The Magician and the Fiddler

Chapters

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV

Chapter I

Where the magician had stood moments ago, a fiery serpent erupted from the stage and pirouetted through the smoky air, illuminating the awe-struck faces of the tavern's patrons. Flames washed over the wooden stage and licked at the maroon curtains while the serpent's neck split like a hydra's. The heads snaked out to mingle with the audience, lighting cigarettes, startling ponies by peeking over their withers to reflect in their glasses of whiskey, and winding under the tables to brush past their hooves. Once the tavern was wrapped up like a kitten in a ball of yarn, the heads arced up toward the ceiling and collided, exploding in a shower of sparks that lit the night for several blocks down the road.

Fillydelphia ordinance prohibited fire magic within a hundred feet of any structure, much less inside one, which was why several patrons' cigarettes all extinguished in unison. Realizing with dismay that the display was just a trick of the light, the ponies looked to the stage in time to see the flames die away, revealing an azure unicorn mare standing on her hind legs with her forelegs stretched into the air. A winning smile graced her face, and her silver mane and starry lavender cloak billowed in a nonexistent gale.

"Ta-dah!" Trixie exclaimed, but the sound was drowned out in the patrons' whistling and rumbling applause as a fountain of bits poured from their coin purses onto the stage. At least, that's the reception she imagined. Save for one enthusiastic onlooker whose face was obscured in the shadows cast from her white cowpony hat by the lanterns overhead, the audience's response was much more modest, and more importantly, stingy. The few bits that landed by her hooves were mostly copper, some silver, two or three gold, and altogether just enough for her room and board. With extraordinary luck, tomorrow's show would yield enough to pay for her appointment in Hollow Shades. She slumped back onto all fours.

The enthusiastic patron applauded awhile longer but stopped abruptly when she realized the others had already returned to hunching over their drinks and murmuring to one another about nothing in particular.

Trixie finally let her smile falter, released a muffled sigh, and began levitating the meager scattering of bits into her burlap pouch but stopped when she felt somepony watching her. She looked up from beneath the brim of her lavender wizard hat and locked eyes with a lemon-yellow earth pony mare whose elegant cobalt mane was covered by a white cowpony hat.

"Hi," the mare said, folding her forelegs on the edge of the stage.

Deciding that some one-on-one time with a fan was the best remedy for her ills in the absence of a budget for alcohol, Trixie strutted over, sat with her hind legs crossed over the stage, stretched back one foreleg to prop herself up, tossed her mane with the other like a practiced showmare, and said, "Good evening, stranger. What can the Great and Powerful Trixie do for you?"

"No autographs or anything—not that I wouldn't like one," the mare replied, smiling coyly. "I just wanted to congratulate you. I've never seen a magician draw her audience into her act so intimately."

Were the mare's smile not so infectious, Trixie would be cringing at the memory of how she used to draw her audience into her act. It hadn't been unlike what stand-up comedian sometimes did, but she had taken herself dead serious at the time, and it had nearly cost her her life more than once. Those days were behind her, though, and that was where they would stay. "Thank you, Ms..."

"Fiddlesticks."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Fiddlesticks. Knowing that somepony out there in the seas of faces the Great and Powerful Trixie sees night after night enjoys her shows is what makes them worthwhile."

"Just Fiddlesticks will do fine. Would you mind my just calling you Trixie? On top of all the smoke and heat in this place, I'll likely swoon if I have to address you by your full title."

"Trixie wouldn't mind in the slightest, Fiddlesticks. She couldn't help noticing your accent. By any chance, have you been to Mareland?"

Fiddlesticks's smile widened. "I have, actually. I grew up in Manehattan, but I spent the better part of the last several years in Mareland. I'm only here now because my family invited me to a reunion, but that was a few weeks ago, so I thought I'd see if the local venues could use a fiddler. I performed here last night, actually. I had another performance scheduled tonight, but I heard about a certain up-and-coming magician and thought I'd cancel to give her a chance."

Trixie only needed a moment to put two and two together, but the silence stretched out as she tried to work out how she felt about the sum. Her reputation resented being deflated to the level of an up-and-coming magician, but that was why she was back in Fillydelphia in the first place—to start over. Furthermore, generosity was apparently harder to come by than when she was growing up—either that or news of the chaos she'd caused in Ponyville had preceded her. When she saw Fiddlesticks's smile faltering into self-conscious concern, she scrambled for a way to break the silence. "Trixie apologizes. She's getting old, you see," she said, earning an adorable giggle. "She often finds herself getting lost in thought lately, but she certainly appreciates your generosity and hopes your performance was better received than hers."

Fiddlesticks lowered her head, hiding her eyes beneath her hat. "It didn't, really. They were polite, of course, and I'm sure most of them enjoyed it, but nopony seems to have much use for a lone fiddler. I can see how being in a band or orchestra might appeal to some, but I never had the coordination to play in concert with others."

The sight of her looking so downcast bothered Trixie on a level she couldn't understand, but one thing she could understand was that she never wanted to see her that way again. "For her part, Trixie never liked performing with other magicians. They would always try to steal the show." She would always try to steal the show, she corrected herself. Seeing that Fiddlesticks hadn't looked up and sensing that no response was forthcoming, Trixie asked, "Would you like to hear a story?"

Fiddlesticks raised her head, the anticipation gleaming in her stunning sapphire eyes being all the answer Trixie needed, and pulled herself onto the stage well within Trixie's personal space. Fiddlesticks ought to have felt uncomfortable putting herself in such intimate proximity to a mare she'd just met, but perhaps the norm was different in Mareland.

The other patrons paid them no mind, for a Fillydelphian's indifference was evidently without equal.

Trixie pointedly ignored them, turned to focus on her one loyal fan, and began, "Trixie wasn't always a nopony, you know. At the height of her career, she traveled the countryside on a hoof-crafted carriage that folded out into a full-length stage, but when she happened across a little trading town called Ponyville and told a tale too tall for two local colts, a cranky Ursa Minor crushed all her worldly belongings underfoot. Fortunately, Trixie was creating a diversion at the time to stall until the town battlemage could arrive. The real tragedy was that Trixie hadn't insured her carriage beforehand and had to flee town to avoid being charged for the cleanup. To an apathetic observer," she said, making a sweeping gesture to the other patrons, one of whom had the courtesy to grunt, "she deserved what she got because—"

"Hang on, I think I know this story."

"You do?" Trixie asked, caught off guard. "I—Trixie means, of course you do. Why should she be surprised that news of her spectacular failure would make international headlines? That would be just her luck, after all."

Fiddlesticks's smile returned, and her eyes glinted with mischief. "My cousin told me, actually. You know, the one you hogtied with her own rope in front of the whole town earlier that day."

Trixie blushed. From the cute orange bandanna and green v-neck shirt, she should have recognized Fiddlesticks from the paper. The Apple Family Reunion itself may not have been newsworthy, but to anypony unaccustomed to Ponyville's insanity, the toppling of a barn at Sweet Apple Acres was. Trixie opened her mouth to offer some sort of apology, but none came. In truth, she wasn't really sorry, and something told her Fiddlesticks would see right through her anyway.

Fiddlesticks seemed to delight in watching her squirm before clarifying, "I thought it was kind of funny, myself, but I can see how Applejack might have thought differently. For what it's worth, she doesn't hold it against you. Not anymore, anyway. She said you've cleaned up your act since then."

Trixie wondered when her emotions became so manipulable as her heart filled with cautious hope and words left her mouth without her permission, "Is her evaluation fair, would you say?"

Fiddlesticks made a show of evaluating her before answering, "Hm, I'd say so, yes. You came to Fillydelphia for a fresh start, I take it."

Trixie smiled, feeling solid ground beneath her hooves again. "That's right."

"You might have considered coming up with a new title."

"Trixie might have, but she decided she wanted to show anypony who remembered the old her that the new one has come a long way, perhaps even far enough to be considered a likable pony, instead of trying to hide her identity when her dazzling appearance would surely have given it away anyway. She'd hoped to earn the bits to pay for her appointment the day after tomorrow with a medium in Hollow Shades, but with only one more performance and barely enough for lodging, she may have to resign to her fate."

"I'm sorry to hear that." After a moment's thought, Fiddlesticks asked giddily, "I've nowhere to be tomorrow and nothing better to do, so why don't we perform together? I've never shared the stage with a magician, but you wouldn't have to worry about me stealing the show. Judging from how you controlled that illusion, we could even coordinate our acts to compliment each other's, and you could keep any bits we make since you need them more than I do."

Trixie almost didn't know what to say. She couldn't remember the last time somepony had shown her such kindness unadulterated by self-interest, nor, for that matter, the last time she'd returned the favor. "Perhaps Trixie has grown too trusting in her old age, but your generosity hasn't ceased to impress her yet. You said you're a fiddler, did you not?"

"That's right," Fiddlesticks said, nodding. Her simplest actions were charged with youthful energy as if she'd always dreamed of performing with her and could barely contain her giddiness at the possibility of getting the chance.

"Trixie will want to hear you play before she gives her consent. She doesn't doubt your abilities, you understand. She just has to be certain that we can make this work." Noting the grammatical incorrectness of saying "we" while referring to herself in the third pony, Trixie couldn't help pondering the implications.

"Of course," Fiddlesticks practically chirped, hopped off the stage, took Trixie's hoof, lead her back to her table, and hailed the bartender. When he arrived, Fiddlesticks ordered a bottle of whiskey, lifted her fiddle case from under the table, pulled out several gold bits, flashed him a sweet smile as he took them in his apron pocket, and asked, "Would you mind terribly if I played a number or two for my friend? We might perform together tomorrow."

Trixie couldn't remember the last time somepony had called her a friend, either. Despite her reservations, a warm, fuzzy feeling was smothering her earlier melancholy in a bear hug.

"Whatever you want, Fiddles," the bartender said as only a middle-aged bartender who's been around the block can, walking back behind the counter to take another order.

Trixie smirked at Fiddlesticks. "Fiddles? Really?"

Fiddlesticks grinned sheepishly and looked like she was trying to hide a blush as she fumbled around in her case. "He's an old friend. I used to play at his bar in Manehattan when I was first starting out."

Trixie levitated the bottle in the pink aura of her magic, and as she poured the pungent amber fluid into two crystal-clear shot glasses, said, "Trixie supposes she'll have to earn the right to call you that."

Fiddlesticks looked up from whatever she had been pretending to do, tilted her head, and said, "I'll tell you what, Trixie. If all goes well tomorrow and you start referring to yourself in the first pony, at least when you're off stage, I'll consider letting you call me Fiddles."

"Trixie—I mean, I think I can manage that."

Fiddlesticks winked, took out her fiddle and bow, and placed the case back on the floor.

Noticing that the string to the far left was severed midway up the neck and curled out at an awkward angle, Trixie said, "One of your strings is broken."

"I only need three." Fiddlesticks downed her shot, lidded her eyes, touched her bow to the remaining strings, and began playing as if there was nothing else in her world.

Trixie listened to the sad, sweet melody, forgetting her drink, her surroundings, and her troubles. All she could do was marvel at how absolutely beautiful Fiddlesticks looked while concentrating on her music and wonder if Fiddlesticks had seen her the same way.

***

Trixie lowered her gaze from the cloudless sky to survey the audience while waiting for Fiddlesticks to join her on the circular wooden platform. Thanks to the bartender's connections, ponies from all over the city were already waiting in the town square by the time she and Fiddlesticks had arrived. Anticipation charged the air like the portent of an impending thunderstorm.

Trixie hadn't performed in front of so many ponies since her last night in Vanhoover before her first visit to Ponyville. She shook her head to clear the memories. Self-doubt was the last thing she needed at the moment. Fortunately, it scrambled back into the dark corners of her mind as she watched Fiddlesticks step onto the stage.

Fiddlesticks stopped a few paces away and looked to her for the signal, her excitement clear in her eyes.

Trixie nodded, braced her hooves, and lit her horn. A tendril of crackling illusory fire slithered and coiled around her until she was completely wreathed and a pillar of illusory smoke twisted up into the sky. She had never learned to fool the other senses, such as smell, but that was probably for the best lest the impression of self-immolation become too realistic.

Fiddlesticks rose to her hind legs—an impressive gymnastic feat that probably took years to perfect but was entirely necessary for most non-unicorns to play instruments—closed her eyes, touched her bow to the strings, and began playing an energetic, upbeat tune.

Elemental duplicates of Trixie stepped forth from her flaming shroud and square danced with each other to the music, the clops of their hooves against the stage punctuated with splashes of fire. More tendrils sprouted from her horn and slithered into the sky, swelling and morphing into two squadrons of pegasus ponies whose rolls, spins, and arcs high above the performance area were accented by smoking contrails and the explosions of fireworks flashing against the rapidly building backdrop of gray clouds.

For a single magician to exert such fine control over such a variety of illusions at once would take years more practice and study than Trixie had. Fortunately, she had help. Before the show, she had cast an amplification enchantment on Fiddlesticks's fiddle so the crowd would be able to hear the notes over the crackling inferno. In a moment of inspiration, she had modified the enchantment to synchronize her magic with Fiddlesticks's playing. It had left her drained and wanting nothing more than to curl up in a warm bed, but it averted any need to worry about coordination. While she poured in the raw energy to sustain the illusions and give them form, Fiddlesticks's music did the rest.

At the end of the first song, the dancers curtsied while the fliers took to circling lazily overhead like burning vultures.

Spurred on by the thundering applause, Fiddlesticks decided to give the audience something to really clop about. Recalling the most elaborate, intensive piece her mentor had ever taught her, she streaked her bow across the strings in such a feverish frenzy that anypony watching would see little more than a yellow-and-brown motion blur.

Taking their cue, the dancers rose to their hind legs and danced a Marish jig with such fervor that each one sent a new pillar of illusory smoke billowing into the rapidly blackening sky.

The fliers spun the smoke into a thick charcoal blanket that veiled the stage in darkness while they weaved in and out, illuminating their paths like sentient needles threaded with fire.

Trixie struggled to remain standing. She didn't have to concentrate on controlling the illusions, but they still drained her magical reserves, and she was on the verge of overtaxing herself. The show must go on, she told herself. If she stopped, she might not be able to start again. Her only hope was to get Fiddlesticks to slow down, but Fiddlesticks couldn't hear her pleas. By the time Trixie tried to cancel the spell, she was too late. Her magic imploded, giving her a head-splitting migraine, her fiery shroud dispersed, and her legs gave out. She wobbled briefly like a stalk of wheat in the wind before crashing to the stage.

The dancers exploded like miniature volcanoes, showering the stage in globs of fire. The smoking fragments twisted into the blackness overhead that continued growing and spiraling unperturbed.

The burning threads melted together, becoming thicker and fewer until only one remained that was wide enough to swallow a pony whole if it felt so inclined.

Trixie ran her hoof along her grooved horn. Sure enough, the magical aura was gone. The illusion had taken on a life of its own. Sulfurous fumes burned her lungs. The stage scorched her belly like a bed of coals, but she couldn't get up. Sweat dripped down her face and sizzled on contact with the polished wood. She dared to look up. Her eyes became saucers and her ears drooped as a flaming serpent tore a gaping hole in the cloud and dived straight toward her. She tried to flee, but her legs refused to budge. She took a deep breath of the suffocating air, and with the last of her strength, let out a blood-chilling scream, "Fiddlesticks!"

Fiddlesticks's eyes shot open and her hoof jerked. A string snapped back and sliced her cheek. Wincing, Fiddlesticks noticed three things in an instant: first, a serpentine pillar of fire was plummeting toward Trixie, second, Trixie was sprawled helplessly on the stage, and third, Trixie's horn was completely dark.

"Trixie!" Fiddlesticks screamed, dropping her fiddle and racing to try to pull her out of the way.

Trixie's wide violet eyes met hers for a split second before the serpent crashed into the stage, incinerated her body, and burst with a shock wave that threw Fiddlesticks off her hooves and into the air.

Fiddlesticks's back hit the stage with a crack. Shielding her eyes from the painful brightness with her foreleg, Fiddlesticks backpedaled away from the broiling heat radiating from the advancing wall of fire. She felt somepony pull her to her hooves and craned her neck to see a steel-maned pegasus pony whose navy-blue coat looked muddy in the shadows and firelight.

Time seemed to stand still as embers carried on the wind reflected in his colorless irises. His weren't the eyes of the friendly bartender who'd looked out for her like a father as she grew up in Manehattan. His were the eyes of the shell-shocked veteran who'd served in a firebombing squadron during the Zebrican-Equestrian War before she was born, burning acres of jungle, villages, stallions, mares, and foals alive. He shouted over the roaring conflagration in an equally alien voice, snapping her out of her trance, "Let's get out of here!"

Fiddlesticks looked back helplessly at the wall of fire. Trixie was burning alive, her screams were inaudible if she wasn't dead already, and there was nothing Fiddlesticks could do. She saw her fiddle just beyond her reach but couldn't muster the strength to grab it, much less get up and run away.

"Come on!" the bartender shouted again, hooking his forelegs under hers and pulling her to her hooves like one would a wounded soldier.

Fiddlesticks found her strength, grabbed her fiddle moments before the flames consumed it, clutched it to her chest with one leg, and cantered off the stage with the other three. As soon as her hooves touched grass, her legs went limp.

Most audience members had scattered, but others were scrambling around the square in aimless hysteria as if the situation wasn't chaotic enough already.

One magenta-maned mare had the sense to scream at the top of her lungs, "Somepony get the fire department!"

The bartender knelt beside Fiddlesticks, pulled her under his wing, and asked in the concerned, paternal tone she hadn't really heard him use since she left Manehattan, "You all right, Fiddles? I'm guessing that wasn't part of the show."

"Do I look all right?" Fiddlesticks asked, looked up at him with eyes that were trying to fight back tears, flung her forelegs around his neck, and sobbed into his mane.

"Water you all so scared of?" one of several firefighters called as he threw the switch on his hose, blasting the stage with an icy torrent. The flames shrunk before snuffing out entirely. What remained of the stage was a sopping mess.

The local pegasus ponies who had regained their bearings worked to clear the fog of steam and smoke.

Fiddlesticks let go of the bartender, wobbled to her hooves, and trotted back onto the stage, crying, "Can you hear me, Trixie? Where are you? Trixie!"

She lost track of her hooves in the fog, tripped on the edge of a shallow, scorched crater, fell into the ashy water, and felt a scrap of fabric floating under her. She pulled her forelegs under herself and leaned back into a kneeling position. She couldn't care less about the water matting her once-elegant tail, staining her hind legs, and seeping through her shirt to soak her fur. All she could do was stare at the charred remains of Trixie's hat and cloak drifting in front of her.

