Weak with hunger, tired, and dehydrated from too many tears shed, Twilight struggled to draw her sigil. It was a miniature design between the lines of their containment sigil, and its form was not certain in her mind.

Octavia’s suggestion had been to try to summon Vanilla Cream and ask for his help. At first, the feat seemed unreasonable, but as time pressed harder and harder on their minds, Twilight found herself consumed by the idea. She knew the basic design to summon an object, and knew the way to vary it, theoretically, to summon a living thing. Her problem was translating it into a shape that would get the attention of a being not of the Gaia, and, from there, condensing it into only a few square feet of space.

She completed a spacious, intricate center before stopping to frown down at the beginnings of the sigil’s middle circle, what was known as the sigil’s mezzanine. There were to be two in her sigil, with only a half-inch of space between, and the thought of so little room froze her creative process.

“All right, Twi?” Rainbow asked.

“Fine.” She knew her terse tone could easily frustrate Rainbow, and the idea of it was secretively attractive. Since their first hours aboard, she had not forgotten Rainbow’s sarcasm, and had indulged herself countless times with elaborate fantasies of telling her off.

She put her brush back to the floor and began the outer rim, telling herself she would return to the middle later, and it was after twenty minutes that she was staring at the empty rings again. She could hear her friends mumbling outside her range of focus, but, as was always the case for her, her concentration rendered their voices down to soft white noise.

Two ideas vied in her taxed brain, ways to complete the spell and draw Vanilla from wherever he was, but she had not the education in Tartarus magic to choose with confidence. Worse still, she had to assume that Thunderhead would notice a spell of the size she was attempting; she had to assume that she had only one chance.

“He might not show up no matter what she does,” Rainbow said.

“Not so loud,” Octavia said.

Twilight sighed through her nose and resolutely began a design, Rainbow’s pessimism enough to bury her uncertainty. As she rounded her sigil, thoughts of magical theory and design from all the way back to her education in Canterlot filled her mind. In a sigil, the mezzanine was the center’s predicate, the magic that determined the conditions by which the middle’s ultimate objective was achieved. For summoning Vanilla, she was unsure of the specific line work to bridge the gap between her world and his. She could summon him, or she could accidentally fill their prison with a stolen patch of high-altitude cloud. She simply didn’t know enough.

She had taken a single class on sigils, and in it she learned the basics on the geometry of magic, and saw how complicated it could become. A line that curved when it should be straight, or radial symmetry instead of bilateral, could make the difference between a sigil that purified the air and one that set the room on fire, or between a sigil that worked and one that fizzled and faded away.

She paused again, considering her progress, before stippling a trio of dots within a small floret of curves. When she was finished, she took a single step away. Her sigil filled only a couple square feet, and she lowered her horn to it to perform the simple activation spell. The sigil coruscated to life, pulsed once, and was gone, just as it was meant to.

“Is that it?” Rarity asked.

“Yes.” Twilight wanted to say that she hoped it would work, but didn’t.

“I don’t see him,” Rainbow said, not looking around.

Fluttershy raised her ears and surveyed the room.

“What?”

“I was expecting him to respond to that. For, um, for dramatic effect.” She looked around again, and Rainbow did as well. “Or that.”

“Hey!” Rarity started, and they all looked.

Vanilla sat just outside the rim, looking in coolly. “Don’t worry, I was only there a couple seconds before you saw me.” He smiled politely. “That was an impressive spell, Twilight. Did you do that from memory?”

“Not exactly; I had to improvise most of it. Was it okay?”

“It was all right. If you were trying to summon me directly, you failed, but it got my attention. Where did you learn to draw like that?”

“Can we get on with it? Thunderhead could be on her way right now,” Applejack said.

“She isn’t. I have occluded myself from her.” He gestured to Twilight. “Please, continue.”

“It’s actually a combination of different spells I know. One was a basic summoning sigil, but the other was for invoking magical beings. I just thought I’d combine the two and add a more… Tartarus-y design to it.”

“You truly have an amazing mind,” he said. “But I suspect you all want to do more than talk about the magic that brought me here.”

“Uh, yeah,” Rainbow said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re kind of stuck here.”

“No, don’t mind me. I can leave if you don’t want me.”

“Wait, please!” Rarity cried, and shot a bitter look at Rainbow. “Please, we’ve been stuck here for… I’ve lost count.”

“You want my help.”

“We need your help.”

He appraised the sigil, and the room’s interior.

“Please say you can do it,” Twilight said. “Please.”

“I am afraid that it would violate my binding far too much.”

“You move us all the time,” Applejack said. “Just do it again. Yank us out and put us in the wilderness.”

“He wants you to be here, and, as much as I would like to, I am in no position to disobey.”

“So that’s it? Twilight summoned you here for you to prance around and let us rot away in this stupid ship?” Rainbow said.

“Is it possible for you to enable us to help ourselves?” Octavia asked.

“Yeah! Give us another upgrade or something.”

Vanilla thought. “An intriguing idea, but who would I select for such a thing?”

“Twilight,” Applejack said. “She’s the magical one.”

“Wait,” Twilight said. “I don’t know.”

“Let me do it instead,” Octavia said. “I have not stopped wanting to fight this, and I do better under pressure. Sorry, Twilight.”

