We are swallowed by the water.

I lose sight of Raegdan in less than a second. I tumble and twist, losing sense of up and down as I am being ravaged from all sides, buffeted by fierce liquid winds and scratched by claws of cold. I do not try to swim or fight the powerful currents that are pounding down on me. I tuck my wings close to my body, tight as I can manage, denying the instincts that call on me to spread them and use them to swim. A wrong twist, a miscalculated push when I should have pulled, and they will break like twigs.

I feel a sharp tug. The rope. I am still connected to my companion. He is still here, still near. I hope the rope holds. That the metal ring holds. That the strap around my body holds.

The explosives! I renew the spells, not bothering to check if it’s needed or not and my horn lights up brightly as I feed my magic into the enchantments, keeping them strong.

The savage twirling goes on and on. At one point I think I see lights, weak ones, but large as houses, casting a faint glow that lets me witness for a brief second the green blurry shapes that surround me, the nearest one being perhaps a hundred meters away.. I fail to keep notice of the passage of time, as I always do in moments of great danger. I never know if events really took that long or that short to unfold, or if my mind was only playing tricks on me. Centuries of experience and I still can’t learn the trick of it.

The twisting movement mostly stops at one point. It is still there, but now it has been greatly replaced by the immeasurable pressure of water dragging us downwards, almost straight to the bottom. We must have have entered the beast by now, this Charybdis. It has swallowed us and we are pouring down its gullet.

There is nothing to hold on. All I see around me is water, foaming and raging, not allowing me to see far enough, not in this darkness. We have to act, somehow. I refuse to passively die as a snack.

I take hold of the rope with my hooves. It is drawn tight and it leads a little below me yet far to the side. I will have to gamble. I open my wings and fight the water. I can’t stop our descent but I can swim to the side, wherever that is. I choose a direction and frantically do my best to pull us both to it.

My left wing passes through something. It arrests my movement as if I go through thin tar. This however takes second place to the intense burning I feel. It is as if my wing has been lit on fire. The pain is almost overwhelming, but I can’t give in. I’m close to the edge, I can see the end of the cataract. I thank my luck that I was so extremely close to it. I get as close as I can before I grab the rope, and I use my magic and wings to rotate around myself.

I pull at the rope as I do so, forcing the other end to follow along. It is hard, but I persevere. The weight on the other side of the rope starts to move. He starts to orbit around me. We fall too quick, we can’t have enough time, maybe a single rotation at best-

The rope draws even tauter and now it leads upwards. Am I falling faster or… No, I’m not falling faster. I’m the only one falling now. Physics take over and I swing like a pendulum. The water feels like a gigantic hoof kicking me all over my body at once now that I no longer flow with it. I keep swinging ahead, to the side, somewhere.

Alicorn princess meets wall. I stop myself before I manage to bite through the breather when the impact sets off the agony on my wing again. I bang my forehead on the wall instead, trying to daze myself even a little to escape the pain.

Some kind of wall at least. I light up my horn and quickly feed magic into the spells before I cast a light spell. Mystery solved. I am now staring straight at the Leviathan’s flesh, from the inside. We’re inside and we’re both still alive. So far, so good. I take a deep breath and examine my wing. The feathers have been half melted and the flesh beneath is red and blistering. So much for being able to fly in the near future. I look up, following the rope where I hang from, like a worm at the end of a fishing line. Raegdan is up there, looking down at me. He managed to actually embed his hooks into that thing’s flesh and give us an anchor. It actually worked. He’s been hurt too. The lower part of his right leg looks as scorched as my wing.

I look behind me. A massive pillar of water runs like a waterfall so close to me. Close… it is meters away. The size, the scale of Charybdis, it- there are no words. I could give them a number, I could point at a field to compare sizes, but it is not the same. There are no words, not to describe this massive growth, this titan.

I- I can’t even tell if the “throat” we are in curves around us. The flesh wall we are hanging on stretches on seemingly straight until it’s lost to the darkness beyond my light.

Seawater runs from everywhere above us, drenching us and weighing us down. We only escaped the main mass of it.

Raegdan still waits for me. I take a deep breath from the air tank and remove the breather. I do not inhale the air inside the Leviathan. I use the air in my lungs to shout, doing my best to be heard over the roar, quickly returning my breather back to my mouth.

“We need to go lower. Throw me your blade. I’ll keep you in place long enough, so you anchor yourself further below.”

He nods in understanding. He lets go of one of the hooks and throws the thick blade to me. It is meant for hacking, but in a pinch it can impale pretty well. I use my magic to thrust it into the fleshy wall in front me. I use my functioning wing to push me forward and I wrap my front legs around the long hilt. I look up and nod. I’m as ready as I will be. I can’t use my wings to hover in place. Even if I tried I fear that at best I’ll end up back in the water and pull Raegdan back in there with me. This makeshift nail will have to do.

Raegdan adjusts his grip on the hooks, He pulls his legs in and bends his knees, putting his feet against the wall of flesh and his body. I can see his torso move as he takes a long breath first and then his legs push just as his arms force his body upwards. For a single moment he is levitating in the air. His weight is not on the curved pikes. He pulls them out.

And falls. Straight down.

He passes just a hoof reach away from me. The rope strains and stretches but I hold on just enough to make sure he is able to keep in reach. The blade slips out, and holding it in my magic I follow Raegdan in his fall, doing my best to slow myself down without hurting my wing any further.

Raegdan has sunk his hooks back in place. I fall next to him and as my light spell approaches and illuminates the area I see a look of panic spread across his face. His left hand releases the hook and he rushes to shorten the rope’s length by forcing it to get tied around his arm in rough loops while it is still slack, catching the furthest end he can in his fist.

He does an amazing job with the couple seconds he had. I hear him growl in pain, even over the water’s roar as my fall stops only two meters below him.

“What’s wrong?” I yell.

Both of his arms are busy keeping us from falling further into Charybdis throat or wherever we were now. His head turns and nods off to the side.

There is something… disgusting, like a line made of thick mucus, extending from the side into the water and, I guess, off to the other side across. It is large, like everything that has to do with this beast. It’s diameter has to be larger than Raegdan’s height.

I look below. There are shadows, but… I strengthen the light spell, forcing it to work like a short lived flare of strong light.

There must be hundreds of them. They are like… like a net. They must be incredibly enduring or elastic to withstand the continuous force that is being thrown on them. I frown with distaste. Mucus was probably too close on the bits. I wonder what function they serve. Could they be used to filter the water in someway or perhaps to break down the force it comes down with? Of course, it could be nothing but the beast having a cold, and this is it’s equivalent of a throat filled with-

Ok, I believe I just made myself puke into my mouth a little. Time to stop.

They get closer and closer together as they go on. I doubt I would be able to weave in between them even if I was able to or dared to fly in this limited space available to safely spread my wings. I look up and seem a couple of them above us. They thicken in density the lower we go apparently. Too bad that’s the only way we can continue.

“This won’t work. You need to carry us down. I’ll need to climb on your back.”

Raegdan nods and motions with his head for me to go to him. I start climbing the rope I am tethered on. I make sure I move the satchel of explosives behind me, tucked in between my wings, away from Raegdan’s touch and with their spells renewed once more.

Better safe than sorry, or rather pieces in this case.

I lock my hindlegs over his hips and around him. My front legs grasp him from the shoulders, after a minute adjustment to stop choking him.

“You can take the weight, right? We have no idea how long the descent is. If you get tired...”

“How is he?” the blonde man asks.

“Not good,” the young brunette answers. “Very bad, actually. He has sliced his hands to shreds on the rocks. He lost quite some blood. He can’t bend his right leg without help. He is getting dizzy, and… he’s getting frostbite. He’s going to lose fingers. A lot of them.”

The blonde man looks up at the gray clouds. A snowflake lands right in his eye and temporarily blinds him. He wipes the moisture off his face quickly. He needs more frost forming on his face like he needs a shot to the head. The weather doesn’t look good. They are not equipped to survive another night up here. At least that’s what he thinks. It’s not like any one of them has anything more than the slightest idea about mountain climbing. All they need is to cross another kilometer at most and then they can start to descent, reaching safety from this cold. He looks around at his ragtag company. Eight of them left out of the original fourteen and the way things looked that number might go even lower. Two of his own friends died already, horribly at that. He didn’t want to lose another one. Their first attempt to go home failed. They didn’t know why. But they had an idea or two to try. It wasn’t much, just a version of clap your hands and believe. Not much of a shot, but it beat just standing around. Now he found out that one more of them won’t make it there to try even that little. Unless…

“Hey,” he gently patted the shoulder of the tallest and strongest member of their group. “Do you think you can carry him?”

“What?”

“Can you carry him? On your back? He isn’t going to be able to climb on his own, and we need to find some shelter soon. I don’t want to be caught out here during the night and if-”

The dark haired man cut him off sharply. “No.”

“No? Look man, don’t be like that. You can carry him, I know you can. You’re the only one strong enough. We don’t have anything we can use to make a stretcher. We can’t leave him here.”

“Why not?” he asked, quietly.

The blonde man was stunned. “You- you don’t want to leave him behind, do you? After everything we’ve been through? Come on, you are better than that.”

The tall man snarled. “Exactly after everything we went through. Look, do you really want to die, here, now? After what we escaped? We are so close, we can be home in a week or two! You can feel it as much as I can! We either leave him here to die or we all die here with him.”

“That’s cold man.”

“That’s- that’s the only way to survive.” The tall man bent his head in shame. “I don’t like it either, but… I can’t carry him. I can’t! If I get tired, if I fall… I don’t want to risk it. I can’t.”

“He’s our friend! What are we even going to tell him? That we are leaving him behind to die alone because you are scared? We can’t get him down the mountain without you.”

“How the hell do you expect me to get down there with him on my back?” the tall man snarled. “Are you trying to get me killed?”

“No one is trying to get you killed. I’m trying to save everyone’s lives here. We’re going to be right next to you, we’ll help you as much as we can. You are the only hope he has. Come on.”

“...No. I’m not going to be able to do it. I’ll fall. I’ll die!”

“Have some fucking trust in yourself, huh?”

“I can’t be responsible for him, alright? I can’t!” the tall man yells, angrily. “I’m… I won’t be able to do it. I know it. I’m not doing it. I can’t- tell him whatever you want. I’m sorry.”

He nods and tries to smile, his lips warping funny around the breather. He removes one of the hooks from the wall of flesh. I get jostled as we now hang from only one hand. He forces the freed hook back in, this time lower, around the height of his shoulder. He does the same with his other hand and we lower down in a sudden motion. For a moment I think he will lose his grip, but Raegdan holds on, grunting. Little by little, we descent.

I call instructions to help him take us the proper route, avoiding the… glistening, gigantic ropes. He keeps a rhythm as we go down, focused only on repeating the same set of motions, and my instructions. He never looks up, down, or to the sides. Not until I tell him to stop while we are next to one of the huge, bridging membranes.

I use my magic and unsheath one of the daggers on me. I gently touch the membrane with it and watch with wonder as it easily pierces through… and hisses. I pull it out quick. I don’t need to look at the damage it caused on the metal. The little puff of smoke rising up tells me enough.

We don’t waste any more time than that. Raegdan’s stamina is not inexhaustible. He carries our combined weight and that of our gear, hanging on nothing but his arms with nowhere to support himself, even for a moment. I’m close enough to hear his laboured breath and feel his chest rise up and down. He’s getting tired and he draws deep breaths as he strives to-

Drat. He’s using too much air. We can’t afford this waste, but what else can we do?

I strengthen the light spell. I can make out some kind of bottom, finally! We can stop there and he can rest for a minute.

“Almost there. Just a few meters more,” I encourage him. He takes a deep breath and he continues. The muscles on his arms tremble, but the arms themselves work with the steadfastness of clockwork.

We make it down. I jump off Raegdan’s back, and as soon as I do, he collapses on his knees, trying to regain his breath and rubbing his arms and shoulders. He gently peels the cloth off his leg. The leg has been eaten down, but not enough to harm muscle or the larger veins. His thick shoe protected his foot. There is enough bleeding even so. Some of the skin on his left arm got shaved off by the rope when he stopped my fall before. He thrusts his wounds into the falling water for a moment to let the seawater soak the missing skin area. I almost warn him off in fear of infection from the Leviathan but I stop. How would he avoid something like it anyway?

