The Mustang rolls to a stop high in the hills, where the pastures have given way to lush forests of beech and maple, verdant with summer growth. There's the obligatory shuffle as Chester and Twilight extract themselves from the back seat, and then Celestia and Sunset get back into the car and close their doors.

"Remember, this is only a scouting pass," Sunset says. "We'll drive back to scope out the ranch, and you two go to where Chester last saw Ember to see if you can pick up her trail. We'll meet back here in two hours and figure out our plan from there."

"Fine," Twilight pink-says, making a beeline for the treeline and forcing Chester to hustle to catch up. As he nears, the wolf breaks into a lope, forcing him to accelerate again, and soon he's sucking in gasps of air, doubling over against a stitch in his side. "Hey!" he wheezes. "Slow down!"

She doubles back, staring at him with a pink which refuses to dislodge, even if this is the first time he's felt like its target since that first confrontation. "Time's wasting," she says.

"I'm… sorry," Chester gasps. "Give… me a… moment."

The wolf sighs and sits down, stewing pinkly—and, now that they're on the move, threads of red are stirring up within it. Discomfort gnaws at Chester's stomach. The red side of the spectrum is the worst. And he hates more than anything being in its path, but it's worth stuffing down his agitation to help out a friend.

"Something's bugging you," he says.

"Yes," Twilight immediately pink-says. "A dangerous target, a very large forest, and a time limit. Let's get moving."

Chester's resolve deflates, and he nearly moves on in meek silence. But that same fear also gives him pause: dealing with Ember has gotten him into a shootout once already, and while agitating Twilight is bad, jogging toward an armed woman accompanied by a four-legged time bomb might end up way worse.

So he tries again. "No, I mean, something about Ember is really bugging you. I can see emotions, remember?"

She stares at him in stony pink silence.

"You'll feel a lot better if you talk about it," he tries one final time. "I promise."

A tinge of lilac breaks through the wall of pink. Twilight turns to move on, but she can't quite hide a chuff. And when he walks after her, her mood has settled down considerably, with calm blue flooding out the pink.

"I've finally realized who you are," she cerulean-says as they move. (Chester isn't certain what prompted that sudden trust, but he'll take it.) "Because that's twice now I've gotten that lecture. The other you was right, too."

Chester blinks. "The… other me?" These strange magical people keep surprising him. "You're from the magical unicorn dimension?"

"Are there a lot of talking dogs around here?" Twilight lilac-says.

Chester's not certain how to respond to that, but other questions are pressing. "If you've met another me… does that make me a copy of one of your villains?"

"Pfft, no," the wolf blue-says, finally free of pink for the first time since he's seen her. (It's a good look—it complements her fur.) "Changelings come in two types, touchy-feely and ravenous. It's obvious neither of you has a ravenous bone in your body."

That reminds him of a question he's been meaning to ask. "You all keep using that word. 'Changeling.'"

"Oh," Twilight says, "right." She raises a paw to gesture, nearly causing her to faceplant on her next stride. "Giant love-eating shapeshifting bugs."

Chester recoils. "In your world I'm some sort of love mosquito?!"

"Tartarus no," she blue-says. "Those are the ravenous ones. Your kind are like… ugh. Harmless rainbow moose-beetles? I don't even know what you eat these days, to be honest. Maybe yarn. Two-thirds of your hive is into macramé."

Chester opens and closes his mouth, completely unprepared for this sudden swerve into Kafka-land. Maybe Twilight is joking?… And has also suddenly become a complete master at emotional control, hiding any trace of lilac as she deadpans the grandmother of all jokes?

Oh, dear. His magic-world self is a shapeshifting bug.

"But, yeah," the wolf says, and the conversation presses on. "So, you being you, you're going to keep bugging me to talk about your Ember. She's…" Twilight's colors destabilize, and that pink surges back in, tinged with faded yellows and reds. "She invaded my home. Controlled my people. Kicked my ass. Broke my scepter."

"Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry." The subject change is simultaneously a relief and a horror. "I can see why you want to track her down. But… if she's that dangerous, should we be out here in the first place?"

Twilight walks in silence for a bit, letting those old wounds bleed their colors out. "She's dangerous with human weapons, but not world-ending dangerous," she finally pink-says. "The real threat was the Bloodstone Crown, and that's just an inert hunk of rock now."

