Fact: Chryssy is plotting something.

Despite knowing that, Chester plays along as Esau hauls him to his feet and half-marches, half-drags him to one side of the main hall. Solitary confinement is far from the worst thing that could happen to him right now. He doesn't want to blow the fragile cover he somehow managed to establish. And he may not get a better chance to get Esau alone.

The stairs up to the second-floor balcony are steep, and Chester's gut is still on fire where he was punched. He leans into the stairs and hauls his protesting body up on hands and knees, with Esau pushing him up and taking most of the weight. At the top, he limps across the ultra-plush carpet, bracing himself on the polished redwood railing, past the door to the Holy Mother's bedroom and the life-size portrait permanently overseeing the main hall.

Up here, her image is radiant, rapturous, innocent, wreathed in a halo of light. Down below, the real one is magenta-lecturing an audience of pale orange devotees that Brother Chester's return is an opportunity to reflect on how they too have failed her, and that she is arranging a sharing session in the morning so that they can unburden themselves of transgressions before they bring her truth to the world.

The door to Chryssy's meditation room is small but ornate, panels of light woods in layered whirling designs set in a sturdy mahogany frame. There's not a knob, but an entire wrought-iron handle, with a discreet keyhole above it for a deadbolt. Esau fishes a keyring from his pocket and wrestles with the deadbolt until it unlocks with a heavy thunk, then pushes down on the oversized handle until the door swings inward. He gestures for Chester to enter, a pale yellow resignation settling in.

Chester walks into the largely empty room—but that knot in his gut is growing increasingly intense. All that motion set it to protesting, and then the stop-and-start at the door got his head spinning along with it. Abruptly, as Esau closes the door behind them, Chester crumples down to hands and knees on the yoga mat which sprawls across a portion of the wood flooring.

Esau opens his mouth to say something, cream swirling back to life—then hesitates and goes peach as he turns to see Chester. His mouth works. "Uh," he finally blue-and-yellow-says, "are you okay?"

"I'm," Chester starts. Then his stomach hitches, and nausea overtakes him. He lunges for a corner planter and vomits into the holy basil.

Really vomits. A sea of cyan floods from his mouth, and he barely has enough time to gasp for breath before his stomach spasms again and a second wave gushes forth. It's cold, slimy, sour, and it shimmers as it sloshes around the planter and sinks into the dirt.

Bizarrely, all Chester can think as a final spasm empties him out is how much he loves Holds-the-Fire. But… somehow it's wrong. The cyan is overwhelming his mouth, numbing his tongue, and his brain similarly feels as though it's fighting free of a choking miasma of her, more obsession than appreciation. He spits, trying to clear the taste from his mouth. She deserves so much better than that.

"Chess," Esau peach-says from behind him, "did you just barf love?"

As Chester's love for Holds-the-Fire diminishes to a more natural level, his mind clears and sharpens. He stares down at the blue-spattered planter, the reality of the situation coming into focus.

The broken bloodstones just saved his brain… and then they used the leverage of their gift to beg to be saved from their wielders? What kind of mind trick was that? He saw their magic ignite to turn the forest fight lethal, and he refuses to ignore the evidence of his senses.

And yet… and yet. He stares dully at the shimmering blue as the last of it evaporates or is absorbed. Tiny doubts gnaw at him, hard to ignore.

He shelves them and refocuses on Esau's question.

"I think I did," Chester slowly says. "But the bad kind. Artificial."

Esau doesn't immediately respond. Chester wipes his mouth on a sleeve and turns to look. Esau is staring at him, still stuck at peach, as if Chester had grown a third eye.

"Look, today has been really weird," Chester adds. "Even before the Holy Mother…" Wait, wait. Focus. This is his opening. "… before she tried to mind-control me. That's what that was back in the main hall."

Cream stabs through Esau's shock. He tears his eyes off Chester, and abruptly walks over to the far wall. (An enormous mural of ascended Chryssa-swamini on a celestial throne, radiating love which blankets and feeds the mortal world below—marred only by some unobtrusive hopper windows in the corners, hinged open to allow air circulation.) Esau stares at the image of Chryssa-swamini as his feelings swirl. Then the cream metastasizes.

