against her coat. I didn’t know what kind of magic was in it, still don’t, but you’d feel exhausted just looking at it, like it was sucking the life out of you through your eyes. Like it was angry, and it wanted something, and didn’t want to wait a second to get every bit of that thing it could take…”

===

Twilight blinked, and Flurry Heart stared impassively back at her. Garnet got the impression Twilight had already told Flurry exactly why she’d come all this way, and Flurry wouldn’t proceed with their conversation until Twilight said it out loud.

“I just… wanted to see how things were going,” Twilight began.

“They’re going well,” Flurry replied. “Anything else?”

“And I wanted to speak with you,” Twilight said next. “About how things are going. The direction they’re going in.”

Now Flurry blinked — once, quick and unreadable, the rest of her face still as stone. “I was under the impression we’d discussed that already.”

“The Alliance has,” Twilight answered. “All our generals and advisors and a thousand other creatures who all think they know what’s best for everyone else. But we haven’t. Just the two of us.”

Flurry glanced Garnet’s way. “And a staff sergeant, apparently,” she said, circling the table to stand nose-to-nose with her fellow Princess. To her credit, Twilight didn’t flinch or shy away.

“He seemed trustworthy,” Twilight told her.

“He is,” Flurry agreed. Neither mare blinked for several more seconds — and then both blinked at once. Flurry inclined her head towards the tent door, still shuddering slightly from Garnet’s recent passage through it.

“Let’s get some air,” Flurry suggested. “Feels stuffy in here.”

The younger Princess turned in place and swept out of the tent without waiting for the older one’s reply, leaving a charge in the air behind her that raised the hairs on Garnet’s legs and neck like the first warning of a lightning strike. He suppressed a shudder, kept his face blank even as the lines on Twilight’s deepened, and silently followed in her wake when she hurried outside.

By the time they caught up with Flurry, she’d already stopped at the top of the hillock hiding the Crystallian outpost from the valley below. For a while, the three of them simply observed that valley in silence, Garnet standing a few steps behind the Princesses and, as subtly as he could, craning his neck for a better view.

The city in the distance wasn’t the Mizuman capital. That was farther northeast, past the craggy mountains blackening half the valley with jagged early-morning shadows. But looking at it from here, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise — for admiring the efficiently networked streets built for both old-fashioned wagons and modern powered carts, and noting the stark boundary at the city’s core where cramped residential blocks became hulking smog-choked factories, and marveling at the monument to the native Mizuman spirit towering over the harbor, its immaculate symmetrical frame and intricately tiled roof stripped of all references — ancient or otherwise — to the Empire across the sea which had once claimed this part of the world as its own, and whose Princess now gazed placidly down on her exiled domain from afar.

“You know what this place used to be?” Flurry said suddenly, and in a disarmingly chipper tone. “Before all this, before the Crystal Empire, even? Fishing village. Just a few reed huts on wooden stilts, sunburned Kirians hunched down in the mud, trawling the marsh for sprouts and onions while the boats out in the bay hauled in red snappers. And look at it now. All grown up.”

As Flurry fell silent, Twilight took a bracing breath. Before she could let it out in the form of words, the Crystal Princess spoke up again. “Still hard not to think of it as Larimar,” she murmured. “Never seen it called anything else on a map. But now it’s… I can’t even remember what the Mizuman word is. Something like ‘Long Cape’ or ‘Broad Island’ in their language. Real creative. Probably why I don’t remember it.”

“Flurry…” Twilight softly said — two mournful syllables, and a gaping void beneath them.

“Sorry. Nerding out. Weird what little factoids stick in your head from briefings, huh?”

“Flurry, stop. This… this isn’t you. What you’re planning, it’s…”

“What I’m planning, huh?”

Flurry’s tone hadn’t shifted, but her body had — each muscle tightened with potential energy, every tendon coiled with kinetic intent. Standing in the late-summer sun, flies buzzing around his head and heat wavering in the air around him, Garnet shivered and felt the hairs on his neck rise again.

“What the Alliance is planning,” Twilight said, seeming to pluck each word delicately from an invisible tangle of thorns around her head. “An invasion, it’s… it’s not worth the cost. Thousands of our soldiers will die. Millions of Mizumans. And I know the Emperor here has been cruel, and they’ve killed millions already and have plans to kill more. I know we can’t just do nothing. But this isn’t what Cadance would’ve wanted. It’s not what…”

Twilight froze, and Flurry seemed almost amused at her discomfort. “Go on,” Flurry told her. “You came all this way to say it. So say it.”

For a moment, Garnet thought Twilight wouldn’t say anything at all. Then her spine straightened and her face hardened, and something like fury flashed in the gaze she turned on her niece.

“It’s not what your father would’ve wanted. What Shining would’ve wanted. And you know it.”

Flurry said nothing. Garnet shivered again. Beneath and beyond them all, the great machine of the Mizuman city spun on in silence.

The Corporal

“Get the fuck outta here,” the crystal pony gushed. Spike had been swapping war wounds with him for a while now — the scar on the pony’s shoulder from a broken thopter cable, Spike’s acetic acid burn while rescuing workers from an industrial accident, the leg the stallion had lost when his ship sank during the Battle of Backbone — but the almost imperceptible gap in the scales above Spike’s left eye was the first one the corporal seemed legitimately impressed by. “You were at the Guildhall Massacre in Akhal-Teke, pre-First-War? How old were you?”

Spike lifted his highball and drained it, his throat numbed enough from previous drinks that the whiskey didn’t even seem to burn. “Not old enough,” he answered once he clacked his glass back down on the bar.

“Heart’s sake, who fuckin’ would be?” The pony caught the bartender’s eye, signaled for two more rounds, then straightened up and blinked at the harsh sound of ice clinking into two clean glasses. “The hell were we talking about, again?”

