Harmony, 4 AM

It was hard, very hard, to wake up and go outside in full dark without coffee, but Twilight dragged herself up, reminding herself of the stakes. It wasn't just somepony's life – well, somedraconequus' life – at stake, it was the safety of Equestria. She knew better than to even try to wake Spike up, just levitated him onto her back, picked up their supplies in her magical field, and trotted over to Fluttershy's house.

There was coffee there, rich and steaming. Normally Twilight preferred the taste of tea, but the heavier caffeine load in coffee was something she desperately needed right now. First things first, though. She poured some of the hot coffee directly on Spike's snoring mouth, making him splutter and start to wake. As soon as his mouth was open, she poured more coffee in. A pony would end up with severe burns if she did this, but Spike was immune to heat, at least up to the temperature of cooking food and probably far past it. Hot coffee was nothing, but the caffeine would start him up enough that donuts could wake him the rest of the way. Pinkie had thoughtfully provided some with gem sprinkles for him.

Once everyone had gathered, and she'd drunk enough coffee and eaten enough of Pinkie's cherry-cheese energy pastries that she could make coherent sentences, she said, "Listen, everypony, Rainbow, Applejack and I got some information from Zecora that I think I need to share with the rest of you."

"Oh! Did you get that piece of the Tree like you were going to? Did you? Did you? Is it shiny?" Pinkie asked. How did that mare have so much energy at this time of day?

"Oh, it's plenty shiny, all right," Applejack said, pulling the bag that held the branch down just a little bit. It was relatively dull in the lamp light of Fluttershy's cottage, but as she moved it, it fell into the path of a moonbeam coming through the window, and it glowed, cool and soft as the moon itself. Rarity sighed.

"How very beautiful," she said. "I do wish I'd been able to accompany you! Do you think we will be able to grow a new Harmony Tree from it, or reharmonize the one they have?"

"We'll need Discord's help," Twilight said. "The Tree – well, this branch – actually spoke to us, briefly. It said that... well, it said 'chaos must smash chaos' for it to be able to reharmonize that world. I don't know what it meant by that; I'm hoping Discord does."

"But do you think he'll be strong enough to help?" Fluttershy whispered. "They – they're doing such awful things to him..."

"Once we take off his collar and he has his powers back, I'm guessing he'll be able to heal himself," Twilight said. "And speaking of Discord, Zecora told us that the stakes are a lot higher than we think. We're not just rescuing Discord; we're quite possibly saving the world, maybe even saving magic itself."

"Really?" Fluttershy squeaked. "I mean, oh my goodness! Discord is that important?"

"What Zecora said was that Discord is the Chaos Avatar, and his position is needed for magic to work in the world. He's not the first, though. When they die, Chaos, or magic, or something, chooses a new one. And, apparently, Discord's far from the worst that there's been. If Discord – if we fail, here, and we can't bring him back, someone else will get the power, and we won't know who. If they're a pony, or a zebra, or somepony like that, they'll go insane and maybe try to destroy the world. They're more likely to be a dragon or something like that, but it would have to be a young dragon who has and can use some magic, and from what Zecora said, that's rare."

"Whoa," Spike said. "Does that mean I could end up with Discord's powers?"

"I asked, and Zecora said no, you're not chaotic enough. Which is a good thing! Being impulsive and overly emotional and liking to mess things up just for the sake of it, those aren't good things. But she said that means you're not a likely candidate. It also means, anyone who is, might be even less likely than Discord to be moved by friendship, and may be a lot more destructive. And because it sounds like most of the species the power might have gone to in the past aren't chaotic enough, or don't have enough young members who know magic, or something... it could maybe end up going to somepony who'd go insane with it."

"What about another draconequus?" Rarity said. "Surely one of Discord's own kind would be the best choice?"

"They probably would be, except they're all gone. Zecora said that Discord's the last draconequus left. All the rest of them died when he was little."

Pinkie's eyes went wide, and filled with tears. "That's so sad!" she said, her voice trembling as if she were on the verge of bawling. Fluttershy ducked her head, hiding her face under her mane.

"How does Zecora know all this?" Spike asked. "I mean, is she friends with Discord or something?"

"No, she says she doesn't get along with him, and no, I don't know how she knows any of this, but I trust her."

Applejack nodded. "I'd believe that zebra over half of the ponies in Ponyville."

Rainbow Dash was giggling. Twilight turned to her. "What's so funny?"

"Spike asked if Zecora was Discord's friend and I was just remembering what she said," Rainbow said, and giggled again. "She called him a stink-encrusted plot!"

"I'm sure that absolutely needed to be shared with everypony, Rainbow," Twilight said, exasperated.

"Hay, you asked."

"Anyway. So if we don't come back with Discord, his powers will go to someone else, and we don't know who they'll be, or what they'll be, but they could easily be a lot nastier and crueler than Discord ever was. That means it's even more important that we succeed."

"So what are we all waiting for?" Rainbow asked.

"To finish breakfast!" Pinkie said, and shoveled six pastries into her mouth at once, followed by a cup of coffee that she gulped like it was juice. She slammed the coffee cup down on Fluttershy's table. "Well, I'm ready!"

"Um, I don't really have much of an appetite? So I'm ready," Fluttershy murmured.

Within short order, anypony who wasn't done with their food finished. Spike hooked his claws into two extra donuts, and munched on them as the group headed out.

---

Harmony, 5 AM

The Everfree Forest was intimidating in daylight. At night, it was positively terrifying. Twilight led the group of mares and young dragon around the side of the forest from Fluttershy's cottage; the portal wasn't actually in the Everfree, but it was close enough that the fastest way to get to it involved skirting through the forest's edge.

"A-are you sure this is the way we should go?" Spike asked, voice shaky with fear. "I mean it's n-night and the Everfree could be dangerous and there could be wild animals..."

"The six of us have been in the Everfree at night many times, Spike," Twilight said reassuringly. "Nothing bad's going to happen."

"Um, I actually arranged for an escort," Fluttershy murmured.

"A what now?" Applejack turned her head, probably pointlessly, since the thick overgrowth above them blotted so much of Luna's moonlight, it was difficult to even see the other ponies, much less make out their expressions.

"Oh, um, Manny is pacing us just out of sight. I didn't want him to scare you girls,so I asked him to stay on the other side of the trees, but he'll make sure no timberwolves or hydras or something come after us."

"Who's Manny?" Spike asked.

"He's the manticore we met the day we found the Elements and saved Princess Luna!" Pinkie said. "Fluttershy's friends with him 'cause he never forgot about her fixing his paw!"

"A m-m-ma-manticore?" Spike's eyes went wide.

"Pfft! Says the dragon!" Rainbow said, snickering. "Spike, when you've got a friend who's awesome enough to tame manticores and use 'em for bodyguards, you've got nothing to worry about! Besides, you're a dragon! Can a manticore even eat you?"

"I'd rather not find out if it's all the same to you," Spike said hastily.

"Well, I believe I agree with Spike," Rarity said. "Surely there was another way to get to this portal? Quite aside from the potential dangers of the wildlife, there is dirtand muck and fallen leaves and vines to trip over in the dark and all sorts of hazards to our coiffures and cleanliness in this forest."

Twilight sighed. "We're barely half a trot into the Everfree. And I didn't want to take the time to go all the way around the forest. Assuming that their time of day is the same as ours, we want to be able to make use of the night to get in, get Discord and get out, and if we waste our time circling around the Everfree instead of cutting through it, it'll be long past dawn." Of course, she had no way of knowing if the time was the same. It seemed unlikely to her that Spike, in any universe, would be awake at 1 am to send a message, and normally dragonfire transmissions were instantaneous, so if their Spike kept the same hours that hers did, it was reasonable to assume they were a few hours behind. Spike's bedtime was usually no later than 10. On the other hand, the different circumstances of that world could have led to Spike's sleeping habits changing. It was also possible that dragonfire transmissions between the worlds weren't instantaneous. She really didn't have enough information to be able to tell one way or the other, so she had to assume the times were the same.

"I agree, that's what's important here," Applejack said. "So let's get a move on." She picked up her pace, forcing the rest of them to do the same. For once, Fluttershy was keeping up with the rest of the group with no trouble, but Spike wasn't so fortunate. Twilight levitated him onto her back – he'd been easy for her to carry when she'd been a unicorn, and now that she was an alicorn, he wouldn't slow her down at all.

"Thanks, Twi." Spike breathed deeply. "Short legs, you know?"

"Someday we're all going to struggle to keep up with you," Twilight said, smiling. "Until then, though, I'm glad to help out."

She called a halt a minute after they broke free of the forest, exiting into an overgrown meadow. Unlike most woods, the Everfree had a defined magical boundary, and most of the trees within it wouldn't grow anywhere else, while trees that didn't live in the Everfree wouldn't generally even grow close to it. So even the wild places near the Everfree, the regions where nopony lived, were open, overgrown with tall grass and weeds and occasionally shrubs, but very distinctly not forested areas. This particular meadow, though, felt... weird. She couldn't explain it precisely, just that something felt off-balance here.

