Cinders, some aglow and others dead inside their ashen pinholes, marked the top platform, where walkway met hill and sloped down into the glaring heat of mingled flame and stone. The hazy air shimmered over a ground black with ash, sagging between narrowing walls that opened up into a wide, dark plain, far off but within sight. In the heat, the canyon seemed to have lost its vitality; once white and fat, the petrified trunks of endlessly long and serpentine trees had shriveled and blackened to tangled, brittle-looking hairs.

Applejack likened them to burnt spaghetti.

“We must rest here,” Octavia said. “It does not look like there will be another good spot for quite some time."

“Ah hear that,” Applejack said as Colgate removed the vestiges of her hoof wrappings, loosened from the run.

Without fuel for a fire, save what little they had brought with them from the downed airship, they gathered around a meager mound of salvaged embers that Applejack scraped off the platform, and which occasionally drifted down on them. With Octavia’s help, she boiled a pot of water, which she drank with a few sprigs of dried mint she found among their rations.

“Let me look at your face,” Colgate said.

Applejack obligingly tilted her head toward the weak light, and Colgate inspected her brow. The thread she had used was frayed, broken in a few places, and the wound looked ready to open again near the middle, where it had not yet completely cicatrized.

“I’d feel better if I could stitch it again.”

“How bad is it?” Applejack asked after a pregnant pause.

“It could be worse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you start bleeding again. And, uh, it’s probably gonna get infected.”

“If Ah start bleedin’, how bad would that be?”

“You’d be bleeding.”

Applejack frowned and sat back. “Honestly, Ah’d rather take my chances. Once is quite enough with you stitchin’ me up. No offense or anythin’, just, that hot needle wasn’t exactly what Ah’d call a walk in the park.”

Colgate nodded and studied the flaming trench that lay before them. The canyon’s sides were sheer and afforded no avenues of skirting the path; they would have to go straight through, or else turn back. She looked back into the canyon, where she could see their hunter’s deadly lights reflecting off a wall of overhanging rock, far away.

She stayed at the hill’s edge for a long time, alternately thinking and taking in the scenery, and when she looked back, her two companions were asleep. She made a spot for herself in the gravel and curled up.

The palace vestibule had shrunken, the throne wedged at a strange angle between pillars, the grand carpet kinked and folded where it ran against pews and columns. Colgate was alone, but knew she was not.

Octavia entered from outside, so Colgate knew, but manifested as an indeterminate presence to her side, liquid and warm, a gray mass out of the corner of the eye. She wasn’t sure what she was to do.

“It is okay,” Octavia said in her monotone, sitting beside Colgate.

And like that, without awkward prelude or hesitant transition, they were together. The dream sharpened and brightened, and though the walls around her still constricted, Colgate felt at peace. The liquid of her new friend had solid1ified into what Colgate imagined Octavia had looked like before: a short, sturdy statue of a mare, her raven mane falling into Colgate’s face and her downy fur comforting Colgate’s weary hooves as they caressed the body.

For a time, they remained so, neither body doing very much, but the warmth increasing all the same, trading back and forth of its own accord. Octavia got up and turned around, and Colgate rose and mechanically went to her, accepting the proposition and climbing onto Octavia’s back. It had grown to a more appropriate size to allow Colgate a more comfortable position, her limbs to not drape over Octavia, but clutch her chest and barrel. Nothing more was needed; Octavia drew from the same knowledge and interests as Colgate, and she took them for a lap around the palace interior. The space between Colgate’s legs burned and stung as the palace blurred—and then the space hurt very badly.

Colgate twisted awake with a yelped “dammit!” and gravel slithered at her side. Her head was swimming, her nether region pulsing. She lay for a moment as the pain washed away, breathing in the dirty air, trying to hold the shreds of the dream as they faded.

“Some sleep, huh?” she thought, getting to her hooves and immediately falling to a crouch. She had carved a deeper rut in the ground where she had involuntarily moved in the throes of her sleep, and she examined the shallow, dusty cuts on her midsection and pubic area. They were not as bad as the injuries on her side, which itched and burned, or even the headache that seemed to have gained strength in her sleep and which now felt like a cage of thorns around her skull, but she had to sit still for several minutes and collect herself before standing. Even taken together, though, all was of little account compared to her forelegs.

