Hayden could feel her world crumbling around her. Victory had been almost inside their grasp, and now she could feel it slipping away.

“Can we stop the ritual?” she asked, painfully conscious of the war drums echoing from all sides now. Even from the north, though she couldn’t be sure how the griffons might’ve got themselves around that far. “I’d like to get my bats on their hooves again. We can’t have most of our soldiers unconscious.”

Avalon shook his head, not even looking up from his screens. “Not possible, Hayden. The one time I removed someone before they had been fully purified… the consequences were disastrous. The infection had been drawn out from their soul into their tissues… the patient did not survive.” From the look on his face, Hayden imagined something truly terrible as he said it. Then she imagined every bat in her city dying horrifically, except for a few.

“Then we have to go out,” Honed Edge said, his voice somewhat timid to be making suggestions around the princess. “We don’t have a choice. We have to keep fighting until this is finished.”

“Could we use another shield?” Hayden asked, probably the only pony in the room brave enough to question the princess now that Nightbreeze was unconscious. “We wouldn’t need a whole night this time, Princess.”

Luna shook her head, pointing at the lines of light out the window. “One of those goes straight up into the sky. To where the Outsiders will be imprisoned. If I cannot seal the area, a shield will not remain stable. So it would require all of my power, without protecting us for more than a few seconds. A terrible waste.”

“I have another idea,” Hayden said. “There’s our final contingency. The weather team. I’ve been holding them in reserve this whole time because of what might happen to the city. But it looks like the city’s lost anyway.”

“Yes,” Luna snapped. “Do it. And those of us with the ability to fight will go out and help protect these six points.”

“Edge,” Hayden said, voice squeaking briefly in her emotion. “Get to the weather factory, and help keep those ponies safe while they make it happen. Memorize this map—made sure they avoid these six spots. The rest of the city…” She shrugged her shoulders. The message was clear enough.

“But I—” He stopped, whatever his objection might’ve been strangled. He straightened again, then saluted. “Aye, ma’am. It was a pleasure… Princess.” He galloped out the door before she could see his face.

The war drums outside were beating louder. In the gloom of twilight, Hayden could see the ships getting closer now. Cannonfire brought down a few of the lead ships, as it always did. But there were so many, and plenty of these were little more than floating hulks. It looked like the griffons had learned to keep their least valuable targets in front, shielding the rear lines from their barrage.

That wouldn’t have worked with computer-guided weapons, but since Hayden’s ponies had to do the calculations themselves using tables…

“Now, there are six points we must defend,” Luna went on, her voice speeding up. “Each has a fighting strength of fifty ponies and twenty-five reserves. Given the numbers outside…” She shook her head. “Well, these two are the worst defended.” She pointed at their own tower, then out at the city. “We have no cannons, even if we are at the exact center of the ritual. But if the Stonebeaks hadn’t realized before where the orders were coming from, they will now. But this position here… this is sandbags and rubble on the street. All these others had existing fortifications to use.”

Princess Luna lifted her sword from its sheath, and held it out in the air for Hayden. “You must wield Achelois and defend this tower. I will use my magic and protect that position.” She looked around the room. “If any other ponies of fighting strength are discovered, or the bats recover themselves, send them out to reinforce all the other positions first.”

She raised her voice. “I can hear the war-songs of the Solar fleet. We will still be here when they arrive.”

And so that was where they went. Hayden had just enough time to return to her torn-up armor and reload her rifle before the Stonebeak ships reached the outer line. They passed straight through Avalon’s cage of light, as unaffected by it as the other ponies had been. Too bad. That would’ve been a convenient way to end this whole thing.

Hayden stood atop the tower, surrounded by some of the youngest recruits to her army she’d seen in active duty. Terrified faces stared out from behind too-big helmets as more experienced soldiers fought for their lives just a little further out.

“Equestria is coming for us, right?” asked a voice from behind her. She didn’t turn to look, but wasn’t that surprised to hear it was a mare. Plenty of them had joined near the end, but hadn’t completely finished their training. From the look of the soldiers up here, plenty of that training had been rushed.

In the center of the tower, Avalon had erected something like a massive satellite dish, worked of dark metal and surrounded by thick bundles of wire. Energy arced between them occasionally, then back up to the shaft of light that soared up into the sky. The ponies kept well away from the cables, walking over them only with the aid of wooden bridges. No one had told Hayden what would happen if she touched them, and none of them needed to.

“Equestria is coming,” Hayden said, spinning around to look at the young unicorn. The pony had her own arquebus resting over her shoulder—now that most of her army had been crippled, there were plenty of weapons to go around. “They’re close. We only have to hold out a little longer, and our families will be safe.”

The young soldiers flocked closer to her like moths in the dark might cluster to a flame. They didn’t really bother taking cover behind the battlements, even as the enemy ships drew closer.