Twilight cast a spell similar to the scrying spell she'd performed in Canterlot, and a glowing roughly vertical line appeared in the air. It was fully two-dimensional, not visible from the back or sides, but wide enough to be easy to see from in front of it. "There we go. That's the portal."

"We can't all fit through that!" Pinkie said. "Unless we were riding in a clown carriage! But even then I don't know if the clown carriage would fit!"

"That's the closed portal, Pinkie," Twilight said. "I still have to open it... like this." She fired another spell at the portal, while looking directly at Fluttershy, since Discord had made her image into the key to the lock he'd placed on it. Immediately the portal irised like an expanding cat pupil, growing to be the width of three ponies. The other side of it was a meadow just like this, and it almost looked as if there were no portal, simply a circle drawn in the air, until one noticed that the meadow to the left and the meadow to the right of the portal did not line up properly with the meadow they could see through it.

"Well, here we go," she said, and stepped through it.

It wasn't like the portal to the human world; it didn't reflect her, since it wasn't a mirror, and her appearance wasn't any different on the other side. It just felt like teleporting; she wasn't aligned with the planetary ley lines in exactly the same way as she had been a moment before. Twilight took a deep breath. The smells were slightly different here, but she wasn't enough of a naturalist to be able to tell the difference. There was something else off about this place, something she couldn't put her hoof on.

"I'm sending a test message," Spike said, climbing down off Twilight's back and quickly penning a note. "Dear Princess Celestia, we're all here on the other side. I'm testing to see if you can still get my messages. Sincerely, Spike. Does that sound good?"

"Sounds fine to me," Twilight said.

A minute later, Spike belched out a return message. "She says, 'Loud and clear. Please keep me posted.' It works!"

"Great!"

Applejack took a deep breath. "Hoo-ey," she said. "What's wrong with the smell of this place? Can't say I'm an expert on the Everfree, but this smells all wrong."

"Rotten trees," Fluttershy whispered. "And mold. There must be so many rotten trees..."

"You're right. That's what I'm smellin'; dead trees." Applejack sighed. "Well, we knew this place was messed up in more ways than just ourselves turnin' evil, most likely."

Rainbow shrugged. "I can't smell it."

"I don't want to," Rarity said, wrinkling up her nose. "Let's just get to Fluttershy's cottage quickly. Hopefully we'll be able to go in, get Discord, and get out of this dreadful place quickly."

"What if we run into the other Fluttershy?" Pinkie said. "What'll we do then? Do we pretend we're her friends? 'Hey, Fluttershy, it's us, your mean friends! Let's go kick some squirrels and steal cake from foals together!'"

Fluttershy looked at her steadily. "No, Pinkie. We knock her out."

"Shouldn't we try to do this without being super mean? She's another you!"

"You don't have to do it, Pinkie. I will knock her out if I have to. For what she's done to Discord, she deserves a lot worse."

"Whoa, fierce much?" Rainbow said. "I like it, Flutters, but how about you leave the conking your evil twin over the head to me or Applejack? She's eviler than you so she might be able to take you in a fight."

"I don't think so," Fluttershy said. "She'll be fighting to protect herself. I'll be fighting to protect a friend. That always makes me stronger."

"But she turned into your opposite, so she might be tougher when she's fighting to protect herself now, did you think of that?"

"Never mind it," Applejack said. "If we meet the evil Fluttershy, whoever gets to conk her upside the head first will do it, and we're not gonna try to figure out who that'll be ahead of time."

"Right. We're wasting time," Fluttershy said, and took to the air. Her fluttery, cautious flight pattern made her better at flying through the Everfree at night than Rainbow Dash, who tended to rely on her eyesight to see obstacles in time to dodge around them at high speed, and had trouble holding herself to slower speeds. Although, even though Fluttershy was flying no faster than she'd been walking, there was a vigor to her movements that there usually wasn't. Fluttershy usually stepped cautiously, kept her head down, and even in the air tended to look at the ground more than was good for her. Right now, though, she was facing forward with a look of grim determination, eyes wide to take in as much of the scarce light as she could.

This Everfree was eerily quiet. The region they'd just come through, on their home side, had been full of rustling, and the chirping of birds that got up so early they were singing before dawn, and occasionally distant howls and growls. That had been somewhat frightening; even though she'd been in the Everfree many times, and was an alicorn now, Twilight didn't discount the dangers there. But here, the frightening thing was the relative lack of sound. There was an occasional rustle, an occasional hoot, but the forest seemed much less alive than theirs. Trees that had been thick with foliage on their side were barren here. This made it easier to see, but the moonlight seemed dimmer somehow, the moon smaller and further away than on their side. There were burn marks on some of the trees, and occasionally signs of withered, dead vines wrapped around many of the trees.

"I wonder what happened here?" Pinkie asked. "These poor trees!"

"I don't rightly know, but I don't like it," Applejack said. "Maybe their Discord did something bad to the Everfree."

"Maybe this is caused by whatever he did to the Elements," Twilight said. "If the Tree of Harmony interacts with the Everfree in any way, then their Discord corrupting the Elements could have affected the Tree, and maybe that caused a lot of life in the Everfree to die."

"Not our problem," Rainbow Dash said. "It's making it easier to see, at least."

"But it's so hideous," Rarity said. "Not that the Everfree was ever a paragon of loveliness as forests go, but living foliage, however intimidating, is so much preferable to plants that are withered and dead everywhere."

"Aren't we getting close to Fluttershy's house?" Spike asked. "Maybe we should be quieter."

"Good point. Let's keep it down, everyone. We don't want to risk waking the other Fluttershy up," Twilight said.

Within a few more minutes they were out of the forest, and then at the cottage. It didn't look any different from their Fluttershy's home, which was bizarre when you thought about it.

"All the windows look shut," Rainbow Dash reported. "So, how are we doing this? A little breaking and entering?" She rubbed her forehooves together gleefully.

"Oh, I don't think that will be necessary," Fluttershy said, and flitted over to the welcome mat. She flipped it over, prodded at the dirt underneath with her hoof, and retrieved a key.

Twilight facehooved. "Fluttershy, that is so unsafe. Everypony puts their key under the mat!"

"Because it's easy to remember where you put it," Fluttershy said. "If I got locked out the animals would be so upset." She unlocked the door and flew inside, slowly and quietly. Twilight considered lifting off herself–the clopping of hooves on the wooden floor might wake the owner of the house, or her animals – but decided to cast a spell on everypony's hooves, and Spike's feet, instead.

It was eerily quiet in the house. Twilight wasn't sure why she found the quiet unnerving; as a night owl, she'd been up late when everypony else was asleep many times. She should be used to it. Maybe it was the fear and uncertainty from being in a place that should be safe, her friend's home, but instead was a place she was sneaking into, where she might have to fight an enemy. She followed Fluttershy to a door built into the floorboards. Fluttershy tugged on a rope around an eye hook set in the floor, and started lifting it, with difficulty; she wasn't strong enough to pull it up without applying wingpower. Twilight assisted her with magic, yanking the door up, ad Fluttershy flew down into the darkness. Twilight followed, with a light spell shining from her horn.

There was nothing down there.

"Discord?" Fluttershy called quietly.

"It doesn't look like he's down here, Fluttershy," Twilight said. She could see a thick-linked metal chain that came up from under the packed earth of the floor, but there was no other evidence that the room had been occupied.

Not that Twilight could see, at least. Applejack followed her down the stairs. "Whoo-ee, it reeks in here. Smells like a ferret, a manticore and half a dozen stallions had a wrestling contest at high noon in the summertime."

"Discord changes his scent with his magic, all the time," Fluttershy said. "I can't tell if this is his scent or not. It does kind of smell like a manticore, a little bit."

Pinkie Pie stuck her head down the stairs and took a sniff. "Nope, pretty sure this was him! Unless the other you was keeping a stallion and a griffin and a dragon all down here at the same time!"

"So he's not even here?" Rainbow Dash called down from the first floor.

Twilight shone her light all over the cellar. "No sign of him."

As she came up the stairs, Rarity appeared out of the darkness. Twilight started slightly. It always shocked her how stealthy a flamboyant white pony could manage to be when she chose. "As it happens, the other Fluttershy doesn't appear to be here either. I've checked her bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom..."

"You think she might be outside?" Rainbow Dash asked. "I'll check!" She promptly flew off before Twilight could call her back.

"Wait --" Twilight sighed. "Well, I guess it's getting light enough that she can see."

Abruptly Rarity shrieked. Her horn lit up and she started thrashing her head. "Ahh! Get it off, get it off!"

