Big Mac, Rarity, Pinkie, and Colgate spent the night in their corkscrew hotel exchanging letters with Octavia on the other side of the country. When morning came, they went down to meet Versus, and the five of them discussed the facts over yet another hotel breakfast.

Everyone else was in Hoofington. They had been taken there by an enchanted letter, sent by Vanilla Cream, and which said that it was his final interference. Whether he was to be trusted was up for debate. The airship had been teleported with them, and Applejack and Rainbow Dash were seeing to its repairs that day. Twilight was still in the hospital with a minor concussion, which the doctor there predicted should not leave any lasting damage. Finally, the last Element of Harmony was in town as well, the Element of Courage.

“Great, so they can snag the last Element, then zip down here and pick us up, and we’ll go get Discord,” Pinkie said. “Easy!”

“That’ll take forever,” Rarity said. “Hoofington to Snowdrift is something like two weeks of distance, and from here to Discord’s stupid castle isn’t much faster.”

“Can we meet them halfway?” Colgate asked. “Partial Thoughts said she had a company airship, we can take that.”

“Ah don’t wanna get her tied up in this,” Big Mac said.

“It’s an option, though,” Rarity said.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Versus asked.

“I doubt it, but thank you.”

“What about the Contraction party?” Pinkie asked.

“Ponies are still talking about it,” Versus said.

“Let ‘em,” Big Mac said. “That ain’t our concern anymore.”

“Wait, how can ponies still be talking about it when Twilight isn’t here anymore?” Rarity asked. “These are precogs, still talking about the Contraction like it’s going to happen?”

“All the precogs are acting like the Contraction’s right on schedule,” Versus said. “This Sunday, sometime late.”

“Sunday? Today’s Monday. They’re not going to get back here in six days.”

“I’m just telling you what everypony’s saying. Why? The Contraction’s gonna go whether Twilight’s here or not.”

“Uhhhh…” Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Well, about that…”

“Not here,” Rarity said, shooting Pinkie a sharp look. “Upstairs. We’ll talk there.”

“What are you hiding?” Versus teased, a coy smile on her lips. “You naughty mares. And Big Mac.”

Rarity shook her head, and everyone took her cue. Talk went to milder topics until they were done eating, and Versus went back to work at the front. Upstairs, Colgate rooted around in her saddlebags while the others talked. She had checked the night before too, but until she had put her hooves to the coveted items, some primal part of her feared that they had disappeared. The bits she had withdrawn, which no one had asked about, and her copy of the princesses’ design for the Elements of Harmony. The parchment crinkled under her hoof, and she felt only slightly better.

“She doesn’t know about Twilight forcing the Contraction,” Rarity said, “and I think we should keep it that way.” She looked at Big Mac. “I know we like her, but we don’t know her all that well. She might ruin it.”

“Why does the Contraction party matter at all?” Colgate asked, withdrawing her pulse crystal to examine it in the light.

“If the precogs are talking about the party like it’s still happening, then that means Twilight is somehow going to set off all that magic she skimmed off the gateway.” She thought for some time, and eventually grabbed a pen and paper. “Pinkie, if you could send this to Octavia, we need more answers.”

“What’s the deal?” Pinkie asked.

“I think I have an idea, but I need to know a few things. Ladies, I assume none of us remember how Twilight was setting up her Contraction? I know I don’t.”

“Not a clue!”

Colgate shook her head. The fact that Rarity had an idea was enough for her, and she put her mind to the conversation fast approaching. When they had discovered their division the previous night, Colgate had known that it was time for her to leave as well. She had been half-searching for an opportunity since emerging from Tartarus, a chance to slip away and fulfill what she considered her private destiny. Big Mac had illuminated it deep underground, the answer—and the only one she could imagine—that forced her life to cohere to those of her new friends. She needed her own Element of Harmony whether the others thought so or not. If she was not already safe, it would save her, and if they were not already complete, it would complete them.

“That’s what I thought,” Rarity said. “Which means it is Twilight setting off the Contraction, and not us. I’m asking her if it’s possible for her to make it happen from where she is now.”

“If it isn’t, then she needs to be in Snowdrift by this Sunday,” Pinkie said, fiddling with the room service menu and dropping it onto the carpet. “Right?”

“Right, and that’s incredibly fast.” Tapping her chin with the quill, she continued, “There has to be some way for them to get from Hoofington to Snowdrift in six days, maybe less if we allow time for her to set everything up. Hold on.” She finished her note and gave it to Pinkie, who sent it off in a sizzling cloud of smoke.

“Going somewhere, Colgate?” Pinkie asked.

“Just checking stuff, all’s good here,” Colgate said, snapping her bag shut. Pinkie had caught her thinking thoughts of escape, must have seen it on her face somehow, and Colgate looked down at the carpet to hide the damning expression.

“Do we have a map of the country?” Rarity asked.

“Ah can go down and ask fer another,” Big Mac said.

“Do.”

As soon as he was gone, Colgate breathed easier. He was her guiding light, his knowledge the key to the rest of her life, but he could not know any sooner than the others her design. She had no doubt that the plan would be her death despite what feeble defense he may forward, all unless she could carry it off to its end, to their end, as Big Mac had suggested long ago. She had no way to guess what he knew or had foreseen before losing the glamour, or if the glamour truly was lost, but he had said there was a good reason for her to be with them. She could imagine no other purpose, no other calling that she alone could fulfill, no other empty space into which she could step except perhaps a grand, sacrificial grave.

If he knew yet, and had neither forgotten nor stopped her, what then? She wondered whether she would be allowed her private destiny or have it stripped away at the last second by some unstoppable magic of Twilight’s. Twilight could do it. In Colgate’s rampaging imagination, the sky was blackened and she was frozen as a scythe of superheated magic came upon her, a dot on the horizon that expanded to a crushing mantle. Like the image of the lone soldier on a hill, she stood and watched death from above in the midst of all, the martyred center of her world at last. It was not such a terrible image to her, but powerful, and she missed Big Mac coming back, so engrossed was she. When Pinkie got her attention again, her heart was racing just as it had been minutes ago.

Best to just do it, she thought. “Twilight can’t scythe me if her friends are in the same room.”

“Unless she can?”

“You took your time, dear,” Rarity said. “Forgive me. You weren’t telling Versus anything, were you?”

“Just sayin’ goodbye,” Big Mac said. “You know, in case.”

Her face broke into a sympathetic smile for a second as Twilight’s note came back. “It says there’s no way she can activate the Contraction remotely, and she’ll think about any ways to get down here faster. This business of the Contraction on Sunday has her curious as well.” She folded the note up. “Now, who’s good at math?”

Big Mac raised a tentative hoof.

“How fast would they have to go to get from Hoofington to Snowdrift in six days? Rainbow Dash can make them go pretty fast with Twilight’s… whatever it is, that recursive magical wind-thing she has at the back of the ship. But is it fast enough, I wonder.”

While the three of them puzzled over their map, Colgate had a bottle of wine brought up to calm her nerves. Everything was still on Aloe and Lotus’ tab, though the twins themselves had apparently left the city.

“Anypony want any?” Colgate asked, yanking the cork with a triumphant pop of magic and pressure.

“It’s ten in the morning, dear,” Rarity said, and Pinkie resolutely shook her head.

With Big Mac’s help, they worked out that, even with magic, flying from Hoofington to Snowdrift in six days was not plausible. Vanilla Cream had said he would interfere no more, so him pulling their friends back south was not an option. All that was left was for them to somehow cross the country in one huge teleport, or a sequence of smaller ones. Perhaps they would write Princess Luna and ask her to shoot them down to Snowdrift, Pinkie suggested, but Rarity did not think it likely—that they would write her, or that the princess, written, would accede.

Meanwhile, Colgate sat on the bed, periodically checked her saddlebags, and drank wine. At one point, she ran to the shower, turned it on for a couple minutes, and emerged wrapped in a towel and smiling goofily to herself. Her chance was missed, but no anticipatory scythe had flown out to them, and under the influence of wine and shower water, and with the familiar surroundings of the uncaring hotel room, a second chance felt more realistic.

“Feelin’ okay?” Big Mac asked.

“Feelin’ weird,” was her response.

A little more calculation and a few more slugs of wine, and they determined that in four days or more, depending on how long it took them to get their Element, Twilight and crew could get as far as Manehattan, perhaps a little farther west, or just north of Canterlot. In other directions, there lay the northern coast, which was no help, and the mountains and mesas of eastern Equestria.

“So does this mean that there’s some way to teleport from here?” Pinkie asked.

“Twilight can’t teleport like that on her own,” Rarity said slowly, trying to fit the logic together. “And I don’t think she can manage a sigil to do it either. If she could, we’d have been doing that long ago. There’s got to be something there already, some sort of weird… teleportation enchantment, or a magical doorway, or something weird like that.”

“Equestria is full of weird nonsense,” Colgate said, thinking of the watchpoints outside Canterlot. “So you might not be far off with your idea.”

“You don’t happen to know of anything, do you?” Pinkie asked.

“They don’t let me see stuff like that.” She took another drink of wine; her bottle was approaching the halfway point.

“Are you sure you don’t want to save some of that for later?” Rarity asked, wrinkling her nose.

Colgate shrugged.

Rarity wrote Twilight another note explaining what they had figured out and asking whether she knew of any ways to travel instantly across the country; Twilight replied that she did not.

“So there’s some sorta fast-traveling magic out there,” Big Mac said. “Ah reckon it makes some sense to have it connect here.”

“I’m thinking,” Rarity mumbled. “I feel like I’ve seen something before, but I can’t place where from.”

They sat, and Colgate jostled her wine bottle, and Big Mac adjusted the curtains. A light snow was coming down over the town and the clouds threatened worse for later, a later that they each hoped not to see. The visible piece of Snowdrift from their window looked large and cold to them, no more the semi-familiar backyard of adventure. All the powerful mares were in Hoofington, and what was left behind was simply the rest of them; so it seemed in the harsh, snowy sun in the creaking corkscrew hotel. The powerless ones caught in the middle, with clouds gathering above and the crowd of hotel-goers ebbing below, mass and motion, life spinning on. It was easy to feel the sickening pull from their isolated hotel room, the sure and slow unsticking sensation as that life threatened to spin past them, and it silently urged them to their own ideas of correct action, to stop the thinking and planning and just get out and make something happen. In Hoofington, surely, things were happening. What would Twilight do?

“So how you doing, Cole?” Pinkie asked, her nerves confined to a rut she was pacing in the carpet between beds.

“I miss friends,” Colgate said. She went to the closet and pulled out a scarf. “Look at this. Octavia and I went shopping earlier and she picked this out for me.”

“Awww, cute! Put it on!”

Colgate stumbled a little and donned her woolen scarf, muted gray and blue, and pranced about for Pinkie, who cheered.

“But I’m not sure about this city anymore,” Colgate said, lying down on the floor.

“What’s that mean?”

Colgate’s eyebrows contracted in realization that she had begun. The excuse she had imagined for leaving seemed suddenly paper-thin, and she got to her hooves once more to check the window for the umbra of Twilight’s scythe.

“Ah’m good an’ ready to get out of the cold,” said Big Mac, who had felt that way since day one. “Ah dunno Ah can take six more days here.”

“Here, here,” Pinkie said, and jumped aside when Colgate ran for the bathroom. They could hear her throwing up, and when she came out, her face was pale.

