“Before we go too far, we should make sure that we can actually get all the way through,” Octavia said.

Applejack looked at the canyon’s side, where the trees from before had twisted into a wall of off-white, vaguely intestinal formations, their shapes hidden under dirt and rock, as if the wall had risen first and then the ground around to reclaim it. She cleared her throat. “Ah dunno if we can get up there to look. Least, not without some serious backtrackin’.”

“We’ll watch for a way to get up,” Colgate said, rubbing the spot under her horn. “But let’s go through for now.”

Octavia looked back at the forest, but gave no objection as they walked forward. The ground was hard and warm, its unmarked stone different from the walls for its flatness of aspect. No soft soil kicked up at their hoofsteps, and there were no cracks or creases to step over. There was no stratification in the canyon walls, further evincing that the canyon had grown from the ground, and not been cut by moving water—a detail none of the travelers noted.

Colgate’s head hurt as it had after a night of heavy drinking. She was tired, though it was morning, and her side hurt from where she had been peppered with glass. She knew she had not gotten it all out, and she knew that she would regret it, but still, after stitching Applejack’s face, her own wound had seemed less important than sleep. Placing her trust in the indeterminate future, she had removed the easiest pieces and crunched painkillers in her teeth.

The rain let up to a fine drizzle as they moved deeper between the two massive, stone edifices, losing the morning sun. Shapes of buildings and walkways cluttered the canyon walls in the distance, emerging out of the mist, their supports long and imprecise, reaching down and across the textured stone like roots. On the canyon’s upper rims, there appeared smoke.

“Eyes open, y’all,” Applejack said; she needed not say more.

“No one can say I haven’t done my job here,” Colgate thought. In her mind, she imagined speaking to a higher-ranking Datura. In the inevitable post-Tartarus questioning, her interlocutor would weigh Colgate’s answers and thoughts, and judgment would be made in due course—perhaps without warning, and perhaps even after several years. Such was the fear that gripped her, and made her choose carefully the words she used, even in her private thoughts.

“Take Applejack for instance, the Element of Honesty. She had an open wound on her eyebrow, and I was there to stitch it up. I had limited resources, yet still did my job. No, my duty.” She tossed a loose stone into a smooth bore hole as they passed, where it clattered loudly into the shadows. “What comes first, Datura stuff or doctor stuff? No matter, I can do both. Right?”

The imaginary interviewer fixed her with an unreadable look. “Can you do both?”

“In this instance, I can, because I happen to be—no, we’re getting off track. C’mon, Cole. No harm, no harm.”

She stopped with the others to watch a spindly gantry swing over a wooden walkway. It appeared held together by just rope, more likely magic that they could not see.

“What about infection? I did heat up that needle, so there’s that, but there’s no way that thread is sterile. Also, how much crap is in the air around these parts? There might be no avoiding infection. Right, but I can’t predict that, so I did my job still. Good job, right?”

She looked at Applejack and tried to place her in the Ponyville Hospital. Imagining the orange mare standing in line, filling out check-in paperwork, glancing through magazines or brochures as she waited in her room, she found that she could not complete the picture. Trying instead to put Applejack in a hospital gown, unconscious on the operating table, was similarly impossible.

Finally, Applejack became a name on a list, an anonymous patient. Some routine operation, some easy fix, some procedure that had scared Colgate when she was just beginning and which now was second nature. She remembered the feeling of responsibility, the trust conferred on her by so many who had never met her or known her.

“Am I so far away from that?” she wondered.

They rested for a moment beneath a high promontory of stone, its tip erupting in a mass of foliage that matched nothing else in the canyon. The drizzle had become steady rainfall once more, and they huddled in the high outcropping’s incomplete shelter. Sounds of work and life came from deeper in the canyon, and they could occasionally see bodies on the walkways. They moved like ghosts across sheer cuts of stone, all shapes and sizes, some holding crude implements and others walking unadorned. The tap of metal on stone reminded them of the bush balls, a quiet and deliberate sound that did not fit the theater of motion developing on the ramshackle walls.

Applejack sniffed and sneezed, angling her head to a puddle. “Ah know what yer gonna say, Octavia, but Ah’m gonna put this out there anyway. We met one Tartarus critter already, an’ she was perfectly harmless.”

“To us,” Colgate said.

“Yeah, to us. Who’s to say those folks won’t be more of the same?”

“We cannot assume that,” Octavia said.

“Ah know.”

“Still… I do not know if we can get around them. There are so many, they will surely see us.”

“What if they’re so used to seeing different types of each other that they don’t recognize us?” Colgate asked. “They might just assume we’re more Tartarus-folk passing through.”

“I doubt that.”

“Well, think about it. They’re obviously working, like—and they’ve obviously been at it for a while, right? Since they’ve got their whole little setup thing going on.”

“You are eloquent today.”

Colgate sneered at her as the rest of her idea was blown apart. She stammered.

“Ah think what Cole’s tryin’ to say is that these seem like civilized ponies. Tartarus-folk, whatever. You know what Ah mean,” Applejack said.

“If we…” Colgate began. “Assume that these folks are like us, in that they form societies and do work and generally concern themselves with their own lives, and all that, then we can also assume that… You know, they won’t just form a mob if we show up.” Obeying her first thought, she stood and walked into the harder rain. The sharp crack of an explosion was on her mind, the fear as acute as ever. Her ears were preemptively ringing with it, her back fur standing on end, awaiting the scorch of hot magic. She saw herself splayed across the far wall.

“Y’okay there?” Applejack asked.

“Fine, fine.” She shook her head violently and raised her eyes to the rain. The silver clouds calmed her somewhat, and she savored the cool water on her aching horn. She recalled the swimming pool where she had mixed red wine and painkillers, and in her memory, the water had turned to the cold of a Tartarus downpour. Shivering, she would turn to Powder Rouge and say “ain’t this the life?” And Rouge would say “sure is, Cole buddy.”

