Looking at Mount Athon from the base to the tip, one would gaze in awe at the long winding trail carved straight from the rock, going as far up as the clouds. It was the largest mountain in the entire Athon mountain range which bordered both the eastern and southern fringes of the Wasteland. The trek took some few days of hiking to reach the end of the trail, near the snow-covered peak. No rest was had, unless for sleep. This was a race, against the forces of both Equestria and the Empire. Two fundamentally different cultures, both obstacles to the future of societal structure. Of course, it was easy to guess what the Empire would have planned: killing the three adventurers would be sufficient to put at ease the mind of the Kaiser. However, the Equestrian plan was harder to discern. It was clear that their focus of interest was on Starlight Glimmer, but the reason for this was unknown. According to Comrade Bright, she who represented the Equestrian force was simply following the arbitrary direction of a magical map. So, then, not even the Equestrian force knew the Equestrian plan. That did not necessarily mean there was no Equestrian plan, unless the map's direction was truly and wholly arbitrary. If it was not arbitrary, then one would go back to the original question: Who would single Starlight out for this sort of attention, and why? And if it was arbitrary, then yet another question would be raised: Why was such a nominally important political figure be allowed to go on far-off wild goose chases out of the naive assumption that this map's directions meant anything?

Although he'd pondered such questions throughout this trek, the Wanderer stopped thinking about them when he and Starlight made it to the end of the trail. In the mountain, itself, there was a gate of solid steel, with the image of two alicorns, and a wing-spread eagle perched atop the point where the alicorns' horns touched. His veins turned to ice as he drank in this critical moment, this closing chapter to his old life as a wandering vagabond. He turned his head down the mountain, seeing the entire Wasteland before him. This, in its entirety, was the place where he had lived for over a century, his entire life. He began losing himself in all the memories of the past, but this was broken when Starlight put a hoof to his head and dragged his gaze onto hers.

“No reminiscing about the past. We focus on the future. Okay?”

“Of course.” He turned back around to face the gate, then bowed his head down so that the tip of his horn was at eye level with Starlight. “Whenever you are ready.”

He watched as she positioned herself next to him, then met the tip of her horn with his. After a quick flash of light from their tips, the mountain rumbled, and inch by inch, the gate dragged itself open. It was an empowering sight, seeing the culmination of all their efforts before his very eyes.

Once the gate was completely ajar, a clang rung from within it, and from the cave inside spoke a booming voice. “Those who seek Wolfram's aid will have their worth tested.”

The two lifted their heads back up. “So, your god's name is Wolfram?” Starlight asked.

“Correct.”

She put on a sardonic expression. “He sounds like a charming guy. Can't wait to meet him.”

They began their walk into the cave, and made it only a few feet in before being interrupted by a shrill voice behind them.

“Stop!” it screamed.

The Wanderer looked back, and saw none other than Princess Twilight, descending down from the sky and onto the snowy ground. He turned around, with Starlight shortly following suit. “Ah. Miss Sparkle. We meet again. What brings you here?”

“W-… wha-… Good Favor? What are you doing here? What are you doing with her?”

Starlight put a hoof to her lip and giggled. “Wanderer, you told her your name was Good Favor?”

“I did,” he replied, “I also told her that Party Favor was my grandson.”

“Oh, you're too much!”

Twilight snarled in a menacing grimace. “You mean neither of those things are true? Why did you lie to me? And to my friends?”

“Do not take it personally,” the Wanderer replied, “I simply could not allow you to keep me from tying up a loose end. I hope her highness does not hold a grudge over a little white lie.”

“I want to know what you did with Party Favor. Now.”

“I already answered one of your questions. I would like one of my own answered before I answer another one of yours.”

Twilight stamped a hoof in the snow. “No. You tell me where Party Favor is now.”

The Wanderer shook his head. “Tsk. Now, child. That is no way to negotiate.” He looked to Starlight. “Would you agree?”

“I would,” she replied.

The Wanderer looked back to Twilight. “Surely, one of regal status such as yourself would honor fairness and civility in discussion.”

“Hmph. Fine. Ask your question.”

“My question is as follows: What is your business here, and why does it concern Miss Glimmer?”

“Well, I was sent to her town by the map in the Friendship Castle. It wanted something fixed, and her town clearly needs fixed.” She paused. “Everyone's cutie mark is gone. Locked away in a vault. The town mayor wouldn't even let me and my friends in, except he told me he wasn't the mayor, but this one you're with right now is!”

“Oh?” Starlight interjected, “And how would you know anything about a town that you've never been in?”