“Too much wine?” Rarity asked, not looking up.

“There’s something I have to do,” Colgate said.

“You just did it,” Pinkie said.

“I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

“What’s wrong? Do you have secret agent work here?”

Colgate rubbed her head and reached for the wine. “It’s important for us all, and I’m not… Six days you said?” “Celestia, I can feel it coming.”

“Well, they’ve got to be here on Sunday,” Rarity said. “So say the precogs, and they know.”

Colgate looked at the map on the bed, not seeing it. “Tight schedule. Okay.”

“Are you going somewhere?” Pinkie asked.

“Not far, and I’ll be back.” She began throwing on coats and tucked her pulse crystal into a breast pocket—as if that would be any protection.

“But we need you here!”

“Run! Get out and hide yourself!” “No harm, damn it.” She rubbed her eyes. “No you don’t. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, it would’ve fed into what the precogs saw. Me being gone either doesn’t matter or somehow helps.”

“Stop it,” Rarity said. “What is this? You always do this, you run off and do something weird, and then it comes back to all of us.”

Colgate grabbed the wine bottle, splashing a drop onto the bed sheets, and drank. “I’m sorry about that.”

“You can be straight with us,” Big Mac said. “We’re not gonna be mad at’cha.”

Colgate eyed him over the top of her bottle, and Rarity moved into her field of view, glowering.

“I’m just going to check on something,” Colgate said, fighting to keep her voice steady. In her head, she had already set off Twilight’s curse; it was shrieking her way in that exact moment, ripping the sky open and raining deliquesced magic onto the earth in frothy torrents. That this was not only unlikely, but completely out of Twilight’s character, occurred to her only very distantly. “I’ve gotta run south for a little bit, but I’ll circle around and come back up here in time for the Contraction party. We can go to Discord’s together.”

“You’re not running?” Pinkie asked.

“I can’t run.” She went back to the window. “But I’m no Element, so even if I do, you’ll be fine without me.”

“We like you,” Big Mac said.

Colgate nodded sharply. Not looking at them made it easier to keep a grip on her emotions. “Yep. I’m aware of that. But you don’t need me. Right now, this is all on Twilight, pulling off this Contraction. I’m nothing here.” She scooted across the room to the door, swaying on her hooves. “Don’t nobody worry about me.”

For a second, they looked at one another, until Rarity said, “Go then. Take care of it if it can’t wait.”

“I’ll come back.”

“Fine.”

Big Mac went to her and they exchanged softer words, and then Colgate was gone. He sat down heavily and put her wine bottle on the nightstand.

“So there goes Colgate,” Pinkie said. “Was it something I said?”

“Sketchy mare,” Rarity said.

“Ah think the division freaked her out. She had some vague plans ‘bout this fer a while, she said, but losin’ half our group scared her into actually doin’ it.”

“Freaked out, you don’t say? I thought she was perfectly at ease.”

“Are you kidding? She looked like she’d had a dozen pots o’ coffee!” Pinkie cried.

“Sarcasm, darling.” She fixed a stray lock of her hair. “Anyone else want to abandon the group while we’re at it?”

“Quit it, Rarity.”

“Ah trust she’ll come back,” Big Mac said.

“Yes, and bringing what problems along?” Rarity asked. “She has been more trouble than she’s worth since day one, if you ask me.”

“You don’t believe that.”

Rarity sighed through her nose and picked at a pillow case. “Perhaps a walk will jog my memory. I swear there’s something that can help us, I swear.”

“It’s pretty cold out there.”

“Thank you, Big Macintosh.” She zipped up three jackets and left in a huff. When they were alone, Pinkie grabbed the wine and took a small sip, replacing it on its stand with a crinkled frown.

Colgate got a taxi to the Mansel bank, mind spinning. She had the designs for the Elements of Harmony and enough bits to buy one in her bags, and she had enough time to get to the mines if she left that day. The thought of it had appeared first in Tartarus, nascent and impulsive, and had popped up periodically since then.

The timing was perfect, she was seeing in the clarifying distance from her friends, provided she survived. Twilight and friends would get the Element of Courage in Hoofington, Colgate could scrounge up a personal one for herself, and the others could hold on in Snowdrift. They would meet up in one grand reunion six days later, fire off into the castle, and make history. Better yet, if she survived the final Element, it would prove her friends’ veracity; they would not tolerate her idea unless they truly did mean her no harm. Some, like Octavia and Applejack, did not need proving, and for this she felt brief periods of gratefulness between cycles of fading panic.

At the bank, the teller told her that Partial Thoughts was gone, so Colgate took a cab to her house, where she spied on her through the window. The white mare moved with calm, persistent energy, trying to pack what appeared to be the entire contents of her house into only four pieces of luggage. At first, she thought about getting Partial Thoughts’ attention by tapping the glass, but then opted for the doorbell, rung several times before she finally answered with a flat “oh, it’s just you.”

Colgate looked at her, not sure what to make of the greeting, but obeyed her hurried beckon and trotted in.

“Who’s in danger now?” Partial Thoughts asked. “Is it me? Is it you?”

“It’s cold out there.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She went back to her luggage, and Colgate went to the fridge and poured herself some orange juice. “Seriously, what’s the problem now?”

“This is good juice.” Trying to get a grip still.

“Hey!” She slammed the fridge door shut. “Tell me what’s going on. In case you can’t tell, I’m in the middle of something.”

“Sorry,” Colgate said. “I need passage south.”

“Okay, great. There’s an airship dealership on the other end of town with great rates.”

“You have a ship.”

Partial Thoughts swallowed a laugh. “Right.”

“Aaaaand…” Colgate hiccuped. “Can I ride along?”

“I’m not going south.”

“You’re going somewhere.”

“I’m going north, somewhere warmer. Appleloosa maybe, that sounds nice.”

Colgate set down her glass as the room wobbled. “I just need a quick trip south and back.”

“And back? Who do you think I am?”

“Rich Mansel pony, that’s who. And you’ve got your own airship.”

“It’s the company ship.”

“Same difference.”

“Not after today. I’m…” She stopped moving and looked at Colgate straight on. “Have you not seen the news? I thought that was why you were here, to warn me or something.”

“Huh?”

Partial Thoughts shoved a notebook against a pile of sweaters, trying to fit it into her overstuffed bag. “The police are looking into Peaceful Meadows’ death. They’re saying homicide, and they’re looking for suspects. In other words, I’m out of here, and your lot should be too.”

“New life?”

She glanced askance at Colgate. “Not that extreme.”

“All right, take me with you, then. I can help you pack.”

“What, aren’t you with the Elements anymore?” She slid a smaller bag toward Colgate. “You can help by folding my shirts, that would be great.”

“Temporarily,” Colgate said, getting to her knees. “That’s why I need to go south, to pick something up, and then I’ll meet them later.”

“Mmmm, and where is it you’re going?” she asked, fiddling with a stubborn zipper. She finally got it, spilling a makeup bag on the carpet.

A glance out Partial Thoughts’ kitchen window confirmed no vengeful magic yet; she sighed out some of her tension. “The mines, please. Six days round trip if we leave today.” Taking Partial Thoughts’ silence as reluctance, she added, “it’s harmless.”

“All right, all right, all right.” She replaced her makeup quietly, frowning at the bags. “You can help me more by getting rid of my car, if you want to know. Tell you what. If you do that, I’ll get you where you need to go. But it’s gotta be soon, because once my boss figures out I’m not coming back to work, I won’t be able to access the ship.”

“You won’t take off without me?”

“No, blue pony, I wouldn’t do that. I owe you… something.” She threw off a top layer of pants and shuffled with the clothes underneath, mumbling to herself. “Where the hell did I—in the laundry basket, I bet.” She got up and returned with a polka-dotted coat. Colgate gave it a strange look as Partial Thoughts stuffed it in her already full bag.

“Where’s the ship?”

“Company ship lot, off-site. You know how to drive a car, I assume?”

“Sure,” Colgate lied. She had seen it done.

“Meet me… You know what? Just come back here, I’ll wait for you, and we’ll get a taxi together.” She floated her keys over to Colgate, who looked at them like they were electrified.

“Soo, I’ll just be going then?”

“I don’t care what you do with it, just get it out of here. Destroy it if you can, I don’t care.” She shook her head and mumbled more to herself as Colgate stepped into the cold of the morning. A thin layer of frost covered the windshield, and as she waited in the running car for it to slough off, she could feel the interior shrinking around her. With no view and no idea how to operate the vehicle, she just sat there for several minutes, getting colder and not knowing it for how much wine she had drank before coming over.

She fumbled the key into the ignition, figured out how to turn on the heat, and idled in the driveway with shallow breaths as the ice and fog slowly cleared from her windshield. Of driving, she knew that she had to be in the correct gear, and she knew the brake and accelerator pedals; it didn’t take long to figure out which was which, and she was soon stuttering down the driveway. She had more than enough loose money in her bags to get another taxi back to Partial Thoughts’ house, but she was wary of spending.

The neighborhood, once large enough for a luxurious walk, had shrunken with her in the car, and she found herself lost before she had collected her thoughts. She turned onto a busy street at a comfortable fifteen miles per hour, cranking the wheel to combat ice and wind, and did not register that the blaring of horns behind was for her. At a red light, she watched the traffic streaming before her, her mind divided between driving and destroying. She curbed the car on a right turn and then, over-correcting, swung halfway into an oncoming lane on a patch of ice. It happened fast, then: a car coming towards her slowly, but not slowly enough, slammed on its brakes; Colgate jammed the wrong pedal, then, angrily, floored the correct one; Partial Thoughts’ car bucked and rattled at an angle into the other oncoming lanes, turning lazily across more drivers’ paths to curve up to the next corner, where she curbed it again and finally got speed to a chorus of horns and screeching tires, with a jarring bump on the behind. With heart racing and eyes everywhere but on the road, she flew toward a gentle curve and almost sent herself sailing out onto a frozen duck pond. Tires squealed and the engine roared, and she fumbled for the brakes, which she hit too hard and in the wrong place, sending herself forward into the steering column. Behind, someone let out a long blast of the horn before moving around her and pealing off. She decided to turn the car off then, right there in the road.

Her eyes were blurry with cold and nerves, and she stumbled to the front of the car and put her ear to the hood, where something inside ticked hotly. A car whizzed by, pulling her mane and tail rudely with its wind. She almost followed them, her legs like rubber from the eventful morning, and an oncoming car swerved purposefully as if seeing her uncertainty.

Then the light turned red, and the traffic on her side slowed. She got behind the car and pushed uselessly before locating the gas cap and removing it to stare down the shiny tube to the fuel tank.

“Gotta get cones for safety,” she thought then, and stepped off the road to look at the duck pond. There were no traffic cones, but plenty of flat river rocks. She began hauling them up to the side of the road and laying them down in a pile behind Partial Thoughts’ car, and when she thought she had enough, began setting them out in a line across the street. Cars honked at her, some slowed to do it, but she kept her buzzing head down and focused on keeping her rocks straight. There was no high thought going on, no real planning; it was the sense for public safety that had been ingrained by years and years of medical school that had made her improvise a roadblock, the action of habit without the will.

