“Where are they going?”

“‘Where are they going?’ Where do you think?!”

“Gods, not again. Hearth’s Warming was bad enough, but now? We’re stretched thin as it is! We can’t deal with more of them!”

The two legionaries huddled against a barricade in the city’s largest street. In front of them, several cohorts of Cirra’s Legion tried to hold swirling and churning masses of unicorns and earth ponies at bay. The soldiers had entrenched their broad red shields in the ground and were leaning against them, struggling to brace themselves against a rioting crowd of angry Equestrian citizens. The tension in the air was high, but it was drowned out by the chorus of angry screaming from the crowd. Demands filled the air like sparks from the fires in the streets.

“Down with Cirran oppression!”

“Equal rights for earth ponies!”

“Remember River Rock!”

The two soldiers behind the barricade nervously tugged at their weapons as they watched the demonstration flare up, fueled by the poison of mob mentality. “They’re getting close...” one of them nervously muttered to his companion.

“We’re under orders to not attack the crowd, no matter what,” the other hissed back. “You know that if we so much as scratch one of them, the whole nation’s in revolt. Do you really want to be the pony that kills Equestria?”

The first legionary tightened his grip on his sword and flexed his wingblades, letting the armored scales glint in the sunlight. “Buck this nation, and buck the other races, I say. Cirra did fine on its own. We don’t need to tie ourselves down like this. We’ve got Cloudsdale after all, right? What are they going to do against that?”

“They’ll cut off our food and we’ll starve, that’s what,” a mare’s voice said from behind them. Jumping upright, the two legionaries swiftly turned and delivered her two salutes.

“Commander Typhoon,” the one began, nearly tripping over the simple address, “we weren’t expecting you... that is, we didn’t mean anything when—”

“Easy, soldier,” Typhoon said as she walked between the two towards the front of the barricade. Squinting through magenta eyes from underneath her brow, colored by a blond coat inherited from her mother, Typhoon surveyed the growing riot with the trained precision and discipline common of the Praetorian Guard. Her wings rustled against her sides, flexing their bladed crests in anticipation. She was wise beyond her years, and at twenty-two, she had already seen more combat than half the elder legionaries. The angry red scar over the right half of her face and the smaller discolorations of skysteel shrapnel embedded in her chest were a testament to that.

The other legionary nervously shifted his weight, and the skysteel plates of his armor rattled against one another. “They’ve been like this all morning, ma’am. An hour ago, another group of citizens joined up with this mess and only began to make things worse.” Gesturing towards a tower in the east, the soldier singled out a stallion in centurion’s armor who seemed to be commanding the situation from above. “Centurio Prior Steel Gait pulled several cohorts from the south side of the castle to try and reinforce the main roads, but we don’t have enough bodies to completely close off all the bridges. The west side is nothing more than a skeleton crew; a hundred and sixty-odd legionaries to try and hold that whole thing.”

The blond pegasus nodded. “I see.”

“Where the hell’s the rest of the Legion?!” the first legionary exclaimed. Raising his shield, he quickly blocked a sizable brick that some unicorn had flung at his head from the crowd. “Don’t we have more soldiers than this?”

“They’re out in the countryside, scattered between here and Platinum’s Landing,” Typhoon answered. “Pacifying the wilderness takes time and effort, and the last thing we need is to let Grabacr’s demons take hold of this land too. We know skysteel hurts them; it’s simply a matter of finding any who dare show their faces and slaying them before they do to this nation what they did to the Compact Lands.”

“Pacifying the wilderness?” the second soldier asked. “My brother was out in the field, and he says there’s a lot more going on in the north than just pacifying the wilderness. He mentioned something about the Crystals and how they—”

“Aren’t sticking their noses where they don’t belong, soldier,” the mare growled at him. Giving one last look over the streets as if it were a battlefield to be conquered, she turned back to the soldiers. Pulling a feather from a wing, she passed it to the taller of the two. “Tell your officer to pull the cohorts away from the north and lead the crowds around that way. When they get near the river, form a wedge and deflect them from the castle. Divide the crowds as best you can and disperse them; we’re only letting them get stronger by letting them stay in one spot.”

The two soldiers saluted the Praetorian and quickly abandoned their post to find the Optio. Tapping her hoof, Typhoon lingered for a few moments before she too retreated back towards the castle. After a few steps to distance herself from any unicorns in the crowd, she spread her wings and took flight, letting the warm air of summer ripple around her wings. She took a few quick circles to expertly increase her altitude before she flew up to a nearby steeple and perched squarely on its top. From there, she could see the entire town stretched out before her.

“Everfree City,” Typhoon muttered to herself as she watched the swirling masses of ponies trying to force their way to the castle. “So much for a city of peace and love. ‘Home of the ever-free’. Right.”

Taking wing, Typhoon flew back to the castle in the center of town. It was a small castle with a wide moat, but there was plenty of room to expand on the island which it dominated. For now, however, it suited its purpose, being crafted by the finest granite and stone that could be brought up from the quarries to the north. Strong ramparts and battlements with deep foundations formed the exterior walls, and on the tallest of these walls, Typhoon landed with a quiet groan.

“The crowd is moving,” spoke a stallion’s voice from the edge of the battlement. It was tired and weary, yet it conveyed its message stronger with a hoofful of words than any opulent speeches ever could.

Typhoon nodded in his direction. “Yeah, dad, I sent the word out to the centurions. Honestly, why they let the riots get this bad is anypony’s guess. Things are only going to get worse and worse the more this keeps up.”

Commander Hurricane, the legendary pegasus warrior, stretched his aching back and aging limbs as he turned to face his daughter. His nearly-black coat was beginning to show its age as the scattering of salt and pepper coloration spread along his shoulders and flanks, and the white scars against his body only stood out more as his body thinned. That wasn’t a problem most of the time, however, because the pegasus almost never removed his armor. The skysteel plates fortified in onyx stone and golden trim were polished as ever, and even the void dust infused into the stone had most of its grit smoothened down into something friendly to the touch—unless a unicorn touched it. Even in such small quantities, it still was potent enough to disorient anypony with Arcana who attempted to hold it.

“Queen Platinum and Chancellor Puddinghead have been trying to see if holding the Legion to let the crowds disperse on their own will be better for the public order in the long run.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but words never left his lips. Typhoon, however, caught it immediately, and raised an eyebrow in response.

“And you?”

