The Elements of Harmony were on their ship, heading northeast to the coast, and Spike was with Flitter in the sauna. She lay on her back with closed eyes, but he wasn’t fooled; her wings were tight and she hardly moved, even to swipe sweat off her face. Her stillness was in response to his own insufficient stutter at her question: am I doing something wrong?

Of course not, he had wanted to say. But the words didn’t come out that easily.

“I mean, I still really like you,” he finally said. “I’m in a weird place right now.”

“What does Colgate do that I don’t?”

“Wait, you don’t think I’m doing anything funny with her, do you?”

“You spend a lot of time there.”

“Well… yeah, okay. So? I spend time here too.”

“Of course you do. We’re dating.” She turned on her side, putting her back to Spike. “What does Colgate do that I don’t?”

“Flitter, I’m not attracted to Colgate,” Spike said. “By pony standards, she’s more than twice my age. Or something. Er, anyway, and she’s not as pretty as you, or nice.”

“That’s all you care about, being pretty and nice?”

“What? No, of course not.” The heat was pounding into his head, and he had to rest for a second. “You don’t have to worry about anything, okay? We’re just friends.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I’m telling you!”

“And I’m saying ‘mm-hm’.”

“Flitter.”

Flitter didn’t answer, and Spike got up to walk to her, but hesitated. He had never seen her angry, and didn’t know whether to try to console her or stay quiet. He decided to return to his spot on the bench.

When one o’ clock came around, Spike was in one of the hospital’s break rooms sharing lunch with Golden Mercy, Colgate’s medical assistant. Colgate was in a meeting with a team of occupational therapists.

Almost two weeks ago, he had put Noteworthy’s potion into her drink, expecting a change within the first couple days. What he got, instead, was day after day of half-fun with Colgate, his enjoyment at being with her poisoned with anxiety and, sometimes, guilt.

“What’s it like to work for Colgate?” he asked.

“Mm, a pain,” Mercy said. Her ruddy, rich fur shook with her nod. “She’s very particular about how things are. She likes to have her charts a certain way, has only one way to document encounters. Sometimes she tries to oversee prescriptions, and we have to tell her, ‘Colgate, girl, go back to your room, this ain’t the place for you.’ She’s tight as a dang clock.”

“Really?”

“But she’s also very calm. I’ve never seen her buckle under pressure, and you can imagine what sorts of pressures there are in the operating room.”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t.

“So it’s a trade-off. I don’t know. I like her. Some of the other MAs think she’s kind of weird, but you can tell they look up to her too.”

“Hm, now that’s interesting.” He grinned. “I didn’t know she was the kind of pony other ponies, you know, did that with.”

“Well, we’re a pretty small practice. We’ve only got three surgeons, and the only other specialist is Dr. Down.” Seeing his blank expression, she smiled. “Dr. Sable Down, our renal surgeon. He and Colgate are the two big names here.”

“So she’s like a minor celebrity or something?”

“Eh, not really. It’s more like… she’s important, and smart, and everyone knows, and she knows they all know.” She nodded again. “She’s earned it, though.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, the usual way. By being smart and reliable.”

He thought back across the last several days. He had spent so much time at the hospital that ponies stopped questioning his presence, except Colgate, for whom he had no good explanation. His earlier lie, that he hadn’t been feeling well enough to practice with Zecora, failed to hold water around the third day, and no other lies came to mind. Colgate hadn’t stopped mildly pestering him.

And then, there was her medication. He saw her take it most days, but every time he considered asking about it, stopped himself. If what Noteworthy said were true, and she was crazy behind the pills, it was not a situation he wanted to get close to.

“How is she with patients?” he finally asked.

“So-so. She’s pleasant.”

“Pleasant. Is that it?”

“She couldn’t ever be a nurse, is what I’m saying.”

“That I can understand. She’s a little standoffish.”

“She’s a lot standoffish. I’m always reminding her, ‘Colgate, smile when you see this patient, okay? She’s about to get her knee joint scraped clean, the least you can do is smile at her.’ So she puts on this big, fake grin, and I’m just trying not to burst out laughing at how poor an attempt she’s making.”

“Hm. Sounds familiar.” He looked at her closely for a moment, and she paused.

“What?”

“What’s with the pills she takes every day?”

“Oh, those are for migraines.”

“Oh.” He slouched in his seat. “I thought they were something else.”

“No, she told me it was migraines. Why, what’d you think they were?”

“I thought they were… you know, crazy pills.”

Golden smiled in concealed laughter for several seconds. “Okay, sure. Whatever floats your boat, Spike.”

“Hm.” He thought of Noteworthy, his mind suddenly darkening. “I gotta go. I just remembered something important.”

“Aw, leaving already?”

“I’ll be back, I’m sure. What time’s her consultation?”

“Uh, five-thirty.”

“Yeah, I’ll be back by then.”

She gave him one more smile as he left the break room.

He found Noteworthy running a flower stall outside the mayor’s office, the two police officers flanking his setup from a distance. As soon as he saw Spike’s approach, Noteworthy’s expression soured.

“Crazy pills, really?” Spike said.

“Oh, this is what my day needed.”

“She’s taking them for migraines, you bastard.”

Noteworthy looked to the side. Roseluck, in the stall next to his, looked over, concern unconcealed. He sighed, eyes closed for a moment. “You’ll just believe anything you hear, won’t you?”

“Golden Mercy said—”

“Golden Mercy doesn’t know her.”

“Uh, yeah she does.”

“Uh, no she doesn’t. Do you know the difference between coworkers and friends? I’m starting to think you don’t.”

“Everything okay?” Roseluck asked.

“Noteworthy’s being a jerk,” Spike said.

Noteworthy rolled his eyes, but his voice was pleasant when he addressed Roseluck. “It’s fine. Everyone’s just a little heated right now.”

“Colgate?”

Spike’s eyes sprung open. “Wait, what?”

“She’s the one everything comes back to,” Roseluck said with a tiny shrug. “Just my opinion, though.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that same thing,” Noteworthy grumbled.

Instead of returning directly to the hospital, Spike did a circuit around town to order his thoughts. Since a week ago, Berry and Derpy had stopped coming around, and Allie’s visits were lessening as well. Even Colgate was going quieter, though another black eye appeared midway through his time with her.

He passed close to the small bridge that curved over a narrow part of the river and stopped, spying a small commotion in the waters. He hastened to the shore, but as he got closer, the pony flopped out onto the bank, her mane hanging limp and her white scrubs showing a moderate blue beneath.

“Colgate?”

She whipped her head to face him, her eyes wide and frantic, but deflated into the mud when she recognized him. “Spike, it’s just you.”

“What in the wide world of Equestria are you doing? Are you okay?”

“Just taking a refreshing dip before a meeting.”

“You’re soaking wet.”

She got up and headed back toward the hospital, her entire body dripping water and mud.

“Hey!” He ran to catch up with her, and she stopped, staring through him. “What’s going on? You haven’t been yourself lately.”

Colgate frowned. “Not myself?” He didn’t respond, and they walked together along the riverside. “I never really got that phrase.”

“You’re not like how you were before,” he said, his dread growing.

“No one is.”

“Uhhhh…”

“Okay,” she snapped, stopping suddenly to turn to him. As quickly as she looked at him, her eyes changed, and she was again looking through him. Her voice dimmed, and she was the Colgate he knew, though much wetter. “I need your help.”

“Huh?”

“I’m sorry, Spike.” She sat down on the grass, her mane dripping onto her muzzle. “I… this is very strange for me. Way stranger than I would expect.”

“What are you talking about? What’s he doing to you now?”

“It’s not him. Or maybe it is. I’m losing my mind, Spike.”

The words passed over him, as though uttered as part of a story, or from an unfathomable source. He looked at her, the sopping, muddy, black-eyed unicorn who sometimes wore bloodstained scrubs to work, whom he knew outclassed him in every capacity.

“I need help.”

“Uhhh… what, what makes you think that?”

“I can’t focus. I can’t think right. Everything’s mushy and slippery, and every time I try too hard to think one thought at a time, it either drifts away or gets replaced with something else.” Her eyes moved rapidly. “Sometimes it’s familiar stuff, like what I’m gonna do later that night, or memories, and sometimes it’s Datura stuff. I was involved when I was in Manehattan.”

“I know.”

“Team medic. They called me ‘terror nurse,’ or I did, or something. I don’t remember. I remember being with them, though.” She looked quickly at the hospital. “Redheart thinks it’s anxiety. I guess that makes sense. Someone’s beating the stuffing out of me, I suppose.”

“Colgate, where is this going?”

“She’s the head nurse practitioner. I remember thinking I wanted her job for a while, but that was a pipe dream. I’m no nurse. I’m a… surgeon.”

Spike watched her closely.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” she said slowly. “Surgeon, surgery, stuff. Oh, fiddlesticks, I have a consultation coming up.” She got up and galloped across the field, and Spike followed, but her stride was longer, and she had soon disappeared into the gleaming double doors.

The following day, Spike woke up early, skipped the spa, and was stopped halfway to Colgate’s office by Nurse Tenderheart, Nurse Redheart’s second-in-command. Colgate had been suspended for the rest of the week, her bedraggled appearance causing a minor stir among the patients and staff. She had taken the news quietly and calmly, and the last thing she did was leave a trail of filthy water to the prescription department, where she made certain her patients were caught up. Not one iota of the unhinged fear by the riverside had made it into the hospital.

After a quick chat with Golden Mercy, who had little to say, Spike passed the spa again on his way to Colgate’s house. Nurse Tenderheart had said it was normal for a surgeon to have a nervous breakdown. Their jobs were extremely high-pressure, and even the strongest pony eventually broke. She hoped Colgate’s break was a brief one, she had said to Spike, who nodded without hearing.

