The days slid by, some faster than others, but all of them still pretty damn busy. It took almost three days to get Sig’s flock settled comfortably, which I tried my best to help out with despite Zip’s wishes. By the end of it, the A block sounded like an aviary, and it was almost impossible to go from one end of the complex to the other without running into at least five griffons. I was so thankful that my barracks was on the B block; sometimes I could hear them through the vents in the floor when I was trying to sleep, and it wasn’t pretty.

On the first day after Sig brought the flock back to the Bastion, he and his siblings held a brief memorial for Jahlen, which they later opened up to the rest of their flock to remember those that died in the schism. Zip and I did our best to comfort him and lend him a shoulder to lean on, but nothing compared to simply commiserating with his other siblings. They were nearly inseparable, like Sig had warned me, and about the only time he ever left his group behind was when duties summoned him elsewhere and his brothers and sisters couldn’t follow.

Gauge and Chaff, meanwhile, had continued tuning up the tank, and Gauge even got to poke around the ringbird a bit before he had to go back to his project. They’d finally sorted out all the issues with the tank’s engine, so the thing was nearly in working shape. They were supposed to have a test run with it as soon as that was fixed, but its computers crashed and it took an entire brain trust of techies liberated from the Fort to figure out what was wrong. After benefitting from our mechanics for so long, the Sentinels were pretty happy to have our brainy bunch to work with when it came to that as well.

The ringbird was less work, at least on the mechanical side, but its computers and tech shit were a fucking mess. The techies of Blackwash managed to copy over the entire contents of the ringbird’s databanks with some help from the Sentinels and were busy poring through that data. I couldn’t tell you the slightest thing about what they were looking for or what they were finding, because I hardly know anything about computers other than the power button, but I think they were looking for its mission logs to figure out just how long the Crimson had the thing and where it’d been to. When I asked Zip about what she was hearing, she told me that signs pointed to the Ivory City, a connection that seemed to be growing stronger by the day. Apparently, the emblem painted on the thing’s hull, the three white rectangles within a gold ring, was the symbol for the city. Where before the Sentinels merely believed the Ivory City had contracted the Crimson to find the pieces of the code sent to Auris, now it was looking like the two were tied much closer together than anypony had thought. What that meant for our attack on the dam, though, I didn’t know. It wasn’t my job to plan and worry about that.

I, meanwhile, spent most of my time at the proving grounds, trying in vain to hone my virtually nonexistent pyromancy skills. With the assault on the Crimson growing closer by the day, I felt like having some trick under my belt would be useful. Unfortunately, my magic refused to cooperate with me, even when I got additional instruction from Warped Glass. My attempts at combustion were little more than paltry candles; my fireballs fizzled and died before they could even travel five feet. My attempts to make a protective wall of fire around me only ended up with me setting my tail on fire when I miscalculated the radius and the point of origin. Glass joked that I could only start a fire by using myself as kindling first. That just encouraged me to work harder—and increase my failures per minute. It didn’t seem like any trick or tip worked for me; the more I failed, the more frustrated I became, and the more frustrated I became, the more I failed. It was hardly more than an endless loop of incompetence and anger that went on for days.

So I blew off steam the only ways I knew how: shooting and fucking. By day, I spent my free time after pyromancy practice at the range, plucking away at target after target, and getting a better feel for the machine guns in my armor. By night, I found excuses to sneak off with Zip, and we spent a lot of quiet time together. There was a lot of kissing and touching in the bunkers on the walls, but the actual fucking part was harder to come by. Zip and Sig both ended most of their days exhausted, and neither Zip nor I wanted to chase Sig out of their shared quarters for some sex after all he’d been through. Though he didn’t really show it, it was clear he was still coping with his brother’s loss. And as for my quarters, they were a little more communal than hers. Good luck with that.

So we got what little enjoyments we could in the moments we weren’t working or busy with other things, which sadly were few and far between. One of those moments found Zip and I walking along the top wall of the Bastion, with nothing but a towering rock wall to our left and a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the canyon floor on our right. I don’t remember how or why we ended up there, only that I’d followed Zip in the hopes of finding someplace quiet to be with her. The air was warm, the sun was low, and the canyon and the distant valley were alive with the sounds of Auris’ wildlife settling in for the evening. A perfect twilight before the darkness of night.