“Gotta do something about these things,” she mumbled, looking toward Applejack and Octavia to make sure they were still asleep. She half-crawled to them and dragged Applejack’s saddlebags over to her groove, and, rifling through them, pulled out the rubbing alcohol and the hydrogen peroxide. After a moment of hesitation, she dug deeper and found a slip of paper.

It was the princesses’ designs for the Elements of Harmony. She had come across it when they were picking salvage from the airship, and, without much thought but with the skeleton of a plan, folded it and crammed it into one of their bags. She replaced it there.

Red lines were spreading from both her wounds and up her legs, faint under the fur but painful and warm to the touch, and a cloudy liquid like tree sap had beaded at the edges. She examined herself carefully, the dream entirely out of mind, her professional side taking over and allowing an assessment free of fear and confusion. Still, with her extremely limited tools, there was not much to be done. She could not wrap herself properly, and could not rest her legs. There were no wheelchairs in their canyon.

Her course of action appeared all at once, but she was long in preparing, selecting another dress and carefully tearing it into strips to wrap herself, laying them out on the saddlebags and using books to hold them down should a breeze spring up. She did not want them dragging through the gravel and picking up any particulate matter. She brought the rain tree over and let it sit, slowly wetting the ground at her side.

With another hurried look at her companions, Colgate scraped a pile of gravel together and magically lifted it. On her haunches, she brought up first one hoof, then the other, and with silent speed and grit teeth, scoured. The new skin peeled away like wet paper, and the more it hurt, the faster and harder she scrubbed, defiant. It was a matter of a couple minutes, and it was another couple minutes before she had mastered her breathing.

She wet the rest of the ruined dress on the rain tree and, holding its dripping form by her head, applied first the alcohol and then the peroxide. Her flesh stung and foamed, as it was supposed to, and she let the chemicals do their work until all that remained was a sticky residue. Then she gently washed herself with the dress, dried herself with another, and doused the wounds again.

She wrapped herself after several minutes of close inspection, searching with both eyes and tentative hooves for any tiny piece of stone or ash, all the while swelling with opposed pride and horror. She had stemmed the infections, but it was a gruesome process; a part of her thought that she should have found a more elegant way to do it. A different part glowed at her creativity and stoicism.

“Okay,” she said to herself, easing back into a crouch. Her legs hurt worse than ever, but the pain was different to her mind, less diffuse. She closed her eyes, but sleep did not come, and she was wide awake when the others got up. She feigned dozing as they set up breakfast.

“Were you playing with the tree last night?” Octavia asked, startling Colgate into breaking her façade. The flight response kicked in first, and Colgate made it to a half-lurch before her injuries stopped her, and she had a second to calm down. Octavia looked at her indifferently, but kept a tactful distance as Colgate composed herself.

“Girls, we’re runnin’ low on foodstuffs,” Applejack said. “Want any turnips? We got those.”

“Are we out of carrots?” Octavia asked.

“Sure are.”

“Turnips will suffice.”

“How’s the cold, AJ?” Colgate asked. Octavia’s look had left her trembling; she could feel it in her chest, a quiet fibrillation.

“Crummy, thanks. Face hurts, head hurts, throat hurts… You get it.”

“Boil more water.”

“It takes so long to get enough outta this little tree, Ah’d just as soon get a move on.”

“We are in the fire part,” Octavia said. “On that creature’s map, this was the last stretch before the gateway. I agree with Applejack.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her head. “This is quite uncomfortable.”

“Yeah.” She scooted over to Applejack’s setup and took a turnip, peeling it clumsily with a chip of gravel.

“How’s the hooves?” Applejack asked. “Any better? You looked kinda rough yesterday.”

“I’ve handled them.” She glanced at her sleeping place, wondering whether there existed any signs of what she had done.

“‘Handled ‘em.’ Hm.”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Now you are sounding like me,” Octavia said.

Colgate shrugged.

“Well, Ah trust you. Yer the doctor.” She put a hoof to her snout. “We got any painkillers left?”

“Ate ‘em all up,” Colgate said.

“Figures.”

“Perhaps we can take our minds off the headaches,” Octavia said. “Do you have any more jokes, Applejack?”

“Sure. Whattaya call this place we’re in?”