Colgate let him in without comment. A book lay on its face on the floor, and she settled down on a cushion nearby, looking at him pleasantly. Her black eye gleamed morosely, its sclera marbled with capillary red.

“Uh… how you feeling?”

Instead of answering, she smiled the same smile he was used to, got up, and embraced him. He stood inside her grasp, almost afraid to reciprocate, and patted her on the back.

“So… is that good, or bad?”

“I’m sorry about yesterday, Spike. You shouldn’t have seen that.”

“Um… it’s okay?”

“Sit.” She disconnected and indicated a spot on the floor. “Please. There’s much to discuss.”

“S-sure.” He grinned and sat down, and she fell onto her cushion, dark blue, like portions of her mane.

“I’m going to tell you about my final day in the Datura.”

He blinked, expecting more of a lead-up, but Colgate only stared past him. Her voice was calm and collected, not the voice of the pony he had caught a glimpse of the day before.

“Know first, I am well aware that you are withholding your true reason for spending so much time with me lately. I can infer that it’s Datura business, and that terrifies me. I think there’s a connection between your recent appearance and what I’m coming to consider my descent into madness, but I have no proof, and, moreover, I don’t care anymore. Whatever happened happened, and my course seems clear. I still think of you as a friend, Spike.” She smiled toothily. “But I’m never trusting you with anything important again. This happened eleven years ago. I was on a team of other doctors in Manehattan.”

Her first residency was a mismatch that tempted her to end her career before it started. She, fresh-faced and ready to take her new skills and innovations to the world of orthopedics, was paired with a dermatologist by the name of Dr. Sheen. Her first month was a blur of arguments, uncomfortable biopsies, and unhelpful administration.

Then, Dr. Sheen took her to a meeting of the Datura. The odd coupling was to see if Dr. Colgate could function in the peculiar mixture of taxing social situations and high-importance procedures. As it turned out, she could.

It was another week before she met Datura outside work. A pair of quiet, watchful phlebotomists showed up at her apartment and led her through the hospital at two in the morning, answering the questions she had not had the wherewithal to ask initially, much the same as she would for an inquisitive dragon more than a decade later.

For the first year afterwards, her life felt complete. Assignments, when she went on them, were fascinating, but seldom dangerous, and she quickly became a mainstay of the team, her ability to work under pressure making her the perfect emergency medic. Hers was the duty of resuscitating victims and suspects of the extranormal, and her medical knowledge stretched and expanded to conform to the array of magical treatment options known only to a tiny percentage of ponies in the country.

The catalyst of her discommendation from the Datura was a slight, stuttering colt by the name of Ultraviolet, whose life she saved in a mundane act of CPR. They had found him hypothermic in a dull summoning sigil, the words “ice made flesh” slathered on the wall in what looked more like paint than blood. Witness accounts claimed only a sudden snap of cold, accompanied by a monolithic gear groan—“like an engine chewing itself to pulp,” one had said.

Finding him to be dangerous only insofar as his curiosity often gave way to irresponsibility, the Datura let him free with all his memories, so he would hopefully learn his lesson. Days later, “The Ice Demon of Manehattan” was published in a local tabloid, to discredit any uncontained testimony.

Dr. Colgate would see him a month later on the operating table. The procedure was, again, routine, and she hardly had to think about it as she worked inside his pastern joint. When he was in the recovery room, shaking off the effects of general anesthesia, she came in for a visit.

“I r-recognize you,” he said.

“I was there when you were anesthetized,” Dr. Colgate replied, putting on her nurse smile.

“No, from before. You re-re-re… you saved my life, a while ago. ‘Ice made flesh,’ right, doctor?”

She paused with her blood pressure cuff still floating off its hook. “And why do you possess this little nugget of information? I scurried away before your focus came back. Your memory should be a blur.”

“The same way I remember you silently pr-praying to Luna when you thought you’d nicked my f-femoral artery today.”

She hesitated, and then took his blood pressure. “So how do you know these things?”

He tilted his head playfully. “I’m the eye in the sky.”

“Cute.”

He smiled. “You must th-th-think me ludicrous.”

“I think you mysterious. Deep breaths.” She checked his breathing and heart, noted the results, and put the clipboard on her back. “I’d like to talk to you more, and I bet my friends would too.”

“How could I say no to more time in your c-company?”

“But it’ll have to wait. Did the nurse show you everything already?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good. Rest up, and we’ll talk later.”

Later was eight o’ clock that night, when Dr. Colgate, Dr. Sheen, and the two phlebotomists, Flowerfalls and Amber Mist, crowded into Ultraviolet’s room. Despite Dr. Colgate’s ease with him, and her comfort with his unexplained knowledge, the others were not as confident. Flowerfalls and Amber Mist stayed cautiously back while Dr. Sheen questioned Ultraviolet with quick professionalism that sometimes bordered on hostility, which he returned with fearful noncompliance.

“Okay, let’s back up,” Flowerfalls said, stepping over and speaking for the first time. Dr. Sheen glared at Ultraviolet from the foot of his bed. “How long did you know about Dr. Colgate’s involvement in your resuscitation?”

“I d-d-d… I don’t know. I think I woke up with it, b-but I don’t know.”

“And then, in the course of your conversation with her, you intuited another piece of knowledge about her, something only she could have known,” Amber Mist said, circling to the bed’s other side.

“Yes.”

“What else do you know about me?” Dr. Colgate asked.

“Nothing. But if I l-look at you, I can get m-more.”

Dr. Colgate shooed the phlebotomists away and stood before him, allowing his weary eyes to cover her. As he examined her, his smile grew.

“I know you tried writing poetry in c-college, but didn’t think much of yourself.” His eyes glazed over and he began to recite: “Tell me, oh t-t-tell me, the difference between—”

“What else?” Dr. Colgate said.

“Let’s see here… you ate an entire tub of sour cream when you were five years old.”

“This is nonsense,” Dr. Sheen said. “Anyone can guess at what someone did at that age, they hardly remember it anyway.”

“Dr. Colgate had to… oh.”

Dr. Colgate clenched her jaw; she thought she knew what Ultraviolet had hit on. “Perhaps we should discuss it privately.”

Ultraviolet paled.

“Not acceptable,” Flowerfalls said.

“Until we know what exactly is going on with you, we can’t let you alone with her,” Amber Mist said.

Dr. Colgate looked directly at her. “I can take care of myself.”

“I’m not worried about your safety.”

“What do you th-think I’m going to do?” Ultraviolet whispered. “I’m bedridden. I swear, I c-couldn’t hurt a f-f-f… I couldn’t hurt a f-fly.”

“It would be unprofessional,” Amber Mist said. Her surly tone was enough to make Ultraviolet shrink into his sheets. His eyes didn’t leave Dr. Colgate.

“It’s fine, Ultraviolet,” Dr. Sheen suddenly said. He smiled beatifically. “You have to realize how bizarre this is for us. I apologize if we came across too strong.”

“Of course.” The unicorn was barely audible.

“Let’s get a nurse in here,” Flowerfalls said, heading outside. Once in the hall, they turned on Dr. Colgate.

“Whatever he’s doing, you’re the one he likes doing it to,” Amber Mist said.

“But he responds well when you talk,” Dr. Sheen said. “Better than for us. I say go for it. Visit him later tonight and see if you can get some answers.”

“And risk an information breach?” Flowerfalls asked calmly.

“He seems to know only her past. With us, there’s not much to reveal.”

“I’m the safest option,” Dr. Colgate said.

“I think so.”

“I don’t want to interrogate him.”

“You’re only asking questions,” Flowerfalls said. “You don’t need to torture him.” She grinned a little. “Although…”

“Don’t push me,” Dr. Colgate said. Her voice came out with no inflection, the words habitual only, but Flowerfalls looked down quickly.

“Ladies,” Dr. Sheen said. “Don’t worry, doctor. No one on this team is going to push you.”

“Then don’t.”

“We’re not going to,” Amber Mist said.

Dr. Colgate stepped back to look at them all. “Then don’t.”

Outside Ultraviolet’s room, the nurse gave Dr. Colgate the report. Shortly after their small conference, Ultraviolet had fallen into a disturbed, sweating sleep, and woken in a fugue that did not improve with opening the window or the administration of drugs. He seemed exhausted, almost hung over, and something more that the nurse couldn’t place.

She advised that Dr. Colgate spend very little time within, and to be consciously gentle with him; Dr. Colgate dismissed her with a terse “understood.” When she entered, Ultraviolet looked to the door, and when he saw who it was, froze.

“How are you feeling?” Dr. Colgate asked. She took a second to put on a smile. Her bedside manner, she had been told, left much to be desired.

Ultraviolet did not un-tense. “Fine, ma’am.”

“You know why I’m here.”

He shrunk against the headboard, his eyes stuck to her like she might spring at him at any second.

She sat on the tile. “What did you see? I have a general idea, but I want to know the specific thing.”

“Uh…” He finally looked away, and she could see sweat on his fur. His lips trembled. “You were y-young, and you g-g-g-got them with the locker.”

“I remember it.”

“I’m sorry, doctor.”

“I’m not like that.”

He studied her more, but closed his eyes with a groan. After a minute of struggling, he let his head fall onto the bunched sheets.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as she approached.

With a strangled yelp, he shimmied away from her.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I told you, I’m not like that.”

He only moaned.

“Fine.” She returned to her spot. “Why do you know what you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to.”

“I-I don’t. It just comes to me.”

“Intuition?”

