The very leftmost doorway was chosen, the one with the words “Harmony Logistics” on a sign written in an old, dead language. This hallway was carved into the stone, the walls were smooth, it had a slight curve, and it had a gentle rise to it. The floor had no prints in the dust, nothing had come this way in a long time, living or mechanical.

The hallway was almost an oval or what might be called an egg-shape, with a flat floor and rounded walls that bowed outwards. The ceiling, high above them, had to be ten feet tall. There were lights up there, some dead, some flickering, and a few that still worked just fine. The curve of the passage grew tighter, and Tarnish’s nerves became more jittery as his field of view shortened.

He kept his shield up and his weapon pointed forwards. It pinged and made hot metal noises, while droplets of boiling water dripped from the barrel. Vinyl had assured him that at close, close range, he wouldn’t need to worry about hitting with the bullet, the sheer pressure of the steam alone would disintegrate just about anything in front of the barrel, stone walls, living flesh, or brass mechanoids.

Coming around the corner, the hallway opened into a round room, and the hallway continued on the other side. This room, though small, was pleasant and there were benches. Rainbow stepped away from the group, gasping, her mouth falling open, and everypony turned to see what she was looking at.

“That’s the Tree of Harmony!” Rainbow squealed as she went to Tarnish’s side, grabbed his foreleg, and hung on for dear life. “I’ve seen it! That’s the tree! You gotta believe me!”

Staring at the wall, Tarnish believed her. Above the tree was a star, a terrible star, and Tarnish knew what it was. The Black Star. It blazed down from the heavens, and the Tree of Harmony rose up in what could only be described as bold defiance. After a moment, Rainbow let go of his leg, then crept over to have a better look.

“That’s my cutie mark!” Rainbow shouted, her voice echoing, and she had forgotten about the danger of this place. Then, her eyes narrowed, and confusion spread across her face like curtains moving across a window. “Hey, that’s Spitfire’s cutie mark… I know that mark, that is most definitely Spitfire’s. There are a whole bunch of cutie marks in my fork of the tree.”

“And there is Twilight’s mark,” Tarnish said as he stood beside Rainbow. “I feel really weird, lightheaded. The smell of this place is getting to me. Is that Twilight’s mother’s cutie mark? I think it is.”

“Yeah, and it is right on Twilight’s fork of the tree.” Rainbow Dash peered up at the fork of the tree where the Element of Magic could be found, and her face wrinkled in concentration. “These are all possibilities, aren’t they?”

Tarnish shrugged. Perhaps these were all of the available, living possibilities.

Daring Do now stood beside Tarnish, and she blinked a few times, as if she was having a hard time getting her eyes to focus. “Hey, Mister Teapot, that’s your cutie mark.” She pointed with her hoof.

With a turn of his head, Tarnish followed where Daring was pointing, and he found his poison joke cutie mark near three pink butterflies, three very familiar pink butterflies. He blinked, his vision blurred over, he was confused, not sure what to think of this, and amid the cluster of cutie marks on this fork of the tree, Tarnish saw a yellow rubber duckie. What a ridiculous cutie mark that would be.

Lips moving, muttering silent profanities, Vinyl fumbled with her camera, which didn’t seem to want to work.

“Right there, next to Rarity’s cutie mark, those three blue diamonds, I know that cutie mark.” Rainbow pointed up with her wing and extended primaries. “That is the cutie mark of Trixie Lulamoon!”

So it was. Tarnish could feel a pressure building in his head, it was like a strap had been secured around his skull, tightened, and then there was throbbing everywhere the band had placed pressure. Beside him, Rainbow Dash was prancing in one place on her hooves, her eyes darting from place to place as the little pegasus mare drank in every detail that could be found.

“There’s a lotta apple cutie marks in the Element of Honesty fork of the tree,” Rainbow Dash said to her companions, unable to contain her excitement. “Wait… is that what I think it is?”

With a terrible pressure building up behind his eyeballs, Tarnish turned to see what Rainbow was staring in shock at. The pain inside of his head intensified, it felt as though his head was full of beating, throbbing hearts, and then he saw it. Right there, right next to a cutie mark he knew all too well, three party balloons, he saw it. He saw it and it made his knees knock together.

Maud’s cutie mark.

With this realisation, the pressure inside of Tarnish’s head hit a breaking point, and he felt something wet come gushing out of his nose. On the left side of his face, his eyelids went limp, and he felt his cheek sagging. He would have dropped his weapon and shield, had Vinyl not grabbed them. He felt his legs buckling, everything went blurry, and the last thing he heard was the shouting of his companions as the blackness overtook him.

Vinyl’s eyes looked worried. Tarnish gazed up into them, his vision going in and out of focus, and he could feel his face being slapped. There was a heaviness in his body, but he could move, and his head was thudding. He remembered seeing the Tree of Harmony, but not much else.

