The cool breeze was soothing to Talib's headache. Out here in the Ponyville hills, the breeze was reliably, preternaturally cool; he supposed Cloudsdale had organised it that way. Early autumn was one of his favourite times; a hard, cold sunlight and cool breeze. The endless sea of green stretched out in every direction from the little dirt road, rolling and roiling like a gentle swell under scudding clouds. Possibly for the first time since his injury, Talib felt not the slightest bit irritable. Probably a good thing, he thought, ruefully, Trixie doesn't brook peevishness. But he'd worry about her when he got there. Right here, right now, everything was fine.

Earlier this morning, his parents had handed down their verdict. They'd asked interminable questions about his experiments, but not from scientific curiosity - they wanted to know how many plots he had, how far into the forest, whether any dangerous creatures were known to hunt nearby, how long until he would be done, how much time he'd have to spend out there. After having earlier woken up in a cold sweat from that nightmare - or vision, as he was now beginning to think of them - and reliving it with Bianca, he had been exhausted and nervy. Preoccupied, too, since she had planted the seed of a thought in his mind, something about water, but for the life of him Talib couldn't pin down the slippery insight. But he'd put on a pleasant face and answered his parents' question as directly as he could. Hayfa hadn't been there to back him up, to reassure them, but ultimately they'd consented. His heart had leapt. They would allow him to finish his experiments under strict conditions. He was not to spend a single instant in the Forest without either Old Sim or Hayfa - or Sifir, as Ghaliya still called her in front of Melaco - by his side. Talib had nearly leapt for joy.

"But not for at least a week," his father had sternly intoned. "No Forest just yet - you stay here, and you don't set hoof inside the Everfree, hear? And if - if - Nurse Redheart says you're mended at the end of that week, then we will allow you to finish up your experiments. But you're on curfew until further notice, young colt."

Talib's shoulders slumped a little. "As punishment, you mean? Or bedrest?"

"Either," said his father, sternly.

"Both," said Ghaliya, without a hint of a smile.

Talib saw Trixie's travelling stage-caravan-thingy come into view over the horizon. He'd decided to push his luck, and as well as allowing him to go to the library with Hayfa, and continue light carving duties at Old Sim's, his parents had allowed him to come out here and collect the devices he'd ordered. It was rest day, after all, and he wasn't allowed to help with the usual Sunday chores until he'd healed a little more. The curfew came into effect at twilight, and Talib promised to be back well before that. He'd relished the chance to get out of the house.

As he got closer, Talib saw that Trixie was already outside, starry cape and hat nowhere to be seen - just sitting on the lowered tailgate of her caravan, chewing a long grass stalk and staring at the cold sky. Her expression was pensive, and she hadn't noticed him yet. Out here, in the middle of this endless, gently undulating grassy plain, Talib thought he had never seen a lonelier sight in his life. He wondered whether it was simple haughtiness, so different from how he saw her just now, which kept her away from the friendly ponies of Ponville. Or something else.

She spotted him, and hastily spat out the stalk.

"So!" she declaimed, springing into a pose, instantly theatrical, "you have returned to seek the wares of the great and powerful Trixie, as discussed!"

"Hi, Trixie," Talib said. After seeing her just now, he couldn't bring himself to stroke her ego like before. Besides, he was tired after the walk, and she'd already made what he wanted. He assumed.

Trixie looked put out by the lack of deference. "Do not 'hi Trixie' me, pathetic Earth pony! You would not wish to- what is that on your head?" She looked guarded, nonplussed.

Talib frowned, and raised a hoof to feel. Oh, of course. "A dressing," he said. "I was attacked by a timberwolf the other day. Nurse Redheart says I have a concussion."

Trixie was silent a while. It was a strange experience to have her frowning at his forehead. He could almost feel the heat of her gaze, tickling…

No, wait, he thought, that really is tickling…

"You're bleeding through," she said curtly. "Must be the exertion of the walk." She sighed, beckoned, relaxing her bombastic style a little. "Come inside, then."

Talib followed her into the dim interior of her covered wagon. He noticed, as before, the much-mended nature of the place, but this second visit gave him a new appreciation for the place. It didn't seem fusty and run-down anymore. It felt cosy. A small coal fire burnt quietly in a cast-iron corner stove, near a folding chair. The cold wind outside - refreshing when walking - threatened to chill the bones at rest, and the solid walls faithfully kept it out. The narrow, all-purpose bench running around the inside of those walls was empty and clean, everything put away neatly except for a couple of books which were clearly in frequent use. Signs of repair abounded, but they reminded Talib of Old Sim's style - careless of appearance, wishing only to do the job with minimal cost, effort and upkeep. He'd never considered their similarities until now.