“A charitable suggestion,” Vanilla said.

“What will you do?” Rarity asked.

He entered the sigil and walked to Octavia, who looked at him with mild inquisitiveness. “Thunderhead, as you call her, is a magical being. A spell, given form. Her true substance is a collection of interconnected sigils on the floor of one of Discord’s rooms, but I cannot allow you to erase them.” He paused, inspecting Octavia. “Instead, Octavia, I shall allow you to undo the spell from this side.”

“That sounds simple enough,” Fluttershy said.

“You must undergo a transformation, though. Thunderhead is a self-regulating enchantment, and it would take a mage of high caliber to take her apart. You probably could, Twilight, but not in this position.”

“Then give her the magic,” Applejack said. “The way you were talkin’, it sounded like she needed to do more’n cast a spell.”

“She already has the ability, I’m sure,” Vanilla said, walking around Octavia. “What she lacks is the time to study, the resources, and, most of all, the space to draw her own counter-sigils. The undertaking would be too significant for her confinement. Now, Octavia, you’ll want to close your eyes for this.”

“That’s always an encouraging sign,” Rainbow muttered.

“You will see her disappear, but she will remain here the whole time. I’m going to turn her into a cloud of magic, very similar to Thunderhead.”

“Whoa, hold on,” Applejack said. “Ain’t that like killin’ her?”

Vanilla held her in his blue gaze for just a moment. “No. It is not.” He turned back to Octavia. “Ready?”

“Do it before I think better of this,” Octavia said, eyes already shut.

Vanilla smiled in benediction and, horn unlit, cast his spell. The weight of the floor on her hooves vanished as her friends cried out, and her vision returned right after, the resistance of her eyelids forgotten, the feeling of her body in its space gone.

“She’s fine, she’s fine,” Vanilla said. “I told you she would be invisible to you.”

Octavia found herself amidst a panoply of iridescent color, giant ribbons of pale violet, lurid scarlet, and glowing amber, twisting and curling in long, loping spirals like strands of submerged rope. Each gossamer swath was faded and fuzzy at the edges, translucent all the way through, and through her incorporeal eyes she saw distant darkness all around, a penumbral shroud of colors layered on colors. Her friends were still discernable in the miasma, silhouettes of themselves, and one crowned with an oblate, olive green bauble.

“What you are seeing, Octavia, is magic. That’s Twilight’s pocket dimension on her head there.”

She turned a slow circle, her vision rotating free of a body. She wanted to speak, but could not.

“It’s okay. I can understand you,” Vanilla said.

“Is this how you see the world?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She watched the room, her friends’ nervous movements. “Why can I not see you?”

“I am here, don’t worry. I’m difficult to see.”

She followed a band of dark yellow light upwards, but stopped when she saw her friends falling away.

“You’re free to move in any direction you choose, and wield any magic within your power. There is no need for familiarity here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You need not have learned a spell to cast it in this form. If you have the power within, it is yours.”

She looked around again, already lost in the network of magic that was Thunderhead’s ghost ship. Where she looked closer, she went, and the sigil that had imprisoned her for so long was a small, flat crystal of color in an unfolding prism, left behind without effort.

“I’ll be watching.”

Above and beyond, a vast canopy of semi-solid light twisted away into the ghost ship’s dark cocoon, and she flowed over a rail of light blue. With Vanilla’s voice gone, she was aware of something more. Slipping through the undercurrent of thoughts, hardly conscious, but within her grasp should she pursue it, an endless stream of numbers and equations, complex beyond her reckoning, flowed through her like pine needles in a river, sprung from every curve, every vertex, every change in the static river of deliquescent light. She stopped between a pair of golden cartwheels, edges frosted with delicate strands of pink and purple.

Positioned atop the wheels, she scanned them briefly to inherently recognize their function. The spell that afforded Thunderhead access to a microcosm of gravity defiance—a spell to turn the ship upside-down without harm.

“I have to start somewhere.”

She prepared to cast a spell of her own, but stopped. “How, though?”

Expecting Vanilla’s response, she froze, confused, as the wheels partially unraveled around her. Fronds of magic twinkled and faded away like living steam as gilt spokes swung around glimmering irises, unhinging and then slowly rebounding back to their places.

Octavia then felt another presence. Moving her perspective, remembering after a second to keep her mind on her position, she looked into the dark envelope of magic. A heraldic point of flame, encased in a tight jacket of hot maroon streamers, moved through the curtains of magic, exploding her disembodied mind with hundreds of calculations, both from the approaching spell itself and the slight displacement of its presence among its own magic. Ripples of visible math flowed and flowered across her artificial sense of sight.

Thunderhead was upon her before she could conceive a reaction.

Her sight rotated as she plummeted through a reforming wheel, and the math in her head turned to static. She was aware of the power of the magic washing over her, intense and indescribable; there was no perspective of the greater world, but her own intentions were clear inside her own dewdrop of energy. Stopping atop a calliope of half-unfurled wings, green as the sigil that brought them there, she swiveled to direct her attention to Thunderhead. As she thought of her action, so it was, and the spell spun and separated like a falling flower. From one side, a curl of royal blue dove obliquely over her, and, for a moment, the magical world gave way to the more familiar view of her friends in the sigil before vitrifying again.

