Chapter Twelve

We stayed cloaked, and hidden, and in disguise. When illusions became too obvious to those magic-users around us who were compelled to seek out dissent on behalf of their master, I taught the girls how to mix dyes that would blend manes and coats into natural-seeming shades. Sometimes we cursed ourselves, temporarily, to seem like other misbegotten victims of the mad monarch. Nobody looked twice, and nobody wanted to look even once, at those unlucky few twisted by Discord. I frequently found myself wearing antlers, just because that seemed like the sort of thing he'd do.

The three of us, the girls now ten and seven respectively, camped out upon a delightfully boring outcropping of stone and brush. I cloaked the fire from above to protect us from what looked like the roving eyes of a pod of sky-whales. I wasn't sure what the creatures had been before- I just knew that history didn't seem slated to allow them to live for very long past this period.

Assuming time behaved like I thought it did.

Assuming Discord's presence itself didn't, somehow, throw out the rules of causality that I'd been secretly hoping kept me from fucking up the future too much.

After the whales had disappeared over the horizon, I heard a winged pony touch down behind us. I had just enough bare-bones magic running to stay abreast of the fact that it was one of the thestrals.

I turned, and didn't recognize the stallion. That was no big surprise, since I'd only personally met some of the hundreds of his tribe that had immigrated over with the rest of pony kind. Nevertheless, I offered a respectful bow.

Thestrals were literally bred to hide. It was only my pushing the issue, and the flock mothers' awareness that not even stealth could hide their tribe forever, that had earned the resistance a secure line of communication in the form of these silent messengers.

"Hello, Downy!" whispered Luna excitedly. It figured, really, that Luna of all ponies would somehow manage to memorize the face of every thestral she met, even in passing.

"Lady witch, and herd," said Downy, bowing right back. "Firstly," he said, straight to business, "Mage Starswirl is nearly through with building the hidden celestial circle. He says we might soon have rested back control of the heavens." He glanced up at the sky, which had been dark for a good eighteen hours, tonight. "Which would be nice. Secondly, the griffon Baroness Whitetalon has pledged another flight of soldiers to protect what she calls her 'favorite rabbit-hunting ground'. I take that to mean that the northwestern borders may be more stable this season, so long as that cloud of algae doesn't flock through again."

"And third?" I asked, because there was always a third.

Downy winced. "Chancellor Puddinghead is... not well. There is word of proposing another vote, but even then, the earth tribe cannot account for everypony in this climate. They say he will not reach spring, whenever the stars claim that might be. The identity of the possible new Chancellors are unclear."

I sighed. "Hear that, girls? Road trip."

"A road trip? My goodness," said Tia in full unicorn-mimicry. "As opposed to the walkabout we've been on this past... forever?" she asked, with no small humor in her voice.

"Ooh, can we get souvenirs?" asked Luna, bouncing.

"Would you like them?" I asked Downy. "Two fillies, and I'll throw in a pair of novelty spectacles."

"Do they clean windows?" asked the dark stallion. "Because I have no windows, and I'd hate to let their skills go to waste if I took them myself, you see."

"Shucks," I said. "Looks like you're stuck with me, girls."

"I was really, really worried there," said Tia, patting my neck.

"Er, Lady Tham'ra?" prompted Downy, and it took me less than a second to figure out what he was asking after.

"Still on a line for the Canterhorn," I told him, the resistance now well aware of my uncanny ability to locate Discord. "He's been there most of this season. Pansy thinks she saw molten rock pouring off of the side of the mountain and making new faces. Heaven help us, I think the king's taken up sculpture."

"Oh goody," muttered Downy. "New hobbies are always a bad thing, when it comes to the mad god."

"Aren't they just?" I asked, rhetorically. "I won't keep you. Fly safe, alright?" I knew how well thestrals didn't like exposed places, and my magic was hit or miss when it came to countering Discord.

