Outside Ponyville, ship resting on a bend in the river, Twilight, Big Mac, and Vinyl walked a tactful distance into the meadow. Big Mac sat on the husk of an old cart that had made its way out of town and looked to Sweet Apple Acres, between them and the sunset. Vinyl’s goggles glowed like dark rubies.

“Do you know what the curse actually does?” Twilight asked. “I figure, let’s start with that.”

“No idea,” Big Mac said. “If Ah did, Ah’d tell ya.”

“Unless you thought you shouldn’t. Well, I’ll tell you what it is, because I finally figured it out. Do you know how hard it was, to figure out what we were cursed with without accidentally activating said curse?”

“You’re only coming to us with this information now, so it must have been pretty hard,” Vinyl said.

Twilight smiled at her. “Yeah. Not easy.”

“Go on,” Big Mac said. “You don’t sound happy ‘bout it.”

“Right, so basically, it’s an amplified location-transpositional enchantment,” Twilight said, pacing a circle around them. She wished she had a chalkboard behind her, so tempted she was to brag about the details of how she had isolated and tested the curse. “Different in makeup to that thing Vanilla Cream does to us, but with similar effect. It’s a curse that’s going to rip us away from… well, I have to assume Canterlot, since we’re apparently supposed to go there.”

“That hasn’t changed, right?” Vinyl asked, looking at Big Mac.

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head slowly. In the distance, a couple voices crossed, and a pair of silhouettes took to the air over the barn.

“All we have to do is try to teleport somewhere,” Twilight continued. “Any one of us, just trying to do it, will activate the curse, and we’ll be whisked off to who-knows-where.”

“Do you know where?” Vinyl asked.

Twilight looked at Big Mac. “Do we?”

“Ah’m sorry,” he said simply.

“Big Mac, come on, you can’t honestly—”

“Ah stand by what Ah think. Whatever it is, it’s gotta happen. It’s fer the best.”

“I trust him,” Vinyl said.

“I know you do,” Twilight sighed. “Tomorrow’s not going to be pleasant. Do we at least know where in Canterlot we need to go?”

“Well,” Big Mac started.

“Not that it matters overmuch, because we’re going to upset a lot of ponies no matter where we go, and probably end up bringing some of them with us. It looks like the enchantment has a large area of effect.”

“Ah’ve got no idea where we need to go, specifically.”

“Could mean it doesn’t matter,” Vinyl said.

“Maybe. It also might mean that there’s going to be a concurrent event in Canterlot that isn’t ready to take place quite yet,” Twilight said.

“If it’s important, Ah’ll know tomorrow,” Big Mac said.

“I’m sure you will. I’m going to tell everyone what’s going to happen, you know.”

“That might not be wise,” Vinyl said.

“No?” Of everyone, Twilight was least surprised to hear the objection come from Vinyl.

“It’ll scare ‘em too much. If this is unavoidable and important, best to just get on with it. We might miss our chance with an argument.” Her face was angled at Twilight in what she imagined was an accusation.

“I’m not going to withhold information from our friends to make Big Mac’s faith thing go more smoothly. They can handle it.”

“No objections here,” Big Mac said.

“See? It’s fine,” Twilight said. “Did you know that it would be bad, Big Mac?”

“Ah… had an impression.”

“But you don’t know how bad it’s going to be for us.”

“How can Ah?”

“And you don’t know how bad it’s going to be for Canterlot.”

“No idea.”

“See, this is what I hate about this thing,” Twilight said, resuming her circular pace. “We’re going to fly into Canterlot tomorrow, go wherever Big Mac says, land, and then I’m going to deliberately set off a chain reaction I only barely understand, and we’re all expected to just trust that it’ll work out okay.”

“That’s faith,” Vinyl said. “Simple as that.”

“We’ve been over this an’ over this,” Big Mac said. “Ah’m sorry Ah can’t master it, Miss Twilight, but it ain’t my fault. Ah’m just the messenger.”

“You know, it started with little bits of advice here and there about how to do things a certain way, and I could live with that,” Twilight said. “Pinkie used to do that exact thing when we lived in Ponyville. Here! When we lived here.” She shielded her eyes and looked into the sunset for a moment. “Ridiculous,” she whispered.

“Ah don’t like it any more’n you do.”

“We’re going to have to say no sometime. This thing doesn’t take collateral damage into account from what I’ve seen, and one of these days, you’re going to ask us to do something awful. If we just go by faith, without thought, then we’ll do it, no matter how bad for everyone else.”

“I don’t think it’ll get that far,” Vinyl said.

“Me neither,” Big Mac said. “This is just friendship we’re dealin’ with, Twilight. What wild situation are you thinkin’ of that has us committin’ atrocities to enhance a friendship?”

“I don’t know,” Twilight said. “I’m just thinking out loud.” She conjured a tableau of magical lines that she held in front of them all. “You might be interested to know that I did my extra credit and worked out where we could wind up after we teleport.” The lines converged and formed a rough map of the country, lighting their interested faces as they leaned closer. “By measuring the curse’s strength and the amount of latent, potential energy inside, I was able to convert it to distance and work out a ring of possible landing points for us.” A large, orange circle appeared over the map, its sides and top half spilling over the map’s edge. “As you can see, a large amount of possible landing zones happen to be off the continent, which, let’s make no mistake, would be the end of all of us.”

“That won’t happen,” Big Mac said.

“I know, because you wouldn’t ever advise us to go to something like that. So,” most of the orange circle faded, giving them a band that stretched across the very southernmost portions of Equestria. “This is what’s left. Look here.” She put a hoof to one small, white dot in the southeast corner just on top of the orange line. “This is Moondrop. Depending on where in Canterlot we cast our spell, we’ll either land right on top of it, or a couple miles away.”

“Is that the only town on the line?” Vinyl asked.

“There’s a couple small villages elsewhere that are close, but Moondrop is the only town that lines up perfectly.” She banished the map. “So I think it’s likely we end up there.”

“But that’s a good thing,” Big Mac said. “The Element’s there.”

“So’s whatever trap Discord is setting up,” Vinyl said. “Remember?”

“Ah, I think he does,” Twilight said. “And what a perfect way to spring that kind of trap, to have your unwitting victims accidentally teleport themselves more than halfway across the country to get to it.”

“What are you gettin’ at?” Big Mac asked.

Again, Twilight shielded her eyes. “Just more thinking out loud.”

“Do you want to turn around, Twilight?” Vinyl asked.

Twilight paused. “I think we shouldn’t have come up this far. We should have gone down and gotten that last Element when we had the chance.”

“We still have that chance,” Big Mac said. “If what you said is true, we’ll be there tomorrow.”

“But on his terms.”

“Not necessarily,” Vinyl said. “He’s not choosing what time we go down there. Who knows, we might still get him by surprise.”

“I doubt that.”

“It don’t matter,” Big Mac said. “It’s too late to turn back now, even if it might have been a good idea.”

“He’s right, Twilight, we’re in this for good now,” Vinyl said. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

Twilight looked at her.

“Sorry, Twilight,” Big Mac said.

She walked them back to the ship, told the others what she had discovered, and had just enough sunset left to see her shadow die on the fields west of town. Circumventing Ponyville, passing within sight of her library and of the windmills to the north, Twilight knew where she was going, but still had to use a small globe of light to keep her path straight as she traversed the gentle countryside. Night had fallen by the time Twilight had reached the cemetery.

She moved among the headstones slowly, pausing when she thought she recognized a name. In all her time in Ponyville, save for the very end, she had never had occasion to visit the cemetery, and the location was still largely unfamiliar to her. She stopped for a minute beside a tall, white obelisk that marked the grave of someone who had passed before she had been born and listened to the night sounds. Crickets sang, and the glowing horn of Canterlot Mountain hummed with indistinct life. She thought she heard hoofsteps in the distance.

Finally finding her grave, she stopped and sat, picking a flower from the small tuft growing within magic’s reach and laying it before the headstone. There rested her former assistant, the closest she had ever had, or had ever wanted, to a child. To her surprise, no cool anger twisted in her heart, no setting of resolve to see Discord destroyed.

What had happened, happened, and maybe it wasn’t so bad that he had not lived to see such times, Twilight thought.

“Twi?” someone asked.

Twilight’s horn flashed for a second before she looked, and then extinguished her magic. The pale mare stood a respectful distance away.

“It is you. I thought I saw you walking.”

“Hello, Bon Bon.”

“Uh… I didn’t know you were back in town.”

“We just got in. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Bon Bon came a little closer before seeing who Twilight was visiting. “Ah. Um… Discord got him. A, a while ago.”

“I know.” She stood, and Bon Bon stepped back. “I was there for it.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Twilight regarded Bon Bon, remembering vaguely the funeral she had attended for Lyra. Bon Bon had been inconsolable then. They all had.

“Um… you look okay, though, otherwise,” Bon Bon said.

“Go home, Bon Bon,” Twilight said. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

Bon Bon nodded quickly and backed away more. “Yeah, of course, Twilight. I’ll… be on my way.” She spared a backwards glance at Twilight as she retreated into the darkness, and Twilight sat down at Spike’s grave once more, thinking of their coming day in Canterlot.

Colgate woke up with a snap of alarm at her dream, and needed a moment to remember where she was. She looked to the TV, which was blank; someone had turned it off while she was asleep.