Hurricane grumbled. “You know what I wanted to do. Break up the crowds before they even become a problem and double the city patrols. Perhaps pull one of our legions back from the north and add them to the city’s garrison. But whenever I even suggest this to them, I get outvoted two to one.” Sighing, the black stallion removed his helmet and fussed with the slowly tattering plume on its crest. “I’m forty-six, Typhoon. I’m past the prime of my life and my fighting days are numbered. I’ve got another twenty years in me at the most, unless Garuda claims me sooner.”

Typhoon stood next to her father and removed her helmet, letting her mane of reds, yellows, and browns fall loose over her face. With a practiced flick of her head, she shook the hair out of her eyes and patted it down with a hoof. “Live for what’s left to live for,” she said, looking towards Hurricane.

The aged stallion sighed. “As you get older, Ty, you find that there’s a lot less to live for,” he said, his eyes looking far, far to the east. Turning away from the city and the noise below, he looked toward the calmer, quieter north. “Summer was always her favorite time of the year...”

Typhoon felt the familiar pain in her heart whenever somepony mentioned her mother. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

An almost disappointed look came over Hurricane’s face as he reached out a wing to hug his daughter. “It wasn’t your fault, Typhoon. It’s been five years; we’d be better if we learn to let go.”

“Have you let go?” Typhoon asked, almost accusingly.

Hurricane exhaled, his neck drooping slightly. “No. I haven’t.” Then his eyes softened, and he looked back towards the distant eastern horizon. “But I have forgiven Cyclone. He’s still out there, Typhoon. He’s paid for what he’s done... I just wish I could bring him here and tell him how much he’s loved.”

Typhoon felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise at the mention of her brother’s name. “If he’s even still alive out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ponies who stayed in River Rock put his head on a pike already.”

The black pegasus sighed and shook his head. “There’s mail from River Rock once every blue moon,” he said. “He’s still alive, but its hard. You know the blizzard never ended, despite what I did.”

“How do they feed themselves out there?” Typhoon asked. “I’d figure it’s kind of hard to grow food for so many ponies in the dead of winter.”

“They make do,” Hurricane answered. “Cyclone’s last letter didn’t really touch upon it. He did mention that they’ve had problems with cannibalism that he’s had to address...”

Typhoon shuddered. “Good for them,” she muttered.

Hurricane looked at Typhoon from the corner of his eye. “I understand there’s still bad blood between you two after everything that happened in River Rock. Still, he’s family. Even if we might never see him again... the least you can do is be supportive and write to him. He’d love to hear about little Tempest. He’s lonely out there.”

The mare looked away and said nothing. Biting his lip, Hurricane let go of Typhoon and wandered towards the other end of the tower. “I have a meeting with Platinum and Puddinghead I’ve got to deal with. When I finish, I want the day’s mess over with.”

Typhoon saluted her father. “It’ll be done, sir.”

Hurricane nodded and began to walk away. Placing his hoof on the door to the castle interior, he decided to stop. Without looking over his shoulder, he added, “One day you’ll be in charge, Typhoon. You keep working like you are now, and you’ll never have to call another pony sir again.”

Then he left, leaving Typhoon to mull over his words as she assumed her father’s post on the tower.

Taking his time descending the staircase, it took Hurricane a few minutes before he found himself on the ground floor of the castle. The halls were spacious and high, lined with art and suits of armor at regular intervals to break up the monotony of gray and white stone. Tall, stout doors of oak and iron were held open with marble wedges, able to be kicked aside so that the halls could be closed at a moment’s notice. Large iron bars backed the doors, paired with equally large iron slats. There would be no repeat of Castle Burning Hearth’s ignominious fall.

Hurricane’s hooves took him along the all-too-familiar path to the meeting room, leading him by numerous murals and stained glass windows depicting events from the histories of all three races. One cluster of windows was dominated by the various visages of the unicorn kings of old, including the legendary Wise Five, who founded the Diamond Kingdom millennia ago. Next to that was a series of depictions of the Low Valleys over the years, from their fight against the domination of the Diamond Kingdom to the founding of the Low Valleys itself and a portrait of Chancellor Muffintop, Puddinghead’s renowned father and the much more popular politician of the two. Following those, at the very end of the line, were the three murals that Hurricane and his sister, Twister, had drawn up.

Hurricane paused to look at these. At the beginning, with the window furthest on the right, a proud homage to Roamulus watched over the hall. The legendary pegasus stood on a hill with the banners of all the tribes displayed behind him and underneath the proud flag of the Cirran Empire. Hurricane remembered the First Emperor’s struggles to unite the pegasi under one flag; after all, it was a story that the youth of Cirra were always reminded of. Now that Cirra was all but gone, however, he and Twister simply hoped that they’d save some piece of Roamulus’ legacy in that window above.

The next window held a much more recent and harrowing event in the memories of the Cirran pegasi. It was a simple window; the glass was predominantly varying shades of blue, filling in for the ocean. On the shore, a small town stood, while in the background a mass of white cloud choked on black smoke. In the sky, however, were thousands of tiny, colored flecks. They had no shape or distinction, but they charted their way across the blue ocean and the fiery skies to some unknown far, far away. A simple gold plaque under the window had the words ‘EXODVS OF DIODA, XI SHIVERING RAINS, CDI A.E.’

Hurricane couldn’t look at the last window, although he knew very well what was on it. In the center of the window was a massive city of white cloudstone, with spiralling towers and massive hills of cumulus. The backdrop was a gray sky filled with flecks of snow. All around the city, black shards of glass fought with each other and orange fires rose from behind it all. At the bottom of the window was an inscription that Hurricane had made himself: ‘The journey has its time, then ends. Thank you for the ride, Swift.’

“Hurricane! Commander, wait up!”

A slight smile drew across Hurricane’s lips, and he turned to face the newcomer. “Centurion Pan Sea, good to see you again. How have you been?”

Pan Sea smiled brightly and trotted down the hall as fast as his limp could carry him. The butter yellow stallion’s right leg was twisted almost completely around so that the front of its hoof pointed towards his opposite leg. He had suffered that wound during the siege of River Rock five years ago when a legionary's corpse fell out of the sky and crushed it under its helm. It had never set properly, and because of its positioning, Pan Sea was no longer deemed fit for active service. Hurricane, however, out of friendship for the stallion, kept him on as his secretary and aide de camp whenever the Legion was campaigning in the field—what little of those days remained.

“It’s been good, Commander,” Pan Sea said as he took his place by Hurricane’s side. “Cleared out all the paperwork for you so you don’t have to worry about that after your meeting with the others, and,” he paused, his eyes shining with a bright and pure happiness, “I proposed to Soft Feather the other day, and she said yes!”