By the time she had reached the other side, the police were at a farther intersection and approaching fast, and she looked at their cruisers blankly, at once admonishing herself for not realizing they might come for her rocks and wondering what crime she had actually broken. She could think of none, and put her back to them to dig around in the car, coming out with a stack of Partial Thoughts’ insurance paperwork, which she rolled up and stuck into the gas tank. She set it afire with her rudimentary magic, and when she was sure it wouldn’t go out, she ran for the pond just as the police were getting out of their cars. She made it as far as the other side when a thunderous boom rocked the world out from under her hooves—Twilight’s scythe at last, and a miss at that!—and she crawled the rest of the way to a drainage pipe sticking out on the other side of an earthen rise, partially hidden by a skeleton of brush.

For only a few minutes did her shot nerves allow her to hide in the freezing filth. The police were swarming the car and blocking the road properly, and Colgate crawled on her belly all the way down a mossy, smelly rut to the next road, where she emerged in diminished triumph and raced to the neighborhood next to Partial Thoughts’, from where she affected a casual walk back to the house, ignoring as best she could the savage shivering from soaked clothes and fur. The cold that had seeped in only lent her small clarity, clarity enough to knock on Partial Thoughts’ door rather than simply barge in.

The white pony, out of her pajamas and stiff in a business suit, jacket, and tie, looked at her distastefully. “I heard that from here.”

“Sorry.” She didn’t know why she was apologizing, but it seemed appropriate.

“Change clothes. I’m calling a cab right now.”

“Can I have a shower?”

“No you can’t! Here!” She threw a bundle of unpacked clothes in Colgate’s face. “Who knows how many cops followed you back here, you…” She sighed. “Hurry up, and grab as much spare stuff as you can when you’re done.”

Colgate, struggling out of her soaked coat, nodded her head awkwardly while Partial Thoughts summoned their carriage. Most of her house had been packed, but the floor was strewn with the leftovers: books, board games, throw pillows, a card table folded up and smeared with hastily-wiped dust, desk organizers, pens and pen holders, a stapler but not a staple remover, a few rolled up posters with corners chewed by years of being hung and re-hung, all such scattered piles of domestic bric-a-brac. Partial Thoughts was a very average mare away from the office, with average interests and middling but orderly intellect: this Colgate determined from the supplies spread about, and from how they were distributed; items that bore common association lay together to show that Partial Thoughts had systematically turned her house upside-down and given everything its proper place before packing; and the lack of free space on the floor indicated she had gotten her bags out only after getting all her things out. A period of indecision, but all begun—this, too, she guessed at from the sheer volume of stuff she had seen—early in the morning. News of the police searching for Peaceful Meadows’ killers had to be recent, for her death was less than a day old, meaning Partial Thoughts had decided to leave town on the spot, immediately on hearing the news. An impulsive mare, but not given to such impulse as easily accommodated Colgate’s need to travel south. Wondering what about her request had turned Partial Thoughts off, Colgate watched her hang up the phone and, after considering, unplug it.

“Ten minutes, blue pony.”

“What about food?” Colgate asked, naked and shivering in the living room. Partial Thoughts had lobbed a pair of slacks and a suit jacket at her, both too big, and she donned them uncomfortably.

“We’ll pick something up in one of the villages on the river.” She raised her ear and ran for the front door, but came back. “Come on, they’ll be here soon.”

“Hey, c’mon.” She looked for a place to set her ruined clothes, and settled on the tile floor. “Are we leaving the house as it is?”

“Yes, we’re leaving the damn house. Stop that.”

Colgate stepped away from the stove, returning its knob to “off.” Partial Thoughts had all four bags, leaving Colgate with a pair of slippers and a pillow, all she could carry telekinetically. Partial Thoughts looked at her as they stood outside, on her face mixed fascination and disquiet. She had not not expected company on her sudden exodus from town, and while she was grateful for it, her blue companion had her a little on edge: the obvious intoxication, the scattered thoughts, the slapdash rapidity with which she had dispensed with the car, it all added up to a tight little ball of energy that Partial Thoughts was not sure she wanted to share an airship with.

“Something’s better than nothing,” she thought, her expression meanwhile saying to Colgate, “I wish I hadn’t given her my suit jacket.” The two got in the carriage, Partial Thoughts casually and Colgate imitating a casual demeanor.

“Keep your head back,” she mumbled to Colgate as they set off down the frosty street, in the opposite direction of the smoking ruin only a neighborhood away.

The company airship lot was a fenced-off square of tiered concrete, stairs cut into the walls like etchings on a monolith, the ships themselves resting atop under thick, fluttering, black tarps. There were close to a dozen that Colgate counted, each of them stacked in one another’s shadows, motionless and ready for use.

Partial Thoughts thanked the driver, tipped him poorly, and flashed her badge for the guards outside. For them, Colgate was an intern, and Partial Thoughts wanted to show her a few things the managers were responsible for. They let them in without a question or sideways look.

“Which one’s yours?”

“Number six. Right up front.”

“They believed you right off, huh?”

“No reason not to,” Partial Thoughts said. “Not yet. These are my working hours.”

The wind had slowed to a short, cutting breeze as they took the stairs up the monolith’s frosted sides. The height was doing Colgate’s drunken head no favors, and she could not keep herself from peering off the edge every time they turned a corner. Even at the first airship, they were high enough to make the guards look like play miniatures, the road encircling the lot a black stream, its reflecting ice speckles of whitewater. The corkscrew hotel reared its sinuous body over squat neighbors in the distance, and on the other side, just visible through a fine shroud of fog, were the spicules of church steeples rising from the hilly north.

“Why don’t they put the stairs inside?” Colgate asked.

“That’s just how it is,” Partial Thoughts said tightly. She was shivering too, but Colgate thought she had taken offense, and decided to be quiet until they were in the air.

Which they soon were. Number six, close to the top and on the corner facing the indomitable glacier, hauled itself to life when Partial Thoughts inserted her key—a replica, she explained, for they were supposed to keep their airship keys at work. Everyone with a brain between their ears, she said, had found a way around that rule.

Getting the ice off the torch, the balloon cables, the wheel, and the rudder took them another half hour, and in that time, they had the balloon nearly inflated, swelling up where Partial Thoughts had rolled the tarp back. Following her instructions, Colgate tied the balloon down and manipulated a sliding scale of metal plates belowdecks, their ballast. They rose slowly at first, and then they were underway, and the lot drifted off below, and the two travelers stood at the wheel and watched Snowdrift follow it. The smoke from Partial Thoughts’ car had not quite cleared, a last little mark on the city.

“That town Fluttershy and I visited while you were in Manehattan,” Rarity said over a calming cup of tea in one of the nearby breakfast spots. “Passage Town, they had something under their… water pump? It was some sort of pipe or pump outside town, and it led to this huge underground vault.”

“You told us,” Big Mac said.

“There was this big, magical thing down there, like a portal. I didn’t know what I was seeing at the time, but I realize it now. Look out there, see?” She pointed at the serrated shape of the forest to the east. “I was seeing this place. I think the view was over the trees out there, because I remember seeing them too, and the mountains in the distance.”

“Was it a teleporter?” Pinkie asked.

“I think so. One of the mares there made it sound like that.” She spooned another lump of sugar into her cup. “Which means if we can find it on this side, we can go through to Passage Town, and Twilight can go through to get back here.”

“Easy!”

“Yes, except that we have no idea where it is on this side, how to use it, or how to even make it accessible for our friends. In Passage Town, as I said, it’s underground.”

“They ain’t flyin’ that ship underground,” Big Mac said, nibbling an apricot scone.

“No. No, they are not.” The three shared a sigh. “Maybe we should see if we can borrow Partial Thoughts’ airship after all.”

In the distance, something exploded, and everyone inside went quiet and looked around for a minute. Sirens followed, and calm prevailed.

“Why not just ask around?” Pinkie asked. “If it’s a secret agent thingy, then all we gotta do is find a secret agent. Duh!”

“What’ll we tell ‘em?” Big Mac asked.

“Aloe and Lotus sent us,” Rarity said. “And I know the pony on the other side, too, Cloud Line. She led us down there herself.” She looked around, as if to spot a Datura in the crowd. “How do we find someone to take us there?”

“Did Aloe and Lotus have any friends?” Big Mac asked.

“Just employees, I would have to imagine.”

“The gateway!” Pinkie yipped. “They said it’s monitored. We’ll just go there!”

“Oh, what a lovely idea. The gateway to hell, just where I was hoping to wind up today.”

“Better than fallin’ though it,” Big Mac said with a heavy shrug.

They paid, grabbed a taxi, and rolled into oncoming fog all the way to the Snowdrift city limit, where they had to hike through frozen weeds on choppy ground to the Tartarus gateway. Waiting for their friends to emerge—only two weeks ago, Rarity realized and kept to herself—they had not noticed the heat that poured out, but walking back to it as winter gripped the rest of Snowdrift, they were shocked at the temperance in the moist air. Big Mac shed his outermost coat, and Pinkie her scarf and hat, on the walk over to the black, dimensionless disc.

Dark furrows, partially filled in by mud and tufts of newborn grass, marked a wide path that looped off the gateway and cut a corner off the forest. Rarity’s horn tingled with ambient magic, and she lowered her ears to the phantom sound that it made in her head, a high-pitched drone that most unicorns could not ignore.

Pinkie was right. They had not gotten nearly so close as two weeks before when a trio of Daturas dressed as park rangers approached and called for them to halt.

“Sorry, folks, you’re not allowed to come this far up here. Gateway’s dangerous.”

“Danger’s our middle names!” Pinkie said. “All of ours!”

“Ignore her,” Rarity said. “My apologies, but Aloe and Lotus sent us. We were hoping you could help us.”

The three rangers looked at her blankly, and Rarity looked right back, undaunted.

“We need to get up north, but we don’t have time to fly. They said we could find one of you, er, your type of professionals, and you could help us. There’s a teleporter nearby, but they didn’t say where exactly.”

“What were their names again?” one of the rangers asked.

“Aloe and Lotus,” Rarity enunciated. “The information pony and her sister. Please. We’re trying to get to Passage Town, it’s a little village just west of Manehattan. We know Cloud Line there, and she’s expecting us.”

One of the rangers whispered something to another and said, “if you’d come with us, we can show you where you need to go. This is the gateway, you need to be out in the woods.”

“That would be wonderful, if you could take us there.” She batted her eyelashes, and one of the rangers gave her a quick smile before turning on booted hoof and jutting his chin purposefully. The other two rangers went back to where they had appeared and the one who had smiled at Rarity took them to the forest’s edge.

“Down that path, see it there? Down there, there’s a clearing with a big, rotten stump. More rangers will stop you past that, and you just tell them what you told us, they’ll help you out.”

“Thank you so much, dear,” Rarity said, giving him another bat of her eyelashes and puckering her lips gently. Blushing, he shook her hoof, and not the others’, and went back to the gateway.

“Imagine workin’ right by that thing,” Big Mac said when they were among the trees. “Every day, right outside Tartarus.”

“I bet their benefits are through the roof,” Pinkie said.

“Did you have benefits, working for the bakery?” Rarity asked.

“Junky ones, yeah. That’s probably why we never hired anyone else. Not that we needed anyone else, but yeesh! Thank Celestia I never needed glasses.”

They reached the clearing with the stump just as a slow, but heavy, rainfall was beginning to rattle the firs and pines over their heads, shaking cold water down onto them in small but shocking sprays. Just past, as promised, they met more rangers, and Rarity gave them the same explanation, and just as the previous ones had, their demeanors changed when she named Cloud Line.