Chester's grasp of the situation suddenly drifts onto shakier ground. He's accustomed to the idea of people having magical powers, because that's just siddhis, but things having magic still feels weirdly fantastical. (Except for… no. That one memory should stay buried.)

"That's a relief," he says, then his curiosity overtakes him. "What did it do, make her hover in the air and shoot fireballs?"

Twilight chuffs with a ripple of lilac. "Seriously? What kind of magical artifacts have you been hanging out around?"

Chester feels his face flush, and quickly parries. "Aren't laghima and ishita perfectly reasonable guesses? They're exactly the showy, blatant sort of siddhis that someone going drunk with transgressive power would attempt to emulate."

Twilight swings her head to stare at him, shifting into creamsicle confusion. "What in Tartarus are you talking about? There are magic cities in the human world?"

"That's not what I…" Chester feels the conversation derailing. "Never mind. So what did that crown do?"

The wolf shakes her head and also refocuses, colors fading back into old yellow pain. "It controlled instincts. Meaning it also made brains shut up. Not sure whether that drove her crazy or she was nuts to begin with. Either way, it's…" She hesitates for a moment, a fresher, yellow-gray regret swirling up. "It's good she doesn't have it any more."

"Agreed." Chester suppresses a shudder. "Anyway, you said that coming after Ember was a change of plans. What were you doing here before?"

"I owed Sunset a favor with her scheme to find all the other villains. She was one of the ponies who helped me track the crown to this world, before your Ember invaded." Twilight's pain simmers back up—although it's reduced; getting her talking is definitely helping her vent. "Once I beat her, Sunset stepped in and convinced me to return her here. I agreed. I felt sorry for her, kind of." The wolf lapses into silence, warm and cool colors warring.

Chester gets it. "You thought maybe being home would be good for her," he says. "That she'd learn from your encounter, and she'd know better than to make trouble again. So you gave her the benefit of the doubt. But she didn't learn her lesson."

"And so here we are again," the wolf says, settling into a muddy yellow bitterness. "I won't make that mistake a second time."

It's still an unhealthy resentment, but it's another step further away from anger, so Chester lets the conversation lapse.

They descend a slope to a broad flat area which Canter Creek meanders through, and Chester heads to the water and searches up and down the bank. He scrambles across a fallen log to the far bank to check out a big muddy patch, and sure enough, there are canine paw impressions—though they're dried, edges indistinct, and Chester has nowhere near the tracking skills required to date them. "Here," he says, and points them out.

Twilight nods, leaps the creek, and starts trotting up and down the water's edge herself, swiveling her head back and forth to look for other prints. "Okay, that's a start," she says, turning the khaki of grim resolve as she turns her focus toward the hunt. "You stay here. And if you hear barking or howling, start sprinting back toward the road and don't stop."

"What?" Chester says. "Where are you going?"

"Upstream. Downstream is Scorpan's ranch."

"But Ember's armed. We shouldn't split up."

"Can you turn into a bear?"

Chester blinks at the sudden, incongruous question. "Of course not, why?"

The wolf turns to glare at him, a determined brown temporarily taking over her unsettling palette. "Last time she and I saw each other, it got ugly—so we shouldn't be here, period. But I can take care of myself. And you'll be entirely useless in a fight without shapeshifting, so I don't want you slowing me down."

Visions fill Chester's head of a giant grizzly bear swinging blundering paws around in a clumsy attempt at self-defense, as an entire wolfpack leaps at him from all angles, sinking teeth into his limbs before an ice-blue-skinned girl shoots him through the heart with a hunting rifle. Yeah, that's the best-case scenario. He steadies himself against a tree, trying not to think about how much more danger he's in as a frail, skinny human. "I… uh. That's fine, you know, I'm good."

"Great," Twilight says, and starts loping away before she hesitates for a moment. She deliberates, colors swirling, then swings her head to face him.

"Hey," she blue-says, "thanks, Thorax. For, you know. Being you again." A lopsided smirk spreads across her muzzle, and she lilac-adds, "But when I get back, I'll have to go through the remedial assertiveness lessons."

"If you say so," he agrees on autopilot, and the wolf vanishes into the underbrush.

… Thorax.