The thestral flew off, and I got back to putting together a simple salad of sweet grasses and leeks. We still had a little spiced cream from the last village we passed that could serve as dressing...

I watched proudly as Luna demonstrated to her big sister how she could lift two rocks, now, and send them orbiting each other. She was up to levitating four stationary targets, too. Tia sent little gusts of air to try to knock them off course.

The girls were growing up so quickly. And, at the same time, not nearly quickly enough. I knew that they would have to face an elemental force -worse, one that thought he had himself a sense of humor- alone. History said little about the princesses' parents, as far as I knew. I tried not to think about what circumstances could cause that.

On the other hand, I'd gotten to trying to plan out everything. I fed them every scrap of knowledge, forced them to think of the most outlandish scenarios that magic pony land could throw at them, and wondered how much good I was really doing.

The future -the present- was coming, and the past was weighing on me far too heavily. Causality felt more and more like a steel trap, less a guarantee of things to come and more like a great set of gears that was insistent on ironing out the finer details. Ironing out me.

I could have handled that. I really thought I could have. But what I couldn't handle were Luna and Tia facing so much, so young, and with only each other to rely on.

"Eat up," I told them, and did a quick bit of mental math to figure out how much sleep we'd gotten, lately. Days were just too unreliable, the last few years. "We should be able to make some distance before we have to stop again. Luna, you ride with me. Celestia, how are your wings doing?"

The pale pegasus cast a critical eye on her own limbs and grinned. "I think I should be good for a while, mama. At least enough to get back to the ground and maybe a bit further. Following your tail wind helps."

"That a girl. Fly lazy, fly smart."

I looked back over the edge, idly shewing on my salad and wishing we'd had a chance to fish, lately. Or managed to pick up something with a few more calories. The earth ponies tried, but there were limits. And Discord's 'clever' idea of free-roaming foodstuffs more often than not came with side-effects.

'Turn me into a pelican again you lousy fuckstick of a demon.'

I glanced down at the open, twisted plains and wondered, not for the first time, where the original inhabitants had gone. No doubt retreated to their current kingdoms along the border. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and Equestria had been good real estate before Discord began plying it with his special touch. I suspected he'd been there for quite a while, waiting. Letting his new toys arrive in their own time, maybe.

"Saddle up, little Luna!" I said, pushing dirt over our campfire.

"I'm not little!" protested the seven year-old, clambering up my cloak.

"You look little to me!" said Tia, helpfully.

'My siblings and I were never this intent on annoying each other, were we?' I wondered.

I'd only ever met the Chancellor a handful of times. It said more about her, really, that the entire earth pony tribe adored her in spite of, or perhaps because of, her many, many eccentricities.

I wondered at the wisdom of having brought the girls, but then it wasn't as if I could have left them behind, now, was it?

The small network of tunnels that served as one of the many safe houses of the resistance had more hanging black cloth than I imagined anybody could scrounge together in such poor times. Luna and Tia both sat quietly, solemnly, in the little ante chamber that we'd found for ourselves.

"Girls? Come here," I said, praying that I wasn't about to somehow screw them up. I gathered them in close and tucked them under my wings. "Here, and out there, is an entire world. And everything, from the largest country to the tiniest speck of dust is exactly where it is because of one thing- because of the ponies that shaped it."

I swallowed thickly. "Not one pony was ever born that didn't change the world. In small ways, and large ways. Pudding did a lot, so very much, for so very many. Her life is written upon every step she took, every thought she ever put in another pony's head. Like how you girls are here because of your father, it's important to remember: just because a pony's gone, doesn't mean they're not a part of the world, anymore."

"It's hard," I said, "to talk to you about this. A little part of me wishes that I never would have had to, and that you two could live without ever having to see somebody go away like that. But you'll remember that she still matters. That she's as beautiful and important now as she was this morning, or last year, or next century."

"And if you have any questions, or just want to talk, you know I'm here for you. Alright?"

"Yes, mom."

"Y's, mama."