“Mizuma,” Spike reminded him, nodding his thanks as the unicorn opposite him and his companion slid him a fresh bourbon. “And Aris Bay.”

“Shit.” The pony grimaced, grabbed his glass, and emptied it down his throat as his face tightened into a glower. “Fuckin’ Aris Bay. Fuckin’ ———.”

Spike didn’t interrupt, and didn’t comment on what the corporal had said instead of “Mizumans.” He wanted information more than the moral high ground over a war veteran — and besides, this wouldn’t be the first or last time he fudged a Guild report for the sake of political sensitivity.

“They didn’t wait a second, did they?” the pony continued. “One day everything’s fine, and the next day Senna’s halfway through Griffonia towards Orlovia, Zaniskar’s on a fuckin’ Celestial Crusade into Zebraria, and the ——— decide they’re too good for us, stab their own family in the back and then decide they want all of Kiria for dessert. And Cadance, Heart bless her, she did everything she could. Shining Armor too. But there was nothing anypony could’ve done. Not when you’re dealing with creatures like that.

“We weren’t even battle-ready at Aris Bay, just a fuel station for refugees who’d gotten out ahead of the purges. Probably ten civilians for every soldier, no air defenses, nothing. And I was just a dumb fuckin’ seacolt assigned on the Resonance, got lost stumbling home from the bar and passed out in an alley. Next thing I know, I’m waking up to thopters buzzing overhead and the cobblestones shaking loose from the bombs, and my ship is sinking into the bay with a thousand souls on board. ‘Cause of the fuckin’...”

The corporal restrained himself this time, but only barely, and seemingly only because of the look he was getting from the bartender. “Sobers you up quick, I’ll tell you that. Hearing mares screaming, kids crying, hooves banging on metal that’s already under thirty feet of water. Kinda thing that changes you. Changed everybody who was there that day… ‘cept for her. Except for Flurry Heart.

“I saw her afterwards, when she first flew in. Saw Cadance just collapse onto her, and when she heard her father was dead, she just… didn’t do anything. She didn’t cry, didn’t seem angry, just went blank for a minute, like she’d left her body behind and gone someplace beyond the world I knew about. Then suddenly she was back like she’d never been away, and she got Cadance standing up and told her it was gonna be all right, and I knew right then just by looking at her that I was gonna follow her to the end of the world and past it, because she was gonna handle this. Handle them. And she did.”

The corporal glanced Spike’s way — at the untouched whiskey in front of him, ringing the bartop with condensation. “I know what I’m supposed to say,” he sneered. “‘Oh, she went too far, she was too mean, we should’ve let all those poor ——— be spies and murderers and who knows what else.’ Buncha prissy little peaceniks who weren’t there tryin’ to tell me, tell everypony who fought and bled and died for this empire, how I should feel and what I should think. And you know what I do think?”

Spike had known what the stallion thought since the moment they’d first met. He’d heard similar thoughts all across the Empire about Flurry Heart’s decree after returning from Aris Bay: any Crystal pony who wasn’t truly of the Empire, who couldn’t trace their lineage back to someone Sombra had once enslaved and frozen in time for a thousand years, was under immediate and indefinite house arrest, and then eventually moved to hastily constructed camps on the outskirts of the capital — “for your safety, and for the security of all.” It hadn’t been nice. It certainly hadn’t been fair. But…

“I think for the whole rest of the war, nobody even thought about attacking us again,” the pony said. “We were safe. Flurry Heart kept us safe. And you know what the only thing she did wrong was?”

He grabbed Spike’s abandoned drink, gulped it down, and rubbed his free hoof against his prosthetic hind leg, glowering at something only he could see.

“She stopped.”

Memories

===

“For a while, they just stared at each other. Felt like watching your parents fight: even though it doesn’t involve you, even though you can only guess at what they’re even mad about to begin with, you still feel guilty, still wanna agree to anything if it’ll make them stop and be normal again…”

===

Without warning, Flurry Heart smiled.

“Oh,” she said, shaking her head and chuckling. “Okay. Yeah. That tracks.”

Twilight looked as confused as Garnet felt, which didn’t make the staff sergeant feel any better. In fact, it had entirely the opposite effect.

“You think I’m doing this for him,” Flurry went on. “Because that’s why you’d do it. That’s what would drive you towards things you never thought you were capable of, so that must be what’s driving me.”

“Flurry, that’s not–”

“No, it’s okay,” Flurry interrupted, sardonic cheer dripping from every word. “You’re right. It’s that simple. I lost someone I loved, and I’m upset about it, and now you’re going to tell me that it’s okay to be sad and it’s not too late to do the right thing. It’s fine. It’s not my fault. Nothing is ever anyone’s fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Flurry,” Twilight insisted, more sharply than she seemed to have intended. After a moment’s pause to collect herself, she continued. “And it was Mizuma’s. They attacked without warning, killed thousands of innocent creatures–”

“As opposed to what?” Flurry interrupted again. “Guilty creatures? If they’d all been soldiers, would that have been fine? If my father had been an asshole, slapped me around instead of loving me, would his death have been easier to excuse? Could I have just said something pithy like, ‘Saved me the trouble of doing it myself’ and then forgotten he ever existed? Could you?”

Twilight took a deep breath and let it out slowly, eyes closed so Flurry’s glare couldn’t reach them. “One atrocity doesn’t justify another,” she said once she looked up again, emphasizing each word like a teacher lecturing a student who refused to apply herself. “There are thousands of Mizumans who deserve punishment for what they’ve done. But not all of them.”

“And that’s what an invasion would be?” Flurry intoned. “Punishing all of them?”

Twilight didn’t respond to that. Flurry sighed and looked down at the valley again.

“You know what you and my mother both got wrong?” Flurry mused. “You quit while you were ahead. You fought the War to End All Wars, and you had that war won, and then you just quit. Took your soldiers home, gave everybody medals, and left a whole continent worth of loose ends to tie themselves up any way they pleased. And they did. And now we’re here.”

