Broken Wings, Scattered Dust

Your Time’s Turning Grey

Everfree was dominated by darkness regardless of what time of day it was.  The canopy was too dense for light to pass through; I’d used that to my advantage on a semi-regular basis.  Few expected me to hide in the forest, but nobody expected me to hide inside the canopy.  No one wanted to look there—and far too many ponies assumed a pair of wings meant you took the skies at every opportunity and hated being kept from it.

It was with mild restraint that I stayed out of the canopy this time.  Violet was less coordinated than a sleep-deprived Whimsy.  In this tangled undergrowth?  One misstep could mean entanglement, or a broken hoof.  So I stuck with her, slightly ahead, but ready to catch her if she fell.  It didn’t help that she knew full well why ponies kept out of the Everfree, and my attempts to reassure her that the monsters only attacked when provoked didn’t go so well.  I didn’t bother mentioning that most of them feared me on the she can summon lightning basis, though the idea of summoning lightning—or shooting it, as fantasies are wont to do—was absurd.  Absurd.  It was a fundemental misunderstanding.

“It’s an equalizer,” I grumbled, causing Violet to jump and smack her head on a low-hanging branch, which would’ve been fine had her mane not wound itself around the wood.  She ended up dangling there like someone’d crazy-glued her head to the tree.

“Ow,” she said, wincing but not making a single effort to free herself.  “Ow, ow, ow.”

I reached over to detangle her mane; she obligingly stayed still until I wrapped my other hoof around her midriff.  She tensed so much it looked like I’d paralyzed her, but her hair was shredded before I could pull more than half of it free.  I hadn’t expected her to drop so soon, but I reasserted myself fast enough to stop us moments before a painful crash.

“Thank you,“ she squeaked as I lowered her back onto solid ground and did my absolute best not to laugh—a good quarter of her mane had been torn off when she fell, leaving her with the appearance of having a partially shredded pink curtain thrown over her head.  “Um...what were you saying?”

“What?”  I swallowed back the snickers.  “Oh, that.  It’s nothing.”

She looked at me doubtfully, but let the topic drop.  “So, uhm...I guess we should get going?”

“Sooner than later.”  I tossed one of my remaining apples at her, silently regretting not asking Julienne if she had any leftovers; apples and dried fruit got old, quickly.  “Stay close.”

I led her away from the ruins and into the forest’s depth, in the general direction of Canterlot Mountain.  Everfree had more than enough landmarks to guide a frequent visitor; a ring of six mushrooms here, some claw-shaped branches some ways off, a perfect triangle of light shafts over there, neither of the moon nor sun.  It was a place of wild magic—the only one within Equestrian borders—and as a result, also a place of chaos, of darkness, and fear of the unknown.  Home.

The one thing that bugged me about Everfree was that it was practically impossible to tell what time it was from within.  No light cues, and oddly, no sound cues.  Day and night were meaningless to the forest’s horrors.

I helped Violet over a fallen, moss-covered tree, then nimbly followed her over and broke the silence for the first time in what seemed like days.  “Violet?”

“Mm?”

“Can I ask you something?”

She bit her lip.  “I guess...”

I took a deep breath.  “Why aren’t you afraid of me?”

“I don’t know.”  She looked up at the canopy, thoughtful.  “You said you wouldn’t hurt me, maybe, but...that’s just what you say.”

I almost agreed, but anything I could add here would just make doubtful, so I kept my mouth shut.

“I...I just don’t know,” she said quietly.  “I mean...I don’t doubt you’ve taken lives...but you seem, well...normal, y’know?”

I snorted.  “Me?  Normal?”

“You know what I mean.  You don’t go around killing for fun, you don’t have...that hungry look in your eyes.  And...”  Her eyes flickered.  “...there’s something really sad about a bird with broken wings...”

“I don’t think so.”

“Huh?”  She looked up.  “Why not?”

“You said broken.”

“Yeah—uh, so what?”

“Something can’t be broken unless it was whole once.  A bird without broken wings was good enough to not break their wings.”

“Oh.  Huh...I never thought about it like that.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said darkly, ducking under a branch brandishing inch-long spikes.