Her vision clouded, the image becoming an amorphous blur of shapes and colors. Her lips quivered. A sob escaped them as she reached out with trembling forelegs, lifted the soaked garments out of the murky water, and squeezed them against her chest. The more she tried to hold back the tears, the more her eyes stung and her stomach twisted. Finally, she gave up, letting them trickle freely down her cheeks, dampen her fur, and seep into the scratch her broken string had left. Remembering the terror and helplessness in Trixie's violet eyes during Trixie's last moments, she clenched her eyes and cried harder.

"There you are," the bartender said as he stepped through the mist. Seeing her kneeling in the puddle and hunched over the dripping lumps of lavender fabric, he stomped his hoof and growled, "Celestia damn it, I should have acted sooner. I could have flown in and pulled her out of the way. I could have gathered a team of pegasus ponies to break up the cloud. I could have done something!"

"No, none of this is your fault," Fiddlesticks sobbed. She glanced up at him with her glistening eyes before they fell back to the puddle. There wasn't even a body for them to bury. The ashes in the water were probably Trixie's. The thought made Fiddlesticks's stomach writhed, but the strength to stand eluded her. "Trixie is dead, and it's all because of my carelessness."

The bartender walked around in front of her, put his hoof on her shoulder, and raised her head to meet his eyes. "Don't say that, you hear? There was nothing you could have done. If you'd gotten to her sooner, you'd be dead too."

"I hate being powerless," Fiddlesticks muttered too quietly for him to hear.

The bartender cast a wary glance at the sky, where the sun was starting to feel safe enough to emerge from hiding. "Celestia, they could probably see that thing as far off as Hollow Shades."

Fiddlesticks looked up, her tears subsiding as a thought occurred to her. She asked in a quavering voice, "What direction is Hollow Shades?"

The question caught the bartender off guard. "Northwest, I think. About a day's walk from here. Why do you ask?"

Feeling no inclination to answer, Fiddlesticks sniffled, stood, wrung the water from the garments, pressed them to her chest once more, and staggered off the stage with her three free legs.

The bartender followed. "You're not thinking of going there, are you? Why? Hollow Shades is home to all sorts of shifty characters: zebras, bat ponies, and who knows what else. Fiddles, answer me."

Laying her two-stringed fiddle in its case, folding the garments, and pressing them in on top, Fiddlesticks explained, "Last night, Trixie told me she had an appointment with a medium in Hollow Shades. Whether she's really dead, disappeared, or what have you, that medium is my best bet of finding out, and if worse comes to worst... at least I'll have the chance to apologize." She slung her case over her back and turned to give him a weary look. "If you're thinking of trying to talk me out of this, don't bother. You're not going to change my mind."

"You said the same thing when you told me you wanted to become a traveling musician," the bartender said, smiling sagely and brushing a loose strand of her cobalt mane behind her ear. "You just do what you've gotta do, Fiddles."

Fiddlesticks couldn't help smiling back. Not knowing what else to say, she gave him a brief hug before they once again went their separate ways.

***

Fiddlesticks gazed up at the myriad bat ponies hanging upside down from the broad branches crisscrossed overhead, wondering how they kept their grips without claws. She couldn't see past the dense canopy, but their presence and the faint beams of light that shined through indicated the storm had passed and the sun was back in the sky. Rain had pelted her all through the night as she made her way from Fillydelphia, but she hadn't minded. Her hat had kept the water out of her eyes, and damp clothes were better than ash stains in her fur.

Despite blending seamlessly into the forest around it on account of the buildings being made entirely of hollowed trees, Hollow Shades had been easy enough to find—normal trees didn't have doors and windows, after all. Finding the medium was the problem. Fiddlesticks had next to nothing to go on. That all the tree houses looked the same from the ground level didn't help either. If there was a signpost, it would be on one of the rickety bridges overhead, but she didn't feel comfortable waltzing into what might be somepony's home just to get up there. She had considered asking for directions, but the few zebras she'd seen hadn't looked open to conversation. None except the one who had just disrupted her train of thought with his urgent beckoning. Curious, she walked over to him.

"Greetings, outsider," the zebra said, grinning ear to ear as she approached. Before she could offer a greeting, ask for directions, or do much of anything, he produced a jar of vigorously wriggling black fur balls, each of which had eight spindly legs and glowing red slits for eyes. "May I interest you in a spider?"

Taking an instinctive step back, Fiddlesticks gawked at the pitiful creatures and said, "I, uh... appreciate the offer, stranger... but I can't imagine what use I'd have for a spider."

Hanging his head and sighing, the zebra stuffed the jar back in his saddlebag and turned to walk away. "Say no more, city pony, for I understand. You find my wares to be phony and bland."

"Wait!" Fiddlesticks called, unwilling to let what may be her only shot at getting directions slip away.

The zebra stopped in his tracks, his ears perking up.

"I never said that," Fiddlesticks said to buy time and looked aside as if the words she sought might be found among the shrubbery. "Your spiders are certainly the most... exotic merchandise I've seen, but—"

The zebra was by her side with his foreleg hooked over her withers before she knew what had happened. "Does that mean you'll eye one, try one, even buy one?" He reached into his saddlebag, pulled out a single polished horseshoe, turned to her with a grin that threatened to split his face in two, and added, "Buy two, and I'll throw in this shoe!"

Fiddlesticks bit back the urge to berate his blatant disregard for her personal space. With carefully measured words, she said, "Well, I never said that either, but I suppose I could make you a deal."

The zebra stared at her with unblinking, inscrutable eyes.

Fiddlesticks shrugged off his foreleg as politely as possible and adjusted her bandanna. "I'm here on business, you see. I have an appointment with a medium who works in the area, and I can't seem to remember where her shop is. If you'll help me, I'll buy all your spiders, but you have to let them go somewhere." Despite the circumstances, she couldn't resist adding, "I imagine they could use the air."

The zebra's eyes glittered like perforated paper cutouts set before a flickering candle. "Ah, you must be Fiddlesticks! Madame Pinkie Pie has been expecting you." He reached into his other saddlebag and offered her two coils of fiddle string. "She said to give you this sinew."

Fiddlesticks stared at the gift as if it was a pair of baby rattlesnakes hoping for her to stretch out her hoof so they could bite it. "How did she know I needed strings? For that matter, how did she know to expect me?"

His bright cyan eyes becoming painfully wide, the zebra dropped the strings, pressed his hoof over her lips, and hissed, "Do not question Madame Pinkie Pie!"

Fiddlesticks stayed rooted in place, momentarily paralyzed by the grave intensity of his stare.

Satisfied that she wasn't planning to spout further blasphemy, the zebra lowered his hoof and leaned in to whisper in her ear, "She has an eye in the sky."

Fiddlesticks looked at him incredulously. She wanted to turn, walk away, and forget such a mentally unhinged individual had ever been born, but her desire for closure stayed her hooves. Besides, she had come this far. Reasoning that he couldn't abuse time and space with her watching, she kept one eye fixed on him as she slowly bent down to pick up the strings and unlatch her case.

She looked away for the briefest moment to slip them into the appropriate pocket. When she looked back, the zebra had predictably disappeared, but a brief survey of the area revealed him standing by a nearby bush, unscrewing the lid from his jar, and dumping out the spiders. She supposed that was just as well and walked over to tap his striped shoulder. Dreading what contrived rhyme he might come up with next, she asked, "Are you ready to take me to Madame Pinkie Pie?"

The zebra turned with a blank look as if noticing her for the first time before smiling, nodding emphatically, pulling aside a swath of branches in the bush to reveal a narrow tunnel, and ushering her in with a wave of his hoof.

"You're kidding," Fiddlesticks tried to reason, part of her knowing full well that he wasn't. "Please tell me you're kidding."

"The spiders know the way," the zebra said, his deadpan confirming her fears. "Follow them through the hay, and you'll soon see that I'm not crazy."

Fiddlesticks glared at him, unmoving. "That's not hay."

The zebra rolled his eyes and said with a heavy, exasperated sigh, "I'm not that good at rhyming, okay?"

"Er, right. Sorry. Didn't mean to offend you." Fiddlesticks knelt before the dark tunnel. She couldn't see the other side. She couldn't believe she was doing this. Despite herself, she disappeared into the bush. When he let the branches swing back into place, the only light was the dim red glow of the spiders skittering ahead of her. As she crawled deeper, the branches scratched her face and tugged at her shirt.

***

The zebra looked around to make sure the street was empty, reached for the zipper at the base of her neck, pulled it down to reveal her light pink back, stepped out of her body suit, and took off her mask. She pulled a purple Saddle Arabian turban out of exactly nowhere and squeezed it over her curly magenta mane. The fluffy lavender feather fitted behind the gold-and-ruby brooch that held the fabric together hung over her eyes. She puckered her lips and blew it back into place. The polished gold crescent hanging from her turban by a string of turquoise beads jingled as she bounced down the side path to the beat of a cheery tune only she could hear.

Making herself comfortable on the cushion beside the table, atop which sat the crystal ball, Pinkie struck a match and lit the oil lamp, bathing the canvas walls and assorted knickknacks with the sort of warm, flickering light ideal for ghost stories.

Fiddlesticks drew back the entrance flap, letting the light spill out into the forest and cast ghoulish shadows on her face, and staggered inside.

Pinkie looked up, fought back a grin, and gestured to the spider clinging to Fiddlesticks's bandanna. "You've got a little..."

"Ah!" Fiddlesticks yelped, brushing the spider away with her hoof.

The spider tumbled to the shag carpet, reoriented itself, and scurried away to take refuge in Pinkie's tail.

Pinkie gave Fiddlesticks a stern look and chided, "Hey, that wasn't very nice." She twisted around to address her tail, "There, there. It's okay. She didn't mean to hurt you."

The spider timidly stepped forth from the long tangles of magenta hair into the musty air.

Pinkie scooped the spider up in her hooves and nuzzled it to her furry cheek.

Fiddlesticks watched in disbelief. Completely at a loss for what to make of the bizarre spectacle, she shook her head and said, "I heard you were expecting me, Madame Pinkie Pie. Does that mean you know why I'm here?"

Pinkie looked up. She didn't scowl. She didn't even frown. Save for the defiance in her eyes, her face was utterly expressionless. Somehow, that was especially disconcerting. Her tone conveyed her indifference more than her words ever could, "I don't care."

Fiddlesticks was speechless. Her mouth moved like a salmon that had miscalculated its jump, landed on the riverbank, and was finding its lack of vocal cords a severe impediment to its attempts to communicate its desperate thirst to the gathered onlookers. For each moment Pinkie's cold eyes bored into her, her heart sunk a little deeper and her stomach wrenched a little tighter. She finally found her voice, "Why not?"

Her gaze warming several degrees and a soft, motherly smile spreading across her face, Pinkie set the spider on the table and nudged it with her snout.

The spider hesitantly crawled over to Fiddlesticks, its needle-like legs poking little holes in the greenish blue table cloth, and looked up at her, its demonic eyes somehow expressing the cautious hope of a puppy that had been kicked for begging but was too hungry to care.

"You didn't apologize," Pinkie explained.

Fiddlesticks's heart beat faster, her muscles tensed, and her bandanna suddenly felt uncomfortably warm and abrasive against her neck. "You have got to be kidding me," she muttered through gritted teeth. Casting a reproachful look at the spider, she raised her voice, "You can't honestly expect me to apologize to—"

The spider trembled and looked back as if it was about to cry.

Fiddlesticks thought she heard it sniffle and wondered if spiders had tear ducts. If they did, and her callousness allowed her to find out, she could probably kiss any help Pinkie might have given her goodbye.

"Ugh, fine," Fiddlesticks sighed in defeat, her anger deflating. She slumped her head to the table and mumbled to the spider, "Look, I'm sorry I swatted you. You startled me is all. Are you..." She couldn't believe she was saying this, "Are you all right?"

The spider leaped onto her face, clung to her snout, pressed its furry body against the bridge of her nose in what probably passed for a hug among spiders, and cooed.

Fiddlesticks hadn't paid much attention in biology class, but she had always considered spiders having no vocal cords to be a dependable, universal truth. Her world view was so shaken by the noise that she barely managed an intelligible response, "I'll, uh... take that as a yes." Feeling profoundly ridiculous but not wanting to offend Pinkie further, Fiddlesticks glanced over the spider's back to find her losing a desperate battle against a fit of giggles. Fiddlesticks's cheeks burned. "What's so funny?"

"You are, silly!" Pinkie said, unable to contain her foalish laughter any longer. She wiped a tear from her eye with her hoof and added, "Oh wow, I wasn't sure you'd actually do it, but then you did! Priceless!"

Fiddlesticks stood and slammed her hooves on the table, causing the spider to scramble up her face for shelter behind the crown of her hat. Her body trembled, as did her voice, "I watched by friend get burned alive yesterday, and I hiked all the way here from Fillydelphia because I thought you could give me some kind of closure, but instead of understanding, instead of trying to help me, you're..." Tears welled in her eyes as she shouted, her voice cracking, "You're screwing around with me!"

Unwilling to give Pinkie the satisfaction of seeing her so broken up, Fiddlesticks turned to leave. Choking on her words, she added, "I thought you could at least let me apologize to her, but if you'd rather go to Tartarus, watch me not stop you!"

Before she heard Pinkie move or processed what had happened, Fiddlesticks felt a foreleg around her withers and another across her chest pull her into a tight hug. Despite her mind telling her to shove Pinkie away and walk out the door, Fiddlesticks couldn't will her legs to move. Were Fiddlesticks being honest with herself, she'd say the gesture felt genuinely comforting.

Pinkie eased her to the floor, unslung Fiddlesticks's case, and rubbed Fiddlesticks's back as one would a distraught foal's. She paid the spider no mind as it crawled into her mane from Fiddlesticks's hat and waited for Fiddlesticks's sobs to subside before saying, "I'm sorry, Fiddlesticks. I really am. It's just that sometimes I get so caught up in having fun that I forget everypony isn't on the same page."

Fiddlesticks looked to her. "What do you mean?"

Pinkie smiled her motherly smile, wiped the tears from Fiddlesticks's eyes, and said in a gentle voice, "Trixie isn't dead."

Her heart swelling, Fiddlesticks whispered as if afraid speaking any louder would alert the universe to its mistake, "How do you know?"

"Madame Pinkie Pie sees all through her eye in the sky," Pinkie said in a perfect mimicry of the voice she'd used when disguised as the zebra.

Fiddlesticks couldn't help smiling. The insanity of it all was just too much. A mirthful chuckle, her first in what felt like forever, escaped her lips.

Pinkie smiled too, and after a few seconds, said, "To answer your question, though, I was expecting you, and I did know why you came here. You may not have noticed me among all those ponies, but I watched you and Trixie perform. I would have stepped in the moment I saw that flaming snake thing shoot out of the sky, but I wouldn't be able to help you if I got sucked into Tartarus too. Celestia knows some of those demons have my number."

"Are you saying Trixie is in Tartarus?" Fiddlesticks asked. She could only assume Trixie had scheduled the appointment for fear of something like this happening and hope of finding a way to prevent it, but for the life of her, she couldn't imagine why it would happen in the first place.

Pinkie shrugged—an impressive feat for a pony. "I just know flaming serpents are the calling card of the Tartaric Prince of Pacts, and he only whisks ponies away like that for breach of contract, so Trixie must have made a deal with him at some point in the past."

Fiddlesticks stood and walked back to the table, grim determination etched on her features. "Contact him."

Pinkie snapped a salute, shuffled back behind the table, waved her hooves over the crystal ball, and mumbled some arcane gibberish. The mist behind the mint-green glass swirled aside to unveil the head and neck of a crimson-coated unicorn with an oily black pompadour.

The unicorn leveled his soulless gray eyes on Pinkie and said in the voice a used-carriage salespony might when he got the feeling his customer was trying to rip him off, "This is the Tartaric Prince of Pacts speaking. How may I help you?"

Her lips sealed, Pinkie pointed across the table at Fiddlesticks.

The unicorn glanced over where his shoulder would be before turning fully, grinning a devilish grin, and waving his cloven hoof. "Ah, hello, Fiddlesticks. How nice to see you again. I'm sorry I had to crash your performance, but a deal is a deal, and Trixie failed to uphold her end, thus damning herself to eternal torment in the inflamed bowels of Tartarus. I'll happily compensate you for any lost wages. Perhaps I can interest you in a contract. I could always use more entertainers."

Fiddlesticks scowled at him with enough ferocity to make a full-grown dragon take its business elsewhere. "I'm rescuing Trixie, and if you want to keep your jaw attached to your skull, you'd better not be around when I get there. Do we understand each other?"

"I'll get back to you on that," the unicorn deadpanned and disappeared in a puff of sparkling crimson dust, leaving the ball opaque once more.

"Ooh, he hung up on you," Pinkie said. "Then again, I suppose you did threaten him. I hope you're ready to follow up on that. He takes pacts more seriously than I take Pinkie promises."

Fiddlesticks chuckled with an unsettling lack of mirth, tossed a sack of bits on the table, slung her case, and turned to leave.

"What's this?" Pinkie asked, peering into the sack at the polished gold coins stamped with Celestia's profile.

Fiddlesticks cast a confused look over her shoulder. "It's your payment. What else would it be?"

"Oh, I don't need payment. I don't even work here!"

Fiddlesticks was about to ask but thought better of it. "Be that as it may, I doubt I'll need bits where I'm going."

"Okie dokie lokie. Say 'hi' to your marefriend for me!"

Fiddlesticks turned away to hide her flushed cheeks as her heart gave a little flutter. "Trixie is not my marefriend."

"Oops, sorry. I forgot that doesn't happen until later in the narrative." Before Fiddlesticks could argue the point further, Pinkie pushed her the rest of the way out of the tent. "Bye, Fiddlesticks! Have fun in Tartarus! If you two come out of there alive and you ever find yourselves back in Ponyville, be sure to pay me a visit. We can share a strawberry tart!"

Upon stepping into the shady forest, Fiddlesticks sighed blissfully at the cool, tranquil air against her face. She contemplated the tunnel through the bushes from which she'd emerged earlier but caught sight of a trail back to the main road. Deliberately ignoring the implications, she began walking. She knew from one of Applejack's stories that Tartarus was somewhere around Ponyville, but that wasn't where she was going. At that moment, she just needed a place to sit.

Along the side of the road, she found a bench, collapsed into it, and breathed deeply. Her case was digging into her back, so she took it off. After a moment's thought, she opened it, took out her fiddle, and began replacing the broken strings.

As she adjusted the tension on the first string, a tuft of lavender fabric caught her eye. She looked to see the folded garments still sitting in her case where she'd left them. Looking back to her fiddle and stretching the second string taut, she threaded the tip through the tuning peg, wound up the excess, and asked herself why she was about to march into the depths of Tartarus for a mare she'd known for less than a week. She wondered if the solitary life of a traveling musician had made her that desperate for companionship.

