It felt like a day had passed, but they could not be sure. From the room at the bottom of the pillar, which they shared with a kind but untalkative family of ponies, the Elements set out on a long, winding road with their guide, a new pony who went by Light Tread, up through the honeycombs of residences and workplaces toward Silver Sun’s workshop. Anomie had left them the day before after going with them for a few hours, exploring, suggesting interesting places to eat, showing them her town. They hadn’t any money—theirs had all been left in Silver Sun’s possession, and the treasury note was of no use in the far-removed mines—but their celebrity status was often enough to get them free meals. They had collapsed into rough beds with no notion of the hour, exhausted from telling story after story to an audience that was always changing, always impressed.

Preparing her tools for gathering the crystals was a complicated ordeal, and Silver Sun did not want to spend the rest of her afternoon making the arrangements and be tired when she entered the darkness. She had eventually explained that there were allowed no lights, no unicorn magic, and nothing electrical, precluding many of the processes she used ordinarily. She would need to find other ways to work with the crystals she sought.

“You said you’ve already done this once or twice,” Rainbow had asked. “Why not just do what you did again? Why all the fuss?”

“Last time, I just gathered ‘em. This time, I wanna do as much of the work right out there as I can.” She looked at them levelly. “Better than draggin’ a whole mess of crystals back here only to have to go out again.”

So they waited. Nineteen hours, which felt to them more like thirty in the unchanging nighttime of the mines, passed, and they walked the busy streets with severely depleted interest in the city around them. The cave formations all seemed familiar, the statues all just rude landmarks, the shops and stands and full homes all sources of the unvaried noise that filled the tunnels. The effect was not unpleasant, but it was everywhere.

When they met with Silver Sun, she wore a tall backpack balanced on both sides with bulging saddlebags, a compass dangling by a chain around her neck, and a short-brimmed hat whose band was striped with narrow metal rings. She nodded to them and their guide, and they were on their way. They were tired from the uphill walk, but she was not, and so when they reached their teleportation pavilion, all sat down for the brief respite as she conversed with the teleporter, who eyed them all warily.

“Go through, I’ll meet you on the other side,” she said, gesturing at a small pillar of stone, a dark square etched into its face. The teleporter nodded greetings to them each as he sent them through.

As their senses reconstituted, they were first aware of Vanilla Cream standing just on the steps down, his body emblazoned against the dark gray form of a long, high wall, its face rippling with the wan reflections of multiple, weak crystals off a running moat. He nodded to each and beckoned them over to a small enclosure of stalagmites, each one carved with gentle spirals and tipped with delicate stars of sandstone. The plaque on the balustrade around them read “For those who wander and do not return, may these Stars find them.”

For a minute, they simply glared at him, before Applejack spoke. “So, what’s it gonna be, then?”

He returned a placid expression. “You were supposed to win.”

“Yeah, we sort of figured at that,” Rainbow said.

“I thought you said you were done with us,” Pinkie said.

“I was, when I thought you were going to win. I thought you were going to free me,” Vanilla said. He moved to pace around them, and, for a half second, his body recoiled in air, as if coming unstuck from where he had let it stand. Pale bights of smoke moved off him as he circled them.

“What’s this?” Rarity asked.

“You didn’t see ahead to us losing?” Twilight asked.

“No.” Vanilla shook his head, and black stars glittered from his mane.

“Maybe you did, but you didn’t want to,” Vinyl said. “We mortals do that all the time.”

“I am mortal. Just not in the same way as you all.”

“This is all well an’ good,” Applejack said, “but what’s the point? What do you want from us?”

“If you were going to move us, you would have already,” Fluttershy said. “I assume.”

Vanilla looked at her. His eyes had lost some of their luster. “Discord has prohibited me from telling you what he wants me to do. He has not, however, prohibited me from answering you any question honestly.” He nodded to Twilight. “I assume you can make inferences from there?”

“So…” Twilight said, a small smile growing on her lips.

“Where’s Silver Sun?” Pinkie asked.

“Delayed. I saw to that,” Vanilla said. “She’s just catching up with one of the teleporters. We have time.”

“So,” Twilight said again. “Let’s start here. Are you going to move us?”

“I am.”

“When?” Applejack snapped.

“After the new Elements are created and imposed upon their proper bearers. Not a minute before.”

“I’m already confused,” Vinyl said. “Why let us get that far?”

“You lost that accusatory edge nice and quick after I said I wouldn’t ruin your plans, Empathy.”

“And you found it,” Rainbow said.

“Why not move us earlier?” Twilight asked.

“Discord didn’t specify when to do it. He said to ‘disrupt their plans somehow’.” Vanilla didn’t smile, but there was honey in his voice. “He was, as usual, not thinking at the time.”

“Really?” Rarity asked. Her face, to Pinkie, watching, seemed what Vanilla should have been wearing, speaking ill of his master.

“Hold on, let’s stay on topic,” Fluttershy said. “Okay, Vanilla, are these new Elements going to be moved before we can get back to them from wherever you’re sending us?”

Vanilla nodded. More black stars.

“Figures,” Big Mac said.

“Keep asking questions,” Vanilla said testily.

“Can we stop you?” Applejack asked.

“You would need to destroy Discord or his hold over me. Doing that before I’ve shunted you away, unlikely.”

“Can you, uh, can you show us where the Elements are once they’ve been moved?” Fluttershy asked. “Or if not that, everywhere they aren’t?”

“I can’t tell you, but I can take you to them.”

“Will you, though?” Twilight asked.

“Unless my summoner tells me not to. It hasn’t occurred to him yet.”

“How can we trust you?” Octavia asked.

Vanilla looked at her icily. “Same way you have been, Octavia.”

“That’s not true, though,” Twilight said, tapping a hoof on the cold stone. “You’ve never been this direct with us before.”

“You and Discord aren’t working together very well anymore, are you?” Vinyl asked.

“Trouble in paradise,” Rainbow said to Rarity, who nodded speculatively.

Vanilla was long in answering. For a moment, they thought he was pausing for effect, but after several seconds, it became clear that he was actually thinking. The question had caught him off guard. “You could say I yearn for my freedom,” he said at last, and then, with a less severe tone, added, “I miss my home.”

“Pony hell,” Big Mac said.

“Tartarus. Your Gaia is my version of hell. Did you know that?”

“How’s that?” Colgate asked.

Vanilla shook his head. “See these? It’s no special effect to dazzle you; my form is falling apart because I’m not meant to be here as long as I have been. I could bolster it and hold myself together, but… my mind is elsewhere.” He parted them and walked to their other side, leaving his afterimage in their midst. “Your concern touches me, but that’s the wrong question to ask right now.”

“Okay, okay, back to the Elements,” Twilight said. “Does he have any more surprises for us? Anything serious?”

“Discord sprung his last serious surprise by imprisoning your goddess. Unless you wait another year to destroy him, he’s in no position to show you anything worse than what you’ve seen already.”

“Is he having trouble too, then?” Rarity asked.

“He’s in about as much trouble as you. The problem is, he has time, and you all don’t.” Vanilla looked around. “Speaking of time, yours is up. Silver Sun comes through.” He heaved a contented sigh. “It feels good to get some of this off my chest. Elements, if you don’t mind, I’m going to follow behind you all the way to your crystals, as a reminder of what comes next. I’d advise you to pretend I’m not there; Silver Sun won’t see me, and you will appear insane to her.”

“As a matter of fact, we do mind you followin’ us,” Big Mac said.

Vanilla nodded. “As a matter of fact, you have no say.” He walked a respectful distance away and stopped, his blue sky eyes burning in the darkness. Behind glowed a trail of white dust.

“Yonder,” Silver Sun said, indicating the wall from where she stood in the pavilion.

The wall was a twenty-foot vertical slab of rough, freezing stone blocks mortared with ice and lit with bare, tennis ball-sized crystals every ten feet along its inner face. It stretched from one vanishing point to the other, so gray and faceless that it could have been a sunken monolith form ages past, left to molder and become part of the landscape, and touched only with the merest suggestions of civilization. They had to cross one moat of cold water to reach it, where they walked for a monotonous while along its base toward a laminated, wooden set of crawling stairs, and stood for a few minutes at the top. The darkness beyond curved out at them, a black curtain of solid smoke billowing back in the middle as if repelled by the reticulum of lights so far behind them.

Below, a wider moat hissed between smooth banks annealed with ice. They submitted to inspection; the unicorns had their horns bound, and Silver Sun had her bags checked thoroughly, and then they were sent down an opposite staircase. The pony who bound their horns looked at Twilight and her friends as of someone looking upon friends for the last time. No one accompanied them down the stairs and across the expanse of cold, still air to the second bridge, simply made of creaking timber held up by weathered stone pillars. They paused halfway across as a large block of ice smashed itself apart against one of the struts.