Breakfast was in three and a half hours, and she could feel hunger like a lead weight. It had been annoying at first, then easy to ignore, and then, finally, impossible to ignore. Her insides howled at her, movement hurt, and thought, once slow and labored, had stopped almost entirely. Her mind was a haze of a haze, and she had to stop and concentrate to turn the TV on.

The only problem: it did not turn on. She pressed at the remote, jiggled it, shook it, but the TV remained resolutely dead. The remote was lighter in her grasp, and she realized with a slow-coming dread her fate. Someone had removed the batteries.

She nodded, miming understanding to herself though it had not yet come. As the first demonstration of light made its way across the duck pond to her drawn curtains, she lit on the first thought that stuck. The TV was her escape, woefully inadequate in recent times with Drift Dive’s infrequent, but potent invasions, and she had thought no one had noticed or cared.

Finding that she was wrong, she began to wonder what other mistakes she might have made. She went to the window and parted the curtains, but shut them a second later. In her mind, an unseen night guard waited outside her door. She crouched behind the bed, anticipating that guard who, seeing the change of light under her door, would rush in, find her awake, and begin whatever machinations they had in store for her, which only her natural sleep had prolonged.

When no one entered, she lay prone on the cold floor and tried to crawl under the bed, but it was too low, and she banged her horn on the metal frame.

Doubtless, she thought, the new day would bring tortures she had not imagined even at the height of her paranoia. The counselors were aware even of her TV viewing, and willing to remove that last haven in the dark of night, without a confrontation or any chance of recourse on her part.

Her wide eyes scanned the floor, searching for what she did not know. It was not yet time for anyone to be awake in the facility, yet she felt she could not move without drawing someone’s attention. Invisible eyes patrolled the corridor outside, invisible ears waited at her window. She could not even climb back in bed without giving away that she had been awake.

Colgate splayed her legs and tilted her head, trying again to jam herself under the bed. No success, and she pulled herself out, ears ringing and breathing shallow.

Still, no one came.

Her mind was finally waking up, and she stood, brushing herself off. The room was lighter, and she could hear shreds of birdsong outside. She took one step to the bed’s corner, trying to recall the building’s layout, ears tense for any hoofstep, any equine voice.

One step became two, then three, then more until she faced the door. She inched it open and, after a long look down both sides of the chilly hallway, crossed it in her sleeping gown and slippers. The fear had dimmed and transformed in her moving mind to urgency. Instead of around her, the imaginary watchers were behind her; they would soon arrive to discover her empty bed, the dust she had stirred up under the bed, the door ajar, everything. She had gone too far; perhaps even waking up early had been too far. The thought gave her comfort, that hers might be an innocent mistake, borne of a faulty circadian rhythm, and not a reaction to the dangerous thoughts that came later. She did not imagine the counselors would make such a distinction.

She passed the receptionist’s desk and went to the sliding doors, which did not slide so early in the morning. With her hooves, she tried to jostle them open, but they did not move, and she spent one defeated moment staring through her gaunt reflection at the street beyond. A large, fancy carriage had parked in the fire lane across from the facility.

And yet, she had no choice but to proceed. If she had not gone too far earlier, she definitely had by touching the doors. No one was there to stop her from returning to the desk and guiding the rolling chair across the empty vestibule, nor did they stop it from pitching like a drunken ballerina through the glass, catching on a piece of door frame, and sticking to twirl monotonously at a slant beside the hole that was large enough to admit her without cuts. The alarm flashed in her ears, but it could not match the silent alarm that had carried her from bedroom to sidewalk.

In the gray light, she blinked and stumbled off into the street. For one, single space of time, she stood in the middle of the road and looked at the sky, mouth hanging open slightly, eyes uncomprehending, mind aflame with too many emotions. Freedom.

“Ma’am? Get in, if you’re getting in,” a voice said.

She slowly looked around, finally recognizing the carriage. Its door stood open, and a white figure beckoned from within, pinning her for a second with its glinting, blue eyes.

“I’d advise haste,” he said. “They’re going to spot you in a couple seconds.”

Colgate walked to the carriage, a brilliant, white purse couched on golden wheels, its spiral spokes thin as spun silk. No heraldry adorned its sides, no lanterns rose from its corners, but it nonetheless struck Colgate as the epitome of class in the dirty street. A pair of rail-thin earth ponies stood in the reins, also white, and they smiled seductively at Colgate as she approached.

“There she is!”

Colgate paused, not looking back, and climbed in, and the carriage lurched to a start as the door closed silently.
The front was open to the air, and she sat directly behind the snow-white driver and his papery mares. She pushed aside a cushion of cream velvet, dimpled with dark blue buttons and trimmed with bound ropes of gold. Her tail brushed a tassel, and she kicked her slippers onto the carpeted floor. Red and blue curtains hung in long, bunched strands beside the oblong windows, also trimmed in gold, affording a side view of the growing chaos surrounding her exit.

“We’re invisible to them,” the conductor said. “They’ll think you vanished into the neighborhood somewhere.” He waited a moment to let the information sink in before asking her name. Sitting up front, he did not look at her, but his voice carried perfectly in the wide carriage space, clear enough to keep her attention. The two mares in the reins nickered and pranced, halting briefly. “Mine’s Vanilla Cream. It’s good to meet you.”

Colgate looked back to the window. “Colgate,” she said.

“It’s a pleasure, Colgate.” The reins snapped, and they moved again. “That was some exit.”

Colgate watched a red traffic light go by.

“Tired?”

Colgate blinked. “I don’t know.”

“Hm.” They drove until the rehab facility was gone from sight, until buildings that had marked Colgate’s occasional looks out her window were gone. Vanilla cleared his throat. “I’ll admit, I was expecting someone a little more lifelike. You don’t seem like the one who’s going to… well, you don’t seem important.”

“Okay.”

Vanilla snorted. “Aren’t you going to ask what’s going on? What all this is?”

The alarm echoed in her mind with the sound of breaking glass. She could still feel the floor against her chest and stomach, and she could feel the invisible eyes watching her escape, taking note of it for later. The flash of freedom was gone, and in Colgate’s mind, she was still in rehab. She had merely woken from one dream to march into a second layer of abstraction, and would soon wake up from that as well.

“It’s no dream, I promise you that,” Vanilla continued. “I’m an expert on this sort of thing. You’re wide awake, Colgate. Well, maybe not wide awake, but you’re living your real life right now.”

Colgate sighed.

“Aren’t you a joy,” he mumbled. “Take a good look at your city, Colgate. Take a nice, long look. You’re not going to be seeing it again in quite some time. Do you have a first name?”

She flinched at a second carriage appearing at their side, its arguing pullers evaporating and reappearing on their other side, the carriage rattling straight through, its clatter sound floating from her right ear to her left. Vanilla did not spare the unharmed carriage a look as they came to a thinner road. “Where are we going?” she finally asked.

“To the palace.”

She glanced at the city outside, actually seeing it for a moment. “Going the wrong way.”

“I know. You’ve got a date with destiny, but the destiny’s not going to be there for another several hours. Any sights you’d like to see while we’re cruising?”

Lower Canterlot had never looked so unwelcome. The fields outside were still scarred from battle, though the debris had been cleared to leave an odd void of defoliated flatland, bisected with the snag of broken river, its only defining feature. The country resembled something assembled from dissimilar pieces by someone with only a vague notion of how a country looked. Then, in the middle, there moldered the wide, dirty city, houses little larger than sheds at the exterior rim, the stunted tips to phalanges of dirt road that eventually gained pavement and spread into the beating heart of the city, lifeless from their distance, shrouded in a thin blanket of pollution. Cars and carriages would occasionally meander into view, but, even when the airship was over the city, there was little to see. Strip malls, grocery stores, hospitals, police stations. They had seen too many cities, and Canterlot was just that: another city.

They rose to fly between a pair of parallel contrails to the mountaintop, gliding slowly behind a bloated, lilac airship with tinted windows and the crest of Luna’s royal moon on both sides, and on each propeller blade. The palace looked as it always did, shining in the sun like a regal sculpture on its purple mountain. The thin bridges that connected the towers seemed to drip sunshine, reflected off the minareted spires’ gilt tops, off the decorative ponds around the palace’s exterior walls, where small crowds jostled. Beyond the encircling moat, the city’s wealthy half rose out of the pollution like a pristine abalone shell, cast up onto the rocks to bask in what sun did not serve only to enhance the palace. Larger towers stood, some still under reconstruction, and they could actually see ponies moving in the wider, emptier spaces, making their ways to the music halls, the museums, the fancy restaurants.

“Take us down to that lot,” Twilight directed Applejack. “Before we go to our fates, I’d like to take an hour or so to re-stock, on everything. Personally, I’m going to the bank and taking out a couple thousand bits. We’ve been out of cash for too long.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Vinyl said. “I have a couple things I’d like to do.”

“We’re not at any risk of missin’ our window of opportunity for this… whatever it is?” Applejack asked.

“Don’t feel like it,” Big Mac said. “Course, it could also be that we’re supposed to split up fer some reason.”

“The point is, Big Mac feels fine about it,” Twilight said.

“Are you just going to the bank?” Fluttershy asked.

“No.” She adjusted her saddlebags, though they still had several minutes before they would be on the ground.

“I will stay here for the time,” Octavia said.

“Me too,” Applejack said. “There’s nothin’ in this city fer me right now.”

