EPILOGUE: MELANIE BREWER

I was nervous as I took the first few steps to the pedestal that held the throne. As soon as I stepped up and saw the room filled to the brim with reporters, I couldn't help but to get jittery, nervous for me making the slightest mistake. Even so much as my slipping up and I'm probably on the front page of someone's newspaper. I looked to the room where the others were, Nondis gave me an encouraging nod, motioning his hand to go on and start.

"Good evening." I said, clearing my throat. "I'm sure a lot of you would've preferred that Nondis or Alex be here to say all of what we have on our account as humans for this situation. But unfortunately, Alex has been busy with some recent work. And I know I'm probably not as experienced in terms conducting interviews, but I'll do my best to answer some questions on what all has happened, at least from our perspectives. My account will not be perfect, but I am straight and to the point. There will be some questions I cannot answer, but there will be some solutions I could possibly provide. On that note, the floor is open."

Questions were coming in full force, I had to hurry along and choose one to get things moving before I end up getting froze to death by nerves. "In terms of you humans, when did you all realize that you had become element bearers?"

That was the first question I heard, so I responded to that. "That's a really good question. When did we all realize that we were element bearers? We found that out in a number of ways, but the hints at the beginning were similar for all of us. We all had a dream, this powerful entity approached us about helping our friends when we could, and then our paths began to diverge. We don't know where the elements came from, we just know who used them before us. The final confirmation was when we tried to not exactly dispose of them, but separate ourselves from them. They would not separate from us, often reappearing in places we did not intend to carry them. Also, humans are not as quick to heal our wounds, broken fingers and other things that usually took a month or two took only the matter of an hour. That's really when we found out that something was up." Another rush of questions came up and I chose the first hoof that was raised. "Yes?"

"With the portals to your world now destroyed, what do you intend to do next?"

I began to feel good about them asking some easy questions, that way I can just give my account instead. "Well a lot has happened here and I know that a lot of our time in the coming month will be occupied with investigations and the like. But I myself personally have taken a liking to Ponyville for how quiet it is. I do have a place rented out if I ever need to take the time away. Though to do a bit of advertising, there's this little inn at the foot of the castle there, I recommend spending your time there, the landlady there is so nice. The food is good, she actually cooks it herself. And she's dedicated a lot of the renovations to her deceased son, who was killed in one of the changeling invasions of Ponyville. She's running the place by herself, and she's a little low on business, I want to be able to help her out for being so nice to us. So yeah, I recommend checking that out."

A few hums came around before the questions started getting asked again. "You have worked on the captain's medical conditioning throughout the past few months, almost being a personal doctor to him. Can you tell us what all has happened with him since his sudden disappearance?"

And then came the hard one. "Well..." Flashes of the images that I saw in the lab flooded back to me, seeing Jasper's head on a shelf, Nondis' head on a table next to Jasper's headless body, the images of the entire operation taking place. Everything seemed to bombard me at once with the unceasing distress. I opened my eyes to see the ponies all standing in front of me, waiting for an answer. "...I'm afraid that I'm not cleared to say much on that. But what I can say is that the time away has dealt him a harsh circumstance. I can't say all of what happened without delving into an ongoing criminal investigation. There are a number of accounts and evidence that points to the... I guess he's a terrorist, I'd call him that, you can call him whatever you're legally obligated to. But to me, that's who he is and no argument to depict the contrary will ever exist. A lot has happened, and we humans have been a victim to it all, moreso the captain."

I attempted to purge my mind of the painful memories, but yet another brought up a terrible image. "What can you tell us about your experience of being an element bearer?"

Suddenly, there was the image of my best friend's head resting on a table, sitting next to his element in a plastic bag.

I had to jolt myself to the present, seeing not a lab of experiements or a stack of corpses being twisted into tentacles, but living ponies wanting to know answers. Instead of focusing on the terror we experienced, I decided to answer on the experience of the moment. "...Well there were a few circumstances that annoyed us. The healing factor was not one of them, but we still understand that pain is still pain, we're not gonna just go out there and break our legs and arms for whatever reason because we can. But the main thing I guess was the side effects. We didn't know that our bodies would transform as a result of the magic, I guess that opens a whole other scientific field of questions, but I'm really not interested in going into depth at this time. For the power aspect, I thought it was pretty scary at first because everything around me is glowing real bright, and I'm just not used to me being in a spotlight, much less being the actual spotlight. Magic surges through you like a conduit, and you can only release that energy where it's supposed to go. I mean yeah in some ways it's fun be up in the air and floaty─like 'Ooh, I'm flying'─that kind of stuff, but it's pretty scary when what you're facing up against is ultimately the line between life and death for all that you know and love. I don't wish the experience on anyone else because I know the weight of that burden, and it's not easy to pick up. I truly hope that these elements won't be used again, but they will be. I don't think they'll be our burden in the foreseeable future. But if we are chosen once again, I don't think we'll mind answering that call."

As I finished my explanation, I felt myself becoming more and more uneasy as I stood there. I couldn't really focus on the questions that were being asked, instead I had to push out a lot of intrusive thoughts and haunting images. I couldn't stay here anymore.

"In the meantime, I thank you for the informative questions and giving me my first public interview. I'm sorry, but I must go."

More questions were hollered at me as the cameras started to flash on and on as I walked off the pedestal and back into the room where the others waited. Nondis was the first face I saw greeting me. "Wow, look at you. You nailed that thing."

"Thanks..." I said with a half-smile, looking off and away from his face. "They were really hounding questions about you."

"They'll do that." He said as he brought me into a hug. "You okay? You froze the moment they started talking about me. I just want to make sure you're okay."

I could tell he took a bath before this press conference, he smelled nice, a far cry from the horrible death that he had to jump and dodge over throughout the past day. He was warm, really warm, but the scars on his neck terrified me. Instead of looking up to them, I closed my eyes and focused on the beating heart in his chest, reminding me that he was still here.

"I'm okay." I lied.

The Next Day...

I didn't get a chance to close my eyes for sleep, there was no such thing after the past three days. That first night was a terrible reminder of what all I saw in that lab. It scared the living daylights out of me with what all we discovered. Then there's the whole siege that had us moving all night, we had to stay up and guard the portals, and finally fight Umbra. And then there's the cruel reminder of Alabaster dying before our very eyes, the bodies being twisted into tentacles, the large hulking mass of corpses used to create an even larger creature that dared to crush us. There was no such thing as having any kind of peace.

There was only questions, and I needed to find answers.

So I got up this morning with the intention of being able to finally put together a decent campaign for trying to find the answers to my ongoing trauma. And there was only one place I knew where I could start. I set out for the lab, hoping to discover something new that could give me an insight of what all happened, why it all had to happen, and gain more knowledge of where it happened.

A guardsmare named Cobalt Blue was kind enough to escort me along the way, looking for more information and checking up on the status of a certain door that they couldn't open. And when we arrived in, we made our way through a number of smelly rooms and into the halls of the lab. We walked in front of the door she couldn't open in yesterday's clearing. In the quiet, I could finally process just how relatively clean this place was to the mountain crag, and abandoned industrial infrastructure surrounding it. But in here, it resembled a modern hospital wing. Every last bit of it had me transported back to medical school. It was scary to think about, but I began to feel comfortable with it.

One thing I was taught in medical school was how to deal with the prospect of human mortality. There was this place we walked into, a morgue-looking office with about five drawers lined up next to one another. And when you open one, out comes the feet, then the legs, then then courtesy cloth covering the genitals, the arms and torso, and finally the head. A lot of us were unnerved at seeing a dead body, someone's existence, or lack thereof, willingly donated for us to observe in greater detail.

There were a number of things, namely seven we were instructed to do before our first dissection. The first; Know what we're getting into, study pictures, observe the various states a human body can take post mortem, and watch videos on the matter to get acclimated to what you will be doing in the future. The second; Wear clothes you don't particularly care for, in my current instance it would be the same clothes I wore for the past two days, don't wanna get any kind of juices or liquids on the stuff you like to wear out. The third; Know that you're not the only one who's going to be unnerved, there are others experiencing this along with you, that one is often the easiest to forget. The fourth; Dealing with the various smells, we could also rub some vapor rub on our upper lips to phase out some of the odor, but I didn't have that here. That one brings up the fifth point; You'll learn to get over it... quickly. The sixth; Know your strengths and defer to those who work better at a certain area. And last but not least the most important point; Keep yourself and everything else clean.

I did a lot to try and process my traumas through those means, especially the images of Nondis' operations. I know what he looks like on the inside, I've cut him open before, I've done surgery on him, I've pulled at a few tendons, lifted here, tucked something there, and closed everything back up just fine. Everything was right and proper in my mind. And the pictures should no longer phase me with the more I look at them, after all they were images taken for medical purposes... an autopsy.

But that only made things worse for me, because that's my best friend.

It's one thing to work outside of proximities, to help a bunch of clients who you detach yourself from in the beginning. It's no problem, until you learn more about them. You grow scared that you'll lose them because that existence is what you're trying to save, what you don't want to happen is for them to show up in someone's classroom next week. And yet, here's my best friend in someone's classroom, dissected and observed, pulled apart and pieced back together in grievous anatomical fashion. And in spite of all of that, knowing the ends of human mortality, he still lives.

I didn't stew on that bit of grim thought for long, as both Twilight and Cadance paid me and Cobalt Blue a visit. And to add to the number of mental distractions, Twilight broke the seals and we walked into Umbra's office. There was a bunch of stuff everywhere, some logs, some other things, and then one thing that really grabbed our attention, there was a portal fully made, not fully programed. It looked as though he was close to finding a way into our world anyhow. And all it took was the words from Cadance to nail home the horror of our discovery.