I leave him to rest and bind his wounds with fabric he tears from his own clothes while I examine the space we are in. I cast a quick spell to help the blood clot on my wing, and another one to lessen the pain as I sit down next to him and wait for the spells to work. I wish I could do the same for him. He is fine with salves and ointments, but he refuses to digest anything that could lessen the pain apart from alcohol. Personally, even though he won’t admit it, I think he did try something once on his own and he didn’t enjoy the effects. It’s one of the few things he begs me not to ask more details about. I think he’s ashamed. I should have brought a flask of strong drink with us. I could do with some myself.

The water comes falling down from above, separated in a thousand small, unending waterfalls. It feels as if we are the size of motes of dust, trapped under a titanic showerhead. I can’t see very far at all. The little illumination I can provide is broken apart in white diamonds by the spray of water and silver curtains. It is… beautiful in a way.

The surface that we stand on is… strange. It feels soft and bouncy. There is a border to where we sit, like a hard protrusion, marking a large area of ten to fifteen meters of diameter. This area curves inwards and leads to a hole to the center, about three meters wide. The whole “floor” we are on must be divided in cells like that. A world made of drains.

I return to my companion. He looks marginally better now that he rested a while. My wing stopped bleeding too. Thankfully the feathers took the brunt of the damage much like Raegdan was protected by his clothing. The muscle and sinew hasn’t been hurt that much. It is still enough to ground me for a while. “We are inside. What now?”

He’s now able to copy me and remove his breather in short bursts to talk. “We need to find something vital. Its heart, its brain, a large area filled with veins. Anything.”

“That will be hard to do.”

“I’ve got an idea. I remember one of Twilight’s reports. Rarity had a spell to detect gems. Maybe you can do something similar. Nothing fancy, just figure out where the greatest concentrations of blood are. We can try bleeding it.” He looks at my hurt wing. “Return the favor.”

I give it some thought. Make up a spell on the fly… It was- well, it was our only option right now. I would have to make it work or we would have to come up with something else. The insights into the translation of magic would help. I don’t have to look for blood itself. I only have to look for massed quantities of a designated substance. “Alright. I will need a sample to focus on. It will make it easier.”

“No shortage of that.” Raegdan lifts the hooks and quickly examines them, turning them around. “Must have washed off. Here we go.” He hangs the hooks from his belt and unsheathes a knife. He stabs the “wall” behind him.

There is no blood coming out.

“Bigger cut,” I advise him. He nods. He slices deeper.

Something starts to drip out.

“That doesn’t look like blood,” Raegdan says after he carefully inspects the thick liquid oozing out.

“No. It’s different. It looks like pus.”

Raegdan collects some of it on the tip of one of his fingers. He waits a bit to see if it affects him somehow before rubbing it between his fingers, examining its consistency.

“It’s sticky,” he says after wiping his fingers on his trousers. “Like the thing that comes out of trees.”

“Sap?” I ask.

He nods. I expected a Leviathan to be different from everything else I’ve ever encountered so far. Their sheer size alone made it certain that there would be things about them that I’ve never thought of or seen, but… sap?

Raegdan keeps digging into the wound with his dagger. He grasps a piece of flesh and pulls. It tears sideways in a surprisingly straight line.

“It feels strange,” he notes. He leans close enough to almost touch his nose to it. “There are small tube things like... veins. But it also feels like… like…”

“Fiber?”

He looks at me questioningly.

I roll my eyes. He should know this word but I guess it doesn’t come up in conversations with him that often. “Like a plant,” I clarify. “It kind of peels like it has a grain, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, or wood. Not entirely, but near enough-”

We both freeze as the implications or what we just said sink in.

“If Charybdis doesn’t have blood like an animal but rather sap like a plant…” I think aloud.

Raegdan captures the train of my thought. “Oh crap. That would make some sense to explain the size…”

“Then that means that it might be close enough to a tree or something similar. If that’s true then-”

“Then it’s very possible that- there’s no brain or heart, is there?. There might be nothing for us to hurt.”

We look at each other. It takes a couple of seconds more to entirely understand what we just said and respond appropriately.

“Fuck!” we yell together in frustration inside the belly of the beast.

Applejack sat still on the small pier. She looked out towards the distant whirlpool every now and then, but the majority of the time her eyes had been preoccupied trying to focus on the scrolls in front of her. It is hard to do so when it’s something that you don’t care to ever see.

It was the seals that she mostly looked at, the ones that really attracted her attention. They hadn’t use ribbons to tie them closed. They had melted wax over them. Normal, yellow colored wax, probably from a candle they found. She called it a seal, but in truth they didn’t even bother with one. The only way you could tell these letters were from Luna and Raegdan was the oval shaped print left by one of Raegdan’s fingers from when he pressed down on the still warm wax. Applejack had examined one of them up close. The print wasn’t completely smooth. There were lines left on it, swirly lines of a strange pattern from his finger. She had never noticed that before. His fingers had looked completely smooth to her. If she was more like Twilight she could probably make a whole book out of it about how simple things are so complicated when you examine them closer.

The worst part, the one that weighed on her now though? What Twilight and Spike had told them. Right there, the first time Twilight ever told them about Raegdan. She did her best to tell them how Raegdan was, his violence and temper, but also the better side of him. The parental side. This tortured fella, this half-mad, violent individual -and Luna too, she had her share of that too- was being kind or caring in tiny ways every day despite it all, and- and everypony ignored it.

Applejack didn’t mean that being kind to a few ponies made up for what Raegdan… did, or his excesses. Neither did they for Luna. But because somepony has a bad side didn’t mean their good side didn’t count, did it? It was wrong to act as if it didn’t matter at all because it wasn’t big, because they weren’t making a show of it. Strange how neither of them had complained about the unfairness of it.

Probably because they didn’t believe in fair anymore. Applejack couldn’t say she blamed them right now. Boy, did she feel rotten for everypony else’s attitude. Hay, what if she had gone through half of what Raegdan or Luna did? How would she have fared in their place? She’s had it so easy compared to them.

Ya know what? The more she learned and suspected about their past, the less she wanted to play that game. She could see and understand the reasons that made them so focused on succeeding without help. But there’s a point where you have to put a stop to that.

Yes, those two were full of faults, she agreed fully to that. Faults that drove them to their dea- their probab- to risk their lives. What they were doing was stupid and needless, and Applejack should have done something to stop them instead of standing there. Because they could be better. She thought she was getting to them. She really did, but apparently all she did was act as a short lived cork. Well, when they got back she was gonna have to up her game, be more forceful. Talk in their tongue. They thought they were stubborn? Wait till they meet an Apple determined to force her own way. Her patience had ran dangerously thin.

None of her friends had ever seen her actually, and completely angry. But she was getting there.

Leaf Stream’s and Solid Charge’s loud hoofsteps on the wooden surface stopped right next to her. Both of them joined her, but Applejack didn’t acknowledge them and they didn’t say anything in turn. They sat silent for a time. Solid Charge was poking and shoving his thick finger beneath his cast.

“I’ve got the Thestrals ready with nets and ropes,” Leaf Stream finally said. “The moment one of them surfaces or Charybdis starts choking on its own blood they will swoop down there to get them out of the water.”

Applejack nodded absently.

Leaf Stream pointed at the scroll pile. “Quick question. Are you tempted to open your letter? Is that why you have them here?”

Applejack closed her eyes, letting out a troubled breath. “Ah’m tempted to burn ‘em,” she said. Solid Charge next to her nodded as if understanding perfectly. “But ah can’t do that because if, ah say if, they don’t… Ah’m supposed to give them back unopened. That’s what Raegdan asked. They’ll be back in a little while.”

“There’s still time,” Solid Charge’s voice rumbled. “They are both extremely experienced and crafty. If there’s somebody who can perform this insanity and come out alive, it’s them. Any of you see a short stick or something similar around? This cast itches like crazy.”

“Have you… have ya thought about reading the letter they left for you?” Applejack asked Leaf Stream.

Leaf Stream snorted. “Buck no. I don’t want to have to do this crazy stuff they piled on me! I’m not cut out to be a leader. When they get back here I’m giving it back and they can shove this crap to some other poor sap. Maybe Solid Charge over here.”

“I doubt I’d be eligible for that either,” Solid Charge answered, amused. “I’m not a pony. Not that many more would rush to join if a foreigner is in charge of the Lunar Guard.”

“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Leaf Stream pointed out. “The Lunar Guard. Seriously, this is madness. I keep repeating myself, over and over, but it is! Why the buck would they want to keep that going? No Princess Luna, no Lunar Guard. It’s simple. There’s no reason for it to exist without her.”

“Perhaps they consider it their legacy.” Solid Charge had returned to prodding his cast.

“Yeah, I’m totally convinced that’s what it is. This isn’t going to work, not if they keep secrets like this. We don’t even know what our job really is. They like to lie their flank off about everything.”

“Ya don’t know half of it,” Applejack said. “Only… ah don’t think they like it as much as they believe it necessary. Ah think they’re really scared.”

“It’d be hard to find something scarier than that. I can think of only three things equally bad.” Solid Charge pointed towards the Leviathan’s location. “And if that didn’t scare them enough, I don’t know what could do it.”

“Ah don’t know what. Luna’s scared of the Elements being used against her, though ah don’t know why she would think that. Raegdan’s scared of ponies learning some things about them both. There’s so much ah just don’t know. Sometimes ah even think he’s scared of me. Heck, he outright told me that once.”

“Well, if you want to we can go and open up my letter right now. I bet they got most of the answers in it,” Leaf Stream offered.

Applejack hesitated. “Ah’ll pass. Ah’ll wait for them to tell me. They will. No more lies after this. Ah had enough.”

Leaf Stream nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, good call. I don’t want to get yelled at anyway. There’s gonna be a lot of it coming my way soon enough, especially if you are serious about the secrets stopping.”

Solid Charge remained seemingly focused on ruining his cast. “I think that was a plea for someone to take something off their chest,” he casually said.

“That does sound like it,” Applejack agreed. “Something you wanna share sugarcube?”

Leaf Stream tapped her hoof on the wooden pier in a nervous fashion. “You guys got my back, right? Because, seriously, I didn’t mean any harm. I haven’t done any harm.”

“Ohoho,” Solid Charge laughed, finally turning to her. “What did you do?”

“I, uh, I may have agreed to, umm… inform a certain party of any activities or conversations I may be privy to that may be of interest to that particular party in mention…”

The rest, if there was going to be any more at all, had lost its opportunity to be said when a hoof smacked Leaf Stream right on the face.

“You were spying on them? They trusted you enough to turn their back to you and you backstabbed them?” Applejack seethed. Solid Charge was shaking his head, pursing his lips.

Leaf Stream brought her hooves in front of her head while ducking away from Applejack’s raised hoof. “Hey, hey, calm down! You’re not that perfect yourself, ok? I’m not deaf and I’m not an idiot. I gathered up enough on the way here to figure out that you and your friends have done the same thing, haven’t you?”

“That’s different,” Applejack shouted. “We didn’t intend to sell them off to ponies trying to kill them!”

“Neither did I. It’s Princess Celestia that I spy on them for. Not exactly spy, just keep tabs on them.”

The indignation vanished like fog under the sun. “What?”

“She just asked me to, I don’t know, keep an eye on them and let her know if there was anything she could do. She worries about them, that’s all,” Leaf Stream tried to explain. She saw how both Applejack and Solid Charge were still not understanding and continued. “Look, when I was still in the hospital, Princess Celestia came to visit me. Just a couple hours after Princess Luna and- and the commander left. It was… I was getting pretty heavily into the whole goddess thing for a long time by then. It’s… it’s very hard not to. But then I had this happen to me while the one I prayed to was right there.”

Leaf Stream moved the small stumps that were all she had left, looking sad at the twitching movement that was all she was capable of now. “Pro tip: that kind of stuff happening tends to be a deal breaker. I mean, I was assured that what I was ordered to do was for her glory and I was doing her holy work-”

“What you were ordered to do,” Applejack spat. “You were trying to kill Raegdan in that fight.”