“That’s fine,” Twilight said.

When they landed, everyone but Applejack and Octavia left and went their separate ways.

“Y’all right?” Big Mac asked, walking beside Vinyl through the pristine Greater Canterlot streets. He had to walk faster than he liked to keep up with Vinyl’s pace, set to give passers-by less time to recognize her. Even so, he had never been in the city, except once on a train, passing through, and the splendid array of ponies and buildings, along with the voices and food smells, was sufficient to keep his head moving in all directions, as if his point of interest were attached to a string in constant orbit.

“Fine,” Vinyl said. “Preoccupied.”

“Anythin’ Ah can do to help?”

“Nope.” She paused to look at him with a smile, but he wasn’t fooled.

“What’s wrong, Miss Vinyl?”

“You know you don’t have to call me that,” she mumbled.

He pushed her playfully, and she gave him a more genuine smile before shoving back.

“Gotta make some calls, that’s all. Meet with someone if I can.” They stopped at a bank and she withdrew a hundred bits, then got in a taxi carriage and were pulled all the way across town to a wide, squat building between an empty sandwich shop and the white arcature of a bustling strip mall, palm trees towering over well-dressed patrons who filled the outdoor food court. Big Mac stared at a young pegasus mare dressed in all black, occupying a table on her own in a shroud of smoke from the pipe hanging surlily from her black lips.

He went into the building behind Vinyl, where she was making friendly with the receptionist. It was clear that they knew each other.

“That’s just my friend,” she said, glancing back at him. “He’s cool.”

He only watched.

“You don’t have to wait around for me,” she said. “I might be a while.”

“Ah’ll be fine,” he said, looking around. “They got some magazines here.”

The receptionist giggled and murmured something into her phone, her face plastered with a wide smile that she flashed at Big Mac as he took his seat. She was cute, he thought, in a big city sort of way.

“I’ll try to be quick,” Vinyl said, reaching up to hug him quickly and then vanishing into the building. He waited a moment before grabbing a magazine and trying to occupy himself, suddenly wishing he had stayed on the ship.

It was not long before he had given up on the magazines, all music related, and not to his interest. From the ponies who passed in and out before him, and what he was able to pick up from the receptionist, Vinyl had dragged him to a recording studio; hers, he figured, the calls to be made in the effort to salvage her career after taking up with the Elements. He had heard about it enough times from Octavia: while noble, nothing could ruin a music career quite like an unplanned tryst with adventure.

He watched what he could see of the mall ponies from his seat. The all-black mare was gone, in her place a pair of business-stallions leaning close together over a steaming box of food. An overweight earth pony tried to control her gamboling children not far from them, her billowing blue dress reminding Big Mac of the tarps they had to sometimes put on the apple trees in the winter, so ill-fitting it was. He laughed quietly to himself as he thought of what Rarity might say to such an observation.

The mother looked up and appeared to shout at a pegasus lying on a small cloud just above her. For a moment, he thought it was Rainbow Dash, but then saw that the pony’s mane was only the single color, a garish orange on her cyan coat. The two conversed for a time, then went their own ways.

When Vinyl came back out, Big Mac went immediately for the door, and only noticed the rims of moisture under her goggles when they were outside.

“Goodness, Miss Vinyl, what happened?”

She looked up at him. In a strained voice, almost inaudible, she said, “fancy a drink?”

Big Mac was not much of a drinker, not anymore, but he indulged a beer while Vinyl worked her way through her time in the studio.

“Just needed to call a couple ponies and let ‘em know I’m still alive,” she said. “My agent, my PR pony, a couple friends.”

“Yer… parents?”

“Don’t know where they are.”

He nodded. “Condolences.”

“Not an issue.” In the dim bar, she was able to wear her goggles up, and Big Mac stared into her eyes. He had never seen someone with such vibrant irises, so close to red as to seem fake. Every time he looked, he found himself drawn inwards.

“They want me back in the recording studio yesterday,” she continued. “Told ‘em I have new material—that was a mistake.”

“Do you?”

“Like twenty pages of ideas on the ship. There’s probably an album on there, yeah.”

“But yer not gonna do anythin’ now, right?”

Vinyl took her eyes off his and studied the empty ashtray on their table. The bar was nothing like the glamorous city without, its interior more resembling the types of saloons Big Mac had seen in Appleloosa. It was polished, of course; there was no dust in the air or on the bar, no peanut shells littering the floor, no rowdy farmers or engineers playing stud in the corner. They even had a cocktail menu, claiming “western authenticity” with its imported whiskies and ciders. Big Mac had stuck to what was on tap.

“Vinyl? What’d you agree to?”

“No music,” she said. “I said I’d do a press conference.”

“Today?”

“Shouldn’t even be drinking.”

“You said you’d do a press conference, today?”

“I had to give ‘em something,” she said.

“No you didn’t.”

She took another drink and wiped her mouth, and then lowered her goggles back to her eyes. “They all thought I was gone. The execs in Applewood apparently told everypony I died in the flood.”

“Mm-hm.”

“They freaked when I called ‘em up. Big Mac, I wish you could have been there, there must have been twenty ponies on the other end of the line.”

“That’s good they’re happy yer alive, but—”

“Can’t just phone them, say ‘I’m alive, don’t worry’ and then disappear again just like that.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause that’s not what you do. It’s… I can’t explain, Big Mac, it’s just not what you do. There’s give and take, you know?”

“Give an’ take.” His gaze was averted for a second as he watched their waitress go by.

“Like on a farm. I’m sure you’ve had to deal with things like that. You know, you have so many bushels of apples and you—”

“Ah’d appreciate it if you didn’t patronize me, Miss Vinyl.”

Her horn glowed for a second, navy blue. “Sorry.”

“Ah ain’t mad, not exactly, but that’s some right poor timin’, an’ you should’ve known it.”

“Well, we have all day, right?”

“Ah can’t know that.”

“We do so far.”

He nodded and finished his beer. “An’ that can change.” He sighed. “When is this, an’ where?”

“You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

“That ain’t what Ah asked.”

The curls of a frown appeared on the corners of her mouth. “At four, in the park behind Studio Three, which isn’t that far from here. We’ve got an hour thirty.”

Glancing at her again and seeing her drink still almost full, he ordered a second one for himself.

Vanilla’s carriage stopped at a junction of hoofpaths out in the fields outside Canterlot, where he and Colgate had wound up after an aimless several hours. It was the first time they had stopped, and Colgate took notice.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Your meeting partners are taking longer than I wanted.”

“Oh.”

The two mares at the front backed up and awkwardly turned them around to face the city.

“No more delays. I have places to be too,” Vanilla said.

“You said they’re not there yet.”

“If I push, they’ll respond.”

In the audience, anonymous, but not really, Big Mac watched with decreasing interest as Vinyl dodged more questions than she answered. Everyone wanted to know where she had been, and where she was going; she couldn’t say except that she was there of her own volition, and she was okay. They wanted to know whether she had any music on the way; maybe, she said. Whether her disappearance was all a giant publicity stunt; no, she said, but that it also didn’t hurt. That comment raised a laugh from the crowd.

Cameras flashed and microphones moved among the sea of reporters, she at a podium fashioned from a stack of fruit crates with a microphone one of the reporters had brought for her. The press conference was conducted in a large park behind a chain of studios, their view of the opposite street beyond obstructed by towering, tilting oak trees, their trunks thick as doorways, crowded together into a nearly contiguous mass broken only toward the tops, diamond-like slots under the interweaving of branches. Rising behind Vinyl, they appeared as a wave frozen just before crest, poised to fall onto the crowd.

Big Mac was the only one sitting in the grass, and some ponies gave him strange looks, which he ignored. He could feel a familiar sense of anxiety germinating as Vinyl explained her views on the Elements’ work, and tactfully emphasized that her personal politics were not up for open questioning. Filtered through the microphones, her voice had a lilting, breezy quality that he did not like.

“What needs to happen?” he asked himself. It was the first question he used to determine whether the glamour was saying anything.

His immediate urge was to end the conference prematurely. “Then what?” he thought. “Back to the ship?” Suggesting a specific action to himself, he knew, was never wise; it was too easy to distract himself with endless strings of hypotheticals, and miss what the glamour wanted. He had to stop and reorient himself, stopping at “then what?”

Repeating the question quietly in his mind, he watched Vinyl gesturing around her, complimenting Canterlot to a small chorus of applause. He had missed the prompt.

Then, he knew that the circle was closing. The deadline, which he had said had slackened, was constricting again; he knew when he realized he wanted them out of the city before sunset. Limbs weakening, he let himself down into a crouch to collect his wits and breathe in the smell of the grass as faceless anxiety quickened to concrete dread. Knowing what he knew, that they had less time than before, he knew he would need to gather the others. That he felt pushed to end the interview early—a paler desire in his true mind, one easily ignored for the sake of his friend—showed only that their time was short, rather than just shortening.

His singular comfort was familiarity, hard-earned in Applewood with Octavia when they had gone to re-claim their airship. He counted off ten seconds in his head and then stood, immediately aware of the perplexed looks he drew. He pushed his way to the front, mumbling apologies to each pony he moved aside, and Vinyl shot him a look of mingled surprise and courtesy: a harmless, but empty smile that he would remember.