“W—what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you’re young.”  I sighed, preempting her muted-but-angry response.  “I know how you feel, Violet.  I was there once, too, and believe me I got pissed when I had to deal with things that I wouldn’t understand until later.  It’ll come, Violet.  It’ll come.”

Despondent gained new meaning when I looked at her.  Ears drooping, head hung low, and she gloomily pawed at the ground like she was excavating a lost work of art.  And perhaps most importantly, her tail was drooping, too—a detail all but the best of actors forgot.  She wasn’t pretending.  Not that I expected someone of her demeanor—and with her talent—to ever feign the truth.

“I guess,” she said, face forlorn.

“Chin up.  Believe me, being older isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

She just looked more morose, but she started walking again.  “I wouldn’t know.  Spent too much time worrying about the now to think about the later.  Tends to happen when you have to fend for yourself.”

I mentally noted that beneath whatever shyness and apprehension Violet lugged around, she had as sharp a tongue as Whimsy.  Presumably you’d only hear if—when she felt comfortable enough to skip the brain-mouth filters.  But underneath that, there was a hint of steel, and a filly I knew all too well; the same pony I saw whenever I looked in a mirror.  A pony that would never shy away from doing what they had to to survive.

“I know,” I said.  “I’ve been there.  I—”

I bit my tongue before I could mention Whimsy.  Faking compassion—or only have smidgens of it—was safe enough, but to reveal the pony I cared about the most?  Too easily exploitable.

Violet squinted at me, and I saw a glimmer of magic.  “Whimsy...?”

Crap.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

She looked suddenly alarmed, and I belatedly realized my voice had lapsed into the icy, distant tones that one normally associates with a cold-blooded killer.  Whoops.

“Sorry,” she said hurriedly.  “I didn’t mean to—I just—I only heard whimsy, I don’t know—”

Relief flooded through me.  She’d only heard whimsy.  She had no idea the sway the word held over me...the kind of influence it had...

“It’s okay.  Just...old memories.”

“Mm,” she said, unconvinced, which in hindsight was probably a state she spent a lot of time in.  But thankfully, she didn’t pursue the subject.

We took the long route around a small pond giving off a thick, grey haze that obscured the trees on the far side—not that visibility was that great to begin with—but if my presence alone hadn’t scared off all the forest’s inhabitants, the pond would finish the job.  It was a lake of some strange, silvery goop that, as far as I knew, was unidentified, but if the creatures avoided it, chances were it didn’t exactly improve survival.  I hadn’t ever seen any ill effects come of it, but then I’d never been stupid enough to stick my hoof in or drink any, either.

Lingering around with the fumes hanging in the air undoubtedly wasn’t healthy, either, but it was take the long way around, or brave a crumbling stone bridge that looked like a good sneeze would send it tumbling into the river it spanned.  Thanks, but no thanks.

Sadly I’d forgotten that the lake’s fringes were still treacherous terrain for a pony not used to the mix of rocks and roots, and it wasn’t long until I had to slow down and Violet navigate the maze of tripping hazards safely.

“Sorry,” I said, catching her as she leapt across a small ditch and fell short.  “Not used to lifting ponies, or I’d fly us over there.”

She half-grunted and wriggled out of my grip, onto solid ground.  “No, I should learn how to do this...”

“Do what?”

“Not trip over my own hooves every five minutes,” she said irritably, advancing to the next stepping stone.  “Must be great, being coordinated...”

I ignored the biting jealousy in her voice and shrugged.  “Practice.  That’s all it is.”

“I’m sure,” she muttered, without looking at me, but she pressed on, determined to master her own four hooves.  I followed close behind—close enough to catch her, but not close enough to make her uncomfortable or feel like she was dragging me down.

In truth I didn’t mind at all—I’d done this a million times before with Whimsy, and she still hadn’t quite stopped stumbling every now and then.  Yet oddly she had no issues frolicking around in the treetops...perhaps Violet had some area of odd comfort, too...

We made it around the remainder of the lake in silence and with no further incident, reentering Everfree’s impenetrable thicket, and I took the lead again once I was sure Violet wasn’t going to plant her face into a tree or anything.  We both breathed a sigh of relief when the silvery haze dwindled into nothingness.