“Duh!” Leaf Stream said. “We went for the kill right away while he tried to keep it down. We pushed, and pushed, until we finally pushed hard enough… I get that I’m the one mostly responsible for what happened. I’m not an idiot. But I was out of the fight, he had no reason to-”

“You tried to kill him and he didn’t, did he?” Solid Charge asked for validation.

“No, not at first. He went easy on us. Then he tore us apart in a minute.”

Solid Charge gently pulled at his braided beard. “How long do you think you can taunt a manticore before it cuts you down?”

Leaf Stream grimaced. “Thanks grandpa, but no thanks. I already learned that lesson by now. Try spreading that centuries old wisdom elsewhere.”

“Obviously ya didn’t learn it enough,” Applejack said. “You are spying on them!”

“And you are still taunting him,” Solid Charge added.

“It’s not spying! And it’s kind of hard to hold my tongue. It’s either say stuff like that or run away from him sometimes,” Leaf Stream defended herself, growing exasperated. She kicked a small empty barrel behind her. It landed hard on the shallow waters, spraying her with salty waterdrops.

“The point is, when Princess Celestia came to visit I wasn’t so sure I believed that crap anymore. Mostly out of spite. Then… we started talking. The topic moved from me to her, I didn’t want to talk about my own family. So in order to keep me talking she told me in parts about her sister, about her friend, about how she hoped they’d all be kind of a family together again. I realized then that she wasn’t the mighty goddess that I pictured her as. She was just-”

“Normal?” Applejack asked.

Leaf Stream scoffed. “There’s nothing normal about her. I’m starting to think there’s no such thing as normal anywhere. Look at you. An apple farmer that has saved the world twice so far and makes the scariest thing I ever saw bow before you. No. She was tired. Tired, lonely, and worried about so many ponies all at once. She kind of reminded me of my own grandmother, only on a more grand scale. Worst of all, she was feeling guilty. Guilty she let the fight go on as if it wasn’t my fault at all. Guilty that she somehow soured her relationship with her sister to the point that even now that she returned Princess Luna was not really talking to her. Guilty that she failed her friend turning back to something he was trying not to be. She takes it all upon herself. I’m… I’m not sure why, but I was thinking about their offer, I really meant what I said the other day, but what cinched it was… Before we left I went to Princess Celestia and told her I was going to keep an eye on them both, for her sake. She asked me to find out why they didn’t trust her anymore. She wants to fix this, that’s all, but those two-”

Solid Charge sighed. “Kind of hard to do so when they seem to be willing to commit suicide rather than let her- I’m still confused on that part. I haven’t been able to figure out why they went ahead with this.”

Applejack couldn’t blame Leaf Stream for anything. Her heart was in the right place. Nevermind that she was right before, Applejack herself didn’t have the most solid ground to stand on. “Pride… and the need to prove themselves. Remember? Same reason they didn’t want to tell her about the ambush or potential pursuit.”

“I don’t know… they seemed more upset that Princess Celestia would…”

“Would what?” Leaf Stream pushed.

“Learn something from the Leviathan. Who knows what.” Solid Charge waved his good arm.

“Ah really don’t think it talks,” Applejack said, letting off a chuckle she didn’t feel.

“Do you have any idea what the Lunar Guard is really supposed to be?” Leaf Stream asked.

“Ah don’t know. Ah might got a couple suspicions but ah can’t have ya going off even to Princess Celestia with them. Ah’m pretty sure that ah’m on mah last strike here as far as they’re concerned, if ah haven’t ruined it already,” Applejack explained.

“Personal curiosity. Scout Filly’s honor,” Leaf Stream said, bringing her hoof across her chest.

Applejack huffed. “Nothing that makes entire sense. Security and monster hunting sound logical, but ah really don’t think that’s what they entirely want ya for. Though they did admit they wanna get rid of the Elements of Harmony, even if it means destroying them. We figured they mean for the Lunar Guard to tackle what we are supposed to in our stead next time, so that’s a part of it at least.” Leaf Stream’s mouth was open wide enough to fit a chair in there. “What?”

“What? Are you serious? Did you just ask me what? They want to get rid of- are they- what am I saying, of course they are. I swear, I’ve turned into a broken record. They wanna do what?” Leaf Stream shouted.

Solid Charge in the meanwhile had been driven to tears by laughter. He was slapping the wooden boards next to his legs while trying to draw breath and trying to form words. The only one he had managed so far was “unbelievable”.

Applejack tried to calm her down. “Hey, hey, simmer down y’all, ok? We ain’t letting them do nothing like that. We’ll have a talk with them if they insist and change their mind. They’re not crazy enough to actually go ahead with something ridiculous like that.”

Leaf Stream ran to the end of the pier, pulling Applejack along, framed the distant maelstrom in between her hooves in Applejack’s line of sight, and screamed right into her ear. “Have you even been paying attention so far?”

“What do we do now?” Raegdan asks.

I shake my head. I have no idea. This suicide mission was based on two beliefs. That we would be able to survive entry, and that there was something in here we could strike, a weak point.

We got one out of two. We might as well have gotten none for all the good it does.

“We continue on. This is all conjecture. We might be wrong. We keep looking.” I automatically renew the spells. “If nothing else, we give it that indigestion we were talking about.”

Raegdan nods. He grabs hold of the long blade he carries and uses it like a stick to help him stand up. “It’s worth a sh-”

The blade barely sinks into the soft flesh of the floor, and like a reflexive muscle it contracts to the sides, disappearing from below us in an instant.

Buck this life of mine.

We plummet down through what I think might be a wide tunnel. I try my best to keep funneling magic into the enchantments as they are quickly drained at a spectacular rate. Every time I feel the sack jostle against something I wince, expecting a deafening thunder to be the last thing I sense. Judging from the pull of the rope, Raegdan must be somewhere right behind me. If he so much as touches them…

The thought remains unfinished, interrupted by the hideous passage we have found ourselves in. Slippery, yet rough feelers of some kind slow down our descent. Hundreds, no, thousands of jutting growths dampen our fall. I don’t see them, but I certainly feel them. I can picture them in my mind’s eye. Yielding pink branches covered with thousands of long hair-like bulges, all of them clumping next to each other to form a thick forest where we fall through, bending enough to allow us entry, going over us like a hairbrush. They bore everywhere and probe everything.

I feel violated, and I’ve never desired clothing, pants especially, with greater intensity than I do now. A void greets me. It goes on for a little bit too long. Another damn fall.

I finally land in shallow water that covers a soft, slimy, and very, very disgusting surface, almost as gross as what I just went through. I quickly push the explosives away from me, before-

Raegdan lands almost on top of me. The blade he held when we fell sinks point first just a hoof width away from my face.

Raegdan coughs hard and struggles to breath. I push his extremities off me in order to get up. I reignite the light spell to check him over. I momentarily freeze with panic at the sight.

He has lost his air tank. He coughs and breaths in unaided. He is covering his mouth and nose with one hand, while the other holds his throat. He had no way to soften his fall like I did, even with my barely functional wing. His left side is bruising right in front of me, and his head bleeds lightly.

I remove my breather and try to force it in his mouth. The stupid male pushes it off and waves me away. “Take it! We can share,” I cry, desperate.

“It’s ok,” he coughs. “I can breathe,” he says while he forces the breather into my own mouth. This idiotic, self-centered biped thinks he can sacrifice himself so eas- what?

“What?”

“I can breathe,” he says louder while tears run from his eyes. “There’s air, but… oh heavens, the smell! I’m going to die from the fucking smell. It’s like a dead fish farted in my mouth and then its family and friends joined in!”

This makes no sense! Why is there air in here? How in Tartarus could this happen? I take off my breather and take a tentative breath myself.

My life is a sea of pure regret, and I wade in the deep.

“Oh my stars!” I shout as the intense desire to retch out my intestines overtakes me.

“You just had to try it out for yourself, didn’t you?”

“It’s horrid!” I cry out. “Gaagh! I think it formed a crust over my teeth. I can taste that!”

“You don’t know shit about taste,” he yells back. “Some of that fucking slime got into my mouth and let me tell you, it tastes exactly like-”

I don’t hear the rest of it, thankfully. I’m too busy emptying my stomach. Rotten meat has nothing on this.

“As much as I hate myself for saying that… we should save the air we have left in the air tanks,” I say after I wipe the bile from my lips.

“No problem. I doubt I’ll ever be able to not smell that anymore, even if I have all eternity.”

“Don’t joke about that.”

“It will follow us in our nostrils, and on the tips of our tongues, forever and ever-”

“Please stop,” I beg.

“...Fine.”

I look around. We are in a cavernous area. It’s… I’m running out of words to describe sizes. Hundreds of meters wide at a guess. Let’s leave it at that. It’s not like I can see even a small part of it in this darkness, but it gives me a sense of openness, almost like as if I’m outside. I can’t see the ceiling or where we fell from. Water is pouring from all over, but it’s not the streams it was before. It falls like an intense rainstorm. I can barely see anything, even with the light I’ve cast. We splash in water that reaches almost up to Raegdan’s calves. It runs like a swift river. My guess is that it all drains somewhere.

“Do you think this is the stomach? Or what passes as one?” Raegdan asks.

“Maybe.” I think of the strange, mucus-like lines. I think of the strange drain type area we were before. The long, violating tunnel like thing we fell from. “Maybe it has more than one. Maybe it passes us through various ones till it finds one that can-”

“Digest us?”

“I sincerely hope there is not one filled with acid or something similar,” I say.

Raegdan looks thoughtful to the distance behind me. “Luna. How much of a chance is there that anything else was able to make it down here alive?” he asks.

I really, really don’t like the sound of that. It sounds too much like a set up. “Just considering that acidic net up there, not much. Why?” He points behind me.

Of course.

A creature of black, slimy, naked flesh stands erect a few meters from us, right at the ring edge of the illumination of my spell. The only reason I can easily see it is its intense, light sucking darkness, and the marking of its silhouette by the intense rainfall on its body. For a moment I believe it stands on legs, like Raegdan, but the glistening wetness beneath it moves in serpentine motions. Some kind of tentacles perhaps. A lot of them. More of them, lighter and thinner, emerge from what I would consider shoulders, provided I took a lot of liberties to call them that. There is no head. The mouth is located at the center of its orb-like mass. A splintered wound opens in more than one direction to reveal needle teeth. It is tall, taller even than Raegdan.

It lowers down. The thick tentacles beneath it mass together, and shift.

It launches straight for me, the coiled tentacles shooting it ahead like a loaded spring. I am caught completely unprepared by this sudden attack. I waste a second, a single lousy second, to gasp and half step back like a frightened filly. I prepare a concussive spell to send it back when my focus is shattered. Lost in instinct I had spread open my wings and something weakened got torn, shooting a sharp pain over my body.

It was a second that would decide my life or death. The teeth open wide to welcome my head in their embrace.

The young woman runs. She runs as hard as she can, screaming for help. Those things are right behind her. They are not as fast as her, not by a long shot, but they do not stop, won’t stop, not until they have her. She can hear the moans, feel their grasping hands reach for her.

She cries as she runs. The thunderstorm over her makes her pleas for help unheard. She has to get closer. She has to reach them.

She has thrown away her shoes. The thick soles which gave her those desirable few centimeters to her tiny height weren’t made for running. Her soft feet were bleeding and hurt so much. She ignored it the best she could, and pushed herself not to slow down.

She runs for the wire fence. If she can get behind the fence she will be safe, she will be able to get far away enough. She will be with her friends, with her boyfriend. She will be safe.

She sees him. He is there -right there!- behind the fence, piling everything heavy enough he can find in front of the door to block it. She screams his name, she begs for help. He turns and for a moment their eyes connect. He is bleeding on the left side of his face. One of them clawed him all the way from the bottom of his cheek to his neck, leaving three long gouges.

There is a hole on the asphalt of the road she runs on. She’d be fine if she just stepped into it or jumped over it. But she didn’t. She didn’t even notice it. She happened to place her foot just to the edge of it. The foot twists to the side, and her own weight breaks her ankle.

She falls down, screaming in pain.

Her boyfriend, her love, he is right there. He sees her fall, he sees the mob behind her. He rushes for the door… and he hesitates. He glances from the barricade to the fence, looking to see if he could climb over it instead of undoing work that could save the rest of them.

The world shines bright for a moment in the flash of lightning. The ruined, abandoned buildings become crispy clear and depressingly real. Deep shadows of a hundred long arms form on the tarmac beneath her.