“I made you more powerful than that,” Vanilla whispered.

She traveled along the curve, following it down across the dark purple rib of a barrel of magic, the spell to allow the ship its near instant travel. Thunderhead lagged behind, and she moved away from the barrel, focusing in on the complex viscera of magic behind its swirling skin. With the same intention as when she started uncoupling the cartwheels, she added her own magical thoughts to the mix. Her mind boiling with calculations, it was a simple matter of tweaking the formula—the removal of a coefficient, the shifting of a parameter, was all she required, and it was so easy that she saw the effects before she fully understood what she was doing.

Thunderhead swayed into the purple cylinder and released a cobweb of yellow tendrils, a pincushion of sharp magic caught in a gobbet of bruised amber. Octavia shifted back, thinking without understanding, and removed the barrel’s containing border.

The math grew in an instant, and Vanilla laughed in the back of her mind. All around her, darkness clouded and churned, and she could feel flakes of ambient magic returning from distances so immense as to ruin the scale of her empirical calculations. Numbers cascaded into exponents of themselves, ones became hundreds of thousands, and decimals stretched to a hundred places, and every bit of it, fast as thought, covered her. She could see it. For an instant, she followed an equation, but dismissed the thought as Thunderhead moved again—leaving her with the isolated knowledge that they were, for one two-hundredth of a second, flying over the south pole, back on the planet. Releasing pieces of herself, Thunderhead fused her colorful barbs to the barrel’s interior before driving the main fuselage of her enchantment after Octavia.

She turned and flung herself away, feeling the magic behind her adjust to admit Thunderhead’s pursuit. The familiar shapes disappeared as she flew past entire cities of magic. Green arrays of orientation magic formed offset walls to checkered, broken crowns of force field and invisibility enchantments while parabolic, orange bands of remote viewing magic hung like decadent earrings. Thunderhead was a star of energy behind her, punching through magical spaces like a meteorite, her endlessly complicated ripples holding Octavia’s attention more than her destination, which was, simply, away.

She was not aware of the passage of time, but when, suddenly, magic gave way to the cavernous vault of the open-atmosphere planet, she stopped as if perched on a cliff—only for a second. Incorporeal weight forced her farther, and the cavern pivoted and opened wider as she spun to take in a panorama of glittering specks, spells so powerful and so distant that she could not find them in the endless string of formulas running through her. The ground below them was a black mantle, the sun a pale silver disc, and Thunderhead a heavy, bristling engine of faceless, soundless aggression.

Her sensations again wavered, and she was resting on the ship floor, her friends looking around with worry. For a second, it came into sharper focus.

“No. That is not what you were made for,” Vanilla said sternly. The magical world returned.

Octavia hung over the wide, coal earth to watch the retreating ruby pillar, a bauble angled away from the gleaming ark of light, its shapes still annealing from their exit. She followed Thunderhead, gliding over the vague countryside until the tangled geometry of the ghost ship filled her vision, the edges of its magic efflorescing against the lifeless sun.

Undaunted, she scanned the ground, the same magical awareness allowing her a sense of location from every faint rumple and crevasse in the distant, dark surface. They were five miles outside of Snowdrift, suspended uselessly over a wide, forested plateau. The town itself glittered below like a plate of refractory crystals, a single vein of white magic bisecting the ovoid village.

She reached the ship, but did not notice Thunderhead waiting within the confines of a temperature regulation spell until her vision thawed into the same view of her friends in the sigil.

“Pay attention, Octavia. This is now three times you would have died if this were in your world.” She fell back away from her body and into Thunderhead’s magical tide, pulling at the edges of her consciousness, trying to separate her senses from her cognizance. With a pull of her own, enough to send another river of calculations through her, she distanced herself from Thunderhead. She was still inside the larger spell, and Octavia, seeing her chance, reached inside to remove a piece. The flowering enchantment immediately folded in on itself, encasing Thunderhead briefly. Her tendrils switched out again, but Octavia, ready for the reaction, held the math firmly in her mind; every change Thunderhead exerted, she was able to sweep away right after.

Thunderhead fought to restore the spell, but Octavia narrowed her thoughts, closing it further. Thunderhead’s movements became more frantic as her arms bent and coalesced, and Octavia squeezed harder, finding, as she did so, growing ease of encapsulating the spell in her mind. Extraneous pieces of the formula died away, and she was soon left with only the pure, simple core of the spell, Thunderhead trapped within like a fly in a jar.

“Wait.” As she could see the calculations behind the magic, she could also follow them. Holding Thunderhead captive, she followed the decision to snuff her out, and saw with dismay the consequence: the ship, connected to its captain, would vanish also, and her friends would plummet.

Thunderhead vibrated and spun like a gyroscope against her artificial confinement, and Octavia could see the pressure on the numbers. The magic within was not equal to the exponential magic outside, but it would not be long before the spells reached equilibrium, and Thunderhead would break free.

“Can I?” She examined the spell’s edges and, finding them reduced and unattached, tried to grab the spell entire. Minute pieces of other spells and enchantments stuck to it as she dragged it through the maze of magic, and, by the time she had found what she was looking for, Thunderhead was closer to freedom, and an ineffective pseudo-spell had accreted to her simple ball of magic, adding useless, confusing values to the delicate balancing act that was close to tipping in her head.