All of us looked on quietly as the guardsmare made her comment. "Holy Faust, he almost won."

I myself was relieved that we managed to bring him down when we did, but I couldn't shake the discomfort of knowing how close we were to certain doom. Twilight saw that I had a lot on my mind and pulled me aside. "Come on, Cadance's got this covered. We can look elsewhere until we get you back home."

As we were walking out, I weighed the options of leaving to stay back home or to finish matters here first. I still had a lot of questions, namely about what all happened and how it was affecting Nondis. I didn't want to leave him alone until I knew that he was going to be okay. So I told her what my intention was going to be when the portal opened. "I'm not going back there to stay."

"Why not?" Twilight asked. "I figured you'd be running for the exit after all of this."

"Well I can't leave my friends. We have a lot of shit to do, a lot of ground to cover. We can't just leave Nondis to do it all like he's been doing. Like what if he's struggling and we don't know anything about it?"

"I understand." Twilight appeared crestfallen, showing the same level of concern. She looked back to the room we just left from. "But you can at least go back to pop in and give Nondis' family a heads-up. Without any auxiliary connections, you guys don't have a phone signal to use to be able to reach back home. Maybe seeing them safe would put him in a better mood."

"They find out what all happened to Nondis, they are going to freak the fuck out." I told the young princess.

"I'm sure you can tell them in a way that's easier to digest." She suggested.

Again, I glanced down to my phone and pulled up the pictures of the operation. "Not even. These pictures in my phone only exist as evidence right now. I'm still trying to process it. They won't be getting those, no fucking way, but they'll have to accept that their son isn't going to be the son they watched walk away the last time."

"What other choice is there?" Twilight replied. "We promised them that we tell the the truth."

I dropped my head, still thinking. "The only thing we can do is to bring them here, to see him still walking around. And if he's feeling up to it, he'll tell them something. I think that's the best thing for both parties. I'll let Nondis have that conversation with them, or let him not have that conversation. It'll be his decision to make."

Twilight looked around, thinking of our idea and the current environment. "Actually, are you sure you wanna bring them here now? I wouldn't really like to have this be the place of a family reunion."

"Can we relocate the portal we just found?" I suggested.

Twilight hummed with uncertainty. "It'll be difficult, and it would probably take a day or two to move all the components safely from here to the castle above. This place is at least two thousand feet below the entrance, and that's not even the elevation of the city's entrance."

Since we were already on some risky grounds to get something so sensitive up top, I only saw one way to do it. "So, easier to move the human, not so much to move the portal."

"You could always wait a few days to do it." She added.

"I think Nondis would rather see them sooner than later." I answered, thinking only of how much they'd want to see him at this point. "If I'm wrong, I'll answer for that."

Twilight showed confidence in my choice. "I know you'll make the best decision for him."

I looked back to the office and took a deep breath. "With this place finally getting broken into, I think we've collected all of what we could from here, at least anything resembling something that lived at one point or another."

"We got everything from out of here, except for the smell." She replied.

"I think that's fine, it's not as terrible as it used to be. As long as they don't see what we had to see, we're fine." I said in return.

Twilight shuddered for a moment. "Staging Zone 1, that place still gives me the creeps."

"How come? It's just a tall room with chains, at least from what me and Cobalt have seen."

Twilight shifted her eyes towards me. "What all do you think were attached to those chains?"

Before I could think of an answer, Cadance came from out of the room. Cobalt continued to collect documents inside of her saddlebags while Twilight walked into the office. The purple princess went up to the panel of the portal seeing the progress of the connection. She looked back at me and nodded.

"It's ready. You can step on through if you want."

I stepped into the portal, finally being back home after a long and eventful half-week. Everything was just as I remembered it. As soon as my signal jumped back to full bars, I had gotten notifications of a few texts and some voicemails. So I reached out to whoever had contacted me last and I finally got started with bringing the family together. I touched basis with Vanessa, hoping she'd be able to come through and visit her husband. Both mama and papa Haines immediately said they'd be right over.

All throughout the course of the weekend, I was letting them now quietly that Nondis was in trouble, that we'd promise to get him back as soon as we could. After fulfilling that promise, I told them to stay away from us for the time being. I didn't want to put them at risk just by being near the portals. I then informed them that I'd give them a call if the coast was clear to visit. And since I gave them the all-clear, they've been hot on the trail. It took Vanessa a while longer to show up, but she did eventually drop by.

At last, I brought them through the portal to be able to see their family and loved ones. And already crossing over, they had questions about the unusual environment. "So what is this place?" Mr. Haines questioned.

"It sure isn't the castle." Vanessa stated.

Cadance promptly answered their questions. "We're in a lab, about some two thousand feet beneath the castle."

The three other humans were amazed at how deep we were in comparison to where we were going. "Well one thing's for certain, this place will survive a nuclear explosion." Mr. Haines joked.

As we walked into the hallway, Mrs. Haines took notice of the unpleasant smell. "Can I ask why this place smells so much like a chemical plant?"

"Lots of chemicals used." I answered briefly.

"For what exactly?" Mr. Haines asked.

As we walked, there was one familiar door that was left open, namely the room we found Jasper in. I tried to ignore the chills down my spine as I spoke. "Well, there's a number of reasons why I didn't wait days to bring you here. The main reason is that I wanted to show you what was going on, namely what all we ran into."

"In other words, something Nondis won't tell us." Mr. Haines replied.

"More like what all he's seen." I informed him.

Vanessa commented on the lab's appearance. "This place is so clean and white. Almost looks completely out of time for what usually goes on here."

"That's the given order of how it goes." I muttered as we were set to enter the first staging zone.

Twilight hesitated in opening the door, seeming as though she had to prepare herself to go back through this way. The doors were opened and she kept her eyes to the ground as she walked. Meanwhile, Mrs. Haines took notice of the particularly bad odor. "Ugh! Honey, this place smell terrible!"

"Smells like something died in here." Vanessa added.

"Yeah it's not pretty. Twilight has the creeps every time she walks in here, so she says." I commented as I followed the purple unicorn. But as I looked up to where the exit doors where, I wondered why she was leading us away from them. "Hey, where are you leading us?"

She stopped walking forward, circling a spot on the ground with her hoof, namely some dark spots on the ground. "This spot here, where you see the stains on the ground. That's where we found him." She answered, looking up to me.

"Found who!?" Vanessa questioned as she identified the dark spots as dried blood.

It clicked in my mind as to what she was talking about. "Oh. So this is the room you found Nondis in?"

"Correct. We found him here, he was shivering cold in this spot, we tore the restraints off of him at this very spot."

Both the middle-aged parents looked down at the dried blood stains and grew mum. All while Vanessa had a quiet retort. "Oh... What happened to you?"

Cadance, who brought up the rear, explained to us where we were. "In all actuality, this place is a fridge. It's not running now, there's nothing in it."

Even I looked back at the pink princess with a bewildered expression. "Wait, why would this place be a fridge?"

Twilight didn't lift her head once as she pointed to the ceiling. "I want you to look up for me, tell me what you see."

"Okay, all I see is chains and hooks." Vanessa answered.

Mr. Haines and his wife gawked at the hanging tools above. "You say this place used to be a fridge, well now I'm convinced this place is a slaughterhouse."

Vanessa's face ran cold as she looked back to the pink alicorn. "Uh... didn't you say this place was a lab?

While the cruel implications started to warm up in their mind, the brutal reality had hit me in the face almost as if I was watching the moment Umbra tried to take Alabaster's body with him. My eyes were lifted up, imagining the shadows of ponies dangling from several of the hooks. I immediately grew nauseous as I spoke to Twilight. "Tell me you're joking. Like tell me this is a ha-ha moment."

Twilight finally lifted her head, looking up as she whispered. "Hundreds... if not thousands."

All of us knew what that meant, and the horror soon set in for the three visitors. "Get us the fuck out of here." Vanessa urgently requested.

And the two princess were more than willing to accommodate.

Our ride up the lift was quiet aside from the rickety wood that creaked and moaned with our long ascent. Eventually we came to the top of the lift and walked outside to greet the fresh mountain air. Twilight and Cadance were also kind enough to use a mass teleportation spell to get us back to the castle.

We didn't have to wander around for long before I found out what room the others were sitting in. It appeared that they had all showed back up in the portal room for some reflection on Alabaster's passing. Nondis appeared harsh on himself for not being here, despite many arguments we all have had telling him he did the right thing. But again, there were a lot of things he had to mentally adjust to with everything being done.

I walked into the room, keeping the other three humans in the hallway as I greeted everyone in the room. "Hey, Melanie, we've been wondering where the hell you walked off to." Cliff said as I appeared.

"You good?" Rick questioned me as I posed myself in the doorway.

"I came back from the lab, left to find some answers to some recent questions swirling in my head at night." I replied. "We found some other things, including a very scary discovery you guys should be interested in."

"How scary are we talking?" Stanton asked. "It can't be as scary as all the shit we fought against yesterday morning."

"Scary enough." I answered as I stepped out of the doorway, holding the door open. "You all can come in now."

As the three guests stepped through the door, everyone's eyes bulged and their collective jaws dropped. Nondis immediately stood up to acknowledge his parents. "Mom!? Dad!?"

Vanessa quickly ran for her husband. "Babe!"

"Vanessa!" He ran right back to her, meeting her halfway. She wasn't ready for the hug he sucked her into, deeply holding her and rocking with her in his arms. "Oh my God, you are my world. I don't ever wanna live a day without you."

"You're awfully romantic today. What got into you?" She asked as she pulled away for a moment.

"Long story." He answered, not even looking in his wife's eyes.

The first thing that Mr. Haines saw as he got closer was the towering height his son had now reached. "Nondis, good heavens, son! You grew again!?"