“I've seen the emptiness in their faces. The pain inside their plastered-on smiles. The dreariness. The desolation. The despair in everyone's eyes. Can't you see what you're doing? Taking away everyone's individuality?”

“Creating harmony by getting rid of the social ills that prevent it. That's what I'm doing.”

Twilight raised her voice; flung a hoof in the air. “At the cost of what makes us who we are? The essence of our very beings?”

Starlight raised her own voice to match. “And why not? What makes your individuality so important that it should come before harmony?”

“What's the point of harmony when it comes at the cost of our happiness and our freedom to express ourselves?”

“But it doesn't come at the cost of happiness. Everyone's happier when they're not bickering over petty differences.”

“But when they can't express themselves?”

“All communities impose social norms on its members. There is no truly free expression; that would be anarchy. The difference between what you do in Equestria and what I do in Our Town is only a difference of degree.”

“Are you listening to yourself!?” She looked to the Wanderer. “And you're supporting her in this?”

“I am inclined to agree with her,” he replied. “As we are getting off-topic, that is all I will say on the matter. Now, is this really why you are here, Miss Sparkle?”

“No. What I've seen here in the Wasteland puts her town to shame. I've seen things I didn't even imagine was possible in this day and age. Slavery, murder, racism, sexism, poverty, drugs, and just the sheer disregard for the sanctity of life makes me sick.”

“I see. And what were you planning to do to change it?”

“Show the Wasteland a better way. Show them the righteous path. Show them friendship. Give them hope.”

Starlight stamped a hoof on the ground. “We are showing them a better way!”

“And may I add,” the Wanderer said, “in a practical manner that could plausibly succeed. So, Miss Sparkle, how would you go about it? Would you stand on a soapbox and preach to the uncaring masses? I hope you do not plan on building the foundations of change on nebulous concepts alone. The average Wastelander has far more immediate concerns. If you cannot address those, then you cannot make even the slightest modicum of progress.”

Starlight's eyes began to slip into madness as her tone and body language became increasingly manic. “Yeah. Nobody wants to listen to some bratty know-nothing know-it-all who blathers on and on about absolutely nothing of value or, or substance! Stupid little girl, thinking she's all that just because her surrogate mammy gave her a pair of duck wings. Give me a break! You got sent on a wild goose chase on the opposite side of the Wasteland, and you didn't figure out that you were fed a load of garbage until the fact was spoon-fed to you. You have no chance of making it out here. You are just. Plain. Too. Dumb.”

Twilight stuck her chest out, trying her best to stay on firm grounding. “All I need to make change is the knowledge that good always triumphs over evil, and the ri-”

A vein popped in Starlight's neck as she filled her lungs with air through gritted teeth, winding up for a ferocious shout: “QUIET!” There was a long pause as this one word echoed over the whole mountainside, and shook some clumps of snow off their precipices. “You know what? This self-righteous twerp isn't worth arguing with.” She turned around and huffed down into the cave. “I'm getting the Gem. Make sure she doesn't follow me, okay, Wanderer?”

“I will.” He motioned for Sucker Pop to follow Starlight, which she did, following a simple smile and nod. After a few moments of silence, Twilight and the Wanderer were alone.

“Look,” Twilight said, “she's clearly too far gone, but maybe I can talk some sense into you.”

“I have heard your arguments, and am not convinced. That topic has been expired.”

“Come on. How can you be convinced by someone who is so clearly unhinged?”

“I would not use such a strong word for her more 'eccentric' moods. She is really quite charming the majority of the time.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I'm sure. Look, maybe it wouldn't help if I preached on a soapbox, but that's not the only solution. You can come with me back to Equestria and help me expose all the terrible things that happen here, or experience friendship for yourself and let the Wasteland see how wonderful it is, or y-”

“Spare me your starry-eyed pipe dreams. One cannot create change without power, and power grows from the tip of a sword. Even if there is a small chance that these plans would work, it would be foolish to favor them over a far more effective course of action.”

“Do you really believe that you'll bring hope to the Wasteland by force?”

“The Wasteland does not require hope. It requires order, security, and unity. That is what we strive for.”

“Well, I can't let you do what you're doing. It's wrong. What can I do to make you realize that?”

“Considering your lack of bargaining power and your lack of compelling arguments, you must show that your ideas are worth consideration by demonstrating your capacity to personally enforce them.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He gestured to her. “Tell me what you think it means.”

“You're saying I have to fight you.”

“Yes. To the death.”

“No. I don't want to. I don't want to kill you.”

“I am afraid you have no choice.”