The purple barrel had been repaired, and she reached a different thought into it. Thunderhead strained, and the first parameter snapped; the inequalities were about to fall into place to allow escape.

Putting the first place to come to mind in the middle of her thoughts, she squeezed Thunderhead’s spell tighter, and let the flood of uncontrollable, whirling numbers spray from the instant-travel spell, while a different singularity formed and resolved itself. Tighter, tighter, and then gone.

Colgate watched the solitary windmill to the south from her seat at the café. She was waiting for Flitter to join her so she could enact Spike’s warning. Telling Flitter that Spike had attempted a kiss during one of his hugs, she would rend his relationship apart—a reminder to him to never go behind her back.

With a far off crash, the windmill’s blades flew apart, and they pirouetted briefly in the clear sky. The wire frame of a fast-fading ship had appeared suddenly, its nose embedded in the ground, but it only remained for a second before leaving the ruined mill tilting awkwardly, its skeleton broken and scattered like a fallen bird’s nest.

She rose from her table quietly and followed the startled crowd across Ponyville’s main square. She could hear Spike’s flabbergasted voice somewhere ahead of her, and hastened to catch up; she needed to make sure he wouldn’t try to take advantage of the momentary confusion to set up some other obtuse plan against her.

When she reached the town’s edge, what she saw gave her pause. She recognized the Elements of Harmony, she recognized Big Mac, and she recognized Discord from multiple advisories from the princesses, towering over the seven ponies.

“—you ponies mucking about like this. I’ll just create another.”

“Like hell you can!” Rainbow shouted. “That thing must’ve taken you a month to get right. Twilight told us.”

He rolled his head around mockingly and flapped his arms. “Twilight told us. Everyone’s intellectual darling, the pony with the answer for everything.”

“Are you going to do anything, or just rant?” Rarity demanded.

“Would you like me to do something?”

He took a moment to look around, and Spike marched out of the crowd.

Twilight’s bearing changed instantly, her eyes widening. “Spike!”

“Stay away from this,” Big Mac said.

“You think you’re something, huh?” Spike cried, pointing his tiny finger at Discord. The size difference made Colgate’s lips twitch in a partial smirk. “You think you can just bully Equestria into submission?”

His little voice was hollow in the sudden silence, and Discord stood akimbo, appraising him, then the ponies on the other side.

“Okay,” Discord said. “You take from me, I take from you.” He clapped his paw and talon together softly, and Spike crossed his arms. “Enjoy the next few minutes of your life, Twilight Sparkle.” With a loud crack of displaced air, Discord was gone, and Spike doubled over.

“Spike?” Twilight asked.

The dragon coughed and faltered, but stayed on his feet. His breath came out in wheezes, and Twilight approached him. Colgate watched as he squeezed out a tighter cough, bent, and then raced back into the crowd. His legs gave out from beneath him as he fell to the sound of everyone’s cries of alarm, his fists pounding the ground as he struggled to take in another breath.

“We need a doctor!” someone screamed, and the crowd gave way as Twilight galloped forward. Spike rolled over, his back curling sharply as he clutched at his chest, his breathing a febrile whisper.

Twilight stopped short, her horn lit but inactive, and Colgate heard a snap like a twig breaking. Spike’s arms and legs drew inward as his chest trembled, and the crowd backed away again at the final, thin scream he would be heard to produce.

The grass leaned inward as Spike vanished in a puff of steam, and the Elements of Harmony collectively screamed. Amid their cries, she could hear Applejack objecting, telling someone to go away. Colgate saw no one in their midst, but their noise halted abruptly, and they were gone.

“Guess I don’t need to find Flitter anymore,” Colgate thought.

Octavia was restored to her body as soon as Thunderhead was no more, and the first thing she saw was the flicker of an upturned gas lamp in the windmill’s wreckage. She heard Discord, and Twilight, and a small, male voice that quickly fell to a deathly wheezing, and then, as she was trying to lift a gear away to let herself out, felt her hooves sink into warm sand. Blinking in the sunshine, she was first aware of the stale scent of salt, and her friends’ uproar just after.

They formed a rough semicircle around Twilight, hunched over and wailing into the ground. She was a desolate figure, a single source of anguished sound on the far away, empty beach. For the first minute, her cries were without definition, but from them emerged two distinct words, repeated: Spike, and a venomous, gasping him. While the rest of them converged, Pinkie remained off to one side. She had lost her cushion in the crash, and traced a small oval in the sand, lips twitching.

“He’s gonna pay,” Applejack said solemnly. “He’s gonna pay an’ then some fer this, Twi, mark my words.”

“I never could have imagined,” Rarity said, shaking her head.

Octavia set her gaze on Pinkie at the sound of quiet laughter. Pinkie had backed a distance away from the group, smiling weakly, and shaking with small giggles, which she was attempting to contain. When she noticed her sister looking at her, her expression broke, and the laughs came out louder, but without mirth. Tail up, she raced down the beach, off the thinning sand bank and onto the stone that remained to form the country’s edge. Twilight stopped and looked up, wiping her eyes.

“What the hell is this?” Rainbow asked.

