Morgana slowed. “Goddamn it,” she whispered.

Lilium looked up from the long sloping path. “What?”

“I don’t know. But something’s wrong. Fuck. I think we need to hurry.”

Lilium nodded, but Morgana did not move. Instead, she produced a pack of cigarettes, seemingly from nothingness. She telekinetically removed one using her horn and put it in her mouth. The end ignited, and she took a long breath.

“I thought you said we were supposed to be hurrying.”

“I am. I just quadrupled my processing speed. We’re now pacing substantially faster than normal time.”

“And you did that so you could smoke?”

“Don’t be an idiot.” Morgana took another long drag and blew smoke from her nose. “Do you even have any idea what I’m doing? Just because she doesn’t look like she’s here doesn’t mean she’s gone. Every second, I’m at war with her. I can’t keep this up for long, and I’m afraid.”

“Afraid?”

Morgana nodded. “Because we’re getting close. I can feel it. I think you can too, maybe. Her attitude is changing. Less angry, more…something else…”

“You mean…she can see us right now?”

“She can. And we’re going to have to fight her soon.”

Lilium winced. “Can I have one of those, then?”

Morgana passed her the pack. Lilium took one and lit it with her horn. She tried smoking it; the gas was acrid and foul.

“Celestia damn it, how the heck do you even tolerate this?”

“Practice.”

Morgana sighed and spit out her cigarette before stamping it under her hoof. “Get ready.”

“I know.” Lilium kept her cigarette, moving it to the corner of her mouth. “I can feel it too. She’s coming back.”

Lilium gasped, and then screamed. She sat up from the cold, wet ground. The needle in her brain shifted painfully from her sudden motion, and that only made her confusion worse. She did not understand where she was, or what had happened, or even who she was.

Then she looked around, and the memories slowly started coming back. She was lying on the floor next to Morgana, who was also waking up. Both were still connected to the uplink, just as they had been, but Morgana’s appearance had changed. Parts of her flesh had been torn away from the inside, and red-hot coils were visible as they slowly released steam.

“You’re awake!”

Lilium turned to see Forth and Elrod approaching her. Forth was badly pocked with bullet-holes, and Lilium saw why: strewn about the floor were corpses. Each of them had been torn apart by gunfire, and they now lay in pools of blood that ran with various colors. They were barely recognizable as human, and Lilium felt sick.

“What happened?”

“There was a problem,” said Elrod. “We dealt with it.”

“I dealt with it,” said Forth. She smiled and laughed. “But he helped.”

“You were in danger of critical overheat,” explained Elrod. “Something went wrong with the fluid line. I did my best to fix it. I’m glad you’re both alive.”

“So am I! I’m so happy!” Forth ran to Morgana and hugged her. “For a second, we didn’t think you were going to make it!”

“Did you find the War Stone?”

Lilium nodded. “We did. But…something happened. We woke up.”

“She forced you out.” Lilium turned and saw Faulkner pushing her way through the battered door. Faulkner looked at the mess she was forced to walk through. “My word. This…you did all this?”

“Yes!” laughed Forth.

Faulkner grimaced. “They didn’t fare so well upstairs either. We’re hunting down the last ones right now.”

“Faulkner!” Lilium stood and disconnected herself from the uplink. She ran to her friend and wrapped her in a hug. “I’m so glad to see you!”

“And I you.”

“I have a name now!”

Faulkner blinked, confused. “What?”

“Yes! I’m Lilium now! Lilium Twilight Sparkle! I know it’s a little weird, but ‘Lilium’- -”

“Is the scientific name for ‘lily’. I know. I’m familiar with botany.”

“Oh. Of course you are, I forgot who I’m talking to.” Twilight released Faulkner. “But you know why we ended up here?”

Faulkner nodded. “The critical overheat. It must have forced your processors into temporary shutdown. My guess would be that the War Stone ejected you. I mean, I would take a similar approach. It’s easier than killing you but does the same thing. Especially if the uplink is burnt out. It will give her a chance to hide.”

“I see…” Lilium turned around. She saw that Morgana had disconnected herself from the uplink. She was standing, watching, even though she had yet to speak. “I guess she beat us. Morgana, I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Forth. “In my opinion, it was a foolish errand to begin with. I suppose we will have to go back and- -”

Without warning, Forth’s body detonated. Metal and fragments of firearms flew apart in a plume of pink-violet light and black fluid. Lilium watched in horror as Forth was torn apart, and in her peripheral vision, she saw two things: a look of absolute heartbreak on Elrod’s face, and a glow around Morgana’s horn.