“She didn’t mean anythin’ by it,” Applejack said softly, coming up close. “We’re all a little irritable, Ah guess. Ah know Ah’m feelin’ that headache you talked about.” She sneezed. “An’ a cold, looks like.”

Colgate regarded Applejack, trying to arrange her face into an expression of cold appraisal, but succeeding only in looking confused. She wiped rain out of her eyes, her heart slowing back down. Applejack was safe. As a patient of hers, Applejack could not be a threat—so the thought went.

“Octy neither, remember that,” she thought, but the thought did not ring true.

“Ah say we get a little closer, scope the place out some,” Applejack continued. “There might be a way through that we can’t see from here. Heck, ya know, we might scare ‘em all into hidin’. If we’re that alien, they might just avoid us.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” Colgate said.

Not long after resuming the walk, their rain tree bobbing in weak telekinesis and adding its own precipitation to the soaked world, they realized there would be no choice in ascending the canyon’s sides. About a half mile farther down, the floor and walls narrowed into a sharp V of smooth stone, a channel of rushing water that flooded into a choppy lot of mud and gravel and emptied into the dark holes that ran along the edges. Between them and it, a coiled snake of planks and poles led into the shantytown, itself unoccupied but spitting them out directly into what looked like a common area. They could see the hunched shoulders of some chitinous beast sitting at a rude table with another of its like, two domed heads moving with gesturing arms in speech.

Colgate glared at Octavia’s back. Her taunt echoed in Colgate’s head, taking on greater import with each repetition, growing—as things did—from joke, to warning, to promise. “Watch your back, for I have found you out,” the subtext seemed to Colgate, who then looked at Applejack and saw nothing of the ill will that had come out of Octavia. Had death inured her of such evil, Colgate wondered, or was the difference in the way she saw the two mares? Perhaps, she thought, her perception was not correct.

“Ah see nothin’ fer it,” Applejack said. “We can wait fer night, but that’s no guarantee either. This might be a twenty-four-hour thing.”

“I hate this,” Octavia said, sitting and running a hoof through her mane. “I…” The rain tree fell out of her magic, and she looked up at their path. She shook her head.

“We’ll be all right. Think of how close we are—halfway. Ah think that’s grand.” Her voice, thicker with the onset of illness, conveyed no such enthusiasm.

“If I may, I would like to stay here for a time. Go ahead if you wish.”

“Octavia.”

Octavia slowly ran her eyes down the twisting ramps.

“We’ll take five minutes, and then we’re gonna walk again,” Colgate said.

“Walking,” Octavia said.

“This is just a dumb ramp, Octavia. You can take it, I know you can. Step by step, right?”

Octavia looked at her questioningly.

“Step by step,” Colgate repeated. “We can take it slow, but we’re gonna get there.” She paced back and forth and stumbled into a cold puddle. Her pastern flamed up, the burn wound shocked and aggravated. Both stung, and she feared infection, but the sharper pain made her cry out.

“Ooooh, yer legs,” Applejack said, going to help her as she nearly fell to the ground. “There’s gotta be somethin’ we can do ‘bout those. How much gauze do we have?”

“In this rain, it doesn’t matter,” Colgate said. “It’ll just get wet anyway.” She looked at Octavia, contemplating the ramps, and saw her for a moment in a brighter light. She was a patient too, of a different sort. In a way, Colgate realized, helping Octavia to walk was not too far from her old job description.

“You are right,” Octavia said at last. “Forgive me. It has been a long few days for me, as I imagine it has been for us all. I am not at my best right now.”

“You’ll make it,” Applejack said, giving her tail an affectionate tug. “Let’s do this before the rain washes us away.”

At the top, where the canyon fell away to become a narrow passage of moving water and cold rock, a large riverbed through which ran a trickle, they stopped behind a rail and watched the workers at their table. If they were noticed, no action was taken, and after several minutes, they felt safe enough to take their eyes off the creatures and take in the rest of the simple town.

Wooden beams ran in parallel bunches to the canyon walls like ribs, from which smaller pikes supported the platforms and walkways, many slanting or asymmetrical, some piled with tools and supplies, some empty, some furnished with tables or chairs or wooden steles that glinted when light broke through the clouds. On the canyon’s far side, a small train of wheels turned like gears over the mouths of dim mines, and small dots hovered and drifted between and behind. Whether small creatures or magic manifested, they could not tell.

The rain fell through slats in the wood and ran down narrow channels, drumming off stacks of uncovered parapets. Near where they stood, rain dripped from an isolated beam onto a flat, metal plate, fast and soft.

“We’ll just walk out like we belong,” Applejack said, “an' pass ‘em by. If we don’t act like we’re scared, they’ll think nothin’ of it, ‘cept maybe ‘hey, new gals.’ That okay?”

“New gals, got it,” Colgate said, not walking.

“I will go,” Octavia said, taking a step away from the rail and hesitating.

Applejack sat back down, waiting to see whether Octavia would go.

“Perhaps we should wait,” Octavia finally whispered, taking a step back.

“The days are shorter here,” Colgate said.

“Right,” Applejack said. She stood and peeked over the rail, and Colgate thought that she would march out into the open, more endless confidence. “Yeah, Ah’m rethinkin’ it myself.”

“We will wait,” Octavia said, going back to the ramps and starting down.

They trotted back to the canyon’s floor, trying not to go too fast as gravity dragged their steps downwards. Vague shame clouded around them, apparent in their looks, each mare demurring when eye contact was threatened.

“We’re not gonna waste this time,” Applejack said as they reached the safety of the ground. “We’re gonna stick to the shadows an’ crevasses, an’ scout this place out. Cole’s right, the days are shorter here, but so’s the nights. We might have to run this whole thing in a night, an’ if we do, we’re gonna need to be prepared.”

“There is a lot to look at,” Octavia said.

“It’s fine,” Colgate said, avoiding a puddle.

“How is this fine?”

Colgate looked at her.

“Let’s wait ‘til these two get off their lunch break,” Applejack said, looking up.

“They weren’t eating,” Colgate said.

