"What truly bugs me," Chester says, "is that after everything she taught us, she could still be so wrong about love."

The ashram's main hall is at full attendance, if not full capacity. Row upon row of saffron robes, and the auras surrounding them look like a fire swept through. Oranges, yellows, some reds, a lot of black, and more gaps than he'd like.

"The Holy Mother used you. She used all of us," Chester acknowledges. Murmurs sweep through the room at that previously unutterable truth, colors shifting and intensifying. "She treated love as something to be demanded, not a gift to be shared."

Before today, that much negativity and doubt about the ashram and its leader would have been an existential crisis. Chester would have been frantically running from devotee to devotee, rallying them to shore up their faith, picking out the ones who had fallen too far so that Chryssa-swamini could personally intervene or boot them out before their apostasy became too contagious.

But today, the doubt is the point. Chester still has faith in the ashram's mission. But that means he has to understand those doubts, let them breathe, confront them head-on, and be willing to change to address them. He owes all the devotees the same treatment he receives himself, and if Chester had refused to listen to his own doubts, the Holy Mother would still be in charge.

"We're all here to learn about love. And I think that's still worth doing," he continues. "But that means practicing with each other. Finding ways to remind ourselves that we all matter."

The murmuring intensifies. The hot colors in the audience are burning out, but there's so much black out there now. He's paying lip service to the principles that attracted them in the first place, but she'd been canny enough to do so too. No one speech will fix things after so much poisoning of the well.

"So I'm calling a sharing session tonight," Chester says.

Various oranges, fear and alarm, ripple through the crowd at the term, and he immediately shifts to reassurance. "Not confessions or accusations—but what we should have been doing all along. In preparation, I'd like you to team up. Pick somebody you don't know well. Spend the afternoon talking together. And what I want you to share tonight is something cool you found out about your new friend."

At that, the murmuring breaks out into crosstalk, wild and unstoppable. Not all the doubt dislodges, but a lot of it does, into violets, indigos, and even some greens.

Chester bows to his fellow devotees and steps down from the raised platform hastily assembled at the back of the hall as the meeting dissolves into pairing-off and conversation. He walks through the sea of devotees, fielding questions as he goes, hearing long-buried grievances and making promises he'll follow up on once things settle down. No more addressing them, untouchable, from above. (The second floor is a burnt-out wreck now, but that's not why.) Just being here together, pulling each other toward enlightenment, the way it always should have been. And he wants nothing more than to stay here and mingle all afternoon, but he's got other things to settle now, too.

Brother Esau joins him near the front of the hall. "C'mon, Chess," he cuts in, an impatient violet-pink, body-blocking several of the devotees trailing Chester. "We've got somewhere to be."

Chester hurriedly finishes his conversation and falls in alongside Esau, who links arms with him and firmly steers him outside.

"Gotta say, you're an even better leader than you were a spy," Esau says, blue-brown, the instant they're outside. "No wonder spy's the job she forced you into."

Chester looks down and smiles, all happy little tingles at the unexpected compliment. "Thank you." He swiftly changes the subject, though, before the praise can get to his head. "Though I must say, I didn't think you were so excited to get to the other world."

Esau rolls his eyes, reinforcing that with a prickling of skeptical gray. "I'm not. Stupid waste of time, when there's so much to do here without Swamini-ji keeping everything under control. But I made a promise, and the quicker we get this sorted out, the better."

"Well, I'm excited."

Esau rolls his eyes again, much more exaggerated this time, but can't conceal either his lilac or his smile. "Excited is a word for it, I guess. Do you actually think you're hiding your cyan?"

Chester squirms, laughing self-consciously, cheeks flushing. "It'll just be good to see her again. We've been busy here, and she and Ember have had a lot to work out." Again, he fishes for a subject change. "What's the latest on your work tracking down our family?"

"Uggghhh," Esau immediately says, a morass of colors swirling up. Pink and pale yellow are prevalent, but Chester picks out some subtle but healthy stirrings of green. "Well. The police scheduled me for an eight-hour deposition in the missing-person cold cases for Mandy and Bill, so that's an entire day things are going to go to crap even more around here." (Chester notes the wording, but lets it slide.) "But the detective did help me pull some old county records, and we found the birth certificates." There's a sudden surge of black, with some simmering orange. "He asked if I wanted him to give their other next-of-kin our information. I'm… thinking about it."

"Well, I'll support you in whatever you decide," Chester says. "Though honestly, I'm super curious if Mandy's relatives can tell us anything more about her power and our color-sight."

"Of course you are, that's classic Chester," Esau says, though the jab is delivered with a ripple of blue. "We've got an entire family you've never met, and the first thing you focus in on is the mystery."

"Only because I've got all the family I need right here," Chester says, giving Esau's arm a squeeze.

* * *

When Celestia's red Mustang pulls through the ashram gates, it's not her driving. It's a woman Celestia's age with skin of light blue vulnerability and hair of striped protectiveness and curiosity, whose emotions seem to default to gray, and whose aura is oddly unexceptional by the standards of everyone he's been hanging around with lately. Her gaze wanders around the ashram and its recent damage with a calculating eye. She sees Esau and Chester, and immediately pulls the car up to them and slides the passenger bucket seat forward so they can climb into the back.

Celestia had mentioned Twilight was her student, and he's met everyone else on Celestia's phone list, so… "Luna?" he guesses, omitting the asterisk.

She turns her appraising eye to Chester, and after looking him up and down, she nods. Then, as Chester is opening his mouth to ask a follow-up question, she says, "Because she can't drive."

"Why isn't Celestia…" Chester trails off, giving her an admiring nod. "Ooh, you're good."