There's a certain resonance to the name. But, then again, giant love-eating shapeshifting moose-beetle. That definitely was not on his checklist of things to expect out of suddenly being flung into a world of magic and wandering heroes and bi-dimensional villains.

Which reminds him—the Holy Mother really needs to hear about this. (But maybe not about the bug part.) She's going to be so excited!

Chester pulls out his cell phone, as expected, to no reception. He climbs the slope away from the riverbank in search of better line of sight, and scrambles on top of an enormous flat-topped boulder randomly littering the woods. That rewards him with a view down the valley—the ranches downstream, the surrounding hillsides, Blackrock Spires jutting up over the hills to the north (downslope from the crags, he can barely make out the ashram from here), and further south, past more forested hills, the tops of the skyscrapers of downtown Canterlot. He's in a wasteland of phone coverage, but by holding it high in the air and turning on speakerphone, he gets it to stabilize at one bar.

He dials the ashram, telling Esau that he has to speak to the Holy Mother immediately, no, really, interrupt her, I'm serious. Then he fidgets, trying to rehearse his wording until her voice comes on the line.

"Ches-ter," the Holy Mother says—and though he can't see colors over the phone, she's using That Inflection again. His throat goes dry—bad time. But he has no choice but to press on regardless. "What did you do?"

"I-it's good news, Swamini-ji!" he protests. "At the airport, I—"

"Your connection is atrocious. Where are you?"

Chester swallows and tries again. "The forest near Canter Creek, Swamini-ji. I met—"

"What!?" she snaps. "Why aren't you at the airport?" Without his color-sight, Chester's ability to read emotions is rudimentary, but even he can tell her tone is getting more dangerous by the word.

"Please, Swamini-ji, listen," he begs.

"You have five words."

Chester's brain goes into overdrive. He's wasting the Holy Mother's time. He lines up his best pitch, feeling sweat bead at his hairline.

"I met other enlightened beings," he says.

The phone is silent for disconcerting seconds. He angles the screen down toward him and glances at it to make certain the call didn't disconnect.

"And why are you in the forest?" the Holy Mother finally says.

"They're"—and his nerve fails; interdimensional talking unicorns is a step too far, even if it's the undeniable truth—"holy magicians. Transcendental heroes seeking out the enemies of enlightenment. They asked for my help."

The silence returns, this time with fangs.

"Chester," the Holy Mother says, "have you been stealing god-weed from the ashram storage room?"

"I would never, Swamini-ji."

"We shall see. Return immediately."

"Wait!" he blurts out—and he needs to leap off the crazytown cliff while he's still got an opportunity; it's not like he'll be in more trouble if she takes this poorly. "You might be in danger. From Master Anton."

"I see," the Holy Mother says, her tone placid. "I assume your magical transcendental pixies told you this?"

"Unicorns," he corrects on reflex.

"Unicorns?"

Chester feels color drain from his face. Oh no—now she's certain he's gone crazy.

He flings a blind desperation pass. "Listen, does the name 'Scorpan' mean anything to you?"

His heart thuds in the silence for a few moments of concentrated terror, and her next sentence does little to dilute it. "This goes beyond breaking into the storage room, Chester," the Holy Mother says slowly. "Where did you get ninth-circle texts?"

"I didn't! I heard it from Celestia. See? How could they have known—"

"Celestia?" the Holy Mother interrupts. "That Bittish ex-princess?"

"… No?" Chester says, confused. "The princip—the one pretending to be the principal of Canterlot High."

"Ches-ter."

He is beyond being deterred even by That Inflection. "She said she had dealt with Scorpan—I mean, Master Anton—before. She and Sunset are going to investigate him while Twilight and I go after the girl who stole his gun."

"Sunset? Twilight? Who are these people?"

"More enlightened beings. Sunset Shimmer was the valedictorian at Celestia's school back when there was that big explosion, Swamini-ji. And Twilight is a…" He stumbles as he realizes where that sentence is going, but his choice is to finish it or faceplant at full speed. "A talking werewolf."

This silence is mercifully brief, and after it, the Holy Mother's tone has leveled back out. "Let me get this straight. You met the ex-princess in the airport, and she drugged you with a hallucinogen and dumped you in the woods, and meanwhile, she's investigating my new recruit?"

