Only hours away from landing in Passage Town, on a steady curve west by southwest to keep out of sight of the village’s evacuees, the deck was astir with activity, all of it Twilight’s. With her books stacked to one side, places marked by bookmarks and feathers or held open by stones or other books, she scurried among six different sigils and two enchanted setups that swung erratically on chains off the gunwales. One kept their ship hidden behind a veil of darkness similar to what Princess Luna had used to hide Moondrop and the horrors it contained; one would react if any outside eyes tried to pierce that veil; one was dormant and waiting for Versus to open her letter in Snowdrift, so Twilight may speak with her directly; and the other five were divination sigils of varying strength, to let her spy on key places in the freezing city. It had taken her all of the day previous to set up the network of magic, working with minimal breaks, moved to action once again by the contents of a letter.

Applejack’s latest note from Versus had been been the culprit. She showed it to Twilight after her conversation with Vinyl, knowing it was bad and that it would probably lead to a flurry of magic and books, to the noise and frustration of a plan forced to form at the last second.

Snowdrift was on alert, police and—Twilight assumed, for Versus didn’t know to identify them—Datura. Those whose job it was to monitor the Tartarus gateway had reported a high volume of missing magic, and with the siphoning crystals they had recently taken down for a second time, it was clear that someone had hoarded the magic for themselves. Versus did not know that it was Twilight, but by the fact that she had written a letter about it, her thoughts were obvious; naturally, the rest of the town suspected Discord, and was watching for an attack.

Twilight jogged up the deck to the sigil from which she could see Versus, the hardest by far to create; a spell that followed someone, instead of keeping to a fixed location, introduced complexities and problems that had taken Twilight several hours to untangle. In the sigil’s glassy surface, Versus was settling down on what Twilight assumed was her front porch, two large wedges of snowbank visible at the edges of the frame. She had Twilight’s most recent letter, set aside while she sorted the rest of mail and drank hot tea, Twilight impatiently willing her to pick it up. When she unrolled it to reveal a diadem of similar design to the dormant sigil on the deck, both glowed faint blue, and Twilight spoke up.

“Versus? It’s me, Twilight Sparkle.” The Versus in the sigil jumped back in her chair and dropped the letter. “Sorry about this, but I had to talk to you. I’m using the sigil on the letter you opened.”

Panting, a hoof to her chest, Versus composed herself and grabbed the scroll. “You… You’re in the letter?”

“That’s great, I can hear you perfectly just like that.”

“Where are you?”

“We’re near Manehattan right now. Oh, wait, hold on.” She cast a quick sound-dampening spell over the area, to muffle the airship’s noise. “Is that better?”

“You’re near Manehattan, you said?”

“On our way to the window to Snowdrift. We’ll be arriving later this afternoon, all of us.”

“Is that Versus?” Applejack asked, climbing up off the deck as she re-associated into herself. “You got her?”

“She’s right here.”

“Howdy pard!” Applejack sprang over to the sigil and waved at Versus, who continued looking at the letter as if it might bite her.

“She can’t see us,” Twilight said.

“Wait, AJ’s there too?” Versus asked, laughing nervously. “What is going on?”

“I’m talking to you from the deck of the airship.”

“Versus, you know in my letter, Ah said that Ah was thinkin’ ‘bout how weird it is that totally unrelated actions can justify each other. Well, Ah totally fergot—”

“Applejack, later?” Twilight pressed.

“Right, sorry. Versus, we’ll talk when we get back into town. Ah think Twilight here wants ya fer somethin’.”

Versus, faced fixed in a drawn frown of bemused worry, cracked a smile. “Whatever you say. I guess… Yeah, well, here I am, Twilight. Pretending this isn’t super creepy or weird, talking to a letter on my front porch.”

“How’s the weather there?” Applejack asked.

“Uhhh, not great.”

“Versus, listen, I need your help. You said that Snowdrift was looking for whoever took all that Tartarus magic. How bad is it there?”

“How bad? Like, it’s all over the news, they said they’ve got ponies on the lookout twenty-four seven for the magic. Everyone thinks it’s Discord, but no one knows where he is—”

“You mean he’s not in his castle?”

“His what?”

“Crap,” Twilight whispered, making a mental note to check Discord’s castle next. “Okay, look—”

“It’s not him, right? It’s you?” Not aware that Twilight was watching her, Versus was picking assiduously at her teeth. “Your friends said something about forcing a Contraction, and the magic, and… Well, whatever, I didn’t understand, something-something magic this, Twilight’s plan that, Sunday, and all that. They didn’t want to share with me.”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Twilight! What the hell?”

“It’s to get the next Contraction going, that’s all. We need to get somewhere fast, and this is the only way to do it.”

“All right, hold on.” She got out of her seat, gathered her mail, and went inside. Twilight smiled at Versus’ integrity, moving into a private place without knowing she was being watched. Installed at her dining room table, she continued. “I’m inside now. So what is this for exactly? Forcing a Contraction? Twilight,” she laughed again, “that’s really bad.”

“I already know it’s illegal, you don’t have to tell me. I’m doing this so we don’t have to spend a week flying out to Discord’s castle, we can just go straight there. Basically, we’re landing in Snowdrift today, having the Contraction on Sunday, and then it’s over.”

“What is?”

“Everything, Versus. Everything.”

Versus stood and put the kettle on for more tea, digesting Twilight’s words. When she sat back down, she fiddled with the teabag in her mug, digging it out, still not aware Twilight could see her as she gave up and used her teeth, squeezed it out on a stained tablecloth. “Luna, everything? If you say so. So this, and that monster in the warehouse, and that Peaceful Meadows pony, and… you’re really in some shit, Twilight!”

“Thank you, yes, I know. Hold on.” She ran over to a different sigil where she had seen movement out of the corner of her eye. A contingency of forest rangers, wrapped head to hoof against the growing blizzard, was meeting outside the point where she could not see the Tartarus gateway, amassed at the wall of shadow, some peeking their heads out like ghosts. She could not hear them, and went back to Versus.

“The ponies in Snowdrift, I’m sure, will know I have the Tartarus magic the second I show up there. They can detect that sort of thing, and I don’t know how to hide it.”

“Are you gonna ask me to do something weird?”

“It’ll be easy, I’ll help you build it.”

“Build?”

“Are you working today?”

She smiled nervously to herself. “…No, I’m off. Today and tomorrow.”

“Great. Take the letter with you, let’s get in your car. You’ll need…” She floated over one of her books. “We need some crystals, some resonating wires, a couple notebooks, some good-quality ink… We can get all this at an arts and crafts store.”

“Twilight, what am I building, and what am I doing with it?”

“It’s a signal. There’s… When we show up, there’s going to be some ponies who’ll want to detain me for my magic, and I can’t let them. This signal will get them away from where we’re going to land.” None of it was true, but the truth would only frighten Versus. Reluctantly, for the snow outside was only getting worse, she got into her car and drove where Twilight directed, purchased what Twilight told her to, and brought it back home. As Versus was spreading all her acquisitions out on the table, Twilight took a moment to go below and check on the others. They had found occupation in the cabin with a board game Twilight didn’t know Vinyl had purchased, and Twilight looked at them enviously before heading back to the deck. For the next few hours, as Manehattan came into view and Passage Town appeared beside the broken hairline of river, Twilight directed Versus in the monotonous creation of her device. For every enchantment, no matter how minor, Versus had to draw a sigil; she could not enchant things on her own. Some sigils she had to draw multiple times, and Twilight was gratified with the speed at which Versus learned them.

What Twilight was having built was a dummy bomb. With sigils repeated on pieces of paper then pressed and bound to a wired contortion of crystals, Twilight was simulating a process by which magic could grow exponentially, a dangerous construction that she knew the Snowdrift secret agents would recognize immediately. When that was done, and they had landed just outside Passage Town, and the others were getting reacquainted, Twilight moved Versus on to a more palatable part of the task. Through a different combination of sigils taped and stapled to strips of fabric wrapped around the crystals, she cobbled together a spell to broadcast through teleportation stations—like the window from Snowdrift to Passage Town—and, at the last and hanging off the whole ugly ball of art supplies, a wide and simple sigil to grab any loose magical spell and feed it through the entire system. None of it would work properly, Twilight had made certain in her design, but it looked like it could. At first glance, its function was to take a spell, like one crafted from the stolen Tartarus magic, increase its intensity exponentially, and then finally release it through the secret agents’ windows around the country.

“I don’t know if I like this,” Versus said when the project was done, a heap of crystals, staples, notebook paper, and felt on her table.

“You did great,” Twilight said, mind drained, wanting nothing more than to go down and catch up with her friends. She could hear Octavia’s voice and the sound of powerful magic, where they were beginning to work on the ground over the window’s crypt. “Get some water, and then we’re going to drive this thing into the forest.”

“Uhhhh…” Versus walked to the window and gestured at it, having by that point figured out that Twilight could see her. It looked like evening there, so heavy were the storm clouds and the torrent of gray snow.

“Get your quill and a battery, I’ve got two more sigils for you.”

“Twilight, my hoof is killing me.”

“These’ll be the last. Please, Versus, we’re almost there. I just need you to drop this off in the forest somewhere. I’ll take care of the rest.”

Grumbling, Versus got a fresh sheet of paper and drew out Twilight’s sigils, which Twilight knew by heart and which she explained while writing, in huge capital letters, a note for the Datura.

“How’s it going, Twilight?” Rainbow asked, flying up to the rail.

“We’re almost there. I’m setting the diversion, then I’ll come down. How are things with you?”

“We could really use your help getting this lid off. There’s a lot of concrete to saw through.”

“Give me thirty minutes, okay? What time is it?”

“About four.”

Twilight nodded, and Rainbow flew back to the congregation of friends, talking and laughing around a crude cut in the ground. Pinkie had found a spray bottle somewhere in town and was using it to cool off Octavia, panting and complaining in the ceaseless sun.

“Okay, got it. Do I just put this on the roof or something?” Versus asked.

“Wrap them around the battery. Tighter. There, and you can just put it in your cup holder. Now take that signal and put it in the car. Hey! Take the letter too, Versus.”

“Sorry.” She struggled to get the weird, sizzling pile of magic onto her back, and then into the car, which took a minute to get going.

“We’re driving out into the woods, not too far. Take us past Umbrella Park, I think there’s a trail out there.”

Versus pulled onto the empty street, Twilight’s first sigil wiping snow away in a wide bubble to give her immediate visibility but nothing else, and the second coating her tires in a thin layer of magic so they would leave no tracks. She crawled through Snowdrift, occasionally passing a car with its own shield bubble, hunched over the wheel, clearly tired, aware that there was something she hadn’t been told.

“You want some music?” she asked, switching on the radio.