Zip found a flat part of the wall that extended a bit from the stone behind it and lied down, stretching her wings and beckoning for me to join her. Rolling my shoulders, I lied down on my stomach and shuffled a bit closer to her so our coats were touching. The sheer drops all around us unnerved me a bit, considering the last time I’d stretched myself out on a cliff a shrike had flung me off of it, but Zip wrapping her wing around my shoulders and pulling me close to her orange body helped to shake some of that anxiety away.

“Pretty,” I cooed, breaking the silence while we watched the sun go down to our right. The sky was awash with an entire rainbow of colors, from blues and greens directly above us to faint reds and pinks and purples closer to the setting blue sun. A few thin clouds added some white streaks to the whole picture, and the rocks of the canyon stood out in sharp detail as the shadows intensified around them.

“It’s one of my favorite places to be,” Zip said, smiling softly as she did so. “Sometimes I forget what the sky’s like, I spend so much time inside the Bastion. It makes me feel… homesick, I guess. Pegasi were never meant to live inside. We need—I need the sun on my shoulders and the wind in my wings. It’s where I belong.”

I nuzzled her cheek. “You can take the pegasus out of the sky but you can’t take the sky out of the pegasus?”

“In a sense,” she said. “Technically, martial law states that we’re not to leave the Bastion for any reasons other than assignments for fear of desertion or enemy snipers. But, seriously,” she said, waving her hoof over the picturesque canyon, “who’s going to bother us here? Not the Crimson, that’s for sure. They don’t have the technology to get past all of our early warning systems. They used to send scouts here to keep tabs on us, but between all the hidden cameras and pressure sensors scattered everywhere, they realized that they were just sending us free prisoners to interrogate. Carrion hasn’t sent scouts or snipers in years.”

“You ever have a problem with desertion, though?” I asked. “It’d be pretty bad if Carrion got his hooves on working Sentinel armor or information about the Bastion.”

She shrugged. “Not since I’ve been a Sentinel. We’re all too dedicated to our cause to desert now. We all know what the Crimson are like. Deserting doesn’t mean that they’ll treat you like a hero. Besides, after the Sentinels fell back from the valley, that was when they had their largest desertion. Ponies didn’t think that they’d ever recover from that, so they left to go try to live out the rest of their lives somewhere in the valley and hope the Crimson wouldn’t bother them.”

“Any idea what might have happened to them since then?” I asked. “Maybe they’d join us again.”

“I have no idea,” Zip admitted. “That was before my time. Maybe some have gone on to be mercenaries since then. Others probably want nothing to do with that life again—remember, ten winters is a long time—and a good bunch of them are likely dead. I don’t think we’re going to see many of them back.”

“Yeah, I guess. At least we don’t really need them, right?”

Zip shifted a bit and rubbed the crest of her wing in the space between my shoulders. “No, we shouldn’t. Bringing in the entirety of Sig’s flock really helped. That added almost two hundred able-bodied griffons eager to take back their home. Add about fifty trained Sentinels to that, plus the sixty volunteers from your town, forty volunteers from the nearby settlements, and another thirty experienced mercs, and we’re at three hundred and eighty ponies, griffons, and zebras all ready to take back the valley against a thousand Crimson.”

“Plus who knows how many slaves we can liberate at the dam itself,” I added.

“And our ringbird and tank against their ringbird and defenses.” Zip smiled a bit and rubbed her hooves together. “A fair fight in the end. If we can strike hard and fast, we win.”

But of course there was the other unspoken outcome. If we let the Crimson bog down the assault, it’d only be a matter of time before attrition destroyed us. Carrion had the numbers, and we had the technology. In the end, however, technology would always fall to numbers. I just prayed it’d give us our edge long enough to win before the Crimson blunted it.

Sitting in the open here under the sun, though, made it hard to think about that kind of doom and gloom. The assault was just a few days away, and I knew that this might be one of the last sunsets I ever saw. For all I knew, come this time next week, they’d be laying me down under six feet of dirt. While I hoped that my practice at the range would keep me alive when it came down to it, for now I was only concerned with enjoying the remaining time I had left before then with my marefriend. Nopony could take that from us, and I’d fight for every last second.