“Have you used the window before?” one asked. She was short, heavyset, with a mane of dirty brown and black that just peeked out under the hood of a brown jacket.

“This’ll be our first time,” Rarity said. “Is there any trick to it? Can’t we just step through?”

“The window’s for spirits only,” the other mare said, an elderly blonde with a sharp voice and fastidious, blue eyes. “Its job is to siphon them off the gateway so’s we don’t have ghosts filling up Snowdrift.”

“Makes sense,” Rarity said, not sure whether it did to her.

“We’re not ghosts,” Pinkie pointed out.

“Heh, yeah, that’s the problem,” the first Datura said.

“Now surely that’s not set in stone,” Rarity said. “You ponies are all over the country. Surely there’s a way to use this window to transport, er, flesh. There must be, yes?”

“It’s kinda inconvenient.”

“C’mon, we’ll show you,” the blonde mare said. They went to a smaller, more secluded clearing, dominated by a conspicuously large tree growing aslant out of a dry ravine. She grabbed at one of the branches and pulled down sharply, thrice, and let it snap back up. When it had stopped swaying, a ramp of transparent light coruscated to life off the ravine’s edge, curling tightly around to bring them to the top of the tree, where, having appeared just as suddenly as the ramp, there shimmered a tall oval of light. Big Mac pawed the ramp’s beginning uncertainly.

“To use the window for transporting material—you know, like a body—we have to really load it up with magic. We’re expanding it, you see?”

“Think of it like a hair tie. On your mane, it’s tight, like a little circle, but if you have it around your hoof, it’s wide open. We gotta do that to this window.”

“Like I said, inconvenient.”

“Where do you get the magic?” Pinkie asked.

“We just take it off the gateway,” the blonde mare said. “Here, come with me. Mirror Bell, you wanna get the magic ready?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the heavy mare said, dropping down into the ravine and climbing up the other side with surprising agility. She tugged at more branches, seemingly at random, while the rest of them trudged up the ramp. The rain passed right through, but it felt as solid as any bridge to their hooves.

“That doesn’t look right,” Pinkie said, looking up at the window. “You said it was underground, Rarity?”

“Where did you say you were going? Passage Town?”

“That’s right,” Rarity said.

“Mirror, Passage Town!” the blonde mare cried. “She’s setting it up. Have you all teleported before?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Big Mac said.

“She’s gonna increase the magic around the window’s edges, and when you step through—I’ll tell you when—it’ll take you where you need to go.”

“What’s so inconvenient about that?” Pinkie asked. “Seems pretty dang convenient to me.”

“Course it does,” Mirror Bell said from below, plucking on individual pine needles with a look of great apathy. Before them, the window’s aspect shifted from a bright, sunny desert plain somewhere outside Roan to the cold blackness of the Passage Town vault.

“Oh, it’s fine for you all, but she means everything afterward. When we send ponies through this, it looks like a fireworks show from the outside. Not great for secrecy.”

“Don’t bore them with details, Amber,” Mirror Bell said. “They’re fine, they’re fine. All right, let it build up a little, then you’re okay to go through.”

“Do you wanna—”

“I’m gonna get the paperwork now, yeah.”

“Okay, I’ll shut it off when they’re through. Pop your heads up on the other side, would you? Let us know you made it through okay.”

Rarity nodded, all the while watching the window anxiously. At first, it was as placid as any glass pane in any building, but when Mirror Bell had finally found that one crucial branch on their tree, the window began to shimmer all across its face, flame-like magic trailing up its sides and sizzling at the apex. Clusters of sparks soon appeared from that intersection, first hissing gently and quickly rising to a whir that matched the ringing in her head and horn, insistent and tuneless. Pinkie and Big Mac were showing signs of feeling the magic as well, but the blonde mare just looked on, waiting for some sign yet to appear.

“You get used to it,” she said at one point, but no one acknowledged her. The window was shaking, its edges white hot contrails, thin vines of magic swirling off to grab the air and pull it inwards in an unsettling mirage, as if the forest itself were being sucked down the black hole. Still, they could not go, nor could they go when the window had begun screeching like a saw and spinning like a loose tire on its axle, nor could they go when the rain began flying off its edges like shaken ball bearings and the trees were made plain in what seemed the light of a second sun.

The blonde mare smacked Pinkie on the flank and indicated they should hop through when the window was beginning to rotate in place, its edges shining and rattling so violently as to no longer appear whole. Pinkie and Big Mac looked back in horror, but Rarity took a bold step forward, balked, and was pushed. The three of them fell off the ramp, though the window, and into a cacophony of light and magic that zapped through their brains and left them feeling like their organs had been pounded to jelly. In approximately two seconds, they had flashed along an invisible line of magic from Snowdrift to Passage Town: a little more than two thirds of the country’s total length.

In semidarkness, before anyone had collected their thoughts, there was the grotesque and unsurprising sound of Big Mac losing his breakfast, an experience made all the stranger for the light show on the window’s other side. The Snowdrift sky was awash in spinning, colliding, colorful lights, with no associated sound coming through. When these calmed down, and Big Mac had finished, Pinkie put her face to the window’s edge and gave the Datura technicians a tired smile, which they returned with waves and the mouthed words “good luck.”

Several minutes later, the window dimmed, the aspect shifted, and they were treated to a peaceful view of the eroded northern coastline. Pinkie flopped onto her back and let off a series of moans and choking sounds, and Big Mac helped her up, an unseen grimace on his clenched face. His entire abdomen felt like it had been emptied and re-stuffed with lesser versions of what it contained. He was weak in the knees, his muscles sore and shaking, his breathing deep but insufficient with each breath.

“We’ll just stay here,” Rarity muttered, lying on the ground, and Big Mac let himself and Pinkie back down. They lay in the grand vault under Passage Town, staring up at the unseen ceiling of stone, letting the earth suck away their body heat by degrees until, finally, with a resigned groan, Pinkie got back to her hooves.

They shuffled out of the cemetery before the window and into the central chamber, where Rarity brought up a soft light to find the stairs. They were fifty feet underground, but it looked much deeper when they looked up at the distant glow of the vault’s one lantern, a pale star showing ribbed sides of the spiraling well. In darkness so near absolute, it was difficult to tell whether she was looking up or down, and Pinkie had to make herself keep her eyes forward, not up, to keep her balance.

The going was slow and delicate, and they stopped several times on identical landings to get their strength back. Of possessions, they had only the clothes on their backs and a few sundries from the hotel, stuffed in a saddlebag that Pinkie had gotten from reception.

“Cloud Line is the secret agent who lives here and monitors this area,” Rarity said. “We’re underneath a broken water pump that lifts up, like a trap door, and the rest of Passage Town is right there.”

“What are we gonna say?” Big Mac asked.

“I’ll do the talking. I’m sure she remembers me.”

“All right.” He breathed out heavily. “An’ what are you gonna say?”

“I guess the truth, more or less. I might abridge some things.”

They continued their climb, dizzying monotony, so slow that even the lantern above seemed to only come closer in large increments, only when noticed anew. Two flights from the top, resting again, they heard hoofsteps that weren’t theirs.

“Who goes there?” a voice shouted out at the same time as Rarity’s. The other pony’s pace picked up, and the walls at the top of the shaft glowed softly with swinging lantern light. She repeated herself firmly.

“That’s her,” Rarity said, “I think. Cloud Line?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s me. Rarity! From Ponyville, I visited with a friend in the summer.”

A second of quiet when Cloud Line put the lantern down. A dark face appeared at the banister above them, and Rarity brightened her light around them.

“What in—how the hell are you—Where did you come from?” The figure jumped over the rail, and Rarity’s heart pounded for a second before she remembered that Cloud Line was a pegasus. She glided down to them and perched on the rail, her long mane pulled back in a tight bun, her eyes magnified behind huge glasses. “I can’t believe it. What are you doing here?”

Getting up and preparing for the next set of stairs, Rarity said, “We came from Snowdrift. A couple secret agents helped us operate the window there.”

“Just now? What’s going on? I haven’t heard anything.”

“They’re fine, dear.” She took a deep breath; it was starting to be less painful to do so, and the feeling of her chest expanding was strangely satisfying.

“We needed to get up north real quick,” Pinkie said. “Our friends are in Hoofington, and Big Mac did the math, and there’s only six days to get to Snowdrift again or else the precogs’ll be wrong, and then we can’t—hey!” Big Mac had pulled her tail.

“Let’s take this back to your house, if we may,” Rarity said. “I’m sure there’s a lot you’d like to know.”

Cloud Line walked ahead of them, her light making easier the way up through the rest of the stone well, into the tunnel of packed dirt, and to the pump. She put her eye to a recessed hole in the earth, a peep hole to the outside Rarity assumed, and tipped the trap door up to let the warm, river-scented air in. While their eyes adjusted, Cloud Line walked around the pump, and then escorted them back to her hut, where they were seated at a too-small table. The hut smelled overpoweringly of fresh spices and peppers, with little jars of powder in uneven, colorful rows underneath hanging husks of dried chilies. Big Mac brought his muzzle to a mortar and pestle, tawny with ground coriander, set beside a checkered mat of thin, wrinkled tomato slices sun drying under the window.

“You’re not supposed to know about using the window,” Cloud Line said. “And you’re also not supposed to be separated from your friends.”

“Something went bad in Snowdrift—where we came from,” Rarity said. “As Pinkie said, our friends are in Hoofington right now.”

Cloud Line closed her eyes in clear exasperation, but only asked, “What for?”

“The last Element’s there,” Big Mac said.

“Mmm, the new Elements.” She held up a hoof. “We all know about them, us… Whatever you’re calling us. Secret agents.”

“But we need to be back in Snowdrift,” Pinkie said. “That’s why we had to be here, to meet ‘em halfway! We figured we’d come out over here, then everypony can just fly right on through the window and flash back south. Then, Contraction!”

“You expect them to fly their entire airship through the window.”

“We were hoping we could figure out a way, yes,” Rarity said hastily, cutting Pinkie off.

“What with it being underground, I don’t suppose you had any other ideas?”

“Well…”

“We hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Big Mac said. “We’re in a time crunch, an’ this was our only option, that’s how we saw it.”

“So…” Cloud Line got up and drew a shade over the window that faced town. “All right, monstrous breach of protocol aside for now, what is so pressing about this final Element? My job would require me to send you back through the window and prep you for memory wiping, but I’m willing to hear you out.”

“It’s complicated,” Rarity said, able to keep her voice even. Cloud Line’s threat, which she did not fully believe, she had nonetheless anticipated. “The short version is, we have an event in Snowdrift that we’re relying on to get us where we need to go, and the precogs there are saying it’s in six days, which isn’t enough time to get from Hoofington to Snowdrift naturally.”

“Thus, borrowing my window. What happens if you miss your six-day mark?”

“We’ll have to fly over to Discord’s castle on our own,” Pinkie said. “That’s on the other side of the country from Snowdrift.”

“So even more time would be lost.” No one responded, but they felt the jab in her statement. “I might be willing to help you get your friends through, but there’s a few problems. One, how do we dig up the window?”

“That’s one of the things we assumed we’d get to when we got to it,” Big Mac said.