“So you would’ve just taken over?” Twilight grumbled — almost growled. “You think we were weak not to treat living, thinking creatures, a whole continent of them, as ‘loose ends’?”

“You’re telling me that’s how you treat living, thinking creatures? Carve up their countries and poison their fields, maim and murder a whole generation of young stallions and then tell them they deserve all of it because they lost a fight they should’ve known better than to start?”

“They told themselves that. They chose to believe it. And whether we like it or not, no matter what we think we know, it’s not our place to tell other creatures what to think. All we can do is give them something better to strive for.”

“Right. Like you did in Griffonia? You and your Orlovian friends, what exactly were you striving for?”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed, and her teeth ground together behind her pursed lips. “I’m not doing this with you, Flurry. If you want to be angry at someone, argue about who’s evil and who’s not as if you don’t know better, fine. But not with me. I’m not going to do what you want.”

For a moment, Flurry just stared at Twilight — then, without warning, she smiled again. “Sorry,” she said, chuckling and shaking her head. “Just… déjà vu. Forget it. Not important anyway.”

Choices

===

“And all the while, that little shard around Flurry’s neck is glowing, pulsing. I remember thinking I finally understood its name: the Heart of the Crystal Empire. The blood of a nation, an entire way of life, coursing through billions of veins, driving them all forward towards... I didn’t know what, back then. But I think I knew it’d be worse than I could imagine. And that in the end, I’d feel like it was my fault…”

===

Flurry murmured like a distant friend at a funeral, trying to express sympathy without any hope of sounding sincere. “There’s no right choice sometimes. You told me that once.”

“I meant it,” Twilight affirmed. “You just have to do–”

“What you think is right. Because we’re Princesses. What we say, goes, and what we think is right, is.”

Twilight shifted in place, wings flaring behind her. “That wasn’t what I–”

“Yes it was.” Flurry turned sharply, eyes furrowed in disbelief. “Do you really believe that’s not what you meant? Really?”

“Flurry, I–”

“Tell me something, Twilight. Tell me the truth, just once: do you think we’re the good guys?”

Twilight looked down towards the distant city. She didn’t answer.

“Because if you don’t,” Flurry went on, “if there’s even the slightest inkling of doubt in your mind right now, then you’re not on the right side. And keeping the power you have in spite of that, doing anything but finding someone who believes in the Alliance and letting them rule in your place is worse than tyranny. It’s betrayal. It’s hurting millions of creatures, destroying millions of lives, because you’re too proud to protect them the way only you can.”

Twilight still didn’t reply. She let out a short, muffled cough, and her shoulders shook from the tiny motion.

“I don’t think we’re the good guys, Twilight. I know we are. We’re fighting against genocide, against nations that would murder us and every free creature in our care the moment we give them the chance. And there is a right choice, always, and it’s whatever keeps us, the good guys, in power. Whatever ensures that anyone who wants to break the world we built — Senna, Zaniskar, Mizuma, Orlovia — is broken themselves before they can even try.”

Flurry was shaking too, eyes glassy and alight with fury. “Celestia understood that. My mother understood that. And they knew they couldn’t do what was necessary, what was right, and they gave their power to someone they believed could. So don’t tell me you don’t believe in what we’re doing, Twilight, because that means you don’t believe in them. You’re letting the monsters of the world win, and I… I can’t accept that.” Flurry sighed, and her eyes hardened, and the shard around her neck jerked on its chain. “You can’t make me accept that.”

Finally, Twilight turned back around. Tears glistened in her eyes and tracked down her cheeks. Flurry blinked her own away, and her pendant shuddered and shone atop her trembling throat.

The Pilot

“You think you’re fuckin’ smart, don’t you?” the pegasus sniped, each word tinged with a barely suppressed snarl. On the other side of the mahogany desk dominating the pony’s sparsely decorated office, Spike shrugged and tapped his claws idly against his notepad.

“I don’t think anything,” the dragon replied. “Just a neutral observer.”

“Of course you’re neutral,” the pony scoffed. “You smart creatures always are. Hear it from every politician and Guildmaster and civilian in their nice suits and ugly fuckin’ ties: both sides did bad things, it’s all complicated, I’ll say anything you want to hear as long as I keep my job. Here’s the thing, though: it wasn’t complicated, not at all. It just makes you feel better to act like it is. You want the world to be something it’s not: bloodless, and simple, and safe.”

“Can you elaborate on that?”

Across the desk, the pony’s nostrils flared, and for a moment Spike thought he’d have to duck away from a gold-embossed nameplate flying at his skull. Instead, though, the pegasus rolled his neck and straightened his jacket, medals jangling together on both breasts. “About Waldbewohner? You want a political answer or an honest one?”

“Both, if you could.”

The pony sighed and massaged his temple with a hoof — polished to a glossy shine, fetlock neatly trimmed. “All our intelligence at the time suggested the city was a valid target. Dozens of factories, thousands of soldiers, artillery positions and anti-air… resources that would’ve kept Senna in the war for another two years, and would’ve turned the push for Bärentatze into a siege even worse than Tersk. We flew our missions, we hit our targets, and the war in Senna was over before summer.”

“Was that the honest answer or the political one?”

Spike’s question earned him a glare and a tightening of his interviewee’s jaw. “What do you think?”

“I think there are a lot of questions the Alliance hasn’t answered about Waldbewohner,” Spike said, glancing down at his notes. “About the targets chosen, where the bombs actually fell. The Artificer’s Guild estimates the civilian death toll was close to–”

The pegasus laughed — a single, short “Ha!” meant to unsettle Spike and successful only at briefly shutting him up. “Civilians…” he grumbled. “What’s the Guild have to say about our side? What were the Sennan bombers targeting in Trottingham, Manehattan, Canterlot? They killed more of our citizens — more of their own citizens, for Heart’s sake — on an average Tuesday than we did in the whole damn war.”