Once they were across, they paused to face the wall again. From the safety across the mines, and even atop the wall, the darkness had appeared a matte impediment, an end of the caves that marked only its own termination, not the beginning of something new. At its edge, the darkness’ apparent finality gave way, and they found themselves staring into shades of gray upon shades of gray, draped over the cave floor like fog, deepening into ultimate blackness even farther beyond. The floor sloped slightly downward, smooth in all directions. The sounds of the city were gone, the constant applause of griffon wings silenced without their noticing. Someone on the wall behind spoke to someone else, and the sound barely reached them.

“How will we know which way we’re going if we can’t see?” Pinkie asked.

“There’s a guide rope we gotta find,” Silver Sun said.

“A guide rope to the crystals?” Rarity said.

“I put it in years ago. Should still be around somewheres.” She set off along the darkness’ inside edge, and they trailed behind, looking around uselessly. Vanilla walked behind, his bright body throwing no light into the mantle of shade, his bright smile doing nothing to lift their spirits.

When they found the rope, tied onto a short staff embedded in a crack in the stone, Silver Sun spared no comment, and they began walking single file along the rope, downhill then up, past unvaried nothingness until the lights of the city were like reflections off a pool, dim and getting dimmer.

“How deep does it go?” Vinyl asked. Her voice carried like a tolling bell, but did not return.

“Dunno,” Silver Sun said. “Never went that far.”

“Has anyone?” Twilight asked.

“Doubt it.”

They walked until the guide rope was only a vague line affixed to their right sides, and the walking slowed.

“If anyone loses touch with the rope, holler,” Applejack said.

“This remind you of anything?” Rarity asked Fluttershy, a couple ponies behind.

“I wish it didn’t,” Fluttershy said.

“How you doing, Cole?” Rainbow asked. “You spooked?”

“I don’t know,” Colgate said.

“I’m spooked,” Fluttershy said.

“How far until we reach your crystals?” Octavia asked.

“We’ll be walkin’ for a bit, ladies,” Silver Sun said.

The darkness always seemed greater before them. Behind, the city gave nothing, and around, the rope and floors were only the barest suggestions of themselves. In silence, they walked across a beam of stone over an abyss without realizing it, their eyes and minds only on the rising and growing shadow. Always, it was darker. As minutes passed, their eyes surprised them by losing smaller and smaller shreds of visibility. What seemed a complete absence of light was only so for a short time before becoming an increment of brightness at their backs. It gave nothing of itself, of the landscape it had claimed, neither sound nor smell nor sense of time spent within. Ancient dust crunched beneath their hooves and settled, undisturbed by wind, untouched by light. Nothing grew, nothing stirred.

Behind, always distant, Vanilla Cream was an empty beacon, a dimensionless spot of white that dispelled no shadows and made no sound as its hooves moved up and down upon the same ground. In the darkness, there was no way to tell how far away he was; he was an image only, a conjuration upon a blank canvass, a canvass in which they had sunk and from which return felt less and less plausible with each step.

Suppose the guide rope should end prematurely, cut by an unseen hoof; what then? Suppose Silver Sun had been in any way wrong, and they were lost without knowing it. Her confidence at the front of the line did not flag or appear to flag, but the march was slow, and words were few. In the Elements’ minds, catastrophes brewed.

Vanilla Cream saw each one. His was the power, among others, to touch thoughts, to see them and sometimes affect them. For him, the darkness was nothing; the vast emptiness under the mountains, carved by magic and time, was no different from the space between trees in a forest. The miles of stone above and the comparatively thin skin of stone below—for they were still suspended off their planet, something it was easy to forget inside the mines—were of a piece.

He had never visited the darkness under the mountains before; he had had no reason to. It had little to offer in the way of diversion or comfort for when he got homesick. In the hundred-fifty acres of vast, stale air, there were the typical cave formations, one lost and hungry creature—a former Tartarus resident, one whose plight stirred pity in Vanilla—and the site of the new Elements. Nothing drew him there, and, following behind the line of ponies, he was already eager to move on.

He could not. The binding upon him, similar to Big Macintosh’s glamour, but stronger, conferred no choice, nor the illusion of one. Vanilla was free to hate his master, was free to question him, but he could not disobey. The thought of it felt contrary to his core, natural as the movement and the intake of breath. The magic had been woven into him upon his summoning into the Gaia, the mirror world, and his first direct order had been not to break his own bindings, which he would have done otherwise. As soon as he had been enchanted, he felt as if he had been made for whatever purpose Discord deigned.

The group stepped around a giant column, which must have felt to them like the cave’s wall, and into a wide valley of slick, lamellated stone which their planet had shrugged up from its depths over centuries. The darkness was complete for them, the guide rope their only help. Even with the light that the non-unicorns could have produced, escape without it was no surety; they were too far in. The city behind was gone from their eyes.

The darkness was no obstacle for Vanilla Cream because he neither saw nor felt, only came to understand. He perceived his world by reaching out various forms of his magic to collect information, which took the place of physical sensation. Like having a perfectly detailed map of the world at all times, in real time, but seeing nothing directly.

In Tartarus, a land steeped in ambient magic, such knowledge came fluidly and in great quantities, not only for Vanilla but for anyone who had the capacity to grasp it. He had been plunged into the Gaia like a newborn, shocked and afraid, ripped from his daily comings and goings and trussed up in a binding spell before he had time to marshal his thoughts. As the days passed in that new era of his life, he had been humbled over and over at how much seemed out of his grasp. Before, he had seen the mirror world as a distant fable, a land of bumbling, misguided creatures who would intend him harm on no basis other than his coming from another land; he had no idea that simply being there could make him feel like an echo of himself.

It was a land bereft of energy, a burned-out husk of the world he knew, a sobering intimation of what lay just beyond the veil. The magic that made his home, and that made him, was present on the Gaia only in cinders, flickers on unicorn horns and larger coals on the goddesses’. He himself had been made but a cinder.

He had been certain that Discord was one of the local gods when he was imprisoned. The draconequus had made it look easy, reaching into Tartarus, pulling Vanilla out like a carnival toy off a rack, and dousing him in enchantments until he was completely beholden to his will. In deference to the new power and the shocking alacrity of its user, Vanilla had given himself over freely after some initial indignation—so he believed.

But then he encountered the true gods. They had never met officially, but they had seen each other’s work, and the gods were aware that he was in their world. Everything that he did that was not in service of Discord’s command was in service of keeping his distance from the goddesses. Celestia, he knew, he could at least puzzle for a time before she got the better of him, for her magic was more physical in nature, and there was nothing physical about Vanilla Cream. Luna, however, could snuff him out without a second thought. In his way of perceiving the world, she had shown brightest, a terrible beacon of power and wisdom that eclipsed all that was near it. For him, Celestia was her lesser double, though most Equestrians seemed to view it the other way around.

Thus, getting closer to the Elements of Harmony had been no arbitrary action.

He poured himself into Discord’s plans, lent his services eagerly to his captor’s wishes, and even helped where it was not required of him. For a foolish few days, he had seen himself sitting next to Discord on some imaginary throne, two rulers of one world, he in Tartarus and Discord on the Gaia, both working in concert and in secret. It did not take long for the idea’s majesty to fade.

The line of ponies before him stopped for a moment, scrambling and hollering as Twilight had accidentally lost touch with the guide rope. Fluttershy almost created a cone of light for them, something that would not have attracted the creature, for it was too far away, but that would have attracted questions. When Twilight got back to the rope, they started forward again.

Discord had slowly turned his back on his own grand aspirations. In the beginning, he had been as eager as Vanilla, expressing at one time that he might release him from his bindings as a show of good faith. He wanted to reform the country, to depose the stale diarchy and impose a new, merit-based government. He wanted to connect cities with magical transit systems, he wanted to widen airship routes, he wanted to turn the desert wastes in the south into fields and forests and lakes.

However, as he encountered resistance, his hopes faded away one by one. He stopped talking about roads and commerce and politics, and started talking about armies and magic and surprises; then, he stopped talking entirely. The goal moved backwards from reforming the country to simply destroying the princesses. “Reform will come,” Discord had said when Vanilla questioned him. That had been shortly before the Elements of Harmony encountered, and then failed to stop, the dam in Applewood. Vanilla had thought the victory over the Elements would buoy Discord’s spirits, but, instead, frustration mounted higher.

