The city of Roan had once been the largest and most advanced settlement in Equestria. Its construction began nearly three decades after Celestia and Luna had deposed Discord, and half a century before they would graduate from mere rulers to goddesses, and move to the Castle of the Two Sisters.

Since then, Roan had grown into a dense, two-tiered column, one half above ground and one half beneath, where some of the oldest bloodlines carried on in fissiparous indecision of whether to accept or revile the tawdry, falsely antiquarian tourist traps that comprised the city’s more prominent half.

With tall pillars modeled after Cloudsdale’s architecture holding up stone domes, made to look much older than they were, and brass cupolas to catch the sun and turn the city into a studded design from above, the city was designed to embody dignity and stoicism, as well as an old-world sense of grace and confidence. The effect was lessened by the train tracks that rooted it to its spot, twisted off in the distance, but whole at the city’s borders.

Night had fallen over Roan, and the blank desert that surrounded, and no one was around to see ten soaking wet bodies materialize in the dust.

Twilight was one of the last to wake up, and she did so violently. She had been shaking with cold, on the edge of alertness, but started awake when her dream imploded. She shot up, pulling with her a single, bright memory of freezing, crushing water, which seemed all the more real when she realized her own dampness.

“Thank Celestia,” Rarity said softly. She lay on one side in a wet circle of dirt. Behind her, Twilight could see the diving blue dot that she knew was Rainbow Dash. Her movements were not smooth in the air.

“Are you okay?” Fluttershy asked.

“I think so,” Twilight said, rubbing her head. “What’s going on?” She looked slowly around, then stopped, seeing an orange mound behind her.

“She’s not breathing,” Whooves said. He paced before them, eyes downcast and voice empty of its usual vim.

“Oh, hell.” Her horn reflexively pulsing to life, Twilight winced as pain stabbed from behind her eyes.

“Do you know how we got here?” Rarity asked. “Your face suggests you don’t.”

Twilight moved to Applejack and sat down, putting a hoof to her chest. “How did this happen?”

“She was like that when we woke up,” Octavia said from afar. She was approaching, and appeared just as exhausted as ever. “We are near the city of Roan. It took me half an hour to get close enough to see that. We will have a long walk ahead of us, I am afraid.”

“Wait, just, everypony stop,” Twilight said. She looked at Applejack again, tears coming to her eyes. “What the hell is this?”

No one responded.

“How? When? She wasn’t like this before we were moved—I do assume that’s what happened. No ship, unfamiliar location, all that.”

“We were in Applewood last night,” Rarity said. She nodded acknowledgement as Vinyl stirred and woke up nearby. “At least, I think it was last night. I suppose we can’t know that.”

“Applewood.” Twilight tested the name on her dry tongue.

“The dam,” Octavia said.

“What’s going on?” Vinyl asked quietly.

“Oh Celestia,” Twilight said. Suddenly, the dream returned. She had dreamt that she was standing somewhere above the ground, the only clear feeling a formless but acute fear, and then been swept away by a wall of cold water. “Oh Celestia, that was real?”

“If you dreamed of a tidal wave, yes,” Octavia said.

“Your idea was right,” Whooves said. “The dam moved. It woke up, pulled itself along, and we couldn’t do a thing to stop it.”

“Rarity held back the river,” Fluttershy said.

“I’m remembering now,” Twilight said. “And then we moved. We were finished, and Vanilla came by to save us, or something.”

“He let us get hit first,” Rarity said.

Vinyl approached Applejack and put a hoof to her chest, exactly as Twilight had done. “Twilight? Um, I think you should see this.”

“I saw,” Twilight said. “I… yeah, I know.”

“Big Mac, Pinkie, and Rainbow are out there,” Octavia said. “They… are not happy.” She sighed. “Which leads me to something I wish I did not have to say right now. We are completely without resources. All of our food and water was on the ship, which is gone, and we are in the desert. The nearest city is an hour away, probably more with Applejack’s… with Applejack.”

“Sweet Celestia,” Vinyl breathed.