I heard a sniffling noise coming from the doorway. My head jerked upward- Smart Cookie was there, sitting on her haunches and wiping at her eyes.

"That was beautiful, Lady Witch. I'm sure that's exactly what the Chancellor would have liked to have heard."

"Actually," I said with a thoughtful air, "she'd probably prefer to hear that we were going to save her a slice of cake, tonight. I believe her clan believed in the really old-fashioned traditions, right?"

Cookie nodded, straightening up. "Yes, well, we've already got a few casks of honey wine ready. It's a bit small in here, but those bat ponies of yours will make sure lots of the groups out hiding will raise a glass tonight, wherever they are."

"Um..."

I looked to Tia, who was trying to look subtle. "One glass between the two of you," I allowed. "Smart Cookie, may we spend the night?"

"Of course," said the mare. "I know we got off on the wrong hoof-"

"I've got four wrong hooves," I assured her. "No big deal. Tell me, have there been any messages left for me? We'll need to set off tomorrow for wherever it is we're going next."

"Oh. Right," said Smart Cookie, pulling up a length of parchment covered in chicken scratch. It was a startling reminder that, not only was she more or less in charge of stopping Puddinghead's... stranger excesses, but she had also been the mare's secretary. "Um... before she, you know, before, she and the Commander were worried about these... dogs. Wolves maybe."

"You're not telling me something," I said.

"They might be made of trees."

"Timber wolves?" I asked.

Smart Cookie grinned. "Hey, that's a clever one! Sounds like something the chancellor would have said. But, um, these fellows are large, with a capitol 'L'. Our only wheat producers that held out through that snow that... fell up from the ground... are being threatened."

"A combat role?" I asked.

Smart Cookie shrugged. "If you have to, then we've all seen what you can do with fire... mostly we want to know if this is natural, and something to be scared of. Or if it's Discord's work, and something to be terrified of."

"And this is why you girls can't have a puppy," I told them, turning to face the littler ones.

"What about a cat?" said Luna with a frown.

"They make me sneeze," I said bluntly. "Get something nice, like a bat. Or a snake."

Tia shuddered, but Luna threw her hooves in the air and shouted, "Yay!"

It had long occurred to me that Luna took after me especially.

It had all started so well, I'd felt. We'd talked to the farmers, had some pancakes which were, I'd admit, a rare treat for the three of us, and then the howling had started.

"Finish your pancakes," I said, dabbing at my mouth with a rough napkin.

Tia looked worriedly outside. "But mama, we can help!"

"Stay with miss Cherry Blossom," I said, pointing toward the worried-looking earth pony, "and finish your pancakes."

I kissed both fillies on the head, pushed through the door, and looked up. And then further up.

Cherry's home might have been carefully hidden in the hillside, but I wouldn't put it past these behemoths to destroy it -and the ponies inside- through sheer clumsiness.

"I used to have time," I grumbled to myself, "to work on clever spells. Fire's fun. I mean, who doesn't like burning things?" I lifted into the air, gritting my teeth as terrified ponies fled below me. "I got to show the girls my 'Starry Spiral' last... year? Fuck the order of the seasons these days, frogs are off hibernating in the spring... Luna thought it was the prettiest thing ever. And it's still lethal. Thirty damned books I haven't translated out of old Neologia..."

I cleared my throat, filled my lungs, and, "Hey, ugly!"

It wasn't my best. It wasn't even that loud. Nevertheless, the three towering creatures stopped their march immediately and stared at me head-on.

Which was quite the thing to do when their heads each had twice as much mass to them as did my entire body.

Their massive, glowing green eyes widened. There bark-wreathed jaws pulled back and trembled, and sap fell like slow, thick drool onto the plain below them.

They looked disturbingly eager, and not even my ego could justify the unnerving focus in their attentions.

"Um." I hovered in place, like a moron. "Good doggies?"

