Opal lay, sheet to chin, in her four-poster bed on the outside edge of the servants’ quarters, a labyrinth of interconnecting corridors and arbitrarily placed bedrooms in a section of mansion that an old owner had had cobbled together after the structure was initially finalized. However, even with her music box twinkling soothing music and a gentle wind moving outside, sleep escaped her.

The Elements had come earlier that day, the only herald to their arrival Lumb’s vague reference to “a good thing,” and they had left her in a state of reflection, which she could not indulge in the daytime with a house full of servants to coordinate.

Octavia was back, and, moreover, had been waiting just outside her estate not twelve hours ago. The thought of her mad mistress filled Opal with uncertainty that bordered on pity, and she remembered her times with the mare’s unstable condition. Her most striking experience, one that refused to soften with time, was walking in on Octavia trying to scrub her bed sheets, weeping and murmuring self denigration at her own nightmares. She had yelled at Opal to leave her, and found her two hours later to beg her not to mention the episode to anyone else.

A hollow moan filled the house, and something within the walls creaked. She had grown accustomed to the house’s sounds over the years, where they were frequently ignored for Octavia’s own disturbed residence, but, alone with her thoughts and memories, she tossed uneasily as the house quieted again.

Since Lumb had taken over, Opal’s purview was mostly empty of activity, but it was still her job to keep all the instruments in working order, and tuned—a weekly chore. With no one to play them, though, the music room had become a cemetery, except the bodies still stood watch. She remembered the piano’s glassy notes from days before, cheery at the time, but spectral and brooding in her restlessness. She remembered the trombone’s empty mouth as it sat askew on its stand, gaping at her while she attended a nearby harp as if transfixed, a black cave for the malicious spirits recalled to her by Octavia’s renewed presence.

A space in the attic creaked, then groaned, then settled, and Opal turned over, pulling the blanket over her head and so leaving her tail exposed. In the semidarkness, her mind was free to run wild. She hadn’t told the Elements how Octavia’s madness had affected her; how, in the final months before the disaster, she had begun to believe her mistress’ stories. Each time the house settled, it was a ghost moving through the drywall; each time water moved through a pipe unexpectedly, it was a spirit letting itself sluice past her.

So it was, when her tail twitched involuntarily, she started up, her back popping and eyes wide, expecting some dark, furry face to leer out at her, as it had done in Octavia’s stories countless times. She sighed, tucked her tail back in, and reclined back. She was all alone, save for her music box, and smiled at her own silliness, but there was no relief in the gesture.

Outside, wind brushed the tree branches.

The museum was a large, blunt figure eight in the epicenter of a neighborhood of concentric houses, its dark walls slick and curved gently upwards into twin domes, like dark dollops of ice cream on the grassy knoll. Twilight, Rarity, Whooves, and Rainbow filed through the revolving door into a cool, quiet vestibule, where Twilight paid the standard admission price for them all, using Celestia’s universal bank slip.

When Rainbow was able to at last drag her back to the hotel, it was ten o’ clock that night, and Octavia had returned, more conversant than usual. The museum’s curator, and new master of her mansion, Lumb, was a close acquaintance of hers, and he was pleased to see her again. They had caught up on events, she careful to skirt any lingering topic of her house, and she had returned to the hotel with a renewed sense of belonging, she said. Meeting someone who remembered her was nice, even if he was a little on the strange side.

The museum was separated into two main areas, art and history, with Lumb’s famous Lepidoptera wing a vestigial nodule off the former’s side, and each was further split into a wide outer ring and a central chamber, both lit more from the glass ceiling than any electric lighting. The first thing they saw on their entrance was a room-dominating oil painting, a shadowy, cyclopean labyrinth of squat, square buildings rendered in rough, reedy brushstrokes. No life was depicted within, only yellowing dusk on uninviting architecture.

“The fabled City of Roads,” Whooves said, trotting past to nearly press his muzzle to the canvass. “Ancient city on the now southeastern border of Equestria, though it was part of minotaur territory back then.”

“I think I’ve heard of it,” Twilight said. “It’s mentioned in a few of my history books.”

“Probably concerning ancient teleological philosophy,” Whooves said. “How the minotaurs built the city originally to serve as a waypoint for messengers and traders, but it turned into a town of residency, which led to its eventual downfall.”

“Bandits and criminals took advantage of its citizens’ weakness and lack of meaningful government until anarchy took over.”

“Uh, I hate to break this up,” Rainbow said, “but we came here to find Octavia’s friend, not discuss boring history stuff that no one cares about. What are you talking about anyway?”

“Don’t worry, Rainbow; it’s nothing for you,” Whooves said, not looking away from the painting. He was squinting, scrutinizing a patch of dark brown amid an amber crosshatch.

“I know that.” She huffed. “C’mon, Twi.”

“Oh, let them have their fun,” Rarity said. She had gone to observe another painting, a dark blue landscape of miniature black trees and flint sparks of stars above. “This looks so familiar.”

“Why’d you even come along, if you’re just going to complain?” Twilight asked. “You knew what this was.”

“I was hoping there’d be, you know, an archaeology section or something,” Rainbow said.

“Maybe in the history wing,” Whooves said, then turned, smiling queerly. “Archaeology? You? I’d have never guessed.”

Twilight, moving to a different painting, attempted to stifle a laugh.

“What?”

“Nothing. I know what she’s getting at.” She flicked her tail. “Go do your own thing, Rainbow. It’s just a museum. Nothing bad’ll happen here.”

“Twilight! Don’t say that,” Rarity said. “Don’t jinx us.”

“I’ve told you that’s not how they work.”

Rainbow groaned softly as she floated down the hall and around the gentle bend, and the remaining three moved after her at their own pace, stopping frequently for Twilight or Whooves to speak about the painting’s subjects, mostly impressionistic landscapes. Rivers flowed across the walls, cutting into deep valleys or stopping short against hills and mountains. Sunrises framed forests on one wall while pitchy nighttime embraced waving fields on the other, and throughout, the meager crowds gave way for them, deferring either to the Elements or the perceived authority from Whooves’ running commentary.