"Damn it, Chess," Esau red-says. "This again? Even now?"

Chester's heart sinks, but he barrels on while he still can. "Listen. She's evil, she has been since the beginning, it took meeting real enlightenment to see it, let me explain—"

Esau whirls on him. "You do this every time! You don't like the way Swamini-ji does things, you get it in your head that she could be better if we just asked nicely or questioned her plans or, I don't know, teamed up with assassins, and it's all of us who have to pick up the pieces of your stupid misplaced idealism. Why are you doing this to us again, Chess? Why are you doing this to me?"

The last 48 hours have been a crash course in standing up to other people's red, but in the face of anger from Esau, of all people, Chester still finds himself folding. "Where's this anger coming from?" he pleads, deflecting from the bizarre example which he desperately hopes was a hypothetical. "You feel guilty about what you did downstairs. You know there's something wrong."

Chester's placation does seem to have an effect—with an effort, Esau simmers down from red into pink, and puts that energy into pacing instead. "I felt guilty because I thought you would know you had gone too far," he pink-says. "I wanted you to have a chance at real redemption instead of being beaten up and hit with a siddhi before you could get one word out. After everything we've done together, Chess, I thought you were better than this." Esau flings his hands up, then gestures at the planter where the holy basil's leaves are starting to droop and curl. "But instead you've become… arrgh! I don't even know! How do you always make everything so complicated!?"

Chester, too, stares down at the planter. It's a fair question. He's suffered plenty for all his recent choices. And yet… and yet. Losing Holds-the-Fire is by far his biggest regret, but if he had the chance to do it over again, he still wouldn't let her shoot Ember.

"Because I try to do the right thing," Chester says quietly. "Evil is simple. Good is messy."

Esau stares at him, pink wavering.

"You honestly believe that," he black-says. "I don't know whether that makes it better or worse."

"Given the good people I met today," Chester says with a touch of dry humor, "that's just speaking from experience."

Esau shades maroon. "The good people who attacked the Holy Mother unprovoked?"

… Not a hypothetical, then.

Chester fixes Esau with a stare, studying him. There are no tells of humor of dishonesty in his aura. Nevertheless, he finds it hard to believe what he's hearing. "Are you serious? Celestia and Sunset?"

"Were those their names?" Esau says, flickering light violet. "Principal lady and delinquent kid? Yeah, they dropped their disguises and unleashed some big blasts of transgressive magic on her, out by one of the cabins by the gardens."

Oh no. "Are they okay?" Chester blurts out.

"I don't know," Esau maroon-says. "I don't care. And it concerns me that you do."

Chester tries to stuff his anxiety down, hoping he'll have a chance to follow up on them later. "Listen. Something's wrong here." He thinks back to that first meeting with Celestia, and the pair's utter lack of malice—even when they thought he wasn't listening in. He just can't square that with them trying to kill the Holy Mother. "Did you see what happened? Or are you just going by what Swamini-ji said?"

"I saw everything after the fireworks started," Esau says. He fixes Chester with a stare and goes an earnest muddy green. "Swamini-ji had survived their initial attack and managed to take the principal down. The delinquent had become some sort of"—Esau gestures, flickering briefly pink as words fail him—"flying… demon… thing, screaming and blasting at her to finish the job. Anton and I managed to distract her until Swamini-ji subdued her too."

There's no way Esau's lying to him about that, and yet Chester can't bring himself to believe it. He numbly shakes his head. "That doesn't sound like them. They weren't even out to meet Chryssa-swamini. Anton captured them and brought them here."

"Well, maybe their plans changed when they realized they had the chance to take a shot at her."

Chester lunges for his rapidly depleting stack of objections. "I'm not saying you're lying, Saw, but none of you look like you've been in a fight." He gestures down at his own robes, soiled and half-shredded.

"Turns out Swamini-ji's got a half-dozen siddhis she never used before today—fortunately including bodily wholeness—because she never needed them until you sicced demons on her," Esau says, muddy green shading into tawny resentment.

Chester winces. "You keep saying that. But how do you know they started the fight?"

Esau finally crossfades fully into pink. "Why is it so hard to believe you got misled by people you met literally today? Do you hate Swamini-ji that much?"