“We gotta go,” he said, the words strangled with discomfort. He cleared his throat and raised his voice, repeating himself. His mind was abuzz with embarrassment, and he stared at the trees behind, trying to focus only on the words he spoke, not the reactions he knew were percolating nearby.

“Excuse me, who are you?” someone asked.

“Gotta go!” he called again, defeating the rising objections around him.

“What do—I’m sorry, what do you mean?” Vinyl asked.

“Miss Pon-three—” someone else said.

“Not now,” she said, waving with a hoof as if to beat back the incoming inquiry. “What is it?”

His cheeks were aflame; he knew his disruptive image was being recorded and broadcasted across the town, and, much later, beyond that. “Something changed,” he simply said, hanging his head and shutting his eyes for one merciful second. He couldn’t even explain it; in his mind, the simple phrase “the circle is closing” repeated, but it meant nothing outside the confines of his skull.

“Now?” Vinyl asked. She wore a sympathetic smile, and cameras flashed relentlessly.

“Someone get this guy out of here!”

“Now,” Big Mac said. He could feel the crowd parting for a pair of security ponies, some of the reporters trying to shove him away themselves. Insults came over the crowd’s noise, demands that he sit down, or that he leave the musician alone. He didn’t wait for tempers to rise further; he cut straight across the front of the crowd, trying to keep Vinyl in the corner of his eye. She hesitated, but separated from the podium.

“Miss Pon-three, wait!”

She caught up to him, and they trotted, but did not run, away from the park, to the trees, where the mass was trying to curve back to pursue her. She looked back, but he did not. His face was burning with mingled shame and worry, growing hotter each time an insult made its way to his ears.

“What the Tartarus, Mac?” she hissed. Behind, the cameras stilled flashed endlessly, and Vinyl paused again to give them a good shot of her face.

“Ah just got the feelin’,” he said, wanting to grab her hoof and drag her along, but he knew what the picture would entail.

“The feeling?”

He bowed his head again as they reached the street, and Vinyl silently hailed a taxi. The crowd was beginning to understand, and only a few determined cameraponies followed them all the way to the street; one waspish, young mare had to dodge out of the taxi’s way as she crouched to get a shot of Vinyl going through the car door. Big Mac directed them back to the airship lot, and Vinyl remained quiet all the way there, goggles fixed on the window.

When they returned, Applejack received them with an energetic wave, and Rarity merely glanced up from where she sat at the back of the deck.

“Now we’re away from all that, you wanna explain?” Vinyl said.

“Ah can’t, Ah just knew,” he said.

“What’s goin’ on?” Applejack asked.

“Apparently we really do have to get to the palace soon,” Vinyl said. “Sure would have liked to know that earlier, Big Mac.”

“Not my choice,” he said.

“Hold up, right now?” Applejack asked.

“Soon. Where’s the others?”

“Twilight’s below, the others ain’t back yet.”

“I’ll get her,” Rarity said.

“Fifteen minutes, twenty, something like that,” Vinyl said. “We couldn’t wait that long?”

“Didn’t know how long you were gonna be,” Big Mac said quietly.

“You couldn’t tell it was getting close to done?”

“Girls, quit it,” Applejack said. “What were you even doin’?”

“She was givin’ an interview fer a bunch of music ponies,” Big Mac said.

“Press conference,” Vinyl said.

“What’s all this about having to bring everyone back?” Twilight asked, walking before Rarity and Octavia. She wore her exasperation on her face and in her voice, and spared some of that in a withering look to Vinyl as she walked by.

“Big Mac says we gotta get to the castle now,” Applejack said.

“I don’t like that I had to split just now for your cruddy glamour,” Vinyl said. “That’s all I have to say about it.”

“I don’t suppose you know how long we have,” Rarity said.

“He has no idea, just less time than before.”

“All right, all right, give me a second,” Twilight said. She lit her horn and frowned, and the light brightened and rose. It shot like a rocket up into the clouds, which scattered, and there hung a stellate gobbet of magenta that bathed the sky and city around them in its lurid glow.

“Ponies aren’t going to like that,” Rarity said, shielding her eyes. “I don’t like it. It makes my coat look like strawberry ice cream.”

“They’ll notice this,” Twilight said.

No one spoke, and Big Mac looked up at the beacon.

It took Pinkie ten minutes to return, Fluttershy fifteen, and Rainbow thirty. Big Mac paced the deck without talking, and Vinyl sulked under the torch while Octavia watched, brooding. Twilight and Rarity talked softly with Applejack, but dispersed when Fluttershy swooped up to the deck, fear in her eyes.

When they were assembled, Twilight extinguished her flare, which had drawn a crowd of nervous, well dressed ponies, all of whom were too scared to get close to the ship, but not too scared to jeer and demand that Twilight turn off her light.

The path from the airship lot to the road that would take them to the palace had been cleared of trees and left to grasses and weeds, whose sparse shadows waved at them in a chilly breeze. The pegasi above were setting up for another rain storm, and they could hear their banter distantly as they made their otherwise quiet way to the towering, white buildings.

When they reached the brick line that separated the hoofpath to the lot and the street that would join the Royal Road, they paused for a car to glide past, the sun symbol on its door. One of the crown’s automobiles, destined for parts unknown. They moved to the sidewalk along the street, though the street was, for the time, empty.

“Just so you all know, I came here earlier,” Rarity said as the drawbridge hove into view. “I got Princess Celestia’s designs for the Elements of Harmony.”

“I have them in my magical space,” Twilight said. “Safe and sound.”

“Your glamour say anything about that?” Vinyl asked, and Big Mac rolled his eyes.

“How the heck did you get those?” Rainbow asked.

“By asking nicely,” Rarity said, “and explaining our situation.”

“We said we were not going to make more,” Octavia said.

“No, we said we might not. I, for one, think we may as well have them with us, just in case, and Princess Celestia happened to agree.”

“No way,” Rainbow said.

They waited a minute for the guards to eye them at the first gate.

“I know it’s not popular,” Rarity continued as they passed through the courtyard. “But the fact is, we may have to face the reality of adding more Elements. Better to be prepared.”

“So you don’t think we can take him down on our own,” Rainbow said.

“That’s not what I said, dear.”

“But that’s what you mean.”

“It’s a precautionary measure, that’s all,” Twilight said.

“It’s unnecessary is what it is.”

“Kind of insulting,” Pinkie said quietly.

“It implies that you think that some of us can compare to you all,” Octavia said. “We cannot.”

“Octavia, can you cool it with the self-pitying routine?” Twilight asked. They stopped outside the decorated entryway to the throne room. “All right, everypony quiet. We’ll talk about this later. Let’s…” She took a deep breath. “Well, right then.”

The doors groaned open to admit them, and Twilight walked at the group’s head, her step not as confident as when she had led them there. Draped in sable folds of thick, furred fabric, Princess Celestia sat on her throne at the back of the grand room, atop the wide staircase under a gleaming row of almond-shaped windows, letting slots of light in to spill across the crimson carpet. Behind the bands of light, the sun goddess gleamed like an ingot of fresh ore, her heavy coat overflowing across the throne’s seat. Of the second goddess, there was no sign. There were no chairs in the room, no other ponies save the usual compliment of guards. There was sometimes a line of ponies out the door with questions or complaints, Twilight knew, but not then. It was four o’ clock on a Wednesday, which she imagined had something to do with it.

“No closer,” Celestia said, not rising. “I don’t mean to alarm you, my friends, but you are cursed.”

“We know,” Twilight said. Looking askance at Applejack, she said, “told you.”

Celestia studied them for a moment, her tired eyes holding each of them for a second before passing to the next. “What do you require of me?”

Twilight looked to Big Mac, in the back, and stepped aside. Suppressing a snide smile, she said, “Go ahead, Big Mac. It’s your situation.” The princess’ uncanny readiness for any spontaneous meeting was something that had unnerved her for years, as she could see it doing to Big Mac.

Big Mac looked back at her, his broad face inscrutable, and stepped forward. “Well, yer highness…” He stopped himself and bowed. “Ah’m not really sure how to begin.”

Celestia looked on.

“Ah guess Ah’m… well, Ah’ve sorta become a… Ah don’t know the word.”

“Your highness,” Vinyl said, going to his side and bowing. “If I may.”

“I’m sorry,” Celestia said. “Can you speak up?”

Vinyl’s horn glimmered for a second, a similar shade as her cheeks. She took a deep breath and spoke louder. Twilight could see her neck tendons standing out as she strained.

“He’s become a conduit for Discord’s will,” Vinyl continued at conversational volume. “He has a glamour that lets him know when there’s something we need to do, something that’ll help the friendship.”

Celestia looked at Twilight, who looked down, shame coloring her face and pounding behind her horn. “Should never have come here,” she thought.

“Bein’ here is important somehow,” Big Mac said. “Ah’m not really sure why.”

“Heightened intuition,” Celestia said. “Does it have to do with this curse of yours? Do you know its function?”

“It’s to move us somewhere,” Pinkie said. “Somewhere far away, Twilight said.”

A guard appeared at Celestia’s side and whispered into her ear, and she frowned. “I’m not expecting anyone else right now.”

The doors opened anyway, and for a second, Celestia’s countenance broke into displeasure, creasing the face that was usually perfectly calm. She did not object, and put on a benedictory smile for the malnourished, blue unicorn, escorted by a pair of guards who kept her well behind the Elements. “You’ll wait your turn,” the guard said to the strange pony.