“Coffee break, then. You know what Ah mean.”

Colgate shrugged and walked into the spider web shadow of the ramps they had ascended. The water was colder as it dripped from the crossties and supports, and she could see straight into a hole in the wall, its edges smooth and sloping. She half expected a long creature to emerge from within or appear from behind and burrow inwards, an earthworm or snake, huge and not interested in her. She shivered and walked on, leaving Octavia and Applejack to consult with each other.

What first stood out to her was the lack of bridges spanning the canyon’s middle. Both walls were overgrown with sagging, open-faced buildings and platforms, bristling with paths and jutting with poles and signage, but the sky between was unobstructed. She wondered what the significance was as she watched the path of a particular creature, its eyes like spotlights protruding from a plated, bat-wing head. Those in its path gave clearance, though its eyes did not waver.

“See anythin’?” Applejack asked from behind.

“Sure,” Colgate said. She returned to them. “Absence of bridges, means we’ll have to stick to the one side, or else find some weird way of crossing. Lots of stuff up there.”

“Yeah, that’s what Octavia was sayin’. It’s lookin’ to me like once we get up there, we’ll have a pretty okay time of movin’. It’s a solid-lookin’ setup. Kinda rickety, but if it holds them, it’ll hold us.”

“We will need to worry about guards at night,” Octavia said. “Maybe. Or enchantments.”

“Us unicorns can feel those,” Colgate said. “Put me out front, we’ll be fine.”

“You are sure? Will not the ambient magic here interfere?”

“Nope.” Colgate didn’t know.

“Ah’d like to know how far we gotta get,” Applejack said. “Any way we can do that?”

“I do not believe so,” Octavia said.

“Cole, yer good with random flashes of insight. Any way we can figure how far this canyon runs?”

“Yeah, by walking it later tonight,” Colgate said, and Applejack laughed into a sneeze.

“It was a serious question,” Octavia said.

“I don’t know, that was the meaning of my answer.” She frowned. “Why should I know that sort of thing?”

“It’s fine, Ah was just askin’,” Applejack said.

“Those two are leaving,” Octavia said.

Without a word, Colgate went back to the space under the ramps and studied the canyon from a different angle, seeing nothing new. All was uniformly ramshackle, as though one strong gale could tear the canyon’s sides away, and she saw no details that seemed significant. She sat in a puddle and slid her gauze down to examine her wounds. They were wet and raw, the skin around them inflamed and red where it pulled away under blue fur. Once, in a swimming pool in Canterlot, a rat had been sucked into the filter while getting a drink; Colgate had watched a friend take it out and hurl it into the grass. Her pasterns reminded her of its limp body.

They ate in a dry spot under the ramps, and Applejack used the last of the gauze on Colgate’s legs, against Colgate’s objections. Secure for the time, she frowned down on her injuries, knowing already that she was in trouble. They were infected, and though she had alcohol and hydrogen peroxide amongst their supplies, they would do no good in the ceaseless rain.

With a saddlebag over her face, Applejack lay back for a nap, and Octavia stared restively out into the canyon.

“Applejack tells me that I got to you earlier today,” she said at last. She did not turn to Colgate to address her.

“Applejack has been known to say things,” Colgate said.

“It was not my intention to hurt you. For my friends, that is never my intention.”

Colgate sneered for her own benefit, for Octavia still was not looking, and said the first thing that came to mind. “We ain’t friends.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Sure.” She paused and tried to quiet her thoughts. “No, it’s not. I don’t know why I said that.”

“Regardless, I am sorry.”

“Yeah.” She watched Octavia’s tail curl around her back hooves and her bad ear flatten as a drip of rain hit it. “I don’t really know when I have friends, and from what I can tell from you all, that’s uncommon. Right?”

“Most ponies are generally secure in that respect.”

“You think I’m a friend.”

“Why should I not?”

“‘Cause we don’t know each other.”

“We do.” Octavia turned at last, showing her sunken face, her sad eyes. “I know that you are capable of much, and yet are hindered by fear and uncertainty. You know that I am trapped in… something of my own making, I am coming to realize.”

“That doesn’t count,” Colgate said, her heart beginning to race.

“It counts a good deal more than the superficial things I shared with the others, when we were first getting to know each other.”

“Hm.”

“If you like—”

“Hush.” Colgate looked down at a grimy puddle, her thoughts shuffling, the old fear stirring inside her. Octavia was circling in on her, probing her defenses, preparing a surprise. The thought to wake Applejack zipped across her mind.

“No harm, Cole,” she thought. It was mindless habit, a phrase repeated at signs of distress with no benefit, but she repeated it again anyway. “She’s my burden here.”

Colgate took a deep breath and counted five seconds to herself, afraid to look at Octavia, afraid of what she would see: a fireball expanding into her face, or a pair of emaciated hooves too fast and too close to stop, or just that depressed mare who thought they were friends.

“All righty,” she said, looking at Octavia, seeing what she saw. “We can continue now.”

“Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Why do you need to stop sometimes?”

“Talking?”

“Yes.”

“I’m gathering myself,” Colgate said. “Making plans, figuring stuff out, you know. Nothing unusual.”

“I do not think I understand.”

Colgate looked at the patient before her, her worry already dying down, smothering itself under the filter of professionalism. It did not occur to her that it was the same way she looked at Applejack.

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it. If it’s—you know, if it bothers you—you’re absolved from freaking me out earlier.”

“That means a lot,” Octavia said, bowing her head. “That is something else that friends do. They forgive each other.”

“I… Yeah, that’s true.” Not knowing what else to say, she serviced with a smile.

“I have thought some about your questions from yesterday.”

“Ah, yes.” Relief slowed her pulse as she mentally switched gears. “What have these thoughts yielded?”

Octavia turned back to the rain without comment, the muscles in her back twitching. “I wish that I were happy. I want to go back to that feeling, in the desert.”

“You already said that yesterday.”

“I know. But it is all I can think about. When I ask myself why I am doing all this, all I can think is how much I wish I had not begun, and that I did not continue doing it.”