Twilight stared at her friend, lifeless on the ground, her hat askew and her jaw slack, her eyes staring glassily into the flawless blue sky. She wanted to say something, something to comfort the others, or herself, but there was nothing. Where she should feel sadness, she knew, she felt mostly mute astonishment at the veracity of her slowly regenerating memories. The nightmare was real, and recent. She had used her horn so much that even the smallest magic current hurt her head.

“Help me get Applejack over my back. If we start now, we can get to town before it gets too hot,” Octavia said.

Fluttershy helped sling Applejack onto Octavia, and Whooves and Vinyl grabbed her cello and Twilight’s book bag, which had fallen out of Twilight’s pocket dimension when they arrived.

“I don’t see how it could have happened,” Whooves said, trotting up next to Vinyl, both of them wheeling their heads around as they followed Octavia. The desert was flat and empty, but for a mound of buildings in the middle distance and a short ridge of mountains much farther beyond, to the west. The sun was at their backs, and the desert horizon still ended in a dark rim, nearly out of sight.

“She got hit worse than the rest of us,” Rarity said. “That’s all.”

They met Big Mac first, flat on his back and staring into the sky. He had not been crying, but he would not rise on his own. Twilight and Whooves pulled him up and shoved him in the direction they were going after a minute of unsuccessful encouragement. Rainbow did not land, but followed them from above, and Pinkie fell into line without comment beside Rarity, her mane down.

No one spoke. Their arrival site disappeared and the new city grew slowly larger, and throughout Applejack looked back at them from where she inanimately jostled on Octavia’s back. Pinkie was a constant stream of wails and cries, and Rarity and Fluttershy walked with her, Fluttershy’s wing on her back in that familiar gesture of comfort. Twilight heard nothing from the others, and nothing from herself. Her own feelings were too heavy, her shock too great. It simply could not be, she thought. There was no truth to what had happened, she would see in time; someone would wake up, either herself or Applejack, and the nightmare would end. Just like that, she thought.

They stopped only when Octavia fell, panting and weak from the heat on her dark mane, but Big Mac moved onwards, dragging no one with him. Pinkie had finally run out of tears, and Twilight and Rarity moved Applejack onto her back at her own insistence, then resumed, Roan within a half hour of walking, and noon nearly upon them.

Even when Rainbow Dash landed at close to falling speed, no one talked. Their hoofsteps blended into one unbroken stretch of white noise, and Twilight was conscious of calm gradually overtaking her other feelings. Slowly, she stopped thinking she might wake up, and her mind was able to wander.

Applejack still wore her Element, its golden frame tarnished but its jewel shining perfectly in the pre-noon sun. If an Element of Harmony were to die, Twilight knew, the identity would pass to another, someone already close to the other bearers. How it was selected, she did not know, nor did she know how to determine who would wear Applejack’s necklace next. Her studies had not prepared her for the possibility of needing to find a new Element without warning.

“So we’re going to that city,” Rainbow said.

“That is correct,” Octavia said. Both of them were at the front.

“Great.”

Octavia said nothing, and Rainbow looked back at Twilight and the others.

“I don’t really see the point, Octavia. Twilight.”

“The point is to find food, water, and shelter from the heat,” Octavia said.

“Then another airship, I suppose,” Rarity added.

“Why bother?” Rainbow asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re done, that’s what I mean.” She didn’t turn around, just spoke to the empty air before her. “We lost—which means he won. Discord. He beat us.”

“We are not done,” Octavia said.

“Uh, yeah, we are. I don’t know if you noticed, Octavia, but we lost Applejack.”

“We did,” Rarity said, casting a fearful look at Twilight.

“This crappy mission can’t go on without all of us, Twilight. I know you agree with Octavia here, but we’re just walking to our own deaths now.”

“You can’t know that,” Fluttershy said.

“I can.” They walked on for a while in silence, then Rainbow spoke up again, her inflection pointed. “The Elements are broken, and the team is incomplete. We can’t accomplish much except our own destruction if we’re missing someone.”

Twilight stared at the back of Rainbow’s head, not sure how to respond.

“This is hopeless now. At first it wasn’t, but now it is.”

“What do you think we should do?” Rarity asked.

“Cut our losses.”

“And go home?” Pinkie asked.

