At the forest’s edge, they took a moment for Octavia to orient herself to the nearest letter sigil. From afar, it had struck Applejack how abruptly the trees appeared out of the desert, with apparently no intervening grassland between; in the forest’s first shadows, she was struck more, for the trees they had seen were but a shell. Out of the white desert ground, as the stone spires behind them, extensions of earth grew and spread, bleached and chalky spines that turned to wood near their tops, smooth bark lined with small, broad leaves. Only behind did she see the trees more to her expectation, things with clear delineation between ground and organism.

The smell of water drew them inwards, their torch swaying and creaking in its harness. The stone trees shrunk and turned to bushes, then weeds, then pale stains of imitation moss as they entered the wood proper, heads bowed under a soft drizzle that came from the canopy, and not the sky.

“Would you just look at that?” Applejack said to herself. In the space of a few minutes, they had crossed into a misty world of running water and green life. Grass rose to their knees and wild mushrooms bobbed under silver strands of water, which ran from spherical bubbles of delicate greenery articulated around needle-thin branches, balanced on—and, this time, connected to—kinked trunks that rose everywhere from soft soil. No lower branches reached from the bent trees; they grew as tall, twisted hairs from the earth, blooming only at their terminus. As Applejack stretched her back, using a tree to balance herself, she observed the shimmer of water inside the sphere of branches, the source of the false rainfall.

They traveled along a thin trail between the trees, never losing the sun. The air was gently tinged chartreuse, a sunset color that gave pools of water a golden cast and the mud a foundry dullness. Of everything, the rain trees were the tallest, their wild shadows twisting across smaller versions of more familiar trees. They took water—still from the torch, for there was no trusting the false rain—at the edge of a wide pond, on the opposite side sagging the aspect of a tiny maple, its trunk ringed with gray toadstools.

As she looked into the water, Applejack considered her earlier position, her sleepwalking grace. She had expected one of the others to bring it up, but they hadn’t.

“Ah’m feelin’ a lot better now,” she said. “The change of scenery’s part of it, Ah expect.”

“Not for long,” Colgate said, joining her to look into the water. A floating flower closed as her shadow touched it. “If we stay here much longer, we’ll start to feel the effects.” She paused, as if considering. “I’m already feeling them, a little bit.”

“Unicorn sensitivity?”

“Yeah, that.”

“How’s it feel?”

“Garden variety headache, but it’s not gonna get better, or even let up. It’ll just get worse and worse.”

“How much worse will it get?” Octavia asked.

“How should I know?”

“We’d better not stop fer long, then,” Applejack said. “Ah’m ready to keep movin’ when you girls are.”

“Any time,” Octavia said.

“We’ll keep off the path, though. Ah dunno ‘bout y’all, but Ah’m a little scared of meetin’ someone here. Might not be a friendly face.”

They returned to the path for long enough to find a convenient way of leaving it without aimlessly walking into the underbrush, and at the edge between trail and wilderness, they stopped to get Applejack’s torch strapped to her back. Octavia took the wheels.

“Nothing dampens your spirits, does it?” Octavia asked.

“Me?” Applejack asked, doffing her hat to let a stream of water anoint her. “Ah try not to let it.”

“Someone has to,” Colgate said.

“You are braver than I,” Octavia said.

“Oh, pish posh,” Applejack said. “Ah ain’t braver’n any one of y’all. We’re all here, ain’t we? We’re all walkin’.”

“Yes, but…”

“But bupkiss, Octavia.” They crossed a second trail, taking a moment to examine a sign marked in unfamiliar lettering. She continued as they negotiated a particularly thick tangle of grass. “If you must know, dyin’ really did a number on me.”

“As it would for us all,” Octavia said.

“Exactly. Ah’m not one of those tough as nails sorts who’ll tell ya it ain’t a big deal. Ah don’t got that… Shoot, what’s the word? Ah read it in one of Twilight’s books, Ah’ve been waitin’ to use it. Anyway, Ah ain’t that. Dyin’ affected me in a lot of ways, an’ Ah know it ain’t the same fer everypony. Luna actually told me this, she said you basically got two options if you come back. You can let it get to you, an’ spend the rest of yer life wonderin’ if you deserve it—the reprieve, Ah mean—or feelin’ bad fer yerself, or livin’ in fear of the thing that’s gonna get ya fer good; basically, you can make yerself miserable. Or you can embrace the opportunity an’ live life how it’s meant to be lived, how you wanna do it. You can guess which path Ah’m workin’ on.”

“It is fortunate that she was there to show you that.”

“Yeah, well, Ah like to believe that Ah’d’ve figured it out fer myself in time.”

“So you don’t mind being here?” Colgate asked.

“Ah didn’t say that. Ah mind bein’ in Tartarus, course Ah do. It ain’t the pony hell like what Ah expected, but Ah don’t like it, an’ that little comment of yers ‘bout the headaches comin’, that Ah like even less. But am Ah gonna let that ruin my day? Heck no. Am Ah gonna come crawlin’ outta that Snowdrift gateway a broken mare? Absolutely not.”

“Like I said,” Octavia said, “braver than I.”

“Now, you can’t look at it that way. Yer just beatin’ yerself down like that.”

“Why not go back to yesterday?” Colgate asked her, but Octavia only hung her head.

“Anypony can do it, you don’t have to die fer it. Just so happens that Ah did.” She shrugged and laughed softly to herself. “That’s the way it goes sometimes. No use cryin’ over spilled… life, Ah suppose. Ah guess that sounds pretty bad, but you know what Ah mean.”

“Is that not a rather selfish mindset, though?” Octavia asked. “If you spend the rest of your life enjoying the time you have been granted, then you will be blind to the suffering of others, to some degree or another. How can you abide that?”

“Ah hadn’t thought ‘bout it. Ah guess it’s important to keep that in perspective.”

“You cannot just turn away from the misery of the world because you were fortunate. Others are not, and you must remember that.”

“Happiness ain’t selfishness,” Colgate said.

“No, I am not saying that.”

“But too much ain’t good either,” Applejack said. “Right?”

“You just need to keep things in perspective, as you said.”

The sound of running water was coming closer, and through the weeping trees, they could see the flinty reflections of a moving stream.

“I am feeling that headache,” Octavia said.

“Shoot,” Applejack said. “That means Ah’m next.” Using a sapling rain tree to hang her hat for a minute, Applejack smoothed back her mane and looked on the creek they had reached. Part of her wanted to forge straight through, but she stopped herself.

“Can you teleport?” Octavia asked Colgate.

“Never tried, but I doubt it. You?”

“I have done so once or twice. I do not like it.”

“But I bet you will now, huh?”

“If I must.”

“Right, always.” They contemplated the creek, too wide to jump but only just, its mossy banks gleaming with the same strange light that seemed to effuse from the trees themselves. Fish swayed on the bottom, long and thin, holding with the current. Colgate grabbed a rock and skipped it downstream.

“This Tartarus knowledge of yers, Cole—got anythin’ on the waters?” Applejack asked.

“My knowledge starts and ends with the fact that the magic here is seeping into us. Yes, as I speak, it does so.”

“If it seeps into us, then does it also go into the water an’ stuff?”

“I dunno.”

Applejack crept to the bank and leaned out, her golden mane falling to catch the eerie light. She looked both ways, and, unsatisfied, returned to her hat.

“Did anyone see a log on the way? Perhaps we could drag that over and use it as a bridge,” Octavia said.

“Y’ever haul timber before, Octavia?” Applejack asked. “Even fer two earth ponies in good health, that’s a tough ask.”

“I have telekinesis.”

