The borough of Farrier’s Forge was afire from one side to the other, a rainbow of flame, in all the colors that fire can burn. Small, steady flames behind heavy glass; wildly flickering towering gouting flares, spurting erratically from the mouths of cleverly-formed pots; wide, heavily smouldering torches, half-hidden within their clouds of smoke. You could say, without fear of contradiction, that the town’s end-of-season ritual was fire-themed. Obsessively so, one might even venture. Bonfires, torches mounted on high poles, oil lanterns mounted on the eaves of every domicile. As soon as Celestia’s sun crossed the horizon, the bonfires and the torches had been lit aflame under the guidance of ceremonial marshals. The adults led a parade of fillies and colts just past the age of majority, and guided these small flame-bearers with their slow-matches bobbing high above their heads. These steady flames hung suspended from pole rigs attached to saddle-harnesses, and as they darted from torch-pole to lantern to bonfire, they set fire to the awaiting combustibles, only stopping now and again for an adult to replace their guttering matches with a fresh coil.

Farrier’s Forge was the fifth stop of our little caravan. We had made our way across the plains west of Coltington and north of Hoofington, the great and humble breadbasket of eastern Equestria, where humble unicorns and arrogant earth-ponies extract the vast cornucopic wealth that feeds the factories of Fillydelphia, Manehattan, Canterlot, and the great pegasus cloud-cities.

We were at the height of the ceremonial season, the waning days of August when the third or fourth harvest in the fields began to oversaturate the land, and the earth ponies were forced to start easing off, lest they open the door for the seedlings of dark magic, lurking underhoof everywhere, just out of sight, but never out of mind. The ceremonies, rituals, and performances that each little hamlet and burg scheduled for this time of year were designed to stretch out the productivity of the soil just a few weeks longer – to burn away the excess and waste magics before they started birthing monstrosities, started cracking the seeds of dark saplings asleep beneath the living loam.

The town before this, they’d held dances, with enormous black flags, and streamers, and costumes – a whirling bacchanal of the townsfolk’s bright coat-colors, framed by the stark black cloth. Mostly flax and woolens, scratchy stuff. Some of those townfolk had lured me into the dance, and even two days later, I was still nursing a bit of a hangover from the lethal mead that was Hivehome’s specialty. That, and their impossibly sweet honeys, and sugarbeets, and sunflowers. Hivehome’s yellow fields full of vast, nodding sunflowers had contrasted perfectly with the Black Masque, echoing their signature honeybees in black and gold.

My staff and I had been working the northeastern farm-town carnival and ritual circuit this season, posing as carnival-workers – carnies, in the vernacular. Many other Canterlotians and rich earth ponies from out east and the big cities were likewise following the pilgrimage trail in front of us, and in our dust. But those pleasure-seekers were on a different quest than ours, and one much less respectable among those that bent a judgmental gaze upon the ‘pilgrims’.

The ‘pilgrims’ slyly insisted that the pilgrimage road was no such thing, that they were good and loyal subjects of the Peytral, that the carnivals were not what they most patently and obviously were. Philosophy is an acceptable pastime and profession in our land, but piety and faith are… well, not actually banned, but they were strongly disapproved of by all and sundry. It was certainly the case that nopony who showed any sign of religious mania or an inclination to worship the Princess would ever receive any official notice, let alone preference or opportunity to serve in any official capacity.

It is peculiar, but must be noted, that in a country like Equestria, prospering under her ageless monarch, and marinating in constant, endless miracle as it does, the belief in a hereafter, in invisible gods and angels and other intangible wonders, has made very little purchase. We tend to be aware that this is a thing in other, lesser lands and worlds, and that in a few, they might even worship our celestial monarch from afar, but all of our socialization and cultural cues concentrate most firmly upon this point – do not worship the Princess.

I’ve lived in Equestria all of my life, and for the most part, I conform to the irreligiosity of my peers and friends and compatriots. The Princess loathes being worshiped, and the incipient cults of royalty that emerge now and again are suppressed by burdensome taxation and deliberate-if-officially-unsanctioned campaigns of ruthless shunning. This hostility towards religion is, unfortunately, often levied against legitimate cults and faiths imported from elsewhere, and the official disapproval of the Petyral towards veneration of the Princess tends to carry over into social discouragement of other, lesser faiths.