They reached a heavy door off the outer ring, decorated much the same as Octavia’s door to her music room, garish with navy and indigo spirals, symmetrical but offset. The room they emerged into was even quieter than the museum behind, and Twilight nudged Whooves in the ribs to make him stop talking. The spectral, omnipresent blue glow and the dust hanging in galactic streams in the low light seemed to demand it. Rows of glass cases on nondescript pedestals spread from wall to wall, leaving them a wide central aisle and narrower branching ones, like the veins in a leaf. Each case had a light to itself, and with the reflections off each glass lid, Twilight felt like she was standing abreast of a field of bits, shiny and well ordered on a dark carpet. On the floor, painted in toneless white, was the single word, Lepidoptera. Lumb’s claim to fame, Octavia had said, and the real pride of his work.

Twilight led, and Whooves kept quiet as they picked their way through the room, stopping for particularly bright colors or intricate wing patterns. The specimens were pinned either alone, for the larger or more eye-catching ones, or in like groups, each with a brass tag at the bottom of the canvass, identifying taxonomy and date of collection. Some had been gathered before Nightmare Moon’s return.

Quiet hoofsteps drew their attention upward from a hyles lineata, and Rarity started back with a tiny gasp. The light of her horn joined the pallid light around them, and Whooves put a hoof on her back.

“Soft, soft,” the shadow said. “I am no one to fear.” The largest unicorn they had ever seen stepped then from behind a case and came to rest a respectful distance away, his eyes on Rarity’s forehead. “Lumb. Curator. I was told about you.”

He studied them for a minute, raising himself to his full, prodigious height. He was just a few inches shorter than Princess Luna, and his coat was just as dark. His horn was a navy blue obelisk cutting through thick, curly locks of dark blue and purple hair, and his bloated swish of tail dangled pompously behind a single butterfly cutie mark. His eyes were a murky, brick red, which looked almost black in the dim exhibit. His voice, when he spoke again, was delicate with an accent Twilight couldn’t place, and low.

“You are the good thing.”

“Yes, er, that’s what your servants told us,” Whooves said, stepping forward. “Dr. Whooves, sir, and a pleasure to make your acquaintance at last. We were told very much about you, very much indeed.”

Twilight and Rarity exchanged glances.

“You are Twilight Sparkle, and you…” He held the pause for almost twenty seconds. “…are Rarity.” He inclined his head. “The pleasure is all mine.”

Without further conversation, they followed Lumb to the massive central room back in the art wing, where he toured them past sculptures and mosaics, explaining each one in his tireless, gentle voice, which had become sonorous in the larger room. They ended at a free-standing frieze, curved lightly to face ponies as they entered from across the Lepidoptera room, which, he said, was the most used entrance. It was a replica of the sequence found inside the Trottingham mountains, telling the story of the river that flowed through its aqueducts. Twilight shivered when Lumb repeated the final words in the river’s story: “make deeper the deep waters, fill the blackest hole.” They had been navigating the dark, decrepit aqueducts just over two months ago.

Their tour ended in his office, where he sat on a threadbare cushion and pointed his horn at an open book on top of his mini fridge. “Within that tome, there are the answers that I seek, but I am unable to reach them.”

No one spoke. His explanations of the art within his museum had been precise and eloquent; faced with such a vague statement, they were uncertain how to respond.

“You know, of course, that the house I occupy is still, in title, Octavia Melody’s. That is something that I cannot take away.”

“Yes, we do know that,” Twilight said. “It’s a lovely house. You’re a lucky stallion.”

“It is a largess I welcome.” He looked back to the book, then rose, grabbed it in his teeth, and brought it to the desk. “We did not speak of it, the residence. She would not.”

“That doesn’t surprise us,” Rarity said.

“Good.”

“I’m sorry?”

“If it comes as no surprise, then perhaps you know more than I.”

“I feel like we don’t,” Whooves said. “You’re talking in riddles, old sport, and that makes me wonder if perhaps you are the one with the advantage.” He smiled a tiny, self-deprecating grin. “Which, in turn, wouldn’t surprise me. We are, after all, strangers in a strange town.”

“How came you to be with these good ponies?” Lumb asked.

“It’s a long story,” Rarity said. “But he is right. Can you please be a little clearer with what you want?”

“Why were there so few unicorn servants there?” Twilight asked.

Rarity looked askance at her, as if to ask whether her question was relevant, but only returned her eyes to Lumb, who watched Twilight patiently.

“I read up on the history of the mansion all yesterday, and there were next to no unicorn servants recorded, which doesn’t make sense.” She straightened her own posture, a smile creeping onto her own face. “It was originally built in twenty-two fifty, right smack dab in the middle of the Apologist Period. A wealthy earth pony named Golden Slumbers had it built in what was then known as Glitterville, a primarily unicorn city—renamed Hoofington some thirty years later—as a response to growing unicorn prosperity and independence in the more resource wealthy regions of Equestria. But, after the house was complete, only a few unicorns served there, and, after Golden Slumbers passed away, there were no more.” Her smile became a frown, the same frown Rarity had seen countless times when Twilight was wrestling with something that didn’t make sense. “Everywhere else, unicorns were given the lowest level jobs available, but serving in that mansion was a job for pegasi and earth ponies, while another earth pony lived as master.”

Lumb thought for several seconds. “That is curious. Why do you ask such a question?”

“It was just weird to me. I figured, if there’s something weird going on on your end, and something weird on mine, they might be connected.”

Whooves bounced a little where he stood. “Just because—”

“I know correlation doesn’t mean causation,” Twilight said quickly. “But it’s somewhere to start.”

“I dare say, you took the words right out of my mouth, Miss Sparkle!”

“I have noticed strange occurrences inside the house,” Lumb said, pausing again for a long interval. “…which the mansion’s incunabula support. It seems an active place.”

“Active in what way?” Rarity asked.

“Like an arthritic skeleton, it groans and creaks noisily, more than an ordinary house should. My own house is as quiet as a church.”

“You have another house besides the mansion?” Twilight asked.

“Of course. I try to split my life between the two equally.” He sighed dramatically. “But, I confess, it is a trying task.”

“I noticed a lot of creaking as well. I just figured that’s how old houses were.”

“It may be so.” He looked through his book.

“So what exactly did you want to tell us?” Rarity asked. “We still don’t know what’s going on.”

Lumb lowered his voice to a dulcet hum. “I do not know if Octavia is aware of this, if she has explored her mansion well enough. If…” he paused again. “…one were to draw a map of the house and its rooms, one would find that the first and second floors are put together much the same as any old abode. However, on the third floor, there appears to be absent half the space. Two corridors intersect upon a small attic, and the rest is unexplored drywall.”

