“Can anypony see anything?” Twilight asked, craning her neck to examine the sky. Her head felt weird and heavy in the armor.

“Everything looks okay from here,” Rarity said. They stopped before the giant, gilded double doors to the main road into the city. No one moved to open them.

“How are we gonna do this?” Rainbow asked.

Twilight was long in answering. “Once we’re out onto the battlefield, we won’t be able to talk things over. Fluttershy, Rainbow, I think you’ll be safest above us. Not far above us, just… above us. Maybe a couple feet. Applejack, stay nearby, but don’t get in the way. Rarity, we’re counting on you to protect us, but remember to watch out for yourself too. We’ll try not to put it all on you.”

“I understand,” Rarity said quietly.

Twilight thought, searching for more to say. Anything to put off opening the gates. “Applejack, cover our backs. Let us know if something’s coming up behind us.”

“You got it, Twi.”

“Rainbow… you can see everything else, so…”

“Don’t worry, Twilight.”

“Yeah. Um… so, are we ready?” She looked at them all, and they looked back at her. Fluttershy’s eyes were blank, and Rainbow’s jumped around nervously. Pinkie smiled distantly, and Rarity merely stared at the doors behind Twilight. Applejack met her eyes and smiled.

“Let’s get out there,” Applejack said gently. “We’re just wastin’ time now.”

“Right,” Twilight said, looking up at the entryway. They could hear the fighting in the distance, filling the night like unseen wind. From within the palace’s protection, everything still seemed peaceful. Behind the courtyard walls, there were no signs of unrest; the skies were clear.

Twilight pushed the doors open and faced the road out into the city. Still clear, but she no longer felt safe. The gate was open, and they had only one way to go.

They slipped out onto the exposed cobblestone road, looking around nervously. The sounds of war swelled in the darkness, but they couldn’t tell how close or far away the fighting was. They loitered nervously outside the gate for a minute, before Pinkie trotted out into the open with a little noise of resignation.

They walked, Twilight, Rarity, and Pinkie in a tight triangle, with Applejack a few paces behind and the pegasi a few feet above. They swiveled their heads and stretched their eyes open intensely, trying at the same time to pick up any meaningful sounds through their helmets. Any moment, they would run into their first enemies; around every corner, behind every building, at the end of every dark alley, they waited.

They rounded a bend and froze. At the end of the road was the ruined, wooden skeleton of the wrecked drawbridge, heavy chains hanging tightly against sides marked with small tufts of flame and framing a dark view of the crowded mountainside. Before it all, a team of gold-armored guards was engaged with a swarming crowd of black-armored counterparts, clattering on the stone road with metal hooves, bashing against each other noisily and releasing inarticulate shouts of pain, anger, and effort. Dark, sharp shadows danced across the cobbles and dulled armor from the glow of a flanking building, embers spiraling into the sky from a flame-pulsing window.

“I’ll get ‘em!” Pinkie cried, taking off directly down the road and to the middle of the fight, a spring still in her step.

“Pinkie, get back here!” Twilight shouted. Not even onto the mountainside, and Pinkie had already separated.

They watched in stunned disbelief as Pinkie raced into the center of the fighting cluster; the ponies were too caught up in their own affairs to notice her, until she barreled through the center of the conflict.

“Pinkie!” Rainbow screamed. The ponies scattered away from Pinkie like dolls, thrown by a shock wave that spread out as she met them, burying Rainbow’s voice. Pinkie stopped at the drawbridge and called for them, smiling wide and proud, and they ran after her.

Twilight’s heart pounded, but as she approached and passed the flaming building, running only a few feet past ponies struggling to their hooves, she felt something strange. Her fear, that sickening, emptying feeling that had been boring through her chest and twisting her stomach all during the preparations, was gone; in its stead, there was only the mindless excitement of action and movement. Gone was the fatigue and the uncertainty, the bitterness at her friends and princess. Adrenaline shot through her veins like electricity, and magic pulsed in her head like blood. “I can do this.”