He nodded. “Sorry.”

“How long have you had this ability?”

He stared past her.

“Ultraviolet?”

He jerked. “Sorry, sorry! I-I think I’ve had it all my life, doctor.”

“And you can choose how to use it,” she continued.

“Kind of.”

“Explain.”

He relaxed a tiny bit. “You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”

“I’m a doctor.”

“Right. D-doctor Colgate. Okay.” He relaxed more. “It only works on ponies, and only if I’m interested in them. S-sort of, I mean.”

“So you were interested in me?”

“You saved my life, and operated on me.” He smiled, but, seeing her serious face, went quieter and tightened his muscles once more. “Please don’t be mad. I was… er, I kind of w-wanted to ask you on a date.”

“I assume that was before you caught a flash of my past.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“Tell me more.”

“J-just out to breakfast or something, nothing fa-fancy.”

“Your intuition.” Hearing something outside, she stood, and the sheets piled to the other side as he scrambled away. “You need to stop that. It’s not good for you. You’re still recovering.”

He only looked at her, frozen again.

“Speak, Ultraviolet.”

“Sorry! Sorry, s-sorry. Uh, I can only do it so much. If I overdo it, I get kind of sick.”

“Did you overdo it this afternoon?”

“Think so.”

“So you woke up from surgery, exhausted yourself with intuiting my past, and freaked yourself out when you saw something you didn’t like.” She took a quick step toward him, and he almost fell out of bed. “Are you okay?” She moved to his side and helped him back. His body felt ready to explode with fear under her careful, expert hooves. She magically adjusted the blanket around his throat and gave her best nurse smile, then left.

“I don’t get it. Why was he so freaked out?” Spike asked.

“Before I grew up, I had a little temper. He caught a glimpse of me hitting someone.”

“Sounds like he got a lot more.”

“He was still a little funny from the anesthesia. Can I continue?”

“Sorry, doctor.”

“Not exactly what we asked for, but you did an amazing job, Minuette,” Flowerfalls said. She had cornered Dr. Colgate the following day with a huge smile, and news of Ultraviolet’s fate.

“Thanks, I think.”

“He was so scared, he told me everything I wanted to know.”

“You went in after me?”

“Sorry, doc. Nothing personal.”

“Feels personal.”

“Hey, I just said you did an awesome job, okay? Lighten up.” She grinned. “Terror nurse.”

“What?”

“That’s what he kept saying. I assume he was talking about you.”

“I’m the terror nurse?”

“Guess so.” She bumped Dr. Colgate’s flank playfully. “Good job, doc. Thanks.”

“So what’s going to happen to him?”

They walked down a narrow, empty corridor to the secondary lab, where she, Amber Mist, and four others drew blood and conducted countless tests. “Nothing good. Turns out, he’s an unregistered postcog. Someone who has access to the past, whether they should or not. Rarer than precogs, and potentially devastating for us.”

“And?”

“He’s getting a full interrogation by the police, in the presence of our Information Handler.” When Dr. Colgate didn’t respond, she forced a chuckle. “That’s right, you don’t know. Our Information Handler is a big deal. She’s coming here specifically to see it.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not necessarily. It just means it’s huge. She’s one of the top ponies in the Datura. Not just the Equestrian division, but the whole thing. As her title suggests, she’s in charge of all our information.”

“All of it?”

“Absolutely all of it.”

Dr. Colgate nodded and separated from her coworker. She wanted to see Ultraviolet again, but Flowerfalls was not the only one who had figured out who the terror nurse was. Every time she passed his room, there was someone outside to gently guide her away.

“I saw him only once more, in a list of anomalous intellects. I liked to keep track of Datura stuff after I quit.”

“They let you?”

“Kind of. Anomalous intellects are in the public record, though.”

“Oh. Wait, so was that your last day?” Spike asked.

“Not officially, but that was the day I decided I wasn’t sticking around. I didn’t want to be involved in a group that brutalized ponies like him. He wasn’t hurting anyone, and they put him through two days of questioning and a memory wipe.”

“At least he doesn’t remember the suffering,” Spike offered.

“That doesn’t matter. I was told the Datura stood for the security and comfort of all, but then they turned around and tortured him.”

Spike nodded. “And to be instrumental in that betrayal, too.”

“I know. Flowerfalls really went behind my back.”

“Uh, right. So… why did you tell me all that?”

“I told you I’m losing my mind. I’m probably going back.”

“Back to Manehattan?”

“No, back to the Datura.”

Though he knew to expect it, Spike had to pause at her bluntness.

“I’m going to give it about a week, and if I’m still thinking about it as strongly as I am now, I’ll join.” She got off her cushion. “The suddenness and enormity of these thoughts makes me uncomfortable.”

“So… do you know why you’re suddenly so attracted to the Datura?”

“No clue.” She looked through him and shook her head. “I wish I wanted to care more. Something’s going on, it’s extremely obvious. But I’m not looking at it the right way.”

“Look, Colgate,” Spike said. “Ponies change their minds all the time. Maybe you’re just thinking about it in a way you hadn’t earlier. Maybe you just need some time away from agonizing.”

She shrugged.

“You’ve got the day off, right?”

“The whole week. Nurse Redheart kicked me out after coming in all wet.”

“Yeah, so let’s go do something to get our minds off it.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Walk in the park?”

“Fine.” She followed him out the door and around the town’s center, to enter the park from the east side, opposite the Everfree Forest. Unlike her house, on the north end, there was only flat grassland to their backs, creased with mountains against the horizon. From their distance, there was no sign of the splits that had, for Ponyville, become no more than a strange fact to be recalled when thinking of the outside world.

Spike followed Colgate, her ears up, to a picnic table under a tree, where an earth pony played a harp with soft, open eyes. A small crowd had gathered, and a few had tossed bits onto the ground, which she did not acknowledge except with a smile and nod to those who contributed. Her lime peel coat was long and fluffy, and in the summer warmth, it puffed the mare up comically against the like-colored grass. Her eyes were unremarkable golden discs under a short and neat candy-stripe of mint and powder blue mane, with no horn parting it. Spike fixed his eyes first on the unmarred spot of her mane, its blankness putting him in a state of mild shock. Non-magical musicians were rare; hooves made instrumentation difficult.

As her song dissipated, she gave Spike a friendly smile and stooped to gather her meager bits. Some of the audience moved away, and Spike and Colgate came closer.

“That was beautiful,” Spike said.

“Thanks. Spike, right?” She strummed a little on her harp.

“Yeah! How’d you know?”

“I moved down from Canterlot,” she said, her voice lilting slightly, her face turning up in a smile, as if the statement of her origin should have been enough for him.

“Does that mean the gaps between Ponyville and Canterlot are fixed?” Colgate asked.

“There are bridges.” She started plucking out another tune. “I just blew into town a couple days ago, actually. I don’t know anyone here.”

“You’ll be fine,” Spike said. “I’m Spike; I guess you already know that. This is my friend, Colgate.”

“Oh, you’re her,” the pony said. “I’m Foxglove. Great to meet you both.”

“Where did you hear my name?” Colgate asked.

“Just kind of around. It came up in conversations I walked past a couple times.”

“Yeah, uh… you came at a weird time. There’s been some trouble,” Spike said.

“Involving you?” She nodded to Colgate.

“I’m in the middle of it all,” Colgate said quietly.

“Hoo, wow. Not as an instigator, I hope?”

“Victim.”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not angry,” Colgate said, angling her body away.

“I didn’t mean anything, I swear.”

“It’s fine,” Spike said. “We’ll see you later.”

As they parted the tiny crowd, Foxglove began a slower, sadder song.

They sat outside Ponyville’s only ice cream parlor sharing a large sundae. By the time they had arrived, Colgate had lost her displeasure at Foxglove’s playful comment, but still refused to smile when Spike tried to cheer her up.

“So are there any precogs in Ponyville?”

Colgate thought for a minute. “Well, Pinkie Pie, of course. She’s a low-level precog. She can get hyper-specific events with short notice. Not overly useful, except as a guessing game. There’s someone else. Oh, who is it? I checked out the public records a long time ago.”

“Does the mayor know?”

“Oh yeah. If Ponyville is like Manehattan, Mayor Mare should know about half the stuff your ponies know. Half the immediate stuff, that is.”

“I don’t even know that much.”

“Bonbon. That’s who it is.”

“She’s not a precog,” Spike said.

“No, I know it’s her. She and Pinkie are the two. I remember thinking it was cute that the baker and candy maker were both precogs. Bonbon’s barely one, though. She gets impressions of future events, so unspecific and unrelated to her own circumstances that it hardly matters. I wouldn’t be surprised if she just thinks she has a super-vivid imagination.”

“Where do they come from?”

“Precogs? I have no clue.”

“I wonder if Flitter knows.”

“Why would she know?”

“She knows everything else.”

“Oh.” Colgate stared into a small pool of ice cream on her side of the dish. She had eaten fast.

“If I find out, want me to tell you?”

“Sure, I’m curious.”

Spike finished his side of the sundae and looked from under the edge of their shade. To the south, he could see the huge, reflective fortress of Cloudsdale. A pegasus took off from the orchard and caught her lithe body against the white canvass. With half the Apple family gone, Granny Smith had taken on the Cutie Mark Crusaders and a drove of pegasi, ousted from their home city by economic unrest. All of that seemed irrelevant. At a quaint resting spot, Colgate across from him—black eye notwithstanding—and no Datura training, he sighed contentedly. At ease, he looked back to his friend, and her eyes went comfortably through him yet again.