“Insulation,” Whooves said. “Fiberglass.” He chuckled. “You didn’t think that a house is just rooms and walls, did you?”

“Funny that you seem to know about the construction of houses, doctor,” Rarity said.

“Point taken, my gentle friend.”

“I know that there is more than empty space and partitions,” Lumb said. “But there would be more fiberglass in this third floor than I could imagine.” He smiled, as if seeing a joke in his own words. “I took it upon myself to make an inquiry of the structure.”

“And what did you find?” Rarity asked.

“It is better to show you.” He pulled open a desk drawer and produced an envelope, on it tight, narrow lettering, saying only “attic.” He upended three photographs onto the desk and dexterously turned each over, using his hooves.

In the first, a dark corona of ashy light framed a crude ingress, its edges fuzzy with splintered drywall and tufts of insulation. A firm loop of exposed wiring put its silhouette into the upper corner while a wider curve of a pickaxe imposed itself on the floor, half out of the picture. Within there was little to be seen.

In the second, the attic opened up for them to show an open floor cluttered with small debris, overshadowed by naked ribs of scaffolding. Light came from a single bulb hanging in the corner, a distant sun, casting long, tooth-like shadows from the scattered bits of wood and nails. A faint, circular design covered the floor.

The third photograph showed a dark blue sigil painted in thick lines on the attic floor, illuminated from an unseen, different source.

“When did you find that?” Twilight asked.

“Several weeks ago,” Lumb said serenely. “I have been attempting, to no avail, to research what waits on the other side.”

“That’s a sigil for keeping something stored in magical stasis,” Twilight said, noticing Rarity and Whooves’ expressions. “And by the looks of those outer rings, it’s hiding something pretty powerful.”

They all looked at Lumb, who turned another page lazily.

“Something sordid inside the estate,” Whooves said. “And how long has it been there?”

“That information has eluded me, but at least two generations before Octavia,” he said. “And that worries me.”

“Why?” Rarity asked. “It seems to me like that… thing was hidden away quite nicely before you broke down the wall.”

“My Rarity, it is…” Pause. “…that very wall that grieves me the most. Why would it be there at all if not because that room is in disuse?”

“Oh, I get it,” Twilight said. “That is bad.”

“Fill us in?” Whooves said.

“Standing enchantments deteriorate if there’s no one around to keep them up. Lumb, how long has that wall been up?”

“I cannot say,” Lumb said.

“So we have a sigil of indeterminate origin, abandoned and possibly forgotten for an uncertain amount of time, and all we know is that it contains something powerful,” Rarity said.

“How long does it take before deteriorating spells turn, er, bad—for lack of a better phrase?” Whooves asked.

“Depends on the skill of the caster,” Twilight said absentmindedly.

“Like, how much?”

“Pretty much entirely.”

“Do you suppose this could have something to do with what we learned about Octavia?” Rarity asked.

“Oh, who knows? Lumb, can you take us there? I need to see this for myself.”

Lumb smiled and waited close to thirty seconds before speaking. “The pleasure will be all mine.”

After a slow cab ride and a slower walk through the wealthy residential section, they approached Octavia’s mansion for the second time in two days. Rainbow had split off from them to return to the hotel, her earlier good nature soured.

“Do you know the Astras, Lumb?” Whooves asked. “Such a charming bunch, even with their, er, crow.”

“Are the Astras here?” Twilight asked.

“The Astras,” Lumb echoed. “You’ll soon find their charm to be superficial.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Whooves said.

“Pardon any impertinence, but what do you know of it?”

“Why, yesterday, we had the pleasure to bring back their delightful flying machine, and they were so gracious as to promise to help us find a ship.”

“Stop,” Rarity said, coming to a halt outside the front door. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

“That lovely Violet told me,” Whooves said innocently. “I thought she told you too.”

“When were you even alone with her?”

“When did you two even go see them?” Twilight asked.

“Yesterday, darling.”

“You left a bit ahead of me,” Whooves said. “That’s all. Violet said their matriarch would call in a favor so we can get another airship.”

“Well… that’s wonderful.”

“What’s wrong?”

“How long were you planning on keeping that a secret?” Twilight asked.

“I thought she knew!”

“Listen!” Lumb said. The air inside the room seemed to swell as the house groaned again. “The house speaks.”

“It could be an effect of the deteriorating sigil, now that I think about it,” Twilight said.

They ascended to the second floor and followed Lumb through a lengthy corridor, its cream wallpaper crawling with scarlet lines like the inside of a fantasy beast.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything,” Whooves said.

“I suppose I can’t blame you for thinking I knew,” Rarity said.

“But yes, we should have a ship on the way, as soon as—what did she call her?”

“Mama Astra?”

“Yes, her. As soon as she can call in that favor.”

Lumb snorted quietly.

“You don’t like them.”

“That family of posturers and their hellbeast belong nowhere near Hoofington,” he said calmly. “Their fortress resembles something that fell out of the sky.”

“They’re quite nice to us,” Rarity said.

He hmphed and started up the next set of stairs, his hoofsteps muted on the black carpet. “They flaunt their wealth with that horrible bird, but can’t bring themselves to live inside the borders.”

“They’re not in the city limits?” Twilight asked.

“Something…” Pause. “…about zoning regulations, or so I assume.”

The doorway at the top of the stairs was a simple burgundy plank with a pair of growing spirals running up its sides, far from the ornate portals below, and it opened into a lifeless well of angled shadows. The overhead bulbs were encased in dreary, white ovals, so that the entire long corridor appeared to be lit by a sequence of alien beans hanging on crooked stems. Everything was still spotless.

“Finding a way into the forbidden room took much forbearance,” Lumb said, leading them to a sharp turn in the hall. “The wall returned hollowness in many places, but granting myself access where no wiring would intercede was a joyless task.”

“Yes, wiring can be a bit of a pain, if I say so myself,” Whooves said, enduring an impatient look from Rarity.

They turned the corner and walked to a pale ellipse on the floor, where the same ashy light from the photograph shone through a tattered hole in the wall. Lumb stayed in the corridor while Twilight, Rarity, and Whooves stepped into the giant, hollow room. Black wires burrowed through fiberglass above them, while low beams formed X’s where wall met ceiling. The sigil at their hooves was wide and not perfectly circular, and Twilight paced its perimeter.