She turned her head away. “It's not right.”

“Look at me, Miss Sparkle.” When she looked back at him with a tear dripping down her face, the Wanderer waited for several seconds, making sure to look squarely into Twilight's eyes. “Party Favor is dead. I killed him.”

Twilight's lip began to quiver; the pupils in her eyes shrunk. “You… you didn't.”

“I did. Without the slightest twinge of guilt or remorse. When I passed the news on to Miss Glimmer, she was just as indifferent about it as I was. But then, one would be hard-pressed to miss such a pathetic wastrel as him.”

“You're a monster…” She paused, then furrowed her brows as her horn emitted a powerful glow. “And sometimes, a hero has no choice but to slay the monster.” A mighty beam zoomed from Twilight's horn. The Wanderer stared the beam down unphased, and at the last moment, he formed a circular shield in front of it whose diameter barely covered that of the beam; a flash of light and heat was formed at collision until the beam was dissolved.

“You are not a hero,” he said, “you are an agent of chaos, and you will be treated like one.”

He charged his own horn, and with a flurry of cutting spells, he tore the ground on which Twilight stood asunder, making her lose her footing. The wings on her back flapped in desperation until she was finally airborne. This was intentional on his part. Forcing her to put effort to both flight and magic would make her perform worse in both, and tire her out more quickly until the time where he would finish her in one swift stroke. This was always the greatest folly of the young and the undisciplined: Although they could fight with unparalleled zeal when motivations were high and energy was plentiful, they always wavered when adversity reared its head, and their brash overexertion took its toll. The problem here was that when this zeal was backed with the sheer, raw power of an alicorn, such a plan was easier said than done.

Twilight soared in loops, always with some earth-shakingly strong beam or missile flurry at the end of each cycle that he would absorb with shields just potent enough to counter them. The Wanderer discharged some weak or moderate beams and missiles of his own as she was making these loops, both to distract her and to probe her defenses for vulnerabilities, but they made harmless sparks fly off Twilight's spherical shield that covered her whole body in all three dimensions. An exhaustive measure, but also an ironclad one. The sparks from both sides had been produced in such quantity for so long that the snow between them began to melt. As powerful as Twilight's attacks were, they were grossly inaccurate, often missing their mark completely.

One of such attacks was a beam that hit straight into the cave and shook it; the Wanderer ripped some stone off the face of the mountain, closing off the entrance so that no more attacks could enter. Twilight's strikes were so strong and executed in such rapid succession that the Wanderer found little room to make strikes of his own, and although this was what he'd expected, he couldn't help but be awestruck at the ferocity of this child.

Following the collapse of the gate, Twilight let out torrents of missiles that bobbed, weaved, and curved in all manner of directions, sometimes colliding with each other and exploding in mid-air. Although defending against this was a hellishly arduous task, the Wanderer had the reflexes and decisiveness to block just enough of them to avoid a direct hit, although many of them grazed his armor, leaving black streaks all throughout. After some long time of this, Twilight made a grand sweep, and let out a hail of missiles on the ground on which the Wanderer stood. Feeling it rumble beneath him, he squeezed out a teleportation spell that landed him on the slanted trail. Keeping focus on Twilight was crucial, but he took a swift glance at the ground that he left, and saw it tumbling down to the bottom of the mountain. There was now no floor to connect the cave to the world outside, and those who entered would need to find another way to exit.

The battle continued, neither side able to make any sort of decisive headway. Twilight had just too much raw power, and the Wanderer was just too well trained. This seemingly pointless exchange went on for far longer than either of them had anticipated. Although Twilight had lasted this long against the Wanderer's far superior skill only through blunt force of will, she showed no sign of relenting. It was as if she was possessed by a ravenous demon.

So it was time to change tactics. Not by fighting fire with fire – he would get tired before she would – but by doing the unexpected. And so he gathered all his will and focus on the peaks around him, and the air filled with deafening bangs and cracks as he tore chunks of stone out of the very mountains, themselves, and used his temperature control to make the space in Twilight's shield as hot as the most brutal of Wasteland summers. With sound-shattering booms, he bombarded her with immense boulders two, five, and ten at a time. All his power, all his focus was put into this one act. His heart was kicking against his sternum. His muscles were hardy steel. His eyes were unblinking, strained, their whites covered in pulsing red veins. Even when the mountains were three-quarters their original size, her shield still held firm. But the assault continued. He gave her not even a sliver of a second to rest or react – even the smallest window of opportunity could let her make this exercise futile. The mountains then were at half-size. Within the clouds of dust and debris, he noticed Twilight's shield start to flicker. Surprise, temperature, shock, and tenacity – only through all these combined and in overwhelming intensity did Twilight finally succumb to fatigue. Her shield disappeared, and a there was a flash of light in the debris just before the Wanderer stopped the bombardment. As he caught his breath, he scanned the air for any sign of a lifeless alicorn body plummeting to the ground.