Pinkie cackled, and a dark pink bubble of magic swept off her, passing them entirely to pick up a wall of sand and fling it out into the grasses and plains behind. She cried Discord’s name, and was gone in a flash of teleportation that was mirrored several miles up the coast before a second wave of magic followed. Sand flew again, and the magic flashed across them, susurrating quietly and leaving a soft, white noise in their ears.

They could still hear Pinkie’s manic laughter, but no more spells followed. “He may have just been moved,” Big Mac offered slowly.

“No. I can tell that wasn’t it,” Twilight said.

“That cowardly bastard’s gonna get it,” Applejack said. “Celestia an’ Luna aren’t gonna stand fer this.”

“Spike was defenseless,” Rarity moaned. A third spell rocked the beach as birds scattered, and Twilight cried out again.

Fluttershy shuffled at Octavia’s side, and, before Octavia could recoil, grabbed her in a shaking hug that did not relent until twenty minutes later, when Twilight had quieted and Pinkie had skulked back, head hung low. Clouds were gathering in the distance, enshrouding the tiny pillar of water that reached to the siphoning station.

With only a brief congress, they started down the beach. Octavia and Rainbow led the group, with Twilight and Applejack talking quietly in the back. Rainbow walked with a quiet, deadened calm that Octavia appreciated. As they moved to meet the coming rainclouds, she had time to think.

“Three times I failed in Vanilla’s form. More powerful than I can ever hope to be as a pony, and I failed three times. Disgusting.” Her steps became more forceful as the day ripened. “No ship, no idea where we are, no plans, and someone important dead. I do not even know what day this is.”

“We’re restin’ here,” Applejack said from behind, and everyone stopped obediently. Everyone looked at Twilight, some subtly, but she returned nothing. Twilight sat and stared into the blue distance, blank. It reminded Octavia of the face she wore when she was fresh off a flashback.

“I do not mean to sound insensitive, but who was that back there?” she asked at length. Rainbow looked at her, first offended, but then appeared to recall that Octavia had no reason to know.

“You met him before we went to Cloudsdale, I think.” Her voice was low, so Twilight couldn’t hear. “That’s Spike, Twilight’s assistant. He’s kind of like her son, or little brother, or something. I’m not too sure.”

“Oh.”

“She hatched him.”

Octavia frowned, trying to imagine Twilight hatching an egg. “I am sorry to hear that.”

“Where were you?” Rainbow asked, meeting her eyes for the first time. “Weren’t you all magical?”

“I was in the wreckage. I regained my body as soon as we crashed.”

“Oh. So you couldn’t have helped any more than us.”

It was five o’ clock when they stopped outside a sulking collection of sheds and cabins, tilted toward the field’s eroded edge and dark with rain, and ate beneath Rarity’s shield. Though they had lost their ship, Twilight had kept all their supplies in her pocket dimension, and they were able to subsist on some old rations.

“I can’t keep a shield up all night,” Rarity said.

“We’ll help ourselves to one of these houses,” Rainbow said. “We’ll be fine.”

Twilight nodded, and Pinkie got up without a sound to go into the rain. By the time they had finished eating, she had returned to lead them to an empty building. Through Twilight’s magenta light spell, they could see a moldering mattress pushed into the corner under a sagging bundle of fiberglass. Shadows twitched across spaces in the walls, and the rain rattled atop a slatted roof. A partially collapsed staircase had gathered filth and cobwebs, and they could see nothing but darkness in what appeared to be an open attic.

“It’s the best I could find,” Pinkie said. “They’re all like this. At least we’ll be alone.”

“Are there ponies in the others?” Rarity asked.

“Yeah. They’re a lot like these buildings.”

They fell asleep early, except for Octavia, who waited at the door, listening to the rain and watching them. Twilight was the last to drift off, doing so after a brief round of crying, partially smothered under Fluttershy’s wings.

When she was confident that she was alone, she stepped into the cold weather and went between two neighboring shacks. She could see light from the small port town up the coast, and reflected off the clouds, but there was no clear reason for the pathetic settlement to have appeared where it did. The smell of rotting wood surrounded her, even as she cleared the alley to skirt a disjointed, asymmetrical house, half-buried in a bank of sand.

She hadn’t slept for nearly two days, and her head, pounding from insomnia, spun as well from her abrupt return from Vanilla’s enchantment. She half expected him to step out of the shadows or appear behind her; she wanted him to. His last words had been to admonish her, and she could not consult Twilight on the matter. She had been left to uselessly ponder what had happened to her, what it meant for her understanding of magic, and she hated herself for her curiosity. One of Twilight’s closest friends was dead, she told herself, and she was concerned about what Twilight might teach her about her magical excursion. The thought of Vanilla’s patient conversation, withheld, depleted her mood further.

“Yo, Octavia!”

She stopped to allow Rainbow to catch up.

“I thought you might go wandering.”

“You know my habits well.”

“You okay?”

“I am confused.”

“Yeah, me too.” They put the final building behind them and stepped onto slippery stone. “I’m taking this way too well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Spike’s death. Twilight and Applejack are angry, and Rarity and Fluttershy are devastated. Pinkie’s… something.”

“She is very upset. Laughter is her coping mechanism.”

“I know that. But—”

“When she ran off earlier today, I think she was trying to get a handle on her emotions. There was a lot of anger there, and I doubt she is used to dealing with that.”