That teases a purple smile out of her before the gray rolls back in. "And because someone needs to get the car back home after all of you go through the portal. We're not taking the chance of people seeing both Celestias at once, so sister sits this one out and I play chauffeur." Her fingers drum on the wheel for a moment. "You'll like Equestria, I think. As for you, Brother Esau, give it a chance."

"Hmph," he black-scowls, sitting down alongside Chester on the bench seat.

"You've been?" Chester asks.

"Yes," Luna says. "Unlike my sister, I've never needed magic in my life, and the one time I got caught up in it, it was scary and complicated. So I thought the visit would be a waste of time." For a moment a pastel green stirs up, not dissimilar to saudade but closer to wistfulness than nostalgia. "But the place has a way of sneaking up on you."

Esau goes gray and crosses his arms, but not before letting slip a flash of light violet. Chester's own curiosity is about something else she said, though. "What was your encounter with magic?"

Luna starts the car and begins the drive back down the mountain. "Nothing worth telling," she gray-says. "I got caught up in something far bigger than myself and it scared me witless. I managed to do something everyone tells me was clever, regardless. But everyone else did the heavy lifting of saving the world, so I decided I'd stick to my strengths, and went back to picking up the pieces at my day job."

Chester winces. "Oof. That sounds familiar."

Luna goes peach and turns her head to study him anew, splitting her attention between Chester and the road. Her colors whirl in calculation.

"I thought I had gotten a good read on you from your school transfer application," she says, a bit of pale orange simmering up. "I didn't peg you for being done with magic."

"Not quite what I meant," Chester clarifies. "All that fighting? Really not me. But I'm starting to understand who I really am, and find people who understand the things that always set me apart. And I wouldn't give that up at gunpoint." He nods firmly, then adds, "Again, I mean."

Luna smiles, though it's indigo, not purple. "You've grown up fast. Speaking of which."

"The application?" Chester says, seeing where she's going with this.

"Indeed." She goes gray again. "It's quite irregular. You just turned 18, you're clearly brilliant, your grasp of the basics is unquestionable, and we have records of 12 years of religious homeschooling. Granted, there's entire subjects you know nothing about, but your academic best interests are to test for a GED, supplemented by adult education and immediate collegiate courses."

"There's clearly a 'but' coming."

"Absolutely not. As an educator, the situation is cut and dried. My state certification—which, I might add, is under enhanced review since the incident at the Fall Formal—requires me to strictly pursue your best academic interests. I'm not allowed to take into account any shared experiences which might tempt me to make an exception for your psychological or, shall we say, parapsychological well-being. I can't let your desire for the high school experience which you've been denied—or the friends you've made—stunt your academic growth, even if we might be able to compensate with a regimen of intense independent study." She turns her head for a moment to stare Chester in the eyes again, and drops her gray guard, giving him a deliberate glimpse of a pure, placid caramel. "As such, I regret to inform you that, once we take care of one minor paperwork matter, I will be required to deny your application."

Chester can feel his grin in his cheeks. Canterlot High just keeps getting better and better. And Principal Celestia is going to have some serious competition for his favorite school administrator.

He asks the obligatory question, voice full of innocence. "Paperwork matter?"

"We never received your mathematics test results. You'll have to pull them again from your ashram's records and refile them."

"Gosh," Chester immediately says. "I think those were stored on the second floor of the main hall, weren't they, Esau?"

Esau—who has been staring out the window, tuning out—blinks and turns his head, a bit of pink stirring up. "What? Don't drag me into…" He takes one look at Chester, sighs, and relents. "Fine, yes, they were destroyed in the first of the fires."

"I sure hope I don't fail miserably when I retake the test," Chester says.

"That would be awful," Luna lilac-says. "If it's bad enough, we would have to assign you a tutor. I wonder if Sunset Shimmer would be interested in some extra course credits."

Celestia slides into the passenger seat in downtown Canterlot, and the difference in auras between her and Luna* is as striking as the sun against the night sky. It's almost painful to Chester's eyes—she's still got some of the afterglow of actually using her power for that rainbow strike—though at least she's sufficiently suppressed it that her periwinkle isn't bleeding out to the physical world.

"Luna," she says as she's settling into the car. "How's your sister?"

"Thriving, as she can't help but do, as both of you do wherever you go," Luna says. She lets her mask of gray break into pink. "You should have called me."

Celestia smoothly shifts to a pastel purple innocence. "Why, I had every intention, but by the time things went poorly, Mister Longhorn had already taken my cellophone."

"You know exactly what I mean. Your sister was quite explicit. The instant things went off script, you were to loop me in so we could arrange enough backup to prevent exactly what happened."

Celestia's innocence doesn't budge; her eyes sparkle in a way that has nothing to do with magic. "Even if you mean to begrudge an old mare the chance for an adventure once in a while, you can't argue with results."

Luna's colors whirl amid building pink frustration. With some effort, she tamps the colors back down behind gray. "Fine. Go home and justify yourself to the other me, then. How did your talk with the authorities go?"

"Well, it turns out a royal title from another dimension means nothing here, but throwing bits into hiring a small army of discreet professionals solves a surprising number of problems." Celestia smiles, shifting back to periwinkle. "The police are keeping Chryssy detained on suspicion of arson and—what's the term?—insurance fraud, stemming from an incident where she drugged her followers with mass hallucinogens for a ritual and set fires around her own compound. And, of course, they are working with the full cooperation of the ashram's new leaders on investigating two old murders."

Esau spikes into peach—then immediately stares at Celestia with the silent beige of betrayal. She meets his eyes with placid periwinkle, then turns her head to give Chester a nod. Esau glances over at Chester, too—and blinks rapidly, bleeding back into peach.