Chester tentatively stands—his gut protesting—and takes Esau's hand. "It's not hate, Saw. Listen. I don't know how much time we have. I can't tell you the whole story right away." (And condensing it to the highlights is going to sound alternate-dimension magical-talking-unicorn crazy.) "But they're the good guys. They care about people. About doing the right thing. And even if you don't believe me on that—I know that you know what you saw when Swamini-ji used her powers on me."

Esau's not buying it. His pink intensifies. "Yes. The siddhi of vashitva, transcendental dominion. Aligning lesser beings with the truths of the universe to bring them closer to enlightenment. You don't think she told me what she was going to have to do to you?" Blue-and-yellow concern creeps in. "And you took her gift and vomited it back out. Enlightenment makes you vomit now, Chess. Doesn't that concern you even a little?"

"It would if she were enlightened!" Chester says, feeling increasingly desperate. "But that's not what her gold color means! I met someone else who can feel it, this amazing girl raised by wolves…"

Esau fades to a skeptical gray.

"… I'm serious, Saw! Look, I got this from her." Chester scrabbles through his pockets to show him Holds-the-Fire's lighter. His heart clenches. It's not there.

Now the universe is just mocking him. He managed to keep it all the way through the woods, and lost it at some point after getting into Anton's truck.

Esau sighs, a pale yellow resignation displacing the gray. "See, Chess, this is what happens when we put our judgment above the Holy Mother's. I dared to think you deserved better than getting beaten up just for being you again. But she was right—you needed that severe of a wake-up call. I wish it had worked. I'm going to go tell her it didn't."

And it's back to panic time.

"Saw! Don't do this," Chester begs. "I know you've got doubts. Hear me out."

Esau backs toward the door, facing Chester, returning to gray. "I don't think I should be discussing doubts with someone who pals around with demons and vomits up enlightenment."

Chester's nearly lost him—and he only has another sentence or two before Esau's out the door. He needs something armor-piercing. Fast.

In desperation, he breaks his silence on the secret he's held for years. "Swamini-ji is covering up Sister Mandy's disappearance."

Esau hesitates, colors whirling—but only for a moment, quickly resolidifying back into wary orange-gray. "I'm sure the demon assassins told you all sorts of lies about that. We've known for years that was just Brother Bill's crazy talk."

Chester could probably coax doubts to life there with more time—but lacking physical evidence, not quickly enough. So he pivots, firing his last shot. "And she tried to remove my color-sight."

Esau presses on the iron handle and tugs the door open, shifting merely into rose-pink disappointment. "I'm no longer surprised she decided you're as big a threat as the assassins."

"No," Chester says urgently. "When I was five."

Esau freezes, peach.

"No she didn't," he says slowly, turning his head to study Chester.

"Brother Esau, I swear upon everything I now or ever held holy, she did."

Esau's silent for several moments. "I don't want to believe you're lying," he finally maroon-says. "But what I see is pure desperation."

"She has a black necklace. It went dark sparkly when she did it." Chester rapidly flings out every detail he can, hoping one of them batters some doubt free. "It failed and she was disgusted with me. Said it was a curse and ordered me never to speak of what happened. That's why I was so freaked out at using it for the spy mission."

Esau explodes into black—a starfield filled with glittering fragments of sympathy, horror, bitterness, anger. There's a part of him which seems desperate to believe Chester's so far gone he'd lie even straight to Esau's face. But there's fear stirring up, too, that something's truly wrong here.

Esau pushes the door back closed, keeping his hand on the handle. "No," he challenges, still a frantic swirl of doubts. "She told me right from the start that it was a great gift, a sign of my potential. That if I harnessed it for enlightenment I could transcend nearly to her level."

"She never tried to remove your color-sight because she already knew what had happened with me." That comes out of Chester's mouth as epiphany, not evidence. "And with you, she didn't have to worry about what happened between us. No wonder you were always her favorite."

"No. She—no." Esau's maelstrom intensifies—and then peach spurts back to the foreground. "You know about the necklace. How did you know about the necklace? You weren't here for the fight."

"I told you. She used it on me when I was five. Right before Sister Mandy vanished." The secrets are tumbling out of Chester now, a burden carried far too long. "She kept it in her bedroom cabinet. Gold, with an onyx gem. She bent the clasp trying to get it off her, but I imagine she's fixed it by now."