“And then, what are ponies gonna say when you show up out of nowhere? No ship, no friends within a hundred miles, practically no supplies—and what you do have is all for the freezing cold. And the Elements of Harmony, no less, showing up like this? It’ll be insanity, and Eggshell and I won’t be able to explain it away.”

“Who’s Eggshell?” Pinkie asked.

“Her partner,” Rarity said.

“Well, we can’t go back. Unless there’s windows in other cities? Maybe we can try a different one.”

“Ah don’t wanna go through that thing again,” Big Mac said.

“They’d never let you out of the reception chamber somewhere else,” Cloud Line said. “No, it was smart of you to come here, at least kind of.”

“What if everypony left town?” Big Mac asked. “Could you help us then?”

“I don’t see how we’d get everyone to leave.”

“There’s only a dozen or so ponies here, what Rarity said. Couldn’t we come up with somethin’ to make ‘em go upriver fer a few days? Maybe set up a farmer’s market, or a travelin’ show.”

“Long enough to dig up the window and then fill in the hole again, all without being seen,” Pinkie said. “I think he’s got something.”

“Could we perhaps let the ship get most of the way here, then teleport it below? That way, we’d only have to widen the actual room where the window is, if that,” Rarity said.

Cloud Line set about preparing a kettle of herbal tea. “Do you know how to teleport something that big? Does Twilight?”

“She might, but I think she’s hurt again.”

“Classic Twilight,” Pinkie said.

“The problem is, whatever you do, with the exception of just teleporting them straight into it from out of the air, we’re gonna wind up with a giant crater where the pump used to be,” Cloud Line said. “There’s no explaining that for when they come back—I do like that idea, Big Mac, I just don’t see how we would execute it.”

“What if—oh!” Pinkie bounced up and down. “How about this? What if we do it fast, like a magic trick?” She waited for a response, but received only questioning looks. “I mean, if we blow up the whole area really quick, and the ship—” With her hooves, she demonstrated, waving them in the air and making sound effects. “The ship, it looks like its crashes into the ground, like booooom! But really, it’s just going into the window. The window makes all sorts of colors, but so does a crashing airship.”

“Let’s not blow up the area right next to my house, please.”

“Pinkie passes as a precog,” Rarity said. “It’s rather unethical, but we can claim there’s a natural disaster coming, like an earthquake or a freak storm.”

“I’m a precog!” Pinkie cried. “Well, I was.”

“Eugh. That is an option, you’re right,” Cloud Line said.

“But the excavation,” Big Mac said.

“The only digging tools we have here are shovels and picks, and none of our unicorns have enough magic to uncover the window, not that they’d be here to help anyway.”

“Perhaps we can bring some help over from Snowdrift,” Rarity said.

“Not likely.”

“Yeah, I thought all the secret agents left Snowdrift to go east,” Pinkie said.

Cloud Line coughed into her tea. “Say that again?”

“They’re headed east, all of ‘em, or pretty much all of ‘em. Aloe and Lotus are gone—”

“The twins are gone?”

“Not gone gone, just out of town. Not sure where. Why?”

“So they aren’t paying attention to what’s going in Snowdrift right now? They’re not there to watch?”

Rarity glanced at Big Mac, who she trusted to detect the change in tone more than she did Pinkie.

“Gone-a-rooney!”

“The twins are gone…”

“Do you not like them?”

“No, it’s… How do you know this?”

“They told us.”

“In a note,” Rarity completed. “They left us a note the morning they headed out, to let us know they wouldn’t be back anytime soon. Not the best for advanced notice, those two.”

“All right,” Cloud Line chirped. “You stay here, I think I’m going to go get Eggshell. He needs to know this.”

“So you’re gonna help us, then?” Pinkie asked.

Cloud Line gave her a look before dashing out the door, and as soon as she was gone, Rarity was up and poking through the hut. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, if anything, but it gave her something to do, seemed to confer some vague advantage in the verbal exchange, if she could find something Cloud Line didn’t mean to be revealed, even if it were harmless or common. By the time the pegasus was walking back with Eggshell, Rarity had found a box of cherry cordials behind a leaning recipe book, which she replaced carefully.

“Because they’re wicked mares,” Eggshell was saying as he barged in. “Greetings, you all. She already told me, it’s fine, I’m not going to do anything to silence you.”

“Glad to meeth’cha!” Pinkie said, springing up to grab his hoof off the ground and pump it. “Pinkie Pie, Element of Laughter.”

“Eggshell, pleased.” He took a seat across from Cloud Line, who looked into her tea. “The twins are gone east. Do you know why?”

“Something about—”

“We don’t know,” Rarity interrupted. Their purpose, Twilight had surmised, was to help with Princess Celestia’s imprisonment in the crater; whether the two ponies in Passage Town were authorized to know about that, she did not know. “You could say we’re not authorized to tell you about it.”

“This is unbelievable,” Eggshell said to Cloud Line. “Un-be-lievable. The twins aren’t doing anything with them, but…” He made an angry noise in the back of his throat. A cream-colored earth pony with vibrant, pink eyes, he looked like a denuded beast as he tucked his chin in and glowered at the floor.

“It’s fine,” Cloud Line said. “The fact that they’re gone—anyway, that changes things, let’s say.”

“So you can help us,” Rarity pressed.

“Oh, we’ll help,” Eggshell said, brows raised as if to indicate reference to something. “But we’re gone after that.”

“We only need you the one time.”

“Good, ‘cause that’s all you’re getting.”

“Why?” Big Mac asked. “Out of curiosity.”

“They can’t tell us,” Pinkie said.

“I’ll tell you,” Eggshell said. His eyes widened and he looked at Rarity. “You’re the mare who came here in the summer, with your yellow friend. I knew I recognized you. Right, sorry, here’s your story. Lotus is our boss.”

“Isn’t she everypony’s boss?” Pinkie asked.

Eggshell grunted. “Great, you know that too. We were assigned here to monitor the window and handle communications six years ago. We were originally contracted for only two. Then, when we only had a couple months to go, they renewed our contract without letting us know, for another year. When that year was almost up, they did it again.”

“We appealed it three times,” Cloud Line said. “That’s the maximum amount of times you can appeal a decision like that.”

“Get the appeals, show them,” Eggshell said. “Sorry, but your friends down in Snowdrift are stone bitches. They pretend to be nice to you, but if it doesn’t have to do with workflow of efficiency, they don’t care. That Lotus, she can’t manage anything. Whatever they did to make her the information pony, they should’ve made her a better leader. All she ever does is shuffle us around, she—”

“Egg, they’re not with us.”

Eggshell stopped and cleared his throat, and Cloud Line showed them the paperwork, wrinkled and stained with dust ground into the creases. On the line explaining why their appeals for exfiltration from Passage Town were denied, the box was checked for “other,” and written was the terse phrase “insufficient replacement personnel.” On all three request forms, the same, with an absentminded squiggle of a signature floating close to its line the bottom.

“Basically, they locked us down here because they couldn’t find ponies to replace us,” Cloud Line said.

“Which is bull,” Eggshell said. “In all of Manehattan, they can’t find two idiots to take our place?”

“Lotus is too lazy to get off her butt and figure out where to send us, is what it comes down to. We tried to appeal, like I said, and we tried to talk to her directly, but she would always blow us off.”

“Bunch of crap every time. ‘Oh, well, we’re not really in a place right now where we can spare the resources necessary to back-fill your positions,’ and stuff like that. And getting a hold of her is almost impossible in the first place, we usually had to talk to one of her lackeys, who told us even less.”

“Why didn’t you just quit?” Big Mac asked, and Eggshell gave a sharp stab of bitter laughter.

“Quitting is worse than working for them,” Cloud Line said. “If you quit, you’ve got two options. I guess three, if you do something stupid and piss them off. You’ll either get your memory wiped of your employment—”

“Fuck that,” Eggshell broke in.

“Or you get moved to a retirement neighborhood, which is basically a little community somewhere safe, where you can live your life under constant surveillance. You can’t leave without a handler, they monitor who you send letters to…”

“If they don’t like a new friend you’ve made, they can tell you to stop seeing them,” Eggshell said.

“What’s the third option?” Pinkie asked.

“The swift embrace of government-sanctioned death.”

“That’s only if you do something that hurts the organization,” Cloud Line said.

"Like we might,” Eggshell mumbled.

“Hush, it’ll be fine.” She looked at Rarity. “Like I said, we can help with the window, but we’re gonna go through right after your friends.”

“And we’re not coming back.”

“Where ya going?” Pinkie asked.

“Changeling islands.”

“We haven’t decided yet,” Cloud Line said, frowning at Eggshell. “I’d rather go somewhere closer to home.”

“They’ll catch us if we stay in Equestria.”

She just waved him off, clearly a conversation they had had multiple times, and which she had no interest in repeating for her guests. “We’ll help, but I’d feel a lot better if we could move the others out of Passage Town for it.”

“Well, Pinkie Pie is a precog, you said?”

“She says she can pass for one.”

Eggshell shrugged. “That works.”

“I’d rather… Yeah, you’re probably right. Here, let me find my design specs on the window, I have to figure out how we can do this.”

Cloud Line vanished into a corner of the hut for a moment, paper rustling, and came back with a booklet of blueprints and graph paper. To the heady aroma of herbs and spices and dried vegetables, she added the smell of old paper as she flipped the book open to reveal an uneven block of figures and design notes, dated some fifty years back in the top right corner.

In Hoofington, Twilight lay in her hospital bed and exchanged notes with the rest of her friends, estranged in Snowdrift without a ride and without an idea on what to do. Why they were focused on the Contraction still, she was not completely sure, but she entertained their questions with the hope that they had a plan. An ugly bandage covered half her face, and she felt dried out and depleted but completely confident in their abilities. One Element to go, and they on its doorstep, and enough magic and determination among them all to batter down Discord’s walls and drag him wriggling into the dust where he belonged.
The airship was parked in a giant garage somewhere in town with Applejack and Rainbow, killing time while technicians and mechanics fawned and cleared schedules and lowered prices for the famous Elements of Harmony; Twilight was in the hospital with Octavia’s gloomy company, one feeling better than she looked and the other feeling just as poorly; and Fluttershy and Vinyl enjoyed the reduced northern chill as they walked the mile and a half from the infirmary to Octavia’s former mansion. Hunched over a map with closed eyes and a brain full of strange, old magic, Fluttershy had pinpointed the Element to somewhere near there, and everyone agreed that it was appropriate, even Octavia, who refused to go and see for herself.

Autumn leaves decomposed in gutters, muted orange turning brown on rough, black stone underneath the green and rain-dripping bowers that indicated their passage from the commercial district to the wealthy side of town. Like stitches, broad bridges ran over a river—still motionless, for some split far north of town precluded water flow even now—toward rows of mansions set into the grassy plains that evened out as they stretched west to Fillydelphia and Manehattan past that. Over one such bridge, Vinyl and Fluttershy trotted and talked as they had wanted since Snowdrift.

“He had me practicing on a cloud of thoughts. Not like Lotus’, but a tiny one,” Vinyl said.

“That’s… weird,” Fluttershy said.

“Said they had ‘em in the magical psychology department at the university. It was crazy, Fluttershy. He just took it out of a jar one time, and there it was, ready to practice on. When it was all done, he cast some little spell, and then it went back in.”

“Did it look like anything?”

“Air.”

