The ashram has shifted from a war zone into a blasted-out Tartaric landscape. Chryssy's no longer in the air, but there's a distorted halo of black and red seething and crackling from the parking lot in the distance, along with the more traditional illumination of fire. Large areas of the ashram grounds are roaring infernos, along with several cars and parts of three buildings. Devotees are running around screaming—some apparently fleeing the compound, some sprinting into cover, and one or two brave souls finding buckets and flinging water at the worst of the blazes. There's no immediate sign of the enormous blue-gray minotaur.

Only a few steps in, Chester is beginning to doubt his plan. That buzzing, crawling energy vibrating through him is egging him to infinite motion, but that's because it's weird, not because he's suddenly become superhuman. And people are heavy. He's barely cleared the cabin porch before his limbs are protesting—and then there's another boom from the Chryssy fight, and the ground sways underneath him and he misses a step. He and Sunset yelp as they go down, tumbling hard into the fields.

She's up first, grabbing his arm and jerking him back upright. "It was a nice thought! But let's both—" And she staggers again, spasming and dropping as Chester tries to cling to her hands and haul back. But he was only mostly up himself, short on leverage and wholly off-balance, and they both go down again in a tangle of limbs.

They struggle back to their feet. Chester, already panting for breath, glances at the distant parking lot.

Fact: At this pace, Chryssy will have regained her control before they get there.

Help! We need a pickup! Chester broadcasts on the bloodstone channel. Ember! Holds-the-Fire! Someone get me and Sunset to Chryssy!

A string of explosions rumbles out from the parking lot, a series of white flashes bursting open the night sky as a new zone of fire roars up. The link is silent for a moment.

Little busy! Ember belatedly says. The words echo meaning into his head like always, and he feels like there are emotional cues accompanying them which are right past the edge of his perception, but the words resolutely refuse to stir up colors.

We cannot let up, Holds-the-Fire says, and even without color, the transmission is fuzzy and distorted in a way that feels wounded. Your ploy grounded her and drove her to strike blindly, but the instant she recuperates, our chance is gone.

Get us there and we can end the fight! Chester pleads.

Stop to assist you and we will not have the chance, Holds-the-Fire says, and then there's another explosion in the distance and her presence withdraws.

Chester curses under his breath, uselessly flailing for a Plan B—and then Sunset shouts and tackles him to the ground. "Chester, look out!"

He yelps, going down hard, breath exploding from his lungs as Sunset lands on him. There's a blur of motion above them, and a split-second of illumination from a distant explosion catches an enormous wall of blue-gray fur right where they were standing.

Sunset shrieks. Her weight suddenly lifts off him, and then she's gone, and fear entirely overtakes Chester. He flings himself to one side, scrambling to sprint away from a prone start, and then something clamps onto his robes from behind and his life flashes before his eyes—

In a single smooth motion, he's lifted off the ground. Then, as he flails and screams, the iron grip at his back swings him up and sideways and releases.

The world spins, sky and ground trading places, and then a giant blue-gray form comes up to meet him and he slams squarely onto the back of an absurdly oversized wolf.

He blinks, stunned. Gravity starts toppling him off one side. He belatedly flails, and his hands catch and hold fistfuls of fur, and he jerks his knees inward on reflex, legs clenching against a torso several times his size. For a moment, everything is still, and he remembers finally to breathe.

There's a low whuff—more like the sound of a mountain shifting than a wolf speaking—and Chester lifts his head to fully take in the scene. Sunset's in front of him, uninjured but looking as traumatized as he feels, with a cluster of giant tooth-gouges in the back of her leather jacket. She clings to a neck too big for her to wrap her arms around, gasping for breath, and staring back at Chester with wide-eyed shock. Above her, the head of the massive wolf from Holds-the-Fire's pack is turned toward them, looking back over his shoulder at his new riders. There's a spark, foreign and wild, in his eyes. Not a person, but something more than animal.

Fact: This is the one Holds-the-Fire called Father. And the forest isn't the only place Chester knows him from.

He was a bloodstone wielder, once, when his muzzle closed around the crown in a long-abandoned hut. For years, the crown desperately tried to pound intellect into its animal companion, until it gave up and drove him to locate raw material more amenable to shaping.

And now the bloodstones have fully awoken, and some buried whisper inside of the wolf knows Chester's part in it.

"Hold on!" Chester says to Sunset, and bloodstone-says: Thank you! Take us to Holds-the-Fire's prey!

Father turns back around and lets out a bark, deep in tone and fraught with wolf meaning Chester has zero vocabulary for. Then his haunches tense, and he springs forward, and the ashram grounds hurtle by underneath his limbs.