Esau's black slowly melts into deep orange horror as the peach fades. "… I was wondering about the bent clasp." Maroon springs back up and the colors begin warring. "But there's plenty of ways you could have known that."

"Saw…" Chester plays a hunch. "Did she honestly act like color-sight was a gift? Not when you two were talking about it. But during the times she didn't think you were watching."

Chester has only watched this awful kind of epiphany play out a few times before. The deep orange swirling in, brittle and spiky, as if to strangle him. Half a dozen other colors venting as he struggles with the realization. Maroon making one last stand, then getting decisively routed. Red flaring and Esau pacing it off, searching for something to punch in the nigh-empty room. Yellow smothering the orange, then white as yellow fails to take hold.

Everyone he's watched go through this has ended up somewhere different once the colors settle. Esau finally burns through the orange with brown resolve, frantically pacing around the meditation room until secondary tints of caramel crystallize.

Abruptly, Esau whirls toward the wall between the mural and the door, fishing his keyring out as he goes. He beelines straight for a second, smaller door, which Chester knows leads into the luxurious private bathroom wedged between here and Chryssy's bedroom.

Esau fiddles with its deadbolt lock. There's a heavy click. He turns back to Chester.

"Here's how this is going to go," Esau says, his khaki fierce and commanding. "I threw you in here and yelled at you a while, but I was so upset when I left that I forgot to check the side door. As soon as you've got a clear opening, you're going to go through to the Holy Mother's bedroom, make a beeline for her balcony without touching anything, and run straight for the woods. Keep going as far and fast as you can and never come back. And don't you dare try to fix this. Just go spend your life somewhere the Holy Mother can't find you." Esau struggles to keep his dark blue contained, but it finally breaks free, and he adds: "My duty's to Swamini-ji, and this doesn't change that. But you always deserved something besides her."

"Saw," Chester says, overwhelmed by relief. "Thank you."

Esau hesitates—amid a tiny flare of maroon—and his eyes flick around Chester's outlines. "But?"

Chester hadn't been consciously winding up for a "but"—though at Esau's prompt, there's no question what it is. "But I can't just run like that."

"Chess." Esau's voice is visibly strained as his colors plummet toward a desperate radium green. "Don't do this again. Not now."

"Celestia and Sunset wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for me. If I abandon them, I have to live with that for the rest of my life. And then there's this other friend of theirs…" Chester doesn't think he can talk Ember out of trying to rescue the unicorns, and from what he just heard of the big fight, she's in way over her head. "I have to fix them."

Creamsicle flickers through Esau. "You what?"

"I have to," Chester repeats, and then trips over his own words. He was thinking of Ember crouching behind the outcropping overlooking the gardens, and that just came out. "Fix… things with… them." Ember's and Holds-the-Fire's faces are overlapping confusingly in his brain, with highlights of gleaming gemstone red, and he has to take a moment to push them apart, like separating two portraits left on the same easel.

Damn it. The bloodstones are getting too deep inside his brain. They're finding ominous new ways to beg for repair, and he could be in real trouble if this escalates any further.

"They're fighting," he adds. "Because of bad magic inside."

Chester struggles to decontaminate his logic into a bloodstone-free version. What most desperately needs fixing is how things went between him and Holds-the-Fire. But if he wants to patch things up with her, it's going to take more than an apology—it's going to take reconciling her with Ember. And he can't do that if Ember charges into the ashram and Anton shoots her in the face.

"… okay, whatever." Esau cradles his face in one hand, shading a muddy orange that is very pointedly embarrassment on Chester's behalf. "Chess. Have you learned nothing from every other time this has happened? You've never fixed a thing in your life. I can't protect you forever. And I can't let you blow things up even further, or I won't have the ability to even give you this."

"I have, actually. I found my own way out of the woods today."

Esau turns violet. "Wait, really?"

"Yeah!" Chester share's Esau's excitement for a moment, but sheepishly adds: "That's how Anton found me to bring me here."

Esau's muddy orange floods back in. "That doesn't really help your case."