She brushed the thought aside and stowed her fiddle, reasoning that she could fine-tune it along the way. Regardless of any feelings she may have for Trixie, Fiddlesticks could reasonably assume, by some twist of logic, that Trixie's imprisonment was as much her fault as Trixie's. With that in mind, Fiddlesticks rose to her hooves, slung her case, and began the long hike back to Fillydelphia.

Chapter II

"Next stop, Ponyville!" Fiddlesticks heard the train attendant call from the aisle outside her cabin. Cracking open her eyes and feeling very disoriented, she raised her head from the pillow. As she watched the early morning sun and clear blue sky reflect off the river whisking past the window, the memory that had kept her awake most of the night receded into the back of her mind, replaced by the memory of how she had boarded the evening train to Ponyville upon arriving in Fillydelphia. Having neglected to ask Pinkie, Fiddlesticks had figured Applejack would be her best lead on Tartarus's location.

When the scenery changed to simple wooden cottages with straw roofs and distant fields lined with apple trees, Fiddlesticks reluctantly threw back the white sheet and climbed out of bed, ignoring its pleas for her to let its luxurious softness embrace her in the veil of sleep once more. She took her clothes from the bedside drawer, pulled her shirt over her head, tied her bandanna around her neck, slung her case, brushed her mane in the bedside mirror, and donned her hat just before the train screeched to a halt. Seeing the well-traveled dirt road to Sweet Apple Acres directly outside her window, she smiled, opened her cabin door, walked down the aisle to the next car, and exited via the door on the left.

As she approached the farmhouse, a tall, muscle-bound stallion whose red coat and short-cut peach mane camouflaged him against the front porch set his bottle of cider down, trotted up to the railing, and called, "Howdy, Fiddlesticks!"

"Howdy, Mac!" Fiddlesticks called back, grinning. She cantered the rest of the way, threw her forelegs around his neck, hugging him over the railing, and asked, "Am I late for the reunion?"

"Nope," McIntosh replied, shaking his head and smiling with his leaf-green eyes but not his mouth, which was occupied with a stalk of wheat. As she pulled away and straightened her hat, he added, "'Bout 11 months early, I reckon."

"I need to talk to Applejack," Fiddlesticks said, her light Marish lilt contrasting with his resonant Southern drawl. "Is she around?"

McIntosh nodded. "She's workin' the north field."

"Thanks," Fiddlesticks said, wasting no time in galloping around the farmhouse and weaving through the groves of stubby trees whose bright red fruit gleamed in the morning sun.

Turning a corner, she nearly plowed into an orange earth pony who was in the midst of landing a powerful buck on a tree trunk. The branches rattled under the force of the impact, dropping their fruit into the surrounding baskets. A stray apple knocked the brim of Fiddlesticks's hat over her eyes. Fiddlesticks pushed it back with her hoof, picked the apple off the grass, tossed it into a basket, and said, "Howdy, Applejack! Do you need any help?"

Applejack looked up from beneath her tan cowpony hat. She had been so absorbed with gathering stray apples that she hadn't noticed Fiddlesticks's lemon-yellow hooves in her peripheral vision. "Howdy, Fiddlesticks!" she said in a less-pronounced drawl than McIntosh's, rising to eye level and grinning. "I wouldn't say I need help, but I can't turn away a cousin I only see once in a blue moon. How 'bout gatherin' the rest of these apples with me?"

Fiddlesticks nodded and set to work, putting her mission on hold for the moment. There was always time to lend family a hoof, especially when about to ask said family to do the same.

After tossing the last apple into its basket and hearing it land with a satisfying thud, Applejack wiped the sweat from beneath her blond bangs, turned to her with a friendly smile, and asked, "What brings you back 'round these parts, couldn't wait to see us again?"

Fiddlesticks adjusted her case's strap, tilted her head, and nonchalantly answered, "I'm actually just passing through on my way to Tartarus to save a mare I barely know from an immortal demon whose jaw I threatened to dislocate. I was hoping you could give me directions."

Applejack stared at her blankly for a moment before remembering how her vocal cords worked. "Mind runnin' that one by me again?"

Fiddlesticks giggled, but her breezy demeanor waned as she spoke and her words brought back memories, "I met a traveling magician in Fillydelphia by the name of Trixie. We decided to perform together, but the Tartaric Prince of Pacts whisked her away in the middle of our act for breaching some sort of contract. Now I'm on a mission to save her and buck his fangs out if I find that he's lain a cloven hoof on her."

Having recovered from her initial shock, Applejack said, "I see."

Realizing no further response was forthcoming, Fiddlesticks reiterated, "I remembered your story about how Twilight had lured Cerberus back to Tartarus, so I was hoping you could give me directions."

Applejack searched Fiddlesticks's eyes. Finding the unshakable determination that's passed on with the mother's milk to all members of the Apple Family, she smiled and said, "I'd try to talk you out of this, but I know for a fact you wouldn't listen. Trixie must mean somethin' special to you if you're willin' to put your neck on the line for her like this, so I won't waste your time askin' for details, but promise me if you two come out of there alive, you'll come back here first thing to tell me all about it."

Fiddlesticks walked over and pulled her into a hug. If Fiddlesticks didn't make it back, she'd regret having spent so much time away from her family, but she had to do what she had to do, and Applejack understood that better than anypony. Fiddlesticks wanted to cry, but she couldn't afford to show weakness. Not when she was so close to her goal. Letting go, she said, "Pinkie asked me to pay her a visit with Trixie next time we're in town, so if I'm still alive in a few days, maybe we can all meet at Sugar Cube Corner."

"How do you know Pinkie?"

"She moonlights as a medium in Hollow Shades."

After a moment's pause, Applejack said, "Right. You'll want to head east across town 'til you come to a bridge at the base of Saddle Lake then keep headin' east through the woods 'til you run into a long diagonal plain of bedrock with cliffs on either side. That's Ramblin' Rock Ridge, and the entrance to Tartarus should be at the far end of the northern cliff. Twilight could give you better directions, but from what I hear, you can probably just follow the smell."

"Thanks, Applejack," Fiddlesticks said, hugging her once more before galloping off.

"Break a leg!" Applejack called, realizing she probably couldn't have chosen poorer words as the image of Cerberus adopting Fiddlesticks as his new chew toy wormed its way into her head.

***

Fiddlesticks stood on her hind legs and pressed her back against the boulder. Even from this distance, the toasty warmth wafting up from within the cavern made her sweat. She inhaled a sharp, shallow breath, the sulfurous fumes burning her nostrils, and poked her head around the corner.

A pitch-black bulldog stood watch, his three heads and towering stature giving him a panoramic view of the barren expanse of fissured bedrock that stretched to the western horizon on his right and gradually blended into the distant tree line on his left. Behind him, the stalactite-lined cavern cut into the sandy cliff face like a gaping maw ready to devour anypony crafty enough to elude its guard and foolish enough to try.

Fiddlesticks once read a historical account of a pony getting past unscathed by putting him to sleep with a lyre. She'd considered trying her luck with her fiddle but reasoned that it would probably just betray her position. That left plan B. She cast a weary glance at the piece of driftwood she'd dragged with her from the shore of Saddle Lake. She really didn't want to use plan B.

She surveyed the cavern entrance again. She had been lucky to get this far undetected, but the scattering of rocky debris was too thin for her to move any closer without first staging a diversion. She breathed a raspy sigh, "Well, here goes nothing."

She poked her head out once more, put her hoof to her teeth, let out a long, piercing whistle, ducked back behind the boulder before Cerberus saw her, kicked the driftwood up into the air, twirled around on her front hooves, and bucked it off to the side. It clattered to the ground a fair distance away considering she hadn't had to buck apples—or anything else, for that matter—in years. She heard barking and claws clicking against stone followed by teeth grating into wood. Her heart trying to clamber out her throat, presumably to run for the hills, she took another cautious glance.

Cerberus was sitting on his haunches and facing away from her. His central head gnawed on the driftwood while his left and right tried to jerk it away in an astoundingly pointless game of tug of war.

"I can't believe that actually worked," Fiddlesticks said with a hint of disappointment and a touch louder than she'd intended.

Cerberus stopped chewing, dropped the driftwood, and swiveled his heads around, all six of his ears perking up.

Fiddlesticks flattened her back against her cover and cursed under her breath. Her legs tingled with adrenaline, and her peripheral vision blurred, preventing her from seeing anything that wasn't straight ahead. Her other senses, especially her hearing, peaked.

Cerberus sniffed audibly at the air once, twice, and growled a warning growl.

Swallowing hard to force her heart back into her chest, Fiddlesticks dropped to her hooves and barreled toward the cavern at a full gallop. The clopping of her hooves against the stone assaulted her sensitive ears like cracking coconuts. She heard him lunging after her and barking hysterically. Despite his height advantage, she managed to maintain a steadily growing distance between them but groaned between panting breaths when she saw the ominous orange glow emanating from within the cavern and dashing any hope of losing him inside.

By the time she reached the entrance, her leg muscles were burning. She didn't notice the steep incline until she was already teetering over it. Adjusting her course just in time, she narrowly escaped tumbling head over hooves, touched down on the cavern floor, and spared a glance back over her shoulder.

Cerberus leaped into the air from the mouth of the cavern, nearly skinned his back on the ceiling, and landed in front of her with a deafening crash that made dust and bits of rock shower from the ceiling. He stood, shook his heads, and whirled around to face her, blocking the main path into the depths of Tartarus. Snarling, he advanced.

Fiddlesticks stared defiantly into his red-and-yellow eyes while slowly backtracking toward the entrance. Spotting a crack in the wall too narrow for him to enter and praying to Celestia it wasn't a dead end, Fiddlesticks dove in, scrambled to her hooves, and cantered down the winding pitch-black corridor as fast as she dared. Before the scratching of his nails against the stone wall faded into the distance, Fiddlesticks thought she heard him whimper.

She emerged on the other side to find herself on the bank of a flowing, gurgling river of magma. The searing heat, her exhaustion, and a nauseous feeling percolating in her stomach finally drew her hooves out from under her. Her chest heaving as she gasped for air, she tore off her bandanna, pulled her shirt over her head, and tossed both to the floor before picking up her hat and putting it back on. The strap pressed against her bare fur and the hat her family had given her before she left Manehattan being her only insulation, she found minor respite, but her coat still gleamed with sweat. She could scarcely imagine what Trixie had been going through for the past few days.

With that in mind, Fiddlesticks stuffed her clothes in her case, forced herself up onto her protesting legs, and hugged the wall as she trotted down the bank. Fully aware that she had no idea where she was going and might die of heat stroke before ever seeing another soul, Fiddlesticks thanked whoever was watching over her that the demons were too preoccupied to give her a proper welcome.

By the time the path opened into a chamber with enough height and width to comfortably accommodate a slumbering dragon, the heat had dried the sweat from her coat and her vision had gotten hazy. The river spilled into a lake that filled two thirds of the floor and branched down another tunnel to the right. The path veered off to the left and rose into a ramp that circled around the lake, leveling into an overhanging cliff halfway up the wall on the far side.

Fiddlesticks trudged up the ramp and saw another tunnel rise into view opposite the one from which she'd entered. When she finally reached the plateau, her legs were ready to give out again, but a pony-shaped smudge of azure painted against the opposite wall caught her attention. She couldn't make out any other identifying features through the haze, but her heart filled with hope that gushed into her voice as she called, "Is that you, Trixie?"

The azure pony raised her head, brushed her silver mane out of her eyes, and looked around. In a voice that was unmistakably Trixie's, she called back, "Who goes there, Fiddlesticks?" After a moment, she slumped back to the floor, turned to face the wall, and heaved a weary sigh. "No, that can't be. The monster's just playing with my head."

Making no effort to stem the joyful tears welling in her eyes, Fiddlesticks found her second wind and raced to close the distance, calling, "Trixie! It's me, Fiddlesticks! I came to rescue you!"

Trixie rolled to her belly, brought her forelegs under herself, and cast a bleary-eyed look in the pony's direction in time to get tackled onto her back. "Ah, Fiddlesticks!" She gazed down at the messy cobalt mane of the pony wrapped snugly around her as if afraid she'd disappear. "It's really you, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it's me," Fiddlesticks said. Her hat had fallen off and landed nearby, and her mane tickled Trixie's neck as she pulled herself up to affectionately nuzzle Trixie's cheek, feeling the warmth of Trixie's blush against her snout.

Most ponies only wore clothes on special occasions. That she only took off her green v-neck shirt to sleep made her especially sensitive, and every follicle of her bare coat resonated with the touch of the mare with whom she was entangled. Being an earth pony, she'd spent most of her life with a very grounded world view, but she got the unshakable sense that the effect the intimate contact had on her went far deeper than the physical.

Here, in the fiery outskirts of the spirit world, their souls had mingled, awakening something that had been securely locked away in her unconscious since she met Trixie in that tavern, at which point it'd started rattling its shackles by rolling around in its sleep. She still didn't know what it was, but that didn't bother her, for on an intuitive level, she knew what it meant. She'd be at a loss if somepony asked her to put it into words, but she finally knew why she'd felt so compelled to come looking for Trixie. She finally understood that she'd been looking for Trixie all her life. Smiling her adorable smile, she made no effort to hide her blush; she didn't need to, for the look in Trixie's eyes told her that whether she knew it or not, Trixie felt the same. "I'd thought I'd lost you, but when I went to Madame Pinkie Pie and she told me you were here—"

"You came looking for me, you followed me into the depths of Tartarus, and you found me. Fiddlesticks, I..." Trixie wanted to say so many things, and that the words completely eluded her now of all times hurt. "I don't know what to say."

"Then don't say anything. The demons are gone, so we can worry about getting out of here later." Fiddlesticks laid her head over Trixie's shoulder and tucked her forelegs around Trixie's sides. "Right now, just let me hold you... You can call me Fiddles if you like."

Trixie wrapped her forelegs around Fiddlestick's back and gazed at the ceiling high above. The last time she'd held somepony was when she said goodbye to her parents and left home to start her life on the road, but that had been nothing like this. Nopony had ever held her like this. Wondering if the same could be said for Fiddlesticks, Trixie held her tighter.

Fiddlesticks broke the embrace first. She brought her forelegs under herself, slid down between Trixie's thighs, and pressed her ear against Trixie's chest.

Her blush returning, Trixie propped herself up on her forelegs to look at her and asked in a rare moment of nervousness, "Ah, Fiddlesticks, do you really think now is the best time?"

Fiddlesticks gave her a puzzled look before realization dawned on her. Her blush at the insinuation deepened at the implication that Trixie would be open to the idea if not for their present circumstances. "I was just checking your pulse. You know, making sure you're really alive. Nothing else."

Noting that Fiddlesticks had made no effort to move out from between her hind legs, Trixie draped her forelegs around Fiddlesticks's neck and whispered, "Believe me, Fiddles. If my heart wasn't beating before, it is now."

Fiddlesticks leaned in to kiss her, part of her mind protesting that their circumstances hadn't changed, that they were still lying on a ledge over a lake of magma in the depths of Tartarus, but not until the frantic clicking of claws against stone became audible over her pounding heart did she consider it a valid argument. Groaning, she rose to her hooves just before their lips met, positioned herself between her and the tunnel, and warned, "Stay behind me."

Trixie rolled over and asked with a hint of disappointment, "What's wrong?"

Cerberus bounded into the chamber and turned to continue down the ramp. His left head spotting Fiddlesticks, he dug his claws into the floor, skidded to a stop, turned, and advanced on her.

"Take one more step," Fiddlesticks growled, dropping into a defensive stance, realizing how slim her chances of survival were, and neglecting to care in the slightest. She hadn't come this far to turn tail and run from an overgrown bulldog of all things. "I dare you."

Cerberus took another step, bared his three sets of teeth, and snarled. Saliva dripped from his jaws and sizzled on the stone.

Fiddlesticks stomped forward to close the distance, craned her neck to meet his eyes, and jabbed his chest with her hoof. "I'm not afraid of you, mutt, and I'm not leaving without Trixie, so unless you want things to get uglier than your mugs, you'll back the buck off!"

Cerberus looked taken aback, flopped back on his haunches, and stared at her with a furrowed brow on each of his naturally furrowed, saggy faces. He looked to Trixie, who tried to shrink deeper into the floor despite already lying flat on her belly, and turned around to talk amongst himself, occasionally glancing back at them over his shoulders. Finally, he turned toward the tunnel, laid flat against the floor, looked expectantly at Fiddlesticks with his right head, and woofed.

Fiddlesticks stared for a moment before shooting Trixie a questioning look.

"I think... he's offering us a ride," Trixie said.

Fiddlesticks looked back at Cerberus, whose heads bobbed in confirmation. "All right, then," she said uneasily, climbed onto his back, unslung her case, tied the strap around the spikes on his central head's collar, and held on. Awkwardly, she added, "Uh, thanks."

Trixie climbed on behind her, pressed her chest against Fiddlesticks's back, and wrapped her forelegs around Fiddlesticks's belly.

Cerberus stood and set off toward the tunnel.

Fiddlesticks lifted a hoof from her makeshift reigns to brush her bangs aside. Her eyes widened. She cried in panic, "I forgot my hat!"

Cerberus ignored her and kept walking.

Biting her lip, Fiddlesticks turned to where her hat had fallen earlier, but it was gone. Seeing its white brim appearing in her peripheral vision, Trixie's head resting against her shoulder, the smile on Trixie's face, and the pink aura fading from Trixie's horn, she smiled back, touched her nose to Trixie's, and said tenderly, "Thanks, Trixie."

***

Cerberus stepped forth from the cavern into the refreshingly cool, crisp air, knelt so Trixie and Fiddlesticks could climb off his back, and gave them a gentle nudge that seemed to say, "Leave this place, and please never come back."

Trixie and Fiddlesticks thanked him and turned, wanting nothing more than to do exactly that, but froze at what they saw.

Cerberus looked up, pawed at his ears, and groaned before bounding off to apprehend the cloven-hoofed earth pony demons frolicking through the plain of bleached bedrock and playing hide and seek under the afternoon sun.

The demons varied in tone, build, hairstyle, and the inky black arcane glyphs where their cutie marks should have been, but aside from their lack of horns, they all resembled the unicorn Fiddlesticks had spoken with in Madame Pinkie Pie's tent—the one who was now approaching her and Trixie.

Suddenly feeling very vulnerable in the open air without her hat and cloak, Trixie took an instinctive step closer to Fiddlesticks and leaned in to whisper in Fiddlesticks's ear, "That's Clovecus, the Tartaric Prince of Pacts."