Mrs. Haines joined in on greeting their son, hugging him as she spoke. "Well it's almost time you'd start looking at being a ball player, don't you think? You'd fit right into the NBA."

"Nah, I don't have the body for that." He said, halfway smiling.

Stanton hugged his dad, but then questioned him. "How did you three get here?"

He then answered. "Well Melanie and Twilight had brought us through some lab deep in the mountain, at least that's what they said. I wasn't sure where we were."

There was an uncomfortable moment of silence as Nondis looked to me. "Mel... Where did you say you brought them from?"

"You know that scary thing I was talking about?" I continued. "Well, we broke into you-know-who's office today. He had a portal... It was thirty minutes away from spawning him back into my apartment."

Everybody who took part in Umbra's defeat dropped their heads in disbelief. "Jesus fucking Christ." Nondis whispered as he facepalmed, rubbing his eyes.

But as he did that, the sleeve of his shirt pulled back and revealed the gruesome scar on his wrist. Mrs. Haines grabbed on to her son's arm and investigated the recent injury. "Son, what happened to your wrist?" She picked up his other arm, revealing the same scar on that and on the back of his hands. "And your hands? Where did all the scars come from?"

The man sighed, wishing that he wasn't asked those questions. "Mel, you didn't bring them here to just say 'hello' did you?"

I folded my arms, telling him the truth. "I told them that we had to come and rescue you. They got concerned and I had to tell them to hold off on visiting. These past few days, they've been wondering if we were even alive. Today, I wanted them to see you, because they want to check in."

"I'm not a spectacle, Mel. I'm just trying to live my life here." He answered quietly.

"Well, they're here, and they see you now." I replied. "They still need to know."

Nondis looked down at his mom, appearing as a giant to her. He took a few steps away from her, digging his fingers into the brim of his shirt. "Mom, dad, Vanessa... I'm gonna take this off, and you're gonna see some shit."

Mrs. Haines grew mortified as she watched her son start to strip himself before her. But as soon as his shirt started to give her the slightest peek at the litany of incisions made on him, she ran over and grappled his arms against his sides. "Don't!" She sounded as though she was a mother in grief, not wanting to even look at the terrible things her son had endured. "Oh God, just let me hold you." She held him close, shaking her head as she still fought him to keep his shirt on. "You're still in one piece, you're still my baby boy."

The man felt a sadness grow in watching his mother's eyes start to moisten. But his father soon noticed yet another troubling mark. "Nondis, what happened to your neck?"

He sighed again, and looked directly at me, almost resigned to fate. The countenance of his face reminded me of the harrowing images still sitting on my phone. I couldn't bear it, I looked away from him. "I'm sorry, I have to go."

"Mel, you wanted them to see me." He argued softly. "If I'm gonna tell them the whole truth, I'm gonna need the parts I can't tell."

The nausea was coming back in full force. I had gagged and held my hands up at the thought of showing them the pictures of their son being decapitated. "No, Nondis." I pleaded adamantly. "I wasn't ready to see that, I didn't want to see that, and I'm damn-well not going to show them that. They don't deserve that."

While the two parents appeared confused by what I was hiding, he knelt down and slowly but briefly explained to them one of the things that happened to him. "Dad... My head was cut off." He said, finally answering his father.

"What?" He ran over to look at his son, still very much seeing the scar, the head being attached, and feeling the warmth in his face. "No, no. You're still here, how does that make any sense? Son, you're still alive."

Nondis moved his collar out of the way and brought his father's hands to the scar. "Just run your fingers along." He instructed.

Initially in disbelief, he traced one hand to the front of his neck, letting his thumb feel the hollowness of the scar tissue. He felt the slight indents at both the top and the bottom of the lateral wound, indicating a stitch pattern. His other hand did the same from the other direction, meeting in the middle. Once he did that, confirming the same hollowness of the scar, he ran his hands all the way around, feeling the very same texture all the way throughout, stopping at his spine. "Son, what did they do to you?"

Nondis swallowed as the tortures they did him had come to mind. He simply gave them a cruel, single-worded answer. "Everything."

Mrs. Haines fell to her knees holding her son as she grieved over the trauma her son was forced to endure. "Oh God."

He then explained to them, almost as though he was making a disclaimer for all the ponies in this world. "This was the actions of one monster, who will soon face justice."

Mrs. Haines made no attempts to let her son go, not even as her husband held onto him also. "Baby, we're here. It's going to be okay."

Vanessa, still shocked at the revelation, looked to her husband to answer for his account. "Is this true?"

Stanton quickly replied, pointing back at me. "Yeah, it's true. She's even got pictures of it."

Both Mr. and Mrs. Haines looked at me as though I had done them a great injustice, but Alex was quick to come to my defense. "She's keeping them for a criminal case, photographic evidence."

As they were talking, I started to zone out as they spoke. Looking at Nondis, I could only imagine him staring back at the nothing as Jasper did when we found him. "He was in a lab, they were doing experiments to him. I won't even say what for..." I could barely hear Stanton speak. "Shit still gives me nightmares."

I tried to breathe, but my chest felt so tight. I kept looking for something to distract me from those moments, but all I could see was the image of him on that table, sitting next to his element. I could hear Umbra's voice declaring proudly that he had met his end, him laughing at how he was going to try and make us subjects for similar experiments.

"Mel?"

I knelt over, plugging my ears, cringing, slamming my eyes shut while the still image of the operating table still glowed in a spotlight of a darkened room. The little filly's voice whispered through my head, calling the decapitated human 'big brother' over and over again. The severed head turned to me very slow, it's eyes looking back up to me as it whispered my name repeatedly. I wanted to scream in that moment.

"MEL!" The sudden shout that reached my ears broke me out of my trance. The next thing I noticed was that I was crouching on the ground, with everyone looking at me as though I had lost it. Instead, Nondis came walking up, kneeling down to me, and bringing me in for a hug. "I'm here. I'm still here. I'm talking to you. Don't go down that way yet. You hear me?"

My entire body broke out in a sweat, my eyes shifted over to see the scar on the back of his neck covered by the locks of black hair. I placed my ear into his shoulder, hearing his heart still beating. I finally came back to reality, knowing that my friend was still here. "I'm sorry." I said, mostly embarrassed that I had completely fallen apart in front of everyone. I damn near chocked him with how tight I gripped against him, crying out more and more apologies. "I'm sorry we couldn't get to you sooner! If only we had just acted instead of talking about it, this wouldn't have happened. It's not fair."

"Don't blame yourself." He replied.

"No, you don't understand." I argued, finally having the courage to look back at his face again. "Nondis, you're still dead in my eyes."

"You said it yourself. I'm me." He said as he pulled me back up to my feet. Looking down at me, he gave me a tap against my upper sternum. "Don't ever blame yourself for this, not while I'm still breathing. I made the choice to get myself into this shit, you don't need to take no fault for any of this."

As I had a moment to recover from my episode, especially for it being my first episode, I wiped my eyes, dusted myself off, took an inhale, and cleared my mind for a moment. "I'm sorry. I'm just dealing with a lot in my mind. It's all mental."

"No. You're good." He replied calmly. "We all need an out on occasion."

Hours after our time in Canterlot Castle, we were transported back to the cave entrance and made our way down the lift. Nondis was kind enough to provide us with the escort for our return; Himself and Alex. We thought that being back in the place where he suffered so much hell would not be a great idea, but he seemed pretty used to being down here already.

It's amazing that he's taking my med student life-lessons better than I am.

Once we arrived back at the portal, he took a moment to gander and see just how bad it would've been had he finished us off and came back to his office to do more of his work. Granted he'd probably be distracted by the idea of turning all of us into guinea pigs, but that would've still been another week or two of him torturing us before finding the need to acquire more humans to play with. Either way, it would've ended terribly.

Mr. and Mrs. Haines hugged their son goodbye, Vanessa settled for a handshake, still a bit disturbed by all of what she was told. But she spared more than a hug for her husband, kissing him on the lips before she settled out back home. "I'll be home tomorrow if I can spare the time." Alex informed her.

"Just do what you can, babe." She answered her husband before looking to her brother in law. "Just take care of yourself, okay?"

"No promises." He replied.

Both of us watched as the portal was shut down again, leaving the three of us to remain here. While Alex took a gander around the office, Nondis and I started walking out into the hall. I began to think about my traumatic episode from earlier. The man next to me placed a hand on my shoulder. "You all good?"

I shook my head in admission. "I never had an episode like that before, Nondis."

"It happens." He said as he walked me along the hall. "Something small may trigger it, or even some lingering thoughts will. It takes time to adjust to."

I chuckled lightly. "You're talking like you've already beaten it."

"Far from. I'm still fighting it whenever I step in certain rooms of this place." He said as he opened one of the doors. While I was still inclined to pinch my nose, he simply took it in. "The smell never leaves me."

I looked at him curiously, wanting to know how it was that he was able to process his traumas so much better than I could. "How do you deal with it?"

"Well for starters, I don't look at things that will trigger it." He said as he summoned my phone from out of my pocket. "That should be your biggest concern, because I know you, you'll look at something from the perspective of a med student and try to dull it down. In truth, you suppress your humanity by trying to remove the human element. And then it rings in your head louder than ever, the fear that it's someone you may know. The fear of losing the responsibility of that life, seeing the blood on your hands, it becomes real. For you, it's the detail of medical knowledge that's been ushered to you, utilizing the two lives you've grown to know personally. For me, it's the smell."

"You've been dealing with PTSD for a while now, haven't you?"

"Months." He said as guessed at my passcode. "My first operation was to stop a train from running off into a ravine. I already told you what I saw then. From there, the fears kept building, the toll grew greater, the sight and smells of it amplified in my memory. At this point, the smell doesn't even phase me anymore, it's the memories that come along with it." He successfully guessed my password and froze for a moment. His eyes open for a moment and then close. He swipes for the home screen and immediately hands the phone over to me with a smirk. "Crazy, huh? To think that we'd both be suffering the way we do."