“Define what you did.”

“Just the way I live. The way I take everything onto my back, the stress I put myself through.”

“Artist types are often perfectionists, or have perfectionist traits,” Colgate said.

“Yes, I thought that that was what it was for a long time. Somewhere along the line, that streak of self-criticism became much more serious than I intended it to.”

“Keep her talking,” Colgate thought to herself. As a patient, Octavia presented only challenges, no threats; and as such, also would earn her high marks if Colgate could see her through Tartarus safely. She could feel the invisible eye of the Datura turned on her even crouched under the leaking stairs. She nodded, trying to encourage.

“I thought that I was doing the right thing. Of course I did, that is why I did it,” Octavia continued. “Yet it has taken me to this point, and I do not see any relief. I do not know.”

“Right,” Colgate said. She realized after a second that a response was expected. “Things get out of control sometimes. Like a situation, it can get bigger than you.”

“We have all discovered that in our ways.”

“Yup.” She angled her head to cool her horn in the water. “You’re certain of that, but not your own situation. Cool, great.”

“I am sorry?”

Colgate shrugged.

“I did not mean to rebuff you, if that is what you think.”

“I don’t think.”

Octavia rolled her eyes, though Colgate didn’t see, looking hotly at the ground.

“Tell me more about this clarity you experienced in the desert,” Octavia said. “You seemed to welcome it then. What has changed?”

“It left.”

“Specifically, I mean.”

Colgate thought of times she had told patients of operations she had undergone, to put them at ease. All had been fabrications, for she had been lucky to not need surgery in her life.

“Well. I guess what it means is that I can think right.”

“You can focus your attention?”

“Kinda.” “No harm, Cole.” “It’s like if my mind is a TV, right? And every thought is a different channel. There’s the news, the cartoons, the celebrity channel, those channels that play music all day, and on and on. Right? But the channel changer’s busted, so everything is all mixed up. Something like that.”

“So when we were in the desert, it was like you stayed on one particular channel?”

“I guess.” She considered how to go on for a time. “I haven’t thought about it much. It never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t just figure it out on the spot.”

Octavia frowned. “I do not understand.”

“‘Cause it’s obvious.” Her heart was speeding up again, intimations of danger again pressing into her thoughts. “If someone sees me having a bad day or something, or being frustrated with a patient, they’ll just figure my channels are changing.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because—” She stopped herself. Two possibilities outlined themselves before her: that Octavia was preparing the barbed question, the line of dialogue that would turn against Colgate; or that Octavia did not share her difficulties with thought control. Colgate liked the implications of neither.

“What is wrong?”

“Walk with me,” Colgate said, hopping up and limping into the cool, but momentarily dry, air. Her hooves screamed up her legs, the gauze like broken glass on her wounds, and her headache a frail echo of that pain.

“Not in the open,” Octavia said.

“I know that.”

They followed a curve of stone to where it overhung an oblate pool of water, a sash of smoke reflected off its surface.

Without thinking, Colgate threw herself in. Her wounds were quiet for a moment, then only throbbed weakly. The last of the gauze was ruined, and she knew that the temperature change would hurt her, but those thoughts came too late. She dog-paddled a small circuit and dipped her head to see the bottom not three feet below.

“You enjoy the water, I have noticed,” Octavia said.

“Yeah!” She flipped her mane back and scattered droplets.

“I do not. I cannot swim.”

“No?” She made her way back to the rim. “I’m not great, but I can tread water. Back in Canterlot, we swam a lot. My friends, I mean. And me—my friends and me.”

“That sounds enjoyable.”

“Some of the best times in life. Their pools are warmer than this one, though—one disadvantage of Tartarus. Also no room service.”

Octavia popped an eyebrow, but did not comment.

“Do your channels not change like that?” Colgate asked. She felt safer in the water, and had even before Octavia reminded her that she couldn’t swim.

“I cannot say that they do. If anything, I would say that my problem is that mine change too infrequently. When I think about one thing, I find it difficult to think of others.”

“Huh. So…” She dunked herself again, the flash of cold in her eyes and nostrils steadying her emotions for a second. She was not certain that she could trust Octavia’s words.

“Every time you do that, I worry that you will not come back up,” Octavia said.

“Yeah.”

“There are other ponies that share your problem, but it is not common—at least, that I know of.”

“So it’s not obvious.”

“It is quite the opposite of obvious, Colgate.”

“Am I hidden or not?” she thought. “Seems I am. But the Datura…” “All right, Octavia, I’ll buy that.”

“I hope so. It is true.”

“Right.”

“I believe I see why clarity is so important to you,” Octavia said. “It is because you do not feel it often. Correct?”

“Yeah, correct.”

“Meanwhile, I might argue that I feel it too acutely at times.”

Colgate put her muzzle in the water for a moment. “Well aren’t we two peas in a pod?”

Octavia began a rejoinder, but stopped, thinking instead that it had been an attempt at humor. She gave Colgate a tired smile. “You should get out. That cannot be comfortable.”

“I’ll live.”

“Come. I might be able to help dry you off.” Thunder rumbled overhead, and Octavia sighed. “Perhaps not.”

“Go on,” Colgate said. “I wanna stay here for a couple minutes. I have to think some things over.”

“It will rain any second.”

“I’m already soaked.”

“If you say so. Do return soon, though. I think the sun is going down; we will need to move in the next few hours.”

Colgate waved her off, and Octavia walked away. The stairs were still visible, and Applejack’s sleeping form underneath, but to Colgate, the space between was too great to cross without an orderly mind. She dunked herself again, thinking of what Octavia had said—worried that Colgate might not come back up—and raised her head to the gentle fall of more rain.

The invisible eye of the Datura had not wavered, she realized. It probably never had; there had just been times where she was too occupied to think of it. She did not know what could be done about that.

Octavia was the key to her survival. Saving Applejack was good, but in the eyes of her adjudicators, as well as the other Elements of Harmony, it would not be enough.