Something was in her mane, making high-pitched growling noises. Twilight used her own magic to yank it out, since Rarity's ability to focus appeared to be badly shot by the fact that the critter was on her head. She had only a moment to observe that the thing held in her magic was a white, long-eared animal before Fluttershy lunged forward in mid-air and grabbed the creature out of her magical field.

"Angel. Bunny. How dare you?!"

How dare he what? Twilight wondered. Was Fluttershy going to try to impersonate her other self, and chastise Angel for attacking Rarity?

Angel chittered in what sounded like an angry tone, but Fluttershy wasn't backing down. "You know very well what you did," she said in the coldest voice Twilight had ever heard from her. "I know that your Fluttershy became a monster, but you did not have to go along for the ride! She taught you better than that, before your Discord transformed her!" More chittering. "Yes, your Discord. The Discord of your world. My friends and I are from an alternate universe—"

"More like an alternate timeline, really," Twilight said.

"—All right, an alternate timeline, where our Discord never did those things to us. He didn't corrupt us, we reformed him... mostly. And when he had a setback and came here, your Fluttershy decided to torture him in the most horrible ways possible, and you cooperated with her! You helped her!"

How does she know that? Twilight thought. Her blood ran cold, remembering what, exactly, Discord's letter had claimed Angel Bunny's involvement in his torture was. Spike and the Princess and Applejack and I, we never said anything about Angel. She – she must have read it. This was one of the reasons Twilight hadn't wanted Fluttershy to read the letter. How could she bear knowing that her beloved pet had, in another world, done that to her friend?

Angel said something in response. "Yes," Fluttershy said. "Yes, I am the Fluttershy yours would have been if she had never been corrupted. And my friends are the ones they would have been if they had never been corrupted... and the Discord your Fluttershy has been torturing is the one who never corrupted us. He doesn't deserve what she's done to him. And he doesn't deserve what you've done!"

"Whatever is she talking about?" Rarity whispered to Twilight. "Angel did something to Discord? He's a tiny rabbit. I admit he can be quite ferocious, but—"

"It's... It was in the letter, and it's not something I'm comfortable talking about," Twilight whispered back. "Trust me, you don't want to know."

Then Angel made a noise Twilight had never heard him make, a keening sound almost like a scream, and curled up on himself. Even Twilight could hear the distress in his "wheak wheak wheak" cries.

"Oh," Fluttershy said, and then sat down on the floor and gathered Angel to her chest. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I – I'm so sorry she put you in such a position, I – you know it was the corruption, right? I would never – she would never have if she hadn't been – oh, my poor Angel, I'm so sorry..." Tears welled in her eyes as she cuddled the rabbit.

"What's he sayin', Fluttershy?" Applejack asked, her own voice hard. Of course, she'd read the letter too, Twilight remembered.

Fluttershy looked up. "She – he, he was protecting the other animals, she would have – he says she told him if he didn't do what she said she would – oh, Angel..." She rocked him in her hooves. "Such a terrible thing she made you do. I should have known you would never have done such a thing willingly, I should have guessed... I'm so sorry..."

Pinkie bounced in. "I looked in the shed outside and in the garden and in the tree itself and in the chicken coop and in all the animal beds and all the cages and even the cabinets but Discord wasn't there! Huh? Why is Fluttershy crying? Fluttershy, why are you crying?"

Applejack caught Pinkie with one hoof before she could bounce over to Fluttershy. "Sugarcube, there's stuff going on here that would flatten your mane for sure. Fluttershy's questioning Angel about what her other self's been up to, and... you don't want to know anything about it, I promise you."

"Oh... okie dokie! I'll... go check outside again!"

Rarity whispered, "Please tell me that what Fluttershy is talking about is not what I think it is."

"I don't even know what you think it is," Twilight said.

"Something utterly vile."

"Um," Spike said, speaking up for the first time since they'd entered the cottage. "Rarity? Um... there are things a lady like you shouldn't have to hear about. You're a gentlemare, this... this is bad stuff."

"Oh, my dear Spikey-Wikey. Always the gentlecolt. But don't fret about me. I have always believed that a lady should have a spine of steel under a coat of silk... so to speak."

Fluttershy was still talking to Angel, crooning at him. "We're going to fix her, I promise. We know how to undo the corruption. Well, Twilight knows, anyway. But – but we're going to need Discord. Without his magic, we can't save her. We expected him to be here, but he's not, so... could you tell us where he went? Did she take him somewhere?"

A soft chitter and a faint "wheak". "Oh. Oh, she took him to Twilight? Your Twilight? Well, that isn't the best news, but thank you so much for telling me. It will make our work a lot easier."

"Wheak?"

"Yes. I do promise. As long as we are able to save Discord and he's not too badly hurt to help us." She got to her hooves. "But you can't stay here. Between the time we rescue Discord and the time he's able to help us undo her corruption, she's likely to do terrible things. I want you to get them all out and moved. Is she still friends with Harry?" Chitter chitter. "Oh. Maybe that's even a good thing, though. Are you still friends with Harry?" Wheak, wheak, chitter. "I'm sure that if you tell him that you're escaping her, he'll give you shelter. He must have some idea of what the other animals have been through. And please tell him this isn't completely her fault. She was corrupted against her will, and if we can undo it, she'll go back to being who she used to be. Like me."

"Fluttershy, you've gotten the information we needed," Twilight said. "We don't have time—"

Fluttershy glared at her. "Twilight, I have to make sure they'll be all right. You didn't hear what I just heard. I want to rescue Discord, very, very much, but I don't want my animal friends to be tortured when we save him."

"Oh dear," Rarity whispered. "She – she's been torturing the animals she cares for?"

"It's worse than that," Fluttershy said, and didn't explain further. "How long do you think it will take, Angel?" Chitter chitter. "All right, we'll make sure she doesn't come back here for at least two hours—"

"We've got incoming!" Rainbow Dash flew in the window and skidded on the floor, knocking over a table with a lamp on it. "Twilight, there are Changelings! Coming from town!"

"Discord's not here anyway, he was taken to my other self's library," Twilight said. "I can just teleport us—" But the moment she reached out to fire up the teleport spell, the moment she reached to feel the ley lines, the wrongness of this world reached out and grabbed her. Magic itself felt weirdly unbalanced here, some of the ley lines were literally in the wrong places, and she couldn't map out the route to her library. "No, scratch that. Apparently I can't teleport in an alternate universe. At least not this soon after entering it. I'm going to have to learn—"

"You're going to have to learn to start runnin', Twilight, because that's what we've gotta be doin' now," Applejack said sharply. "C'mon!"

Pinkie caught up with them outside. "Did you know there's a lot of Changelings around the house?"

"Yes, Rainbow just told us," Twilight said. "Head into the forest, we'll try to lose them there!"

"How will we know which ones are us and which ones are them?" Pinkie said. "The last time we fought Changelings they all looked like us! Wait, I know! We say 'Marco' and if they say 'Ponio' then they're us and if they don't then they're not us!"

"And you don't think Changelings are gonna catch on to that?" Applejack asked skeptically as they ran for the forest border.

"Wait, wait, I've got it! First we do Marco Ponio, and then we do passwords! The first password is 'cabbage!' The second is 'cribbage!' The third is 'backgammon!' Come on, girls, do I have to make all of them up?"

"Pinkie, perhaps we should just save our strength for escaping them, and be less concerned with passwords," Rarity panted. "Just a thought!"

Twilight could hear the insectile buzzing of the Changelings' wings now. Her plan to enter the forest would cut the Changelings off from being easily able to use their wings, and to the best of her knowledge, Changelings could only impersonate ponies; aside from the six of them, she didn't expect to see any other ponies in the forest. It would also handicap Rainbow Dash; Twilight herself would still have her magic, and Fluttershy's flight abilities weren't good enough to help her in combat anyway, but Rainbow wouldn't have a lot of maneuverability in the forest. She'd have to watch out for that...

...though that brought up another point. If the Changelings caught up with them, how was Fluttershy going to fight them? Spike, little as he was, had teeth that could crunch gems, claws that could rend stone, and tremendous resilience to physical damage. Fluttershy hadn't actually fought any Changelings during the wedding; she'd used trickery, pretending to be one long enough to run away. The Stare wouldn't work on multiple targets at once, and she had literally no other combat skills. She was also their best hope for getting Discord patched up enough to escape if he were badly injured, and probably the best pony to get through to him if his mental damage had gotten worse since the letter was written. "Fluttershy, Spike! Once we're under tree cover and we've led the Changelings away from the house, I want Fluttershy to double back to the house and from there go find Discord while the rest of us occupy the Changelings! Spike, I'm going to cast an illusion spell to make you look like Fluttershy! You don't usually come with us on missions, so I'm gambling that their Spike doesn't go with them, so the Changelings will expect Fluttershy, but not you." She panted. The effort of speaking so much, loudly enough that all the mares and Spike could hear, while she was galloping so hard, was wearing at her.