As soon as they met Pinkie, she turned and began to run again, shooting a small pellet of magic at the drawbridge. The entire towering, wooden obstacle ruptured outwards in flaming fragments, littering the ponies outside and faintly illuminating the chaotic scene. In the space of a few seconds, they were out onto the mountainside, and it was madness.

Where the drawbridge had been shattered, they emerged into a small pocket of empty space, surrounded on all sides by crashing armor, shouting voices, and trampling hooves. As they entered, the space was already beginning to shrink, a rough line of Canterlot Guards pushed back by a solid tide of black aggressors.

“Follow me!” Pinkie shouted as she led the charge, and Twilight and Rarity followed without hesitation, the others lagging only a moment behind. Again, as they hit the mass of ponies, Pinkie threw them all away, and Twilight was able to follow in her wake without using any magic of her own, to her relief. In the tiny space between witnessing her first bit of violence and reaching the outside, she had felt ready, but now, actually running around in it, the thought of using her magic—even the simple, non-lethal repulsion spell—made her want to turn around, run back to the palace, and hide in the gardens.

She looked to the side, where Rarity kept pace with her, her striking white coat set into tiny pieces by the golden armor, and above, where she could make out the fluttering of Rainbow’s and Fluttershy’s wings. Their presence afforded no comfort, and when she looked back, Pinkie had moved many feet ahead of them, darting between ponies and carelessly tossing aside anyone who stood in her way, friend or foe. Twilight hastened to catch up to her, angry. “Wasn’t she listening to the princess?”

“Watch out!” Rainbow screamed, but before Twilight could react, they were enveloped in a cloud of smoke and dirt, slammed with the accompanying roar of an explosion. Rarity’s shield held.

“Pinkie, dang it!” Applejack yelled.

Twilight cast a quick spell to clear the air and looked around for what had caused the explosion, jumping and dancing to the side and back to escape the enemies she imagined to be just by her side. In her frantic movement, she caught sight of Pinkie, running recklessly at a single pony, and again called out to her, to no avail. She ran after her again, and as she did so, Pinkie’s target—a unicorn—began conjuring a great, dark ball of energy, balanced and growing like a fruit on the tip of his horn.

Twilight froze, and almost fell over, and before she could marshal her thoughts back into coherency, Pinkie was on him. She bucked him in the side of the head, and as her hooves connected with his helmet, a pair of shock waves radiated out from the impact site. The unicorn flew up and over, landing somewhere among the other fighters, his energy ball dispersed uselessly. Twilight gasped and squealed, unbelieving. She squeezed her eyes closed for just a second. Multiple ponies flying aside was one thing, but the sight of the individual, launched bodily, made her stomach turn.

And then Pinkie was back, running alongside them. “Got him, Twilight!”

Rainbow flew up, paused for a moment, and then back down in a fast arc. “Great. Guys, everyone’s moving our way.”

“What?” Rarity shrieked.

“To the slopes,” Twilight said, taking the lead. She passed Pinkie without a look; if Pinkie could go running off without them, she figured, she could do the same. The self-assurance of her gesture gave her confidence. She ran the first few paces without a spell, but the ingress of soldiers was too much for her, and, as quickly as it had come, the confidence was gone; desperately, as if it were for her life, instead of her space, she conjured a cone of static repulsion magic. Ponies fell back and away from her, pushed away forcefully, but not dangerously; she had purposefully made the spell too weak for that. She heard none of Pinkie’s spells behind her, as there had been not a minute earlier.

She ran blindly, through the furrow of displaced soldiers, paying no attention to her flanks or back. In her mind, only one terrified thing repeated: “I’m doing it, I’m doing it, I’m doing it. This is war, and I’m in it.” The thought blinked on and on in her head behind the thunder of thousands of hooves and the pulse of her own blood in her ears, all softened inside her hot helmet.

There was no final line of ponies to break through, nor any special defenses to test them. Slowly, the two armies thinned, and then they were resting on a stony slope beside a small pond. Twilight was already tired; she had never run so much in her life, and she had only been outside the palace a few minutes. It felt like hours.

