She knew of the small grey stallion, trotting so very slightly ahead of her as they moved through the castle. (She looked around whenever she could, noticed ponies cleaning and putting things away. They didn't look at her. It seemed as if they were taking special care not to look at her, and it was another kind of pain.) It had been a lesson from years past: if something happened, if he didn't come to see her for a very long time, if she began to suspect he... could never return -- then she was to use the emergency passage and in time, somepony at the other end would take her in, continuing the Great Work as best he could.

She knew of him. But she was beginning to wonder if she also knew him. (She had met so few ponies, and the vast majority had been for a single day.) He didn't seem to be the least bit familiar: nothing about his person brought any degree of recollection forward. But he looked like something. He looked like...

...and it came.

"You look like one of my -- memories."

The wince which followed those words had two kinds of pain behind it. She didn't talk about her memories, for she knew how much being among memories hurt him and... the day she'd forgotten had been the day which destroyed their world.

(They were going to run, he was going to lose his practice, his life, she had hurt him again...)

She wasn't supposed to talk about their existence, much less the presence of the other ones. And the fact that she could both reach them and make them...

There had been so many mistakes, and they had spoken of very few of them. Nothing about what had happened at the end, when all of the errors had been hers.

She didn't, shouldn't talk about it. But the medication (which was wearing off quickly, faster than it should have) made words into slippery things: they fell onto her tongue and tumbled into the air, a split-second before she realized the damage they could do. It was one of many reasons to hate the drugs: the way they fogged her thoughts, how sick they sometimes made her feel. A liquid reminder of her failure.

Quiet had stopped moving. He glanced back, looked up at her. The grey features, which had previously been locked into what had seemed to be a sort of neutral concentration -- she'd often seen that on him, on those occasions when they read together -- abruptly shifted.

"You remember me?" The volume was muted: about halfway between whisper and speech. The shock was not. But the rest of the tone... she'd noticed it happening with him, when the drugs were in effect. That there would be something within his voice which suggested he was once again treating her as if she was very young, barely capable of understanding anything beyond the simplest (and first) lessons.

He's part of the Great Work. He's the one I was supposed to come to, if anything happened. I can talk to him...

But not to the ones who had said they'd wanted to help her. The ones who had ultimately refused. The pony who had said --

"If he ever --"

She froze, felt a muscle spasm trying to break through the deteriorating chemical shield. Looked at Quiet, who was waiting for an answer. And in place of the thing she did not wish to think about, she focused on that memory.

So few ponies had ever come to teach her: it had been important to make a memory for each, so that she would always know who they had been. And even away from her place, without having it in sight... even then, thinking about the memory brought everything back.

"You came... four years ago. The lesson was hospitality. He thought I was a -- good host, but... there would be grand events. When the Great Work was -- complete." And she had failed. "So you came to see me. Because he felt that being -- a good host... you knew more about that..."

"...than anypony else," he softly finished. "Yes." The grey head briefly dipped. "I'm starting to feel as if the doctor might have overestimated my skills."

She didn't have any response for that, and so they stood in silence for a while.

Finally, he looked up at her, too far up, and there was a small, wry smile on his face.

"It's nice to be remembered."

He turned forward, began to trot again. She did her best to follow, and found her left foreleg beginning to hitch as the muscles within shifted.

They went up a ramp. She wasn't used to ramps and when it came to being indoors, was just beginning to develop a nodding acquaintance with up. There were deliberate imperfections in the surface, placed to give hooves purchase -- but now it was both forelegs, and it made progress that much more difficult.

"Everypony here tonight," Quiet eventually said as he turned to the right at the top, gestured a forehoof for her to follow, "will remember you for the rest of their lives."

To her, the words had been fairly steady -- but most of her conversations had been with him, and so she had never truly been exposed to certain undertones. And she wasn't really trying to identify the unfamiliar elements (at least not just yet), because his statement set off an instant reaction within her, something which made the fading drugs rally just long enough to let it slip free.

"I wish they wouldn't."

He stopped, looked back at her again, waiting for her to continue.

"I..." she began -- then stopped.

This is his most devoted. The one who knows more than anypony.

She was looking at a pony's features. Not endless dark robes and staring eyes. Not six of the seven (and where was that strange little seventh?) who had ultimately rejected --

"If he ever --"

...if she could talk to anypony else now, it would have to be him. They would be running together. There was a chance that for the rest of their lives, there would be nopony else.