He hesitates for only a few seconds. Not much. Five perhaps, at most. He pushes the pile away from the side, causing it to fall over, their friends and the rest of the bus passengers lending their help, making enough space for him to open the door enough for him to squeeze through.

He runs for her, shouting her name. She struggles to her knees and reaches out her hand for him to grasp, to pull her up. He will save her. He promised he would protect her. He promised. All he has to do is pull her up, and he can easily outrun them, even while carrying her. He is strong, strong and fast, and he loves her as much as she loves him. They’ve loved each other since they were kids. He promised. He’s always been there, every time she needed him. She needs him now more than she ever did. The tears stop flowing as he gets closer. She is saved!

He’s only a meter away. He reaches out and she struggles forward, reaching for his fingers.

Hands grab her hair and violently pull her back. Tufts of hair get unrooted along with pieces of her scalp. Nails dig into her calves, feet, and back. Teeth sink into her, tearing chunks of flesh off her. She shrieks with pain and terror. She is pulled back, deep into the mob. The last thing she saw was his screaming face, pale white in another flash of lightning.

Everything else was teeth, blood, and short lived screams.

Raegdan doesn’t hesitate, not even for a fraction of a second. He was behind me, but he covers the distance with a few swift steps and a jump. The multi hinged jaws close ineffectively as the black monster is pushed away from me. Raegdan assaulted it with his own body, hurling himself at it to push it back.

He kept his place at my side. He defended me when I was in danger. My horn lights with magic. That thing reaches for him with its long tentacles.

How does it dare? He is mine. My magic forms the proper shapes around my horn, my mind fills with detailed understanding of what I want done, and the searing beam of his kind is once again mine to command.

The forest and plains shake with the force of the unified howling. The timberwolves have grown wild. They have grown in numbers. They have grown in courage, or arrogance.

They have grown hungry… and they know where the meat is. Where it hides.

There is a small pony village just beyond the hill. Lines of gnarled wood-like creatures run to climb over it, driven by terrible hunger pangs and succulent smells. The ponies have grown fat and weak while their own numbers have grown strong, culling the wandering members of these pathetic herds. It would be the greatest and easiest meal of this humongous pack.

The first timberwolves crest the hill and pause. The ponies have formed a line of their own in front of their lair. They are waiting for them with fire, shaped tree flesh, and earth bone. They intend to fight.

The timberwolves paused, but it wasn’t fear. It was the view of the rich meal that waited for them. Some of their number might die. This was how life was.

Dead timberwolves meant more meat for the victorious survivors. Saliva was running from each jaw. Unthinkingly, they waited for all their insatiate members to mass together and howl their craving. The weak ponies below fell down on the ground and covered their ears, all except a large blue one.

What the timberwolves saw was a selection of offered, defenseless necks. They could no longer control themselves. The ground is trampled beneath the weight of their bodies and the air vibrates by the volume of their growls.

The ponies hold. Timberwolves burn in acrid smoke, their pained howls filling the battlefield. The ponies cheer as they taste victory.

But timberwolf wood doesn’t burn as fast as they thought. Their cries of victory turn to cries of dismay as teeth and fire leap for them, desperate for one last bite before they perish. Their weapons stop swinging as they back away from the walking flames.

Then the second line of timberwolves crashes like a wave upon them. The ponies break, and a gap appears. The weak members of their herd cry behind them, spurring the predators bloodthirst as they see the path open up for them to reach this easier prey.

A pony, blue and larger than the rest, moves to block their advance. She tries to bring unity to her pack with her words and her shouts.

The timberwolves are united by hunger and the smell of blood. Their shared desire to fill their bellies keeps them strong. The smell of fear rises from the ponies around the blue one and they fall behind to seek shelter among the mass of greater numbers, leaving her to protect the gap, alone and vulnerable.

The timberwolves want flesh. Hers will do just as fine.

An hour later every timberwolf has been killed or routed. Ponies lie dead, but not many. Ponies are crying out for aid as they have been savagely injured, and of them there are more. The young, the old, and the sick, are safe in their untouched shelters.

The blue one lies in a pool of her own blood, surrounded by a wall of broken branches that was dozens of timberwolves just minutes ago. Meat and fur that used to be part of her body is now buried under those same branches, caught in former teeth and stomachs.

Still, she won. She held the breach on her own. They didn’t make it a step further.

She fought for every breath and struggled for the next beat of her heart as she waited for somepony to finally reach her, and give her some much needed aid at last.

She was thirsty. So terribly thirsty.

Though he did manage to push it back and away from me, the creature is heavier and the snake-like, thick tentacles on its lower body didn’t allow it to fall like he did. Raegdan is on the ground, and before he has a chance to stand up again the thinner tentacles of the creature have coiled around him. He has been completely entangled, unable to move or escape.

For a moment at least. All I need is a one second burst. All the creature’s upper appendages are in one convenient row. I cut them all down, the short lived beam easily slicing through the thin flesh.

The second downside of this spell, apart from the increasing drain the stronger and longer I make it, is the fact that it mostly cauterizes the wounds it causes. I would enjoy to see the creature fall and bleed out its life at my hooves, whimpering for mercy it wouldn’t have.

I step forward, ready to finish the job. The creature wails and screams at the loss of its limbs. I chuckle menacingly at the sight. It sees me coming and a few of the thicker appendages on its base rise up, ready to fight. It spreads open its jaws, showing me its terrible teeth, and roaring a challenge that it cannot win.

A small metal object makes a perfect arc and plummets straight down its open jaws.

Before I have time to turn my head towards the only one who could have thrown that, I’m lying on the ground, covered by Raegdan’s body. There is a muffled explosion and black blood rains over us. Some pieces of meat too.

“I had that,” I tell Raegdan, pouting.

He gets off me, smiling in apology. “Oh come on. How could I resist that invitation? For all we know it could spit poison. I thought the faster we finished it, the better.” He spotted his lost air tank and moved for it.

I hate it when logic spoils my fun. I sniff in mock offense and instantly regret it.

“Gaah. It smells even worse now. I think this thing might have been the source,” I say, looking down at the offal with disgust. If this thing smells that much worse dead I would have made sure it stayed alive. It’s ghastly.

“Yeah, I noticed. Its foul.” He sniffs once more as he ties the air tank’s straps. “I bet it will smell even worse when it starts to rot.” He reaches for the blade and places it back on his belt.

Never let it be said that I’m not a glutton for punishment. I smell the air again and groan at my stupidity. “My stars, then it must rot amazingly fast. It smells much worse than it did seconds ago. I thought you were supposed to get used to a smell, not feel it get stronger and stronger.”

Raegdan steps next to me and draws breath through his nose. He chokes a bit. “Ugh, you are right. It’s much worse. It wasn’t like that not even ten seconds ago.”

I shake my head and turn away from it. “I hope there aren’t any more. The smell of more like it would be horrend-”

I am an idiot. My wayward tongue is smarter than me.

“Luna…” Raegdan says, warningly, overcome with apprehension.

I flare my light spell. I make it strong enough that despite the storm falling all around us we can see dozens of the creatures slithering on their thick appendages towards us. “Oh my stars…” I gasp.

Raegdan has something more efficient in mind. “Run!” he shouts as he grabs one of the straps around me and drags me to one of the few directions these things are not. I barely manage to remember the duffelbag of explosives as we begin our retreat.

Retreat to where? We are inside a stomach. Where are we going to go? This shallow lake we are in doesn’t help at all. It drags at us, making each step harder than the last, greedily sapping our strength as we struggle for each meter we cross, and to retain our balance on the slippery, uneven floor underneath. Raegdan must have it worse, standing on two legs as he is. The rapid flow of the water is pushing, making it harder to- to…

This water must drain somewhere, otherwise it would fill up this entire area in minutes. I don’t know where it may lead, but it can’t be worse than our current predicament. Unless of course it leads outside Charybdis, and we suddenly find ourselves get popped like cherries from the intense underwater pressure.

I change direction, following the water flow. Raegdan follows without asking, even though I can guess he’s wondering why. He trusts me, and follows my decision unquestioningly.

I love him for that.

We run, and run some more. The salt of the endless water drenching us stings our eyes. It burns our throat and it makes our thirst flare. It’s almost as if we are trying to move underwater. We cough and exhale forcefully to drive out the water that makes its way in our mouths and noses. We keep on running.

Until a tall figure on our way forces us to stop.

It’s another one of those creatures. Raegdan’s left hand whips to his chest to ready one of his bombs while the right one goes to the hilt of the blade. He hesitates when he sees the creature isn’t paying any attention to us. Instead, it is preoccupied with something else.

“Is that our boat?” he whispers.

It is! It has been broken, burnt, and shattered into pieces. The faceless creature reaches out and carefully removes a piece of long wood that had been stabbed erect at the bottom of the water. When it’s out its tentacles flex and twist. The wooden board cracks and disintegrates with unbelievable ease at the strength it commands.

Is that what would have happened to Raegdan if I hadn’t taken immediate action?

It turns its attention to the rest of the boat, taking its time to lift the pieces in the air and destroy them to fractions of what they were.

“Why is it doing that?” Raegdan asks.

“I don’t know,” I answer. “And we don’t have time to find out. The rest of them are right behind us. We have to run!”

We do so. We double our efforts. Stopping there, even for a second, was a mistake. We have no idea how long until we reach our goal or if there is even one. We will either need a miracle or a smart idea for once if we are to survive this one.

The rain stops.

“What the hell is happening no-” Raegdan doesn’t have time to finish his sentence.

Everything shakes and the world trembles. We choke. The air is gone and the water starts to rise.

“It’s moving again! Oh, this isn’t good at all! I thought that thing was supposed to stay there longer,” Leaf Stream cried out.

“Maybe it ran out of food, or they did something in there. Where do you think it’s heading?” Solid Charge asked.

Leaf Stream snorted. “Where else do you think it’s gonna head now? Didn’t you hear the commander? It’s gonna screw with us royally before it keels over.” She turned tail and headed for the Thestral village.

“Where ya going?” Applejack shouted behind her.

“We need to get to Baltimare right now, and bring the Thestrals with us. You sent a letter to Princess Celestia didn’t you?”

“Ah-” Applejack stuttered.

“Come on, hurry up! Yes or no?”

“Yes! We did. Luna said it was fine, remember? Princess Celestia said she’d send warning to Baltimare to moor their ships and she’s heading here to meet with us,” Applejack caught pace with Leaf Stream easily enough. Solid Charge was left behind, but he didn’t seem to hurry a lot himself.

“Good. You need to send another one. Tell the Princess the Leviathan is on the move. She will need to reiterate her orders, make sure no greedy flank tries to ignore her, and hurry up straight for Horseshoe Bay instead of wasting time coming all the way here.”

“What about you?” Applejack asked.

“I’m gonna send the fastest thestrals ahead to warn Baltimare in person, and make sure no ship or boat tries to sail. Then I’m getting as many of them as I can and we follow behind. Horseapples, I’ll need to get some thestrals to follow the Leviathan from above. The bosses might try to get out while it’s moving.”

“Ya know, for a mare claiming that ain’t made for this ya sure know how to take cha-”

“Shut up, and never, ever, tell that to anypony else!”

It’s been over an hour.

The Leviathan must be moving. It’s the only thing I can imagine for what is happening. Raegdan must be thinking the same, though I cannot ask him at the moment.

He has used the hooks as anchors and tied the rope around them. One of the hooks is reserved for the explosives that I still try to keep safe. The other for both of us. It’s the only thing that’s holding us in place. There are currents, savagely strong, that try to pull us back and forth. The outcome of the beast’s movement I presume.

We have been taking turns breathing from one of the tanks at the time, conserving as much air as possible. We hold each breath for as long as possible, keep our movement to the minimum.

One of them is empty already. The last one is running out.

Raegdan holds me in his arms, with my head leaning on his chest, right below his chin, just the way I like to lie when we sleep. It’s a consoling position. The way things look we might drown in here.

I lift my head and nudge him with the hoof, requesting the breather. He positions it at my lips and for a second I feel like a foal drinking from a bottle. I draw just enough air to quench the burning in my lungs. Seconds later, he tentatively breathes in turn.