They howled, plastering back my fur and soaking me in the scent of... fallen leaves and blood. These weren't the pony-sized things from the episodes of 'My Little Pony'- they were monsters. Twilight, too, hadn't ever described them like this.

And the thing about monsters was, unlike when facing ponies, there would be no bluffing and relying on my reputation. These things were already far too interested in how I'd taste.

I pulled up vapor script -always easier when I was using my wings actively- and wove current of hot air around me. Concentrating oxygen out of the air was a newer trick, and one I wouldn't expect to be possible of ponies for another four-hundred years. 'Comparative science' had been a pretty regular topic, back when the mane six were visiting. Twilight and, surprisingly, Pinkie, were the biggest takers on chemistry. Rainbow had just wanted me to make her an account for Call of Duty.

I kept the current of highly, highly flammable air away from my head -pegasi were good enough at drawing oxygen into our lungs that I might send myself into shock by accident- and wove my way around the beasts on a wide, arcing trail. They lumbered around, trying to follow me, but their size worked against them. I lined myself up, did my best to picture the precise curves I'd need to take, and tucked in my wings.

The fact, no, the experience that separated flyers and made for true masters of the weather, was that realization that we didn't fly with our wings. We moved the sky around us, and just happened to fly as a side effect. Flapping your wings just once could last a pegasus for one short, intense distance.

The golden fields below me went soft and streaked through with speed. Each of the three dogs moved as slowly as the sap within whatever they had that passed for veins. I brought my hooves forward, a silly little affectation that nevertheless made the airborne slalom easier to direct.

Over the back of each of their necks.

I snapped my wings out at the end of the short path and spun like a top, coming to a rest with my front aimed at the three things given mobility, and cast out a spark of plasma.

Magic could provide the heat, but my little trick with the air made that space above and behind their heads flare a sharp, vicious blue. And stupidity made me stop where the backdraft would send me into a tree.

"Why does this world not have safety goggles?" I growled, shaking my head clear. I'd be seeing stars for the rest of the day.

"Rrr...rah!"

"What?" I blinked, and between those white stars, I saw another white object. A familiar one, with tiny blue figure behind her, cheering her on.

"Oh stars, why couldn't they have been chubby, shy little nerds! Take after mom a little more, why can't you?" I groaned, forcing myself back into the air to where Tia was trying to pummel the furious, smoldering head of a timber wolf. I more fell than flew through the air, watching with terrified eyes because my eldest was so damned close to that thing's mouth-

But as I neared, and saw her tear loose a part of the wolf's snout without it so much as flinching away from where it watched me, a little warning bell sounded in my head. Creatures, even magically animated ones, don't ignore damage to the most vulnerable parts of their body. Not so much that it wouldn't turn, ever so slightly, and snap the filly in half. But these creatures had carried a grudge with them, here, against something that ought to have been like a harmless bird in comparison.

"You don't like me," I growled. "You're gonna like me a lot less in a second!"

I caught Tia and Luna both in a Ghostly Hand and dropped them off in a massive stack of hay, made an about face, and released a Starry Spiral. Tiny, white-hot points of light gathered and flew like tracer bullets, only much slower. Instead of going through the timber wolves, as munitions might, they slid along surfaces and into every available wound and orifice and only then began burning. It wasn't the kind of thing I'd do to anything that wasn't a plant golem, and I was reminded just why that was as the three began burning from the inside.

They howled, and writhed, unable to move their limbs from when the first trails of fire burned through what must have served as spines. They gave massive shudders, and finally fell still.

It was an act of restraint that I was able to fetch nearby clouds -thankfully the white and fluffy kind as opposed to the candy ones, because chocolate rain and fire made for a nasty smell- before rounding on my girls. Rain poured down over the wooden corpses and nearby field.

"No!" I landed roughly as they poked their heads out of the pile of hay. "No fighting monsters! No getting eaten by monsters! You're both grounded, now go to your rooms!"

"What rooms?" asked Tia.

I ignored her and began pacing. "I am officially putting my foot down-"

"What's a foot?" asked Luna.