So, the official stance of all was that the pilgrimage road was nothing in the nature of a religious observance, and yet. And yet, nothing could restrain the satirists and clowns from their japes and their mockery of the striking similarities.

The fact is that ponies are not made to be faithless, and so, they tend to displace the trappings and habits and social behavior into other, nominally secular pursuits. These things – these behaviors which on other worlds are absorbed in public worship, or explicit religious ritual, or faith traditions – in Equestria are expressed in mass ritual, in enormous, magic-infused group ceremonies. The running of the leaves, winter wrap-ups, fire festivals, black masques – these are the faith expressions which nopony will call religion.

I’ve even seen some ponies with little shrines to Harmony, capital-H, in their homes. But they will insist, even under duress, that this is not a faith tradition, is not a belief system. They will say that this is simply the way the world works. That these are the things that ponies do, in order to keep the weather on track, to make certain that the seasons follow themselves in proper train, to guide the heavens in their courses, to send the sun and the moon through their daily procession, moonrise, moonset, sunrise, sunset, round and round as the world goes.

And, in Equestria, all this is true. An immortal empress regulates the heavens, moves the sun and the stars and the moon in their courses, and I personally have seen what happens when the Princess gets up late. An entire world that sleeps in with their slugabed empress – this is what happens when we are careless, when carefree Equestria slacks in her observances and duties.

We spend our entire lives working endlessly, ceaselessly, to keep the machinery of those lives in operation. I have spent most of my life in the service of the Princess and the ponies of Equestria. It is a life of hard work, of care and delicacy, but it is also rich beyond the imaginings of those poor ponies of my youth.

Equestria is full to the brim with magic and miracles. Equestria is, if anything, overfull. She is often in miraculous waters over her head, and occasionally in danger of drowning in her own magic. And to add to that powder-keg of endless miracle, the slow-match of honest faith? The fires of belief were a constant danger in an explosives-warehouse like Equestria.

And so, the festivals and ceremonies, to burn off miracles, to use magic wastefully, profligately – lest the magic use us. A most careful, controlled, and rigorous burning of the accumulation of tinder and unused magic. And as the torches and the lanterns and the bonfires lit up the fading twilight, faint arcs of magic fire begin to trace their arcs from torch to lantern to bonfire and back – not simply the oranges of a healthy torch, or the yellows of a tallow-candle, or the blues of an oil-lamp, but rather – all the colors of the rainbow. A night of wonders got underway, pulsing with possibility, as ponies burned miracles to keep away the darkness for just one more day.

It was time for me to lead the procession back to our collection of tents. My horn lit up, and my pierrot-illusion settled upon my withers. Others before me had worn actual grease paint, and cloth, and tinsel and so forth, and thus attracted the foals to the hoary old recreationium in their day. But one of the side-benefits of my particular talent meant that I could weave attractive wonderments around myself, like a beacon of whimsy, a figurement of fun.

It was a total betrayal of my actual personality, but such are the things we do for the love of the Princess. And so, my illusion pranced, and smiled, and twinkled, and did all the things that stodgy, grim old me would never, ever be able to do without a full-body cringe. I’d never actually given my phantasm-pierrot a name; I know it’s just an illusion. It is not another pony, another me, however much it feels like a sort of self-possession in the actual act itself. But I do use a peculiar, high-pitched voice to sell the illusion. And the foals come running, as they always do.

The townsfolk always let their foals play late into the evening on festival nights. It’s a tradition. As is what we do under cover of the magic and the brilliant late-summer nights, although almost nopony is aware of our quiet little… supra-traditions. No, this is not the right term. Our occulted, hidden traditions.

Right Name and Swift Gallop greet the crowd of foals as they pour into the first of the tents, filled with very specific playsets and toys and equipment. The interns were still setting up the rearmost tents, but we, the seniors, can handle the initial introductions of the toys and equipment to the foals.

They’re designed to be played with, after all.

For 90% of the foals who come into the recreationium, it’s just another somewhat hinky festival attraction, a sort of break between the ring-toss games and the merry-go-round that the true carnies carry from festival to festival. We’re not nearly as much fun as the ball-pit or the rope-ladder rigs, but we’re passably amusing for the discerning provincial foal. And the equipment and the toys are oriented towards the younger foals, the ones who haven’t gotten their cutie marks yet.