Chester takes his brother's hand in equal silence, waiting for his colors to settle down.

Finally, Esau sighs, pale yellow. "Yeah, you're not even a little shocked. I should have figured you couldn't leave Swamini-ji's secrets alone. How long ago did you figure it out?"

"Not long after the big fight," Chester says. "Once I realized that Chryssy had blood on her hands, and put that together with how personally her biggest, darkest secret impacted you, there wasn't anything else it could be." He gently squeezes Esau's hand. "I know you've been trying to protect me, Saw, but you don't have to play big brother on this one. Because of our age gap, I barely knew Mandy and was never close to Bill. And I know it's different for you. So please let me be here for you if you need to mourn our mom and dad."

Esau takes a long breath to steady himself, then speaks with quiet brown resolve. "Thank you. But I've done my mourning. Now I just want her to face justice."

"Justice will be an important part of healing. Not just for you, but for the ashram." Chester glances back over at Celestia. "Speaking of healing… not to change the subject, but how is the Holy Mother?"

(He still can't say that around Celestia without her smiling. And he finally understands why she finds it so hilarious.)

Celestia stifles her grin and re-enters the conversation, allowing mixed blue-and-yellow concern to show. "She has refused to speak to me, or anyone else who enters her cell. It's clear there is too much pain for her to accept an outstretched hoof." A bit of emerald green hope stirs up. "But it is equally clear that what she saw and felt left an impact on her. I suspect she is isolating herself exactly because the color-sight you gifted her still persists. I hope some time to reflect on that will one day help her consider a different way."

"Me, too," Chester says. Given his lifetime living with her, and the stories he has now heard of the other her, he doesn't really expect Chryssy to embrace the touchy-feely path. But the hope is a nice one.

"Meanwhile," Celestia says, "a certain Mister Longhorn is accessory to many of those same charges, and between his experiences at the ashram and the evidence conveniently located at his ranch—"

Luna sighs, a bit of pink straying through her gray. "You realize that in this world they call that breaking and entering?"

Celestia smoothly returns to pastel purple. "Dear me. Even when the police enter with a search warrant, and just so happen to possess the safe combination Sunset learned when touching Mister Longhorn to drain away the magic transforming him?"

Luna side-eyes Celestia, shifting to the muddy blue of grudging admiration. "…Well played."

Celestia smirks, allowing herself a moment of lilac. "As I was saying, given that evidence, he immediately begged for a plea bargain, and offered to testify against his business partners and the corrupt officials who aided his Canter Creek takeover. The commissioner was so grateful for our assistance with that breakthrough that he sees no need to follow up on the stranger aspects of the eyewitness reports."

"Thank you so much," Chester cuts in. "The last thing we need right now is more bad publicity as Esau and I try to turn things around."

"If we even can," Esau grumbles, white and pink. "We've got to rebuild nearly everything—and it turns out Swamini-ji was cooking the books for years. I think we're in more debt than the ashram itself was worth, even intact."

"I believe you'll find an anonymous donor has made a substantial contribution to your faith to get that sorted out," Celestia periwinkle-says. "It's the least I can do, Brother Esau, especially after your follow-through on your promise."

Esau blossoms into violet and sits up straight, though it's quickly taken over by maroon. "Don't think that that changes anything between us," he mutters, "or that it makes me any more eager to visit—"

"I don't recall that being in the definition of 'donate'," Celestia says, smoothly shifting back to pastel purple. "Aren't people allowed to give gifts to organizations they think are doing good work? I have faith in you and your brother. That's all it is."

Esau grumbles and turns his attention back to the window, but Chester doesn't miss the threads of green stirring up deep within him.

They drive to a trailhead in the woods near Canter Creek, then hike uphill along some forested trails until Chester spots a clearing in the distance underneath some sandstone cliffs. Sunset—black leather jacket on despite the late-summer heat—is napping underneath a tree to one side of the open area, and there's a giant pile of multicolored wolves lounging in the shade not far from her.

Chester's heart skips a beat as he sees the wolfpack, and he breaks into a jog, arriving well ahead of Luna*, Celestia, and Esau. And as he gets closer, there are indeed hints of a humanoid form buried beneath the fluff—but they're not ice-blue.

"Uh, hello?" he says, thrown.

There's movement in the wolfpile—displacing a small dun-colored wolf—and an unfamiliar human head pops to the surface, with skin colored like pale yellow resignation and hair of pink frustration. Her aura looks like those emotions are largely foreign, though—while she bursts into orange at his approach, it mingles with deep blues, empathy and protectiveness, along with some pervasive, diffuse purples clearly related to the wolves. She's yet another person whose aura is naturally intense, not quite at Sunset's level but far above average, and at this point Chester barely even registers that as unusual any more.

The unfamiliar girl's vibrant orange ratchets down as two wolves detach from the near end of the pile—gray with large feet, and a spindly, short-furred white one—and stand up to face Chester with tails vigorously wagging.

"Oh!" she violet-says, her fear entirely dissipating. Still, her normal voice sounds like a whisper with the volume turned up. "Wide-Paws and Sharp-Eye recognize you! That must make you Chester."

"I, uh," he stammers, brain engaging. There are multiple teenagers running around with wolfpacks? No—then the wolves wouldn't recognize him. Also, just like with most animals, he couldn't pick "Wide-Paws" and "Sharp-Eye" out of a police lineup, but that's definitely Father directly behind the mystery girl, curled around her protectively and looming like a cryptid among the much smaller pack.

Chester glances helplessly back and forth between the wolves and Sunset. "This… that's not some weird third-alternate Holds-the-Fire, right? I'm not going bloodstone-crazy or something again?"