I grabbed my phone and immediately pull back up the screen, only to see that I was at the home view. I took a sigh of relief that he hadn't come across the messages. "I couldn't even imagine if any of this happened with a bunch of humans."

"Yeah, I had to live with that thought while I was down here. Leaving here, I had dreams of you all being the very thing I didn't want; Some appendage I could use to commit unforgivable atrocities."

I looked at the man and grew morbidly curious. "Does any of that still apply to you?"

"More than you know. There's a lot I can do that I couldn't before this past weekend." He answered, flexing his hands. "I won't bother you with any of it."

"Just as long as you're still you, I guess I can't complain." I answered meekly.

Nondis looked back down the hall, seeming as if a light bulb had popped over his head. "Oh shit! Hey, I gotta go! I quietly told Shining that I was gonna help him with the detainment effort tomorrow. I might bring Kali along to help her get used to operating in the open. She could use some time out in the sun instead of sulking about how she couldn't help when it all mattered. I gotta help her break her out of that depression."

"You just be careful." I said as he started to run off. "And for the love of God, don't let Celestia find out. She'll fire you for real."

"Press will be keeping her busy, she's not gonna be paying any attention." He said running back, but then stopping himself dead in his tracks. "Oh yeah, one more thing."

"Yeah?"

He laughed nervously as he hollered out. "You might wanna watch what you leave in your inbox. I saw how you and Rickey have been sending some sultry stuff back and forth." And with those final words, he disappeared around the corner and down the hall.

I called out to the man in frustration. "You asshole! Why would you even go back that far!?"

Two Days Later...

I started taking his advice on how to deal with trauma. It took a whole other night of not being able to sleep cleanly for me to finally find some point in my day where I could just take the moment to get in a nap. Granted, those naps were short because of some recurring nightmares popping up. But as the time progressed over yesterday, I started to keep myself busy by interacting with some of the maids and guards here in the castle. A lot of them continued to share their thanks for saving the nation, and a few other stallions grew brave and tried to ask me out on a date.

I can't really say that the attempts weren't cute, it's just that I was already spoken for.

After that, I took it easy and read a few books, passed out, and woke up feeling refreshed. The thoughts would still plague me in my dreams, but I at least had some help in the staying-asleep department. Twilight was kind enough to drop a sleeping spell my way just so I could keep myself functioning like normal.

Today, I wanted to try and interact with more of the guards again. I wasn't really going to do much of anything until the beef of the case was already in the works. Really, I spent the majority of the morning shadowing Solemn Oath, who had a lot to say about Nondis. So it was comforting to be able to find someone I could exchange perspectives with on a common subject, despite it being about a guy.

In speaking of which... "Yo."

I turned around to see Nondis standing right behind me. He appeared to have a weakness to the sun that beamed in through one of the boarded-up windows. He seemed to squint at everything around him. "You look tired. Are you okay?" I asked him.

"Nah, I'm just getting reacclimated to work is all." He answered dismissively with an added yawn. "So, tonight is going to be a little get together at the pub downtown. After the week we had, the guards and I all agreed to have a night out to celebrate, you know, drown out the edge."

"Well that sounds like fun." I said hesitently. "Are you─"

"They actually─" That one instance of him interrupting me seemed to be the most energetic part about his exchange with me. He quickly corrected himself. "Oh, my bad."

"No no, go ahead, what were you going to say?" I replied, giving him the floor to speak.

"I was gonna say something, but I think I forgot what the hell I was gonna sa─Ah, okay. So I was gonna tell you that they also wanted to celebrate with the new element bearers in town. So far, I got a yes from everyone else but you."

I wanted to ask him if he was okay, but then again, I was a bit concerned about Stanton being in an environment full of alcohol while he himself being underage. "Wait, what about Stanton?"

"Age restriction is eighteen here. He's good to go." He answered aloofly, just waving his hands all over the place. "He's down. He is down to do it."

"Well, okay." I answered, still wanting to make sure he was making a good decision. "Are you sure this is something you want to do? Like maybe there's something you should be doing right about now that could be important to your own health. I mean, you don't have to subject yourself to trying to be normal."

"Melanie, we lived through the gauntlet of hell. I think we deserve a moment to unwind."

After throwing out the hint, only to have him bat it out of left field, I accepted the invitation, but only with the intention to keep an eye out for him. "Okay, let's be upfront about what we're doing. What drugs are you planning to take?"

"Got the goods from our world. Guy from the frat made a drop at the apartment late last night." He held up a zip-lock bag of weed. "We're gonna be firing this shit up all night. We're blasting off, straight to some good vibrations."

I looked over to Solemn Oath, covering my mouth as I whispered over to him. "Does your special someone know you're doing all this?"

"I told her, she didn't say anything." He said as he yawned once more.

"She didn't say yes or anything, nothing that remotely indicated that she was fine with you doing it?" I questioned him once more.

"No, I think she was just pretty busy with her paperwork." He said as he put the half-full sandwich bag in his pocket. "Honestly, I'm looking forward to it. I need the time to just find some joy in my life, some celebration after all that crazy ass shit. I tell you one thing, I'm gonna get faded until I get some sleep tonight."

I finally told him the pretenses of my agreement. "Okay. If I come with you, I'm doing it to make sure you don't have an episode where you just drug yourself into nonsense again. The last time you did it, you literally woke up in another world."

"No shrooms." He said, raising his right hand. "Guard's honor."

While I wasn't above the idea of blowing down a few joints myself, I still felt that it would be better to bring a drinking buddy along for the ride. "Can I bring a friend?"

"Who you bringing?" He inquired.

It took me half a second to answer his question. "I wanna bring Blue."

He chuckled with excitement. "Hell, the party starts when she walks in! Let's do it!"

Later on that evening, Nondis was nice enough to give me a lead on Blue's address. As soon as I showed up, poor thing was already dealing with bloodshot eyes and a bad case of the sniffles. She invited me inside to wait on her to get ready, and then she told me to get anything out of the fridge if I needed anything. At first, I wasn't really interested in raiding her fridge, but then I felt a little peckish for something sweet. So I took her up on the offer and walked into the kitchen.

The moment I walked in, I realized just how bad of a mood she was in. A bottle of pills sat on the side of a dark wine bottle, a glass half empty, and a photo of her brother sitting across from where she sat. There were bunches of tissues all over, on the table, draped to the side, fallen on the floor, just a pure mess. Looking over in her sink, there was a single plate, a fork, and a glass of water. Everything she did was by herself. She cooks, she cleans, she spends time only with herself.

Maybe having that party tonight was a good call.

Once she was ready, she came walking down the stairs and called for me. I showed back up and we settled out for a night in the town. Our walk was pretty quiet, she only observed moments and places that seemed the most familiar to her, but didn't stay on them for very long. I wanted to at least open up by addressing the elephant in the room, namely sitting at the kitchen table. But I felt it was too inappropriate to delve into her mourning methods. So I kept my mouth shut for most of the walk.

It was her who actually broke the silence between us. "So... you said Nondis is throwing this party?"

"Him and the guards. I guess they're just doing it to cope." I replied.

"Well... I guess it's okay for now." She said with a saddened tone.

"I'm just happy that he's trying to find some measure of normality after all of this." I said, not really wanting to discuss how he seemed to not be sleeping.

Unfortunately, that was her next concern. "How does he look?"

"He's seen better days, but he's trying." I answered.

She looked up to me. "Have you been sleeping?"

"Whenever I can. It's still a struggle sometimes." I admitted. "What about you?"

She seemed a world distant from the Blue I knew at the gala, instead of smiling and dragging me everywhere, she was loosely walking beside me, frowning in the face the entire time. "I cry before I sleep. I hold the pictures of my brother and mom and talk to them until I finally doze off."

"You live by yourself?" I already knew the answer to that question, I don't even know why I asked. I guess I was just trying to keep the conversation going.

"Yeah. It's pretty quiet back home, as you can tell. After all the time in Canterrot, I prefer my nights to be as noisy as possible before I go to sleep. I just can't deal with large open spaces, it reminds me too much of where I used to live." She said, stalling for a moment before her eyes opened for a moment, acknowledging my close presence. "...I'm signing over my rights to the mansion, you know."

"To who?" I inquired.

"Kalimba."

I raised a brow at her choice. "Oh... kay? I don't have a problem with your choice, but it's pretty much out of nowhere. Why her?"

"I asked Nondis if he'd accept it, he said 'no' right out the gate. And I can't live there anymore, my brother, my dad, my mom, they're no longer here. My life starting off was nothing but my dad denying that I was even his to begin with, because I wasn't born by the traditional means of him sticking his dick in my mom. That's more than I could say for myself, he raped me in the warming room. Plus my mom hung herself in the rafters of my dad's old study when I was a kid. And my brother's spirit is nowhere to be found in that place. It's like he abandoned it just as life quickly abandoned him. I'm more interested in burning it to the fucking ground for insurance money, but that's illegal."

I looked around, seeing if there was anyone listening in on our conversation. "Yeah, I suppose."

She didn't exactly stop there, she went on to talk away another cruel truth. "Uncomfortable topic, yeah I know. But that's why I drink, to drown out the feeling of my dad's seed running down the back of my legs."

I knew she was drunk already, but just seeing her this way is downright depressing. "Are you okay?"

"My brother's dead. This is my only method to grieve." She said before getting back to her original subject. "But yeah, I'm signing the mansion away to her. This way, Kalimba gets the life she deserved, plus the space to help her sister get reacclimated to her usual lifestyle. Gala may be blind, but she's not deserving to be so brutally thrown into uncertainty, not like how Kalimba and I was."