"-No traipsing around in dangerous area and you could have died even if it didn't eat you its teeth were bigger than you are tall-"

"I don't think she's listening," said Tia, rubbing Luna's mane with a hoof. "Give her a second- this is like with those dog-people things."

"-And another thing, Luna was right behind you! There are no cheerleaders in fights! Cheerleaders are for hoofball- not for when you're facing giant dogs made of malevolence and-"

I broke off and spun. "Are you even listening?!"

"Yes, mama," said Luna, head bowed.

"Um... yeah, but you're saying a lot of things that don't make sense," said Tia, flinching.

My sides heaved. I forced myself to breathe, calmly and steadily. "I.... I'm not... I'm not angry at you girls. I'm not." I recoiled, inside, seeing a little redhead in place of Tia, trying to teach herself to remain quiet and just listen to the hours and hours of yelling, and...

"I'm scared," I said, breaking my own useless train of thought. "I was so very, very scared, right then. There are monsters out there... here, even. You have no idea how important the two of you are. How much you mean to me."

'Meaning enough to me that I haven't tried to look for a way to the future in over a decade,' I didn't say. The very minute I chose to take Winter as mine, to make a family, I'd known that I would rather take the long way around. What was it, seventeen hundred years until I met my friends, again? I didn't seem to be aging- I could wait.

Could have, if I didn't expect that even that choice might soon be taken away from me. Discord's reign was ended by two sisters- not by two sisters and their neurotic mother.

"But we just watch and we watch and we can't do anything!" said Luna, muzzle up in frustration.

"And you, Tia?" I asked.

She nodded. Reluctantly, but she was clearly glad her sister had voiced that. "We want to help. You help those other ponies all the time, and it's important because we know we could just go back and hide but you don't, even if you don't have to. I mean," she shuffled her hoof through the matted grasses, "you always complain about it but then act like you're trying to be everypony's mom."

I was speechless.

"We love you, mama, but we want to help," said Luna. "So we... so we all, I mean, together..."

"Come here. Both of you... come here." Reluctantly, nervously even, they shuffled forward. I let my bruised, magically exhausted self weigh on them just a bit. Enough to let them know that I was completely there with them.

"You know I've been around for a long time, right?"

"You're old," said Luna, with all her usual tact and adoration.

"Luna!" hissed Tia.

But I just chuckled. "Yeah. Almost a hundred years old. Now keep that in mind, because I have a hundred years of lessons to cram into your heads, and not a lot of time in which to do it. I'm..." I swallowed, knowing how utterly necessary this was and yet just how much of me was rebelling at this. It was the part that didn't care about the march of history, or the flow of time. Or about two alicorns I'd never met, because the princesses were small and still had tiny faces that smiled up and called me 'mama'.

Unfortunately for my weaker parts, I knew children were meant to grow. I wanted them to grow. Their lives would be written with every one of their steps, and I knew they would have a lot of steps to take. Compared to the ways they would rock the world, I'd done little more than wade through sand.

"You two are going to be heroes," I told them. "And I'm going to make sure of it."

The two of them brought themselves in tighter. The scary moment was over, and I sure as hell managed to catch myself at, what I thought was, the perfect time to catch a problem from growing.

I had to do better. I owed them that.

And because he had always been so much better at this, I wished Winter was here.

High up above the marsh, on a bough coated in moss, I watched in absolute silence and concealment. Every splash and ripple left by those tiny hooves below made me wince. I wanted to go down and correct, and lecture, and demonstrate, but that was just impractical. My girls had never gone to formal schooling -what little existed in this world- and thus had yet to be truly introduced to the 'test'. I was knocking off points in my mind even as I prayed that they would pass.

But I had to prepare them to fight Discord.

And so I let them approach the bubbling spot of morass that held the creature that lay in wait, there.

Of course, I'd woven a half dozen protective enchantments over the two fillies, careful not to let on that they had been cast, and had three fittingly violent spells dancing literally on the tips of my wings.