“I… do not know.”

“A bunch of bull. Ah don’t think Ah can eat.”

The hill was unstable with loose sand and cinder, and their descent to the hardpan slow and precarious. Above, the blue sky was stained, enclosed by the heat-darkened canyon walls, their curled forms appearing as coarse hedges growing from the ground, packed so tight that only the occasional burst of firelight deep within showed, blush-like. They had to walk slowly for Colgate, and no one spoke of it.

“Stop,” Octavia said, doffing their saddlebags. The sweat was a visible sheen on her body, and Colgate stared.

“Ah’d rather not stop, if it’s all the same to you,” Applejack said.

“I am looking for shoes. I could have sworn I saw some in here.” She pulled out a quarter, tied together in an ugly knot.

“Who’s the lucky mare?” Colgate asked.

“You are,” Applejack said. “Yer hooves are already hurt bad enough.”

Colgate tried them on, but the cuffs brushed her wounds, and she passed them on to Octavia. The walk resumed.

Larger boulders began to appear at the trench’s sides, forcing the travelers closer and closer to the middle. From the ground itself, the walls, and the new boulders, dry heat radiated and occasionally manifested as yellow feathers of fire. The smell of ash had grown thick, and they walked with lowered heads and bent backs, eyes to the dead ground. Sometimes, dirt shifted and fell through minute lacunae, revealing to the quick eye more of the same black wires that formed the cliffs on either side. It seemed to Applejack, who could think of little else as she forced herself onward, that the flaming trench, the canyon, and the bizarre forest were all of a piece; that they had first seen the living canopy, passed through the main trunk structure, and were finally reaching the roots.

Octavia had taken the lead, and she doubled back at a bend, where they stopped at a sizzling boulder, trying to look around it without burning themselves. Spotlights like those that had chased them in the canyon moved lazily along a bottleneck, piercing the smoke and making spare silhouettes of the loose rocks along the bottom.

“We might be okay,” Colgate said, stumbling over to a sandy swale. She took a moment to make sure of her balance before pointing. “It’s coming from that building.”

“There’s a buildin’ out here?” Applejack asked, joining her. It resembled just another piece of flaming scenery, so much that she thought at first that Colgate was making it up. After a second of scrutiny, though, the architecture stood out as its enshrouding flames shifted; the shack appeared intact, and though fire ate at it from all sides, turning its walls and roof to solid, moving light, no pieces fell away.

“They’re posted up in there, and they’re facing into that… all that stuff. Not out of it.”

“You think they’re watchin’ that somethin’ don’t come out?” Applejack asked. “An’ they consequently won’t care if we go walkin’ in?”

“That’s what I think.” She began to move, and Octavia and Applejack followed, reluctant but without counterpoint. They only had the one path.

Still, they paused once more at the shack’s side, where it hung above them, its foundation carved into the stone hairs that occasionally gleamed from within the conflagration’s bosom. The spotlights circled, illuminating nothing that the fire did not.

“Colgate,” Octavia said. “We will want to move faster here. Will you permit me to carry you in my magic?”

Colgate looked at her, expression inscrutable even as her face paled. In a small voice, she said, “Sure, no problem.”

Octavia nodded and took her up, and Colgate froze, limbs stiff and jaw tight and trembling.

“Just run, don’t let the heat slow ya down,” Applejack said. “Three, two, one!” She took off with a splash of sand, galloping down the thin crevasse, dodging away from stones, hind legs kicking up spastically and head whipping back and forth. Octavia, with a sigh and a look up at the crack of sky, followed just as a light passed over her back. Unlike in the canyon, she did not feel it for the heat that pressed in from all other sides. On her left and right, each rock was a self-contained bonfire, and below, under pounding hooves, warm sand gave way to hot wires. Sweating and scrambling, the two ponies danced down the gap. Octavia was reminded of the ponies who walked across hot coals, and the time she had refused to try when once asked—spring break, long ago.

Applejack was slowly hopping back and forth between two larger monoliths where the trench widened again, and Octavia reached her after a minute, her entire body stinging and raw. Colgate, floating beside her like an apparition, still had not moved, and Octavia set her down. She expected Colgate to tear away, or pace a sequence of agitated circles, or otherwise give vent to her evident anxiety, but the unicorn only sat down and looked back.