“It’s my final test,” Colgate thought. “Save ‘em both or… Celestia knows what. But I gotta get ‘em both.” Thinking so, she paddled to the other side of the pool, barely making it before her head slipped underwater. Her chest was frozen, her limbs stiff, her head cloudy and thrumming with pain. She crawled out and rolled on the slick stone, letting the rainfall caress her. She could not feel it for how cold she already was, but the thought of all the rain comforted her.

“She doesn’t mean me any harm,” she said to the clouds. The ragged canyon walls cut her view of the sky, and she closed her eyes, but opened them immediately as a frigid breeze touched her fur. Completely soaked and limping, she returned to the others.

They were gratified to see the strange beings shuffle away as the light faded. No torches were lit, no lanterns swung on hooks, and when it was just them and the bright clouds, they ascended the rickety staircase a second time. Colgate had wrapped her hooves with torn pieces off one of Rarity’s dresses.

“Y’all are sure you can make it tonight?” Applejack asked. “Not that it matters, so much, but still.”

“I will be fine,” Octavia said. “Will you?”

“Ah’m actually more refreshed than Ah expected. Back’s a little stiff, but—” she sneezed. “If we got the fuel fer it, Ah’ll boil some water fer myself after this.”

Colgate said nothing and trotted out to the table that had stopped them earlier in the day. Sitting at it for a moment, she contemplated the canyon. All she could think of was how many stairs and ramps there were to see, and dismissed the thought as useless.

“Let’s put some pep in our steps,” Applejack said. “This might be a long one.”

The boards creaked and groaned as they traversed the canyon walls, and when the rain let up and the clouds parted, they were able to see a clear path over the V of rock that had prompted their ascent. Most of the larger buildings were above them, either perched on the rim by thin legs of wood and thatching or crouching farther off, only their rooftops visible from where the ponies walked.

The walls were scored and marked without design, sometimes inelegantly pitted. White dust stuck to their hooves from the walkways and platforms, and one of them would occasionally cough when it rose too high. Like the dust in the desert, the stone dust was lighter, more prone to fly when touched. The object of the labor was clearly excavation, but there were no deposits of ore, no mine carts or baskets.

They stopped for a minute at one of the steles they had seen from below, taking water from their captive rain tree. It was of bare wood, knotted and bent, its bark sanded off to expose pale, otherwise untouched wood, sticking out of its platform with obvious purpose, though nothing the mares could guess. Applejack used it to brace herself and get a better look at the canyon below, which had narrowed into a gully of sharp rocks and winking pools of rainwater.

“How are you feeling, Applejack?” Colgate asked.

“Me? Ah’m stuffed up pretty good, but it’s this headache that’s gettin’ me. You were right ‘bout it.”

“And your eyebrow?”

“Painful, but nothin’ crazy.”

“I’ll look at it again tomorrow morning.”

“That might be good. Ah know Fluttershy can heal me up once we get out, but all the same, Ah’d rather not trifle with infection. Same fer yer poor hooves.”

“Can her magic dispel infections?”

“Ah don’t see why not.”

They continued along the next walkway, which was tilted away and ran such for a quarter mile before joining an awkward stack of twisting stairs and asymmetrical walls.

“Who wants to hear a joke?” Applejack asked suddenly.

“Fine,” Octavia said.

“Jokes are funny,” Colgate said; her mind was elsewhere.

“They sure are, Cole,” Applejack said. “Okay, so there’s two cowponies, a mare an’ a stallion, and they’re in love. The stallion, he’s got plenty of experience, you know, with love-makin’, but she’s still innocent. A vestal virgin, you could say. So they get married an’ go off to their honeymoon.”

“Where do they go?” Octavia asked.

“It don’t matter, they just go. So off they go to their honeymoon, an’ things are gettin’ hot an’ heavy, and they’re explorin’ each other, an’ it’s all goin’ great until the mare goes downstairs an’ finds the stallion’s, er, equipment.”

“His penis,” Colgate said.

“Yeah. An’ she says ‘oh my, what’s this?’ An’ he says ‘that there’s my rope, honey.’ An’ then she finds the balls an’ says ‘now what’s them?’ an’ he says ‘them’s the knots’. So they start makin’ love, an’ after a couple minutes, the mare stops him. ‘Stop, honey, stop,’ she says. ‘What’s wrong, am Ah hurtin’ ya?’ he asks. ‘No’, she says.” Applejack chuckled to herself, and the boards below them creaked. “She says, ‘Just undo them dang knots, Ah need more rope’.”

Octavia laughed once and stopped herself, and Colgate grinned.

“Ah got a million of ‘em.”

“That was amusing,” Octavia said.

“Either of you got any?”

“There is one that I remember from college,” Octavia said. “What happened to the musician who stole note stands from the concert hall? She got in treble.”

“Aww, that’s silly,” Applejack said, laughing. “Cole, you got one? Make it to three?”

“I can’t think of anything,” Colgate said.

“Here, Ah’ve got another. This one’s a little mean. What do you call it when a pegasus tries to fly an’ talk at the same time? Fallin’.”

Octavia laughed again, and Colgate chuckled too; the contrast between the joke and Applejack’s friendly nature was funnier to her than the punchline.

“Do not say that in front of Rainbow Dash,” Octavia said.

“You kiddin’? She’s the one who taught it to me. RD loves jokes like that—s’long as they’re not serious, obviously.”

“I did not know she found racism funny.”

“Oh fer Celestia’s sake, it’s a harmless joke. How ‘bout this? A wife asks her earth pony husband to go to the store. She says ‘pick up some bread, an’ if there’s eggs, get a dozen.’ So the husband comes back in a couple minutes with a dozen loaves of bread.”

At that, Colgate laughed.

“You can just interchange whichever type of pony you want for these jokes, it seems,” Octavia said.

“So?” Applejack asked, still chuckling.