A wide grin spread across the older stallion’s face. “Good job, Pansy! I knew you had it in you!” Reaching out a wing, Hurricane rubbed Pan Sea on the back. “Have you thought about the wedding at all?”

Pan Sea chuckled and ran a hoof through his amber mane. “We’re thinking on the anniversary of when we started dating, right at the beginning of summer.”

“So a little less than a year from now,” Hurricane observed. He smiled again at Pan Sea and bumped shoulders with the smaller pegasus. “Good for you! Good for you.”

The yellow pegasus nodded and chuckled happily for a few moments. “So, how about yourself, Commander? Any mares catch your eye?” Ribbing the praetorian through his armor, he added, “Maybe Platinum?” with a wink.

Hurricane scowled and shook his head. “I don’t want anything to do with her outside of my job. She may be a better and nicer pony after everything we did in Equestria, but she’s still a king’s daughter at heart.” When Pan Sea tilted his head, confused, Hurricane rolled his eyes. “She may be a queen now, Pansy, but she’s still spoiled.”

Pan Sea mouthed an ‘oh’ and tried to play it off. “I was mostly kidding, Commander. I was hoping that you’d maybe found somepony new, but...”

The aged stallion sighed. “I understand, Pan Sea. I’ve got senators’ daughters lined up outside my bedroom half the time waiting to have their chance with me. I’ve got all the fair and beautiful of Cirra to choose from, but...” he stopped and shook his head. “They don’t have that spark like Swift did. They don’t understand what its like to fight or to struggle or sacrifice, and the mares that do—the mares in the Legion—respect me too much as a commanding officer to even think about approaching me.” Shrugging, Hurricane walked onward. “Perhaps it’s for the best. I’d only be disappointing myself if I tried somepony new.”

When Pan Sea failed to come up with a response, Hurricane shrugged and continued walking. Making a left down an intersection of hallways, he led the two of them to a large and impressive chamber in the center of the castle. Tall, narrow windows that stretched nearly a hundred feet from floor to ceiling were opened to air out the stone room, and three colored tapestries, blue for Cirra, purple for the Diamond Kingdom, and white for the Low Valleys, trembled in the breeze they let in. Running the length of the hall was a large banquet table, although the wood was bare at the moment. Despite the simplicity of the table, the columns of marble and detailed etchings into the stone were all edged in the finest of gold leaf and the clearest of diamonds. The work of River Rock’s masons and architects hadn’t dulled with the inclusion of Cirran and Low Valley architecture in the castle; instead, they had welcomed it into their style, making the result something that could only be called Equestrian.

Something else that was truly Equestrian was already gathering at the end of the banquet table. Seated at two of the three high-backed chairs were a pair of ponies, talking with each other as quietly as the two ponies in question could manage. The one was a unicorn mare with a silver-white coat and a rolling purple mane curled into luxurious twists underneath a large crown. The silver of the crown was inset with amethysts and plated with white gold, and a robe of royal purple and white fur was draped over the mare’s shoulders. Next to her, a large, brown earth pony stallion gaily sat at the table, clothed in an unsettling mix of yellow and brown and wearing what essentially was a large bowl of pudding on a hat. They finished their conversations as Hurricane took his seat at the table across from the earth pony.

“Commander, we were wondering when you would show up,” the mare spoke, to which the earth pony nodded.

Hurricane sighed and rubbed a hoof against his brow. “I was busy making sure that they didn’t storm the castle on us, in case you weren’t aware.” Then, removing his helmet, Hurricane set it down on the table and leaned back. “So, Platinum, Puddinghead, are we ready to begin?”

Queen Platinum nodded and set her crown aside, while Puddinghead mirrored the action with his hat. “Yes, quite.”

The Commander nodded and turned to Pan Sea, who was still standing by the table. “You are dismissed, centurion.”

Pan Sea saluted and hobbled out of the hall. When the door shut behind him, Hurricane redirected his attention back towards the other two Equestrians in the room. “I left Commander Typhoon in charge of the situation outside. We will not be disturbed.”

“Good,” Platinum said as she leaned over the table, “because the situation has been getting rather largely out of hoof as of late. If I recall, this is the seventh major riot in as many months, and looking out of the window, it looks like it was the largest one to date.”

“The largest was in White Fields... sorry, January,” Hurricane added when Puddinghead gave him his signature clueless look, before continuing. “You remember why.”

A haunted look paled Platinum’s face even underneath her white coat. She looked down at her hooves and muttered “beloved...” softly to herself. She began to shudder, and her hooves clawed at a heart-shaped silver locket around her neck. “I’d rather not reopen old wounds, Hurricane, if you would be so kind,” she breathed, her eyes focused on some distant event far away.

Hurricane nodded respectfully. “I understand. But the fallout over what happened still put the nation on edge. Combined with the rising tensions between the different racial districts in Everfree over jobs and property, all we need is a spark before these riots become a rebellion or a revolution.”

“I’ve done my bestest to find out why the ponies are so angry,” Puddinghead piped up in his usual excited voice. “The unicorns and earth ponies don’t like the pegasuses being in charge of the army, the earth ponies and pegasees don’t like having a unicorn queen, and the peggasses and unicorns don’t like us earth ponies taking up all the jobs!”

Hurricane sighed. “I’ve opened up the Legion to allow earth ponies and unicorns to serve, but I can’t do anything to draft them in times of peace. Your races don’t have the same drive to serve their nation that the pegasi do, which is why the Legion is still ninety percent Cirran. We’ve got one legion of earth ponies and unicorns. One. The rest are auxiliaries in other legions, but there are next to none in any of the campaigning armies. They simply can’t keep up if they don’t have wings.”

“I’ve made it clear time and time again to the ponies of Equestria that I’m not really their queen,” Platinum stated. Holding her crown with her Arcana, she slowly rotated it back and forth, looking at her reflection in the metal. “We are a democracy, and I hold as much power as either of you two. Our parliament consists of equal numbers of senators, nobles, and members of the Board of Representatives. I am simply the face of the nation, by your own consent, since I take a keener interest in politicking than either of you.”

Chancellor Puddinghead frowned. “I like politics!”

Platinum thought for a moment before changing her answer. “Or because I’m a more apt politician than you two.”

Hurricane shrugged his wings. “I could care less. I never enjoyed politics; Swift was better at it than I ever was. Just put me with my Legion, and I’m fine.”

“I’ve been trying for years now to get everypony to share the jobs!” Puddinghead suddenly exclaimed. “But it’s nearly impossible when all the jobs are farming or stabbing things, and us earths are really good at growing things and you non-earths aren’t, and nopony other than the air-types want to stab things and die!”