Such a sign was not found, but there was another flash nearby, on the Mount Athon trail to his side. There, he saw Twilight with a limp wing, snapped and twisted to uselessness, and a searing malice in her eyes. He destroyed the peak of Mount Athon with a slant in Twilight's direction, but she magically grabbed all that debris and flung it down to the depths below, then began gathering every ounce of her will and anger in one final attack.

The Wanderer turned to her and chuckled. “I must congratulate you, Miss Sparkle. You are the only worthy opponent I have had in many years. There are not many who can match a Legionary Fir-”

Twilight cried out in anger. “SHUT! UP!”

A beam erupted from Twilight's horn. It was of such colossal size and power that it warped the aether around it, tearing the very fabric of reality and creating a black void surrounding it which sucked matter of all kinds into its endless chasm of the null. The Wanderer put his most intense focus on a shield contouring his entire body, and galloped in a great push to the beam's source. As enormous as this beam may have been, it was too spread out, so the shield could just barely hold firm. However, as all focus was needed to keep the shield intact, nothing could be done about the intense heat which made his steel plates emit a blinding orange glow. His concern now was not that he would be evaporated by Twilight's beam, but that he would be cooked alive in his own armor. Still, he pressed on. The smoke from his searing flesh blocked his sight and filled his nose with its stench. The crackling from the friction of beam and shield muddled his hearing. Consciousness was fading. His vision grew dim.

But then, he felt the beam stop pushing him back. He'd come within striking distance. Bringing his head down, then jerking it back up in a mighty thrust, he drive his horn through Twilight's neck into the back of her head and lifted her whole body off the ground. The sound of crackling sparks was now the sound of gargled screams and searing flesh, both Twilight's and his own. He threw the now-paralyzed alicorn onto the mountain wall next to him, and from his horn, he unleashed a monstrous pyre that consumed her utterly as she gargled on her own fluids, until she was blackened and charred. Once he could no longer exert himself, he ceased the flames. There was the Princess of Friendship, now a smoldering carcass on the top of Mount Athon. Then, there was the horrific pain jolting throughout his whole body as the rush of battle settled down. His vocal cords were so thoroughly damaged that he couldn't even scream.

They say one's entire life flashes before him in his last moments, but all that flashed before the Wanderer was that one day, forty years ago, when he fled in the face of the Saracen hordes and disgraced himself before his Legion, his Reich, and his god. He had witnessed, with his own eyes, those Legionaries in his own Century disobeying his orders, some fleeing, others throwing themselves carelessly into the fray to go out in a blaze of glory. For over forty years, he had wished he was among the latter. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. There was just something about watching those he'd worked so hard to keep disciplined and lawful suddenly dissolve into chaos, that made him disillusioned with the Fourteenth Crusade and with the Reich as a whole. He just didn't see anything worth dying for anymore. But here, he was safe in the knowledge that he had, at long last, been redeemed. His act of cowardice in the Crusade would surely be overshadowed by his act of valor on Mount Athon.

Throughout the course of the fight, he'd attained a newfound respect for Princess Twilight Sparkle. Yes, she was naive, and yes, she was young and brash and impulsive, but her strength and determination were deeply admirable. It wasn't everyday that a mare died in battle, especially not one of such delicate age and effete background, and never to a warrior of his esteemed credentials without it being laughably one-sided. One had to wonder if she had Imperial blood coursing through her veins, or if she had been blessed by a true behemoth of a god. Indeed, there would be a special place for her in the Hall. To that, there was no questioning. They would meet each other again in the next world, hopefully on friendlier terms.

Despite the stinging burns which covered his flesh, he felt a splash of relief as the chilly embrace of death took him. He took one last look at the Wasteland below. Its future was uncertain, and the Reich may yet defend itself long enough to suffer the gradual rotting decay that so many empires before it had suffered, so he could only find his end bittersweet. For better or for worse, the Reich was an integral part of his very being, and watching it rot felt like having a part of himself also rot. As he looked back over the mountain, he collapsed onto the ground, and as flakes of snow settled from the sky down onto it, the last bit of his consciousness withered away, and he passed on into the darkness. Next Chapter: Chapter 15 Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 19 Minutes