I can’t see him of course. I don’t dare to use more magic than I have to for the explosives, which we will probably never have the chance to use. I can only tell what he’s doing from sensing his movements.

We drift in the cold, dark waters. The only sound I can hear is the rapid beat of his heart. We hug each other in the darkness, and wait for death to come, either by asphyxiation or teeth.

As we wait I can’t help but ponder. Do I want to die first and let him spend his last moments holding my dead body, or would I prefer to reserve this fate for myself?

Over an hour after the water rose there is a great turbulence. The water level drops, fast. The current is almost strong enough to tear the hooks off. Raegdan manages to unhook the long blade and drive it down, making another anchor point for us. He holds the handle with one hand, the other wrapped around me. I take a moment to drive a dagger down the same way and loop the strap of the bag of explosives around it.

Our lungs burn as we wait for the water to fall back to its previous level. I manage to grab the breather and take a precious breath, quickly passing it on to Raegdan’s lips so he can breath too. His hold had began to slacken, but it becomes strong again as he draws in deep.

The water is gone. We can hear hissing, like wind. We aren’t sure what to do anymore. Finally, Raegdan simply shrugs and breathes in. He holds it in for a timeless second and then exhales and nods. I start breathing freely myself.

We spend two minutes just lying down, inhaling great gulps of that smelly air.

The rain starts to fall again. Not just water. Fish of various sizes fall around us too. Most of them are half melted or entirely cut in parts. The head of a giant shark lands a few meters away from us.

“These things are still around, Luna. We have to get out of here.” He wheezes as he slowly makes his way to his hands and knees before he manages to stand upright with difficulty. He must be feeling as bad as I do. I have the mother of all headaches and I feel I’ll never be able to breath properly again. My whole body aches in a dull way. Still, he is right. We must move.

“Any… any ideas? I was going to take us where the water drains, but if we have some time we might try for something better.”

“I’m- I’m not sure… keep moving in the same direction? We must be reaching the edge by now. Let’s see what’s there.”

We walk ahead, no longer running. I’m not sure if we could even manage it now. We keep glancing behind us, and to the sides. If these creatures return to their pursuit we will be forced to find out.

The end of the… stomach is in sight. If that is even where we are. Perhaps we haven’t reached the true one yet. Honestly, I don’t care to. We are here to kill the Leviathan, not become part of its diet.

Even though we let ourselves be eaten to get in here. What was even my point?

The waterflow at my hooves -and Raegdan’s feet- is turning into a waterfall as it falls down a canyon that runs around the edge of the stomach wall like a moat. We follow the canyon for a few meters until we find a gap in it. A large bridge of flesh, five meters wide, connects the floor we stand on with the wall. Afterwards, the canyon continues again.

There is too little water for this to be the whole result of this constant rainfall. This must be how the stomach is all around. I bet if we turn the other way and keep walking we’ll reach a point, the center of this place, after which the water flows to every other direction.

I feel like there’s not enough air.

I don’t dare make my way to the edge. “What now? Do we fall down?” I ask Raegdan.

He is eyeing the flesh bridge instead. “I’m thinking no. Why don’t we go straight ahead instead of down?”

“You want us to cut through?”

“Why not? I doubt there’s anything we want down there. Let’s see if we can make it through.”

“We might just cut our way outside.”

“That would suck. Nah,I doubt it. Look, there’s either someplace there for us to reach or it’s just meters of… whatever Charybdis is made of and we’re safe. Let’s take a look.”

We cross the bridge and reach the wall. The rain stops midpoint of the bridge and we are left to breathe a little easier. The wall looks completely identical to the one we clinged on before. Raegdan draws the long blade, leans back, and stabs it straight in as hard as he can.

He makes it halfway in.

He leans on the handle and pushes it further in. The metal slowly sinks deeper and deeper until suddenly it’s thrust all the way in. He turns to me with his eyebrows raised.

Hollow. It is hollow and surprisingly thin. Now we are getting somewhere.

“We could use a stick of the explosives to make a hole,” Raegdan suggests.

I shake my head in disagreement. “I’d rather not waste what little we have for this. I can make a hole on my own. Could you move aside please?”

He takes a few steps back. “Try to make it as big as you can. We need to let air circulate in there,” he advises.

I ready the spell. “Don’t worry. It will be big enough.” The beam moves fast in a circle. I cannot hold it for long. I carve the wall as deep as I can in that short time.

Raegdan inspects the cut. “Almost, but not quite. No hole.”

“You can cut the rest of the way yourself,” I pant. Keeping yourself on the verge of asphyxiation for so long is not fun. Not fun at all. “I’m going to rest for a bit.”

I turn around so I can watch for anything approaching as I sit down. Behind me I can hear Raegdan slowly hacking with one of his daggers.

“Start at the bottom,” I say. “The weight hanging off it will pull the top part and make it easier for you to cut it down when you reach that point.”

“I knew that,” he says. There is a pause as the dagger stops to move to the bottom, making me unsuccessfully attempt to stifle a laugh.

A few minutes later a wet slurping noise alerts me to the completion of his task.

“Oh sweet heavens. Count yourself lucky you didn’t see that.”

“I thank my luck every night.” I make my way to him. “Anything?”

“That depends. Does a corridor count?”

“What?”

“Look for yourself. It’s like a corridor in there. I think we really lucked out for once.”

I climb through the hole, light spell above me. It is a corridor. The ceiling reaches about two meters over Raegdan’s head and it’s four meters wide, an almost perfect circle with a flat, straight floor. I walk ahead with Raegdan following behind me. As we move on and light further ahead we see that it makes a sharp ninety degree turn to the left. We stop and gaze in wonder.

“...this is freaky as hell,” Raegdan says after a minute of silence.

“This… this cannot be a vein or… what is this?”

“Maybe- maybe it moves something else.”

“Do you see something I don’t?”

“No. Air maybe? Or- or it’s something it makes use of when it moves?”

I look behind us. “It goes on the other direction too. Do we go back and try the other way or do we continue clockwise?”

Raegdan gulps. “This- this… I won’t lie. I’m feeling a little scared now.”

“It’s nothing but a passage. Why would you be scared?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

“So… go as we are?” I ask again.

“I- I guess so. Nothing else to do.”

We stand in place, terrified by a turn of this corridor, this passage. Neither of us wants to move. I’m not sure what has affected him so, but it has spread to me in turn.

“Are you going to walk or will you keep standing there?” I prod, hoping he will take the hint.

He looks at me and forcibly steels himself. He takes a deep breath, and deliberately takes a single step forward. He pauses for a moment, watching the dark turn ahead. He shakes his head, and while he didn’t while in the cold waters he shivers now. Still, he marches on.

I follow behind him, as close as I can.

We walk on the strangely perfectly shaped, organic corridor. It feels as if we left the beast behind us and we have now wandered into a building.

I honestly thought this couldn’t get weirder. Then we saw something neither of us wanted to believe possible.

An intersection. The corridor we followed connected to another one leading to the left.

“I vote we somehow get out of here, and never talk of this again,” Raegdan stammers. “I don’t know what, or how, or why, and I don’t care to find out. Fuck this, fuck Baltimare, fuck Equestria. I want to leave, now!”

“You need to calm down.”

“No! This- I want nothing to do with this Luna. Let’s leave. We can climb as high as we can, and when it starts to move we can force our way out. I don’t want to stay here a second longer. This thing makes no sense!”

I straighten myself and look him in the eyes. We are too close to run like cowards. “If you want to leave, be my guest. I have a job to do here. I’ll join you when I’m done,” I say, making sure that I inject all the disappointment I feel into my voice.

Raegdan bends his head in defeat. “I’m- I’m not leaving you. I’m with you all the way.”

“Then choose a direction and move,” I order him.

He glances between the available paths as if there could be a sign pointing at the right direction. “Let’s go this way,” he says, pointing at the passage turning to the left. “That one might just circle around.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I don’t! It’s just a guess. I said might, didn’t I? Come on.”

I half-believe him. He’s lying, but not to me. Whatever his mind is suspecting is enough to scare him almost senseless.

We follow the corridor for about ten meters until it also makes another turn to the right. The next section is long and on an incline downwards.

“We’re going down whether we want it or not,” I say.

“Definitely not want to.” He exhales and straightens his shoulders. “Alright. Let’s see what we can find.”

We descend gently down the slope until it straightens again for a few meters and we reach an arch. Beyond it is- is…

“You have to be kidding me,” Raegdan roars. “You have to be fucking kidding me! Why is there a room inside a monster? What’s next? Are we going to find a little hut and a guy reclining on a chair under an umbrella?”

“You need to calm down,” I repeat.

His fists are on top of his head, grabbing handfuls of his hair. “But- this- why the hell… Fuck!” he screams. He crouches down, balancing on his toes, panting.

I give him a few seconds. “Are you feeling better?”

He nods. “A bit. Yeah. I’m better now.”

“Good. Let’s see what’s the purpose of this.” I’m pretending to be calm, but in truth I am almost as vexed as he is.

The “room” is quite large. Nothing like the proportions of what we went through already. We can see where it begins, and where it ends. It is a tiny space where each fleshy wall stretches on only about twenty meters.

It’s all about perspective I suppose.

The only notable feature I can spot are two large bumps, located at the center of the room, each of them about a meter in diameter. We move closer to examine them in greater detail.

They look like… they greatly resemble… they have the shape of… of…

They look like a certain hole that has tightly puckered up. This beast has been too awfully repugnant so far to make it even worse by unneeded comparisons. They are like hatches that have been closed off by meat flaps. There.

Raegdan has walked off to the wall left of the entrance. I approach and notice there are similar… gates located on it too. Two of them.

“Any thoughts?” I ask.

“No. Not yet.” He goes back to the center of the room. “Can you think of a way to find out what’s in here?”

“We could force them open.”

“Hmmm. But what if we want them closed later?”

“Why do we suddenly care about causing damage to the Leviathan?”

“We don’t. Didn’t you notice what it looks like? What if we open it up and all that comes up is a geyser of s-”

“Thank you,” I interrupt loudly, “for the lovely image.”

“Pleasure. So, any ideas? All I can think of at the moment are exactly what I don’t want to do.”

I tap my hoof at the floor, making a thick “thwap-thwap” sound as I think. Perhaps this could be a vein system, or something likewise important. We do need to take a look inside. I guess this is a time where the only answer is magic.

“How thick do you think it is?” I ask him.

Raegdan bends down and touches it with his hands. He prods and hits it a few times, carefully listening to the sound. “Twenty, thirty centimeters? No more than half a meter, certainly.”

“Are you sure?”

He scoffs. “Hell no. How often do you think I try to guess how thick a slab of meat is?”

“Hmm. I’m going to try some scrying. Normally this kind of spell is tremendously draining and you get a very blurry image most of the time. I hope the short distance will help.”

“Can you blindly cast a light spell in there before you do that?”

“Why- oh right. Of course. Yes.” That would have been embarrassing. I cast the spells -in the right order- and my eyes go white as my sight is elsewhere. I hold the spell only for a few seconds. I repeat the process on the second doorway.

“So?” he asks.

“Nothing. They are almost empty. That was a waste of time and my magic.”

“Empty? What exactly did you see?”

“Nothing. It’s huge and empty. Each one is a lot bigger than this one, and much, much taller. Just empty rooms, with no other exits and nothing in them. Even the walls are completely smooth, as much as they can be in here. Though…”

“Yes?”

“There was something at the sides. They looked like carved lines, or flaps. They repeated themselves every few meters. That’s it.”

“Ok,” he says, trying not to sound disappointed. “Still… are you completely sure? Maybe there was something that you didn’t notice?”

“I’m not blind,” I defend myself. “There was nothing in there. Maybe some mist, or the room was too cold.”

“Maybe way down at the- Mist? Cold?”

“Not exactly. A sense in the air, like it was… I’m not sure how to explain it. Dense?”

“Hmm. Can you try to teleport some of it outside?”

“Teleport some air? Why?”

“Instinct. My gut tells me this is important. Just give it a shot.”

“I am a bit curious myself. Ok, fine. Here you go.”

I use my magic and cast a teleport spell. Normally doing this blindly is bad for whatever you are attempting to grab unless you are completely certain of the position of your target, but what do I care? All I’m trying to teleport is a bunch of empty air. I finish the second part of the spell and transfer the nothing I got hold off between us.