The battle persisted nearby in broken fringes, but none of the warriors paid them any mind. From their vantage point, they could rest and see the battle’s progress clearly. The black aggressors were deeper inward than they were earlier, pushing the smaller knots of Canterlot Guards back toward the palace, where they clumped together to form a hard, thick line of defense before the broken drawbridge. Flashes of magic and fire illuminated the intense band of fighting like opposite sides of a marble, dense and metallic. Elsewhere in the city, away from the palace, buildings were aflame, and pegasi darted all around the turreted rooftops of taller structures, silhouettes frozen against the burning cityscape. The fireworks had stopped.

“Look over there!” Rainbow said, pointing at the opposite side of the battlefield, where the mountain sloped downward and, Twilight knew, a small country road ran to connect Greater and Lower Canterlot. Twilight squinted: coming up on the mountain like inequine monsters, slowly, was a column of large, rolling machines, some tall and thin, others low and stout. Their crane necks and spindly protrusions spiked the horizon, making it impossible to tell how many there were, or how close together they moved.

“Machines,” Applejack said, looking out at them angrily.

“How did he even get them here?” Rarity moaned.

“It doesn’t matter,” Twilight said, looking at them all quickly to make sure they were all still with her. “We have to stop them.”

She broke into a gallop, surprising even herself with its suddenness, and they all followed along, Pinkie again at the back with Applejack, and the pegasi above. She knew she could not sustain her pace for much longer, but at the moment, the thought was meaningless. “We have to stop them.”

They formed a tight unit, breaking through the fighting easily. With Rarity protecting them all, Twilight was free to concentrate on her repulsion cone, giving it just enough strength to shove ponies out of their way without hurting them. She was getting used to its weight on her horn, as well as the sight of ponies scattering before her, thrown off their hooves. As she ran, she tried to look to the sides to see whether the soldiers got up again, simultaneously hoping they would and hoping they wouldn’t. She could hear explosions in the distance, but none were close enough to belong to Pinkie.

“Rarity, how are you doing?” Twilight called. A tired “fine” was all she heard in return; she didn’t look to verify it.

“Twilight!” Rainbow cried. A flash of light sped up and into Twilight’s peripheral vision, and Applejack let out a cry of alarm as it landed, a few feet to their side. The explosion rocked them off their path and sent Fluttershy flying upwards in a wild corkscrew, and though she was unhurt, Twilight felt her heart seize up in crippling fear. Pinkie cleared the smoke and dust, regaining her hooves and taking Twilight’s place at the head of the group. Rainbow came down to help Twilight up, and for an instant, their eyes met.

“You okay, Twilight?” she asked quietly, and, despite her temptations to the contrary, Twilight shook her head weakly. The thin veneer of bravery that had kept her from running aimlessly, teleporting away, and escaping the mountain was wearing down. She was tired, thirsty, and discouraged, and Rainbow’s concern only brought it into harsher light. “Please, let it stop.”

Pinkie and Rarity were a few paces ahead, waiting for Twilight to follow them. She called them back to her. “I have to stop,” she said firmly, ashamed.

“Twilight, no!” Pinkie cried. “You can’t!”

“I can’t keep running like this!” she yelled, the exertion hurting her parched throat. Fluttershy hovered nearby, and she saw her flinch at her raised voice. She didn’t care. “If you can go on, do. Leave me behind.”

“Twilight, no,” Rarity said.

“We’re not leavin’ you,” Applejack said.

“Yes you are! Go get those machines, and let me rest!”

“You’re going to get hurt,” Rarity said.

“I can shield myself,” Twilight said tersely. She took a breath of cool air that chapped her dry mouth and stung her chest. “Now stop delaying and get out there!”

They hesitated. “Are you sure, Twilight?” Pinkie asked.

“Just go, Pinkie. I’ll find you later.” She looked up at Rainbow and Fluttershy. “You too.”

“Absolutely not,” Rainbow said, landing next to her. “You three go; we’ll stay with Twilight.”