“Logs’re heavy, Ah’m just sayin’.”

“Have you hauled timber?”

Applejack picked at a blade of grass that had caught in her tail. “No.”

Colgate watched the two of them, and the water moving behind. She sighed and pushed past them, and, without giving herself time to think about it, dove in. She splayed her legs out and let herself land chest first, soaking her fur and chilling her skin. Behind her, Applejack called out, not completely disappointed—for she was actually glad that someone had taken the initiative, and done what she had wanted to.

Sputtering and struggling, Colgate’s hooves wheeled and scraped the bottom, her hooves clicking off stones and brushing grass. The water was deeper than it appeared, and she brought her head down to see, even though she was already sinking. A splash behind drove her head back up, and Applejack dog-paddled past, a grin on her face. She was the first to climb out, and Colgate followed reluctantly, reaching the shallower banks opposite and staying immersed.

“I cannot swim,” Octavia said.

“Jump out, Ah’ll meet ya halfway!” Applejack called. “This water, Ah tell ya, it’s brisk!”

Octavia looked disdainfully at the water, as if she might not jump, and then launched herself into the water with a pitiful splash that bespoke the weight she had lost. Applejack went back out to help her, and Colgate put her head below again. The fish had all scattered, but the dark green strands of grass remained below, moving independently of the current around them. On the opposite bank, a muddy brown shape undulated, resembling a snake from the Gaia. Colgate remembered that certain dangerous snakes hunted in rivers and streams, and wondered how close they may have come to meeting one.

With a sequence of splashes and gasps for air, Applejack and Octavia emerged as one, the former clutching her charge and still flashing her vivacious smile. For Applejack, it was all sport, he face seemed to say.

“Get on out of there, Cole,” she said. “You don’t wanna catch a cold out here.”

“You’re not my mom,” Colgate said, dunking her head again. She remembered, in Ponyville, flailing uselessly in the river not far from her hospital. She would soon join the Datura again, and the invasive thoughts of doing so, which she had not the ability to recognize, had terrified her. Splashing about in the water had given her a sense of calm that did not last, and, months later, resting in the Tartarus creek did the same. The invasive thoughts had become routine; the paranoia that drove her with relentless fire in the past had faded to background anxiety. It crossed her mind that she might drown herself, but the idea disappeared in an instant, as such thoughts often did.

“Remember that they mean you no harm, Cole buddy,” she said to herself, her words lost underwater.

“C’mon, Cole,” Applejack said. “We gotta get goin’. Octavia thought she heard somethin’.”

Colgate pushed herself out and trudged up the banks. Her gauze had loosened around her pasterns, and she took a moment to remove it. Balling it up, she held it for a few minutes, then cast it into the underbrush as they walked.

“I’m not sure I’ve heard the whole story on this death thing,” Colgate said. She wanted to get her mind off herself. “I just keep hearing references to it.”

“Shoot, all ya gotta do is ask,” Applejack said. “How do Ah start?”

“We should find a place to dry off,” Octavia said.

“Hard to do, under all these trees.”

“Perhaps we should cut some.”

“Ah don’t like that idea. Look at ‘em.”

“They are just trees.”

“We don’t know that,” Colgate said.

“Ah know one thing, Ah sure ain’t gonna complain ‘bout that piddly little airship shower no more,” Applejack said. “Heck, you know what Ah just realized? Snowdrift is gonna be cold when we get outta here. Ah hope they’ve got sweaters fer us when we meet ‘em.”

“If we meet them,” Octavia amended.

“No, Ah mean when. Anyway, sorry, Colgate, didn’t mean to blow you off like that. Yeah, my death. Hmmm, now where to begin?”

As Applejack told her story, starting with the dam in Applewood and backtracking to the curse that had led them to it, and had led to her infusing it with her spirit, they worked deeper into the forest. Ceaseless streams of water wet their backs and heads, and clouds of insects irritated their eyes and muzzles. The mingled smells of mud, algae, and trees filled their noses as they crossed misty expanses of blooming earth. Colgate grabbed another flower along the way and replaced the withered one in her mane, dripping dirty water onto her face.

The air turned greener as the sun went down, and the forest was cast in an oddly magical light, trees and water taking on emerald sheens as shadows lengthened. They paused at a bend of the earlier stream, weighing their chances for safety at the prospect of shelter, which appeared in the form of an overgrown mill.

Curtained by falling water from the bent trees that rose high above its roof, the mill’s jade walls leaned inward with the weight of time, a waterwheel rusted in place on its side. The windows were spread with grime and ivy, a small well burst open to admit a massive tree. No chimney or gutters were visible, but on the side opposite the wheel, a wide pipe connected the building to the ground, its sides split and corroded.

“Abandoned,” Applejack said. “You think?”

“I think,” Colgate said.

They approached the mill carefully, but by the time they were looking through the front doors, all were convinced that they were alone. Broken shafts of light from a hole in the roof penetrated musty shadow, and Octavia’s gray light revealed nothing strange. A table, taller than the sorts they were accustomed to, and a rough counter indicated that they had entered an ancient dining room. Plates had affixed to the far wall by the slow encroachment of moss and lichen.

“Sun’s going down,” Colgate said. “I say we stay here. Good?”

“Fine by me,” Applejack said. “You s’pose we got a bedroom here?”

They found the bedroom at the far end of the mill, right next to the wheel’s gear house, rusted and inert and showing through a broken pane of wall. The mattress was gray and infested, a soft slab for insects and fungi, smelling of decay.

“We’ll just stay out here,” Applejack said when they returned to the kitchen. “It’s by the door anyway, in case we need to make a hasty exit. Ah hope we don’t.”

Colgate scanned the walls, and noticing one of the windows was much larger than the others, approached it. She took up a hooked wooden carving, what she thought might have been a bookend, and, at a distance, smashed it repeatedly into the overgrown glass.

“What are you doing?” Octavia asked tiredly.

“This is my thinking,” Colgate said. She remembered Applejack’s request from earlier, that she explain herself better, and it was a few moments before she had ordered herself. In her head, the ideas fit perfectly, and did not need examination.

“Whoever lived here probably didn’t have ears, or wasn’t sensitive to sound. I got that from the fact that the bedroom was right next to the waterwheel. The gears and all that, they didn’t keep the pony—whatever—awake. Right?” A corner of the window gave way, the glass shattering and collecting in a tangle of vines. “Lots of windows though, so they had eyes. I figure…” She grunted as she hit the window some more, punching a hole in the middle and letting the dying light in. “I figure these windows were placed for a good reason, and this one, being the biggest, it was more than decorative.”

“How’s that?” Applejack asked, searching the walls for a fireplace.

“It faces a dense section of forest, I noticed walking up. If some wild beast or whatever might appear, that’s a good place for it to appear from. That’s why I wanna smash this, so we can see it too.”

“Ain’t you sharp?” Applejack asked. “Yer a bona fide detective, Cole.”

“Here, let me,” Octavia said, and with a forceful shove of gray magic, kicked the window out of the wall. Tatters of vine and leaf dangled around the edges, and warm, moist air entered.

“Cool, good,” Colgate said, tossing her bookend out as well.

“All of that from a window an’ a bedroom,” Applejack said to herself. “If that’s what they teach you in college, Ah’d’ve maybe went.”

“College is what you make of it,” Octavia said.

“What’s for dinner?” Colgate asked.

After a brief debate, they set up a small fire under the hole in the roof, and were finally able to dry off. They re-wrapped Colgate’s injured legs; in the creek, some of the blisters had ruptured, but Colgate didn’t complain.

“I was only teasing you earlier, when I said you should teleport across the river,” Colgate said. “I don’t know if you got that.”