“Contemporary,” Twilight said. The music sounded tinny and flat through her communication sigil, but it was nice to hear; on the ship, they had no such convenience.

“Am I gonna have to worry about the cops busting down my door?” Versus asked as Umbrella Park came into view.

“I will, but you shouldn’t.” Twilight’s mind was on her own magic; how, in the space of a few hours, she had guided an unskilled earth pony in the creation of what was almost a weapon of mass destruction. The interconnections of magic across Equestria allowed for too much to someone who knew how it all worked, and Twilight was glad that Discord was no such person.

“So you’re gonna have me place this, then what?”

“Then it’ll draw the right ponies away from where we’re coming through. They won’t see us, and we can hide in the forest until it’s time for the Contraction. How’s the party, by the way? Applejack said it was still going?”

“It’s simmering. All the stuff is up, like the booths and games and stuff, and they’ve got a weather shield over it all. It’s like a town fair right now, ponies are just waiting for the big day.”

“Good.”

“Setting it up wasn’t easy, you know.”

“You didn’t do everything on your own, did you?”

“I organized it. I was down there on my lunch break every day, and before and after work too, keeping things going. Just keepin’ the fun rolling, Twilight.”

“Yeesh.” To imagine the logistics of such a thing, Twilight was amazed. Magic and the machinery thereof was easy for her, but the chemistry of a party, and one so giant as the Contraction party in the park, was alien to her. Pinkie’s parties of old had seemed intense enough, and those just lasted a single evening and took place in a single building. “That’s incredible that you were able to keep all this going, Versus.”

“Thanks.” She had to slam on the brakes to avoid swerving into a tree, and Twilight’s sigil swung violently with the sudden movement. When they were on the forest trail, Twilight directed Versus out of the car, down the path a ways, and had her wedge the fake bomb underneath a web of frozen tree roots. She looked over her back the whole time, feeling correctly like she would be in trouble if she were caught, and when she was done, Twilight stayed with her until she was back home.

“That should be it for you. You did great.”

“Yeah, I gotta say, I feel weirdly taken advantage of, Twilight.”

“No, seriously, you just helped me tremendously. I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She sighed, looked out at her friends again, wishing it were already over. She still had one more step. “Keep this letter out and available. If you need to contact me, you can press the sigil with a hoof, I designed it to work for earth ponies.”

“You can do that?”

“Sure, it’s easy. I’ll leave mine up too, so I can contact you if I need to. If you see your letter glowing blue, that’s me trying to talk to you.”

“Oooookay.”

“You’ll be fine. I’m going to go now, I have to take care of a few things on my end. We’ll be in Snowdrift in a few, but you won’t see us, hopefully. I’m going to try to keep us out of sight.”

“Great, that’s not suspicious at all.”

“You’ll be fine, I promise. And thank you.” Before Versus could delay her, Twilight cut the connection and trotted down to meet her friends, leaving the final step of her plan behind for the time.

“All good?” Rainbow asked.

“For now. I still have to scramble the agents at the window, but I’ll do it later, when we’re almost through the ground.”

“Say again?”

“Diversion. So we can go through to Snowdrift and not be caught instantly by whoever’s on the other side.”

“Are they after you?” Rarity asked.

“For the magic, they will be. Octavia, take a break, I’ll go from here. Where am I cutting?”

“Right here, Twilight!” Pinkie crowed, prancing in a line through the dusty grass just outside town. “Let’s lift the lid off this pumpkin already!”

“Twilight, we can’t just go back into Snowdrift if they’re after you,” Rarity said, following her at a distance as Twilight lanced a beam of magic into the earth.

“As I was telling Rainbow,” Twilight said testily, “I’ve already set up a diversion for the agents there. We’ll go through this window and find a hiding place in the forest, let Colgate back if she’s there, and then it’s off to the castle. I know what I have to do to plug us into the Contraction magic, I just need to work out the precise direction we’ll be flying.”

“And what are we going to do in the forest until Sunday?”

“We’re not waiting for Sunday; that’s two days away.”

“We are waitin’ fer Sunday, though,” Big Mac said, joining up with them. “All the precogs are geared up to have their Contraction then.”

“Then we—seriously?”

“Sunday,” Rarity echoed.

Twilight paused, her magic fading for a moment as she thought. She shook her head. “No, I can’t worry about that now. Something will hold us up until Sunday, fine, but we’ll get through it.” To Rarity’s questioning look, she said, “if the precogs know it’s Sunday, then we know whatever we do until then is the right thing. It’s foreseen.”

“That doesn’t mean it’ll be pleasant.”

“I’ll worry about it later!” Rarity flattened her ears and looked at Big Mac, who looked back.

“I’m sorry. You can probably tell, I’m a little stressed right now.” She faltered where her spell appeared to stick in the ground, and with a grunt of exertion and a sudden flare of sparking magic, yanked her beam back up, drawing with it a horrible sound of rent stone.

“Is there an easier way to do this?” Octavia asked.

“I could set up a system of enchantments, but I’d have to research a bunch of things first, and I just got done with a project like that. I need a break. I need mindless labor.”

“Want a squirt, Twilight?” Pinkie asked, running up with her spray bottle and misting Twilight’s hindquarters.

“Who are they?” Twilight asked, nodding thanks to Pinkie, who then ran off to join Rainbow in a patch of taller grass and reeds where the river bent southwest.

“Eggshell and Cloud Line, the local agents here,” Octavia said. “They agreed to help us when Rarity told them that Aloe and Lotus are no longer in Snowdrift.”

“I take it they’re not supposed to be doing this, then.”

“No, I believe they said they will be on the run after this. The organization does not take kindly to this sort of behavior.”

“As they shouldn’t.” She sawed away at the ground, walking a mild pace and applying her tired mind at the monotonous task of cutting concrete. By eight o’ clock, Twilight was taking her first break for Octavia to finish the job. The ground sagged visibly in a few places at the edges, but they had cut at an inward angle, obviating the risk of it falling in and burying the window. Twilight sat with Eggshell and Cloud Line, leaning back on a lawn chair Eggshell had taken from someone’s backyard.

“I’m sorry they did that to you,” she said, shading her eyes from the sun. “We used to think they were nice mares, but we saw the truth in Snowdrift. For Lotus, anyway. Aloe still seems fine.”

“Aloe’s useless,” Eggshell said. “She doesn’t know anything about her ponies. No help whatever.”

“Oh. That’s a shame.”

He snorted. “Yeah. You could say that.”

“What can you tell me about the agents in Snowdrift? Are they good? Are they experienced?”

“The best get sent to Snowdrift,” Cloud Line said. “The best, but also beginners they want to throw in the deep end. Why?”

“I just want to know what we’re, uh… up against.”

“Curious choice of words.”

“One of you said you’d be hiding in the forest,” Eggshell said. “On the run from the Snowdrift agency, it doesn’t bode well for the Element of Magic.”

“Hence my question,” Twilight said.

He sneered. “Why hide at all?”

“No reason.”

“Hey, you don’t have to tell us anything.” He sighed and slid down in his chair. “We’ll be on the run too. Once we’re through that window, we are done.”

“Yeah, it’s job abandonment,” Cloud Line said. “We won’t be able to come back. That was made clear to you, right? You can’t go back through here, at least not with our help.”

“We won’t need to,” Twilight said and got up. “I reckon it’s about time.”

“Hm?”

“Nothing.” She looked in on Octavia’s progress and went back up to the ship, where one of her sigils still displayed the woods northeast of Snowdrift, where Rarity had told her was the window’s other side. A column of black hid the window itself, as well as the gateway, two pillars of shadow rising off Snowdrift, curious and sinister to any wandering eyes. Watching the area outside did not alert anyone, but if Twilight tried to see inside, the secret agent would know immediately. More, she had learned from her book on counter-surveillance, they would most likely be able to invert her divination spell and see who it was that was trying to spy.

It was that inversion that Twilight relied on, pushing her sigil’s focus into the black veil and holding up her sign. If they caught her spell and looked back through it, they would first see the warning she had written for them: “MAGICAL THREAT IN THE WOODS EAST OF THE PARK, EVACUATE WINDOW.” It would mobilize them away from the window and buy Twilight and crew enough time to get through and find a hiding place.

The sigil displayed only foaming black before, not even a minute in, it shimmered and became a mirror to the top of their airship. Twilight peeked her face into frame for a moment, letting them see her, and then held out her sign. A few more seconds, and the spell shattered; the sigil died and reverted to a complex design on the ship’s deck. She tossed her sign away and raced to the next sigil, from which she could see a pair of agents, dressed in the standard park ranger uniforms, bolting through the woods toward town.

“Okay, everypony, the window’s clear,” she said, voice magically amplified—but not too much, not enough to let the Passage Town ponies hear her upriver. “We should have an hour or more to get through and find a place for the ship. Eggshell and Cloud Line, get ready to set up the window. Everyone but Octavia, on the ship and get ready to go through.” She stood at the top of the gangplank for a second, gratified at the flurry of motion before her, all the ponies running about and organizing themselves at her command. Twilight breathed deep of the dry, winter air, touched with dead grass and river water, rejoiced in the base pleasure of her own body functioning as it should, and got back to work.

She and Octavia finished cutting the ground together, and, taking either side of the wide wedge of earth, lifted. Twilight’s magic was far stronger, and after a brief argument, Twilight directed Octavia to drop her end so that she could simply drag the plug out into the plains herself. At the very end, aware she was being watched, she closed her eyes and summoned the strength of will to tip the disc on its side and send it rolling for a few clumsy feet before it settled on its side, a great cylinder of concrete and soil—the equivalent force to kick an apartment building across its street. She and Octavia boarded the ship and waited, and from aloft, they could see into the well of stone, the graveyard that had never seen the sun before that day. Applejack nudged them into position just above, that they may slowly lower to the window by deflating their balloon, and below, Eggshell and Cloud Line hastened along the cemetery path toward the inscribed plinth.

Rarity had described traveling from Snowdrift, how the window had come alive with harsh magic until it appeared it would set the entire forest aflame. Hanging over Passage Town, Twilight saw it for herself, and more as the window expanded and entirely loosed itself from its stanchion, a sleet gray disc of Snowdrift entrapped in the blinding white of a magical corona, spinning and shrieking, throwing gouts of crimson fire into the air and across the stone floor; and then, with a deafening cry of pure energy entombed and the frantic flashing of a monsoon coming up from the ground, the window became a torus of light with the speed of its spin, impossible to look at. Big Mac was not heard bellowing fearful epithets from where he hugged the torch.

