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Bullet With Alicorn Wings

by ToixStory

Chapter 1: 1 - Nascence

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There was a field with a small hill at the top, and on that hill was a vast tree whose limbs stretched out far enough that the entire hill was buried in shade against the hot summer sun. Flowers in the field colored the stretch of countryside in reds and blues, periwinkles and violets, until it was as if a rainbow had laid down to rest from the heat of the day. The flowers stretched from the base of the tree out to the train tracks that cut through the middle of the vast plain.

I had found the tree many years and journeys before, and somehow always came back to it. Its leaves were familiar to me, and the patterns of its bark like hairs on my coat. It was an old tree, I knew that. How old, I wasn’t entirely sure. All I knew was that whatever time I came to it in, it always seemed to be there, waiting for me.

I dreamed of it sometimes, when I was far from anywhere I had ever known, lost in a different time and place. It was comforting to me, not just because it was pretty, but because it was constant. The kind of life I lived, in which everything else was temporary, desired a constant, longed for one. Outside of myself and what I had with me, all I had was the tree.

When I came to it once more, it was almost too good to be true that I saw it again. My hooves ached and half of my face was numb from where it had been burnt. The red cloak that I wrapped myself in was frayed. It had taken almost all of my strength to jump out of the train I had taken, so by the time I reached the tree I felt as if I couldn’t move any longer.

I collapsed beneath the spreading oak, and my eyes shut. It had been early in the morning when I reached the tree, but by the time I woke again it was in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t wake up on my own, however. It was only a steady tapping on my head that brought me back to the land of the living.

“Equestria to Twilight, are you there? You’ve got a very worried draconequus out here that doesn’t share your fondness for boring old trees.”

I opened my eyes to find myself face to face with Discord, or, at least, the form he now took. His body was made up of a tattoo pattern that was eternally attached to my side, though he could stretch himself off at will. Despite his appearance, his voice maintained the same whiny tone he always had.

“Well now I’m awake,” I said, sitting up. “Was there a reason I have to be right this minute?”

Discord crossed his stubby arms. “No need to be rude, Twilight. You were the one who told me to keep an eye on you once you got here.”

“I did?”

“I’m not sure whether I should be amused or insulted that you don’t remember.”

I rubbed my head and sat up. Fluffy white clouds danced across a bright blue sky above me, which was nice to look at but did absolutely nothing to block out the sun, whose glare threatened to blind me. My mane was frayed in every direction, so I patted it down while I talked.

“Well I’ve been through a lot in the past few days, so maybe lay off a little?” I said. “I’m surprised we even made it here in one piece.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised we made it out of that fire in one piece. I’m not entirely sure our immortality applies to fatal injuries.”

I winced. The fire. I had spent three days on a cross-country train ride trying to forget about it. Even so, I could still feel the heat on my skin, and the smoke filling my lungs. That had been a dark night, and a very stupid one for me.

“Yes, well, we did, and we’re here now, so let’s try to forget about it, alright?”

Discord twisted himself in the air to look down at me. “I would hope that doesn’t include forgetting why we rode out this far. Or are you going back on your word so soon?”

“I’m not.”

“Then tell me what you’re here to do. Repeat it back.”

I leaned against the tree and closed my eyes. “Leave me alone.”

Even inside my own head, though, I wasn’t alone. His essence was inside me, and his voice could reach into my mind. It wasn’t exactly my favorite part of the arrangement, but I didn’t have a choice and hadn’t had one for a century, all told.

His voice came into my head: PLEASE, PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU DIDN’T DRAG ME ALL THE WAY TO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE TO NOT GO THROUGH WITH IT.

I responded, I didn’t say that.

YOU IMPLIED IT.

Well I’m sorry if I’m having second thoughts. Are we really sure this is the best idea? My last big idea nearly cooked the both of us alive.

WELL WE LIVED AND SHE DIDN’T, SO NOW WE’RE HERE. UNLESS YOU THINK BACKING OUT IS REALLY THE MOST BECOMING MOVE FOR A PRINCESS.

Former Princess.

I sighed and opened my eyes. There was no use debating in my head with him, since his uncomfortably-warm voice tended to overwhelm mine if I gave him the chance.

“Alright, we’ll keep going. I only wanted to stop here to rest anyway. We’ll tell him,” I said.

“Tell him what?”

I sighed. “I’ll tell Mr. Dale that I couldn’t save his wife.”


After I had spent some more time at the tree, and had seen the next train coming from across the plain, I trotted across the wide meadow toward the tracks. The flowers reached up and brushed themselves against my underside, which left me smiling for the first time in several days. I hadn’t needed to come to the meadow, and in fact it was a detour from the town I was to go to. But at the same time, it was a place to calm my mind and rest, and it had done its job well.