She did squeak a bit when she noticed the enormous boulder she’d followed me around was in reality the entrance to an underground cave, and there did come a deep growling from its shadowy maw, but nothing emerged.  Nothing would.  Lightning was a terrifying force to virtually every animal alive.  Except for Holly.  And I guess, me.  There was something beautiful about it, about the sudden, chaotic, efficient, and price balancing of scales...

“Um...Jet?  Zephyr?”

“Yes?”

“Why are all the creatures in here afraid of you?”

So she’d seen the fear stowed away in the shadows.  I smiled, holding up a foreleg.  “You know what my bands do, right?”

She squinted at the grey ring, violet magic flickering again.  “Not exactly.  I see lightning, but..they’re conflict?  Doesn’t make much sense...”

I kept smiling.

“No.  They can store lightning.”

She looked confused, so I let a bit of the chained energy free, allowing it a jagged line of pure blue-white to briefly connect the two bands with the familiar whisper of thunder.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, stumbling backwards but thankfully not entangling herself in anything this time.  “I—you—what?”

“That’s why the creatures here are afraid of me,” I said meaningfully.  “Lightning.”

“Oh.”  She squinted at my bands again.  “I’ve...never seen that before.”

My smile faded.  “Yeah, they...the pony who made them destroyed the, ah...blueprints after making a working prototype.  Something about them being too dangerous.”  I bit my lip before I could mention the other reason.  Hard enough to draw blood, which distracted me from actually thinking the other reason, too.

Violet didn’t seem any more inclined to question me further, and for a change she didn’t keep sneaking sideways glances at me, either.  With suspicion wasn’t an entirely new way for me to be treated, but being investigated by a pony with the ability to not just see, but sense, truth?  There was sure to be something she’d find that she wouldn’t be able to rationalize.

We entered a small clearing whose center was occupied by a triangular stone obelisk.  Violet paused in front of it, then walked around it, inspecting the decorative glyphs adorning each face.  I’d seen every side of the obelisk, before and still found the glyphs puzzling.  Whimsy had found them intriguing, but neither one of us had been able to decipher their meanings.  The most I knew about them was that each face featured various depictions of a different animal.  A shark, a heron, and a spider.

“Hm,” Violet said thoughtfully.  “I’ve seen these before...”  She brought her magic to bear, a violet veil enshrouding the stone from top to bottom.

But nothing changed.

“Huh.”  She rubbed her chin.  “Guess it’s just a plain old monument.”

A light fog crept into the clearing as we left, the stone almost mournful at our parting, with only a lonely mist for company.  Everfree played host to a myriad of mysteries—purportedly there was even a stillwater pond that could clone creatures—but the obelisk edged towards the more obscure.  Unlike the pond, the underground illusory room and living area we’d just come from, or even the Shaman, there was no immediately apparent magic about it.  Whimsy had even said it looked no more magical than any other run-of-the-mill rock, which just about settled it.

“Violet?”

“Mm?”

“What was with that room we were in?”

“Oh, that?  It was there when we found that place.  It’s, erm...we’re not sure.  It takes your dream and makes it...real.  Sort of.  You saw what it was like.”

“Mhm.”

“We took to calling it the observatory.”  She paused as helped her across a rickety wooden bridge that spanned a small chasm.  “The thing that gets me is that it’ll only recreate details that you think of.  Like...you know how in dreams, you can’t feel, or smell?”

“Aye.”

“It won’t recreate those things unless you consciously think of them.”

I filed away a mental note to ask her later why the garden we were in had scents, and a lot of scents, but it was so obvious.  She’d been there before—she’d smelled it all before.  Someone like her probably had an astoundingly good memory.

“So...that garden...”

She dropped her gaze.  “It’s real.  It’s the only thing I remember from...from when I was young.”

Well, maybe not that good.

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, but I saw a flicker of irritation cross her face.  “Don’t be.  I’m almost glad, with that room and all...”

“Nightmares too, huh?”

“Yes.  Sterling doesn’t like it much, but nopony makes him go in there.”

I silently decided never to go in there again if I could help it.  But on the other hoof, getting Whimsy in there...actually, no, that’d be just as terrifying.  That pony’s imagination held just as many horrors as wonders, and neither knew any sort of boundaries when it came to how...creative they were, in spirit.