“They did. And the creatures who did that are now in prison, facing trial for war crimes.” Spike looked the pegasus in the eye. “You aren’t. Neither are your crew. I was just wondering what you thought about that.”

The pony leaned forward, his desk creaking under his weight. “What I think about it,” he growled, “is that we won. I think we were attacked by a nation hellbent on world domination, and that we fought back, and that every creature in that crew you’re so quick to criticize is worth a million of you half-measuring spineless Guild fucks. We followed orders and we served with honor, and we put our lives on the line, gave our lives, so you and everybody else in the Empire could be free to just ask questions about the manner in which we saved yours.” He flopped back heavily in his chair. “Put that in your fuckin’ report. And get out of my office.”

Spike scribbled on his pad, stood up, and nodded politely as he made for the exit. Just before he left, though, he asked one last question.

“You followed orders, you said. Given by who? Who ordered you to firebomb twenty-five thousand civilians to destroy a hundred factories?”

The pegasus sneered, and his eyes darted towards a portrait on his wall — three feet tall, in a polished silver frame, depicting a pale magenta mare with a violet mane striped arctic blue and an icy stare painted into her opal eyes.

“What does it matter?” he growled. “We did what we had to, and we’d do it again. We won. Now fuck off.”

Endings

===

“I think by then they’d completely forgotten I was there. I’d almost forgotten I was there. I just stood behind them, watched them go at each other, and didn’t say a fucking word. Because I was a good soldier. Thought I was fighting for something good, something better. Maybe I was. Maybe every creature down in that valley thought the exact same thing. Maybe it doesn’t matter at all…”

===

Twilight wiped her eyes with a hoof. It rose in slow, jerky movements like it weighed a hundred tons, and when it fell again, her face looked like it had aged a thousand years.

“I loved your mother,” the Equestrian princess murmured. “Like she was the big sister I never had, the perfect match for the big brother I did. I loved her confidence, her spirit, how she could tie you in knots with words and cut you in half with a smile. She was a wonderful princess, but she was born to be a diplomat.”

Her gaze swept towards Garnet and then past him, to the outpost ensconced in the trees. “She was born for this world, not mine,” she went on. “But when Shining died, after Aris Bay… something broke in her. Something shattered, and some days it feels like all the shards of what she used to be got stuck in me. I can feel them dig into me, cut deeper and deeper with every decision I make — every life I save or end with a word or a smile or my own confidence that I’m on the right side of things.”

Now she regarded Flurry again — like an ant sizing up an approaching sparrow, trying to decide whether to run and warn the colony or die hopelessly trying to protect it. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, Flurry. More than I can count. But the biggest one, the one I’ll regret for the rest of my life, was you. I should’ve done more. I should’ve been there for you.”

“And done what?” Flurry asked, gaze steady and jaw set. “If you’d been there?”

“I should’ve told you the truth,” Twilight answered, lips trembling and eyes refilling with tears. “You’re every bit your mother’s daughter and more. You’re a brilliant tactician, passionate and courageous and strong beyond measure. You’re exactly who the Alliance needs to lead it…”

Twilight took a breath, sought strength within herself to match her fellow Princess — and found it. “And you should never have been a Princess. You did nothing to earn the power you have, never had to learn how to live without it. Instead of bending to the world and the creatures you serve, you bend them to serve you, and if they won’t bend, you break them without a thought. You’re everything Celestia feared most, the reason she waited a thousand years to choose someone to take her place: because if she got it wrong, she’d give unimaginable power to someone who’d abuse it. Who wouldn’t save the world, but break it, and remake it into something it should never be.”

Twilight took a step forward. Flurry didn’t move — didn’t seem to react at all. “You scare me, Flurry. You have since you were a baby, since I first spoke to you as one grown mare to another and didn’t recognize who I saw behind your eyes. I think of what you are, who you’ll be if you’re left on the path you’ve chosen for yourself, and it terrifies me beyond what I thought my heart could take.”

Another step — and still no reaction. “But something you should know about me, Flurry? I’ve been scared before. I’ve stared down tyrants and psychopaths, warlords and murderers, and I’ve felt fear course through me like poison. But it didn’t stop me. I stood my ground, and I fought for the world that every alicorn before us knew it was our duty to preserve… and I won. Every single time. Not despite my fear, but because of it. Because I knew there was no other option, and because I wasn’t afraid of the only thing that mattered.”

The two alicorns were inches apart. Twilight’s eyes were dry. A low thrum rumbled through the soil, echoed in the trees and skipped in the hearts of all who heard it. “I’m afraid, Flurry: of what you could do, who you might become, what will happen if you aren’t stopped. But I’m not afraid of you. And if you leave me no other choice, I will make sure that no creature anywhere ever is again.”

The Liberator

“It was the smell,” the changeling said, her voice so small Spike had to strain to pick it out from the soft sounds of the hive around them — the distant buzzes and clicks of creatures going about their normal lives. “That’s the only reason we found it. We smelled it, this… rot on the wind, like a corpse sighing in your face. And we’d heard rumors, we knew the Freiherde had driven the changelings out of their land and imprisoned the ones who didn’t leave, but…”

She didn’t stop speaking so much as choke on the words before they could leave her throat. Spike reached out to take hold of her hoof, and she gently pushed him away — steeled herself and pushed on. “We weren’t that far from Bärentatze, maybe ten miles from the outskirts, encamped in a little hamlet the war had barely touched. Maybe we should’ve known the moment we got there, from the looks the civilians gave me and every changeling in my unit, that they knew. They swore they didn’t, said they’d never seen anything, but they knew. They let it happen. They…”

Another pause. The changeling’s hoof trembled, gripped at the air like it was the throat of some invisible creature she meant unconsciously to throttle. “They were at the fence when we arrived,” she continued, soft again, almost ethereally serene. “Hundreds of them, hollow carapaces and sunken eyes, draped against the wire so you couldn’t tell until you got close which ones were alive and which were long dead. We got the whole company to come back, brought supplies and cut through the gate, and inside it was just…”

“You don’t have to repeat it,” Spike assured her. “I’ve seen the photographs. I know what–”

“You don’t,” the changeling snapped, and for a moment Spike wondered whose neck her clenching hoof was really meant for. “You… you mean well. I know. You want to record what happened, what I saw, and I understand that, appreciate it. But you don’t know. You weren’t there.”