"I... failed." A simple statement. Two words which had to summarize far too much. The endless agony of not having been the One, the one he had believed she would be. Having disappointed him. Letting him down. Her wasting all those years of his life, a life she had just destroyed... and that for the second time. "There was. One chance. And I --

"-- you're still alive," he told her. "As long as you're alive, there's a chance."

She didn't know how to answer that. She just waited for him to move again, for there was only one structure in the world which she truly knew. She didn't know where to go, or what to do, or...

"If he ever --"

He seemed to be examining her face a little more closely. The grey gaze then moved to her legs, came back up again.

"The medication's wearing off," he softly observed.

She'd been trying to hide it. "You can --'

"-- there's spasms in your brachialis muscles. You're also having some trouble speaking. And there's other signs which..." A brief pause, followed by "I... know something about pain."

There was truth within his eyes, and so she simply looked at them for a time.

"I can't give you any more right now," Quiet finally said. "I don't even have anything on me: that's for the doctor to dispense, and he said your body needed to recover from the dose he used for the conference. And once I get you situated, I have to gallop all over the castle, trying to get the last things ready for our departure. That's going to take a while: probably a few hours. We have to pack up the chaos pearls, just for starters. So I can't even stay long enough to --" He sighed. "There's breathing exercises. Meditations. Things you can use to -- drive some of it down for a little while, or just make it look like you're feeling better. Even when you're not. I don't have the time to teach them to you here. But when we're out there together, I'll make sure there's time."

The words had been soft. Gentle. Sincere.

"Thank you." It seemed to be the only response possible.

He smiled a little. "I'll always --" and stopped.

She'd been looking at his eyes, and so she saw it happen.

"...you're -- hurting."

Eventually, he nodded.

"It passes," he told her. "For a while. Come on. It's not much further."

It wasn't. And then there were books, so many books, with some of the titles familiar because of course there had been studies of history, others were new to her -- and then she wasn't looking at the books any more.

"Stay in here until he or I come for you," Quiet said. "Nopony else. Read anything you like. I don't know if you enjoy adventure stories, but -- what is it?"

She'd been caught staring: she knew it... "Just... looking. Outside. Any book?"

"Any book you like," he assured her with a smile. "Is there anything else I can do?"

Make it not have happened.

"I'm... hungry," she reluctantly admitted. The near-instant changes had done that.

Another nod. "I'll send somepony up with food."

He stayed long enough to help her pick out a book, eventually pushed two of the reading couches partially together in order to give her a little more resting space. And then Quiet left. A few minutes later, the door opened, just enough for a basket of fruit to be pushed through the gap, then closed again.

She didn't open the book, not immediately. It looked old, and... the horn was already starting to go away. There had been many reasons for timing the conference carefully, and not among the least had been making sure she was in a place where she could give demonstrations: they'd already learned that accelerating her transformation made the drugs wear off all the faster, and she'd had to do it twice. At the moment, as far as her cycle went, she was still capable of using that form of magic, but -- the book was old, and turning pages by field, without damaging them, was something which required fine control. One spasm at the wrong moment, a loss of focus, and she could easily tear the book. It was safer to simply nose the story along, as a broken pony would. And she was certainly --

"If he ever --"

She wanted the thought to stop, and so she kept her focus on the place where it had been for so much of her time inside the study.

In one sense, she'd seen it before. There had been pictures in some of the books, and a few of the oldest memories (none of them hers) had included such details. But in another...

So that's a window.

She looked at the clear glass, the rivulets of water running down the outer surface, listened to the thunder. She had some experience of thunder, although it had been considerably more muffled. Rain... that had come shortly after her failure, and she remembered the little agonies which had come from drops pelting against her twisting skin. The lightning, however... that was new, and she softly gasped as a streak blazed towards the ground.

How would they leave the castle? Would they use a passage, or would the three of them (three) be outside, with little explosions going off within her at every impact of moisture? It had to be the former. Or... they could simply wait until the storm had passed. There was time.

It's just pain.

I deserve it.

It's just being wet.

I've been more drenched than --

-- I was, I'm sure I was, but he told me that's not how it happened, not how it could have ever happened...

He had told her to look back, to find the truth which he had known was there. That, as with her recent attempts to do something else entirely (all done while he watched, waited with an expression on his face which she had never seen before), she would succeed. But as with everything else in her life, all she had done was fail.