Pinkie didn't seem to have any such restraint. "Noooo! You can't split the party! Don't you remember what happened the last time you had Spike pretend to be one of us?"

"I was... trying... to get him to use an Element. And the... rest of you... were discorded anyway."

"But if you send Fluttershy away, what if we need to use the Elements?"

Applejack, also not out of breath, rolled her eyes as she ran. "Pinkie, we had to put those back on the Tree, remember?"

"Oh, yeah, right!"

"Fluttershy's... not good in... a fight. Better... for... finding and rescuing... Discord. Spike... you hang back. Don't start... anything. But if... a Changeling comes... for you... slash its legs. Won't... kill it... but that'll... disable." The Changelings' insectoid carapaces were very tough, but Spike's claws would crack them like a hoof bucking a glass window.

"I don't know, Twilight... I'm not exactly good at fighting and stuff..."

"You're... a perfect gentlecolt, Spike," Rarity said, breathing as hard as Twilight herself. It was kind of unfair – what good was being an alicorn if she was going to be just as weak and out of shape as a unicorn? On the other hand, she had to admit, Rarity had been a much stronger unicorn physically than Twilight. Rarity might not be willing to let anypony see her sweat, but Twilight was fairly certain that she worked out secretly several times a week. "I've no doubt... you'll defend yourself... heroically. Just like... a knight."

"Or like Shining Armor," Twilight pointed out. It was funny; Spike had spent his entire childhood swinging pretend swords and playing at being a brave knight or a Royal Guard like Twilight's older brother, and yet when faced with the prospect of deliberately hurting their enemies, he was balking. That was natural, though; fantasy was a lot more fun than reality when it came to adventure, and violence. And it had probably shaken him up a lot to discover that his counterpart was a murderer, without even having been corrupted like the mares' counterparts were. "There's nothing... wrong... with self-defense... or defending your friends."

"O-okay, I guess."

Fluttershy said nothing. She'd been galloping for the tree line as fast as any of them, but she was physically the weakest of them – Spike's short legs would have slowed him down more if he weren't riding on Twilight, but even he was stronger than Fluttershy. Now her skin shone red through her coat and her flanks were gleaming with sweat, her mouth foaming slightly. There was a pony who was driving herself to the limits of her endurance. "Just... hang in there... Fluttershy. Almost... there."

And then they were. The sun had come up, low on the horizon and painting the sky with a sunrise that seemed somehow more pedestrian and less colorful than the ones their own Celestia made, but the Everfree Forest was still in twilight, the low sun blocked by the trees. The fact that the forest had significantly less life in it made it slightly brighter than their own Everfree might have been at sunrise, but only slightly. With the buzz of the swarm behind them, Twilight and the others charged into the forest.

Twilight stopped for a moment, breathing hard. "Fluttershy. You go. Along the forest edge, then double back. Find a way... to sneak into... the library." Fluttershy nodded, still breathing much too hard to talk herself.

"Spike... get down. Spell won't... look right... if you're on me."

"Right. Fluttershy wouldn't ride you." Spike slid off her back. "Okay, hit me."

The spell Twilight cast on him would not hold up under close inspection. Any Changeling who got close enough to harm him would see through it... but probably not quickly enough to keep themselves from being hamstrung by Spike's claws. It wouldn't buy Fluttershy an infinite amount of time, but it might be long enough.

"Hey, look at this," Applejack said. She was pointing at a thick, black, thorny vine wrapped around a dead tree. "I reckon this here looks way too much like one of Discord's plunder vines to be coincidental, what do you say?"

"I think you're right," Twilight said, only then noticing that the forest was honeycombed with them, both withered, dead black vines and thick ones that weren't growing uncontrollably or moving but which definitely seemed alive.

"Well, then I got me a weapon! Hoo-ee, I'm gonna crack me some bug shells!" Applejack tore one of the living, thorny vines off a tree and began spinning it around in the air as if it were her lasso.

And then the Changelings were on them.

The last time they'd fought Changelings, Twilight hadn't been an alicorn, they'd been in a wide open space, and they'd had no weapons. Rarity's magic pulled up rocks and dirt from the forest floor beneath them, Pinkie leapt into a tree, and Applejack had what amounted to a spiked whip. Rainbow Dash took the initiative, divebombing Changelings as they flew into the forest and flinging them into each other. Twilight's legs were tired and her lungs were burning but there was absolutely nothing wrong with her horn, and in a forest, she could rip plunder vines loose and tie them around multiple Changelings at once. As she'd expected, most of the Changelings took the forms of her and her friends... but they were obviously more used to the ones native to this dimension, because aside from Rainbow Dash, they were all distinct from her and her friends. The Applelings wore the hat that Applejack had left on the other side. The Flutterlings menacing, and being crippled by, Spike had pink manes, not purple. Rarilings had indigo manes, not sky blue. Pinkielings had pink manes and tails, not the bleached blond poofball and blue cotton candy blob that Twilight's Pinkie sported now. And the Twilings she herself faced weren't alicorns. Only the Dashlings actually looked exactly like the mare they were impersonating, and none of them fought well enough to fool Twilight.

The first time they'd faced Changelings, it had been an entire hive's worth swarming them. Here, there seemed to be about fifty or so. Still not in their favor, setting them at 8 to 1 odds, 10 to 1 if Spike could manage to stay out of it, though Changelings were attacking him directly so apparently not. But a lot more manageable, particularly given that the Changelings hadn't seemed to realize that the extradimensional team didn't actually look identical to this world's Bearers.

With alicorn magic and plenty of objects in a forest she could lift with her telekinesis and hit Changelings with, it didn't take Twilight long before she'd disposed of all the Changelings attacking her. At least ten, maybe twelve. Spike had backed away from a pile of moaning Changelings oozing green ichor from their legs, Pinkie was standing triumphantly on a pile of Changelings, and Rainbow Dash had one that looked like Rarity by the hind hooves, swinging her head first into a tree. Rarity was fighting off two Changelings with martial arts, and Applejack had lost her whip and was instead bucking a doppelganger. Rarity was the only one who even looked like she needed help; Twilight used telekinesis to grab the two Rarilings and smash them together, knocking both unconscious.

"Good work, girls," she said, panting. "And Spike." Applejack and Rainbow Dash finished with their opponents. "We can go regroup at the other Fluttershy's house, meet up with our Fluttershy, and—"

At this point a Rainbow Dash came out of nowhere and divebombed her, smashing her hard into the ground.

Dazed, head spinning, she saw what had to be her Rainbow Dash charge into the impostor, full speed. "Nice trick! You must be smarter than the other Changelings! But you're still dumb as a post if you think one Changeling is gonna beat us!"

The impostor twisted under Rainbow Dash, used her momentum against her and flung her into a tree. "Oh, I totally know better," the impostor said. "But you're not up against a Changeling, you're up against me. And I am loads more awesome than you."

"In your dreams!" Rainbow said, kicked off from the tree, and flew at her doppelganger.

"How horrendous!" Twilight heard a Rarity say. "What sort of awful thing have you done to your mane? Did Sweetie Belle pour a gallon of bleach on your head, darling? You're lucky I'm here to put you out of your misery!"

"You have the nerve to complain about my mane when you're wearing all of that gruesomely gaudy jewelry?" another Rarity said. It had to be her Rarity, who hadn't come over wearing any jewelry. "There's such a thing as taste and restraint, you know! You look like the worst sort of nouveau!"

Applejack helped Twilight to her hooves. "Heads up, sugarcube," she said. "Looks like we've met the enemy, and they are us."

The opposing Rarity really was decked out in a ridiculous amount of jewelry. She was wearing her Element, half the gem so dark it was almost black, as Discord had said in the letter. She was also wearing several necklaces, bracelets, and jeweled belts, and a jeweled maneclip.

"Where are you, me?" a high-pitched, cheerful voice sang out. "Are we gonna play Hide and Go Seek? Goody, I love that game!"

Twilight turned her head. Her Pinkie was no longer visible. The pink-maned one she could see looked no different than Pinkie had before the mane dye, unlike Rarity and her jewels. Except that she was wearing a belt around her barrel with cooking knives strapped to it.

She understood then that the Changelings had been a distraction, intended to wear them down, soften them up and herd them toward where their counterparts had been waiting. Oddly, the other Fluttershy wasn't there, but everypony else was. The two Rainbow Dashes were fighting each other already, throwing each other into branches and treetops, crashing into what seemed like every tree in the forest, up above Twilight's head. The other Pinkie and Rarity – Twilight decided to call them Opposition Pinkie and Opposition Rarity, both because they were the opposition and because of their yin-yang Elements – were flanking the group to the left and the right, respectively. Opposition Applejack was striding forward, looking no different from their Applejack, freckles, hat, ponytail and all, except that the orange apple on the torc around her neck was half-dark, like the others'.