Again, I tried to keep the conversation rolling. "So I have a question. What do you do with your brother's assets aside from the mansion?"

"I split it down the middle. Half of it I give to local charities, the other half I already signed over to Nondis. I'm sure he'll share half of that with Kalimba since she's going to be living in the mansion pretty soon."

I thought for a moment of the bits he already had in the bank, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars he has back home. I began to do the math in my head, coming up with some awfully high numbers. "Doesn't that make Nondis hella rich?"

"Wealthy is more like it." She corrected, starting to show signs of life. "Rich ponies spend their money out of habit. But wealthy ponies will send money into rotation. He has a pretty wealthy mind, I trust him to make the stock market burn for a day." She ended off with an amused smirk.

"Nondis doesn't know what the hell stock is, much less what he's doing with his stock options. I want you to know that before your company tanks to the ground." I warned her.

She lightly giggled. "Who says it's my company's stocks he has? Those stocks are all in the companies who's CEO's and CFO's have pissed me off over the past three years. Alabaster was just holding on to them for an artificial rise in the value. But once they sell, the value tanks. Some companies he owns more than thirty percent of their market shares. I might be an heiress of a billionaire, but Alabaster was holding that mansion because he could more than afford it." She giggled once more as she spun herself around. "Just think of all the market chaos when Nondis sells every last stock. I might even tell him to fire-sale the whole portfolio Monday morning. Then he can buy my company's stocks to inflate the value. We'll be set for another fifteen years."

I don't know what was in those pills, but they've obviously started to kick in with a vengeance. At least she was starting to feel better, at least for the moment. "Sell your opponents' stock and drop the market while your profits rise? You are scary."

"It was Alabaster's plan. The executive board always said that Alabaster had my mother's financial aggression." She said before dropping back down to her melancholy self. "...I'm gonna miss him so damn much. He's not even going to wake me up tomorrow morning. Oh fuck, I need a drink."

Well that didn't last long.

Outside of the tavern, Nondis was flagging everyone inside. Hard to ignore the only living thing close to seven feet tall for miles around town. He continued to flag in more guards until he finally saw the both of us walking up. "Ladies! You made it!" He already smelled of weed.

"Alright, so what's the party looking like in here?" I asked as we walked through the door.

"We just got started. Drinks on me tonight." He cheerfully replied, guiding us inside.

While he was closing the door, I pointed out to him the cost of that endeavor, especially with what seemed like over four-hundred faces all over the bar. "Nondis, that sounds pretty expensive."

"Yeah, but I'm not doing this every night." He was so chill talking about it, but then again the weed can numb the emotional response, that or amplify it depending on the mood. "Table's upstairs."

While we traversed the the bar, there was a group of young guards muttering about Canterrot's apparent demise. "Hey, have you been in the Corrotto District lately?"

"Yeah, that place smells!"

"They're still cleaning house over there?"

"Yeah, Princess Celestia has been pretty academic in purging the place. Can't lie, it's set to raise the property values of that area significantly."

While we didn't actively partake in the passing conversation, Blue did add to it with her own comment. "If there's ever a place that needs to be gentrified, it's that one."

As we reached our table, the others appeared quiet in watching. Solemn Oath and her friends joined us as well, mainly here for the drinks. I guess they also needed to purge their minds for a bit since they've been particularly involved in the cleanup of the lab. The others I think were here for the same purpose as me. There was a bit of a cheer at the table when we arrived. Nondis especially was the one excited. "Well, the gang's all here! Might as well chase down a few shots!"

But before we could do any of that, calls from the floor below were all chanting for what they wanted. "Captain! A speech, if you will, on your huge victory!"

"Yeah! You ain't said nothin' about anything! What's up!"

"Hell yeah, let's get it!"

"Speech!"

"Damn. Can't fire one up with the guards like this." He said as he offered the joint he smoked over to me. I took him on his offer and smoked a bit as he walked away. "Gotta give the ponies what they want." He said, exhaling a puff of smoke.

How everyone saw him at the table was one of two ways. To Solemn and her friends, he seemed loose-spirited and happy in spite of all that he endured. He appeared strong, able to persevere. But to Cliff, Rickey, and I, he appeared as though he was doing his best to smile. "He's trying too hard again." Cliff pointed out.

"You don't think I see that?" I replied, taking another hit before passing it on to Stanton. As he grabbed it, I felt the smoke tickling my throat, causing me to cough. "Holy fuck, that shit is strong. Where'd he get this?"

"Hookup at the frat. Probably had Rod on the plug." Cliff answered as he finished rolling a new joint to bring into the rotation. "He know where all the good shit is. If you wanna get fucked up by the end of the night, that's the one you go to."

"Thanks for the tip." Stanton said. "As a transfer, I need that plug, my guy." He took a hit, coughed a few times and screamed. "Tha-KUH-at's the good s-KEH-hit alright!"

Before we knew it, Blue took the bud and looked at it. "So what does this do other than make you cough?"

"Make yo ass fly." Cliff answered as he took a lighter to his and took a huge puff. "If you cough, you lift off."

"Well I guess I'll be the first unicorn to give it a try." She said as she took a sip, blowing out the smoke harmlessly. "I don't feel anything."

"Well you ain't cough, so you ain't lifting off." Rickey pointed out. "Don't just suck some up and kick it back out. Breathe like you trying to take a swim."

This time, she took Rick's advice and did as he instructed. This time, she coughed almost immediately. Gagging as though she had taken on water. After a small coughing fit, she replied. "I'm not sure what this is supposed to do other than kill you!"

Cliff started laughing loudly, already knowing what's to come. "Give it a minute, you gon' feel it when it hit."

"I'd offer y'all some, but I don't know if y'all got drug tests." Rickey said to the other guardsmares at the table.

"I'm down to try anything the first time." Cobalt openly stated as she took a hit, coughing immediately after. While her friends crowded around her, she waved them off. "I'm okay."

"This bout to be some funny-ass shit." Cliff said with a wide grin.

As we were about to see how the girls were going to react to the weed, Nondis finally got around to standing on a table and announcing himself loudly. "Ladies and fillies, and gentlemen and colts, bastards of all sexes, I wanna give a huge thank-you for coming out tonight to help me celebrate our big win. A lot has happened, I lost my head... in a bad way, and a lot of shit we had to deal with was unnecessary to say the least. The fact that we had to find a way to fight all of what we did is more than enough to convince a lot of ponies out there, that this shit ain't worth the pay."

The crowd erupted in laughter. I looked over to the others. "He's already drunk, isn't he?"

"And solo'd a whole roll, he has no filter right now." Rickey pointed out.

"You didn't think to stop him?" I questioned.

"This is usually what he is when he's having a good time." Cliff added. "This part is normal for us."

"I don't think this is normal." Solemn replied.

"This is what I've been seeing when we break out the good wine." Blue rebutted.

"Well either way, we're definitely here to keep an eye on him." I suggested.

"Agreed." Said Alex as Nondis continued.

"But you know, the work and dedication that you all put into your job, not to mention the sacrifices you all made when you swore in, everyone else takes it for granted. I don't, not fucking once. I fought through mountains, forded over streams, chased rainbows into large pits of gold, and gained every nightmare imaginable. But in spite of that, many of you showed only support, giving me the strength and courage to press on. Without any of you where you were on this weekend, Equestria would be in a much worse place. This is by far the best damn army I've ever been in. And though I may be young, too young to lead, you still allowed me to take charge and try to do what I can for you. And in return, you ran over those same mountains I fought through, you glided across every stream I forded, you came along with me for the ride. And you all share the same nightmares I have. Everywhere I went, I look behind me and see you all right there. You guys are the best I've ever served with, that I'll have the pleasure in serving beside, and if God wills it, I'll be the one the you all leave behind to fall in the rust with."

Blue started looking at her hooves. and glanced over to me. "Hey, am I supposed to feel tingly?"

Cliff giggled as he dapped up Rickey. "Here we go. Here we go!"

Nondis continued his speech down below. "After these next few weeks, the souls of our brothers and sisters in arms will rest peacefully, without ever being threatened with what we saw on Monday night. Those who know, we know. Those who don't, keep that peace. But just as Shining said the other day, we're all here for each other. Look to either side of you, this is family. We all got your six if you feel the demons crawling up your back. From here on ahead, we sharpen each other as iron sharpens iron. So drink up tonight, get your buzz have a good time. But if you pass out on us, don't expect to stay. We'll get you some water, some coffee, sober you up, get you back home safe. If you need a room cause you can't make it back home, let me know, I'm on it. If you are feeling down deep when you leave here, you will not be left alone tonight. You'll be watched, cared for, and we will see you when you rise. We not losing nobody tonight, we're celebrating life. We're drinking on behalf of the ones who ain't make it, not to join them, I'm real about that. So let's start tonight off right."

While the others were closely watching as Blue took her ascent to her high, I paid closer attention to the man standing on the table downstairs. He seemed to still have some awareness of self, at least enough to plainly disclose what was going to happen of any one of the guards here decided to get black-out drunk. He still showed concern for everyone here, which was pretty admirable.

He raised a mug, along with everyone else in the tavern. "For the loved ones who's peace we've brought, for the ones we lost, for our brothers and sisters in arms, for those who paved the way for us, for the ones who made us laugh, smile, and feel comfortable, we honor them first. There's too many names to name, But their memories aren't forgotten." He patted his chest and looked to the sky. "Rest in peace, long live they."

"Long live." All the guards chanted back as they took that first drink together for their sake.

Once that moment passed, Nondis went right back into party mode. "ALRIGHT! LET'S FUCKING GET OUR SHIT MOVING! FIRST ROUND, WHO MAKES IT OUT ALIVE!?"

