Chester, too, leaves.

What else can he do?

* * *

He walks aimlessly, automatically. The forest he slogs through, too, is drab, lifeless, devoid of emotional color. There are no humans around to have those emotions, only a cold and unfeeling nature and—somewhere—the amazing woman he stabbed right through the heart. Her chartreuse aura of betrayal still lingers in the shadows of Chester's vision, haunting him in the moments after blinks.

His mind keeps replaying Holds-the-Fire's final words as he walks. But it's been a long and crazy day, and it slowly starts to dawn on him just how much other trouble he's gotten into.

Chester's thoughts stray to the ashram, with an underlying knot of dread. Every other time the Holy Mother had been this angry at him, Esau had been there to shield Chester from the worst of it. But Esau's been avoiding him since that stupid little rebellion. And more importantly, Chester has thought things today he can't unthink. There's a very real chance that the wolfpack will only be the first of today's excommunications.

… maybe it's not that dire. The Holy Mother had left him an opening at the end of the phone call. Even with his track record, he can probably dance around the worst of his doubts and grovel enough to appease her. But it's going to hurt. The order to invent his own punishment had meant that Chryssa-swamini was looking for something creatively painful; permanent airport duty, as bad as it is, would be too milquetoast for anything more than a starting point.

Maybe… maybe he just shouldn't return.

But where else would he go? The closest thing he's ever had to a friend outside of the ashram is the magical extradimensional unicorns. And after what Twili—damn it, Ember, he still can't believe he got that one wrong—after what Ember said when she ran off, there's zero chance they'll forgive him. Ember had been correct. Holds-the-Fire had been 100 percent harmless with a non-working gun, right up until the moment he had taught her how to shoot.

But they're wrong about her! Holds-the-Fire isn't some genocidal villain. She's a scared and powerless girl, backed into a corner, just looking for a way to provide for her family. If she had wanted to kill, she had every chance to shoot him and then Ember. She had every chance to rush past him and chase the fleeing Ember, or send her pack after the wolf. The thought had to have occurred to her. She's terrifyingly smart, and inquisitive, and fun, and understands him, and…

Chester blinks, some moments later, and shakes himself away from forlorn thoughts of her face, their mutual blue-greens as they held each other's hands, her simple joy at their joint discoveries, her blazing lilac laughter when they were wrestling together in the wolfpile.

They're wrong about her. Aren't they?

Abruptly, Chester sits on a nearby log, cradles his head in his hands, and lets out a little sob. He doesn't know. He thought they were wrong. But he's not sure he can think straight about Holds-the-Fire. He loves her, or something like it—that much is obvious from how much everything hurts. But he can't see his own colors to sort that out from his analysis. If she were here, she could. He wants nothing more than to ask her what he's feeling. But she's gone, and that's his fault.

He grits his teeth, wiping tears from his cheeks, and tries to stay focused. They're wrong about her.

No, that's not fair. He thinks they're wrong about her. But this morning he was defending Chryssa-swamini, and then Holds-the-Fire helped him realize that maybe he shouldn't, and then he taught Holds-the-Fire how to shoot a gun, and then he made her kick him out of the pack. Who would trust his judgment? Who should? It's the absolute worst.

Chester lets self-pity wash him away, crumpling into a ball and sobbing into his folded arms for a few minutes. His sleeves turn from dirty mess to muddy mess. Once the tears are cried out, he sits up and unconsciously wipes his arm across his cheeks, smearing gunk across his face. It's disgusting, but even that thought only makes him think of Holds-the-Fire's tongue licking his teeth.

He's got to go back.

But what would he say? Chester has more experience with upset enlightened beings than any mortal should, and so he knows that her telling him to go hadn't been a snap decision. She'd meant it. Him defending Twi—Ember—was a dealbreaker.

Chester stands and resumes his walk. How in Tartarus had things gotten so bad between Holds-the-Fire and her extradimensional werewolf duplicate? He tries prodding his wandering thoughts in that direction, but its contours are as foreign as the bewildering colorless geometry of the woods.

And then he's snapped out of his thoughts as he realizes: he recognizes that tree on the right.

He blinks, and his brain immediately kicks into gear. Nature is the same black box to him that it's always been; Chester recognizing a tree is absurd on its face. But this particular birch tree is even more so. It's bent in a twisted S shape which can't possibly be natural, the trunk nearly doubled over at the base before swerving discordantly toward the sky. It had been bizarre enough to register in some corner of his hindbrain even amid the earlier suffocating haze of grief.

