The rush of water slowed and stopped, and they breathed as one. Very slowly, Applejack extricated herself from under the mattress, and Colgate helped Octavia up. Like prisoners released by an unseen power, they crept toward the stairs, afraid to move too fast.

The captain’s quarters had been tossed, the window broken, the desk upended against the wall in a storm of books and scrolls. Twilight’s experiment had spilled across the floor, leaving a sticky stain that still faintly smoked as it seeped into the boards. Outside, they could see a roseate sunrise.

The deck leaned but slightly, and they each took in the sky as it expanded before them, serrated with russet clouds and lit dimly with nascent stars, an upturned bowl to contain a wide view of rough desert. Towers of stone characterized the distance, throwing oblong shadows into the world.

Applejack followed the balloon’s cables up and back, turning around to see what they had crashed into, and what had stopped them from meeting the desert head-on. Under a blank disc of faint shadow, they had landed on the broad side of a great pillar, a twisted, pointed structure. Gateway to ground, the pile rose nearly thirty feet, tipped with intricate conglomerations of bone: ribs and spines, twined through greater spaces like sutures and threads, while longer and sturdier bones crisscrossed like buttresses and balustrades, a design that Applejack, who had helped build a few barns in her time, recognized as deliberate. Deeper in the mesh, like burs in cotton, she could see skulls and whole exoskeletons. Spines and other curves met to form supports, encased in finer nets of pin bones or delicate webs of what she could not identify. Lower her eyes traveled, taking her to the gunwale where she saw the tower thicken at the bottom, its materials crushed under the weight of their burden, shrouded with mud and windblown grit, and eventually, at the foundation, turning to etched stone, its irregularities glimmering with water. She sniffed the air experimentally and found it, to her surprise, an improvement; gone was the wet, suffocating smell of the lake, of the rain, of the Equestrian south in general, and its cloying notes of pine. She smelled instead the clean, warm desert, the rustic smell of wet dust and naked rock. No decay of bone or flesh, no wicked tang of preservation, touched the air.

“That’s fortunate,” Colgate said.

Applejack looked back up, where she saw what Colgate meant. Their balloon had caught on an outcrop of bone, arresting their crash prematurely, leaving them as a promontory over the land. A dry breeze ruffled the balloon’s skin.

“At least it’s sturdy,” Colgate continued. “Some crash. Everyone okay?”

“Ah’m… fine,” Applejack said, not believing it as she said it. It had been the sort of crash, and the sort of crash site, that demanded some sort of corporeal harm, she thought. The edifice of death that had saved them theirs, the lurid sky, the sheer terrifying knowledge that they were in the long-feared Tartarus—it needed a sacrifice, surely. All the morbid lore she had heard required it.

“I am fine,” Octavia mumbled.

“But look,” Colgate said. She gestured at the tower’s top, and Applejack looked obediently. Water dripped from a radial arrangement of long bones into the hilum of a wider piece, and she was entranced. She followed the water’s path, up a crooked spine that was much too long to have belonged to anything she had seen, through one large eye hole in the center of a blocky skull, where it tapered as a spine should. She gradually made her way to the very top, tipped with no triumphant pendant or symbolic relic, no grand gesture or sinister shape, and then looked higher, where she saw just sky.

Just sky. No gateway.

“Oh,” she said at last. “Didn’t we just come out of there?”

“We did,” Colgate said. She glanced at Octavia, once more on her side, her ribs showing as they rose with the labor of her breath. “Something’s wrong with it.”

“Wrong?” Applejack pulled herself away from the tower and focused on Colgate, who averted her eyes as soon as Applejack did. “What do you mean, wrong? Fer that matter, where are we?”

“This is Tartarus.”

“Yeah, we know that.”

“I want it established,” Colgate said firmly. “No unclear terms.” She took a minute before going on, her face showing the process of thought, of deduction. She paced the deck once, going uphill to the wheel and then back.

“Can we open it again?” Octavia asked.

“The gateway was above these bones here,” Colgate said. “It’s closed behind us for some reason—we can see that from the lack of water.”

“Obviously,” Applejack wanted to say.

“It’s possible that it’ll open again in a while. Maybe the gateway is on a cycle, and we were unlucky. Maybe our passage through screwed something up.”

“Either way, it’s not good.”

“We shouldn’t stay up here. I don’t know how strong our balloon is, and we don’t want it tearing away.” She looked over the rail. “Getting down there won’t be pleasant.”

“We can slide on this ship,” Applejack said. “It wouldn’t be that bad, since we’d be doin’ it from a stand-still.”

“Someone would have to stay on the deck to untie the cables, and it would be dangerous for them.”

“Right.”

“Inside first,” Colgate said. “Everyone’s things are in here. We might need them.”

The two of them went inside, and Octavia eventually pushed herself up to follow. They gathered paper and pens, a couple books, Twilight’s treasury note—buried under a pile of sigil designs, all crossed out and annotated in a tight, frustrated script—and all the food they could find, stuffing it in a pair of saddlebags that Applejack wore. They had water still, but in heavy gallon jugs and smaller canteens, scattered. When they were back on the deck, light had dispelled the stars, and it was morning in Tartarus.

Colgate looked back up at the space of the absent gateway. “We do need to find a way to get the ship down, though. We need water.”

“Uhh, what are you thinkin’?” Applejack asked. The logic connecting Colgate’s twin statements was not apparent to her.

Colgate looked at her, and Applejack saw suspicion in her eyes. “We might be traveling on hoof.” For a second, it appeared she would stop there. “Actually, we need to contact the others first. Octavia, come here.”

“Colgate, can you please slow down? Yer hoppin’ from one subject to another, yer not makin’ any sense.” She rubbed her eyes. “Can we start with just gettin’ off this bone tower?”

Colgate went to Octavia and helped her up again, placing a piece of paper and a pen in front of her.

“Ah get that yer thinkin’ things through, but we need more’n what yer givin’ us, is all. Maybe some explanation?”

“Right,” Colgate said. She looked back up at the top of the tower and narrowed her eyes, and Applejack looked back. “If that’s closed behind us, then we might need to find a different way out. The nearest gateway is the one north of Snowdrift, and the others are probably thinking that too. They haven’t contacted us yet because they can’t; they’ve got no paper. Actually,” she paused for a second, “they have that face mask Twilight was wearing. It was raining, so they might try to send some dried mud scrawled on her mask, or a big leaf if they can find one. Anyway, we need to move, probably on hoof.”

“Okay, so that’s why we’re gettin’ off this thing. Where’s the paper an’ the water comin’ in?”

“Just hold on,” Colgate snapped. “I’m getting to it.” She walked the deck again, favoring the other side, and even leaned out over the prow for a minute. “We can send a letter to them, so we’re going to.”

“I do not know how to do that,” Octavia said.

"What?” Applejack asked.

“Settle,” Colgate said. “It’s easy, Octavia. You just—no, this isn’t right.” She walked a tight circle and shook her head, as if to clear it. “We’ll write first.”

“Shouldn’t we get down first?”

“I’m thinking about that. We’ll write first.” She grabbed the paper and pen away from Octavia and looked at it.

“Somethin’ simple, just lettin’ ‘em know we’re okay,” Applejack said.

“Yes.” Colgate grabbed a spare pen and set it beside the paper. “We’ll send this as well, so they can write back. They won’t have anything on their end.” She scratched out a hasty message, her mouth-writing fast and practiced from scribbling out years of prescriptions and office visit notes. She read it back to them, and they approved.

“How will you send it?” Octavia asked.

“I can’t, I don’t know any of their magical signatures. You gotta.”

Octavia was quiet for a moment. “I do not know them either, and I do not know how to send a letter.”

“You do.” She paused, thinking back. “Applejack, get the balloon torch disconnected and see if you can empty the fuel. Just off the side will do.”

“Ah’m sorry?” Applejack said.

“Empty the torch. We need it. Send the fuel off the side.”

Applejack looked at her, baffled, but did as she was told. Colgate’s tone—her doctor tone—brooked no argument, and Applejack had no better ideas anyway. She couldn’t imagine them needing the fuel for anything else.

“Imagine your sister as you always would, naturally, not in her present condition,” Colgate recited. “Think of her magic, and then of your own. You two are alike, perhaps more than you realize.”

“I do not understand,” Octavia said.

“Just do it.” She rolled the note around the spare pen, and Octavia took it in a small cloud of telekinesis. “Envision her and envision yourself. Are you?”

“I am.”

“Sending a letter is like thinking one specific idea for a brief, powerful moment. Imagine that letter and see it in her possession, see it in your mind’s eye.”

While Octavia stared down at the scroll, Applejack loosened the bolts that held the torch to the deck. She had no idea what Colgate was thinking, and looked up with shock as the letter fizzled and flamed, then turned to a halo of smoke, which dissipated around Octavia’s inclined head.