“We don’t have to suck the fun out of everything,” Colgate said. “I remembered one. A mare walks into the doctor’s office for her yearly, and when she comes in, she’s got a banana in her left ear, a radish up her nose, and a bunch of grapes smashed in her right ear. She asks the doctor what’s wrong with her.”

“Ah think Ah’ve heard this one before. Go on, go on.”

“The doctor says ‘you’re not eating properly’.”

“Hah! Ah knew it!” She paused while Octavia finished laughing.

“That’s a nice, clean joke for you, Octy.”

“That one was my favorite,” Octavia said. They stopped at a misshapen door in the structure they had seen from afar, a spindly cage of imperfect walls that afforded a view of the floors from outside, clinging to the canyon wall on uneven struts. It groaned when they stepped in, the floor above dripping on them. After a minute, Octavia lit them a dim light, showing nothing but empty space around a sagging staircase.

“Ah say we stay on this bottom level,” Applejack said. “Just in case.”

“I wish to go higher, to get a better view,” Octavia said, starting for the stairs. They joined her up three flights to exit onto another walkway, no different from the one they had quit. The canyon wall was still too tall to admit a view out, but Octavia trotted ahead, the walkway taking them on a gentle incline. At a wide, circular parapet, they rested, and Octavia stood atop a broad, flat block in the middle, briefly rising to her shaking hind legs.

“There sure ain’t much here, is there?” Applejack asked.

“There’s more than what we see, I’m sure,” Colgate said, going to the block and partially bracing herself, should Octavia lose her balance. “Magic is the way of life here, remember, so these folks don’t need to rely on tools and stuff like we do. I bet this whole platform is enchanted fifteen ways from Sunday.”

“You said you could feel enchantments,” Octavia said.

“I can, and I do. I feel it all.”

“You can’t tell what any of ‘em are, right?” Applejack asked.

“My magic sense isn’t that sophisticated.” She crouched to look through a gap in the floorboards. “Now lookee here, though.”

“What’s this?” Applejack joined her in pressing her face against the floor. “Yep, no doubt ‘bout it, that’s a shadow.”

Colgate moved out of the way.

“Looks like a burlap sack. It’s hangin’ from a pole.”

“A primitive security system, perhaps?” Octavia asked.

“We’d know if it was by now,” Colgate said. “I guess you didn’t notice, we walked over a bunch of ‘em earlier.” She went back to the block.

“You gonna put that college education to work again?” Applejack asked.

“It’s just an interesting thing to note. Who needs sacks in a place like this?”

Applejack snorted back laughter, and Colgate looked at her blankly.

“Sorry, my mind’s in the gutter. Yeah, Ah guess it is kinda weird, ain’t it?”

“I don’t know what they are. Let’s go.” She gave the stairs a last look as Octavia led them, but it was not long before they had to stop. Octavia crouched at a point of stone and gestured for them to be quiet, unnecessarily indicating the foreign lights across the canyon. Like headlights, bright white dots floated along their own walkway on a lower level, not straying from their path but wide enough to touch both the wall and the walkway’s outer edge not far before their bearer. As it came parallel, they could see its glassy body, streaming with tiny strands of multicolored light, like something from the bottom of the ocean.

It passed a tilting shack and paused but a second before putting its glowing eyes to one of the wooden poles, and then was gone.

The light flared up behind them in the same instant that Applejack ran, her hooves slipping and clattering noisily and shocking the others to follow. Not a sound was heard behind them, but the lights swung onto their backs, warm even at a distance and exposing the naked fear in their uncoordinated gallops.

The wooden path rattled and bent under them, water splashing from their hooves and coming off their rain tree in juddering mists that appeared as imitations of the cloud-obscured stars in the piercing light.

“Here, down,” Octavia said, dodging to the side to a narrow ramp and throwing her shoulder against a latched gate. In a line, they endured momentary darkness to reach a lower level, but the light was again on them as they spilled onto the next walkway and onto the next disc. Pausing for a second at the central bole, Applejack looked back, eyes lowered to not blind herself. She heard no footsteps and saw no feet, seeing instead a rapid dance of colorful lights on the boardwalk—she was momentarily reminded of the gaudy lights of Applewood.

“C’mon, farmer,” Colgate said, pulling at Applejack’s tail.

As Applejack turned to run, she thought she could see the edge of a new light in her peripheries. Ahead, Octavia made to duck into a hole in the wall, and Colgate bit at her tail. The verbal exchange was lost on Applejack, who had given them a small head start for her curiosity, but Octavia emerged with a dark look, which turned darker as she turned all the way around. Applejack’s heart leapt up another notch, her legs almost skittering out from under her in the snap of fear.

Then Octavia looked up, and Applejack raced under a more familiar flash of orange light, a clap of fire that was strangely comforting against the silent pursuer. Rafters and joists came down in a disjointed avalanche behind her, shooting freckles of fire out into the canyon’s mouth, and Applejack scrambled on a wet beam, nearly losing her balance.

“Who told you to do that?” Colgate asked.

“I do not answer to you,” Octavia said, glaring first at Applejack and then at the creature behind. Through the flames, already dying down from the rain and the soaked wood, they could see a dark body behind the bright eyes, a chest that was smooth and semitransparent; a head that was wide enough to sweep the walkway, bowed upwards on two points like a crescent moon. When it turned in retreat, they could see the conflagration of little lights on its back, racing up and down, and then only an afterimage. It had jumped to the other side again.

“Move,” Applejack said, pushing to the front at a gallop, but stopping after only a few steps when the creature materialized in front of them. “All right, don’t move.”

“We’re going back,” Colgate said. “I know what it’s doing.”

“I will hit it if it gets close,” Octavia said.

“Not smart.” She ran for the extinguished debris and urged them to follow, saying, as she ran back the way they’d come, “we can do it too.”

She nearly flung herself into the erect pole on the platform, spraying a puddle around herself. “Let there be light, Octy.”

“What?” Octavia cried.

“Put a light on this thing. No! Like—move it. Like this.” Colgate shoved Octavia out of the way and summoned her own, weaker light, which she set to the stele. The creature glided closer, parting the dark smoke they had left behind. “Touch it.”