With another few seconds of hesitation, Pinkie turned and ran again, and Rarity and Applejack reluctantly followed.

Twilight watched them go, Rarity’s shield around her fading with the distance, and sat down with Rainbow and Fluttershy above her. She brought up her own shield to augment the one Celestia had given them all, and was once again safe; anyone who approached her was merely deflected. Her chest ached and her head throbbed; her eyes felt gritty, and sweat beaded under her coat, insulated by the helmet. Her body felt tight and hot, compressed, stressed, pulled and pushed, a bundle of nerves and muscles forced into a situation it was absolutely incapable of handling.

She hated herself. She didn’t know how long they had been in the battle, but it couldn’t have been more than half an hour, and she was already sitting down, away from the others, watching through an impersonal haze of fatigue and numb fear as the other soldiers fought around her. While Rarity and Pinkie ran on to stop Discord’s machines, and buy time for Celestia and Luna, she sat. While Pinkie had unhesitatingly run into the fight, throwing ponies around without a care, she was too afraid to do more than push them out of her way.

She remembered Celestia’s words: “Twilight, this is no time to be merciful, and it is no time to be indecisive. Destroy what you can of the enemy, and don’t stop until it’s over.” She looked around once more and closed her eyes for an instant, too short for reflection. A single, simple thought pierced her self-pity. “I can’t do it.” She had been called to help her princess, to go to war, to use her prodigious magic to turn the tide of battle, and instead, she sat on the destroyed grass and stone of the mountain meadow, having not even incapacitated a single enemy.

“Twilight!” Rainbow shouted. She jumped to attention, and a sharp pain flared through her horn. She recognized it with a horrible, sinking feeling: the shield was gone. She tried to get up, but something hard knocked her to the ground, her back twisting at an awkward angle and her head flailing downwards. She heard Rainbow and Fluttershy shouting and flying toward her, but before they could do anything, a blunt force hit her in the throat; her vision squirmed and she keeled backwards, her alarmed mind conjuring up the first spell she had ever learned: telekinesis.

She was aware of a cessation of action in her immediate area, and tried to ignore her strained, cracked, incomplete breathing as she examined what she had grabbed with the spell. Everything in a twenty-foot radius hung off the ground, enshrouded in a purple mist. Ponies struggled to escape, corpses floated like horrible clouds, and pieces of armor and dislodged weapons were scattered among them all like flotsam. Above her, Rainbow and Fluttershy squirmed unhappily, and, without thinking, she released them, then forced the rest away in a single, swirling charge of energy. Most flew off into the distance, while the rest ground into the earth painfully. She watched, horrified, as her mind came back to her. “Oh, Celestia, what have I done?” She hadn’t even seen her attacker.

She tried to stand, head spinning, but went to the ground again in a spasm of coughing. Her horn burned and her chest and throat pulsed with a dull pressure that sent bolts of pain through her tired body. Fluttershy flew down to her and told her to remain still, and she tried to concentrate on a new shield spell, managing to erect a weaker one. For the time, it was safe; the soldiers, scattered away, gave her a wide berth. There was a flash of light and another crack of a firework.

She allowed Fluttershy to cast a quick healing spell, keeping her eyes on Rainbow, who hovered nearby, staring into the distance with uncharacteristic focus.

Suddenly, she turned back to Twilight and Fluttershy, terrified. The expression made Twilight’s body break out in terrified tingles. “Uh, guys. Something’s happening.”

Fluttershy moved back meekly as Twilight stood, stiff, but in less pain. She looked where Rainbow indicated, and, at first, didn’t quite believe what she saw. Traced in the sky in fine, thin, burning red lines hung another sigil, much larger than those that had come before.