“We’re not sure where we’ll wind up, but it’ll be important,” Pinkie said, raising her voice and taking a tentative step toward the regal stairs.

“It’s gonna be Discord’s trap,” Rainbow said.

“Rainbow!” Rarity said.

“Hey! It is!”

“That’s enough,” Celestia said, rising. Big Mac was trying to turn around and go to the back again, but Octavia stopped him.

“You dragged us here for a purpose,” she said, pulling him down to speak into his ear. “Fulfill it.”

“Let him go,” Rainbow said.

“Let him speak,” Fluttershy said.

“No,” Twilight said, edging around the tightening knot of friends and facing Celestia. With a quick bow, she said, “we’ll just be going, your highness.”

“Twilight,” Rarity said.

“We’re not doing this!” Twilight snapped.

“Stop,” Celestia said, her voice filling the throne room, though she had hardly raised it. “All of you, get out.”

“We gotta do it,” Big Mac mumbled.

“We’re not doing it,” Twilight said, bowing again to the princess.

“We can’t back out now,” Rarity said.

Twilight didn’t want to put her back to her mentor, but did so to lead their exit. In the turn, she saw Vinyl saying something in Big Mac’s ear, and a chill ran through her blood. Something in Vinyl’s assiduous expression froze her in place.

“Twilight’s right, let’s book,” Rainbow said, too late, for in that half second when Twilight had not her wits about her, Vinyl lit her horn with its natural magic color, not one of the many hues of light she was wont to express. The familiar tug of teleportation began and ended at Twilight’s extremities, her ear tips, horn point, and the bottoms of her hooves. The air was still, and she realized, before it was all whisked away, that sound had been extinguished.

She felt as if she were floating, lifted out of her body and out of the throne room, and then swept adrift in currents so fast that she could not tell where she was in one instant or predict where she would be an instant later. Like the moment of falling before a dream’s abrupt end, she was a displaced meteorite, cannoned through the sky and the earth.

And then…

It was a different experience for them all, she would find. For Twilight Sparkle, it was not pleasant.

She stood in the middle of a rain-lashed dirt road under hanging branches, the eerie light off the full moon turning the weeping limbs into the dead or dying claws of drowned horrors, coldly aflame in a silver glow. In her magical grip, she held a door, freshly torn from the smoking ruin of a once fancy car that lay, hood crenated, against a tree.

She dashed and crouched behind the car, holding her door up to shield her from any possible downward curving attacks. The sound of the rain buried all other noises, and she could not tell whether there was anyone in the brush close to her, or slopping down the street to meet her head on.

Her breath came in short stabs, her eyes wide and frantic as she tried to see everything at once in a world that was shrouded in darkness. She knew her life was at stake, or those of her friends, but she could not tell from which angle the threat would come. It may, she knew, simply come from the car itself, the fire catching on a pocket of gasoline and ending her troubles in a flash.

Deciding to take a chance, she lit her horn and threw the entire crash site into falsely sunlit relief. For one moment, she saw the shocked gleam of eyes watching her from behind a nearby bush, and she didn’t think. As the darkness rushed back, Twilight cocked and spun her car door into the bush, scattering twigs and globes of mud into the air with a heavy grinding sound before an even heavier crash.

Pushing against the warm car, she got to her hooves and scrambled down the road, downhill. In her mind, her friends were behind her, waiting for something to happen, for her to come back and tell them what to do, or that everything was okay. It wasn’t. Slowly, so as not to slip in the mud, she pumped her legs and rent her lungs with exertion, her primary concern to put as much distance between herself and the other pony as she could. Whether she had hit him with the door was of little immediate consequence; if she had, and he was not chasing her, whoever later discovered the body would be.

She was aware, even in the flying colors of varying fears, what she was leaving behind: her friends, her hopes, their hopes; along with more personal things: her integrity, her pride, her name. So frightened she was that the notion to return and simply lay low did not enter her thoughts, certainly not before the more insistent memory of her time on the palace balcony wended its way into her shuffling fears and spread across all, before then converging. Soon, she was running through the dark, empty courtyard under the balcony where it had all begun. The white banister’s shattered teeth littered the topiary.

And then…

She fell face-down into warm dust and pushed herself up, sneezing and shaking her head. The sun beat on her and her alone.

Twilight turned a slow circle, mind resonating with the memories conjured from the dream. It had been lifelike, but, as she slowly overcame the cold sweat that worked its way down her body, brought on by the oneiric flashback, she realized that it was not completely a dream. Too little had faded with consciousness.

She stepped into the only nearby shade and looked up at the imposing pillar of stone, uncarved and unblemished, a perfect cylinder melded with the reddening ground, obdurately incongruous to the uneven, cracked arena that made the pillar its center. She stared at it, and then jumped back as a second pony flashed into being beside her. Applejack kept her balance, but had to stagger against the pillar and rest for a moment before her eyes cleared.

“Twi!”

“Applejack, where were you?”

“Wait, where the hay are we?”

Twilight looked around. The topaz sky told her nothing, the encircling cliff face that she was in an enormous crater, bedecked with remnants of architecture like fossils dropped into a dig site. Their airship listed to one side against a tipped plinth, its top shattered away and draped with a loop of smoking curtain. Shards of glass winked on ugly patches of Celestia’s rich carpet, already patterned with cinders and spun dust. The throne stood perpendicular to its tilting steps, empty, under an archway that slowly leaned away before collapsing into the torus of a broken entryway. A pane of stained glass had landed mostly whole closer to where they stood, dumbfounded, the princesses’ angular visages facing upwards in unflinching determination.

“Ah can’t tell.”

“I’m not sure either,” Twilight said, though she thought she was.

Fluttershy flashed out at them, and she looked around with wide eyes for a long time before speaking.

“Ah’m guessin’ we were different places,” Applejack said. “‘Cause mine was great, an’ you two look like death herself.”

“Direct sunlight makes me look paler,” Fluttershy whispered.

“No, darlin’, Ah mean dead. Yer paler’n milk in a blizzard.”

“I was back in The Mountain Zone, I think,” Twilight said. “I did something bad, and I was running.”

“Did ya, er—”

“Only a little. I think I’m okay now.”

Octavia appeared, and Twilight helped her up. She stared at them all, disappointment quietly arranging itself back into her usual stoicism.

“I was back in Applewood,” Fluttershy said. “The dam.”

Pinkie appeared on the pillar’s opposite side, where she dismounted from a slab of floor and trudged to meet them.

“I was performing for an audience of thousands,” Octavia said. “I thought I would never be able to play my encore, the applause went on so long.”

“Yeesh,” Applejack said. “Ah almost feel bad fer ours, then. Ah was back home havin’ a Hearth’s Warmin’ feast.” She nodded at Octavia. “You were there, d’ya know that? That’s what Ah’d call a tellin’ detail.”

“Was I?” Pinkie asked as Rainbow appeared, wings askew.

“Course you were, Pinkie. Yer my best gal.”

“Does anypony else feel warmer?” Twilight asked.

“A little, now that you mention it,” Pinkie said.

“That’s the desert for ya,” Applejack said.

“No,” Twilight said, scrutinizing the obelisk, running her eyes up its sides to the flat top, where a veil of heat waves ascended. “It’s coming off of this.” She took a step closer and reached a hoof out; she could tell the stone was already too hot to touch, hotter than something simply baked in the daytime sun.

“Let’s back away,” Rainbow said, grabbing on to Octavia, who seemed reluctant to move.

“Twilight?” Fluttershy asked.

Twilight looked down once more, her eyes caught by a flash of pale yellow light, not as solid as Discord’s lustrous gold, not as pure as true sunshine. It had appeared for just a moment, and she could not tell its source. One thing she did know: “That’s Princess Celestia’s magic.”

“What’s it doing down there?” Pinkie asked, coming to Twilight’s side.

There was a final flash seeming from without the obelisk, blinding them for an instant, and all around broke the others, first the blotches of white—Vinyl and Rarity—then the big, red lump—Big Mac—and, lastly, the light blue bookended with gold armor.

“Twilight!” Applejack cried out, backing away.

Twilight looked back and followed Applejack’s eyes down as her vision cleared. Around the pillar’s base, instead of the red desert, there leaked the slender beginning of a tenebrous aureole whose dimensionless, faceless darkness Twilight thought she had seen before, never so close.

“Everyone get away!” Twilight shouted. “We need to get out of here! Applejack, get that ship up and running.”

“What is it, Twilight?” Rarity asked, galloping over, but veering to the side when she saw the shadow, slowly expanding from the pillar’s foot like water emptying onto the arid landscape.

“On the ship, on the ship, let’s go,” Twilight called, gesturing with one hoof and trying to toss away loose debris with her horn. The two guards helped the blue pony stumble in Twilight’s direction.

“It’s growing!” Pinkie shrieked.

“That’s why we need to go, Pinks,” Rainbow said, zipping overhead. For a second, Twilight spared relief that Rainbow was uninjured; she had not looked it at first.

As the airship engine purred to life, and Octavia and Big Mac—she pulling magically, he pushing impotently—righted the vessel, Twilight watched the darkness expand. It was slow, growing only an inch or so in the minute she gave to observe, but she knew that would change.

“Twilight!” Rainbow called, and Twilight trotted to the lowered gangplank, one eye over her shoulder. Behind her, a piece of white masonry fell and rolled a heavy somersault in the dust.