“It’s old, I can tell that much. This could have been done more efficiently.”

“Can you tell what waits inside?” Lumb asked from the hall.

“Let me try something,” Twilight said, preparing a spell in her head. “Maybe I can see inside this thing.” She closed her eyes, and her horn turned the attic into a warm, magenta cavern.

The magic did not last long. As soon as she reached out, the house groaned again, louder on the third floor, though whether by the attic’s acoustics or her proximity to the offending spell, she didn’t know. She withdrew her magic.

“Twilight, dear, remember what we discussed on correlation not equaling causation?” Whooves asked.

“I didn’t do that for the dumb sound,” Twilight said. “I did it because I saw that it’s not stable.”

“You can see that?”

“Well, not see. That was the wrong word. ‘Sense,’ more like. I’m guessing this has been like this for a while. The magic’s a little shoddy.”

“So what does that mean?” Rarity asked. “What happens?”

Twilight went back to the corridor. “Spooky up here. What it means is that sigil won’t hold. I can’t say how long; I would need some specialized equipment, and a couple hours, to figure that out.”

“Can you give a range of possible durations?” Whooves asked.

“Not a good one. It could be days, months, years, or longer.” She sighed. “So much depends on how well the original caster made this, and I can only tell so much by staring at the design. Sigils aren’t even my area of expertise.” She sighed again. “But, when it goes, whatever’s in there is going to come out. I can be sure of that.”

“That’s probably bad,” Whooves said. “And you can’t look too well into it, because it’s not stable?”

“Think of it like trying to see inside a bubble.”

Whooves chuckled. “A bubble that isn’t clear?”

“You know what I mean. If I poke at it too much, it’ll pop on me.”

“So what in the world do we do?” Rarity asked. “We can’t just leave this to dissipate on its own.”

Twilight looked back into the room. “This would be a lot better if I knew what was in there—if anything. Heck, it could be empty for all I know.”

“Do you believe that?” Lumb asked.

“Not for a second.”

“Could it be a trap from Discord?” Rarity asked.

“Seems like his style,” Whooves said.

“I don’t get that impression,” Twilight said. “He’s more for grandstanding. Can we get out of here?”

Lumb led them out, humming a light song on the stairway down. On the front step, he stopped them. “Beware the Astras. They are of weak character.”

“What did they do to you?” Whooves asked. “If you don’t mind my asking, good sir.”

“I am…” Pause. “…a wealthy pony, but self-made. They exhibit their good fortune as though they earned it. Disgusting arrogance, and that crow of theirs is nothing short of an opulent vulgarity. I wonder that they did not dress the thing in gold.”

“I was under the impression that they worked just as hard for their money,” Rarity said.

“No, their ancestors did. The current generation is safe to luxuriate in their birthright.”

They came to the main fountain, and Whooves trotted up ahead as they moved through the hedge runway.

“That’s your limousine, correct?” Rarity asked.

“Yes, non-operational. I need it worked on, but haven’t had the time.” He didn’t turn to look at her, but she could feel the pointedness of his words. “I know what you’re getting at, and I’ll have you know that I worked for years to afford the machine.”

They passed the sleeping limo, Lumb stopping to affectionately look at the golden butterfly on the license plate, before exiting the gates and stopping at the head of a bridge.

“Do not let their affluence blind you, and, Twilight, keep…” Pause. “…me informed on the spell in the attic. I feel a great confidence that my interests and yours intersect directly over every servants’ head.”

Octavia and Applejack spent close to two and a half hours at the capital building, waiting for an audience with the mayor to alert him to Twilight and Pinkie’s restoration spell, which they cast toward six o’ clock later that day, standing on the hotel rooftop and looking out over the city that had learned to suture itself. Some ponies had disengaged bridges from the gaps, to save them from being embedded when the earth drew back together.

By seven, the sun was dipping into the horizon and the worst hubbub from the spell had cleared. Following Octavia’s prompts, they took a cab to the park for some fresh air, leaving Rainbow back at the hotel to sulk and stew in a bad mood she couldn’t explain. On the grassy promenade, they stood a moment to take in the Hoofington evening. Their first had been inside the hotel, awash in uncertainties and anxieties for Octavia, and, in memory, was nearly indistinguishable from the parade of difficult nights since first finding themselves en route to the mountains in the south. One more hard night.

Octavia took the lead down a cobblestone walkway, taking them between circlets of bright flowers and lush grasses, moving deeper into the park’s thick, floral atmosphere. Grasshoppers hummed through the air while distant ponies walked, many chatting about the recent restoration spell, and they stopped again on the far side of a group of well-dressed ponies clearing away the remains of a wedding.

“Even in all this, love persists,” Whooves said. “It’s enough to make even a hard case like Discord soft-hearted. Ah, young romance!”

“I could not count how many times I have performed here,” Octavia said. “I think I have seen this park from atop a stage more than from my own hooves.” At this, Pinkie laughed, and Octavia returned a conciliatory smile.

“Rainbow really is missin’ out,” Applejack said. “All this fresh air’d do her good, Ah say.”

“It’s something about Trixie,” Twilight said. “She’s been acting kind of touchy since last night.”

“What happened last night?” Rarity asked.

“She apologized.”

“About time,” Fluttershy whispered. She blushed and looked away at Twilight’s questioning expression.

“There it is. I wanted you all to see this,” Octavia said. She pointed across an open space toward a crowd of dark, dull metal statues, surrounded by a ring of stone pylons and hemmed by a pointillistic carpet of roses—pink, orange, purple, white, yellow, and blue. “They are statues erected in your honor. The Six Bearers, they are called.”

They approached and stared at themselves, about thrice their size, standing ready and confident behind Twilight’s cantering form, diadem on her head sparkling proudly in the waning sun. Rainbow and Applejack bore determined frowns, while Rarity and Fluttershy took more quietly formidable stances behind, with Pinkie laughing in the rear. Their cutie marks, outlined in thin gold, were the only colors aside from each shining Element, though the detail was breathtaking. Unicorn horns had grooves, and Twilight could see the texture of each feather on Rainbow and Fluttershy.

“These are incredible,” Twilight said. “I never knew about them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we never heard anything about these!” Pinkie said, running to the chain that was there to hold ponies off the flowers. “But they’re so cool! Look, Twilight! They got me perfectly! And you, Applejack, they even put the notch in your hat! And Twilight’s doing that little stand-up thing that she does!”