The entire crowd shouted and screamed in celebration. Bar servers and maids circled around with giant trays of beer, rotating their way around the tavern. Some have even made their way back up to us, dishing out pints for us to drink. I still kept my eyes on Nondis, watching him down a whole drink by himself. "He's not as drunk as I thought he would be."

"Yeah. Usually he's a little less sober-minded." Rickey observed.

Blue giggled, her face showing a constant state of relaxation. "To be fair, the stuff they serve out to the masses is really weak anyhow. It tastes hoppy and frothy, but it hits you and leaves as quick as you down it. But this stuff we're smoking, waaaaay better."

Both Rickey and Cliff bust out laughing, watching as Cobalt soon joined the mile-high club. I snickered as well. "I forgot that you're our drinking buddy for the night."

"Can you bring the magic cigarette back? I think I wanna stay here for a while." She requested, getting an even bigger laugh out of the two frat boys.

I shook my head and passed her a blunt. "Okay, just take it slow, it's not like a cigarette."

As she took her next hit, Nondis shouted out down below. "Easy round, easy round! ROUND TWO, LET'S GET IT!"

More cheers erupted from the ground floor, everyone happily getting a second round of drinks. I looked to Alex and asked him. "So Nondis drank before this all got started, right?"

"Yeah." He said, watching carefully over his brother's antics.

"He just drank two pints like it was nothing." I pointed out.

"Yyyyeeeeaaah, I think we might need to check on our boy." Cliff suggested.

"Oh, he's good." Blue said smoothly. "It's all good. Just let him be."

I looked to the mare and clearly understood that her mind was firmly buckled in on a first-class flight to the other side of the world. "Are you sure?"

She nodded slowly. "Oh no. See, we had this one brand of wine that's like illegal to sell, the really good shit, a while back. It was so good that he had a whole threesome with me and Kalimba, doesn't even remember the shit going down or the fact that he shot a wad of cum across the room while we were both blowing him."

Solemn spat out her drink, choking on that instead. Meanwhile Alex perked up immediately as he did the same. "A-hukuh-what?"

Stanton dropped his head. "Damn! Y'all ponies are some freaks!"

"Quick question, how big was he?" Cobalt asked.

"Cobalt, what the hell!" Solemn scolded her sky-walking friend.

Blue just laughed naughtily. "He was a pony at the time, and I had another shot at him, he can go for hours." She bit her lip and sighed. "I know why he's a suitor, because his dick don't disappoint. Even a princess needs her daily dick appointments, you know."

Alex quickly tried to change the subject from the idea of hearing of how well his younger brother pleases ponies. "So yeah, about that drinking thing. How does that wine affect him in any way?" It was a brilliant save.

Blue got back on subject after being prodded back on track. "Yeah, you drink some of that, you're never drinking alcohol the same way. It'll take him another eight before he starts to feel buzzed on that level."

"THIRD ROUND, LINE 'EM UP!" He called out just as quickly.

Stanton grimaced a bit as he murmured. "This man wants to die."

"How many did he have before we came here?" I asked.

Alex held up his hand. "Five."

"Ohhhhhh." Blue droned. "Oh well he's going to be really feeling that first buzz."

Cobalt wasn't exactly done with poking and prodding Blue for information on Nondis. "So... is he a spot or solid, like what does he look like down there?"

"COBALT!" Solemn angrily chided.

"He's a solid." Blue answered. "But get this, you know how a stallion flares up when he's about to go off? Well, he doesn't go off like off the rip, he stays that way for like minutes at a time. He's just out to crush it. You're literally counting O's before he has his first blowup. Plus he does give out good hornjobs too."

"HORN-HWHAT!?" Alex exploded.

Rickey fell out of his chair, holding his stomach as he laughed his ass off. "Ah...euhh... I can't breathe." He wheezed.

Gleaming Brass looked between her friends and the human dying of laughter on the floor. She looked up to Cliff with a determined expression. "You, what you gave to Cobalt, I want next."

"NO!" Solemn called out firmly.

"ROUND FOUR! POUR 'EM UP!" Nondis called out another time, pointing out some of the ones who declined their next round. "And the safe ones are already pulling out! It's only going to get more fun from here, folks!"

Cobalt leaned over the railing, biting her lip as she locked her eyes to the human down below. "Hey, can you set me up with the captain tonight?" Cobalt requested.

"Hell no! He's off limits!" Solemn called out.

"Aw come on, Solemn. It's not like his girlfriend's gonna come barging through the door."

Just as she said those words, the doors of the tavern swung wide open. All the yelling and rowdy chants of chugging came to a halt as a foreboding presence entered the room. Solemn glanced down to see none other than Princess Celestia scowling at the display taking place before her. "Oh shit." Solemn mewled as she sank her head beneath the railing. The maids stopped serving, the others stared as the princess walked towards the human standing on the table.

"Uh... Princess on deck?" Cobalt said, partially alert.

As the others fell into a silence, Nondis openly greeted the princess with drink in hand. "Oh hey, princess! You wanna join us for a morale booster?"

I can't even begin to describe the ferocity of how quick she dragged him from off of the table and planted her hoof in the middle of his back. "YOU! OUT! NOW!"

"Hey now, come on! I was just hanging out!"

"NOW, CAPTAIN!" She shouted as she telekinetically grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, slinging him back out the door. As the doors closed behind her, there were a number of loud comments that grabbed the entire bar's attention. Everyone started peeling for the windows and doors.

I snapped out of my high as well as Blue started to drift out of hers. We all looked to one another and thought of a way to see what was going on between the two of them. "Okay, let's beat this crowd real quick." Alex said as we all stood up and made a beamline for the back exit.

As soon as we came back around to an opening, we could hear the two arguing down the street as she dragged him along. "Hey, stop! What's the fucking deal!?"

"You!" She snarled, snatching him down by the scruff of his shirt. "This isn't who you are!"

"Lady look, I'm just trying to enjoy a few drinks with the guards. That's all I'm doing, it's just this thing called fun. What's wrong with fun?"

"You have not slept in four days, you've already disobeyed me by going out there with Shining yesterday! Do you honestly expect me to let you keep this up!? When was the last time you looked in a mirror, Nondis!? I can barely look at you because you don't even look alive right now!"

As the others soon came up behind, the watched in silence as the two continued to argue. "If this is about the mirror in your room, I promise that I'll pay for it. I'm sorry for breaking it, I'll have it replaced!"

"To hell with the mirror! Stop acting like you can keep going without giving yourself the rest you need!" She shouted back to the inebriated man. "I told you to take a break, you work anyhow! I tell you to give yourself a rest, you keep pushing without even looking at yourself! You don't want to sleep, you barely eat, you haven't even spoke to your therapist in two weeks, no rescheduling, no follow-ups, nothing! Stop trying to run from nightmares, I know it's hard to look at them, it's hard on the mind, but you need to rest! Your brain will slow, and you'll die sooner than I can help you!"

Celestia trembled with every concern that she listed, probably from having seen it times before. But Nondis continued to argue against her. "I'm just trying to have a good time right now! You don't need to worry about me! I'm happy knowing that I can be awake when I want to be!"

"Are you happy right now!?" She pressured.

"Hell yeah!"

"NO, YOU'RE NOT!" She shouted back before she finally let her anger go and gave way to simply pleading with him. She placed her head on his abdomen, quietly begging him. "Nondie, please come home. Rest for me. I can't let you keep going like this. It hurts to see you like this, please don't push this. Just hurt so you can heal, don't be like this. Please."

The man looked down to the mare leaning against him and kissed her forehead. "I'm gonna rest after this, okay? I'll rest, I promise. Just... just let me find a way to... regulate. I don't know any other way, just let me have this moment, I'll go to bed, I'll even sleep where you tell me, just let me get back in there and cleanse. Please?"

Celestia clasped her hooves around the human, firmly holding him in place, knowing that he would not be able to contest her immortal strength. "No. Leave now. I told you on last Friday that you were going to come back home and be done. Stop trying to be Superman and act like you're exempt from mortality!"

"MORTALITY!?" He snapped back at her. "Don't you get it!? I can't fucking rest, not with a portal already being finished in the fucking lab to begin with! We should be still waiting to get home for another month, not have one already! Do you wanna know how fucked up I am now!? Let me show you what I can do now! Let me remind you of what the fuck I've been made into!"

He closed his eyes, his whole body turning as black as a shadow before he slipped from her grasp. She stumbled forward as his presence completely sank into a dark shadow, only to rise some feet away. She stood silenced, her mouth held as she watched the man tremble in fear and terror.

"It's just as he said... it's as easy as blinking. So imagine if I just close my eyes for eight hours and find myself sinking into the void. To be in that darkness all over again with the nightmares I suffer, to relive the horrors of being pulled under the surface and feel like I'm drowning, again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN!!!." His head shook violently, his hands trembled as he illustrated his thoughts loudly to her. "Imagine waking up to the sight of your rapist digging in your your chest, removing and replacing ribs he's taken out at a whim! It's so hard to breathe when I think about that shit! Imagine reliving being shocked for three hours! I had to process the thought of him swapping my head around the place like it's some Lego experiment! He had a portal, he could've went and snatched my parents, they could be laying right next to me, dead! What if that was my mom or dad's body I was stilted on instead!? I STILL HAVE TO PROCESS MY HEAD BEING ON ANOTHER FUCKING BODY, MUCH LESS BEING DECAPITATED! I'VE SEEN THE FUCKING PICTURES, CELESTIA! I'VE SEEN THEM! THEY'RE ON MELANIE'S PHONE, I SAW THEM!"