“Right. Anyway, though, I don’t know. I should be pissed, but I’m not.”

“What do you feel?”

“That’s the thing. I feel… just fine. Well, not fine—I’m still sad about it. But I feel okay. Better than the others.”

“Were you not as close to him as they?”

“No, we were buds.” They sat down beside a jagged boulder. “I’m almost relieved.”

“Relieved.” Octavia tried to think, but could only focus on Vanilla, and his absence. “I do not understand.”

“Me neither. It’s like finally breathing after being underwater for a long time.” She shivered and tried to press herself closer to the boulder. “I’ve had death on my mind for a while.”

“I imagine we all have.”

“Before we got captured.”

“Hm.” Octavia swept her mane out of her face.

“I don’t know what it all means.”

“It has been a hard several days, and it looks like it will be hard for the next several as well. Go back to your friends and get some sleep.”

“What about you?”

“I will stay outside for now.”

“You sure?”

Octavia looked at the clouds off the edge of the world. “I am sure.” She did not look back to see Rainbow fly away, only turned fifteen minutes later to find herself alone. She got up and crossed toward the edge, ignoring the pain of freezing stone against her hooves.

“Vanilla, if you are watching me, please come now.”

She stopped at a slope’s edge, where the rainwater flowed off in a steady rivulet, craning her neck to see more of the dark emptiness beyond. It had been so long since she had seen a gap, she had forgotten the dread majesty of their altitude. Somewhere, a mile below her hooves, the water was landing in a shallow, displaced ocean.

“Vanilla, if you are watching me, please come now.”

She sat down and shivered as the water flowed under her flanks and dock. Thrice, she had needed help to continue fighting Thunderhead, and, even then, she had been too distracted to consider Discord’s intervention.

“That little dragon is dead, and I could have prevented it. I had the same power that Vanilla does, and I could not handle it. I could not even comprehend it.” She turned her head, but he was still not there. “Absolutely pathetic. My friends are sleeping in a leaking shack, their friend dead, and we have no transportation. We should have stayed with Thunderhead.” Her brows knit, and her head throbbed. “Perhaps I could have bought them enough time if I stayed behind.”

She closed her eyes for a minute, only to force them open again. She knew she was pushing the boundaries of her endurance, but the idea of sleep felt inappropriate with the volume of grief that surrounded her. She lay down in the thin skin of water and looked at the clouds, and, before she knew it, she was crying.

“It should not be like this. I should not be punishing myself for Discord’s cruelty.” She uttered a soft gasp and hit her hoof on the stone. “Weakness, Octavia. This is exactly what you have helped Twilight with. Do not succumb yourself.”

Her eyes closed once more as she lay her head down in the water, letting it soak into her fur and numb the corner of her mouth. “They are right. I am killing myself. Slowly… slowly, slowly, I am killing myself. For what?” She shuddered and sat up to look into the abyss of the sky. She felt only the cold creeping deeper into her flesh, and the unremitting pulse of sleeplessness, scouring the inside of her skull. Another couple tears came out quickly before she stemmed them with a frustrated, wet hoof.

“Perhaps it would be better if I ended everything now, rather than in a few years, when I finally lose my mind.” She raised a hoof to take a step onto the slick rock, but faltered, afraid to lower her body by even a small margin. The rock edge had no rim, and one or two steps would leave her standing on a slick precipice with no purchase. One slip, and she would fall.

“Just like you want to, right? Weak, Octavia. Indecisive. Either do it or back away, but do not stand here like a lost filly.” She bit her lip emotionlessly, tracing the endless curve of the imprisoning sky. She was used to seeing more ground across a gap, and to stand at the absolute verge of Equestria was enough to distract her thoughts for a second.

“Beautiful view, isn’t it?”

She turned slowly, expecting Vanilla, but saw, instead, an unassuming, brown stallion a few feet to her side. He wore an umbrella over his head, leaving his tail to stick out and drip like a tuft of ragweed. His cobalt eyes shone like dull stones, and his body was thin.

“Just wish the weather was more clement, eh?” he continued. His voice was courteous and smooth, his tone light. “I wish I had wings.”

She looked back at the sky, imagining, as she did so, the feeling of a mile of cold air ripping through her plummeting body. It didn’t sound so bad to her.

“No offense, ma’am, but you look awful. Do you need some help?”

She didn’t say anything; she was mesmerized by the view.

“You’re very close to that edge.” He gasped. “Wait, you’re not… please, hold on!” He trotted over to move in front of her, but there was no room. “Come on now, no need to think those kinds of thoughts! I’m sure things’ll look up eventually! What about all the ponies who love and care about you? There’s so much in life worth living.” He placed a hoof on her chest and guided her away, and she was too tired to offer resistance. “Sorry if I’m violating any personal space, but it looked like you were getting ready to jump there. Lacking wings, I suspect that would kill you. Not a nice thing, especially for a mare so young.”

She stared at him.

“Uh, well, you’re not alone, anyway. Truth be told, I was also considering ending it all, a few hours ago. I guess good can come from anything.” He shuffled uncomfortably. “Do you want to share my umbrella? You look cold.”

She looked back at the edge.