Sunset yawns, stands up, and stretches, colors strengthening as she stirs into an amiable purple. (There's still an enormous set of tooth-marks in the back of her leather jacket, Chester notes; it really adds character to the garment.) "Oh! Hey, Chester." There's a spike of creamsicle as she processes his question, before receding to purple again. "That's right, you haven't met Fluttershy yet. She's one of my best friends, who helped redeem me at Canterlot High. This just… happens around her, with animals."

"It's lovely to meet you," Fluttershy purple-says. "We probably won't get to talk much until you get back from Equestria, though. Holds-the-Fire wanted her pack to be in good hands while she was gone, and I'm ever so glad that she was willing to give me a chance to wolfsit, especially after our first meeting didn't go so well." There's motion in the pile next to her; a floofy light-gray head pops up to nuzzle Fluttershy, tongue lolling out, and she shifts her attention for a moment to snuggle it. "Oh yes who's the best Thick-Pelt ever."

Chester looks around in confusion. "Where is she, then? Did she and Ember go through without us?"

"Nah," Sunset says, an unconcerned gray. "They said something about taking a run while we waited. By the way"—and there's a brief spike of cream—"I'm sorry I wasn't able to do more, back against Chryssy."

"Are you kidding? You helped me blow it open when it counted."

"Yeah, but I'm the one with all the world-saving experience, and I spent most of the time unconscious." She chuckles, though it's self-deprecating laughter, colored like her hair. "You did really well. But I can't help but feel like I left you hanging."

"That's on me," Chester immediately says, agitation stirring. "I got you captured in the first place, I didn't have enough energy to wake you up until right at the end—"

She cuts him off, blue empathy bleeding off her. "Chester. You fixed it all, too. Please don't beat yourself up. I know where that one goes all too well."

Chester sighs. "Fine. Fair. Sorry. It's just… I could have done so much better."

"See, this is exactly what I'm talking about." She takes his hand, smiling, and even though she's not actively pushing that blue at him, its proximity is good to feel. "It was your first time. My first time, I turned into a demon. My second time, I kept it together, but wouldn't have gotten to the finish line without six friends and a DJ with a bass cannon. Nobody's born ready to save the world. You trust your friends, get through it, and learn from your screw-ups to make it easier next time."

Chester nods, gazing back into her eyes, but can't keep himself from fidgeting. "You say that like there's going to be a next time."

Sunset lilac-laughs. "That's what I said to Twilight after the Battle of the Bands. But with the frequency I get dragged into crazy magical adventures, given that I'm going to be tutoring you in math now, I promise you'll get used to it."

Chester's about to protest, but he's cut short by rapidly approaching crashing in the brush. He tenses on reflex, but their source quickly becomes apparent: Two ice-blue forms, tall and short, racing side by side, girl and wolf both sparkling brown with magic.

Holds-the-Fire leaps sideways past a patch of brambles, springs back off a tree trunk, and dives into the clearing—tucking herself into a clean shoulder roll and skidding to a perfectly poised three-point stop, two small dust trails rising up from her bare feet. Ember, meanwhile, goes low and bursts straight through the brush with head down—taking a moment to realize she's clear, and leaning into a rough four-legged skid, until she passes by Holds-the-Fire's free hand and the girl effortlessly grabs her by the scruff to arrest her momentum.

Ember, muddy orange, pants for breath. "I'd… have won… if it weren't… for all the… branches in my face."

Holds-the-Fire—breathing heavily but controlled—allows some puce to stir up. Then you should have been smart enough to avoid them.

Ember shakes herself out, shedding twigs and thistles from heavily matted fur, and retreats into muddy brown pride. "Too busy getting used to this wolf thing. Rematch in the Dragon Lands."

Accepted. Holds-the-Fire adjusts some of her hide clothing knocked askew by the sprint, then looks up and does a double-take, colors dissolving into whirling chaos. Ches-ter.

It's the first time Chester's seen her since that night at the ashram. He feels his heart start to hammer and a flush rise to his cheeks, mirrored to at least some extent by stirrings of greens and blues amid Holds-the-Fire's uncertainty. But he had hoped that a couple of days apart would let her sort out the emotional shift which started with the bloodstones' repair. He had been counting on it, actually—planning to read her and respond in kind—and now that she doesn't know what to feel, he finds himself equally unmoored.

"H-hey," he stammers.

They stare at each other in silence, eyes mutually unfocused.

Sunset glances back and forth, fading to black, then clears her throat. "I, uh, I'm going to let you two catch up," she says, taking some shuffling steps back. Then she turns her head, suddenly spiking radiant purple, and runs off to lunge into a hug with Celestia. "Princess!"

Chester and Holds-the-Fire both watch the hug, then turn back to each other as Sunset and Celestia begin animatedly talking. Holds-the-Fire crouches slightly, tongue slightly protruding from her teeth. Chester fidgets, scuffing the dirt with his shoes. It's their old damned language barrier again, but now the one language they share is choked up on both sides. He can see orange start to corrode the black in the background of her unstable colors.

Thankfully, Ember cuts in. She's been silently getting agitated by proxy, Holds-the-Fire's unsettledness bleeding through, and Chester can see her hackles raised despite her own relatively solid brown.

"Hey," she says, a bit of pinkish-yellow stirring up, "if you two are just going to stand there weirding out at each other, can we maybe get going back to Equestria and figure it out along the way?"

Chester lunges for the lifeline. "That sounds like a great idea," he says. And without another word, the three of them go to join the rest of the group.

* * *

Fact: When Ember gave Chester a description of changelings that sounded like a living Pfranz Kafka nightmare, the sole incorrect element of it was Chester's assumption that it was a nightmare.