"We've met," Fiddlesticks grumbled, imperceptibly bracing her front hooves should the need to twirl around and make good on her promise arise.

"Ah, Fiddlesticks!" Clovecus said, stopping just beyond her range and grinning in apparent disregard for the game of three-headed cat and mouse playing out behind him. "I'm so glad you could make it. You'll be happy to know that I've reconsidered your proposal and come to a solution on which I think we can both agree. Since the only way for me not to have been in Tartarus when you arrived was for me to leave, my commitment to this new deal trumped the one that bound me here in the first place, and since you've already rescued Trixie, thus upholding your end, we can go our separate ways and never speak of this again." He turned, began walking away, and called back, "Have a nice life, you two. I know I will."

"I never agreed to those terms," Fiddlesticks called after him. Turning to see Trixie's questioning look, she pointed an accusatory hoof at him and explained, "If we let him go, he'll be free to wreak havoc across Equestria, and who's to say he'll stop there."

Clovecus turned, his grin sagging. "Perhaps I was unclear. If you refuse, I'll return to Tartarus, but I have the right to take Trixie with me, and if you try to rescue her again, neither I nor Cerberus will give you a snowball's chance in, well, Tartarus."

Wondering when the last time he'd actually seen snow was and hoping he ever saw it again, Fiddlesticks amended, "I said I disagreed with your terms. I never said the deal was off."

Clovecus twisted his head around to an angle that turned his frown into a horribly unsettling smile—a feat that would have snapped any normal pony's neck and probably did the same to his if the accompanying crackles were any indication. He asked, "What do you propose, then?"

Fiddlesticks fought her stomach's attempts to find new residence outside her body and grasped for some semblance of a plan. Remembering Pinkie's gift of fiddle strings, realizing she still hadn't had a use for it, and trusting Pinkie wouldn't have given it to her for no reason, Fiddlesticks asked, "Do you play the fiddle?"

Clovecus reoriented his head with the crinkle of newly mended bones breaking, lifted his cloven hoof, and clacked his toes together like pincers. "Frankly, I could never figure out how normal earth ponies manage to hold the bow, but since demons don't have that problem, we've all taken up fiddling to pass the eternity."

"How about a contest, then?" Fiddlesticks asked, her confidence in her abilities bordering on the sort of bravado she presumed no demon could resist. "If I lose, I forfeit my soul and grant your freedom, but—"

"Fiddles," Trixie began, "don't—"

"If you lose," Fiddlesticks continued unabated, "you forfeit Trixie's soul and return to Tartarus under the same terms that put you there."

"You're a high-stakes player, I see," Clovecus said jovially before growing serious. "Very well. I accept your offer, but before you sign the dotted line, so to speak, wouldn't you like to know what terms put Trixie here in the first place?"

Fiddlesticks sighed. A swift conclusion was probably too much to ask from an immortal megalomaniac, but she thought she'd try anyway, "I really couldn't care—"

"Trixie was the last filly in her class to get her cutie mark, and the teasing she endured from her peers, who found her being the last blank flank in her class positively hilarious, nearly drove her to the brink, but instead of ending her miserable existence, as others in her position have, she summoned my avatar and begged me to force her cutie mark to appear."

Trixie cringed and cast a wary glance at Fiddlesticks, whose glare dropped the ambient temperature around Clovecus by several degrees.

Clovecus paused to contemplate the thermodynamic anomaly with mild interest before shrugging and continuing, "In exchange for a life of solitude, I granted her wish. I thought the whole affair was rather insignificant, considering how I couldn't tell her what her cutie mark actually represented, and from the looks of things, how she would likely spend her life alone anyway, so you can imagine my surprise when I found out that she'd actually found somepony who could tolerate her. Alas, a deal was a deal, and I had no choice but to punish her for breach of contract. That you would put your soul on the line to save hers touches my black, putrid heart, but I have to wonder if she would do the same for you."

"You fail to realize that I'm not doing this for Trixie," Fiddlesticks said and stomped her hoof. "I'm doing this because you took her away from me. Celestia may frown on vengeful ponies, but I won't be satisfied unless you never see the sun again. Now shut up and play!"

"Suit yourself," Clovecus sighed. His horn glowed ultraviolet, and a perfectly ordinary fiddle and bow materialized within his magical field, but as he began playing, the difference became apparent. Unlike the hauntingly beautiful melodies she had played for Trixie that night in the tavern, his was more akin to an irate poltergeist—an infernal din that forced them to their knees with their hooves pressed over their ears.

In contrast, the demons forgot their mortal peril and ceased their fleeing to sing and dance in sanguine joy, allowing the unaffected Cerberus the opportunity to clamp his jaws around several, who yelped in surprise and disappeared in puffs of sparkling crimson dust instead of screaming in pain as blood poured forth from their mangled bodies as they might have were there two less foals in the audience.

When the song ended, if it could be referred to as such without incurring a stern talking to from orchestra conductors the world over, Clovecus turned to Trixie and Fiddlesticks with a knowing smirk and said, "Your turn, Fiddlesticks."

Fiddlesticks nodded, unslung her case, took out her bow and fiddle, and staggered to her hooves. Her mentor had taught her to play better than most ponies with only three strings. That her fiddle was currently equipped with four promised to make things interesting.

Rising to her hind legs, she narrowly avoided falling over backwards, for she hadn't fully recovered from the auditory assault. She shut her eyes, took a deep breath to steady herself, and began playing. What happened next was anypony's guess, for Trixie lacked the vocabulary to do it justice, and Fiddlesticks's attempt was met with blank stares from five of the six other ponies sitting at their table, unspoken considerations that she was more closely related to Pinkie than Applejack, and further considerations of those implications.

However, both Trixie and Fiddlesticks agreed on what happened after. Despite Fiddlesticks's performance having been so angelic by pony standards as to leave the demons catatonic long enough for the apparently tone-deaf Cerberus to capture them and probably bring Celestia to tears were she present to hear it, Clovecus declared himself the winner by popular vote.

"Your demons can't be the judges," Trixie protested. "Their stake in the competition makes them a biased party."

"By that logic, neither you, I, nor Fiddlesticks can either," Clovecus countered, "so whom do you propose?"

Trixie glanced up at something behind him and smirked as only a practiced showmare with a history of antagonizing her fellow performers could. "Well, when you put it that way, there seems to be only one possibility."

Clovecus arched an eyebrow and turned around to see that his demons were nowhere to be found and Cerberus was standing behind him and grinning three big, toothy grins. His ears drooping, Clovecus muttered, "Oh."

Cerberus's central head sunk it's teeth into him and picked him up, but he neither bled nor disappeared like the others. Instead, he just hung in defeat as Cerberus physically carried him back into the cavern.

"You win this round, mongrel," Clovecus groused, clacking his cloven hoof.

"He might just escape again via the same loophole, you know," Trixie said.

"We'll just have to tell everypony we meet how we saved Equestria from Tartarus's wrath by sheer luck and hope nopony follows in our hoofsteps," Fiddlesticks mused, watching Cerberus disappear into Tartarus. She went to put her fiddle away, saw Trixie's hat and cloak, and pulled them out from beneath her shirt and bandanna. "Hey Trixie, I have something of—ah!"

Trixie leaped on her and threw her forelegs around Fiddlesticks's neck, toppling her to ground. The garments landed on the dusty ground nearby.

Fiddlesticks giggled and reached up with her hoof to brush Trixie's silver mane. "I'll take that as a 'thank you for bringing my clothes.'"

Trixie lifted her head to lock eyes with her and noticed that their lips were mere inches apart.

Fiddlesticks must have noticed too, because a soft smile had spread across her lemon-yellow face.

Trixie felt the steadily quickening beat of Fiddlesticks's heart.

Fiddlesticks lost herself in Trixie's violet eyes. The last time she'd seen them so wide was when Trixie had been sprawled helplessly on the stage in Fillydelphia, but the emotion in Trixie's eyes wasn't fear this time. Excitement, anticipation, and perhaps even longing, but not fear.

Trixie closed her eyes and brushed her lips against Fiddlesticks's. The feeling was so electrifying she imagined her mane must be standing on end, and only a fraction of the light-headed warmth that flushed her mind and body came from the magma running through the ground beneath them.

Fiddlesticks had longed for this moment since she first saw her perform in that Fillydelphia tavern, and now it was finally happening. Trixie looked as absolutely beautiful now as she had then—as if she considered their kiss the only thing in the world that mattered. Her heart pounding against Trixie's chest, Fiddlesticks closed her eyes, wrapped her hind legs around Trixie's haunches, parted her lips, and met Trixie's tongue with hers. She couldn't agree more.

Trixie broke the kiss first, propping her forelegs up on either side of Fiddlesticks but letting her lower body stay wrapped between Fiddlesticks's thighs. Trixie gazed into Fiddlesticks's sapphire eyes and asked, "What if you lost?"

Fiddlesticks smiled, hooked her forelegs around Trixie's neck to pull her into a hug, and whispered into Trixie's ear, "At least we'd be together."

***

Fiddlesticks latches the door to her and Trixie's room at Ponyville's only tavern as Trixie concentrates on casting a basic fire spell from a grimoire Twilight lent her. Turning to see the bedside oil lamp's wick flare up seemingly of its own accord and chase the evening shadows away, Fiddlesticks smiles. On her way to the nightstand, she hangs her hat on the rack next to Trixie's.

Untying her bandanna, she watches through the mirror as Trixie lifts the bedspread, tucks herself in up to her neck, and rolls aside to make a space for her. Fiddlesticks pulls her shirt over her head, folds it, and sets it on the nightstand. Brushing her ruffled coat and mane back into place, she asks, "Do you think anypony believed us?"

Trixie rolls onto her back, props herself up on her forelegs, exposing her azure chest and shoulders to the chilly night air, and meets Fiddlesticks's radiant sapphire eyes through the mirror. She can't help smiling as she reflects on how lucky she is to have Fiddlesticks for a marefriend and answers, "Nopony ever does, but so long as we have each other, I couldn't care less what anypony else thinks."

Fiddlesticks walks over beside the bed, slides between the sheets, and snuggles up against her. She reaches down to pull the upper sheet back over their shoulders, brings her foreleg to a rest across Trixie's chest, and shivers in pleasure as Trixie rolls to face her. From the brushing of their coats to the intertwining of their legs and tails, Trixie's touch never fails to have that effect on her. Fiddlesticks kisses her, tasting the strawberry tart they shared at Sugar Cube Corner on Trixie's lips, and says in her Marish lilt, "From now until forever, we'll always be together."

Chapter III

"You were wrong," Trixie whispers, a peal of thunder and lightning splitting the sky and drowning her words as she stands beside Fiddlesticks's coffin. She tugs her lavender cloak more tightly around her withers. Having taken off her matching wizard hat and cast a ward to keep Fiddlesticks's coffin dry but not extending it to cover herself, she can't tell where her salty tears end and the torrential rain that plasters her silver mane to her neck and chills her to the bone begins. Fiddlesticks's friends and family have all gone home or retreated indoors to wait out the storm, but for her, the storm is here to stay. For the first time since before they met, she's completely, horribly alone.

Were she a unicorn, Fiddlesticks might have lived another fifty years, but twenty-five is a ripe old age for an earth pony, as evinced by her once-cobalt mane, which has faded to a pale-grayish teal, and the creases around her eyes, which used to only form when she'd flash her heart-melting smile but even now give the impression that she's facing death with a light heart and mirthful countenance.

Leaning in to kiss Fiddlesticks's forehead, Trixie slips a single gold bit beneath Fiddlesticks's pillow. The reclusive denizens of the Equestrian Treasury Department frown upon the practice, and nopony has really remembered what purpose it serves since the demigods Celestia and Luna's acting as mediators rendered the old gods less parts of everyday life and more curiosities to be pondered by scholars with nothing better to do. Being older than the Equestrian Treasury Department itself, though, it won't be forgotten so easily. Besides, the mental image of a bespectacled unicorn who seldom sees the light of day getting flustered over an insignificant piece of currency being taken out of circulation brings a faint smile to Trixie's face.

Fiddlesticks would have laughed.

Trixie's mirth dies when the allegory rears its ugly head: to everypony else in Equestria, Fiddlesticks is just an insignificant piece of currency being taken out of circulation, an obituary to be read over breakfast and forgotten by lunch. That pains Trixie far more than how nopony the world over ever believed that Fiddlesticks saved not only her but all of Equestria from damnation at the hooves of Clovecus, the Tartaric Prince of Pacts. Trixie can only hope Fiddlesticks's achievements get the recognition they deserve in Hades, but she's always hated leaving things to chance.

Willfully fooling herself into thinking she's made up her mind, she shuts Fiddlesticks's coffin, dispels her ward, lights Fiddlesticks's funeral pyre in defiance of the rain, dons her wizard hat, and sets off toward Ponyville. In reality, the notion that she has a choice in the matter is as illusory as her magical fire was before Fiddlesticks convinced her to study in earnest.

***

"Absolutely not!" Pinkie shrieks, slamming the door to Sugar Cube Corner in Trixie's face.

Trixie waits on the doorstep, hearing snippets of a conversation through the persistent patter of the rain that's followed her from the edge of town. She can't make out the words, but two voices, nearly indistinguishable in their youth and cadence, appear to be arguing with Pinkie.

The twins Pound Cake and Pumpkin Cake were foals the first time she visited. Now, they're attending school under an aging mulberry earth pony who, like Pinkie, will probably pass to the next life before they graduate.

Trixie shakes her head free of the morbid thought along with the icy water streaming down her bare neck.

After a moment, Pinkie lets the door creak open, presumably for dramatic effect. She stares back accusingly at Pumpkin Cake, who's using her magic to help Pound Cake into his raincoat and galoshes, and follows them our into the downpour with her eyes before meeting Trixie's. The inexhaustible well of energy that hasn't deserted her even as her youth has is nowhere to be found. Her lips pursed with resignation, she says, "You'd better come inside."

Trixie follows her inside. Sugar Cube Corner is bursting with warmth and life, but the bright colors and enthusiastic chatter fail to crack her frozen exterior. Sitting at an unoccupied table by a window in a corner where the light is dimmer save for the odd flash of lightning, she lowers her hat over her eyes. The tension seeps out of her muscles as she focuses on the steady drip of rainwater from her soaked fur.

The clink of glass being set on the old wooden table breaks her trance. Opening her eyes, she sees Pinkie sitting across from her and pouring a glass of effervescent, neon-pink fluid from a tall, clear bottle.

Pinkie slides the glass over to her. She doesn't pour one for herself.

"I didn't order anything to drink," Trixie says, watching the bubbles fizzle to the surface and pop around the ice cubes.

"It's on the house, Trixie," Pinkie's look leaves no room for discussion.

Even the Great and Powerful Trixie can state no argument before those eyes, which speak of vistas more majestic and abominations more horrific than anything ponies are meant to witness. Instead, she tentatively sips her drink. The ice cubes feel warm against her lips, but the cotton-candy schnapps and tonic water refresh her in the way they fizzle across her tongue and burn her throat. "Thank you," she rasps. "I think I needed that."

Pinkie's expression softens, but her smile doesn't return. "I'm sorry you have to go through this, Trixie."

"Everypony does."

"I know, and I wish it wasn't that way; I wish everypony could live for as long as they wanted; and I wish Hermes only took ponies to Hades when they wanted to be taken, but he has a job to do. We have no right to interfere, to tamper with something so fundamental to the natural order. It's wrong."

Trixie slams her glass on the table, spilling her drink and silencing the other patrons, who have all turned to stare. Scanning the crowd with a disgusted glare, she calls, "Aren't you ponies tired of being herded?"

Pinkie begins, "Trixie—"

"Well, I am!" Trixie cuts her off, still addressing the crowd. "Fiddlesticks, the only mare I've ever loved, has been taken from me, and I won't accept that! I can't. I'd rather be dead, so do you know what I'm going to do? I know what you'd do, but unlike you, I won't take a beating sitting down."

Rising to her hooves, she continues, "Instead, I'm going to do one of two things: I'm either going to bring her back or die trying!"

Addressing Pinkie before storming out the door, she says in a hushed, threatening voice, "You just try and stop me."

Turning her baleful gaze to the true architects of her suffering, whom she knows are watching her with passing interest from somewhere in the blackening sky, she screams, "Hear me, old gods, for in this life or the next, I, the Great and Powerful Trixie, will be your undoing!"

A pillar of lightning splits the earth and sends her sprawling into the mud; a thunderous shock wave rattles the windows all the way to Golden Oaks Library and chokes the air with ozone. Pulling herself to her hooves, she wipes the dirt from her face, grins mirthlessly, ignites her horn with white-hot magic, and swallows the sky in an eruption of fire.

The millions of microscopic ice crystals composing the dense cloud cover explode into transparent vapor, painting the world in swathes of red, blue, green, and everything in between as the sunlight refracts through the mist.

The ponies who'd taken refuge from the storm indoors or fled from the initial blast emerge from their shelters into the hot, humid air to take in the beautiful, impossible sight with wide eyes and slack jaws, blissfully unaware that nature is only partly responsible.

While her experience with the demons of Tartarus gave her an edge in learning fire magic, Trixie only mastered her special talent for illusion magic after apprenticing with a changeling who tried to replace Fiddlesticks on one of their tours through Canterlot. Trixie promised to help him leave Equestria, and he taught her how to tap into the collective consciousness, for true illusion magic isn't a trick of the light but a trick of the mind. When they finished, she thanked him and upheld her end of the bargain by burning the air from his lungs. The wind carried his ashes all the way to the neutral zone.

Walking through the shimmering air and the clusters of stunned ponies, Trixie allows a smile to crease her youthful features for the first time since she last saw life in Fiddlesticks's sapphire eyes, for she knows winning their hearts and minds will be half the battle when she returns with Fiddlesticks to drag her adversaries from the heavens kicking and screaming.

Pinkie watches from the doorway to Sugar Cube Corner as Trixie sets off toward Golden Oaks Library, where she'll find the only mare in Equestria powerful enough to help, curious enough to want to, and naive enough to not see the danger, hangs her head, and sighs.

***

"Will here suffice?" Trixie asks, gesturing with her hoof to a vacant expanse of wood paneling in the center of the library's basement. The flickering lanterns scattered around the room cast an ominous shadow across her face.

Silhouetted against the doorway, Twilight calls down from the head of the stairs, "Gee, Trixie, I couldn't say, but perhaps if you told me what it was you wanted to show me..."

Trixie sighs theatrically and calls back, "A good magician never reveals her secrets, Twilight. You of all ponies should understand that."