She was alone. She had time. It was something to think about other than the increasing pain. And so she looked back again...

...there is nothing, and it is everywhere.

There is no room. There is no stone. There are no memories. There is no fire. He is gone. She is surrounded by nothingness, a voiding of existence which claws at her mind and forces her to think of something else, anything else simply so that the nothing will not enter her heart and convince it to join the vacuum.

She's just barely starting to focus, turning back towards her lessons, the first lessons, those teachings which make up the core of her -- and then the nothing is gone, replaced by too much.

Light assaults her eyes, a brightness she has never known, a new kind of pain lancing through her skull. And there are no wings. There is no horn. (She can't remember a horn, he says she must have had a horn, but she can't remember...) It almost feels as if she is herself again, the self which had existed in the second before it all went wrong, but there are differences in size and mass which she has yet to recognize, especially as there is a much more important fact calling for her attention, screaming for notice, breaking through the pain and making her focus on a single aspect of reality.

There are green things, and that is not what matters. There is light (too bright, it hurts) and that doesn't matter. There are colors she has only seen in memories (and not hers), because she has no direct familiarity with sunrise or dawnlight.

What matters is that she has no wings. She has (she still believes it) no horn.

And the teleport, created by magic she didn't understand, performed without any understanding of a place she could safely go -- has brought her to the world. To the sky.

She is more Celests above the green than she knew to exist.

She is falling.

Her body begins to tumble. The very air beats at her, increasing a pain which has only existed for, at most, two minutes and now seems as if it must have been eternal. It will last the rest of her life, because that life is about to end. She will fall into the green, and the impact will kill her. She is tumbling, her jewelry feels as if it is cascading around her neck, pure habit brings up a forehoof up to adjust it but it does no good, she is falling and she has no wings and no horn and she is going to die in the same way she lived, the reason she's going to die at all. As a failure, a sin. She will die broken.

And from the core of her, her soul cries out. It is a cry which will be heard by nopony, for he is not there. In fear, in desperation, in the heart of deepest instinct, she calls to something she has never truly known, something she didn't realize was only waiting for the moment it could finally hear her voice.

It emerges as song. It resounds as something very close to a chorus.

HELP ME!

When she hits the green, the trees, she will die. Find a gap between them, hit the ground, and she will die. But there is more to the land than wood and stone. (She feels that, she feels for the first time and nearly loses it in the sensory assault.) There is always what lies within.

She asks the world a question, and the world splits.

Rocks separate with a sound like a rumbling scream. Trees are jammed against each other. (Animals are running, birds flee, and some will eventually return to their tilted homes.) Vibrations begin to travel outwards, are quickly muted within absorbing soil. The world yawns open beneath her, the channel for what had moments ago been a completely underground river twists to align with her plummeting form, and she falls to where the ground had been, tumbles into the ravine, hits the water.

It is still a shock. She doesn't know how to dive. (She has never been to an ocean, or a river, or a pond.) She doesn't know how to pierce the water. It creates more pain, adds it to her towering tally, and then that hideous total starts to account for the drain: the opening of the ravine took so much strength from a body which had very little to give. Between agony and sudden exhaustion, she comes very close to blacking out. But the water, colder than anything she has ever experienced (she does not know snow, only sees ice in drinks, has never stood within the drifting heart of winter), unites with earth pony endurance and durability, helps to prevent that final degree of mercy. It all combines to keep her awake, lets her have full awareness that she is no longer tumbling through the air, but doing so underwater and cascading down the flow of the fast-moving river.

Still lost, still helpless, still broken and about to die, but now that condition exists in a somewhat denser medium, one she cannot breathe. She is also still tumbling, and her body momentarily inverts. The necklace, her most constant companion in life, never to be removed until the day the Great Work was complete, falls away, hits the riverbed. One chaos pearl is dislodged from its cradle, catches against a projection of rock: the rest rushes away.

She is being swept along with the current, and it will take her underground. She is trying to reach the surface, but she can't get oriented, she's in too much pain and shock to find her way and she never learned how to swim. She has seconds in which to find air before she will be in a place where all that waits above her is rock, perhaps a minute beyond that before the water fills her lungs and she drowns --

-- but the song is still resounding, that desperate verse not yet fully answered. And so a wedge of rock wells up from below, contacts her body, pushes it to air and a Sun she has never seen and life.