“See? Easy,” Colgate said.

Applejack shook her head and loosened the last of the bolts, then stood herself against the torch, not sure how to proceed with emptying it safely.

“How do you know that I could have done that?” Octavia asked.

“Sometimes, if a patient is in a coma, we see if they’re still alive by sending a letter. If the letter goes through, then their mind is still active. We have to use siblings sometimes; siblings have the letter connection born into them. It’s genetic.”

“That is amazing.”

“It's a standard procedure.” She looked at Applejack and went below, coming back with a jug of water. “Help me get more of these,” she told Octavia.

Applejack eventually tipped the torch over and rolled it to the gunwale. She was some minutes working at the too-small latches that kept the fuel contained and pressurized; she had to use her hooves, for she was tired from keeping them in place in the lake for so long. When she released the seal, strong-smelling fuel dripped to her hooves as she struggled to get it poised over the edge, where it ran in a slow stream to mix with the water at the tower’s base.

“Got it?” Colgate asked.

“Ah got it.”

“When that’s empty, we need to take it below, to the shower.”

Applejack shook her head, but did not verbally question Colgate. When she had wrangled it downstairs, Colgate had the shower door open, and Octavia leaned against the sink.

“Can you get that top part off?” Colgate asked. “We’re cleaning this out.”

“Might Ah ask why?” Applejack asked, turning the torch on the floor and looking down its coiled barrel for how she might do what she was asked.

“These things hold more stuff than they look like, so I thought we’d put all our water in it and carry that instead.”

“That is a good idea,” Octavia said. “But I do not like the idea of walking. Where will we go?”

“I’m thinking about that.”

Her tone, again, invited no argument, and Applejack did not offer her commentary, for she had none. As she twisted the torch apart, small piece by small piece, and trying her best to remember where each went for reassembly, she was able at last to appreciate how lost they were. One thing that she knew, they could not just head north, for there was no way to know whether north in Tartarus were the same direction as on the Gaia.

The accomplishment of a small task was enough for her. Colgate turned on the water and aimed the shower head into the angled torch, and Applejack watched her. Her movements and her face were placid, as if the crash did not worry her, or its significance had not landed. Despite Applejack’s uncertainty, it had enabled Colgate to take charge and assess the situation first, something for which Applejack was grateful.

“You’ve filled the water tanks on this ship before?” Colgate asked.

“Me? Uh, yeah.”

“When we’re done with this, I’ll want you to empty them into the torch as well.”

“How will we get off this tower?” Octavia asked.

Colgate glanced at her, her mane dripping from where it had caught in the shower. Slowly, she said, “I’m thinking about that.”

“We should at least let ‘em know what we’re thinkin’. Meetin’ ‘em at Snowdrift an’ all,” Applejack said.

“Yes, fine.”

Octavia wrote the second letter and Applejack found a brush that Colgate used to clean out the inside of the torch. When it had been rid of all traces of fuel, they hauled it back up to the deck and poured their water reserves inside. Applejack screwed it back together, Octavia lay on her side, Colgate paced, and the sun rose higher.

“Wait, duh,” Applejack said. “Ah know how we get off this thing. Everybody below.” Savoring the feeling of being in charge, if for only briefly, she rolled the torch back through the captain’s room, down the stairs, and down the corridor. “Let’s get these mattresses set up again, fer the next crash.”

“I do not want another crash,” Octavia said.

“This one’ll be better. Uh, not better, but less bad, Ah mean to say.” She looked at them, side by side for just a moment: emaciated, quiet mares. When they were ready, the walls inexpertly padded, she closed her eyes and ran her magic across the ship’s corpse, touching all the inert pieces of machinery and, only after she had done so, settling on the balloon cables and their pegs. Though simple, they still counted as part of the whole machine, and with a little work on her part, Applejack was able to untie them remotely. The small exertion throbbed in her forehead.

With a sickening chorus of snaps below, muffled under their hull, they pitched forward and to the side, and though Applejack knew they were only a couple stories off the ground, the second of weightlessness came with a rush of bile in her throat. The tower ground and grated against their ears as they fell, and the final collision rocked them forward with an ugly sound of shattered wood and inscrutable stone. Octavia was struggling to her hooves, only to fall again as they tilted to rest on their side turbine.

“That should be the last of it,” Applejack said.

“You were right, that was not so bad,” Colgate said softly.

Her first steps on Tartarus soil reminded her of the desert outside Roan. While Colgate and Octavia stared into the distance nearby, Applejack recalled her first minutes of second life. She had described it to the others as a sense of new birth, and kept it at that, but in her private mind, the feeling had been more detailed than that, and eerily similar to how she felt now. The destroyed shadow of the ship’s prow glistened on the muddy moat around their pillar.

The sky and the ground were not so different from the Gaia’s versions. Besides the slight variance in palette, she could have believed they were still on the Gaia—yet all around, in every detail she took in, she sensed that she was not where she should be. The dirt seemed wrong, the air that she breathed, even where pebbles and gravel appeared on the ground. Each aspect of her new world, it seemed to her, was a replacement for some more correct, more true thing that she might find on the Gaia.

The sense that she ought not to have come back was the feeling she did not bring up when her friends asked her about her resurrection, and the feeling that gently settled on her once more as she looked at the desert.

“We’re going to get our bearings first,” Colgate said. “That’s today.”

“All day?” Octavia asked. “That is one more day before we get to Snowdrift.”

“Where’s that?”

Octavia looked at her. “North of here.”

“And where’s north?”

Octavia pointed behind them.

Colgate scratched a little face in the dust.

“We don’t know if the cardinal directions are the same here as there,” Applejack said. “We gotta find some way of figurin’ that out first.”

“Bingo. We also need to make sure we have everything we need for the trip, and a way to carry it all,” Colgate said. “We won’t want to come back to this ship. I assume you can’t repair it, Applejack?”

“Not a chance.”

“Perhaps we should get away from the tower, then,” Octavia said. “It is not natural, so someone might come by later to find us.”

“Smart,” Colgate said. “I don’t see how we can move, though. We’re not moving the ship.”

“We are not, right?” She looked at Applejack.

“Ah couldn’t get this thing runnin’, not in a day, not in a week,” Applejack said.

“We can hunker down inside,” Colgate said. Then, to Octavia, “You like to stay up late. You watch when night comes.”

In the cabin aslant, curled up on the mattress they had wrestled back inside, Octavia and Applejack dug through Twilight’s books for anything and everything about Tartarus. Colgate watched them and thought.

She knew two things immediately and absolutely: that the others did not have any knowledge of Tartarus, and that they must not know that she did. Though her education on the subject was basic and entirely theoretical in nature, she felt vaguely at ease, the holder of a distant advantage. They would soon feel the effects of the new world, the effects of being immersed in foreign, ambient magic. They would likely encounter natives, either wildlife or sentient beings. The knowledge itself gave her less comfort than the fact that the others did not possess it.

What she did not know, and what stopped her from trusting the others, was by whose intention they had crashed into Creation Lake in the first place. It could be the long reach of the Datura, a plan formed long ago and set into motion by her deceased commander; it could be Discord, disguised as a puff of cloud or a leaf on the wind; it could be one of the Elements, seeing no better way to dispose of Colgate and intending to pluck the others out later—it would explain Octavia’s insistence that they find the Snowdrift gateway so quickly. If that were the case, she knew, then Applejack and Octavia would be looking for ways of casting her into the wilderness.

Her sole advantage was her familiarity with the terrain, vague though it may be. Where Octavia had taken in all with the same resignation as ever, and Applejack was enchanted by details, Colgate had had time to work through her own small panic; by the time the others had any attention to pay her, she had ordered herself. It was a slight advantage, one that would not last, and she could give away nothing of her knowledge, for it was all she had to keep herself attached to the Elements. Like the balloon they had left on the bone pillar, she could feel her tethers pulling tighter and tighter, soon to come undone and leave her twisting in the wind as the Elements pushed on without her.

“If they could just include a map in one of these books, we’d be all right,” Applejack said.

“I do not believe ponies come here very often,” Octavia said.

“D’ya think we might be the first?”

“I do not know.”

Colgate held her peace. She had to be careful when she spoke, lest she give away her position. She feared she may have already with how she had handled the aftermath of the crash, though she could credit her professional training for that. She was good to have in a crisis, she had been told, and they certainly were in one.

“Gotta assume it’s one of these two,” she thought. “Which one?” She looked between Applejack and Octavia. Neither looked back at her, but she was not fooled; she could feel their intentions, their shared attention to her movements, her mood. The desert would be a good place to leave her marooned, but they might wait until they were farther from the ship, so she could not return and find a way to scavenge survival.