Chester walks over to study it up close, and then he sees a double-hand-sized shriveled gray burl on the ground near its roots—as if some other, even more alien tree had strode by and deposited a coprolite in its wake. That's what clinches it for him. He remembers that weird gray pile, too, and even if there are two S-shaped birches in the forest, the combination is impossibly unique.

So he's been here before. About… half an hour ago? Not long after leaving the site of his failure.

A cold, hard lump settles into the pit of his stomach as he pieces together the implications. Somehow, in the haze of self-pity, he has doubled back to his starting point. He's wandering in circles.

… No. There's no need to panic. Chester's no longer a stupid kid wandering into the woods. He is an adult, eighteen years old, and it's been years since Swamini-ji first allowed him a smartphone. Which has GPS. This is as simple as tapping the Navigate app and letting his phone lead him to the road.

He sticks his hand in his pocket.

His smartphone's gone.

A spike of terror stabs Chester. He frantically checks his other pockets. A couple of folded pamphlets for the Holy Mother. Four bits, in crumpled singles. A tiny hard lump—Holds-the-Fire's lighter.

His gut twists into a knot. That's right—he last saw the phone in her hands, and pocketed the lighter right before they started fiddling with the gun. Then things spun out of control too fast and too far to sort out their possessions before she left. Just how badly has he screwed up today? Not only did he break Holds-the-Fire's heart, he stole her name.

Chester fights the urge to crumple up and start sobbing again. Right now, self-pity needs to take a back seat to self-preservation. He can sort that out once he's safe.

He looks around—really looks around, trying to pick out distinctive features other than the Impossibirch. But… it's forest. That's the best he has ever been able to do. Out of everything he's seen today, this specific tree and maybe the giant boulder are the only things he would be able to identify as landmarks. And if he can't do better than that… well. He doesn't have Esau to save him this time.

He's going to get lost and die in the forest.

Chester paces in a frantic circle, fighting to leash his panic. No. He's got to do better than that. What can he do? Think! Think!

Can he orient himself by the sun, maybe? He's heard that's a thing outdoorsy people do. He's been mostly in the shade, but he does see sporadic glimpses of light through the treetops. Chester thinks that through for a minute. It's mid-afternoon, and the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so the sun should be to the west, right? Wait, maybe southwest? Sunlight still comes in the ashram's southern windows at noon, so that should put the sun on the south side of the sky.

Would figuring out the sun's direction even help him? Where would he head? The ranches on the valley floor, maybe, and those were, what… east-ish of here?

Uncomfortably, Chester concludes that the plan is unworkable. All he's got are vague memories of the road trip (and the panorama from the boulder, from which he remembers mostly the ashram), and trying to piece the local geography together from such thin scraps is already making his head hurt. And if he can't get even compass directions clear in his head, using the sun to get anywhere might be worse than a blind guess.

Can he retrace his path? Find his old footsteps and double back on them? That plan dies after a minute of frantic searching; even knowing that he has walked past the Impossibirch twice, there's absolutely nothing even resembling footprints in the matted deadfall underfoot. He's not even certain what he should be looking for. Short of his old steps beginning to flash red like a video game objective, that's a nonstarter.

But that gets him thinking, really thinking, about retracing his steps. Even if he can't find his old trail, anything he can remember about how he got here might be the key to saving his life.

It seems pretty hopeless, though. They had started at the road, and he had figured that they would take a straight-line path from there, but Tw—Ember—had led him on a broad, twisty route. They'd changed direction constantly.

… Hang on. He does remember something. That no matter which way they walked, the right sides of his feet hurt.

Wait, that's it! He remembers noticing that, and wondering whether the wolf was choosing their path just to mess with him. But then he had realized why Ember was taking that weirdly winding path: it meant they didn't ever have to climb or descend the slope as they wove their way through the hilly terrain. Chester had been momentarily impressed at that. He remembers thinking how smart that plan was, and being briefly grateful that an enlightened being was around to come up with it, before his conversation with Ember swept the thought away.

And following the lead of an enlightened being? That, he can do. Stay at the same elevation and follow the hillside.

Relief floods in as pieces of a plan click into place. It doesn't matter that he doesn't know where he is—he can retrace his steps that way! The road they started at cuts a line from the valley floor all the way to Horseneck Pass; even if he messes up and strays too far up or down, following the slope means he has to hit the road somewhere as he circles the hillside above the valley.

He double-checks his logic before committing to the idea, but he can't find any flaw. The road is a big, long, impossible-to-miss ribbon of concrete. Like the edge of a map: impossible to leave the area without crossing it. The hike from the road to where he and Twi—Ember—split up was only… what, five minutes?… and from there to the boulder, and from boulder to Impossibirch, were only a couple of minutes each. He's twenty minutes from the road at most.