The sudden discharge of air knocks both of us back a step.

“What the hell was that?” Raegdan asks, bewildered.

“I- I don’t know!”

“Do it again.”

“I- alright.” I perform the spell again, with the same results. This time Raegdan is ready, and breathes deep as the same effect goes off. I try to breath in too whatever that is, in an attempt to recognize it.

“It doesn’t smell like anything,” Raegdan says. “And it just occured to me that this could be poisonous. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” he adds, looking ashamed of himself.

“I don’t think so. But it really…”

“What?”

I’m not sure how to put this. “The shortness of breath I had. The headache. It helped a bit.”

Raegdan puts his hand over his chest and inhales deeply, as do I. Whatever had briefly filled the room really helped. I feel somewhat better.

Raegdan stands in front of the floor… panel, door, whatever, and turns so he can see both it and the one on the wall.

“Straight line…” he murmurs.

“I’m sorry?” I ask.

The young boy stands at the side of the road, waving his arms at the passing cars, jumping up and down as each of them approaches only to zoom off to the distance again. He looks at every one of them leaving them behind with sadness and disappointment before he tries again, refusing to surrender his attempts.

“Why don’t you stop doing that and come help me instead?” a man, obviously the boy’s father, says. He is standing in front of a black car. The hood is popped up, and a few last puffs of smoke are still emerging from the engine.

“No one stops to help,” the boy says, saddened. “That’s not fair. We need help. Why don’t they help?”

The father’s arm grabs the boy’s shoulder and pulls him to his side in a one armed hug. He spends a few seconds ruffling the boy’s hair, smiling down at him.

“Sorry kid. Life’s not all that fair sometimes. Like now. I took the car to the mechanic last week and look at us! Stranded halfway home,” the man laughs. “I’ve got a small towel in the glove compartment. Can you get that for me? It’s too hot to touch this.”

“Sure!” the boy answers, and rushes into the car. He finds the towel -a very dirty one- his father told him to get, and a pack of gum -perfectly edible. He passes it off with the attitude of a child that completed a very difficult task and expects a treat, ice-cream perhaps, as his hard earned reward.

“Can you fix it?” the child asks, chewing ferociously.

The man reaches out with the cloth and starts unscrewing a tap. “What do you think?”

“I think you can fix it.”

The tap is taken off and some left over steam rises up. “Why do you think I can?”

“Because. You look like you know how to fix it.”

The man leans back and with a fake conspiratorial look checks for anyone overhearing them, making the boy giggle. He leans down to his son. “Want to know a secret?” he whispers

“Yes!” the boy shouts, excited.

“I have no idea what I’m doing.”

The boy laughs, disbelieving, and slaps his father’s thigh. “No, you don’t!”

“It’s true. I don’t know how to fix cars. I’m winging it as I go. But here’s something important to remember. Never let anyone know you don’t know what you are doing.”

“That’s lying,” the boy accuses, yet still laughing.

“Yeah, well, if your mom was here and I wasn’t doing that,” the man says, wincing, “she’d have me jump in the middle of the road so I could stop a car for help. But we both know we don’t need help, right?”

The boy thinks for a few seconds. “We do. We just don’t admit it because… we have to act like we know what we are doing?”

“Well… in general terms. It sounds silly when you put it like that.”

“But we don’t. So why are we?”

The man leans under the hood again. “We might get lucky. As long as we got some ideas of our own, no matter how stupid, let’s not call it quits until we try them out. You’ve got to learn to rely on yourself, and not run to others for help every time. We had a full water bottle, right?”

“Yes. I only took a sip. I wasn’t that thirsty.”

“Bring it here. I think that’s what the problem was.”

The boy obeys quickly and the man pours a large sized water bottle into the car’s radiator. The young child steps on the fender so he can look into the engine.

“It looks all random,” he observes.

“It’s not,” the man says with mock offense. “It all makes perfect sense if you take a moment to look. See how this part connects in a straight line to here? And how all the wires slowly make their way to one place? That’s the battery.”

“What is this here for? Or this?”

“I don’t know. I just pour oil into the engine every now and then. That’s all I know to do,” the man answers with an embarrassed smile. “Get back. I want to close the hood.”

“Was water all it needed?”

“I hope so.”

“In school we learned that water in chemistry is H2O.”

“Delightful. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes… but I forget.”

The man sighs. “It means that there are two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen in each molecule. You need to pay more attention to school. Read something else instead of fairy tales.”

“I like fairy tales,” the boy complains. “Uh, I remember that oxygen is what we breathe, right?”

“Yes,” the man answers while he opens the driver’s side door. The boy rushes in through it instead of getting in from the other side, leaving marks from his dirty shoes on the seat.

“What’s hydrogen?”

“It’s a lighter than air stuff. It can make things float.”

“Like balloons?”

“They don’t use it in balloons anymore. They use helium instead because… ok, have you seen those big airships, that look like stretched air balloons?”

“Yes! They were in a cartoon this weekend. The bad guys used them to try and bomb the good guys.”

“Right. Lovely. They used to fill those up with hydrogen so they can fly. Hydrogen is very dangerous though. One of them sparked a little on the inside once and it exploded.”

The boy gasps. “Does that mean if I drink water I can explode too?”

The man laughs hysterically. “Oh god help me, that was a good one. Oh, your face… No, you won’t. I’m just trying to make you interested. Science isn’t all that bad. There’s a lot of explosions and cool stuff in it.”

“I prefer stories where the hero is a knight in plate armor and saves the world.”

“Ah, it was worth a shot. Let’s see if we can be on our way now.”

Ten minutes later the car was still immobile on the side of the road. The boy had grown bored and kept bringing the window up and down on his side.

“Are we going yet?” The boy kicks at the mat at his feet. “I should have brought a book…” he mutters under his breath.

“Uh, no. I don’t think I fixed it after all. It’s ok. I’ve got another idea.”

“What?”

“I’m going on the road to get a car to stop and help us. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Raegdan? What did you mean by that?” I ask him as I get closer. He looks to be lost in a daze.

“Huh?” Oh, I-” He shakes his head and blinks, rubbing his forehead. “I have no idea. I thought I had it but- crap, I can’t remember what I was thinking about. Something about roads maybe?” He returns to the center of the room, looking down on the circular closed holes.

“I think it’s full of oxygen in there. Compressed. Like our air tanks.”

“Really? How strange. Where did it get it from? Does it surface up sometimes you think?”

Raegdan shook his head. “No. I think this stupid things does drink the sea after all. Some of it at least. Then it breaks it down to this.”

“What’s the use? Why?”

Raegdan shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it needs pure oxygen to breathe? Maybe it uses it to create the whirlpool? Movement? Energy? Digestion? Maybe it just stores it…”

“Why would it store it?”

“I’ve got no idea. I’m just guessing blindly here. Maybe it likes to blow bubbles when it’s bored. That makes as much sense as everything in here.”

Could this be the break we needed? “So, two… tanks full of oxygen right? Huge ones at that.”

Raegdan hesitates. “Actually…. this one is oxygen alright. I suspect that the other one might be filled with- with… ok, I don’t know the word for it. The other thingy water is made of?”

“The other thingy?” I ask, raising an eyebrow at this articulate explanation.

“Water’s made of oxygen and… something else. Now, this second part is volatile from what I know. Especially if there’s a lot of it, and with all that oxygen next to it… this place is dangerous. It’s a good thing we didn’t try to force these open.” Raegdan takes the air tank off his back and checks the gauge. "Though I guess you could try and teleport some of that oxygen in this to refill it. Can you do that?"

My curiosity is peaked and aroused. “Easily enough. Before that, tell me why is it so dangerous though?”

“It can explode. All it needs is a spark. With all that oxygen next to it, feeding it? It could… oh. Oh, hoho!” he laughs, understanding where I was getting at. “We’ll need to make sure it’s what I think it is first, but if it is…”

My own smile is threatening to tear my cheeks in half. Oh, this will be glorious!

“Why the tartarus wasn’t that ship tied down? Who let it sail off?” Leaf Stream was screaming at the cowed portmaster, shaking her hoof menacingly over him. The two scowling minotaurs at her side weren’t making the stallion feel any better, and neither did all these grim Thestrals that obeyed her.

“I- I relayed the order to have all ships moored, but- but the captain is a relative and he- he always ignores me. He claimed he could sail out and escape,” the pony stuttered out in fear.

“Seriously? You let him? And then you let others do the same?”

“What- what was I supposed to do?”

Leaf Stream’s voice reached new heights of volume and strength. “Get the guards to arrest them for disobeying royal orders, how about that?” She turned to the stumbling guards in question and pointed the portmaster. “Get that snivelling stallion away from here. Throw him in a cell, and for buck’s sake, hold him in there. He’s as much responsible for anypony’s death as the captains of these ships.” She turned around and headed for the thestrals.

“Silverwing!” she shouted.

“Yes, Lunar Guard? How may we be of assistance?” The old thestral was thriving in the panic and confusion, and he seemed extraordinarily happy to have somepony other than him calling the shots.

“Get as many of your thestrals as you can, recruit any pegasi that are standing around if you can, and get to these ships!”

“Lunar Guard, I beg your pardon, but we won’t be able to pull them away from the maelstrom-”

“That’s not what you’re doing. Just delay them from falling in as long as possible. These ships are filled with earth ponies, unicorns, minotaurs, donkeys, and who knows what else. The pegasi and griffins can fly off, but they can’t get the others off them, there are too few of them. You go in there and evacuate every ship, right now,” Leaf Stream ordered.

The thestrals, having taken their orders, flew off. The port was a disaster area. Everypony had panicked and there were loads of damage, even a few fires, from trampling crowds. The large docks were shaking and groaning as the ships that were tied on them were testing the strength of the ropes to their limit.

Despite all that, ponies were still trying to get on their ships. Some of them to carry off their merchandise, others determined to risk their lives and get their livelihoods away from the Leviathan.

The idiots that were claiming it would stand up any minute now to trample Baltimare didn’t help.

Applejack, Rarity, and Spike, came to stand with her. “Any news from Princess Celestia?” Leaf Stream asked anxiously.

She shouldn’t have taken charge. She totally shouldn’t have. Now everypony was looking to her for orders, and she had absolutely no idea if she was doing the right thing. What if she should have done something else? Something she forgot? Was she supposed to set up a field hospital? No, there were plenty of them in Baltimare, and they didn’t have to worry about wounded caused by the Leviathan, did they? The guards could take care of any accidents that happened due to panic. Or did they also expect orders from her? Should she go talk to their captain? What about the fires? Should she do something about them?

This was a load of horseapples! Where was a princess to take charge? There were three of them now, where the hay was a single one? Maybe they should hire more. This was way too stressful, all her muscles had tensed up, and now her stubs were absolutely killing her.

“The Princess says she’ll be here in an hour,” Rarity informed her.

Ponyfeathers! One more hour of this? She didn’t want a single minute more. What was she supposed to do until Princess Celestia arrived? She smirked when a thought came to her. Why, spread the misery around, what else?

“Alright. We wait, and while we wait… Solid Charge?”

“Yes sir?”

“Don’t call me that!”

“I’m sorry. I meant, yes ma’am.”

“That neither you stupid flank! Gaah, just… Ok, you asked for it. Go and take charge of the Royal Guard here. We aren’t doing any good unless we coordinate and this is the easiest way to do it. I want the port cleared of anypony who doesn’t have real business to be here. The ships are now off limits. Settle the injured too, get them straight to the hospitals. Got it?”

“Alright. I’ll have the guards to start patrols in the commercial districts too, in case anyone gets the craving to do some looting while there’s panic going on.”

“Yeah. Yeah, good idea. Go do that.” Ok, delegating. That’s the ticket. That’s one load off her. Now for the next one. “Cast Iron.”

“Oh, no.”

“Stand straight soldier,” she cackled, her good mood returning when she saw somepony hating what happened to him as much as she did. “I want these fires gone. Like now. When Princess Celestia gets here there shouldn’t even be a hint of smoke. Got it? After that you and whoever you can rope into it are on rescue detail, and you will take over settling the injured from the Royal Guard so they can focus on other stuff.”