“Come on, come on,” Twilight mumbled, attention divided between the boarding crowd and the growing shadow. It would soon overtake where she had been standing.

“We’re ready,” Applejack said. “Thank Celestia the balloon’s okay.”

“Get us out of here,” Rarity said.

“Twilight, we need to stop that,” Octavia said.

“It’ll stop,” Twilight said, catching her breath.

“What if it doesn’t?” Fluttershy asked.

“It will.” She took a moment to breathe. The remnants of the dream still clung to her mind, and even the short jog to the ship had put her back into her desperate mindset. So torn, she did not concern herself with a preface to the ill news. “That’s a Tartarus gateway opening down there.”

“What?” Vinyl gasped. For her, it was a shout of alarm.

“How?”

“Twilight!”

“Somepony stop it!”

“Quiet!” Twilight shouted. “Everypony just shut up for a second.” Her breathing was shallow and labored, but she could not slow it down. Black flies danced in and out of her eyes.

“We came out of that?” Pinkie asked.

Big Mac parted from Vinyl and walked to look over the rail.

“Where are we?” Octavia asked firmly. “Let us start there.”

“No, let’s start there,” Rarity said. “What is that doing where we just got spit out of some kind of… some kind of group dream?”

“Miss Sparkle, if I may,” one of the guards said.

Twilight jerked her head, the flash of gold armor catching the sun just right, and that was all she needed to take her back.

“Twilight?”

She knew she shouldn’t, but she kept her eyes on the armor, perversely attracted and frightened at the same time, the idea of sinking into another flashback. It had been a long time; the weakness, in her constricting mind, was earned, and she chose to not fight.

“Here we go again,” was her last coherent thought before the scene fell away like water on a shower curtain, her friends and ship a barely visible backdrop to the same, old nightmare. The chasing pegasi, the burst of magic, the flash of broken banister, the smear of blood, everything rendered in exaggerated granularity, certain details replayed and others merely lengthened. Along with fear, Twilight felt shame and loathing. As in the dream, she was abandoning her friends at a crucial time.

“We’re away from it, Twilight,” Applejack said. “Can ya hear?”

“Let her have her moment,” someone said.

“We don’t have time for moments,” someone else said.

The voices waxed and waned in her ears, most lost to her scrambled thoughts.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “I think I know where we are!”

“Hey,” Twilight said. The rest of the sentence did not register, but the “hey” did. Attention, it bespoke.

“Twi?”

“Hey,” Twilight repeated. “Hey.” She said it again. “Okay,” she whispered. Her thoughts were converging on that word, relieved and ashamed.

“Twilight?”

She closed her eyes and opened them again.

“What was that?” Vinyl asked.

“Have we seriously not told her yet?” A jolt of anger jumped across her brain.

“You okay?” Vinyl asked.

“Can you be quiet?”

“Uh—excuse me?”

“Twilight,” Pinkie said.

“I was just asking about you.”

“Vinyl,” Twilight said warningly.

Vinyl shrugged dismissively. “Didn’t even do anything that time,” she mumbled to Big Mac, who only looked at her.

“You did plenty.” She didn’t move her eyes to look at Vinyl.

“Hey—”

“Hey yourself!” Twilight screamed, finally turning away from the edge and advancing on Vinyl.

“Whoa, whoa, Twilight,” Applejack said.

Twilight whirled on Applejack, but her retort died, and she turned back to Vinyl. The white unicorn stared at her blankly, her goggles offering no rejoinder to Twilight’s display.

“Aren’t you the one who teleported us?” Rainbow asked.

Twilight took a deep breath. “Rainbow.”

“No, she’s right,” Vinyl said softly. “It was me. You don’t, ah, have to actually teleport to do it, just try. Twilight told me so earlier.”

“Wait, and just who told you to teleport us?” Rarity asked.

“Twilight was backing out,” Pinkie said.

“I did what I thought was right,” Vinyl said, shrugging again. “Sorry.”

“Can we get back to the part about the missin’ princess?” Applejack asked, rapping on the torch.

“What do you say, Big Mac?” Twilight asked, snapping her attention to him.

“Leave him out of this,” Vinyl said.

“Why, can’t he speak for himself?” Rainbow asked.

“Rainbow, stop it,” Rarity said. “What’s done is done. We should—”

“Why’d you pull the trigger when we were obviously not sure about going through with it?” Twilight asked.

Vinyl stepped back, her mouth partially open, her horn lit with color. “You said we were all gonna go for it.”

“Yeah, before I knew what it was going to do!”

“We weren’t gonna turn back, Twilight.”

“Says who? We hardly talked about it.”

“Who put you in charge, anyway?” Rainbow asked.

“Girls, come on,” Applejack said, trying to tug Twilight back by her tail. Twilight flicked it forcefully and swatted Applejack on the nose.

“You’ve been around for a month now?” Rainbow continued.

“Does it seem right now, Vinyl? Seem okay now?” Twilight asked.

“Princess Celestia is missing,” Octavia said loudly.

“I mean…” Vinyl began.

“You’re the expert on faith, Vinyl. This seem like a good idea now?”

“No, Twilight, it doesn’t.” Her voice was shrill with hurt, but, with the goggles on, Twilight could not see but a shadow of emotion. “You’re right, seems to me that we were all betrayed! Misled, betrayed, and left alone in this—” Her horn flashed a momentarily blinding shot of neon blue. “Stupid desert!”

“Hey, hey,” Pinkie said, putting a hoof on Vinyl’s back.

“Sorry, Twilight. You’re totally right, my fault! Happy?”

Twilight glowered at her. “I told you this was going to happen, and then I told everypony else. What were you thinking?”

“Twi, let’s let it go, huh?” Applejack said.

“Applejack, Princess Celestia is gone!”

“An’ we’re not gonna bring her back by arguin’ like this.”

“I have some good news,” Fluttershy said moodily from the back.

“If we even can bring her back,” Twilight said.

“Come on, if y’all can resurrect me, you can handle this,” Applejack said.

“This isn’t the same.”

“You’re right, it’ll be easier. Celestia’s still alive,” Vinyl said bitterly.

“You don’t talk now.”

“Hey!”

“Nopony asked fer this, Twilight,” Big Mac said from behind the torch. Only his head was visible as he leaned out to address them. “Fightin’ don’t help.”

“I’ll just go,” Vinyl said, shaking her mane and heading for the hatch.

“She did pull the trigger,” Rarity said, sidling up to Twilight. “If it’s any consolation, I agree with you. She had no right.”

“It had to be done, though,” Pinkie said. “I think.”

“Bull,” Rainbow said. “This was a trick, through and through.” She frowned at Twilight. “You told her so too.”

Twilight sighed and closed her eyes, then went to the gunwale. “Fluttershy, you said something. What was it?”

“Oh, are we done arguing now?” Fluttershy asked.

“Don’t be like that.”

“That was some really swell harmony and leadership you just demonstrated, Twilight.”

“Fluttershy, not now.”

“Yes, now. Do you want to know why?”

Twilight didn’t speak.

“Because the last Element is just a couple miles away, and that means Discord’s castle is close too. This isn’t the time to be fighting.”

Twilight had to wait for the information sink in. “I suppose you want us to rejoice.”

“Obviously not,” Fluttershy said. “But we don’t need to alienate our friends.”

“Our friends don’t need to set us up,” Twilight said, glaring back at Big Mac.

“He did not know what he was doing,” Octavia said.

“That true, Mac?” Rainbow asked.

Instead of replying, Big Mac got up and went to join Vinyl below.

“That’s great about the Element,” Twilight said. They were rising out of the crater, though they still had a couple hundred feet to go, and Twilight returned to the gunwale. For her, the gateway was still small, a little hoop of darkness, perhaps a piece of eerie art to pair with its pillar, motionless and afloat in the void. She could see it still growing, and faster. “But first, I think we should… who am I kidding? I think I should go back down there and figure out what’s going on.”

“Miss Sparkle, you cannot,” one guard said, approaching Applejack, who was working on changing their direction.

Twilight didn’t respond.

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Take it back up,” the other guard said. “Take us up!”

“It’s too dangerous to go down there,” the first repeated. “If what you say is true, then that is a gateway to Tartarus. Any manner of—”

“I know that,” Twilight snapped, noting without pleasure that Applejack had not paused in their descent, and the other guard was hesitant to interfere. To the first guard, she kept her tone firm, her expression stony, but she felt faint. The flashback, and the dream below it, rang in her head with the fight, all diminishing the confidence she feigned to a point so thin she could hardly bring herself to turn away and face the creeping shadow.

For Twilight knew that it was either a gateway or something similar, a much less stable magical construction; she could do nothing about it either way. No gateway could she close, no magic that imitated one could she undo in what she imagined would be so short a time as she would have before Discord came to complicate things further. Likely, he was already on his way.

“Miss Sparkle, I must formally protest,” the second guard said. “For the safety of the crew, if nothing else.”

“Your protests are noted,” Twilight whispered to herself. The false confidence, at least, bolstered her enough to order her thoughts. The first, and possibly only, thing to do would be to cast a simple recognition spell, to see what magic was at play below.

“How close?” Applejack asked.