“You started recovering within moments of getting you away from that picture of the Tree of Harmony,” Daring Do said to Tarnish as she too, looked down at him from above. “I don’t think it agrees with you. Or us, for that matter. My eyes kept getting blurry.”

“I can’t remember what I was looking at,” Rainbow said to nopony in particular. “I know I was looking at something, but the details, they’re just… gone. My head feels swimmy.” After a moment, Rainbow had a question she had to ask. “Hey, why was Tarnish so affected, but we’re not?”

“I don’t know, Rainbow.” Daring Do, worried, let out a snort, and looked her fellow pegasus in the eye. “I can’t seem to remember anything either, and it is very, very frustrating. I just remember there were a lot of cutie marks.”

Tarnish, grunting, rolled over, his long legs kicking, and he felt Vinyl lifting him up. He rose, wobbled a bit, and then he had his legs beneath him. Flexing his knees a bit, he gave himself a shake, snorted, and he felt Vinyl strapping his gear onto him. Whatever had happened, he felt fine now, even though he still smelled blood in his nose.

“Can you keep going?” Daring Do asked.

“Yep.” Tarnish flexed his knees again, and everything moved like it was supposed to. “I feel fine. Let’s get moving.” Reaching out with his magic, he took up his shield and the Bellringer once more. His magic felt a little shaky, his horn ached, and there was still some pressure just behind his eyes, but it felt as though it was easing off. He was fine enough to keep moving, and he wasn’t in the mood to worry.

And with that, the companions were off again.

Nothing had been down this way for a long, long time. The dust was thick here, and Tarnish couldn’t tell if the stench had eased off or if his nose had just died at some point. There were some living quarters here, it was obvious what they were, small rooms with a carved stone shelf that was just the right size for a mattress, and a stone table that jutted from the wall.

Tarnish suspected that these rooms had not been carved from the stone, but shaped. Everything was too smooth, too perfect. There were gathering rooms, studies, offices, and what appeared to be laboratories. Looking at the beds when he saw them, Tarnish was made to wonder, how did centaurs sleep in a bed? Their bodies had a hinge in a weird place and they had two rib cages.

“You know, we could probably get away with sleeping here, in this wing,” Rainbow Dash said to the others while they made their way down the hall together. “Look at this dust. The cobwebs. Nothing has been here for a long time. Not even the automatons.”

“That’s dangerous, Dash.” Daring Do’s face contorted, but she did not dismiss Rainbow’s suggestion.

“Danger is my middle name.” Rainbow grinned, a reckless lopsided grin, and she clucked her cheek at Daring. “We’re armed with a fronking portable cannon and Vinyl has that weird coil gun that uses magnetism. We have Flamingo. I think we’d actually have an advantage here, if we had to fight, because look at these doors, they’re metal and they’re like three inches thick.”

“These ley lines are going to mess with our heads though, and make us act funny.” Tarnish came to a halt, his ears straining to listen, and he looked down at Rainbow. “Even if we’re not standing right on top of them at the moment, they’ll mess with us. Make us edgy. Aggressive.”

“Yeah, but I also feel super-strong right now, like I could fight anything—”

“Rainbow, that’s the point,” Tarnish snapped. “These fake ley lines, they flood you with weird, wonky magic. They make you stronger, more magical, they amplify everything about you, but they also screw up your thinking.”

“Okay, you’re right. I guess I’m feeling a bit more confident than usual.” Rainbow’s muzzle wrinkled and her eyelids closed halfway. “I’m also sporting a monster filly boner right now, and I feel kinda angry that somepony might notice.”

“Rainbow, your head is already messed up.” With a shake of his head, Tarnish smiled, and some of the tension eased. “I don’t fully understand how these fake ley lines work, but the magic manages to bypass my own magic just a little bit.”

“Plus that weird Tree of Harmony painting that nopony can seem to remember the details of,” Daring Do added.

Nodding her head, Vinyl joined the conversation.

With all of the strangeness of Skyreach fresh in Tarnish’s mind, he began to rethink his question, What is Skyreach? Now, after all the weirdness endured so far, the question had evolved into something else entirely. What had been done here, at Skyreach? Perhaps just being here was an answer, or maybe, possibly, he and his companions would become part of the question.

A question that others might ask. What happened to Daring Do and her cohorts at Skyreach? With a slow blink of his eyes, Tarnish felt a little pressure returning just behind his eyes. It was faint, but noticeable, like a sinus-ache but worse. Now, there was a new question. What was Skyreach doing to him?