“Are you okay?” Octavia asked after a moment. “Both of you?”

“Ah wouldn’t mind takin’ a spin on those shoes, if you can spare ‘em,” Applejack said. Octavia removed her shoes without comment.

“They’re not comin’,” Colgate said. “We did good. Thanks for carrying me.”

“Of course.” She looked to the sky again, then the distance. “I can see where this ends. We are close.”

“Then let’s go,” Applejack said. The sand was deeper, and their movement became labored. The smoke still rose from the stones, sometimes also from spaces under the sand that they noticed, but did not mention. Each was aware that she was walking on top of the fire’s source, and not around it, as they had once surmised.

A veil of smoke lifted on hot wind, and they raised their heads instinctively to see into the distance, which, up to that time, had been blotted and obscured. The sky was blue above, but ran through green into a jaundiced dusk at the horizon, dentiled with towers of smoke that were as stitches, binding the sky to an equally vast plain of mingled black and red, swirling around clumps of charred land that coalesced not far from where they stood to become the frayed edge of their ground. On the shore stood the source of the smoke they had seen earlier: a wide, stout tower of beaten metal, its top open to declaim a perilous glow, its face perforated for the same effect.

Colgate had only taken a few lunging steps before sand was in her wrappings, and she had to stop. The others didn’t say anything as she fussed with the fabric, but writ on their faces was displeasure that even she recognized. When the sand had been shaken to a less sensitive area of the wound, they continued. Applejack plowed ahead, looking back every few seconds.

“If you wish it, I can carry you,” Octavia said.

“I’ll let you know,” Colgate said, not looking at her. Fresh sand, already, was irritating her, but she forced her legs to work. At each step, she stifled a moan of pain.

“This may not be the best time to mention it,” Octavia began, “but it may also be the best time we will have in a while. I do not know—all I know is that I would prefer this stay here, with us.”

“Mm?”

“I do not know how to go about it, but I would very much like to change. I have been unhappy for some time.”

“You keep saying that.”

“That is because it is true. More than that, I have said it because I did not know what else to say. I have believed—chosen to believe—that the misery I put myself through is earned and deserved.”

“Hard life.” She lowered her face with a series of choked coughs, accidentally breathing in a plume of smoke. Octavia patted her back.

“I know that this had nothing to do with your specialty, but do you… know anything about psychology?”

Colgate coughed again. “I know what everyone knows, pretty much. Congrats on admitting you need help, obliquely though you did it.”

“Hm. Thank you.”

The two followed Applejack in silence for a time, and the sand became gravel: easier to walk on, but sharper. Movement was careful, and missteps were painful on their burned, tired hooves. A few times, Octavia breathed in as if to speak, but did not. She had rehearsed her declaration in her head since that morning, and Colgate’s reception, though similar to what she imagined, stopped her from pursuing the topic further.

“Please, Colgate, let me carry you,” Octavia finally said.

“I carry me,” Colgate said bitterly, unable to ignore the pain and finishing her sentence with a weak cry.

“Let her carry you,” Applejack said.

“Hey!” She cast a look at Octavia, expecting a cloud of magic to envelop her. Octavia only returned the look with sad, unimpressed eyes.

In the soft purr of flames all around, a rock clattered. Colgate flinched and the others looked in its direction. The trench’s wall was an indeterminate coil of stone wires and dark flames, and movement behind it sparked no suspicion for several minutes, as it crept closer on camouflaged legs. For a moment, Colgate thought she saw a single, bright circle pan their way, but it was gone, lost in a shroud of fire. She followed the flames’ path, disturbed, and was drawing her conclusion when Octavia spoke.

“Freeze,” she said softly. “From the mines. It is one of them.”

“Ah see it now,” Applejack said.

The creature struggled through a space in the wall, its face like a collage of arrowheads ringed around the flaming bore hole that served—Colgate guessed—as a sensory organ. Its legs scrambled against the wires, and it slowly extruded out to them. A few scraps flaked off its back as it emerged, its lumpen body a boulder of volcanic rock, black and sharp. Smoke poured out of holes on a stunted back ridge and off the glowing fringes that formed its featureless, conical face. They looked up at it, shrinking from the light it radiated, and it pawed at the cliff side before selecting a path and slowly lowering itself.