Trixie drew some curtains, letting in the weak, grey autumn light, and opened a drawer with her magic. A gauzy cloth and some scissors emerged.

"Sit," she commanded, and he did, in the folding chair by the fire. She peered at his dressing and carefully unwrapped the bandages, then gently remove the pad to inspect the wound. Talib knew it looked ugly, but Trixie didn't seem to react at all. He felt her dabbing and pressing and re-dressing abstractedly. She was close, and he could feel her warm breath flowing over his ear and temple. He felt an echo of that fluttering which Applejack and, to a lesser extent, Zecora evoked in him. That's it, he thought, ruefully, I'm doomed. I definitely have a thing for strong mares.

Or maybe you just need to get out more.

Trixie stepped back and began cleaning up, declaring herself finished but ordering him to stay seated for a while, to allow the bleeding to stop. "Should be in bed," she muttered, "idiot." Talib silently wondered how she'd become so competent at first aid. All those years travelling by herself, he thought. I guess she's had a few scrapes, seen a few things. But Trixie's mien did not invite enquiries. Talib looked around the mobile cabin, but saw no memorabilia. That same sense of unutterable loneliness.

"Well," she said eventually, striking a hooves-on-hips pose in front of him, "that's that. As a completely inadequate token of your gratitude, you will walk slowly on your way home, and refrain from bleeding through the Great and Powerful Trixie's fresh dressings."

"Thanks, Trixie," said Talib, sheepish.

She snorted. "Now, as long as Trixie has a captive audience, she might as well present to your pitiful mind the genius of her devices. No doubt her efforts to achieve the impossible will, as usual, go unappreciated."

Talib sat silently as Trixie opened one of the many cupboards lining the trailer. Out came dozens of small cardboard boxes, floating gracefully on the pale-blue luminescence of her magic. She directed all but one onto the bench. This last hovered between them, lid opening, and from it emerged a simple little contraption. It was a little cube made of some kind of honey-golden wood. Talib was learning to identify most lumber by its colour and grain, but this didn't appear to be anything that grew near Ponyville. A small vertical axle supported a kind of fan - both copper - oriented flat against the cube, like helicopter blades. On one side, the edges of three stacked copper discs protruded through the cube, engraved with numbers. The other sides were covered with sigils Talib didn't recognize, crudely carved into the wood and filled with a kind of waxy substance. As he watched the device hovering in the glow of Trixie's magic, one of the discs was slowly but visibly rotating, numbers climbing higher.

"You couldn't possibly grasp the theory," Trixie declared, although Talib was pretty sure he could, "but in the simplest terms; a magical field will cause the discs to rotate. The top one spins fastest, then the second, then the third. The more magic is present," and here the glow intensified, "the faster the wheels will spin. Just wind them to zero to reset it - they move freely."

"What units do the dials report?" asked Talib. He wasn't aware of any other methods for measuring magic, let alone standardised units.

Trixie hesitated, not quite following. "It's in… I mean… the numbers are right there!" She gave him a hard look, like he was the one who didn't understand. "Look," she said, exasperated, "it's simple. You know Rainbow Dash?"

Now Talib really was confused. He nodded, frowning and cautious.

"You've seen her with Tank, her tortoise? That flying helicopter thingy that Twilight rigged up for him, powered by magic? Well, it's like that. Except the Great and Powerful Trixie has used her incomprehensibly advanced magical understanding to allow it to take power from any nearby magic, not just what is deliberately given to it."

Talib nodded to show he'd understood and calm her down. He considered adding a few audible signs of amazement, but decided that would be pandering. At the back of his brain, however, a small, hushed voice was trying to get his attention.

It draws any magic, the voice was saying, urgently. Something like this, scaled way up…

Talib didn't think Trixie had considered all the applications. He wanted to know how she'd done it, but decided that could wait. A device that siphoned off ambient magic, for power of even just to harmlessly dissipate it, could be rather useful.

Or very, very dangerous, said the little voice. It really depends, doesn't it?

There is a dead story, no longer told.