Discord began blaming Vanilla for his own failures, laying poor decision upon poor decision at his form’s hooves and heaping on more conditions to his binding, sometimes contradictory. Discord would spend days locked in his room in the stolen castle, leaving Vanilla to his own devices, where Vanilla would come to learn the depth of his homesickness, his degree of unpreparedness when he had been pulled out. He had thought he had seen the full extent already, but without Discord to steer him, even the simplest decisions seemed once again extraordinary. Movement was one of the few things that came with relative ease.

The crux, Vanilla had learned, was that the Gaia was an inherently un-magical place, a place where magic was possible and even easy for many, but where magic was not the natural state of all things. A tree, left to grow with no outside influences, would come up un-magical on the Gaia. A sentient being was not guaranteed access to magic upon birth.

For Vanilla, it was poison. The space he occupied was empty and thin, bereft of life-giving magic except in the barest quantities. He felt stretched and weakened. He felt as though more and more of himself dwindled into that woeful air with each passing day, like a balloon shriveling at the outer edge of the atmosphere. It was a concern that Discord had dismissed with a “so be it” wave of his paw.

Colgate kept looking back at Vanilla, and he touched her mind, understanding then her curiosity. She was one of the Gaia’s Datura, someone familiar with Tartarus and its folk. He gave her a smile that she did not return.

“Not far from here,” Silver Sun said up ahead. “I recognize this hill. Crystals are up a piece.”

Nervous chatter followed.

Vanilla had made his decision after Celestia’s imprisonment. The trap for her had been a feat of ingenuity that had made Vanilla truly proud: an infinite dream that was powered by reflecting Celestia’s magic down into Tartarus and then back out, enhancing it with the mirroring world’s magic, making it strong enough to maintain the bonds necessary to trap a goddess as well as the impermanent gateway between worlds. Even that, he knew, would not last long. She would escape naturally inside of a year; sooner or later, the outpouring of magic would seep back into Tartarus and melt the mechanisms that held her prison in place, or else simply overwhelm the fabric that kept the two worlds apart and allow them to collapse into each other. In such an event, he had chosen to not warn, both Gaia and Tartarus would invert, turning like plastic bags into each other and spewing their contents into the universe of the other. It would be ruination to make the world’s present state a nostalgic memory.

He knew, thus, that his feat had deserved praise, even if he had been only the voice guiding Discord’s unpredictable magic. For it, he received instead a vague compliment and a new set of orders, then nothing as Discord vanished. It had not occurred to Discord that the other goddess would throw down the gauntlet the second her sister disappeared. It had not occurred to him that Luna would go to his castle, surround it with magic, and evaporate every single enchantment he had painstakingly put onto and into its structure. It did not occur to him to warn Vanilla that Luna was right outside when Vanilla did his daily inspection of the castle’s magic.

The moment Vanilla had come face to face with Luna, he thought that he was no more. He was an invisible life, but Luna’s magic had surrounded him with no warning, looked straight through him, and then moved on. It had been his version of waking up at the point of a pulse crystal.

Discord had no plan in place if he should ever be put out of his home, if ever he should be put on the run. In his factoring, in all his attention to minor details and logistics of traps, of magical beings that the local Daturas would spare the Elements having to fight, he had neglected a contingency plan if ever the goddesses should simply give up the pretense and knock down his door. He could survive such an encounter, of course; he, like them, was more than mere flesh and blood. His magic would eventually knit back together, and he with it, and he would be there to terrorize yet another generation of unprepared ponies, but that was not the point. He was too close to victory to allow all his work to be reset. His one remaining advantage was that the lone goddess knew that she could not completely destroy him, and it stayed her most powerful magic.

It still had to be the Elements of Harmony at the end of the day.

They stopped at a split in the guide rope, the beginning of a great circle around the unseen form of a sunken castle. Vanilla did not know how it had come to be so far underground, but he knew it was older than the mines without. The castle had been overrun with magical crystals, slowly growing and expanding across buttress, across wall, across tower and corridor and armament, vitrifying the structure over the course of centuries or more. The process was nearly complete, and, in places, the crystals were expanding into the cave floor.

“Here, here,” Silver Sun said, stopping at a patch of crystals that had encased a fallen flag pole. Its banner had become a rigid arch, its fabric distressed and dried by a fur of fine, needle-like gems. She looked back at the ponies uselessly. “Careful. Some of these are sharp.”

“This is it?” Rainbow asked.

“This is it.”

“We are out in the open,” Octavia said. “How can you tell that they are here?”

“‘Cause they’re here.”

Silver Sun ran her hooves delicately over the crystals before selecting one and gently picking at it, filling the darkness with tiny, metal ticks, before finally prying it loose.

“Get comfortable.”

“How are you going to see what you’re doing?” Twilight asked.

“By feel.”

Silver Sun began her quiet work, chipping at the crystal, feeling it with her hooves, selecting each tool from her bag with care and precision. Ten minutes passed before she had begun to size the so far unchanged crystal shard. The Elements, however, were silent as well. Silver Sun’s confidence was palpable as she moved, made adjustments, picked out her implements. To Vanilla’s touch, her mind was jumbled with orderly information and experience. A pragmatic mare.

Discord was hiding somewhere in the flooded wreckage of Applewood, waiting for Luna to quit his castle and either look elsewhere or return to Canterlot. Despite his advantages vanishing piece by piece, he still had time, more time than anyone else. He could wait, he could hide, he could let things stagnate all around him and lose nothing he had not already lost. It was not his job to keep the country running, and such was the nature of his magic and his reputation that it would implode without a princess at the helm. Both goddess and demigod knew this.

While Discord hid, Vanilla had time to himself, time to help the ponies, a bitter task, for he had lost patience with them as well.

“So… how long’s this gonna be?” Rainbow finally asked.

“As long as it takes,” Applejack said. “Just watch fer that monster.”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“You should have gone before we left,” Rarity said.

“I didn’t have to go then.”

“Just go here,” Pinkie said.

“Do not,” Rarity said.

“You can shuffle to the back and go somewhere back along the rope,” Vinyl said. “Hopefully it’ll dry before we get back to it.”

“I guess,” Rainbow said.

The nature of Vanilla’s binding precluded affection for the Elements or their friends, but, he thought, he probably would not like them even if he had the option. For being such important figures in the country’s culture and defense, they had remarkably little command over their magic. That a scattering of mere objects could render them helpless was a thought both foreign and ridiculous to Vanilla. In his world, magic surrounded all; one’s ability to use it did not rely on tools. For that reason, he had been insulted to find himself imprisoned inside a sigil when Discord had summoned him. In Tartarus, there were no sigils, for there was no need of them.

He would allow them to get their Elements and he would allow the crystals to undergo the process needed to impose upon their new bearers. Then, he would fulfill his order and move them. Discord had stipulated to separate them from their ship, so Vanilla would leave it back at the mines’ entrance and instead move a different airship to their location, fully furnished.

He was tired of living under Discord’s whimsical rule, and tired of watching the Elements flounder at each and every obstacle. Was it that they were truly not equipped to handle magic at the level being demanded, or were they dumb for their species, he wondered. It might not be their fault, but that did not soothe his frustration.

“Yeah, I gotta go,” Rainbow said. “Slide over.”

“How?” Twilight asked. “I’m not letting go of the rope.”

“Me neither.”

Eventually, they were able to get Rainbow to the back of the line, and she shuffled back to relieve herself in peace. She looked up and glared at Vanilla, who watched impassively.

The appearance of passivity, he had found, was the best way to face the Gaia. He could control his form, and thus appear always calm and collected, though he had not felt such in some months. He did not know how long he could persist in the other world before the magic that comprised him would flake away to nothing. The process had begun—for him, the scintillating shards of light that flecked from his surface were a source of merciless worry. Proximity to Tartarus gateways helped the condition, but less with each visit. Soon, he knew, mere geographical closeness would not suffice, and yet he could not reenter his land until Discord released him from his bindings. That Discord had threatened multiple times to never release him rang in him a deep, clear dread that shook his entire self.

Without magic, Vanilla was nothing in a literal sense. He had no body, no true form, nor even substance as defined by conventional thinking. He was the product of a semi-rare combination of magic and intention in Tartarus, a form composed of thought and enchantment which, with enough time to germinate, became able to perpetuate itself. As a body respires, Vanilla drew magic into himself and expelled it in different forms, himself nothing more than a piece of information that had access to common magic. He had once been asked to define his nature to Discord. After close to an hour of thought, he had settled on the imperfect analogy, “autonomous knowledge, sort of like a popular joke or rumor. That can cast spells.”

When Octavia had been enchanted on Thunderhead’s ghost ship, she had not seen Vanilla Cream because there was nothing to see. The magic he used was not the magic that made him, and the magic that made him was nothing but a collection of ambient powers focused upon a particularly strong imposition of disembodied will, an impression that grew weaker the longer it spent away from home.