The tilt of the extruded plane sends her rolling down to a riverbank which has known less than twelve seconds of existence -- then, with the question answered and a way out awaiting that once-silent daughter, sinks back down.

She spends some time in coughing up water, more in mindless pawing at her neck while trying to reconcile the absence of something which had always been there. Endless seconds in trying to figure out what had just happened as the pain crashes through her, does its best to distort the music which arises from the land itself. And there are more kinds of agony than that of whatever's happening within her (still happening, never ending, always and forever changing). There is the arrival of a brand-new sense, something which had been blocked from her for a lifetime until the manifestation of the mark --

-- her mark. She... has a mark. She knows it (and doesn't understand how, can't think about it just yet). And she is still broken. She isn't an alicorn (and there is the agony of failure, something which has yet to fade). She hurts more than she ever has in her life and she doesn't understand why. There is stone below her prone form and it gives her a place to try and center, for stone is what she knows. But instead of stone above her, there are green things along the edges of the split -- trees, they have to be trees -- and the too-bright light and sky, that's the sky added to feel and the rushing noise from the river and a song previously unheard trying to find a place within her senses...

She vomits. Several times. It is the least possible reaction to the utter sensory overwhelm. So many minds would have broken then and there, with others temporarily shutting down in an attempt to escape. She does not.

It hurts... Words far too small to describe the fire burning her from within, but they are all she has. It hurts...

She doesn't know where she is. She doesn't know what happened to him. (She tried to protect him, she knows she did.) She only knows that she failed. She has her mark. She isn't an alicorn. She doesn't understand why she's in pain.

So she looks at the mark (with her desperate stare needing to travel across an increased distance, something she's just barely starting to register) and does so at the exact moment the smallest fraction of a growing wingtip begins to push against the skin.

It will be three minutes before the screaming stops, and there is only Sun and world to hear.

He had told her... that she'd had a horn when it happened. That it was the greatest feat of unicorn magic he'd ever heard of. It had been his opinion that it might have only been possible because of the True Surge: so many ponies were strongest at the moment of the mark's arrival. But he had accepted that she'd done it...

...with a horn.

He had told her that her recollections were confused, first from pain and then from drugs. (He'd never really said anything about disorientation, not even after she'd admitted how many hours she'd spent flinching at the sounds of the simplest breezes.) He had said she'd had a horn, and... no matter how many times she went over it, tried to remember... there was only the voice, and that had not been the one he was still waiting for her to hear.

He's right. He must be right. He's always...

But she couldn't remember it that way.

Hours in this room. Hours to spend in reading, in agony, in failure, and she was so tired of failing. Of thinking about what she had done to him. Of everything which had come from it.

I shattered his life.

Twice.

I just wanted to give him something...

...no. She couldn't go over that again, not immediately after thinking about the fall. She had to think about something else...

...there were so many ponies in that room.

Admittedly, there were ways in which it would make for a rather monotonous memory, assuming she ever got to make one again. (A new wave of pain, entirely comprised of crashing emotions, all crested by guilt.) There had been more ponies at the burnout, with fur and mane and (for some) feathers and horns out in the open. She'd even spotted a few broken ones. There had been so many colors... and at the conference, but for those at the front of the audience, it had only been robes and eyes.

That, at least for variety, made the scene at the burnout (her fault, forever hers) into a much more interesting sort of memory. But there were other things about the conference which made her reluctant to think about capturing it.

There had been eyes, just about nothing but eyes. And the way they had been looking at her... she didn't know what that look was. She didn't know what the rest of the expression looked like, not when it had been hidden under those robes -- and yet, somehow, that grouped stare had been familiar.

The eyes had been bad enough. It had been made worse by the sound of a voice she had wished to never hear again. And that still hadn't been as horrific as the six among the audience whose faces she'd fully been able to see.

Those who had rejected her.

They won't help.

There were so many kinds of hurt, and she seemed to be going through every last one of them.

"Not on your terms." She doesn't understand that he's right. He must have told them about so much, he must have told them about me and what happened and... she didn't listen. She didn't care. I thought...

Her right hind leg spasmed: it took a few seconds before she could make herself continue.

...I thought she understood.

And then the pink one...