“Our options as to the employment of Equestria’s workforce are rather limited,” Platinum said. “We have no real trading partners to exchange goods with, now that our three races are united, so commerce has plummeted sharply. The Crystal Union has hardly been helping, either, despite the promised ‘trade agreements’ representative Smart Cookie has set up with them.”

“I think he’s more interested in hearing that crystal plot ring,” Puddinghead whispered to Hurricane from across the table.

Hurricane only rolled his eyes, but Platinum apparently didn’t hear the Chancellor. “Only pegasi want to go into the military, the skilled jobs are taken by unicorns, and agriculture, our primary employment, is populated with earth ponies,” she continued. Sighing, the mare tapped her hoof against the table. “Anypony who wants to do something other than their race’s usual profession can’t find jobs. The only thing where the races really mix is in industry, but our industry is tiny and incapable of employing more than a few thousand ponies. It doesn’t help that the skysteel business is exclusively pegasus, as pegasus skysteel smiths and harvesters make up a sizeable chunk of the population.”

“Hey, if you find a way to get earth ponies and unicorns up to Cloudsdale to work skysteel, be my guest,” Hurricane replied. “But you don’t have Empatha, and so your steel will be flat, assuming you could even work it into anything other than cloud.”

“I’m sure Clover would enjoy another research project,” Platinum answered. “Star Swirl too. Why, the old stallion’s always finding something to pick up around here, I don’t think he’d mind helping out.”

“And what else would the earth ponies and unicorns do if they could stand in Cloudsdale?” Hurricane asked. “There isn’t anything up there for them.”

The unicorn sighed. “I’m sure there’ll be some sort of jobs they can take on up there.”

“But what about all them rioters outside?” Puddinghead questioned. “They don’t want to go to Cloudsdale. Hay, they seem like they want our heads more than anything else! What are we going to do about them?”

“Garrison more legions.”

“Make concessions.”

Commander Hurricane and Queen Platinum turned irate glares towards each other. “The only thing that is going to keep them out of this castle is more soldiers than angry citizens, your highness.”

“You’ve obviously heard the cries out there, Commander. ‘Down with Cirran oppression! Disband the Legion!’” Platinum shook her head, disappointed. “What do you think is going to happen if we only give them more to worry about?”

“And what can we concede to them that we haven’t already?!” Hurricane bellowed. “I’m tired of having this argument with you. We’ve done all we can to try to appease them, but what we can give them isn’t what they want!” Sighing, Hurricane slumped in his chair and tapped his hooves together in frustration. “We shouldn’t have tried to do this, to make three nations one. We would have been better off going our separate ways and maintaining the Compact system. We’re not three races united under one banner. We’re three races tied together by the same noose around our necks.”

Both Platinum and Puddinghead had no response to that. Instead, the three leaders sat around the table with their heads in their hooves, sighing and mumbling half thought-out plans that quickly fell apart under further scrutiny. By the time the full hour that they had dedicated for their meeting had passed, they had drawn nothing up except for the crumpled pages of a few abandoned measures.

“Business as usual,” Hurricane muttered as he placed his helmet squarely back over his graying head. “No wonder the ponies of Equestria want our heads. We can’t even come to an agreement ourselves about how we can save them.”

Platinum gripped a quill in her Arcana and angrily snapped it in two. “Woe is this nation without a monarchical system! Things were so much easier to do when you could just write it off as the Word of the King and the will of Celestis and Lunis!”

“Celestis and Lunis talk to you guys too?” Puddinghead asked, eyes crossed. “I thought they only talked to me after I finished my daily smoke before dinner! Man, whatever that weed growing behind my house is, I gotta franchise that stuff!”

Hurricane gave Puddinghead a quick, disdainful, yet completely unsurprised look. “That explains a lot.” Turning back to Platinum, his eyes narrowed. “We can’t rely on those cheap tactics anymore, Platinum. We’ve only got our thr—two brains to find a solution to our problems.”

Puddinghead’s ear flopped. “Hey! I know when somepony’s being made fun of, and somepony’s being made fun of!” His face immediately shifted into one of concern, and he gently held Platinum’s hoof between his own. “I’m so sorry, I can’t believe he just said that.”

Platinum scowled at Puddinghead, and her face turned so red Hurricane thought it would burst into flames. Hurricane himself found it hard to hold onto his expressionless façade, although he managed to pull it off with a great deal of effort. Puddinghead, all the while, was dead serious.

“Let go of me!” Platinum growled as she yanked her hoof free of Puddinghead’s grasp. Standing up, she faced the flag of the Diamond Kingdom and held a hoof to her chest. “In, two, three, hold… Out, two, three, hold.”

Her breathing exercises complete, she turned around and walked back to the table. Her horn lit up, its blue aura wrapping around her crown and bringing it back to her head.

“Feel better?” Hurricane asked, the tiniest fraction of a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“One moment,” Platinum said, closing her eyes and looking away. Her horn remained lit, and only when Hurricane saw the candlestick flying over from across the room did he see why.

CLANG

Puddinghead’s head slammed into the table while Platinum returned the bent candlestick to its place. The Chancellor began moaning after a few seconds and clutched at the back of his head, although he was much too disoriented to do anything else.

“Better,” Platinum said, smiling to herself. Turning back to Hurricane, she nodded to him with a slight tilt of her head. “You were saying, Commander?”

Hurricane couldn’t help but smile ever so slightly. “Nice shot.”

“Thank you.”

After a few more chuckles, Hurricane cleared his throat. “Right. Parliament doesn’t like our power over them, so we can’t rely on them to help us unless they’re feeling the heat as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the senators and the nobles are helping to stir up trouble for us with the crowds outside.”

Platinum raised an eyebrow. “You really think so?”

Hurricane nodded. “You may never have seen it because your father was a popular king, but nobles and other politicians will always plot to gain the most for themselves. Hell, I was throttled by the Senate when I first took power twenty-five years ago.” Hurricane looked out the window for a second, remembering. “If you don’t prove yourself as a strong leader, Platinum, there will always be ponies looking to cut your legs out from underneath you and steal everything they can from your saddlebags while you’re down. That’s the situation we’re in right now. If we lose our footing, we’re going down hard, and it’ll be the end of us.”

The unicorn queen solemnly nodded. “I see. I see.” Sighing, she stood up and began to walk around the table, patting Puddinghead on the shoulder to get him up. Hurricane followed, with Puddinghead taking up the rear. When the three of them reached the doorway, Platinum paused by the massive oak and steel doors. “I thank you both for the time, what little we did with it. ‘Any progress is better than none,’ my father used to say.”