“It’s comin’ our way,” Applejack said.

“I do not think so,” Octavia said.

“Ah do.” She backed away, shying from a patch of sparking shale.

“They feel heat, do they not? It cannot feel us amidst all this fire.”

Applejack shook her head, and Colgate watched her. Applejack’s face was drawn, her eyes dilated, her tail switching. She was ready to sprint, and the motion of Octavia’s tail suggested the same, belying her tone.

Colgate walked past Applejack, facing the stone beast. Its head rose and the glowing hole hit Colgate square in the eyes, and for a second, she was reminded of the spotlights from before. At her side, gravel flew, and she fell over herself to join in Applejack’s retreat. Her hooves felt ready to burst, and she yelled in pain and self reproach. She whipped her head around at the sound of an avalanche, then back as she was lifted off the ground.

It was Octavia, she knew, but her first thought was that she had been captured or thrown, that the betrayal she had feared had come at last, and Octavia had tossed her back to the creature as a diversion while she and Applejack escaped. Colgate twisted and squeaked in the magic, her heart hammering, her eyes adjusting as the spotlight left them and became a galumphing hammer of stone on stone, a bobbing sun as the beast gave chase.

The flames and stones whipped by for all, and Colgate held her breath as Octavia indiscriminately pulled her through spirals of smoke and cinders. The creature behind them pounded the ground with its clastic feet, stepping where they could not, scattering hot coals and tossing gouts of fire up in a trail behind. Its porous body glowed, and against the hellish backdrop, it was like a part of the fire trench had come alive to ward them off. They had seen the same creature in the deep chill under the Friesian Mountains, but there, it had been diminished, weakened, its fire paler and its bearing less sure. In its home, it charged like a battering ram, mouth and back growling with white and blue fire. It left deep prints in the gravel, and for Octavia and Applejack, it felt as though the entire canyon were shaking with its weight as it gained on them.

Colgate almost fell out of Octavia’s magic as it weakened suddenly. Applejack ran on, unaware that they had stopped, and Octavia turned to face the beast and lowered her head a fraction. The ground erupted upwards, a geyser of stone and grit, big enough to obfuscate the beast for a second before it charged through, a terrible aspect looming through dust. Octavia did not flinch, and threw a second explosion into its face. The sound clapped throughout the canyon, stopping Applejack several yards ahead, and shook the wires that supported them. On both sides, sand sifted down, and the stunned creature turned to the blast, pausing for enough time to receive another attack that jolted it back.

Colgate thought she saw the bead of gray light between Octavia and her enemy, a light-fast drupelet, flickering once and then gone. Rock and fire exploded outwards, and the creature bucked and shook, its side torn away in twin flashes and a torrent of sparks. Liquid sulfur poured out, frothy and stinking, and it wheeled away from them on fewer legs than it had started with, dragging itself to a crevasse in the walls. It produced no sound, save the guttural motions of escaping fire and the grind of moving stone.

From far behind, Applejack screamed. “Hoooooo-weeee! Now that’s what Ah call a butt whoopin’!”

“I must put you down,” Octavia whispered, crouching as well and releasing Colgate. Applejack galloped to join them.

“Octavia, yer a terror! Ah thought we were done fer!”

“Thank you.” Her eyes were closed and her breathing was fast.

“Walk,” Colgate said.

“Huh?” Applejack asked.

“Not you, her. Octavia, open your eyes and walk. Pace around.”

Octavia shook her head.

“Help her up, walk her around.” She looked at the destroyed fragment that had landed nearby, a dead leg protruding off the rocky shell. On the canyon floor, it seemed at home, a natural rock formation that might be likened to something alive, but not alive itself. Colgate coughed. “If you just sit there and breathe like that, you’re gonna hyperventilate. Walk it off, slow your heart rate normally.”

When Octavia was ready, they walked, slowly again. Colgate insisted she not be carried, but moaned with each step. Only the sight of the ever nearer tower buoyed her.

“So what’s so bad ‘bout bein’ carried?” Applejack asked. “Is it a pride thing? ‘Cause if it is, let me tell ya, we don’t care ‘bout that.”

“It’s not,” Colgate said. “Unless it is?” she thought. She frowned at the side of Applejack’s head. “I just don’t like it.”