Twilight begins, "If you want me to lend you my magic—"

"However," Trixie cuts her off, "the Great and Powerful Trixie, as her name suggests, is no mere 'good magician,' and she recognizes that confiding a few of her lesser secrets in you will make her act all the more impressive. In fact—"

"I thought Fiddlesticks talked you into dropping the third pony," Twilight cuts her off, descending the stairs to put herself on eye level with her. "If I recall, you agreed because saying "we" in the same sentence was grammatically incorrect and you foresaw yourself needing to do so more often."

"Fiddlesticks is dead," Trixie states. Her haughty facade broken, conflicting emotions war for dominance of her expression before hurt and betrayal reach a stalemate. "There is no 'we' anymore."

"I'm sorry, Trixie," Twilight says, walking across the creaky floor to drape her lavender wing over Trixie's withers.

Choking back a sob, Trixie buries her face in Twilight's pink-striped-indigo mane to hide the tears in her violet eyes.

Brushing Trixie's silver mane with her hoof, Twilight says, "If there was anything I could do, you know I'd do it in a heartbeat. I can't say I know what you're going through, but at the very least, I can promise to be there for you."

Trixie pulls back, smiles a world-weary smile, and says, "That's all I'm asking." After a moment, she continues, "I'm glad you remember that story; it's important foreshadowing for what I'm about to show you."

Retracting her wing, Twilight asks with a hint of suspicion, "How so?"

"Allow me to demonstrate!" Trixie says, her facade restored. She struts to the far end of the room, rifles through an old cardboard box, levitates out a worn piece of chalk, and inspects it with a critical eye. Satisfied, she walks back to the center of the room and begins drawing two concentric circles on the floor in wide, sweeping lines.

Her expression darkening as realization dawns, Twilight says, "No."

Trixie draws six equidistant circles in the space between the two concentric circles, and in the central circle, connects them with a six-pointed star vaguely reminiscent of Twilight's cutie mark.

"Trixie, stop," Twilight commands, her voice raising. "You're not summoning a demon in my basement."

Trixie reverently sets the chalk down outside the incomplete magic circle, turns to her, and says, "You're absolutely right, Twilight. I'm not summoning a demon; I'm summoning a god—a psychopomp, to be precise."

"Dear Celestia," Twilight whispers, "you're trying to bring Fiddlesticks back from the dead, aren't you?"

Backing away, she continues, "Conjuration is bad enough, but necromancy is just about the most forbidden school there is, second only to blood magic. Trixie, there's a reason we leave communing with the gods to Celestia and Luna: the gods are cruel and vengeful, and if you try to break their laws, the laws of nature, of life and death, you'll set yourself up for another visit to Tartarus, and this time, there'll be no one to rescue you."

Trixie walks over, wraps a comforting hoof over Twilight's withers to both distract her from the faint glow of her horn and give her magic a more direct, innocuous path, and whispers into Twilight's perked ear, "You're smarter than you let on, Twilight, but you know, you really should relax. Take a minute, and use that deductive reasoning of yours to look at this situation logically."

The discrete charm congealing Twilight's thoughts into warm, syrupy goop, the tension in her muscles melts, but her goat-in-the-dragon's-den look persists.

Trixie takes no pleasure in tracing her hoof between Twilight's shoulder blades, across Twilight's flight muscles, and down Twilight's spine, making Twilight's legs wobble with a sensation far removed from fear. Smiling the wooden, predatory smile of a timber wolf, she continues, "After all, I'm the instigator here; you're just my reluctant accomplice. If Celestia finds out, which she won't, the blame will be on my shoulders.

Leaning in to whisper in Twilight's ear, she says, "The worst you'll get is a firm spanking, and don't tell me you wouldn't like that."

Blushing madly, her wings fully extended, Twilight stumbles out of Trixie's grasp. The physical and mental connections severed, she points an accusatory hoof at her and warns, "I don't know how you found out about that, but if you tell anypony, I swear to Celestia—"

"Whatever threat you're about to make, I'm sure you have every intention of making good on it," Trixie cuts her off, as she's wont to do. "I doubt you could live with yourself, though. Fortunately, there's an easier way: lend me your magic, and you have my word that I won't tell a soul."

Twilight stares her down with gritted teeth, but the resignation in her eyes betrays that the fight has left her.

Trixie continues, "I'm so glad you see things my way. First, fetch me a book on the religious practices of ancient Roam, the last civilization to openly practice conjuration. Ponies were even closer to their gods in those days than you are to Celestia. Her being a demigod, I wouldn't be surprised if—"

"Shut up," Twilight shouts. "I thought you'd changed, Trixie, but I see now it was all an act."

"Maybe it was," Trixie states, her voice devoid of passion.

Trudging up the stairs and kicking dust into the musty air, Twilight mutters, "I can't imagine what Fiddlesticks saw in you."

Looming over the incomplete magic circle, after a moment's silence, Trixie says to the lifeless room, "I couldn't say, really, but I imagine it was the same thing I saw in her."

Twilight returns a moment later with a heavy leather-bound tome floating behind her and says, "Here's your book."

"Thank you," Trixie says without looking back, takes the book in her magic, flips through its tattered, yellowing pages until she finds the section on summoning rituals, scans it for the subdivision depicting Hermes's glyphs, picks up the chalk, and begins transcribing them into the six equidistant circles.

After double-checking her work, she closes the book, sets it and the chalk aside, removes her hat, and unfastens her cloak, letting them fall to the ground beside her.

The myth that young, naked mares would sneak out into the night to have carnal festivals and practice conjuration in the wilderness after it was banned stems from the very real obstruction clothing poses to the flow of magic through a unicorn's body. While apparel that touches the horn poses an obstacle to anything beyond the most basic magic, any apparel whatsoever will interfere with the most complex magic.

Trixie hears Twilight swish her tail involuntarily at the slightly erotic display and the images it conjures up, considers calling her out on it, but decides not to, reasoning that she's damaged their relationship enough for one day. Glancing over her shoulder, she says, "Twilight, I'm sorry. I doubt you'd understand, but—"

"I think I do, actually," Twilight cuts her off, but her voice bears no malice. "I'd like to think I'd never stoop to your level, but even though I've never been in your position, I understand that you're only doing what you think is necessary. I'm not helping you because you blackmailed me; I'm helping you because you're my friend."

Trixie nods, turns back to the magic circle so Twilight won't see her tears, and begins casting the spell. Unlike when she was a filly summoning Clovecus, her target has no desire to be ripped away from whatever plane he presently inhabits. Having no edge in conjuration magic like the ones she has in fire and illusion magic, she soon finds that she's not powerful enough by herself. That's why she had to enlist Twilight, whose special talent encompasses all schools of magic and whose raw magical strength is far beyond hers. Straining to maintain the spell, Trixie glances back questioningly, almost pleadingly.

Biting her lip, Twilight nods.

Trixie opens another telepathic connection and begins siphoning from a seemingly bottomless magical reserve of which Twilight herself is scarcely aware, eliciting a yelp to which she pays no mind.

Pink light to match that emanating from Trixie's horn beams up from the chalk lines and races around the glyph as if the magic was carving it into the floor, growing progressively brighter until a blinding flash rips through the basement and extinguishes the lanterns before vanishing and leaving absolute darkness and the scent of ozone in its wake.

When her strength returns to her, Trixie pulls herself to her hooves and illuminates her horn with a basic light spell.

A slender pegasus-pony stallion with a cream coat and curly bronze mane stands in the six-pointed star, gazes at her with patient, curious eyes as inky black as the ornate glyph composing his cutie mark, which matches the one drawn on the floor between him and her, and says, "Pardon me, Ma'am, but I seem to have gotten lost after dropping that last mare off at the river Styx. You don't appear to be dead or dying, and I'm supposed to be attending an accident at Cloudsdale's weather factory. If you could just tell me how far I am from there, you won't have to see me again for—let's see—about another fifty years."

"Welcome, Hermes, to the basement of Golden Oaks Library," Trixie says with a cordial smile which soon shrivels into a frown. "I, the Great and Powerful Trixie, seek safe passage to Hades to return a dear friend of mine to the land of the living. You're going to give it to me."

"Fascinating," Hermes says, looking over his shoulder, flexing his wings, and shaking out his legs. "I haven't been summoned in, oh, centuries, at least. It feels just like the first time—pitch-black basement and all. You ponies certainly have a flair for the macabre."

Looking back at her, he continues, "You probably haven't done this before, so I'll give you a hint: this is the part where you tell me what makes you think I'll give you anything."

Trixie is about to speak, perhaps to threaten him.

Twilight chimes in, "Like Discord, you're one of the trickster gods. You'd never pass up the chance to fluster the stuffier gods for whom you work with some harmless mischief. What's one soul in the grand scheme of things if it means having a little fun for the first time in Celestia knows how long?"

Hermes turns from Trixie to Twilight and says, "Right you are, young lady, in every respect except Discord's name and gender, but I suppose that's excusable; I doubt she's gone by 'Eris' since she refused to barter with Celestia and Luna with the rest of us, and that was more than a thousand years ago. At least, I think it was—time is harder to measure in the realms without solar cycles."

Turning back to Trixie, he continues, "Being a trickster god, though, I can't just grant your request. How boring would that be? No, we'll have to do something to make it interesting. Now, let me think."

He paces around the room, occasionally ruffling his wings before stopping beside Trixie, thrusting a hoof into the air, and announcing, "I've got it! If you went the physical route, you'd have to confront Cerberus and draw attention to yourself, but if I rend your spirit from your body, I can take you straight to the river Styx like I do with everypony else. Return there once you find your friend, and I'll take you two back to your bodies. If that sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. If the sun and moon complete a full cycle before you find your friend, your connection to your body will have become too weak, and I won't be able to take you back."

"That's insane," Twilight cries. "You'd have better luck finding a needle in a stack of needles resting over a bed of smoldering coals before being seared beyond recognition and choked by your own smoking body."

Ignoring her, Trixie asks Hermes, "How soon can we leave?"

Hermes steps back into the six-pointed star—almost-certainly for dramatic effect, as it's just lines of chalk without the magic that powers it—and says, "We can leave as soon as you're ready, but you'd be wise to bring some bits to pay Charon to ferry you across the river Styx. Otherwise, you'll be forced to wander the shore for a hundred years, ending your journey before it's begun."

Torn between relief at having honored the tradition at Fiddlesticks's funeral and disdain at having one more reason to hate the gods, and to a lesser extent, the Equestrian Treasury Department, Trixie dons her hat and cloak, gathers a hoofful of gold bits from her burlap pouch, puts them in her cloak's interior pocket, tosses the pouch to Twilight, looks to him, and says, "I'm ready."

Having caught the pouch in her magic and set it on the ground beside her, Twilight says, "Trixie, you don't have to do this. You'll see her again. You just have to wait for your time to come."

Offering her hoof to Hermes, Trixie turns to her with the same world-weary smile she wore earlier and says, "With Fiddlesticks gone, I have nothing left for which to live. If I don't come back, at least we'll be together in death."

Hermes takes her hoof in his and disappears in another blinding flash.

Twilight illuminates her horn, pushing back the shroud of darkness to reveal Trixie's comatose body lying in the middle of the six-pointed star.

***

Trixie awakens to find herself laying flat against a plain of black obsidian that stretches to the infinite horizon, where it meets the starless oblivion overhead. Carved into the ground before her like a gaping wound in the earth is a winding tunnel, the floor of which is rendered impassable by a reservoir of lava. She could use her magic to warp the heat away from herself and cross unscathed if she wanted to, but the faint screams, cackles, and other unpleasant noises echoing from within make her fur stand on end and tell her all she needs to know to know that she never wants to set hoof in that place again.

She can safely assume that she won't find Fiddlesticks in those infernal passages, for she knows her better than she knows herself, and she knows Fiddlesticks has never committed any crime against the gods so heinous as to deserve an eternity in Tartarus. Rescuing her from the consequences of her violated contract with Clovecus could count, but Trixie convinces herself that if the gods had any issue with her escaping, they'd have intervened right then and there.

In reality, the gods, who are renowned for their profound laziness, would have been content to play the waiting game while she lived out her stolen years until death brought her right back into their hooves, but since Clovecus was himself one of their prisoners, he'd brought about his own undoing in trying to construe Fiddlesticks's threat as a pact for his freedom. Thus, they saw Trixie as a passing curiosity that warranted no further consideration.

While unaware of how little she means to her adversaries, Trixie ignores that bleak possibility. Otherwise, she'd have to admit to herself that even if Fiddlesticks were in Tartarus, she doesn't know if she could bring herself to go in after her, and self-doubt, now more than ever, isn't something she can afford.

Despite her conviction, she can't take her eyes off the gash in the otherwise-monotonous landscape. Then it hits her. She's in Hades, the underworld, and yet the second entrance to Tartarus goes down. Finally pulling herself to her hooves, she says, "That doesn't make any sense."

Hermes, who, unbeknownst to her, has been standing beside her the whole time, lacks lack her ability to read minds, but through centuries of experience dealing with the dead—who generally refrain from speaking on account of the misguided belief that they shouldn't be able to—he's garnered uncanny precision in deducing thoughts from body language, so it should come as no surprise when he says, "If standard spatial relationships apply here, the entirety of Hades is actually upside down. Personally, though, I don't think they do. Hades is a roughly circular floating landmass, but you'd never guess if you saw it from the shore—because no pony ever bothered to define its circumference, its shape never becomes apparent."

When putting two and two together yields nothing but a smelly, squirming heap of cephalopods, Trixie asks the only sensible question she can form from his explanation, "Are we not in Hades?"

"Yes," Hermes answers.

After a moment's thought, he adds, "Well, no. We're technically on the outskirts. Hades proper is across the river Styx."

"Where's the river Styx?"

Hermes rolls his eyes and says, "Turn around."

Slowly turning to face him, Trixie finds an insurmountable wall of opaque, light-green fog blocking her view past the shore of the tranquil river Styx, which, like the shore, stretches as far as her eyes can see. She doesn't perceive any enchantments affecting her perception—whether or not she would if there were any is a question she decides not to raise—and she has a feeling scrying magic would be useless even if she knew it.

"Right," Hermes announces. "That's the river Styx. Charon seems to be away at the moment, but he'll find you eventually if you just keep walking. As for me, I've got to get going; you're not the only spirit who needs to pass from life to death, and the others have credentials. Before I go, though, here's a word of advice: don't stray too far from the river Styx, don't enter it without a guide, don't try to cross it or pierce the fog without paying the fare, and don't even think about levitating yourself over it; you'll either tire yourself out and plummet to the ground or soar into it headfirst. Either way, you'll die. That's the way things work down here. You're a guest of the gods, and if you try to go where you're not supposed to, you'll just find yourself going back the way you came."

Trixie nods, and without saying goodbye or waiting to see him leave, she starts walking along the shore, straddling the ledge where the rough-cut obsidian gives way to the cloudy spring-green water. Glowing lights in a variety of washed-out colors swarm beneath the surface, but their source remains obscured. She stops to take a closer look and finds that they're clustered together like galaxies in the night sky if one were to view it after ingesting some of the more exotic mushrooms in the Everfree Forest. She keeps walking while watching the water in her peripheral vision and notices that one of the clusters, an ice-blue one, seems to be moving alongside her.

A malignant, tumorous voice the sound of which makes her keenly aware of the previously imperceptible decline in her heart rate reverberates through her mind, dragging her attention back to the vacant plains of obsidian, "Hello, there."

Trixie looks left and right but can't identify the source. Despite her protests, the possibility that she's going mad worms its way to the forefront of her mind. If the voice's next words are anything to go by, the possibility has spilled onto her features as well.

"You're not going mad, Trixie," the voice assures her. "Ponies only see me when I want them to."

"Why don't you want me to see you?" Trixie asks. "I wouldn't blame you if you were afraid, but you don't need to be; I'm not going to hurt you."

The voice chuckles, "Oh, I wouldn't be so sure of that, but I'm certainly not afraid of you. Since you insist, though..."

In the vacant space from whence it's been emanating, an earth-pony stallion appears. That's not to say that he materializes from thin air. The effect is more as though he's always been there and Trixie just hasn't been paying him any mind. With a blue-gray hoof, he brushes his white, feathered mane aside to reveal his eyes, which are a bright, soul-piercing scarlet, but Trixie's attention is fixed on the inky black glyph adorning his flank.

Returning his gaze with a cold stare, Trixie asks, "Which god are you, then?"

"Well, I wouldn't say I'm a god," the stallion says, glances at his flank, and frowns, "but my 'cutie mark,' as you call it, appears to say otherwise."

Meeting Trixie's stare with an obliviously pleasant smile, he concludes, "You can just think of me as a curator."

Trixie raises a skeptical eyebrow but shrugs off his demeanor, which reminds her enough of Fiddlesticks's mortician's that she can rationalize it as the result of spending too much time around the dead. She keeps walking.

She doesn't hear the curator following her, but before she can release a relieved sigh, she realizes he's been keeping pace with her all along. Shivering at his unsettling ability to elude perception, she asks, "May I help you?"

"Yes, actually," the curator says, his smile returning to light up his face like sunlight beaming into a crypt. "Thank you for asking. I was wondering what business you have in my museum. You're not—as far as I can tell, and I have a very good eye for these things—supposed to be here."

Trixie stops, takes a breath, looks him dead in the eyes, if such a flagrant pun is pardonable, and says, "I've come to steal one of your exhibits."

Instead of her expected reaction, the curator grins manically and says, "Centuries have passed since anypony's tried that! Why, I'd thought they'd given up." His grin fading as quickly as it appeared, he adds, "Should the guards catch you with your hoof beneath the glass, what then?"

"As per my arrangement with Hermes, I'd have to join her on display," Trixie says simply.

Though she elects not to mention that she wouldn't mind in the slightest, she offers, "There's no use trying to convince me to go back the way I came; I couldn't if I wanted to."

The curator glances toward the river and back to her before saying, "You're a fascinating mare, Trixie. I'd love to hear how you and Fiddlesticks met, and for that matter, what about her you think is worth risking your life in the realms of Hades—though I think I have a good idea—but your ride is here. I won't keep you, but I hope you don't mind if I keep an eye on you; you don't exactly have much choice in the matter."

Trixie turns to see an elderly pegasus-pony stallion whose coat is stretched taut over his bones standing atop a utilitarian wooden gondola anchored a hundred paces down the shore and listening impatiently to a petite unicorn mare with a white coat and frazzled salmon-pink mane.

The stallion's mane, tail, and beard are long and knotted like clumps of charred seaweed, and his cutie mark, which is partially obscured beneath his primary feathers, is an inky black glyph.

Vaguely remembering something Hermes told her, Trixie surmises that the stallion must be Charon, which means she's one step closer to finding Fiddlesticks. Despite herself, Trixie turns to thank the curator, but to absolutely nopony's surprise, he's already vanished, and she has a feeling he won't be coming back.