Hurricane saluted her with his wing. “True enough words, but we’re going to need more than a little progress to save this nation. Sooner or later, a little won’t be enough.” Pulling open the door, he fidgeted with his helmet one more time to make sure it was secure. “I should go and make sure that the riot has calmed down before the sun sets. Maybe we’ll get a good night’s sleep for once.”

Platinum and Puddinghead watched Hurricane go down the hall and disappear around the corner. Sighing, Equestria’s queen shook her head. “I don’t know what to do, Chancellor. I just don’t know.” Looking toward a portrait of a regal blue unicorn stallion, her eyes saddened. “I wish my father was around. He would’ve known what to do.”

Puddinghead shrugged and touched the lump forming on the back of his head once more. “I don’t know, sister, but I’d say beating each other over the head ain’t gonna help our problems out that much!” Trotting away with an awfully cheery attitude, he called back over his shoulder. “Equestria needs to see some symbol of unity for once!”

Platinum paused by the door as Puddinghead too left her behind. Silently, she closed the door behind her, thinking. “Unity… how can we show unity if these councils, they only thing we have to represent it, is what the ponies hate?”

A pitch black room sparked to life with a green glow from its center. In the dull light, the pale outlines of worn tables and scattered papers upon cluttered desks became visible. They only became clearer as a second green glow materialized around something else, a straight, black razor with a ring at one end. It appeared to be chiseled out of stone, and green sparks angrily flew off of the aura surrounding it before being quickly devoured at the tip.

“Good, good. Do you feel it yet?” a stallion’s voice asked from the darkness. It was old and soft, but measured with a precise fascination and interest.

“I think I’m feeling something. It’s hard to tell through the leyline feedback, but I think I’m getting some sort of charge.”

This one was a mare’s voice. Confident, young, fresh, wise. The pony behind it was obviously well-learned, and lacking no amount of respect either. She seemed comfortable in the presence of the older stallion.

The stallion coughed in the darkness, and a slight jingling accompanied it. “If the crystals take mana as I hypothesized, then we might be able to get a positive-negative field with which we can store mana. Of course, there’s always the risk of—”

The black razor in the room suddenly took up a brilliant white glow before fracturing into pieces, releasing a bright flash of light that outlined the two unicorns standing in the back of the room. The flash was accompanied by a sizeable boom, and somewhere in the room an inkwell shattered. For a few seconds, only the tinkle of stone shards on a stone floor could be heard.

“…that?” the mare spoke in the darkness.

A sigh. “We should have triple-layered the crystals, and made the middle layer perpendicular to the other two for strength. That way we could—”

A door abruptly opened, letting torchlight pour into the room and light everything up. The torch was held in an aura of aqua Arcana, and another unicorn mare, this one still a filly, wandered into the room. Seeing the shattered remains of black crystal on the ground before her, the filly pouted and stuck the torch in a sconce on the wall. “Are you guys doing advanced arcane studies without me again? Clover, Star Swirl, you promised you’d let me help next time!”

The mare known as Clover, a pistachio green unicorn with a darker green mane and purple eyes, glanced to Star Swirl and took a few steps towards the filly. “I’m sorry, Diadem, but we only had one of our prototypes to work with, and we needed a gentle touch for it. Your Arcana is still a bit too untempered and volatile for the work we’re doing.”

Diadem, an aqua unicorn with a teal mane and eyes, huffed disappointedly. “Come on, Clover! You were fifteen too when you started working with Star Swirl! I want you to mentor me and help me become an archmage too!”

Clover laughed. “Well now, Diadem, I was actually seventeen when I started working with void crystals, so you’ve got another two years ahead of you. And I already told you I’d take you on as my apprentice next year when you’re sixteen and old Star Swirl’s an impressive eighty.”

Star Swirl the Bearded laughed, and fiddled with his flowing white beard with an olive drab hoof. “Eighty is only a number, Clover dear. I’ve got plenty left to live for; like great-grandchildren.”

The green mare’s cheeks turned a healthy shade of rose. “I’ve been looking! As a project… on the side,” Clover stammered, her cheeks only becoming redder. “I’m thirty! I’ve got plenty of time to find the perfect stallion!”

Diadem rolled her eyes. “One that would let you experiment with him?”

Clover raised an eyebrow. “Well, not really, I wouldn’t want to perform possibly dangerous magical experiments on another pony that I love, or any other pony at all, but I would consider it if it came down to… why are you looking at me like that?”

Diadem had the purest representation of a face that could only be described as ‘really?’ So simple and so complete was its depiction of that rhetorical question that all Clover would ever picture years from now when it came up would be Diadem’s current expression. Even if the mare was confused at the time for the reasoning behind such a face, Star Swirl certainly wasn’t. In fact, the elder stallion felt the need to point out exactly what Clover was missing by burying a hoof within the folds of his beard and chuckling.

“I don’t think she means that sort of experimentation, Clover dear,” Star Swirl said when he pulled his hoof away from his face. His eyes wandered off to some distant place, and the bells on his hat and robe jingled at his reminiscent sigh. “I remember those days. Why, your grandmother was a sight to behold once the sun went down. Her mother was an acrobat back in her day, and boy, did she inherit something special…”

If Diadem had previously won the award for best face, Clover’s visual expression of shock, terror, disgust, and intrigue certainly dethroned her. “Grandpa, please!! You’re making me uncomfortable!”

The elder stallion only laughed and gave Clover a wry smile. “One day, Clover, you’ll understand. One day.” Then, turning his golden eyes towards, Diadem, he levitated over several loose leaves of notepaper. “This is what Clover and I have been working on, Diadem.”

Diadem’s own horn lit up as she took the notes from Star Swirl. Her teal eyes darted back and forth across the paper as she took in the complicated notes and scrawled diagrams written up and down the parchment. Rotating the papers to get a better look at them, she eventually shifted focus to the shattered stone razor on the ground. “...what is it?”

“An arcane energy amplification support made out of void crystals,” Clover explained as she lifted the now inert void crystal fragments from the ground with her magic. “Star Swirl and I hypothesized that if the void crystals devour whatever mana they can get a hold of, they must store that energy somewhere. We were seeing if it was possible to reverse-engineer the crystals into some sort of device that gives off mana rather than taking it, which could be used to give arcane strength back to unicorns with failing horns, and maybe even counteract the Scourge that Queen Platinum carries in her blood.”