As Celestia watched him fall to his knees, completely ignoring the impact of the cobblestones under him, I felt myself become nauseous once more. I could only cover my mouth as I watched my best friend undergo such a breakdown in the street. And it was all because he had access to my phone. My heart sank as I watched him shiver, holding himself.

"I can't sleep... I still see it." He said distressfully. "I still see him digging in my chest... I still feel him on top of me... I still... inside... down my legs..."

I looked immediately to Blue, recognizing those same words. She had already started crying for him.

Meanwhile, Celestia slowly walked back to him. "Come here." She said, opening her wings quickly walking to him. "Don't you break down, not without holding me first." He let out a painful shriek, finally letting go of the pain he had kept inside for so long. Celestia wrapped her wings around him, coiling her forelegs around his shoulders, nuzzling him as he cried out to the night sky. "It'll be okay, I promise." She said, gently rocking him from side to side, sweetly whispering in his ear as he cried out once more.

"WHY!? WHAT THE FUCK DID I EVER DO!?" Finally, he grew quiet, unraveling in her grasp. "...Why me?"

The soft inaudible weeps and the gasps of air filled the otherwise quiet streets.

I felt deeply responsible for everything that happened here. All while he was trying to guide me on how to deal with my new traumas, he was still bartering with the ones he recently acquired as best as he could, as quietly as he could. And I was thinking that Blue and I had some rough times to drink away, but neither of us suffered the level of violation that this man has endured for the sake of something so gray and idealistic as love.

Solemn looked away, not wanting to see the pain the captain had carried. The others did the same, and the four friends walked back into the bar. We inevitably followed suit, walking back inside and seeing the hushed crowd of guards somberly drinking one final round before submitting their tabs. They no longer felt like Nondis had any ground to pay for their drinks and requested their own payout. Solemn and her friends all did the same and left shortly after. Before we knew it, the bar was empty again, filled only with the occasional regulars who'd sit at the counter and talk about their work week. But even they were quiet after hearing the voices in the street.

All six of us walked out of the bar, sober after having been quiet. The streets were just as empty as the night of the siege. Blue pulled at my shirt, letting me know what she wished to do. "I think I wanna go home now."

I acknowledged her request. "I'll take you home." And then parted ways from the others. "I'll catch up to you boys later, make sure she gets home and stays safe. I'll see you in the morning."

"Need any of us to come with?" Alex proposed.

"We'll be fine. You four just go on without us."

Rickey reached out to insist that he'd come along, but Alex halted him. "I think you two will be okay. Just be safe out here." He then addressed Rick. "Let's let the ladies have their time." There was no further contest. We all split up and went our separate ways. As we walked, I watched as Blue wiped her eyes every step of the way.

Meanwhile, I learned a valuable lesson from that night; That my individual struggles were my own, and that they would never amount to the pain of some others. If I ever had a hard time in my life, I would always think back to this moment and see that I had endured much, but experienced so little.

I will never be so selfish, not ever again.

6 Years Later...

Those words stuck with me all throughout the years I've lived my life, indicating not just how quick you can change something, but also just as quick as everything around you can change. Life doesn't believe in waiting for it's turn, it just happens whenever it so chooses to not be boring. And for me, that is definitely the case as the years went by.

For starters, Rick and I had our first child sometime in late 2015. We found out that if you have ample amounts of sex while in pony form, that initial pregnancy process continues throughout transformations, as they are still a mere collection of cells. Yeah, that first month went by and I didn't even know anything. The second month came around to a close and I started getting really sick, often. Took a visit to the doctor later in the week, and surprise, there it was. Dad flipped out because he was scared that I wasn't going to be able to finish school, but with the money Nondis left us, we had ways of planning around what we could do to mitigate that. Another seven months later, and our son was born.

I wanted to change what the name 'Jasper' meant to me, so we named our son Jasper Emilio Santaña.

Rickey's family was excited to hear that he had a son now, they were ready to throw the whole neighborhood at us, bringing us all sorts of food and gifts to us to help celebrate the occasion and help make the transition to motherhood a bit easier. Dad did what he could in supporting me, but he also had mom to look after. She cleaned up completely, and very slowly took the time to reach out to me so we could reconnect. It took a lot to both be a mother, and then forgive one who wasn't there much because of her crippling addictions. But we made it work.

He and I ran into a few rough patches in our relationship, namely from the stress of him trying to be dad and live his life, all while I tried to play catch-up and finish my education a year into Jasper's growth. But that was the easy part, next came the hard one.

I had finally finished my training in the police academy, and was admitted to serving in the Austin Police Department. That began a whole trial and tribulations of issues that began to unravel into political mayhem. I myself had no problems with individuals of varying communities, but some officers had perceived biases and would often patrol in manners that would heavily inflict one or two communities as opposed to others. Racism was almost the norm, in spite of this city being one of the most liberal ones in the state. And if anyone ever speaks out on it, they find themselves either getting blackballed... or worse. A lot of times, I was left to feel remorse for not being a nurse like I had originally set out to do. That changed drastically, especially with the election of our previous president.

Some people liked him, some people hated him, but a lot of his policies and practices left our officials holding office to pander to his method for votes. That began to bring out a lot of issues with Rick's family, since some of them came on work visas that eventually expired. And though they tried to reapply a number of times, they weren't approved fast enough to prevent a deportation or two. My parents on the other hand loved him, they agreed with a lot of what he had to say, in spite of them not really benefitting from any of his policies. They started getting really heavy into fringe politics, and then a divide started to occur between both my parents and my own immediate family.

And then, there was last year, 2020.

Our idiot in chief decided to keep it under wraps that the spreading of a global pandemic would soon hit our shores, and had no pandemic response team in place to keep anything in check. So by mid February, we were already getting news that COVID-19 had hit our largest cities, namely Seattle and New York. Then it broke out in Atlanta and Houston, then it hit us. While a lot of places here in the state were less than willing to shut down, the writing was on the wall for what was to come next. When March came along, there was the one incident that really drove a dagger into our way of life. March, 11th of that year, an NBA player tested positive for COVID in Oklahoma City.

Everything went into shutdown. No sports, no festivals, no schools were open, hardly any churches had in-person services, and those that did defied mandates put in place. We were told it was for a month, that in April we would be able to get back into the swing of things. Then it was May where we were promised to come out of our shelter-in-place mandates. Then it went from that to the summer heat would kill the virus... and so on, and so forth.

Then in July, our lives were dramatically flipped upside down.

Mom and dad both caught COVID. Then I caught it, Rick caught it, Jasper caught it. All of my college friends who worked in the field were either preventing themselves from catching it, to recovering from it, even to succumbing to it. And with both of my parents going with the usual red Texan flow, they didn't pay any mind to the mask mandate, and our so-called governor refused to listen to reason. Our lieutenant governor even made a comment a few months back, saying that we should be willing to die for the economy.

And that's exactly what both my parents did. July 15th, my father died. July 17th, my mother followed.

The bills from the medical carriers were astronomical, and they were left to me to pay. Then there was the fact that neither of them had life insurance, so I had to come out of pocket for their postmortem care. And once that was done, I was still looking at the possible bill that would show up at my door for Rick, who suffered long-COVID. For four grueling months, he was forced to live in a hospital, where his job decided to conveniently cut him off and leave him to me to take care of. So with his insurance out of the picture, that left me to pay the rest.

While I had a mild case of it, and our son having an asymptomatic version of it, that left Rick as our only missing piece in our life. And I had to take a night shift to take care of Jasper, get him to and from school, order in some food to keep him fed, look over his homework, and have him get to bed before I head out to work. The hours grew taxing, our savings from Nondis were completely vaporized thanks to family medical expenses exclusively, and I was over our elected officials kissing Trump's orange ass with every waking moment.

We voted him out in November. But unfortunately that's not the end of our mounting issues at home.

Finally, Rick came back home after several near-death scares that the doctors simply described as 'miracles from the healing hands of God', because many times where he went critical, he was not expected to make it through the night. But both he and I knew what that was, the healing factors from our brief stint as element bearers came back into play. However, our healing factors could not heal the large medical debt we acquired.

Situations went from dire, to extremely untenable. We had to put a mortgage on our house to help pay the medical expenses. One of our cars has a lien on it. And now our power's out due to a brutal cold snap making a mockery of our state's energy infrastructure. We've been out of power for two, going on three days now.

And just fifteen minutes ago, it started raining in our living room... of our two story-house.

"Babe!"

"Yeah." He answers back, sounding defeated. I can't blame him for sounding so fed up.

Meanwhile, I have a brilliant idea of how we were going to deal with this situation. We leave. "Have you seen Jasper's amulet!?"

"Should be in the top drawer of the night stand!"

I walk into my son's shivering cold room, reaching in his sock drawer for a green and white amulet. As soon as I pull it out, I'm looking at the the ice-covered city in the far distance. While we're out in the suburbs freezing to death, all those rich CEO's and business owners have their heat and lights running a full 24/7.

For a brief moment, our lights flicker back on in a brownout, only to shut back down into total darkness again. Initial cheers and the following cries of despair all throughout the neighborhood reflect the desperation and hopelessness we all suffer. There's hardly anything left for us to keep warm outside of our own cars and gas-operated fireplaces.

And we're slated to pay money for this? "Fucking bullshit of a shitty-ass power grid." I say as I take the nearest toy I could find and slam it into the ground, as if our son hadn't destroyed it enough already.

My husband walks into the room, grabbing me to get me to stop. "Babe, calm down!"

"The fuck I'm gonna calm down for!? We live in a fucked up country, our governor's apeshit, our power infrastructure's complete ass, and we haven't had power in over two days, it's freezing, our pipes are busted, and we're in the middle of a global pandemic that our governor seems to give a rat's ass about! I already lost both mom and dad to COVID, I almost lost you to it, I can't stand my profession as it is because it's people out there thinking I'm gonna shoot a random black guy in the head with no justification, this shit fucking sucks! I'm not gonna lose our son because Greg Abbot wants to have a giant wad of money fisted deep into his paraplegic ass!" After a profanity laced rant that ends in me throwing one of his Hot Wheels cars into a wall, I take a few deep breaths and recollect my composure. "Where's our son?