As she sets off toward the boat, her eyes wander to the mare's flank, which she discovers to bear a cutie mark of an open book. Catching herself tracing the mare's contours, she averts her eyes, but before she can contrive an excuse, the clunk of an oar impacting the obsidian shore draws her attention back to Charon.

Getting closer, she hears the mare whine, "That's not fair! I knew about the fare, and I put it in my will that I was to be buried with a bit from my estate—one measly bit—but my father worked for the Equestrian Treasury Department. It's not my fault, so why am I being punished for it?"

Charon answers dispassionately, "That's the way things are, that's the way things always have been, and that's the way things always will be. If I make an exception for you, I'll have to make—"

"We've all heard that tired old excuse before," Trixie cuts him off, "so why don't you give it a rest? I don't have time to argue, so I'm going to pay for both of us. Will that satisfy your need to be an insensitive, traditionalist prick?"

Charon, who apparently didn't see her approach, turns in her general direction and squints his sunken, cataract-clouded eyes.

Trixie realizes he's completely blind, feels a faint pang of regret, and promptly squashes it underhoof.

The mare falls silent and stares at her with bespectacled emerald eyes full of surprise, relief, and confusion. She opens her mouth to speak, but Charon cuts her off.

"That will do," Charon states and holds out his ashen hoof.

Trixie grudgingly levitates two bits from her cloak's interior pocket to his hoof and climbs aboard. Turning to sit, she sees the mare settle in across from her and smile gratefully, realizes one of the mare's ears is clipped, deduces that it's probably a sensitive subject, and instead, says, "You looked like you wanted to say something before Charon cut you off."

The mare looks puzzled for a moment before her eyes light with realization and she says, "Oh, I was just going to mention that before ponies used currency, any item of personal value, the kind with which your family buries you and you keep in the afterlife, like your hat or my glasses," she pauses to push her glasses up her nose, "would be acceptable fare, which is more symbolic than anything, as he can't abandon his duties to spend it. In fact, no one's really sure what he does with it. Who knows, maybe he's saving it all up to buy a present for his beloved."

Charon gives no indication of whether her suspicion is correct, nor does he give any indication that he's even aware of their conversation, so focused is he on the resistance he feels as he sweeps his oar through the glowing water. Had he eyes capable of sight, they'd treat him to the spectacle of a cluster of ice-blue lights swimming around his oar and narrowly evading its strokes.

"Let me get this straight," Trixie says, unable to stop a smile from creasing her somber features, "a mare offers to pay your fare and save you from wandering the shore of the river Styx for a hundred years, and instead of thanking her, your first thought is to give her a history lesson."

The mare blushes, looks aside, and in a soft voice, says, "I didn't mean to sound ungrateful; I just thought you might be curious. Besides, it's not like I'd be stuck there."

Trixie decides not to ask what the mare means by that, shuffles toward the left edge of the gondola to watch the galaxies swim by, and almost leaps out of her coat when one of them emerges from the water to cock its oily-black head, brace its scaly forelegs against the hull, and meet her gaze with glowing ice-blue eyes. Lines of glowing dots curve across its cheeks, under its eyes, and back up to meet along its snout. More dots trace decorative lines and accents along its gills, fins, forelegs, and torso. She can't see its lower body, but if she wasn't so entranced by its beauty, she could have reasonably assumed it had a long, prehensile tail instead of the hind quarters of a land-bound pony.

The creature smiles coyly, bows its head so its bioluminescent mane falls before one of its eyes, and says in a musical, hypnotizing, and unmistakably feminine voice, "It's impolite to stare, you know."

Before Trixie can have the courtesy to blush, the mare says in a voice filled to the brim with wonder, "You're an Equus pegasus mare—a sea pony. Can you move your eyes independently of one another?"

With a bemused smirk, the sea pony turns to the mare, glances back at Trixie with her left eye, earning a delighted squeak from the former, and says, "That's a curious question, but since you ask, yes, all sea ponies can. We generally prefer not to, though; it messes with our depth perception. Our species weren't in contact when I died, and that wasn't very long ago. Where did you hear about us?"

"I found an entry on sea ponies in a cryptozoological encyclopedia," the mare answers absently, unabashedly examining every inch of the sea pony's body and looking for all the underworld like a schoolfilly on a field trip.

"Interesting," the sea pony says, her tone expressing none of the indignation Trixie would feel at being reduced to an urban legend. "Did that encyclopedia mention our role in the afterlife? We can't get around on land very well, so you must know that we don't go to the same part of Hades as you."

"It didn't," the mare says, "but my family and I had the honor of dining with Princess Luna when I was a filly, and she said that sea ponies were created from pegasus ponies in the relatively recent history of the world. When she found out about them, she negotiated with Hades on their behalf to expand the river Styx to harbor an undersea facsimile of the realms above where only sea ponies and their honored guests could go. Naturally, they didn't have to pay the fare, but they could only leave the river Styx as guests to the land ponies."

Casting a meaningful glance at Trixie, she continues, "It's an alternative to spending a hundred years stranded on the shore of the river Styx for ponies who can't pay the fare. I would have liked to see the undersea Hades, and maybe I still will, but I want to meet my ancestors first."

The sea pony turns back to Trixie and asks, "What about you, care to explore the world beneath the underworld—or above, if standard spatial relationships apply? You may have to find a safe place to leave your hat, but you won't have to worry about drowning; you're already dead, after all."

"I'm not dead," Trixie says.

The mare and the sea pony stare at her in two different kinds of silence.

"I'm not dead," Trixie repeats solemnly, "but my lover is. I came here to look for her, to bring her back if possible, and if not, to join her. As long as we're together, we could be in the bowels of Tartarus for all I care, and I know she feels the same, because that's where she found me."

"Aww, that's so romantic!" the sea pony squeals, swooning backward into the river and gazing up into the impenetrable fog with a dreamy smile as the spring-green water licks her speckled cheeks. "I wish I had somepony who would endure an eternity in Tartarus for me."

"She's like no other mare I've ever met," Trixie agrees, letting a tinge of warmth seep into her voice and her iced-over heart.

"Well, I won't be the one to keep you from her," the sea pony says, waves, and dives back into the depths.

Trixie watches her go. Realizing the mare is still staring at her, Trixie turns to her and asks, "What?"

"Nothing," the mare blurts, averting her eyes. "Okay, sorry, I'm a terrible liar. It's just that... being around somepony who's still alive when you're dead is a little... I don't know... unsettling. I imagine it's what being around somepony who's dead when you're still alive is like."

Trixie hides a smirk and says, "I don't find being around you unsettling."

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I know."

Chapter IV

Minutes that feel like hours drift by as the gondola crosses the river in silence save for the rhythmic swish of Charon's oar. The fog becomes so dense Trixie can't see Charon at the helm and can barely make out the outline of the mare sitting across from her, but she becomes keenly aware of the wooden bench beneath her haunches as it jerks to a halt.

Charon pokes his face back through the fog, stares at them with unseeing eyes, and announces, "We're here."

The mare cautiously probes the fog beyond the boat with her hoof. Finding solid ground, she steps off.

Trixie hesitantly follows, hears Charon push off with his oar, and glances back to see the fog engulfing him once more.

"Well, here we are," the mare says and shrinks when Trixie's violet eyes meet her emerald ones. "I guess I should be going." As she starts walking off in the opposite direction, she says over her shoulder, "It was nice meeting you."

"Wait," Trixie calls after her with a hint of anxiety. "Where are you going?"

The mare turns to her with an optimistic smile, cocks her head, and says, "To be honest, I'm not really sure, but I'll know once I've walked a ways. The fog eventually subsides to reveal the realm best suited to your actions in life, and once you turn your back on them, the fog and the river Styx vanish as if they were never there. At least, that's what the accounts I've read have said. It might be different for you, since you're not dead and all."

"All right," Trixie says, biting her lip as the notion that she's deep in enemy territory sinks in. Imagining unspeakable amalgamations of bloodshot eyes, razor-sharp beaks, and cupped tentacles—the likes of which amateur conjurers sometimes bring into the world by accident only to find that they're resistant to conventional magic and easily agitated—waiting to ambush her just outside her field of view, she stalls for time, "I hope you find your family."

"Oh, I'm sure I will," the mare says. The fog leaving her perception of Trixie's anxiety unhindered, she adds, "I'm sure you'll find your lover, too, so don't worry about it, all right?"

"I'm not worried," Trixie lies, more to convince herself than anything.

"You're a worse liar than I am," the mare says. Rolling her eyes, smiling impishly, and grabbing Trixie's hoof, she drags her into the fog and says, "Come on. If it makes you feel any better, you can walk with me for awhile."

Though she's right in front of her, Trixie loses sight of her before long. Soon after, she feels the mare's grip slacken. Her heartbeat growing erratic, she asks, "Are you still there?"

When the mare doesn't answer, Trixie breaks into a gallop. She wants to call the mare's name, but she never asked what it was. Sweat trickles from her pores and immediately evaporates, but it's not from exertion—the air has become unbearably hot and dry. The ground beneath her hooves goes from smooth and solid to broken and sandy, reducing her pace to an unsteady canter. Wisps of fog trail after her as she emerges into a sun-bleached wasteland and slows to a trot. A scattering of blackened, skeletal trees indicates that it may have once been a forest and implies that the cloudless sky and baking sun have remained constant ever since. The only shade is an incalculable distance away in the path of a sandstorm that appears to be encroaching without making any tangible progress. She gets the feeling the endless plain never sees night.

Glancing back, she sees that the fog and the river are nowhere to be found. In their place is an erect slab of rock, one of many, not all of which are standing, that suddenly come into focus in the distance all around her.

Wispy, immaterial chains bind a bat-pony stallion to the slab. His intestines sag out of his picked-open belly as an ethereal vulture strips the muscle from his ribs, staining the white sand with his blood.

Managing to suppress a grimace but not her stomach's attempt to wring itself out like a wet towel, she kicks sand over its steaming contents and approaches slowly and cautiously in an effort to not disturb the vulture.

Nevertheless, the vulture twists its transparent head around to look at her with hollow eyes at an angle that'd break its spine if it had one and emits a squawk that makes her cringe and fold back her ears. Pushing off the stallion and taking more of his entrails with it, it launches into the sky with a gust of wind disproportionate to the size of its wings.

Trixie steps closer to examine the stallion.

Like all the bat ponies she's ever met, the stallion's mane and tail are midnight blue and his coat is charcoal. His cutie mark is a fishing net. The stallion rolls his head in her direction and opens his yellow cat eyes to stare at her. He must see something he likes, for after a moment, he grins, revealing the short white fangs that betray his carnivorous tendencies.

Trixie takes an instinctive step back and arranges her hooves in a defensive stance. Upon realizing how pointless doing so is given his current state, she relaxes but keeps her distance.

The stallion frowns, strains against his bonds, and pleads, "Please, don't go. I was grinning because I heard your beating heart."

"You realized I was fresh meat, in other words."

"Well, yes, but that's hardly the point. Your heart beats because you're not dead, which means you're in this god-forsaken realm of your own free will and you can help me escape."

"First of all, I'm not here of my own free will—this is the first place I ended up after leaving the river Styx. Second, why should I help you?"

His grin returning, the stallion says, "You're not the first to come to Hades before your time. If you count the hundred I spent swimming with the sea ponies, I've been here for a thousand years—ever since I died in support of Luna's rebellion—and despite having spent that entire time chained to this damned rock with that same vulture returning every day—not that there's any difference between day and night—to tear open my gut and pick at my entrails, I've overheard enough conversations between gods, demons, and other spirits to know how this place works. Leave me here, and you'll die and spend the rest of eternity in the Fields of Punishment. Help me reunite with my family in the Asphodel Meadows, and I'll get you that much closer to whatever you're after so you can live long enough to redeem yourself of whatever actions brought you here. In fact, freeing me could be your first step in that direction."

"You certainly talk a lot for somepony whose intestines are baking in the sun," Trixie observes.

The stallion breaks into unpleasant, barking laughter despite the pain that manifests on his face in response.

"Stop that," Trixie orders.

His laughter subsiding, the stallion explains, "What you see is an enchantment. It puts forth the illusion of grievous injury and causes me all the pain the real injury would, but it's no more real than that infernal vulture. Spirits can't be harmed by conventional means, so this is the alternative with which the gods came up."

"In that case, dispelling it should be a simple matter," Trixie concludes. Closing her eyes to concentrate, she lights her horn, scans the magical field around her for the trappings of illusion magic, latches onto the enchantment, and unwinds it like a ball of yarn. She opens her eyes to find that his belly is intact and his bindings are gone, leaving him face down in the sand.

Presumably, somewhere in the blinding sky, the vulture has ceased to exist.

The stallion groans and pulls himself to his hooves.

Trixie surprises herself by giggling, for she'd thought all the mirth had left her when Fiddlesticks died.

When the stallion fixes her with a slitted-eyed glare, she bristles, but he cracks a smile, lunges at her, closing the distance with the slightest flick of his leathery wings before she can erect a ward or counter with a spell, nearly knocks her off balance with a bear hug, and says, "Whoever you are, thank you! From the bottom of my cold, dead heart, thank you! I'd long since grown accustomed to the pain, but having it all just vanish after a thousand years may just be the greatest thing I've ever felt. Thank you so, so much!"

Lacking the presence of mind to pry him off with her magic, Trixie rasps, "You're... welcome. Could you... let go of me now... please?"

"Sorry," the stallion says, releasing her and coughing awkwardly. After a moment, he fans out his wings, takes to the sky, and circles around overhead, shouting, "Wee! I can't even remember the last time I felt the wind beneath my wings! By Luna, it's wonderful!"

"Hey, I thought you were going to help me!" Trixie calls up to him.

Sighing, the stallion circles toward the ground, alights next to her on a boulder, climbs to the top, points a hoof toward the sandstorm on the horizon, and says, "That way."

Trixie could have sworn the sandstorm was on the other horizon. Looking around, she notes with dismay that it's on every horizon. Fortunately, it still doesn't seem to have made any progress. Turning to him, she says, "We have to go through the sandstorm; is that what you're telling me?"

"Aye," the stallion confirms, leaping off the boulder, setting off toward the horizon, and smiling to himself as she grumbles and trails after him. "Unlike mine, your fate isn't set in stone yet—ha, no pun intended—which means you can visit any realm you want so long as you know where it is. Strictly speaking, the realms don't have set geographical locations. Like the fog over the river Styx, the sandstorm of the Fields of Punishment is a barrier to turn around prisoners, mostly crafty unicorns, who get loose and try to escape, but since I'm your honored guest, the rules don't apply."

"How are we already here?" Trixie asks, staring up at the insurmountable, seemingly impenetrable wall of wind-whipped sand that sneaked up in front of her while she was focusing on his explanation.

The stallion looks at her like one would a foal who just asked why staring at the sun is a bad idea and says, "Like time, space is relative, especially in Hades. We'd never have reached the sandstorm had we not been trying to. It'd have just receded further into the distance, revealing more and more barren landscape."

At his expectant look, Trixie clenches her eyes and presses into the barrier, feeling it assault the skin beneath her coat like a thousand biting insects and clamping her hat and cloak in place with her magic. When the pain subsides, so does the unbearable heat. The sweat in her coat makes the crisp air that much cooler.

The stallion pats her shoulder and says, "You can open your eyes now."

When Trixie opens her eyes, the sight takes her breath away. A brilliant blue sky full of fluffy white clouds stretches overhead to the horizon, where it mingles with a long line of snowcapped mountains. Glancing back, she sees the same panoramic mountain range but no sign of the sandstorm from which they emerged or even the sand that should logically be scattered over the ground. Mossy boulders, clumps of trees, and shallow bodies of water break up the surrounding plain of overgrown grass. Save for the lack of flowers and the thin layer of frost that covers everything in sight—including, to her surprise, her cloak—it looks just like Equestria. Her eyes sting, but she refuses to cry; there's a time and a place for homesickness.

"Look!" the stallion exclaims, pointing at something just outside her field of view. "It's Lethe!"

Trixie traces his hoof, but all she sees is a rushing, winding river. Watching it spill over its reedy banks to fill the air around it with a rolling mist, she swears it wasn't there a minute ago.

The stallion gallops toward the river—presumably to quench an unimaginable thirst, given that he's probably forgotten what rain is over the course of his stay in the Fields of Punishment.

Assuming Lethe is one of the ponies who are barely visible on the opposite riverbank, Trixie gallops after him but stumbles to a halt just before the edge and looks on in choked horror when he jumps in, for the murky blue-gray water washes the color from his mane and coat like dye as he swims across, rendering him completely monochrome by the time he pulls himself ashore on the other side.

She teleports across in a flash of pink magic to avoid the water, moves alongside the stallion, and asks, "Are you all right? What happened?"

The stallion slows to a stop and lazily turns his head to look at her with eyes as gray and unseeing as Charon's. His blank expression tells her all she needs to know: as far as he's aware, she's a total stranger. He trudges on to join his kindred spirits, who pay him no mind as they mill about without passion or purpose.

Alone on the bank of the river Lethe, Trixie feels her legs go limp and drop her to her knees, for a terrible thought has chosen that moment to surface in her mind: if she finds Fiddlesticks in the Asphodel Meadows, Fiddlesticks will look at her with those same cold, vacant eyes before passing her by like a merchant would to a beggar in the streets of Canterlot.

Under the weight of the realization, she lists to the side before collapsing into the damp grass. Pulling her limbs against herself, she cries herself to sleep. The rushing river drowns out her body-racking sobs.

***

Trixie awoke without an inkling as to how long she'd been unconscious to the feeling of scorching stone beneath her belly. She opened her eyes to find herself lying on the edge of a plateau with her head hanging over a lake of glowing, gurgling magma far below. Gasping a lungful of the sulfurous volcanic air, she backpedaled away from the edge. She coughed and panted to no avail and rolled onto her back to face the ceiling and distribute the heat. When her shock faded, she resigned to the burning in her lungs. Though it wasn't killing her, she didn't expect it to.

The Tartaric Prince of Pacts would have that honor. He'd have it as many times as he liked, relishing every tortured scream, every plea for the merciful death he couldn't give her if he wanted to.

Trixie was Tartarus's newest denizen. No matter how many times she died, it would never be permanent, but with each regeneration, a little more of her would come back wrong. This time, it affected her magic. She could feel it in her heart and mind, but she cast a simple spell just to confirm her theory. She couldn't keep it manifested for more than a second, but sure enough, what was once illusory fire was now as real as the magma on the level below her. Her cutie mark would be the last thing to go, replaced with an inky black glyph to signify her complete assimilation into the ranks of his demons.