“Hold it,” she thought, the command splitting her running stream of worry. “It’s simpler than I think. Octy isn’t strong enough to do anything. She can’t have much magic in her condition, and Applejack’s just an earth pony.” She didn’t smile, though she wanted to.

Feeling electric, she forced herself to stay stationary as the others kept leafing through their books. She wanted to move, to pace the deck or trot circles around their crash site. She looked at the walls and breathed deeper, trying to keep them from swelling inwards. She could feel the air inside the cabin, stale and empty, and her head felt suddenly empty as well.

“You okay, Colgate?” Applejack asked.

Colgate froze, rudely aware of how loudly she was breathing. Her head was swimming, and she could feel her shoulders shaking with excited fear. She was caught, and so easily.

“Colgate?”

“Get some air,” Octavia said. “Get some water.”

She licked her lips with a tongue that tasted of iron. She remembered the sensation, the feeling of control dissipating without warning, the shadow of confidence flashing to nothing. She knew it was harmless; she knew that Applejack meant her nothing worse than a pleasant day. But she did not really know it.

Her mind called for her to turn and run. The charade was up as fast as it had begun, she had been found out, there was nothing left to do but disappear. However, she forced herself to turn her back to the mares and walk out of the cabin, imitating a calm pace, dignified to the end, or perhaps simply cowed under the ineffable pull of decorum. She ascended the stairs and got out to the deck, and, finding it not spacious enough, descended to the desert.

Looking back at the ship, she expected to see one or both of them there at the edge, watching her, perhaps training pulse crystals on her. Twilight had mentioned getting some in the mines, and Colgate knew who they were for. Seeing nothing of the sort, she still watched until sweat formed under her mane, and she sat down. Her strength ebbed away, seeping into the ground; thinking of it in that way, she began to silently weep.

Her tears were without drama or duration. One or two minutes, and then she was done, her flash of emotion spent, her thoughts slowed but not stopped. The life-and-death fear had been reduced to suspicion once more.

When she saw Applejack appear and head toward her, she didn’t run. She stood up and faced the Element of Honesty, who wore the look of someone concerned. It was a look she had seen on countless patients in her days, and she understood its implications: Octavia must be in trouble.

Something in her mind snapped back into place, and she straightened up. She was a doctor once more, a mare of higher education and specialized expertise. A professional.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” she asked, walking back toward the ship.

“Ah was gonna ask you,” Applejack said.

“Me?” She thought. “I don’t know anything. She looked fine when I was there. Is she conscious?”

“What?”

“Octavia!” Colgate snapped. “Is she conscious?”

“Wha—yes, of course. No, Ah’m not out here ‘bout her. Is that what you thought?”

Colgate stopped walking, momentarily angry. “What do you want, then?”

“What happened in there? To you, Ah mean. You looked like you were ready to pass out.”

“Me. She’s asking about me.” She frowned, piecing it together. “I’m fine.”

“Don’t look fine. Yer pale.”

“I’m pale.”

“Paler’n usual.”

Colgate looked around, keeping Applejack in her peripheral vision. An idea was trying to surface through her wild emotions. When it did, Applejack was looking at her like she had in the ship’s cabin. She steadied herself, looked again into the distance, gauging how far she could run before she dropped.

“So you’re the Element of Honesty,” she began. In her mind, she was pulling at a thread that Applejack did not want pulled. Exposing a weakness, perhaps; she felt clever, but also filthy.

“That’s me.” Applejack sat down and fanned herself with her hat. “An’ to be honest, you’ve got us both pretty worried already. What’s wrong with you?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Colgate said. “You’re bound to be honest about stuff, right? If I ask a question, you gotta be honest.”

“Ah don’t haveta, but yeah, it’s in my nature.”

Colgate sucked air between her teeth. “What would make you lie?”

“Colgate, what the heck is this about?”

Colgate shook her head and spun a half circle in the dust, very nearly getting up and taking off then and there. She made it a couple paces before turning back. The sun was hot, but the cold sweats were returning. The particular thought that got her attention simply repeated “this isn’t happening” in a soft voice, very much like Powder Rouge’s.

“Hey.”

Colgate looked at her, seeing a hoof upraised. Her heart shot again, her mind completing the picture and placing a gleaming pulse crystal square on the end of Applejack’s foreleg. She blurted out what she was certain were her final words: “don’t kill me.”

Applejack paused, her hat halfway back to her head, and replaced it. “O-kay, that answers one question, but introduces ‘bout a million more.”

Colgate looked at her, chest heaving.

“So…” Applejack paused for a long time, and Colgate gradually calmed. “All right, we can do this. Colgate, look at me. My eyes, look at ‘em.”

Colgate reluctantly did.

“Ah… this is really weird. Okay, as the Element of Honesty, Ah promise you that Ah ain’t gonna hurt you, or kill you, or even anything close to that.”

“Octavia.”

“No, she won’t do anythin’ like that either. Ah promise that.”

Colgate, not sure what else to do, sat again. “Can you… the hat?”

“Huh?” Then, understanding, Applejack doffed her hat and repeated the promises.

Colgate exhaled. In her mind, Applejack with the hat and Applejack without were two ideas, the former a crude attempt to copy the latter, for which she blamed her reaction. She could only stare, dumbfounded, amazed at the promise rendered. She decided to push her luck.

“Have you ever thought about hurting me in the past? You or… or anyone?”

“Ah know Ah haven’t. Ah can’t speak fer the others, not bein’ a mind reader, but Ah’d put the farm on it that they haven’t.”

“Haven’t?”

“Have not.”

“I see.” She breathed in and then she breathed out, breaking out in gooseflesh as her thoughts stopped. Applejack filled her eyes, the ship and desert beyond becoming a smudged backdrop. “Don’t move,” she thought, not aware that the words had made it to her lips, soft, and Applejack did not move. One conclusion burned bright and wide across her head, and she grasped at it: they meant her no harm. They meant her no harm.

It was obvious. It was beyond obvious, it was intrinsically correct. Holding the thought closer to analyze it, she could feel that it had been present in the storm of fears and doubts and impulses the whole time. It was a nugget of truth waiting to be excavated, to tumble out of the debris and dazzle her with its simplicity, its humility, the basic certainty of its being. It hid nothing, it implied nothing more than itself; it was so whole, so impossibly clear that she felt unable to accept it. Perhaps, she thought distantly, she had only passed through another layer of deception, and had found that she was the worse liar the whole time. That everyone, not even the ponies that knew her, but every one in the world, had an advantage over her, could see through the most complicated of ploys as though they were tissue paper, and she were only finally grasping their abilities.

The thought withered; it made no sense to her. She felt blinded, stunned, and disarmed, and in the face of her weakness, Applejack made no moves to harm her, to hurry her along. Applejack waited, perplexed, but unassuming.

“Means no harm,” Colgate thought again.

“You gonna be okay there?” Applejack asked.

“I can’t…” She could not take her eyes off Applejack, irrationally afraid that breaking eye contact would break the truth she had found.

“Ah mean ya no harm, Colgate. None of us do. None of us did.”

“That’s…” She did not know what it was. She did not have the words to describe her feelings, the feeling of fear releasing its clutch on her. It was the feeling other ponies described as like having a weight lifted off their backs, but for Colgate, it was the end. She could only stand there, uncomprehending, her every experience adding up to naught in the face of one moment. She didn’t need the experience anyway—astonishing for her to realize.

“I don’t really know what to say,” she finally said. “I’m just kinda shocked.”

“You look like you just got yer whole world turned upside-down, if ya don’t mind my sayin’ so,” Applejack said. “Do you wanna get back to the ship? Maybe get a glass of water?”

“We can get water.” Saying it so, it made her feel more in control, and they went back to the ship.

“She’ll be fine below. She’s just readin’.” Applejack tipped some water out of the torch into a cup, and Colgate placed it on the deck where she sat. Applejack took one for herself and studied Colgate. “Drink. You’ll feel better.”

Colgate drank.

“Why are you afraid of us?”

Colgate thought. It had never occurred to her to wonder where her fear came from. She looked at Applejack, her expression free of judgment or impatience. They could have been on a routine flight to the next city, for how Applejack looked at her.

“I don’t know why I’m afraid,” Colgate said. “I just am. It’s—in the interest of honesty, since we’re doing that—it’s… not just you. Not just you, I mean. It’s a problem I’ve had with everyone.”

“Why is that?”

“That's just how it is, I don’t know.”

“Fair enough, Ah guess. If you were born with somethin’, it might not seem strange to you.” She frowned. “You thought Ah was gonna kill you.”

“For just a moment,” she lied.

“Why?”

Colgate looked back to the desert. It called to her still, an escape from the interrogation. Still looking out, she said, “To be rid of me.” Speaking it to the emptiness was better.