I focused weather magic around my ears, creating artificial sound cones. It was a trick I'd picked up from some members out of a retired pegasus legion, some decades back.

"It's up here," whispered Tia.

"How do you know that?" asked Luna, wide-eyed and up to her chest in mud. Lucky girl- for all that she was getting more of it, fur was a deal easier to clean than her sister's wings would be.

"Because you can hear the birds, but nothing moving in the water," said Tia, gaze darting at every likely piece of detritus.

'Smart, observant girl,' I thought. She still lost points for not tying back her pink mane in a dangerous situation. In the damp, it kept drooping over one eye.

"There, Tia, there!" Luna pointed, stirring the mud as she lifted her hoof to point. I resisted the urge to plant my head into my forearms. Both at the noise she made, as well as the fact that she was pointing at the monster's tail. A tail with an outline much like its head, to confuse competing predators. Not as bad as chimeras, which did have multiple heads, but still bad.

I forced myself not to reach out and drag my girls back or strike down and flash-boil the creature in its own muddy shelter.

"Eats ponies," recited Tia, voice steady. The times had left my girls more jaded than I'd have liked. They idolized the founders in small ways- Pansy wanted to get them each a gladiolus.

"Amphibious," continued the preteen. "Has a sticky hide, clever enough for ambush tactics, draws in prey by looking like a helpless pony from the front forward. Like a seapony, but evil."

Obviously, she needed further lessons.

"Go high," said Luna. "If it looks at you, I can get close. It's... like a frog, sorta, right? I can make it cold."

Conflicted, Tia eventually nodded. "I'll be close."

She took off as quietly as possible, leaving Luna to sink down to her nostrils and creep forward. My breath caught in my throat. Rich military history or not, ponies simply lacked the predatory mindset. This wasn't right. They should have stayed behind, I could have given more lectures...

With a determined set to her face, Celestia made a short dive, twisting in midair to give a solid buck to the tree above the creature. Stupidly, it reared up and snapped at the rotting chunks of wood and shed bark that splashed in around it. Luna sped up. As the shower of debris eased off, Tia called down:

"Ugly! Look up- dinner on the wing!"

She dove, skimming horrifyingly close to the arc made by the leaping, angry creature. In its full glory, the kelpie let out a hollow bark and snapped upward.

Tia banks around toward its tail, cleverly circling away from Luna's closing presence. The kelpie turned in on itself, snapping its tail up to just graze the pegasus's passing hooves.

Luna, horn crackling with exactly the kind of elemental magic Clover had been schooling her in during their captured moments as teacher and student, stopped within the creature's striking distance. Too eager to not miss, too eager to mind the danger.

She cast.

Arctic air, stripping moisture from the damp air and carrying a thick wave of sleet, impacted the creature's side in an impressive area of effect. The kelpie recoiled, taking its eyes off its prey to focus on the little pony that dared injure it. Shocked by the cold, it flailed its tail wildly toward Luna.

Tia arced around again, and caught the tail's faux 'head' in all four hooves. She twisted her body like a helicoptering seed, using her wings to torque the limb in a direction it wasn't supposed to go. The kelpie's attention was drawn away, again, from its target.

As it brought its pained limb and the cargo thereon toward its gaping jaws, Luna let loose again. This cone of frost was narrower, and more focused. It was so fierce, in fact, that when Tia, still clamped onto its tale struck the thing's face, it shattered at the neck, leaving a stump.

The body couldn't even fall back into the water, given that the first cold spell had frozen its belly into the mud.

Staring and shaking, I all but fell off of the branch and glided down into the now-cold morass, grabbing up both girls. We squelched. Luna was never hit, and Celestia had all of a pegasus's normal resistance to impact.

'Tell them it's enough,' I thought. 'Tell them that they've proven themselves, and that this was enough...'

"My girls," I muttered, holding them closer. "Get cleaned up. Tomorrow, we're going to face a hodag."