“Everypony does that, Pinkie,” Twilight said.

“Am Ah the only one a little unsettled by the fact that no one bothered to tell us ‘bout this?” Applejack asked.

“Ah’m pretty sure it’s legal,” Big Mac said. “They’re public property, technically, so they don’t have to get our permission to carve ‘em.”

“Now that seems backwards to me. Wouldn’t they have to get our permission more fer somethin’ like this? Somethin’ that everyone’s gonna see an’ use?”

“But no one’s profiting off of them,” Twilight said. “Except us, I guess, in an abstract way.”

“I thought it was more that our images are public property,” Rarity said. “We don’t have to be consulted on every single use of our likeness. If we did, we’d be buried in paperwork day and night. Celestia knows my face has been in a lot of places without my express consent.”

Pinkie snickered, and Rarity reddened. “You know what I mean.”

“I did not know you knew law, Big Mac,” Octavia said.

He shrugged. “Little bit. ‘Nough to do our taxes each year.”

“Hey, there’s something written on Fluttershy!” Pinkie said, pointing. “It’s carved into her chest. That must hurt!”

“What’s it say? Ah can’t make it out,” Applejack urged.

“Uh…” Pinkie squinted. “‘If Twilight defers, Fluttershy takes a mantle.’ Well, that’s silly. That doesn’t mean anything!”

“This is not the first cryptic message that we have encountered,” Octavia said.

“Discord toying with us?” Whooves asked.

“It sounds like more than that,” Fluttershy said. “Um, I don’t know about the rest of us, but I’ve noticed a lot of his little… messages don’t amount to much. This seems pretty direct.” In a much lower voice, she added, “and it’s about me.”

“Pinkie, can you sense anything coming up? Anything… disastrous?” Twilight asked.

“Nope! My Pinkie Sense has been quiet as a mouse! A really, really quiet mouse!”

“And no Elements nearby either,” Fluttershy said.

“Sooooo,” Twilight sighed. “Another mysterious problem. Just what we need.”

Daring Do stared down the dark barrel of the cannon, but she kept her cool. Rainbow Dash hunched over the hotel writing desk, listening to the city outside and trying to write. Her mind was clouded with anger, fear, and doubt, and the words flowed out of her clumsy pen more naturally for her than ever.

Discord, the puppet master behind all the chaos from earlier, grinned an insane smile while Daring struggled uselessly. She was scared, who wouldn’t be? But she wouldn’t let him see it.

Her thoughts traveled back in time to her former lover, also a mare. Her name was Sheer Moon, Sheer for short, and she was a beautiful blue unicorn with a silver mane. Sheer had been captured by Ahuizotl and held captive for months before finally escaping.

Daring didn’t know where she was now. She hoped Sheer was still alive. Dread filled her soul when she thought of it, and even trying to be optimistic was an unimaginable effort.

She remembered Sheer’s smile and loving touch. Never had a pony, much less a mare, loved her in such a way, and the thought that she might be in trouble made her want to scream. No, not might. Was. Was in trouble. Something bad was coming and she could feel it in her heart like a pony feels a sneeze coming. Whatever it was, it was bad, and Daring couldn’t do a thing about it. She was so scared and worried for her marefriend that nothing else seemed to matter, even the danger she was in.

Sheer Moon was half a country away in Appleloosa and she was in trouble, but Daring didn’t know what kind of trouble. She wanted to scream and cry, but she couldn’t because she didn’t know what she would say. It was bad and it was inevitible.

Sheer was going to die, she knew.

Rainbow turned over her page and tried to begin a new sentence, but the pen would not stay still in her trembling jaw. And so, she did the only thing she could. She put her head down on the desk, closed her eyes, and wept bitter, self-conscious tears.

Princess Celestia inspected her gilt hooves unhappily. The decorated golden shoes she wore were tarnished with heat and dust, but she would have to wait until returning to Equestria to fix them—a spell so simple, she had actually caught herself casting it without thinking, and had to quickly reverse the magic. The dragons’ culture valued ceremony and appearances, and any alteration to her outfit, especially one that rejected the natural wear and tear of living in their harsh, mountainous country, would be a metaphorical slap in the face.

Her bedchambers, however, were not monitored, and she was free to modify them to her liking. Unlike in Equestria, the dragon lands were rich in conductive metals and piezoelectric crystals, easily allowing for tools to transfer, direct, and shape magical discharges. Back home, if Celestia wanted to encase her bed in an infinite looping waterfall—the sound helped her sleep—she needed an array of spells; in her substitute bedroom, she needed only arrange a jaw of crystals around her bed and throw a water summoning spell, and the complexities of magical propagation and electrostatics would take care of themselves.

Leaving the country in her sister’s care was not easy to do. As much as she loathed it, as much as she told herself she was being irrational, her memories of Nightmare Moon put a pause in her decision each time she needed to leave. The dragons were barely familiar with the incident, only those ruling, some even older than she, conversant in Equestrian history. She didn’t mind.

Someone knocked on her door, and she bade them enter. A young dragon, only a few years older than Spike, entered with obvious fear and handed her a letter, trimmed in gold. Something formal, but not vital—so the color indicated.

She waved the young dragon away with a polite “thank you” and read the letter, smiling to herself as she did so. There had been earlier talk of her attending an Unburdening, what the dragons called the eruption of a volcano, but she didn’t think it was serious.

She placed the letter on her bedside table, scooted well away from her waterfall, and stopped to think. Dragon custom was painfully particular about dress and posture for those of power, but she did not know whether it was required of her to change outfits for entertainment. In her time there, she had only attended hearings and a single uncomfortable press conference, for which her words were translated on site.

She knew she could not freshen up her shoes. That was one detail that she could not change.

Twenty minutes later, she was in the air, soaring over the complex of castles, in no hurry to head for the volcano, which was due to erupt in two hours. She could reach it in a matter of seconds if she needed to, or less, if she had a clear line of sight. Her flight, mirroring some of the Elements’ departures from company, was for fresh air and something to clear her head.

The dragon lands had formed in Gaia prehistory when the continent that would become Equestria collided with a young mountain range in the eastern ocean, leading to a cataclysmic subduction zone on one side and a snarled clench of mountains on the other, many of which grew from furious uprisings of magma into the water. She found it hard to believe that it had been an island nation before solidifying into a single, blackened bur on the planet’s face, and then overgrowing into a sylvan blemish the envy of aspiring geographers all across Equestria.