“Look.” A hoof slowly curled around one of hers, leading her a few paces farther from the drop-off. “I don’t want to pry into your business, but I also really don’t want to have a dead mare on my hooves, so if you could just tell me you’re okay, then I can get out of your face.”

She did not look at him. “I am okay.”

“Come on, lady, even I know that’s a fake. Here, I’ll tell you what! Let’s go back to my place, have a little warmth, a little shelter, maybe some food. We’ll both feel better, I promise.”

She sighed, but let him begin his tentative walk back to the buildings.

“Not much of a talker, eh? I guess that’s forgivable, considering. So… ugh, look, I’m not good at this kind of thing, okay? But, uh, do you want to talk about it? Whatever it is? Talking will make you feel better, you know.”

“I do not want to talk about this.”

“Hey, you spoke! That’s a good sign.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Wouldn’t anypony?” He looked up and sighed. “Maybe you just caught me at a sensitive time. Like I said, I too was thinking about, uh, jumping. A few hours back.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t want to unload all my life’s grievances on you now. Not after you were so close to… well, anyway. Here, I live in that crooked one.”

They entered into a damp, candlelit chamber similar to the shack Pinkie had found. A single tallow candle flickered in a glass bulb atop an overturned apple box, and a heap of sand filled one corner. Across from it, there was a small pile of cans and pouches of food.

The brown stallion grabbed a can of diced peaches and worked the top off before dragging over a flat stone from another shadowy corner. “My beautiful eating stone. Fully washable, and if you leave it out in the sun all day, you can kind of cook eggs on it.”

“What is the meaning of all this?” Octavia asked, sitting down. “Why did you do this? Why were you even there?”

“Just returning to scene of the, er, almost-crime. Call it a morbid fascination.” He looked up at her as he bent to eat his peaches. “You look like you’ve been through Tartarus and back, lady.”

“It has been a hard several months.”

He nodded. “I hear you.” He shook his head once, slowly. “I can’t believe this. Where are my manners? I’m so sorry—my name is Whooves. Dr. Whooves.”

“Marble,” Octavia said. “My name is Marble.”

“Happy to make your acquaintance, Marble. Shame it wasn’t under better circumstances.”

“Please, stop speaking of it.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry! You know, sometimes, my mouth runs away from me, and I have to—”

“Relax.”

He looked at her again, demure in the weak light. “So what’s wrong?”

“I am sorry, but my story is not for telling.”

“Are you sure? After all, talking will make you feel better. We already covered that.”

“Earlier, I could have perhaps been convinced to speak on this. I have since recovered from that temptation.”

“Well, that’s good. I think.”

“It is not good. It is, in fact, the worst thing I could do to myself.”

“Oh.” He looked at her perplexedly. “Why?”

She swallowed. “I am in desperate need of help, and I refuse to accept it.”

“Well… what if—”

“You will not convince me. I have been this way since I was a filly. I appreciate the effort, however.”

“Uh, you’re welcome?”

“Never mind. I was momentarily weak. Tell me about yourself.”

He looked her up and down for a second, considering her proposal. “It’s a long story. Let’s just say, this isn’t where I envisioned living out my life when I left home.”

“Where is home for you?”

He squirmed and took a peach, chewing it thoughtfully. “You know, south of here.”

“Everything is south of here. This is the coast.”

“Not the northernmost tip.”

She sighed and put a hoof to her head. “You know what I mean.”

“Sorry, I’m not being very helpful, am I? I was born in Applewood, but I haven’t been back there lately. I, er, move a lot. That’s part of being the doctor.”

“What kind of doctor are you?”

“The kind with a doctorate in mathematics and science.”

“Are you a professor?”

“I collect bags of grass and haul them over to trucks, to take down to the siphoning station.”

“And before that?”

“You know, odd jobs. I was referee for my town’s local hoofball team.”

“I see.”

He tapped the stone with a hoof, gesticulating aimlessly with the other. “I’d like to find something more, er, consistent. You know, a nice, steady place to live, with a good income. No living in a shed on the former beach.” His eyes narrowed to dark slits in the candlelight. “Marble, how did you get here? There aren’t any other ponies around for miles, and I didn’t see an airship.”

“My friends and I were taken here.”

“Taken? I’m afraid I don’t quite catch your meaning.”

“We are… travelers, but we have run afoul of a mischievous spirit.”

“Discord?”

“No, but an envoy of his. He magically moves us across the country from time to time. We were in Ponyville a few hours ago.”

“I see.” He slapped his hooves on the table, jarring a peach to the floor. “That’s a fantastic story, Marble, but, under the circumstances, I guess I have to believe it.”

“We have no airship. It was lost.”

“Well, maybe we can find it.” She sighed again, and he smiled weakly. “It’s a joke, okay? Admittedly, a little weak, but—”

“Do you have access to an airship?”

“I—what?”

“Airship. Do you have access to an airship?”

“Er,”

“We do not travel for pleasure. We have an important task, and for it, we need an airship.”

“Well, I don’t, but… well, I might be able to help.”

“Explain.”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“Doctor, you cannot say that you might help, and refuse to explain. Either you have an airship or you do not.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. It’s just, it’s not easy, okay?” She fixed him with her dark eyes, burning with fatigue. “I don’t have a ship, but my coltfriend might be able to get us on one. How many of you are there?”