Now, though, I watched as the train approached, coming steadily down the plain. It was a model run on oil instead of magic or coal, so I knew the year to be roughly six hundred years after Luna’s return, but I was never quite sure. I didn’t check calendars much anymore, and newspapers were hard to come by unless I looked for them.

“I don’t think that train will be slow enough to jump on,” Discord said. “Unless you time it perfectly enough that we don’t end up as a skidmark.”

I shook my head. “I’m not going to jump. I’ll teleport onboard.”

“With the condition your horn is in? I’d rather risk jumping.”

“I’ll be fine.”

At least, I hoped I would be. My horn was among the list of things that I hadn’t had time to repair on my body, and possibly the most vital. Since the fire, it had been all about running and hiding, trying to keep myself hidden from anypony who saw me, so I hadn’t had much time for it to heal. I hoped it would hold up for a simple spell, but if it didn’t I would find out very quickly.

The engine blew past me on the tracks, carrying gusts of warm air laced with the smell of oil in its wake. I watched silo cars pass by, as well as a few tanker carriages. Teleporting inside those would have been even more of a disaster than jumping in front of the train. The box cars followed, though, and it was those that I watched closely.

Not all were empty, so I had to judge which ones would be alright to teleport into. My heart sank to my stomach with a dull thud when car after car was full and its doors closed. I could hear Discord humming to himself like he always did when he was right but wasn’t going to say it out loud, even though I knew what it meant.

Then, a row of box cars passed with their doors opened, and I smiled. I focused on a car in the middle, a big, brown box. The spell itself came to me without any effort after knowing it for so long, so all I had to do was concentrate on my destination and let my magic do the rest.

My horn took longer than usual to spark up, but when it did I felt magic course through me, and where I had been standing on a soft tuft of grass a moment before, I found myself inside the box car. Unfortunately, I found myself to be standing on the roof. It took a moment for the magic to wear off, and then I fell to the floor with a crash and a startled moan from myself

Discord laughed, which was an odd feeling while he was still attached to my cheek. “Well, it seems we made it here in one piece, more or less. At least, I hope this isn’t what the afterlife looks like.”

“Do you always have to be so sarcastic?” I asked.

“My therapist tells me it’s how I handle stress,” he said. “Then again, I am my own therapist so what do I know?

I shook my head and ignored him. He had been on edge since the fire, and for a day had even refused to talk to me. I never thought I would have missed him until he wasn’t there, honestly. I was never entirely sure what he was going to do, and now since he had come back I was even less sure.

The ride to the town we were headed for—Edham, the medical examiner had told me—was going to be a long one, I knew, so I settled against one of the back walls of the box car. While the countryside of western Equestria passed by outside, I undid my cloak and laid it on the floor in front of me.

It was a gift from a time long ago—longer now than it seemed—made of the finest red fabric, weaved out of zebra-spun cotton and embroidered with a golden weave made of silk. It was light as a feather but strong as chainmail, and imbued with more magic than the average unicorn. It was also, sadly, in disrepair after so much time and the fire.

I stuck my tongue out of the side of my mouth and ran my hooves over the fabric. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the fabric spells Rarity had tried to teach me, back in my old life, in Ponyville. Celestia, had it been so long?

“Are you . . . petting your cape?” Discord asked.

“It’s not a cape, it’s a cloak,” I said, “and I’m trying to remember a spell to fix it, since I don’t think we could find a seamstress with enough talent to fix this without some money.”

“Are you sure you should be trying more magic after the teleportation?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

He stopped talking, though he did start humming again, which I had to fight to ignore. It was especially difficult to concentrate on the spell, and I had to borrow a little of the memory from our shared consciousness. I didn’t like dipping into that well, but most of my magic had been shared between us when we had been joined together.

It was odd, reaching my mind into a swirling vortex of chaos and magic, but experience had let me shield my mind against it in all but the most dangerous and stressful situations. I got the spell, and focused my mind on the cloak. I used the spell to feel the threads and how they ran over each other and meshed together in a matrix of cotton and silk.

Now, the hard part was melding the whole thing back again, to make the cloak go from a tattered mess to brand new all over again. It was also the part I was most unfamiliar with. Making something out of nothing was exactly as it sounded, magic or no. Even with a framework I could use, it was difficult. Even still, I could feel the spell start to work and my horn light up.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the exertion. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was using a spell I hadn’t in a very long time or because of the condition my horn was in, but I could feel my strength draining from me. I opened my eyes just enough to see if I was getting close to finishing, but right as I did my strength gave out and there was a loud pop.