"You don't understand!" Chester shouts. With that, he is far beyond arrogance into blasphemy, but he knows what he saw. "Their auras are the strongest I've ever seen! Twilight has telepathy! Sunset can read minds! Celestia"—wait, has he actually seen her do anything besides utterly fail at phones?—"has forbidden interdimensional knowledge! They're hunting down dangerous villains like Anton and they asked me to help and they have actual magic, Swamini-ji, I've experienced it firsthand!"

"I see," the Holy Mother says. "And I don't?"

Her tone is gentle, level. But the words themselves carry so much menace that even over the phone he knows they're blazing crimson red.

Awareness of the precarity of Chester's position abruptly dawns.

His heart starts hammering against the inside of his ribcage. His head goes light.

"That was in no way my implication, Swamini-ji," Chester forces out before his throat locks up entirely.

The Holy Mother lets this silence hang for far too long. Chester would normally be babbling to fill it—desperate apologies, explanations, confessions of his sins so that she might apply the necessary tough love to drive him back toward enlightenment—but this time, what can he say? He can't uncross those lines and won't recant those truths. He has to rely on her seeing, from her enlightened station, the truth of what he has unearthed; and on the mercy of her love to set right his arrogance.

"You have," she says, "despite the unprecedented depth of your heresy, provided me with useful information about an enemy of enlightenment. Therefore, I shall allow you the mercy of remaining a devotee. Return immediately and alone. And on your way, I suggest you begin thinking of appropriate punishments for your transgressions. If you know what is good for you, you will make your ideas more severe than mine."

"Thank you, Swamini-ji," Chester says, vertigo and relief flooding him in equal measure.

The call goes dead.

Chester's heart is still working double time, cold sweat beading on his brow. His skin is going clammy and his head is light. But the moment has passed. She listened to his warning. He's in basically infinite trouble, but it could have been so much worse.

His limbs start to quiver as adrenaline finally releases its iron grip. He suddenly remembers to breathe, gasping quickly and hungrily for air.

He teeters, balance evaporating. The edges of his vision fuzz.

Then Chester crumples limply to the stone, the world fading away.

He is lost in dense fog, and there is something Wrong nearby.

There is no wind, no scent on the wind. The mist swirls, gray and impenetrable, creating optical illusions of shadows, vertical lines of trees which evaporate and reform as he looks around. He breaks into a four-legged run, which stirs up the fog without moving him anywhere; there is not even sensation to his footfalls beyond a vague sense of gravity against some vague mist-shrouded ground.

And all the while, the Wrong stirs. There is a prickle at the nape of his neck as though he were hearing the distant song of the hunt, soundless no matter how he strains to shift his leaden ears—but the hunt-call is the Wrong's, and the hunger of something so ugly and unnatural leaves him feeling very much the prey.

That awareness of the Wrong sharpens, and his panic grows. Help he needs help need help—the howl springs from his throat, desperate dark orange, twisting and shading the fog as it pierces through.

Something inside him ignites in intuitive comprehension. In this fog, the Wrong is not the only hunter. In here too is the Wolf, who taught him the song of this place. He is lost and scared and the Wrong stalks ever closer, but the Wolf will answer if she hears.

A ripple of color reflects in the fog. Diffuse light violet curiosity. He has been heard! His throat burns, renewing his plea.

A return song! It's creamsicle confusion, but it is a response. Then the source of the howl gains the sensation of motion—and his panic surges. The Wrong approaches.

No—wait. It's the Wolf. Isn't it? The return call must have been the Wolf; the Wrong is alien, grotesque, desecrated. It raises every hackle. And when he focuses on the source of the howl it is the rapport of the Wolf. But another part of him also screams the warning of the Wrong closing in for the kill. Wolf approaches. Wrong approaches. Both true. Both true! The sensations overlap, salvation and death racing neck-and-neck—

He narrows his focus to the Wolf's song, pushing the perception of the Wrong back away, and bursts into a sprint, the fog roiling past at the speed of thought. He must reach Wolf before Wrong overtakes him. The Wrong cannot win, every atom of his being screams. But they hurtle inward in unison—and just as he bursts through the fog to Wolf's salvation, spindly red claws grab him and

a gleaming red figure sears into his memory—not flesh but living crystal, a frail mockery of form not human and not wolf, the color of blood and fury—

fix me

—the ruby gemstone figure vibrates, radiating dark orange desperation to blast apart his screams of vivid orange terror, and he writhes and flails and its tenuous hold on him snaps to

tear through the writhing reddening fog with Wolf and Wrong chasing at his heels, the sensation of hot breath at his flanks—

Wake.