“I did not,” Octavia said. “It was not a very funny joke.”

“Yeah.” Colgate looked at her wrappings, her legs stinging underneath. “I didn’t mean any harm by it.”

“You know, you do have that way ‘bout you, Colgate,” Applejack said. “Sort of a flatness—no offense—that it makes ya kinda hard to read. You know, if yer jokin’ an’ whatnot.”

“Yeah.”

“So, if ya don’t mind my askin’, have you given any thought to our discussion earlier?”

“Which?”

“From the crash, when you…” She looked at Octavia.

“She can hear about it,” Colgate said. “It won’t come as a surprise; we had similar words earlier as well.”

“I do not wish to intrude,” Octavia said.

“Ask your question, Applejack.”

“No, Ah was just wonderin’ if you’d thought it over anymore. You were pretty shaken up, so Ah was hopin’ that would change if Ah gave it some time.”

Colgate thought. Part of her asserted that Applejack was testing her defenses, seeing whether Colgate were willing to trust her, to make herself vulnerable. “Suppose she is,” she thought. “So what? We’re all dying sometime.” She cleared her throat. “I’m growing more accustomed to the thought, but it’s kinda hard. You, uh… It’s hard to accept.”

“What’s hard about it?”

“I don’t know.” Her default response, spoken before she had actually thought about the question. “What I mean is, I’m not used to not looking behind my back all the time, so it’s just a habit.”

“You always feel like you gotta be on guard.”

“That sounds right.”

“I do not recall you speaking about that earlier,” Octavia said.

Colgate licked her lips, suddenly alert and nervous.

“What d’ya think it means fer you, not havin’ to worry so much anymore?” Applejack asked. “If ya don’t mind—Ah’m sayin’ that a lot lately, ain’t Ah? You strike me as the type who has certain difficulties makin’ friends.”

“It’s the keeping, not the making,” Colgate said, thinking of Rouge and Fleur.

“Fair enough.”

“In answer to your question, I can only imagine that I’m… I don’t really know, because I don’t know who I’m gonna run into later. If I get lucky, then I’ll be safe. If not, then this is for nothing.”

“But if it makes you a better mare, then it’ll be worth it, won’t it?”

“Better than what? I am who I am already, that’s not gonna change.”

“There is always potential for a pony to better herself,” Octavia said. “If you can do it by learning to be less defensive, then you must do it.”

Colgate narrowed her eyes at Octavia.

“You’ll be happier, that Ah can tell ya right now,” Applejack said. “You sure don’t seem happy now, or when we first met either.”

Colgate shrugged.

“Ah’m just sayin’. But hey, it’s good yer thinkin’ ‘bout it, at least. As you said, yer gettin’ used to the idea. No one can expect more’n that at this point.”

“Right.”

“But… in my experience, anyway, an’ definitely if you intend to go along with us to the end, yer gonna need to get past that, past this.”

“Friendship is magic,” Colgate said.

“That exactly. Where there’s fear, there ain’t no friendship.”

Colgate nodded, wanting to think more clearly on Applejack’s words—advice, she realized, meant for her and given in goodwill—but her mind was stuck on Octavia’s assertion that she must change if she could. It seemed out of place to her, something uttered for no purpose but to trip her up.

“Celestia, Cole, no harm. No harm.”

“If you’d like—”

“I gotta think about it,” Colgate said. “It’s a difficult topic for me to chew on, okay?”

“All right, no problem.”

Her thoughts faltered; she had expected Applejack to resist.

Talk returned to more mundane things, and Colgate simply listened, losing herself in her fears and pulling herself out each time—she was never more prepared for the next onslaught of worry for it. Applejack thought that she was feeling the beginnings of the impending headache, and Octavia, after much coaxing, admitted to pain all across her body. Malnutrition.

Like the desert, the forest was unseemly lit of its own virtue, everything of a green hue that made sickly and dreamlike their motions in tourmaline firelight. Applejack and Octavia swam in Colgate’s eyes, their talk thick and distant.

“Colgate? What d’ya make of this?” Applejack asked, poking Colgate in the side. Colgate stiffened and scrambled up from the floor, aware in a terrified flash that she had been asleep. In the immediacy of her revelation, she felt only fear and disgust at letting her guard down, and she had to force calm back onto herself.

“That clicking,” Octavia said. “Do you hear it? Is it another effect of the magic?”

“Quiet,” Colgate said, ears up. She had grown used to the trickle of water all around, and found it initially difficult to hear past it, but when she did, she could distinguish a soft, mandibular clicking, like darning needles, relaxed and consistent. It came from above and about, but she could not tell whether it surrounded them, or was simply far off.

“Is it the trees?” Applejack asked.

“Let’s look,” Colgate said, going to the broken window. Seeing nothing, she pushed open the front door and stepped into the chilly, damp air. “Octy, your ears are more sensitive than mine, get out here.”

Octavia joined her. “Do not call me that. Also, only one of my ears is sensitive, thank you very much.”

“Right.”

Octavia stood with her head tilted for a minute. “There is more than one source.”

“We’re not alone,” Applejack mumbled from the sagging doorway.

“I don’t see anything,” Colgate said, taking a tentative step toward the dripping trees. The sound was vaguely familiar to her, but she could not place from where or when. Applejack exited and walked the other way, eyes to the canopy.

“Above us!” Octavia said, dashing for the door. “I saw a shadow pass above."

“Whoa nelly,” Applejack said. “Ladies…” She stood by the wheel, and they hastened to join her, where they could see a clearer spot in the treetops, though not as clear as earlier. Dark, spherical shapes hovered just above the upper branches, turning around one another, not touching, aimless but clearly alive, or guided intelligently.

Octavia looked directly up, shielding her eyes as best she could. “They are all around us.”

“Let’s go then,” Colgate said, ducking around the corner and reappearing a moment later, dragging their supplies behind her in an unkempt pile. “C’mon, grab your stuff, we can’t be here.”

“Have you seen these?” Applejack asked, strapping the torch to her back.

“Let’s just go. Octavia! Get!”

Octavia tore her eyes from the treetops and grabbed her saddlebags, and Colgate ran inside again. Their little campfire spat and crackled in the middle of the floor, and she almost jumped on it a second time. Stopping herself, she took up a piece of scaffolding from the fire’s heart and swept it across the blaze, throwing cinders to the walls in a quick, dazzling clap of wood. Tossing her scaffolding carelessly, she dashed outside to the others.

“This way,” Octavia said weakly. “I feel a sigil in this direction.” Tired and burdened, they ran into the forest, the water cold and the underbrush treacherous in green nighttime. The clicking disappeared under their uneven hoofsteps and ragged breathing.

“Stop,” Applejack said, pausing by a circle of mossy stones. She wiped her brow. “Let’s just hold on an’ examine our options.”

“Onwards,” Colgate simply said, slowing to a trot.

“No, we’re stoppin’. Pausin’, at least.” She caught her breath, a small part of her wondering what had Colgate so nervous; the odd shadows had not seemed to notice them.

“Is that the house?” Octavia asked between breaths.

Colgate didn’t look back, but Applejack did, smelling the smoke and seeing the orange glow between trees. At first glance, it seemed almost natural, her earlier associations with Tartarus snapping back into place to remind her that fire was no surprise. “The campfire!” she yelped, understanding. “Ponyfeathers! We left it in there!”

“The forest will put it out, will it not?” Octavia asked.

“We should be moving,” Colgate said.

“Hold on.”

“Fire spreads, c’mon.”