Princess Luna used her traveling library liberally, and sometimes for research. Discord had gotten his forces underway the Sunday previous, and she, on a stormy Thursday, dined alone behind its protective paneling. She had summoned it for a rest on the eastern side of Toad Pond, the highly inaccurate name for the five hundred square-mile lake that basked a scant hundred miles away from Draught Castle’s solitary figure.

Discord had originally led her on a chase east of the castle, almost to the cloying waters of Mineral River, which had marked the Equestrian border at one time, before turning quickly in a way she expected, but wasn’t fully prepared for, and teleported his entire contingency back to the starting point. A pure waste of time, meant specifically to annoy her: a tactical raspberry.

She didn’t give in to his taunt, and let him get ahead of her by about a day, feigning inability to relocate him. While she had dinner, he was strutting around the perimeter of his army’s improvised campsite, intermittently singing to himself and plotting more seriously. She saw it all through a simple remote viewing spell, which she had placed the instant she found him the first time.

After an hour of repeated renditions of the Equestrian national anthem, sung backwards and in every register at once, she deactivated her spell, raised the moon, and went to the library’s bedroom. She could comfortably go a week without sleep, Celestia two months, but it was a luxury she had grown accustomed to, and felt a quiet pang of shameful giddiness as she climbed into bed. It was baseless. One of the first things she did when setting out was strengthen her awareness of others’ sleep. When Discord finally nodded off, as he had to every night, she would know, and the spell would wake her. Then her true work would begin.

At one o’ clock exactly, she slipped out of sleep as comfortably as taking off a nightgown, and glided up and through the library wall, flying to a height where she could see the entire southern half of the Everfree Forest. The clouds, no longer raining, filled the sky above her, but she held herself aloft with centuries-old muscle memory.

The library, the smallest of her four in Canterlot Palace, was an afterthought. As soon as she had flown far enough from it, she banished the structure back to her pocket dimension, a magical construct the envy of every knowledgeable magician in Equestria. With it, she held an armory of spells, suspended mid-cast, to be released instantaneously if she needed, along with a set of enchanted armor, should the need for bloodshed become unavoidable. The magical power it took to even create what she stored was more than most could aspire to in a single lifetime, and the power to contain it was greater than the sum of equine magical power in the city of Manehattan. She had done the math once.

With another spell, she let her body’s dimensions fragment and flatten until no light touched her, and she flew, an invisible labyrinth of two-dimensional crystals, bound still in the form of an alicorn. Occupying the same space in multiple forms was one of her moderate spells, and the most advanced one she remembered teaching. Better than a simple camouflage spell, her spell rendered her undetectable to anyone paying attention to air currents or changes in temperature, a common warning against hidden enemies.

She took her time over the quiet fields fencing Toad Pond. She was only just on the south side of Equestria, a side that, normally ending flush against minotaur country, brought them close to the south pole. She could feel the temperature difference even where she was, nearly parallel with Trottingham to the west. The south half of Equestria was chilly all over, and crushingly desolate in many places; she was over one of them.

After fifteen minutes of flying, soft light manifested on the ground. She lowered herself to see a ghostly forest of torches glowing from within a bank of mist, enchanted, she could tell. She resisted the urge to teleport; such a bold method of movement would likely activate one of Discord’s myriad magical defenses.

While she and Celestia, pulling no punches and undistracted with keeping civilians safe from collateral damage, might eventually destroy him, he was a match for both on their own, though more to Celestia than Luna. Her sister, who had spent longer as a mortal, took nine centuries to develop into a master of the tangible. With energy to level cities at a touch, shatter mountains with a thought, and turn her own body into something almost as hot as the sun itself—which Celestia sometimes lied she could walk across—she was the clearer of the two superpowers that could unseat Discord, but also the more vulnerable to his malignant, entropic magic.

Luna, meanwhile, who had died more times than she could count or clearly recall, held firm control over the subtler, more thoughtful brands of magic. In some circles, she was affectionately known as the warrior scholar, not inaccurately. Immersed in magic dealing with form, causality, and the fabric of reality, her power was as far-reaching and impossible to track as Celestia’s was to avoid. With a mind like a million-gear timepiece, she could watch the dreams of every pony in Equestria at the same time, and split herself to intervene in half that number simultaneously. She could change her appearance, or create duplicates of herself. She could see into memories, and invade them if she wanted; she could do it to herself.

Her magic was not something Discord could contend with with a simple wink, joke, or song-and-dance routine.

She sped down to the campsite in a cone of dilated time, half an hour for her passing only two minutes for the dozing enemies below. She had shied away from chronomancy for a long time before achieving full agelessness, when death by natural means was still possible, and the prospect of putting herself out of synchronicity with the rest of the world imminently plausible.

Coalescing back into the form she was most comfortable in, she winglessly hovered a half inch above the ground to silently move around the site. She could see their dreaming minds like glowing pearls scattered in the field, and quickly scanned the area for those who were still awake.

Most of the beings before her were ponies, hypnotized, glamoured, or merely lied to, but some were magical constructs. Like Spring-hoof Jack and the flying ship that menaced the wilderness, they were powerful enchantments wrapped in an equine shape. She glided around the perimeter until she was near one of their tents. A single mortal shared with two constructs, and she could feel his dreams pulsing sexually behind the fabric.

She gently landed on the grass and closed her eyes, her horn glowing a soft, lunar blue. While Discord’s magic was not as effective against hers, it was by no means benign. She had briefed the Canterlot Guard and her own Datura, separately, on the nature of his magic. Celestia’s was like a ball of molten stone, Luna’s a chorus of suggestions and commands, and Discord’s a whirl of acid. With a flair for dynamic enchantments, hidden redundancies, and corrosive spells, his was a style of magic best suited to gradually eat through defenses and subvert traps. She needed full concentration to ferret out whatever lingering magic he had left floating around his ponies.

The lead she had allowed him had worked. Confident that she was on his tail, but still trying to figure out her approach, he had set up only a simple pair of spells, one to react to dispelling magic and one to react to teleportation, either in or out.

“I will not kill them if I can help it,” she had said to her sister. For Luna, who knew well the spiritual plane beyond mortal life, the thought of sending an unprepared pony there always put her heart in a quiet clench. “I will uncouple what magic I can without his knowledge, but the bloodshed, I leave to you.”

“Okay,” Celestia had said.

She let her horn lie dormant while she considered her possibilities. She had already laid a large cascading resonance spell on Discord’s ponies, to be activated in response to his own total-affect magic. He would try to help his army in the fight, but, instead, they would be overwhelmed by the sounds of their own mayhem. That would buy Celestia’s defenses a minute of time, or less.

“Besides, why do you not simply go to him yourself and unleash Tartarus in the wilderness?” Luna had asked. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Because, dear sister, that would not work,” Celestia had said, her voice an imperious taunt that Luna would have jumped on, were the time less serious.

“I think it could.”

“With no Elements of Harmony, we could not hope to strike a final blow against Discord. His plans and army would be devastated, but he would remain, aware of our power and our eagerness for battle. And he would be angry.”

“I could destroy him,” Luna had said after too little consideration.

“You could slow him down.”

She rapidly flipped into a remote viewing spell, to make sure no one was watching her. Of course her sister had been correct. The Elements of Harmony were designed specifically to contain the kind of magic that filled and exuded from Discord, quarantining his viral magic in a way that neither of the princesses could. Celestia could flay his flesh from his bones, reduce his entire being to a cough of carbon in the air, and Luna could banish his spirit to a microcosmic loop of its own chaos, but the aftershock would stain them both. The smallest remnant of his magic to cling to their own spirits would be enough. It might take decades or centuries, but it would draw together, mend, and strengthen, and he would return. Chaos magic, Luna had taught more than a thousand years ago, was by its nature impossible to use exactly as one intended. To wield it, one needed to suffuse themselves in it, and so lose the firm spiritual grounding that helped keep mortals and immortals alike from dissolving into obsolescence.

“By some accounts, Discord died the day he cast his first chaos spell,” she had said to an amazed classroom.

Any implanted suggestions in his ponies would be immediately found, she knew, as well as any magical constructs of her own. Invading their dreams or minds, too, was out of the question; it would take but one suspicious dream of the lunar goddess to put Discord on edge.

She couldn’t do a single thing to affect them physically or psychologically, she knew—not in a way that would matter. Discord would heal any damage done. She thought for a moment more, and then smiled mischievously, her idea coming.

“I can drive the madman madder.” Lighting her horn, she pooled her concentration into studying Discord’s dispel warning. It was a simple barrier, but airtight: any change to the other, smaller enchantments he had on his ponies—things like increased strength, pain tolerance, and confidence—would set off an invisible alarm for him.

She concentrated for a minute, separating her bodily and spiritual identities in her mind, and cast a low, monotonous spell to copy her own form into the same folded dimension as her library, armor, and frozen spells. The body—her body, not tangible but heavy in her mind with the twin knowledge it possessed—waited inside, non-sentient. When it was ready, she loosed it from herself. In a different part of her mind, she imagined lecturing on the process to a crowd of collegiate mages, ponies who thought they had seen everything the theories of magic had to offer.

“And in so creating a copy of myself, epistemologically manifest only, for the sake of efficiency, I’m allowing my own version of the anti-dispel warning enchantment to connect back to an anchor outside my enemy’s mind.” She produced a spell, nearly identical to Discord’s, and let it slowly unfurl over the meadow, invisible tides of magic blanketing the grass.