Rainbow came down to her, and the three of them waited under Twilight’s shield, transfixed. The sigil had appeared by the other side of the mountain, huge and ghostly, a ring of glowing wires among the stars. Slowly, a jagged point emerged from its center, thin cords of tense ropes stretching off its tip and back into the sigil. A dark prow emerged behind, and then a ship’s body, black and hard-looking, like a fragment of onyx. Sails followed, lashed to masts at least thirty feet tall, clearing the top of the ring with only a few feet to spare. Twilight saw no propulsion system, nor mechanism to keep it afloat; it merely hung in the air, suspended by nothing, sailing through the sigil like a dream.

“Twilight?” Rainbow asked fearfully, looking at her. Twilight shook her head and watched.

The sigil faded as the ship cleared it, and the nearby pegasi flew away from it, some doubling back and behind to attack, the rest fleeing. The ship sat above the mountainside, a sudden hole in the pegasi’s fight, and slowly turned in place. Twilight knew as she watched it where it was going to face, but prayed against it. Out at them, it didn’t stop; toward the river, it didn’t stop; at the palace, it stopped.

“Twilight?” Rainbow repeated urgently, and she looked at her. “That’s gonna tear the palace apart.”

As she said it, Twilight looked up again. Just under the bowsprit, she could make out a small dot of light. Quickly, but also with great deliberation and power, a titanic pillar of flame burst from the point, engulfing the night in a narrow mushroom of orange fire, its end rising up in a bulb of heat that obliterated the pegasi unfortunate enough to be caught in its path. Twilight stared, heart sinking. “How can this be happening?”

Pinkie felt bad leaving Twilight behind, but she seemed adamant, and she had a point; there was no use waiting for her when they could handle the machines on their own. She ran across the field, casting ponies aside as she went, eyes set straight ahead and mouth drawn. Her brain felt numb and cold, almost asleep, and with each spell that she cast, she felt herself farther removed from her actions. She had never deliberately hurt someone before, and it was scary at first, but, as she ran with Rarity and Applejack toward the procession of machines, she found herself less and less bothered. It was just war, after all—run and smash, and don’t look back.

They burst through a group of fighting soldiers and stopped suddenly, standing at a bend in the wide road that led down the mountain. Her surroundings were forgotten, though she could see the shield vibrating with the harmless impacts of arrows and pebbles, from behind and before them. The convoy of creaking, wooden structures inched up the road: tall, twisted siege towers; crane-like trebuchets; fat and heavy battering rams; and rickety, spindly cages, suspending over the destroyed earth large, black, dripping, dead-looking spheres.

Without thinking, she targeted one of the strange, black balls and sent an explosion spell into its middle, as easy as breathing out. It popped like a balloon, its black shell splayed out against the sky like a disembodied claw, a plume of deep orange fire and dark brown smoke engulfing the cage that had contained it. The explosion was huge, but quiet, manifesting in a muffled fwump instead of the loud bang for which Pinkie had flattened her ears. The fire was a giant, greasy, sloppy ball, dripping down onto the road and splattering into the air, catching nearby machines and sending the ponies operating them into a frenzy.

She watched, distantly interested, as the fire spread; the machines were too close together, and though they tried to separate, the initial explosion was too big. The flames radiated outwards slowly, and when the first tower fell with a squeal of overstressed axles, it did so onto another sphere, bursting it like a boil. Acrid fluid drained out in tremendous gushes, unctuous and smelly, and it was only an instant before it caught too, bringing the entire country road into a single, snakelike line of hellishly glowing tongues of fire. Toxic smoke rose and choked the air, blotted out the stars, and mixed with the smell of burning wood into an oily, nose-biting, eye-stinging haze that, even at its distance from the three watchers, made them back up a little, eyes shielded from the light.

And then another one exploded, one supporting leg weakened and releasing its payload into the inferno. Pinkie watched with anxious triumph as the convoy halted and tried to back up, to no avail; the fire moved too fast and flew too far with each new explosion. Giant, liquid drops of flame trailed through the sky like miniature fireworks, arcing sickles of light and smoke, catching on everything they touched.