"He's in the living room next to the fireplace. He's keeping warm."

Just as I finish with that bit of therapeutic release, I make my way into the den and bend down to put his amulet on his arm. "Okay honey, let's put this on you."

As I pick him up off the ground, I start making my way to the master bedroom. "Mommy, are we going to pony land?" He asks in the most adorable voice.

"Yes sweetie, we're going to pony land today. We can't stay here and have you all cold." I say back, trying to sound as calm and sweet as I try to be around him.

As soon as we step inside, he then asks. "Can I bring my Switch?"

Rick and I look at one another, he nods and walks back to the den to grab the gaming system. "Yes honey, you can bring your Switch. Now come on, let's get on through here."

As I politely tap our son through to Equestria, I hear my husband coming back to give me the gaming console. "A whole week. They expect us to do without power for a whole damn week."

"First sign of an invoice we get saying that our bill is going to spike after this, we are moving to Equestria, no questions asked." I emphasize to him as he starts walking towards the portal. "Moving, Rick!"

"I hear you. I just hope you have everything packed." He answers back.

"To hell with just having everything packed! We are going in a place where we don't need to wear a mask because of this crazy shit going around. I'm not going to have my son sit in a class full of kindergarteners not wearing masks, threatening his life, all because their fucking parents want to make a goddamn religious political statement." I grumble as I walk towards the portal. "They wanna stop 'liberals from hiding the faces of God's children', well they can fucking watch as their kids get their faces hidden in a motherfucking box."

"Babe, our son is over in another world and we're not there to watch him." He replies.

I sigh in resignation, finally stepping through the portal.

The moment we step through, we notice the significant difference in temperature. The room we walked into was vastly warmer, making our three to four layers of clothes more of an overkill. Also, with our sudden appearance triggering the sensors, we are soon greeted by a familiar purple face.

"Melanie! Richard! It's been a while!"

"Hey, princess!" I call out excitedly, running up to the mare who was just a little taller than Celestia now. Twilight met me in the middle, wrapping a wing around me to greet me. As we broke apart, I rolled my eyes and started telling her what all was going on. "Ugh, girl, it's a mess over there."

"Global pandemic still?" She questions with a raised brow.

"And a power outage during a brutal cold snap. We're seeing artic temperatures in a place that's usually no colder than twenty-five. It was negative thirteen this morning with wind chill."

"A power outage?" The princess inquired in disbelief. "What is your government doing over there!?"

"I don't know, you tell me how we're supposed to live in that." I answered sarcastically.

"This slimy motherfucker." The both of us look back to see Rick looking at his phone. He looks up to see me glaring back at him for cursing in front of our son. He promptly apologizes. "Sorry."

I disregard his offense and ask him what drove him to swear so broadly in front of Jasper. "What happened now?"

He shows me a picture of one of our elected senators boarding a plane. "That's Ted Cruz flying to Cancun this morning."

I'm not surprised. "Look, I don't blame him at this point, we're doing the same thing. The only difference is that Texas is sitting in the ice age with no power and he's looking to bring attention to himself with all the political power he has. What else is new? You tell me rock bottom, I'll point to a Texan republican holding a shovel and tell him to dig to China."

Twilight, who grew invested in our world's political climate, could not find much time to update outside of our rare visits. So she asks us every time we come around. "In speaking of China, did they ever get rid of that other guy who was causing a mess in office?"

I laugh sarcastically. "Did we!? He had a whole tirade on the way out, honey! He had a bunch of people riled up and ready to overthrow the government because he couldn't accept he lost an election. Honestly, I'm done. Where's the citizenship papers? We're moving here next month."

Twilight giggles and smiles back at me. "I'll be sure to have your application ready by tomorrow."

"Thank. You." I say with a sigh of relief.

She directs her attention to my husband. "How are you, Richard?"

"Everything's okay aside from the chaos that is our current political landscape. And here I thought 2020 was terrible, I caught the bug and everything. As of now, I don't want to even think about the v-word."

"Daddy, do you mean the venbulator?" Jasper asks in an innocent voice.

Rick rolls his eyes and leans down to pick up our son to put on his shoulders. "Yes, mijo."

Twilight leans over to me and covers her mouth with a wing. "What's a venbulator?"

"He means 'ventilator'." I answer quietly.

"Oh." She nods with understanding. "But yeah, Stanton's been keeping us posted. Also, Shining Armor's been really anxious about the sports season this year."

Oh yeah, I forgot that Shining started keeping up with American football some years back. "Oh yeah. How is he doing in Indy? I don't usually watch football like I should these days, but is he doing okay?"

"Well they're in the offseason, but he said he was already making plans to come by for the wedding." She replies.

"Do you know where they'll have it at?" Rick inquires.

"It'll be here." Twilight confirms happily. "I'm actually going to be conducting it myself. Favor for a friend."

"You okay with that?" I ask the mare.

"Me? Of course! I'm not mad or anything about it, Celestia's been needing something good in her life. Nondis is the same way." She states pretty plainly. She seems to have gotten over the situation fairly well.

"Any word on Mama Haines?" I ask her.

"She's still having problems with taste, but she's recovering. It's nothing like Richard's case."

Rick then speaks out. "As far as Alex goes, Mr. CEO has been really hard to get a hold of."

"Believe it or not, he will make it for the wedding in June." Twilight confirms.

"Well that's good." He says with a nod of approval. "How about Cliff? He's been hard to keep in touch with since he moved over to Sunset's world."

"He's been living his best life as far as I remember. I don't think he's had any complaints yet. Then again, Sunset does what she does to keep him happy, and he does the same for her. I'm expecting them to get married next." She replies with a smirk .

"I didn't think he'd be on the board for marrying an Equestrian when they first started off, but that was how many years ago?" He questions as Jasper plays through his hair.

I tilt my head at my husband. "Honey, we're going to be Equestrians. Does it even matter at this point?"

Twilight walked up to the assaulted father and looks on fondly to the young child. "Well in terms of school options for little Jasper, we can see about enrolling him in somewhere where his talent can truly have a chance to shine."

"Thanks a bunch." I respond kindly, already having a choice in mind. "How's Starlight running the school down south in Ponyville?"

The princess goes on to hold her namesake institution in high regard. "She and her husband have been a one-two knockout punch on it all. Add Trixie into the mix and you got the trifecta of a really good administrative core. It's amazing what all they've done together. And not just for adolescents, but the Cutie Mark Counselors there are wonderful in guiding young ones in the right direction. You would love it."

I can't help but sigh in relief over hearing her speak so highly of her institution, knowing it would be a much safer option to anything in America at this point. "Actually, Rick and I were thinking of moving there, to Ponyville."

"Sure thing! I can get him situated there with Starlight, he'll be in a great environment that will be inclusive and educational."

"Great!" Rick responds. "I'd much rather trust the weather here as opposed to in Texas. At least we know what causes power outages here."

"I'm sorry you had to go through all of that." Twilight says with a solemn bow.

I hug the high princess with adoration and gratitude. "It's fine. We're just about done with America anyhow. Meaning that we have money doesn't mean that we should have to spend it all on trying to survive. The past two years have taught us that if we save our money carefully, we still might lose it all in as little as a year. And if you're not rich enough, you'll be eaten alive financially."

"It's a dream still worthy of having for some, it's just not our dream anymore." Rick cosigns, holding our son above his head. "Not with this little one still looking to have a future. I trust Equestrian schools moreso than the craziness we see in the headlines nowadays. It's almost a lottery's chance, but that's not a chance I'm okay with taking."

"I understand." Twilight agrees, levitating the young child down from off his father's shoulders and onto her back to ride on.

I rub my hands together, cheesing at the princess who gave our son a pony ride. "So... Where's our landowner extraordinaire? We need to share a drink over where we're going to be moving into."

"Believe it or not, she's still at the flat near the family home. I'll have Spike drop her a line and tell her you two are here to do business. She'll be excited to share a glass of wine with you."

As we walk out of the room into the halls of the castle, I have yet one more question for the princess. "Okay. How's Kali been? I hear she learning to work abroad nowadays"

Twilight smiles brightly at the thought of explaining the zebracorn's status. "Well you wouldn't believe it, but..."

And with this, Melanie's part in the story has come to a close.

I know that there were some who wanted to focus more on the relationship aspect of how she and Nondis were going to be with one another, but I felt that I had enough chapters to highlight how that has been for them, especially with one of the more recent chapters that took place. But instead, I decided to focus on more on the the emotional and mental trauma of the aftermath.

In all honestly, we as writers can conclude a final conflict without really underscoring the trauma and struggle of having to process what's all been done and seen. So this chapter was to highlight the things that the characters can sometimes endure when they finish a huge fight like this, even as some may suffer losses to either personal health, mental security, or even a physical loss such as the death of a loved one. This is probably the darkest of the epilogues because it depicts the oft unspoken truth of what we deal with when the conflict is resolved.

Also, Melanie is in our world, so she's subject to all of the events we endure as well. And I know that part is probably the most unfavorable thing about this chapter, but it's not really meant to be a complete feel-good read either. I wanted to display the reality of a choice to stay and the very real consequences of that playing out in I guess you could call it "real time." We do have some loved ones who may align themselves politically and socially, we do have discourse, and it often does lead to a lot of division, that's on display here as well.

And to some overseas readers that may not understand the financial burden of medical expenses here in the States, DM me or ask around.

And with that done, we have a surprise entry next: Kalimba.