Chester stares around the changeling hive in open-mouthed joy and wonder. It is literally the most welcoming place imaginable—the very architecture reacts to his color-sight! Even for the world of magic that's an impossible wonder! The very walls of the twisting, organic tunnels vibrate with cyan, and he basks in the background glow, feeling a song bubbling up in his throat. This place is paradise.

He has no idea why none of the others are reacting accordingly.

The transformed Esau—an iridescent bug-moose-pony whose chitin has a physical dark-green sheen that really looks good on him; Chester wishes Esau would let himself feel hope more often—touches a wall and recoils, orange-red, as his hoof comes away damp.

"What's wrong, Brother Esau?" Celestia says, her usual unflappable periwinkle not having budged since entering the hive.

"Sweet son of a blasphemer," he orange-red-says, flailing his hoof and stumbling over to one of the many macramé wall hangings, nearly yanking it down in his haste to rub the goop off. "All this love-feeling stuff on the walls—that's bug spit?"

Their escort—Pharynx, an identical-looking dark-green-chitined changeling who has been silently glowering maroon since meeting them at the hive entrance—finally breaks his silence amid a spike of violet. "Thank the stars, someone else gets it!" he vents, shifting to a curious mixture of pink and blue. "It's insane! I swear, this place drives me absolutely guano."

Esau pauses, a matching blue flooding in and washing out his impending rant, and turns to his double. "You. Your opinions are correct and I like you."

Pharynx allows himself a ripple of smug muddy purple, then covers it in gray and turns to resume the brisk walk toward the throne-chamber. "Of course I'm correct," Pharynx says with gray matter-of-factness. "Our reserves are only 80 percent full and it's an extravagant waste of food."

Esau blinks, exploding into a kaleidoscope of colors. He opens and closes his mouth several times. "I would like to note," he finally says, mixed orange-red and a blue-gray grudging respect, "that as disgusting as that is, I am not yet retracting my statement."

They pass by several side rooms full of brightly colored egg-like shapes (which Chester at first assumes to be hatcheries, before realizing they're giant yarn-ball stockpiles) before the winding tunnel spirals upward and ejects them into a sprawling bowl-shaped chamber open to the sky. Plants (as usual, a color-sight void) line all the surfaces, and there's a big chair whose back is a weirdly holey tree.

Chester had expected to be disappointed at returning to a lack of architectural color, but the physical greens of the plants are gorgeous complements to the sea of cool colors in the inhabitants' auras and the iridescent physical greens and blues of the changelings themselves. It's a breathtaking blend, meticulous in the three-sourced ever-changing variations in hue as his eye wanders the room, and he stares in open awe at the artistry of it. Even Esau is looking around, his scowl not disguising his violet.

Holds-the-Fire barely spares the room a glance, then stares at him with light violet curiosity. A pang of longing spears Chester's heart. For as much as the two of them share, the way she sees feelings isn't strictly color-based; she knows he's getting something out of it, but she's missing out. Perhaps if he gets Sunset to touch him and scan his memories of the sight, and they work together on a way to re-broadcast that memory via bloodstone telepathy—

An abnormally tall changeling (physically the pastel grass-green of saudade with little throat-sacs of depression and sprawling horns of fear) steps forward, his emotional colors a vibrant violet. "You must be Chester!" he says, keeping that pure and radiant enthusiasm as he sticks out a welcoming chitin-hoof. "Oh my gosh, and you must be in a human form, I've been wondering what they look like ever since I heard about the human world!" A burst of green fire swirls up across the bug-pony's form, and now Chester is staring at a perfect duplicate of himself, down to the crisp, starchy saffron robe. "Can I shake your hand? Princess Twilight told me that's the most common human greeting and I've been dying to give it a try!"

Chester loves his counterpart's unhesitating sincerity already. "Thorax! It's so nice to meet you," he says. "Ember's said so much about you."

Ember promptly goes blazing muddy orange, turning away to pointedly study the greenery of the walls.

Chester and Thorax glance in unison over at her, then at each other. There's no missing the cyan that stirs up in Thorax, and he clearly doesn't miss Chester noticing. But he dissolves his emotions into a deliberate dark blue, and they come to a wordless agreement to leave things unspoken for Ember's sake and roll onward with their handshake.

Thorax's motions feel smooth and practiced, if a bit unnatural, and there's a thread of spyfeel to his eagerness as he studies Chester's technique and revels in the learning experience so he can get it perfect next time. "Thank you!" he says. "I'm curious though—did you not change form when you came through the portal to Equestria? All your friends did, and everypony I've ever heard of has."

Chester's mind flashes back to that moment—

"Huh," he said, staring at the iridescent chitin of his hoof. "Huh."

Esau stood orange-frozen, except for his head whipping around as he tried to take in his quadrupedal form all at once. "I'm not going to panic," he said in a voice clamping a tight lid down on that thrashing orange, "because you told me this was going to happen, but this is seriously messed up."

"Take all the time you need," Sunset blue-said, patting his withers with a physically greed-colored hoof. "It's always disorienting the first few times. We planned a rest break to let you adjust."

Celestia—who had stepped through first, and whose horn was aglow with magic, maintaining the shield that kept them all safe from the roiling lava just feet away—nodded. She seemed a bit distracted, but as far as Chester could tell, the level of actual effort it took for her to ward away the heat of an entire volcano was inconsequential. On this side of the portal, it felt startlingly literal to describe her as shining like the sun which also adorned her flanks.

Ember, meanwhile, went purple as she stretched all six of her limbs and lashed her tail back and forth, then craned her muzzle skyward and exhaled a brief jet of fire. "Oh yeah, it's good to be back," she said. And Holds-the-Fire crouched to one side of the portal, not saying anything but sharing Ember's color tone as she flexed her own draconic claws and resettled her wings.