And then a small purple unicorn strode forward, a tiara on her head with a gem half-purple, half sparkling white, not dark like the others'. Twilight stared down at her. For some reason all she could think was Wow, I had no idea how short I used to be.

The other Twilight's face bore no expression at all, until she got a bit closer, when her eyes went wide. "You're an alicorn?" she wailed. "He never said anything about you being an alicorn!"

"I'll bet you never asked," Twilight said sharply. Discord's letter had said he hadn't said anything about being from another universe. The other Twilight's reaction said that that was no longer the case. Please let her have just asked him and made the honesty spell do the work. Please don't let her have tortured him again.

"Even when he can't do nothin' but tell the truth, he's still a no-good liar, Twilight," Opposition Applejack said. "Stands to reason he'd find some way to lie to you."

"You're a fine one to be callin' names," Applejack snapped at her counterpart. "Granny Smith didn't raise you to be no torturer."

"Granny Smith is dead," Opposition Applejack said. "Discord made her think she was a filly again, and her heart gave out while she was rompin' around playin' tag. So don't you talk to me about Granny Smith, or what I do, when you ain't lived my life."

"This is a waste of time," Opposition Twilight said. Her moment of shock appeared to have passed, and her voice was now flatter, more monotone than Twilight could ever remember her own voice sounding. Do I really sound like that, or is it just her? "The Changelings you defeated were expendable soldier nymphs. We have full-grown, experienced soldier Changelings on their way as backup, and they will be considerably more difficult to defeat. Surrender to us now, and we will escort you to your portal and see that you go back through, without harm. But if you stand against us for the sake of Discord, we will treat you as the enemies you'd demonstrate yourselves to be."

"Our Discord is reformed," Twilight said sharply. "Obviously he had a relapse, or he wouldn't have come here, but he never did anything nearly as horrible as what you're doing to him. Spike killed your Discord, right? Isn't that enough? Do you have to throw away your equinity for revenge?"

"It's not a matter of revenge. Discord's actions did terrible damage to our world, and in killing him Spike made it worse. Since 'your' Discord, as you put it, presented himself to us, I have no choice but to use him to reshape the world and repair the damage done. And since he cannot possibly be trusted to aid us of his own volition, he must be conditioned to obedience. A task you should have undertaken, rather than being so irresponsible as to trust to 'friendship' in a creature who represents its antithesis."

Twilight stared at her. "You – you don't even realize what a monster you've become, do you?"

Her other self's eyelid twitched. "I am the monster, when you're the one that calls Chaos a friend?"

"We gonna jaw at them all day or are we gonna kick some flank, Twilight?" Opposition Applejack said. "I've got trees that ain't gonna buck themselves to get back to."

Instead of answering verbally, the other Twilight fired a bolt of magic at Twilight herself. She's fast! Twilight barely got a shield up in time. The other one vanished. Twilight looked around herself frantically, trying to track her. Then a bolt of magic smashed into her back, flattening her.

The other Twilight, despite not having wings, had teleported straight up and fired down from a tree branch. As Twilight tried to fire back, her Opposition counterpart disappeared again.

She's a unicorn. She can't have as much raw power as me. But that thing she combined with the Element of Magic... Discord didn't know what it was, but it's magically active, I can tell. It's altering her magic somehow. Opposition Twilight's magic was beautiful but sterile; it was clean, it was precise, it was laser-focused, everything Twilight herself would have wanted her magic to be in the days before she discovered friendship. Twilight threw up a bubble shield, like one of Shining Armor's. Her counterpart's first strike against it dissipated harmlessly. The second strike cut through it, running on precisely the magical frequency where it was weakest.

She can tune her magic to a specific, focused frequency. She took down Discord, and he's a lot more powerful than I am. How am I going to do this? That thing she's wearing isn't amplifying her the way the Alicorn Amulet would – I can feel that it's not giving her a literal power boost, but it's boosting her control somehow. And she's so fast! Is that the magic item she's got or is that just combat training?

Twilight shielded again, this time in layers so there was no one frequency where she was weak, and flew up. Being in the air made it easier for her to think three-dimensionally, as if her unicorn-born brain needed wing activity to kick off her alicorn version of a pegasus' spatial abilities. From here she could see her friends. Rainbow and her counterpart had gotten above the tree cover and were in full aerial combat, flying at each other and slamming hooves into the other's body. I should have made Rainbow do something to differentiate herself. I can't tell which one is which! If they weren't moving so fast, the fact that Opposition Rainbow was wearing her element would clarify who was who, but Twilight couldn't make out who was wearing what. Spike's illusion had worn off, presumably the first time Opposition Twilight had hit her, or possibly when Opposition Rainbow had crashed into her, but he was hanging back as she'd ordered him to, not joining the fight. He had, in fact, climbed a tree, and was looking down, watching the combatants below.

Down there, Pinkie and Opposition Pinkie practically danced with each other, bouncing and leaping. Opposition Pinkie had knives in her hooves, and was giggling. "Wow, me, you're fast!" she was shouting. "But I bet you I'm faster!" Twilight's Pinkie actually looked scared, an expression Twilight rarely saw on Pinkie outside of events that simply terrified everypony like roaring dragons. The two Rarities were using Opposition Rarity's jewelry as weapons against each other; presumably Opposition Rarity had used her telekinesis to fling sharp gems at Twilight's Rarity first, but now that the gems were in play both of them were sincerely trying to cut the other to bits. Twilight's Rarity was using a bunch of scarves as a mobile shield; the scarves flowed around her body, blocking gems that her opponent was flinging. The other Rarity was blocking with pure telekinesis, which would normally imply she'd tire faster, but she, too, seemed better combat trained than her counterpart; it was Twilight's Rarity who had more cuts and bruises on her body from successful hits. The two Applejacks were simply wrestling, rolling around with each other on the forest floor. Opposition Applejack had lost her hat and Twilight's Applejack's bun had come undone, turning back into a ponytail, so they, too, looked identical.

Where was her own opponent?

"Twilight! Behind and down!" Spike yelled. Twilight looked, and narrowly managed to dodge a bolt of energy flying at her underbelly. As it went past she felt it, a resonator spell, intended to shatter her top shield. The other Twilight had two spells cued up and didn't seem to have time to pull the second back; the second one did strike her, but it was calibrated for the weakness in her inner shield, not her outer, so it splashed off.

I'm fighting defensively. I've got to take it to her. She isn't a match for my raw power; if I could just land one clean hit on her it'd be over, but she's so fast. A barrage in every direction was probably not something Opposition Twilight could teleport away from, but it would hit her friends too. I've got to lure her away from them. Get her off to the side, maybe back out in the open outside the forest, where I can bring all my power to bear without worrying about hurting my friends by accident. She'd calibrated for the strangeness of this world, finally, in every location she'd actually been, which meant she could safely teleport to right outside the forest. But a teleport will be dangerous if she sees it coming; she can reroute it, and she knows this world. I don't. Best to fly, then. Not that it was easy to fly in a thick forest, but this Everfree had a lot less foliage to get in the way than in her own.

Twilight blocked several more strikes, and then began to fly in earnest, heading out of the trees. She has to follow me. She knows if she lets me go, I'll go free Discord. The small unicorn (dear Celestia, how was I ever that short and didn't even notice?) followed her, running after her, firing more laser-precise magical beams at her, most of which carried a spell or two as a payload. Twilight had to keep shifting the frequency of her shield, because Opposition Twilight was fast enough to punch a hole in her outer shield and then send a second spell, designed to pierce her inner shield, through it before she could counter or repair the hole.

And then she was out and through the tree cover, back into the clearing they'd passed through to get back into the Everfree.

There were a dozen Changelings in the air there, waiting. One of whom had a horn, like Chrysalis, and eyes with pupils, though she (he? It?) was the size of a standard Changeling and didn't have whites in the eyes like Chrysalis did.

Well. She'd wanted a venue where she could go all out without risking her friends. Twilight dodged a bolt of magic from the horned Changeling, did not quite evade being kicked by one of the standard ones but managed to take it on her withers rather than her head, and teleported straight up to give herself a moment of breathing room. She drew power to herself, pulling on the deep reserves she had now as an alicorn, and fired off a highly overpowered sleep spell in a radius all around her. Eleven Changelings dropped out of the sky like rocks. The horned one had a shield up, but Twilight's attack had overwhelmed it; that Changeling managed to avoid falling asleep just long enough to get herself to the ground.

Twilight landed, breathing hard, scanning with magic to make sure the Changelings weren't dead. Several had cracked carapaces, but none were injured badly enough to die. Good. Twilight refused to become a monster like her counterpart, and murdering her enemies would have been monstrous.

She looked around herself, but didn't see her counterpart. Where was the unicorn? Surely she knew she had to stop Twilight from going to her library and freeing Discord, didn't she? Wait, no, what if she'd doubled back to help her corrupted friends against Twilight's friends, so she could take hostages? Twilight needed to see if her friends were okay. She flapped her wings, rising up—

--and screamed, falling to the ground, as a bolt of pure heat seared her left wing, burning a hole in it.

