Somewhat disgusted, but thoroughly impressed, Vinyl Scratch remembered the words of Helianthus. Tarnish’s magic and null-magic came from the same source. Just as she had predicted, the Hurry-Flurry spell had persisted, allowing Tarnish to make short work of the null-spiders. This was the sort of win that he needed, the overwhelming beatdown that Tarnish required to nurse his fragile ego made of glass. She watched as he moved among the writhing, wriggling masses and put anything still twitching out of its misery.

Tarnish had passed through the doorway and into the chamber of petrified nullwood with no ill-effects. Vinyl’s thoughts darkened, as the memory of the Crown of Corruption was a bleak time. She had become the Herald of Selene, Tarnish the Heliophant, and the four of them were drawn together in some weird way that she still did not fully understand. Weird magic was at work, magic that was far too mysterious in origin to comprehend.

“Tarnish… are you okay?” asked Daring Do.

“I feel great,” he replied, “like I could take on hundreds of spiders. There’s some pep in my step. Must've slept well.”

“Well, you certainly gave those horrors what for.” Daring’s lip curled back in disgust and her nostrils flared wide as she shook her head from side to side. “Did you… did you get it in your mouth?”

“Yeah.” Tarnished heaved out the word as if he was sighing, as if saying so took some great act of physical exertion. The wrench came down upon a legless sword spider, smashing it flat, and he turned to look at them as entrails went spraying in all directions. “I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel clean again. It’s not just slimey, it’s also a bit gritty, as if the goo was full of sand.”

Rainbow Dash made an odd ‘glurk’ sound deep within her throat and then looked away.

“What a mess.” Flamingo flew over and swooped around Tarnish’s head, bathing the ghastly scene in a cheerful pink light that somehow made the sight of it even worse.

With each step, Tarnish’s hooves made wet, squelchy noises, and moist crunches could be heard. As another legless sword spider was smooshed, Tarnish almost lost his balance, slipped, and fell. Vinyl had a rather morbid thought, and that was that if he did fall, it couldn’t be made worse. He was already covered from hoof to ear in spider viscera.

“I think… I think I need a hug,” he said as he shook stringy ribbons of spider entrails from his wrench.

Rainbow’s ears pinned back, and both she and Daring Do grimaced in disgust together, at the same time. Both mares shook their heads and Vinyl couldn’t help herself; as bleak as everything was, she smiled. Tarnish knew exactly what he was doing—this was his way of letting them know that he had held on to himself through the conflict. He had himself a bit of black humour about him; Maud treasured it, she even contributed; it gave Octavia something to complain about; and as for Vinyl, it was the perfect way to make a bad situation better.

“Really, I’m having a bad day… I think I need a hug.”

“You need quarantine, followed by a thorough scrubbing,” deadpanned Daring Do. “Stay back, I’m warning you. I’m not messing around.”

“What do we do?” Cringing mightily, Rainbow Dash retreated behind Daring Do and kept one wary eye on Tarnish. “It feels wrong to keep going down the tunnel with Tarnish like this. I want out of these tunnels. I want out of this place. I want to fly again.”

“I think Rainbow needs a hug—”

“Maybe I do, but not from you, Big Guy. Sorry.”

It was then that Tarnish slipped in a puddle of spider guts—he ran in place for what felt like a full second or so first, his hooves finding no traction—and he tumbled to the floor with a spine-shuddering splash. To his credit, both his wrench and his shield remained aloft, his concentration remained unbroken.

Vinyl was impressed with how far he’d come.

Tarnish squinted as he stepped out of the metro station and into the bright, artificial sunlight. Try as he might, he could not recall a memory of this place and everything beyond the metro station doorway was unknown. As his vision adjusted, he saw a dump, a festering trash heap of ruination that was nothing like the residential sector they had departed from.

