Wolf and woman are in motion almost before Chester can blink.

Twilight hurtles herself straight at Holds-the-Fire's face, fangs out. The girl jukes and grabs the wolf out of the air. The instant they touch, their red auras surge and go sparkly and

time slows

to a

crawl—

As Chester stares, immobilized, at a world quickly draining of color—turning into a three-dimensional black-and-white photograph, except for the blazing shimmering red of the frozen combatants at the center of the tableau—a fact drills into his brain with the weight of absolute truth.

Fact: This frozen moment is the bloodstone's doing.

This isn't the weird fog-realm, but the sparkling red of wolf and girl's auras sets off the same screaming terror of being grasped by that gleaming ruby gemstone figure. Not just visually—he can feel it. The Wrong is whispering.

No—shouting. Not at him, but he hears it nonetheless. Both of those shimmering red auras are heavy with that discordant sensation from the fog. In this frozen moment he can't move to look directly at either combatant, but when he shifts his concentration to Twilight, she feels Wolf and Holds-the-Fire feels Wrong, and then vice versa when he refocuses—like it's always there in both of them, but only visible in his blind spot.

Oh no. Was Twilight infected by the Bloodstone Crown, too?

As Chester keeps staring—helpless to do anything else—a bone-chilling certainty slowly sets in: one of the fighters will not walk away. Not even with Anton's or Swamini-ji's fury has he ever seen anger like this. It's like the colors themselves are fighting—the ice-blue figures within them less real than their blazing, shimmering emotions.

And he suddenly realizes something else: the Wrong, almost wholly occupied by the duel to the death, nevertheless is talking at him—

—fix me, the red shimmer of the frozen girl whispers, kill her—

—and the same ugly request from the wolf in midair, fix me kill her—

Fact: The Bloodstone Crown wants blood—

and time

restarts

as Chester violently recoils from both those pleas.

The pair wheels indistinctly within the clashing reds, and goes down with an ugly-sounding crunch. Chester hears a sharp canine yelp. Then there's a higher-pitched yip from a human throat, and the blurred figures resolve for a snapshot moment, Twilight's jaws locked around the arm holding the rifle, liquid red dripping from between the teeth. Holds-the-Fire jabs for the wolf's eyes with her other hand, and Twilight howls in pain, staggering back with reddened muzzle and favoring one leg.

It all happens so fast. Chester needs to do something, but relative to the sparkling blurs of wolf and girl, every movement feels like wading through molasses.

As Holds-the-Fire charges in, Twilight gapes her jaw open and hisses. It's a bizarre, decidedly non-canine sound, and Chester has no idea what to make of it. But it seems to mean something, because Holds-the-Fire instantly veers away mid-charge, barking in surprise and diving for cover.

There's a lull in the fight as the girl scrambles upright and the small ice-blue wolf shakes her head to recover her vision. Instinctively, Chester is in motion. He sprints into the fray, grabbing Twilight and jerking her off her feet. She howls and thrashes, flailing her limbs and snapping her red-smeared teeth in mid-air. Chester madly hugs her body to his chest, keeping his face behind her neck and one arm wrapped around her throat, cutting off the range of motion of those lethal jaws.

"Stop!" he yells, a dim awareness of the danger he's just thrust himself into belatedly catching up. "Stop!"

His voice seems to burst open some metaphysical dam. The fighters' shared aura of sparkling red splits with a jolt, and their figures snap back to full focus. Twilight twitches in his arms, and he can see a spasm pass through Holds-the-Fire's body. Their reds recede to a normal but still terrifying brilliance, sparkles dying away.

Oh, thank the stars. Chester nearly whimpers in relief.

For a few moments, they all stare at each other. Holds-the-Fire breathes heavily, clenching her bleeding arm. The wolf in Chester's arms has stopped thrashing—Chester's voice seeming to have snapped her back to awareness from some more primal, fight-or-flight state—and is growling at the back of her throat, repeatedly blinking teary eyes and focusing her vision.

It gives Chester's mind a moment to catch up on the non-bloodstone context, and he instantly pieces the scenario together. Less than two hours ago, they had left the car. Therefore, Twilight had still been exploring upstream. Then she had heard the gunshot and bolted straight for it, fearing the worst.

So this fight is entirely his fault. He had gotten so caught up with the rush of back-to-back discoveries with Holds-the-Fire that he had forgotten why he was there in the first place.

Holds-the-Fire's voice echoes in his head, snapping him back into the moment.

Chester, she says, her red tempered by a guarded and determined gray-brown. Listen carefully. We have one chance.