Diadem trotted over to the shattered crystals and picked one up. It was the base of the assembly, a wide ring paired with a vertical blade that had broken off in the experiment. It was obviously designed to fit around a unicorn’s horn. “So you mean some unicorn could stick this on her head and her power would be doubled or something?”

“In practice, yes” Star Swirl clarified as he picked up the pieces and laid them out on the table. “An apparatus such as this could be charged with an copious amounts of magical effluence, which a unicorn could access at will by connecting it to the leylines in their horn. Thus, casting a spell would draw on the mana inside the apparatus more so than the unicorn’s own Arcana, and it could serve as a mana reserve to keep a pony without access to their own supply alive. You saw how the Scourge sapped poor Platinum II dry until there was nothing left.”

Both Clover and Diadem shuddered at the thought. Queen Platinum’s only child, Platinum II, had been born two years ago with a deformed horn. Early last autumn, it had become twisted and gnarled with the Scourge. The tiny unicorn didn’t last much longer after that; by the time she died in February, what little was left of her was a shriveled husk, devoid of any sort of mana. The Queen had been heartbroken and suicidal when Star Swirl tested her afterwards and told her that she carried the disease in her blood and, although she’d never get it, would always pass it on to her children.

Clover in particular shivered at the memory. There had been some long nights where she had to stay by Platinum’s side to make sure that she didn’t hurt herself. She remembered how panicked she was when the queen was late to breakfast one morning and showed up with purple bruises around her neck. It hadn’t helped at all that Platinum’s husband, a unicorn noble from the Opal family, died of mysterious circumstances barely a week earlier.

Nothing had ever come to light about that in the months since, come to think of it. All Clover knew was that was when the first riots began.

Diadem was already pleading with Star Swirl by the time Clover brought her attention back to the present. “…saying I know a lot about how void crystal works, too! Don’t you remember that I was able to overpower the ring they had on my horn at Onyx Ridge? Not even you or Clover could do that!”

“You have the strength to overpower one of the most dangerous elements in the world, yes,” Star Swirl noted. Pulling his pipe out of a pocket on his robe, he immediately settled it between his lips and filled it with tobacco. “But what you have in power, you lack in control, young filly. It takes more than just the raw expenditure of mana to be a skilled mage, and even more so to be an archmage like Clover or myself.”

The ‘young filly’ in question grumbled in frustration and picked up a live piece of void crystal with her bare hooves—something which outright shocked the two archmages in the room. “I still don’t see why you guys won’t let me help you with this, though! See? I can handle the crystals on my own without needing some scaffolding to just be able to move it. Sure, it stings, but it’s nothing that I wasn’t used to after months in Onyx Ridge.” Setting the stone aside on a work bench, Diadem turned to Clover and took a step closer. “Please, Clover? I really want to learn! You’ve said it yourself that I’ll probably be the greatest archmage to ever live someday! Give me this one chance, this one project, to let me prove it!”

Sighing, Clover’s concerned frown turned into careful smile. “Alright, Diadem. I trust you enough to handle yourself. Though I will say, that’s a tough project for my first student to take on.”

Diadem immediately began bouncing up and down. “Oh, thank you thank you thank you! Clover, you’re the best. You too, Star Swirl!” she added as she twirled towards the bearded stallion with a hop. Star Swirl only released a puff of smoke from his pipe alongside a nod as his only acknowledgment.

Clover settled her unofficial student with a pat on the shoulder. “Easy, easy. We wouldn’t want to break something, now would we?”

The filly stopped, yet she nudged a shattered piece of Clover’s prototype with a hoof. “Like this?”

“That was in the name of the arcane,” Clover quickly defended. Then, gathering up the last of the fragments in a dustpan, she, dumped the rest of the destroyed prototype in the garbage. “Of course, now we need more void crystal. Do we have any left?”

Star Swirl took his pipe out of his mouth and began to peruse through the various cabinets in the room. After a few minutes, however, he shook his head. “That was the last of it, unfortunately. We used what little we had left from the Diamond Kingdom already. We’ll have to get more.”

Diadem cocked her head. “Can’t we just have Smart Cookie send some more down from the north? I mean, he’s been settling our trade agreements with the Crystal Union for three years now. All he has to do is ask Queen Jade and I’m sure she’ll send some down.”

The elder stallion hummed and drew on his pipe some more. “Smart Cookie has gotten quite close to the fair Jade in recent years, although I doubt he’ll simply be able to sign off on a shipment for a hundred or so pounds of void crystal. Jade is very careful with her nation’s supplies of the crystals; besides, little trade ever gets through between the Union and Equestria these days.”

“What do you mean?” Diadem asked. “I thought we’ve been trading with them for the past few years.”

Clover shook her head. “We were, Diadem, but the borders are all but closed to the north. It’s not safe to send anything along those roads anymore.”

Diadem frowned as she tried to imagine why. “But why not? I mean, even if the roads weren’t safe, we’ve got the shipping lanes open from Platinum’s Landing to the Crystal Shores port. There aren’t any other naval powers than us and them.”

“Jade no longer owns Crystal Shores,” Star Swirl mumbled from the corner of the room.

The aqua unicorn turned towards him, confused. “What? Yes she does! It’s one of the Union’s towns, after all.” Looking between the two older unicorns in the room, she raised an eyebrow. “What’s going on in the north?”

“Nopony knows, Diadem,” Clover said, shrugging her shoulders. “The excuse I’ve heard is that the Legion is ‘pacifying the wilderness’, but I’ve never gotten a clearer answer than that.”

Diadem paused, a worried tone creeping into her voice. “Do you think the warlords are back?”

Clover emphatically shook her head ‘no’. “Of course not. From what Smart Cookie told me way back when, Onyx Ridge was the last barbarian stronghold ever, and the Union annihilated it. They’re long dead and gone.”

“Well you can never be too certain!” Diadem insisted. “You remember what those guys were like when we were prisoners! Any one of them could have been strong enough to gather their own following and start pillaging again.”

This time, Clover sighed and put on her ‘business’ face. Walking over to Diadem, she clasped her hooves on the filly’s shoulders. “The warlords are gone, Diadem. End of story. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Diadem knew better than to argue with Clover whenever the green mare put on one of her ‘mom faces’. Grumbling, she pushed Clover’s hooves away and muttered “Fine.”

Satisfied, Clover returned to her work. “Good. Now, before we all pack in for the night, we should just take a quick inventory of what we have left.” Grabbing a clipboard from the nearby counter, she passed it to Diadem with her magic. “Go to the storeroom and take inventory of our supplies. We’ve got a busy day of experimentation tomorrow.” Flinching at a recent memory, Clover turned her eyes to her grandfather in a new light and frowned. “And not that kind of experimentation, grandpa.”