A gap in the trees appeared, but it didn’t lead out of the forest.  To the contrary, it led to a sickly-green bog with what seemed like more than its fair share of frogs.

“C’mon,” I said.  “The mountain’s not much further.”

It was becoming harder and harder to bite back my fear, which was never a good sign.  Canterlot itself wasn’t the problem, it was getting Violet to the top of it, which meant bypassing Celestia knew how many guards, and even then, once we got there...well, I had to pray that Blackout wouldn’t deduce my identity.  Ugh.

I didn’t have a problem with fear itself, for the most part.  Fear is a survival instinct.  The problem I had with fear was when it began to override rationality, which in my case had happened only once, as far as I could remember.  But when it did...

My thoughts were interrupted by a silvery glimmer, flashing through the trees ahead of us, gleaming with the many hues of a rainbow, resolving into a prismatic snake that wove through the trees with a needle’s precision.  It slowed and came to a halt in front of us, pulsing, breathing.  Alive.

And yet at my side, Violet did not flinch.

“Hello, Flicker,” she said casually.

The snake split open, becoming a rend in the air, gaping, widening, like a mouth.  And from the shimmering maw came a miniature creature—but none like I’d ever seen.

It was small, scaleless, vaguely dragon-shaped, and its smooth skin transitioned seamlessly from teal to pink and back again, spotted here and there with white freckles.  Two featherlike antennae extended from its head, and its wings looked mostly like that of a butterfly, save for the shredded-looking back end.  Each wing was a salmon-pink, shifting to purple near the edges, and they each bore a series of identical, intricate white markings, including a crescent moon at their tips.  Another unmarked dorsal ridge ran from its head all the way to the tip of its curled tail, and despite the claws at the end of its four limbs, it looked about as harmless as harmless gets—though that alone was more than enough cause to be wary.

“Greetings!  How fare you, Violet?”

Its voice was female and unmistakeably young, but its cadence, its timbre—it felt extraordinarily, unbelievably alien.  And its eyes...its whiteless eyes were a purple so deep they were almost black.  Little portals into a being unknown...

“The same.  You?”

“As usual.  But not, I think, for too long.  Your friend has buried more than bodies.  The why eludes me.”

I twitched.  The Calamus couldn’t ever send me somewhere where there wasn’t some crazy magical beings flipping through my past life like the morning paper, could it?  Was nothing sacred?

“Can it,” I told the creature.  “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t,” I repeated venomously.  “Nose out if you know what’s good for you.”

“If you will.”  The creature floated a hair backwards and bowed its head.  “In this eon, I am known as Flicker.”

“I take it you already know my name,” I growled.

“All of them,” said Flicker, amused.  “There is little that can hide from me.”

I said nothing.  How could I?  The less that was known about my past, the better.  Period.  There was too much there, too many ways to exploit me or Whimsy.  No, my past was best left in the shadows.

“So what are you doing here?” Violet asked.  “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

Flicker opened her mouth and vanished completely.

“What?”

Then she was back, with barely a glint of magic to mark her return.

“A pony with a new, ancient power has entered the world,” the creature said.  “She will need help.  I will provide it.”

And in the same manner, Flicker vanished, but this time I saw her go—she faded out and went from solid to ghost in the blink of an eye, and in another blink she was, again, gone completely, nothing but a few lingering silver sparks in her place.

“You lost me,” I told the spot she’d been hovering in.  Really, I was lucky, having the few beings who had information on me also not really caring enough to do anything with it.  However careful I was, it was inevitable someone, somewhere, somehow, would eventually pry up enough evidence to bury me, or at least exile me.  Flicker, Canzonetta, Deluge, Violet, Eve...thank Celestia none of them wanted to turn me in.  Well, could, in Eve’s case.  I’d long since stopped agonizing over why the twin sisters did nothing about me; it was almost guaranteed that they knew pretty much everything about me.

“She’s a faerie dragon,” Violet explained.  “She’s basically half-magic.  When she disappears like that, she’s phasing in and out of the astral—err, fae plane.  Sorry, the astral plane is for unicorns.”

“I thought there was only one magical plane.”