He had no intention of telling the others of this, but also had no intention of lying to them if they asked.

“Okay, let me back in,” Rainbow said.

“Yer stayin’ in the back,” Applejack said. “Too much fuss bringin’ you up here.”

Rainbow huffed.

“Who wants to go first?” Silver Sun asked.

“What do you mean?” Twilight asked.

“I’ll do it,” Vinyl said.

“What’s your shape?” Silver Sun asked.

“Shape?”

“Cutie mark.”

“Oh.” She paused. “Musical note.”

“Mm-hm.”

“What type of musical note, Vinyl?” Fluttershy asked tiredly.

“Oh, sorry. Beamed quaver.”

“What’s it look like?” Silver Sun asked.

“It’s the one that looks like two little hooves hanging from a horizontal line. It’s filled in.”

Silver Sun replied in chipping gently at the crystal. “That’s a complicated shape.”

“Octavia’s is worse,” Rarity said.

“Mm?”

“Mine is a treble clef,” Octavia said.

“Not an octave clef?” Vinyl asked.

“No.”

“That’s the one looks like a ‘and’ symbol, right?” Silver Sun asked.

“Yes.”

Silver Sun hummed to herself, thinking. “We’ll be here all day if I have to carve these shapes out here.”

“Mine’s just an apple,” Big Mac said.

“I’ll carve ‘em later.” She dug around in her bag.

“So can we go back?” Pinkie asked. “I kinda need to go potty too.”

“We got one crystal prepped.”

“What else do you have to do out here?” Rainbow asked.

“Gotta set ‘em in their casings.”

“But you said you were gonna carve them later,” Colgate said. “Why set them now?”

Silver Sun scraped at the loose crystal with a file.

“These crystals are magical,” Twilight said. “She has to surround them with the gold in such a way that they maintain the important part of their magic but also don’t destroy themselves when we use them the first time.”

“How are you gonna melt gold without heat?” Colgate asked.

“It’s complicated,” Silver Sun mumbled, a ring gauge clasped tightly in her teeth.

“Ain’t gold too soft to hold these things?” Big Mac asked.

“Magic gold.”

Two and a half hours passed in tense semi-quiet as Silver Sun worked. Her method of melting the gold without heat proved to be a complicated system of potions that Twilight explained unbidden to her friends. As the gold was fed through each potion, it grew progressively softer until Silver Sun was left with a combination of weak acid and liquid gold, at which point, using the same potions as before, she fed the solution through, stripping the acid away through a monotonous magical and chemical process. What heat was produced in the sequence of reactions was dissipated across the thick surfaces of the beakers she used.

Colgate was at the back of the line with Rainbow and Pinkie, the two of them talking over her head about their former adventures. Her eyes ceaselessly scanned the darkness, afraid, not of the nameless creature that was said to dwell within, but of losing touch with the rope. Her attempt to ingratiate herself into their group had failed; they had seen no reason to make her an Element. As the decisive conversation had reached its end, she had felt her sense of security recede, but could say nothing for fear of expediting her own doom. If she were to push too hard for an Element, they would redouble, and she would surely lose what little time she had left—she could not fathom why they were waiting so long before cutting her loose in the darkness of the unexplored mines.

“That brownie sandwich with the strawberry ketchup,” Rainbow said abruptly. “That’s my favorite one.”

“Mine too!” Pinkie screeched. “I’ll make us one when we get back home!”

Rainbow laughed. “Make two, Pinks, ‘cause I ain’t sharing.”

“Desserts,” Colgate thought, the usual quick upturn of anxiety coloring her thought. “Celestia, is it really desserts, or is it some kind of code?”

“Cole, favorite dessert, go,” Rainbow said.

She put more of her weight on the post and tightened her foreleg around the guide rope. If they were going to cast her off, she was going to take at least one of them with her.

“Dessert, Cole?”

“Thinking,” Colgate snapped.

“Dang, sorry.”

“No, not like that. I mean…” “That’s it, that’s the end. That’s the last straw.” Her heart raced as sweat broke out on her head, despite the cave’s low temperatures. In her mind, Rainbow was bracing herself with her wings, preparing to shove Colgate off the rope and into the blackness. Her sharp tone had been her undoing in the end.

“Hey, no biggie,” Pinkie said. “My second favorite is that quadruple chocolate marshmallow hurricane sundae! Too bad it’s a seasonal.”

“What the heck is seasonable about that?” Rainbow asked.

“Uh, duh! The whole thing! Who needs a sundae in the winter time?”

Colgate tried to squeeze the rope tighter, but could not for her angle. Her chest hammered, and she could hear her own breathing; it seemed like the loudest thing in the cavern. It seemed inconceivable that Rainbow and Pinkie should gloss over such a misstep on her part, the perfect opportunity to be rid of her once and for all. Yet, they had done nothing.

“Could the Elements of Harmony be capable of stringing a pony along like this?” she wondered. Her immediate, impulsive response was that they were, but logic did not bear it out. Deciding to test the waters, Colgate cleared her throat.

“I like cheesecakes, myself.” She used her bedside voice: warmer, slower, and more enunciative than her speaking voice. “Caramel on top, or some chocolate chips is good.”

“Are you kidding? That’s my third favorite!” Pinkie cried. “Are you a mind reader?”

“I never got the appeal of cheesecakes,” Rainbow said. “If I’m ordering dessert, I want something sweet. Cheesecakes are sour.”

“Where are you ordering sour cheesecakes? They’re supposed to be fluffy and nice. Like me!”

“Hey!” Twilight snapped from the front. “Sorry girls. Fluttershy just spotted something out there.”

“Shit,” Rainbow blurted, and Pinkie giggled. Colgate’s pastern was sore from the grip she had on the rope, but she did not relax it as she turned her eyes outwards. It was not hard to see what it was Fluttershy had spotted. In the distance, too far off to hear, a faint yellow shape wavered. Pale light drifted deeper in its center, a wan core to a spectral, stellate collar of darker lines. It moved and flattened, and behind it extended even thinner, fainter lines of orange light. As a whole, the aspect appeared to pulse with infernal life, a living silhouette framed in dimensionless blackness. For Colgate, it appeared as a lone spirit adrift on the surface of a Tartarus gateway.

“You let me know if that thing gets closer,” Silver Sun said. “We might have to pack up in a bit.”

“How close are you to done with our Elements?” Octavia asked.

“Not.”

“Can you be more specific?” Big Mac asked.

“Mm.” She thought. “After this’n, I’ve got one more gold frame to make. Then we can hoof it.”

“So a while,” Rarity said, dread undisguised in her voice.

“Just watch.”

They watched. The work continued. No other sounds penetrated the darkness, no alien voices or beastly roars, and no other lights joined the first, a lone intruder that watched them watch it. Beside them, closer but not appearing to be so, Vanilla stood at attention, his placid eyes and face betraying none of the foreknowledge he possessed. As the light got neither closer nor farther away, options were weighed. Running, creating distractions, standing and fighting, hunkering down farther up the line and hoping it would pass them by.

“What are we gonna do ‘bout this?” Applejack whispered eventually.

“Don’t talk,” Twilight said. “It might hear us.”

“It can probably hear Silver Sun,” Vinyl said. At that, the tools stopped.

They waited, and soon observed the light nearer, once again shrunken into the dandelion shape of light, brighter and larger. Soft, heavy steps padded out into the endless darkness. The space they occupied was lost and unknowable save for the ground at their hooves, the rope at their sides, and the single mote of light moving closer, the only point of reference they had.

“Does it see us?” Rainbow asked.

“Not in this,” Colgate said.

“Standing here is not doing anything,” Octavia said. Most of them knew exactly what she was going to propose. “I know it is dangerous, but we should try to chase it off, or otherwise defend ourselves.”

“Yer not lettin’ go of this rope,” Applejack said.

“We have light.”

Twilight coughed. “Uhhh, maybe we shouldn’t—”

“We have light.”

“You wanna chase it off yerself?” Big Mac asked. “That what Ah’m hearin’?”

Octavia paused for just a second. “Yes. That is, I think I should be the one to do it, given the unicorns’ conditions.”

“Nope, that’s it, we’re going down the line,” Rainbow said, turning awkwardly and shuffling along the rope. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“It already knows that we are here. It will just follow us down the line; we cannot lose it.”

“We can try,” Pinkie said, butting up against Colgate, who stared at the feverish aspect. “Cole? C’mon, follow Dashie!”

“I should just handle it,” Octavia said.

“Well I say someone needs to make a decision,” Silver Sun said. “I ain’t not comin’ back from this.”

“Fine,” Big Mac said with a sigh. “If you can do it, do it.”