Hayden couldn’t have that. She wasn’t just here to keep this part of the ritual going, or even to protect the ponies in the tower. She had to keep her soldiers alive too. “I don’t know how many unicorns we have,” she said. “Let me hear a count, we’ll go around starting from me.” There were eleven, as it happened. Unicorns must’ve been spread pretty thin, since their magic let them fire a weapon without the help of another soldier.

“Well, you eleven. Hand off your rifles to the reserve for this first attack. I count… three ships headed towards us. That big one in front, that’s a bomber. They’re going to drop barrels of boiling oil on us. Let’s rearrange… I want you ponies spread out…” They did, and she split their attention so that they could be focusing on individual sections of the room at a time. “Now, get ready to push it away. Not up, that would be too hard. Just push sideways on any barrel falling towards your half, so it doesn’t hit the floor we’re standing on. If they burn us all to death, this won’t be a very long fight.”

The steady beat of friendly war-drums became a distant, unsteady cadence. The ponies who would’ve been keeping them steady were fighting now. Most of the cannons had stopped firing too, or at least weren’t shooting regularly. The enemy was upon them. Hayden heard many shots from many rifles, the flashes of magic, but she forced herself to tune all of that out. She couldn’t defend the other six points, she could only protect the one.

And so they fought. The griffons held back on sending soldiers during their initial attack, preferring to land them on the ground outside the keep and assault the fortifications that way while the towers were bombed from the sky.

But the keep was solid stone, and not very flammable. Hayden’s soldiers were, but her unicorns didn’t make a single fatal mistake. A few times barrels struck the edge of the parapets, leaving patches of flaming pitch that made some part of the tower inaccessible, but not even one of her ponies had been burned by them.

Eventually it was too dark, and the griffons gave up on that. Then they came in earnest.

Hayden fired every shot in her advanced rifle, until the plastic case had started to glow and distort with the heat of it. When she had killed dozens of them that way, she was forced to resort to the sword.

She kept her own ponies in a circle, always firing outward so they wouldn’t shoot each other by mistake. While less experienced ponies protected the lines from the side, she covered the air.

Hayden had seen historical accounts of battles like this before. She found herself thinking back to the ancient colonial conflicts, when a small number of British regulars and South Africans had held off thousands of Zulu warriors. But for that fight, none of the British troops had been able to fly with a magic sword.

They fought for hours. There was some respite—unlike the other points, they could get fresh supplies from the keep, which had enough powder to survive a siege, as well as send their wounded below instead of leaving them on the killing field.

There were so many corpses that Hayden had to order them pushed over the parapets, and pour sand onto the stone to keep them from losing their footing in the blood.

She was only distantly conscious of the raging storm that swept across the Stonebeak fleet, her so-called final contingency. Only once was there enough of a break in the fighting for her to try and get a good look at it.

By the time the last of the ships had given up, Hayden’s troops had dwindled to less than half of what they’d been before. Most were only injured, but plenty more had been killed, and lay respectfully covered by one side instead of shoved into the night.

Hayden finally dared to let herself look up and survey the city.

At first, she couldn’t even see the Grand Fleet. In the far distance the storm still raged across the city, carrying the still-burning wreckage of ships and buildings. The fleet was back there somewhere, matched against a fleet of white and gold ships with sun banners.

The Equestrian fleet no longer looked outnumbered, either. But still the griffons fought. Hayden looked closer to home.

The light was still there, though something had changed about it. There was something in the air above the city now, something so large and dark that it nearly took up the entire sky. A part of her wondered if it was the real reason that the griffons had fled, and not their last-resort storm.

It looked a little like a bat pony, if a bat pony had wings a mile wide and a body like a deep blue starfield swirling with purple nebulae and eyes like black holes. Its size made its movements look like they were in slow-motion, battering up against the cage as it closed in around it.

Then she saw something else. The part of the diagram behind the tower still had two griffon ships hovering above. And it looked like they had taken most of the ground too.

Oh god.

Hayden rose up into the air, lifting Achelois as she did so. “Azure, you’re in charge!” she said. “Looks like we’re done here. Just stay alive!”

And she flew, into a dive that brought her in as narrow as she possibly could. But Hayden wasn’t flying fast anymore, and she didn’t have much strength left. She’d given just about everything she had defending Icefalls. There was so little left.

She landed beside Princess Luna. The princess had several griffon swords and bludgeons in the air beside her, though she held them with a droop. There wasn’t a single pony alive on the ground around them, at least not any that weren’t running away into the city in terror.

Birds were pounding at the equipment with their clubs. The little metal box already had half a dozen holes from crossbows, though it didn’t seem to mind those. How much more can it take?

They didn’t say a word, fighting their way through at least a dozen of the enemy. Hayden fought with everything she had, yet she felt like a child compared to the one beside her. Luna’s tools were primitive and broken but she could still use them to catch crossbow bolts and bludgeon enemies coming at her from behind.

Then a bird thought to tear the cables. Hayden heard them come undone with a terrible crack of lightning, and one of the six little beams of light went out.

Slowly, at least from Hayden’s point of view, the Outsider noticed. It spread its wings wide, and tore through the opening in the broken spell.