Even with the circling path Father takes, skirting all Chryssy's fires, his massive bounds quickly chew up the distance to the parking lot—and not fifteen seconds later he bursts around one corner of the barracks, then skids to a stop just shy of several burning cars, flinching at the flames. It looks like this is as far as the Wolf Express can take them, and Sunset and Chester slide off his back. As he backs away, they crouch behind a little dirt mound blasted up from a deep, broad crater.

The parking lot looks like the surface of an alien planet, charred and crater-pitted, blazing skeletons of vehicles bleeding trails of molten metal across the ground, and at the center is Chryssy—who is starting to look alien herself. The red skin of her demon form is warped, oozing, cracked with holes—smeared black with ash and some sort of dark ichor. She's kneeling and swaying slightly side to side, and the ground around her is painted with erratic, sludgy pools of dark blue—no, pools of shimmering cyan, shot through with dark contamination, their edges hissing as the rock around them bubbles and vaporizes.

Chryssy's wings are extended, and one of them is shredded to tatters. Ember and Holds-the-Fire are circling her at a cautious distance, bruised and ash-smeared and both limping—and every few seconds Chryssy swings her head at one or the other, hissing, making them scramble back in the direction of cover. The earlier massive fireworks display seems to have slowed—Chryssy's eruptions of random power are gradually coming back under her control, though she still looks decidedly unwell.

"Demons," she mutters under her breath. "Heretics. Liars. False images beset my eyes, the truth is inside me, the base world tears down the unworthy, the truth is inside me…"

We're here, Chester bloodstone-says. But we need a distraction.

We might go down giving you one, Ember grumbles as she circles, with an odd shift in mental tone Chester can't place. We chewed her up pretty good, but she's still got too much fire in the gut. Lured us both in and blasted us in that last exchange. And I think she's got another trick prepared.

Worst-case scenario, I can try ponying up early, Sunset says, and Chester realizes that shift was adding her to their talk. But if I spring a trap I can't handle, our plan's shot.

Father's ears perk, and he suddenly spins in place, staring at something behind the barracks with a low, rumbling growl.

Chester glances over and does a double-take. What he had taken to be a particularly large pile of debris is actually a massive minotaur, cowering out of Chryssy's line of sight, balled up as close to the ground as his twelve-foot form will let him.

It's Anton—that's clear from the eyes, which have receded from green fire into wide white rings around tiny dark pupils. And something—Chryssy's takeover, his transformation, or his proximity to a withering magical battle vastly beyond his capabilities—has broken him.

He swings his head to lock eyes with Father, then freezes stone-still. One hand creeps to his hip, gropes for a missing holster, and comes up empty.

"N-n-nice doggy," he whimpers.

Chester takes the opportunity—no hesitation, no remorse.

Father, he broadcasts. Please play-bite the cow-man somewhere painful.

Wolf lunges at minotaur, aiming low. Anton shoots upright to his full height, a shocked bellow splitting the night.

Chryssy whirls on the noise. A wave of power blasts out from her in a circle, rattling the buildings and knocking Holds-the-Fire off her feet and blasting dirt from the top of the mound into Chester's face. His vision blurs, and he's blinking tears into his eyes as light ignites around the parking lot—then he can feel the pressure wave slam into him in reverse, hot air blasting at his back with such intensity that he pitches forward into the mound. Then a heat pulse like his entire skin surface briefly touching a hot stove, and an eldritch scream that never touched a throat, and a flare of red he can see through his eyelids, and when he blinks his vision back the entire front wall of the barracks is molten slag.

The demon screeches in impotent rage as the new fires die down—then doubles over, wheezing, her stomach hitching.

NOW! Holds-the-Fire shouts, leaping out of the impromptu cover of a crater and charging at Chryssy.

She springs and hits the demon square in the back with a tackle, one hand grabbing Chryssy's horns and smashing her head vigorously into the ground as they go down together. It seems overly vicious to Chester—until an unfazed Chryssy grabs her by the face and returns the favor. Then Ember leaps in from the side, closing jaws around the demon's good wing and biting hard, bloodstone energy shimmering even in the physical. There's a loud crunch. Chryssy jolts upright, back arching, and shrieks, a sonic wave blasting out from her with enough force to stagger Chester and Sunset and blast Ember back away. Holds-the-Fire, on the ground underneath her, takes that opening to grab her and roll them over, driving a hard knee into Chryssy's stomach.

It's an ugly fight, primal and unrelenting, and about to get uglier. But that's when Sunset and Chester dive in, clasping their hands to Chryssy's bare shoulders

and the world

again slows

to a

crawl—

—but this time, the frozen tableau of the battle doesn't go gray. It's already colorless. This time, colors ignite.