Once they’ve gotten their marks, they’re not really any good to us anymore. They’re set in stone by that point. The magic can be guided, but it can’t be budged once they’ve crossed the threshold. We’re looking for foals approaching that door, but not having passed through it yet.

The true carnies leave us alone. They don’t quite get our game, but they know we’re not to be trifled with. We have many strong-legged and intimidating ponies who don’t generally wear their armor while they’re setting up our tents. But the guardsponies never go anywhere without their wings and tails full of sharp, pointed objects designed to discourage ponies from giving us grief. Longknife, Spearpoint, and their troops don’t answer to rank or title while we’re on the road, but they generally answer to ‘Hay You’ and ‘Milk Run’ if there’s a problem.

And, of course, they’re here to watch, observe, and report. Miracle festivals have birthed actual religious revivals on more than one occasion, and the guard polices them much closer than anypony really understands, who isn’t involved in the planning and deployments. We’re not the only agents of the Peytral here, either. The covert services – whatever name they’re operating under this season – will have their own agents in place, to watch the revelers, and perhaps, even keep watch over us.

At least two prior religious movements had drawn in servants of the Peytral, and one religious rebellion had actually been led by a prophet who had once been one of the Princess’s prized students. Although those histories were held in the most secure section of the Restricted Archives, where the general public could not get… the wrong ideas from their foolish forbearers.

But that watch on the sentiments of the general herd was held by other ponies. Our remit was the evaluation and examination of foals. We were here to comb through the potential destinies of these foals of the right age, the right stage in life, to see what they’re harboring, what they can offer the Peytral. We look for a very specific set of conditions, of personalities. For the few foals that we are out here looking for, the games and toys have a specific purpose not immediately apparent to the naked eye, or the untutored horn. Certain patterns may be triggered by foals of a certain bent; certain toys will draw the right foals to them like gravity pulls upon an upward-flung stone. The ones who deserve our attention will find themselves guided by the shape of the recreationium into certain of the smaller tents set up behind the main tent, with the most-special objects arrayed so as to not draw the eye to any one toy, any one object.

In those smaller tents are toys that are less shiny, less foal-like. And intermixed with the toys are devices, and objects, and paper. Lots and lots of paper. Many of the foals who find their way back into the back tents, never follow their noses into that last tent. It takes a certain personality, a certain inclination, a certain destiny, to find their way into that last tent.

In most towns, nopony but our staff ever sets foot in the last tent. We set it up, the interns put everything just so, and then nothing. We break down our tents, our equipment, and we go to the next town, and the next. The last tent sees a foal maybe a dozen, a dozen and a half times in a season. And all the time, the current holder of the office for which we are the recruiters grows older, grows weaker. And the hidden linch-pin of Equestria’s wisdom and wealth weakens under the assault of time and age.

As the evening wears on, the interns replace the three of us in the main tent, to keep an eye on the town’s other foals, and make sure they don’t damage the equipment.

“Thumper, make sure they don’t set anything on fire,” I instruct one of the interns. “This town is full of firebugs, we don’t want them to get any ideas.”

“Mr. Gold, they’re just foals. How much trouble can they be?”

“By Celestia’s sparkly beard, you are a fool. I’ll be glad to kick you back into the service pool when we get back. Garnish, Moonstone, take over here, this imbecile needs further training. Pot Thumper! Come with me!”

The intern, Pot Thumper, wasn’t one of mine. He’d come in from Treasury on a cross-ministry seasoning tour, and was older than interns generally ran. Not that you could tell from just looking at him, he was so short that you could be excused if you confused the hay-colored Pot for one of the taller foals.

“Mr. Thumper, the only proper synonym for ‘foal’ is ‘catastrophe in waiting’. You can turn your back on a manticore, if you’re clever and quick of reflex, you can ignore a timberwolf, but children? Never, ever give a child the opportunity to burn your carnival-tents! Take care of that, and the rest will generally take care of itself.”

“Uh, all right, Mr. Gold, if you say.”