“There are eight of us altogether.”

“Yeesh. Tight fit. Uh, he might be able to help, but I don’t know.”

“What is the problem?”

“Well, you see, we had a fight the other day.”

“Will he not help us for that reason?”

“Feelings were running high when I left.”

She narrowed her eyes, letting them slip closed for a moment. “Left?”

“The area. We’re still together, at least nominally. I don’t know if he’ll want to help, after how distraught he was.”

Octavia jerked her eyes back awake. “Where can we find him tomorrow?”

“Find him?”

“Doctor, you are not the one who is supplying our airship. I appreciate what you have done for me, but, with all due respect,” she yawned, “you are not needed here. We need to find your coltfriend, not you.”

“Oh.” He slumped in his seat. “I suppose you can find him…” He sat up and looked at Octavia, her head down. Grabbing the candle in his teeth, he held it closer to see that Octavia had fallen asleep in her seat. He gingerly guided her to the floor, dragged the stone out into the rain, and fell asleep himself on his pile of sand.

Octavia awoke to two heated male outside. She rolled over, knocking her head on a stone, and started up. The night before flooded back as she rubbed her eyes, dispelling her dream’s afterimages and replacing them with the memory of the vast drop she had considered consigning herself to. She looked around the bare room for something to drink, finding only a plastic container of stale water.

“Fine, if you’re going to demand an apology—”

“I’m not demanding a single damn thing,” an unfamiliar, blunt voice returned.

“Any idiot can see they’re the Elements of Harmony,” Whooves said. “That Octavia’s sleeping in my shack right now. She didn’t get here on her own, and not by accident either.” He sighed, and sand shuffled as he paced. “I’m trying to think about our country here.”

“Oh, there he goes again,” the other voice said. “Look at you, Mr. For-the-good-of-the-world. Do you get dizzy on your college-educated pedestal?”

Whooves scoffed, and the door flung inward a second later. “Oh, you’re up.” He walked past Octavia and grabbed the pail of water, dragging it to throw out onto the sand.

“What is going on?”

“Your friends are out wandering in the work fields.”

“You know that I am not who I say I am.”

He shook his head, not looking at her. “That purple cutie mark, that mane—even bedraggled as it is—those eyes. As soon as it was light, I could tell. I’m not a fool.” He went outside for a moment and returned with the stone they had eaten on. “Octavia, there’s some free-standing showers on the edge of our little burg. For the love of Celestia, go use one.”

“Tell me what is going on first. Is that your coltfriend out there?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Glorious fellow, isn’t he? You must have a glowing first-impression.”

She walked past him and out into the overcast morning, where stood, beside an oval of wet sand, a stout, brown unicorn, standing almost an inch below her. “I am told you can help us with an airship.”

“Octavia, right?” he grunted. “Doc told me about you. Are you feeling okay?”

She paused, looking back at the sagging doorway, through which Whooves bustled anxiously. “All is well.” She looked at him, and he looked back for several seconds before speaking.

“Yeah, an airship.” He looked up. “I fly a cargo ship between here and Hoofington every couple months. I’m leaving later today, if you’re interested.”

“Hoofington.” Her pulse was suddenly huge in her head. In the haze of other events, she had lost sight of the city, and its reappearance felt false to her—like a tasteless joke, lifted from the annals of her own tortured memory.

“Is that a problem?”

Her voice felt like it was coming out of someone else. “We will go with you. We will be happy to do so.”

“Hold up, hold up a second,” Whooves cried, trotting back out. “What about me?”

“What about you?” the stallion asked.

“You can’t leave without me.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not?”

“I mean why not?” the stallion said, glancing at Octavia. “Go and get your friends together. We’re leaving at six tonight.”

While the eight of them worked to arrange their supplies and themselves comfortably in the cargo ship’s cramped quarters, Whooves and his coltfriend bickered outside. The sun was setting when they lifted off, and it was night when the arguing finally stopped and the coast was well behind.

Whooves clattered into their room, a hastily repurposed dry storage compartment, shoving a stack of books over to tumble across a pyramid of spice bags. “Apologies,” he mumbled. “I need to get some space.” He looked at them, sitting close beside one another, and grinned weakly. “In a metaphorical sense. If I can just,” he shuffled between Rainbow and Fluttershy. “There we are. So, the Elements of Harmony. Can’t say I was expecting this.”

“We appreciate what you’ve done for us,” Rarity said.

He looked at the rest of them and forced a chuckle. “I can see where Octavia gets her reticence, anyway.”

“This ain’t a good time,” Big Mac said.

“For any of you?”

“Fer all of us.”

“What’s wrong?”

Big Mac rolled his eyes and leaned into the wall.

“We’ve had a hard several days,” Rarity said. “Please, we’re not trying to be cold, but now is not a good time to talk.”

“Okay, okay,” Whooves said, getting up. “I can see when I’m not wanted.”

“Don’t be like that,” Applejack said.

He looked to the door. “I just don’t want to go out there with him right now,” he whispered.

“There are other rooms on the ship,” Octavia said.

He looked at her, mouth parted in a tiny, shocked oval.

“I am sorry. That was unkind.” She stood as well. “Come. I will keep you company.”