“She’s right,” Applejack said, shouldering her torch again, almost knocking herself off balance with its shifting weight. She thought it likely the fire would not catch them, not with so much water falling, but Colgate’s energy—her pacing, her disturbed glances all around—put her, too, on edge.

“We’re getting out,” Colgate said suddenly, beginning at a trot and quickly diving into a gallop that they struggled to follow, under a line of streams and across a glowing carpet of flowers.

“Colgate!” Applejack called.

“Fire’s comin’!”

They raced through the flowers and over a thin offshoot from the nearby creek, Applejack nearly slipping in the mud, conscious of the sound of Colgate not far ahead of her, but also growing more distant as she flung herself through bushes and low branches, heedless and light without cargo. Octavia stumbled and wheezed behind, and Applejack bent forward under the weight of their water, shoulders and haunches burning in protest.

They met her in a wide clearing, the forest curving around them on all sides but one to give a narrow view of the desert. Fur damp with sweat, chest glistening, Colgate mashed her forehooves into the grass, soaking her gauze with the evening dew, and Applejack unceremoniously dumped the torch onto the ground. Its wheel setup was forgotten in the burning mill.

Octavia joined them and collapsed, and Applejack regarded her, noticing how thin the mare had become. The points of her spine stuck out above slender ribs, and her cheeks, like her sides, was sunken. Her lips were chapped and her mane was thinning, and when her wild eyes met Applejack’s for a sickening moment, she knew that Octavia would not be going on—and what it meant for them all.

“If you’ll just look up…” Colgate said.

Applejack raised her eyes as bidden, and filling the sky, as if cast from a net, a tide of the circular shadows turned languidly. Farther off, shards of orange light formed like iceblinks on those wreathing the smoke.

“Can she run?”

“I can do nothing,” Octavia whispered.

“No no, don’t talk like that,” Applejack said, offering a hoof to help her up.

“I am useless.”

Colgate turned a quick circle in the grass.

“Octavia, don’t,” Applejack said. “We gotta keep goin’. Ah know you can do it, Ah know.”

Their eyes met once more, Applejack’s firm and calm despite the fear slowly eating away her resolve. Another quick glance to the sky, and she descried yet more shadows, appearing from seemingly nowhere and blanketing the forest, a second layer of nighttime to blot out the brightness that lingered after sunset. Octavia let her head drop, her face in the grass, her eyes open, her body shaking.

“We gotta go,” Colgate said softly, and from a distance.

“All right, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Applejack said. “Colgate, get over here an’ grab the torch.”

Colgate stepped back toward them, eyes to the sky.

“Yer carryin’ this, an’ Ah’m carryin’ her.” Gingerly, so as to not injure her, Applejack removed Octavia’s saddlebags and put them on, then gently turned Octavia and maneuvered her onto her back. Octavia’s muscles contracted slightly, and she was able to wrap her forelegs more securely around Applejack’s neck.

Colgate gave her an inquisitive look, braced awkwardly under the torch’s weight.

“Go.”

They staggered to the other side of the clearing, back into the forest, into a sea of white noise. The infinite trickle of water and the clicking, closer and no longer hidden by the sound of their travel, mixed with the light sound of hidden wildlife into an ill-fitting simulacrum of peace, as though the forest knew their tension and wished to give it space to flourish. Octavia’s weight did not slow Applejack but a little, but she tried not to think about it.

They passed through a cluster of smaller trees and into a low, shallow basin of slimy water. Their ripples broke apart a pair of imperfect shadows on the water’s surface.

“Here’s the good news,” Applejack managed between breaths. “Looks like the fire’s not spreadin’.”

“Further,” was Colgate’s only reply.

They splashed out onto a bank crowded with mushrooms, which turned slightly to face them as they walked, and pushed into deeper darkness. The trees were growing closer together, their queer angles causing them to cross in places, or form barriers of opposing points. Sometimes, ropes of hanging, fruiting ivy spanned the spaces between trees, and sometimes, Applejack or Colgate would stumble over an unnoticed sapling. Progression slowed and faltered, and they found themselves backtracking more, defeated by thick braids of trees or spaces too small for passage.

Applejack wound up ahead as they followed a dense ridge of knotted trunks to another clearing, a grassy vista that opened into a star-washed horn of desert far beyond. She stopped to catch her breath and adjust Octavia, who had been quiet.

A lone hill rose in the middle of the field, dark and wide. She could see minute scratches of uneven stairs dug into its sides, and at the top, empty space under another sphere, strangely still amidst its neighbors, which swiveled and swooped loosely, rising and falling over the hillside like massive birds of prey, or ornaments jostling on long strings.

Directly overhead, still more of the same circular shadows were encroaching, some of them low enough to brush the treetops, some lower than that. Her head throbbing, her muscles aching, Applejack felt as though she were running in a dream, and the racing of her heart and breath were outside her body.

“We’ll go there,” Colgate said, coming up behind, struggling under the torch’s weight, but not putting it down. Her shoulders shook and twitched.

“Where?”

“Uphill.” She paused. “That’s no ball there, not the same shape.”

Applejack squinted at the floating circle above the hill, seeing what Colgate meant. “What is it?” She flinched at the sound of a strike, something hard meeting a tree trunk. The shadows were sinking, and from the underside of one, she saw an indistinct trail of ropes or vines, swaying like anglers’ lines and tipped with small, hooked cudgels. A couple were caught on a tree, and Colgate forced herself forward, stumbling. Applejack followed suit.

There was no time to think, even as the balls descended onto the field and the ponies moved into range. The short grass and flowers waved and nodded as all before, and more snaring lines draped onto the field, some swinging loosely and others lying in the grass. The clicking was faster and nearer, joined by a weak, floral wind.

Octavia bounced on Applejack’s back as they outstripped Colgate, racing under the quickening shadows and the indifferent sky. The grass was lightly serrated, and it pulled at her tail and at the short fur around her hooves, and the hill was still far away. To Applejack’s eyes, it was a final push to safety, though she knew she should not see it that way, for she did not know.

In the tops of her eyes, the sky was shredded and thick with darting shadows, but she could not look up and keep her pace.

“Stop—go back,” Octavia gasped.

Not stopping, but throwing a fast and frightened look back, Applejack nearly toppled over herself. Colgate was trying to get up, her body hidden behind grass so that it appeared the torch alone was jittering in place. At the sound of wind in her ears, Applejack cringed away, thinking a line had nearly missed her head, and she dashed back, again knowing what she would need to do, and again trying not to think about it.

“Let’s go,” Colgate said, barely standing under the torch.

“Drop it, we’re tradin’,” Applejack said, trying to let Octavia down gently, bobbing her head up and down, fighting the fear of the moving shadows and their swinging hooks. Any minute, she expected one to collide with her, ending their race.

Colgate let herself fall out of the torch’s straps and lay on her back for a moment, staring into the moving sky.

“I can run now,” Octavia said atop shaking legs. “I think.”

“Then run,” Colgate said.

“Come on,” Applejack growled, grabbing the unicorn’s foreleg in hers and dragging her up. Octavia was shambling forward, her wind not fully back but her determination pushing her nonetheless.

Colgate, standing, looked about wildly for a second before darting past to meet Octavia, and Applejack was left to put the torch back on. The water inside pushed and pulled her as she got into the harness, the wind harrying her at the same time, and she fell. A hook on its line swung past, thick and dull, of the same dark wood as the kinked trees. Her mane was tangled in the grass, and she let out an involuntary shout as she tried and failed to get up.

A pair of hooves fell onto her, and she shouted again, kicking out and hitting nothing. It was Colgate, her haggard, blue face blocking the sky for a moment as she tried to undo the torch’s straps, her eyes skittering, her frantic breath in Applejack’s face. The magic tingled and burned under her shoulders as Colgate put a hoof to her chest, wordlessly telling her to hold still.