For a moment, I felt weightless, then everything went black.


I woke up to the feeling of being dragged across the floor of the train car. It was not a pleasant feeling, as my thinning coat was slid across sharp pieces of wood that threatened to give me splinters and half a dozen kinds of infections, I was sure. I tried, on instinct, to pull myself away, but was only given a slap for my trouble.

My eyes opened to see Discord having detached himself almost all the way from my body, and was wiggling in the air to drag me toward the edge of the car. I almost yelled at him if he was trying to kill us, but then I realized we weren’t moving and I could see buildings outside. So, I stood up and bumped him on the back of his tattoo head.

“You could have just woken me up,” I said.

“Well I wanted to save myself the trouble,” he said. “You ponies and your sleep . . . I wasn’t so hard to wake up when they dug me out of stone twice!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

I grumbled and hopped off the train onto a long stretch of gravel below. The town we had arrived in was small enough that all it had was a single train station that stood away from the rest of the buildings. The roads were at least paved, though, and the houses seemed to have electricity. Most of them were whitewashed, clapboard homes centered around a main street that consisted of the bare minimum of a grocer, bank, city hall, and other random stores. By my best guess, there were maybe thirty ponies in the town all told, and probably as many out in the surrounding countryside on farms.

The sun beat down on the simple community, and made me feel even more like an outsider. I reached back and grabbed my cloak from the train before it took off again, and tied it around myself. It didn’t look as frayed as before, but it had a long way to go before it looked new again.

“Ah, a sweet old town in the good old days. How quaint,” Discord said.

“You know that I lived in the good old days,” I said. “To me, this is high tech and fancy.”

“No, you lived in the days of mud and dirt, things that I don’t qualify as ‘good.’ I like my towns small but with enough running water to let me bathe for hours. Well, in your body.”

I might have felt a little more squick toward his ideas of personal space a century or two before, but I’d long ago become far too used to his presence to care if he made creepy jokes or not. Instead, I just ignored him and looked around the town from my position at the train station.

The only significant thing in the whole place was a large house on a hill that overlooked the town. It was probably the tallest thing for a hundred miles, I figured.

“Well, at least we know we’re in the right place,” I said. “That stallion that gave us directions said there was a big house on a hill.”

“Great, now did he say where Mr. Dale lived?”

“Well, no . . .”

“Then I guess I know where we should start.”

I sighed and started walking into town. A part of me that was larger than I wanted to admit was telling me to call the whole thing off and leave until I had another time skip, but I did my best to ignore it. In my years of traveling with him, Discord had rarely been so pushy to get me to do something, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what happened if he really wanted to get his way. There seemed to be a wall between his mind and my own, but I wasn’t about to test how fragile it was if he wanted to invade.

My hooves felt sore walking over the hard asphalt road that ran straight through the town, which a sign informed me was “Bridleburg.” I headed toward the grocer, since it seemed most likely that I could gather the whereabouts of Mr. Dale without causing too much suspicion.

Two seconds after I walked into the grocer, I realized that not causing suspicion wasn’t going to happen.

Over time, I had gotten used to my appearance of a scraggly traveler. I had a worn out cloak, a mane that had grown long and covered in split ends, scars all over my body, and Discord’s giant tattoo running from my face down to my right back hoof, which it curled around. To me, that was normal. To the ponies of Bridleburg, however, it seemed to be a bit of a shock.

All five ponies inside the cramped store stopped to stare at me once I had come in. It probably didn’t help that, as an alicorn, I stood a head taller than most of them. I suppose a giant, scar-covered mare walking into your store would frighten you, so I had to give them the benefit of the doubt in that situation. I was glad that I had learned long ago how to magically hide my wings, and that Discord was smart enough to keep quiet.

I managed to sidestep my way from the front doors to the checkout counter that was, mercifully, empty. A mare with a curly, graying mane stood behind it. She was the only pony in the story that, after the shock, looked thoroughly unimpressed with me.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a drawling accent.

“Uh, yes,” I said. “I’m here to speak to a Mister, um, Under Dale. Do you know where I can find him?”

“You want to talk to Under Dale?”

“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind telling me where he is—”

She gave me a sour look. “He ain’t here. And before you ask, no, I don’t know where he’s gone. If you want to leave a note, his house is the one up on the hill.” She spat into a cup on the counter next to her. “Now if you don’t mind, Miss, I got customers.”

I stepped away from her counter in time for another pony to take my place with a bag full of food. My stomach made a few growling noises, but I ignored it. I didn’t technically have any money anyway, and I’d found out the hard way that I could go for a very long time without food if I needed to.