There were three foals in the two intermediate tents in the back. Two were playing with a toy sword and a rattan lance, hacking away at the post quintains under the interested eyes of a small crowd of our guard-carnies. Many of the guard are recruited by our little expeditions, moreso than those few recruits we bring back home to the lesser Academy for employment in the bureaucracy. I hadn’t been recruited in this fashion, but callow young Pot Thumper and the other interns had gotten their start here.

“You see here? Those two are never ten seconds away from bashing in each other’s heads with those heavy sticks. See how they’re always kept under careful observation? We are here, first and foremost, to watch, observe, and only last, to recruit. In some of these towns, we are the only representatives from outside of the provincial bureaus to ever show their muzzles. Keep your eyes open. Watch for the formation of new cults, or the re-emergence of old ones.”

Pot Thumper had twitched when I’d mentioned cults. Well, that was fine, many ponies were uncomfortable when the subject of open worship came up, and he had gone through the proper vetting. Hadn’t he? Treasury would have...

I was distracted from that half-formed thought by the behavior of the third colt in the guards-equipment tent. He was a grey-coated unicorn colt with a brown mane, and he was not dallying among the guard-bait equipment like the other two. He was looking at the metal fixings, the few pieces of forgework among the foal-safe equipment in the tents. Perhaps a smith in potential?

“You never know what’s brewing unattended here,” I continued, trying to recover my train of thought, “in towns like the Forge and Hivehome. Watched pots never boil, but unwatched pots can brew up all sorts of catastrophe unobserved.”

No, he put down the buckler, and walked slowly back through the rear gap in the tent. He was going for the final chamber. My nose-hairs bristled at the sensation, the feeling – I could sense the potential drawing the young colt like a current, strong enough that I could feel it from all the way over here.

I closed my eyes, ignoring the intern I had been lecturing, and triggered the observation spell we had set over the final tent’s entrance, a view-arc which took in the whole array of tables and objects, and any ponies who might approach those things.

“Mr. Gold?” asked Pot Thumper, trying my patience.

“Quiet!” I muttered.

There had been instances in the past where a hedge-witch or warlock had been drawn to the enchanted items among the decoys, and attempted to steal them for the strength and possibility they represented. In order to trick destiny, to winkle out those foals with power and potential, we had to lay bait of a certain strength and vigor, and sad to say, those sorts of objects are easily abused, mis-used, perverted to ill intent.

At least one factor in our recruiting-season is to lure ponies of this sort of power into the Princess’s service, so that they don’t curdle unattended, they don’t run wild and become hedge-witches or warlocks. The great cities have their own methods, but not all great mages can be found among the great cities. Many a humble farming-hovel or hamlet has birthed a great and powerful wizard – a Star Swirl, a Morari, a Meadowbrook – all of these came from once-nameless little burgs whose name forever afterward had become, ‘Edinspur, the birthplace of Star Swirl the Bearded’, or ‘Bogwash, the birthplace of Mage Meadowbrook’.

The foal approached the two tables in my remote-viewing, and I watched him as he scanned the piles of parchment, paper, bound books and scrolls. The inkwells, the various magical artifacts and alchemists’ tools didn’t attract his notice in the least. Rather, his attention was drawn to the written material scattered among the more obviously-magical items and mundane office-equipment. How very odd, that he’d focused on forged equipment in public, and yet, here where for all he knew, nopony was looking, his interest was in… the written word.

“By the Princess,” I said, “He’s a book-keeper of some sort. Can it be?”

“Sir?”

The grey colt picked up the Book. The Book Itself. The Index-matrix! And it was glowing in the colt’s horn-magic! It was glowing!

I broke into a dead run, leaving the gormless Pot Thumper behind, and all the guardponies in the intermediate tents took my cue, and burst into action, fanning out to secure the exits and the perimeter behind me as I broke into the final tent. The colt was levitating in front of me, his eyes glowing white-gold like a hammered bar of half-forged steel thrust deep into the hottest heart of the blast-furnace. The Book also was glowing, although its glow was a cornflower blue, the same color as the colt’s magic.

He was in the midst of being Marked. We’d lured Destiny into our snare once again, and with the Book!