“Um, Pinkie?” Rarity asked quietly. Pinkie turned; Rarity’s eyes gleamed through her helmet, and Pinkie recognized a combination of fear and disorientation in them that made her jaw clench. She followed Rarity’s indication, immediately seeing the problem. Sometime during her conflagration, a new enemy had appeared: a ship. Strange, silent, horrible; it drifted toward the palace menacingly, a cloud of destructive potential. Pinkie watched it without thought.

“We gotta stop that,” Applejack said.

“It’s all the way across the battlefield,” Rarity said, her voice exhausted and unhappy.

They both looked at Pinkie, and she paused. “Tether!” she blurted, remembering Celestia’s enchantment with a flash of excitement. She turned to Applejack and grabbed her hoof, to drag her through the spell with her, and before Applejack could object, she was squeezing and contracting into the darkness of teleportation.

As the row of flame dissipated from the ship’s front, Twilight felt a pull from behind. She turned to look, and Pinkie and Applejack flashed suddenly into view, Rarity a couple seconds behind. Applejack doubled over and vomited, and Rarity helped her up when she was done. Pinkie, meanwhile, babbled at Twilight, who largely ignored her as she stood up—she knew what they were going to try to do.

As soon as Applejack was ready, Twilight began a slow trot toward the palace, pushing ponies out of the way with her repulsion cone. Only a minute into the run, she began to feel her leg muscles groaning with the effort to keep moving, worsened with the blow she had suffered; she ignored the pain and tension, and the others followed her grimly. The ship loomed toward the palace, unhindered and undeviating, completely ignoring the flocks of pegasi that darted around it.

As she ran, slowing to exhausted lopes, Twilight knew they wouldn’t reach the ship in time.

“Twilight! Look!” Rainbow shouted, pointing.

She squinted against the ship’s dark side and, after a couple moments, spotted a pair of smoky ribbons, one white and one dark purple, slicing through the air before the ship’s side. “Celestia and Luna,” she thought immediately, her heart giving a relieved leap.

The ribbons spiraled around swiftly and met in the ship’s middle, streaking up along its side and twisting off above it before going their separate ways. Just as they were out of the way, shimmering through the sky toward the palace, a trail of huge explosions erupted in a vertical line where they had flown just moments before. Pinkie and Rainbow let out whoops of victory as the ship cracked and splintered, and Twilight could only stop and stare, excited beyond words. “Is it really that easy?”

The ship slowly tipped to the side, its interior open; pegasi flew in in droves, wrecking the insides of the massive vessel while fire ate upwards along its fringes.

“Stay with me, girls! We might still be needed!” Twilight shouted, pumping her legs with strengthened determination. She had had her moment of pity and fear, and now, with the princesses in sight, she took heart. “We’re not finished yet.”

The ship drifted lazily forward, its jib angling down at the ground like a broken bone. The fire spread slowly, and though the side was mostly engulfed, the ship seemed undeterred, flying with as much intent as before.

By the time it came abreast of the palace walls, the fire had spread to its masts. Twilight could see ropes snapping and sails disintegrating, but, on the side of its hull, the fire had gone out, leaving, to her disbelief, a largely unaffected hole. Its belly was still wide open, but the edges were whole and unburned, as if the fire had not even touched it. Its top lit the sky like a birthday cake, burning and crackling in three tall fingers, huge pieces of sail fluttering down to color the air with ember-speckled curls.

“It’s not stopping,” Rainbow said breathlessly.

Twilight looked up at her for a moment, shocked. “What?” She knew it for herself, but to hear someone else say it shot panic into her heart.

“It’s not stopping, Twilight! Look!”

She looked back at the palace, an immobile target not a quarter of a mile away from the skeleton ship, and saw the same two ribbons flitting between them, strong ripples of energy emanating out from them. She squinted, her jog slowing down once more; tiny black dots flew from the ship’s front, each one bouncing off the princesses and into the palace gardens.

“Are those cannons?” Pinkie asked.

“Oh, Celestia,” Twilight said, her legs bending reluctantly; she stumbled and landed in a half crouch, her confidence, once again, gone. The princesses were occupied in the palace’s defense, and the Canterlot army was weak. The battle was left primarily to her and Pinkie—she, who had not even killed a single pony, and Pinkie, who had stopped casting her spells as soon as Twilight took the lead.