The geographic results of the country’s restive birth were drastic, and had taken her breath away when she first arrived. Mountains sawed the brilliant, blue sky for as far as she could see, creating a panorama of ragged peaks, sheer cliff faces, and narrow canyons, all of it covered with trees and grasses, and threaded with unpaved roads or bored through with black tunnels. Where she was staying, a marvelous, slate-smooth shield volcano had been used as foundation for a spreading, low castle, towers sprouting off of each other like enchanted mushrooms and unguarded, covered corridors reaching like roots across and into the ground. The structure went at least half a mile underground, she knew, and there lived her dragon consult.

She paused her flight atop the pointed tower top, draping a wing around a stone flagpole for support, and breathed deep of the fresh dragon air.

Around a week after they arrived back home, full of pride and vitality, Celestia and Luna were sucked into a power vacuum, not entirely unwillingly. Discord had decided, with no given reason or warning, to harvest the mud from the riverbanks north of town, allowing for unchecked erosion. Several ponies in the small town feared a drought if the river could not be saved, and it just so happened that the forepony who had overseen the construction of a rudimentary canal system—the same system that the sisters had helped, so cementing Discord’s pique—had gone missing. With no prior knowledge or experience, Luna and Celestia stepped up to take control of the operation, and found that it was not particularly hard. The ponies practically organized themselves after Celestia gave them a motivational speech.

It didn’t stop at the river. As primary foreponies, and the only ones from town who had seen Discord, their knowledge and experience with magic was much sought after, never mind that it was by the same ponies who had chased them out of town months prior for simply having an audience with the draconequus despot. When a new system of thin canals and inlets was in place, there was a town-wide celebration in their honor. They were the first unicorns in that section of Equestria to accept a position of such hard work, something reserved for earth ponies and occasionally pegasi—“undignified labor.”

A generation later, the sisters would trace their rise to power back to that one point.

She landed on a circular, metal parapet that hung from bulky chains across a former quarry, and met the dragon dignitaries: three familiar faces and one stranger. Her decision to seek the dragon lands had been a difficult one, and one against which Luna argued strongly. Visiting the griffons first had been unquestionable; their relationship with Equestria was frosty at best, and frequently given to suspicion from both ends. After that, she had been torn between the dragons and changelings.

The changelings, inhabiting an archipelago to the north, had been most drastically affected by the disaster, and securing their trust was vital. The dragons, meanwhile, shared their southeastern borders with the vestigial and geographically remote nation of draconequuses. Celestia knew that they had disavowed Discord as a political gaffe, but did not know whether they would assume Equestria’s disappearance was a sign of a successful coup. If so, she knew she could wind up with an army of confused draconequuses on her doorstep, thinking they were there to help oust their own maniac, as one reigns in a rabid dog. The implications of that, while not as severe as the changelings’ loss of respect, would be more immediate and obvious. Her ponies, close to ninety-five percent of which polls showed knew next to nothing of other draconequuses, could easily assume the worst, and terror and aggression would sweep the shattered country.

She had decided to curb the more immediate threat first, and planned to use the dragons’ support to leverage more time for herself to figure out the next step, which, she imagined, would probably be to pay the draconequuses a visit, bracing words at the ready.

The stranger, an iridescent green dragoness with a barbed chest plate and a lightning bolt branded into her shoulder, bowed, bringing her briefly to Celestia’s height. With a second of hesitation, she offered her claw to be shaken, and the five of them marched in a row to the portal, through which they would take five separate staircases up to the volcano’s lip.

Ceremony was everything for the ruling elite, and, Celestia was happy to discover in her research, that the same set of rules was applied to each city-state ruler, even though specifics were allowed to develop and break down for the lower citizens of each area. As an honored guest, she must have the first word in any meeting, a rule she had tested only slightly. She would never admit it, but, of all the creatures in the world, dragons were the only ones that could consistently scare her. The thought of sharing a meeting room with something older and larger than she was did not sit well, and, though they had been universally patient and pleasant, she fancied she could see a ferocious glimmer in each of their eyes, a fire that she could not extinguish with diplomacy if it were excited.

The rest of the nation, however, was different. While the dragon kings and queens, barons and baronesses, comported themselves with exhausting calm and dignity, the working class, the youth, and the domestic stirred within the mines and channels of their sweeping country like disorganized bees, a sea of life that she could never imagine transplanted into her country.

She could hear the disquieting sound of thousands of dragon voices—some speaking Equestrian, many not—beyond, and she stopped where their path split into staircases, all of different sizes to accommodate the differing sizes of dragon. She was to take the left-most set, left being their honorific position, but, first, turned to her companions.

“Thank you for inviting me.”

They each bowed and returned phrases of acknowledgement, then started up their stairs. She wondered, on her own, what would happen if she refused to let them speak up through the greetings at the volcano, whether everyone would look to her to announce its eruption, or whether the crowd would simply let it occur in silence. She withheld a giggle at the idea.

Discord finished his newest project, a ten-ton trebuchet made entirely of molded and enchanted earth, and used it to fire a single boulder over a field outside his castle, whereupon it collapsed into a ten-ton pile of dirt. He cackled and went back inside, and the ponies who bore witness to it were finally made aware of why he had seen fit to ruin the riverbanks. At that same time, Celestia and Luna were facing a question they had never expected to encounter: what to do with the ponies they commanded?

While the river was safe, there appeared more work to be done: houses to build or rebuild, fences to create, wells to dig, and no one seemed more qualified to lead in these projects than the unicorn sisters. They had proven themselves competent leaders and intelligent delegators, and it didn’t take long for the novelty of their magic to turn into a mystical reputation.

It also didn’t take long for Discord to respond.

Before leaving Equestria, she had set a team of three researchers to compile five or ten pages of essentials on dragon culture, and, up until she had stepped into view of the crowd, she thought they had done well.

One sentence in the report had caught her eye at the time, but she forgot it almost immediately after reading it: “The young dragons have also used you as a certain inspiration for their own culture.” She hadn’t given it much thought at the time.