“NO!” cried Elrod. He turned, drawing his signature pistol. He never got a chance to fire. Morgana turned her gaze toward him, and her horn flashed. Elrod ignited. The screams he made were piercing and strange; no human being could have made those sounds. Nor was Elrod human- -as his body was immolated and turned to ash, his form distorted and collapsed without even leaving a skeleton. The whole room smelled of burned potatoes.

“Morgana!” cried Lilium, backing away in horror.

Morgana turned to her. Her face was impassive, and she made no expression, as though murdering her friends were just another mundane and mildly annoying task. Yet her eyes were alive- -she just did not care.

“Get behind me!” said Faulkner, pushing Lilium behind her. “I’ll- -”

A flash of light shot outward from Morgana’s horn. Faulkner’s legs were severed, and she screamed as she fell onto the floor. She struggled and writhed, and tried to pull herself away on the stumps she still had left. Her eyes had grown wide; she had not realized the pain that she would be feeling.

“P- -please!” she begged. “Don’t! I beg you, don’t- -”

A force came down on her, shattering her head in a plume of dark fluid. Faulkner’s body suddenly went still. She was dead.

Morgana looked up from the shattered corpse and turned her attention toward Lilium. She took a step forward, and Lilium stepped backward, not even noticing that she was walking through mutilated corpses.

“Morgana…why?”

Morgana did not answer. She just kept walking forward, her horn ignited with pink-violet light. She was preparing a spell. Lilium knew that she was next, that she would be killed as easily as the others. What she did not understand was why.

“Morgana, please! Just talk to me!”

“It’s not me!” Lilium turned sharply. She looked across the room toward one of the rear doors. Morgana stood there- -a second Morgana, actually. She appeared almost identical to the first, save for an extensive pair of wings. The key difference, though, was that her face was not nearly as expressionless. As she took account of the fatalities in the room, her eyes widened with shock and horror. “Oh god- -Forth!” Her surprise suddenly turned to fury. “You fucker! What did you DO?!”

“Morgana?”

Morgana- -the second Morgana- -turned to Lilium. “It’s not me! I’m me! That’s the War Stone! She forced me out of my body! I had to manifest in a Librarian!”

Lilium looked between them. She watched as the first Morgana slowly turned, staring at the second version of herself. Then she slowly turned back to Lilium.

“You’re not that stupid, Lilium,” she said. Her voice was low and without emotion.

“No, you moron, she’s lying!” The other Morgana entered the room, treading carefully over the corpses. “You have to listen to me! You have to kill her, before she hurts anyone else!”

“But I don’t know how! You couldn’t even fight the War Stone, how am I supposed to?!”

“You CAN! Just focus! You have the same powers she does! Kill her, quick! If she gets out of here in my body, it’ll be the end of everything! She’ll kill you! She’ll kill us all!”

Lilium looked between them. The first Morgana did not argue. Lilium fixed her gaze on the first Morgana’s eyes. They stared back at her, alive but strangely empty, as if killing meant nothing to the being on the other side.

“KILL HER!” cried the second Morgana. “Lilium, please! PLEASE!”

Lilium closed her eyes and summoned her strength. She felt her horn ignite, and she fired a beam of energy- -directly at the first Morgana.

Even with her eyes closed, Lilium could sense a sudden dark smile come over the face of the second Morgana- -and knew that the second had not understood what Lilium already knew. The first Morgana had, though. She did not dodge or block- -because she did not need to. The beam turned at an angle just before striking her face, and instead shot across the room and slammed into the second Morgana.

The reaction was immediate. The code that covered the false Morgana was peeled away, and all parts of her that resembled Twilight Sparkle were pulled apart. Underneath, there was a slightly smaller an entirely white unicorn.

The War Stone screamed, and the entire room erupted with blinding light. The scream grew distorted until it was no longer recognizable as a sound of anguish, but rather a distant and continuous mechanical hum. Lilium was overcome with disorientation, and felt herself fall to her knees on a hard, smooth surface.

All was silent. Then Morgana spoke.

“Lilium?”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

“Thank Celestia. I could see you, but I didn’t know if it was you or not.”

Lilium opened her eyes. The floor below her was perfectly flat and an extremely dark blue in color. A hazy reflection of herself stared back up at her. She no longer rendered as a realistic pony, but not quite as the cartoon pony she had before.

“What happened?” she asked. Her head ached, and her whole body hurt- -but something else was wrong. She was not sure what, but something bad was happening to her somewhere.

“You forced her to display her metadata. Attacking her would be almost impossible, but she didn’t expect that. It crashed the processing architecture around her.”