Fluttershy shook her head. She had known, when Vinyl was the only volunteer to go with her to the Element, that they would speak of her memory wipe, and of course the aberrant memory that necessitated it. It was a conversation they needed to have, and she knew it, but bitterly did she exit Twilight’s hospital with the white unicorn; restlessly did she wait for Vinyl to speak first.

“But I think I’m getting it. I was able to wipe out some deeper memories in the cloud recently.”

“Good.” She flew off the top of the bridge to the sidewalk.

“I for sure want to practice more before I wipe you, but I think I can do it. It’s not actually hard, just needs a lot of precision.”

Fluttershy looked ahead in thought.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, the usual. Second thoughts, self-doubt, blah blah blah.” She gave Vinyl a smile. “You don’t need to hear it.”

“Hm. I’d like to.”

“Oh, Fluttershy, please tell me your problems, I’m dying to have it out with you,” she thought mockingly to herself. “I can’t be up-front, I have to have Vinyl beg me to share. Great. What a victim I am. What a victim I’m making myself.” “It just scares me. Not the process itself, I trust you to do a good job. I just hate that you have to do it.” Insufficient words for how she felt, but she hoped Vinyl would take them at face value and drop it there.

“What else?” Vinyl asked.

She said she trusted Vinyl to do a good job wiping her memory, but it was also true that she was tired of thinking about it at all. Every night they were her only companions, the black thoughts of Pinkie’s failure, their failures as a group, the injustice and the lies and the shifting of responsibility; truer still, and flat with repetition, was that she was tired of the adventure. That she wanted to go home was not worth mentioning, and that she still felt that ache so acutely, could not shrug it off like Twilight or Applejack did or seemed to do, made her question herself in the same way as did her feelings toward Pinkie. She was Kindness, not the most complicated concept in their sextet. Did that preclude a certain depth of emotion or insight? Pinkie’s Laughter certainly appeared to have, and Rarity’s Generosity the reverse, and between these two she felt unable to fully trust herself. In anger and action and good company, the hot rectitude of moral outrage filled her, and in calm and isolation and the introspective half-hour before sleep, she was left the residue of self-doubt. Both had eroded her, she could recognize, so that any discourse on Pinkie’s grand betrayal was painful: generative or not, talk on the subject—and so infrequently indulged outside her own mind, what further annoyed—served only to frustrate her, to make her want to just shake her head and spread her wings and get out. Either get out or get the worst of it over with, like a failing marriage.

Her trust in Vinyl’s abilities was secondary to this need to simply be done, but she knew she couldn’t say that without inviting a barrage of questions and well-meant advice. Vinyl obviously could not perform her memory wipe spell without first hearing from Fluttershy, so the pegasus bottled her feelings and chose instead to shift the topic off herself.

“I hate that she’s not going to be held accountable.”

“There it is. That’s what I thought you were gonna say.”

“Does that make me a bad pony? I don’t hate her, but she needs… Some sort of justice needs to be done.” She sighed. “I’m glad she’s not here right now.”

“You were angry in Snowdrift.”

“And I’m angry now.” “I’m just tired of her. She’s constantly—I shouldn’t complain about her. She’s my friend.”

Vinyl remained silent, not wishing to pass judgment on whether Fluttershy was right to use the word.

“It’s like she doesn’t even know what she did! It’s like she’s blind to how she affects everypony else, and she just bounces along with us, and she’s always just a little bit more than useless, so no one else gets mad at her.”

Vinyl nodded. They had a while before the mansion still, and she knew Fluttershy had been aching to let out her thoughts.

“And it’s like, okay, so am I a bad pony for not wanting to put up with her… her shit—sorry for the language—um, or am I the only one who remembers how she used to be, how she was supposed to be? She has magic, Vinyl, Celestia confirmed that ages ago.”

“She’s scared to use it because of the responsibility.”

“Yeah, I know. You know what I say to that? Screw you. Oh, not you, I mean screw her. Oh—”

“I know what you mean.”

“Screw her! What gives her the right to duck responsibility when the rest of us don’t? Does she think she’s the only one who’s scared, or does she think her fear is special? It’s not. She’s not special, I don’t know why we’ve all decided we’re going to pretend she is, like her situation is somehow more important than us. Rarity and Twilight, those two are basically different mares at this point. Applejack frick—um, she died, you don’t see her trying to play off her part in all this. Octavia, she’s got her thing. Even Big Mac contributes more than Pinkie, and he didn’t even want to be here for most of it.”

“I don’t know, Fluttershy. Fear can stop ponies from just about anything. Not saying it’s a good excuse, but…”

“Sure, but that’s why she’s the way she is. You’re probably right. And what do we do about that?”

Vinyl nodded.

“I’m really asking. What can you do then? If your friend’s too scared to do something important, what’s the best way to help her? I mean, if encouragement hasn’t helped…”

“Support, encouragement, like you said. You know the answer to your own question, though.”

Fluttershy kicked a pebble off the sidewalk.

“How come those things haven’t worked on Pinkie?” Vinyl asked for her. “Is that what you’re thinking?”

“It didn’t sound as nice in my head.”

“Say it anyway, no one else’ll hear.”

“Um… ‘So why is she even here, if she can’t handle it? Isn’t she just a waste of space at this point?’ That was what I wanted to say. I know it’s not kind.”

“You’re forgiven.”

“Don’t do that to me,” she thought. “This stupid ‘all-forgiving, all-accepting, I’ve-done-things-you-can’t-believe’ Vinyl act that you like. Your forgiveness isn’t anything. Celestia, Fluttershy, pull it together, she’s just trying to help.” Lacking an appropriate response, she serviced another smile.

“I don’t know with Pinkie, to be honest.”

“If she’s so scared, why is she even with us anymore? She could’ve done like Dr. Whooves and run off when we weren’t paying attention. We’d be screwed, but what would she care?”

“You know she wouldn’t ever do that.”

Fluttershy frowned and kicked another pebble. She knew Vinyl was right, but could not admit it without ceding ground to the counterargument that Pinkie was, in fact, worthy of forgiveness. As a living, breathing pony, an individual life in the thresher of circumstances unearned and unprepared for, she was as worthy of forgiveness as any stranger might be, inviolably worthy, for what did Fluttershy know of her true heart? In the private pain of failure and the secret regret she could not voice for fear of turning her friends away, Pinkie could be clutching at some desperate germ of plausible deniability, just as easily as she could have forgotten the whole affair that landed her in such an uncomfortable position in the first place. Fluttershy could never know for sure, and yet this too did not matter for the emotional impact Pinkie’s inaction had caused, too wide to be overcome, the severity of the trespass eclipsing the ambiguity of where culpability lay. Fluttershy had no foothold for justifying forgiveness, unable to give her the benefit of the doubt as Vinyl had; and what did that mean? She didn’t like to think about it.

The two walked in quiet for some time, each stewing in her own thoughts, trying to guess what the other was thinking. They ascended a wide staircase cut into the brick wall where they met a hill and turned a sharp corner down a narrow alley behind a row of tall houses. Curtains billowed in an open window, and Fluttershy frowned at those too.

“Can you forgive Octavia, do you think?”

“She hasn’t done anything.”

“Her story? Tumble Tower.”

“Oh.” Recognizing immediately the trap she was in, she looked away. “I can, I think, but that’s different.”

“How’s it different?”

“It didn’t happen to me.” It sounded selfish, but it was the truth. Octavia’s story was complete, its events played out long before she had met any of them. Not wanting to admit what she saw as a hypocritical opinion, she said, “Maybe it’s a matter of scale.”

“Fair enough.”

“Why can I forgive Octavia?” she thought. It was not even forgiveness, for Fluttershy had not felt that Octavia deserved recompense for her own youthful inaction. The scale was smaller, but Fluttershy knew that was beside the point. Someone had died in her story too, but in the telling, it hadn’t seemed as severe. Octavia’s guilt, she imagined, had eliminated the need for justice—but that just brought her back to the problem of Pinkie’s heart, how deeply-hidden Pinkie’s own guilt might be. Perhaps Fluttershy required a display of gratuitous emotion before she could bestow forgiveness, she thought.

“I’m just sick of her, that’s all,” she finally said, disgusted with herself. “Trust me, I’ve thought about how to get around this a thousand times, and I haven’t gotten anywhere. I know I can’t forgive her—at least I do know that now, I can stop pretending.”

“You can’t?”

“I have tried on multiple occasions, Vinyl.”

“Okay, okay. Well… I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t badmouth Pinkie with you, though.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to. I know you like her.”

Ignoring the attempt at a sting, Vinyl said, “once we get back to Snowdrift, I’ll do another practice session, and then I can wipe your memory. I should be okay by then.”

“It’s for the best.”

“Is it really?”

“It’ll be good for her.” She fluffed her wings against the breeze that blew a little too hard, and this, too, made her want to lash out. “Look at me, the demure Fluttershy sacrificing a piece of her own mind for the benefit of all. If only she hadn’t turned venomous, then maybe the Elements wouldn’t have misfired the first time. Woe to us all, but at least she made the heroic choice in the end.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Nothing.” She sighed angrily. “It means I’m tired of myself too.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Right.” They first spotted Octavia’s mansion wearing a sash of shadow from where it kept the sun off some of the sprawling lawn. Its half-moon windows, like a creature’s black and lidless eyes, peeked over top of another house’s roof and were gone. Silent, Fluttershy and Vinyl reached the mansion and confirmed that the Element was there, not simply nearby.

Fluttershy rang the doorbell, Vinyl looked through windows, and the two of them tried the servants’ quarters to no avail. There was no one to admit them, no sign of life, only shreds of packing tape on the huge driveway. Vinyl beamed a splinter of unicorn light through a window and reported that there was nothing on inside. Emboldened, Fluttershy tried the doors, and was shocked when they opened. Unlocked, the great double doors swung inwards on powerful, quiet hinges, exhaling the mansion’s stale breath. They stood at the foyer’s entrance, both feeling suddenly watched, set up, manipulated. Having not known it would serve them, Lumb had neglected to tell the others of his emptying the mansion, and Fluttershy and Vinyl were thus unprepared for the magnificent, patient silence that seemed to push out at them from within the largest house in Hoofington. Darkness shredded by tall combs of light through austere windows, deep blue carpeting to offset the red and cream wallpaper, the delicate and dusty lustre just visibly perched from the ceiling, the slick banisters like black pythons on staircases freighted with rivers of trampled carpet, Octavia’s mansion imposed itself on them and steadied their hooves, slowed their breathing, made respectfully slow their wandering eyes.

“Holy shit,” Vinyl said.

“I know,” Fluttershy said. “I’d forgotten how big it was. Come on, the Element’s back here.”

Upstairs and through a smaller set of double doors, they shuffled down a long corridor and into a dismally lifeless ballroom. Chairs were wrangled behind plastic cords against the walls, dust had filled the spaces in the checkered floor, the piano stood on its stand in the corner behind a table where one might place a gramophone or DJ set. Vinyl filled the room with lilac light and spun a little circle on one of the tiles. Fluttershy did not oblige a smile, and together, they followed her senses to a cozy parlor.

“Stop,” Fluttershy said, ears up, as Vinyl pushed ahead to inspect a large glass case, empty but for the patchy dust that bespoke the room’s recent vacation.