Spike nodded and sat back. When she was ready, the changeling went on. “You are right, I suppose. There are other records, other changelings who survived the camps and who liberated them. I saw the same things they did, probably less than some of them.”

“But you saw her,” Spike said. “The Princess.”

“Twilight,” the changeling confirmed. “She flew in from Canterlot. She believed us, the report we sent, but she said she had to see it for herself. Like it was her duty to. And she did see it, all of it. Didn’t look away, hardly blinked the whole time I was inside the camp with her. And I’d…”

The changeling stopped again — but instead of shaking, she sat perfectly still as her eyes darted around the room, and layered a question into the look she finally gave Spike that he answered with a nod: I’m alone, and you can trust me.

“Everyone was shocked, you know?” she murmured. “When… after the war, after Larimar. But I wasn’t. I saw Twilight in that camp, saw the look in her eyes when she saw the bunkhouses and the furnaces, and then how it changed when I told her we’d found the commander who’d run the place, him and a dozen other Sennan guards.”

This was where the official Alliance report on the camp outside Bärentatze stopped. This was one of the last pieces to a puzzle Spike had spent months assembling, the portrait of two Princesses who Spike had once known and who the world had once believed in.

“They told her the same thing they told us,” the changeling said. “That they needed magic to counter Orlovian runes, and extracting it from changelings was the only option left, and they couldn’t be blamed for doing what they had to do to win. Twilight knew it was a lie as much as we did… as much as I think the Sennans did. They could’ve done what they did in that camp to every changeling on the planet, and it wouldn’t have gotten them a week’s worth of two-track fuel.

“They wanted us exterminated, nothing else. And the commander, standing there with his hooves tied together and a dozen rifles trained on him… he was still smiling, leering at me and my unit, telling us with his eyes, ‘Just you wait, I’m too important to go to prison, they’ll let me go and I’ll come get the rest of you.’”

“What happened?” Spike softly asked. “What did Twilight do?”

The changeling gave him a look that told him he already knew, and there was hardly any point in her repeating it. But she said it anyway — in a mournful whisper, desolation laced through her distant gaze.

“She did what she thought was right. With every last one of them. And when she was finished, the smell was still there, and there wasn’t a single soldier in the company who could look her in the eyes.”

Beginnings

===

“You know what happened next. Don’t make me say it. Don’t… this was a mistake. We shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I should’ve sprinted back to camp and grabbed a rifle and charged back up here and…”

===

The two alicorns stood still and strong as stone, expressions mirrored, horns aglow. Garnet thought about stepping in between them — thought about it then and thought about it later, through sleepless nights and shortening days filled with paperwork and ticker tape and soldiers kissing nurses in the middle of cheering, rabid throngs.

Flurry blinked first, then blinked again as a wan smile played across her lips. “You did it,” she muttered. “You were finally honest with me.” She shook her head, and her smile grew with the volume of her voice.

“Thank you, Twilight.”

Garnet couldn’t believe what he’d heard. For a moment, it didn’t seem like Twilight did either, until then Flurry took a step back and gave a small, tight nod. “You’re right,” she said. “An invasion is a terrible idea. It’ll cost billions of bits, thousands of our soldiers’ lives, and even if we won, we’d leave millions of civilian casualties and hundreds of miles of destruction behind us. It’s not worth it. All it’d accomplish is making an even bigger mess.”

Now Twilight’s face softened, and flushed, and blossomed with a grin that Flurry returned in kind. She offered her niece a hug, and Flurry embraced her aunt like the family she was. Only Garnet saw that Flurry’s eyes stayed open — focused on the city in the valley, then flicked to the skies above it. She never looked at him. He wouldn’t have done anything if she had.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Twilight said as they pulled apart. “Too much for anyone, Princess or not. And I… what I said to you, I should–”

“No. Don’t take it back, Twilight. You meant it.” Flurry’s lips twitched into what could’ve been a smirk. “And I’m grateful you said it. You have no idea how much I needed to hear that from you.”

“Then… you’re welcome, I suppose,” Twilight chuckled — almost giggled. So innocent. So naïve. “So… what now?”

Flurry sighed, eyes rolling up in thought, something hollow in her pretty smile. “Guess I’ll call my scouts back. Tell the Alliance forces to stand down. Shouldn’t take long. It’s as good as done already. And in the meantime…”

As Flurry trailed off, a distant droning buzz rose in the air. Garnet followed Flurry’s gaze — targeted, not searching, because she’d already known exactly where to look — to a little black speck of an ornithopter emerging from behind a cloudbank to the east, steadily crawling across the sky in the direction of the city.

“Might want to start with that one,” Twilight said, nodding towards the aircraft she’d finally noticed. “They’re getting pretty close.”

“Oh, that?” Flurry replied. “That’s not a scout.”

Twilight’s brow furrowed. “A troop transport?”

Flurry shook her head. The thopter didn’t change course.

“Then… what is it?”

Flurry didn’t turn around. The thopter was headed right for the city. Squinting, Garnet could barely see a number stenciled on its nose: “82.”

“I meant what I said too, Twilight,” Flurry murmured. “You didn’t follow through last time. You left a mess behind. And you were right: I’m not a Princess. Not like Celestia, or my mother, or you.”