Tiers were carved into the volcano’s outer rim, which didn’t surprise or bother her. Dragons had incredible heat tolerance, as did she. What made her stop and stare, drawing curious looks from the other dignitaries, was the multitude depictions of her own visage looking back at her, moving like feverish reflections through curtains of heat waves. The young dragons below held banners, flags, and posters of her and her name, much in Equestrian, and decorated with clearly draconic whorls and arabesques. Torches adorned much of what they held, and some dragons, she saw on a second long pass, were even dressed in her colors. Pastel rainbow manes hung off scaly heads, and golden suns shone on proud chests.

Before she had looked away from the mass of pretend-Celestias, one of the dragons by her side started speaking, and the crowd quieted after a brief spurt of unintelligible murmuring. She was surprised that the announcement was not in her language, while so much else had been, but she knew well enough what to expect. The volcano would erupt, the lucky dragons toward the front of the stands would get lava on them, and everyone would be happy. It was an event for the dragons what an eclipse was for her ponies.

In exactly thirty-one minutes, the first upwelling of magma would announce itself. Looking into the volcano’s mouth, she could see enough to know it would be soon, but her magic allowed her to put a precise time prediction to it. She noted with a certain surreptitious pride that the daylight mixed with the earthen glow below her masked her pale magic.

While her sister used the subtle, cerebral aspects of magic to manipulate reality more quietly, Celestia took firm command of force and matter, using them to shape her world like clay, or words on a page. She could move mountains, or create them. She could make herself fly at apocalyptic speeds, or make herself into something so dense that she would fall through the ground. She could wick away radiation and reproduce the conditions to create diamonds on the tip of her horn, and her body was nearly indestructible. Whether the dragons knew that of her, she wasn’t sure.

A friend of theirs, a pegasus, warned them over the mending of a wall one day, saying that he felt that “something unwelcome had made them its destination.” Those words had stuck with Celestia, so much that she would reuse the phrase in a book about magic and its many complicated forms, a book that would become required reading for nearly every university student.

If it was Discord, of which they were confident, they knew their tiny village would be insufficient to hide them, even if they could pull every pony there together around a lie as to their whereabouts. Luna first suggested they retreat into the southern forests again, and they would have, had not Celestia had an idea of what she called pure madness, inspired by the pegasus’ physiology.

Weaving together the unicorns’ ability to apply magic to targets and the pegasi’s inherent magical lightness, she created a precursor to the cloud-walking spell, an inarticulate and dangerous piece of magic that required both sisters to wear permanent magical shields to protect them from any movement of air, which stung like windblown sand. It was the only way she could find on short notice to render them capable of resting atop clouds. Where would Discord never think to search for them, she had mused. Why, in a pegasus’ house.

With the help of a team of pegasi, they hid away on a low cumulus cloud four horizontal miles from their village, constantly tired and anxious from maintaining shields and watching for Discord. They didn’t have to wait long.

Eldritch, pulsing darkness heralded his arrival on a chilly Thursday afternoon, two days after their ascension, turning the distant town into a decomposing toy model. Dumbfounded ponies ran to and fro, but they could only hear thin, infrequent cries of displeasure from their vantage. For hours, they watched the town malinger under shadow before he actually appeared, making himself a giant silhouette to stride through town, waist deep underground and as black as the intimations of night that were coming on. With no facial features or expressions, his lifeless picture head swiveled like a dumb cloud, once lighting on a larger cloud beside them, but never quitting the town.

The first firework of magic made their hearts plummet, until they realized that it was not Discord who was illuminating the village’s tiny sky, but the unicorns who lived there. The shadow figure dissipated without a sound, but the magic continued, a miniature stream of sparks coalescing as ponies found one another, and then moving up and down pathways before turning and converging on a house. Luna would later swear she had heard the door bang open, but Celestia could only watch, astounded, as a tall, serpentine figure flopped into the dark, dusty street and batted at the tiny lights like he was trying to shoo away fireflies. He was chased, and the giant shadow figure flickered to life for only a second before Discord stretched, thinned, and became no more than a ribbon of blackness, sucking away the unnatural dark as he allowed the sky to claim him. Starlight regained the town, and a confused murmur reached them from where they sat.

And then another note came, coming to rest directly on Celestia’s muzzle. “Wherever you are hiding, we can all be sure that you will be found.”

The volcano rumbled, and Celestia smiled giddily. It had been a long time since she had seen something as awesome and invigorating as an eruption, the disaster to her own country too fragmentary to incite much fascination. It was interesting, and the magic involved was a topic of endless conversation between her and Luna, but it lacked the splendor of the world at work.

She had read that certain dragons, at a sufficient age and magical capacity, would go to live under the ground in water tables, magma vents, or mineral deposits. She didn’t know whether there were any dragons under the volcano she watched, but she assumed so; it seemed appropriate.

Orange glowed below her in a moving disc, and she could feel the heat that would put most mortal ponies in the hospital. She inhaled and puffed out her chest, relishing the bands of scalding warmth in her metal decorations—permanently enchanted, so they could not melt. She had stopped perceiving temperatures as normal ponies did millennia ago. For her, heat was nothing but another kind of energy, something she could absorb or radiate at will, but which hardly affected her. The same was true of most magnitudes of kinetic energy.

The first bubble of lava sent orange flecks over the volcano’s rim, and the dragons cheered. She only watched calmly, noting the temperature increase impassively while the molten rock rose. While the dignitaries spoke from their parapets, still in draconic, she studied the lava’s undulation, its bubbling, the rising violence as it drew nearer to her position on the edge.

She let a smile break out as she thought, playfully, what might happen if she were to dive in. She would not be harmed, of course, but the dragons might not know that. “Heck,” she thought, “I could probably make my way to the core from here.” The smile faded as more lava spurted upwards, some nearly touching her platform.

She had seen the planet’s core before, once. When she was young and arrogant, she thought she might create a sanctum for herself there, not realizing how far below it was. Choosing a spot at random in the middle of the desert, she had activated a favored spell and started boring through the ground, stopping only once when she broke through solid bedrock to fall nearly two hundred meters into an ancient deposit of magma. The heat had not bothered her, nor the pressure, but she was dizzy upon landing, and had to take several minutes to regain her bearings. Deep inside the world, she had not considered the fact that everything would be too condensed to allow her sight much use.