He blinks, a bit thrown. Holds-the-Fire—still clenching her bloody arm, her gaze still locked on the wolf in his grasp—has undertones more of pink and black to her red. But he's well aware she can send emotions she doesn't feel, and it does make sense if she's trying to disguise her transmission to avoid cluing Twilight in.

So he, too, does his best to focus his return thoughts narrowly. Hang on, he thinks toward Holds-the-Fire. Let me talk to her first.

Holds-the-Fire blinks and shifts her stare to him, creamsicle overtaking the pink. What? she asks, and Chester realizes his mistake a moment too late.

Drop me and run, Twilight continues in the mental voice he last heard at the airport. It's only now that she and Holds-the-Fire are speaking back to back that he realizes just how identical they sound. I'll go for the gun, and follow you if I can.

Hang on! Let me talk to her first! Chester thinks desperately at Twilight, watching Holds-the-Fire's red coalesce anew and feeling himself on the precipice of a catastrophically degenerating situation.

Wait, is she— Holds-the-Fire's reddening confusion spikes into an alarmed peach, and her eyes widen. Then a snarl contorts her face, and she raises the gun.

You get out of my packmate's head! she red-broadcasts.

Chester yelps, and does the only thing he can think of that might possibly stop them from both getting shot: he whirls around, covering the wolf's body with his. Don't! he broadcasts back, pure panic.

With his back to Holds-the-Fire, he can't see her reaction—either physically, or via color. For a terrifying moment, he waits for the thunder of a gunshot. Instead, his head explodes with a barrage of colored crosstalk.

Packmate? What's she talking about? Twilight says (in a peach he can see echoed on the wolf in his arms).

Ches-ter! What are you doing? Holds-the-Fire says in a different, more urgent peach.

A fragile emerald hope stirs in the wolf, and she narrows her thoughts to Chester alone. Are you infiltrating? Is this a changeling thing?

The girl's voice shades red: Get out of the way!

It's becoming too much to keep track of inside his head, and all he can do is respond to the bigger threat. "No!" he says, voice ratcheting up in pitch. "You promised me you wouldn't shoot the gun in anger!"

Okay, Twilight mind-whispers to Chester, shifting to a gray-filtered red as she reassesses. If you can keep her distracted—

Shut UP before you get us killed! Chester snaps back. The wolf's colors shift back to peach, but he doesn't have the luxury of caring about her reaction. He's the only thing between Twilight and a quick, ugly death (by gunshot and/or wolfpack jaws), and every word she says is distracting him from fixing things.

Speaking of which—Chester had expected Holds-the-Fire to say something by now. He risks a peek over his shoulder, into the narrow-eyed stare above the yawning void of the gun barrel. And his brief moment of relief that her red has receded is replaced by terror as he recognizes the ugly beige of betrayal—aimed at him.

You're working with her? Holds-the-Fire broadcasts, though she's clearly talking to Chester.

Even if Chester had wanted to lie to Holds-the-Fire's face to deny it, he immediately realizes there's no point. She just did the same thing which he had done back in the car—noticed from the shift in their emotions that there was a conversation going on without her. Now, his best shot is to bring everything into the open and hope he's built up enough goodwill to talk things out.

Chester takes a deep breath, then sets Twilight down. "Stay behind me, and don't move," he hisses in her ear, praying that she listens. He turns to squarely face Holds-the-Fire, arms spread out in a useless effort to give Twilight more cover.

"I met her and her friends before I knew who you really were," Chester says, quietly and firmly. "They told me how dangerous you were. But we can prove them wrong."

He's just getting started, but Holds-the-Fire interrupts, eyes widening. You what? she says with a fresh burst of yellow pain. You lied to my face!

Chester knows the ugliness of Twilight and Holds-the-Fire's mutual history, but that accusation still brings him up short. "…What?"

Holds-the-Fire shifts to creamsicle as she reads Chester's own confusion. You said you had never met her!

Chester is starting to feel dangerously lost. He's fairly certain that the subject of Twilight had never come up. He had made a point of not mentioning her, in fact—but that makes the lie he's being accused of even more bewildering.

Maroon suspicion creeps into Holds-the-Fire's colors as he thinks, and Chester's consciousness of his own feelings kicks into overdrive. He's legitimately confused, and knows she sees that—but he can't afford to have her find him untrustworthy because his confusion is insufficient, and he also can't afford to overcompensate and have his confusion get interpreted as an artificial projection.

"What are you talking about?" he says, struggling to square the impossible circle of feeling his feelings at the correct intensity.

Fortunately, it seems to work; Holds-the-Fire's maroon begins to fade as she recalculates. Then she is the one who lied to you, she says, looking past Chester with an old and simmering red-yellow. Did Ember not tell you she was the one who cost me everything?