The thopter reached the city’s core, and a tiny dark spot dropped from its belly — just one bomb from one craft, unlike any other raid Garnet had ever seen. As it fell, the thopter which had carried it sped up and rose rapidly, tearing back behind cloud cover with far more urgency than any anti-air defense could warrant.

“Flurry, what is that?” Twilight asked — louder, more intently, frightened, too late.

“You only ended one war,” Flurry croaked. She turned around and lit her horn, and Garnet saw black, yawning death in the eyes of a mare who would never, ever die. “I’m going to end all of them.”

Twilight began to say something, Garnet flared his wings, Flurry shut her eyes — and the bomb went off.

There was no point in describing it: the impossibly bright flash, the opaque arcane shockwave, the sight of buildings and creatures alike shriveling and crumbling into dust, as the bomb built for the cause he served pushed everything in its path through a thousand years of entropy in an instant. Because it had happened, and Garnet had seen it, and there weren’t words wretched enough to make the Guild that had designed the fucking thing understand what it felt like to watch the world end.

It didn’t matter what happened next: the spots in Garnet’s eyes that even Flurry’s shielding spell couldn’t protect them from, the tears falling from Twilight’s when the bomb’s energy finally dissipated, the serene calm with which Flurry teleported a typewritten message to Alliance operators who would ensure it was passed on to the Mizuman Emperor. There were hundreds of thousands of his citizens who would hear neither the Alliance’s demand for unconditional and immediate surrender nor its promise to rain these bombs down on every city, town, and county that refused, because they’d been born to die as the opening statement in a media-laundered political debate.

And anything Garnet could say now would be as impotent as what had been said then: his own thoughtless groan of shock, Twilight’s broken whisper of “What have you done?”, and most of all Flurry’s impudent reply — “What I thought was right.” Because Spike knew it all already, and he’d seen what Flurry’s brutality and Twilight’s rage had accomplished, and he’d forced Garnet to tell it to him anyway out of some infuriating need to know the truth.

Well, here was the truth, Spike: you weren’t there. You didn’t save them. You did nothing to stop this, and you have to live with that just like everyone else. And if you think one conversation with a traumatized, AWOL staff sergeant will give you the answers to any miniscule part of this, you’re out of your pretentious, Guild-worshipping, useless fucking–

The Mizuman

“I was outside,” the foal said. He was no more than five or six — barely two feet tall if he stood on his overlarge hooves, missing an incisor that a sprouting adult tooth had recently pushed out. Spike could see the tiny white bud at the top of the gap it should grow to fill, which itself should have been hidden behind chapped lips and an impish smile.

“I wasn’t … to be.” Spike’s translator stuttered mid-sentence, struggling to parse the colt’s hoarse, garbled speech. Spike left the device alone. The foal gasped for air. “Momma said there was a raid, but … no Dragons. Just one. I … to see it. I went outside.”

The colt’s lips had cracked and peeled apart, and his teeth were all visible in an involuntary skeletal grin. His milky, pupil-less eyes were sunken beneath sagging, blistered skin, and blood seeped from sores on his forelegs and chest that nurses sponged at as he spoke. He took several shallow, gulping breaths between each sentence. He had been found just over a mile from where the bomb had been dropped on what had once been Larimar.

“I looked down … caterpillar. Lotus didn’t. Momma told her to come get me. She … right at it. It was bright and hot, and I fell down. Lotus fell too. My eyes hurt. Lotus didn’t have eyes anymore.”

The colt fell silent. A few minutes ago, a nurse had told Spike that he’d been the youngest of six children, born to a seamstress and a cobbler living in the city’s mercantile district. Tomorrow, Spike would be informed by another nurse present that their patient had died in the night, and his bed had been filled by a filly of about nine who would not survive the week.

“Our house was gone. Momma was gone. I didn’t cry. I was brave. But I … find her. And the…”

The translator missed the colt’s last word. Spike didn’t. In a dictionary, it would’ve been labeled something like “masters” or “gods.” To a Mizuman, it meant only one thing: “alicorns.”

“They were flying. Faster than Dragons and … to the ground. There were two of them. It was loud. They were using … and hitting each other. They hit buildings too. They were so loud.”

Spike leaned forward — saw the nurse nearest to him glare, and lifted his claws in a gesture of peace. “Did you see where they went?” he asked. The colt shook his head — jerked in pain.

“They … for a long time. I think I fell asleep. When I woke up, they were gone. The ground was glowing.”

“From the bomb? The bright flash?”

The colt didn’t move this time. Spike saw the tendons in his neck flex — stringy, quivering, fit for a stallion ten times the foal’s age. “From them.”

Then the colt shuddered and coughed and choked, and a nurse ushered Spike out of the room, past beds and mats and patches of blood-streaked floor crowded with eyeless, limbless, faceless bodies. Spike asked if the colt would be all right. They told him he shouldn’t be here right now. He asked if he could come back tomorrow. They looked at him as if he’d lost his–

Crimes

===

“–mind!”

…

“For fuck’s sake, say something! At least pretend you give a shit!”

It was war. Creatures die in wa–

“Creatures get killed in wars! Other creatures choose to kill them! You and the whole fucking Alliance, you act like things just happen, like it’s all inevitable and we’re just a force of nature we don’t have any control over, and we do! We chose to do this. This is the image we made the world in. And everyone just acts like it’s normal, like it was good, and I… it’s insane! I feel like I’m fucking insane!”

…

“I’m going to prison, aren’t I? Court martial, the whole nine yards?”

Probably.

“Go fuck yourself, Spike. And find your own way back.”

===

Spike turned his head and watched Garnet leave, until the pony was no longer visible through the trunks of the trees and the brush peppered between them. He didn’t follow him. He stayed on the ridge and faced the ruined valley, waiting patiently to learn who had been following them from the road all the way to where he stood now.