They stopped immediately to try to help her up, but Twilight shook her head sadly. “No, Pinkie, I can’t do it. I’m too tired.” She looked down in shame. “Go ahead of me and try to help them.” She felt awful to slow them down, but she forced the thought from her mind. “Now is not the time to feel sorry for myself.”

“Go!” she shouted, and Pinkie and Rarity took off. She watched them run, much faster than when she had led them, and stole a look at the princesses; Luna remained, but Celestia had vanished. She accepted help up from Fluttershy. They were all crowded inside Celestia’s shield, isolated from the battle. “At least I have this,” she thought with a small smile.

And then her heart stopped as Luna’s voice exploded across the battlefield: “To Twilight! To Twilight!”

Her mind tensed like a vice, and her chest tightened. She felt the pull of magic, and Pinkie and Rarity were by her side.

“This is it, Twilight. We’ll protect you,” Rarity said weakly. Twilight looked at her closely for the first time during the battle. Rarity was slumped, bedraggled, and her face was absolutely soaked in sweat. Her eyes were dull, her face was slackened, and her horn had turned from its usual pristine platinum to a gritty white.

“Oh, Celestia. Here we go.” Suddenly and acutely aware of her surroundings, Twilight gathered her magical energy into a gigantic clearing spell. She looked at Rarity once, who nodded absently, and pushed outwards; ponies of both sides flew back in a clamor, leaving a huge, flat circle in the soot-stained, trampled ground.

Rarity instantly erected a nigh invisible dome around it, as she had during practice, and Twilight and Pinkie raced inside, Pinkie moving to its center obediently. Fluttershy and Rainbow, joining a large group of gold-armored pegasi, flew above her in a protective cloud. She summoned her brush and ink, and, with a sigh, began drawing.

As soon as the brush hit the ground, her mind went blank. She had her instruction: give Pinkie her power. As much as she could. Fear and self-pity dropped away as she traced the outer circle. The sigil stood out strong in her mind, impervious to the dulling effects of fighting, fatigue, and anxiety.

As she completed the initial circle, walking quickly around the outer perimeter of the shield, she looked up briefly; a crowd of Canterlot Guards had thickened outside the dome, jostling and holding their ground in defense of the shield. In defense of her. That so much energy should be expended to keep her alive did not register with her.

She moved as fast as she could, taking care not to step on her own lines, the enchanted brush gliding over the dust and pebbles smoothly. She looked up once more, and saw the line of ponies around her surging and snarling; the enemy had figured out that something was going on.

“You’re good, Twilight, just keep going!” Rainbow encouraged from above, and she looked back down, redoubling her efforts to move quickly. Rarity emitted a cry of surprise, followed closely by an explosion behind and above her. In her haste, she had already completed a third of the sigil, and her eyes had tunneled to see only the ground before her, overlaid with the model in her mind.

There was a bright flash of light, but didn’t look at it—if she had, she would have seen a battered Celestia arriving to help defend her. She drew frantically, swishing and angling her lines just as they were in her mind, making connections with some and branching out with others. For several minutes, she drew uninterrupted.

There was another explosion, but she paid it no heed; she had only half left, and the sounds of fighting outside were more intense.

“Come on, Twilight, you can do this. They’re all counting on you, and you can’t let them down.” She drew another tight cluster of lines, and began swishing over to the next spot; there was a pair of explosions, fast and small. Her head pounded.

“Come on, Twilight!” Rainbow shouted. “We can’t hold this forever! Half the army is on us now!”

Twilight’s mind tensed like a steel spring, and she clenched her teeth. She tried to draw faster still, making her lines almost haphazardly; she nearly shouted in anguish as she overextended a line, forcing herself to go back and redo it. There was very little room for error, and it took all of her will keep her pace steady. Any faster, and her mistakes would undo her speed.

She approached Pinkie and began drawing around her hooves, not looking up once at the pink pony.