She could feel the torch sinking off her, and with the sureness that fear makes from uncertainty, felt the sudden emptiness as Colgate could be lifted off her, caught with a hook and reeled into the sky.

“Go, c’mon,” Colgate said, slapping Applejack’s hindquarters as she ran back. Applejack got to her hooves and followed, again trusting, and jumped a taller tuft of grass. Octavia had not stopped, and was ahead of them all, beginning the climb while a pair of shadows converged to intercept her. Colgate trampled over flowers, and Applejack noticed, for a half-second in her whirling view, a spark as she did it.

Wind and the sound of hooks raced around her ever-turning head. She saw nothing clearly; the hill was a blob, her friends sprites of pastel shadow, the balls above textures in her peripheries. Her ears rang and her legs burned, their saddlebags slapping at her sides. Her hat was gone, but she would not notice until later.

An explosion rocked her head and pushed her ears flat as a ball of fire expanded at the hillside. Flaming branches rained, clattering and breaking into cinders to lie, half buried, in the grass. A grin appeared on Applejack’s face as a second one broke the white noise of pursuit.

“Steady!” Colgate cried, and Applejack let herself call out as well. She could feel the ground beginning to rise under her hooves, she could feel it all the way up her legs. The first stair smoked with a small, red and black coal, and Applejack stumbled to avoid stepping on it. Octavia stood a few steps up, her lank mane covering her face, her tail switching back and forth, while Colgate scrambled ahead.

“Ya good, Octavia?” Applejack asked breathlessly.

Octavia gave no reply, but turned when Applejack passed her.

The stairs were narrow and poorly spaced, and Applejack could see, or thought she could see, shadows flitting across the incline. She did not look back to see the field, covered as though with a new canopy bereft of trees. She had eyes only for the top of the hill, its stationary shadow an indistinct sign of hope.

Sparks flew as Colgate crushed more flowers on the stairs, and Applejack half expected to hear another explosion behind her, as if the sparks were preludes to Octavia’s magic.

She was aware of rain hitting her head as they neared the top, and was grateful for the tiny respite. Her head felt aflame, a headache swelling, and she could only collapse at the top of the hill under the lightly swaying shadow of her safety. Colgate stood by, panting, and helped Octavia up the last few steps, who collapsed as well.

“Welcome home,” Colgate said, apparently to herself, as she slowly walked around them. They were safe for the time, for no shadows had yet made it up to them, though a flock was ascending over the stairs. No one noticed that they avoided the remaining smoke from Octavia’s attacks.

“Not long, and then we gotta get in this,” Colgate said, and Applejack looked at her, brow knit and mouth open partially, as if to reprimand her. In her scattered mind, Colgate’s words found no purchase; she was aware only that she had time to rest. The unicorn’s slower pace showed that clearly enough.

“Shelter,” Octavia managed. “Thank Celestia.”

Applejack looked up, and she thought her eyes were wrong. In the starlight, finally free of shadows, she could see the shape of a door, of windows, of a small fence around a flowerbed below. The sphere they had seen, which she had mistaken for another ball, manifested instead as a house, its walls curved and smooth and showing no seams save for around the entryways. At its apex, thick ropes rose almost parallel into the clouds. She could see where the grass under the house was dry, where the rain had not landed.

“We’ll go back for our water,” Colgate said, offering a hoof to help Applejack up and nearly falling herself when Applejack accepted it. “But we’re gonna wait these things out inside this.”

“What if there is someone inside already?” Octavia asked.

Colgate shook her head as she stared at the door.

“Never mind that, she’s right, this is our chance,” Applejack said. “Hopefully we can explain when we get in there.”

“Not long,” Colgate said, looking back at the approaching shadows. Their clicking was becoming audible once more.

From where the house hung, it gave close to five feet of clearance to the hilltop, and the three of them approached, watching the door and trying to conjure a way inside.

“We’re just wastin’ time,” Applejack finally said, reaching up to adjust her hat, and, finding it gone, wiping rain off her brow instead. “Let’s just climb in. Colgate, Octavia, one of you use yer telekinesis an’ open it. Ah’ll boost y’all up.”

Both mares hesitated, but a blue cloud of magic appeared at the door’s handle, and, resting for a second, turned it to open the door. It creaked on hidden hinges, but no other sounds greeted them, and Applejack edged back to see inside.

“Looks empty.” She glanced at the balls; the first in the swarm were showing their crowns at the top of the hill. With lightness she did not feel, she asked, “who’s first, then?”

She first boosted Octavia into the house, then Colgate, and then awkwardly climbed in herself, half assisted by pulling magic. The air inside was damp as well, but warmer, and Applejack felt momentarily lost as she closed the door behind them. They stood on a curved floor of dark brown wood, veined with raised, burgundy lines, which felt to Applejack’s hooves a part of the material, and not decoration.

They naturally clustered in the house’s small nadir, and each mare followed her eyes up its walls. A table and stool were affixed midway up, on the table a bowl of unidentifiable vegetables and a carafe of water, both resting where they had been placed and showing no strain of gravity. On the other side by a window, a bedroll lay flat, and nearer the ceiling, what resembled a work desk, sized appropriately for pony proportions and mostly clear of paper. A long sack of what looked like fishing rods—which Applejack had heard of, but never once used—rested against the desk, under the strange vector of more hanging vegetables, which, from their perspective, seemed to point on rigid strings from midway up the house’s side, like the lines of a cross section.

“I do not like this,” Octavia said at last as Colgate took an experimental step up the wall. Her hooves held, and she stepped more, and before Applejack could believe her eyes, Colgate was walking up the wall and looking down through the window.

“Welcome to Tartarus,” Colgate murmured to herself, cautiously making her way to the ceiling. When she looked down on them, standing experimentally to brace on the work desk, she finally smiled. “Try it.”

There was no trick; Applejack put one hoof after the other, and she ascended the sloping wall. It was as easy as traversing flat ground, and though her eyes rebelled to see it, the house and its occupants rolled underneath her. She pulled out the chair, adjusted the carafe, and Octavia watched her suspiciously. From Applejack’s perspective, Octavia was nestled in a pocket on the nearby wall, and Colgate the opposite side, both mares tenuously stuck and she the only one safely on the floor. She looked through a window, which afforded a sheer drop into deep green sky on one side and the unclear tufts of forest on the other, a split vision, no different from before, save that it was all under her hooves, separated by a thin wall and a pane of glass.

She joined Octavia back at the bottom while Colgate poked through the desk.

“Are we just assuming that they cannot get us inside?” Octavia asked at last.

“We’ll be fine,” Colgate said. “I remember something like this. We had one in Ponyville a while ago, after your party left.”

“One of these made it to Ponyville?” Applejack asked.

“That’s what I said.” She frowned and took out a tablet with writing on it. “They call ‘em bush balls, I think.”

“‘They’?” Octavia asked.

“Yer employers again?” Applejack offered.

“They lit it on fire and drew it away from the forest, and that was pretty much it.” She trotted to the window and looked down—out—through it again. “Granted, that was one, and these are many.”

“You have not explained why you think we are safe,” Octavia said.

“We’re safe ‘cause we’re indoors!” Colgate snapped. She shook her head and threw the tablet against the desk. It bounced and landed with a slap on the ceiling.

“Ah understand yer concerns,” Applejack said slowly, “but they’ve only got those hooks, looks like. So we should be okay. Maybe stay away from the windows?”