Star Swirl only chuckled and drew the last of the tobacco smoke from his pipe.

Once it was clear that Clover had already directed her attention elsewhere, Diadem sighed and left the archmages’ study. The study was at the height of one of the castle’s towers, and the only way up and down was a spiraling staircase that let into a long, stone hallway that ran the length of the upper floors. On the left was the library; home to vaulted ceilings, sharp ceiling arches, and large windows, it was filled to the brim with thousands of books amassed from Star Swirl’s collection back in River Rock. How the wizard got so many books out of Compact Lands and into Equestria was anypony’s guess, but like all things involving the archmage, it obviously involved magic. Diadem was at least thankful for it; it was one of her favorite places to relax and get lost in a good book or look up some of the more obscure of the arcane spells.

Of course, that had its own risks as well. The book about the fisherpony’s wife had been a terrifying and confusing experience to read.

Just past the library and around the corner was a heavy skysteel door that kept the magic supplies safely contained. The door was magically sealed and could only be opened with Arcana, where the unicorn used their horn as a sort of key. Inside there were more doors and more locks to restrict access to the more sensitive and valuable materials, and only Star Swirl, Clover and Diadem herself knew the combinations to these. Even still, there was one door in the very back of the storeroom that opened only to Star Swirl. Diadem had never seen what was inside, and the thought always tickled her curiosity whenever she wandered near it.

Placing her horn in the first lock, Diadem, entered the combination of mana pulses required to open it. After a few seconds, the steel rumbled and slid open, granting her access to the storeroom within. Glancing again at the clipboard and seeing the list of everything to inventory, the filly grumbled and walked towards the nearest shelves. There she began the drudgery of counting and placing checkmarks in boxes that ran up and down the sheet of parchment for the next hour.

Diadem didn’t know when she dozed off; all she knew was that she woke to the sound of something moving nearby. Fluttering her eyes open, she sat up from where she had her face pressed against the table and looked around. Nothing moved, and not a whisper of air could be heard in the stone room. Yet she knew that she had heard something. Getting up, the filly’s horn lit in an aqua glow, and she wearily wandered around the storeroom.

The tall shelves and shady corners suddenly took on a whole new appearance for her. Before, they were boring and annoying. Now, each corner housed the threat of potential danger. Gulping, Diadem blinked as a solid wall of aqua Arcana filled the doorway, sealing off the room.

Step 1: Containment. Diadem wearily looked over her shoulders as she walked up and down the aisles in the storeroom. Clover was no battlemage, but the mare had taught Diadem a few basic skills to make sure she could handle herself in a situation such as this. The rest the filly had picked up on her own time, either in the streets of Everfree or from her time back in Onyx Ridge. Making her way back to the center of the room, Diadem took a deep breath and expanded her Arcana, letting her horn grow brighter as a result.

Step 2: Sweep. A solid wall of arcane energy formed behind Diadem, and, at her urging, began to move forward. As it touched the shelves, the wall naturally broke and reformed around each individual object, never once letting more than an inch of open space form in its barrier. When it reached Diadem, the filly’s Arcana passed around her without harm. Slowly, surely, she ran the wall further and further into the room.

When the wall reached halfway, Diadem stood up straighter and teased a few stray hairs from her mane away from her glowing horn. “Hello? If there’s anypony in here, you better tell me right now. You don’t want to touch the glowing wall of death over here. Seriously, it’d hurt pretty bad.” Receiving no reply, Diadem shrugged her shoulders and continued pushing the wall, ignoring the small bead of sweat that formed on her brow. Maintaining an arcane wall was taxing for most unicorns, but the filly already had such a large mana reserve that it had barely consumed a fraction of it thus far.

Cautiously walking farther into the room, Diadem followed the wall of her Arcana at a safe distance. She had already swept out most of the storeroom and hadn’t encountered the slightest bit of resistance. If there was somepony in there, she would have heard them by now, either from them choosing to reveal themselves or their pained shrieks as the wall fried their limbs. Yet there was nothing. Regardless, Diadem wasn’t about to turn around and leave until she knew for sure whether or not there was somepony actually in the room with her.

The end of the storeroom bent around a corner before ultimately coming to a stop with Star Swirl’s special door. Diadem was only ten feet away from the corner at this point and, siding with caution, swept her wall in an arc around the corner to clear it before pressing onwards. Just as she was sure it was clear, she felt the slightest tug of resistance on her Arcana.

The unicorn immediately stopped dead in her tracks. Funneling more power into the horn, she pushed on the wall. Something pushed back. With a nervous gulp, Diadem walked wide of the corner so she stood in the center of the bend. “I know you’re there!” she shouted. “Just tell me what you’re doing here and you won’t get hurt!”

The mysterious entity’s only response was to push harder on the wall. Diadem knew that it must have been a unicorn of some sort; it was the only way somepony could resist the wall and not burn themselves. Releasing a breath, Diadem widened her stance and anchored her hooves to the ground. Closing her eyes, she breathed as she opened the floodgates to her mana reserves. She met the opposing push with one of her own and waited.

There are three fundamental concepts in dueling with Arcana. These are speed, power, and reserves. Even though Diadem was still a mage in training, she was already better than most of the unicorn court mages in Everfree, and she knew it. She had access to powerful mana and could transform it into Arcana as fast as most of the wizards, but her real strength was her reserves. She could hold a taxing spell, one that Star Swirl the Bearded could only maintain for several minutes, for half an hour. In a game of magical tug-of-war, the young filly was guaranteed to win nine times out of ten. As she matched the opposing unicorn’s Arcana step for step, Diadem only maintained control over her breathing and let her enormous mana pool flow through her horn.

But then the other pony pushed back. Harder. Diadem gritted her teeth as she opened up her leylines to dump as much mana as she could into her spell. She was emptying her reserves at an amazing rate; she knew she’d only be able to keep the wall up for about five more minutes. But as she struggled, she realized it still wouldn’t be enough. Opening her eyes, she could see a distorted purple and blue shimmer rippling over the left side of her wall. As she watched, it only grew in intensity until the wall slowly began to turn despite Diadem’s best efforts.

Eventually, the mysterious force had pushed Diadem’s wall back enough to break her lock on the remaining section of the storeroom. Sweating profusely and with sparks flying off of her horn, Diadem desperately swung the wall around in tandem with the other pony’s push, causing it to violently revolve in place. She hoped that the burn would at least be enough to incapacitate the pony in question without outright killing him… her… it.