Twisted, knobby, gnarled trees could be seen. They looked like monstrous skeletal hands reaching out from a grave. A ruined, collapsed building was just a few yards away. The road was all shattered, busted, and parts of it were rippled, as if it had melted and then become solid again. He spotted more fallen buildings, some of them quite large, none of which had survived.

The trees were the only survivors, but they had been twisted, mutated beyond recognition.

Daring Do went left, Rainbow Dash went right, and Vinyl stayed just behind him. Tarnish’s senses strained, trying to see, hear, and smell danger. It smelled awful here, and the stench was such that it could be smelt over the funk of spider goo. Behind him, the outer wall and doorway of the metro station was barely even standing.

Then, without sense or reason, Tarnish knew where they were. The knowledge trickled into his conscious thoughts a little at a time, and he had the weird sense that he had been here before, that he had stood in this spot at a time when everything was new, was beautiful. He had stood here before the cataclysm, before the collapse of harmony. Somehow, Tarnish had stood in this very spot and passed through this very doorway back when everything was perfect.

“This is Pearwood Station,” he said to his companions.

“Sounds like a lovely suburb,” was Daring Do’s coldly sarcastic response. “Just the sort of place to move to and raise a family.”

“This is an oxygenation station.” His eyes narrowed as his head swung from left to right. “The trees were modified and specialised to work as air filtration. This is one of the many places where oxygen comes from. But the trees are sick now. Skyreach’s lungs have grown cancerous.” Shaking his head, he sighed. “There’s a residential complex and an artisanal complex here.

Other thoughts and memories came bubbling up to the surface, and he murmured them aloud as they happened. “Generational ships… vast… airships that traveled through the vacuum beyond the sky. Ships made of hollowed-out planets, whose passengers were not aware that they were spacefarers. The illusion of life as it once was to sustain them as the planet was towed to a new sun… a new star… so that life could start anew. The trees were leftovers from a time almost forgotten, and the centaurs had to reverse engineer them so they could understand them. They then worked to make them better. To make improvements upon the original design.”

“Tarnish… what are you talking about?” asked Daring Do.

“I… I’m sorry, I don’t know.” He blinked and gave himself a cautious shake to clear his head.

What happened next happened so fast that Tarnish couldn’t keep up with it. Something dropped down from up above and moved with such alacrity that he couldn’t possibly react in time. Rainbow Dash moved like a blur—she really did move at super-equine speeds that seemed impossible—and everything that followed happened so quickly that his eyes couldn’t register it, but his ears did.

Standing bipedal, Rainbow Dash kicked out one hind leg three times, each time moving faster than the eye could follow. It collided with something hulking and greyish-brown. The sound of bones shattering could be heard, each of them overlapping with one another. Then, still moving faster than the equine eye could register, Rainbow twisted off a devastating roundhouse kick. There was a thunderous crack—one wondered if Rainbow Dash’s hoof broke the sound barrier—followed by a violent eruption of meat, brain, bone, and eyeballs.

Avoiding the fine mist of gore, Rainbow cartwheeled out of the way and came to rest on all fours. She wasn’t even breathing hard; in fact, this appeared as though it hadn’t been taxing at all. The rainbow-maned pegasus was completely unruffled as the roamer’s body crumpled to the floor. Tarnish, frozen this whole time, stood slack-jawed, wide-eyed with shock, surprise, and was absolutely horrified as the bright scarlet mist washed over him.

A sizeable chunk of roamer jawbone struck Tarnish on the chin and snapped him from his daze.

“What the fuck?” he managed to say as fresh blood congealed with spider goo all over his face.

“I feel that is justified in this situation.” Daring Do, looking somewhat ruffled, took a moment to collect herself. “That bright red and glistening grey looks rather garish. We really need to get Mister Teapot cleaned up, or I fear I shall be sick.”

“What the fuck just happened?” he said again, repeating himself.

“Roamer ambush.” Rainbow Dash reached out her right front hoof and pointed at the twitching, convulsing, headless corpse. “I heard a sound like suction cups being pulled from glass and there it was, getting the drop on Tarnish.”