“Uh-huh. Ah don’t think Ah quite get it. Why would we wanna be rid of ya?”

“Because…” She did not know why. Like the fear that shaped her, she had never questioned why those around her sought to harm her—did not seek to, she reminded herself again. The thought still felt strange, too perfect to be real, and too obvious to be essential truth.

“‘Cause none of us do. Yer one of the crew.”

Colgate only looked at the deck under Applejack’s hooves. She was aware that Applejack expected a reply, but she had nothing.

“I don’t know what to say, about any of this.” Thinking of something she had heard Octavia say, she added, “and for that, I am sorry.”

“Let’s back up a little, then. Do you believe me when Ah say we mean ya no harm?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t got a gut feelin’?”

“My gut feeling—my intuition—says you’re telling the truth. I suppose you must be, since you’re the Element of Honesty.”

“That Ah am.”

Saying it herself, she felt more confident. She thought again to herself, “they mean me no harm.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“Well, Ah reckon you should take some time to calm down a little, an’ then we find a way to figure out what north is in this dang hellscape, saddle up, an’ take a walk. What do you think?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

Applejack only looked at her.

“I think I’m hunted,” she said quickly. She had to say it quickly, else she would have looked away, gotten up, and walked off, perhaps never to come back. The possibility of dying in the desert still pulled at her.

“Hunted? By who?”

“Ponies.” She cleared her throat. “In Canterlot mostly, but maybe in Ponyville. There are ponies who want to see me dead.”

“Why’s that?”

“Not sure.” She glanced at Applejack. “That’s not true. I’m in trouble with them, is all. I’ve been in trouble for a while.”

“Ah’ll say.”

Colgate frowned.

“Sorry. Keep goin’, Ah’m listenin’.”

Colgate was not sure what to tell, how much was relevant. Her time spent with Rouge, the drugs and alcohol, the aimless plunge through life that had left her lost and alone in the rehab facility; the Datura, the things she had seen and done; her time on the battlefield, mentally unprepared to order the triage nurses around and make clinical decisions. It seemed to her, as it so often did when she looked back, that her life was a multi-faceted organism, a racemose collective of incidents that did not communicate with one another.

“When I was back in Ponyville, and I was still working for the hospital, I would often feel like I was being crushed underneath a wall of stone, inches at a time. I didn’t have a way out, you see, so I had to just sit there and let my life change.”

“You weren’t in control of the things you did.”

“No,” Colgate said, confident in her response for the first time. “That’s not what it was, Applejack. Don’t take me for a head case.”

“My apologies.”

“That is where it went, though. Things went bad in Ponyville, and they moved me to Canterlot.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“My employers. They moved me to Canterlot, and then… drugs and alcohol, for a while.”

“Ohhh.” Her tone quieted, and Colgate glanced at the back to make sure Octavia had not come out.

“I don’t remember a lot of it. I let someone’s dog out into the alley once. I…” “Alley, dog. Dog?”

“Are the police after you?”

“I just figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

Colgate stood, kicking over her water. Thinking of the dog had led her to think of leashes. Suppose the ponies on the Gaia side could create a leash of sorts for their Tartarus counterparts?

“We need to test it, but if Octavia can feel a letter coming before it actually gets sent to her, before the connection completes, then we can have the others set down a relay of automatic letter sigils on their side, and we’ll head north by feel.”

Applejack looked at her blankly—another expression Colgate was able to identify. It meant she had said something difficult.

“I’ll explain it to Octavia.”

“Wait, hang on, Colgate.”

Colgate waited.

“Are you a wanted mare?”

“Not by the police.” She thought of her new revelation; it was beginning to turn into another facet, and she had to think harder to remind herself of its significance. “Maybe not by anyone. I don’t know. I… kind of feel like this is the first day of my life, in a way.”

“Ah understand that feelin’.”

Colgate had no reason not to believe her, and said so. Applejack only smiled.

It was midday when they sent their third letter, explaining Colgate’s plan to the others. They ate, conducted a final check of their supplies, confirmed the theory of the letter-sending sigil, and were off. Applejack had fastened the water torch into a harness and put it on wheels, so she could drag it behind her on even terrain and carry it in rougher places.

Of the three, only Octavia did not turn back to look at the ship. Her hooves were sore and cracked, and planting them on the desert ground was a tiny torture, but still her pride whelmed up inside when she saw Applejack and Colgate cast sentimental looks behind. She was the strong one, the stoic one, and would not be swayed to nostalgia by a crashed airship.

She bowed her head, her dark mane lank and hot across her skull. She would need shade, but there was none nearby. Pillars of stone segmented the distance, singular all, tapering toward the ends but tipped in imperfect globes of stone. They reminded her of pins stuck in the ground and left there, petrified over centuries.

“Walk next to Octavia,” Colgate said. “Give her some shade.”

Octavia shook her head imperceptibly, her eyes fixed to the ground. She could not speak for a painful dryness that had settled in her mouth, but she wanted to object. “No pity. No charity. Walk, just walk.”

Applejack came up beside her. “Y’all right, Octavia?”

“Fine,” she croaked.

“Get the mare some water,” Colgate mumbled, and again, Octavia shook her head.

“Land sakes, Octavia, we’ve got plenty,” Applejack said. “If you need some, holler.”

Octavia shook her head.

“If you say so.”

They walked against the alien sun, their only tracks the grooves of their water torch traced on hard ground. For Octavia, who had grown up on the rock farm, the difference in dirt stood out most. On the Gaia, it could be thick, it could clump together, it could get stuck in fur, but the Tartarus desert offered no such qualities. The dust, when she noticed it, blew away at her steps, thin shockwaves with each step. It dissipated, but did not settle, and it did not stick to things. When she finally sat down, head swimming and heart hurting, and accepted water, she noticed no dirt on her hooves or tail.

“Ah think Ah can still see it back there,” Applejack said, closing the torch up again.

Octavia only stared at the ground, hating her weakness, and they walked on.

Relief was short-lived as clouds skirted the sky, which had turned to an off-blue color with the sun. A little too pale, a little washed out. There was no wind, but the sound of wind occasionally forced a pause or a raised ear. Applejack was on the lookout for others—for Tartarus was populated, one detail that Octavia recalled but did not care to consider very much—and Colgate kept her own council, walking a few paces away from the two of them. That she had seen Octavia’s need for shade and for water was an unwelcome relief, and for that, too, she despised herself.

“For what purpose?” she kept thinking. The thought never completed beyond that, but she did not need it to, for the harsh questions it asked had been long since ingrained. They made her up, serving as both foundation for her life and etching on her personality. Why must she walk? Why must she survive? Because she must, a truth that had grown threadbare over the months.

Her part in the Canterlot battle was the agent of her change, but acknowledging it had given no comfort, not to herself and not even when she admitted it to Pinkie, or Fluttershy later. Acknowledgement did not give back the lives she had taken, did not comfort those grieved, but the bitter resolve, and the knowledge that she would do it again if she had to, sharpened her guilt to a fine point.

Each step in Tartarus, what some called “pony hell,” was penance in her mind, the punishment of a broken body stacked atop the punishment of leaden guilt, stacked atop the punishment of prior exhaustion, stacked atop the first punishment of willful and endless consignment, so many years ago.

At bottom, it had been her choice all along. She could have said “no, thank you,” that day when Rarity approached her in the train station. When the prospect of adventure lay bright and interesting in front of her, she could have thought better of it; she could have politely declined and gone back to debt, paranoia, and depression. She could have gone back to life.

Octavia had not eaten for three days, and not slept for two. The familiar scenes that replayed in her head when she closed her eyes had been replaced of late: a lone silhouette sinking to the ground had become a flash of light and a crater, a head lolling on its shoulders in the reeds. Her own head felt lifeless, her eyes like coffee grounds, her skin like paper, her abdomen like a gutted pumpkin.

The flame in her heart had grown dim and tired over the months, and, for the first time since her youth, she felt it had finally gone out. She did not mind, and that feeling was the worst of them all—a despicable sense of emptiness, not deserving of acknowledgement and yet demanding every attention, every moment of thought; a selfish cancer of the spirit that left her useless, overtaken, and very small.

They stopped for lunch in a shallow valley, setting their supplies down by a dirty gutter. Water trickled from a hole bored in the stone, and from the puddle grew a stunted, denuded tree, its bark pale yellow and its branches angular and sharp. Where roots might grow from a Gaia tree, it instead offered a single extension of its trunk, tapered and twisted like a braid of rope. Applejack produced some bread and greens, and they had sandwiches. The water and food cleared Octavia’s head somewhat.

“You think it’s gonna get chilly at night?” Applejack asked.

“Might,” Colgate said.

“Hm.” Applejack climbed the valley’s gentle side and stood for a moment, the sun penetrating her blonde mane. She came back down. “We’re not far from those rock towers out there. We can get there before sundown, an’ then Ah say we find a place to hole up.”