“How am I even supposed to-”

“Go and throw your weight around. Pretend you are our charismatic, gentle commander and get the fire stations to work for you for starters. It worked for me. Now shoo.”

She turned back to Applejack and Rarity, sighing. “Ok, we got this. We actually got this. This is going much better that I fea-” She was interrupted by a young thestral mare landing in front of her.

“Lunar Guard, we have a problem.”

“Of course we do,” Leaf Stream said, defeated. She felt she was about ready to cry. Or kick somepony in the face till she fell over from exhaustion. “What is it?”

“The captain of the first ship and many of his sailors refuse to abandon it. They say either we get their cargo off too or they go down with it.”

Applejack gasped. “They can’t be that stupid, can they?”

“Nah. They are bluffing. They want us to agree to save their money from going down the drain. Ok, tell them we agree. We’re getting them out first, cargo immediately after.”

“We can’t,” the thestral protested. “That ship is going down in minutes! What about the rest of the ponies in the other ships? We’re barely managing so far.”

“Well, duh!” Leaf Stream said. “That’s what we are telling them. No way we risk anypony’s neck for somepony’s pocket.”

“Oh. Oh, ok. Yeah, that’s good. I’m going now.” The mare took off, heading back to the ships as fast as she could.

“You forgot to salute!” Leaf Stream shouted behind her, just for the fun of it.

“Nice bit of maneuvering there,” Applejack said, sounding unsure if she approved or not.

“Eh, Lunar Guard, Lying Guard… I’m just taking my cues from the bosses. Shining beacons of example and all that. Let’s go somewhere we can get a good view. I’ve never seen a monster eat a whole ship before.”

“I’ve got the spells all set, the explosives are in place… The hatches will pop first and then my spells will go off, making sure it fires up. This will be glorious!” I shout, excited.

“Yes, I heard you the first time. How much time will we have to get out?” Raegdan asks.

“I’ve set it to half an hour. It’s already ticking by the way.”

“Half a- Are you crazy Luna? How are we going to climb all the way up in half an hour? You can’t fly!” Raegdan yells.

“We won’t have to,” I tell him, completely calm. “We just need to make our distance away from it until it explodes. Then we will have a new, giant hole to get out from.”

“Oh. Nice plan.”

“Thank you,” I say, taking an exaggerated bow.

“Do you also have a plan to make it out of that new, giant hole while there’ll be tons of water rushing in through the new, giant hole?”

I freeze.

“Sounds like someone else got too cocky this time. Can you change the timer or whatever you used?”

I bite my lip. I screwed up, didn’t I? If I cancel the timing spell it will all go off, instantly. I tied everything on it.

“Should we be running?”

“...Yes…” I whisper, feeling extremely guilty.

“Fuck my life!” Raegan grabs the rope that connects us, and takes it in his arms so it won’t get in the way while we run. I quickly pick up the few sticks of explosives that were left. We might need them to make a hole in a hurry.

We make our way, running as fast as we can, through the bizarre corridor and out the circular hole I cut. Raegdan drops the refilled air tank we have left and delays a bit to pick it up again. I continue on ahead, getting back into the intense rainfall, the rope stretching between us.

“Don’t fall back!” I yell at him when I feel the rope reach its limit.

“I’m coming, I’m coming. Shit, we’ve got to figure out someway to get up there. I can’t even see the ceiling. Maybe we can make some kind of grapple with the- Luna, look out!”

I look up. Debris of wood is falling all around us. Raegdan runs towards me. A large piece of boards, nailed together, falls near me, but I easily avoid it as I do everything else that comes down around me.

Raegdan is too focused on me to pay attention around him. A piece of hull falls next to him barely missing him. It leans slowly, tipping at its side, falling towards him. Raegdan sees it and moves away in time. Pieces of wood and metal keep falling all around us.

The rope that was holding down a small barrel in place on that piece that Raegdan barely avoided is frayed too much. The shock and sudden tilt of its weight is all it takes to make it snap. The barrel falls and crashes right on the side of Raegdan’s head. He loses his balance, his coordination, and momentarily at least, his consciousness. He falls over the side, and slips down into the canyon.

The rope uncoils and straightens. It starts pulling me down with him. I try to resist, but the water flow, the slippery surface… I can’t! I slide backwards.

As I pass the debris that caused his fall I reach out and manage to hold on. The wood is weakened and cracks beneath my hooves. Having no other option, knowing that slipping even a few centimeters more would doom us, I bite down on a piece that seems to the sturdier than the rest. I bite as hard as I can. Splinters fill my mouth and I can feel my gums bleed. I pull myself up by my neck muscles and frantic motions of my legs, just for the little further reach that I need to get a proper hold. I make it and wrap my hooves around a protruding piece.

“Raegdan! Raegdan, you have to climb up!” I shout. He doesn’t answer back. I keep calling his name.

Through the curtains of water four headless figures approach menacingly. So bucking typical. I shout his name one last time, louder.

I barely make out his answer. He sounds confused and weak. “L-Luna?”

“Climb up! They are coming, climb up!” I shout, desperation making its claim on me. Four. I can’t fight four of them. I’m too tired, too spent. Too weak. I’m the only anchor for Raegdan. If I stop holding on we will fall! There isn’t enough time left. If we fall now we will both die in here.

“Drop the rope! Luna, drop the rope!”

I prepare myself. There will be no dodging, no escape. I will have to endure, and not die. Another day in the life of the Night Princess. “No. You make it up here and you help me.” The monstrosities creep closer, fixated on me.

“Luna, please! Drop the rope! Teleport up! You can escape!” Still, he climbs up. He knows I won’t give up, not on this.

“You get up here, and stop them from killing me,” I answer. “Together. One way or another.”

“Luna!”

I don’t answer back. They’re upon me. I prepare my spells and start casting. They answer back with savage strikes and needlepoint teeth.

We rip each other apart.

The man manages to climb up at last. It took him too long. The rope slipped and moved violently while Luna was fighting up there, and his arms still burned from the descent, but that was no excuse. It took him too long. He should have cut the rope himself, but he knew, he knew she would only jump after him.

He follows the rope. There is no light. It faded halfway through the sounds of combat, of monstrous screaming and- and-

Little by little he follows it, crawling on all fours and reaching ahead blindly with his hands, until he touches wet fur. His fingers reach further, and touch ravaged flesh.

Panicked now, he reaches upwards, searching for her neck, looking for a pulse. His princess responds before he manages to find it.

“R- R- Raegdan?” she croaks in pain.

“Luna. Luna, I need you to make a light. We must treat your wounds.”

“I- I just want to sleep. Let me sleep… I killed a Leviathan, isn’t this enough… just- just let me go to sleep, let me forget the pain… I’ve done enough, ha- haven't I? Can- can it stop being like this?”

“Luna, it’s no longer like that. I’m here with you,” he pleads. “Please. For me. Make a light.”

“...Ok. Ok…”

A small blue light flares weakly above her. It is enough to see what he needs to see. The corpses of the creatures lie around her, burnt and torn apart, slowly pushed away by the water. He doesn’t care about them, not as long as there are no more around to hurt her. She is still clinging on to a heavy piece of a crashed ship. One of the legs she did so with is broken, but that didn’t deter her. She is wounded. Heavily. There are gashes and tears on her flesh, as if she has been mercilessly repeatedly whipped with something thick and strong. A chunk of flesh has been bitten off from her left side, near her mark. There are more bites on her hind legs, but no large piece of flesh has been torn off from there like on her side.

He pulls a dagger off his belt. “Luna, you must heat this up. Come on now, stay with me.”

“I’m tired. I can’t cast another spell…”

“Yes you can. One last one. Come on. Heat it up. Don’t do this to me Luna. Please.”

She flickers one eye open, just long enough to see her target with an unfocused eye, and casts her spell. The effort exhausts her. Her breathing becomes even heavier. Her legs slack and she falls down, into the water. He grabs her and lifts her up to him, supporting her against his chest. The dagger is burning hot. He can smell his own flesh cooking around the handle, but he can’t feel any pain, not now. He carefully touches the point of the dagger to select spots, cauterizing veins that have been exposed.

He tears off most of his clothing, turning it to rudimentary bandages. He murmurs to himself constantly to be careful, to not cut off her blood flow. He does everything he can. It’s so pathetically little.

He pulls her further up, with such care as if she is a weave made of spidersilk, and cradles her to his chest. “Luna. Luna, listen to me. It’s straight up from here, and you can get out. All you have to do is teleport up. Teleport up, as high as you can go. Come on Luna, please. Teleport out.”

“I c-can’t,” she croaks.

“Yes you can,” he insists, kissing her forehead. “Yes you can. Come on, you can’t die in here. You have so much more to do. Just… just do the spell. Please… please, do the spell!” he whimpers.

“Not enough magic left…” she coughs and struggles to breath in. “Everything hurts. I’m- I’m completely exhausted, and- and… I can’t leave you here on your own,” she cries. “Together… one way or another…” Her last words are a soft whisper, and she faints.

He checks her pulse. Still going, but weak. She needs real help or she won’t last long. “No, no, no. I- I can’t… can’t save- What am I supposed to do now?” he whispers in the darkness, terrified.

“I promised I’d protect her! I promised!” the tall man wails.

The two women, and the blond man, try to soothe him, to calm him down. The others surround them, unsure of how to help besides offering their presence. “It’s not your fault. You tried your best,” the brunette woman whispers in his ear as she hugs him.

“She was right in front of me! She- she thought she was saved and- and I- I killed her. I killed her!”

“You didn’t do anything like that! You tried your best! No one could save her,” the blond man insists, trying to put some sense into him.

“I promised her, and I killed her instead!”

“You’re leaving me behind,” the blue faced young man stammered through his frozen lips. The wind howled around them, almost drowning his words.

“I- we don’t have a choice.”

“You don’t want to carry me.”

“They told you?”

“I could hear you. You could save me. But you won’t, will you?”

“I can’t. I can’t help you!”

“You promised me we’d go back home. All together.”

“I-”

“You- you promised. Please. Help me.”

“You-”

“I- I can’t feel my legs,” the young brunette cries.

“It’s ok! You’ll be fine, but you need to be quiet. They’ll find us. Please, be quiet.”

“I- I can’t! It hurts. It hurts so much,” she almost screams as she cries in pain. Her whimpers fill the air.

“Shh, shh… please. Be quiet!”

The woman keeps crying ever louder as she regains feeling in her shattered legs, and the true scale of the damage starts registering.

“Listen. Listen! I’ve got some- some painkillers left. You’ll be fine. Just quiet down for a second.”

“I- I thought it- it was all gone.”

“There’s some left. I’ll inject it to you now, ok? It will sting a little.”

“What- what is it? Where did you get a syringe?”

“It will stop the pain. Trust me. All you’ll feel is a little nick on your leg.”

“I’m scared. I want to go home already. It’s been years. Why can’t we go home? When will we find the right one?”

“We will be home before you know it. Last one, I promise you. I can feel it.”

“That’s what you always say. I feel sleepy… Will- will I be ok?”

“You’ll be fine. I promise. You’ll be fine.” The man closes the woman’s eyes. “You’re going home. You’re home…”

“-dead! Because of you!”

“They were going to stop us! Are you all blind? It was either them or us!”

“We promised them we meant them no harm. You promised them that yourself. For god’s sake, they had children with them!”

“We need food and water! There wasn’t enough for all of us if we’re to reach home. What was I supposed to do?”

“Not that! Never that! What the hell is wrong with you?”

“-promised-”

“Are we going to be home in time? I need to change clothes before I go out.”

“We’re going to be there before you know it. Here, wrap your arms around me so you don’t fall.”

“Don’t you have a helmet for me?”

“There’s not enough space on the motorcycle for me to store a spare. You’ll be fine, I promise you.”

“Just don’t cross any red lights. I will tell Mom if you do that and she will yell at you.”

“Don’t worry little sis. I’m careful.”

“You owe me. You… you owe me… keep her alive… keep her safe… Mom… mom would never forgive me if I let my sister… If I let her come to harm...”

“Hey, daddy?”

“Hmmm?”

“Are the houses at your home as big as that?”

“Bigger, and not ruined either. You’ll see them for yourself soon. I promise.”

“-me,-”

“You shouldn’t have left her…” the wizened old man says with deep sadness, standing over the disheartenedly small grave.

“She was supposed to be safe here.”