She had known it would not be as easy as walking in and snatching the Element, for it was never that easy. She had expected the house to burst into flames, or lightning to strike at them, or Discord himself to pop out and dance a jig on the weathervane. When she saw that the mansion was abandoned, she had assumed they would be somehow locked in or set to endless wandering; that taking the final Element might spring a magical trap to shuffle the rooms inside, or drop the floor out from beneath to inter them in the foundation, or simply rip them away to a new city like the last one had. The forceful slump of an unseen mass on the third floor, rattling dust down in thin streams and echoing from the back of the house, had not been anything Fluttershy was expecting, and for a second, she froze, waiting for it to sound again and hearing instead the creak of plaster and the occasional sough of what she thought were footfalls.

The crash that followed was much more noticeable, the pronounced shudder of old timber and the shake of lights in their brackets betraying obvious cause. Vinyl only looked at Fluttershy, horn aglow, mouth drawn.

“Fine,” Fluttershy said. “It sounds like a monster, I’m sure it was set to appear once we came around. Who knows how long that’s been waiting for us.”

Vinyl followed meekly behind as Fluttershy retraced their short steps out of the parlor, down the corridor toward the oncoming sound, and back to the foyer. The second floor trembled with each heavy step, but besides the initial crash, not a further sound was made. They had made it to the entrance and were looking back with puzzlement, expecting more than a scary noise and an unseen beast, when a second and third crash snapped inside and above, quick in succession, dins of glass and wood and furniture as something threw itself about in its room. A lower sound, like a couch scraping the ground, trumpeted and cut into an abrupt, wall-shaking smack; both mares stepped back outside, heads angled to see whether it would appear in the great overlooking windows.

“We can’t leave this,” Vinyl said.

“Go find some secret agents, tell them there’s a monster in the house.”

“‘Find some secret agents’? How do I do that?”

“Go make a panic in the streets. They’ll find you.”

The quick sound of breaking supports rang through to the mansion’s intact front, followed by the rude scrape of a shingle coming loose to fall onto the walk far from where they stood. “I can’t raise my voice,” Vinyl said. “How do I—”

“Then stay here and watch the house!” Fluttershy snapped, looking at Vinyl. “Keep the monster under control or find help, Vinyl, pick one.”

“You’re not gonna—”

“I am too gonna.” She looked back at the window, where she could see a dark shadow sliding back and forth with unnatural speed and steadiness. The light from Vinyl’s horn flashed away as the unicorn turned and ran off the property, and no sooner had she gone than a hole punched itself through the window, giving volume to the uncanny shuffle of talons on varnished wood floor. It was on the second level of the foyer, overlooking the grounds and presumably Fluttershy herself, though she did not believe it knew what it saw. The mad scramble of claws and feet, churning carpet to shreds and gouging the floor, did not sound like they belonged to a creature of intelligence.

Rising on tense wings, she had to divert and nearly hit the ground in a fall as the window broke outwards to admit a black, shiny, indeterminate body that slammed the ground with a weighty flop. A flock of doves scattered from the yard nearby, and Fluttershy with them to get an aerial view that did not last long.

In the few seconds she did have, before the creature gained its balance and rocketed into the air with a mighty, light-footed jump that forced Fluttershy into an ungainly barrel-roll, she descried a being of oily, black skin that shone like polished onyx, eight limbs affixed to a spheroid body without facial features or orifices; falcate claws retracting into wide, hairless paws, four sets on one hemisphere of the body and the other four splayed across the ground on trunks of legs. It flew toward her—not at her, merely near her, apparently trying to catch something else—with force enough to push her the distance she wanted to cover but hadn’t the energy in her wings to gain, landing by a smaller fountain near the servants’ quarters before curling two of its arms into cudgels and breaking into a lope toward the building.

In a few seconds, Fluttershy observed this through the tumble of disrupted flight, and righting herself, took off after it. Without stopping, it hit the quarters’ outer wall and bounced off, leaving a cracked dent behind, and when Fluttershy was closer, she saw more. What she had thought in her hasty first look was sunlight reflecting was, in fact, a thin coating of white froth coming off its veined, lumpen corpus, dribbling down the quartet of legs as it rested and then flinging off as it turned and ran under her toward the road.

“Damn it!” she cried unthinking, and by a similar instinct, borne of seeing it done so much by the others, she reached out with her unpracticed but strong telekinesis and gave a tug. One of the meaty arms hauled back and broke free, but not without sending the creature sprawling onto the cobbled walk, a different arm pinned underneath at a strange angle that, from what Fluttershy could tell, did not bother it. It paused again for her to catch up, halfway to the street, where an onlooker raced in the other direction, and then started again to advance haltingly.

She took another arm in her magic and pulled harder, and the creature whirled around and jumped again, flying over her this time and landing in a wiggling heap at Octavia’s doorstep. Where it had stood and dripped its bleeding, white foam, there was a colorless outline on the grass.

It got to its feet and, turning, brushed an arm on the door frame, and then in another wild whirl pivoted and slashed into the house, dislocating wood and stone and mortar with its fat paw, a flash of dark motion and noise, mindless aggression. She flew at it as it slashed again, repetitive motions that accomplished nothing but to widen an ugly hole in the house’s wall. There was no thought there—but in Fluttershy, observing with her kinder side calling for observation and study and rehabilitation, and the rest of her recoiling with disgust, there was the singular thought that here before her was some failure of a creature set against them, too stupid to be of any use except as an obstacle. A life with no value, no utility but for demolition, dredged up from Celestia-knew-where and plopped down in their paths. One of many.

“Sound familiar?” she asked herself. A gout of broken stone collapsed off the entryway for the creature to stand on, its great feet stumbling on the sliding debris and trying to find purchase in the same place. “Hey!” she yelled, grabbing another arm and jerking it upwards, arresting its movement. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The other three arms, meanwhile, flailed limply with their claws extending and retracting uncertainly. It pulled away from her magic and stood there, then turned and brushed the wall, and the whole thing started up again.

“No, that’s why I pulled you back,” she thought angrily, “so you would stop that.” This time, she took up a loose brick and hurled it at the huge ball of flesh. It bounced off without response, and Fluttershy tossed another one, then two at once.

“There you go, big guy,” she thought as it lurched back and threw its arms out in an attempt to catch its assailant. The legs tensed and Fluttershy got out of the way, magic ready to take it out of the air, but it took off running instead, freeing itself from its mess with an awful grind of stone and concrete. She followed it into the foyer, going up through the broken window and alighting on the banister over a torn patchwork of carpet. She hunched over to watch the beast’s mindless progress to the stairs, beginning with her distance to lose the anger that had driven her to throw bricks.

On the first step, it faltered and wrenched one arm back, the other three hanging uselessly at its sides, shredding the banister with a crunch. For a moment, the fragments were visible in the sunlight that streamed in, then another spray of splinters as it flung its arm more, claws out again, the same dumb repetition, the same inability to change, the same wastefulness. Then, a speck of dust floated into her eye.

Not even from the giant claws or the stubborn insistence on using them in the absence of appropriate flesh, not from anything the creature had done besides perhaps existing, the speck of dust in Fluttershy’s eye and that made her get off her banister, bring up her wings for balance, and rub and blink and tear up, the whole time thinking “great, just what I need,” brought back up through her entire body the spring-tight bolt of anger that had never found release. She looked up, blinked experimentally, found her eye still stinging, and leaned over to see the creature at work now on the other side of the stairs, scraping at the hole it had already cleared as if expecting something new each time. The noise, the stuffy heat of the mansion, the physical discomfort, the frustration, the fatigue, the indignity, the injustice, the insultingly impersonal nature of the newest threat, the tiny memories that had accreted and finally came up like dry tinder to fuel that expanding plume of rage—Fluttershy was on the cusp of release, as sublime and stupid as the creature below.

With an invective clenched between her teeth, she dove to the entresol and took up a dislocated baluster in her magic, swinging it overhead to shatter on the creature’s sloping mass. It froze, but she didn’t, taking another and swinging it at an available elbow. Each shock of broken wood sent an echo of pain into her brain, numbed by adrenaline and the delight of letting go. If Vinyl could see her, she would see two beasts at work or at monstrous play, and this spark of thought too added a layer of disgust that manifested in a concentrated spear of telekinesis to shove the black creature off the foot of the stairs and out into the main hall.

She was like a broken dam, grabbing pieces of wrecked house and throwing them with too much force to be accurate, every hit and every miss contributing in equal measure to the rage spilling forth. When the creature had at last realized that it was under attack, and that the house was not simply falling down upon it, it reared up its pointless, sexless body, the white acid foam still transuding to bleach Octavia’s beautiful carpet, and Fluttershy struck it across the middle with a section of rail that did not break at first and allowed for a second, weaker hit.

Flying up over its charge, she preemptively lowered her ears for the crash of a destroyed wall. Powerful legs carried it like a wanton cannonball down the short hall into a home office, where it stumbled on an empty desk and slammed its paws down furiously, as if the desk had somehow stopped it where the walls did not. Fluttershy flew right after it, another spear of magic ready, blunted but strong and wide enough to invert the room’s contents against its walls. A shawl of lit dust mingled with shattered glass for a second, for which the only sound was her ragged breathing before the creature resumed its attack on the desk.

It was that which she picked up next, and she, amazed by the fact that she was not amazed at her own magical strength, ducked her head and swung it in a sideways circle that knocked the creature off its front legs for a couple seconds. The recoil was worse than the exertion, and Fluttershy dropped the desk long enough for the creature to flail in another burst of anger or self-defense, slamming the desk up to the ceiling with two of its arms and finding the next wall with the other two. Unthreatened, it would attack any inanimate object that it stumbled upon, but when attacked, it had enough mind to push past the walls and fences and find safety for itself. A rational response, but Fluttershy did not feel rational; she chased it down through the next hole into a spacious bathroom. Not waiting for her quarry, she pulled the shower curtain rod off with a crinkle of old paint and brittle drywall and thrust it like a javelin into the massive body. It turned and grabbed at her, glass raining onto them from the overhead light its claws broke incidentally, and she hit it again. The sink came off next in a shower of water and an unhealthy gulp of broken plumbing, then the medicine cabinet in a crash of mirror shards and tiny, plastic shelves. The tile was scraped and scarred under its clawed feet, water sprayed from the sink and then the shower as she grabbed its telescoping head and flung it. “Water’s out, what the heck?” she thought, not caring, reveling in not caring. If Discord could do it, why not she?

Their only light came through a small window at the top of the shower stall, light that broke apart on the twin cascades of water and lent an alien sheen to the monster she dueled, double her size but feeling like more in the cramped room. Its feet scratched and slammed heedlessly on the floor of broken glass and loose water, kicking the snapped curtain rod against the toilet and chipping porcelain off with the force, and Fluttershy had to keep to the threshold.

When the sink was at last decimated and the marble counter reduced to heavy blocks under its heavier tread, the monster broke through the shower doors and punched an arm, with muscles thick as ropes, through the tiny window, scattering empty shampoo bottles and a porcelain soap tray among another clatter of tile. It wriggled its arm in the hole, spreading deep cracks through the shower’s slick wall and up to the ceiling, and Fluttershy pushed it straight forward to stumble out into the fresh air. Through smoke and dust she flew after it and took a swinging leg to the midsection as it got up, so much faster than she expected despite seeing it do just that a few times already. Her body tensed up, the wrong thing to do, and she tumbled across the lawn as cold grass scraped her fur away. Her head rattled and her wing joints were instantly numb with pain, and she pushed herself up much more slowly as the creature careened in her direction. A mushroom of magic hit it square in the front and diverted it past her and around the mansion’s corner, and it disappeared from view with a pair of arms scraping through the walls with an evil sound, the golden frames of Octavia’s shower doors jostling loose to lie on the lawn.