“You know that we cannot,” Octavia said. “We are—”

“No, we used to be whatever you’re about to say,” Rainbow said. “Let’s just get a ship, something cheap and quick, and fly off to Canterlot. If we can get there fast enough, we can warn the princesses.”

“And then what?” Twilight asked. “Their hooves are tied even worse than ours. They won’t be able to finish this for us.”

“Well hell, Twilight, I don’t know then! Maybe you can use some of that brain power to figure something else out!”

“You want to abandon our quest and hope someone else comes along to finish it,” Rarity said. “That’s not cutting our losses, that’s cutting our own throats.”

“Doesn’t matter if they’re already cut, Rarity.”

“I do not believe that we are so without hope as you say,” Octavia said.

“And it means so much, coming from you. You can go home any time you want.”

“That is not true.”

“Well, you sure don’t have the fate of the whole freaking country on your back.”

“A duty that you wish to abandon.”

Rainbow thought for a moment and spoke again, somewhat mollified. “I just don’t see the point anymore. There’s no coming back from this.”

Twilight nodded, and Rainbow turned back around. She didn’t want to believe that Rainbow was correct, but her own lack of a plan rang loudly in her head. Time was already short; it had been short for a while, something they all had denied in their ways. With one Element and its bearer missing, along with the three they still hadn’t found, she could easily envision Rainbow’s plan.

“We hold a funeral for Applejack, somewhere where it isn’t as dusty. Somewhere in the grass. Then we get a ship and fly home. Princess Celestia will understand, and maybe we can work something out with Discord. He can leave Ponyville alone if we agree to… something.” Twilight blinked, and, finally, tears came. That was the crux. Failure. She realized it, and she cried.

They were walking in the middle of the trackless desert thirteen thousand miles from home. The southern half of Equestria had been so long a distant idea, a destination no more interesting than the next town, and Discord’s veiled warnings had never completely landed. Everything had worked for so long, despite the occasional fight, the occasional danger, the occasional harrowing moment. Someone had always come through.

Even flying home would take too long, she realized slowly. No airship she knew of could get them to Canterlot in less than a week, and in that time, there was no telling what would happen.

She thought of Spike. Even he had been a momentary bump in an otherwise competent plan. She had recovered from that loss relatively quickly, and it had not made their own quest any harder. He was not part of the central effort, and he never had been. She wondered whether he had known that.

“Ponyville won’t be home for long, though, even if it is when we get back.” They would not persist there with the weight of their failure hanging on their hearts. “We might not persist anywhere.”

The princesses would be no help in the long term. Twilight knew, as she knew they did as well, that they might be able to coordinate a way to stop Discord, but he would not go quietly, and even the goddesses were only two. The ripples would expand much the same as they had after that first horrible night, and no one would be left to hold them back. The goddesses were only two.

“Twilight,” Whooves said, “I just had a thought. Actually, Vinyl did.”

“Wait, she’s still with us?” Rainbow asked, turning around. “Celestia. Just what we need.”

“What is it?” Twilight asked.

“Over the radio, Applejack said that you told her once that her spirit can stay inside the dam if her body dies, and she was inside it for a large portion of the battle—or so I believe. Might it be possible that she’s still… you know, around?”

“Dead in body, but alive in spirit?” Rarity said. “Twilight?”

Twilight thought, trying to remember her readings on the subject, long ago. “If she was inside the dam when her body… passed, then she might still be inside it, yes. Getting her back wouldn’t be easy, though.”

“But it’s possible?” Rainbow asked, suddenly right in front of her, filling her vision with her intense expression.

“It is possible, yes.”

“Then we’re going back to Applewood,” Rarity said. “How far is it, Octavia?”

“Three or four days by airship,” Octavia said.

“Hang on,” Twilight said. “Stop. Stop walking. Pinkie, put her down.”

“What’s wrong?” Rainbow asked.

“Just thinking. I might be able to figure this out more.” She walked a careful circle around Applejack, keeping a respectful distance as though expecting the orange pony to spring up.

“Talk to us, Twilight,” Whooves said. “You’re our thread of hope right now.”