Chester will never be able to trust his pathfinding, but he can at least trust basic logic. He takes a deep breath and sets off.

Approximately half an hour later, Chester's starting to really worry.

Maybe he's just bad at time estimates? He orients himself to the slope again, settling back into the familiar foot-hurting-right pattern, and walks for another… he'll call it ten minutes. Then, just to be sure, another ten. Something's definitely wrong; he should have long since passed the road by now.

Chester shouts a curse to the heavens, startling some birds. His plan was Chester-proof and he still failed. He's going to get lost and starve to death in the forest. It's the perfect end to the unrelenting failure of this stupid day.

He crumples to the ground, curling up against a fallen tree, and sobs his tears dry again.

It's too much. He just wants to lie down and let sweet release overtake him. But as his tears slow, his brain refuses to stop chewing at the problem. There has to be something. Even if he's too worthless to find it, there is a way out. Chryssa-swamini survived in the jungles of Elytra for four years; even he should be able to survive a single damned afternoon.

He sits up. Alright. One more try. He takes a long breath and takes stock.

Fact: He's screwed.

Chester is now double-lost. He's eaten nothing but an airport sandwich all day. He's hungry, thirsty, and has zero equipment except for a fuelless lighter. It's getting on toward late afternoon, and he's not looking forward to losing light: even if he survives a cold, lonely night in the woods, his situation will only get worse as time passes.

Fact: He has no choice but to rescue himself.

Without his phone, he can't call for help. Holds-the-Fire and the wolves will avoid him. It's not impossible that Celestia or the Holy Mother might come out here to search for him, but neither know where he intended to go, much less where he actually is. They'd be looking for a Chester needle in a forest haystack.

Fact: Everywhere he can walk might just get him into more trouble.

He could go uphill for a better view to get his bearings, but then he's heading deeper into the wilderness, and the best-case scenario is that he gets a momentary understanding of his position and then backtracks to plunge back into the disorienting trees again. He could go downhill toward the valley floor, but at this point that's no guarantee he'll reach civilization—he might walk right past the ranches while still in the trees, and if he can't find them he'll really be lost, without even the few landmarks he has now. He could aim for the road, except he can't: he already tried that and failed.

… Maybe not everywhere. What if he backtracks to the Impossibirch? That at least is a known location, and walking at the same elevation on the hillside should work the same in both directions. That by itself doesn't get him un-lost, but… hmm. Then he could keep going the opposite way until he reaches Canter Creek? He hasn't crossed any water while going this direction, so the creek must be behind him too.

That feels like a much longer shot than it should be right now, but it at least gives him an option.

… But is it an achievable one? He frantically tries to poke holes in his logic, in hopes of finding where he messed up last time. Canter Creek should be as unmissable as the highway, right? It starts up in the mountains, flows steadily downhill through the hills he's in, and then goes past the ranches on the valley floor—if he stays at roughly the same elevation, he has to reach the point where it goes from above him to below him. But then, he thought the same thing about the road, too, and that didn't work out. But then, this time he's turning around and going backwards. But then, without even trying, he did that originally by mistake… do forests even follow basic laws of geometry, or is he trapped in some weird shadow realm where directions don't apply?

Chester stops and takes a deep breath. Focus. This has to work. He has no other ideas.

What if he accidentally stumbles on some other stream thinking it's Canter Creek? Chester thinks about that for a bit. He's… kinda dubious there are any others. This late into the summer, all the places the hills fold together have been rock-scramble dry gullies; Canter Creek is the only water he's seen flowing.

But, honestly, he'd take it. As thirsty as he is, any source of water would significantly improve his short-term odds. And in a worst-case scenario, another creek might not go downstream to the ranches, but it probably goes downstream to somewhere, and at least he would have drinking water as he walked.

Chester racks his brain. He really isn't excited to follow a plan whose logic has already failed him once. The spark of hope keeping him going is rapidly fading. But, ultimately, it comes down to this: he stops moving and dies, he wanders in circles and dies, or he approaches the problem with some vague veneer of methodology, and probably dies. Retracing his steps is the least deadly option.

With that cheerful thought in mind, Chester stands up, does an about-face, and sets out again.

It feels a bit weird having the downslope on his left, and after a few minutes of walking, he finally realizes why: the opposite sides of his feet hurt.

He stops walking for a moment and smacks himself on the forehead as epiphany strikes. All of his hillside traversing before now has been with the downslope at right! No wonder he couldn't find the road! All this time, he'd been hiking in the same direction that he and Ember had gone to walk away from it.