“By understanding the construction of Discord’s spell, I can weave my own into his, strengthening it. Then, it’s simply a matter of applying… oh, wait.” She slunk away from the campsite, too intently focused on her magic to hover. Her next move would wake Discord. She took flight outside the enchanted mist that shrouded his army, keeping herself a modest five feet off the ground, and made her way back to the lake. She cast no spells on the return trip; there was much going on in her head already, and she needed to center herself before adding to it. Too many spells at once could upset the elaborate framework of magic she had created in her mind.

The sun was coming up when Luna made it back to the lakeside, tired from flying and walking. Her spells were linked and ready, and the warning would go to both sides, though hers was simply an unaware pit of intelligence. Standing at the shores, she took a moment to view a side of her country she didn’t often see. The lake and outlying fields fit on an unbroken slab of earth, so large that she had, in her walk back, forgotten that there would be gaps to negotiate in the future. The sun turned the lake into a flat eye, lashed with golden grass and whips of reeds. Morning sounds surrounded her. Insects flitted past on humming wings as the grass breathed in a light, warm wind.

She activated the final component to her chain reaction, a simple unbinding spell, far too small to undo Discord’s magic, but enough to force both alarms to blare inside their heads.

As soon as her spell was active and away, a constant drill that would not break and not break through its obstacle, she felt him stir. He was already awake, but not alert. In the back of her mind, the twin-Luna squirmed in discomfort, but her true body, her true spirit, were untouched. “Attaching both spells to myself means that Discord can only shut off the alarm if he can disconnect the two defensive spells, which would force him to face me directly.” The imaginary audience stomped applause, and she walked to the shore, dipping a hoof in its placid surface. The minor storm from the night before had passed, leaving only ghosts of gray clouds above to take the edge off the summer sun. The weather had not been planned—in the wastelands, it never was, though few ponies knew that.

By noon, Discord was underway, marching his troops relentlessly north, to cut through the swamps. It was another five days of travel until he would reach their stifling, overgrown edge, and he would need to create a path, go around, or teleport them some thousand miles in a single shot. He could do it for himself, but she did not believe he could move the army that far.

She followed.

To the west, far from where Toad Pond tapered to a large delta, then a river from the swamps, there stood a single, tall finger of stone, Paragon Point. To most ponies, it was nothing more than an image for a postcard, something to hike a quarter of the way up and marvel at. To Princess Luna, it was the lithified remains of an ancient watchtower, constructed when griffon incursions were common, and to be defended against.

The sun was going down, and Discord was slowing. When she looked, he was just beginning to set up camp, throwing up tens of enchantments in faltering song. After clearing a spot in the grass for her library, later, she sped toward the stone monument. Magenta light bathed the desert in a roseate tone, and she rose to striate the clouds’ dark undersides. In the imperfect distance, she saw the suggestions of what was once Trottingham, an abandoned shell. In the past, she would see flocks of airships occluding the lapis sky beyond, where, on the opposite end of the country, one would hit a worn, desolate hoofpath between Appleloosa and Snowdrift. There, instead of black silhouettes of ships, she saw endless, blank sky.

Paragon Point sloped gently upwards for forty feet before becoming a vertical testament to the architectural abilities of the past’s pegasi. Unicorns, at that time, belonged to an aloof aristocracy, and were more likely found ordering the construction of such a tower, rather than assisting it. Time and weather had removed the friezes and busts that once ornamented its exterior, and all she could see were faint depressions where windows had filled and then petrified with dust and sand.

Cresting its top, she looked automatically to assess how many ponies were on watch that night, seeing only her own shadow standing behind. She trotted to the middle and turned a circle, letting Equestria expand around her. Splits sectioned the world into rough pieces, like individual gems in a mosaic. She and Celestia had surveyed damages, both remotely and up close, in the days after the disaster. Around Canterlot, the chasms had radiated extremely closely, turning the surrounding hundreds of square miles into something resembling shattered glass from a thousand feet up. Farther out, the splits thickened and lessened, until the wastes to the south were more like icebergs than splinters, and, while cities still suffered, there was more room for ponies to interact and create solutions.

“Beautiful view,” Discord said.

She turned lazily to face him, standing at the point’s edge in full battle regalia, the striking blue and green of ancient Equestrian Air Defense glinting like a living crystal in the sunset.

“Commander.”

“Not for you,” she said, and turned away from him. If he had wanted to harm her, he would have; she hadn’t been paying attention in her contemplation. “I’m surprised you remember, given your… condition at the time.”

“As Equestria’s premier warmonger, it’s my duty to study your military past.”

“Is that what you’re calling yourself now?”

“I figured I’d taste the term on my forked tongue.” He spat, and a small patch of flowers sprung up from the stone. “Raise your moon, princess.”

She sat down and folded her wings against a breeze. “It’s not quite time.”

He grinned, almost harmlessly. “Okay.”

The wind died, and she sat with him, both of them quiet. When the light had dimmed and the first stars appeared, Princess Luna reached into the darkness outside the world, grabbed the tiny satellite that was their moon, and brought it up. She set it in motion with what felt like a gentle flick of magic: enough force to blow a city-sized crater out of the ground.

“You wound me, Luna.”

“You don’t act wounded.”

He paced a loose figure eight in the dust. “How many servitors did you have to use to get in my head?”

“Just the one.”

“In your null space, I assume.”

She didn’t answer.

“When will you realize how much better it is to simply be your own servitor?”

“I will not sacrifice my sanity for power, Discord.”

“And am I insane, Princess Luna?” Though he came no closer, his voice sighed in her ear. “We both know the answer, but I want to hear you say it.”

She continued to stare toward Trottingham. “You are not well.”

“And yet you wound me.”

“As you march on our capital city.”

“As I march on Equestria’s capital city.” She turned to see him grinning. “Dare you admit such conceit as to say they are equal?”

She studied him.

“Please, think about your answer.”

She sighed. “I will not. You are correct. The city is mine, but I do not stand for Equestria as a whole. I could never hope to.”

He strode to the edge of the tower. “It’s maddening, you know. The amount of suffering your poor, dumb copy must be enduring staggers me.”

“She doesn’t suffer. You know that.”

“Perhaps.” He spread his mismatched arms. “My arrival at your city will be a slaughter, Princess Luna. Of me, to be precise.”

“You think so?”

“I expect it. You harry me from behind while Celestia prepares the way. How could I hope to succeed?”

“I do not know.”

“I am but a single city-state, besieged on both sides, crumbling in the march toward destruction.”

She sneered. “You know, I thought you were charming in your villainy when we first met, Discord. You were creative, suave, and charismatic. Now you’re a pompous shell, hiding behind mind games.”

“And you used to fear death,” he said. “No games.” He folded his claw and paw behind his back as he paced. “You say I am unwell. Insane. What about you?”

She tilted her head to look down at him.

“Of course, both of you are doing fine now. What will happen in a millennium or two, when the tides of memory and experience finally begin to sweep over your heads? I’ll have shattered by then, of course. Will you sink under the burden of too much knowledge?”

Luna wet her lips. “I have already considered that fate.”

“Oh, good! Then there’s nothing to worry about.” He sashayed toward her, and she stood her ground until he knelt, bringing their faces inches apart. He looked into her eyes, his own unfocused and shallow, and then backed up a step, offering a claw. She shook it.

“You can get help.”

“That so?” He walked back to the edge.

“If you renounced your chaos magic, it would be possible to restore your mind and spirit. I see them for what they are, Discord. I see how broken you are.”

“Thank you, but I’ll pass. The magic and I are one.”

She watched him walk off the tower, across air, and then fade into the navy blue beyond. “Very well,” she eventually said.

Princess Luna woke atop Paragon Point, disoriented from a dream three thousand years in the making. She was chatting with Discord, sharing a chamber in his castle, a map of the world between them. With neither aggression nor duplicity, they talked and made plans: plans for trade, diplomacy, airship routes. No such meeting had ever taken place, though such a detail was trivial to her: the goddess for whom thoughts, imagination, memories, dreams, rhetorical scenarios, observations, and deduction blended with magic inside and outside her mind until they were inseparable pieces of each other, turning and transforming endlessly in the only phenomenon of its kind.

She and Celestia were precocious youths, younger than Twilight when she had moved to Ponyville, when they met him for the first time. They were not powerful, but crafty, and well-liked in their hometown. Discord had offered them an audience after hearing of their roles in the renovation of an eroded canal. At that time, unicorns using their magic for labor was unheard of, and their charity had finished a two-month project in a week.

Discord was different too. He was still mad—Luna thought he must have been touched with madness even before he began practicing chaos magic—but his madness was soft, easily guised under languorous cheer.

They traveled for two days in a carriage that he had sent himself, creaking and swaying north from the dark conifers on the southwest border, between a pair of small mountains, and through a smaller wood to his castle. The building left them speechless. On one side, it was a heavy, powerful stone monolith, steady and firm enough to withstand any disaster with thick, black walls and reinforced towers; on the other, it was a crystalline chandelier of buttresses, crenellations, and turrets that rose high from the rest of the building, its gentle curves and angles offset by serrated edges and cruciform points of shining glass, a magnificent insult to the mud and tree branch village twenty miles west. For Celestia and Luna, it was like something from another world. What they had seen their race accomplish was no comparison to the awe-inspiring castle.

They dined in his great hall on sumptuous breads and candied fruits that they had never seen, he at the head of his high, curving table and they at his sides, and answered his questions, delivered calmly and without threat. He asked about life in a town that had easy access to water, what had inspired them to help with the canal, and how the other ponies had reacted. He asked what they thought of their world, and what they thought of the castle. He asked what they thought of him.

They were happy to give him a frank impression of impoverished life, though they didn’t know that that was what it was. They told him of their house, and the earth pony servant who did their food preparation and water carrying, and did so without bitterness. Servitude was all she knew as well.