There's a gleam at Chryssy's throat, the geode bursting to life. Then blue vinelike tendrils burst forth from her, ghostly tethers growing out into everyone in the melee and scores of devotees beyond. Shimmering brown flowers out from Holds-the-Fire, frozen atop Chryssy with a fist drawn back; shimmering red flowers from Ember, frozen mid-leap with fangs agape; green from Sunset, which overlays a physical aura of light bathing her chest and ringing her eyes and spreading out into the air like wings; dark orange from Chester's outstretched arm—then, out of the corner of his eye, distant dots ignite at the end of dozens of tethers, little stars in the night, people, then a galaxy of further stars out to Canterlot and beyond, fears and hopes and love and rage and everything in between, a web of connections with Chryssy at their center, her every move impacting all those lives and

her chest pulses, shifts, the obsidian shivering with internal impacts, faint patterns gleaming and black stirring like rain on a midnight window, and the geode's light intensifies with all the colors of the outside world, and the obsidian

cracks

—and time

restarts

with a tsunami of color blasting in every direction from Chryssy, shoving both her and the earth away. His friends, too, rocket off, ragdoll-spinning at the leading edge of the blast, and for a moment Chester is weightless, the crater-pitted ground multiple body-lengths below.

Gravity reasserts itself, and the earth rises back up to meet him.

Chester bounces and tumbles, oddly pain-free, until the ground falls away underneath him again and his next bounce slams him to a halt in the wall of a crater. He leaps to his feet, light-headed and invincible and absolutely buzzing with energy, a body high matching the intense purple euphoria around his limbs.

He looks down again to confirm, his aura rippling into violet. His entire body is glowing healthily with colors matching his feelings. And being able to see himself can only mean one thing.

Fact: this isn't his color-sight, but Chryssy's, blasted into him through their fresh new link as the geode went into overdrive.

That's not all. There's a faint echo of an entire world buzzing in the back of Chester's skull, because he's linked to Chryssy and she's linked to everyone else, and he feels like he could just reach out and touch them if it weren't for her screaming existential horror attempting to reject every last scrap of this priceless gift.

Chester does look up at that, head swiveling straight to the colors' source. Demon Chryssy is on hands and knees, brilliant light flaring through cracks in the voidstone in her chest and painting the ground painful white, a spotlight aimed far too close. She, too, has an aura—not the overwhelming physical power she's been blazing with during the fight, but a more familiar set of swirling emotions hugging close to her skin, muddy red and bright orange and dark orange bubbling beneath a cage of gray-white denial.

That confuses Chester for a moment (as he goes creamsicle). If he can see his own colors because Chryssy is sharing her new color-sight, why does she have an aura?

Then the others start picking themselves up off the ground, and their auras are out of focus—like he's trying to deliberately stare past them to line up one of those ancient magic-eye puzzles. Ember and Holds-the-Fire and Sunset all have two sets of colors, entirely identical but just barely offset. And he realizes he's actually seeing with two color-sights: Chryssy's geode-shared perceptions plus his own vision, returned through the same link which connects them.

Chester's aura ignites into violet. That means the geode cracked the voidstone's greedy hold on all her stolen power. She's drained and her victims have been restored. They've done it!

Chryssy's eyes are squeezed shut, black tears bleeding through her eyelids and streaking down her darkened cheeks. "Defilers!" she hisses, intensifying her gray-white barrier as hundreds of emotions press inward from every link. "Do you know who I am? I won't forgive this insult." She curls the claws holding her up into fists, arms beginning to tremble and the light from her chest taking on an ugly, bloody hue matching her stirring red emotions. "And if I can't put you in your place I will take you down with me."

… Okay, maybe not quite yet.

Chester isn't about to give her a chance to show what she's still capable of. "Everyone!" he shouts, leaping out of his crater and dashing in front of Chryssy. "Feel things at her!"

He punctuates that with a burst of determination, taking all that antsy, vibrating power inside of him and feeding it into the roaring furnace of his emotions, watching his aura leap into brown and intensify to brilliance he didn't think himself capable of feeling. He pours that color into the Chryssy tether, watching it batter against her denial as she flinches from the sudden force of it.

Then Sunset joins in from Chryssy's far side, and a powerful blast of green slams into the demon from behind, the same hope for redemption Sunset dove in to touch her with. Chryssy screams, lifting her claws and expanding her drab shield, a surge of black from her chest darkening and condensing her colors—but Chester can see the voidstone shivering, its cracks expanding, and he knows instantly that if they can shatter it she'll be defenseless against the geode's perspective.

A beam of red lances in from the left, Ember's righteous anger at all the damage Chryssy has done, nearly knocking her off balance until Holds-the-Fire's purple crashes in from the right, satisfaction at their shared triumph over a dangerous foe. Chryssy's shield shrinks, beset from all sides, but collapses into an egg-like shape of black-limned gray, defying the pressure. The voidstone is humming, making Chryssy's entire chest vibrate, but for the moment is holding. And seems to be slowly rallying, feeding Chryssy with an ugly and corrupted power, all dark whispers and doubts and nihilism.