"… It's disorienting?" Chester asked.

Sunset spiked peach for a moment as she glanced at him. "It's not?"

"I mean, no?" he said, prancing around in a tight, high-stepping circle and then crab-stepping sideways with overlapping steps, sinking into the rhythm of his horizontal posture. "See? Changelings are inherently shapeshifters, which means my body's got this on lock, as long as I let it do its thing and don't overthink it."

Esau swung his head to stare at Chester, spiking lilac-gray. "Chess, you overthink everything."

"No I don't. Do I? I totally don't." Chester paused. "It doesn't matter, the theory is sound. Look, we have wings." He snapped open his wing covers and stretched the gossamer wings underneath to full extension, vibrating them up and down with a low buzz. "See? I don't have any competing instincts about how to fly or how to walk quadrupedally in my human body, so all I have to do is listen to this body's instincts and everything works." He hesitated, tapping a hoof to his muzzle. "Actually, hang on. That can't be how it works, because then any time nearly identical instincts overlapped, we'd faceplant. For someone switching between biped and quadruped, not so big a deal, but Holds-the-Fire would barely be able to move." He froze. "Wait. Everything has breathing instincts. Am I changeling-breathing or human-breathing right now? How do I know how to breathe?"

Ches-ter, Holds-the-Fire said, barely restraining waves of lilac.

"I am definitely not an overthinker or I wouldn't be breathing!" he protested, face flushing, and forced himself to inhale. "Okay. Wait. If I were that bad of an overthinker I wouldn't have been able to connect to both bloodstones. One requires instinct—" He started pacing as he talked, at least until he tripped over his front hoof on his first step with his hinds and went down in a tangle of limbs.

"Right! Rest break!" Sunset said, lilac and muddy orange, while Celestia lost it entirely and collapsed with blazing lilac laughter.

Chester blinked stars out of his eyes, and lunged for the last-second save as his lungs started to burn. Fact: His logic with the bloodstones was sound; his connection to instinct did have to be substantial or he couldn't have pulled off half of his quick-thinking narrow escapes. Fact: He was a changeling and therefore a shapeshifter. Fact: He already had experience moving energy around his body; if he gathered energy, did some similar pushing, let instinct do the heavy lifting, and really wanted to mold himself back into human form, he—

Green fire filled his vision. Everything went floaty for a moment, and then everything felt familiar.

He scrambled back upright to human feet. "It's okay!" he shouted, gasping for sweet, sweet air. "I can breathe now."

Four pairs of eyes stared at him in that special kind of half-peach, half-violet shock. (Celestia merely brought her laughter under control and sat back up, a bit of approving purple mixed in with her return to periwinkle.)

"You've been a changeling for less than 30 seconds, and you just learned how to shapeshift because you forgot how to breathe?" Sunset slowly said. "That is simultaneously the most impressive and most humiliating thing I've ever seen."

"The duality of Chester," Esau said, briefly shading blue-brown.

Chester held up a finger as possibilities blossomed out, excitement overtaking his flustration. "Wait! I can shapeshift! Do you know what this means?"

"New and exciting ways for you to suffocate?" Ember lilac-said.

"No! Well, maybe. But I'll keep this one quick. Check this out."

He closed his eyes and took a moment to focus. Now that he had changed once, he had a template. So all he needed to do was fix the shape in his mind, concentrate, and push—

A ripple of sensation rose from his feet to his head, and little shimmers danced around his closed eyelids for a moment before fading.

He opened his eyes to see Ember and Holds-the-Fire staring, sharing an unrestrained blue-brown—with some extra threads of green on Holds-the-Fire's side.

"Okay, that is cool," Ember said. "Giant wolf! You can fit in with her pack."

Chester felt his eye twitch.

He slowly lifted a paw to the bridge of his nose. "Damn it," he said, voice deep and husky through a canine muzzle. "Did I get those mixed up again?"

—and he returns to the moment, staring into Thorax's inquisitive face.

"Well, you know," he says, "I figured, we're changelings, right? So why not take advantage of that and show you the real me."

* * *

"You'll feel better if you show him the real you," Chester says.

It's three days into Chester's trip to Equestria, and after the big tour of the changeling hive, the group has started to fragment. Esau has long since returned home to sort things out in the human world. Celestia—who ducked out for a day near the start of the trip to visit her sister—returned just long enough to join them for the hive and then drag Sunset away again. Chester's soon supposed to be meeting them in the pony nation of Equestria, where Sunset has promised to show him around some tiny rural town named Ponyville.

But Ember has been acting increasingly strange since their visit to Thorax, and Chester is determined to coax it out of her before he leaves.

He waits as her orange builds up and she fans herself with a claw, a tic he's beginning to find oddly endearing. "Look," she says, flailing with that fear, "I get it when you want me to share feelings"—she fidgets, tail lashing—"to make things better, but sometimes"—the orange overtops—"feelings are bad."

He takes her claw. "Ember," he says gently, "I can see your emotions and I assure you that there's nothing bad about your feelings for him."

"Yeah?" Her orange blazes into pink frustration, and she glares at him, the color suddenly finding a focus. "Do I love him?"

Chester was prepared for that displacement, but not for the bluntness of the question, and immediately leaps into equivocation as he recovers. "Ah, well, it's not just a single thing, there's a whole spectrum of greens and blues which go along with—"

She grabs him by the horns, pulling his muzzle in. (Chester's currently trying out his bug-moose form now that he's had a bit more practice changing shape.)

"That's not a yes," she pink-hisses.