In her mind, it was among her most incredible applications of magic she had ever managed. Punching through pure rock and magma, enduring impossible pressures and temperatures, she traveled at just under two hundred miles per hour to reach the solid core in what Luna would later tell her was nearly a full day. At that depth, even her godly magic was not sufficient to keep all the heat out, and she was sweating heavily as she surveyed the tiny cavern she was able to create for herself on the core’s shell, her dulled senses warped further by dizzying magnetism. Disappointed, but feeling accomplished nonetheless, she carved her name into the core and returned to the surface, a meteor that must have resembled a fiery harbinger to those who saw her, rising into the stratosphere on a monstrous column of smoke and steam, pulling behind a pocket of superheated air that took the leaves off the trees in a mile radius. A week later, Celestia created a mountain to hide her passage to the center of the world. It was a few hundred miles northeast of Applewood’s eventual location.

Below the tiers of seats, there were carved wide slits in the volcano’s rim, and Celestia watched appreciatively as lava poured out in slow, sporadic streams. Smoke and heat waves mingled in the air, and the dragons had fallen gravely quiet. Lava lapped at the bottom row of seats, and she watched as some, but not nearly all, spectators bent to dip their claws in the red liquid. As a resource, lava in its natural form was all but useless, and this made it something of a luxury in draconic culture. She made a mental note to bring some back in an enchanted vial for her sister.

The dragon closest to her leaned over and extended a long, grotesque arm to indicate the outflow. “Like a sunset, very pretty,” he said, smiling. She internally flinched, but returned the smile. Their sharp teeth made for a disturbing grin, but she knew they meant no harm—to her, at least.

A fierce bubbling sound erupted near the volcano’s middle, and a larger font of lava came up in a broken, red rainbow, with a coda of small, smoking, black stones to pepper the crowd. They cheered, and she nearly did too.

After the celebration, they convened in a large, open dining room, where her dragon counterparts dined with surprising elegance on various, unidentified meats. “Not pony, no worries,” one had said, earning laughs from her friends and a strained smile from Celestia. She helped herself to their other fares, but found herself, toward the dinner’s end, eyeing the glistening meat. She had heard descriptions of its flavor, and, though curious, was enticed more by the presentation. Smooth-trimmed, spice-rubbed discs of flesh hung on decorative pikes over open flames, the fat dripping and shining above eager flames, like treasure, while bones stuck out of the larger beast from which they were carved, yellowed and sticky. Fat, red tomatoes and pristine, white pearl onions mingled with yellow and purple potatoes in decadent salads, dressed with a vinaigrette that glittered with herbs, and, she thought she saw, tiny shards of gold, while geometric mounds of bread steamed on sweet-smelling wooden pallets. Sesame and caraway seeds fell off in sand-like streams whenever she helped herself, and she laughed with genuine amusement when one dragon, a huge, black drake with a head like a cannonball, used his claw to slice a delicate wedge of cheese for her.

Her thoughts did not linger on Equestria, or her sister, or the Elements, for that time.

Pumpkin Patch was the most successful farmer in town, and her neighbor, who went by the simple sobriquet “Whip,” had been the one to intuit Discord’s coming to the sisters. The four of them met at a hillside next to town and decided that staying there would invite disaster for the other ponies. Discord was after them in some way, and, though the unicorns there had defended themselves once, it was an act of terrified desperation, and could easily be shaken out of them if he should come a second time.

They decided to leave, heading west, to a nearby village that Whip said was familiar with the sisters’ names and deeds. It would bring them within viewing distance of Discord’s castle, but it was the closest civilization that they knew of.

Under cover of night, the four friends slipped away. Celestia and Luna offered to go alone, but Pumpkin Patch and Whip were adamant; they would not see the two unicorns who gave their town renewed hope and self-worth march into danger alone. The four traveled as far as they could through the narrow horn of forest, until it dwindled into nothing, and they had to walk through open plains, distantly frightened under the gleaming, crystalline figure of Discord’s castle, just visible.

In her bed, surrounded by the soothing sound of running water, Celestia allowed herself to become lost, looking emptily into the small vial of lava. She could see the Elements. One of the first things she did when they weren’t paying attention—and that was frequently, she was mildly ashamed to admit to herself—was cast a remote viewing spell on them. She could track their progress no matter where they went, as long as they stayed on the Gaia. Luna had done the same thing, but disbanded her spell a few days in. She had no desire to see their day-to-day comings and goings, and was content to simply hear reports from Celestia, or Twilight directly.

In Hoofington, they had reached a strange lull in activity. Twilight had a research project and Rainbow appeared to be under significant stress, but that was it. She assumed they were waiting for something, but, if they had discussed it, they had done so when she wasn’t watching.

Luna’s stern voice played through her head. “You can see them at any time, and be by their side in an instant if they run into trouble. Why do you stand by and let them get hurt?” Her sister’s tone had stung, but not the question itself; it was a question she faced all the time.

“It is not my place,” she had said. “Nor is it yours, nor the Datura’s, nor anyone’s. They are the bearers of the Elements of Harmony. It must be them to finish the task and ultimately seal Discord away. They must learn how to do it on their own, Luna.”

The unfortunate truth, she reflected, was that caution was not something they could afford to throw away. She had to assume three things: that Discord had some way of watching them, or at least keeping tabs; that he had a plan for quick, violent retribution if events tipped out of his favor too quickly; and that any use of country-wide magic would be a trigger for such a move. Unlikely, she thought in the safety of her foreign bed, but possible, and not something she wanted to test. It would almost certainly mean the dissolution of what little hope they had. She had explained it to Luna, who wanted simply to find his castle, kick down the door, and tear his operation apart, as a chess game with a mad pony. Make one overt move, and their opponent was liable to flip the board. Therefore, they had to rely on the Elements to invent a solution, while the goddesses and their acolytes worked as far in the background as they could. Even this, she explained, was risky, as it could well take them too long, and give Discord the time he needed to whittle Canterlot away naturally.

She closed her eyes and looked in on the Elements. Twilight was at Octavia’s mansion, pouring over several books at once, and everyone else was back at their hotel. Rainbow Dash sat against the wall, a pillow propped behind her back, holding herself poised in flagging concentration while a magical dome of precipitation moved in and out of existence, dampening the carpet. On the other side of the room, Applejack appeared to be sleeping beside the radiator; Celestia could determine the magic that passed between her and the machine. Remarkable, she thought, how the group had taken to magic. She smiled knowingly while Applejack practiced interfacing with a simple appliance half a world away.