Instead, there was no screech of pain as the wall made a complete revolution. All Diadem saw was a flitting black shadow dart into the clear before her wall could touch it. It immediately sprinted away from her and to the door, which still had Diadem’s arcane shield on it. Instead of stopping to try and dismantle the spell, the figure simply lit up a sharp and curved horn with its magic and sliced the shield to ribbons. Diadem felt a spike of pain in her horn as the severed connection to her mana made itself known in her leylines. Dissipating her wall, she immediately switched her Arcana over to grabbing onto the intruder’s tail.

An aqua glow lit up around the fleeing figure, and as Diadem tugged, he lurched to a stop in the doorway. After a quick struggle to physically break free, the pony snapped around to face Diadem directly. The filly gasped as she tried to take in exactly what she was seeing.

Her live Arcana lit up a dark blue-gray coat that heavily favored the blue coloration. It was definitely a unicorn of some sort, judging by the large curved horn, but no unicorns Diadem knew had slitted yellow eyes. Or fangs. Or wore cuirasses as dark as the midnight sky. In fact, the filly was starting to doubt that this was a pony at all.

The pony-thing bared its fangs at her, and his—for Diadem was pretty sure it was a he—horn lit up in its distorted glow. Diadem tried to squash out his Arcana by wrapping her own around his horn, but he simply punched through it with brute force and retaliated with his own magic suppression hex. Try as she might, Diadem couldn’t resist the pure strength of the pony’s magic, and she soon felt her leylines close up and spark with pain as her mana suddenly found nowhere to go. Blackness tickled the edge of her vision, and she fell down to her knees, panting.

It didn’t keep her down long. After a few breaths, Diadem flew to her hooves, only to see the pony escape out of the storeroom. “H-Hey! Get back here!” she cried out in a futile attempt to get him to slow down. The unicorn didn’t even spare her a look as he ran down the long hallway away from the room. Feeling the adrenaline rushing through her body, Diadem galloped after him, her hooves hammering across the flagstones in an eerily settling rhythm.

Coming to a corner, the other unicorn leapt into the air in a fluid motion and ran along the wall for several feet before touching back onto the ground again. Instead of trying to maneuver, however, Diadem’s horn flashed twice. Two aqua circles appeared in the corner, one directly in front of her and one against the perpendicular wall. Lowering her head, she sprinted clean through the first circle and came out the second, having changed her course to sprint down the hall without having to lose speed from turning.

In the torchlight outside the storeroom, Diadem could clearly see that the pony she was chasing wasn’t a pony like any other. His dark coat seemed only darker in the light, and his well-muscled and lean body moved at an unnaturally fast speed. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Diadem hounding after him, closing the gap inch by inch through sheer will and determination. Frowning, his horn sparked to life, and several crisscrossing barriers of Arcana erected themselves before the filly. Furrowing her brow, Diadem’s horn flashed twice again, this time creating a hole on the floor in front of her and a hole on the roof farther down the hallway. With a gasp, she dove straight through the first hole…

…and landed heavily on the stallion’s back. It was cold as ice, and Diadem gasped as she felt his broad shoulders begin to teeter under the sudden impact. Surprised, the muscular stallion collapsed beneath the filly’s weight, and the two of them tumbled to the ground. Rolling out of the fall and bruising her shoulder in the process, Diadem managed to scramble to her hooves at the same time that the stallion did. Wasting no time, she immediately materialized an arcane cage around the other unicorn’s body and squeezed, tightening it down to try and immobilize him. After a second to gain his footing, the stallion’s horn came to life and shattered the bars of Diadem’s cage, blasting them back with such violence that it knocked the filly off her hooves. Diadem grunted as she slammed her back into the wall and cracked her head against the stone. Stars danced before her eyes, and all she could do was moan as her skull throbbed.

When she could finally see straight, she could see the stallion smiling at her from halfway down the hall. His fangs extended a good inch over his lower lip, and when he laughed, it was a surprisingly deep and smooth sound. “Not bad for a filly. Not bad at all.” He examined a drop of scarlet decorating his hoof, and simply wiped it off against his coat. “It’s been years since I last bled. It’s but a scratch, but impressive all the same.”

Turning around, he galloped away from Diadem, leaving the filly in his wake once again. Groaning, all Diadem could do was stand and clumsily stumble after him. Yet inwardly she smiled. She knew that the hallway came to an abrupt end right around the corner. Although she couldn’t take on the mysterious fanged unicorn by herself, she did hear the drumming hoofsteps of legionaries rushing down the hallway towards her. He wouldn’t be a match for Cirra’s finest.

“Might as well… give it up,” she said, pausing in the middle for a shallow cough. “You’ve got the Legion’s attention now. You don’t want to be on their bad side.”

Rounding the corner, she came to where the unicorn was quickly scanning the walls for the door. The only escape was a window, but that would be a deadly fall from a hundred feet in the air. Besides, the castle was warded to prevent teleportation spells being used from within, which was why Diadem preferred to use portals.

The unicorn turned to crack one last cocky smile at her. “Believe me, filly, I’ve been through that once before. And while I’d really like to stay and dance again, I really should be going.”

His horn quickly filled with an alarming amount of blue, purple, and gray Arcana, and with a loud bang! he disappeared in a flash. Gasping, Diadem ran to the window and peered through the dusty and grimy glass to see a corresponding flash on the northern hills. Even from this distance, she could see the mysterious unicorn wave to her, as if mocking her efforts, before turning tail and disappearing to the north.

Just then, a trio of Cirran legionaries rounded the corner behind her. One of them, a tall stallion wearing the lorica segmentata of the Cirran Eagle cohorts, rushed over to Diadem’s side. “Miss Diadem! Are you alright? What was that?”

Diadem refused to take her eyes off of the northern hills. “I… I have no idea.” Turning around, she remembered the storeroom she had abandoned, and that the stallion had been hiding near the back—near Star Swirl’s door. “But I think Star Swirl and Commander Hurricane and I should talk.”

Author's Notes:

It's here!

First off, I'd like to say that it feels great to write ASoS again. Roadac was fun and all, but slice of life isn't nearly as fun as adventure. This promises to be a grand new epic for the concluding story for Commander Hurricane.

Secondly, I'd like to thank you, the readers, for sticking with me for two stories (and now a third). Let's hope that I finish off this trilogy with a bang decent enough for you all.

Lastly, I promise no update schedule for Summer Lands. Adventure stories usually have more words per chapter, and thus can take a bit to get out. Just keep an eye on the progress bar on my user page to see how I'm coming along with the next installment.

Thank you guys again! You're the best!
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