“She’s not hurt,” Twilight said. She prodded at Applejack’s body, lifting the hooves, stroking the chest and sides. “I’m not finding any broken bones, or anything else unusual.”

“She drowned,” Octavia said. “Most likely.”

“But we didn’t? It makes no sense that Vanilla would keep all of us but one alive. By rights, we should all be dead.” She sat down, chewing her lip, recalling what she could from her reading. She didn’t want to pull out a book then and there. “If she was inside the dam at the time we were teleported, then her body would have moved, but her spirit wouldn’t. Maybe. Maybe… or the spirit might have come along, torn away from the dam.”

“Then it would just go back into her, wouldn’t it?” Fluttershy asked.

“Nnno, I don’t think so. Unless Vanilla specifically put it back inside—which he obviously didn’t—sorry.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nose. Her heart was beating with excitement, much as she willed it not to. It was too early for elation, the idea too small for relief. “Which he didn’t,” she repeated. “Applejack wouldn’t have any knowledge of how to get around in the empty air, between her own body and whatever she possesses. So, if she’s not in the dam, she might be… around, I guess. She might be out here, separated from us, but not actually that far geographically.”

“So what good does that do us?” Rainbow asked.

“Hope, Rainbow,” Whooves said. “It gives us hope.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got that, but what does it do? If she’s stuck out here, then what can we do? She obviously can’t get back into herself, or she would have already.”

“Not necessarily,” Twilight said. “Now—bear with me on this, it’s been a while since I studied this kind of magic—she might be lost. She… how does it work? When a pony’s spirit leaves its body, things like time, spatial orientation, and so on go out the window. If Applejack is a spirit, suspended out here somewhere, she probably only knows she’s not in the dam. She won’t be able to see us, hear us, or contact us in any way on her own. She might even think she’s dead, or not know that she isn’t. If she isn’t.”

“Soooo, again,”

“Is there a way for us to communicate with her?” Rarity asked. “Surely there’s some kind of magic that will let us do that.”

“I’m sure there is, but I don’t know it, certainly not off the top of my head,” Twilight said. Seeing Rainbow’s embittered expression, she said, “this is a problem for Princess Luna. She was never my teacher.”

“We should keep going, then,” Octavia said. “If there is a solution, it will be easier to enact in town.”

“Yes, I agree,” Whooves said, a little pep back in his voice. “I say, though, this little talk has rather emboldened my resolve. What say you, Miss Dash? Don’t you feel that pessimism washed away in the tides of possibility?”

“Let’s just walk,” Rainbow said.

Roan rose to greet them from atop a gentle hill, which nonetheless took them close to an hour to climb in their fatigued state, stopping once for Octavia to recover from another brush with heat stroke. The city was full of life and noise, and they were nearly to a small, arched gateway when Whooves stopped them.

“We can’t just go marching into town carrying a corpse on our backs,” he said. “Especially one as eminent as Miss Applejack.”

“Well, I don’t see any other options,” Rainbow said.

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Twilight said. “That’s a good point. We need a place to stay first. Let’s see here, a place to stay, then supplies, then an airship.”

“Where’s Applejack fit into that?”

“Can one of you go into town? Take this.” She brought Celestia’s worn and crumpled treasury slip out of her book bag. “Get us some rooms in a hotel, any will do. Uh, and while you’re at it, try to find Big Mac. I’m going to research something to do with Applejack while we wait.”

“I’ll do it,” Rainbow said, grabbing the note. “Fluttershy?”

The two of them flew low into the city, and Twilight began sorting through her books. Pinkie sat down to provide shade for Applejack.

“How’s everyone feeling?” Whooves asked. “Physically, I mean.”

“We are all dehydrated,” Octavia said. “Personally, I have an excruciating headache.”

“Dare I ask how much sleep you had before last night?” Rarity asked.

“I was actually asleep last night, before Twilight woke us up. It was horrible.”

“What about you, Vinyl?” Pinkie asked. “I haven’t heard a peep out of you.”

Vinyl looked at them all, her purple goggles reflecting like garish oases in the mid-afternoon sun. Her horn pulsed briefly. “I’m still taking everything in.”