Come to think of it, hadn't the two of them crossed the creek to look at the pawprints? And in his distraught state, after losing Holds-the-Fire, Chester never crossed back over. So it has been behind him all this time. Both it and the road, actually.

Ugh. He's cost himself so much unnecessary stress and wasted time. Still, it's an immeasurable relief to finally understand how he failed. That ember of hope starts to cautiously smolder again.

The forest wastes no time in reminding him that understanding his mistake is not the same thing as correcting it. Everything about the return trip seems designed to sap his energy. Without a trail to follow, he's spending nearly as much time navigating around impassable terrain as he is making progress. The dry gullies the hillside regularly crosses feel steeper and more treacherous than on the trip out; the vegetation seems thicker, more choked with brambles and vines, requiring him to break further upslope or downslope just to find a clear path; and with the day's lack of food and water kicking in, everything is much more of an effort. In the thicker brush, thorns and dead branches rip at his limbs and robe, and he's sweating profusely with the exertion in the summer heat. Soon, he's moving in a half-haze, merely putting one foot in front of the other, pushing forward because there's no other option.

Time passes. He's too tired to track it. The sun drifts lower in the sky.

Chester's beyond exhausted by the time Canter Creek sneaks up on him. Following the curve of a sharply bending hillside, he pauses for breath after ripping through some particularly ugly brush, and suddenly there's the melodic trickle of water ahead. He perks up and hustles forward until he can see it. A steep, narrow ravine cuts through the slope, a deep gouge in the hillside, but down at the bottom ankle-deep water burbles through a rocky streambed. He remembers Canter Creek as broader and more placid, and the hillside around it as far less steep, but it has to be Canter Creek because Chester knows he didn't cross anything else while the right sides of his feet were hurting.

Reaching the water involves either a long, brush-choked traverse or twenty feet down a steep, precarious scramble. Chester chooses the climb down (and nearly wipes out as the soft hillside gives way under his sneakers, saving himself from a fall at the last moment by lunging for a young tree). At water's edge, giardia be damned, he cups his hands and drinks his fill straight from the creek. Then he sprawls against the hillside and, for the first time in hours, lets himself relax.

Getting back to the creek was a big win. If he has to be honest, it's better than he thought he was capable of. Holds-the-Fire… well, wouldn't be proud of him, exactly, but maybe she'd have to acknowledge that his skill at being a wolf is greater than zero.

Not that that would change anything.

Chester's earlier recriminations slam back in. By returning to Canter Creek, he has fixed a wholly self-inflicted problem and done exactly nothing about the bigger ones. He lets out a humorless chuckle. What a stupidly perfect metaphor. Once again, he's back to where he started, with nothing here for him, not knowing where to go.

He sits up and stares at the creek. (And then, while he's here, gives in and dips his hands back in, rubbing them clean in the running water and getting the worst of the dirt from his arms and face.) Keep walking on left-side-hurting feet and go back to the road? Maybe Celestia and Sunset and Ember, or at least their car, are still there waiting for him; but that's both a long shot and not necessarily a positive. Also, if he tries for the road again and blows it again, he's pretty sure he's going to have a nervous breakdown then and there.

So, downstream to the ranches, then.

(And then what? Borrow a phone, call for a Hoovr pickup, tell the driver to pick a direction, keep going until his credit runs out, and start over somewhere under an assumed name?)

Chester struggles down the ravine for long enough to realize just how awful an idea it is. He'd thought the brush was bad before, but at water's edge, it's on another level entirely. Often his only choices are plowing directly through the walls of brush he's been so far treating as impenetrable, or a wet, slick, rocky scramble down the center of the creek. The steep ravine slopes are nigh impassable. His sneakers, and soon the bottom of his robe, are quickly soaked, and his rate of progress is in feet per minute. Finally, out of desperation, he scrambles on hands and feet back out of the ravine, and walks down the hillside about fifty feet away from the water, which is still unpleasant but at least the kind of unpleasant he's been making progress through all day.

Fortunately, that misery doesn't last long. The hillside starts rapidly leveling out, and Canter Creek emerges from its ravine into the broad, meandering waterway he remembers crossing. Apparently his two hours of traversing had left Chester a fair bit uphill from his starting point.

A minute further downstream, he catches sight of a familiar-looking boulder upslope from the creekbed. Now he's really back to where he started.

There's no sign of the wolfpack. He briefly considers abandoning his plan and trying to track them—but that's both stupid and beyond his capabilities, a combination he has no appetite for. No, better to keep going downstream and figure something out once in the smothering embrace of civilization. With a sigh, he puts the boulder at his back and walks away.