For three more years, through the Inverted Spring, beneath the notice of the Chthonia Cyclopia, and in defiance of a mad, mad world, we traveled and fought as a family.

The day I truly began to count my failures, I was distinctly on edge. Discord, judging by my strange sense, had take to traveling. Rapidly. North. East. Southeast. Northwest. I think my girls were getting dizzy just watching my head whip back and forth.

We were systematically investigating the caves east of what I thought would one day become the Unicorn Mountains. The ground was honeycombed with abandoned mines, and natural systems blended seamlessly with them. Some days, we were underground for days at a time, keeping careful track of where we were. Not having spent much time underground before, I was coming to have a new appreciation for all the nasty things that could live down there. Including a rather nasty fungus whose spores left the girls and I sick for days.

It was only a week after that, that we came to a kind of nasty crater. It didn't really match the profile of the 'Titan Vole' that had been harassing unicorn scouting parties, but we wanted to be thorough.

"Mother?"

I glanced back at Tia, realizing I had let my mind wander again. Discord was to the east. Back on the Canterhorn, maybe?

My girls stood together, having sprouted up as ponies tended to do. They were beautiful, and confident. And frankly, some of the best educated ponies in the world- I couldn't help but let some human science and theory slip out, in between telling them this world's extensive lore.

My eldest's confidence warmed me the most, to be honest. On her neck was a deceptively plain pendant, one charmed to hell and back. She and I had shared, some time back, a very frank discussion over her approaching puberty. While not exactly fun, she reaffirmed her happiness as, well, as being herself. After my own clumsy attempts at psychoanalyzing her, I'd eventually agreed to charm the pendant with a spell much like I suspected certain other ponies already used. A number of simple, semi-cosmetic charms layered over one another and, combined with a natural grace that she certainly hadn't inherited from me, made for an appearance that suited her much better.

Luna was naturally lankier, and I think she would end up with my own height, eventually. Minus the alicornification, of course.

The two of them argued, allied together in the face of adversity and vegetables, and just generally lived as typical sibilings. Winter Whistle would be proud and amused. Mostly amused, I thought.

"Alright," I said, stopping outside the disaster area that was the cave's entrance. "Taking all bets. All bets are now final."

"Diamond dogs!" chirped Luna.

"Raccoons," Tia countered. "I'll bet two sugared plums and a shiny rock."

"I'll take your shiny rock and raise you a funny-shaped vegetable," I said. Half the fun in paying bets was hunting down the stakes.

"This is getting too rich for my blood," squeaked Luna. "I want two-to-one odds!"

"I never should have taught you two statistics," I moaned. "Fine. Let's go. And don't forget- at the first sight of zombie ponies, we run screaming."

"Aye!" came two voices.

And to think, the first time I'd told them that had been a joke.

"Details, girls?" I asked as we picked our way over the rim.

"Scattered rocks... mean an impact!" said Luna. "Or an explosion."

"The stone is weathered, which means it's been a while," continued Celestia. "But still sort of sharp- so they were broken."

"At impact or at the explosion?" I asked, for my little 'daily double'.

Luna tapped the ground. "It's all tillable soil, so... before! 'Cause the soil would have cushioned the debris."

I grinned as I cast an illusory ghost light to lead us in. "Good girls. Most cleverest, most adorablest, most... huh."

"Huh?" asked Celestia.

"Huh," agreed Luna, glancing around. "Diamond dog, but without that dog smell."

"That's what happens when you don't lock the doors on your house before going out for milk and bread," I lectured. "A titan vole moves in."

The cavern was filled with dust, collected over deep gouges in the stone floor that made our footing treacherous. Those were 'dog steps'. I couldn't read the markings particular to the diamond dogs, but it probably meant something like, 'shelter here' or 'next den: three days east'. Nifty- I felt the urge to write up a dictionary of sorts, sometimes.