Bound Index might be able to retire before death took him in the traces. The ancient Index, upon whose talent rested all of the nation’s vital data, the equine Index to our precious archives. Without that miracle in the hide of a pony, our ministries, our records, our communications would break down, wither, collapse into chaos. It was a sisyphean burden to place across the withers of any mortal pony, and it weighed heavily on the Indexes. Bound himself was the ninth such Index, the early ones having been recruited by the Princess herself, and the later ones having devised this particular test to seek out their successors in their turn.

“Son,” I said to the colt, “What have you done? What do you see?” The ritual words, the ritual to be completed by his foretold responses, marking him as Destiny’s response to our hopes and needs.

“The text! I can see the words underlying the words! Look! Look! They thought to hide from me, but I can see them!”

Those were not the responses. What in Creation?

The miraculous rush of the colt’s Marking began to ebb and fade, and his hooves touched the canvas underhoof, joining me on the ground again. He held the book towards me, and gestured to the meaningless text. It was a proxy, a dummy – the words in the Index-hook had been literally without content, printers’ lorem ipsum placeholder text. The book itself was the hook, not the words in the book – someone had scraped the original parchment, and whatever the book had been before it had been repurposed as destiny-bait, had been lost to equine memory, destroyed by the magical preparations which had made the Index book what it was, a conduit for the Index-pony’s talent and magic, once we’d found them.

Except there were new words glowing through the meaningless lorem ipsum, words with meaning and context. A description of a battle, written in the distinctive cadences and rhetorical flourishes of the First Celestial Era historical style. This is not what the Index’s codex was supposed to do – this was – what was this?

I grabbed the codex in my own magic, and scanned it quickly, speed-reading at the limits of my capacity for that skill. Insurrection in the ranks, the armies coming home, the losing battles for the portals, the close-run affair at Peak Aramaspi… This was an account of the Nightfall War. By the Peacock Angel, it was a true account. I held cultural catastrophe in my hooves, political chaos and desolation.

“Mister Clown, you can see the words under the words? I never been able to get nopony to see them before!”

I looked down at the colt who had turned my Index-bait artifact into the historical equivalent of a thousand-gigathaum megaspell. It was then that I saw the colt’s new cutie mark. It wasn’t the expected variant on Bound Index’s star-studded grid of glittering webbing, or any of the eight prior Index-marks, all more or less similar in their general theme and arrangement. This was a… scroll un-rolled with shifting words half-seen? Brown-faded letters hiding under blacker words?

“You’ve always been able to see things like these?” I asked the colt.

“Yeah!” he chirped, bouncing on his hocks.

I knew what this was. I have read about such things, but never really seen it myself.

“Palimpsest. You found a palimpsest under the Index-text artifact.”

“Is that what it’s called? I’ve always been able to see th’ words they said had gone away, that they said they’d gotten rid of. Erasure, Mr. Flying Colors called it! Words that weren’t there, erased stuff – I always got so confused when Mr. Colors wiped the blackboard at the end of class. It weren’t like the words ever really went away!”

Damn, damn, damn – don’t frown, don’t frown, don’t show the frustration – this is this colt’s greatest day, his discovery of what makes him special, his destiny. Don’t shit on that, Gold. Look at him, bouncing around, laughing…. “That’s wonderful, son. What is your name?”

“Hahaha- Ah, yessir, sorry, I’m Flow Flash, my daddy wanted me to follow in his hoofprints, blacksmithin’. I don’t – I think this means I ain’t gonna be hammerin’ iron no more?”

A colt who could see what was hidden, who could find what had been destroyed by time or intent, who could bring out lost meaning? No, we wouldn’t be wasting him on a provincial ironmonger’s shop. “I suspect you’ll be taking another name, son. That’s not the mark of a Flow Flash.” Nor would we be letting him run free about the countryside, spraying Truth about like a pyromaniac hosing down the landscape with accelerants.

“What did you call this? A palim-sest?”

“Yes, a ‘palimpsest’. It’s what is left when somepony tries to re-use old parchment or paper, and scrapes or bleaches away the old words to re-use them for new records, new stories, or histories. Or shopping-lists, I suppose.”

“Why did they erase this? It’s interestin’! Something about a rebellion, and a cult of… who’s Princess Luna?”

“We can talk about that later, son. We need to talk to your parents, and you need to think about a new name, don’t you?”