Even as she hit the ground, she could feel the crawling itch of alicorn regeneration, the rapid healing that would restore her wing, but she was too dazed from her fall to consciously cast spells – and there was her counterpart, standing in the shadow of a tree, blurred by darkness she'd pulled all around herself from the shadow, visible now only because her horn was glowing.

No! Twilight tried to throw up a shield—but she wasn't fast enough.

The last thing she saw was brilliant purple light in her face, the color of her own magic, and then nothing.

---

"Come out, come out, wherever I am!" Pinkie's opponent caroled at her.

Pinkie leaned into the shadow of a tree, shivering. The wrongness of her other self had her shaking in reaction. In the first few minutes of the fight, she'd been as cheerful as she usually was during a fight, drawing on that reserve of joy and laughter and love for her friends that Granny Pie had always told her was the way to defeat nearly any opponent, bouncing and giggling and dodging as her other self had tried to catch her.

And then Other Pinkie had gotten out the knives, and slashed them at her, and had actually managed to cut a thin, painful, bleeding line across Pinkie's flank before Pinkie had managed to flip away. And she'd licked the blood on her knife, and giggled, and said "Yummy!" And then she'd come for Pinkie again.

Pinkie understood her own anger, her own sadness. The Pinkamena sleeping inside her could come out any time Pinkie couldn't manage to convince herself to be happy, and while Pinkamena was mostly sad, desperate or apathetic, it wasn't hard to push Pinkamena into a dark rage, because she was so unhappy she had no way to ward off her anger or moderate her reaction to it. All the Pinkies who were part of Pinkie held as one of their most important jobs the need to keep Pinkamena from coming out. Not that Pinkamena wanted to come out – Pinkamena was always miserable, and when Pinkie was Pinkamena all she wanted was to stop being Pinkamena by any means possible. Not that Pinkamena was actually a separate pony, either – she was just like Logistics Pinkie and Alertness Pinkie and Navigator Pinkie, a name and personification Pinkie gave to a semi-autonomous portion of her own consciousness. But because she had been who Pinkie had been most of the time, back on the rock farm, before she'd learned the magic of fun, she was the only part of Pinkie that Pinkie could fully turn into, if the other Pinkies were overwhelmed by loneliness or sadness.

This creature she faced was not Pinkamena. This other Pinkie was happy, and cheerful, and laughing... about trying to commit murder. As she slashed at Pinkie and Pinkie dodged and rolled and blocked, she giggled about cutting up Pinkie and her friends and putting them in a pie. "And then you'd really be a Pinkie Pie! Okay, maybe more of a Red Pie than a Pinkie Pie, but I could always add some marshmallow to the mix to lighten it up and pinkify it!"

"You aren't funny," Pinkie retorted as she rolled out of the way of a slash. She had to find a way to get back onto the offensive here, to disarm her other self. If she just kept dodging, sooner or later Other Pinkie would get lucky, and then what? "You aren't funny at all! You're just mean! And gross! And I bet your pies taste terrible!"

"Oh, lighten up, me! You have to see the funny side of things! Wouldn't it be funny if I made you into a pink pie? Because you're Pinkie Pie! Like me! And then I could eat you and I would be a Pinkie Pie eating a pink pie made of Pinkie Pie!"

"That isn't even one little bit funny! You're even meaner than Discord was when he was being the worst meanie pants I ever saw!"

Other Pinkie laughed. "That's what he said! Then I stuffed his mouth full of so many cupcakes he couldn't keep talking and I tied his muzzle closed because he was being really really loud. Like sheesh, I saw him take his arms and legs off himself how many times? But all of a sudden I do it and he can't even be a little bit quiet about it! You'd think of all ponies he could have seen the funny side, wouldn't you?"

Pinkie's eyes went wide. "You did what?" And swung a fallen branch against Other Pinkie's slash, so the knife ended up embedded in the branch, which was flung away from both of them by the momentum of the clash.

"Oh, no, you ruined my best carving knife!" Other Pinkie glared at Pinkie. "It's not easy to find meat-grade carving knives in Equestria, you know, Miss Me! Now I'm going to have to order one from Griffonstone or something!" She pulled another knife off her belt. "Oh, well, now I have to cut you up with my second best carving knife!"

There were lots and lots of holes in the world here, even more than there were at home, but the one time she'd tried to exploit one, Other Pinkie had come through a different hole and grabbed her mane while she was in the place between places, so Pinkie didn't dare take one of them. Her other self was much too familiar with where they were in this world. And her other self was as acrobatic as she was. Pinkie needed a disequalizer, something she could use to make Other Pinkie not as good at everything as she was. In desperation, she pulled the cookies from the cookie tray from Canterlot out of her mane and began flinging the cookies at Other Pinkie like throwing stars.

"Ooh! An appetizer!" Other Pinkie jumped, mouth wide, to catch the cookies as Pinkie flung them. Which meant that when Pinkie flung the baked bad made with dirt and the contents of truly stinky foal diapers at her, she caught that in her mouth as well. It had occurred to Pinkie last night, while baking things for their trip, that if their evil selves were really really evil, she might need to employ the evilest prank in her repertoire, a prank so mean she would never ever do it to a pony from her own world, and she'd made the fake chocolate chip cookie. Of course at the time she'd had no idea precisely how evil her other self would be.

Other Pinkie dropped, gagging and retching. "Oh, gag! Gag gag!" That joke wasn't nearly as funny as gasping "Gasp!", Pinkie thought. "What did you put in that cookie? Guh! Yuck! Augh!"

In the moments when her opponent was disabled by terrible food, Pinkie moved. A single bounce and she was sitting on her downed counterpart, the rope for rope emergency in her hooves under Other Pinkie's muzzle, against her throat, and her own back hooves stepping down on Other Pinkie's folded forelegs, keeping her from being able to deploy her knives. "You are a bad, bad mare and need a time out, Evil Me," Pinkie said, pulling the rope and choking her other self.

Other Pinkie bucked her head wildly and tried to squirm out from under Pinkie, but Pinkie had leverage on her side, and the fact that her own tummy wasn't twisting in revulsion under the onslaught of a baked bad. Pinkie sang in her counterpart's ear. "Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, my little pony. When you wake, you will be, a much nicer little horsey."

Eventually Other Pinkie went limp under Pinkie, which was an obvious trick, so Pinkie blew directly into her ear, making her throw her head back and squirm again with a squeal. The next time she went limp, she didn't respond to an ear tickle with Pinkie's nose, so Pinkie let her go, checking to make sure she was still breathing. She cut the knife belt with one of the knives, letting it fall off Other Pinkie, then pulled Other Pinkie's forehooves back and tied them behind her back.

That wouldn't take Other Pinkie long to escape from, of course. So Pinkie took all the sandwiches and all the rest of the Canterlot cookies out of her mane and piled them in front of Other Pinkie, along with a big bowl full of chocolate milk – hoofmade, not nearly as tasty as Discord's magical chocolate milk, but it would still be irresistible as a palate cleanser after the baked bad, and there was no way any Pinkie could resist cookies and fancy royal sandwiches. In fact, Pinkie took a sip of the chocolate milk herself and nommed a sandwich and a cookie before reluctantly leaving the rest of the pile to occupy her counterpart's attention. Once Other Pinkie ate all of that stuff, her tummy would be too full for contortionism, so she wouldn't be able to break out of the ropes around her forehooves.

Pinkie turned around. One of the Applejacks was on top of the other one, teeth in her ponytail as she smashed her opponent's face into the ground. At first Pinkie couldn't tell which one was winning, until she realized with dismay that it was the Applejack on top who had the half-corrupted Element around her neck.

She checked quickly on Rarity, who was now locked in hoof-to-hoof combat with her evil self, both mares covered with dirt and bleeding scratches and furious with each other about it. Neither Twilight nor Dashie were visible anyplace. Time to rescue Applejack!

She bounced over to the two farm mares. "Hey, Applejack!"

"Shut up, Pinkie, I'm—trying—"

"But look! Look, I've got something to show you! This is really important!"

"Sweet Celestia, Pinkie, don't you have any sense of timin'?" The evil Applejack turned around, at which point Pinkie bucked her hard in the face, knocking her off the good Applejack and sending her to dreamland.

"See? I told you I had something important, called my hooves! My hooves are very important!"

Her own Applejack rolled and got to her hooves. "Nice, Pinkie. Thanks for the save."

"No problem! Let's go help Ra—"

And then there was a flash of purple magic in her face, and suddenly Pinkie felt like she'd been pushing rocks around the rock farm all day and all night and all yesterday too, every muscle aching so badly she could barely move it and the need to sleep overwhelming her. She tried to stay on her hooves, but the pull was too great. "Pinkie!" she heard Applejack shout, but it was as if she were underwater, or under a huge pile of blankets and Applejack was very far away.