“Did you see any trees or things?”

“Nothin’ bigger’n this, but a little bit, yeah.” She put her hoof to the tree. “Ah reckon we can fashion some kinda shelter out there. We’ll have fuel fer a fire, at least.”

“That’s good.” Colgate looked into the puddle, and after a bit, dipped her hoof into it. A small insect skated away from her. “I was taking prescription painkillers back in Canterlot, and I was drinking too. I was mixing them.”

“Oh.” Applejack was clearly not expecting the conversation, but, after a second to change gears, spoke. “Ah’m sorry to hear that. Ah take it… well, yer here now, so you must’ve gotten past it.”

“It wasn’t my choice, but yeah, I made it out. They put me in rehab.”

“Probably fer the best.”

Colgate didn’t respond, and they sat for a while as the shadows lengthened. When they got up again, Octavia veered from the path, feeling the tingle of a coming letter. She nodded and forced a smile when Applejack asked whether they were still on the right path.

Her thoughts clarified from food and water, she was able to bring her self-loathing into sharper focus. Made aware, from the clarity, of what she was doing to herself, she felt the familiar accusation of cowardice rise in her thoughts. She was afraid of life, of facing the results of her actions, and worse, she was afraid to admit that fear. Instead of pushing through her feelings, as her friends had, she allowed herself to wither and languish in her own depression.

“Pathetic,” she thought. “Apparently, even this is not beneath me. To slowly kill myself, instead of… pathetic. I deserve this.” She closed her eyes and forced herself to see the familiar image. “No, this is the easy way out.” She clenched her jaw until shoots of pain moved through her teeth, hating. That even at the depths of sadness she should choose fear over a fate she knew she deserved, it appalled her. She saw herself standing before her friends, and they, one by one, leveling her failures to her face. She saw them looking her in the eyes and laying bare her every fault and weakness, not the smallest glanced over. Each of them, in turn, would look upon her and say that word: guilty. She was guilty of cowardice, of weakness, of simple lack of ability. Was it a crime to lack something? In her dark fantasy, she knew that it was.

The clouds had all blown away, and the sky was again turning to burnished evening. Stars appeared, but no moon, and the stone towers drew nearer. From afar, the tops and towers had appeared as one, but the closer they came to the one that would be their shelter that night, Octavia could see that there was no connection. The sphere floated above the stone finger, calmly poised, motionless and silent. She did not doubt that it would remain there, that the magic that held it in place had nothing at all to do with them, that their camp would disturb nothing and leave no trace but ashes.

“Cole, you seem to be up on things ‘round here,” Applejack said. “You reckon that’ll fall on us?”

“I don’t reckon,” Colgate said.

“Let’s set our camp a little further away anyway.” Applejack shrugged out of her harness and dropped her saddlebags, and Octavia watched dispassionately, thinking that she should have carried them.

How selfish she was, she thought, allowing her private suffering to stop her from easing a friend’s burden. This crime, too, would be revealed in her fantasy, and she would accept it with the others.

“You okay, Octavia?” Applejack asked. “Don’t worry, we’ll have a fire soon, an’ then we can…” She sighed. “Rest. Finally.”

“I can help,” Octavia said.

“That’d be great. Here, help me get this set up.”

The two of them, with some hesitation, chopped the spindly trees and broke them into kindling, while Colgate gathered smaller tinder from the dry grasses and weeds from along the stone tower’s base. The sun had turned the color of caramel in the distance, and the night above a dark umber, not as dark as back home. Without the benefit of moonlight, they could still see everything clearly.

Over a small fire, they ate more greens and bread, and Colgate used weak magic to slice one of their lemons into cups of water.

“Ah wish we had yer cello still,” Applejack said. “Ah don’t know ‘bout y’all, but Ah can go fer a campfire song or two or ten right ‘bout now.”

“Why?” Colgate asked.

“Just sounds nice.” Applejack rested on her haunches. “Ah dunno, maybe Ah’m crazy, but this really ain’t so bad.”

“Perhaps we are lucky,” Octavia said. “We may have landed in a good place.”

“That’s entirely possible. Still, as Ah said, this ain’t so bad. Sore hooves aside, it’s been an okay time so far.”

“I know what you mean,” Colgate said, but did not elaborate.

“Or some marshmallows. Yeah, that’d be perfect.”

“It is because she is not afraid,” Octavia thought, quietly jealous. “She has already seen worse than this.”

“How’re you two holdin’ up, though? Sore legs?”

“I am sore,” Octavia said.

“Fine,” Colgate said, shrugging.

Applejack chuckled. “Couple more days of this, you won’t even mind it, Ah can tell you that.”

They added more wood to the fire, and Applejack turned in. The temperature had not dropped but slightly, and with no weather to speak of, they had decided that shelter was not necessary. With her hat over her face, Applejack snored gently on the ground, a picture of peace and contentment that Colgate found baffling and Octavia found accusatory.

As was her custom, Octavia soon forced herself up and walked from the campfire to be alone with her thoughts. The dark distance enticed her, and she wondered how far she might walk before dropping. She would not try it, of course.

“So,” Colgate said. Octavia had seen her rise to join, and did not begrudge the company. Yet another mote of weakness, she thought: the need for company to dull her contrition.

“You should sleep,” Octavia said.

“You too.”

“I am fine.”

“Right.” She thought. “So… I’m not sure how to begin. This is different.”

“Just begin.”

Colgate nodded. “Octavia, over the past two weeks, how often would you say you’ve felt little interest or pleasure in doing things?”

“I do not know.”

“You can be general. Like, a lot, a little, not at all. You know, general terms.”

“I would say that I feel that way every day.”

“What about feeling down, depressed, or hopeless? Same thing, past two weeks.”

“Every day.”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“How about trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping too much? I guess we already know the answer to that one. Every day, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Feeling tired or having little energy?”

“I have energy.”

“You kept up with us this whole way today.”

“I did.”

“Can you do it again tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

Colgate nodded. “Let’s skip to the end. Have you had any thoughts that you would be better off dead or hurting yourself in some way?”

Octavia did not look at her. “That is difficult to say. I know that I should not do those things.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I suppose I have those thoughts sometimes. But they are always distant, and I know that I will never act upon them. All my life, I have known that I will never.”

“That’s good.”

“Why are you asking me this? You think that I am depressed.”

“You are.”

“That does not matter.”

Colgate shook her head. “I can’t not address it. I’m a medical professional, remember?”

“If it makes you feel better, then by all means, ask me these things. Know that I will not kill myself, however.” So stated, she allowed herself to feel more assured. The weight on her back lightened by degrees.

“You’re killing yourself now. I’m aware of how little you eat, you know.”

“I have not been hungry.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t need a doctor to tell you that’s unhealthy.”

“You are right.”

“I’m gonna tell you anyway. Not eating is unhealthy, Octavia. Your hooves are cracking—I saw it by the firelight, but I also saw it earlier in the way you walk. You’re favoring the right instep on your foreleg. It’s ‘cause you don’t have enough nutrients, so your body is leeching what it needs out of its less important parts. Hooves and fur and all that. Is your fur getting thinner?”

“I have not checked.”

“It is. The insomnia doesn’t help that either. You’re probably dehydrated to boot.”

Octavia sighed. Colgate was right, and for a minute, Octavia was afraid. If the stranger could diagnose her so easily, the others may also have, or at least have come close.

Colgate sat down.

“I have not been happy in a long time.”

“That’s the impression I get.”

Octavia nodded, not sure how to go on, or whether she should. She looked up at the sound of wind, in time to see a curlicue of dust cross the sky. “You mentioned that you have a history of drug usage earlier.”

“Yup.”

“Forgive me if I am intruding, but I would like to know more about that.”

Colgate eyed her. “Oh yeah?”

“You do not seem the sort to me. You seem very together, every time I interact with you.”

“Yeah.”

“If I have offended you—”

“Stop.”

Octavia stopped and tried to see, in the darkness, the emotions on Colgate’s face. The unicorn disclosed little; she was in thought, but her eyes were frozen in place, her brow smooth. After a minute, she saw that Colgate was mumbling something; her lips formed the words “no harm.”

“I got involved with drugs—painkillers, and I prescribed them myself—because it seemed to be the thing to do.”

Octavia frowned.

“What I did in Ponyville seemed the thing to do. Taking drugs and drinking, the thing to do. Leaving rehab, the thing to do, and then going back later.” She put a hoof to her head.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do not know why you did it?”

“I did it because I did it,” Colgate said.

“That is interesting. I cannot say that I understand, but that is interesting.”

“And this is the thing to do, too.” She paused. “Ears up.”