Applejack looked at Octavia, but did not question. In her mind, though Colgate had said she was not, Colgate was the Tartarus expert. She felt her hoof on the post for a split-second before falling off, out of the light and away from her friends. She jumped up and spun around just as Octavia careened into her, seemingly out of thin air. Both lights were on the other side of the canyon, and then just one as Colgate joined them, also falling.

“I will not even ask how you knew that,” Octavia said, picking herself up.

“College education,” Colgate said. They were not far ahead before the creature was behind them again, but were able to shoot to the other side from another post, wedged awkwardly against a shed and gritty with wet sawdust.

“Let’s start blastin’ the path behind us,” Applejack said, panting, as they came to another tower of stairs.

“Blow this thing,” Colgate said, running into the first room and heading back up—for they had only been able to go lower or directly across, never higher. Her body was caught on the stairs for a moment as the creature’s light flashed them from outside, its misshapen corpus sliding through the air like a tiny, evil airship, incapable of fatigue.

At the tower’s apex, Octavia turned and delivered another explosion to the supports holding it to the canyon’s side. From below, the spotlights cut through her magical fire, scissoring lights that threw the falling architecture into a more hectic sort of chaos. For a second, the torrent of rubble obscured their watcher, but it was still there when the last of the debris had fallen away. Unlike before, it did not turn back to find another pole. Its unblinking eyes penetrated and divided them, holding them in place while another light slowly blossomed from behind.

“We’re still runnin’,” Colgate said, taking off. Applejack followed shortly, and Octavia remained behind just long enough to witness the completion of its movement, the second light’s graduation into a wide, shimmering set of wings that turned the canyon to daylight and her fire to a pale candle’s flame. She ran.

Still without sound, but with presence and light enough that they needn’t turn, the creature quit the platform and followed, borne on sunlit wings, vast and growing vaster as they caught the current of invisible magic that had made the canyon. Their own panicked shadows on the bulbous walls, the three mares galloped across platform and walkway, not looking down at the drowned canyon floor. Occasionally, they used a magical pole to jump forward, but the creature did not fall behind—but also did it not rush. Like a physical sign of the dawn, it came down the canyon with neither haste nor mercy, its black body lost in the twin slabs of light that it had grown, lightly brushing their steps as they put more of the same, ramshackle monotony behind them.

They panted and groaned, Octavia wheezed; the saddlebags clapped Applejack’s sides while the rain tree sprinkled her face, she in the back. She was not sure whether the warmth creeping up her tail was from the Tartarus light or her own imagination, and it did not much matter to her. She was focused on Octavia and Colgate, one sometimes ahead of the other, both sometimes together—Colgate always on the far edge, one stumble away from twisting down to the water and rock that did not look so far away, but was.

Her head spun when she took another teleportation pole, and Octavia helped her to her hooves with a sharp pull and a harried stare into the light. Colgate was already scrambling down the broken edge of their perforated platform, trying to crawl onto a support that would let her drop to the path below.

“Come,” Octavia simply said, racing to the edge and, after a pained second, casting herself over. Applejack had no choice to follow, momentarily breathless in the freezing, falling air, and then deflated with the landing. Her chest felt petrified, and she had to lie on the planks for a few seconds before gaining her hooves. Behind, still, the light drifted their way. Where it had run out of room on the sides, it had gained height, a pair of slender towers that had nearly converged.

“Legs!” Colgate cried, stumbling before a gouged work table.

“It’s still behind us,” Applejack said.

“I know that!” She pushed herself up, and Applejack could see its light in her squinted, watering eyes.

“Here,” Octavia said, pulling Colgate’s tail along and trotting to a wide hole in the rock. They retreated into the smooth tunnel, breath held, until they could not see in front of their own faces. The tunnel had taken them on a gentle slope down, not narrowing—as Colgate feared—or splitting into multiple paths, as Applejack feared. Like a wormhole in a rotten fruit, the tunnel followed a straight path into the land, its floors and walls a smooth but uneven ring, gilt with the coming light. They could see little of the constricted entrance when they stopped, so deep had they run, and when the strange being came upon their hiding place, it was not immediately clear that it had stopped as well. They saw only light, and when that light slowly faded and divested itself of its earlier form, leaving the dreaded twin spotlights of old, they were still not sure.

The composure broke when those spotlights turned their way.

Colgate simply ran, her shrinking body painfully visible as it retreated down the tube; and Applejack froze, her heart threatening to burst and her mind reeling and reaching blindly for ideas. All she could think of was her friends, and that they would never know what had happened.

Like an image from a dream, the creature, its smaller strips of light turning the tunnel walls to scattering wings of dull jewels, glided in their direction. Every texture on the wormhole was visible, shot with physically intense light, and Applejack felt like a pinned insect under the collector’s headlamp.

She turned to follow Colgate—still visible, just—but turned back. “Come on, then,” she said, ears ringing with the collective panic.

She didn’t register the tunnel collapsing, or the sound of crashing rock and roaring flame, but the pressure wave punched her breath out and cut off her final thoughts. Without comprehending, she waited for death to take her again, watching fire leap away from them and boulders the size of headstones fill the space, blocking much of the light. It wavered behind the rubble.

Octavia took a breath and sat down, and Applejack did the same. “This ain’t what it feels like,” she thought.

Neither mare spoke for a time as the tattered light shifted behind the collapse. Once, it brightened again, and they had to close their eyes, but nothing came of it. When the light died away, they were left with complete dark, their eyes singed and sore, their tunnel a smear of color. Applejack was conscious of Colgate returning, her hoofsteps on the stone.

She tried to force a chuckle. “Guess we gave it what fer, huh?” With no reply, Applejack lay down, her chest and forelegs against the warm stone. Whether warm from the light or from its own accord, she could not say.

When eyesight returned, Octavia approached the rubble. “Before you say anything, this was the only solution I saw. I did not want to attack it directly—I do not think I could have done much.”