Colgate swiped sweat from her forehead. Her coat was sticky, her skin clammy, her mouth dry. Her heart still palpitated. She could feel them pushing her off the rope, could feel their hooves on her body in the dark. She wanted to lean away to escape the phantom feeling, but she could not release the rope.

Something like the clatter of rocks moved in the middle distance, and the light faltered before righting itself. Closer, thin, red veins of light were visible extending from the brighter core, tapered and faint like cracks wreathing an impact site. A dry, acidic smell met their noses.

In that moment, Colgate loosed her hold on the rope and took two fumbling steps into the darkness. In her mind, she had given up a losing battle of wills with the others; she had lost her own life, surely, but on her own terms. Free, as free as when she had left the clinic in Canterlot, she let the darkness cover her like a new set of clothes, filling her, completing the spaces between shards of joy and relief and terror, all tumbling inside her mind and setting her heart to beating even faster. She breathed deep, then stopped herself, trying instead to steady herself. In her private moment, she did not hear Octavia make her decision.

The set of hoofsteps beside her drew a delayed reaction. Her first thought was that it was one of the others to drag her back, but when she recognized Octavia’s voice, and Fluttershy’s behind, she recognized instead co-conspirators, partners in the terrible freedom she had found.

“This is plumb crazy,” Applejack said from back on the line.

“Light, Fluttershy,” Octavia said.

“Um… I mean…” Fluttershy pattered nervously ahead of Colgate, then activated a soft cone of light around the two of them, blinding after hours of darkness.

“I was looking right at it!” Pinkie cried.

“Well, whose fault is that?” Rainbow asked.

Colgate saw nothing of the approaching creature through Fluttershy’s magic, and trotted to catch up with them.

“Oh, Celesta, Colgate’s with ‘em,” Big Mac said.

“Cole! Get back here!” Rainbow called.

“You cannot help us,” Octavia said, glancing at Colgate. In her face was etched a tired determination, as if her self-appointed task were nothing new. Colgate saw only animosity, and pushed ahead, walking to the edge of the light and trying to spot the creature, seeing only afterimage.

“Dim that light, Fluttershy,” she said. “We’re not gonna see it until it’s on top of us.”

“Sorry,” Fluttershy said, and the light diminished into a dark, straw yellow that gleamed off the slick rocks and gave electric edges to the castle behind. Colgate could hear Twilight gasping at its aspect.

“We need to scare it off,” Octavia said. “I think I know how.”

“You’re not going to hurt it, are you?”

“If I must.”

“Octavia…”

“I know.” She sighed. “I know, Fluttershy.”

The smell of burning pitch grew stronger, and Colgate held out a hoof. “Lights off.”

“No,” Octavia said. “We will be blind again.”

“This light plus it’s natural light are gonna be too much. Turn that light off and let’s let our eyes adjust.”

“I do not like this,” Octavia said, even as the light went down again.

“Don’t blow it up.”

“I said I would not.”

“No, I mean don’t do any explosions in here,” Colgate said. She was reminded briefly of her time on the battlefield outside Canterlot, handling the nurses. For them, too, she had had to explain too much that seemed to her obvious. “We’re underground.”

“The ceiling is far above us. We will be fine.”

“There it is,” Fluttershy said.

“We don’t know how thin the floor is,” Colgate said.

Octavia was silent, and the creature slouched closer. Around its hot center, they could distinguish the outline of a stone maw, circular and rough, as if chiseled by an inexpert hoof. Around it, concentric arrowheads of liquid fire radiated in a sheer, conical arrangement that lost definition far before the lines themselves ended.

“W-well, what do we do?” Fluttershy asked.

“If we get behind it, perhaps we can draw it away,” Octavia said. “It was attracted by our noise.”

Fluttershy looked at Colgate, who studied the creature and its light, to her seeming two separate beings, one immediately behind the other, a perfect counterpart that inhered nothing of its forbear, and vice versa. It was as though the light were casting a shadow on itself, and the shadow, though larger, were not the thing to fear.

Watching with the same apathy as before, Vanilla stood behind.

Octavia, naught but a silhouette, sidestepped away from Colgate, face fixed on the approaching creature, whose stride had slowed. Thin legs hooked out from beneath a wide and widening face, absent eyes or other features, showing only the crude mouth of fire. Colgate looked into it for only a second before having to turn away, and saw nothing but a hot, emotionless void of magical flame. She could feel its heat and hear the soft crackling of fire, static under the percussive footsteps whose number, she noticed, did not match the number of legs she had seen on first inspection.

“Hey!” Octavia shouted.

The beast did not turn, but stopped its advance and wavered slightly on its legs. In the new light, Colgate counted seven, all of them thin and irregular, massed in no particular arrangement underneath a drill-like body. She and Fluttershy faced it head on, and could only see the shattered face, a vortex of ensiform fins fanned back along its body like a lion’s mane, each glowing with arteries of molten stone. It stood at nearly twice their height, its glowing, sulfurous mouth at eye level, its only defining feature.

“Fascinating,” Fluttershy whispered as Octavia tried again, unsuccessfully, to get its attention.

“It can’t hear you,” Colgate said. “I don’t think it hears.”

“I would welcome your suggestion!” Octavia barked.

Colgate licked her lips and walked toward the beast, her eyes revolving around the glowing center of its mouth, trying not to blind herself with a direct look. Fluttershy objected behind her and rushed to catch up, and Colgate shook her head. She felt hypnotized, caught in an amazed fall inward to the creature. Her old Datura training had amounted to nothing but isolation and betrayal, and yet, out in the world, they had found something that demanded her professional attention.

Emboldened, she walked on.

At seven feet away, she was bathed in a pale glow that made her eyes squint and her nostrils burn with each inhale. She could hear the fire rushing inside its body, which it turned to better face her. Some of its legs woodenly curled up and uncurled in a torturous half step that brought it no closer, but that she recognized. Hesitantly curious, the beast was considering meeting her.

“Get away from it!” Octavia shouted. A pair of small pops flattened her ears at the beast’s side as small lights burst, bright but flimsy against the creature’s natural light.

“Let’s just back away and reassess,” Fluttershy said, a note of pleading in her voice.

Colgate stared into the creature’s face, the pattern of layers to its fins, the lava glowing in a spiderweb around the borehole of its mouth. It had made no other moves, but it had not aimed the glowing hole away.

Something warm and insubstantial grabbed her from behind and dragged, and Colgate lost her balance with an outcry as she flailed her front half. The gray magic tugged at her as she kicked uselessly, and the beast was gone from her world so easily. It felt as though her mind and heart were exploding in tandem, the former into a world of bad ideas and desperate counters, the latter into a pool of unmoved blood and viscera in her chest cavity. She had no words to offer the emergency, and only breathed out a faint “no” as her back scraped across the floor.

When Octavia released her, Colgate lay where she was, chest heaving, eyes racing. Both of them were speaking, but Colgate’s ears were full of her own pulse. She shook as she watched Octavia walk past her, and gave no reaction to the sound of a larger explosion in the creature’s direction.

“Am I dead? Was that it?” She could not move. Her body was inert on the floor, her limbs cramping from holding an unusual position, but her breathing was slowing. She no longer felt her body in its space. It was as if, in a deft spell, Octavia had managed to cleave Colgate in two, spirit and body, and the body, deserted, would go on.

“Are you okay?” Fluttershy asked, leaning down.

Colgate froze, held her breath. Fluttershy was checking if she were still alive.

“Do you… did it get you?”

The second she breathed out, Fluttershy would get her. In her mind, she screamed, and her lips trembled as tears came up.

“Let’s get you further away,” Fluttershy said, putting a hoof to Colgate’s foreleg. “Does it hurt?”

Another explosion.

“Get ‘em, Octavia!” Pinkie cried out from afar.

“I’m fine,” Colgate managed to mumble, pushing herself partially up, hoping the ruse would be enough to fool Fluttershy.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“You look like you saw a ghost.”

Colgate blinked the tears back, some of them catching on her lashes and dripping onto her muzzle.

“Okay, come on,” Fluttershy said softly, raising one wing. “May I?”

Colgate looked at her, and Fluttershy retracted the wing.

“Back here, let’s catch our breath.”

They walked a distance away from the beast and Octavia opposed to it, the two staring into each other’s faces. She would occasionally let loose with a smaller explosion, and the beast would start, but neither rushed the other. Both poised, they looked to Colgate like the two halves of a mobile, waiting for something to come along and set them awhirl.

“Here okay?”

Colgate sat without thinking and looked at the ground, and Fluttershy sat near her.

“You’re not hurt?”

“Not hurt,” Colgate said. “I need to think.”

“Of course.”