"It doesn't smell like dog," said Celestia, glancing around and shifting her wings nervously. "But does it smell like vole?"

The three of us paused and realized not one of us knew what a vole smelled like.

"We must satisfy ourselves with visible evidence," Luna declared, then sighed. "I see no ginormous rodents," she admitted.

"Me neither," said Celestia. "Visible evidence: gathered!"

I gave them both a sour look, and they beamed back at me.

"Come on, then," I said. "Usual procedure in ancient ruins- let's get some rubbings of any carvings, desecrate any remaining urns..."

"Can I help? That sounds positively fun!"

I took in the horrified expressions on Luna and Celestia's faces. I considered how I'd more or less forced myself to ignore Discord's rapid movements over the last couple of days.

I considered how ridiculously like John De Lancie the voice from behind me sounded.

With a flurry of disorienting fog, I spun and readied a destructive spell. Discord, a flurry of mismatched animal parts, flung out his hands and cut through my runes.

The invisible runes, the ones that enabled my spellcasting.

"You look very familiar, you know?" said Discord, stroking his beard. "More interestingly, you knew exactly who I was, as if we'd met before, back on that mountain." His yellow and red eyes narrowed down at me. "What are you?"

A fireball caught the side of his head, sending him staggering to the side. A gust of wind picked him up and sent his body into the wall with a heavy, satisfying crack.

"Get away from our mom!"

I stared, and shakily began drawing more runes as my daughters stood side by side, standing as threateningly as two young girls could.

"Hmm..." The spirit of chaos smirked, removing his body parts and dusting them off in turn before replacing them. "The thorn in my side has thornlets!" He looked pensive. "Is 'thornlet' a word? It should be, I think. In fact, I declare it to be a word!"

My thoughts raced.

Luna could teleport, but only on line-of-sight. Celestia had good flight speed, but not with a passenger. Discord's range was, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. I'd thrown my most damaging magic at him, before, and only inconvenienced him. In an enclosed space with Luna and Tia, I couldn't even do that much.

"Girls?" I said, not daring to look back as I cobbled together what was probably a working spell. "Remember the story of Tripper?"

In hindsight, writing out my stories for them and incorporating various tactical scenarios was a bit paranoid.

'Tripper' was a unicorn who, much like I shamelessly stole from the Captain America cartoons, was trapped with his own enemy as a delaying action.

"Ma?"

Really, I mused in a horrified sort of way, this was a great idea. Earn my girls a couple more years to prepare, give Equestria some time to recover...

'If there are any gods in this place, let them give me a break, for once,' I thought.

I threw myself at Discord, opening the rune script to engulf the both of us, and-

"Nope!"

I gagged, his claws wrapped around my throat. My wings flapped uselessly, trying to relieve the weight.

Discord's eyes focused, not on me, but on the air around us. He ignored the thin streaks of lightning and fire being thrown off by my daughters.

"Curiouser and curiouser," he muttered. His eyes lit up. "Oh... oh, that's clever! That's a genuinely clever idea!" He grinned. "I think I'll steal it."

I felt the shell of magic shrinking, felt it... invert? But no, something else, something...

The spell which was supposed to cast the both of us ahead five years -hopefully- was twisted into something I couldn't recognize, but which was still being fed by my magic.

"Be sure to pick me up a souvenir," said Discord casually. "And don't be hard on yourself- that would have been a really neat trick."

Discord didn't let go, but I felt his grasp on me vanish anyways. Everything, in fact, was vanishing. Going dark. It wasn't unconsciousness, for all that I hadn't been able to breathe. I turned -awkwardly, as gravity seemed to have forgotten itself- and saw my girls staring at me with tears in their eyes.

I didn't know if they could hear me, but I screamed anyway: "Run!"

Before Discord, along with everything else, disappeared from sight completely, I released a focused beam of light that probably outshone most stars. I had to blind him, had to buy Luna and Tia time.

I had to...

Had to...

And then everything was gone.

'Had to...'