“You have a nervous disposition,” Octavia said. “I am not completely surprised, to be honest. I do not like it much myself. But in here, and under these circumstances, we must put those feelings aside. You understand, do you not?”

“Oh sure, it’s great.”

Applejack glanced at her.

“I know not to just grab you out of the blue,” Octavia continued. “I will ask permission always, or warn you if permission is irrelevant.”

“Yep.”

“Ah remember Twilight used to pull little Spike around all the time,” Applejack said. “He didn’t seem to mind, least Ah never heard him complain ‘bout it. Ah think it’s a tad rude, personally.”

“She ever grab one of you?”

“It’s happened, but Ah don’t remember any specific instances. Ah know Rainbow chewed her out over it pretty good once, a long time ago.”

“That sounds like her,” Octavia said.

“Ah miss her. Ah miss ‘em all, but… You know what Ah mean.”

“I miss them as well.”

Colgate, to fill the gap where she assumed her response was expected, said, “Me too.”

The rain tree was shriveled and limp, but still produced a trickle of water, which they stopped at a rise to take. They had to angle their heads and almost suck at the needle-thin branches to get anything. From where they rested, they saw that the trench ended suddenly, its walls sloping down sharply and flattening into an elliptical plain, at the center of which burned their tower. The smoke was higher, and they could see more clearly the volcanic sea laid out beyond, the land’s perforated edge as it reached and weakened across lava. To the east—what they considered east—the lurid red and orange of the melted world seemed to go on indefinitely, stained with smoke under the same yellow sky, turning to a phlegmy brown in long coming sunset. To what they thought of as west, a sheer wall of rock enclosed the sea and rose past the smoke and the few clouds. Soon, it would cast its shadow on their path.

The tower in the middle, meanwhile, burned eerily, its top open to spit endless sparks, sometimes adjoined by shards of fire, dim and dirty and gone in a flash. At its base, a circular door stood open to reveal the fire’s body, a golden pool of light shimmering on the black ground outside. On both sides ran a wire fence, studded with signs in the unreadable Tartarus language.

“Ah don’t see the gateway,” Applejack said.

“Perhaps…” Octavia began.

“It might be on the other side.”

Their heads rose back up and their nostrils opened to the fresher air as they exited the trench. They could not help it; as the flaming world widened around them, the heat became less stifling, the smoke less daunting. They paused again where the ground changed.

It had seemed a shadow from a distance, a subtle ring around the tower where dark brown ground became black, but a shadow it was not. Where the canyon walls, the slender but tough wires—to eventually become living trees, miles and miles hence—dipped and joined the ground, they stood abreast of a divide, an inch or less wide, but complete as far down as they could see. The sand and gravel were gone, fallen through widened interstices, poured through a great and intricate filter that had no visible bottom. Filling a natural well of telluric light, the wires twisted, knotted, met one another and branched away, forming a rigid plug of coarse, thin stone hairs, dense enough to walk on, seemingly suspended by the magic that formed it. At the edge, they could look all the way down, as Applejack did, and see no point at which wire met ground. The three of them stood and looked down at the endless loops and angles, and Applejack contemplated their origin, wondering again whence the wires came, and whether they originated from one source or many. The thought of how many miles long each wire must be, and how many of those miles were packed like vasculature into the pit, awed and worried her.

Octavia put her hoof on the exposed wire and tested it; it held her weight, and did not move when she tried to shake it. They walked on, carefully lest they slip through and twist a pastern.

“I am reminded of the pillar of bones,” Octavia said. “In the desert.”

“Ah remember,” Applejack said, looking down, quietly mesmerized. Under the headache, she regretted that she would not be able to properly describe it to her friends, but in the moment, she felt only lightheaded unease. There was no visible bottom; for all she knew, an unthinkable fall would take them to the core of the world, if such a thing existed. Maybe, she thought randomly, the trees would bloom again at the bottom as well, and the core was not of fire but of soft greenery and gentle breezes.

Colgate looked over her shoulder, a habit that did not fade with her slowly germinating trust, and froze. As if sensing her fear, the others paused and turned as well. Out of the trench, a chipped coal, the beast shambled, its face white and dripping. Its movement was slow and pained, the wound Octavia had opened black and empty.