(The hue... it had still been pink. But there had been something different about the shade, she was almost sure of that. A change to the mane and tail? Something...)

...what she said...

And just like that, she'd brought it back. The words she didn't want to think about. A statement she would have given so much to never hear echoing within her mind again.

"If he ever loved you at all... then he wouldn't have loved you for what he thought you should have been, he would have loved you for who you are..."

The sentence seemed to have a certain mobility. It raced through her mind, kicking at everything it could find.

He loves me.

That had been the first lesson.

The pink one's voice faded, just for a moment. Older words took the stage, sentences she'd heard time and time again. They might have even been the first words to ever have been spoken to her and over the years, they had lost the cadence of speech, becoming something much closer to a poem.

I love you
I love you, and so you will love me too
In spite of what you did, I love you
You killed your mother and I love you still
You are broken...

Her eyes squeezed shut. Tears began to run down her face, but fur was not glass: the little rivers were quickly absorbed by strands which darkened with moisture -- and then darkened further still, as blue continued its relentless march towards deepest purple.

I killed my mother and he loved me.

I was broken and he loved me.

He told me I didn't have to stay broken. That if we succeeded, nopony would ever have to...

I failed him.

Please let me --

No. She couldn't let herself think that way. They would find a new place. There would be different theories. Something which would work.

...this was supposed to work.

Her fault. Her failure. Hers.

She had spent her life in failure, simply through the curse of her existence. And then she had extended it.

There was the quilt...

It had been such a small thing -- and like everything in her life, it had been a reminder. She didn't even know why she was thinking about that, unless all of the failures were trying to line up within her mind while failing to recognize any kind of proper order. She hadn't thought about the quilt in years, and refused to do it now. A small thing, and it had taken hours for those tears to stop.

Something else. Think about anything else. Anything.

She tried to read the book. It quickly proved to be a good one, and just as rapidly taught her that with everything which was churning within, she was incapable of focusing on it for more than three sentences at a time.

Something else.

I... just wanted to give him something. And that's why I failed. That has to be it.

I -- don't know if I can ever make a memory again. If I ever should. (And with that thought, her soul hurt.) Not when it led to this.

But there's still... something I can give him. The thing he wants...

She wanted it too. She longed for it. She'd had dreams, and they had been channeled in exactly the wrong direction. She had to try again, to do it his way.

I'll try. Maybe it'll work.

Please let it work.

One thing. Please let me do one thing for him. One thing right.

She closed her eyes, all the better to block out the endless distraction which existed within the lightning. Flattened her ears as best she could: it didn't do much to stop the thunder, but she had nothing else to block them with -- well, technically, she could start ripping up books or tear up the couch, but... there was hospitality and even with a place she would never return to, which the host was about to abandon, there was being a good guest.

Star Swirl said... to look inside. To listen with my soul...

He had said that and from what had been passed on, there had been very little about the how.

Still, she tried. She delved down into the dark as best she could. Pain followed her, trotted at her side as that new most constant companion, locked its jaw around her tail and tried to pull her back. But this was for him, and so she gritted her teeth (which felt as if they might fracture) and forced herself to go on.

Down into the darkness. But... it felt as if it was simply the darkness which came from having her eyes shut. There were moments when it was broken by little flashes of light and color, but those could have simply been the result of having her eyes shut tightly, something which grew all the worse as the pain built and surged. As a filly, she had learned that putting pressure on her closed lids could produce the appearance and sensation of racing down a geometric checkerboard tunnel, something which had provided hours of entertainment during the times when she could study no longer and there was very little else to do. Her delving wasn't even producing that much.

But she had to try.

Hello?

Silence.

He said... that after it happened, I would be able to feel you. I know it went wrong. I know I failed, and... maybe that's why I can't do it. But you should be there. You have to be there. He said so. He...

...are you mad at me? Because I failed? Are you there and not letting me feel you, hiding, because you...

...please don't hate me.

I already hate mys --

-- please. Just once.

Something.

Anything.

So I know you're there.

I've been waiting all my life and

you have so many reasons to hate me

everypony does

they won't help me and I'm making him run and I shattered his life again

you have more reasons to hate me than anypony, and -- maybe that's why you're hiding. But even after what I did, he loved me and I hoped -- I prayed -- I wanted you to --

I don't deserve to live

I don't deserve to be loved

"If he ever loved you at all..."

And so she failed again.