"It's a complicated question!"

She shakes his head. "No it's not! I'm not stupid, Chester, there's a specific feeling to love, the entire hive felt like it, Thorax feels that way toward me, and from what Holds-the-Fire said, I don't feel it back."

Fact: It is possible for color-sight to make a relationship problem worse.

Chester has spent his entire life reading a nigh-infinite number of books written by people without it, and it has never failed to strike him how much more complicated their relationships are. This is new territory: Ember's problem is the additional information.

More accurately, it's the fact that she doesn't have a lifetime's worth of practice at seeing emotions, and doesn't have any nuance to her understanding of cyan and the other emotions that accompany it. Worsened by the fact of this world's changelings having specialized to favor an extremely specific shade among the infinite colors they can absorb and the still-ample subset they can digest. And double-worsened by Ember's new primary point of emotional reference interpreting them through an even simpler wolf lens.

Chester blinks. He slowly swivels his eyes toward Holds-the-Fire, unease stirring his gut.

Fact: This conversation is about to turn into an enormous complication bomb.

Holds-the-Fire still hasn't exchanged more than a few words with him since their meeting back at the portal. She's barely been speaking to anyone, actually. She has been Ember's shadow for the entire trip, never more than a few feet away, often feeling a wide range of colors but never without a diffuse background orange.

Part of that, Chester understands, is pack dynamic: she is scrupulously showing deference here, where Ember has authority, to honor her promise not to raise a challenge again. But that's not all. Their mutual feedback loop has only strengthened since that night at the ashram, and he's starting to see that Holds-the-Fire is using Ember as a filter: taking the overwhelming newness of the world of fire's experiences and processing them secondhand through someone who finds them more familiar. Even Chester has struggled with some of the weirder sights, and he's a voracious reader with a vivid imagination; he can't truly understand the trip's impact on someone whose entire life experience has been hunting in a forest, any more than she could understand the glory of the changelings' throne-room art.

Chester has slowly come to realize that Holds-the-Fire has been doing that filtering with him, too.

Ember had been incrementally relaxing here at home, especially with her renewed bloodstone powers resolidifying her reign, and had been chatting more and more with Chester (at least until visiting Thorax threw a spanner in her brain-gears). And all the while, Holds-the-Fire—who had been maintaining a deliberate distance from him, both physically and with a gray emotional wall when she noticed him seeing her—had been slowly letting herself inch closer, the hue of her colors stirring up through the gray by degrees. Seeing Ember's ongoing friendliness and openness to him, she had been rebuilding her trust by proxy.

The problem is, that dynamic hopelessly entangles the question of Ember and Thorax with the significantly more unsettled question of Chester and Holds-the-Fire.

Fact: He needs to draw a line separating those.

On his own side of that divide, Chester increasingly burns to just talk to Holds-the-Fire directly and set things right. From tiny scraps of information over time, when she has let her guard down, it's become more and more clear that the beige he once stirred up has faded to a processed ache, and fresh threads of green—even some cyan again—have sprouted to replace them. The thought of that cyan is a bonfire in the pit of his stomach, screaming for fuel. Some hungry corner of his mind keeps producing ways to skip the wait, take a shortcut to reconciliation, and cultivate that love.

He's had several days now to marinate in those temptations, and he adamantly refuses to listen.

Everything is still so complicated between them, but one thing is clear: Abusing connections to manipulate people into exploitable emotions was Chryssy's way. He saw what that almost did to everyone he cared about. He never wants to be Chet Land to anyone ever again—much less Holds-the-Fire. Now he just wants to be the kind of person whose presence can nourish that love in her. So he's determined to let her approach that at her own pace.

He also knows Holds-the-Fire has been observing all his emotional fallout over the last few days. He has let her, despite her own deliberate gray. That asymmetry has been painful. But he was the one who broke her trust, and now he has to trust her judgment on whether that was forgivable. He did it for good reasons, and he did get her back her bloodstone, and all her reactions have been positive so far—but he neither gets to make that judgment nor set the time frame.

Fact?: Regardless of how desperate Chester is for Chester and Holds-the-Fire to work out, Ember and Thorax are good for each other.

There's no way he can evaluate that objectively. But it feels like anyone else would call the evidence cut and dried.

… Exhibit one: Despite Ember's growing overall levels of draconic impatience and irascibility, she instinctively reins it in when he freezes up and goes deep into brain-space like this. That's a textbook Thorax trait, and she's clearly adapted herself to accommodate him.

Chester takes a deep breath, gently pushes away the wrists of the claws still gripping his horns, and gestures for Ember to take a seat.

"Okay," he says. "Right. Thorax, feelings, yes. How do you feel about him?"

Ember spikes orange for a moment, then retreats into the color link. Holds-the-Fire glances into Chester's eyes for a moment, and her gray wall slams down. Colors whirl between them inconclusively.

"You tell me," she grumbles back, her colors settling into pink frustration. "You're the expert."

"I think we should do this without color-sight for once," Chester replies. Top of the list of things he never thought he'd utter. "How does being around him make you feel?"

She spikes orange, eyes darting around. "Uh. Weird… and jittery. Like this?"

Chester shakes his head. "No, that's just you having feelings. Let's take a step back." He rubs his temple with a hoof. "Do you enjoy having him around?"

It takes Ember some time to claw it out of the orange, but she mumbles, "Yes."

"Do you trust him?"

"Of course." She doesn't even have to think about that one; her orange immediately lunges into cerulean.

"Do you like making him happy?"

"Yes," she blurts out, purple spiking ahead of the orange this time. Then she quickly muddies in embarrassment.

"Those all sound like someone in love."