“She kept calling for you, you know. Saying you promised to show her your home. She loved you so much. I can’t understand how you could throw away such a gift... She kept saying it was an accident, claiming it was her fault.”

“She wasn’t supposed to die. She was supposed to make a life here, and I could go back to- to-”

“Not much of a life in the world anymore. Truth be told, there couldn’t be even that much for her, even without the raiders or the death swarms. The way you crushed her ankle, I doubt it would ever heal properly. This would happen sooner or later. You don’t live long if you can’t run. Someone like you who dares to wander alone should know that.”

“You were supposed to keep her alive…”

“We tried. But we all have our own children and families to take care of. No one noticed her missing until it was too late.”

“You were supposed to keep her alive…” The man growled with unspeakable hate, and lifted his rifle. The kind old man was the first to die. The killing continued for an extremely long time, even for the scarred man.

“You always break them. So… abominable of you.” The hand caresses him from cheek to throat.

“-remember?”

“Celestia order, me do. Me no hurt ponies. Agree.”

“I keep you safe little one. I never let hurt come you. Promise.”

“I’ll always be right next to you, little flame. I’m not abandoning you, ever.”

“You’ll get out of this alive Luna. Trust me!”

“...Not like the rest. No. No! I’m keeping my promise, I’ll manage to keep my word one fucking time, this time I’ll do it! I’m not failing again, not again! No more. Not one more. It’s over. I’ve lost too much, I’m not losing you too Luna, not now!”

He lifts the Alicorn up and puts her on some flat wooden debris, making sure it’s clear and stable enough to hold her out of the water. He walks around, making circles around himself, desperately searching for a way out.

“Think, think, for once in your forsaken life, think and do something right you moron! It will all blow up soon, and these fucking mutant squids will be here any second…” He looks around at all directions, trying to see through the haze of water and the piercing darkness.

“Where- where the hell are the rest of them? There were dozens of them…” He urgently checks himself, making sure he has all his weapons still on him, and that the grenades he and Luna made are still strapped on his chest. He sees the duffelbag that contained what remained of the dangerous, homemade dynamite he could barely make. He moves for it, unsure if he wants to use it or throw it away from them, away from his Luna.

He lifts a wooden board to free the bag’s strap, and stops. Slowly, he looks at the wood, and the debris around him, the sad remains of a ship that got swallowed. For a moment he remembers that there could be ponies on it, but he doesn’t care enough to waste time thinking about them.

He remembers the rowboat they sailed on instead.

He remembers the Odyssey.

He remembers what his little flame said, and his disappointment in not seeing Charybdis do her trick.

“It can’t be that easy…” He looks around again, and then below him. He stomps the ground with his uninjured foot. “It won’t be that easy, even if it works, will it? But it might work. It might fucking work! Oh, if there’s a god out there, a good one, hopefully one that doesn’t get his shits and giggles out of my torture, make this work. You took everything from me. I have nothing left. You took it all. Don’t you dare take anymore from me! I swear, if she dies… if she dies… Raegdan dies too. You won’t like who comes out next. I’ve got infinite time, I know how to cross worlds, and I can really keep a grudge. Just a warning. Make this work.”

He sees a piece of sail floating towards the canyon. He runs after it and takes it to Luna. It’s large enough to cover her in multiple layers. She will need the protection it offers. There’s even enough for… no. He can’t afford to hamper himself like this. He will need to to be able to swim and pull Luna to safety after they make it to surface. He will make it somehow. He will have to rely on a light covering that he’ll be able to dispose of easily, and his own resilience. Hopefully the change in speed will be enough. It’s one thing using gravity only, it’s another being launched forcefully… he hopes. He ties a loop of the rope around the small piece of deck, hoping it will stay above them and take the brunt, and carefully makes sure that Luna can breathe from the remaining air tank.

He stops for a few seconds to take one last look at Luna’s wounds. She wasn’t supposed to get hurt, not while he was around. What the hell was he doing? “You know,” he tells her, “I don’t think you’re supposed to threaten during a prayer, but it’s been too long since the last time I tried that. Just… be ok Luna. Please, don’t die.”

The question now was, one point of massive damage, or a lot of smaller ones? A big one, he decides. He doesn’t have time for anything else. He draws the long blade and pushes it into the flesh under his feet. He doesn’t stop until it’s down to the hilt, and when it is he grabs it and pushes the hilt back, forth, and to the sides, enlarging the wound as much as possible.

Deeper. Could he dig deeper? Yes, he could a little bit. He needed some more space too. He grabs two of the grenades on his chest and pulls the pins. He doesn’t hurry. As long he touches them the spells won’t work. It’s the only reason he dares wear them exposed on his torso like that in a world where one third of the population could pull the pins if it wasn’t for his disruption.

He lies down, holding his breath as the water envelops his face. He pushes his arm in, and even moves on his side so he can go a few centimeters deeper. He lets go of the grenades and jumps away.

Black water and pieces of alien flesh spray over him. He returns to inspect his handiwork. There was a tremor at the moment after the explosion, he was certain of it. He was on the right track. He just needed something with more bite.

He opens the duffelbag and very carefully, taking his time, makes sure he deposits each stick of dynamite at the bottom of the enlarged wound with utter care. He hopes the water doesn’t seep in and make them explode while he’s over them. He pulls the pin of another grenade and gets ready. He will need to run back to Luna’s side in seconds, and get ready. He doesn’t know how or when it will happen, but he’s certain it won’t be easy or soft.

He lets go of the grenade and runs to his princess.

“Throw up, you damned beast. Open wide, and throw up!”

Applejack tapped Leaf Stream on the shoulder. The broken pegasus was too busy yelling at ponies to go reinforce the docks somehow so that no more of Baltimare’s livelihood ends up in the Leviathan’s stomach.

She was forced to be more heavy hoofed in her approach. She grabbed Leaf Stream’s head, and turned her towards the Leviathan.

“Ow! Seriously, what is your problem now you crazy apple farmer?”

“The whirlpool is stopping,” Applejack told her.

“Ok, so what- wait, the whirlpool is stopping?” She threw off Applejack’s hooves from her ears, and ran to the end of the port where the stairs leading down to the piers started to descend. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“Ya weren’t listening!”

“Well, how could I listen with all these flanks tooting their song?” Leaf Stream answered back, waving her hoof at the suddenly embarrassed rows of ponies behind her. “I need a thestral, where is a darned thestral?”

“Here, ma’am.” A thin, underfed looking thestral stallion landed on the paved road and waited for orders.

“Don’t call me that! What are you and the rest still doing here? Go out there. The bosses might be coming out any moment no-”

“Whoo, ah think they’re on their way out now!” Applejack yelled.

“Oh, for buck’s sake, what did I miss no- Is the Leviathan blowing bubbles or am I seeing things?”

The water did bubble. The sea raged, rose and fell, small geysers formed only to vanish again, and water sprayed high into the sky. It was as if a volcano was about to erupt, only this one wouldn’t spew out lava.

It was like a hose of water turned on under the water. Huge swaths of white sea foam filled the sea over the Leviathan and the waters churned as if the whirlpool formed on the reverse, forming a hill made of water. They watched, frozen.

“Hey,” a voice shouted excited beneath them. Applejack saw Spike pointing at the spectacle. “It’s spitting out the sea, just like dad’s story said it would!”

Spitting out the-

“Why are y’all still standing around? Go and find them!” Applejack yelled at the poor thestral that had stood to watch. She was about ready to start chewing on her own hooves as thestrals massed together, carrying ropes, flotation devices, and nets.

“It’s been hours Applejack,” Rarity whispered. “They didn’t have that much air with them. What if- what if they don’t find them?”

“They will,” Applejack spoke with utter certainty. “They’ll be fine. They have to be.”

The thestrals separated in teams and flew over the raging sea, circling around, searching. Every second that passed where none of them flew lower, or gave any sign of finding anything, was like a vice tightened around her chest.

“Come on, you must have caused this. Get out already,” Leaf Stream mumbled to herself next to Applejack.

A team of thestrals suddenly swooped lower, catching something in a large net they were all holding together, and dragged their catch away from the Leviathan.

“Oh my Celestia,” Rarity gasped. “Is that them? Did they find Princess Luna and Raegdan?”

“I don’t know,” Leaf Stream answered, narrowing her eyes as she tried to see better. “It’s too far. I can’t see.”

“It’s gotta be them,” Applejack said.

The rest of the thestrals all gathered together and caught a section of the net in their hooves. Their leather bat wings beat as one in an incredible display of coordination, and they flew back towards Baltimare, carrying the net below them.

Leaf Stream yelled, exalted, when the thestrals got close enough for her to see. “That’s them! Both of them. They got them!”

“Whoo-wheee!” Applejack shouted, relief and enthusiasm breaking through. Rarity was laughing like a school filly, and before they knew it they had grabbed each other from the shoulders and jumping in place on their hind legs, shouting indistinctly. Spike ran up the stairs and joined them in their joyful yelping.

“Ok, ok, calm down,” Leaf Stream called out, laughing a little herself. “We still have a Leviathan to deal with-”

A thunder roared from the depths. An uproar that called of flames and quaking earth. The loudest crack that Applejack had ever heard, bar none, and as she turned towards the Leviathan it shocked her to see that it had been muffled by the water and still rocked her in place like that. The sea… blew up from the inside, and for a second or two, huge tongues of fire erupted upwards through the splitted, boiling sea.

Tartarus broke loose. More explosions roared their deafening song. One after the other, faster and faster, until there was no sound or color, only the vibrations in their bones, and the hope that this terror would end soon before it splintered the world.

Monstrously large chunks of something that Applejack couldn’t recognize made their way up, green, black, bulbous, and most of all, monstrous -she couldn’t underline that enough- the very sight of whatever that was, even so distant, was making her nauseous.

Huge waves rocked the ships and the docks. Wood was heard splintering, large parts of the dock collapsed, and some of the ships started listing on their sides. Many of the smaller ones were already sinking. Ponies wailed as they saw their fortunes lost, and others screamed as their homes and businesses were claimed by the fury that was released. Pegasi soared over the remains, calling for anypony unlucky enough to be caught in that.

The remains of the Leviathan surfaced, only to sink again. At first she thought it was a flower, or a lilypad, coming up, a truly titanic one. A green crystalline surface glimmered like a mirror in the sun on one of the- the petals that weren’t petals. She saw muscles and orifices. She saw gnarled tentacles and disfigured fins. She saw something else too, only for an instant, but her mind blanked it out of her memory the moment it went out of sight. There was nothing that looked even distantly like a face on that thing. There never was.

It sunk. Thank Celestia, it sunk below the waves again. The sea calmed down, and this time no whirlpool formed. A lake of yellow and brown sludge grew slowly over the surface, with pieces of the Leviathan’s remains floating amongst it.

When the ponies around them, the whole city of Baltimare that was watching, realized what they actually saw, that the unknown Leviathan that arrived on their doorstep was dead… there was an eruption of another kind. The cheers rivaled the immense chain of explosions in volume. Ponies, citizens, guards, and sailors, fell on the ground, crying in relief.

“I- uh… ok, then...” Leaf Stream gulped heavily before continuing, having difficulty to be heard over the din. “We have the corpse of a Leviathan to deal with, that’s what I meant… Just how strong are those explosives of his? They… they didn’t make that big of a boom before, did they?”

Spike pointed at the thestrals that were still carrying the net, and now heading into the city. “Hey, where are they going? We’re down here! Hey, down here you jerks!” Spike shouted, jumping and waving his little arms.

Silverwing made his appearance, looking exceedingly grim. “Lunar Guard, we’re taking the Princess and your commander to the nearest hospital. We will wait for you there.”

“Why? What happened to them?” Rarity screeched.

“We don’t know yet. Your commander is covered with some kind of burns. Princess Luna, she’s-” The old thestral took a shuddering breath before continuing. “She’s been exceedingly wounded. I’m sorry, I need to get there as fast as possible, and make sure they get the care they need. I don’t trust these soft ponies.” Silverwing flew off, his worry making him reach Rainbow Dash levels of speed.

“Oh. Oh, no…” Applejack whispered.

She didn’t waste any time. She threw a tearful Spike on her back and ran through the crowds.

Rarity and Leaf Stream were just a step behind.