Pinkie swayed and fell over. She never even felt herself hitting the ground.

---

Applejack reared back the moment she saw Pinkie drop. It was the only thing that saved her from being taken out herself, as a second bolt of Twilight's magic shot past her, right where her head had been a moment ago.

"Bull puckey," she said softly to herself, and then spun on her hooves and dodged behind a tree, trying to keep objects between herself and the corrupted Twilight. When Granny Smith had taught her to fight when she was a young'un, she'd always emphasized, never let a unicorn get the drop on you. The only way to deal with unicorns in a fight was to take 'em out, fast and hard, before they had a chance to take you. Now Pinkie was down, and most likely Twilight, since the evil Twilight was here. And there wasn't no way Applejack could take on a Twilight who was hostile and had the advantage of surprise. About the only way she could imagine winning this one was if she could lure evil Twilight into coming close, without actually being in line-of-horn with her at any point, and then buck her in the head quick before she had a chance to cast. But if evil Twilight had taken down Applejack's Twilight, then odds were, there was no winning this one.

The other Twilight stalked after her, ignoring the Rarities. Applejack had to dodge more than one bolt of magic searing past her. She was faster than the unicorn, but unless they were in the open she couldn't use that; there was no galloping at full speed here in the forest. And if they were in the open, there'd be nothing to stop Twilight from hitting her. If the mare would just hang back, just give Applejack a moment, she could rig a trap, but she just kept coming and there wasn't any time.

And once she was down, Applejack reckoned there wasn't no chance Rarity wouldn't go next. She might be even steven with her other self right now, but not if the evil Twilight got into the fight. This was looking bad.

At that point Spike jumped on the evil Twilight with a shriek and grabbed her horn. The unicorn thrashed her head, trying to throw Spike off. "I'll break it off, Twilight! Don't think I won't!" Spike was shouting. "You tell me what you did to my Twilight right now or you can say goodbye to your magic!"

Applejack turned and ran toward them, to support Spike. He didn't seem to need it, though. He had the claws of one paw dug in around the base of evil Twilight's horn, and the other was wound in her mane, pulling her head back. "Tell me what you did to her!" he screamed again.

"I put her to sleep," the corrupted Twilight said, breathing heavily, her eyes wide. "Just as I did to Pinkie. I'm not monstrous enough to harm alternate versions of myself and my friends, as misguided as they may be."

"Rarity! Um, not my Rarity, the other Rarity! You surrender to my Rarity right now or I'll break off Twilight's horn! I'll do it!"

"How uncouth," the evil Rarity sneered. "You should know your place, little dragon. Nothing good comes of your childish attempts to 'protect' us."

"How dare you say that about Spike!" the good Rarity said. "Surrender right now, and apologize to him!"

"I will surrender, to protect Twilight from this brutish threat," evil Rarity said. "But I most certainly will not apologize! He's threatening to de-horn a friend of mine! What sort of unicorn are you that you cannot comprehend how uncivilized and horrible such an act would be?"

"Maybe it is," Applejack said. "But if you went to another universe to rescue a friend who'd been tortured, I reckon you wouldn't care so much about makin' the torturers happy."

"You ponies are monsters," Rarity said. "Discord is far from my personal favorite pony, but let us not talk about uncivilized and horrible behavior from Spike without acknowledging how horrible it is to commit torture."

"You have no idea what Discord has done to our world," the other Rarity snapped.

"And seems to me he paid for that, seein' as how your Spike killed him," Applejack said flatly. "We want our Discord back. The one you've been torturin', the one who had nothing to do with any of the awful stuff your Discord did to you guys. I surely do feel sorry for you and what you suffered, but that ain't no call to take it out on a fellow who didn't do it."

Applejack bound the other Rarity, being somewhat unnecessarily rough when she saw how many more cuts and bruises were on her Rarity than on the other one. "Now you wake up our Pinkie Pie," Spike said. "Do it!"

The evil Twilight sighed. "Very well. Will you actually let me cast a spell to reverse the sleep spell, or are you going to tear my horn off the moment you sense magic channeling through it?"

"Uh, of course I'll let you cast the spell to wake her up," Spike said, and relaxed his grip on the horn slightly.

Suddenly Applejack saw where this was going, and began to shout, "Spike, don't—"

It was too late. The magic that pulsed from the corrupted unicorn's horn didn't waken Pinkie Pie. It lifted Spike into the air and bent him backward as if he were doing the limbo. Dragons didn't bend that far, in that direction. Spike screamed.

"Let him go!" Rarity shrilled.

"Now the two of you surrender, or watch him die," the evil Twilight said.

"You wouldn't! You – you just said you weren't monstrous enough to kill any of us!"

"He has proven willing to cause me permanent, disfiguring damage that would cripple me. If you doubt that I would kill in the face of that, by all means, refuse. And live with your conscience afterward, when I call your bluff."

They'd been so close. So close. Poor Spike. He was just a kid, he shouldn't have to live with a single tactical mistake being what would take down all his friends. But better he live with that than not live at all. Applejack didn't know if a dragon could be killed by breaking its back, but from Spike's screams she wasn't going to take the risk. "We've got no choice, Rarity. Gotta do it."

"I agree," Rarity whispered. "We – we surrender. Don't hurt him, please."

"I will not," evil Twilight agreed, dropping Spike to the ground and no longer bending him. "But if he does not cooperate, I will hurt you."

And then the sleep spell she'd cast on Pinkie swept over Applejack, and Rarity too, judging from how she swayed. Applejack fought to stay awake, channeled all her stubborn into it, and held out nearly a whole minute after Rarity had pitched over, but she couldn't make it further than that before the spell overwhelmed her.

Fluttershy, looks like it's up to you. If you can't get Discord free and get him to help... this looks real bad for us, Applejack thought as her knees buckled and she collapsed to the ground. Rainbow Dash might still win against her opponent, but how was Rainbow going to take on a version of Twilight that had defeated their own alicorn one? Spike had only gotten as far as he had by total surprise. Their best hope was going to be getting Discord's help, and who even knew what shape he'd be in?

And then the darkness claimed her.

---

"I must thank you for that rescue," Rarity said to Twilight, using her magic to brush the dirt off herself vigorously. "That thoroughly boorish and plebeian alternate me was quite the ferocious fighter, I must admit, even if her taste in mane coloring is atrocious."

"They knew they'd be up against us. They disguised some of themselves so they could differentiate themselves from us. I wonder why Applejack didn't? And the other Rainbow Dash didn't look different either," Twilight mused. "Let's get the others awake so they can help. I want to get these five on a train to Canterlot and have Shining lock them up."

"Did Chrysalis ever send reinforcements as she promised?" Rarity sniffed.

"Eleven experienced soldier Changelings and a Princess. The alicorn took them all out, but they distracted her long enough that I could copy her sleep spell and cast it on her, and then I woke them up. They're guarding the alicorn in the meadow."

"Oh, Twilight, to think you have the potential to become an alicorn! What an amazing notion! Perhaps you should question Discord as to exactly how his so-called 'friend' became an alicorn. What if you could duplicate that for yourself, and become a princess?" Rarity asked excitedly.

"That won't be necessary," Twilight said. If her research with Discord produced the results she hoped for, all ponies could be alicorns, or at the least, as immortal as alicorns. "I'm content with my own nature." Although, if she were an alicorn, she could help Princess Celestia with the sun and the moon herself rather than needing to break Discord to serve. But it wasn't worth pursuing, not now. Maybe later, when she and everypony had all the time in the world.

Twilight stepped over the bodies of the expendable young soldier Changelings, avoiding the ichor all over. This version of Spike was a vicious, brutal monster, judging from what he'd done to these Changelings and what he'd tried to do to Twilight herself. She'd left him awake – he wasn't immune to pony magic like an adult dragon was, but he was resistant, and she wanted to save her strength. But all he was doing now was whimpering and trying not to cry, because she'd made it clear to him that a second attack on his part would result in the death of the alternate Rarity. If he had the same childish crush on her that her Spike had had before Discord awoke and ruined the world, that should maintain his cooperation.

A spell restored her so-called friends to consciousness, and another one freed Pinkie and Rarity from their bonds. It was time to take their prizes to the train. And to get Fluttershy back to her cottage, where her other self undoubtedly was, looking for Discord. When the call had come in from the Changeling scouts this morning, Twilight had let Fluttershy sleep in, on the grounds that someone needed to guard Discord in case they weren't able to intercept their counterparts. Discord had probably informed the mares of the location of his captivity, which was why the Changelings had spotted them at Fluttershy's cottage. The other Fluttershy would probably stay there in hiding – before their own world's Discord had corrupted them, Fluttershy had been a cowardly, pathetic pony who would hide and tremble at any opportunity. But she could probably rally her animals – well, their own Fluttershy's animals – to attack anypony who confronted her there, and if any of the other Bearers, or any Changelings, hurt her animals even in self-defense, Fluttershy would go ballistic. She was the only one Twilight felt could safely counter the advantage of the animals and capture her counterpart.