Chester blinks, speechless.

It's one of those epiphanies which is blindingly, stupidly obvious in hindsight. Twilight—no, Ember—is basically Holds-the-Fire turned into a canine. The same slight, wiry build, the same ice-blue color, voices like identical twins. He should have realized it when he saw them both at once, but he was too distracted by their fight. No—he should have figured it out when Twi—Ember—told him about their clashes, or kept referring to "this Ember". Or from them both having wolf telepathy. Or even back at the beginning, when he was coming to his humiliating conclusions about the werewolf mafia; he had already seen Holds-the-Fire by that point, albeit at a distance.

Chester had ignored so much because he was so proud of his deduction from that stupid address book. And it landed him in the middle of a deadly feud between two bloodstone-poisoned villains.

Ember shoves her head past Chester's leg. "Oh, don't you start!" she red-says, as Holds-the-Fire swings the gun barrel to her face and Chester yelps and scrambles back into the way. "You want to tell him how you invaded my world, enslaved my people, and were going to wipe out ponykind?"

You invaded MY world first! You were after MY crown from the beginning! Holds-the-Fire red-says. Both of their auras are starting to develop sparkles again, and Chester feels an icy clench in his gut—if they clash again, he'll be powerless to stop it.

"Because we were worried about the exact thing you actually did!"

"Ladies!" Chester shouts, leaping halfway between them and throwing his arms out, one palm toward them both. "Do not make me turn into a bear!"

It's a stupid and desperate bluff, but it does in fact jolt them both out of their argument. Peach blooms in both of the auras at the corners of his vision—Holds-the-Fire's with a heavy creamsicle overlay, Ember's more pure.

"I thought you said you couldn't do that?" Ember says, her own notes of creamsicle belatedly shading in.

"I can't. So don't make me." Chester turns back to Holds-the-Fire. "And you. You made a promise and I'm holding you to it. Put down the gun."

The end of the barrel doesn't waver. Holds-the-Fire composes herself for a moment, colors swirling, then speaks in a slow, deliberate, restrained red. I promised that I would use the fire-stick only with a clear head, to protect my pack or to hunt. My justification is perfectly clear. She has already incalculably damaged my pack and remains the biggest threat to our future success. I will end her to protect us.

"You also promised you wouldn't use the gun while angry. That's when people do things they regret. And you are super red right now."

That red flares out, yellow joining in. Holds-the-Fire's eyes bore into his. Why does that matter, if I can defend my decision? What about everything I've lost! Don't I have the RIGHT to my anger?

"You do," Chester says, granting her a concession because this is the worst possible moment to talk about bloodstone poisoning. "But you made a promise." He softens his voice. "Please, Holds-the-Fire. It's easy to teach you how to shoot a gun, and so much harder to teach you why not to. There's so much human history you don't know. So many ways tools can go wrong. We have better ways of making this right."

Black threads of uncertainty creep into Holds-the-Fire's colors. She stares at him down the barrel, arms starting to tremble as the black and red war within her.

"I'm sorry," Ember peach-says from behind Chester. "Did you just say you taught her to shoot the gun?"

Oh.

Oh shit.

He turns his head back to the wolf. "Can we not talk about this now?" Chester hisses.

"Would you rather talk about it when she's out on her next mass-murder spree that could have been prevented by just keeping your mouth shut?" Ember's fur bristles as her red finds a new target. "You had one job, Chester—no, zero jobs!" she red-shouts. "And yet you still somehow managed to screw it up!"

Ches-ter, here is how I will keep my promise, Holds-the-Fire says, her black evaporating back into barely restrained red. I will shoot her, then I will give the gun to you until you deem me worthy of it again.

Chester makes a strangled little cry and wheels back to Holds-the-Fire, spreading his arms and stepping forward to block as much of her line of fire as possible. "No! No shooting!"

Black briefly stirs in Holds-the-Fire's aura again, but is quickly smothered in a tawny resentment very pointedly directed at Chester. I have trusted you over and over again to show me how to be something I am not, in order to understand your human ways, she says to him alone, fingers shifting and re-tightening around the rifle grip. But this is too far. I can no longer neglect the protection of my pack. And I promise you, Ches-ter: if you would protect the one who has cost us everything, that cannot include you.

Chester meets and matches Holds-the-Fire's stare. And in his peripheral vision, her colors are heartbreaking to look at. She can barely even hold her resentment through the end of her speech, as feelings from every part of the spectrum batter her. A thin but resolute strand of green, as she hopes he'll come back around to her side, and a faint, wavering blue as she meets his eyes, having second thoughts about her threat to banish him. Spreading, bleeding yellow as he holds his ground. That earlier thread of hope shifting to an uglier radium green of desperation.