"But I'm not!" She throws up her claws, a pinkish-yellow distress, wings flaring out. "It's not the love feeling!"

Chester thinks about how to explain cyan. "That's a very specific type of love. It's when you'll do anything, make any sacrifice, for that person. It's… almost kind of an addiction." He forces himself not to look at Holds-the-Fire. "Chryssa-swamini used it to control us because it makes you lose yourself into the feeling so much. I think the changelings here eat it because it's so pure and intense. Not going to lie, it feels pretty amazing, but you're not broken if you don't feel it."

"Okay, but I can't and he does."

"And that means he wants you to be happy. So if he makes you happy, too, then spend time with him and be happy together. Love tends to sort itself out when you do."

"Yeah, that's the other thing." Ember's just venting, now, but it's a positive sign; when she shifts all that orange over to pink and then gets it out, it lets the rest of her feelings creep into proper focus. "He's a changeling. I'm a dragon."

"Is… that a problem?" Chester says. For emphasis, he changes to a dragon form and back, green fire rippling up and down his body.

Then he notices the olive green stirring up around Ember's form, and the hint of a flush to her cheeks, and realizes the contexts where it could be a problem.

"Uh," he says, "new topic!"

* * *

The conversation sticks in his craw during his flight to Equestria.

His brain keeps circling it, nipping at it from different angles. Mostly, what that accomplishes is increasing his confidence that his advice was correct. They're clearly good for each other and want the best for each other. Thorax undeniably does cyan-love her, she's got all the components that lead there, and before he had even met Ember she had already felt so strongly about Thorax that it bled over to Chester. Thorax evens out Ember's impulses and gets her in touch with her emotions; Ember contributes the intensity that pushes Thorax to be better. Peanut butter and chocolate. There's no universe where him encouraging that was the wrong move for either of them.

But now he's got Holds-the-Fire to think of, too. And even if his intentions helping Ember were sincerely about what she needed… was the end result to push Holds-the-Fire too hard by proxy?

* * *

"There," Ember violet-says, pointing to a little rise in the rocky valley far below.

It's six days since he stepped through the portal, and Chester's extended tour of Equestria is on its final stop, back in the Dragon Lands. And even by the standards of the Dragon Lands, the area they're flying over is a remote, lifeless wasteland, with tangy, still air instead of the frequent dust storms that help gemstones grow. (Chester still isn't certain of the physics-slash-biology of that one.) The terrain is erratic but modest, without deep caves to lair in or lava rivers to bathe in or grand mountains to perch on. It's about the most miserable possible place for a dragon to live, and it's the location of the Bloodstone Scepter's final memories of the Ancient Dragon Lord.

"I really appreciate you taking the time to help me find him," Chester says, angling his large, leathery wings to veer down toward the site. He's spent several days now putting different forms through their paces, and while changeling wings are fantastic for short bursts and precision movement, he's learned that nothing beats dragon wings for gliding.

"Are you kidding? Confirming the Ancient Dragon Lord's story is huge. We've never even had his name before." Ember, violet intensifying, trades some altitude for speed and takes the lead.

To her right, Holds-the-Fire—at first Chester was telling them apart by color and body language, but he's come to realize that her draconic form is fractionally skinnier and more elongated—is painted dark violet with intense focus, eyes scanning the ground.

For better or for worse, nothing about their distance has changed since the Thorax talk.

She drifts sideways to follow Ember instead of parallel her, and the three glide for some time in a broad, silent spiral. Suddenly, Holds-the-Fire points downward with a spike of violet. There.

The three of them drift down to a short cuplike spire jutting up from the surrounding rock, with jagged sides and no shelter from the skies. The stone is blotchy gray-and-red, and even at their closer distance, it takes Chester several moments to see the weathered bones within, grayed with age.

They land, and a pastel-green Ember walks up to the enormous skull. "Dang," she says in a hush, resting a claw lightly to one of its horns. "It's really him."

They stare at the skeleton in mutual silence, then Chester carefully shrugs off his backpack and rests it against the side of the spire. "Let's get to work."

He transforms into a giant mole-thing, and soon, between his giant claws and the dragons' smaller ones, they have carved out a chest-deep hole in the floor of the spire. Ember and Holds-the-Fire take five as Chester gently stacks the bones into the pit, in a circle that makes it look like the long-dead dragon has curled up to slumber. Then he walks over to his backpack, extracting the wooden box which was the entire point of this trip.

He opens the lid, checking its contents one last time. A human skull—he had half-wondered if it would turn feline when going through the portal—and the few bones they had been able to locate amid the fragmentary foundations which had once been the sorceress' home in the human world. He sets the box down next to the dragon's ribs, in the center of the hole.

Finally reunited.

"Rest in peace, you two," he says.

He's not certain he can articulate why this had been such a priority for him that it was the first plan he locked down after the hive visit. He's hundreds—thousands?—of years too late to make a difference in their story. The only beings which had even remembered it had been the bloodstones, and while they had connected to their wielders' pain at the time, it seemed as if even they had moved on.

But maybe that's it exactly. It's such a small thing. But if he doesn't care, nobody ever will.

He scoops gravel into the grave in silence. The dragons—a subdued blue, sensing his solemnity—sit against the walls of the spire and wait for him to finish.

Finally, he smooths out the top of the anonymous mound, then straightens up and steps back. "Thank you," he says quietly. "Let's go home."

Author's Note

We're nearly at our journey's end. Chryssy defeated, Chester in charge, and the promised Equestria trip taken. But there's still one crucial thing left to settle.

Our final chapter drops Wednesday, October 9, Thank you all for being on this journey with me, and I hope you've enjoyed it.

See you in a few days for "A Wolf Of Her Word (Reprise)".