—and he bolts in the direction of this new call, which is still in that Wolf-Wrong voice but distant, elsewhere. Frantically he hurtles toward its promised exit, a rabbit bolting for his hole, as the fog lightens and thins—

A familiar voice tickles the edges of Chester's perceptions, rough but undeniably feminine, and orange-gray sweeps away the last of the haze:

Wake.

His brain shudders to life to parse the word, and that brings other sensations with it. Cold against his back; the tug of gravity in that direction; the distant rustling of leaves and whisper of a creek. Chester's awareness of his body, bit by bit, reconstructs itself around that core.

His heart is hammering, adrenaline pumping. His hindbrain, still trapped in that sprint through the fog, is screaming danger and Wrong, terrified flight from slavering fangs. But there is a quickly growing distance to that, as if a dream were evaporating, as his thoughts re-engage—except for the memory of that terrifying red gemstone monster's grip around his throat, seared in somewhere deep and primal.

The fog felt like no mere dream, though. Raw, vivid, somehow real but in a way he has never experienced before. He has no context for where he was. Not even who he was. It was like… if everything that made him Chester was stripped away, reducing him to pure animal reflex.

Something hard and uncomfortable pokes Chester's side, grounding him fully back into his body.

Wake, Twilight repeats, again a cautious orange-gray, with stirring garnishes of blue-and-yellow concern.

Is he sleeping? Why? Where? Memory fully engages, reminding him that before the fog he was atop the boulder by Canter Creek. Logic stirs to life: He fainted.

Wait, right. He's lying on the rock unconscious.

Chester's eyes jolt open, and he gasps in a breath of forest air. The adrenaline that had very nearly ebbed immediately strangles him again:

That voice wasn't Twilight's.

A teenaged girl draped in animal hides is crouched over him—aura unusually intense (like Anton's or Esau's), ice-blue skin, dirty white hair down to her shoulders, rail-thin and built from iron, five-foot-nothing at a generous guess. One hand is holding his phone. The other is clenched around the stock of Anton's stolen rifle, and she's jabbing the barrel repeatedly into his abdomen as if it were a pointy stick.

Chester yelps and scrambles back out of her line of fire, and motion explodes in the corners of his vision wolves wolves wolves startled baring teeth oh gods he's surrounded and then from the freshly orange-limned Ember comes a flaring pulse of blue, painful-bright. The color echoes into her wolfpack and reflects back at her as they immediately lie back down, fur still bristling from Chester's sudden motion but staring at him with something closer to curiosity than hunger. And that blue presses against him, too, with an almost physical sensation, as if he were standing in a wind-stirred pond and a soothing wave was lapping at his feet. It has no actual power to calm him down—there's not enough force to penetrate his thrashing, roiling panic—but it gives him something to focus on besides his out-of-control adrenaline, and it gets him looking around the scene with fresh eyes.

The reason Chester hadn't noticed the dozen wolves right away is that they're all sprawled in a lazy arc at a respectable distance from the boulder. They… don't match his mental model. He was expecting something like a gang of hoodlums, the canine equivalent of scowling ruffians with their eyes locked on their mark, idly polishing their guns and cleaning their fingernails with pointy knives. But now that he's no longer startling them with explosive motion, they feel more like a group of rugged construction workers leaning on their shovels. The largest of them—an absolute unit of a blue-gray wolf, comically oversized compared to the others, Chester's height at the shoulder—is plopped on his butt near the center of the pack but still at a deferential distance, scratching one of his floppy oversized ears with a hindleg. A modest-sized gray wolf with unusually large feet is sprawled half atop a diminutive one with a dun-colored coat, grooming the top of the small one's head with her tongue. A larger reddish-brown wolf has gone upside down, paws flailing in the air as he rolls on the ground, kicking up dust. A large light-gray wolf with an absurdly floofy coat and permanently lolling tongue is staring vacantly into space, one eye not tracking the other. The others are yawning, or stretching, or licking themselves. All Chester has from them is body language—they're wolf wolves, not werewolves—but none of this feels like a threat.