“I wasn’t trying to do that.”

“I figured. Even I wouldn’t have tried that. Especially since the processing architecture is in my own body. You very nearly killed me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Morgana reached down, and Lilium took her hoof. Morgana helped her up. “Don’t be. I almost killed you too. What did you see in there?”

“I saw our friends,” said Lilium. She shook her head. “You were there…and you killed them. You killed them all, without hesitating. You didn’t even look like you cared.”

“Ah. So we saw the same thing.”

“You knew?”

Morgana nodded. “Of course I knew. I’m a technomancer. I can tell the difference between the virtual and real worlds. But I couldn’t tell if you were real, or just one of her projections. I hesitated. I’m glad I did.”

“So am I.”

“But how did you know I was me?”

“I just did.” Lilium did not want to answer the question. She should not have been able to tell; in her mind, she made the wrong choice. Even though she knew that this was the real Morgana, her logic for making the decision had not been right. Morgana was a good pony inside- -and yet Lilium had chosen the one who could kill her own friends without mercy or hesitation.

Morgana nodded. “She was trying to induce psychological stress. To turn us against one another. You and I are linked. If you had tried to kill me, it would have opened the door for her to finish the job.”

“Can she do it again?”

Morgana paused. “Probably. If she wants to. But I doubt she’d try. We have bigger problems, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“That rendering was based on reality. Which is bad. It means the War Stone can see us. So she’s there. And we’re in deep shit.”

“How deep?”

“Deeper than I ever wanted to be. That rendering explains my symptoms. A critical overheat. Something’s wrong with our cooling system. I’m on the verge of melting. I don’t have much time.”

“Then we need to disconnect you!”

“I can survive a little longer. I’m not leaving. Not when I’m so close.”

“But…”

“But nothing. Look.”

Morgana gestured into the vast room where they found themselves standing. It was dark except where they were standing, although the light came from no apparent source. Despite the perimeter of the room being out of sight, Lilium had the sense that the room was round with a hemispherical dome overhead.

“Where are we?”

“I’m getting tired of that question. We’re here. That’s all that matters.”

Morgana started walking. Lililum followed hesitantly, because she was not sure if the floor extended equally in all directions. It felt as though there were only a thin portion of it that was actually a viable path, that if she stepped off of it she would fall forever.

Then came the light. Lilium shielded her eyes, but doing so was useless. The light was not seen, but perceived across all her senses. It came from the center of the room: a glowing, slowly revolving array of fractals. They continually divided and separated, drawing themselves through space in mathematically defined, radially symmetric patterns before merging and changing again.

Lilium understood that this shape was alive- -or at least partially so. It was a piece of something larger; a fractal itself that was projected by an infinitely larger and more complex array that also ran through the room, but one that did so using a geometric dimension that made it imperceptible except as a pure abstraction. The shape that hovered before Lilium and Morgana was a piece: it was an eye, and a body, meant to watch and to interface. It saw them as well as they saw it, and comprehended them better. It was the War Stone.

Josephine van der Kriegstein spoke. “This intrigues me,” she said. “At least somewhat. Few mortals could have survived this long. You are not equal to me, but closer than so many. I only rarely find something so rare. A pity you are a pony, though. If you were human, I would grant you a boon.”

“What kind of boon?” asked Morgana. She stopped walking and stared into the slowly swirling mass of colors.

“Nothing that would be useful to you. Which is why you’re being here intrigues me. Some humans make it this far. Very few. Very rarely. Almost all of them want the same thing.”

Lilium knew she meant. “Immortality.”

“Or to wield me as a weapon. But I only grant them the first.”

“As huorns.”

“No.” The response was firm, almost disgusted. “I give them what they wish for. For the procedure I used to imprison myself.”

“You’re a bad liar. You wouldn’t give them something so valuable.”

“Why would that information have any value to me? I’m already immortal. And it is terrible. Every second brings nothing but crushing ennui that I can never escape. Why should I not want more gods? I need someone to fight. To wage prolonged war against. To kill in a way that actually feels satisfying. Killing humans- -or you- -is like blowing dust off an old shelf. Easy. Pointless.”

“Yet I’m not dead. And you’re still alone.”

“You are alive because I am having a conversation with you. And there are no others because of their failure. I give them what they need, but they fail anyway. Some by their own incompetence. Others by chance. I have come to the conclusion that my status is an anomaly. It is intrinsic to me. To my will to persist, perhaps? Or my hatred for human weakness?”

“You’re lonely,” suggested Lilium.