She wondered if her being a unicorn would make her a Tartaric Princess and if such a thing existed or whether she'd lose her horn at some point. She could ask Clovecus, but he might take it as a suggestion and make her his bride. Even if she was into stallions, the very idea would make her sick. The only reason she didn't throw up was that, just like it'd left her without her hat and cloak, her first regeneration had failed to recreate the breakfast she'd had at the tavern with Fiddlesticks.

She'd never see Fiddlesticks again, but even if she did, it wouldn't matter; she was tainted, and Fiddlesticks would never let a half-demon into her heart.

She'd faced her circumstances with detachment and stoicism, but her latest revelation filled her with grief she could neither express nor understand. If she cried, the heat would only burn away her tears, but she had no reason to cry. They'd only met the other day, only spent a scant few hours together talking and drinking the night away and putting on a performance that unleashed the fires of Tartarus on Fillydelphia the next morning. As was often the case, though, her emotions, which ran deeper than conscious awareness, wouldn't listen to reason, and tears blurred her violet eyes before evaporating on their way down her cheeks.

When her tear ducts finally realized the futility of their circumstances and ceased, she felt none of the catharsis crying in private usually brought her. Instead, she felt only numbness. Not even the heat affected her anymore.

Her fate was set in stone—all she could do was wait. She rolled onto her side, rested her head against the floor, and closed her eyes.

She couldn't imagine what was taking Clovecus so long. She'd have thought he'd be waiting to greet her the moment she woke up, yet neither he nor his demons were anywhere to be found. The only explanation she could think of was that he was messing with her, leaving her alone long enough that a seed of hope would have time to take root in her heart before coming in to yank it out. She'd fallen for his tricks once, but it wouldn't happen again. She wouldn't hope, for as long as she acknowledged the bleakness of her situation, she'd be able to endure it. Fate, however, had other plans.

A familiar voice, quavering with exhaustion but gushing with hope, called out across the cavern, "Is that you, Trixie?"

Trixie raised her head, brushed her mane out of her eyes, gazed across the plateau at the hazy form of an indistinct yellow pony with a cobalt mane, and called back, "Who goes there, Fiddlesticks?"

After a moment, she slumped back to the floor, turned to face the wall, and heaved a weary sigh. She knew what was happening, and while she was shocked and enraged that Clovecus would stoop so low, the best she could do was ignore him. "No, that can't be. The monster's just playing with my head."

"Trixie!" the voice persisted, sounding so tearful and joyful and so much like the mare who set her heart aflutter that she couldn't help wondering if the impossible had happened, if there was cause to hope after all. "It's me, Fiddlesticks! I came to rescue you!"

Fiddlesticks broke the embrace first. She brought her forelegs under herself, slid down between Trixie's thighs, and pressed her ear against Trixie's chest.

Her blush returning, Trixie propped herself up on her forelegs to look at her and asked in a rare moment of nervousness, "Ah, Fiddlesticks, do you really think now is the best time?"

Trixie rolled over and asked with a hint of disappointment, "What's wrong?"

Cerberus bounded into the chamber and turned to continue down the ramp. His left head spotting Fiddlesticks, he dug his claws into the floor, skidded to a stop, turned, and advanced on her.

Cerberus took another step, bared his three sets of teeth, and snarled. Saliva dripped from his jaws and sizzled on the stone.

Fiddlesticks stared for a moment before shooting Trixie a questioning look.

"I think... he's offering us a ride," Trixie said, hardly believing her eyes.

That one mare's unshakable determination could bring the guardian of Hades himself to his knees was unthinkable, but not only had Trixie seen it happen, that determination had stemmed from a desire to protect her, to rescue her, to be with her. In that moment, she finally admitted to herself that Fiddlesticks was the mare with whom she wanted to spend her life.

She didn't want to worry Fiddlesticks by breaking into tears, but the torrent of emotion had to escape somehow, so when she climbed on behind her, keeping her balance wasn't the only reason she pressed her chest against Fiddlesticks's back and wrapped her forelegs around Fiddlesticks's belly.

Cerberus stood and set off toward the tunnel.

Fiddlesticks lifted a hoof from her makeshift reigns to brush her bangs aside. Her eyes widened. She cried in panic, "I forgot my hat!"

Cerberus ignored her and kept walking.

***

Trixie's eyes snap open, her mind consumed with a single thought: if ponies who drink from the river Lethe forget their identities and Fiddlesticks is one of those ponies, Trixie will just have to remind her. She rises to her hooves, turns to face the rushing, breaking river, and shouts through the mist, "Reveal yourself, Lethe! The Great and Powerful Trixie demands an audience!"

Thunderheads billow in from the horizon to blot out the sun and douse the world with chilling rain, just like the day Fiddlesticks was buried. The howling sky hurls spears of lightning to scorch the earth, and a slender unicorn shrouded in the waters of the river Lethe plants her hooves on the riverbank and pulls herself ashore, her glowing, burning eyes never leaving Trixie's.

Trixie respects a dramatic entrance at least as much as the lost souls who scramble away in primal terror like her and Fiddlesticks's audience did the day the Tartaric Prince of Pacts came to claim her in the middle of Fillydelphia, but something else captivates her attention such that she can neither express her approval nor do much of anything else until a bolt of icy water lances toward her chest from Lethe's horn and jolts her from her reverie. She ducks and rolls, but the bolt grazes her shoulder, stripping the color from her coat and cloak like a splash of paint thinner as her hat tumbles to the ground nearby. Whatever her realization was a moment ago, it's gone now.

Seeing another take flight toward her exposed belly, she ignites her grooved azure horn like a torch and wreathes herself in licking flames before pulling herself to her hooves. The bolt splashes against her shield and evaporates like an ice cube on a stove top, but her shield wavers long enough for another bolt to skim her neck, staggering her and blurring her memory of who she's fighting and why. All she knows is that she's being attacked, but she's no stranger to defending herself, and without loftier concerns clouding her judgment, she deftly weaves out of the firing line of yet another bolt, conjures a volley of inextinguishable hellfire, and sends it streaking toward Lethe.

Lethe recoils, losing control of her spell and screeching as the fireballs boil away patches of her shroud to reveal her stark-gray coat, which is left untouched, making Trixie wonder just how far out of her league picking a fight with a god is. The film of murky water regenerates to shroud her once again but not before the sight causes Trixie to draw a realization from a half-forgotten memory: the pony Trixie is fighting isn't Lethe anymore than the lost souls peaking out from behind distant boulders to watch the showdown are the ponies they were in life. Like them, Lethe is under the influence of an illusion enchantment.

Trixie sensed the illusion when her eyes first connected with Lethe's, which burn like the ethereal vulture from the Fields of Punishment. With the realization that it's directly connected to the waters of the river Lethe comes a tactical plan for forcing Lethe's surrender, but she forgets it when her carelessness grants Lethe a direct hit to her head, sending her sprawling to the ground with an anguished cry. She managed to clench her eyes, but the colors still bleed from her face, vision, and magic. Another bolt impacts with her chest, and she forgets everything else.

All that's left is her primal instinct, her fight or flight response, and without her ego to keep it in check, it's telling her to fight, fight for all she's worth. Fortunately, the demonic magic she uses to call forth the fires of Tartarus requires no careful casting. Emotion governs it, so the animal rage that consumes her mind and makes her enfeebled heart race a mile a minute manifests in a pillar of fire that dissipates Lethe's attacks and pierces the heavens. While her rage-fueled inferno cuts through the tidal wave Lethe calls forth from the river like a hot knife through butter and has all the power necessary to banish Lethe to the rivers of magma flowing through Tartarus, the crushing pain in her chest makes her concentration waver.

Her heart beats faster and faster, trying in vain to keep pace with her magnifying rage until it abruptly stops. The inferno twists into nothingness, and she crumbles to the ground in a smoking, panting, colorless heap.

Lethe approaches her and offers a cascading hoof.

Trixie opens her eyes to glance up at her and the thunderheads rolling through the distant sky. If she could see herself, she'd see two things in her eyes. First, she'd see a few scattered flecks of violet, the last vestiges of her identity given physical expression. Second, she'd see a spark of recognition morph into murderous intent.

Lethe narrows her formerly expressionless eyes and prepares a final spell, but it won't manifest. She tries again, but the same thing happens. Something is blocking her magic.

That something is Trixie.

Lethe stumbles over herself as she backs away, never daring to take her eyes off Trixie's.

Trixie pulls her hooves under herself and stands with unnerving patience even as the distance between herself and her quarry steadily increases, for she knows there's nowhere Lethe can run. She's made sure of that.

Now, neither her thoughts nor her emotions cloud her senses. The tranquil void her animal rage left in its wake is filled with something no enchantment can take from her: the determination of a mare to whom neither the natural order nor the gods themselves are sufficient obstacles to keep her from her lover.

With her newfound focus, she draws on a more primal magic than anything she could conjure herself: the magic that keeps the realm of Hades itself from rupturing like a popped balloon and diffusing into the oblivion in which it, like all other realities, resides. She doesn't take nearly enough magic to destabilize the realm or endanger the ponies therein, though; she barely mars the surface, but the shavings she does collect are of such potency that her eyes shine more brilliantly and blindingly than Lethe's. Terminating the rain and lightning, she tears open colossal rifts in the pitch-black sky.

The sickening orange light that bleeds through and bathes the land in an apocalyptic glow doesn't come from the sun, though. It comes from the reservoir of superheated magma in the deepest depths of Tartarus from which the Tartaric Princes draw their power but which even they dare not approach directly. The light grows brighter and solidifies into a viscous liquid. That liquid is lava, and it falls to the earth in great fiery drops that splash on impact, wilting nearby vegetation, dissolving boulders, trapping the lost souls who can't die but have nowhere to run, burning away Lethe's shroud, and cleansing the river from which it restores itself.

Trixie witnesses the destruction she's unleashed across the land, hears the screams of the helpless ponies she's roasted alive, and even senses the distant cackling of the Tartaric Princes. She pays none of these things any mind. All she knows is that she's done what's necessary to overcome the latest obstacle in her quest, for while the river has been cleansed, Lethe's enchantment still grips her, rendering her as thoughtless and emotionless as a natural disaster.

Upon seeing that the threat has been neutralized, though, she allows the rifts in the sky to mend themselves, but not before having reduced the Asphodel Meadows a blasted, volcanic wasteland not unlike the shore of the river Styx. Even the once-snowcapped mountains bear the scars of her siege, which rendered them indistinguishable from a giant diamond dog's mandible.

As the clouds scatter and the sky returns to normalcy, she approaches Lethe's charred and battered form and sees that it's barely clinging to life. Gods, it seems, aren't as immortal as they like ponies to believe. That won't do.

Lethe will die, but not today, not while she still has a purpose to serve.

Trixie remelts the igneous rock encasing Lethe, ignores Lethe's tortured screams, draws her up into the air, and begins reshaping Lethe's mangled body and smoothing Lethe's boiled flesh. What's too badly damaged or utterly annihilated, she simply replaces. The process takes more out of her than she expects, far more than conjuring the firestorm, for that was a simple matter of connecting one place to another, but she manages it and lays her down beside the river, which was barely a trickle while Lethe was trapped in the ground but has not only been restored to its former glory but retains its crystal clarity.

Lethe looks naked without the shroud of murky water veiling her monochrome eyes, mane, tail, coat, and glyph cutie mark, which is the only feature that sets her apart from the myriad other lost souls who are still trapped in the ground but whose screaming has ceased since the rock cooled. She watches her warily, but if she can speak, she doesn't.

Knowing what to do as instinctively as the heart knows to beat or white blood cells know to root out infections, Trixie closes her violet-flecked eyes and reaches into Lethe's mind, where she finds the enchantment as deeply entrenched as a weed and rips it out just as mercilessly, absorbing it in the form of raw magical energy while Lethe shrieks in unfathomable pain. In so doing, she unravels the periphery enchantments on herself and everypony else who was influenced by the tainted waters of the river Lethe. Regaining self-awareness only to find themselves immobilized by stone, the ponies start their screaming anew, but Trixie is once again deaf to their cries, for all the magic she's absorbed is trying to tear her newly restored mind apart. Without an outlet, the damage will be irreversible.

She has no idea what that outlet might be, but if she's going to lose her mind, she's at least going to have some answers first. Cracking open her vibrant violet eyes, she meets the amber eyes of the unicorn mare pulling herself to her hooves where Lethe lay a moment ago and asks, "What happened to you, Lethe?"

Lethe opens her mouth to answer, but before she can utter a sound, Trixie uses her telepathy to scan her memories like a textbook.

Lethe's entire life flashes before Trixie's eyes like a ream of black-and-white film streaming past a projector at double speed, and her memories have a definite beginning and end. The end is when one of the other gods—a muscle-bound, curly-haired pegasus-pony stallion wielding lightning from atop a cloud and seen only in silhouette—cursed her for some ill-defined transgression, twisting her into the goddess of oblivion.

The beginning is when she emerged from the collective consciousness as a separate entity, taking a portion of its power in accordance with her original domain—the peace of mind achieved only in death.

Color and motion return to the world as Trixie emerges from the flashback. She realizes that magic isn't the metaphorical fire Prometheus stole from Zeus, as Star Swirl the Bearded hypothesized, but the last scrap of power the gods didn't steal from their pony creators.

As if thousands of years hadn't just sauntered past, Lethe answers, "I'm afraid I don't know. I've been unconscious for such a long time, and my memories are still trickling back to me."

Trixie ignores her, for she's discerned the answer to a far more profound question and her spirit is still bursting at the seams with magic. She clenches her eyes, and with her newfound knowledge, reaches out to the frayed hem of the fabric of reality. Instead of pulling at the loose strings like she did before, she weaves them back together with fresh thread, expelling all her excess magic to terraform the blasted landscape into the beautiful spring-time meadow its name implies.

From her extra-dimensional vantage point, she sees into the minds of the myriad ponies present as they come to their senses, pull themselves to their hooves, and scatter like colorful ants in search of their long-forgotten relatives. Wanting to give something back to make up for snaring their immortal spirits in cooling lava, she searches their memories for every variety of flower they've ever seen, concentrates, and delights at their surprise as plants sprout up and bloom across the landscape, filling the Asphodel Meadows with a rainbow of dazzling colors as far away as the mountains on the infinite horizon.

Though the landscape is still too monotonous for her taste, the more radical changes she wishes to implement, such as carving gorges and erecting waterfalls, meet unconscious resistance from the spirits who've lived there for centuries and whose innate magic fuels her renovations. Given time, she could surely appeal to their conscious minds and sway them to her will once they realize how much power they collectively possess.

Lethe's words pull her back to her body before she can attempt to open lines for telepathic communication, "Nevertheless, I really can't thank you enough for everything you've done. If there's anything I can do to repay you, please, don't hesitate to ask."

Trixie feels the weight of the exertion on her immortal form and startles at how close she came to overextending herself. She's no changeling queen, and had she succeeded, the myriad voices in her head may well have driven her to madness. She would need to be more careful in the future; she would need somepony to keep her grounded. Gazing blearily at the earth beneath her azure hooves and talking to herself more than Lethe, she mumbles, "I need to find Fiddlesticks."

Scrunching her amber eyes in concentration and staring at nothing in particular, Lethe says, "I don't recall anypony by the name of Fiddlesticks entering my realm or drinking from my river, but you might ask the spirit whose fare you paid earlier. I think she's around here somewhere."

Trixie raises her head in confusion, having assumed Lethe would have no recollection of what happened while under the effects of the curse, much less knowledge of what happened outside the Asphodel Meadows. Before she can consider the implications, she notices Lethe's baby-blue coat and braided custard-yellow mane. The impression of an innocent, carefree filly and the complete lack of evidence of the cataclysmic battle they just fought unnerves her. She turns to walk away under the auspices of searching the crowd for the bespectacled mare with the pretty emerald eyes, saying, "Thank you."

"Wait!" Lethe calls, her eyes widening with sudden realization. She canters after her before Trixie can disappear into the crowd, and stops awkwardly when Trixie turns to face her with a bemused expression. Avoiding Trixie's questioning eyes, she asks, "Did you two happen to get a good look at Charon when he took you across the river Styx?"

"We did," Trixie says. "Why?"

Biting her lip, Lethe meets Trixie's eyes and asks, "Was he... gray?"

"Yes," Trixie says, arching an eyebrow.

"Oh, dear," Lethe says, breaks eye contact to stare at her hooves, and paces back and forth beside her river.

Trixie watches her with mounting confusion. Finally, she asks, "Why?"

Lethe stops, looks up as if noticing her for the first time, and explains, "While he's always ferried souls across the river Styx, he used to have colors, an identity. From what you're telling me, he's lost both, and it's all my fault."

She sidles up to Trixie and continues in a hushed voice as if afraid somepony might hear, "He and I had an affair once, but another god—I can't remember his name for the life of me—didn't like that, so he cursed me and my river. We haven't seen or even thought of each other in more than a thousand years."

Tears welling in her eyes, she flings her forelegs around Trixie's neck and sobs into Trixie's mane, her touch as cool as a spring breeze.

Trixie already knew the story, at least for the most part, but Lethe seems to be remembering it for the first time. In retrospect, she can't help feeling a fleeting sense of camaraderie. They've both been scorned by the gods; the only difference is that one of them is a god. Awkwardly, she reaches up to stroke Lethe's neck with her foreleg.

Lethe seems to appreciate the gesture, for her voice grows less wispy as she presses on, "Up until now, I never knew what became of him, but I know now he must have been forced to drink like everypony else. You may have saved me, but there's no way of knowing if your magic extended beyond the Asphodel Meadows. I'm not supposed to leave, but I have to go to him. He needs me; these ponies don't. They have each other, and you have Fiddlesticks. Go to her, and may Fortuna's blessing be with both of you."

Trixie wonders how she's supposed to go anywhere with her draped around her like a second cloak.

Before Trixie can verbalize as much, Lethe pulls her head back to meet Trixie's eyes and says, "Wait a minute. There's something else, something more recent, a pillar of fire, a terrible flood, an unnatural storm the likes of which only a Tartaric Prince could summon, and at the center of it all—"

Her eyes widening with recognition, she gasps, stumbles backward, trips, falls on her haunches, scrambles away until she's cresting her river's bank and obscured by its spray, and points a hoof at Trixie. Her voice cracking, she accuses, "You tried to kill me!"

Her face expressionless and her voice unnervingly devoid of emotion, Trixie explains, "I wasn't in control of myself. Neither were you. We fought like animals because that's what we were."

Lethe takes a deep breath. The misted water of her river visibly relaxes her, but the wariness doesn't leave her words. "Well, your heart was in the right place, and you did bring me back from the brink of death. I'm still grateful for that. Ultimately, it's not for me to decide, but Hades will know what to do with you."