Yet through all, the airship held steady, the savage-looking magic neither singing nor pushing it in the air, simply passing through or diffusing harmlessly upon the hull. The sound became too high to hear, but not to feel, putting all their insides to shivering when Cloud Line, finally, appeared again at the surface and gave them the signal to go through. No one could look directly at it as they went through, but Applejack’s aim was true, and the window’s suction sure; they were thrust rudely into the freezing cold after another head-splitting second, and it was all they could do for several minutes afterward just to lie on the deck and catch their breath as the window quieted and the Passage Town Daturas went through themselves, to parts unknown and not to be seen by the Elements again.

The black forest shellacked with snow and torn by wind, the roiling clouds, the freezing air, all was broken then by the window’s discharge from the other side. Lesser than what was demonstrated in Passage Town, still the aftershock ripped through them with the force of a cannon shot, bending trees and dying the clouds neon purple for a lurid second before shriveling to a small fountain of sparks out of the window’s middle. Its face showed the echo of Passage Town, a sunlit crater where once had been only concrete, before shifting to a view of placid, rain-speckled sea. This Rainbow watched, trying to figure where they had been that looked like what the window showed.

Ten minutes later, they were up and assessing damages, of which there were none. For the window’s spectacular display, it commanded no destructive powers, a fact of which the Daturas had reminded the Elements before, and which was forgotten almost immediately.

“Get us in the air, Applejack,” Twilight said, breathing still heavy. “And hurry. We don’t know how much time we’ve got.”

“Wh-wh-where… Where do w-we? Oh, th-thank you, darlin’,” Applejack shivered, donning a one of the jackets Rarity brought up from below. She ignited the torch and spun the wheel, and when she could speak, asked, “where are we gonna have space to land in the forest, Twi?”

“I’ll clear a spot for us if I have to, just go. Keep us low, though.” Frowning, she stood at the gunwale, wrapped in a coat of her own warming magic, and ran her eyes over the trees. “They’ll be looking.”

“So I take it you don’t need me at the back anymore,” Rainbow said.

“Thank you, no.” She glanced at Rainbow and gave a smile, and Rainbow slunk away.

“Colgate will never find us if we are hiding in the f-f-f-f… in the forest,” Octavia said, shaking and clutching at herself inside her jacket.

Twilight tapped her chin as if thinking, but Colgate was far from her mind. The fact that the Snowdrift precogs held so fast to the Contraction taking place on Sunday, though they had arrived the Friday before, did not sit well with Twilight. “Maybe the delay is us waiting for Colgate. That’s not horrible.” She drew away from the gunwale as pine branches scraped down their ship, casting flurries of snow onto the deck and sapping what little warmth they had managed to gain for themselves in ascent. Wordlessly, Rarity shoved the snow off with a plow of shield magic.

“Here, stop here,” Twilight said, joining Applejack at the wheel. She studied the compass. “Head that way. Rarity, can you bend these trees back with a shield?” Rarity, shivering and miserable looking, became a third at the front, and still silently, conjured a wedge of gossamer magic to push the treetops away from their bow. The forest groaned around them and snow fell to either side as Applejack slowly broke through, the balloon the only piece of their ship showing above the treetops, still too close to be visible from town. They set down at a frozen brook where the trees were older and easier for Twilight to slash out of the way. There, on packed snow on the slope’s shoulder, they landed and tied cables around a massive tree, and everyone disembarked to feel the snow under their hooves. For many, it was a relieving sign that they were back on track.

“We’re not gonna stay hidden here ‘til Sunday, Twi,” Applejack said quietly, so as not to let the others hear. “You said it yerself, they’ll be lookin’ fer ya.”

“I know.”

“Another thing, an’ Ah hope you thought of this already, but this is the precog city. If they’ve got precogs—”

“I did think of that. One of these sigils lets us know if anyone gets close to the ship.” She paused for a second, shivering. “Since I know if I’m landing near someone, any precogs that might foresee us out here will have to wait until after we’ve landed to approach; otherwise I would have just moved away from wherever they foresaw, you understand? And if they come out here after we’ve landed, it’s just a matter of running, or chasing them off. That being said, I know it’s uncomfortable out here, but I want us to stay close to the ship if we possibly can.”

“How are you gonna pull off the Contraction?”

“I just need to access the city’s foundation.”

“Oh, is that all?”

Twilight smiled. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Anythin’ Ah can do to help, just name it.”

Walking back to her cluster of sigils, Twilight said, “I know, I know.” She frowned down at one. “Actually, I do have something. Help Octavia find Colgate, so she’ll stop…” “Bugging me about it,” she thought. “So she can be at ease.”

“Now that, that Ah can do.” She dissolved into the ship’s inner workings while Twilight studied her magic. Many of the sigils had gone dead in the teleportation, and some of them she wiped away, pondering what she would need in the coming days. One book, open to a chapter on dampening the passive effects of magic, she had gone over multiple times to find a way of reducing the obviousness of her purloined Tartarus magic. She went to the chapter’s beginning and started to read again, though she was certain she had not missed anything.

That same night cycle, eleven o’ clock and the sun not a whit lower, Colgate and Partial Thoughts lifted off the icy parapet and took to the jagged, mountain skies. The procedure had been the same as before: she placed her order with the jeweler, Silver Sun; she went into the dark back of the mines with her, mastering her fear and repulsion from the memories that came with it; gave every bit she had left, which was enough not only to fund the Element but to expedite its creation; and then left with head low and Element squirreled away in the bag she had purchased. She did not try it on underground for fear of being seen, and did not try it on in the air for the same reason. The notion that Twilight could conjure death from above still weighed heavily on her mind, and as they flew north back up the mountain chain, she became increasingly convinced that Partial Thoughts was a threat after all, that she had been placed there to spy. In her mind, the all-knowing Twilight Sparkle had recognized Colgate’s innate need to break away, and had given Partial Thoughts instructions to keep tabs. Twilight was always ten steps ahead, and as Colgate thought, sitting on the cot belowdecks and trying not to be sick with the pitch and yaw of their flight, the surest sign that Twilight had outsmarted you was that you thought you had outsmarted her. As was her wont, the thoughts grew bigger and more elaborate, until the sound of thunder over their heads made her jump up with a squeal and race for the bathroom to try to cram herself under the wooden toilet, where Partial Thoughts found her ten minutes later. She retreated to the deck, pacing, wearing her haversack as tightly as she could, ignoring the hail that hammered her face when she stepped out from under the balloon’s lee.

“Sorry, I really had to go,” Partial Thoughts said, startling Colgate again. “What is with you?”

“I’m just… hungry.”

“Hungry. Uh-huh. Listen, blue, if we’re on the run again—”

“We’re not on the run.”

“Now how come I’m not sure you’re telling me the truth there?”

“Dunno.” She ran to the rail as lightning forked the sky between a pair of snowcapped peaks. “What if this is it? What if she summoned a storm for me?” “I’m gonna be sick.”

“Do it below.” It was too late; Partial Thoughts could only flatten her ears to the sound of Colgate throwing up over the side. “You really are a piece of work, you know that?”

Colgate stared down at the churning gray slopes, her mane whipping back and forth violently across her face.

“Listen, we’re not gonna just coast out of here. Get below and check our antifreeze levels.”

“Sure thing, boss.” She slunk belowdecks again, to the clattering engine room, where the sound of the weather was drowned in the furious work of machinery and fire. In a metal locker on the far side of the room, she found the antifreeze, snugly shoved beside jugs of oil, cleaning fluid, and the like. She uncapped it and held it to her nose, and then the oil, and then a bottle of industrial decalcifier, which she contemplated the longest. Thoughts of Powder Rouge inevitably entered her mind, and were enough to snap her out of her reverie and do the work she had been sent below to do.

By twelve-thirty, they had reached a hole in the clouds, and Partial Thoughts was debating whether to stay beneath them or try to go above. Colgate, feeling better with the knowledge that there was an easy way out if she incurred Twilight’s ire, stood beside her, offering little but thinking her presence was welcome.

“We’ll stay below,” Partial Thoughts finally said. “I can’t see how long these go, we might need to land before we get past ‘em.” She glanced at Colgate. “Feeling better, then?”

“I think so.”

“Well that’s good.” She checked the dials on either side of the wheel. “Once we’re out of the mountains, I’m gonna put everything I can into the engines, and hopefully we can get back to Snowdrift tomorrow night, or maybe the morning after.”

“Fast ship,” Colgate said, not really paying attention.

“Best of the best, except for what the princesses have.” The two stared at the sunlit mountains below, rapidly giving way to more of the stormy gray monotony. “So how did you get tied up with the Elements anyway? You don’t seem like them.”

“I’m not them, no.” Partial Thoughts gave her a look. “They picked me up in Canterlot and—I’m being honest, by the way. You can trust me, a doctor never lies.”

“If you say so.”

“There was an accident in Canterlot, and I got stuck aboard their airship. By the time they could drop me off at the next town, we were friends, and they didn’t want to. Ta-dah.”

“An ‘accident’, huh?”

“There was magic and fate involved.”

“Fate?”

“My fate. My destiny. I guess I’ve got a job to do before this is all over.”

“Was… going down here part of that job?”

“For better or worse, uh-huh.”

Partial Thoughts held back her retort and looked at the dials again, wondering whether she could possibly get them to Snowdrift sooner than the next day.

The Elements spent their first night in the Snowdrift woods huddled in the airship’s cabin while Twilight worked out her latest plan. The magic was ready in her wreath of crystals, which she released from her magical space and placed in the bathroom, where its frightening appearance would be least disruptive—for, out of sight, the crystals had steeped and changed, turning a diseased yellow and developing thin strands of limestone around their bodies, as if wrapped in hardened spider silk. To touch them, as Twilight discovered as she placed them on the counter, was to receive a painless but numbing discharge of magic.

“They should still work fine,” she had said, “they’re just a little… ripe.” That was the last she had spoken until she worked out her next step, an hour and a half later, and by which time only Vinyl and Big Mac were still awake.

“You got that look in your eye like you’ve just solved it,” Vinyl said.

“I have. I’d like to find somewhere with a deep cellar if I can. What time is it?”

“Twelve thirty-six.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow morning, then. I need a deep cellar so I can reach the town’s foundation easier. That’s where the ancient sigils are that allowed the town to teleport back in the day.” She smiled thinly at Big Mac’s inscrutable face, with which she was familiar enough to read confusion. “They’re still active, and if I want to get that,” she pointed to the bathroom, “to do its job, I need a link to the foundation. I’ve already made the wire—that’s what we call it—but I need to place it still.”

“So you’re gonna go into town?” Vinyl asked.

“I’m going in tomorrow to set the wire, yes. Once it’s ready, I can activate the Contraction remotely, so we’ll just have to make sure the ship is ready. I’m almost done calculating our position for that, by the way.”

“So you can do everythin’ tomorrow,” Big Mac said. “But we’ll be a day early.”