He didn’t have to wait long. The fluttering of wings preceded the gentle clack of hooves on displaced stone, and he straightened up as his uninvited guest approached him.

“Spike,” she addressed him as she came to a stop a few feet away.

“Princess,” he replied, without turning around.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Spike flexed his claws, let his eyes fall closed, and turned in place. When he looked up, Flurry Heart tilted her head slightly to match her bemused expression.

“No,” Spike told her. She twisted her lips, glanced at the valley behind him, and shrugged.

“Hmm,” the Princess hummed. “Shame.”

They stared at each other for several seconds. As usual, Spike was the first to blink. “What’ll you do with him?” he asked, nodding towards where Garnet had vanished into the forest.

“Probably nothing,” Flurry replied. “He seems harmless. And if he’s not, well, you don’t trim branches while they’re buds. You really did upset him, though. Thought you’d be good at interviews by now.”

“Always room for improvement.”

“So I’ve heard.” The Princess nudged her hoof against a loose stone, then idly inspected the scuff mark it had left behind. “You’ve been busy lately, Spike. Doing what, I wonder?”

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I don’t worry about you,” Flurry remarked. “Just like to know what my friends are up to. And we are friends, aren’t we, Spike?”

Spike looked at the mare he’d known since she was an infant — at the ruler of the free world who knew exactly what she’d done to his sister and would’ve relished anything he had to say about it.

“I’m with the Guild,” he said, “and the Guild will always stand with the Alliance.”

It wasn’t a question of whether Flurry could kill him, just whether she wanted to bother with it herself. She thought for a moment, and seemed to decide she didn’t.

“Well, at least you’re honest,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the nonsense I’ve heard from the Sennans we’ve got back in Canterlot. Apparently there wasn’t a single true Freiherder in the whole scientific corps. What are the odds? But give ‘em credit, they’re cooperative. And better that they help us than Orlovia.”

“Orlovia,” Spike murmured. “Always against something…”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing,” he said — an answer Flurry didn’t believe, but accepted nonetheless.

“Well, enjoy your nothing, then,” she said, lighting her horn. “Gotta get back. There’s a new changeling leading the Equestrian hive, wants to talk about reclaiming an ancestral nesting ground in one of our Saddle Arabian territories. Worth a listen, I figure.”

“Glad you dropped by,” Spike told the Princess, who grinned.

“Don’t lie to me, Spike. It’s rude.”

The Princess vanished in a flash of magic, leaving Spike alone as far as he could see. She probably knew better than to upset the Guild by detaining him. He should probably hurry up anyway. He turned back around, sighted out his path, and began to pick his way down the pulverized hillside towards the smoldering, twilit crater in the distance.

Lost

The colt in the hospital had been right. The exposed soil glowed, suffused with arcane energy, and Spike already knew that while the city might recover with time, repopulate, even renew itself as a living memorial to the final act of the world’s last great war, no building erected here would stand, and any streets laid upon this ground would crack apart and dissolve as weeds and bushes and trees with trunks like skyscrapers pushed through it from the saturated soil.

This was what happened when alicorns fought — what had made a place called the Everfree Forest in the nation he’d once called home, and what would soon spawn an impenetrable pockmark of wild magic on the face of a rapidly industrializing planet. In its own way, it would be beautiful. But it wasn’t what he’d come here looking for.

He found it at the foot of a collapsed municipal office, visible even from a distance against the soot and ash caking the ground around it: a flower, pure white from stem to gossamer petals, not just glowing but glaring as bright as a guiding star. As he knelt next to it, Spike felt something within it reaching out, trailing over his scales and frill, nestling within his heart where he knew it would gladly stay if invited. For a moment, he thought about letting it in. For a moment, he imagined himself as something he wasn’t.

The flower had no formal name, and only a clawful of mortal creatures had ever known it to exist, let alone seen it. To the Guild’s knowledge, it had sprouted twice before in recorded history: within the ruined Castle of the Two Sisters a thousand years ago, and in Aris Bay less than six years prior. It came from something breaking that was meant to never bend — from the will of an alicorn failing, and the limitless font of magic within them briefly escaping containment.

Celestia had used the first flower to raise Twilight Sparkle from studious unicorn to ageless royal paragon. Flurry Heart had used the second to create a weapon that could reduce a city and all its inhabitants to dust in a matter of moments. And this was the third, spawned by a mare who used to read to the little dragon she’d hatched until he fell asleep tucked underneath her foreleg and dreamed of great machines flying through cloudless skies, dismissed as borderline treasonous fantasy by Guildmasters who had forbidden Spike from even speaking of it aloud, let alone searching for it.

Now he had found it. He’d known it existed, and he spoke to everyone who could give him any scrap of information about its location, and now he knelt before the universe’s solution to the mortal faults of immortal beings — a tiny, glowing, cosmically bestowed reset button.

With this, he’d have power enough to defeat the tyrant he’d lent a claw in raising, the psychopath who had murdered the greatest pony he’d ever known and denounced her as a Orlovian defector to millions of creatures celebrating the Alliance’s victory over the forces of evil. That had been his intention when his search began: to do what was truly right for every creature everywhere, or at least find someone capable of the same.

And then he’d spoken with creatures who’d seen what he hadn’t, learned what his sister and niece had done in the name of peace and prosperity, and seen himself in both of them: in Flurry’s polite savagery, and Twilight’s mix of well-meaning impotence and self-righteous fury at its consequences. They had both been good once, and thought they were fighting for the only correct cause. And in equal measure, absolute power had corrupted and cowed them, and Garnet had been right about the world built in their image that Spike now knelt within.

Maybe, with an alicorn’s power, he would be different. Or maybe one atrocity would beget another, and no living thing could be perfect, and no matter what he would still be a cog in a machine bigger than all the creatures serving as its components. He didn’t know. No creature could ever really know.