“Fight or flight?” Colgate asked.

“My energy was expended the first time,” Octavia said.

“Then let’s go,” Applejack said. “Slowly. To the fence.”

They crossed the wires, and it was clear, even when they did not look back, that the creature had joined them on their ground. Under its weight, the entire frame trembled; they could feel the wires shivering under their pained hooves, could hear the delicate ticking of stone like chandeliered strands. Each step behind them resonated through the ground and up their legs. The creature had not noticed them, or was ignoring them, but none trusted it. They had seen how fast it could move in the trench, and such a charge might shake their platform apart.

The heat stopped them farther from the tower than they had expected, a wall of pain that bit their chests and faces, driving them back in uncoordinated revulsion. They began to follow the invisible line in a wide circle to the fence, and the creature slouched along, heading toward the tower, its face low and swinging in its injured amble.

“You got a name fer this thing?” Applejack asked quietly.

“Me?” Colgate asked.

“We’ve got rain trees an’ bush balls. Got one fer this fella?”

“Hm. Rock dog? Fire thing?”

“Let us just walk,” Octavia said.

“Now… am Ah to assume that you’ve got at least enough magic to let us through this?” Applejack asked.

“Assuming that the fence is not enchanted in some way, I should be able to.”

“Oh, shoot.”

“Did you forget about enchantments?” Colgate asked. In all the haste of the day, she had forgotten too.

“Sure enough.” She winced and scrunched her eyes closed, the headache pushing at her skull.

At the fence, Colgate examined a sign that she could not read while Octavia teased the chain links apart. They gave way slowly, uncoiling like waking vines, glowing dull red where her magic concentrated.

Applejack looked at the small ring of red tips, expanding as Octavia gradually undid the magic that held the fence together. “Those must be hot,” she thought, and her eyes sprung open. She whipped her head around to descry the approaching rock dog, attracted from across the wire field to their tiny buds of heat. Her lips trembled, her tongue darted against the backs of her teeth, and she smacked the fence with a hoof.

“What?” Octavia snapped, glaring up at her, then back. “Oh, hell.”

“Can you—Ah mean, Ah know you said—”

“This is hard enough. Be quiet and let me concentrate.”

“It’s comin’, is all.”

“Then do something about it!”

Applejack’s jaw dropped, and she swallowed her response. She looked at Colgate, who looked ready to run again, injuries or no, and at Octavia, who scowled down on the fence as it untwined, slow and vaguely beautiful.

“How…” she began, her mind working to unstick itself. She was used to Octavia or Colgate saving them with flashes of power or insight. For that matter, she was used to Twilight or Rarity stepping up with their magic and their poise, so much more useful in a tight spot than she.

“How…” she repeated, inching away from the fence, positioning herself in what she supposed was a good stance to enact her plan, when she had it. “It likes heat. Is that anythin’?” she thought. She looked to the rain tree, a crusty dandelion carelessly thrown on the ground, its shape and color alike with the wires.

The rock dog’s pace moved from a walk to an uneven trot; they felt it in the ground. Applejack dodged to the rain tree and, with a mumbled apology, took it up in her mouth, then ran. Neither mare paid her any attention as she took off across the tangled plain, the tree’s dying weight pulling at her face and concentrating in her brow. She thought she could feel the string that bound her coming apart, and imagined as she ran the feeling of blood seeping into her fur, her eye. “Just what Ah need,” she thought, looking around as she moved past the rock dog. She needed a source of fire, and realized as she ran and stumbled that there were none nearby. The heat came from everywhere, from the ground and air itself, but the only fire she could see was from the tower, which she could not approach, and the rock dog. She could not run all the way back to the canyon, not with the tree and perhaps not even without it. Her head pounded, seeming to swell as she breathed harder and harder. Her sweat was drying up.

She dropped the tree and fell to her knees, closing her eyes and catching her breath. “No, walk,” she murmured to herself, recalling Colgate’s advice. She picked up the tree again and paced, forcing herself to breathe evenly, in through the nose and out through the mouth. She walked toward the rock dog, its lumbering steps shaking her ground. Colgate trembled, frozen, beside Octavia, who still bent over her work.