“Here it is. I knew it was something like this,” Twilight said. “Spirits can perceive themselves—so Applejack does know she’s alive, or at least not in oblivion—spiritual magic, if it’s in a high concentration, and energy gradients, also at high intensities only. In Applejack’s case, since her spirit is attuned to machines, I’d hazard a guess that she can perceive anything mechanical as well.”

“Perceive how?” Rarity asked.

“Distantly. The book describes it as a feeling sort of like remembering or imagining something. So…”

“The world is full of things that she can perceive, then,” Whooves said. “I propose we find a way to combine all of them into something, to sort of double down on the sensory information. Make the biggest beacon in the spirit world, as it were.”

“Yes, I was thinking the same thing,” Twilight said. She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know how to go about that, though.”

“She might just go back to the dam,” Rarity said. “That has a lot of machine to it, as well as magic.”

“Twilight, what did you mean, ‘oblivion’?” Vinyl asked softly.

“That’s just a generic term for what happens to spirits once they fade away.”

“Exactly,” Twilight said. “A spirit persists outside of its host body for a little while after it’s removed, but then eventually loses potency. That’s all it is. Some ponies call it ‘true death’.”

“That title seems a hair romantic, does it not?” Whooves said.

“I’ve never liked it.”

“And this happens when the pony dies?” Vinyl asked.

“That’s the most common way, yes. There are certain types of magic that can rip a spirit out of a living body, if the pony is restrained properly; that’s what exorcism is. Then that spirit has a limited amount of time to find a new body, an empty shell, it can make its own. If it doesn’t, then it goes into oblivion.”

“How much time?” Pinkie asked. “How long does Applejack have?”

“It depends on her magical strength. It could be a matter of days. It could be less.”

“Could it be more?” Whooves asked.

“That’s unlikely.”

“How will we get Applejack into town?” Octavia asked. She sat to the side, and had listened patiently for a time.

“Can’t you just use that handy magical space?” Whooves asked, smiling at Twilight.

“No chance,” Twilight said. “I’m spent from last night. Even if I weren’t, carrying something like that is… different. Bodies aren’t the same as inanimate objects, even when they’re dead.”

“Is it the same reason why self-levitation is so difficult?” Rarity asked.

“Something like that.” She paged through her book before selecting a different one. “I really have no idea how to even start this. It’s going to be some heck of a setup, though. That much I can already tell.” She looked at Applejack’s body.

The sun was a dark fireball in the west when Rainbow, Fluttershy, and Big Mac returned. Applejack’s body was beginning to turn, and nopony had the magical energy to stop it.

Leaving Fluttershy behind to watch over Octavia’s cello, they walked through dusty, hoof-beaten streets to a small hotel caged in a sky-blue colonnade, athletic pegasi painted on its sides in all manner of motion. Their rooms were small and had a view of the backs of the neighboring buildings, but the view didn’t stay for long.

“Pull the curtains,” Twilight ordered, dragging the cello case to the middle of the room. Rainbow helped her pull Applejack out and lay her on the floor, and Octavia set to wiping the inside of her case before leaving to get her instrument back from the desert.

“So, what do we do?” Big Mac asked.

“For now, we need to keep her preserved. I simply can’t cast magic of the magnitude this kind of… thing requires. Tomorrow, yes, but not tonight.” She thought for a second. “We should fill the bathtub with ice.”

“You’re kidding,” Rainbow said.

“I hate to say it, but she has a point,” Rarity said. “There is a certain smell that’s beginning to drift.”

“Ponies are going to be curious why we need so much ice,” Whooves said as Vinyl grabbed the ice bucket. “Suspicious, even.”

“As long as they don’t ruin my magic, they can be as suspicious as they want,” Twilight said.

“What about tomorrow?” Big Mac asked. He sat on the bed with a long, greasy squeak of old springs.

“Tomorrow, I’m going to take that coffee maker there and draw a big sigil around it, and some smaller sigils around the main one. I’ll probably need one or two of you for some active spellcasting as well. If I set this up right, it shouldn’t be that strenuous on you.”

“An’ that’ll bring her back?”

“It’ll get her attention, if… well, if anything can.”