He told him nothing of his own life, except that it was similar to theirs, and then offered them a tour through the crystal gardens. It was a location that Celestia would often visit in her own dreams, centuries later. Under the flat surface of a sinister, ovoid balcony, they embarked down a glass path into a courtyard of delicate fireworks of pale blue and pink, forests of scalpels and perfect, clinking teeth growing from stalks fuzzy with microscopic needles. They had to avert their eyes where the sun shone over dips in the fortress walls, where the crystal gardens glared with almost as much intensity as the sun itself. A souvenir he had treated himself to in a visit to the changeling lands, he told them. A little grove he had selected from a jungle that was slowly succumbing to the magical march of organic crystallization, and which then visited its own magic on his home, spreading within months to transform much of the castle’s ramparts.

They left his castle that day thinking they had found a quirky potential ally in the unformed goal to better their world.

Luna took off from the former watchtower and followed the lake’s brilliant curvature back toward the empty grasslands of mid-eastern Equestria. Discord was already urging his contingency forward, and she could hear the frustration in his voice through her spell. Despite appearances, her drill was doing its job. She moved at a comfortable fifteen mile per hour glide, keeping the ground in sight but not near.

The first split she found since turning around at the castle was laced with the distinctive, vaporous afterimage of magic that signaled Discord’s presence. He had teleported his army across in a single burst of magic, and she touched down to look closer. They had crossed a mere four hours ago.

When Celestia and Luna arrived home two days later, their house was a blackened crater of brittle, sharpened coal, the word “traitors” painted in a crude, crimson dye on a massive, smooth stone in the middle of what had once been their flower garden. Their audience with Discord, the careless and distant despot of Equestria, had turned the town against them.

She flew to the other side of the chasm and dipped down, coming to rest on a narrow outcrop of stone, and looked down to the planet. She had not been to the surface, but her sister kept her informed of goings on. By far, the most disastrous result of the spell was the near draining of the northern ocean. For the minotaurs, to the south, the result was a sudden, cataclysmic coastline that had swept several miles inland before leveling off somewhere near the capital city, on the inside edge of the planet’s arctic circle. To the north, the changeling archipelago had gone from a chain of islands to a chain of mountains caught in a ship-destroying, industry-crushing riptide, until they stood, not in the bountiful equatorial ocean, but in a collection of massive lakes, divided by ridges that hadn’t been exposed in recorded history.

Celestia’s first task had been a harrowing one. The griffons, who shared Equestria’s western border, and with whom the country's truce was the most tenuous, had demanded explanation. She had gone first to New Brasston, the capital, to assuage accusations of an indirect attack, and then to the lofty, isolated Ridge of Gold, a mountain range deep in griffon territory where pony incursion was infrequent. There, she met with the griffon elites, a class of fifty or so aristocrats and tycoons, to explain the situation again. Equestria would handle its internal affairs, she had asserted, but cooperation from the bordering countries would be indispensable for overcoming the ocean drain.

Her next task, she realized after a week of agonizing back home, was to visit the dragons to the east. Luna had urged her to visit the changelings instead, for whom the disaster had been most ruinous, but Equestria’s position with the dragons, Celestia felt, was more important. They, neighboring the lesser nation of draconequuses to Equestria’s southeast, would be key in mending ties with the land from which Discord hailed, and which had, long ago, ceased to acknowledge him as anything more than a political embarrassment.

There were no clouds below, and Luna could see the faint suggestion of blue that was the new ocean. She knew that some ponies had attempted to find succor below, either in marathon flights that often ended in the pegasi plummeting, unconscious due to the shift in air pressure, or in airships that swiftly found nowhere to land. To her knowledge, only six groups had survived the journey down, none of them large.

She enjoyed being under the shelf of the world. Below, sometimes hundreds of feet, sometimes only tens, there was solitude and darkness, perfect for contemplation. The view from above, while demonically beautiful, was nothing compared to that from below, she thought. The infinite shadows, sectioned off by sword-like cataracts of sunlight and starlight, were like a great, black puzzle, and she found herself lost in its pieces that afternoon, as she frequently had before.

She tipped off the stone and flew along the ground’s bottom rim. The coupling of proximity to the intimate places of the world and dissociation from the planet put her machine of a mind at what was, for her, ease. It was something Celestia would be envious of.

Every day in Canterlot presented challenges. Keeping up with the cloud convoy, tracking Discord and his magic ship, and rebuilding the city’s infrastructure were just the beginnings. While Celestia often held day court for endless streams of ponies and their individual problems, the lesser politicians and acolytes were in charge of coordinating repairs to roads, sewer systems, phone lines, and landscapes. Luna, meanwhile, applied calm to ponies’ dreams when needed, and worked with her Datura to obviate worsening damage or stagnation outside the diarchy’s circle of immediate influence.

She had been told that the Elements were in Manehattan, having stopped there to help a friend of theirs put on a show. The Datura Information Handler, the pony in charge of all knowledge aggregation and dispensation for the country and small parts of the outside world, had informed her, and she had only stared at her globe for a minute, processing the information. The sheer shortsightedness was enough to make her sick, and almost write an angry letter on the spot. She thought better of it, but, by the time her gentler reminder was ready, Celestia had already sent her commendations and word of the newly found Element.

She stopped to rest in a dead tree by a lone wheat field. Some bold farmer had set up a single house and shack in the golden distance. She did not send out a spell to determine whether there was anyone within.

A grackle flapped into the tree, its black droplets of eyes surveying her. She offered no token of recognition, and, soon, it flew off. Its tiny mind was a fleck of foreign material to her own labyrinthine intellect.

The townsfolk chased them into the pine forests just south of their town, where, it was fabled, demons and monsters roamed freely. They moved inwards, as far as they could, heedless of the stories they had grown up with. A foolhardy, reactionary journey into cold isolation.

Deep in a forest that would eventually be clear-cut to construct the city of Roan, where she and Celestia would rule some seventy years later as burgeoning goddesses, they learned their craft. Celestia, mover of earth and feller of trees, who had riven the canal’s length with a trowel of sharp, heavy magic, learned to control the stones and the air, creating their first house from a hollowed-out boulder. Luna took to meditation in the boughs of a leaning pine, where she, more often than not, fell simply and restfully asleep. For a time, it looked as though she was destined to waste her intellect on reflection while her sister excelled.

When she began lucid dreaming, it was enough of a shock to reignite her passion for magic, dulled with a lack of clear development. After a couple months, lucid dreaming became a second wakefulness. When she started casting magic in her dreams, affecting, not only the dreamscape itself, but the way it changed to her moods and impulses, she began to learn about her mind. Five months into their exile, she would sleep for entire days, plunging into the dark and delightful facets of her unconscious mind, unraveling mysteries and creating puzzles to tease her when awake.

When she discovered the propensity of these puzzles to change properties, dependent on the state of her consciousness, she knew she had found something immense. If she could affect a change in herself and her own mind simply by dreaming, she could find ways to do the same to the outside world, she reasoned.

The tree was not quite large enough to hold her comfortably, and she struggled out, falling to the ground in a graceless pile that made her giggle. She pushed herself up with her wings and trudged through the field toward the house, no specific intention in mind. Discord rushed ahead, exhausting his army, but she was in no hurry to catch up. The defensive spells he had erected rendered it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for her to approach him when he was awake, and he would lose speed at the swamp’s edge besides.

She paused by a scarecrow. Its splayed spindles of legs sunk into the ground like a quartet of rigid, spinal weapons, supporting a hollow imitation of a pony’s skeleton, its head hanging crazily on a helix of black twine. She nodded appreciatively at the tiny moon carving in the back of its jaw.

The door creaked open, and a tan pony stepped out, her flaxen mane obscuring her face in a mottled, coarse curtain. A hoe dragged behind her in a sunny halo of magic.

“Uhhhh…”

Princess Luna smiled. “Hello.”

“You’re Princess Luna.”

“I am.” She studied the pony, who looked up into the sun for a moment, allowing her hair to fall back and reveal a slack, weak expression. Luna turned away quickly to hide her horn’s glow as she glanced into the pony’s mind.

“This is the meadow.”

Luna looked around obligingly. In the instant of magical probing, she had seen the fuzzy, black pit of mental retardation. “And a very good meadow it is.”

“My brother is a farmer.”

She nodded. “That’s very nice.”

The tan pony nodded rapidly, her head dipping lower each time, and turned back to the door. “Come on in, come on in.”

Luna hesitated. Her meeting with Discord the night before had put her in the mood to think, to reflect, not to commune with citizens. The pony’s drooping, pathetic gait impelled her inwards.

The first thing she noticed about the house was the smell. Moldering vegetation mixed with the heady smell of smoke and herbs, tinged with mildew, and her nose wrinkled. Sunlight came through dirty windows to land on an uncovered foundation, and spider webs filled the corners. A slight stallion with dull eyes reclined on a threadbare cushion under an uneven table. She reached out to him as well, and was relieved to find his mental faculties undamaged.

“It’s Princess Luna,” the mare said.

The stallion crawled out from under the table and offered a hoof, then retracted it and bowed instead.

“Rise,” Luna said. “I’m not here for official business.”

“She was in the meadow,” the mare said.

The stallion sat down. “What brings you here, your highness?” Luna looked at the mare, who looked back with her blank, mane-covered face, and he smiled. “Let’s go outside.”

Heat pulsed on her face and chest outside the small house, but the stallion didn’t seem to mind, traipsing quickly through the field to a small well hidden in a skirt of dry grass.

“I’m sorry about my sister, your highness. She’s not the most intelligent pony.”

“She has brain damage.”