“Mm-mm.”  She shook her head.  “Two.  The astral plane, for unicorns, and the fae plane, for wild magic.  I kinda think they’re just reflecti—hey, where are you going?”

“To Canterlot.  Unless you can’t walk and talk at the same time for more than five minutes?”

She winced and hurried to catch up with me.  “Sorry.  Don’t really get to talk about this with anypony...”

I knew that feeling.  “It’s okay.  I understand.  I just—I’d rather we stay moving.”  I gestured at the canopy.  “We still have no idea what time it is.”

“Oh, that.”  Violet closed her eyes, but her horn did not glow.  “It’s...a little past midnight.  Sorry, forgot to check.”

I gave her a sharp glare.  As sharp as I could manage, anyways.  Without stopping, and with us both walking side-by-side.  “How do you know?”

“It’s...well, easy,” she said.  “The two planes shift with day and night.  I can—well, any unicorn can, if they’re sensitive enough—feel which plane has the bigger presence here, and right now it’s the fae plane.”  She paused.  “It’s got nothing to do with, ahm...truesight.”

“You need a better name for that,” I commented, pressing my side into a small ledge and bracing myself, so she could climb up.  “It’s so...beyond sight.”

“I know.”  She clambered onto me—she was unsurprisingly light, even for me—then onto the ledge, waiting until I leapt up after her.  I found her wearing a bit of a frowny, puzzled expression when I did.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can I be honest with you?”

I stopped short.  “You haven’t been?”

“No, no!  It’s just—I mean—I don’t want to offend you or anything—”

I snorted.  “I’ve been called a lot of things.  Take your best shot, I can take it.”

She clammed up, staring blankly at me like I was an odd-looking weed in a garden.  I itched to keep walking, but if there was going to be conflict between us, it would be better to resolve it here and now.  Much preferable to doing it in the middle of the densely-populated, guard-filled heart of Equestria.

“You’re weird,” she said suddenly.

“Nice try.  No dice.”

There were about sixteen different answers—all legitimate—to my question, but I had to ask anyways.  I had to know what and just how much she knew.

“So why am I weird?” I asked, endeavoring to sound curious rather than demanding.

“Um...where do you want me to start?”

“Anywhere you like, as long as we keep moving.”

I started forward again, and she tailed close behind, answers spilling from her like stones from a sack.  “Well...you smell like a dragon.  I’ve only ever met two other ponies that did—one of them could turn into a ferret, and the other...could do things she shouldn’t be able to do.  Things I’ve never seen anypony but her do.”  She took a breath.  “You didn’t freak out when Flicker appeared.  You haven’t asked why I know her.  You have a weapon most wouldn’t believe.  You—”

“Okay, I get it,” I grumbled.  “Little observant, are you?”

“I can’t help it,” she muttered.  “Oh, and—most pegasi I’ve met hate being earthbound.”  She gestured at the canopy.  “But we’ve been in here for hours and can’t even see the sky, but you aren’t bothered by that at all.  You haven’t even unfurled your wings, except to...preen them,” she added sheepishly.

I could help but smile.  She was sharp.

“I’m used to it,” I said simply.  “And Flicker was strange, I’ll admit, but I’ve seen a lot of strange things—she’s not very high up on the list.  As for the dragon-scent thing...I’ll let you figure that out on your own.”

A ghost of a smile played about her mouth.  “And the preening is because you flavor your feathers?”

“Ew, no.  That’s nasty.”

She grinned and said nothing; we kept on, guided by Everfree’s subtle landmarks.  We’d just made it past a rickety wooden bridge when she spoke again.

“So uh...you’re not too weirded out by Flicker knowing who you are.”

I almost stumbled.  “It’s usually not a good idea to threaten those whose capabilities I don’t know.  Usually.”

I could feel her squinting at me, but she passed no further comment.  A bend in a near-stillwater, uninhabited river told me that we were getting close to the forest’s edge, but what I was not expecting was the two dark figures at its banks.  One was the Shaman, easily distinguishably by her brown cloak and—despite the darkness—the glimmer of her ever-present golden rings, and the other, intermittently vanishing and reappearing as she was, was unmistakeably Flicker.  The Shaman appeared to be in a trance, put there by a bowl with rising vapors in front of her, and was murmuring in her strange tongue to the shifting waters .  A few days ago I would’ve thought she was insane for doing so, but I knew better now.