“I’m doing everything I can to make sure our delay is just waiting for Colgate, and not from any interference from the secret agents. That’s why I’ve got all those sigils on the deck, to let me know if someone’s coming for us, and also why I’m going to leave the Tartarus magic here when I go into town tomorrow.”

“Are you gonna be disguised?”

“Yes.”

He looked at Vinyl, who patted his back. “You got it all figured out.”

“I’ve been thinking about it since we left Hoofington.” She heaved a sigh, and, more to herself than the others, said, “we’re almost there. One more step.”

“So we’re leaving Sunday,” Vinyl said, “and then it’s Discord? We’re gonna fight him the same day?”

“We’re going to destroy him, yes. Two days.”

“So… Okay. Two days. Got it.”

“Yeah, both of you, if you’ve got anything, and I mean anything, unresolved, you’ve got tomorrow to do it. Actually, that’s a good point, I’ll tell everyone that before I head out tomorrow.” She rubbed her eyes.

“Get some sleep, Twilight.”

“I really should.” She turned back to her books and kept reading into the small hours, when she finally dozed off with her cheek pressed against a diagram of geologic morphology in the Equestrian southwest.

At seven o’ clock, she woke to the smell of coffee. Octavia had not slept that night, and instead walked into town, braving the snow and wind, to buy supplies. Red-eyed and shivering, she sat under a blanket between Fluttershy and Rainbow, the latter of which had a dome of warm air around them from her unpracticed magic, while Applejack and Pinkie attended to breakfast. Twilight, in the other cabin, conferred with Versus on various places around town that might have the deep cellar she needed.

“All right, girls, I’ll be going into town after breakfast,” Twilight said, entering. “Versus found me a place to set my wire, I’m going directly there, and then we’ll just wait and deal with whatever it is that’s going to hold us up.” She gratefully took a bowl of oatmeal from Pinkie and stirred it until the lump of butter was dissolved. “I told Vinyl and Big Mac last night, but I want to repeat it here. If there’s anything we still need to address, friendship-wise, today’s the day. We’re leaving on the Contraction tomorrow, and it’s going to take us straight to Draught Castle, and Discord. No more time, hear me?”

“You’re a bitch, Twilight,” Rainbow said. Everyone stopped to look at her. “That’s all I wanted to say. You’re still my friend and I still love you, but I have to say it: you are a bitch.”

Twilight nodded, unfazed. “I accept that. Thank you for your candor, and for the record, I’m sorry it had to be this way. When we get home, I’ll find some way to make it up to you all.”

“You don’t have to make it up to me. Like I said, I still love you; I get why things are the way they are. I just had to get it off my chest.”

“I want to make it up to you all,” she said, smiling. “And you won’t stop me.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Rarity said. “There’s a dress I was seriously considering buying before we had to leave.”

“It’s yours.”

“Ah just want the farm,” Applejack said. The conversation rolled around the nine of them until breakfast was over, and tiny grievances were aired. Rarity told Applejack that her newfound peace of mind and burgeoning spirituality grated on her nerves, and Applejack apologized and said it was not her intent. Pinkie told Big Mac she thought he was handsome, but didn’t want to complicate anything, and Big Mac, blushing, said he had his eyes on Versus anyway—no surprise to most of them. Octavia apologized for her general harshness once again, and received all the usual assurances that they were used to it from her. Between Pinkie and Fluttershy, there were no words.

With snowfall crinkling in the pine boughs and wind whistling, Twilight magically disguised herself as a transient and then donned as many layers of clothing as she could, stepping out into the coming blizzard that made the day look like evening. She waved goodbye to her friends, though they did not come up to the deck to see her off; it was a gesture more for her own sensibilities, to assure herself that there was still some sentimentality inside her. There was no trail out of the forest, and at a frozen pond, she paused to make sure she could detect the Tartarus magic on the ship, to use as a beacon on her return trip.

At Snowdrift’s edge, Twilight spent several minutes just looking. Through the snow, there was not much to see, but she stood anyway, her senses attuning to the storm, letting the cold become an impersonal sensation where it penetrated her clothes. The church she needed was in the middle of town, within shouting distance of the Tartarus gateway; more importantly, it was long vacant, its priest having disappeared many years prior. Versus had told Twilight the only thing she would need to worry about there would be homeless looking for shelter or hoodlums looking for privacy, and maybe a groundskeeper or custodian.

She walked to the first icy road and crossed into a neighborhood of blanketed brick houses, many adding tufts of smoke from their chimneys, and shuffled past to an empty intersection where she watched the city for another minute before heading in the church’s direction, cutting across a long park, leaving a thin line of hoofprints that were filled in only minutes later.

No one accosted her on the way to the church, and there was no one inside. She wanted to barge straight in, but made herself stop to check for enchantments on the door and embrasure; there was one, to dissolve her disguise upon entrance, and this she left active. Thin, silver light came through ensiform windows in slats all the way up to the altar, behind which a baroque rendition of Luna’s cutie mark imposed itself. There was no dust on the pews or carpet, but a thick layer on the altar. She stood behind it for a minute, smelling the dust and the musty odor of old books, and rested her forehooves on the altar as if to address a crowd of parishioners. She had never been religious, and had no interest in learning about it, but before the rows of ascetic pews, under a gray skylight, behind the bare altar, and beside the cobwebbed organ, she did feel a twinge of reverence. She quelled it and located the stairs down to the cellar.

Supplying her own dim light, she followed the cellar’s walls, cluttered with boxes and shelves of religious articles, before stopping with a tiny gasp at the naked tunnel that lit itself with her approach. She took her hoof off the pressure plate, extinguishing the pea-sized crystal wedged into a notch in the wall. She had seen crystals of the sort in the mines, and stepped back, trying to remember the specifics involved in casting an invisibility spell—much harder than a disguise spell, but, to her eyes, suddenly necessary. By the time she could hear steps coming her way, she had made herself transparent, which was close enough to what she wanted. She pressed herself against the brickwork, a cone of lantern light swinging into view on a griffon’s tail not seconds later. Golden eagle eyes raked the empty cellar as a second griffon appeared, wings shuffling quietly as she joined the first to stalk slowly around.

“Rats,” she said.

“Probably.” The second griffon passed within inches of Twilight, her chest straining with the effort to breathe as slowly and quietly as possible. When the griffons were gone, she gasped and lay down for a moment, letting herself manifest in the darkness. She debated leaving to find a new place for some time, but the one thing she could not get around, which impelled her into the strange tunnel, was that she did not know how deep below the city the sigils were. She could be digging for hours or she could be digging for days, to say nothing of what geological obstacles she might encounter. She first went back up to the church to search for books on magic, finding nothing helpful, but remembering how to make herself properly invisible in the interim. Invisible and also soundless, Twilight stepped back into the cellar—but she was not weightless, and the tunnel was alight again as she hit the pressure plates. She was able to squeeze into a corner while the same griffons passed her by again, muttering to each other about the church’s apparent vermin problem.

Stone stairs wound in a long curl, the walls and roof tan, porous stone and reflecting oily crystal-light with the voices of workers. She stopped at a bold, black line on the floor, uniformly solid and perfectly edged, following its tunnel with so slight a curve that the circle it formed would go around the entire city, and more. Smaller lines branched off and met in open areas, sometimes crawling up the cavern’s supporting columns like vines, sometimes terminating at seemingly random, but all of them onyx-black and wire-straight. Crystals lined the walls to make the chamber almost as bright as the afternoon on the surface, and Twilight could see the suggestions of a second floor in the distance, where a great hole showed decussate ramps and, to her straining eyes, what appeared more black lines arranged in a similar manner to those above. She took it in as she walked, following a gentle downhill path on the main curve before stopping to listen to a cluster of workers sitting around a column and taking tea.

“Did you get what Frozen Flurry was saying about Q4?”

“Oh, he just wants us to touch up the first and seventh lines again, there’s a little dust in the ink.”

One mare spat ungraciously on the ground. “I hate line seven so much.”

“I know! It’s always got something wrong with it! Luna, tell me about it.”

“Job security, ladies.” They all laughed politely.

Twilight breathed out through her nose, her magic diffusing even that soft sound, and crept deeper into the foundation sigil. She took note of the signage near where she had entered, found a comfortable spot where she could watch the workers but not be in the way, and waited for their shift to end. In her head, she thanked Celestia for her magical capacity, that she would not drop the wire out of exhaustion.

There was nothing for it; Vinyl and Fluttershy wrapped up and hiked through the howling woods to Snowdrift, where they flagged down a carriage after ten minutes of agonized waiting on the snowy curb. Mukluks on their hooves were enough to keep them dry, but they only had two layers of clothing between them, and it was not sufficient for the wind; with each turn the carriage made, with each whisper of air, heat was sapped from their cores, and it was with numb faces, stinging eyes, throbbing ears, and shallow breaths that they reached their destination. Soulful Song, the memory therapist, gladly ceded the guest room to them, solicitously offering hot beverages and snacks while getting a fire going.

“He’s not going to interfere?” Fluttershy asked when he was gone.

“He’s fine. Knew to expect me for this at some point. We worked it out before I left.”

“If you say so.” She took a blanket from the ottoman and stuffed it as a thick rope under the door, to block their sound. She looked at Vinyl, standing by the fire, and sighed to herself. “Let’s get this over with.”

Vinyl looked through her notes. “Get comfortable. We might be here a while.”

“Should I lie down?”

“Whatever’s best for you.” While Fluttershy arranged herself, Vinyl piled pillows to sit on. “I’m gonna talk to Pinkie after this, tell her what I know.”

Fluttershy opened one eye to look at her.

“I owe her the truth. I won’t mention you, there’s no point, but I’ll tell her about Mac and me.”

“Don’t do that, Vinyl.”

“She deserves to know.”

Fluttershy sat up, her wings on end. “Don’t, seriously. You think that’s a good idea? She’ll freak out, it’ll ruin everything.”

Vinyl crossed her forelegs and sat on her haunches.

“She’ll either totally deflate and be unsuitable as the Element of Laughter, or worse, she’ll break down and confess to the whole ship.”

“I just thought… Yeah, guess you’re right. After, though.”

“Um, actually—”

“She needs to know sometime, Fluttershy.”

“I was going to say, I’d appreciate it if you let me tell her. After, I mean.”

“Uhhhh…” She scratched her head, gestured at Fluttershy.

“I’ve been forming it in my head for a while now. I, um, I wrote a letter to myself, to be opened only after we beat Discord. I gave it to Big Mac.”

Vinyl nodded, impressed and a little dismayed by the idea. She had done a lot to learn how to wipe Fluttershy’s memory, and it rankled that her friend planned to undo the work just as soon as she was able.

“I might not have the heart to do anything about it then, but I owe it to… myself. Someone. Can we please get started?”

“Are you relaxed?”