I crossed my neck behind Zip’s and buried my muzzle in her mane. She smelled so wonderful. I wanted to spend the rest of my life lost in her scent. I felt her shift her wing across my back to pull me in closer beside her, and her cheek brushed my own as she turned her head. “You’re worried.”

I parted my lip to say no, but my breath caught in my throat. Of course she knew I was worried. She could read me so easily. “Mmhmm,” I hummed, closing my eyes and huddling under her wing. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Zip clucked her tongue and leaned back a bit so she could hold my face in her wingtips. “Ember, you don’t have anything to worry about,” she said, smiling and trying to encourage me. “I’ve fought worse before. Crimson bandits are easy compared to some of the things I’ve fought. Did I ever tell you I fought a tolan once?”

I shook my head. “Sig told me you did. He didn’t say much else.”

“Yeah, I fought one. Sig’s just jealous that he didn’t get in on the action.” She released my face and shifted back to lying shoulder to shoulder with me. “I found one with my squad at the time on patrol a few years ago. Tolans usually don’t come to the valley anymore, but this one looked like it was rabid or something. The moment it caught a whiff of us, it came charging over on its huge legs. We happened to be near a settlement, so my squad leader ordered us to lure it the other way, away from innocents. We kept up a barrage of bullets to keep its attention, and we ran as fast as we could.

“Of course, we were near the river, so shit was fucked,” Zip said, her eyes losing focus and drifting to her memories. “We had the settlement in front of us, the river to our backs, and flat ground all around. Nowhere to hide. We couldn’t outrun the thing so we circled it and tried to get its attention if it went after one of us so they could get away. Still, we didn’t all get out of there in one piece. Gray Water had one of his legs torn off by its claws, and it swallowed Sergeant Hemlock whole. Nearly crushed her under its foot and probably broke her spine before it scooped her up in its jaws. Destroyed her machine guns so she just couldn’t shoot it from the inside. I could hear her screaming all the way down its throat.”

“Holy fuck,” I murmured.

Zip shuddered. “Yeah. Unpleasant. I was the only pegasus in the squad, so I knew I had the only real chance of killing it before it ate the rest of us. It had its sights set on Gray Water as he tried to crawl away, and it stopped paying attention to the rest of us when it realized that we couldn’t hurt it. That was my chance. I flew in fast and high so it couldn’t see me, and I turned on my razor wings. I just dived on it and held my wing out to slice through its neck on the way down. I didn’t get a good angle to kill it outright, but it collapsed from the blow. Before it could stand back up, I jumped on its back and just kept slicing and slicing until I’d severed its spine. It died pretty quickly after that.”

The mare shrugged her wings, though I saw them twitching at her sides as they relived the memory of that flight. “We had to evacuate right then before Gray Water bled out. I wanted to stay and try to cut Hemlock out, but we didn’t hear her screaming anymore. Tolans have gizzards that can crush rocks and stomach acids that can melt steel. Between that and the wounds she’d already taken, there was no way she survived. So we fell back to our extraction point and got out of there as fast as we could. They promoted me to sergeant after that for killing the tolan and to replace Hemlock.” Then, with a quiet smile, she added, “After dealing with that nightmare, the Crimson are a piece of cake. The only thing they had that worried me were their ringbirds, and we’ve already killed one and stolen another. They don’t scare me now.”

Then, touching my cheek again, she turned my head toward hers and kissed me. When we separated, she placed her forehead against mine. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Ember. I know what I’m doing, and so do you. We’ll be fine, and when it’s all over, well…” She grinned at me. “Think you could go the full twenty-eight hours?”

“I don’t know,” I said, a mischievous smile forming on my face, “I think I’ll need some practice first…”

Zip’s attack was fast and sudden, taking me by surprise. Before I knew it, she had me pinned on the wall, her body firmly pressed against mine as our lips locked and our bodies thrashed. I wrapped my hooves across her shoulders, holding her against me as our legs locked and our tails entwined.