The dog leaked from its face, either from the wound or as an indication of hunger—“Do they get hungry?” she thought—and its trail was marked by glowing stipples on the wires. At a jog, Applejack came to the sulfurous path and lowered the tree to it, its weight hurting her jaw and forcing her to drop it again. She took a few more breaths before lowering her face. “Like a campfire,” she said to herself, blowing at the leaves where they met the smear of gilt liquid. The wires were not hot, not like the canyon’s floor, and her mane draped down into a space as she encouraged the fire. She could not blow too fast or hard, else she would extinguish the blaze before it could start, but with the rock dog’s footsteps, away from her and closer to her friends, she had to remind herself constantly. “Campfire, not a candle. Campfire, not a candle.”

The first weak curls of singed leaves bent away, and Applejack brought her face closer. Her eyebrow burned, a brand that made her reel back no matter how she tried to ignore it, as with the smoke she could not completely avoid inhaling. She blew too far away, then pushed herself back for another attempt, her balance unsure, her hooves catching in spaces and on the thin cords that made them. With a moan of frustration, she prostrated herself and angled her muzzle, pushing to the cradle of fire, and blew. Small crackles rewarded her, then the first orange slit of flame. She paused to let it catch, and then gave another gentle gust. The fire grew, and in only a few brief moments, the rain tree’s center was alight. She grabbed it and ran, having to wrestle it out of the wires’ grasp, where the slim trunk had slipped down.

Under her shod hooves, the wires twanged and ticked as she tried to gallop, the flaming tree unnatural at her head. Under her tired eyes, it appeared to her that she raced across an artful manifestation of the smoke that had tormented them earlier, the whorls of an artist’s practicing pen in febrile limbo, scrawled between the inscrutable cliff and a shimmering expanse of lava. The fire to her side shredded itself with her speed, a dragging sound of ruffled fabric in the wind, white noise to color the sound of her breath in her ears.

Colgate finally ran, a blue shadow along the fence, and Octavia did not look up. Applejack wanted to call out, to announce herself to the rock dog and to her friends, but could not. She did not think it could hear her anyway, but the thought was no help, and she pushed herself to a more reckless speed, heart rattling and lungs burning. She felt that if she were to cough, her body would fly apart with released tension, her limbs and ribs as taut as the wires that supported them all.

The dog turned to face Applejack, and she ran on, heart and chest burning, lungs thinned, throat dry. The glowing hole of its head filled her and blinded her to the rest of the world, and she thought again of death. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, as many supposed, just the murky cold of confusion and emptiness. No loved ones had appeared to greet her or show her the way, and her life had not flashed before her eyes as it did as she charged the flaming, hulking beast.

She veered and fell on a misstep. The tree spun away and her knees were bit open, her mane flopping lightly against her side, which was cushioned by the saddlebags she had forgotten she carried. The ground shook under her as she struggled back up, sight smothered under the rock dog’s image and skin tingling with heat and fear, and the after-burn of adrenaline.

“I see it! Get over here!” Octavia shouted. “Colgate! Come back!”

Applejack did not look back at her tree. She pushed herself across the wires, stumbled, kicked, lost a shoe. The fence was open, and she and Colgate converged upon it like freed spirits in flight to meet their savior, who shook her tail wildly to dislodge a cinder. The rock dog was momentarily forgotten.

Colgate slipped through the fence first, her thin frame allowing quick and painless passage that was not so for Applejack. She got a look at her cut knees as she wriggled through the hole, fur matted and scarlet, looking much worse than they likely were.

The dimensionless gateway stood aslant and embedded in the wires, a shard of darkness caught through its middle. Colgate struggled and fell, and Applejack took a moment to heft her onto her back as Octavia raced ahead. Behind, the rock dog shuffled and pounded its legs, and Applejack was distantly aware that it was chasing them down. A minute later, less, the fence broke apart, metal pinging off rock and heavy paws slamming in a torrent.

It cast no shadow, but they could feel the heat draining away as the gateway consumed their view. As big as a house, as thin as a sheaf of paper, as black as death and cold as the ocean, the gateway hove up, loomed, consumed. Applejack did not see her pained face slacken and lift with hope, for the physical shadow disclosed no reflection.

They flew out into sheer cold, their world and its gravity re-orienting itself and then meeting them with a breathtaking splash of melted snow.