Fluttershy closed her eyes and got more comfortable on the couch, and Vinyl activated her horn, the soft magic at its base humming just behind her eyes, which she had also closed the better to focus on her task. The magic to wipe a memory was related to that of reading a mind, and to do the one, she had to partially do the other. Skimming the surface of her consciousness, Vinyl was astonished at the complexity of the equine mind, the depth, and the prickly feeling of anger and doubt that were specific to Fluttershy; it was different from practicing on a cloud of thoughts.

Taking time to acclimate to contact with Fluttershy’s mind, Vinyl went over the steps to herself. She needed to gather Fluttershy’s collective consciousness in an envelope of the gentlest sort and then hold it there while she explored the memories. To a practiced magician, it could be done mostly by feel, but Vinyl would have to do it verbally. When she was ready, she spoke.

“You’re doing great. Now, we talk about your memories of Pinkie. You need to remember each thing as strongly as you can, and I can eliminate it. We’ll go through one by one. Are you okay?”

Fluttershy hummed, smiling weakly, and Vinyl could feel the ripples of anticipation across her magical seal. She knew the feeling well; like the moments before an unpleasant but necessary surgery, Fluttershy was at peace, ready for discomfort she knew was to come.

“What do you remember about the night we fought the dam?”

“I remember Pinkie Pie being a filthy coward.” A spike of memory, but too vague.

“What did she do?”

Fluttershy frowned. “She denied that she had the power to help us.”

“Okay.” The slightest squeeze of magic, and the memory, like a withered bud on a shrub, was clipped free. Fluttershy’s face evinced no feeling. “What did we want Pinkie to do?”

“We wanted her to stop the dam somehow.”

“Did you have any specific ideas on how she could do that?”

“Maybe…” A ripple of quick thought. “Pick it up and set it back down in its place. Break its main engines.”

“All right.” She removed the memories of what Fluttershy had wanted Pinkie to do. “What did the others want her to do?”

“The same thing.” More memories gone, these a little closer to the surface, a little harder to remove safely. Vinyl tried not to think of what extra she might accidentally erase.

“What did you feel when she refused to help?”

“I didn’t believe it.”

“What else?”

“I was mad. Then we were teleported, and I woke up outside Roan with you all.”

Vinyl snipped the memories of Fluttershy’s emotions; those would need to be replaced afterwards.

And on they went, going through the scary times in Roan, the tension of Trottingham, the battle for Canterlot, the anger in Furnace Creek and the fight after Discord, the anxious armistice in the mines, the cold and introspective days on the river north to Snowdrift, and the bitter times thereafter, recalling every conversation about Pinkie and about memory wiping, every bad feeling that had kept her awake, every time she had been tempted to declare Pinkie’s failure to the whole group and let the chips fall where they may, finally culminating in the letter Fluttershy had written for herself and the beginning of the memory spell itself. They talked for hours, and at the end, Vinyl asked, “now, what were we talking about?”

Fluttershy’s mind squirmed with thought, its surface patchy with everything Vinyl had removed, like a pruned tree. If she had missed anything big enough to undermine the spell, Fluttershy would remember it in time.

“I don’t know. What were we talking about?”

“Good.” Time to fill in the gaps. “We were talking about Applewood. The night we fought the dam, Pinkie was suffering from a headache, and could barely do any magic. She did try, but she only hit it with a couple shots of telekinesis, not helpful. In Roan, we were all too concerned about Applejack to talk about much more than that. Your temper was particularly short then, understandably, but you got over it when Applejack came back.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That’s right. We flew north, where we met Lacey Kisses, and though she irritated you at first, you argued in favor of helping her. You were worried about Pinkie, who was with Octavia and Dr. Whooves at the time. In Furnace Creek, we discussed adding Elements of Harmony, and then we picked up Colgate. Pinkie helped keep everyone’s spirits high when that was happening, but it wasn’t enough to stop us from fighting after failing to stop Discord.”

“I remember that fight.”

“Pinkie said something that insulted you then, and you snapped at her. Tempers were running high, and you currently wish you hadn’t lost yours with her.”

Fluttershy nodded, her brain coruscating with the thoughts that Vinyl fed her.

“When we were separated and had to travel upriver, you were depressed and worried about your friends, specifically Applejack, who you had lost once already. Seeing them safe and sound in Snowdrift helped you, gave you the strength and courage to fight off the beast from Octavia’s mansion. I remember you came out of that fight oddly energized, maybe a little triumphant.”

“I remember.”

“Yes you do,” Vinyl thought. “And that’s it. We came into town today to pick up some warm clothes, and I saw my friend here and we came in to say hi.”

Fluttershy nodded along, and Vinyl, no longer narrating what she was doing, carefully released the spell. Fluttershy would be dazed for a few minutes, but after that, all Vinyl would have to do was remember her own excuses for why they were out and about, and not back on the ship.

She let Fluttershy come to her senses.

“Why am I here?”

“Shit. Forgot to tell her why she was on the couch.” “Uhh, you were just tired, that’s all.”

Fluttershy blinked and looked around slowly, as if not fully convinced, but said, “I feel better now. Is there a shop nearby?”

“I think so.” Her heart was palpitating, just waiting for Fluttershy to ask something that would unravel the whole farce. No one memory was discrete from any other, had no distinct shape, so she had no choice but to trust that she had gotten everything.

They bid their goodbyes and thanks to Soulful Song and trudged out into the mounting blizzard once more.

At ten o’ clock, Twilight, fuming and shivering, got back to the ship. She didn’t speak before she had a shield sigil down, relieving Rarity of the job of blocking the snow that by then was coming down fast and thick, covering their forest and the ship’s shield. Vinyl kept them in a soft, evening light, her horn like a tea candle.

“All right, Twilight?” Applejack asked.

“There were already ponies down there,” Twilight said with a strained imitation of cheer. “Workers underground, who keep the city’s sigils maintained. I got to wait for their entire eight-hour shift, not eating, not going to the bathroom, not anything. Just… waiting!” She punched a beam of magic through the shield and threw the snow off, which was quickly replaced.

“But no trouble?” Pinkie asked.

“Oh no, no trouble. Yeah, it was easy when I was finally alone. Why?” She cleared the snow again with a loud spell. “Why is there so much snow? I knew there was a delay, obviously I had to know, and of all the stupid, insignificant… Waiting for the drones to clear the way!”

“We saved some dinner for you,” Fluttershy said.

“Great! Just…” She closed her eyes and breathed. “All right. Thank you, Fluttershy. I’m sorry, it’s been a long day.”

“I have had days like that,” Octavia said. “On the farm.”

“It sucks. All right, I’m better now. The delay’s done, we can leave tomorrow.”

“Wait, but you’ve got the thing in place now?” Rainbow asked. “Why not leave now?”

“We still need to wait for Colgate,” Octavia said.

“That,” Twilight said, “but also, I realized we need to be somewhere better before we head to the castle. All these trees around us, we’ll break to pieces if we try to go.”

“Aren’t we just teleporting? How’s this different from every other time we do it?” Rarity asked.

“It’s different.” She took several bites of food. “I can explain it in detail if you really want me to. Basically, in this, we’re not getting immediately compressed like in a real teleportation spell. We’ll still be able to crash into stuff in the first few microseconds.”

“Are we taking off from the park, then?” Rainbow asked.

“Somewhere like that. The park is fine, or I think there’s an airship lot near there. We’ll go tomorrow, and hopefully this stupid blizzard will be done then too.”

“When will we leave tomorrow?” Octavia asked.

“I don’t know. I want us all to get a good night’s sleep for once—that means you too—so probably not that early. We’ll get up, eat, fuel ourselves for Discord, talk over anything that needs talked over, and then go. I’ll need to get us aimed right too, that could take a few minutes, or more if this wind doesn’t slow down.”

“So what are we doing tonight?” Rarity asked. “Is there anything?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve done everything I can do beforehoof.”

“Cards?” Pinkie asked, met with silence.

“Ah think Ah’ll be turnin’ in early,” Applejack said.

“I can play,” Rainbow shrugged.

The two played while everyone gradually filtered belowdecks, save Octavia, who stood at the gunwale and watched the shifting patterns of snow collecting and sliding on their shield. When Rainbow and Pinkie retired, Octavia went below with them and lay down until she was sure they were asleep, and then got up and piled on as many coats as she could, and walked out into the blistering cold.

Between Colgate and Partial Thoughts, little was said; neither much liked or trusted the other, and both breathed a sigh of relief when Snowdrift came into view, even beset with torrential snow. Colgate was realizing that she had no idea where the Elements would have wound up, though most likely not at their former hotel, and she was not dressed to search for them.

The thought appeared that the blizzard could be from Twilight, who wanted to snuff Colgate out at the last conceivable second, but she did not entertain the notion enough to frighten herself. In her mind, Twilight as the enemy had shed any subtlety; her eyes were open to direct attacks only.

“After I drop you off, I’m gone. I don’t want to find out if they’re still looking for me, that clear?”

“Clear as clear can be.”

“So we’re square. You and me, we’re done. You don’t owe me anything, I don’t owe you anything.”

“Yep.” Colgate shook her offered hoof. “Good doing business with you.”

“Yeah, something like that.” She raised herself up a little to see the edge of town. “Is someone out there?”

Colgate froze to the rail, muscles tense suddenly. “It’s her! She’s gonna shoot us out of the sky.” The previous calm blown apart just that easily, she raced down to the engine room and grabbed the decalcifying solution, uncapped it, sniffed, then hauled it up to the deck.

“Now what in the name of Celestia are you doing?” Partial Thoughts asked irritably. “Put that shit away.”

Colgate didn’t hear, and leaned out over the rail to better see Twilight and the magenta death lance that would surely head her way. She had to see it, had to feel the sinking certainty in the pit of her stomach. It almost hit her when the snow rose up and doused an orange explosion on the ground, and the ship lurched with Partial Thoughts’ reaction. Two smaller pops of fire lit the air far before them, and that was when Colgate knew.

“Land us! It’s her! Land us here!”

“Hell no!” Partial Thoughts shouted, wrenching them around.

“That’s Octavia, she’s one of us.” She ran to the other side and called out Octavia’s name, lost amid the airship noise. “That’s my friend.”

Partial Thoughts looked at her, then angrily turned the wheel back around, snapping at Colgate to vent the balloon.

Only the dark gray shreds of mane around muddy, purple eyes identified Octavia, who managed to convey deathly seriousness even with her face covered. She stood and let the snow build around her fetlocks as Colgate drifted down to her, and when she was on the ground, the two looked at each other for a second before both going for a hug. Colgate leaned into Octavia’s body, her neck to the fabricated mole fur of Octavia’s outermost jacket, eyes closed, breathing out all her accumulated tension.

“It is very good to have you back. Did you accomplish what you needed to do?”