To Chester's shock, he realizes it doesn't matter. "Then how many examples do you want? I started the day failing at airport duty, and since then, I've taught someone color-sight, stopped a fight by pretending I could turn into a bear, survived a truck ride with Anton, and resisted a mind-control siddhi." (Even with assistance, that feels like an accomplishment.) "You were right. I needed something besides life with Swamini-ji. Because now I have friends I need to protect, too, and I'm finding out just how much I can do on my own."

It's the most beautiful pitch Chester has ever given. Because he started it purely to change Esau's mind. But halfway through, he ended up convincing himself.

Chester can do this.

He stares Esau in the eyes, gives him a nod, and marinates in that novel sensation of justified confidence.

Just like every time Chester drags him into his plan, Esau projects pink in a pointless attempt to hide his stir of green. "Dammit, Chess."

"I'm not even asking you to do anything different. Just forget to check the door like you said, and I'll sort out the rest."

"When you get caught again, I swear upon everything holy that I'm not going to lift one single finger to help."

"If I get caught again, that's the least of my problems." (It's a very Chet Land sentiment, Chester notes dryly, but it's true.)

Esau sighs, pale yellow. "You are serious about this. Ugh. Just… can you at least not make your move until tomorrow morning? Let me see what I can sort out. I'm not sticking my neck out for you again, but maybe the Holy Mother can be persuaded to put off dealing with you and the assassins."

Chester shakes his head. Despite his protestations, Esau would be putting a lot on the line trying to steer Chryssy's actions—and Chester's not going to let that blow up in Esau's face again. "No. I'm serious, don't take any part in this. And besides, tomorrow's too late. She wants to talk to me in the morning, and it sounds like she and Anton have big plans."

"Fine." Esau's pale yellow brightens as he pleads for a concession. "Midnight, then. If you're helping the others escape it'll be easier in the dark. And there's something I want to look into before you make the Holy Mother melt down entirely."

That request's much harder to deny. The others are in danger now… but Esau's already risking so much for him, and giving him so much. It looked like Chryssy was going to be distracted by Anton for a while. And to be honest, Chester could use a little time to sort through all of today's craziness and come up with a plan.

"Alright," Chester says. "Midnight, I can do."

"Good." Esau's indigo is immediate and pervasive. He walks over to the main door, and hesitates with his hand on the handle.

"Hopefully," he says, his blues darkening, "I won't see you again. Hopefully you won't be stupid enough to pop your head up where the Holy Mother can find it, once you all get out. So good luck with whatever you do out there."

"You too," Chester says, and Esau steps through the door.

The keyhole above the handle darkens. There's a thunk as the deadbolt engages. Then fading steps as Esau walks off down the hall.

Chester lets out a long breath, glancing around the empty room. A moment of peace. Finally.

He sits on the yoga mat—well, gingerly lowers himself to the yoga mat, stomach still feeling ugly. Now that no mortal threat is staring him in the face for the first time in… hours? Holy smokes, today's been the longest day of his life… his adrenaline is draining away.

And that makes everything hurt. The shots he took from Esau are still new—throbbing, simmering pain—and he's sporting three different sets of bruises from Anton's mistreatment and his woodland stumbles and his fall off the boulder.

He tries to find a comfortable sitting position, but his hindquarters have taken as much abuse as the rest of him. Chester finally settles for rolling onto his side, knees pulled halfway up to his chest. It's so nice just to unclench his muscles and yield to gravity—even if half his body is screaming and the other half is cramped.

Not moving helps. The pain recedes, bit by bit. He feels muscle knots start to uncoil that he hadn't even realized were there.

Chester closes his eyes. Just for a moment. To clear his thoughts.

He has so much to think about.

… Boy, does lying down feel good.

Author's Note

In Chester's defense, he definitely needs some rest at this point. Everything that's happened since meeting Celestia has taken place in less than 24 hours.

I probably need some rest too, but no time for sleep -- I'm off at a writer's retreat for the next week! I'll still poke my head in to keep an eye on things and get chapters posted, though. Next chapter, "When It Clicks", posts Wednesday, Sept. 11!

Bonus fact for anyone who didn't catch the chapter title pun: Glurge is the term for, as one show put it, "sentimentality so nauseating that no living creature could possibly take it seriously".