“Well, somehow I should have guessed that his house would be the one on the hill,” Discord said once we were safely away from the store. “A pity about him not being home, though. I suppose we’ll have to wait.”

“Right,” I said. “Just wait . . . for days or weeks or months.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, I do.” I started to walk up the road, toward the hill in the distance. “I’m going to break in.”

“Yes that’s very—what? You’re going to break in?” He was talking so fast that I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or yelling. “I’ve raised a monster! A beautiful, terrible monster that I, for once, didn’t make with magic! Oh, what a world!”

“Stop that before somepony hears you,” I said. “And drop the melodrama. This isn’t the day for it.”

“If you say so, princess.”

I let him simmer and walked up the road toward the hill. It wasn’t a very long journey, but in the heat of the sun and in my weakened state, I was much more tired by the time I got to the top than I rightly should have been. There was a white picket fence around the large house at the top of the hill. It had a gravel driveway that led to a two story garage separate from the house. The home itself was the kind with a wing to one side that resembled a castle tower that stretched up for three stories. It was painted yellow.

I took a small jump over the fence, then paused before walking across the green lawn. “Are you really sure that this is the best idea?” I asked. “Do we really need to be the ones to tell him this?”

“Twilight, don’t start that again,” Discord said. “You know it has to be done.”

“Yeah, but—”

He sighed. “For all the time I’ve known you, you spent most of it drifting almost lifelessly through time and space. Even I felt like I was withering away. You made a mistake, sure, but that shouldn’t stop you from picking yourself up again and getting out of that rut.” He chuckled. “There is a mind beneath my jokes, you know.”

Now you tell me,” I said under my breath, taking a few steps toward the front door. The soft grass felt like a welcome relief under my hooves, and for a moment I just wanted to stand there, close my eyes, and take it in. However, I didn’t want to be seen by the townsponies below, so I kept walking to the front door and peered inside.

The house was dark and, to my surprise, just about barren on the inside. I saw little sign of furniture, or even of the place having been lived in. I was beginning to wonder if the mare in the grocer had just been pulling my saddle, but I figured I could use a rest anyway, so I walked around to the back.

It wouldn’t have been the first time I, Twilight Sparkle, once a proper and respected pony, had broken into a house for food, so by that point I was past shame over it. For the most part, anyway.

I rounded the back of the house and stepped onto the front porch. There was a large screen door protecting one with a giant glass panel on it. Easy. All it would take was one good kick and—

“Excuse me, but what are you doing here?”

For a moment, my heart felt like it was freezing in my chest, though I knew that wasn’t actually possible. I turned to see a pony sitting in a wicker chair, staring off into the fields at the bottom of the hill behind his house. He had a long, maroon mane that brushed against his gray cheek.

“Is there any particular reason you’re sneaking around my house?” he asked.

“Oh, uh, I assume you’re Mr. Under Dale, then?” I asked.

“I am, and just who exactly are you?”

“I’m just a traveler, stopping through. I came on the train and I stopped here and saw your house, so I came up here to have a look.”

He smiled at me. “Ah, so a traveling burglar, eh? Don’t get too many of them around these parts.” When I tried to reply, he waved his hoof at me. “No, no, don’t bother. I won’t be reporting you to the sheriff. To tell the truth, it’s been so long since I’ve had a visitor that I’m almost happy to see you.”

I sighed and didn’t even bother trying to refute him. “I didn’t mean any harm. Really.”

“I’m inclined to believe you, seeing as you haven’t tried to overpower me so far,” he said. “If you are to continue that, I might be persuaded to offer you a seat. Like I said, I don’t get many visitors.”

He patted the seat next to him and, after a moment, I took it. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to at that moment, but it felt like a good idea. The chair was warm from the sun beating down on it, and the wood slats were spaced apart evenly in such a way that laying down on them made me not want to get up ever again.

It also had the side-effect of keeping me from wanting to tell him anything at all about his wife. I didn’t want to ruin the moment, or somehow anger him to the point that the day was ruined. Why did I pick a beautiful day to ruin his life? The way the sun shone on the rolling hills of grass made me want to say nothing at all and, somehow, all the bad would go away.

YOU KNOW IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT.

I know.

Still, I took my time. Just in case that it would work.

“I built that house myself, you know,” Under Dale told me. “I started when I was a young stallion, back before I was even married. I lived in a little shack that was next to the house while I built it. Ten years, it took me. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”

I shook my head. “Ten years? How did you keep going for that long?”

“Because some things are easy to do, and some are a gradual process that you might not see the end of for a long time, but you have to know it’s there.”