Octavia perked her ears, looking around for the source of the sound she was only just noticing. It was the swirling of wind far off, the sweep of dust.

“Just a storm,” Colgate said at last.

“Would you say that you are impulsive?” Octavia asked.

“I am measured and precise,” Colgate said. “Because that’s my job.”

With no knowledge on which to base an objection, Octavia nodded respectfully. One thing, however, she did notice. “You speak to me as if you are expecting me to lash out at you. Why is that?”

“…That’s not true.”

Octavia looked at her, and Colgate looked right back.

“I will not,” Octavia said. “Forgive me if I seem cold. I have been having a difficult time of late, and I sometimes forget that not everyone is used to my demeanor.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it.” She bowed her head. “I do not wish to give you the wrong impression of my intentions, or my character, least of all here.”

“Fine.”

Octavia watched another signature of dust move on the wind. In the not-quite-night, it shone faintly like unicorn magic. It curled and turned, first a spiral and then a long loop, an articulated thread that seemed to point back the way they had come. She looked around but saw no others of its like.

They went back to their fire and added more kindling. For Octavia, the conversation was not over, and she did not think it was for Colgate either. Both were sensitive about their lives, and Octavia chided herself for her inquiries, knowing that she would not have the courage to answer honestly if Colgate returned them.

“Do you feel the magic out here?” Colgate asked.

“No.”

“You will.”

“Is there a lot of it?”

“Not much right now, but that’ll change, depending on where we go. We might walk through a hot spot, and all of us’ll feel it, even AJ. It’s like a… kind of a headache, but with sound.”

“Like over the Moondrop crater.”

“Yeah, like that. That was worse, though.”

“Is it so bad for unicorns?”

“I don’t feel it particularly strongly.”

Octavia fed a twig to the flames.

“You once said that you became a surgeon because it was the thing to do. That is in addition to all the other things you have done?” She looked up. “What is that?”

Colgate looked up and stood without a word. Not far off, but not near either, Octavia could see two ragged silhouettes moving, large and slow, with hunched, domed backs and flat heads. They seemed to glide across the ground, legs and feet hidden below trailing capes.

The firelight fluttered and faded, Colgate suddenly dashing dust onto it, and before Octavia could turn her attention back, Colgate had closed the distance to kick the logs apart. She hissed, but still did not speak, and Octavia could only stare in astonishment as Colgate danced among the hot coals, scattering flames and throwing shreds of smoke all about. She coughed and stumbled, and Octavia rose to pull her out. With a grunt of exertion, Colgate punted the largest log out of the camp, where it rolled to an ungainly stop, smoldering in the dirt.

Panting, Colgate said, “put that out, Octavia.”

She could do nothing but comply. Lifting a pile of dust in her telekinesis, she watched Colgate out of the corner of her eye. The unicorn was frozen where she stood, as if shocked by her own actions, no brighter than the shadowy figures.

“Get down,” Colgate whispered, crouching. Octavia got to her knees and coughed as she inhaled an errant feather of smoke, her eyes stinging and her chest seizing up as she tried to hold in further sound. The ground was warm, and she could feel the heat off the pulsing coals.

Wind blew again, and the travelers’ cloaks billowed about the ground. Their movement was slow and, she noticed after a moment, pained; the larger of the two limped, and sometimes appeared to lean on the smaller. Their flat faces pointed stoically forward, their course with the wind. Octavia knew they were destined for the bone pile, the same strange certainty that had told her they would not be crushed by the suspended boulders.

Without warning, a greater gust came up, throwing their cloaks before them, long and tattered like waning projections of the bodies they concealed. Coals tumbled and dust scattered across her back, and she closed her eyes as another trail of smoke drifted into her face. One of the larger logs had caught again, its crenated body furry with tiny tongues of light, dipping and rising with its own lifelike rhythm. She wordlessly poured more dust onto it, even the simple spell making her head hurt with the effort.

She turned back to see that one of the shapes had stopped, sunken to the ground. Its friend had stopped too, watching, but offering no assistance to rise, and Octavia held her breath. For a minute, the picture was perfect; she was young again, a warm and impressionable filly, crouched on the hillside just off her parents’ farm. The curve of Colgate’s body was the neighboring hill.

The picture changed back. The memory was just that once more, and she put it aside—though never fully. The figure got back to its feet and their shamble resumed, and then they were past, and then they were out of sight.

Colgate stood up, then sat back down, and Octavia finally looked at her. Both forehooves were burned; she could see the shine of broken blisters on the pasterns and, on one, a little higher up as well.

“Why did you do that?” Octavia asked.

“Hm?”

“That was extremely stupid of you, kicking the fire apart.”

“Hey, I saw a problem, and I dealt with it.”

“By practically jumping onto hot coals?” She wanted to be angry, but she was too tired. “You could have asked me to extinguish them.”

“This was faster,” Colgate mumbled.

“Please.” Octavia sat down beside her. “That is the sort of excuse I would make.” She leaned in. “How bad does it hurt?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“I don’t know,” Colgate repeated. “A couple second-degrees, a couple one and a half higher up.” She lay on her back and put her hooves in the air. Octavia looked at her. “Elevating the wounds. It’s basic medicine,” she said.

“I know that, Colgate.” “Be kind, Octavia. She is wounded,” she thought, and for the moment, she was too distracted to hate herself for the lapse of temper. “We need to wrap those with something.”

“If there’s gauze in the first-aid kit, that’ll do,” Colgate said.

It took Octavia a minute to find the kit and the gauze within, and Colgate watched her spool out a strand.

“I can wrap myself.”

“I am not completely inexperienced,” Octavia said. “Give me your hoof. No, the worse one first.”

“Make sure it’s dry.”

“I am, I am.” Octavia patted it with a cotton swab and began to wrap it. “Seriously, why did you jump on the fire?”

“I told you,” Colgate snapped. Her head jerked to the side, and Octavia had to pause her wrapping as the hoof jerked as well. “I guess I just did. I don’t know.”

“Was it the thing to do?”

Colgate smiled. “I suppose.”

The wind sighed, and smoke drifted over their heads.

“Other hoof now, please.”

As Colgate allowed her other foreleg to be wrapped, she examined the first one. “It hurts, but I’ll be fine.”

“We might have some painkillers too.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I do not want you to be in pain.”

“I said don’t worry about it.” She sighed as Octavia finished with the gauze. “It was the first idea I had, so I did it. That’s all. Better I didn’t, I guess.”

“You should be more careful,” Octavia said after a pause.

“Yeah.”

“What I mean is… I do not know. Just be careful.” She hung her head, ashamed. How many times, she wondered, had she been in Colgate’s position and received advice from the others? How many unnecessary risks had she taken, how many unnecessary injuries had she incurred, simply because she had gone with the first wild thought to spring up? For how many times she had been on the receiving end of such advice, she was woefully unequal to giving it to another.

“Sure,” Colgate said, getting to her hooves. She looked back into the distance, where the figures had gone.

“What do you suppose they were?”

“Indigents. They didn’t see us.”

“We hope.”

Colgate said nothing more, and after a time, Octavia fell asleep. Colgate studied her for several minutes, measuring her breathing, and, finding it to be genuine, allowed herself to drift off as well.

“Rise an’ shine, ladies,” Applejack said, poking Colgate awake. “We got a big day ahead of us.”

“I believe the nights here are shorter,” Octavia said softly.

“They are,” Colgate said. She had no reason to say it, but to hear her own voice.

Applejack prepared breakfast and Colgate told her of the encounter in the night, and her injury. With Octavia’s help, they changed her dressings.

The water torch squeaked on its wheels as they walked, gradually downhill into a wide, grassy depression. On the opposite side, the stone pillars grew in greater numbers, and smoke colored the horizon. It reminded Colgate of the burning watchpoint just outside Grass Graves, and she remembered that it had been she who set it to flame—the natural course of action.

They rested in short grass, in the shade of an oblate boulder, and Applejack dispensed water. A warm breeze rippled the field, turning flowers’ faces up to them. Colgate plucked one and examined it, an overlarge bulb draped with a single, loose petal. She thought of the travelers’ capes, and, obeying an impulse, tucked the flower into her mane. Applejack gave her a smile.

The crossing took them to a wider stretch of clay-colored desert, and they passed under the pillars’ shadows, a soft border that marked their way without ceremony. As the sun turned over them and the clouds slid around and away, they planted their hoofprints in the thin dust, hoofprints and narrow wheel tracks.

Applejack paused only to fan herself with her hat. Unlike the deserts of Equestria, the Tartarus desert did not fatigue her. Sweat dripped down her neck and haunches, but it was the inoffensive sweat of steady work. They only occasionally stopped for water, and as she walked, always heading their little group, she did not think of much. The earthen spires that decorated the boundless horizons; the dark patches of forest or nude rock splayed across distant mountains; and, closer to her eyes, the same queerness of natural arrangement left no impression. She plodded along, took her water, stopped once for Colgate’s injured legs, and peacefully let the world scroll around her.