I found it in a ruined and forgotten library, deep within the Everfree Forest. In those ancient days, when some anonymous scribe recorded it there, this tale was already old and dying.

A story that old, of course, does not concern Ponyville. Nor does it concern the gigantic Everfree Forest. No, it hails from beyond the far edge of the Forest, many days' journey, in the distant Night Mountains.

There, the tale goes, the peaks are different. Squeezed and close and cramped, stacked and looming crazily over one another in a most un-mountain-like fashion. They shade one another, like a forest of impossible stone trees, racing to out-grow one another and bathe their canopies of rock in the sunlight above.

It is always dark, walking through the Night Mountains. Climbing those sheer and overhanging cliffs is impossible, and so one travels through the gorges. The wanderer must pick their way carefully over a chaotic road of boulders, cast down from the heights above in their growing pains. Narrow, fragile ledges give way underfoot. A grinding, a deep earthen groaning is heard and the echoes of the gorges mask its source. Who can tell where the darkness of the midnight valleys ends, and the blackness of the cave begins?

And there are caves there, yes - the Night Mountains are riddled with them. Odd things live there, eyeless things, stranger even than the denizens of the Everfree.

Strangest of all, perhaps, by their very familiarity, are those which resemble ponies. The Nocturni, the Night-Kin, call these caves home. They know the sun; they fly with leathery wings to the basking peaks, but they do not like it.

What are they? Pony? Pegasus? Some strange chimera, the descendants of bats? Or perhaps they only appear to be ponies, and are something else entirely. Nopony can say. Certainly Princess Luna must know, for she rides with them across the night sky. But they speak to nopony, as though mute, and keep their own company as they guard our Princess, as silent as the night.

A most interesting tale. I wonder if there's anything to it. Were I able, I would make the journey and see for myself. Alas, Ghaliya is too young to travel. Well, it will make a good bedtime tale. Who knows? Perhaps one day my little Ghali will chase this down in my stead…

"Huh," Talib grunted, not quite sure what to make of the story. "I wonder if it's true."

Hayfa shrugged eloquently. They were seated on the ancient sofa in the little library at Sugarcane Farm, taking a break from his lessons in the Griffon language by reading through some of Baba Azhar's journals. Or rather, Hayfa was reading, translating from the original Griffon. She was not a born storyteller, that much was clear, but Talib hung on her every word, even - especially - when she cast her eyes to the ceiling, searching for the right translation. Baba Azhar's stories were fascinating.

"You know," Talib said slowly, thinking, "my dreams-"

"You mean visions," interrupted the griffoness.

Talib tensed slightly, uncomfortable. "I, uh, don't think- that is, we can't know… what makes do you…" he trailed off.

Hayfa shrugged again. "Call them as you will, pony, if that term makes you concerned for your sanity or dignity. Something in the Forest is calling to you, sending you a message." She looked out the little round window, onto the night sky. Talib couldn't be out after twilight, because of curfew, so Hayfa came to him. Her gaze was distracted. "It's not unheard-of. I've seen stranger things…"

Talib watched her a moment, wanting to ask what was on her mind, but he knew from previous experience it was useless to press her when she got like this. They'd spent most of the past week together, running through an immersion course in introductory Griffon, spending their time between Sugarcane Farm and Twilight's library. Now that the Ponyville ponies saw Hayfa more often, they were treating her less like an outcast. She ate with the Canes - who still knew her as Sifir - most evenings, and Talib could tell his parents were reassured by spending time with her and the ever-so-gradual lowering of her guard. Whenever Talib felt that the cerebral strain of learning a new language was getting too much, he'd go off to the workshop or Old Sim's place and do some wood carving. Talib was growing into a real appreciation of working with his hooves, being creative, making something tangible. He could hold it, be reassured by the incontrovertible reality of it, and marvel at the product of mind and material. That union - it nourished some part of him he hadn't known was starving.

Talib was definitely feeling better. Of course, he hadn't been permitted to install Trixie's magic-ometers at his experiments in the Forest, but Hayfa had done that - he'd drawn up maps and instructed her simply to place them in the centre of the plots, somewhere the blades could turn freely without being overgrown. He'd broken one, unfortunately, on his way to warehouse them at Old Sim's, where they would be closer to his experiments. There was no room in Sim's furiously messy cottage, of course, so Talib had decided to store them in the much-neater shed near the bonsai garden. Unfortunately one of the boxes had slipped from a pannier on his way across the garden and fallen into the little pool there, the one fed by a Forest stream in which he and Sim would bathe after the sauna. Talib had fished out the soggy cardboard box but the device inside was dripping wet, and wasn't turning in the low-level background magical field. He took it home and made a mental note to see if Trixie could fix it.