She closed her eyes and steadied her breathing once more. Her pieces were drawing together. The spirit was closing in on the abandoned body, and the body was pulling itself back into working order. The magic that had taken her was gone, elsewhere occupied, and she was with someone who did not seem to share its goal.

She tried to say something small and innocuous, hoping that its intent be understood, but she could muster only an unsteady whimper.

“Are you sure you’re okay? You can tell me,” Fluttershy said.

Her impulse was to lie, to say that she had slipped and banged a knee, or that the monster was too hot. Holding it back, she asked herself what might the harm be in telling the truth. Fluttershy seemed an honest pony, and her Element, Colgate knew, couldn’t have come out of nowhere.

“She grabbed me,” Colgate said.

“She didn’t like how close you were getting to that thing.”

“Yeah.”

Fluttershy hesitated. “Do you not like to be… handled?”

Her skin crawled at what she was about to say, at the truth she was about to lay bare for Fluttershy’s judgment. If she were feeling the wrong thing, she knew, her only hope would turn on her. Then, she may as well charge out into the darkness and let the land claim her. In her mind’s eye, she could see her body doing exactly that. A blue speck disappearing.

“I don’t like being moved,” she said at last. Her mind was on alert, and she watched Octavia still squared off with the beast, neither of them giving any ground, neither making a move. Octavia was sweating and shaking. “She isn’t doing well.”

Fluttershy looked up at Octavia. “Oh no.” She lifted herself partially up, but stopped. “What do we do?”

Another explosion flared out on the creature’s face to no reaction. Fire licked across the stones’ surfaces, and for a second, a towering haze of dark smoke was visible, shaded into the unaccountable space above them.

“Oh, I get it,” Colgate said. “It likes heat.”

“What’s that? Heat?”

“I bet it found us because of our collective body heat.”

“Octavia!” Fluttershy called. “Stop!”

Octavia wiped sweat off her brow and looked at them impatiently.

That was why they had had to pass through the cold wall, Colgate realized. The twin moats of ice water, the lack of torches, the insistence on not taking along anything electrical or magical: all was in the service of bringing no heat into the back of the cave, and of making the border between back and front as cold as possible, as inhospitable to the beast as possible. No eyes, no ears, and a mouth that generated only fire and sulfur; it seemed obvious to Colgate, for whom it had clicked only suddenly.

“Let’s just make a fire back behind it,” Colgate said. “It’ll go to that and stay away from us.”

“How do you know?” Fluttershy asked.

Colgate explained her thoughts, her observations, while Octavia tried to batter the creature further. She was jerking closer with each blast, grunting and groaning with each exertion. Her eyes were narrowed and her stance was weak.

Octavia felt as trapped as Colgate, facing the stone furnace and assailing it with the only magic she felt confident using. She tempered her blows to not crack the floor, though it felt solid to her hooves.

She had targeted every spot on the beast’s rocky hide that she could imagine, punching her magic onto its scales, between them, into its glowing mouth, at the spots where its legs appeared, to no avail. Sometimes, it would shudder, and she would think she had found something, but it was only moving with the force of the air cushion she released with each will-depleting explosion.

Into its terrible face she stared, mesmerizing herself, trying and failing to conjure a solution. In the condemning spotlight, her shadow thrown behind her like trailing smoke off her slowly burning body, she locked her gaze and endlessly, unfeelingly circled some imaginary point of inevitable meeting. She could hear the fire like a muffled cyclone, smell the vapors that made her nose sting and her head light. Behind the beam through its mouth, Octavia could see a smooth lining of iridescent blue and green and red.

If her weaker magic did nothing at all, she did not believe her stronger magic would be enough to harm the creature; she held her energy still, fought the temptation to release a spasm of blasts, one leading into the other like beads pulled on a string, the weight of one dragging the rest behind. She stopped herself and tried to think.

She could not lift it, as she had Colgate, nor push it back. She could not teleport it or produce an illusion to frighten it. It crossed her mind to try to extinguish the fire within, but she knew no so much magic. Theoretically, she could reverse-engineer her magical explosions to create a spell with the opposite effect, but she knew not how to even begin something like that.

“Get away from it!” Fluttershy called, but Octavia did not look at her. She barely heard, their voices coming in to her ruined ear. She breathed in through her mouth, fighting the urge to cough at the prickle of ash in the back of her throat. Her mind tried to race, but through the combination of exhaustion, heat, and toxic air, she could only return to the same, routine answer, which was not an answer so much as a reminder of her inability. She must try harder.

Her earlier feats were forgotten, burned away in the light from the volcanic bore hole. It occurred to her that she may have reached her end in a slow, inglorious march toward hot doom as she gathered more useless magic.

Another explosion lashed out without her thinking, glancing across the creature’s mane and lighting the rumpled, fusiform backside for an instant. Nothing happened, and sweat dripped into her eyes. She shook a lock of mane out of her face, breathing heavy, legs trembling, heart hammering. Her power and will seemed to drip away with each spot of sweat, leaving her small in incapable, as if in the physical heat she were reverting back to her younger self.

Yet she could neither back away, lest she invite the creature to chase her back to the others, who were less equipped still to protect themselves. She flipped the wet stripe of mane out of her face again and momentarily lost her sight, the blood in her head seeming to evaporate for a second before reforming.

“Octavia, we figured it out,” Fluttershy said, her voice nearer. “Get out of there.”

Octavia shook, her eyes and nose burning.

Fluttershy’s voice was lost under the sound of fire, and she danced a pattern of colorful sparks in front of Octavia’s face. Octavia closed her eyes with a shake of her head, whipping cold sweat against her sides and neck, and glanced to Fluttershy, her one side illuminated to a color much the same as the light that covered it.

“I must do something,” Octavia managed. Her head was cloudy, and she was only partially aware of what she had said.

“Come around,” Fluttershy said, grabbing for her foreleg. “It’s not going to chase you.”

Octavia stumbled and nearly fell to the ground, but Fluttershy caught her. “We need a fire, Octavia. A nice, hot one.”

The creature took a step that put tremors through the floor, its light swinging gently to and fro as it ambled their way. In the flames’ activity inside its body, there was no change in pitch or speed. The engine in its belly purred with relentless ease, neither aggressive nor friendly, as if the creature had no will of its own and was simply a manifestation of something greater, a curse chosen to endlessly follow them.

“I do not know any fire,” Octavia said.

“Yes you do,” Fluttershy said, guiding her away, guiding the creature back toward Colgate, who watched, seated on the stone, with a blank face. Her eyes were dull, her face unimpressed; Vanilla, far behind, mirrored Colgate’s expression.

They turned a wide circle around the creature until it stood between them and the guide rope, and their backs were to the greater darkness from which their opponent had emerged. That there might be more like it out there somewhere was on their minds, but unvoiced.

“Deep breaths,” Fluttershy said, guiding Octavia into a tight crouch. Octavia’s eyes felt like they had been rubbed with sand, her sinuses the same. Her forehead still burned, and the sweat had turned tepid, which felt to her overheating body like ice. She shivered and cried out involuntarily.

“Deep breaths,” Fluttershy repeated. “Fresh air, away from all the smoke.”

Octavia breathed for a minute. “What do you require of me?”

“We need you to make a fire back here. It’s attracted to heat.”

Octavia stared dully at the beast, its advance once again arrested a moderate distance away, as if sizing them up.

“I do not know any fire spells.”

“You—don’t you? Can’t you just make an explosion, but… make it last?”

Octavia took a deep, clearing breath. “I do not know.”

“Rainbow Dash,” Colgate said in the distance. Her small hoofsteps pattered behind the creature, the pony herself unseen with her cohorts. Fluttershy and Octavia stood together in the unaccustomed light. The creature took another step toward them, unbidden. Its light rose and fell, a briefly disembodied star whose heat hit them like a physical blow, making both reel back, shocked. The heat was an affront, a sting that covered their skin and forced eyes shut and ears down. Octavia’s skin felt stretched and torn as she moved back, and the rock under her hooves felt no longer smooth, but sharp and thin, like walking on a hot grate. Fluttershy moaned, and it seemed to Octavia incorrect to join her; she grit her teeth and prepared herself for a larger explosion, seeing no alternative and no further time to find one.

“Don’t do it,” Fluttershy hissed. “You’re going to wear yourself out, you can’t hurt it that way.”

Her muscles relaxed, and the thought of the explosion died away. Colgate’s hoofsteps returned, and her voice, reedy and clipped, commanded but one thing: “Light! Light!”

“What?”

Into the burning glow Colgate stepped, the dullness from earlier replaced by a sharp, calm look that recognized nothing of the creature she put at her back. Octavia thought she could see Colgate’s fur smoking, but was not sure.