Colgate squeezed her tighter and then released. “All’s good here. Can we—here, let’s get back on.” They got on the ship and back into the air, cruising low to the top of the city, where Partial Thoughts landed at an airship lot and saw them off with the scantest pleasantries. Octavia and Colgate did not wait for her to take off before heading to the street, where they broke into a gallop north, freezing, tired, and content. Colgate didn’t question it when they went into the woods, and when they were back on their own ship, Octavia went below and brewed tea for them both. Colgate warmed her hooves over a hot plate, stained with use.

“Hiding in the forest,” she said when Octavia came up and sat down.

Octavia shook her head. “The Snowdrift secret agents are looking for the magic that Twilight stole, apparently.”

“Is it here?”

“In the bathroom, slowly corrupting the countertop.”

“Why no night watch?”

“One of these sigils is for that.”

Colgate raised her eyebrows.

“We are leaving tomorrow afternoon. Everything is in place.”

“I was just in time. Good.”

“What did you do?”

“Soul searching,” Colgate said.

“I see. What did you find?”

“Found my soul.” Octavia chuckled, and Colgate smiled. She had not meant it as a joke, but she had not meant it as truth either; it was just something to say.

“We are fighting Discord tomorrow, if all goes well.” The news did not shock Colgate, but her silence gave that impression. “We are all prepared. I am certain that we are in harmony this time, and Twilight is sure of it as well. We need only find him.”

“What about Vanilla?”

“Twilight has not said anything about him.”

“He might just run off when Discord is stone. That’s what happens, right?”

“The Elements turn him to stone, yes.”

“They don’t kill him?”

“I do not believe he can be killed in any conventional sense.”

“All right. Tomorrow.” She drank her tea, already cold on the deck, though she felt warm and almost comfortable under the shield. “Tomorrow.”

“Then we go home.”

“Great.”

It was understood between them that home was not what it was for everyone else, nothing symbolic or rewarding, no physical place. Neither had to explain that their old lives were gone, and neither had to deflect pity that it was so. When they landed in Canterlot or Ponyville or wherever, everyone would disperse to their houses, greet loved ones, collapse onto beds and sleep, eat home-cooked meals, tidy up, sit down and stare out the window and repeat to themselves that it was finally over, blot unpleasant details from their minds, comfort themselves with drink or good company, shed tears of joy or anguish; and Octavia and Colgate would wait around for something else to happen. Their home was the unstable combination of airships and hotels, their life the journey, their comfort the small pleasures between work and disaster. Mutually known, acknowledged through the significance of their silence and their comfort with each other, there was no solution in sight to either. As time passed and they sat together, not speaking, their thoughts converged upon death, a constant and near option in Colgate’s mind, a basic eventuality in Octavia’s. Sacrificing themselves in the battle with Discord was plausible, and really, what was there to lose? Why survive the final meaningful moments in a life destined for obsolescence the second those moments had passed?

“Good night, Octavia.”

“Good night, Colgate.”

They took breakfast to a close imitation of morning light, the snow hardened to ice over their shield during the night cycle and making pale and thin the light that made it through the cloud cover. Colgate described her “soul searching” adventure down south, telling them of the tiny town where they had stopped for supplies and explaining how they had roomed with the farm family the whole time. Nothing had happened, and it was just how Colgate had wanted it; she wanted to get close to the land, take some time for herself, figure a few things out. The clarifying relief she felt at being with her friends was mistaken for the deeper peace she purported to have found in the country, and no one questioned her, not even Twilight.

When breakfast was over and Colgate had heard the story of how they had all found Octavia’s Element and then one another, Twilight shattered the ice off their shield and Applejack got them aloft. Her magic allowed her to clean out frozen sludge in the engine without help from the others, a fact lost on all but Colgate, who did not miss it from flying with Partial Thoughts.

“To the nearest airship lot, and then I’ll get us set up to go,” Twilight said. “I’ve got the figures right here in front of me.”

“Any chance Ah’ll have time to say goodbye to Versus?” Applejack asked.

“I don’t know.” They rose out of the pines and into a weakened echo of the blizzard from the day before, drifting between leaden clouds and pristine, white rooftops, Umbrella Park a loud and lit spectacle they could see from across town. Shadows lengthened and Snowdrift turned creamy gray before their eyes as the party gained details: tents with tartan pennants flying, food stands under columns of steam and smoke, trees bejeweled with flowers and glass ornaments, tuxedoes and cloaks and gowns on partygoers, a pair of jugglers on stilts standing taller than the tallest firs, and stardust clouds of helical streamers and confetti in a suspension of snow-blocking magic over all. Jovial, scraping music ebbed in and out, fiddles and trumpets and the plangent groan horn bringing a smile to most of their faces. By the time they were passing over the Contraction party, it was sundown, and the crowd had fallen nervously quiet with heads upturned.

“Twi?” Rainbow asked.

“I don’t know why Discord does what he does.”

They hovered over the airship lot, a difficult task with the wind blowing snow sideways, and Twilight set upon her figures, guiding Applejack in degrees one way or the other, constantly pausing to test their orientation and correct it for the wind. The Tartarus magic was once again in her space, and she could feel it fizzing in a pocket of her mind.

The moon was sinking and she was still working when Pinkie trotted back from the edge. “There’s some ponies coming, Twilight!”

Twilight let her breath out slowly, knowing who it probably was, and went to the plank to meet them. No one she recognized, dressed in ordinary winter-wear with innocuous saddlebags, they waved at her from the ground. “Twilight Sparkle?”

“That’s me.”

“Can you come down here?”

“I’m busy right now, thanks.”

“We need to talk to you, Miss Sparkle,” the other said, less friendly.

Twilight looked down on them and back at her friends, who could tell something was happening and watched her anxiously. “Can we talk in a few minutes?”

The first agent nodded to the other, and in a flash, they had teleported onto the deck right in front of her. “Miss Sparkle—”

“No. Get off my ship.” She straightened up, not lighting her horn, not giving them a reason to pull the pulse crystals she knew they must be carrying.

“We just want to talk. It seems you’re holding something very important.”

“Something that belongs to the city,” the other said, nodding along, encouraging Twilight to behave.

“Off.” She paced around them, to the side, where she could clearly see the ground. “Both of you, off my ship, right now.”

“Twilight.” As one moved to cut her off, she teleported down into the snow, breaking out of her spell at a run and shortly followed. There was no time to look back at the ship as she scrambled into the storm, and the wind drowned her friends’ reactions as well as those of the Daturas behind. Against wind and blinding snow she forced herself, across an angular lawn of dead grass and to the pallid light of a street-side bar. The frosted glass doors flew open on a plume of magic and Twilight, heedless of the patrons gawking at her, barreled through to the back, out into an alley and around the corner to a perpendicular-running street. She stopped to catch her breath, leaning on a newspaper stand, and cast a simple spell on her shoes to lighten them, that she may leave no hoofprints—the same spell she had used on Versus’ tires.

A peal of thunder brought her head up and her eyes around, searching for the Daturas, the awareness coming distantly that hoofprints did not matter, that they would find her by the Tartarus magic she carried—for that was how they would have found her in the first place. With no plan cohering, she tore open the newspaper stand and, on the broad white stroke of snow in a photograph, burned the quick message: “stay where u r.” This she sent to Octavia before galloping over a snowbank and across the next street.

The first suggestions of dawn were easing onto the city as Twilight bent the bars of a gate apart, admitting herself to the sudden and incongruous lucidity of a private golf course, all one hundred-twenty acres protected by a deep, upturned bowl of aquamarine magic that rendered the snow to warm rain that coursed down her body and upset her balance on squishy, healthy grass. At a trot, looking behind as often as she could spare it, she ran for the nearest water feature. Her first idea was to summon the magic crystals and ditch them in the water, but when she was there, one irrational idea gave way to another, and she teleported herself out to the middle, threw out a small forcefield, and sank to the silty bottom where she sat, put her head to her hoof, and barely stopped herself from wasting the little oxygen she had brought down in a scream of frustration.

Not in a frenetic battle with Discord, or an argument with Vanilla Cream, or a match of wits against one of her friends did Twilight find herself, and it took her the few seconds to catalogue her situation thus to realize how underprepared she was. They didn’t want to hurt her, obviously, they only wanted the magic she had taken; could she not let them have it and then devise some way to grab it back at the last second? But then they would probably release the magic back into Tartarus before she could enact any plans, and then…

“No. Focus, Twilight.” They would appear at the water’s edge soon, most likely more than what had come initially, and she would be back where she started, except colder and more tired.

Her eyes landed on a mossy golf ball.

“That’s it! Is it?”

The first shadowy figure took shape and appeared to look out over the water as Twilight put a hoof through her shield to roll the ball her way, wracking her brain, trying to remember the spells required to transfer magic from one vessel to another. It wouldn’t matter; she would need thousands of golf balls to hold the magic in her crystals, and there was no time left. A boat was skating her way, its glossy trail cutting up her vision of the shore, and she was running out of air besides.

She teleported once more, ball bobbing behind in a nub of telekinesis, and took off across the course to the nearest hole. She had to hide the Tartarus magic, and the only way that she knew of was to disperse it.

“Or!” she thought, so suddenly she stopped mid-stride, jerked, and ran again, “plain sight!” If she could reach the Tartarus gateway, she would have a chance.

At a copse of trees jutting out into the middle of the green, she stopped for breath again, ignoring the golfers’ shouts of protest. She shook her head back and forth, frantic to see the pony from the water’s edge.

“Fore!” someone yelled cruelly.

Eyes pressed closed, head aching, she put her mind to the church from the day before, the altar, and with only hazy memories she teleported again: unsafe, but desperate. Her legs bent and gave way as her chin struck something hard and warm liquid filled her mouth, freezing stone on her cheek and thick cloth against her pounding head. She had materialized several feet above the altar and clipped it on her fall.

She dashed out into the snow in a daze, spitting crimson blood onto the stoop in a lurid gout that got on her jacket too.

“Twilight! Stupid! They’ll never let me get close to the gateway with this thing.” She retreated into the church, her old idea rematerializing. She could never transfer the magic to a thousand golf balls, but to storage sigils on paper, she might. She twisted the antiquated lock on its chest of drawers until it sprung open to reveal a dusty missal. A simple sigil to store raw magical energy, copied and copied and copied, could hold the magic she had taken; then it would just be a matter of disseminating the pages so there appeared no concentration of magic to those who searched. “Easy. Sounds easy.” She looked to the front doors, imagining the Daturas barging in with battering rams and pulse crystals, coming to detain her, wipe her memory, remove her from herself. That they might think she had been taken by Discord never occurred; she was simply in the right and they were trying to stop her. She ripped open the missal and massaged it with a spell she used all the time in revising her letters, a spell to remove markings from paper. Then she tore the pages from the binding and wasted precious time racing into a back office to find a pen.