Chester feels his own doubts start to creep in—but as his brown darkens toward black, he pushes those thoughts back to keep his color as pure as possible. Still, he's not certain what more he can do if they're not enough to deal the final blow—

"I hope I'm not too late to help this time?" a melodic periwinkle voice says from the edge of the devastation.

Chester risks a glance over, and his colors spike into violet. It's Celestia! And Esau!

She's back to her typical overwhelming brilliance, looking none the worse for wear. Meanwhile, he's a giant mess of bruises and dried blood and intense, vivid yellow, heavily leaning against the older woman, but he's up and moving. Peach-and-violet colors blossom through the pain as he silently stares at the Holy Mother's last stand—then a subtle undercurrent of satisfaction, and a sideways glance at Celestia with a brief spike of cerulean.

"Drag you all to Tartarus," Chryssy mutters, seeming barely conscious of the new arrivals, a hint of unearthly reverb returning to her voice as sweat drips down her face.

Right. "We need more emotions to break her voidstone!" Chester dark-orange-shouts over the crackle of the background fires and the effort of their collective barrage.

"Mmm," Celestia blue-agrees, but rather than immediately throwing herself into the effort, she turns her head side to side to take in the entire battlefield. Her colors whirl for a moment, then spike into lilac. "Well!" she says, chuckling. "It's not quite Harmony, but there's a delicious symmetry to it."

Chester can see the stream of his blast against Chryssy's shield shift to a dark orange. "I'm not fooling around," he pleads, "we really need help here."

"I know, Chester. Since you have her pinned down, a large, sharp strike will do it—and if it's acceptable for me to steal a bit of your glory, I've nearly got that sorted out." Celestia raises her arms, igniting her periwinkle into shimmering light; her hair starts billowing out behind her and she begins to hover just off the ground. "There is just one piece missing, if you please."

Chester goes creamsicle as he considers that. Then he closes his eyes briefly to focus, really locking in that sensation of shoving emotions in Chryssy's direction so that he can keep it up while he tears his focus from her. Something about Celestia's request pricks at his pride, and before he begs her to take this seriously and just tell him what she needs, he wants to copy Celestia's glance at their surroundings and figure out what he's missing here.

His eyes stray to where she was looking when the spike of humor hit. Over near the barracks, Anton has returned to cowering on the ground, frozen in bright orange terror with Father still looming over him, standing guard. Admittedly that is a bit funny, or… no, the sight turns his aura purple with satisfaction rather than its lighter cousin. Plus, Celestia isn't the sort to laugh at others' pain, and that's magenta anyhow. But it has to be something about Anton specifically, it's not like she's using color-sight or anything—

—wait. She is. Everyone has it temporarily from Chryssy.

And now that he's counting Anton and Esau, the scene is remarkably close to a rainbow, isn't it?

Chester glances around one more time, noting his own aura's spike into caramel (and seeing a satisfied purple flit through Celestia as she sees his epiphany). Ember's red, Anton's orange, Esau's yellow, Sunset's green, Holds-the-Fire's purple. It's just missing one color.

He turns back to Chryssy, igniting deep blue compassion for her.

Cyan would be a lie at this point after how she's abused it, but that's neither what this moment needs nor what she needs. Despite all the harm Chryssy's caused—or because of the harm she's caused—Chester truly, honestly wants to see her better. There is something fundamentally broken about her rapaciousness. He had brought plenty of converts in who had been wounded by love, and who had wanted to heal and find it again, but she had never once even tried. And even she deserves that chance.

As Chester's beam shifts into that blue, Chryssy reels—and the black underlayer of her shield-egg flinches back from the beam's impact before the shadows whirl and reassemble, mounting a fighting retreat.

But over Chester's shoulder, light is already intensifying. Dust swirls around the ravaged parking lot, some intangible solar wind stirring to life and whipping Celestia's hair in pastel waves, as her six sources of color flare into unearthly brilliance one by one.

Pure, colorless light bursts from Celestia's eyes and forehead and shoulders, holy power illuminating the ashram with daylight as a gleaming horn and pair of wings solidify. She raises one hand—palm open, fingers flat—and six chromatic beams burst into the sky, swirling and mingling into artificial noon.

Then a rainbow of goddess-amplified emotions streaks down to the earth, and that is that.

Author's Note

In truth, that is not quite that — Chryssy has been defeated, but we've still got two chapters to go.

Tune in on Sunday, Oct. 6 for a glimpse of life after Chryssy with the special double-sized chapter "Rhapsody In Blues"!