For her, raised on work and the quiet self confidence so often twined with it, the silence of her thoughts was as an early morning haze. Times were, she would wake up with the sun, take a cup of coffee or a cold apple from the larder, and set hoof out on the still and dew-crisp earth, taking up her daily tasks without audience. Toiling quietly until the day lightened, until the morning chill had again receded into the stubborn ground that made their livelihood, she would work with single-mindedness that could be mistaken for simplicity or inattentiveness. Sleep to work, work to sleep, unbroken hours of silent, content labor—rare with the size of her family, and all the more precious for it.

Stones stood free and warm in the tawny air, backs flat as mirrors and carved with only what designs the dust left in its movement. She did not mark them. They were the same for her as the dried creek bed they jumped; the thorny trees whose roots spread far but near the surface, posing tripping hazards; the floating boulders on their pillars. Someone else’s work, someone else’s life writ upon the land, and not for her to judge. She hummed a song from an obscure part of her youth as they walked beside the vitelline sun.

When they stopped for dinner, the first of the world’s stars were showing themselves, and she leaned their supplies against a fat, sandy boulder, its top touched with short grass. She sat and thought little as Octavia and Colgate vanished and came back with firewood. She stirred when the fire appeared, thinking for a moment how nice it would be to be with the others, but as her eyes settled on the coals, the orange and yellow tongues lapping the shimmering air, all was still once more.

“Bit for your thoughts, Applejack?” Octavia asked.

Applejack blinked and regarded her. She could talk, she knew, but to do so seemed in some way profane. She shook her head then. “Wow. Can you repeat that? Ah must be really out of it, Ah’m sorry.”

“I only asked you what was on your mind.”

“Ahh. Ahh.” She nodded and returned her gaze to the fire. Octavia, like that, was gone. Applejack sighed and adjusted herself where she sat against the stone, moving her tail to a more comfortable position, alone and whole in the warm nighttime. It was similar to death, an immense and ablutionary grace that filled her until she felt she must have been born with it. She was not happy; there was no need for happiness, for there was no sadness, no bitterness.

This she knew, and so knowing, she slept.

Octavia didn’t mind that Applejack had fallen asleep, only that she might have to wait until morning to speak her mind, to share what had happened. She could share with Colgate, she knew, but Colgate did not know her as well, and she did not wish to presume closeness.

She lay on her back and stared at the night sky, eyes bloodshot and sore, stomach stinging, muscles aching, ears ringing, and smiled to herself. Her heart felt alive in her chest, like a baby bird fluttering its pitiful wings, a joy that had no voice but that she knew must express itself before long. It had come over her as they walked, slow and unstoppable—which was best, for she knew her old, twisted self would fight the coming with every terrible thought and memory it could.

She closed her eyes and saw no images from the past, and sighed to herself. She had been doing it all day, each time less surprised and also more. Her old feelings had been sapped from her body, cleaned away by the dust or blown on the wind, or perhaps shriveled under the stoic glares of the floating boulders and the diminished sunshine they reflected. She had been afraid at first, noticing the change.

Under the blanket of night, though, the only fear was that she might not be able to adequately express her feelings when morning came. She was light, but she was also empty. For every second of the day’s quiet walk, little pieces of herself had chipped off. Guilt had softened back into kindness, anger had spiraled back and collected itself into a pearl of assured patience, and fear had simply faded.

Her memories remained, but as still images. Life was not created from a collective of important moments, or a collage of the great and small; it simply was, different for everyone but essentially the same, and it was no different for her. She had done what she had done, and life went on.

“Still awake?” Colgate mumbled.

“Very.”

“Just checking.”

Octavia forced herself up. She was still exhausted, her already truncated sleep the night before beset with the usual nightmares, but her excitement moved her to stand, to pace a circle around the campfire, to smile and warm her chest against the flames.

“Something has happened to me today,” she said.

“Mm?”

“I…” Her one fear dropped into her thoughts like a pebble into a pail of water. She was, in fact, not sure how to express herself. Had she her cello, she would have instead painted the night with its music. She smiled to herself, the small fear turning over and becoming an eager challenge. “I feel like a new pony. I feel reborn, like I…” She shook her head, amused at her inadequacy, and laughed.

Colgate looked up from the fire. It was not the polite laugh that Octavia used to signal that she was paying attention.

She wiped tears from her eyes when she stopped, the peals of her high-pitched laugh leaving a wide silence in their wake, a bell rang once and no more.

“This is different,” Colgate finally said.

“I feel beautiful,” Octavia said, trotting over. “I do not know why or how, and I do not care. Something… I see now, in a way I never knew one could see. I see myself, and I see you!”

Colgate looked at her.

“I apologize, I realize that I am not making much sense. I am just… I feel better.”

“Yeah?”

“I feel like I own my life now. Does that make sense? Your face suggests that it does not. Let me think here. I feel like…” She scrunched her face in thought, wishing harder that she had her cello, and eventually found the right words. “I have made mistakes in my life, and there is nothing wrong with that.”

“Happy for you.”

Octavia offered her hoof, and, after a moment of surprise, Colgate shook it.

“Thank you for listening to me. I am not a poet, I cannot express myself with language how I would like, but I thank you nonetheless. I… I…” She looked into the uneven waves of dark desert all around, and knew what she needed to do. “I am very, very tired, but I must take a walk. I cannot sleep when this is all so new to me. Watch, would you? That I do not stray out of sight. Call me back if you think I have been gone too long.”

Colgate only nodded, herself coming to terms with a change, and stunned by the one in Octavia.

“Thank you again.” Octavia smiled a true smile, her lined face a stranger’s for just a second, and merged with the darkness.

A procession of night strolls had come before, some bored, some hopeful, the majority tenaciously and desperately contrite. Octavia walked over the hard ground, kicking up dust and tapping across plates of rock, her mouth and nose wide to accept the night’s delicate sweetness. How much, she wondered, had she missed in her well of sorrow? No matter, she thought, for life was long; more opportunities would come. She knelt and sniffed the dirt, amused to think how she might look to Colgate.

“I have made mistakes,” she said aloud. “And that is okay.” Saying it did not make it so; it was true independent of her words, but she felt better for it, as though happiness were inflating her to leave no space for the agonizing thoughts that she knew it was her way to entertain. A universal pardon had come to her, she thought, and it could not be more real if it had come from the mouths of those she had wronged. She kicked a cloud of dust and let it dissipate around her head. She wanted to smell like the earth, to return to her friends cleansed of her old self.

“This is most certainly it,” she said to herself. The turning point, the very instant that they had won against evil—or she had, at least.

For a time, she stood still and smiled at nothing, breathing in life. The feelings had slowed, but not stopped growing, and as she calmed down, she was able to better examine herself. She was nothing more complicated than happy, and touched with disappointment that it had taken her so long to realize it. She tried to imagine when and where it had taken root, from what memory it had come. Her mind returned again to the night, the sky’s vast face, the cold starlight and the comforting emptiness. She let herself get lost in a pattern of stars, but they told her nothing.

“Not the sky, but the solitude,” Octavia thought. “That is not right either. They are both a part of it. Is it this? Is it being out in the world?” Her night walks blended together in her mind, a thin layer around her true self, the true self she was still getting to know.

“Maybe I just enjoy being out in nature.” The idea seemed to ring true to her, and why should it not, she thought. The feelings were simple, merely awesome in scale, and there was no need for grandiosity in their origins or even completeness in their designs. Life was a collection of incomplete pieces fit together in the narrow frame of the individual experience, and that, too, was not bad. If the reason for her change were to be best explained with a guess, then so be it.

She yawned and snapped her head back up, lulled by her contemplation, and she giggled to herself as she turned back toward the camp, her joy spent in a flash and replaced with the silken feeling of fast coming sleep. Colgate’s bright eyes watched her reenter the fire’s pale circle, and she let herself fall on her side. In her head, the demonstration was her one and only tribute to the grim, lifeless Octavia, part joke and part acknowledgement.

“I was like that then, but I do not need to be like that now.”

Applejack hardly spoke in the morning, and Octavia spoke much, and Colgate listened and replied accordingly as she helped prepare breakfast. It was more of the same from her: inarticulate expressions of happiness or relief, apologies for not being clear, occasional laughter. Colgate finally saw how Octavia and Pinkie could be related as the gray mare rambled and interrupted herself.

She knew what the other two did not suspect, that it was the magic of the land that had crept into them all and forced a change. What sort of magic it was, she had no idea, but she had known to expect something, and also that it would not last. Her particular reaction allowed her to dread that knowledge with clarity that was frightening in and of itself, for it was clarity that had descended upon her. The stream of bad ideas, incomplete thoughts, and momentary desires had been quelled, like a TV channel set to static and finally switched off.