"Yes, well," he continued, awkwardly, after several minutes of silence from Hayfa, "uh, anyway, in my - dreams - there's always a sense of wings… leathery wings. I thought maybe it was something to do with the, you know."

"The dragon?" asked Hayfa, and Talib hurriedly shushed her, glancing nervously at the door. His parents would call them to dinner any moment.

"Yeah, uh, that. But what if it's not the…" he said something like mumbledragonmumble, and Hayfa raised a mischievous eyebrow. "What if it's these Night Kin, the Nocturnii?"

Hayfa frowned sceptically. "What," she asked, "as we say in the Griffin Kingdom, has that to do with the price of oats in Equestria?"

Now it was Talib's turn to shrug. "Just a thought."

"Dinner!" came the cry from the kitchen.

Farm talk always dominated dinner. The family sat around the casual table in the kitchen - Hayfa was not quite a guest any more, but somewhere on her way to becoming a friend of the family - and discussed, surrounded by slightly-battered cupboards and warmed by the oven. The events of the day were dissected, the weather reviewed, the progress of the farm chores updated. Plans for the weekend market were discussed: how to prioritise the space in the wagon, which pickles had finished fermentation. It was management by mealtime. The price of sugar or cane mulch. The talk was usually quiet and businesslike, murmurings in between passing the pepper or serving up seconds, and Talib kept expecting Hayfa to burst from boredom. But once the meeting wound to a close, the talk would liven up. Jokes would emerge, quietly at first, but eventually, most evenings, mirth held full sway.

The shop talk was petering out, and mint tea was on everybody's minds. A baking dish held the leftovers of a cheesy, herby potato bake with a crunchy breadcrumb crust, quietly going cold on the table. Beside it, a dish of roast Brussels sprouts, drizzled with a butter-pepper sauce, was nearly empty, everypony - and griffon - too polite to take the last spoonful. As usual, it would probably end up on Bianca's plate somehow. Scraps of coarse-crumbed bread were sponging plates clean. Soon the autumn mushrooms would be blooming - the only reason the other Canes ever ventured into the Everfree Forest - and meals in the cooling evenings would take a serious turn for the hearty.

"Derpy had some bad news today," said Ghaliya, signalling the official beginning of Gossip Time, like clockwork. She always made time to chat with the friendly mailmare. "She went round to Spud Farm yesterday - seems Mr. and Mrs. Tater had a dreadful fire. Burnt their barn and little cottage right to the ground. We'll all be helping with the rebuilding, of course." She looked pointedly at Talib. "You too, young colt. Talk with Old Sim about getting some timber cheap, will you?"

Several replies fought for primacy.

"So I'm well enough for work again?" he asked, innocently.

"Did you really think we'd fall for that?" asked his father, smiling quietly. "You can go back into the Forest when you get a clean bill of health from Nurse Redheart, and not before. But even if she says you're not well enough to be raising barns, you can help in other ways."

Talib grinned sheepishly at nopony in particular, looking down at his plate. He would have to wait for the checkup appointment tomorrow after all.

"When was this?" asked Bianca, looking sharply at her brother. This, apparently, was too seriously for joking. "Are they alright?"

"Around Tuesday week ago," replied Ghaliya levelly, "during the night. We only just heard about it because the Taters have been recovering with relatives. Some nasty burns, but nothing too serious."

Talib froze, barely controlling the urge to bolt upright. Beside him, he heard Hayfa's voice catch, and release in a long, quiet exhale. Nopony else seemed to have noticed.

The night her camp was burnt.

Hayfa finally reacted, frowning slightly. "Does anypony know how it began?" she asked, slowly.

Ghaliya shook her head. "It's strange, because us farm-ponies are usually so careful with a flame, out here in these wooden farmhouses, with straw and whatnot everywhere… but it does happen, time to time." She frowned, now, at the ceiling. "Passing strange that both the barn and their home went up, though. I thought they were spaced pretty well apart, but maybe I'm mis-remembering."

After dinner, Talib tried to act normal, to chat, to enjoy the mint tea. But it just tasted like ash.