“Huh, it’s still kinda faded… neat! I’m thinking… Faded. Faded Palim- Palimpsest? Ain’t nobody gonna laugh at me in class ever again with a name like that, makin’ fun of the iron-forger’s colt with the big words and the little horn!”

I smiled at him, and tried not to focus on the destroyed Indexing artifact, nor the deadly-dangerous truthbomb the little colt had made of the ruined magical tool. It had revealed somepony’s destiny, right enough – but it wasn’t the destiny we’d come out here into the boondocks to search for. Little, pretentious Faded Palimpsest would go into the Academy, and train to be… I don’t know, an investigator? An archivist? Possibly something greater, who knew?

There was some movement behind me, in the tent-opening, and I looked over my shoulder to see the intern, Pot Thumper, staring at us both.

“Well?” I said testily. “You heard the boy. Get his family’s details, we’re going to have to have someone stay here to make the arrangements. Faded Palimpsest’s definitely for the academy. Chop-chop!”

Pot Thumper got the colt’s information from him, and scampered off to find the boy’s parents, somewhere in this night of miracles and constrained chaos. Because we’re good, and we have seeker-charms for this sort of thing, the parents were soon produced, and we met with the family in a small tent off to the side of our complex set up for this very purpose. They were more concerned with celebration and sharing in the colt’s joy, than the details of the how and why. In the end, Pot Thumper was left with instructions to get young Faded Palimpsest on a train to Canterlot as soon as he could extract the colt from his markday party.

The rest of the staff and I busied ourselves breaking down the tents, in hopes of making the blessing of the rows in Maizeburg a half-day’s trot to the west of Farrier’s Forge. I found myself fuming over the ruined Indexing codex, and trying to figure out how to improvise a replacement for the next town.

As far as I was concerned, that night had been a bust. Yes, we’d found a potential danger, and the professors of the Academy would spend a number of years defusing young Faded Palimpsest, moulding him into a nice, safe pony in the Service, an archivist or an investigator. But our charge remained, and our time grew short.

So short, in fact, that the season itself had been a bust. We didn’t find Bound Index’s replacement that year. I wasted a week re-enchanting the Indexing artifact, and in the meanwhile, toured with the other, lesser artifacts, recruiting more students for the Academy, more ponies for the Guard. How many potential replacements for Bound Index did I miss in that week? I couldn’t tell you, but I am haunted with the thought that somepony slipped through my grasp, that some pony somewhere is now living some other pony’s destiny, because I wasn’t in the right place at the right time.

The only result of my failure that I can be sure of is that Bound Index was bound to his duty for another long, agonizing year, struggling and keeping ahead of his infirmity, biding his time. Marking time until the next summer’s last shortening days drew forth the travelling carnivals once again, and we could comb through the miracles of another dying year for that hidden pony whose destiny it was to join all the rest of us together into that invisible web of destinies that we call Equestria.

Author's Notes:

This was born of two fathers.

The first was a conversation with Oliver about how the Equestrian bureaucracy would need to maintain a cutie mark and name index-database to keep track of the princesses' subjects, to which I replied, such an index would by Equestrian logic probably be tied to a magical-miraculous cutie mark talent itself. After that came the idea of a group of Canterlot bureaucrats searching for the replacement to their irreplaceable Index-pony, a pony long past due for his retirement. They'd travel the land like Tibetan monks searching for the next incarnation of the Panchen Lama.

The second, was that I wanted to use an incidental character featured very tangentially in In The Company Of Night, one Faded Palimpsest, in a projected semi-sequel to that story, wherein our fallen-on-hard-times archivist was brought in to join the newly returned Luna's rather short-hooved Court. I wasthinking of playing the paranoid and xenophobic Faded Palimpsest against his unsettling new liege and her collection of eccentrics and offworld cultist-mercenary guards. Think of H.P. Lovecraft as the unwilling courtier of a Dagonian fish-princess, and you have the basic concept.

Thus, little Flow Flash, now Faded Palimpsest, whom you've just met for the second time. He's as cute as you'll ever see him, and a reminder that even the fussiest and most irritating of protagonists were once innocent little things like Flow Flash.

Thanks to Shrink Laureate and the General Company for invaluable advice, editing aid, and pre-reading services above and beyond the call.