The first sigils she had to write on her own, but the second she copied by placing the first page on a blank one and touching it with another, equally simple, spell. The two she copied into four, the four into eight, then sixteen, thirty-two, and sixty-four, at which point she had had to move into the center of the church, shove pews aside, and surround herself with a broad ring of pages. When the first book was complete, she wasn’t satisfied, and copied her sigils into a song book from one of the pews, another three hundred pages. She summoned her crystals, found a focal point in her golf ball, and as quickly as she dared, fed the magic through the tiny, weak sphere and into her designs: one sigil to hold a shred of magic, a second to keep the pages from being easily destroyed—a lesson learned the hard way when she was in school. The heavy oaken doors opened as she was finishing, and without time enough to confirm her work, she scooped up pages and crystals and all and ran to the back of the church in a cloud of visibly enchanted detritus.

They were ordering her to stop, the sound of magic under their voices as they prepared a spell to make her do just that. She blew open an unassuming side door to a rickety wooden staircase and funneled the mass of paper before her before running, too distracted for fear, into the belfry. On a turn in the stairs, she paused and confirmed her work.

Success. It had sapped her will and eroded her ability to focus, and the ache of magic overuse was inflating behind her forehead, but she had moved the Tartarus magic from the crystals to the quire of enchanted papers in her grasp—and as she reached the top of the tower, from which she could see the gateway’s black horizon behind snowfall, the tree-tufted hillocks of northern Snowdrift and the smoking cottages between them, the fringe of the central district, the galaxy of loud magic and decoration over the Contraction party, and the dark tide of evergreens swelling on hilly land to the north and northeast, she thanked Princess Celestia again for the lesson on protecting enchanted paper. The storm overhead would pose minimal threat to her designs. She wadded them up, save for one page which she held onto, encased them in a ball of magic, and cannoned them up into the rolling clouds. The corrupted crystals, no longer active, she dropped on the parapet for the trio of Daturas close behind.

Twilight put her back to the windy sky and faced three new plainclothes agents, tucking the last page of her magic into her space as they backed off from the crystals. She looked at them with undisguised resentment as one went back downstairs and the other set about securing the crystals. The third stepped around to speak with her.

“You know who we are.”

“I might.” She stole a quick look behind to see how far the fall was, if the snow looked deep enough to save her the pain of another teleportation spell.

The Datura’s horn glowed and Twilight was gone in another flash of magic that left her dizzy down in the hard snow. She stumbled around to the church’s dead garden, static in her eyes and the black hole of unconsciousness waxing threateningly with each breath, the Daturas scrambling behind. She reached the creaking door of the wood shed in time to miss the flash of more teleportation as they came down to chase her. They crowded her landing site, confused, looking for the hoofprints she had not left.

“So now they can’t find me by my magic. Let’s get back to the ship and leave this Celestia-forsaken town.” Not that easy, though; on her last teleport, Twilight had exhausted the majority of her magic, severely depleted from the work in copying all those sigils, enchanting the pages, and throwing them into the storm. In the drafty shed, tiny fangs of ice growing from exposed plumbing below the sink, her breath coming in too-fast puffs of fog and her sweat stinging the base of her horn as it froze, she knew she was only a few minutes away from being discovered again.

“Below,” she thought, standing to rifle through a sagging cupboard. She had overheard hundreds of useless trivia from the sigil technicians, and among it, the very useful detail that the underground caverns were empty on Contraction days: a matter of safety.

They had locked the doors behind them, but Twilight had not; provided no one had come down in the early morning for last-minute maintenance, she would be able to walk right in. The Daturas did not know she knew of the underground spaces—unless they did.

“Focus, Twilight. Get to the church.” Two were out of sight, the third speaking to what looked like a pea-green amulet around her neck.

“Okay. Shit. Out of time soon. Diversion.” She ran to the back of the shed, looking over a rectangle of snow enclosed by icy black fence posts, iron fleurs de lis casting muted shadows under a rising sun. Beyond, a path to the church’s back, the raised cellar entrance between stained-glass windows; she would need to run right across their line of sight to get there.

A pale veil of magic swept over the church entire, as fast and singular as a swung blade, what Twilight assumed was a spell to detect life within. The Datura from whom it came was still talking to her amulet, sitting in the snow under a little black umbrella of magic that extruded and expanded from slits in her upturned collar. She nodded and looked up at the belfry, horn aglow for a second and then extinguished. She got up, Twilight tensed, but neither moved.

“We’ll bring it in anyway,” Twilight heard her call, and the Datura sat back down. Her wreath of crystals; they were going to confiscate it for study.

“It’s nothing now! No magic, just a stupid arts and crafts project. You don’t need to study it,” Twilight thought bitterly, surprised at her own indignity. “Focus, Twilight. Get to the church.” The selfsame veil of magic sliced through the shed then, dousing her in wan light for just a second before going through the floor. She didn’t hear what the Datura said, but it was obvious. She threw open the back door, no plan in her head, while the available Daturas converged.

Twilight remembered Roan, the mortuary, where she and Rarity had gone to embalm Applejack’s corpse. They had been caught then, too, but managed to buy time with a convenient fire alarm.

“This is a wood shed,” she said to herself, and turned back, spurred by urgency rather than logic, to find a way to bring her half-plan about. A gas heater, a stove, something flammable, anything that she could use other than her own magic to construct a distraction. The door shut out no sound; she could hear them stomping through the snow, their chatter. At least one would circle around to cut her off, and Twilight stopped where she stood as the realization hit her.

“Time up, Twilight! Time up, Twilight! Time up, Twilight!” Her only thought. She could not focus.

She whirled on the cupboard of goods and put her magic to it, her horn searing her to blurry tears and weakened knees, stopping itself and restarting as she forced herself further, unable to ignore the pain but unwilling to stop. It was physical, as though her horn were in a vice, squeezed and twisted until something gave, either her skull or the horn itself. She cried out despite herself, hit her head with a hoof, and extracted magic from the matter of her mind to summon a hot coal and place it in the bosom of a cobwebbed cereal box. Before she could smell smoke, she was out the door in too much of a hurry to dunk her head in the snow, throwing herself against the garden gate and squeezing between it and the fence, stumbling into a partial crouch and waiting for something to hit her, someone to announce they had her, something more substantial than the oily light of spreading fire.

On her belly, in the snow, crawling and clenching her teeth against the pain that was not subsiding, she could not hear the Daturas contending with her distraction. She only heard the churr of burning beams and the ticking of rapidly heating metal, the tin roof which she had hoped would collapse. The mixture of their voices meant nothing to her, save that she had been successful, that yet another group of ponies was upset by something. The particular cadences of panic were too familiar and too easy to tune out, and when she looked back, it was not to ascertain their safety but hers, to make sure no one would see her as she slipped into the dark stairs under the church, down into sudden stuffy warmth and the tang of metal and oil. Incapable of even a bead of light, Twilight found her way by feel, navigating the cluttered room below the organ. She ran headlong into the bellows, cursed, and eventually sat with an ear to the door for several minutes before venturing out into a wide hallway she had missed on her first trip, and which led to an adjoining section of the cellar.

The crackle of fire was lost, and her ears rang with stifling silence, tingling painfully as they warmed. When she found the pressure plate at the tunnel’s entrance, she waited in the open, hating it, letting her eyes adjust to the semidarkness that seemed bright after her brief time without any light. Fearing another pass of magic from overhead, she trotted into the echoing chamber, its huge emptiness yawning before her even before she had reached the vestibule. The small click of lights overhead was all she heard, the pinhole flares each time she stepped on a plate all she saw, for the darkness always just in front of her face was absolute. Before, alive with employee banter and the audibly unremarkable routines thereof, the fact that she was beneath the city lost its edge easily.

At the first black line of the foundation’s sigil, she found a red-outlined pressure plate and a large stone beside it. Rolling it onto the switch, the entire cavern came alive with light, and Twilight let a whispered “yessss” escape her. She looked around, still hearing nothing. “Now to find my way to the other side.” She could not simply cross the sigil’s diameter in a straight line, for that was not how it was designed. The complexities of a sigil of its size and function were manifold, and where there were gaps in the design, there were columns and walls to hold up the ground above. She was sure she had seen maps on the walls, but could not remember where, nor even where she had gone to retrace her steps from the day before. Twilight picked a direction she thought might be toward where she had left the airship and walked, quickly swallowed up in the twists and turns in the catacombs beneath Snowdrift.

Discord kicked open the door to the castle’s throne room and crossed the tattered carpet, waving his arms to create moth wings of neon light that expanded and contracted where he left them like breathing flowers, and sat on the throne to gloomily look over the empty hall. In Draught Castle, dust and the echoes of magic reigned, for Luna had undone every enchantment he had placed on the structure. He had meant for the Elements’ journey through his castle to be something between a torturous ordeal and a carnival ride, filling his rooms with funhouse tricks as well as truly deadly traps: a poisoned snare here, a tacky jumping skeleton there. All of it was gone, and he had neither the time nor the inclination to replace it. He simply sat, chin on fist, and imagined his hall filled with the members of a day court. Imaginary supplicants came to kneel and ask his wisdom, imaginary guards stood on alert at either side of the wing-back throne, even an imaginary janitor cleaned the dirt-caked windows.

He summoned Vanilla Cream, who appeared as a wiry outline of himself, his magic faded to a pathetic palimpsest that Discord found intriguing and repellant at the same time.

“Dance, spirit.”

Vanilla looked at him, his blue eyes reduced to emotionless marbles suspended over the white ovoid of his body.

“Dance now.”

Vanilla danced a lifeless jig, which Discord ignored, not cheered.

“They’re coming for you,” Vanilla said, his voice a suggestion of its former self.

“Let them.”

“I am.”

“Stop dancing.”

Vanilla raised his marble eyes again, putting in them as much hatred as his limited form allowed.

“Stop dancing now.”

The image of Vanilla Cream stopped and strode to the throne’s side, where he appeared to sit. “Cold hooves? But this is what you wanted for so long, master.”

Discord said nothing. In the whirlwind of magic and thought that was his mind, there held the poles of regret and relief, and fear as well, all for Vanilla to perceive.

“How plans do change,” Vanilla droned. “You thought you were a real mastermind, my lord. Puppet master Discord.”

“Shut up.”

“Now he’s afraid of getting the beating he so rightly deserves. Perhaps he’ll die.”

“Shut up now.”

Vanilla stopped talking.

“I can’t die,” Discord mumbled. “But that doesn’t make this any easier.”

Over Equestria, the sun was heading toward evening again, and Discord took the time to speed it along a little more. It was all an illusion, one that would vanish the second he was encased in stone, or the second Celestia escaped from her bindings, but until then, it gave him hollow pleasure to operate. It was one of the few things he had left to control.