“You can do it, Twilight,” Pinkie said quietly. “But you’ve gotta hurry. Rarity can’t keep going much longer, and I think Discord is coming.”

Twilight didn’t have the presence of mind to nod, her drawing had so consumed her. She finished the spot around Pinkie’s hooves. One third to go.

She continued with feverish intensity, and the sound of the war outside was fading to her. She thought of Rarity, who Pinkie said was almost finished, and of Discord, who would soon add himself to the mess.

She thought of her old phrase, uttered endlessly during the trip over. “I can’t afford to fail here. I haven’t failed my friends yet, and I’m not about to start.”

She refocused herself into drawing, almost seeing her progress before she made it. The brush glided across the ground as if it had a will of its own, separate from hers. She connected a spiraling mishmash of arcs and half circles to the edge, and started filling in the final quarter.

In the distance, she heard a loud barrage of explosions, and then a voice that turned her blood to ice. “Here I come, Twilight Sparkle.” Discord’s clear, authoritative voice rolled over the warring ponies like a fog, cutting effortlessly through their noise and directly into her ears.

Her heart beat as though she were still running, but she willed herself to remain calm. “Celestia and Luna will keep him away,” she thought, not fully believing herself. She tried again to hasten her progress, and did a little, but she knew she was at her limit.

Discord cackled in the distance, and there was a long, grisly ripping sound, followed by more explosions. She didn’t dare look anywhere but down, but hoped, prayed, that at least one of the princesses was on him.

“Almost there,” she thought, and even the words in her mind sounded strained.

“I know what you’re doing, Twilight Sparkle, but I don’t think it will work.”

Another explosion. Her concentration wavered, but remained solid. Only a few feet of space remained to cover, and she attacked it with feverish intensity.

“Twilight, you need to finish now,” Rainbow cried urgently. “He’s here, and we can’t hold this barrier.”

The words glanced off her mind as she continued drawing, each time a little closer to the edge. The line of soldiers had thinned and quickened, but no details of their condition revealed themselves to her.

There was another explosion, just outside the protective dome, and a shriek.

Twilight drew.

There was a series of loud pops, and the dome faded for a moment—just a moment.

Twilight drew.

She heard Discord laugh again, and Rainbow’s shout, twisted in feral rage.

Twilight drew.

One small slice of the circle remained, and she began the last long, elegant loop. She added the affectations—dots and lines—and did the final swoop. She didn’t know whether Rarity’s shield had held its integrity, and only stared at the ground, waiting.

At first, nothing happened, and her heart plummeted. “This is it. It’s over.”

But then something did happen; her mind went weak and hazy, and her horn burned. Her vision clouded and frayed, but she saw the sigil begin to shimmer.

“Yes.”

Her sight turned to fuzz, to fog, to blackness. Her orientation changed indistinctly. Her mind slowed down and her horn blazed like a meteor.

There were shouts, explosions, hoofsteps, and one deeper-than-ever crumbling, rumbling sound that surrounded her from all sides and angles. It grew in volume and in presence, and then she was gone.

Had she remained conscious, she would have seen Pinkie receive the magic, an enormous cloud of purple dust that faded into her skin. She would have seen Discord dive through the center of the protective dome, shattering it; she would have seen him throw a beam of energy at Pinkie, and she would have seen her deflect it effortlessly. She would have watched Pinkie stand for a moment, uncertain, and then canter once, giggling, before slamming the earth with glowing white hooves.

She would have seen the entire army erupt in a scattered panic. She would have seen Discord flash out of view, and the unbelievable floating ship turn and shoot into the distance like a comet. She would have watched, horrified, as the majority of the remaining ponies fell through the maze of cracks splitting the ground.

She would have felt the world shake as if in a prospector’s pan. She would have seen the mountainside crack open. She would have seen the landmarks in the distance drift away from one another like leaves on a pond. She would have watched the clouds swirl and separate, and the skies boil angrily. She would have watched the moon grow larger.

She would have watched the world fall apart.