He lay back in his chair then, like he was content with what he had said and didn’t expect me to add to it. I didn’t want to, either. He looked so peaceful, so calm . . . he didn’t deserve this. His wife hadn’t either. Just that thought, though, reminded me that I really had to do it.

“You know, I really didn’t come here to break in,” I said.

“Oh, is that so?”

“I came here for you, actually. To . . . talk.”

His lips hardened into a straight line. “About my wife, right?”

“How did you—”

“There wouldn’t be any other reason to come talk to an old geezer like me, my dear.” He laughed softly and crossed his hooves over his chest. “I found out a few days ago. It broke my heart it did. I grieved and I cried, but that’s over now. I won’t cry or scream, if that’s what you were expecting.”

I blinked. “Well, it wasn’t exactly that. Yes, it was about your wife and her, um, passing, but it was more specific than that. I was there.”

“The night she died?” he asked in a neutral voice.

“Well, it was in the day, but yes,” I said. “I was with her, at the last. I was trying to . . . save her. There was a fire in the building, but most ponies were outside, except your wife—I couldn’t get to her in time.”

He was silent for a little while, but eventually nodded. “I see.”

“I can go, if you like. I just wanted to say I was sorry that I couldn’t rescue her.”

“Were you . . . were you with her when she died?”

“I got to her side right before she died, yes.”

A soft wind blew in from over the plains and up the hill the house stood on, washing over the both of us in a small cacophony of warmth. It whipped my mane around my face, covering up the burn scars, if only for a little while. I could see it blew a few tears out of Under Dale’s eyes. What surprised me was when a smile slipped itself onto his face. “Thank you, Miss Burglar. Knowing somepony was there with her in the last moments, that she wasn’t alone . . . that really is something.”

“But I didn’t save her.”

“No hero has ever won every battle, Miss. I couldn’t hate you for trying.”

I looked down. “She knew I was coming, and I’ve just been thinking that, maybe, that kept her from trying to get out herself. That I failed her.”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “Who knows what happened? I loved that mare more than life itself, but I can’t blame you for trying to save her. I would have wanted you to, if only for that hope.”

“I’m not a hero,” I said. “I shouldn’t have tried.”

He got up out of his chair and looked down at me. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, Miss Burglar. I’ve seen good ponies and I’ve seen bad, and I’ve seen heroes come and go. What separates a hero from a regular pony is that they are willing to get up and try again and again, even if they fail, to try and make this world a better place.” He coughed. “Now, maybe it’s none of my business, but you came all the way out here from Manehattan to apologize for trying to do the right thing, so I’ve at least got to talk some sense into you.”

I bit my lip. “You don’t understand, though,” I said. “I tried to be a hero because of me, because I wanted to feel good about my life. And I even failed that.”

“But you still, at the end of the day, tried to do good, and that counts for something.” He smiled. “Hey, you’ve got to try a little, and nothing is forever. Maybe I won’t ever see you again, but you did me a little good today. You might want to think about that.”

He stretched and looked around. The sun was starting to dip a little bit off in the distance and, to me, he looked to be very tired. “I’m sorry if I got a little wordy,” he said, “a lifetime as a circuit speaker will do that to you. I just hope you remember what I said.” He paused, then added: “And thank you, Miss Burglar.”

I stood and watched as he turned and went inside his house, sliding the door shut behind him. I didn’t move for a little while after that. Then, when I did, I took off in a gallop down the far side of the hill, away from the town. My hooves pounded through the tall grass, and my heart beat fast in my chest. It was a rush of adrenaline, and it spurred me on. The cloak around my neck whipped around me like—though I would never admit it to Discord—a cape.

When I had finally gotten winded, I came to a stop, far out in the middle of the field where Under Dale’s house was a speck in the distance. While I started to pant, Discord chose that moment to come back to life.

“Feeling better?” he asked, waving his hands in the air. “I should really start billing you for these therapies, you know. My advice doesn’t come cheap.”

“Okay, okay, you were right,” I said, “but not just for that reason. I think it was the . . . honesty.”

“What, like those silly old Elements of Harmony? I thought you gave them up. Not that I can blame you, after feeling the blunt end of them, I don’t exactly trust them.”

I watched the sun set off in the distance and the streaks of purple and red light that flowed across the field. “Maybe it’s time I start again,” I said. “I’ve spent hundreds of years doing nothing. I may have failed once in trying to help ponies, but maybe I can figure out a way to get this right. It’s at least worth a shot.”

He chuckled. “Whatever you say, princess. At least whatever happens next won’t be boring.”

Next Chapter: 2 - Levity Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 5 Minutes
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