“Not much room,” Colgate said sullenly. She pulled open another desk drawer and rattled its contents with a hoof. Applejack flinched away, expecting the contents to rain down onto her—which, of course, they did not.

Octavia took a single step up the wall, extending her neck to barely see out the window. The bush balls were appearing in a mass outside, a flocculent cloud of clicks, micro-sound from inside the hanging house, and almost more threatening for it.

“They’re right on top of us,” Colgate said quietly at first, and then more loudly. Applejack watched her turn a short circle on the ceiling, rip another drawer from the desk and drop it carelessly beside her. Her eyes were wide and her breathing was shallow, her movements jerky.

“Steady, Cole,” Applejack said. “We’re fine right here. They’re just bouncin’ harmlessly outside. Think of ‘em like clouds.”

“Not clouds,” Colgate said, leaving only that for Applejack to divine the precise cause of her agitation.

They all froze at the same moment to the sound of branches scraping outside, louder than the rain and absent the sound of assisting wind. Octavia chanced another look out the window, but saw only dry foliage. Up close, the bush balls were no more than their namesake, masses of twigs and sticks with no visible core, alive with gentle, repetitive movement deep inside. Octavia stared for a moment before turning away with a dry heave.

“Get some water,” Colgate said, taking the carafe in her magic and floating it, first toward her, then into the empty middle, and finally finding the correct vector and sending it to Octavia, who looked at it skeptically.

Octavia took it in her hooves, balanced on her haunches, and tried to turn it. Her hooves still shook.

Colgate and Applejack yelled as one when the house jumped. On their respective floors, mirrored, they crouched and looked around, and Octavia let the water spill and pool on the window. A dry snap sounded above them as the house jumped again, and as Applejack was realizing what was happening, it happened.

Branches rustled and crashed against the walls as they hit the ground, and for a perilous, pregnant second, all was still but the pounding of rain. Then, the grass and the ground slipped away, and the wild, dark land sped to receive them. As a fuselage falling through the sky, all within was subject to the same spin, the same velocity, and to each pony, hers was the floor around which the dark lands of Tartarus cycled. They kept to their hooves, the windows depicting a whirling, untamed wilderness, spinning on an invisible axis around them, magnified and brought to noisy life when one window shattered, and its neighbor just after.

Though all inside the house had been still, when they hit the first uneven patch of ground, the world quit them entirely for a blood chilling few seconds, and then returned with a resounding crash that sent each mare falling toward the same spot and then boomeranging back to her place, not to rest or reclaim her balance but to be shaken again, torn from their floors as the spherical house rampaged down the hill and out into a pale, faceless desert.

Like popcorn kernels on a hot skillet, they jumped and landed, sometimes crossing the neutral middle and sometimes colliding with one another, banging skulls and shoulders and unable to control themselves. Each one cried out, threw her hooves, tried to access her weak or weakened magic to no effect.

With a crash that buckled something outside and sent them caroming through a patch of shrubs, the desk joined the fray, its opened drawers spitting paper and writing tools like a threatened animal, pinging off walls and catching broken glass, perforating the bedroll’s fabric as it leapt up to entangle with the rest of the furniture. Water scattered across the air, and hanging vegetables flapped like ribbons in the wind, some breaking open to throw seeds and spicy aromas into the mix.

The walls shuddered and banged, and a writing tablet whisked itself out a window. The fishing rods clattered out of their bag, bouncing off bodies, snapping on walls. The carafe dented itself on a windowsill before whipping through Colgate’s tail as she spun in place. The roar of rainfall had become the gritty, tough sound of momentum tearing across land, a roller coaster’s thunder and rattle.

Gradually, the destroyed windows showed a world slowing, and the mares were able to stand once more as the furniture calmed around them. Applejack held a hoof to her eyebrow, where a desk drawer had caught her and opened a vein, and Colgate lay in a tight ball, shaking, her tail curled around to cover her injured forelegs.

The land had become desert again, and it came to a stop on a final, weak jolt that put the ground just outside their door. No one spoke or moved for several minutes; as they had crashed through Creation Lake, they took their time to come to their senses, to assess that the chaos’ aftermath.

Applejack broke the silence. “Ah don’t wanna panic, but Ah think… Ah might be in trouble.” Thoughts of her mortality rushed in, and she could scarcely keep her voice steady as she went on, “Ah don’t know if it’s broken.”

“We need to get out of here,” Octavia whispered.

“Shut up,” Colgate said, crawling across the littered floor toward Applejack. She glanced out the window. “We’re getting out first. No bush balls, c’mon.”

“Ah dunno if Ah can,” Applejack said.

“Lemme look at it. Octy, scamper, make sure it’s clear.”

With a glare, Octavia disappeared out a window. They could hear her light hoofsteps in the white dust outside.

“Take your hoof away,” Colgate said. She was bleeding as well, her right side shot with glass, her fur taking a crimson stain.

Applejack gently removed her hoof, and Colgate looked at her brow.

“You’ll be okay, you’re not bleeding out or anything. That’ll need stitches.”

Applejack swallowed, not sure whether to be relieved.

“Outside, c’mon. We can do it out there.”

On shaking hooves, Applejack climbed through the opposite window and out to the desert. She could see their hill at the end of a broken trail of dust and flattened grass, the bush balls swarming just as before, but coming no closer. They had finally stopped in the horn of desert, a narrow crescent of wasteland that bit into their forest, and were not far from the other side. An hour’s walk, or less, would see them back among the trees.

“All righty, girls, we’ve got a situation,” Colgate said in her doctor’s voice. “Octy, get Applejack’s saddlebags out of the house. We need first aide.”

“Can you not call me that?” Octavia asked, complying.

“Later. Applejack, you’re gonna be okay. Do you know who I am?”

Applejack frowned at her. “Yer Colgate, the pony who’s been travelin’ with us.”

“How many ponies in your family?”

“This is about my broken eyebrow?”

“How many?” She grabbed the first aide kit that Octavia proffered and fished out the isopropyl alcohol. “Immediate family, all those folks on the farm, how many? C’mon, we’re losing blood.”

“Four of us, dangit! What the hay are you playin’ at?”

“I’m checking,” she said archly, applying a cotton pad to Applejack’s wound, “if you’ve got a concussion. You don’t. Happy?”

Applejack huffed.

“Shaver.”

“Me?” Octavia asked.

“Shaver,” Colgate repeated. One floated to her magical grasp, and she deftly shaved Applejack’s eyebrow. Orange fur drifted to the wan desert ground. Colgate took the cotton pad and let it soak up some alcohol.

“Colgate, you are wounded too,” Octavia said.

“I’ll do me later. Applejack’s bleeding worse right now.”

“You said Ah’d be all right, though?” Applejack asked.

“Keep your head still.” She dabbed the wound, wiping grit and blood away. “Good. Now take this and hold it.” She gave Applejack a second, clean pad. “We’re gonna wait for that blood to slow down before I go in and close you up.”

“…Okay.”

“I need sutures, though.”

When the sun’s first light was turning the desert into a nacreous expanse, and the forest back to a peaceful, green fimbria, the last of the three fell deeply asleep in the shade their wanton house afforded, stuck in a ditch and hemmed on one side by an aged, dead tree. Applejack had taken several painkillers, her brow held closed by the strongest string Colgate could find in Rarity’s sewing kit, which had seen little use up to that point. An immeasurable distance away, on the other side, Twilight and her crew were booming along under the Friesian Mountains.

It was Tartarus’ version of noon when they rose, looked around, and realized that they had no water. Their torch was still somewhere in the field around the hill. Applejack tentatively touched her face, and Colgate told her to find a mirror instead. She used the compact in Rarity’s makeup kit.