What she was left with, she did not immediately trust, for she could not know that the thoughts were correct. True cognizance and passing pieces of thought had so often mingled that she was only sure she would be okay that morning, when she remembered an idea she had had the night previous. The wheels on the torch needed inspection, for she had noticed them squeaking; in the new Tartarus dawn, the idea seemed sound still.

So they checked the wheels, changed her dressings, and were off. A bushy mound of forested land had appeared in their path, and by Octavia’s reckoning, they were on track to walk right through it. As if satisfied with her simple report, Octavia wasted no time in charging ahead to scout the desert scrub.

In its middle, the forest appeared as a Gaia forest, a fluffy canopy that was green and alive, as it should be, and a small relief after the mild desert; but it fanned out on both sides to become dense and pale, like moth wings claimed by the dust, weighed down and wed to the land. The trees crowded tight as they shrunk back into the ground, losing their shape and color until Colgate found her eyes following the unbroken contour of a blanched hillside, which, followed farther along the horizon, became the indistinct shape of far off mountains, themselves patched with forests. She thought of Twilight in Tartarus, the opportunities for exploration, and wondered whether there might be time later to return.

The morning sun warmed the top of her head and her horn tingled not unpleasantly from magic exposure. She thought it odd that all three of them could feel the magic’s effects, though only one was a unicorn, but did not worry the question. Better to ask Twilight later, she thought, and let her mind wander in the present. It had plenty of places to go.

During her blurry days with Powder Rouge, she had experienced a feeling very similar, and it was for that reason that she was not concerned, for she knew the change was temporary. Alcohol and painkillers had allowed her a smudgy window through which to glimpse the world with her present eyes, an imperfect imitation of clarity that she had mistaken for the real article. What she had gained in singleness of mind, she had lost in impulse control, but it was only as she strode along the others’ tracks, trying not to breathe too much of their dust, that she realized what it meant for her past actions.

She thought about herself, tentatively asking herself questions and drawing out answers, always afraid of uncovering something she would bring along after the white noise reasserted itself, as she knew it would when they left the cloud of magic. For a peaceful time, the notion of herself bore no weight; it was a thought experiment, a feat of theoretical acrobatics, like contemplating a paradox. Always before, she could dismiss the question when it came, but with the noise shut off, she didn’t, and by the time they were stopping for their first water break, she had placed herself back in Canterlot—specifically, at a candlelit table, surrounded by jovial ponies and the smoldering ends of cigars.

The reaction that she remembered was of rushed anger and, later, worried disappointment. She hadn’t known why she had burned the pony then, she had just done it. Her reason at the time was that it was her attempt at a joke.

“Because it’s not a joke,” she thought. “They didn’t see it that way because it wasn’t that thing. I was hurting someone.” Her thoughts faltered, her conception of the self turned in on itself, and Octavia nudged her along. Applejack stood at the head of the group, the same placid look on her face from the day before.

“Hang back, Octavia,” Colgate said. “I’d like to run some things past you.”

“Please do,” Octavia said. “Anything at all.”

“What do you see when you look at me?”

Octavia looked her up and down, her head bobbing freely with her loose gait. “I see a middle-aged unicorn with not a lot of weight on her, kind of like me.”

“I’m seriously asking you.”

“I know, that was my answer. That is what I see.”

Colgate frowned. No unwelcome suspicions crowded in to smother her reaction, no expectations for some cruel punchline—which, always in the past, might not come immediately, but days or even weeks down the line. She merely thought, “how can that be all?” She asked it.

“Because, if you want the truth, that is all I feel comfortable saying about you. I do not know you well enough to guess at anything deeper.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I do not. Only what I have heard.”

“What’s that?” She didn’t care to hear; she was stuck on the first reply. Octavia did not know her, had no way of knowing what she had done or what had been done to her. She wondered whether that might be the same reason it was so easy for Applejack to assert that they meant Colgate no harm.

“Very little. I know you are educated, that you took care of yourself for a long time. I know you had difficulties with addiction—for which I am sorry to hear. I can assume that you are a good mare, dedicating your life to medicine as you have.”

“No harm,” Colgate said to herself.

“Do no harm, yes, I have heard that phrase.”

Colgate glanced at her. “So my being here, my being… with everyone, that doesn’t bug you?”

“Why would it?”

She searched Octavia’s face for guile, but found none. In the past, all clarity had come with acute knowledge of the danger that surrounded her. Under the influence, she had been able to react to it preemptively, and in the more clinical mindset of her professional life, she had been able to set it aside. Now, from two separate ponies, she was faced with the likelihood that her fears had been for nothing.

“I’m used to expecting the worst from folks,” Colgate said. “That’s why I’m surprised.”

“Why is that?”

“Reasons. I don’t know. I might not figure it out in time.”

“What does that mean?”

They stopped, Octavia nearly running into Applejack. She stood, hat balanced on an outstretched hoof, looking into a muddy stream at the bottom of a shallow gully. Thinking it was the stream that had stopped them, Octavia strode forward and jumped it.

“Ladies,” Applejack finally said, and shook her head. “How long have we been walking?”

“Since sunrise today,” Octavia said.

“Whaaaat?” Her voice was quiet and strained with thought, as if she were just waking up from a deep slumber.

“Come on,” Colgate said, her doctor’s voice coming out. “We’re gonna cross this and then walk some more, and you’ll feel better soon.”

“Ah…”

“Come on, you can do it.” She hopped the gully and beckoned Applejack to follow. The earth pony hopped weakly and splashed in the mud, and Octavia helped her clamor out.

“What the hay is all this?” Applejack whispered.

“You’ll be fine, just walk with us,” Colgate said. Applejack followed her reluctantly, and Colgate looked around, searching for signs of the waning magic, whether it would be manifest in the world. She could see the pale reflection of sunlight off blades of grass, not far off.

“This coming field. The grass eats the magic away. Does that make sense?” she thought. “Who cares?” She paused, catching the first invasive thought immediately. The magic would slip out of her soon as well.

“All right, all right,” Applejack said. “Ah’m comin’ along, Ah think.”

“Further,” Colgate said. Already, the testiness had come back to her voice, and she was only distantly concerned, and only for a minute.

Yet, as they crossed into the field, as the flowers tilted their heads to mark the ponies’ passing, one thought did remain unobstructed: “they mean me no harm.” If only one truth were to stick from her brief period of clarity, Colgate thought, it was a good one.

“I cannot believe it,” Octavia said.

“All right, this is far enough,” Colgate said. “Let’s take a break, I’ll explain what happened.”

“You know?” Applejack asked.

“I’ve had a little education about Tartarus.” She paused, realizing what she had said, and sighed. Her imagined advantage was gone. “Basically, we all walked through a field of magic, and it affected our brains.” She shrugged, not sure what else to say. She had no interest in sharing her personal experience; that interest had dried up with the clarity, and dull fear had replaced it.

“How long were we in that field?”

“Couple days.”

“Couple days?”

“Do you not recall sleeping?” Octavia asked.

“No!” She took off her hat and wiped her brow. “Ah coulda sworn… So the day before yesterday, that really happened. Where we found that little dip in the ground an’ rested by those three boulders?”

“That happened,” Colgate said.

“Shoot. Ah thought that was a dream.” She wiped her brow again. “At least it was a good dream.”

“Does it not bother you?” Octavia asked. “I, personally, am bothered.”

“Of course you are,” Colgate said.

Octavia gave her a dark look.

“Hey, hey,” Applejack said. “Now how come you two ain’t all discombobulated?”

“It affected us differently,” Colgate said. “That’s what I assume. You felt like you were asleep, Octavia and I felt other things.”

“What did you two feel?”

“I cannot describe it,” Octavia said.

“I felt fine,” Colgate lied.

Applejack replaced her hat, sighed. “Well, Ah dunno what to say ‘bout all this, except thank Celestia an’ Luna both we’re outta there.” She laughed uneasily. “Ah’m a mite hungry now, but Ah reckon we’d like to put some more distance between us’n that magic, right?”

“Let’s get closer to the forest,” Colgate said.

“My thoughts exactly.”

So it was that, as the grass thickened under their hooves and the last traces of magic swept clean from their minds, the ground rose and the trees with it, short but getting taller with each minute. They selected a covered spot beside a still pond for their camp, and all three mares helped raise the fire.

While Octavia brooded in the shade of a nearby tree, back to her old self, Colgate watched Applejack tend the fire.

“You’ve been dead,” she finally blurted out. “Was it a lot like walking under all that magic?”

Applejack considered for a time. Eventually, she said, “This time it came up on me slower, but yeah, they were ‘bout the same.”