She pulls her hooves under herself. Gesturing to her river, she says, "We'll never reunite with our lovers if we stand around talking for all eternity, but please, before you go, quench your thirst from my river. You cleansed it yourself, so you know it's safe to drink, and I think its effects will do you good."

She vanishes in a burst of teleportation magic, leaving Trixie alone beside the river save for the myriad colorful ponies running and playing in the distance, the rushing water drowning out their laughter. A faint scent of ozone lingers on the crisp air.

Trixie approaches the river, watches the crystal-clear water sparkle in the bright afternoon sun, which casts rippling shadows on the rocks and sediment lining the riverbed, lowers her head until the water dampens the fur on her snout, and drinks deeply.

When she raises her head, she sees the Asphodel Meadows and its inhabitants through eyes untainted by the stress, anger, and worry she's accumulated throughout her journey, which fall away like the water dripping from her chin. One feeling remains, and that's her longing to see Fiddlesticks again, but despite having no way of knowing how much farther she has to go, she has the inexplicable sense that everything is going to turn out all right.

She turns away from the river, scans the crowd for the mare she met at the start of her journey, spots the mare's clipped ear, and approaches.

When Trixie catches her eyes, the mare smiles, waves, excuses herself from the older white-coated mare and stallion with which she's speaking, meets her halfway, and pulls her into a tight hug.

"I thought living ponies unnerved you," Trixie remarks, returning the hug instinctively but pulling away when she sees the mare's relatives watching them.

"Yeah, well, that was then; this is now. Even before I drank from the river Lethe, my memories were a little foggy—death will do that to you—but once you lifted the curse, I realized how silly being afraid of you was when I'd spent my entire life reading about heroes like you," the mare says, poking Trixie's chest to emphasize the last word.

Trixie blushes at the accusation. "I'm not a hero by any account; I'm just a mare who's too stubborn to let go."

The mare grins and counters, "That's exactly the sort of thing that makes you a hero—you barely recognize your virtues in the shadow of your faults. I bet you don't even realize how lucky Fiddlesticks is to have a mare like you, but if I told you, you'd probably just tell me I've got it backwards, that you're lucky to have a mare like her."

Trixie remembers how different a mare she'd been no more than a year before she and Fiddlesticks met and wonders how her life might have been different if she'd never been humiliated in Ponyville, but a suspicious realization cuts her musings short. She states, "I never told you her name."

"You didn't need to, Trixie the Great and Powerful. You two made a life out of going from town to town acting out your story. By the time you came to Canterlot, your reputation had preceded you and I knew I had to see your show. Nopony else to whom I talked believed your story, but I did. I took notes, contacted Pinkie and the others to help me fill in the gaps, and even got a copy into the Canterlot Archives."

"I don't know what to say," Trixie says, meaning it in the best possible way. She starts walking to ease the tension in her legs. Seeing that the mare isn't following her, she casts her an inviting glance and asks, "Won't you walk with me?"

The mare smiles, trots to catch up before matching Trixie's leisurely pace, and asks, "Well, why don't you tell me where your journey's taken you so far? I'd love to have another story for my repertoire, and I might even be able to give you some pointers as to where to go next."

As they walk along the riverbank, Trixie tells her story, omitting select details like the part where she caught herself checking her out or opened fissures in the sky to rain the fires of Tartarus down on the Asphodel Meadows.

Having listened in silent interest from start to finish, the mare finally speaks, "I guess I was wrong—you're not a hero."

"Fiddlesticks was the hero," Trixie comments.

"You're the anti-hero," the mare observes. "You balance each other out."

Trixie smiles. She can't afford to care what ponies think of her quest, but having sympathizers can only be a benefit.

"Besides Tartarus, the only place you haven't checked is the Elysian Fields, but be warned: the gates only open for ponies who've achieved great things in life or died in battle for a noble cause."

"Do you suppose lifting the curse from Lethe and all the ponies under her river's influence is achievement enough?" Trixie asks, smiling wryly.

"It just may be, at that," the mare says, mimicking Trixie's expression. "On the other hoof, Lethe said she was being punished. If Hades sides with whomever her punisher was, you may find yourself right back in Tartarus."

Trixie stops in her tracks, the prospect of waiting that much longer to be reunited with Fiddlesticks eating at her resolve far more than the prospect of facing the Tartaric Prince of Pacts, his legion of demons, and probably Cerberus all over again without Fiddlesticks's help. Last time, she gave up without a fight because she thought she had nothing left for which to live. If there's a next time, no matter how many times they kill her, she knows she'll never lose the connection that kept her going even as her identity puddled around her like stripped paint.

She smiles to herself, for she's come a long way since the start of her journey and seen many things, among them a goddess brought to the brink of death by her hooves. She wonders what would have happened if she finished the job. Knowing she'll find out sooner or later and any interference from Hades will only expedite the inevitable, she says, "If he has something to say, he'll find me, and if he tries to keep me from Fiddlesticks, he'll regret it."

"I'll support you," the mare says after awhile, seeming to understand Trixie's implication. "We all will."

"That's all I'm asking," Trixie says, knowing that's all she'll need.

***

Wading through the sea of tall grass and sprigs of poppy, lavender, and hollyhock, Trixie ducks under branches of almond and clove blossoms and passes blindly through the fog permeating the peak of the mountain range. Whether the flowers on the far side of the mountain are the result of her magic expanding beyond the Asphodel Meadows or have been there all along is unclear. Descending through the fog, she's just recovered her breath from the seemingly insurmountable climb when the unparalleled beauty of the vista that greets her steals it away.

Golden sunlight bathes the lush hills and valleys, sparkles in the streams, shines off the forest's dense canopy, and mottles the well-traveled trails, the widest of which stretches straight from the foot of the mountain to the towering gate of an infinite wall of living tree trunks. The wall prohibits the unwelcome from entering, but its leafy bows scarcely obscure the view from her mountainside vantage point to the far side, where blissful ponies frolic through the grassy clearings, rest together beneath the shady groves or atop the pastel-painted clouds, and exchange mugs of cider and stories of battles long past.

The only other pony on Trixie's side of the wall is wearing a hat that obscures her face and mane, cradling something wooden in her hooves, and sitting upright on a mossy boulder surrounded with a red-and-white scattering of snowdrop, red daisy, and fly agaric. Her coat looks to be a shade of yellow, but Trixie, never one to let hope make a fool of her, assumes it to be a trick of the light.

Concluding that the pony must be a goddess charged with keeping the gate to the Elysian Fields, Trixie approaches her. Her mind is too preoccupied drawing battle plans and scouting escape routes in case things go sour to pay much attention to her, but as she gets closer, she can't help recognizing certain features—an elegant lock of cobalt mane, a fiddle with a missing string. Finally, a treble-clef cutie mark comes into focus, proving the pony's identity as surely as her shirt and bandanna would were they anywhere to be found.

"Fiddlesticks!" Trixie cries, the thorns of the blue roses crossing her path barely scratching her as she gallops past hanging stalks of lily of the valley.

Heaving a weary sigh, Fiddlesticks ceases the sad, sweet melody she'd been playing but doesn't look up. Her Marish lilt lends her words a lyrical quality as she muses, "Oh, Trixie, how I wish that were you, and how I wish your voice would cease to haunt me day and night. Can't you see it isn't fair, isn't right?"

"It is me, Fiddlesticks!" Trixie pleads, getting close enough to see the tears streaking Fiddlesticks's cheeks. "Look, I've come to rescue you!"

Fiddlesticks raises her head, her forlorn eyes filling with recognition, surprise, and finally glee as she sees her racing down the trail. Propping her fiddle up against the boulder, she gallops forward to meet her, frilled petals of ambrosia and tall clusters of phlox seeming to sprout out of nowhere to tickle her exposed legs as she passes, crying, "Trixie!"

Trixie may have collided with her had they not practiced this routine countless times since they first reunited in Tartarus. Since they had, she waits for the right moment, lights her horn, and lifts them both in her magic. They twirl through the air as their youthful bodies meet. Their fore and hind legs intertwine, and so do their lips. Self-levitation being a taxing feat even for her, especially after the battle she's just fought, she lays herself down with Fiddlesticks on top of her in the shade of a patch of amaranth long before they break their kiss.

Fiddlesticks lays her head across Trixie's chest, content just to soak up Trixie's warmth. Their hats having fallen in the nearby grass, her mane falls loosely around her neck and cascades over Trixie's. Had either been paying attention to anything but each other, they'd have seen jasmine flowers that had long lain dormant blooming all around them.

"Fiddles..." Trixie whispers, stroking Fiddlesticks's bare back with her foreleg and sending shivers down Fiddlesticks's spine.

"Yes, Trixie?" Fiddlesticks asks serenely, nuzzling her head into Trixie's neck in lieu of meeting Trixie's eyes.

With her magic, Trixie pulls her up her chest, the friction of their bare coats drawing a delightful gasp from Fiddlesticks, and whispers in Fiddlesticks's ear, "You're naked, love."

Fiddlesticks gives her a blank look for a brief moment before a devilish little grin alights on her features and she whispers conspiratorially, "We'll have to do something about that, won't we?"

She hooks her hooves beneath Trixie's withers, rolls onto her back so Trixie lays sprawled atop her and Trixie's cloak shrouds them both, shifts beneath her to free her thighs to wrap around Trixie's haunches, pecks Trixie's lips, and says, "That's better, don't you think?"

"We're together," Trixie says, gazing into Fiddlesticks's glittering sapphire eyes. Fiddlesticks's mane flows over the ground around her as if it were water, and her lemon-yellow coat glows in the fading sunlight. "That's what matters."

"I wasn't expecting you for another five decades, to be honest," Fiddlesticks admits, "but even then, I'd wait an eternity. What happened?"

Trixie doesn't answer immediately. For a brief moment, she considers forgetting her promise to the old gods and her plans to return to the mortal plane in lieu of spending eternity with her in a place where death can never part them again. As she meets Fiddlesticks's expectant eyes, though, she realizes she could never abandon such a monumental cause after sacrificing so much and coming so far. If she did, she wouldn't be the mare Fiddlesticks loved, for which Fiddlesticks would wait an eternity. She asks, "Have I ever told you how much I love you?"

Before Fiddlesticks can come up with a sufficiently sarcastic remark, Trixie tucks her forelegs under Fiddlesticks's head and seals Fiddlesticks's lips in a deep, passionate kiss.

Her eyes easing shut, Fiddlesticks melts in Trixie's embrace as if they were two halves of a whole that'd been kept apart for centuries.

Trixie wonders what sex is like in the afterlife. Her telepathy has allowed them to share a mind in the past, but she imagines it's even more spiritually and emotionally intimate. That suits her just fine, but despite her insatiable appetite for Fiddlesticks's lips, the impulse to make love to her right then and there in the grass and flowers outside the Elysian Fields, and the knowledge that Fiddlesticks wants her to as much as she wants to, she breaks for air when she realizes how long she's gone without it. Finding that she doesn't feel out of breath, she wonders if she may have drank too deeply from the stress-relieving waters of the restored river Lethe. If she did, worrying about it is the last thing on her mind.

When she feels she's allowed herself enough time to catch her breath, though, she decides the first thing on her mind can wait until she's given her a proper explanation and regales her with an uncensored, unabridged account of everything that's happened since Fiddlesticks's funeral.

When Trixie finishes, Fiddlesticks, who's rolled onto her side and lain her head in the grass but still clings to her for warmth, caresses Trixie's back and says, "You've had a rough day."

Trixie, who fully expected Fiddlesticks to be disappointed but sees only sympathy in Fiddlesticks's eyes, breathes a sigh of relief.

Fiddlesticks nuzzles Trixie's cheek as if she's read Trixie's thoughts and says, "Trixie, love, I can't express how much your willingness to risk both body and spirit to be with me touches my heart. Had you succeeded, though, the gods would have taken your violating the natural order as an excuse to imprison you in Tartarus, and they're more methodical than you think—you know I'd try, but I don't know if I'd be able to save you."

"You're not saying I shouldn't have come," Trixie says, not intending it as a question, rhetorical or otherwise.

"I'm not," Fiddlesticks confirms. "Like I told you all those years ago, If I couldn't save you, I'd join you in a heartbeat. My heart may no longer beat, but that promise still applies—so long as I'm with you, I don't care where I spend eternity. That's why I haven't entered the Elysian Fields: if you couldn't join me, it wouldn't be paradise, and if you could, I'd want to share the moment with you."

Remembering Fiddlesticks's implication, Trixie asks, "What do you mean, 'had I succeeded?' You said yourself that our being together is all that matters."

"You've succeeded in finding me, but you can't take me back to Equestria. To leave Hades, our spirits need vessels. You cremated my body, but even if you hadn't, you'd still be too late. Hermes said the time frame for returning a spirit to its body is twenty-four hours; I've been here much longer than that, and though you haven't, I can't feel your heartbeat."

Trixie presses her hoof to her chest but feels nothing. Her eyes filling with panic, she raises her hoof to her neck. Her voice trembling, already knowing the answer, she asks, "What are you saying, Fiddles?"

"I'm sorry, Trixie," Fiddlesticks says, pulling her back into a hug, "Hermes was playing a crooked game with you. His victory was never in doubt."

Her panic giving way to understanding and finally a wry smile, Trixie says, "He may think he's won, and he may be right, but he's not the only one. You once put your soul on the line to save me from the Tartaric Prince of Pacts, knowing that even if you lost, we'd still be together. For the chance to see your beautiful smile, to feel your lips against mine, and to hold you close to me..."

She trails off, holds Fiddlesticks as if afraid she'll disappear, and kisses her as if they've never kissed before. Fiddlesticks's teary-eyed smile almost setting her stopped heart to beating again, she finishes, "...Death is a small price to pay."

Meanwhile, an earth-pony stallion who definitely wasn't there a second ago makes his presence known by breaking into blubbering sobs. His piercing scarlet eyes dampen the blue-gray fur on his cheeks, and roses as black as his cutie mark twist up from where his tears splash the ground. When they stop to look at him, he seems surprised they can see him and says, "Please, don't let me interrupt. I have a message for Trixie, but I can see you're busy. I'll come back later."

Before he can turn to leave, Trixie says, "Wait a minute, I recognize you. You were on the shore of the river Styx... You're Hades, aren't you?"

Tossing his head so his feathered white bangs fall away from his eyes, Hades meets her gaze. Despite the streaks on his cheeks where tears traveled moments before, he manages a stoic expression and confirms, "I am."

Trixie reluctantly pulls away from Fiddlesticks, rises to her hooves, and takes a step toward him. Locating her hat on the ground and levitating it to her head to disguise the excess magic she's absorbing, which is causing a nigh-imperceptible drop in the ambient temperature, she demands, "Why have you come, then, to imprison me in Tartarus again for liberating the bat pony from the Fields of Punishment and Lethe from oblivion? If so, I'd suggest you reconsider; while I couldn't fight you last time you took Fiddlesticks away from me, I can now."

"I don't decide who goes to Tartarus."

"What do you mean?" Fiddlesticks asks, having picked up her hat, pushed it onto her head at a slight angle, and taken up a safe position just behind and to the left of Trixie.

Turning his attention to her, Hades explains, "Like I told your friend when we met on the shore of the river Styx, I'm but a humble curator. I don't even decide who lives and who dies—that's Hermes's jurisdiction. All I do is make sure ponies get where they need to go, and their actions in life decide that. I've never seen the entrance to Tartarus or the ponies who walk through it. It's not part of Equestria, and it's not part of Hades."

"Why have you come, then?" Trixie repeats, having let the venom in her voice disperse with her magic. Though she soon dismisses it, knowing she can't afford to second-guess herself, the suspicion that he's not her enemy, that he may even be in a similar boat to her and Lethe, worms its way into her head.

Hades smiles a smile that would have returned the warmth to the air had her dispersed magic not already done so and says, "I'm here to offer you a choice. When you first set hoof in my realm, you were destined for the Fields of Punishment, but regardless of the lengths to which you may have gone had things turned out differently, in dying in battle with Lethe in an effort to restore the identities of the ponies of the Asphodel Meadows and reunite with Fiddlesticks, you proved your worthiness to join her in the Elysian Fields."

Trixie, against all odds, is at a loss for words.

Fiddlesticks comes to Trixie's rescue the best way she knows—by tackling her to the ground in a hug, inadvertently knocking the wind out of her, and gushing, "Oh, Trixie, that's wonderful!"

"Alternatively," Hades says, his eyes wrinkled with mirth, "you could opt to be reincarnated."

Trixie feels she doesn't really have a choice, but Fiddlesticks's joyful countenance fills her with conflicting thoughts. Blushing, she asks, "What do you think, Fiddles, should we spend the rest of eternity together in paradise or be reincarnated in alien bodies, perhaps a thousand miles apart, meet, fall in love, and live out our lives together all over again?"

"You make it sound so romantic," Fiddlesticks purrs, nuzzling Trixie's snout and wrapping herself around her so Trixie, who's always been shy about displaying the full extent of her affection in front of others, be they friends, relatives, strangers, or gods, can't squirm away.

"You're not the first to have such ambitions," Hades admits, eying a sprig of hollyhock that wasn't there last time he visited, "but you are the first in whose abilities I have full confidence, for while drinking from the river Lethe to erase one's memories of one's previous life used to be customary for spirits wishing to reincarnate, you've rendered that custom irrelevant—whether you're reincarnated as ants or antelopes, whether you have to travel a thousand miles to reunite or ten thousand, you'll never lose sight of that goal, for it will have been with you from the moment you were born."

Gazing into Fiddlesticks's sapphire eyes, Trixie brushes a lock of cobalt mane illuminated by the light of a new moon behind Fiddlesticks's ear. Her voice strained to the breaking point under the weight of a truth that would have been better left forgotten, she says, "Even if we stayed, paradise would only be a fleeting distraction. I made a promise before I died, and I could never consider myself deserving of your affection if I didn't stand by my word."

Her eyes brimming with tears—whether they're of joy, sorrow, or a mixture of both is unclear—Fiddlesticks nestles her head in Trixie's neck and says, "Well, as an old and dear friend of ours once said, 'You just do what you've gotta do.'"

Hades sighs, shakes his head, and says gravely, "If that is what you feel you must do, Trixie, may Fortuna's blessing be with you."

"No, Hades," Trixie says, fighting back tears of her own as the realization that she and Fiddlesticks may not feel each other's embrace for decades sinks in, draping one hoof over Fiddlesticks's withers, cradling Fiddlesticks's head with the other, and getting a distinct sense of deja vu as the forest, ground, and sky fall away like cardboard props to leave them alone in the ever-present void backstage of everywhere, "may it be with you."