Vinyl returned with the ice, and they listened to her pouring it out in the tub. “Twenty or so trips, I think,” she said, exiting the bathroom.

“We’ll take turns,” Whooves said. “I volunteer to go next.”

“Thank you both,” Twilight said. “I’ll go after that. I… I’ll go after.”

How ironic, Colgate thought, that the solution to her problem had been as simple as a different type of pill. And she, working at the hospital, had seen it a thousand times, and never thought anything of it.

She had taken one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with intentions to take a third for dinner. She and Rouge were on an afternoon stroll around the block, so she could introduce Colgate to her neighbors. “It’s something I should have done long before,” Rouge said. “Some of them are Daturas too. Small world, huh?”

While Colgate trotted beside her, a bounce in her step and the warm sun on her face, Rouge listed to one side and occasionally stumbled in the curb or, once, someone’s flower garden. She’d been nursing a bottle of cupcake-flavored vodka since nine in the morning.

“Yup, this is your ideal slice of suburbia,” Rouge said, pulling Colgate by the foreleg across the street to a canary-yellow house. “Here, this place belongs to my friend Whipped Cream. Now, he’s not a Datura, Cole, so no shop talk.”

She ran and nearly overbalanced on the uneven walkway to the front door, then rested for a second against a planter box full of daisies and pinwheels. A wind chime shone silently like an icicle from the eave, and Colgate saw a large cat jump off a cushion in the window at their approach. Rouge mashed the doorbell twice and gave Colgate a grin. “Whipped Cream’s the best, Cole. The best.”

Colgate’s expectations were set. The house’s clean, wholesome exterior, the ornamentations outside, the cat in the window—all of it enhanced by the warm numbness from her new pill—had put her in the mind of an elderly pony, or a cookie-baking househusband. She only smiled dumbly at the college-age colt who hoof-bumped Rouge as he levitated his headphones off.

“Cream, this is my new roommate, Colgate. Hey, it rhymes! Roommate, Colgate.”

Colgate shook his hoof, adjusted her smile to something less vacuous, and looked at his face. “Pleased to meet you. We’re just making the rounds, meeting the neighborhood.”

“Can you believe she’s already been here like half a month? Where does the time go?”

“It’s great to meet you, Colgate,” Whipped Cream said quickly. “Hey, listen, Rouge, now’s not a great time. I’m kinda in the middle of something.”

“It’s good,” Rouge said, shrugging. “I just wanted to show you the fresh face.” She patted Colgate’s back affectionately. “We should totally hang out sometime. When’s the last time we met up for drinks? I could bring Cole here, she’s a hoot. One hell of a good time.”

“Uh, yeah. Great.” He smiled and tentatively lifted his headphones back up. “We definitely should. Yeah, uh, but, as I said, I’m kinda in the middle of—”

“Right, yeah, I gotcha.” Rouge nodded, and Colgate imitated her, not knowing what else to do. “I gotcha. Yeah, go ahead, do what you have to do. You’ve probably got, like, homework or something, right?”

“It’s a midterm,” he said slowly.

“Cool, cool. Yeah, I remember those days. What’s it about?”

“Listen, Rouge, I really—”

“Sorry, sorry. Go ahead, go in there and write your paper. Me and Cole gotta cover the other half of the block still. Hey! Drinks later, don’t forget. Maybe after that paper.”

He chuckled and glanced at Colgate, who had let her dazed smile return.

“Bye Cream!” He closed the door, and Rouge bumped Colgate playfully. “Isn’t he the best? Shy ponies are the cutest.”

“He was all right,” Colgate said. They stayed on his doorstep for a minute before returning to the sidewalk and making for the next house. Something about him had put her off, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

Rouge ordered a large pizza to split for dinner, and while Colgate let her third pill do its work with some water, Rouge mixed an astringent drink for herself with the rest of the cupcake vodka. Its smell filled the dining room, and Colgate leaned away whenever Rouge faced her to speak. She had immediately put the neighbors out of her mind when they came back, except for Whipped Cream. He had stuck out to her, and she thought she knew why. Dialing in on it was difficult with Rouge rambling.