I do not want to shoot you, Holds-the-Fire adds, that desperation flaring to full strength.

And that color promises: no matter what he does, she won't.

That settles it, then. Chester can't move from between woman and wolf. As painful as it is, his decision is simple: he cares for Holds-the-Fire too much to let her become a murderer. (Let alone reignite that Wrong inside her.)

I should have known this would happen again, she beige-says—no. That's Ember, making everything confusing again by switching to telepathy to yell privately at him. Ember and Thorax instantly hitting it off. Never mind that YOUR Ember's a murderous psychopath. Muddy yellow bitterness overtakes her words. You've unleashed a monster, but you were always going to. This is my fault for letting you come along.

Chester begins to wonder if he is, for the first time, feeling anger. If he survives this, and if—somehow—Holds-the-Fire is still talking to him, he'll need to ask what she saw.

"Ember," he says, keeping his voice controlled with an effort, "leave. Now."

He watches Holds-the-Fire's last scraps of green bleed into wounded chartreuse as he confirms his decision. It rips a similar wound in Chester's heart. He holds his ground.

The wolf switches back to speech to respond in kind. "Sure," Ember beige-says, "I'll just let her capture you, you two deserve each oth—"

"Listen, idiot mutt," Chester snaps, "You do not understand how much I just sacrificed to save your damn life. So I will say this once. Turn and run. Now. Or so help me Sun, I will step out of Holds-the-Fire's way."

He turns his head to punctuate his statement with a glare. Ember flares up an outraged muddy red, bristling at the order. But those colors get tangled up in black as she glances around at the wolfpack. They've been holding back at a cautious distance, milling around uncertainly, and haven't yet seemed inclined to interfere—but they are enough of an implied threat that, deprived of both Chester's backup and her earlier incandescent rage, Ember seems to have finally reconsidered a last-ditch frontal assault.

Without another word, she wheels and scrambles for the underbrush, crashing through greenery and immediately vanishing. The bushes sway on a straight-line route downhill and the crashing noises recede as she sprints toward the river.

Chester turns back to Holds-the-Fire, silently sighing, and returns his gaze to hers. His gut twists.

Of her earlier colors, there is no sign—only the broken chartreuse of their connection betrayed.

Also, there are fresh tears on her cheeks.

Holds-the-Fire's eyes briefly flick down to the gun, and she seems to belatedly realize she's still pointing it at him. The rifle's tip lowers, then falls to the ground. She takes her attention off him for a moment to fiddle with the safety, returning the small lever to the non-firing right. Then she looks back up.

I was wrong, she says, that same deadened chartreuse. Ember had not yet taken everything from me. But now she has taken a packmate. And… a friend.

"Wait, we can fix this," he says, on autopilot himself. There's no conviction in his words. Why should there be? He just survived—defused—a magic-fueled deathmatch, saved a life, stuck to his principles, and temporarily derailed Holds-the-Fire's single-minded drive for vengeance. (Along with expending a lifetime's worth of bravery, through the simple technique of being stuck at gunpoint with no other options.) And yet, in a lifetime positively full of failure—routine mockery from his peers, constantly disappointing the Holy Mother, and even getting abandoned by Esau—he's never hurt someone he loved this massively, or this deliberately.

What is there to fix? Holds-the-Fire says, shouldering the rifle and yipping sharply to summon the pack to their feet. I am a wolf of my word. I kept your promise. I must keep mine.

Chester's hindbrain is screaming to do something, say something. He can't lose her—this transcendent wild princess who, against all odds, understands the world's colors the same way he does. But he already made his choice when he refused to budge against her threat. What is there to say?

He tries anyway.

"You're a good wolf," Chester says softly. "I hope you understand that not shooting her was about also being a good person."

They stare at each other for a silent moment. Then she turns, and doesn't look back. Goodbye, Ches-ter.

He numbly watches Holds-the-Fire and the wolfpack lope away, until they're swallowed up by the forest.

Author's Note

And with that, I'm heading to Everfree Northwest for the weekend. I'll see some of you there!

Everfree will be the dead-tree debut of Blues, in a collection titled "The Other Me", along with Administrative Angel, Devil May Care and Fang and Flame. More info here! At some point after the convention, it will be available for online purchase as well via Ponyfeather Publishing; I'll announce that in a blog once it's available.

Of course, you can keep reading it here as well! Chapter 10, "Lost," launches on Sunday, as Chester starts picking up the pieces.