This time, hopefully, for good.

* * *

The next part of Chester's hike goes, if not easily, then at least according to plan.

He has already learned his lesson about walking in the creekbed; he stays a dozen paces away, skirting the edge of the riverbank thicket. He has already learned his lesson about wandering blindly; he keeps the creek within line of sight, listening to its burble as he goes. He has a landmark to follow; he's not trying to retrace his steps or navigate by elevation. Most importantly, he knows that if he just keeps walking, Canter Creek will reach the ranches sooner or later.

The forest thickens as it levels out, and quickly Chester finds himself pushing through tall, woody bushes and low, branchy trees. Progress is slow and grueling—but it is neither the slowest nor the worst conditions he's walked through today, merely exhausting bushwhacking. And then, suddenly, it opens up again, the trees giving way near-instantly to a wide dirt road, then fence, then open fields.

Chester lets out something halfway between a whoop of laughter and a sob of relief. He shoulders through the last of the brush into late afternoon sunlight, then drops to his knees at the road's edge and slaps his hands triumphantly down on the hard-packed dirt. Civilization. Civilization!

Beyond the fence, some cattle edge away from him, lowing. At that, he erupts in cathartic laughter. "That's right, domesticated beasts, withdraw in fear!" he shouts. (The cattle spook and trot away.) "For you face a man touched by wolves. Chester, Conqueror of Forests!" He spreads his arms, laughing hysterically as the herd trots off. He's not going to die today.

Slowly, the euphoria begins to wear off. Chester remembers how much he's still got to sort out. Well, one thing at a time. He turns toward the highway and starts trudging down the dirt road. Maybe if he hitchhikes to Canterlot? He'll need money, somewhere to sleep—but he does have some experience shaking down travelers for donations for the Holy Mother, and begging for himself can't be that different. Of course, if he truly needs a fresh start, maybe he can find his way up north. Whinnypeg or Chevalgary. He's always kinda wanted to explore the Crystal Empire—

Chester's thoughts are shattered by the gunning of an engine as an enormous pickup truck rounds a corner in the distance, skidding onto the dirt road and accelerating in his direction.

He pauses, then hustles to the edge of the road before the truck can reach him. As desperate as he is for human contact, that sort of urgency never bodes well. He should hitchhike with someone in less of a hurry. He'll just let them pass by.

The truck slams on its brakes as it approaches, fishtailing to a stop alongside Chester and kicking up an enormous cloud of dust.

Chester, coughing, raises an arm to shield his face. "Hey, what…" he starts to protest—and then catches sight of a familiar Stetson, and realizes who is grinning at him through the open driver's window.

"Well, well," Anton says in an ominous magenta, using a jovial tone of voice that Chester presumes is meant to sound friendly. "If it ain't Brother Chester!"

Of all the people who could have welcomed him back to civilization, of course it's the hair-trigger gun nut who he lied to extensively and unleashed a bunch of extradimensional villain hunters on. And Anton's schadenfreude is a literal red flag that this conversation is about to go nowhere good. Maybe Sunset slipped up and said something about them working together?

Chester's heart drops into his stomach. Or maybe Sunset's team made friends with Anton, and then Ember told him about how Chester's working with Holds-the-Fire?

He glances behind him at the trees lining the road. This could be really bad. Maybe he should make a break for it back into the forest.

… No, he decides. He's not that desperate.

Anton is, fundamentally, a human problem—and his emotions are an open book to Chester. It doesn't matter what he knows; there's always a way to muddy the waters. Play along, figure out what he learned from Sunset, play on his sympathies, and look for a chance to slip away before he can sort the truth from the lies.

"Anton!" Chester says, mimicking the enthusiastic tone. "Boy, is it good to see you!"

Anton guffaws. "You took the words right out of my mouth," he lilac-says—and for a moment, Chester dares to hope that he can sort this out.

Then Anton lifts a pistol up to the window, levels it at Chester, and thumbs back the hammer with a bone-chilling click. Magenta reasserts itself, shining bright and steady.

"Thought I was gonna have to run around the forest for days to drag your lyin' ass back to Blackrock Spire," Anton says as Chester meekly raises his hands. "Ain't Chryssy going to be thrilled?"

Author's Note

Sorry for posting a bit belatedly - Everfree NW has been an eventful convention. I'll be out of the woods soon, the same way Chester now is. Though hopefully without his additional complications.

Next chapter - "Cold Call" - publishes Wednesday, Aug. 28!