“So, of course, for that first month after the, uh, the incident, I guess, Photo Finish has her models doing these mandatory physicals. Gotta check if they’re flesh and blood, and not, you know, clay.” She bit into her third slice of pizza, grease smearing her face and hooves. Her eye shadow was smudged, reminding Colgate, as it had when they first met, of her own once bruised eyes. “And being a Datura, I had to be there, just in case one did turn out to be something weird. I don’t remember the excuse she made so I could be in the room when they were being inspected.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I kept telling her she should do some kind of medical-sexual fusion, you know, sort of normalize those physicals, but she said I was full of shit. I dated one of her models for four or five weeks. Now that was a whirlwind! Cole, you ever hear of Big Bop? It’s a street drug kinda like that thing I got for you, but, like… Imagine your mer-peh-dime had a foal with some good old-fashioned LSD.”

“I didn’t know you did more than drink.”

“Sure, I’ll get my party on other ways sometimes. I’ve calmed down a lot since those days, though. I kinda have to for this gig.” She donned a sage voice. “The Pants has been known to do random drug testing.”

Colgate nodded. The thought of it didn’t worry her.

“Yeah, I, uh—where was I? Oh, right, Big Bop. I wound up trying to make out with his coffee table once. Almost caught my mane on fire, too!” She leaned over, laughing, her pizza slice falling to the floor. “Can you imagine? It was like, this—” More laughter. “This romantic dinner thing, candlelight and soft music and crap, and I was outta my gourd! Just right out of it, Cole!” She let herself flop to the carpet and belched. “You sure you don’t want some of my drink?”

“I shouldn’t mix my pills with alcohol.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I might die.”

Rouge snorted one rueful laugh. “Oh. Well, that’ll do it, I guess. Geez. This is a good night, Cole. I like you.” She got to her hooves, then back on the couch. Her breath stung on Colgate’s muzzle as she moved closer. “I want you to know, you’re a really good friend. I know I’m not in great shape right now. Maybe I shouldn’t have drank so much, but fuck it, you know? What day is it?”

“It’s Monday,” Colgate said. She was watching someone’s light from where she sat; she could see its top half over the back yard fence.

“Eh, fuck it. See?” She stood up shakily. “This is what happens when you get to our spot in the fucking Datura, Colgate! All this, this is ours!” She turned a circle, stumbling, and laughed at her imbalance. “Easy job, no hassles, no boss on us all day long, nothing! Hey, did I tell you how I can afford to live like this?”

“I think you did, a while ago.”

“Fancy Pants pays for it! Right, isn’t that a hoot? It’s some kind of stipe, stipend. All this, right out of his pockets!” She fell to the floor in laughter again, and Colgate watched her roll around for a while.

“Wanna watch a movie?” Colgate asked. She turned the TV on, and Rouge crawled to the couch.

“What’s on?”

“Let’s see.”

As Colgate moved through the channels, Rouge lay down and began playing with Colgate’s tail. “This is the life, I’m telling you. Who needs all that responsibility the other bigwigs have? We’ve got it made. Made in the shade.”

“I enjoy it so far.”

Colgate stopped on channel eleven for a second. A dark blue pegasus danced underneath a yellow, cardboard moon to a crowd of laughing ponies.

“I hate this show. Keep going,” Rouge said.

Colgate moved one up, and they left it on Runway, a griffon-made film with badly dubbed subtitles and cheap special effects. She watched it with Rouge until she could hear the cream pony snoring, and then waited until eleven o’ clock. It was starting to get chilly at night, but she didn’t put on any clothes as she stepped out the front door and into the street.

She reached Whipped Cream’s house after ten minutes of wandering the neighborhood. It was dark, as were most of the houses nearby. Only one had its lights on still, a corner house that belonged to a married pair of Daturas that Rouge referred to as “the gruesome twosome.” Colgate stood in the middle of the street for a long time, waiting to see if anyone would come out and ask her what she was doing. If so, she would pretend to be drunk and lost, and shamble away.

No one did, and she quietly crossed, avoiding the streetlights as best she could, and made her way over Whipped Cream’s lawn. The grass was cold and soft on her hooves, and it reminded her of Rouge, whom she imagined would like to fall asleep in something like it.