But he could give some creature — all creatures — the gift of never having to find out. For good or ill, he could ensure the path the future took would be something other than this.

Spike knelt next to the flower for a while, thinking his choice through from every angle, solidifying it in his mind. Once the sun had sunk completely below the horizon, he plucked the cog-and-lightning medallion off his collar, placed it gently at the flower’s base, and concentrated until the eternal flame in his belly rose into his throat and burst between his parted teeth.

The flower ignited the moment his fire touched it, but he kept blowing until even its farthest-reaching roots had been completely and utterly destroyed. He felt it die, heard it scream in a thousand voices that sounded like every creature he’d ever loved, and he shut his eyes against the tears beading within them until the sound was gone and the light had gone with it. When he opened them again, the world was dark, and he was alone.

There would be no more alicorns: none magically summoned by would-be saviors, and none born to the one who remained, rendered barren — so he’d heard — by what the little plant she’d taken so much from had taken in return from her. But someday, there would also be no more divinely appointed rulers, and no unassailable forces to commit acts of unspeakable evil in service of undefinable good.

Empires of all kinds would persist, maybe for years, maybe for centuries upon despotic millennia — but now, inevitably, they would end. And when they did, it would be the task of mortal creatures to ensure the world they left behind was better than they’d found it. Spike would have to live with that. He was willing to give it a try. And in the meantime, he had a long way to travel before he was someplace he could consider safe.

Twilight Sparkle’s number-one assistant stood up, dusted himself off, and walked until he disappeared under the cover of night. All the world’s hope went with him.

Author's Note

I lived as best I could, and then I died.
Be careful where you step; the grave is wide.

- Michael R. Burch
"Epitaph for a Child of Hiroshima"
/
"Epitaph for a Palestinian Child"

The Mage

“Eight hundred and seventy-two days,” the griffon rasped, staring down at his talons as his foggy pupils slid out of focus. Spike didn’t understand him until a moment later — until his guttural Orlovian speech had filtered through the enchanted orb at Spike’s side to become tinny and unnatural Equestrian. The griffon eyed the device as its echo faded down the hallway, smirked, and went on.

“That was how long the Sennan Army laid siege to Tersk. Two years, five months, two and a half weeks, through holidays, funerals, births and birthdays. There were infants, bundles of bones and skin born to mothers who could not make milk for them, who never knew life could be anything but annihilation.”

The griffon looked up, sightless eyes pointed over Spike’s shoulder to the grungy stone wall behind him. “We evacuated as many as we could, saved hundreds of thousands, but millions stayed behind. Many died. All fought. Through bombardments, massacres, mass graves filled with neighbors and comrades, we still fought back, because we know something they did not, were something they could never imagine. With all their war machines and stolen magic, the Sennans were still an army of two million serfs, each serving only himself, each imagining that he would be the sole survivor ruling over the ashes of the conquered world.”

He shook his head — let out a gravelly, phlegm-choked chuckle. “But we were Orlovians. We served Orlovia, chick to cock to elder to grave, and one true Orlovian is worth a thousand Freiherders, and they knew it. They learned it, by the sting of our talons and knives, and by the sigils and spells we wove through their flesh.”

The griffon couldn’t see Spike shift in place, but he seemed to sense it, his beak splitting into a prideful leer. “You’re referring to rune magic?” Spike said, pausing a moment so the auto-translator could reverse course and reshape his question into reedy Orlovian. “To something the Alliance has formally declared to be–”

“A crime against equinity,” the griffon finished. His tone needed no translation, nor did his rumbling scoff. “You are Equestrian by birth, yes? Your magic is beautiful. To you, it costs nothing, is nothing, used without thought and abused without consequence.”

“It also doesn’t require torture. Or desecration of corpses, soul-rending, credible reports of cannibalism…”

“Power in all forms has costs. Closing your eyes to a thing does not make it something else, and a lie does not become the truth no matter how often you repeat it. Magic, true magic, desires supplication, demands sacrifice. You are a dragon by nature, as I am a griffon. We know this, as a pony would not.”

“The Alliance would disagree with you.”

The griffon spat on the ground. “The Alliance declared the siege a ‘military operation’. Millions of lives, thousands of bloodlines wiped from existence, all perfectly legal. I will sleep soundly without their approval.”

Spike glanced at their surroundings. “I can see that,” he said, before turning his gaze down to his notes. “You did seek their approval, though. Once the siege was broken and Orlovia joined the Alliance. You were part of the advance through occupied Griffonia, the third prong of Equestria and the Crystal Empire’s push into Senna after they’d defeated Zaniskar.”

“I was,” the griffon confirmed.

“And you saw the Princess. Met her, right? After Gąsiorwice?” When the griffon didn’t answer, Spike continued. “The Griffonian village your unit passed through, near the Sennan border. There was a massacre. Dozens of civilians dead, women and children. Griffons, like you.”

“Not like me,” the griffon said, scowling. “They were not besieged. They could have fought back.”

“And that excuses pillaging? That excuses rape?”

“We were soldiers. Far away from home, traumatized by endless war. What creature could react normally to that?” The griffon’s scowl twisted into a smirk. “And what is so awful about his having fun with a hen, after such horrors? The Princess did not agree, of course. But she understood. Ironclaw understands us still.”

Spike blinked. His translator gently buzzed beside him. “You told her about it?”

The griffon shook his head. “She already knew. And she did nothing. She ranted, she raved, she thought us monsters and called us worse. But in the end, she served the Alliance, and she required us to die for it. Believe me, do not believe me, it makes little difference. It was so.”

Spike gripped his notepad — folded one hand over the other, to stop them both from shaking. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

The griffon leaned forward — wrapped his talons around the scuffed metal bars of his cell. “I served Orlovia. I would do it again. And you, Artificer, serve nothing at all.” He paused, then grinned. “Otherwise you would be in here with me.”