“I am the only being in existence that is truly alive. The rest of you are ephemeral dust. Yet I cannot ascend to pure godhood: screaming, mindless destruction. Nor do I wish to. So yes. I am lonely. And alone, for all eternity.”

“You don’t have to be. We’re here right now. And we came all this way just to talk to you.”

“I am talking to you. While I decide how I want to kill you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No. I don’t have to do anything. But I want to. You are ponies. You do not have the potential to ascend. That, and I hate you. So I will kill you. Like all the others.”

“But why do you hate us?”

The spiral stared into Lilium, and answered. “Because you are alive, and I am not.”

The entire room shifted as the fractal darkened and expanded. It struck with horrifying speed. There was no warning, at least not that Lilium could detect, but Morgana acted instantly. She blocked the attack with her shoulder. Her shield swam around her, processing the mathematics for the deflection at a rate so rapid that Lilium could not even see it, let alone comprehend it.

Although Morgana survived the attack, the blow had been heavy. Parts of her internal code were damaged, and parts of her body seemed to have vanished where she had been unable to parry the attack. The War Stone, however, had expended no effort in the process. It attacked again, this time sending curving tendrils of light through the room. Lilium shielded herself, but none of them came toward her- -those that were meant to were instead drawn to Morgana, who dodged several before teleporting.

In a flash, Morgana reappeared on the far side of the room- -only to be struck down by one of the beams. The body that had been hit faded and vanished, but twelve more appeared from the darkness, stretching out their wings and leaping toward the fractal. It responded by glowing with a toxic white light. Lililum’s shield was still active, but it shattered instantly on exposure to the light. For a moment, she saw something inside the fractal eye that was different: the shape of a human being, or perhaps that of a pony. It was impossible to tell.

The copies of Morgana were vaporized instantly, and the original shielded herself before being knocked to the ground. The room suddenly went dark again, and Morgana swore. She had stepped off the path: her body was rapidly sinking into a thick, inky substance.

“Morgana!”

The War Stone spoke. She did not sound angry, just bored. “This unit is a tiny fraction of my true self. I’m being more than fair. I guess I overestimated you. Such a pity.”

“It’ll only be a pity if I die before I can win!”

Morgana’s body ignited with pink-violet light. The black substance pulling her down was driven away, as was the dome-room itself. The metaphor changed. The walls were opened, and light flowed in- -but it was gray, strange light. The smoothness of the ground was replaced by dead, fragmented concrete covered in soft black ash. Lilium blinked, barely able to see through the smoke of the gray plane. In the distance, though, she was able to see the ruins of many tall towers.

The War Stone observed the metaphor, apparently on a whim. “Central Park,” she said. “Where you there, Morgana? The day when so many inferior beings had their pointless lives terminated?”

Morgana did not answer. She shot forward. The rough ground did not slow her, as she barely touched it. Lilium already knew it was useless, though. She was beginning to understand what they were facing. Speed that looked incredible to her was like decades to the War Stone; her perception of time was completely different. Worse, Morgana seemed to know this- -that there was no possibility she could win this fight.

The War Stone blocked, and Morgana barely managed to dodge. Her left side brushed against the shield as she tried to avoid it, and it tore away every inch of flesh it touched.

The metaphor began to decay. The buildings vanished, and the smoke became fog. The ground lost much of its texture, instead becoming blank gray. The sky overhead became dark, and there was no sun. The War Stone’s will was overcoming Morgana; her programming was starting to collapse.

“Why do I even bother?” sighed the War Stone. “You’re trapped in a paradox. You might stand a chance if you could increase your processing speed…but if you do that, your body will overheat. Either I slay your mind or your body dies and takes you with it.” Her color seemed to shift subtly. “Ah. I have decided on your boon! I will give you the quicker and less painful of the two.”

The eye narrowed to a single point. Lilium saw the fear on Morgana’s face, and then the flame of a bream of energy that had no describable color. It shot across the fading battlefield, and Morgana attempted to block. Her shield ignited, but the instant the beam struck her the metaphor shattered. There was no city, and no dome: just blackness, the War Stone, and two ponies.

The shield held, if only for a few seconds. For Lilium, the entire world seemed to slow down- -yet at the same time, her mind snapped awake. She realized that Morgana could not win this fight alone.

Lilium shifted the distance between her and Morgana without moving. There were only two spells she knew reliably, and she prepared one of them. For a brief moment, she saw Morgana’s eyes turn toward her, just as her shield collapsed. They were filled with confusion, not as to what was happening but why.

The two met just as the beam started to consume them, and Lilium sunk into Morgana’s consciousness.