“Yes, yes she does.” He nodded feebly. “So…”

“I am tracking Discord. He passed this way around four hours ago.”

He frowned, and his voice was softened with concern. “Princess, are you sure it was him? He was encased in stone a long time ago.”

She studied him closely. He was a hoof-to-mouth farmer in the wastes of Equestria, completely cut off from other ponies. Things like the palace, the castle, and cities like Manehattan were probably foreign to him, she realized. She sighed, not wanting to explain the country’s state of affairs yet again. “It resembled him. However, when I saw your house, I thought I’d take a closer look. Bold of you to have a dwelling all the way out here.”

“Is it? With all due respect, your highness, I grew up here. It doesn’t feel particularly bold.”

“Your family, then,” she conceded with a cordial smile. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Apple Jam.” She eyed his flank, and he laughed. “Apple Jam the wheat farmer, yes, I know.”

“Are you from the Apple family?”

“Distantly.”

“I knew they were all over the place, but I didn’t know they ever went this far outside civilization. Or that there were unicorns in the family.”

“Oh, her. I don’t know. Maybe she’s an accident.” He shrugged and looked at her. For a second, he held her gaze, but then broke into a scowl. “Don’t ask her, either, unless you want a never-ending loop of repetitive drivel. We’ve always been in the meadow as far as she’s concerned.”

“What happened to her?”

“Born that way.” He yanked a stalk of wheat out of the ground and chewed on it. “At least she’s not dangerous.”

“That’s good. Unicorns can be tricky sometimes.”

“Yeah. Er, yes, your highness.”

“You don’t need to be formal, Apple Jam.”

He grunted.

“So what do you do here?”

“Harvest wheat, get water from the well, and that’s it. She does a lot of the heavy lifting. Gets her out of the house for a while.”

“Sounds… interesting.”

He laughed. “Thanks, Princess, but you can do without the pretense.” He hopped up to sit on the well’s edge, and his voice sobered severely. “This is Tartarus. Worse than Tartarus—in Tartarus, I know what I did to earn it. Here, I’m just stuck with my idiot sister, turning land that I hate for food I don’t want to eat.” He looked into the depths of the well, his face a rictus of disgust and confusion. “I don’t even know what I’m missing. There’s some great world out there, but I have to stay with that waste back there and take care of us. Nearest town’s more than a thousand miles away.”

“There’s no need to blame your sister, though,” Luna said.

“No, that would be a waste of time,” he murmured. “I know that.” He climbed off. “I better get back before she drowns herself in the water jug.”

Luna followed closely behind, studying his motion. Where his sister was well muscled, Apple Jam had little definition, and he moved with a comfortable motion that did not fit his occupation.

When they got back to the house, his sister was lying on the cushion under the table, but sprung up at the sound of the door opening. She looked around wildly for a second, trying to see between locks of hair, before realizing who had entered. Luna paid her little mind, but, when she cringed away at her brother’s approach, the princess paused.

“Go plow, Dirt,” he grumbled, and she scurried past, throwing one worried look up at Luna. “I have a little water, if you want it.”

“No, thank you. What’s wrong with your sister?”

“She’s afraid of everything. Poor thing needs a couple seconds to recognize anyone familiar.”

Luna frowned. “I see. Well, Mr. Jam, I appreciate your hospitality. Good luck.”

“Oh, you’re leaving already?”

“Yes.” She left swiftly and without looking back at him, and walked over to his sister, pulling a plow with little effort. She looked up slowly as Luna stopped before her.

“You’re Princess Luna.”

“I am.” She watched as the mare went back to work. Her brother’s feelings were obvious, and the mare’s reaction to his arrival put Luna on edge. However, there were no signs of anything worse than condescension and exhausted pity, and her memories, so far as Luna could see in a couple seconds, were empty of abuse. Though the fear in his sister’s eyes was significant, she couldn’t be sure enough to act.

“I like the meadow.”

Luna nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Dirt.”

“That’s not a very nice name.”

“I’m called Dirt because that’s where I belong.”

“Who told you that?”

“Applejam.” She froze, and the plow handle dropped to the ground. “Oh! Oh no!” She looked around again.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not supposed to call him that.”

“Why?”

She waited several moments before responding. “It’s bad.”

Her frown returned. “Why is it bad?”

“It’s against the rules.”

“It’s okay. He’s not here now.”

“But it’s bad,” she said. She remained in her pensive position for a minute before returning to her work. Luna watched.

She had touched ponies’ minds before. Those with brain damage or psychological disorders, she would, very occasionally, cure. It was an ability she took as seriously as her moon-raising duty, for a change as basic and profound as a healed mind altered the trajectory of one’s life forever, and could not be taken back. Even to return the mind to its original state after a mistake, the pony had to live with the memory, or the lack thereof; it had destroyed as many lives as it had restored in her long existence.

Luna took off with a powerful, single flap of her huge wings. She only looked back when the first smears of cloud partially covered her view, and the house was a clod of dark brown in the golden field.

She could have cured Dirt’s condition. She could have reached inside the mare’s brain and reconnected whatever was broken, filled in whatever was missing—but to no good. What Luna could not do with the time she had was relocate them, take them away from the isolated wasteland that had been their birthright. As uncomfortable as the decision was, she knew that intelligence would only reveal suffering to the mare: she was stuck in a world of stagnation and filial contempt, and a healed mind would only uncover that.

It was a decision she knew she would make as she walked back with her brother, where it had also crossed her mind to try to remove his negative emotions. She dismissed the thought immediately. The equine mind, for all its complexity, was like an echo chamber, and any change from outside could be the catalyst to anything else; no matter how strong her own knowledge of psychology, it was not something she could safely predict. He could potentially go mad from the unsolicited, unexpected alteration—she had seen it before.

The first time she had tried to heal someone’s mind, she had removed a debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder from a young mare. Instead of a life of comfort and stillness that the mare had supplicated her for, she got a ceaseless sense that something was missing that followed her to a miserable grave twenty years later.

When a contingency of bandits and raiders came through the forest, they did not expect to find Celestia and Luna, nor did they expect such incredible retribution from two young mares when they decided to attack. Celestia had been the star, lighting backpacks on fire and launching ponies into the air with small cyclones of dirt and leaves, while Luna stayed back to erode at their perception, dulling every sense and turning reflexes into stretched, faltering impulses.

It was at that time, a year and a half after they had been chased from their home, that they began to think about their futures. In exile, their powers had grown beyond anything they had seen, excepting Discord’s. The question they faced was monumental and simple: what next? They could not hide away in the forest forever, but after so long a hermitage, returning to society was intimidating.

They decided, after a month of excuses and false starts, to destroy their house and head north. They did so, not thinking, in the middle of the afternoon, and arrived at what was once their home in the middle of a cold, sunless morning. The remnants of their house had been cleared away, and they fell asleep in a small knot at the bottom of an abandoned, dry canal outlet.

They woke up with a slip of parchment draped across Celestia’s muzzle. “The banished ones return stronger than ever. You have my full attention. Discord.”

She put more strength into her wings before stopping for a moment atop a tiny cloud, scarcely large enough for her to hold on to. She hugged it and watched the landscape unfold, her mind stuck between self-doubt and anger. Perhaps it was nothing, she told herself, but the thought did not ring true. Whatever was happening in the lonesome house, she was sure the mare was not happy. She buried her face in the cloud, its soft coolness clearing her head only a little.

“Discord,” she mumbled, pushing off.

She pursued him all night, pausing only to raise the moon and have a quick dinner inside her mobile library. By the time Celestia had taken over the sky, she was only one hour behind Discord. The land was again turning verdant and alive, endless seas of dried grass surrendering to lush tracts of vegetation. She traveled along another rift, splitting a plain of grass into two green clamshells, dotted with flowers and larger patches of trees.

A quick check of her remote viewing spell showed Discord standing abreast a wide valley: Southern Smile, so named for its long, gentle curve and waterfall dimples on both ends. His army milled about uncertainly behind, some at the edges craning their necks to search for a bridge. Luna knew there would be none; both bridges across the Smile had collapsed in the disaster, and no one had bothered to replace them.

“We’re going down, ladies and gentleponies!” he crowed, his voice a tiny chirp in her ear. She heard the crescendo of disappointment as a minuscule sigh, like wind through the grass below.

She landed. Only a day before, the ground had been hot and rough, and she had had to endure frequent pokes from dried grass on her hooves and pasterns. Her silver horseshoes were tarnished and scratched, and she briefly imagined returning home. “The first thing I’m doing is hitting the spa,” she thought.

“No.” She climbed over a large stone. “The first thing I’m doing is helping sister set up defenses.” She sighed. The sky was clear, and the day promised to be warm and strenuous, as usual. She would pursue Discord until he reached the bottom of the valley, and then strike, though she knew not how.

When the ground started sloping down, she stopped to gather her wits. Summoning the building behind her, she went inside and pulled a book at random. Discord had reached the bottom, his army covering the south slopes like a network of scrap caught on uneven terrain. Armor and weapons reflected all along the ground, and no one was still.

She leafed through the book casually, stopping on a chapter about the formation of the first trans-Equestrian road. Paths and roads had been common even in Discord’s chaotic reign, but they were not standardized, or handled by a competent governmental body, until six hundred years after his deposition. By that time, many towns had established themselves, and the Everfree Forest had started growing, making roadways all the harder to map out.

She stopped on a page concerning the difficulty in keeping road surfaces level, an idea suddenly forming. With a grin, she dropped the book and flew out of her library, again simply passing through the wall and out into the coming dusk. She stopped at the valley’s edge and looked down.