“It’s in my mouth.” Tarnish spat out gobbets of coppery, acrid blood. “Everything keeps going into my mouth. Ugh!”

Then, almost in unison, each of the companions looked up to see if anything was looking down at them. Tarnish, whose eyes were burning from the gross liquids seeping into them, had trouble seeing anything at all, but he trusted in the eyes of his companions. He felt slow now, lethargic, as if he needed a rest. Just a while ago, he felt energised and peppy. He almost wanted to yawn, but held it in.

“Let’s find a place to hole up so Tarnish can conjure up the water he needs to get clean. If, if he can get clean, that is.” Daring Do gestured at Rainbow Dash. “You, up front. I’ll bring up the rear. Let’s move.”

As luck would have it, they found a decorative lobby of some kind in a mostly ruined building. Being a decorative lobby, there was the remains of a fountain. The upper parts were destroyed and scattered all over the floor, but the lowest part, the basin, was still mostly intact—and bone dry. But not for long. Tarnish was quite capable of summoning a tremendous amount of water, provided that there was a source he could tap into.

Vinyl’s hooves clicked on the cracked, ruined tile floor as she investigated what might have once been a desk, or some kind of reception area, perhaps. Most of it was gone, smashed into rubble, and very little of it remained standing, only a narrow section of marble countertop. She stopped, staring, and a second later, she held part of an equine skull aloft.

When the mute mare picked up a crystalline rod that had a faint blue glow, a voice from the past could be heard by all.

“—Bugbear and the others got sucked through the portal and into the world of the naked, hairless apes. I told them not to mess with the Director. I told them! Now there’s a whole lot less of us to deal with Spear Breaker’s chosen favoured and those mad unicorns. Coming here was a mistake. I wish I had flown south with my sister and her flock. Becoming a soldier was a mistake. Spear Breaker has doomed us all. Now I’m spending the last moments of my life talking to a glowy crystal. Nothing makes sense anymore. Bugbear was my brother-in-arms, and I shall miss him, stupid churl though he was. I wish—”

The crystal crumbled, as they tended to do, and whatever message was left unsaid would remain unheard. Tarnish, solemn, understood the sense of regret in the message. What might have been, what could have been, these were the sorts of things one thought about when all alone in times of trouble.

“The pegasi turned on one another.” Rainbow’s ears fell even as she spoke and her eyes turned sad. She shuffled in place, her expression angry, but the sadness in her eyes was all that Tarnish could see. “We have a bad history of doing that. Turning on one another. The bloodiest wars in history have been pegasus ponies fighting one another.”

“Buck up, Rainbow—”

“No.” Snorting, Rainbow tossed her head around and stomped her hoof. “We’re our own worst enemy. I can’t stand it. Everything is getting to me. Twilight. The trip through the tunnel. Being stuck here. That roamer. Hearing that.” She pointed in Vinyl’s direction. “This whole place… Skyreach… what did we pegasus ponies do to the world?”

“Rainbow, pegasus ponies didn’t build Skyreach—”

“Daring, that doesn’t matter. We came here and disturbed something we shouldn’t have.” Dejected, Rainbow sat down and in doing so, caused a huge cloud of dust to rise around her. “I’m the Element of Loyalty and a pegasus pony. A pony of the Pegasus Tribe. And here I am, facing off against the ghosts of our past. It feels like I’m being made to answer for all the horrible things we’ve done, and it doesn’t feel very fair.”

Daring Do, her face contorted in pain, went over and sat down beside Rainbow. She stuck out her right wing, wrapped it around the blue pegasus, and then leaned up against her. “I want to say I understand, but I’m not sure that I do. Being the Element of Loyalty must be tough.”

Rainbow Dash, observant even in her state of distress, pointed at Tarnish and said, “Your gemstone is turning dark. Drink some tea, Big Guy.”

Author's Notes:

- No hugs!