“As close as you can,” Twilight said. “I need to… oh, crap.” She looked into the sky, for a moment losing herself in the endless blue. She would need to be almost within touching distance of the pillar for her spell to accurately tell her what was going on without interference from the magic she could already feel spilling out of Tartarus and into their air. It fizzed invisibly along her horn and hissed in her ears, and she jerked her head involuntarily.

“I feel it too,” Rarity said, hooves clutched to her ears.

“To the rim. The ship won’t get us close enough, unless you want to dip into the gateway.”

“No!” a guard yelled.

“The rim,” Twilight insisted, her eyes on a loose column that had been catapulted far toward the crater’s interior edge, leaving a dark brown trough where it had scored the desert floor. “Rainbow, Fluttershy, I’m going to need you to hover by my sides, in case I need you to pull me back onto the ship.”

“You’re not seriously going down there, are you?” Rainbow asked.

The sound in her ears pressed deeper. She could see the blue unicorn shrinking as well, and the guards standing at attention with pained looks on their faces. “Not into the gateway, just close,” Twilight said, voice raised against the keening in her ears.

“How are you getting closer on your own?” Fluttershy asked.

Twilight shook her head, horn sparking as if on fire.

“Whatever it is, can we get it done with?” Rarity cried out.

“Land us by that pillar,” Twilight said, trying to keep her volume low and her thoughts ordered. “But then follow us out to the middle.”

At that, Applejack paused for only a second before angling them down and away from the obelisk, where they came to rest a foot above a scattering of tiles, bunched like flung shale on a minor rise in the crater’s floor, shining like ice in the bare sun. A long stele, originally meant to stand in the far corner of the throne room, lay heavily beside the wreckage, its yellow fabric loose and undulating in the light breeze. Hairline fractures ran its length, melding with shallow embossments of the princesses’ divine words. Twilight could do no better than grabbing it, and, in straining magic, try to gently roll it about to point toward the growing darkness. It’s unevenly broken base jostled and crashed on the ground, throwing up tufts of dust. Ship and pegasi in tow, she slowly walked the pillar out toward the edge of darkness. From above, it had appeared more than long enough, but, closer, she could see that the darkness would soon reach the pillar’s halfway point.

“This gateway’s not going to be slow for long,” Twilight panted, setting the upright down and reaching indiscriminately for the other, smaller pieces of rubble, the hole all the while fanning out, erasing the ground and allowing debris to simply fall out of sight. “They expand at increasing rates, so it might not be long before this falls in.”

“We’ll be right next to you the whole time,” Rainbow said. Behind her, Fluttershy, catching on to what Twilight was doing, swooped back and forth, depositing smaller stones and pieces of wreckage on the growing pile that smothered the column’s shattered top.

“Good. I don’t know if I’ll be able to teleport, this is taking a lot out of me.” She trotted off to grab a wide curve of ceiling, which she dragged across the rough ground, sparks flying with an awful noise that, for Twilight, hardly registered under the apiarian press of too much ambient magic.

She let the span tumble onto the pile gracelessly and staggered onto the stele, her hooves struggling to find purchase on the stone. From the ground, and certainly in her magical grasp, it had seemed large, but there was scarcely room for her to walk without slipping over one end. She would need to crawl, or else tread a painfully slow, straight line.

“Get on either side of me,” Twilight said, hugging the column and pushing herself forward.

The heat emanating from the magical monument was distinct from the desert heat that filled the crater; it was more direct, and it seemed to come in waves, slapping her in the chest and drying out her nostrils. She was sweating through her coat, and had to pause once to wave her hooves in the air, trying to dry them. In that moment, relying only on the strength of her back legs to keep her secure, she could feel her stomach doing flips in mimicry of her heart. She watched with mute horror when the gateway slid beneath her, an aphotic stain that took away the ground, and her breath, and gave back not one jot of reflection, not one suggestion of depth.

“Someone, keep your eyes on that counterweight,” she mumbled, inching forward.

“You’re fine, Twilight,” Fluttershy said.

“Remember,”

“It’s not even close yet,” Rainbow said.

Twilight nodded, but resisted the urge to look back. Ridiculously, she thought they might be wrong, that neither knew what she had meant by “increasing rates.”

“You’re doing great,” Fluttershy said again. Her voice, too, was strained; she hadn’t looked down once.

When she reached the chipped pedestal, so near to the hot, screaming stone, her ears were lowered and her teeth bared. She felt like she was caught in an electrical storm, and had to move steadily, and with intention. Any sudden movement, she feared, she would inadvertently exaggerate, likely to her demise. Still, when her head jerked without warning, she stared into the abyss for a second, and thought she felt herself sliding off.

“You’re fine, you’re fine,” Rainbow said, putting a hoof to Twilight’s back. “C’mon, you made it, now do what you have to do.”

Twilight dared not close her eyes. She contended with the sickeningly slow tilt of the world back into view, the gateway giving way to visible light once more, where the obelisk stood at the center of her attention.

“Not long, Twilight,” Fluttershy said.

“How many minutes?” Twilight asked. She couldn’t hear herself.

“I don’t know.”

During her crawl, she had tried to put the magic overload out of her mind, to accept the incessant assault on her senses and immerse herself in the feeling, rather than fight it and exhaust herself. To a degree, she had been successful, but conjuring a spell of her own in the environment was different. She could not raise her hoof; she had to blink the sweat out of her eyes.

“Go for it, Twi,” Rainbow said.

Twilight’s eyes were frozen on the obelisk, still blank, its color not changed for the heat it radiated. She felt as though she were approaching a colossal unicorn horn, hot with magic as if to bore a hole straight through the ground, as it must surely bore through her before long.

Her spell was a basic one, and she was eventually able to pull it out of her taxed brain and cast it, much more strongly than she needed to. Magenta light briefly lit the stone face, its spillage giving no more definition to the gateway below. She stared, trying to make sense of what her spell told her. The magic at work was simple, in theory, but its scale was not.

“Let’s go!” Rainbow said, grabbing Twilight by one side, Fluttershy quickly joining on the other, and they pulled her up to the waiting airship. Her unfocused eyes stared straight into the gateway, a dreamlike loss of sight; accompanied by her friends’ pulls on her inert body, she felt as though she were again leaving herself behind. By the time Twilight could move and look back over the rail, there was no trace of the column that had held her.

“Well?” Applejack asked.

“Get us out of here,” Twilight said, stumbling to the back of the ship, where the other unicorns had taken refuge, ears clamped down and eyes shut tight. Octavia watched her impassively, and Twilight wanted to reach out and smack her. “You try being sensitive to magic, Miss Invincible!” she wanted to yell.

The guards were both better off than the other unicorns, and looked at Twilight with tortured faces. “Is it true?” one asked.

Twilight nodded. “It’s a gateway. There’s more, but… we have to get out of here. I’m working on it.”

Fifteen minutes later, just under the crater’s rim, away from the heat and the magic, and barely within view of a settlement, Twilight took her usual lecturing position at the bow, glass of water on the deck next to her.

“It’s a great, big Tartarus gateway, as I’ve said. Now, that big stone in the middle of it, it’s some kind of magical prison.”

“Ah can already see where this is goin’,” Applejack said.

“There’s containment magic at work, as well as illusion magic.” She paused for effect, trying to find a way to properly express the significance of what she had to say next. “It’s no regular illusion, though. That… has to be the biggest or most complicated illusion in all of Equestria, right down there.”

“Inside that pillar?” Rarity asked.

“I’m not sure where it is, physically, but yes. There’s more magic at work there than in most cities, and it explains why there needs to be a gateway beneath. All that Tartarus magic that’s coming through, girls, I think that’s what’s feeding this illusion.”

“That can’t be right,” Pinkie said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I saw Princess Celestia’s magic flash outside the stone, before the gateway started opening,” Twilight continued. “So I’d be willing to bet that she’s in there.”

“That’s probably what we experienced,” Applejack said. “Our own illusions. Before…”

“Before we got kicked out,” Pinkie said.

“Did the princess knock us out of there?” Rarity asked.

“Here’s how I see it,” Twilight said. She glanced back, just to make sure the gateway had not grown again. By the time they were nearly out of the crater, it was sweeping across the final expanse of ground too fast for any of them to have outrun, and it had finally stopped expanding a couple minutes later. “We were all teleported into that pillar, or wherever, into our own illusions. Princess Celestia either knew, or reacted quickly enough, or something, and was able to push us out of it.”

“But not herself,” Rainbow said.

“Ah bet she only had a few seconds,” Applejack said.

“But what’s holding the gateway open?” Fluttershy asked.

“I need to research,” Twilight said, heading for the back hatch. “I have a theory, but I need to look some things up.” She paused at the stairs. “But I don’t think it matters very much.”

“How can it not matter?” Pinkie asked.

“Because we are screwed, Pinkie,” she intoned. “We don’t have a princess, and we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“Well…”

“We’re not gonna try to get her outta there?” Applejack asked.

Twilight went to the prow. The shadow was motionless, the obelisk floating and embedded in the center like an auger. There was no trace of the palace pieces, and Twilight could see the slow climb and retreat of a family of ponies on the far cliff edge, running away from the darkness. Rivulets of dirt streamed into the open maw from the crater’s sides, slightly too tight to contain the gateway, and left to hang over its rim in an unbroken, circular promontory. Eventually, time and gravity would take their toll, and the sides would slide down for the crater to widen into the magical sinkhole. For the time, though, it was simply a macabre sight; a chill wind blew across the deck, and then turned to a gust. At the obelisk’s base, Twilight could see the occasional flash of Celestia’s light, a weak pulse through the sea of black.