I was hoping we could pass them unnoticed, and we undoubtedly would have but for Flicker, who turned almost the instant we saw them.  I felt her this time, radiating layered whispers of magic, the roars and screeches and calls of the wild mingling into a weave of noise, soft, quiet.  Yet I heard the distinct hints of fang and claw, a steely ring that threatened to devour any who wandered too far into the fae plane.  And if I could hear it that well, that clearly...then Flicker was an incredibly potent creature.  She’d send Whimsy into convulsions for sure.

Flicker wandered over.  “Oh, hello.”

“Hey, Flicker,” Violet said.  “What’re you guys up to?”

“We are communing.  Would you join us?”

Violet looked at me, an unspoken plea for permission.  She wouldn’t need it.  As much as the Shaman weirded me out—she could perform magic with a jar of weeds, for Celestia’s sake—I wanted to join them, too.  I already knew who they were talking to, and it was someponyI wanted to see again.  Somepony whom I could trust, and somepony who would be inclined to offer aid if I needed it.

Violet looked a little intrigued when I didn’t respond and simply followed Flicker back to the Shaman, but she followed nonetheless.  The Shaman, however, did not move as we joined her, but as I’d expected, there was an image on the river’s surface, a reflection of neither any part of the forest nor its inhabitants.  I gave the rippling figure a curt nod, and at once the water erupted, a blue blur barely visible within a thickset spray of of ice-cold water.

“Hello, De’,” I said casually.

The weathermare dried herself off with a quick shake and landed next to us.  She looked, still, no different except for a slight shimmer in her eyes, like the light at the bottom of a pool.  The only evidence that she had absorbed the memories of a dying dragon, and with them, a deep connection to the primal magic that had given birth to Equestria.  To the world, really, as I understood it.

“Hey, you two,” she said.  “I wasn’t expecting to see either one of you so soon.”

“Me neither,” I admitted.  “But there were...a few signs I noticed.  Seems your new job has earned some attention.”

The Shaman, though dripping with water, calmly opened her eyes and surveyed us with some curiosity; that alone stopped Deluge from replying.  Evidently it was news that I was involved in her...ascendance.

“And what is this I find before me?  Is that the child of storms I see?”

“It is.”

I still had no idea why the Shaman insisted on calling me the child of storms, but then, lightning was, at least in part, kind of my callsign.  In any case, it was preferable to both my real name or any title that alluded to my profession.  It meant I could converse with her without revealing my identity to others.  I got the feeling she knew who I was and what I did, but for one reason or another she never bothered to turn me in.  Too isolated, perhaps.

But then she turned to face me and lowered her head so far it brushed the grass.  I felt myself stiffen from head to hoof in shock, paralyzed, and I still hadn’t recovered several seconds later, when she rose from her bow.

“Then it is thanks that I must give, for by your deeds, the world still lives.”

Okay, maybe it wasn’t news.  “You’re welcome?”

The Shaman looked ever-so-slightly crestfallen at that.  “It is my duty to guide her kind, but some pony has disturbed my peace of mind.  She cares not for safety or life, you see, and she does not give many a chance to flee.  Numerous ruins has she left in her wake, in zealous pursuit of some higher stake.”

Zealous pursuit....numerous ruins?

“She wears a cloak all the time, too, doesn’t she?  With a silver ring?”

“It is more than a ring of silver, I think.  Between that and her power, there must be a link.”

I nodded in agreement.  I’d noticed nothing remarkable about Dust besides her apparent magical abilities, but both times I had seen her, that silver ring was there, keeping her cloak on.  Hm...

“Uhm...did it look like this?”  Violet held up the ring she’d brought along.

I wordlessly took it from her, turning it over.  It was crude, cold to the touch, unpolished, uneven...except for two tiny, identical indents on the sides of an oddly clean bump—a bump that was mirrored on the other side of the ring.

A serpent’s head.

“Huh,” I said, showing it to Violet.  “Look at this.”