“Looks pretty good, considerin’,” she said.

“Taking those out’s gonna be a pain,” Colgate said. “We’ll also need to watch for infection.”

“Speakin’ of which, how ‘bout you? You feelin’ okay? Yer hooves all right?”

“Fine.” She twitched her shoulders, residual nervous energy finding its way out. “You still mean what you said earlier, about… what you said?”

“Sorry?”

“Never mind.”

Applejack thought, her mind still cloudy. Too much had happened the day before.

“I hate to say it, but we may have to take our chances with the water in the forest,” Octavia said. “Shall we?”

“Yeah, onwards, whatever,” Colgate said, casting a wrapped hoof in the forest’s direction. The bush balls had all gone.

They walked in a line across the strip of dry land, Colgate limping, Octavia in the lead with head bowed. A dark web of cracks had spread on the house’s outer shell, and it was the image Applejack held in her mind as she marched, thinking against her better judgment of all that could have gone wrong the night before. The house could have split and flung them across the hillside, or the furniture could have shredded them. With her brow stinging—they had had no anesthetic, forcing Colgate and Applejack to make do with a hot needle and a rag between the teeth—Applejack found it difficult to remind herself that she was lucky. They all could have incurred worse injuries, though it didn’t seem it.

The forest’s inner edge was a raised ridge of calcified tree trunks, tangled like vipers in a dense, helical rope that merged with the ground and became one wall of a narrow canyon. A thin stem of smoke stood stationary at what appeared the canyon’s far end.

They were able to climb over the ridge, picking their way steadily down tree trunks that resembled PVC piping in an intricate sewer system, until they were back into the familiar, all-surrounding trickle of water. In a crowded grove of flowers and mushrooms, they each sat and drank of the trees, each one hoping they were not making the same fatal error.

“Don’t run your head under this,” Colgate said. “You might open the wound up again.”

“Ah know,” Applejack said.

“Do we have any possible way of carrying water with us?” Octavia asked. “I believe we left our water bottles on the ship.”

“We can empty out the rubbing alcohol bottle, Ah guess. That’s somethin’.”

“We’ll be wanting that for later,” Colgate said. “The hydrogen peroxide too.”

“Can we… It’s silly, but can we uproot one of these an’ bring it with us?”

“I see no harm in trying it,” Octavia said.

“Bush balls,” Colgate said.

“That is not what attracted them last night.” She rose to stand against a tree, looking into its plumed halo, as if contemplating how best to apply her magic.

Applejack rubbed the spot above her eyebrow, relieving the itching but a little.

“I do not want to cut this one,” Octavia said. “I feel like cutting one will break whatever this magic is. I will uproot a smaller one, when we find one.”

“Fair enough,” Colgate said. “We ready?”

“Are you?” Applejack asked.

By way of response, Colgate trudged into the underbrush.

Sunset was again creeping into the canopy when they found their sapling, and Octavia roughly tore it out of the ground. Its small stream of water did not falter, and, satisfied, they moved on.

“Does it really bother you that I call you Octy?” Colgate asked.

“It does,” Octavia said.

“Why?”

“It just does.”

“Why?”

“Because it is not my name.”

“Hm.” Colgate snorted. Her heart was fluttering, memories of her hours of clarity swirling and diluting with all the usual fears and impulses. She still held onto the crucial fact, that they meant her no harm, but it had lost its import; it seemed as though it were something told her that she had once trusted, and to remind herself of it, she had to constantly renew her trust.

“She means me no harm,” Colgate thought to herself. “Do I mean her harm?” The response flashed up quickly, not exactly surprising her: “No.” The gray mare might be a patient, Colgate thought.

“So that magic that hit you in the desert, what made you feel so happy.”

“I do not wish to speak of it.”

“I bet not. You seemed pretty sad when it left.”

“I was merely disappointed.”

“Did you think it would last?”

Octavia sighed.

“Well?”

“You are without your precious clarity, Colgate. How do I know that you will not make some joke about it?”

“‘Cause I—” She shook her head rapidly, banishing her initial thought, to ram her shoulder into a tree and shake water onto them.

“I said I do not wish to discuss this, and that is final.”

“You are such a pain in the ass, do you know that?”

Octavia did not respond at first, but then said, “Likewise.”

“Yeah, sure. I’m just asking questions.”

“I do not like these questions.”

“What do you like?”

Again, a sigh.

Colgate sidled up closer, allowing for a lowering of voices. Applejack, behind, courteously did not catch up.

“I’m curious,” Colgate said. “Why are you bent on destroying yourself?”

“I have told you time and again, I—”

“Not eating, not sleeping, staring into space, yadda yadda yadda. I’m no psychologist, but I’m also not stupid.”

“Your bedside manner is terrible.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The conversation halted for several minutes as they crossed another small stream. The forest’s edge was coming into view again, and the canyon’s mouth with it.

“I was disappointed when the magic left because I thought that I had finally discovered something,” Octavia said quickly. “I thought I had found happiness, but it was a lie. Do your worst.”

“My worst is nothing,” Colgate said, not really sure why. Re-ordering her thoughts, she asked, “how can an emotion be a lie?”

“It was false. It came from something outside myself, as you explained.”

“So?”

“I had no right to feel the way I did.”

Colgate opened her mouth to reply, but had nothing. In a way, she thought, Octavia’s feelings mirrored her own. Where one had felt joy without cause, the other had felt fear.

“It felt like I was lying to myself,” Octavia went on. “And that sort of thing has always bothered me.”

“Do you want to go back to that happiness?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I asked.” She smacked a tree as she passed, sending a lance of pain down her leg.

“Of course I do. If I could, I would.”

“What stops you?”

Octavia fell silent.

“Well?”

“I do not wish to talk about this.”

“We already—”

“No, that was earlier, when I was not certain that you were asking me these things in good faith. I am more secure now, but still, I wish to stop this conversation.”

“Hm.”

“It is very personal for me,” Octavia said softly. “And to be perfectly honest, I do not have an answer for you, for what stops me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Perhaps I will in time. I will need to think about it.”

“You do that.”

Octavia looked at her, and Colgate looked back and allowed herself to fall behind.

In a starlit glade, where the water dripped into natural basins of stone, they stopped for food and rest. Octavia was silent, but hers was a silence of contemplation, rather than sorrow, and it showed on her face. Applejack sat against a whitened stump, trying not to touch her brow, trying to imagine without feeling how it looked. She thought of Rainbow Dash on the other side, seeing her and commenting. “Wow, AJ! That’s one heck of a shiner you got there!” She smiled.

Colgate fussed with her wrappings nearby, and Applejack let herself stare at the burn wounds that covered her legs. Her flesh was spongy and tufted with black and blue fur, and Colgate turned her hooves over dispassionately, inspecting them, thinking thoughts Applejack had no interest in guessing at. She wanted to keep walking, despite her fatigue, but did not think the others would be willing to push themselves.

Speckles of rain pattered on the grass, and a sound like slithering leaves moved at the glade’s edge. Applejack looked up, seeing but not, telling more by instinct than sense that they were suddenly not alone. She leaned over and tapped Colgate, pointing at where she had heard the sound. She could distinguish among the trees and shrubberies a dark shape, but could not recall whether she had noticed it before. It bore resemblance to a stump, and as she stared at it, it blended in with the shadows until she was no longer able to tell where she thought she had spotted it.

“I see nothin’,” Colgate grumbled. “Trees and stuff.” She returned to her wounds.

Applejack looked at the sky. She had marveled in the first days how bright the nights were, how the stars were stronger. She wondered whether they were the same stars that hung over the Gaia, rearranged. Perhaps the Gaia was somewhere on the other side, separated by those stars; an astral gulf.