“Why did it stop?” Rarity asked.

“Even the princess’ magic is finite.”

“So we are not going after the princess?” Octavia asked. “I am understanding this correctly?”

“You know what I think?” Rarity asked. “I think that would be just what Discord wants us to do. He wants us to spend time here, when we could be taking the last Element up to his castle and finishing him off.”

“I don’t like leavin’ the princess behind,” Applejack said.

“I’ll be back,” Twilight said, heading for the hatch. “I’m going to write Princess Luna and tell her what’s happened.”

“If she can deal with what’s down there, we can go get Discord,” Pinkie said. “It’s perfect!”

“Fluttershy, where’d you say this Element is?” Applejack asked.

“Town,” Fluttershy said.

“Twilight knows what she’s talking about, right?” Rainbow asked when the hatch was closed.

“She usually does.”

A few minutes later, they crested the crater’s edge. “Look at those,” Pinkie said, awed.

The crater’s perimeter was surrounded with similar, smaller totems, some glowing and others not, spaced far apart and scarcely shadowed in the noontime sun; they were so far south, and so close to winter, that the sun would reach its apex not quite in the middle of the sky. Unlike Celestia’s pillar, no Tartarus gateways hemmed the smaller obelisks; they seemed placed for artfulness only, or pure malice.

Moondrop was five minutes away, and they landed on a flat expanse of desert not far from what appeared the town’s only general store, alone on its section of earth. Narrow, unpaved bridges crossed the gaps in the ground, and the Elements collectively stopped to stare, having not encountered one for so long. While their chase for the Elements of Harmony had picked up and their reassembly of the broken ground had relaxed, others had taken up the slack, but not in Moondrop.

They crossed in a single file line to the miniature town, Vinyl and Big Mac at the very back, Twilight in the front, and the blue pony and her guards trailing behind as a separate group entirely.

“How you holdin’ up?” Big Mac asked Vinyl, staring straight ahead, back stiff. They were far enough behind the others that they would not be overheard.

“Further along,” Fluttershy said ahead of them. “I think it’s somewhere in the middle of town.”

“I don’t think I’m cut out for this after all,” Vinyl said.

Big Mac nodded, but did not speak.

“Twilight hates my guts.”

“She’s a little mad at everyone right now.”

“She’s mad at me ‘cause I moved us. How’d she put it? I ‘pulled the trigger’.”

Big Mac nodded again.

“Nothing changed, right? Like, at the last minute or something. We were supposed to do this? We’re supposed to be here?”

Big Mac sighed. “Ah s’pose so.”

Her expression darkened. “You don’t think so.”

“Ah said Ah do.”

“But you don’t mean it.”

They stopped at another bridge. The ropes were constructed of dried and twined pulp, the planks wide, well-fitting rectangles of wall and signage. At the bridge’s extreme ends, they could see the reinforcements underneath, where they met the edges’ stone faces. In the cold wind, the bridges would sway, but nothing more. Vinyl watched Octavia hurry across, not looking down but clearly nervous.

“Do you believe we did the right thing?” Vinyl asked.

“We?” Big Mac thought. “Ah don’t know. Ah haven’t had enough time to think.”

“What’s your gut instinct?”

“Whatever the glamour tells me. In this case, it says to keep goin’. We’re doin’ good.”

“And yet…”

“What do you think?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not sure.”

“How ‘bout stickin’ with us, then? How do you feel ‘bout that?”

Vinyl moved across the bridge, looking down once and immediately regretting it. Big Mac followed, trying and failing to not copy her.

“Can’t very well stay here,” she said. “Next town, maybe.”

“You wanna leave.”

“Maybe.”

“Not sure?”

Another gust of wind blew, and Vinyl stepped closer, her side brushing against his.

“Mm-hm.”

“What was I supposed to do? Should I really have stood back and let Twilight stop it?”

“Ah dunno.”

“You don’t not have an opinion.”

He shrugged. “Like Ah said, not enough time to think it out.”

They slowed at a small strip of wood and adobe buildings, behind which waited dusty, unpainted carriages and wagons, and one rickshaw. Through a grimy window, a group of elderly diners were laughing over coffee and pie. Through another, chairs stood upside-down on mahogany tables under darkened bar lights. From each building ran large, dull troughs that converged on the ground and emptied into small, smooth canals, flowing southward toward what they did not know. All were dry, and had been for some time.

“This must be the tourist section,” Rainbow said, flapping up to the roof of one building. “There’s more parked on the other side.”

“How close?” Twilight asked Fluttershy.

“One minute,” Fluttershy said, eyes closed.

“Remind you of home, big bro?” Applejack asked.

Big Mac swung his massive head back and forth.

“Me neither.”

“We’ll follow this thing,” Fluttershy said. “Close.”

Big Mac looked back and saw the three strangers still behind, the two guards holding their own counsel and the blue unicorn following with a dazed expression. He paused, pretending to see something on the ground, and, when Vinyl stopped for him, abandoned the pretense and walked to the new unicorn. She regarded him with polite interest, and Big Mac realized that he had seen her before.

“Yer from Ponyville,” he said.

“Colgate,” she said.

“That’s it.” The guards quieted their conversation, but did not stop. “So how’d you end up here, if you don’t mind my askin’?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ya don’t know?”

“I don’t know.”

He studied her as they walked. Her stride didn’t falter, her eyes were steady, yet she carried herself like someone who had not slept in a long while. He had seen the look on his sister plenty of times, during harvest season.

“If the ladies with the map up there are right, we’re in a little town called Moondrop,” he continued. “One of the southernmost towns in Equestria, Ah think Ah heard ‘em say.”

“I forgot your name. You’re one of the Apples.”

“Big Macintosh, but Big Mac is fine. Mac, even.”

“That’s your sister ahead.”

“Applejack, yes ma’am.”

Colgate considered for a time. “I believe I understand what he meant now.”

“Pardon?”

Colgate didn’t reply; her countenance, no more vibrant than the courtesy with which she introduced herself, deadened, and Big Mac knew she was lost in her own head. “Great,” he thought, “Another quiet, brooding type.”

A stone’s throw from the closed down shop that ended the strip of buildings, they passed the hotel, pausing only momentarily to look in on its ice blue pool through the gaps in the walls. No one was visible inside the wide, dusty corridors, but someone was playing music on the second floor, twanging at an acoustic guitar and singing with a voice that was neither pleasant nor objectionable.

Beyond that, across a slight expanse of uneven terrain, they reached the oblong bulk of an upwards sloping mound, a colorful jigsaw of pink adobe and cyclopean, beige brickwork, misshapen windows set deep into the veins of blushing stone that lay over the structure like petrified tree roots. Rainbow shot ahead and curved back on them; it was a museum.

They had to circle the entire building to enter, crossing another dry canal on a thinner bridge of the same construction as those that spanned the gaps. Twilight, after a short argument with the cashier, paid their admission with some of the bits she had newly withdrawn in Canterlot, the guards and Colgate staying outside; for a moment, Big Mac considered staying with them.

Fluttershy resolutely led them past displays of ancient equine artwork and more modern renditions of the same, not once pausing to indulge Twilight’s obvious, but subdued, interest. No one spoke, and Twilight could feel everyone’s eyes on her back, waiting to see if her outburst had truly concluded on the ship. A young couple went quiet as they passed through a room with a wall-covering tapestry of stained, wooden beads.

“It’s here,” Fluttershy said finally as the group spilled into a large, circular room, its concrete floor funneled slightly downwards, a deliberate design choice to accentuate the mass of the museum’s proudest centerpiece. With neither glass nor velvet rope to protect it, an argentine nugget rested on a sandstone block, lit from above through the skylight, sunshine directed by a small cat’s cradle of mirrors.

Fluttershy circled the meteorite, flew up into the rafters, and then landed with a puzzled expression.

“Where is it?” Rarity asked.

“Right here,” Fluttershy said. “I think it’s either underneath or inside that.”

“Twilight, possible?” Rainbow asked.

“Sure, you can stick something like that in a meteorite. It’s just material.”

“We can’t just walk out with that,” Applejack said.

Twilight stared at the meteorite for a minute, thinking. Luna had not replied to her letter, but she hadn’t expected her to. “Get the Element, Twilight. The princess will be fine,” she thought dully. “She’s a goddess for a reason.”

Eventually, she shrugged, reaching her conclusion. “Watch the doors for me? I’ll get it out.” She first encased the meteorite in a small bubble of magic, then, after another moment, selected the spot where she wanted to cut. A shining disc of magic appeared outside and slipped in to the metallic surface. She stood close, using her body to block some of the light as a shower of sparks arced up and out at them like those from a welder’s flame. The sound was muffled inside her magic sphere.

“They’re gonna kill us,” Rainbow said, hovering close to get a good look.

“I’ll leave a note,” Twilight said. Applejack, at the nearby entrance, laughed.

“It is just a meteor,” Octavia said.

“It’s ancient, and it’s museum property. Rainbow’s right, we could get in a lot of trouble for this.”

“But we don’t care about that,” Vinyl said softly.

The only reply was a taller gout of sparks as Twilight ground away at the last Element. The embers left a pattern of ashen freckles on the floor where they faded.