The Elements of Harmony were on their way, as he had intended from the beginning, and which now he dreaded with such intensity that he had to force himself to stay on the throne, where he meant to meet them.

Nothing had gone right. From his stone entombment, he had worked it all out down to the finest detail, but released, he had failed on the very first step. He would take Canterlot by surprise, banish the Elements in search of their jewels, put agents of chaos in every major city, and begin rebuilding the country to his liking; he had not expected total and literal destruction. That Celestia had lent one of the Elements power equivalent to her own, and then enhanced it further, was a move he would have only expected from one as mad as he; but over the months, over the arduous and frustrating process of juggling the pieces of his failed plans, comparing Celestia’s choices to his own had lost its fun. With a ruined country and the goddesses on alert, there was no point in assuming rule, even if he could manage it, so he had been forced to change everything, to make it look like a decimated Equestrian continent was his plan all along and thereby justify his appearance in the first place—for they would never grow complacent if he had vanished as quickly as he had appeared. To that end, he had to stick around, he had to cause trouble where he could and make all appearances of meaning to take over a shattered country instead of a whole one.

Discord had charged Vanilla with helping the Elements where he could, giving them parts of himself in the form of helpful magic, so that they could face him at the end of their journey, subdue him, put the Elements to him, and win the battle without ever suspecting a grand design. Order would be restored, the country would mend, and Discord would be able to try again in a century or two when the princesses had gotten comfortable.

He had envisioned his plan taking three or four months, not eight, and he had not been prepared to deal with that much chaos, that much push and pull against his enemies. As with the Elements and princesses, Discord had time enough to get used to things how they were, so that by the time the Elements were closing in with what looked like the final blow, he no longer wanted them to win.

It was two months ago when he realized he had changed his mind, and on the eve of the final day, uncertainty still ate at him. In one second, he wanted nothing more than to lie down and let them have their victory, and in another, he imagined himself rising to the challenge and smiting them at the last. He could find another one like Vanilla, he was confident, and in time, he could rebuild the foundations of his empire. They could put Equestria back together too, and in one unformed idea, he saw himself helping with the effort, ingratiating himself to the goddesses. Would it be worth the effort? Would anything? He wasn’t sure.

He banished Vanilla and sat on his throne, staring out the open doors into the orange of coming sunset, breathing the stale castle air, drumming the fingers of his lion paw on his knee, hating the world as well as himself.

When Twilight found a map of the underground, she had walked from the church all the way to an offshoot of the commercial district, no closer to her destination. She was miles away from the airship lot, and hunger was beginning to take the place of magical exhaustion. There were drinking fountains and bathrooms, but nothing to eat, and she durst not go above, not knowing whether the Snowdrift Daturas were still looking for her. Her only comfort was that no one was guarding the airship; Octavia had sent her a note saying so, that Colgate had convinced them that the ship was connected to Twilight and would move with or without her being there, and that it was safer to not be nearby in the event of a sudden flight.

According to the map, etched on a wall and poorly illuminated, there was an entrance to the tunnels in the woods to the east of Umbrella Park, and it was between that and one under the southern warehouse that she had to choose.

Walking, there was nothing to do but think. There were twelve entrances to the catacombs all around Snowdrift, and one long emergency exit that purported to lead all the way to the mines under the Friesian Mountains. She looked back on their time traveling from Creation Lake, one party on the Gaia and one in Tartarus, and imagined how much worse it would have been if they had had to use what she was sure was a slow, energy-efficient rail system connecting mines to caverns. The train ride had been hellish; crawling down some claustrophobic tunnel all the way to Snowdrift, she could not imagine.

Even the best of friends get tired of one another. Twilight had not spent a single day of the last eight months on her own, none of the core group had. On reflection, it was a wonder to her that they had not argued more. Vinyl’s sanctimoniousness and high-flown ideals, Rainbow’s directness and insensitivity, Rarity’s obsession with appearance and the weird streak of anger she had kept buried since Manehattan, Octavia’s abyssal sorrow, Pinkie’s jubilation that waxed and waned with no apparent pattern but always seemed inappropriate, Applejack’s steadiness that made the others insecure, Fluttershy’s quiet hardness of spirit that surprised them no matter how many times she revealed it, Colgate’s alternating helpfulness and unreliability, and the hurt and discomfort Big Mac plainly wore and patiently waited for to subside. And of course, Twilight’s own reckless tunnel vision, her headlong plunge into what the others shied from, the actions that so clearly showed the mare she had become, what she at first called strength and only now could acknowledge was the beginning of wickedness. The accusation had come many times, and she had admitted it, but at those times, she had not truly felt it; she had felt like an actress in a play, miming feelings, going through the motions of confession and apology and personal growth. When she stopped blaming her friends for their failure at Discord’s castle, she could not say for certain that it was true, or that she had truly blamed them in the first place. Her feelings had become depersonalized from months of self-reflection, life pounding away at her. No emotion, however strong or unexpected, was free from analysis or from recognition as it came up. When she cried, she knew it; when she was excited, she knew it; always, there was some part of her that paid attention, that catalogued her feelings for inspection and explanation later on. Whether she was ever truly happy, or upset, or affectionate, or anything she did not know, just as she did not know whether her problem was unique, whether everyone in the world dealt with some form of emotional distancing in themselves and agonized over what it meant. Knowing her feelings in the moment, not giving herself over to them in whole, conferred a sense of control over them, made her feel like she could stop them or change them at any time if she so chose—and it was just that she never did choose to. The explanation for this, too, had come in time: not changing her emotions was easiest and led to the fewest questions, did not threaten the sanctity of her façade, if a façade it truly was. She was left to believe that there was always some deeper emotion to be found, some extreme she had not touched, and from that premise it was easy to want to find those extremes, to keep digging until she truly and honestly felt something in whole, until she lost that little, impartial part of her mind that rendered invalid everything she had felt before. It had to be possible, even easy, for ponies did it all the time; there was despair everywhere, incomprehensible joy, irrational love, blinding rage, and even the oblivion of ego death. If Twilight could achieve an extreme of any emotion, any absoluteness, she could be whole: so she thought. Why, then, not go out and force it upon herself? Why not purposely develop a life-ruining habit so she may feel total desolation, perhaps total disembodied pleasure as well? If it was what she wanted, then why be afraid?

This, too, was a conversation she had had with herself several times. Fear stopped her from pursuing the absolutes, even the pleasurable ones, but admitting it to herself brought no enlightenment. Whether she was numb, she did not know, for she did not know what it was to feel; she could define neither term in a way that was satisfactory, could find nothing to compare to anything else for a clue. She thought she felt, but if her senses were deficient, she would never know. She could ask a million ponies and get no closer to the truth, for their definitions would be individual to them, and bear no relation to Twilight’s. Every path brought her to the useless conclusion to keep digging, keep hoping to find something new inside herself, some platonic ideal that could not be mistaken or refuted. “Yes, this is it, this is absolute whatever,” she would think, and her doubts would be washed away, and she would have the key to find herself. She would know herself, and at last, the frightening question could be answered whether she was ultimately good or bad. Good ponies did bad things all the time, and bad ponies did good things. If she knew which she was, she could go about her life with that certainty, repair her soul if it needed it, and stop wondering.

In the catacombs’ dim light, however, she had arrived at one very simple thought only: “I forgot to wash this sweater last night.” She sniffed herself, found that her worries were unfounded, and trudged on.

Back at the airship, everyone tentatively sat down for a late lunch. It was five o’ clock, and all they had heard from Twilight was a repeat of her instructions to stay where they were, burned onto the note they had sent her earlier.

“She’s gonna come out of nowhere and tell us we have to leave immediately,” Rainbow said. “You know she will.”

“She probably has a plan,” Colgate said.

“Twilight needs hours to plan something. This happened suddenly, she’s flying by the seat of her saddle out there.”

“Versus!” Pinkie cried, hastening to let down the plank. Versus trotted up to them, teeth gleaming in a wide but tired smile, mane frazzled under two hoods.

“You’ve been here all day?” Versus asked. “You should have come down to the party, sillies. You had time.”

“We did not know,” Octavia said.

“Ah wanted to,” Big Mac said, smiling weakly at Versus, who looked back with the same happy expression she wore for everyone, and in which he saw the significant look he wanted to.

“Yeah, well, it’s too late now.” Versus pranced about the deck and dropped her saddlebags. “Everyone’s getting ready. I guess it’s going in ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Ten or—” Applejack jumped up and ran for the wheel.

“Yeah. So…” She sobered. “I guess this is goodbye for real. I got you all something.”

“Aw, Versus, you didn’t have to do that,” Fluttershy cooed.

“I’m gonna miss you girls. Here, Fluttershy, this is for you.” She gave Fluttershy a small, glass paperweight, in which was suspended a brilliant pink flower. There wasn’t time for elaborate thanks or explanations for what inspired which gift, so a group hug sufficed.

“Where’s Twilight?” Versus asked.

“She’s not well,” Colgate said. “Downstairs. Ate a bad peach.”

“I just wanted to tell her that I’m not mad at her. I know you’re all up to some funky stuff, and I wanted her to know I didn’t hold anything against her.”

“We’ll tell her for ya,” Big Mac said.

She smiled at him again, and he blushed. “All right, I gotta get off. I can’t have you taking me along. Although, maybe… No, I’m kidding!” She bounded down to the ground and waved at them. “Good luck, and thanks for everything!”

“It was great to meet you!” Pinkie shrieked next to Vinyl, who conjured a little heart of pink light.

“Ah’ll write as soon as Ah can,” Applejack said.

“Can’t wait.” She raised an ear; the park was getting louder, the music swelling. “Oooh, it’s about to happen. Bye girls! Bye Big Mac!” She galloped into the snow and was gone, and a minute later, Twilight emerged from the other side, panting, pale, jacket stuck with pine needles and snow. She raced up the plank and, exactly as predicted, commanded them to get ready to go.

“They’re still out there, they’re coming. Applejack, that way.” She pointed. “No time to get it precise. We’ll make up the distance later. Everyone else, get ready.” She flattened her lone page on the deck.

“What’s that?” Pinkie asked.

“Oooooh, they comin’!” Colgate hollered from the gunwale. “Let’s go, ladies! Shake a leg!”

“This okay, Twi?” Applejack asked.

Twilight didn’t answer. She looked at the freezing, gray expanse of cloud and far-off forest, bent her head to the page, and activated a chain reaction of magic that started on the airship and branched out like a web of lightning to hundreds of points in the sky and on the ground, to every other page the snowstorm had taken, and which converged on the church, attracted to the wire she had planted, and fed the sigil below the city. A thousand voices cheered as Snowdrift was sucked down to a microscopic point and released to its full glory an instant later, and the airship, and all those like it, was gone.