She nodded her chin to her chest, but jerked awake. In the forest, she saw two points of light, like opals or dew drops. The other two were asleep, and Applejack closed her eyes to slits to feign sleep. It took all her weakened, tired will to not panic when the shadow moved, hesitated, and slid into the open.

Undeveloped eyes glinted from deep pockets in a wide face, dark skin glistening under a uniform coat of small, translucent spines. Thin arms dragged on the ground, webbed hands clutching baskets of fruit, which it dropped when Applejack raised her head. Berries spilled amidst tumid root structures that seemed, to Applejack, grossly incongruous with the rigid loops of bone that grew at acute angles from its hip joints.

For a second, it took her in, its head rotating slowly on a body with no neck. A trickle of water appeared at its crown to run down a shallow lumen to the roots.

“Let’s just all calm down,” Colgate said evenly, her voice showing signs of the sleep Applejack had seen not minutes before. She did not look at her.

The creature—something between a cactus and a frog, Applejack thought—righted a basket, raised an arm, and wrapped one amphibious hand around a pole strapped to its back. Slowly, it held the pole out, pointed with a thin, shining blade, and then let it fall. A light whistle came from spiracles on the bone loops.

“What does it want?” Colgate asked.

“Ah think it’s sayin’ it ain’t a threat,” Applejack said. She cast around, searching for something to use in kind. Settling for a large rock, she held it between her hooves, and, as the new creature had, let it fall before her. “I can hurt you, but I don’t intend it,” the gesture said.

The whistle lowered to a hum, then went out, and still they stared.

Applejack looked long into the mostly featureless face, trying to discern an emotion in the creature’s teardrop eyes. “Here’s a long shot. You speak Equestrian?”

It whistled.

“Maybe we’re in its territory,” Colgate said.

The roots at its base shifted slowly, pushing grass and weeds back and planting themselves in the topsoil before them. The creature’s arms were relaxed through the bone hoops, and it ran one sticky finger along the inside of one. It began to replace the berries in its baskets as another skin of water ran down its body, and Applejack saw the brief mist of magic at some of its points. For a moment, magic reflected off sliding water, giving its black body an oily sheen.

Everything in its bearing suggested to Applejack that it was not aggressive, but she could not think of a suitable reason it should approach them. There was curiosity, but she knew their kind must be as foreign to the creature as it was to them. Why not watch them from a safe distance, if watching was its sole intention?

She took up a stick from their firewood bundle, and though the creature did not turn its eyes upon her, its movement stopped.

“This won’t hold,” Colgate said.

“Ah got an idea.” She looked around and walked to a patch of mud under a rain tree. She beckoned, and after a few moments, the creature went to her, its fat roots rolling and turning over the grass and one another, conveying the short, barrel body across a wash of firelight. It circled widely around Octavia’s sleeping body.

Where it stopped, Applejack had drawn a simple map. On one end, she had made the gateway to the Gaia, which she indicated with a heavy spiral, from which led a wide cone of blank space spotted with her attempts at the stone towers they had seen. She drew the forest, a dark line of rough tree shapes, and stopped.

The creature hummed, and pale magic shimmered on its eyeballs as it leveraged itself up to look down on the map. The hum became a higher mewl, but it gave no further reaction that she could tell.

“Let’s try again,” she mumbled, fearfully conscious of how close it had come to see her work. If she leaned too far into her map, she would bump her head on its spines; up close, they resembled cactus spikes, and she could see the faint ripple of water at their bases. It smelled vaguely of the brine, not unpleasantly.

Applejack wiped away the mud forest and started again, making her trees clearer, and adding a stream where she best remembered it. Near a bend in the line, she placed a small mill, complete with water wheel. At this, the creature, still looking down, pointed to her and then the gateway spiral. “You come from there?”

She nodded, then settled for tapping the gateway with her stick.

The creature took up a berry and placed it on the gateway.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Colgate asked, edging closer.

“Maybe,” Applejack said, wiping another section of mud clear and drawing a second spiral in the middle, isolated from any land features. She put the stick down.

Still without regarding her, it took the stick and began to complete the picture. Around the spiral, there appeared clear indications of fire, crowding into a zigzag at a narrow passage that opened into a longer corridor, ending at the edge of their forest. With the other arm, and a trilling whistle accompanying, it gestured toward the canyon they had seen, tapping with the stick where its drawing met Applejack’s.

“Look at this,” Applejack said evenly. “Ah think we’re on the same page. So we’re here.” Colgate looked over Applejack’s wither, and Applejack scooted away. “This here’s the valley we’ve been seein’, an’ through that, we’ve got the gateway. But now look at these.” She pointed at the crude drawings of fire, little claws in the mud, smearing as water fell from its tree.

“More trees.”

“Ah think fire. Well, Ah can see how it might be trees.” She faced the creature and looked back down at her drawing. She had more questions, but no way to pose them.

The creature sat near the fire with Applejack and Colgate while they ate, and when they woke Octavia and showed her what had joined them, she only blinked and said “okay.”

It had no mouth that they could see, digging its roots back into the topsoil instead while they ate their rations. In the firelight, its perpetually moist body gleamed like fresh ore, its wicked-looking spines rigid and opaque, its arms like lifeless vestiges, its loops oddly delicate. Applejack traded the stick back and forth with it, exchanging simple pictures with no obvious meaning. Her head hurt, inside and out, and the small gesture of camaraderie—so she chose to take it, fully realizing it might not be such for the other—eased her spirit.

Occasionally, it would hoot or trill from its loops, a thin, reedy sound that made Octavia recall her instruments back home. She had not touched a musical instrument in more than a month, and not seriously played one for much longer than that. She did not meet the creature’s milky eyes through their time together.

Before they had to face the possibility of sleeping in its presence, the creature, as if sensing the lowering energy around their camp, retracted its roots and swayed back toward the forest. It stopped, its spines still alight, and rolled a berry their way. They kept still and listened as it shuffled away, waiting for the underbrush to be quiet once more, before Applejack went to the berry and scooped it from the grass. In the firelight, it was similar in color to a cranberry, but longer and wrinkled.

“I wouldn’t trust it,” Colgate said. “Might be poison for us.”

“Ah know that.” She tucked it into her saddlebag.

“I did not like that thing,” Octavia said.

“Weren’t hurtin’ nobody.”

They made their beds in the tall, damp grass and slept without interruption, their dreams filled with black, spiny creatures that stared without expression.

Their roll of gauze was nearly used up after they changed Colgate’s dressings in the morning, but the tree Octavia had pulled still produced water. They bathed in a nearby pond, breakfasted on dehydrated rations, and put the last shred of forest behind them.

Octavia felt the gentle pull of one of Twilight’s sigils far off, she said, but it did not appear that the sigils would lead them into the canyon. The choice, nonetheless, was clear: to follow Twilight’s path, they would need to cut across more forest and find a way up a challenging incline, that they might traverse the canyon’s rim. Going straight through seemed the less difficult option, and would funnel them straight to the gateway.

Another small rain storm touched them on their final approach, sloshing through a field and fording a wide, but shallow gully that had formed naturally where the trees began to ossify. As at the desert ridge, the trunks gradually grew smaller and paler, tangling with one another tighter and tighter until the mares trod upon white, sandy platforms of stone. The canyon’s walls rose up steadily, an opposing pair of perforated, beige cliff faces from which more trails of water fell. The sound of rain surrounded them as they entered, pellucid columns disappearing into black tunnels in the ground.

The smoke in the distance was no longer visible for the canyon walls.