Saying nothing, Tarnish began to wander away from his companions, drawn in an unexplored direction, his eyes wide and dull. He could feel a tug, it was like an invisible cable had been connected to his horn, and he had to go. In movement, the pain inside of his head eased off a little, and he was thankful for the sweet, blessed relief.

“Tarnish, what are you doing?” Daring demanded.

“I gotta go,” Tarnish replied in a slow, syrupy voice. “I have to find a question. Or maybe an answer. I feel weird—”

“Mister Teapot, I demand that you cease feeling weird at once, this instant!” Darning Do drew up along Tarnish’s side, but he didn’t stop. She made a gesture, and the others followed her while Tarnish stumbled ahead like a zombie.

“It’s weird,” Tarnish murmured, “it’s like watching a baby spider make a little string of webbing, and the wind catches it, and the little spider goes flying away, caught up in the wind… caught up in destiny. Whichever way the wind takes you. I go. You go. We go.” Tarnish paused, peering ahead, and right in front of him, he saw the smiling face of Director Solis, who had just appeared out of nowhere. Tarnish felt no particular need to feel panicked about it.

To his companions, he asked, “Do you see that?”

“See what, Tarnish?” Rainbow replied, looking worried.

“Nothing.” Picking up speed, Tarnish moved forwards down the hallway. Director Solis didn’t walk so much as she floated down the hall, her legs didn’t move, she just sort of drifted, like a cloud blown on the wind. Great. Now he was following ghosts while feeling absolutely apathetic about it. Was a perfect state of calm indistinguishable from apathy?

“Tarnish, you’re scaring me.” Daring Do looked up into the face of her tall companion, trying to read his blank expression, but there was nothing, nothing at all save the fact that he looked a little sleepy.

“What is Skyreach?” Tarnish murmured to himself as his broad hooves clopped on the stone floor and his long, easy gait propelled him forwards. “It is a place where no earth pony should ever come. This place was taught to hate me, to hate my offspring—”

“Tarnish, if you don’t stop being weird, I’m going to have to brain you and put you down!” Daring Do shouted, her voice echoing down the narrow hallway.

“Hatred was brought here, to this place of love,” Tarnish continued, oblivious to Daring Do’s threats. “I’m a little Teapot, tall and thin… here’s where I stop and here’s where I begin… we must keep going, always going, never slowing.”

Daring started to say something, but Vinyl gave a sharp yank to her tail. Yelping instead, Daring looked back at Vinyl, and saw that she was shaking her head. Against her wishes, Daring Do went silent, and she followed Tarnish as he continued down the hallway, leading them on to wherever it might be that they were going.

“What’s going on?” Rainbow’s voice was a scratchy whine.

“Hatred came here, long after this place was forgotten.” Tarnish shook his head, his lips and ears flapping, and then he blinked a few times. “Love was the great defense. Harmony. Unity. They were counting on us staying together. Depending on it.” Ahead of him, Director Solis beckoned him on, waving her finger at him with a come-hither gesture, and when he saw into her eyes, a thousand thoughts flooded his head.

“We sought to weaponise hatred,” Tarnish said, his voice changing entirely from his own. There was an uncomfortable itch within his horn that lasted for a few seconds, but then he felt better, and he continued, “We were going to turn our enemies’ hatred against them with a powerful, unimaginable weapon of immense destructive ability. A weapon so terrible that there would be no choice but to turn away from the path of war. Immediate surrender and a cessation of violence was the only option to disarm the weapon. A weapon fueled by hatred, indifference, and violence. It was perfect, so perfect… a society of sufficient harmony would be immune to the weapon, but its aggressors would not. It was such a perfect plan.”

“Tarnish, you’re not making sense,” Daring Do said to her dazed companion while he stumbled forwards.

“We sought to protect our beautiful, perfect children, all of them, from the industrious, happy go lucky little ponies to the noble guardians, the diamond dogs. A world with perfect peace, a world where evil could hold no sway.” Tarnish’s voice was deep now, commanding, it boomed from his lips and made the metal doors on each side of the hallway rattle. “A world where evil would succumb to the iciness it left upon the hearts of those who would chose to embrace it.”

Tarnish came to a stop, the hallway ended with a bright orange centaur steel door, and he watched Director Solis step through the impenetrable barrier. Still filled with a commanding spirit, he looked down at his baffled companions, and in a big booming voice, had one final thing to say.

Wᴇ ᴡᴇʀᴇ ᴡʀᴏɴɢ. Sᴇᴛ ʀɪɢʜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡʀᴏɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴡᴇ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴄʀᴇᴀᴛᴇᴅ ɪɴ ᴏᴜʀ ʜᴜʙʀɪs, ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ᴘᴏɴɪᴇs.

Author's Notes:

Just take a moment to think; one of the potential Elements of Kindness went and smashed the fingers of an elder jungle god beneath the lid of a piano.