Golden sunlight pierced low, long streaks of cloud over the other side, filling the massive, flowering valley like tea in a tremendous, earthen cup. A silver band of water marked its lowest point, terminating a few miles to the east, at a split. Daisies and daffodils broke through the all-covering grass on the slopes, gems scattered in the sea, until the halfway point, where grass became bushes, and bushes became trees. The only path down was the trampled wake Discord’s ponies had left.

She climbed onto a fallen tree and used a thick, broken branch as a point to jump off, letting her wings carry her down into the valley quickly and quietly. She had no desire for stealth. She could feel Discord’s enchantments filling the valley like a pollutant, could determine every single one, and was ready for them. A hundred counterspells worked their way through her mind, shifting in and out of each other, more complex and fast than any mortal pony could handle.

The cry of alarm first went up when she was halfway over the army. She was nothing but a dark blue shape hurtling downwards, too high to reach, too fast to make out in detail. Her eyes, though, were on Discord, a tall point down by the static river.

Before anything could happen, she released her counterspells to let them fly out all around her.

His magic was persistent and strong, hers insidious. The air around her seemed to boil away with activity as spell met spell, some dispersing, some hardening into pointed grains of intention, some expanding into membranes that moved beyond the valley. Trailing lines of sparkles climbed like steam through small clouds of uncontained electricity. Lights flickered, and her mind felt besieged. Ideas not her own winked in and out of her conscious and unconscious mind, and her ears rushed with the power and violence she had introduced into the air. Behind, an anti-time dilation spell swelled and twisted, and, for a moment, she could see herself tumbling down into the river as the magic flooded past and through her.

Then, Discord moved. His standing form whirled and stretched, and his face was in her own, big and imposing. Her reaction was immediate, as was his: her body shifted and emptied, to pass around him, and then a crushing grip snapped down onto her heart. The world spiraled away, replaced with a firm crack of pain as a tree slammed into her face. Before she could orient herself, her ears were pressed in with soft static, and her skin sizzled rapidly.

Her chest ached, and her heart rate jumped slightly as she activated an impulsive shield spell, tied to a spell to dispel enchantments, at the same time activating her remote viewing spell. She could see herself lying in a weeded arroyo, hemmed in by soldiers pressing up on her shield, eyes glassy and limbs crumpled. Discord was streaking through the air toward her, smiling.

With a flap of flying debris, she teleported upwards. Her first instinct was to escape the valley, to get away and reconstitute herself, to do exactly what Discord should have expected. She could feel her head and wings lurching away with the sudden velocity and air resistance, and her body tumbled like a cork through the air.

She wasn’t worried. Though he had anticipated her defensive maneuver and overwhelmed her senses, her mind was still sharp. She looked below at the churning mass of displaced ponies, Discord beneath, waiting for her landing with a devilish grin.

Her clockwork of magic and thoughts spun quickly, creating and banishing spells and ideas until one satisfied her. Several plans had worked their way to the surface in her uncontrolled descent, but the one she went with took the least amount of effort. She summoned her library.

As soon as it was out, it sunk beneath her, more streamlined than the winged, plummeting puppet of a body that her own magic had reduced her to. Startled voices cried out, and were silenced with a thunderous explosion of wood and stone. Windows burst outwards, avalanches of books shuddered within, and, for a moment, the library stayed where it had landed, Luna splaying awkwardly on its roof two stories above the valley slopes. Then, it slid. A stone gave, a tree branch creaked, and the structure began a slower dive toward the river, tearing bushes and soldiers alike, while masonry and glass shattered on the ruined path. Somewhere, Discord was cackling.

The building stopped its grind thirty feet below, and before she could reorient her body, still using her remote viewing spell, a charge of energy hit the back of the building, and she was flying again. Her wings went out, but were uncoordinated, and her body crashed into a large bush.

“Let’s do something about this pesky second sight, shall we?” Discord loped over the rubble with a lopsided smile, his head twisting in place like a knob of loose flesh. The sky went dark, and the valley faded, and he laughed again.

For an instant, she was worried, but her body cast a light spell of its own accord. One chain reaction, set in motion by the initial surprise and waiting for the correct set of sensory inputs, had activated. The valley did not illume.

“It’s in your head, dear princess!” he cried, his voice cutting through the fluffy static in her ears. She moved again, loose and weak in the darkness.

Then, another idea came, one she did not often entertain, but had prepared for nonetheless. She could still feel her null space, and quickly located the spell within that would give her an immediate and complete advantage.

“Now now, Luna, we can’t—”

She was too fast. His words were cut off in the resultant implosion, and the most impossible pain scraped her brain, like ice through her skull, thick and raw, brutally dull and powerful.

Then, she was free. The imposing magic was gone, and her senses, first acute, then smothered, exploded into an intricate and detailed awareness that was her version of death. The body’s head had been crushed, sucked in on itself, and her spirit, and the magic tied to it, were released, untouchable from the other side.

Discord stood, shocked at the suddenly headless princess held aloft in his talon, and then realization came, and his smile vanished. With a growl, he hurled her inert body into the river, stomping and waving his arms.

“No one move!” he shouted, his voice amplifying across the entire valley. “Not one inch! She’s among us!”

Her entire arsenal of spells at her disposal, an invisible cloud of power that filled the space, she refocused her original spell, coupling it with a pair of others. The first was a simple message, directly to Discord’s tensed ear, and spoken in dripping self-satisfaction: “You’re right. I used to fear death. Do you still?”

The second was a simple application of force, cutting up the ground at the valley’s top and letting it slither downwards, picking up speed and power.

The third was not simple. Spreading what felt like her own dark wings, she let her magic cover the army, blanketing them from any interventional spells from their commander and letting her own intentions dig into their minds. Perceptual alteration was her best and most nuanced area of sorcery, and the only class of magic that her sister could barely touch.

The army dispersed to the sound of Discord’s shrieks for order, and in all directions. Rock and earth growled above while ponies scattered, falling over each other, their own hooves, vegetation. Discord wouldn’t realize it until he had collected them all and restored calm, which would take the rest of the day, but they were effectively trapped in the valley. The spell she cast was a wide-area lateral-vertical space inversion spell; the ponies would travel along the valley, thinking they were climbing out.

She did not stay for the carnage. In a single moment, she was out of the valley and covering a plain, her magical presence huge and unformed, invisible mist. The avalanche was audible from her distance, though she did not hear, and the sun was nearly down, though she did not see. Sparing no thought for the act, she sent an extension of herself into space to set the moon on its way. As easy as it was in a corporeal form, it was effortless when she was uncoupled from her flesh. She could have swung the moon out of the planet’s gravitational range, had she wanted, or reeled it in for a cataclysmic embrace to pale the one wrought on their country only three months prior.

Death was not difficult or foreign for her, but it was also not the same death that mortals experienced. The separation of the spirit from the body was disorienting and weakening, and left the spirit always in a state of helpless uncertainty. Senses and awareness faded, sometimes so severely that the dead pony did not know it was dead when they entered the spiritual plane.

For Luna, who had had millennia of practice, death was like a second skin. Her magic unhampered, she used simple and complicated spells both to keep her consciousness constantly oriented and bound to itself, so she would not fly apart in a planet-covering skein of magic, stretched too thin to do anything. Her awareness was a sheet of such sensory magic, feeding her information of all sorts from across anywhere between one or two square miles to two or three hundred, typically. In an instant, she had access to temperature, topography, elevation, and the presence of life, along with other common materials: water, air, stone, metal, and the like. She had a constant read on the flow of time, and the presence of magic.

However, no matter how comfortable she was, one thing that she could not overcome in death was the need for an anchor in the tangible. With no body, a spirit, no matter how strong, would eventually fade. For most mortals, the threshold on first death was a couple days, and would expand with each subsequent experience. For her, it was centuries.

Princess Luna woke up to the sound of birds. She had no eyes, but she had a body, and she had magic. Using a quick spell to check the ecliptic, she determined that only two and a half days had passed since her death.

Her spirit was in possession of a large cypress tree. She could feel her magic surrounding it in a haze, and took a moment to contemplate her next move. For the dead, the passing of time was vastly different, and her momentary distraction in the battle had left her addled enough to not pay attention to her own sensory magic, alerting her at the passing of each day. Her sister would be worried; she would have had to raise the moon twice herself.

A dozen birds communed in her boughs, and she flicked a spell up at them, tying herself into their minds to use their eyes and ears. She was on the edge of the swamps southeast of the Everfree Forest, and the last obstacle that separated Discord from Canterlot. Around her, seen through twenty-four eyes, was peace and stillness and trickling water. The river that was supposed to eventually feed Toad Pond reflected pale sunlight half a mile before her.

“Okay, let’s move.” She selected a large half sphere of ground beneath her nest of standing roots and gently separated it from its cradle. Water rushed in to fill the space, and she floated away, her earth and water held in a filthy, algal bubble. The birds did not stir; she had made them hers.

She let herself float over the treetops and up into the clouds. The birds’ eyes were useless at her altitude, so she used magic to survey the landscape. The Southern Smile was quiet. No soldiers struggled in its depths, though many lay dead under the rubble she had sent their way. Her library was still there, and she dipped to return, then stopped. “I’ll just assign some Datura to recover it.”

She could not feel Discord nearby, but she could feel her own drill alarm still screeching in the mind of her servitor. Wherever he was, he was still suffering, and the thought made her want to smile, a tense and uncomfortable feeling in her tree body.

She floated back toward the swamp and lowered herself until she was a mere fifty feet over the treetops, and there she felt him, fourteen miles in. Masking herself and her supporting bulb of water with a curtain of invisibility, she silently drifted through the air.