The prescription that Rouge had gotten for her was a painkiller of middling strength that she had frequently given to ponies after surgery, or right before anesthesia. She had selected it specifically for its ability to dull pain without completely slowing her down. Something stronger, like morphine, had been tempting, but she knew it would be too much.

She stopped again behind the house’s corner, out of view from the street, and sat down beside his garden hose, coiled neatly. It had taken her all day to figure out what about Whipped Cream was wrong.

He was, like she, too good at seeing through ponies’ faces. He had looked into Rouge and seen the alcohol she had consumed, saw the thoughtlessness that would manifest as her unsolicited lingering. So, too, had he looked into Colgate, and seen her own suspicions, her own dormant caution. He would not understand why she was so cautious, so anxious in her new place in Canterlot, and would struggle to find a connection until finally breaking down and attempting to force it out of her.

It was Colgate’s job to show him that that would be a mistake.

She looked back at the street, verified that no one was watching her, and slunk to the gate. She balanced on the edge of another planter box and inspected the back yard. He had a birdbath, a trampoline, a covered patio, a raised flower garden around the back fence, and—most importantly—no guard dog. The gate’s latch was not locked, and she let herself in magically.

She strode confidently across the grass, not hesitating or even looking up as the patio light clicked on. She assumed it was automatic.

She circled to the other side of the yard, where she found a shovel leaning with some other tools against the wall. Her path was clear, and she felt a lightness in her movement as she dug up his flowers and deposited them in his birdbath. Daisies and marigolds mixed with swirls of soil in the concrete pool, and she added to the mess until nearly half of his garden was a sopping, ruined disc in the middle of the yard. Then, taking the hose from outside, she placed it in what remained of his flowerbeds and turned it on full blast.

The trampoline came next. No one had come out to inspect her, though the patio light remained, giving flawless light to her actions and identity. She got under the trampoline and, placing her horn to its bottom, activated her weak heat spell, one of the few she was any good with. It wasn’t long before the center had burned away, leaving a drooping ring of black mesh.

She crawled out and inspected her work so far. She wasn’t finished, but she felt she had made a good start. She smiled a real smile as she imagined his reaction to the damage. He would not know who had done it immediately, of course, but would figure it out soon enough. She was a rare sort, she knew, which meant that he would know it as well.

Colgate walked across the muddy ground to the flowerbed and lifted a large, painted stone from the soaked soil, dripping cold water onto her hooves. She carried it to the patio and wiped her hooves on his mat, making sure she wouldn’t track mud along the sidewalk as she made her escape, and then, hefting it with more magic than she was used to, pitched the stone through the back door window. The blinds shivered and snapped like wires, adding to the sound of breaking glass to become the single, sharp warning she wanted to give. She saw the light click on in a nearby window, but didn’t stay. She trotted through the gate, closed it, and crossed the street. Whipped Cream would spend so long gawking at his back yard that Colgate knew she need not worry about him seeing her walk away in the front.

She didn’t run; she didn’t need to. She had done exactly what she had come to do, and the choice was his. If he wanted to respond, she knew her message was clear enough that he would do so knowing that he would not do it safely.

When she got back to Rouge’s house, Rouge was still passed out on the couch, the TV still mumbling quietly. Colgate turned it off, wrapped up the remaining pizza, and went to bed. She fell asleep happier than she could ever remember.

A few thousand miles away, in the dead of night, in Hoofington, the Astra Crow paused in its foraging. Something strange had come over it, and it stood completely still in the empty meadow outside the Astras’ makeshift fortress. After several minutes, it lifted its head and looked around, its glass marble eyes magically seeing its surroundings. It dipped its beak to the ground experimentally and extended its dangerous wings, giving a single, uncertain flap.

Putting its wings back, it tried to walk back to the Astras’ residence, but tipped over. It rolled across the ground, its hot metal body leaving a wide trail of withered grass behind where its sharp angles did not completely tear up the soil.

Outside the fortress, it paused again, and, as if not knowing what else to do, battered its wings against the ground until someone came out.