The wolf-girl—her personal colors receding from orange into wary orange-gray—sends out another pulse of soothing blue. This time, it's more narrowly directed at him, and it comes along with words: You are not prey.

Chester lets out a shuddering breath, and struggles to tamp down his nerves.

His mental alarms are blaring at full volume—wolf danger and villain danger and weird fog-dream gemstone monster danger—but none of those things is currently trying to kill him. (What in Tartarus was that terrifying blood-red thing? He needs to sort that out once he's got a free moment.) Right now, though, the priority is the wolf-girl who woke him up and is flinging blue at his brain.

"You're," he croaks through a throat gradually remembering its need for moisture, "Ember."

He immediately knows he's said something wrong. The girl tilts her head, staring at him with peach and yellow bursting through her aura. He sees her fingers tighten on the rifle stock.

I am Holds-the-Fire, she says, the chestnut red-brown of a challenge he dares not accept. But I know that name.

Another piece of the greater puzzle falls into place. Anton's otherworldly duplicate is apparently Scorpan, and Twilight had told Chester that his own double is Thorax. Names don't always seem to match up perfectly, and he's going to have to be careful about that because it sometimes seems to be a sore spot.

That reminds him: where is Twilight? He sneaks another glance around the pack. No sign of the villain hunter, and fortunately, no bloody muzzles or other signs of a recent fight. Given what she had said about her history with Emb—with Holds-the-Fire—it looks like them splitting up was a stroke of good luck for once. The wolfpack's reaction toward him would be very different if they knew he was with her.

Holds-the-Fire drops to a crouch, a jealous yellow-green swirling up amid her wary curiosity, and before Chester can react she has loped forward on all fours to close the distance between them (gracefully leaving both gun and phone behind as her hands contact rock). He flinches reflexively as she grabs his head with both hands, but there is no red to Holds-the-Fire's motions, and he tries to go limp and not provoke her. She leans in, nose on his cheek, and inhales sharply, then pulls back far enough to go eye-to-eye with him, tilting her head again.

I do not scent the world of fire on you, she says, her colors receding into a conflicted swirl, with light violet curiosity the most vivid. But I think that if you confuse me for Ember, you have seen her only there. Did she take everything from you, as she did me?

Holds-the-Fire is a lot cannier than she looks.

Also: That's right. She's a villain's duplicate, so therefore Ember is a villain—and apparently played a role in Holds-the-Fire and Twilight's story.

An itch stirs in the pit of Chester's stomach. Once again, there's more going on here than he knows—and Holds-the-Fire seems right at the center of it.

And she's gripping his head, waiting for his answer.

"I've never met Ember," Chester says sincerely, returning to the moment. "But maybe we should talk about the, uh, 'world of fire'." He immediately backtracks as yellow spikes to the forefront of Holds-the-Fire's aura. "Only if you want to, I mean." He clears his throat. "What do you want?"

She regards him for a moment, and then in a single fluid motion she releases him, quadruped-lopes a pace backward, and stands up, gun and smartphone in hands. I need new magic, she says, You will help me learn the secrets of your human tools.

And Chester's jaw drops open.

It's not a startling, or even unusual, request. All Holds-the-Fire is doing is holding the items. But he still has to blink, rub his eyes, and stare in speechless awe.

Because her color—a color he has only ever seen in the Holy Mother's aura—is a brilliant, sparkling gold.

Author's Note

It turns out that Fang and Flame's narrator/protagonist has a name! Or, more accurately, has earned her pack-name in the wake of that story, finally fully coming into herself — and (perhaps understandably) has deliberately chosen a name which reflects her unique successes, rather than something which reminds her of the sting of her greatest failure.

If you haven't read F&F, you'll get to learn about Holds-the-Fire as Chester does. "Twilight*" gave him the crucial basics of that story, though there's one or two key pieces she didn't think to mention. I wrote a short blog with a Cliff's Notes summary of F&F if you'd like full context for this Bloodstone Crown that's been name-dropped; the bloodstones, plural, and the Embers' ugly mutual past will both play important roles as the story unfolds.

Of course, since the next chapter ("Shared Colors") drops on Sunday, Aug. 11, this is a great time to read F&F's 14,000 words of high-octane combat and character drama!