“Rainbow’s coming. Put on your light, back there.” She glanced at Octavia. “And you, get out of here.”

“I cannot,” Octavia said.

Colgate walked toward her and, with a firm hoof to her chest, pushed her back into Fluttershy, who stumbled out of the way. “Move it.” She hesitated. “I know what I’m doing.”

Behind her, Octavia slumped to the ground, holding onto one of Fluttershy’s wings. A different set beat through the darkness nearby, and Colgate repeated her request for light to Fluttershy, who cast a dim beam out into the abyss.

“Where?” Rainbow asked, body hidden in the darkness.

“Into Fluttershy’s light. Stay aloft as long as you can.”

“You’re not gonna—”

“We’ll be there, between you and the rope.”

The creature took another step, slightly faster than those before it, and its frontmost legs lifted a second time in preparation to continue its approach.

“Get her out of here,” she said to Fluttershy.

Colgate walked backwards with Rainbow into the light, keeping an eye on the beast, watching it for movement. It appeared torn between possible prey.

“You can keep yourself aloft for a long time?”

“As long as you need,” Rainbow said, unsure of herself. “You’re sure this’ll work?”

“It’ll work. Get your heat on.”

Rainbow landed for a second to ruffle her wings and rose into the ceiling of darkness. Colgate could feel the gentle swell of heat against the top of her skull, and not long after, saw the creature angle its face their way.

“How did you know I can do this?” Rainbow asked.

“I felt you doing it that one day on the bridge. I also heard you talking about it with someone.”

Rainbow didn’t comment, and Colgate walked back toward Octavia and Fluttershy, giving the creature a wide berth; it did not appear to notice, it was fixated on Rainbow’s bubble of warm air, its face drawn upwards inquisitively, pinning Rainbow in a broad beam that made her appear spectral against the velvet blackness behind.

Octavia went into a crouch and put her head down, breathing hard, and when Colgate drew near, she threw up. Fluttershy rushed to pat her back and ask if she was okay, and Colgate watched without reaction. Part of her felt impelled to action, but she did nothing until Octavia was finished, where she simply stopped aside Fluttershy and put her eyes back on the stone creature.

Rainbow had risen, suspended over its back like an ornament, while it slowly rotated, sometimes backing up a step to try to look up. Her wings flapped slowly, but her body was not relaxed; her hooves jutted at strange angles, as though she had forgotten where to put them, and her head was turned down, curling her body behind it as if caught in a somersault.

“It will stay this way?” Octavia asked.

“Should,” Colgate said. Behind, she could hear the others slowly resuming their work.

“I owe you many thanks. I would not have thought of this.”

“Mm.”

“I had no ideas.” She hung her head.

“That’s what friendship is for,” Fluttershy said eventually. “We help each other. Right, Colgate?”

Octavia flopped to the ground and Fluttershy started, but Octavia was only lying down; she did not throw up.

When Silver Sun at last announced that she was content with her work, made easier in the residual light off the creature’s heraldic body, a sigh rippled through the ponies amassed at the line. Under Colgate’s direction, they all spread out, going back up the rope with five minutes of distance between, so that their body heat would be spread too thin for the beast to follow them. She put Octavia toward the front and herself at the back, with Rainbow bringing up the rear, panting. Much farther behind her, Vanilla strolled and replaced the creature’s unholy light with his eerie, shineless brilliance.

Quiet conversation moved in pockets all along the rope, anticipating the return to the mines proper, brightening at the first sign of light. It was so faint that there could have been argument, but no one wanted to. At the first notice, everyone rushed to agree, and soon, laughter and occasional song made its way down to Colgate and Rainbow.

“How did you know about the heat thing?” Rainbow asked. In their distance from the creature—it had eventually slunk off into the darkness—she had edged closer to Colgate.

Colgate told her how she had figured it out. Rainbow’s vocal surprise, in turn, surprised her.

“So you just figured it all out, huh? Just like that?”

“It was not so amazing. All the information was there,” Colgate said.

“I wouldn’t have figured it out, is what I’m saying.”

“Okay.”

Her mind was on Octavia and what she had done, pulling her away from the creature with her magic. Colgate had felt no strong emotion to see Octavia sick not twenty minutes later, but imagined to herself that she would have imposed a punishment of its like, had she the ability.

Octavia’s expression of gratitude was the confusing thing. “Maybe she can’t control her emotions,” Colgate thought. “Aggressive one minute, thankful the next.” She ran through a list of common symptoms in her head. “Flattening of aspect, superficial charm… I wonder if she’s only pretending to be dumb sometimes.” Thinking it unwise to assume otherwise, Colgate asked herself what Octavia had to gain from such an act.

“She may have known she would be a new Element before I arrived. If so, she would have known to act this way from the beginning of my time, as a way to trick me. No, that doesn’t make sense. She chased me away from the rock thing.” She rubbed her flank against the rope; it was raw, where she had stood too close to the infernal creature.

“I wonder if she means me no harm.” Her thoughts stopped there and spun out on other things, and her focus was lost. An idea might coalesce later, or it might not; she did not mind either way, for she knew that she was, at least in the moment, safe. Her value to the group had been demonstrated. She could be their problem solver when Twilight was indisposed.

“When Twilight is indisposed.” Her heart jumped.

“Hey Cole?” Rainbow asked.

“What?”

“This is a total shot in the dark question, but do you know anything about secret agent ponies? Seeing that thing, it kinda reminded me of them.”

“I haven’t heard of anything like that.”

“Eh, no biggie. I’m just glad we’re done with it. What a day.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m glad someone finally found a use for my crummy magic, too.”

“You don’t like your magic?” Genuine interest piqued Colgate’s ears as she said it.

“I hate it.”

Colgate slowed her pace slightly, letting Rainbow draw up closer behind. Feeling she were about to hear something not meant for the others, she asked in a whisper, “Why?”

“I just do. It’s so… wimpy, it’s like a joke.”

“Any magic is stronger than no magic, though. I have none.”

“You have none now, you mean.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Huh. It’s like, when I think of myself, you know, I see pretty much pure awesomness. I’m the best flyer, I’m funny, I’ve got charm to spare, and all that stuff. But now that I’ve got magic, there’s like this one little, crappy, withered part of me, you know, and it’s like I kind of wish I never even had it to begin with, ‘cause then there wouldn’t be anything, you know, glaringly wrong with me.”

“You’re no unicorn.” She frowned. “Meaning that no one should expect you to do magic in the first place.”

“No, and I don’t think they do, but I do, you know?” She chuckled. “I guess I can’t stand to not be the best at something.”

“And this makes you dislike the magic? Why not dislike yourself instead?”

“What? Me? Heck no. I’m not gonna hate myself for something like this. I learned it straight, my magic isn’t worth two bits in a puddle.”

“So?”

“So there’s nothing I can do about it,” Rainbow said. “I wish the magic was gone, but I don’t hate myself for having it. That’s like… I dunno, like hating yourself for being blind or something.”

“That implies you can’t overcome it.”

“Can’t I? If I don’t have it, I don’t have it.”

“Ponies learn to work around things like that all the time,” Colgate said.

“Like how?” She scoffed. “Don’t tell me ponies in wheelchairs. That’s different.”

“There are tons of nurses who are addicted to prescription medications, but they do well enough at their jobs. Some of them.”

“Not for long, I bet.”

“One of the MAs was addicted to antidepressants during my residency,” Colgate said. “She never knew I knew.”

Rainbow was silent.

“Is that different too?”

“No, it’s just not what I was expecting to hear.”

“She had her addiction, but she learned to live around it.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“She had nothing to do with me.”

“Uhhhhh…” She thought for a second. “Yeah, I think it is different. Addiction’s something you choose—at least at first. I didn’t choose this.”

“She didn’t choose her predisposition.”

“Maybe.”

The conversation lapsed for a second, and, in the intervening, pregnant quiet, an idea burst forth inside Colgate and made it to her lips without prior consideration. “Can I tell you something?”

“What’s up?”

Feeling that she had overstepped some boundary, but lacking time to create a lie worthy of the indiscretion, Colgate stumbled into the truth. “Octavia did something that really bugged me today.” Understanding grimly settled over her. She had made a mistake yet again, and would need to own it.

“What happened?”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“She grabbed me with her magic and pulled me back, from the rock monster.”

“That bothers you?”

Colgate snapped her head back, just in case Rainbow were to try using her own weak magic. She couldn’t see anything behind her, certainly not the glow of magic. After a second, she said, “I don’t like being trapped.”

“Heck, who does?”

“It worried me a little.”

“Worried?”

“Scared.”

“You mean she caught you by surprise.”

“No,” Colgate said, getting annoyed. “I mean scared. Never mind.”