She hoisted the trembling, whimpering Spike with her magic. "Everypony, take your sleeping alter ego and carry her to where the Changelings are waiting for us. The sooner we get them off to Canterlot, the sooner you can all return home."

"Thank goodness," Rarity moaned. "I am in desperate need of a shower and some beauty sleep."

"Yeah, well, some of us just have to live with the fact that we got kept up all darned night with this nonsense," Applejack snorted. "Guess I'll sleep when the sun goes down again."

---

Twilight had told Fluttershy to go along the tree line and then double back to the cottage, but there was no way she was going to do that with Changelings in the meadow. Fluttershy needed allies. Her friends would occupy the Changelings, and she would go rescue Discord, but she'd need some backup – how would she get Discord out of the other Twilight's house directly under that Twilight's nose? She'd need to create a distraction, and she had nothing on hoof to do it with – her saddlebags were full of medical supplies. She'd normally have relied on the others to create the distraction, but right now she was on her own, and Fluttershy did not do well on her own.

Angel Bunny had said that Harry had turned against their Fluttershy in disgust. This wasn't surprising, but it made her sad. And also cut her down a potential ally. Theoretically she could find Harry and talk with him, persuade him that she was the kind of Fluttershy who'd originally befriended him and not the corrupted version, and get him to help her, but Harry had a temper on him, like most bears. Going to ask him for help could result in him attacking her, if he didn't believe her. Manty was another potential option, but if her evil counterpart had driven him off as well, manticores were also known for stinging first and asking questions later.

Zecora, however, was a rational equine being. She might also despise this world's Fluttershy – Fluttercruel, as Discord had called her – but the concept of alternate universes could be explained to her, if she wasn't already familiar with it. And Zecora would have things like fireworks and smoke bombs and other means of creating a distraction. Fluttershy hadn't asked her own Zecora for anything like that because she hadn't thought she would be the one needing to create the distraction.

So instead of moving along the forest edge, Fluttershy went deeper into the forest. This version of the Everfree didn't scare her at all; it saddened her. So many plants were dead, so few animals were visible anywhere. Usually Everfree animals hid from ponies, if they weren't trying to eat them, but Fluttershy knew nature well enough to see the signs of life, evidence of nests and dens and droppings, and in this version of the Everfree there were so few. The withered remains of plunder vines twined around so many dead trees. This world's Twilight obviously hadn't figured out the need to return the Elements, and given that they were corrupted, that might not even have worked.

Fluttershy came out into the little clearing that held Zecora's hut, and stared. Half the roof was torn off, the door off its hinges, animal chew-holes visible in several places along the base. She trembled. This was all wrong. Zecora wouldn't leave her hut in this state; she must not live here anymore.

But maybe she'd left a message saying where she'd moved to. Tentatively, Fluttershy stepped into the ruined hut. "H-hello? Is anypony here?"

There were vines throughout the hut, and broken terracotta pots all over, and Zecora's masks fallen to the floor. Her cauldron had been knocked over. Spots on the packed earth floor had turned strange colors – bone-white, bright blue, blood red, even yellow. This didn't look like Zecora had moved, it looked like she'd been attacked. But there was dust all over everything, and some green, non-plunder vines beginning to twine around the legs of a table, so whatever had happened, it had happened a while ago. Fluttershy turned her head, trying to take in the whole room – and screamed, and couldn't make herself stop screaming.

A tangle of vines that came up through the floor and rose up to the ceiling, where they had pushed through the half-roof that still remained on the hut, held an equine skeleton trapped in it. A skeleton with a gold torc around its neck, and scraps of black and white fur still visibly attached to the bones right above the hooves. On the earthen floor under the skeleton, there lay two golden earrings... one of them with half an ear still attached to it, shriveled and dried but still plainly part of a zebra's ear.

"Oh, Zecora," Fluttershy said, choking up. Tentatively she reached a hoof toward the body, and pulled back before actually touching the vines. They seemed as if they might still be alive, still black and thick rather than the withered things Fluttershy had found all over the forest. What if they reached out and grabbed her? And she didn't have time to bury Zecora's bones, anyway; she was here to rescue Discord, and restore the Tree, and return her and her friends' counterparts to their true selves. If that part of the plan worked, she could tell them about Zecora's death, and they could lay the shaman to rest.

But if the plunder vines had killed Zecora, and the corrupted Elements were still in the hooves of the Bearers and not on the Tree... had the Tree even survived?

Fluttershy turned and galloped, dodging through the trees, heading as fast as she could go to the place where the Tree of Harmony had been, in her world. Please let it be alive, please. If it was dead, how could she keep her promise to Angel, to restore his Fluttershy to who she'd once been? And how could she make that Fluttershy pay for what she'd done in a way that kindness could endure inflicting, otherwise?

She shook her head. She wasn't doing this for revenge. It's just a bonus. No! The rage that welled inside her every time she thought of Fluttercruel and what she had done to Discord, to Angel, to all of the innocent, helpless little animals she cared for... she had to push that down. It wasn't helpful. Maybe later she would need it, but she couldn't let herself feel it right now.

By the time she reached the stairway down into the cavern, she was lathered and out of breath. There were no vines visible along the path or along the stairway; that was a good sign so far. Her legs felt like jelly, though. Oh, I really need to go for more runs, I'm so weak! If the way she dealt with her own weakness and helplessness was to get help with friends, then without any friends, she was useless... and one of her friends needed her right now. More than one of them, really, when you considered that the animals were depending on her to restore their Fluttershy and her friends were depending on her to get Discord's help in completing the mission, but Discord was the one whose freedom and sanity was at stake.

Well, she hadn't used her wings at all in getting here – she'd wanted speed, and in a forest, flight wasn't always the best way to get it – so they were well-rested. Fluttershy extended her wings and jumped, so fear of heights couldn't lock them shut, then flapped wildly as she descended down into the cavern. She hated starting a flight from so high up, but the sooner she had answers, the sooner she could go to Discord's rescue.

As she landed, her eyes widened in dismay, taking in the condition of the Tree. The top half of it was free of vines, but dim – not dead, not lightless as it had been when she'd seen it covered with vines a few months ago, but nowhere near the radiance it should have had. The bottom was twined all around with vines. They weren't so thick as to make it impossible to make out the symbols on the trunk of the Tree, though.

The symbol of the Sun glowed weakly. A crack ran through the Moon symbol, and it was dark, standing out against the dimness of the Tree by how very lightless it was. And down near the base, on the side that didn't face out into the cavern, she saw a faint, flickering glow. When Fluttershy flew around the side of the Tree, avoiding the vines on the ground, she could make out the flickering symbol. It was a heart, very similar to Cadance's cutie mark, glowing brighter than the Tree itself only in flickers, and occasionally flickering with the internal darkness that the Moon showed.

Up above, the giant star in the center shone brightly, but half the light was the color the Tree normally radiated, brilliant bluish-white. The other half was dull, no brighter than the rest of the Tree, and yet it cast a half-star-shaped spotlight across the cavern floor. When Fluttershy accidentally flapped in front of it, it was so bright it blinded her for a second, and even after she'd turned her head and shut her eyes, it shone as a brilliant red afterimage in the darkness of her closed lids.

A tree that was dim, but not dead. A Sun that glowed, a Moon gone dark, and Love flickering. The star of Magic normal on one side, and on the other shining a blinding light that couldn't be seen unless you were directly in front of it. Fluttershy wished Twilight were here; she would understand what these things meant.

Well. Maybe the Tree could be saved and the Bearers reharmonized, and maybe not. There were no clear answers for Fluttershy here, and nothing here she could use as a distraction to help her save Discord. She decided to go back to the cottage after all and see what she could find. Maybe Angel wasn't done evacuating, and some of her little friends might be available to help her. Bird friends, maybe. Or possibly something she owned, or that the other her owned. One way or another, she needed something she could use to lure the evil Twilight out of the library so she could get in and find Discord.

She flapped her wings and lifted into the air. A sense of urgency pressed her; it was daytime now, the sun up over the horizon, and if Twilight kept the same hours here she did at home, she would be waking up soon... and if she was holding Discord at her library there was probably a reason. If Fluttershy took too long to find her distraction, Twilight might start... she swallowed, unwilling to even finish that sentence in her head, but her imagination was far too good at coming up with horrible, terrifying images. She couldn't delay, and let Twilight start doing... things to her friend. He'd endured far too much already.

Fluttershy feared heights, and she wasn't a strong flyer, but she could do anything for a friend. She lifted straight up until she was above the Everfree, clear of the tree cover, and put on a burst of speed, in a direct line for the cottage that was and wasn't her home.