“This is more than fine, darlin’,” Applejack said. “More than fine.” Colgate only glowered at the impediment.

“Stand back, please,” Octavia said.

From farther back in the tunnel, Colgate and Applejack watched Octavia labor to remove the stones she had loosed through a mixture of telekinesis, smaller explosions, and main force.

“I think that was a night watchpony,” Colgate said.

“It weren’t no pony,” Applejack said.

“You reckon it’s still out there?”

“Ah reckon it is. You think it can turn off its eyes? If so, then we could be in trouble still. Might just be waitin’ right outside.”

“I’ll just go back in here if it is. I recommend you do too.”

“Ah’d rather not, all things considered.”

Colgate tapped the floor with a nervous hoof. “It’s warm down there. Hot, even. I got far.”

“Yeah?”

“Gets hotter the deeper you go.”

“Swell.”

“Makes me worry about the future.”

“Ah try not to think ‘bout that as much nowadays.”

“Yeah.”

When the last rock tumbled out of their hole, they waited for the lights to reappear. Colgate kept looking over her shoulder at the black pit of the tunnel, and Applejack looked with her.

“Let us move,” Octavia said. Her voice carried from near the entrance as though she were beside them, and Colgate shivered as they crept back to the open air. Where the rain tree had been dropped, there was a puddle of water that they both almost slipped in. No sentinel waited for them, just drooping platforms and a sky painted with breaking clouds.

Gone were the stacks of stairs and the oddly positioned sheds, the hanging sacks and the magical poles. They stood atop a slanting boardwalk that smelled of rot and soot, running down to the frame of a half-destroyed platform. Applejack hefted a sledgehammer—very much alike to what she could find on the Gaia—and revealed a ring of rust where its head had been in contact with the flooring.

“Eyes up,” Colgate said. “Observe the distance.” Fear was not in her voice, but in the others’ heads as they snapped to attention. The canyon glowed, not with the white light of their enemy, but with the unmistakable warmth of fire.

“At least we’ll be dry,” Applejack said.

“Think of this,” Colgate said as they began their descent. “It was raining heavily not long ago, and yet there’s enough fire down there to light up this whole end of the canyon.” She paused for effect. “That ain’t natural.”

“Perhaps we should have gone around the side after all,” Octavia said.

“Do you still have contact with Twilight’s letter things?” Applejack asked.

Octavia was silent for a few seconds as she chose how to approach the climb down. “The last one I felt was some time before we ran, and it was faint.”

“Could it be we outstripped ‘em?”

“That is possible, yes. The distances here seem to be less than back home.”

“It’s a more compact world,” Colgate said.

“All right, Cole, now that we’re not runnin’ fer our lives anymore, how’d you figure that teleportin’ pole trick? That was genius. Octavia, blowin’ our tunnel too, that was… Ah’d’ve never thought of it. Ah’m glad you did.”

“Thank you,” Octavia said. She had made her way to the end of a beam, and was perched there, trying to lower one hoof to the platform below.

“I just saw the light guy do it,” Colgate said. “It hit the pole with its eyes, and that activated ‘em. That’s all. The shadow pointed you where you’d land.”

“Higher learnin’,” Applejack said, shaking her head.

“Did you not go to college?” Colgate asked, following Octavia with a graceless fall and thump onto the shaky boards.

“High school was it fer me. Ah knew Ah was gonna be on the farm fer my adult life, we all knew that up front. Heck, when my cutie mark showed, it was pretty much guaranteed.” She scrambled down to the platform. A mold-eaten walkway stuck out not far below, and it would take them back to the canyon floor, shimmering with water.

“If you do not mind my saying so, you sound somewhat jealous whenever you mention college,” Octavia said.

“Ah mean… All right, maybe Ah am a little envious of you girls. Ah don’t regret bein’ on the farm, even if it was kinda out of my control, but it does sound like Ah’m missin’ a lot.”

“You’re not,” Colgate said, mirroring Octavia’s “you are.” The two glanced at each other.

“For me, college was about experimentation and creativity,” Octavia said. “It was an arts institute, so how could it not be? I enjoyed a lot of time there.”

“Really?” Applejack asked.

“Believe it or not, I did.”

“What did you enjoy?”

“I found the social aspect to be quite invigorating. It was a large school, but the classes got smaller the longer you were there, and I was able to become friends with some of my professors. Many of the students were very friendly and open, which I liked at the time, though I did not capitalize on that very much. I do not know, I just liked how open and free everything felt there. The work did not feel like work to me.”

“That’s a sign that you were in the right place,” Applejack said.

“Yes.” She did not continue, but Applejack knew the story’s outline. She would graduate, get a steady job, buy a house outside her means, and then be claimed by the mystery that haunted her.

“How ‘bout you, Cole? College not so fun?”

They paused before hopping off the platform, angling their heads to make sure the pool of water below was as shallow as it appeared. Octavia, with Colgate's consent, floated her down in a gentle fog of telekinesis.

“The workload sucks,” Colgate said. “You gotta take a ton of classes on stuff you’re gonna wind up not using in your specialty, plus all the general education stuff. There’s tests and certifications and all that. Lots of writing, too. I hate writing.”

“I as well,” Octavia said.

“I went to school with a lot of boring ponies. Passionate, but boring. All they did was study and complain, and have sex.”

“Whoa, what?” Applejack asked, laughing. “Wasn’t expectin’ that.”

“Everybody’s blowing off steam from all the work, and sexual release is an easy way to do that.”

“Did you partake?”

“Once or twice,” Colgate said guardedly. “I was shy, so I didn’t try a lot of that stuff.”

They rounded a ridge in the canyon walls, where rose up another ramshackle arrangement of platforms and ramps, at the top of which sloped away a burgundy hill that blocked their view of what created the smoke above. They had seen it from afar, and finally, they were upon it. The ground emanated warmth, and the air was dry and pleasant. Grit and gravel shifted against their hooves as they trudged toward the first ramp.