She scrunched her nose and took it back, examining it for several moments, but she said nothing when she slung the necklace over her head again.  I could almost hear her brain buzzing with as many questions as revelations; it was like she shut down her physical presence entirely.  Her silence went unnoticed by anyone besides me—and Deluge.

“Wish I could go with you guys,” Deluge grumbled, aware that the awkward silence would only put more pressure on Violet.  “I want to find out how she did that...bow thing.”

“Yeah, that was weird, I dunno how she did that.”  Truth be told, I had some ideas, mostly involving the near-universally unknown powers of earth ponies, but even Whimsy didn’t know half of what they were capable of, and she could literally see magic.

“She is the end of an act most disputed.  Many have fought over her, and perish they did.  This is only what I know, of course, but...”

What she knew turned out to be a monologue that was closer to a dense slab of tangled rhymes than a story.  It sounded like a love story of all things—and painfully lame one at that—and it continued in that vein until I was bending over the river, trying my hardest not to choke on all the cheese.  Blah blah blah they fall in love via some contrived coincidence, blah blah blah doe eyes, blah blah they kiss, blah blah happily ever after.  Guh.

Then just when it seemed like it had ended, I guess it was mauled by some natural disaster, because it suddenly sounded like someone had woken up and decided the dragon population was twice as big as it needed to be.

“...and that is all I know, I’m afraid.  What lies after the end is merely in shade.”

“What?  You don’t know how it ends?”

“No,” said Flicker.  “It has just begun, and the question lives unanswered.”

“Question?”

“It has plagued a number of my friends,” the Shaman said.  “Just what happens, after the end?”

“End?” Violet asked curiously.  “Like...death?”

“Death.”  Flicker seemed to glow at the word.  “Many, many things can die.  Most do not think a story can die.  They do.  Every story has its end, but their death comes only when they are forgotten and lost to the ages.”

Deluge shuffled uncomfortably in the silence; I pictured...something...fading away into nothingness, before Deluge turned to me.  “So I take it you two need to get somewhere?”

“Canterlot,” I replied reflexively.  “Okay, the summit, actually, but—”

“Yeah, I don’t think either Princess would be chuffed with you two just appearing up there.”

“Probably not.” Violet emerged from her reverie, but not entirely; she still looked a little out of it, like...like she knew, but didn’t understand why or how Deluge was different.  “But how are you—?”

I caught the sparkle in Deluge’s eyes.  “You don’t think I was just going for a swim, do you?”

Violet muttered something indistinct, but before I could intervene, Deluge’s eyes clouded, a veil of mist obscuring them momentarily.

“Sorry.”  She shook her head, and her eyes cleared.  “Apparently there’s a tsunami headed for Seaddle.”

“I’ll explain it to her,” I said sharply.  “Can you get us up there or not?”

She nodded curtly, took a stunned Violet by the hoof, dragged her around, and shoved her into the river.  Violet promptly disappeared beneath the surface, eyes wide, panicking.

“What?” she said when I look at her in shock.  “You must know by now, if I tried to convince her to do it herself we’d be here for weeks.  I don’t think either one of us has that kind of time.”

“I guess not.”  I took a breath and jumped into the surprisingly warm river, surfacing just in time to catch Deluge’s parting words.

“Thank you for all the help,” Deluge said.

“It was wisdom, nothing more.”  The Shaman bowed.  “But I am honored to be your mentor.”

“You did not need much assistance,” Flicker noted.

“Canzonetta knew a lot,” Deluge said softly.

Flicker continued as though she hadn’t been interrupted.  “It was no trouble.  I have done the same for all of your kind, and there is one thing you must know:  Perception alone creates time, a beginning, and an end.  Always remember.”

“I will.”

I pushed a clingy Violet off until I could breathe.  Perception created and colored many things, that was true.  But Flicker?  Assisting every Sapphire Paradigm, who had presumably existed from almost the universe’s inception?  The notion seemed ridiculous, yet here she was...

Violet thrashed wildly in my grip when I tugged her out of the way to make room for Deluge.  The weathermare slid into the river smoothly and, when she was entirely underwater, laid a reassuring hoof on her friend.  I locked hooves with hers, and that was the last thing I felt before she dragged us out of the water and into realms unknown.