“No, hey, I’m sorry. Okay, it scared you. Why?”

“Never mind.”

“Why?”

Colgate trudged ahead. In the thin coming light, she could see the outline of the guide rope again, jostling gently as her companions brushed against it.

“Why, Colgate?”

It was still dark enough for her to disappear in a surprise dash, if she needed to, and Octavia was too far ahead to listen in. She decided to take her chances with the truth.

“I thought she was going to hurt me.”

“Uhhh, why?”

“I just did.”

“No, why would she hurt you?” Rainbow hesitated. “She wouldn’t ever do that to someone, not intentionally, anyway. None of us would.”

“Hm.”

“Least of all you.”

“Hm.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I am.”

“Is that why you’re so antsy around us? You’re afraid one of us is gonna pop you or something?” She lowered her voice further, as if realizing the implication of such a fear. “Has that happened before?”

“Attempts,” Colgate said. In a way, she thought to herself, it was not a lie; she had survived so far, after all.

“Uh… huh.” Behind her, Rainbow was realizing that she had accidentally stepped into something she was not prepared to deal with. Colgate waited for the reprimand that did not come. “That really sucks, Cole. I’m sorry to hear it.”

Colgate frowned.

“I won’t ask you to tell me more if you don’t wanna.”

“That’s fine.” Her heart was slowly returning to a normal pace as the conversation drew to its natural close.

“For the record, no one here is like that. We won’t do… whatever, to you. You might tell Octavia you don’t want to be picked up again, though.”

“Yeah.” Her head swam as light grew in her eyes. She resolved to keep an eye on Rainbow in days to come.

At the cold wall, Twilight took the lead, pushing Silver Sun back to speak with the guards herself. They asked whether everyone was okay; they were, Twilight said. They asked about Octavia, who looked like death; something she had eaten, Twilight said.

“Nope, nothing even close,” Twilight said with false brightness when asked whether there had been any monster encounters. “I thought I heard something in the distance once, but nothing happened.”

Silver Sun had her bags inspected again, the unicorns had their horns unbound, and then they walked the short distance to the teleportation pavilion. Vanilla Cream was ever their white shadow, unseen by all to whom he did not intend to disclose himself.

They sat on the cold selvedge of a rock garden in a sparsely populated courtyard near where they had come out, and Silver Sun quietly pulled the new Elements out of her bag and let them look them over.

“They’re safe to touch fer the time,” she said. “Haven’t treated ‘em yet.”

“Does it matter that they’re the wrong colors?” Vinyl asked, turning her opalescent chunk over in her hooves. The nascent Elements were asymmetric, hyaline gouges from some massive parent crystal, each one ringed about the middle with a slender, tight hoop of pure gold.

“The colors’ll change when they impose on their host,” Silver Sun said.

“What ‘bout the shape?” Big Mac asked.

“That’s the rest of yer money. Shapin’ these ain’t easy.” She slapped the stone and rose. “Speakin’ of, let’s back to the shop so I can draw yer marks.” She glanced at Octavia’s clef and sighed.

Back at the shop, they waited awkwardly for Silver Sun to handle another customer who wanted a clasp repaired on a necklace, and then repaired to an anteroom, where they dispersed slowly to lounge on a wide ring of straw at the room’s walls. Silver Sun dragged a tall hookah pipe over to them and, setting it up, asked, “Why’d you lie ‘bout the critter?”

“If they knew we had encountered it, they’d want to know how we dealt with it,” Twilight said. “Us non-unicorns aren’t supposed to have magic.”

Silver Sun nodded and worked quietly for a time, as if that were enough explanation for her. When she had seated herself, hose dangling from the corner of her mouth, she looked to continue speaking, but instead inhaled a full cloud of smoke and passed it on to Vinyl.

“I figgered you’d found a way to smuggle unicorns in, or something. Disguised.”

“That’s an interestin’ thought,” Big Mac said. Vinyl blew a smoke ring at his head.

“So how long will it take to get these things…” Rarity’s eyes strayed to the door, where Vanilla stood. He smiled and held up a hoof, tapping at the imaginary watch. “Er, these Elements made?”

“Couple days, I reckon,” Silver Sun said.

Twilight coughed and passed the pipe on to Applejack, and Vinyl patted her back with a stifled giggle.

“What of the imposing process?” Fluttershy asked. She, too, watched Vanilla closely.

“Mm, couple minutes,” Silver Sun said. “That’s the easy thing.” She shifted in her seat and nodded as Applejack blew out a long plume through her nose. “Good?”

“Minty. Ah like it,” Applejack said. “Never had somethin’ like this before.”

“I’ll pass, thanks,” Fluttershy said, and Applejack passed it to Rarity.

“How come you need more Elements?” Silver Sun asked.

“Long story,” Vinyl said.

Silver Sun shrugged and got up. She rummaged around in a box for a moment and grabbed a second hose, affixing it to the hookah’s tarnished base and drawing deeply. After another couple plumes, she said, “I got time.”

“We don’t,” Rainbow said.

“Mm?”

“We should be hurrying,” Octavia said weakly.

“You sure yer gonna be okay?” Applejack asked. “That guard was right, you look like the shadow of death.” Her eyes flicked up to Vanilla.

“I am sure that it will pass.” She waved the offered pipe on, and Pinkie took it.

“Whoo, that goes to the head, doesn’t it?” Twilight asked.

“It certainly does,” Rarity said slowly.

“Y’all’s pansies,” Applejack said with a laugh. “It’s relaxin’.”

“Do ponies do this all the time down here?” Twilight asked.

“Some,” Silver Sun said.

“How do you vent the smoke? It has to collect down here sooner or later.”

“Never been a issue.”

Vanilla walked over and took a silent seat between Rarity and Fluttershy, who both shrunk from his intangible form. He looked to each one, smiled again, and looped a foreleg around Fluttershy’s hunched withers.

“I think we should be getting back,” Rarity said. “I… not to suggest that I’m not enjoying this.”

“I’m not,” Rainbow said. “This stuff is funky. It’s like, coating my tongue.”

“Do you drink the water afterwards?” Pinkie asked, blowing a smoke ring and then a smaller ring through it.

“We’ll get to the Elements in a minute,” Silver Sun said. “I need to get off my hooves.”

Colgate stared at Vanilla, who glanced her way.

“So how come you’ve got magic, then? No one told me about that.”

“It’s… Princess Celestia did it,” Twilight said. “I mean, she touched us, long ago. It’s not a common thing, nor is it exactly legal.”

Silver Sun nodded. “Got us out of a bind, you did.”

They smoked until the smoke became hot and harsh, then simply left the hookah in the other room and lined up against the counter, where Silver Sun laid out the three new Elements.

“Any preferences?” she asked.

“I will go first,” Octavia said. She approached and faltered. “What do I do?”

“Hang on.” Silver Sun grabbed the largest of the crystals and brought it to a small, stone basin set into the far wall. With the push of a switch, the basin filled with a strong-smelling liquid. “I’m gonna treat the jewel real quick, and then we’ll impose. Stick your hooves on the counter.” She poised her own forelegs on the counter, joints to the corner, as if ready to receive something that might fall into them. “Like this.”

Octavia did as told as Silver Sun dunked the crystal in the liquid. She pulled it out with a large ladle, which she held in her mouth, and dropped it into Octavia’s waiting hooves. Faint, magical light skittered across its surface, and, as Octavia held it, the magic slowly took on her color. “Just wait,” Silver Sun said. “It’s changin’ colors. Let it do its work.”

“How does it feel?” Pinkie asked.

“It is just like holding a stone,” Octavia said.

“Does it tickle?”

“No.”

When the Element was done, a dull purple shard in its golden ring, Silver Sun gently lifted it away and placed it on a line of paper towels in the back. “Next.”

Vinyl went next, her Element turning the sharp black of her cutie mark, and Big Mac last, his the smallest of the three, a thin chartreuse that Silver Sun held up for them to see through.

“That’ll about do it,” Silver Sun said. “I’m gonna let ‘em sit there for a hour or two, let the magic settle down. Then I’ll get to work. You can hang around, or you can go.”

“Two days, right?” Twilight asked.

“Two or three.”

Vanilla moved behind the counter and surveyed them all.

“Ah think we should get movin’. We’ve got places to be still,” Big Mac said. He shook Silver Sun’s hoof. “Good to meet you, Miss Sun.”

“And you.”

They departed the shop and walked several paces down the road before Vanilla caught up to them. Without speaking, they closed their eyes, and the magic was done. In one moment, they were in the chilly vaults under the ground, and in the next, they stood under the rattling, corrugated cover of a parking lot while a hot, desert wind blew spumes of dust across the macadam and into their tired, momentarily blinded faces.