She caught it on the back of the house, she winded and battered, it still stupid and powerful. Another dull shot of magic to its middle to push it through a bay window and she was in the library with it, shelves cracking and crumpling with its rapid movements, but the books safe and sound somewhere in Lumb’s storage. “Twilight would appreciate this,” she thought wildly as she selected a shelf and grabbed at its top. The library was the largest room in the mansion, occupying two of the three floors, a great tank of stale air at the property’s corner, emptied of goods and of things to throw. She backed away and tugged at a bookshelf, only the top piece breaking off to hit the creature’s head area ineffectually, the rest of the shelf bolted to the wall. Then the idea reached her, and she flew up to the second floor.

“How do you stop a mad monster? Destroy its house!” she thought, a frantic joke in her mind. She spat out the imitation of a laugh at her own idea as she put the creature behind her, charged down the next corridor, and blasted the door off its hinges to emerge into Octavia’s music room. Behind, the creature clattered through its own doorway, apparently recognizing that its attacker had moved. The sound of its brutish advance, displacing walls and light fixtures with its girth, put her in mind of a giant termite.

Hovering with some difficulty, she hammered and cut at the floor’s underside, but it was of solid construction. When the first of the beast’s claws punched through the door below, she brought a sledge of magic down on the floor, flying out from underneath at the same time. Dust rippled off with the sparkles of magic diffusing on impact, rippling multiple times as the balcony shook more with each strike as the creature passed unharmed below, where it dropped into the pit where Octavia had once kept her collection of instruments, and which now contained only empty racks, chairs, and stands—and the huge, restored organ in one corner, which Lumb had not been able to transport safely on the short notice that his intuition had allowed.

“It’s fine,” Fluttershy said, flying up toward the ceiling and around the giant, bowing set of strings that they had been shown on their first time visiting the mansion. Octavia’s whale cello, too large to be practical, had been left strung across the ceiling for the same reason they had left the organ. Another waste, she thought, closing her eyes to the spray of glass as she blew a skylight apart. She landed, panting, on a separate pane over the music room, and there she recovered some of her strength in a pool of sweat on the water-spotted glass. The third floor rose around her to give the illusion of being near the ground, the meandering creature far beneath as of something freshly exhumed and left in its mausoleum. It whirled and slashed without her, throwing music stands against the walls, bending and ripping up decorative golden banisters, ruining the marble that had been cut and colored into the motif of a heraldic crescent moon amid the stars.

Distance renewed, her flare of anger was receding back into self-consciousness, and she thought rationally once more. Vinyl would be coming back with secret agents eventually, but Fluttershy could not let the monster out of her sight until then, nor could she chase it indefinitely. Her magic was strong and ran deep, but not as deeply as Twilight’s or Rarity’s, and she could feel her limit fast approaching. Physically aching and mentally tired, she sat up and, with a minute of difficult concentration, cleared her mind and sharpened her telekinesis to apply like a chisel to the cartwheel of masonry that formed the music room’s roof. The windows between each spoke shattered as she shook the building, her ears deafened to her own work and her legs soon inured to the rattle underneath them. There were six spokes to the wheel, and when she had mostly destroyed one, she went to the next, one eye on the monster below and one to the roads and houses she could see from her elevation, not where Vinyl had run off too but the only ones she could see.

That even a process such as this, of breaking loose an entire section of ceiling, could become unfeeling work, put Fluttershy in a state of bitter bafflement. The creature never thought to jump up at her, sufficiently distracted by what it could find in the pit. When the whale cello fell from the incessant shaking, its strings snapped and coiled up on itself like a dead spider, emitting a guttural twang when it landed and that neither Fluttershy nor her monster heard. Shortly after that, she got into the air again and assess her work, noted the black puffs of smoke rising too close to be anyone else’s house, and gathered her will for what she hoped and intended to be the final push. The project had left her sweating and determined, her mind taxed to a duller and less reactive anger, and from this she fed a blunt but effective spell that she brought down onto the roof’s center with a bang. It fell and shattered around the edges where masonry caught the overhanging second floor, glass and cement and ceramic shingles a frenetic noise that she had heard several times before, but not by her own agency. The black form vanished under smoke and rubble, with it the destroyed whale cello and the priceless organ it had somehow missed. She flapped over her handiwork, sinking slowly as her exhausted wings labored, and found a spot to rest on a second-floor balcony off the library’s outer wall. After a moment, she came to her senses and located the Element, tucked away behind a shrub at the mansion’s side, Octavia’s elegant amethyst clef. She had run right past it in flight against the monster.

She hefted the Element and put it around her neck as the common sensations came back: cold sweat, a racing heart, muscles aflame and mind blank with vague self-disapprobation; lungs prickling with dust and smoke, ears ringing; and, of course, sirens in the distance. For Fluttershy, for them all, sirens in the distance meant only that they must hurry. It was nice to sit and regain some semblance of herself for once, instead of scrambling to finish a task or flee from the scene of a task completed. The house fire to her back was immaterial; she could smell the smoke and hear the blaze, both distant and coming closer slowly enough for her to escape when she wanted, which was several minutes later. She glided from the balcony to land near a gazebo, which had survived the struggle in a pristine patch of grass and flowers surrounded by a little ring of water. There she sat, flat on her back on a frigid, stone bench, watching the mansion’s front get eaten away by a towering wall of flame. Firefighters were rounding corners in their squealing trucks, neighbors were lining fences, a reporting airship was coming closer with a frame of warning lights bristling off its body, and Fluttershy just lay there. Empty, released, she heaved a contented sigh and listened to the roar of water and propellers. “See, Pinkie? This is what it’s like.”

The fire got hotter, though, and the firefighters found her and escorted her off the property, and there she met Vinyl in the small crowd of onlookers. For Fluttershy, it was a trivial crisis: no lives were lost, nothing more valuable than an antique organ destroyed; and the house itself would not be missed, certainly not by its rightful owner. For the citizens of Hoofington, though, it was devastation. The greatest house in the city mysteriously lit up like a funeral pyre one sunny Monday morning, out of the blue but coincident with the Elements’ arrival. She looked around and saw faces aghast and sickened, Vinyl’s among them, but did not share in their reactions.

“See, Fluttershy?” a voice like Twilight’s intoned in her mind. “This is what it’s like.”

“Are you okay?” Vinyl asked into her ear.

“Better now, thank you.”

They watched the firefighters work until they were chased from the scene, and Fluttershy saw what she knew must be the secret agents who had found Vinyl moving along the ground’s edges. “In the back!” she called at them. “I left it in the back, under the collapsed roof! Thank you!” One acknowledged her, raising a hoof and smiling behind a pair of ostentatious sunglasses.

Only when they were back to a bridge did Fluttershy stop to rest her legs, and Vinyl sat with her. “What happened?”

“I handled it,” Fluttershy said. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be cryptic. It chased me, I chased it, the mansion—you saw—and we made it to the music room, at the back of the house. I dropped the roof on it. I don’t know if it died, but I didn’t see it after that.”

“You dropped the roof on it?”

“I guess I did.”

Vinyl helped her up and they walked on. Fluttershy expected her to say something obvious, something to point out how ironic it was that the Element of Kindness could wreak such havoc, but she said instead, “I’m sorry I missed it. Sounds like a time.”

Fluttershy laughed. “I think I know how Twilight feels now. You know, I have a lot of magic power too. Maybe you didn’t know that, but that’s what Celestia said.”

“I’ll say. Fluttershy, it looks like you did great.”

“Thanks.” They left it at that. Compliment and gratitude, tension eased, anger vented at last. The city was alive with ponies reacting to the fire, but Fluttershy and Vinyl were relaxed as they walked back to the hospital where they found their friends gathered, not too concerned from the news. Octavia had found somewhere to be alone with her thoughts, probably the roof, Rainbow said. Fluttershy showed them the Element of Courage, which they passed around in demure silence.

“So that’s the last one,” Applejack said. “Girls? We’ve actually done it.”

“Just gotta find our friends now,” Rainbow said.

“Yes, and they have a plan already,” Twilight said, grabbing the letters on the bedstand. “Or some of a plan. It’s weird, but I think it’ll work.” She told them their next steps, starting with leaving town and speeding toward Manehattan. While they were in transit, Rarity’s group would work to evacuate tiny Passage Town, and then, the groups rejoined, Twilight and Octavia would blow open the ceiling on what Rarity described as “an instant teleporting gateway between here and Snowdrift.”

“I think it can work,” Twilight said. “She’s not very clear on how this gateway works, but if they were able to get through it the one time, we should be able to go back. I’m not sure about the ship, though, that’s pretty big.”

“How is the ship, by the way? Did you get it fixed?” Fluttershy asked.

“Ready tomorrow, that’s what the grease ponies said,” Rainbow said. “Nothing too important was damaged.”

Twilight reached with a hoof, her horn still injured. “Can I get another piece of paper? I’m going to write Versus and tell her to keep the Contraction party from fizzling out before we get back.”

The TV turned up of its own accord, and Fluttershy looked between it and Applejack, who winked at her. On the news, the husk of Octavia’s mansion still flamed weakly, reduced to a great plot of smoking charcoal that they could also see from their room. A clip played of Fluttershy and Vinyl calmly walking away from the scene, and the reporter stated that the Elements’ location was not yet confirmed. Cornering them for interviews had been made verboten at the start of their quest, but if they could find the elusive Vinyl Scratch, the reporter speculated, all would be made clear. At this, Vinyl moaned and softly banged her head against the wall.

“We’ll be gone tomorrow, they won’t get us,” Applejack said.

“Even stranger, though, was the charm spotted around Miss Scratch’s neck as she left the site this afternoon,” the reporter said beside a blown-up image of Vinyl’s Element, the black quaver fuzzy but clear enough to look like what it was.

“Now we had to figure this’d get out soon enough, marchin’ around with our fancy new Elements as we do.”

“They didn’t bat an eye in Snowdrift,” Vinyl said.

Applejack shrugged and cracked open a bottle of water, and another letter fizzled out of Twilight’s horn.

Dearest Twilight Sparkle,

I just heard that you got the Element of Courage. You have my deepest thanks and relief, girls. Before you blame Discord for the thing you had to face in that preposterous mansion of hers, know that it was not his. He borrowed it from someone just as mad as him. Spare some pity for your uncle Discord, yes? Or perhaps not? Perhaps your hearts are just as dry and threadbare as mine.

If pity be gone from your little hearts, then I ask only this one thing: that you destroy me and mine with as much prejudice as you can muster. Remember everything I’ve done, the direct and indirect injuries suffered at my poor little paws. Write a list, Twilight, you like those.

Grind me down under boot and heel, rub me from history! Crush my skull under the ruins of my castle, flay me and salt the earth where I fall! If I am the thing you hate, then let me be petrified without dignity. Snuff me out as I would have snuffed you if the tables were reversed. I will wait in my castle, and I will open the doors if you knock. Your friend for now and forever, Discord.

Twilight folded the letter and put it with the others. “Discord’s taunting us, but I think he knows he’s lost. He wants to rattle us.”

“A little late for that,” Rainbow said.