I’ll put it pretty blunt here: we fucked, and we fucked for a while. I don’t feel the need to recount another one of my sexual experiences here; it wouldn’t add anything new to my story, really. About the only thing I have to say about it was that a few times our rolling took us dangerously close to the edge of the wall, and we had to stop and center ourselves whenever that happened. Falling to our deaths (or realistically, mine) would’ve been a total mood killer.

We finally finished well after the sun had set and the stars were appearing in the sky. It felt good to just relax after sex under the beauty of the night sky, me and Zip both lying on our sides with our hooves wrapped around each other’s barrels. We occasionally kissed whenever we made eye contact, but we’d both gotten our fill of loving for the moment. She was satisfied, and I was too. That was all that mattered.

“I think I’m in love,” I said to her, just completely out of the blue. My heart sped up when I saw her raise an eyebrow, and I felt heat building in my cheeks. “I… I-I hope I’m not saying that too soon.”

“You may be right,” Zip said, kissing my nose. “About the love part, that is.” I felt dismay in my chest when she took her forelegs off of me and slowly stood up by my side, but a rush of adrenaline came back to me when she offered me her hoof to help stand. “I know how to prove it.”

I stood up next to her, and she led me a few steps toward the edge of the wall. My eyes darted down when she spread her wings and began hovering next to me, slowly turning me around until I was the one with my back to the canyon. Taking both of my hooves in hers, she flew a little closer until our muzzles were right next to each other. “Do you trust me?”

I swallowed hard and looked away for a moment. “I…”

She shook her head. “Look at me. Don’t look away.” When I did so, she asked again. “Do you trust me?”

My mouth felt fuzzy, and my heart began to pound. “I-I trust you.”

She nodded and began flying against me, pushing me back a bit. “Don’t look away,” she said. “Just look into my eyes. Trust me.”

I nodded and tried to stare into her eyes without blinking as I stepped back and back. My heart hammered in my chest like it was trying to break out and tell me I was being an idiot. I wasn’t stupid. I had a good idea of what she was going to do. Still… I trusted her. She would never let anything happen to me.

My hind leg stepped on nothing, and I gasped as I slipped.

The top of the wall began to rocket away from me, and my mane and tail whipped toward Zip as she fell with me. Every single instinct told me to scream and flail as terror set in and the roaring wind deafened me. But Zip hardly blinked; she only looked at me with a soft smile on her muzzle, and somehow that was enough to calm me. I stared back at her, eyes probably wide with terror, but I only looked at her, completely oblivious to just how far away I was from becoming a stain on the ground.

Suddenly, Zip opened her wings, and I felt gravity invert as she pulled me upwards. The change in perspective let me see the ground whizzing by us for a second before she started climbing again. It was really fucking close. I’m surprised I didn’t piss myself at that.

Zip’s wings eventually took us back to the wall with me clinging to her for dear life, and it wasn’t until she set all four hooves on the steel and smiled at me that I feebly let go and flopped onto the ground. While I panted and hyperventilated, all but kissing the metal beneath my hooves, Zip just grinned by my side and rubbed her wing on my back. “Yes,” she finally said once my heart rate slowed down a bit. She looked like she was practically glowing as she grinned at me. “I’d say that you are in love.”

For some reason, I thought that was funny. I started to laugh, and soon enough I had to start wiping tears from my eyes. When I finally calmed down, Zip was giving me a strange look. “I’m sorry,” I ultimately said. “I’m just… I never thought I’d be happy like this. This is just so… you’re just so wonderful.”

That put a smile back on her face, and she draped her wing over my shoulders. “You’re wonderful too, you know.”

I smiled and nodded. “Thanks. I’m just… well…” I looked into her eyes, and she looked up into mine. “You’re amazing. And I love you.”

Zip’s wings fluttered in excitement, and her smile revealed her teeth for a moment before she rubbed noses with me. “I love you, too.”

We kissed, but it was so much more than that. It wasn’t a kiss between two ponies dating. It was a kiss between two ponies coming to grips with love. A perfect, shining moment, like nothing I’d ever experienced before. This was the beginning of something beautiful, something that we’d hold to our hearts for years. I wanted to capture this moment, hold onto it, and if it had lasted forever…

Well…

I would’ve been okay with that.